BRATTLEBORO-On March 11, 2011, four nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, were destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami, triggering a disaster that still resonates worldwide. Within a swirl of mismanagement and misinformation, the nuclear catastrophe was one of the biggest in history.
This Friday at 118 Elliot, Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) presents author, journalist, and scholar Thomas Bass in a talk on the disaster, the costs of “containing it, the lives of people living near Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zone, and the broader implications of Fukushima for the world at large,” states a WWAC press release.
Bass, author of Return to Fukushima, teaches English and journalism at State University of New York in Albany and writes for The New Yorker, Wired, Smithsonian, and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, among other publications.
“After seven years of research and travels to Fukushima as recently as January 2026,” the release explains, “Bass offers a sober, balanced account and reflects on lessons learned to help navigate what may be an increasingly atomic future.”
The impetus for Bass’s talk, as event moderator Lissa Weinmann states in the release, is that “as the U.S. pushes new and unprecedented government investment in nuclear energy [...] while cutting regulations at every level, including radiation exposure standards for workers and citizens, it is important to analyze [...] what is happening with a failed nuclear plant in a technologically advanced society.”
The Commons spoke recently with Bass.
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Annie Landenberger: How did you come to write Return to Fukushima?
Thomas Bass: A few years ago I was traveling in [Japan, and] I decided to go take a look. This was the world’s worst industrial accident — it devastated a large part of Japan’s eastern coast. I became interested in who was living in that nuclear exclusion zone.
[Since the disaster] people have returned to parts of it and shown remarkable ingenuity, bravery, and intelligence in confronting conditions there.
I then traveled to Chernobyl and kept my eye on other nuclear exclusion zones. I suspect that an increasingly large portion of the world is going to end up as a nuclear exclusion zone. This just seemed to be a lens, it seemed to encapsulate forces at work in the world.
A.L.: And so the book...
T.B.: Although “Fukushima” is in the title, it very much is coverage of what I have learned over the last few years about nuclear energy and how atoms for war never actually succeeded in becoming atoms for peace.
A.L.: Given the limited supply of arable land in Japan, it makes sense that they’re trying to reclaim what they can. There must be a pretty intense science around how to restore contaminated land like that.
T.B.: Well, they borrowed the idea from the United States after the U.S. exploded thermonuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll. They tried to resettle Bikini by scraping up the topsoil that was contaminated with radionuclides.
Japan borrowed this technique and scraped up a massive amount of topsoil in Fukushima in order to lessen the amount [of contamination]. That succeeded somewhat, but I describe it as a kind of lily pad effect: You can hop from one clean area to the next, but if you stray, the radiation detector will spike.
And Japan suffers during the winter from monsoons and heavy rains, which wash all the contaminants back down into the coastal areas.
But the government is desperately trying to resettle the nuclear exclusion zone. They’re paying subsidies if you move into the area, including your gym membership and covering your bill for eating out in local restaurants. Not to mention subsidizing your apartment or building a house.
A.L.: Wow. Talk about incentives.
T.B.: At the same time, they’re engaged in this very peculiar practice of taking radioactive soil from Fukushima and spreading it across Japan.
A.L.: Why?
T.B.: Well, you may smack your forehead in disbelief. The Ministry of the Environment has called it “happy soil.” It’s contaminated under 8,000 becquerels per kilogram, an extremely high amount of contamination.
A load of happy soil was dumped in the prime minister’s flower bed in Tokyo a few months ago, as [part of] the first wave of dumping radioactive soil from Fukushima across Japan into sites, roadworks, and so on.
Japan has backed itself into a corner. They have mandated that all radioactive soils and other radioactive material have to be removed from Fukushima. No one has volunteered [to take it], so the government is spreading it throughout Japan.
These are the things I’ve been tapped to speak about when I show up in Vermont, where you people have been leading this anti-nuclear struggle for a long time. You’re the real heroes in this project.
A.L.: Yeah, it goes way back. And Vermont Yankee is still visible.
So what’s your connection to WWAC?
T.B.: Well, I received an email entitled, “I love your book.” I think there were several exclamation marks behind that email. It just struck a nerve with these old warriors, because I really do attempt to encapsulate the entire history of this effort to boil water — nuclear reactors being the world’s least efficient and most expensive way to boil water. It’s really a terrible idea.
Anyway, when Vermonters got hold of my book, they said, “Please come.”
A.L.: You must have a hard time sleeping at night. These exclusion zones are increasing worldwide? That doesn’t seem to be getting enough press.
T.B.: I’ll give you an example: The Santa Susana Field Lab in Los Angeles. It’s one of the worst nuclear disasters in U .S. history. A reactor blew up just north of Los Angeles [in 1979], and it was covered up for many years. The effect of the damage has never been fully investigated. There have been cancer clusters in the vicinity.
So, that’s a nuclear exclusion zone right on the edge of Los Angeles.
The Hanford reactors up along the Columbia River [in Benton County, Washington], Kazakhstan, the Russian reactors that have blown up, the damage to Chernobyl, Fukushima. I mean, the list goes on and on. And oddly enough, human beings, for whatever reason, have a way of forgetting these things. Our memory sort of wears off after 10 to 15 years.
We’re seeing the 15th anniversary of Fukushima as Japan is now rushing to restart its nuclear reactors. They’ve been mothballed for the last 15 years and were never particularly safe to begin with.
This is a country that has over a thousand earthquakes every year. It’s going to end badly.
A.L.: Right. Not the best place to put a volatile reactor.
T.B.: It’s the world’s worst. And that’s a whole intensely interesting story in and of itself involving the CIA financing the effort to build nuclear reactors in Japan.
They got Japan to buy into this enterprise of building nuclear reactors. That’s what Fukushima was: General Electric reactors, the same design as Vermont Yankee’s. And no more safe. Anyway, one can smack one’s forehead in disbelief over and over again. These stories tend not to get publicized.
A.L.: When did you first start digging in on nuclear issues?
T.B.: My father was in the military industrial complex, building the triggers for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So these are subjects I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
A.L.: What will the format for Friday be?
T.B.: I’ll be giving a brief talk, maybe with some photos out of Fukushima. I have a current report I could give. And then I’m hoping to have a freewheeling discussion with the people who show up who I suspect are going to be long-time battle-scarred warriors, agitators, troublemakers. I hope there will be some younger people as well.
We’re clocking 80 years since the Trinity explosion in New Mexico, so people need to remember this is getting to be an increasingly lengthy history.
A.L.: Do you see any hope on the horizon?
T.B.: Well, we’re still here. We have yet to blow ourselves up. A fair amount of luck is required here. And so far, a fair number of us have been lucky. Others have been unlucky.
I don’t know how much we’ve learned. As I mentioned, we seem to forget faster than we learn, which is a worrying state of affairs.
We need to distinguish lies from truths; we need facts, and we need fact checking. And we need all those old skills that journalists actually have.
We’re not enemies of the people; we’re the only friends the people have, so all we can do is carry on, I guess.
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The discussion with Bass takes place this Friday, March 13, at 118 Elliot in Brattleboro. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
The program — and live broadcast on BCTV (Comcast channel 1078) and livestream via YouTube — begins at 7 p.m.
A reception with the author will follow.
A $10 donation is suggested, not required. To register for the event and to connect to the livestream, visit Fukushima.eventbrite.com. For more about the WWAC, visit windhamworldaffairscouncil.org.
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Editor’s note: Stories presented as interviews in this format are edited for clarity, readability, and space. Words not spoken by interview subjects appear in brackets, as do editorial clarifications.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.