Return to Fukushima
Copyright © 2025 by Thomas A. Bass, Professor of English and Journalism
Reviewed by Sharon and Ace Hoffman, December 2025
In researching and writing "Return to Fukushima", Thomas Bass has done the whole world a great service, because people all around the world are living with radiation.
The book paints a vivid picture of how people are attempting to deal with the aftermath of the March 2011 triple meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. "Return to Fukushima" emphasizes that what happened was unusual but not unexpected: "In industrial engineering, systems with known risks and rates of failure suffer not from accidents but foreseeable events. Given the dangers inherent in the technology, disasters at nuclear power plants are predictable and inevitable. They are not accidents. They are political decisions with disastrous results." (pg. 161)
"Return to Fukushima" obliterates the nuclear industry's myth that everything was okay at the reactor site until the tsunami inundated the backup diesel generators and pumps. According to the late Masao Yoshida, who led the last-ditch efforts to stop the reactors from melting down, extensive damage happened prior to the tsunami. Cooling pipes had been damaged, the site had lost electrical power, and monitors outside the plant were already measuring radiation levels "approaching 12 millisieverts per hour". (pg 124) ("A dose of 10 sieverts will kill you immediately." pg. 38)
Bass visited the area in 2018 and 2022. He interviewed people who had returned to areas the government claims are safe — but which still have highly contaminated "hot" spots — about their efforts to measure radiation and to mitigate its impacts on their lives. He met them in houses filled with soil and water samples and different types of radiation detectors. Bass talked with people tackling the endless task of removing radiation from their houses (endless, because contaminated soil, air, dust etc. keep coming back in), people who live far away from their families as they attempt to reestablish their livelihoods in the contamination zone.
Each place, plant, or animal that has been contaminated presents a different -- often impossible -- challenge. For example, in a rice paddy, farmers must remove contaminated soil and water without destroying the vital underground drainage systems. Similarly, farmers must decide between cutting down trees or living with new radiation beneath the trees whenever it rains. The people living near Fukushima-Daiichi and other contaminated areas worldwide try to solve these problems with limited information and resources, and with limited success.
Prior to the meltdowns, generations of people in the area harvested crops, raised livestock, and fished for highly prized seafood. Now, fishers incomes have fallen dramatically, despite partial government subsidies that pay them NOT to fish most of the time. Fish in the rivers near the reactors are also more radioactive than might be expected by measuring the surrounding levels, because the radiation bioaccumulates in moss on the bottom of those rivers.
Farmers attempting to restart their lives there face many problems. A couple of inches of topsoil was scraped from hundreds of square kilometers of farmland, bagged into millions of one-ton plastic bags, and hauled away to reduce local radiation levels. The heavy plastic is already deteriorating (of course).
Without the topsoil it is difficult to grow crops, and inevitably many of those crops are still too radioactive to legally offer for sale in Japan (although in some cases the crops may be sold in other countries, including the United States). One woman runs a produce market where every item is labeled with its radioactive burden. (She probably does NOT use the slogan "get it while it's hot"!)
Attempts to pretend that Fukushima has been "cleaned up" include officially determining that soil scraped off playgrounds downwind may simply be buried in other locations, and that vast quantities of contaminated water have been, and will be, diluted and dumped into the Pacific Ocean for the next hundred years or more. Incinerating radioactive debris leaves an ash pile that is often more radioactive, per kilogram, than the original debris. Radioactive smoke from these fires spreads radioactivity around Japan and around the world.
None of this redistribution of radioactive materials eliminates ANY radioactivity that has been and continues to be released. The molten blobs continue to fission under the reactors, just as Chernobyl's "elephant's foot" is still fissioning nearly twenty years after that "accident."
In addition to the personal stories that make up the bulk of this concise book, Bass somehow manages to cover much of the history of nuclear power, the different ways internal and external radiation affect living organisms, the impossibility of removing tritium from contaminated water, the nuclear industry's plans for "new" reactors which are actually based on old (and failed) technology, and many other topics.
Bass's book makes clear how much of a gamble nuclear power really is. Accidents will continue to happen, spoiling the home we live in permanently.
That is not the option society should choose.
"Return to Fukushima" is a quick and compelling read, and is highly recommended. It will disturb you, but if you are ever the victim of a future nuclear accident, it will help to have read this book.
Sharon and Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
Thomas Bass also gave an excellent presentation at
NEIS Night With the Experts on October 30, 2025 (recording available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seOEIkjpIbk). His presentation covers some of the important research from his book, and the Q&A delves more deeply into many aspects of nuclear power disasters in general and Fukushima-Daiichi in particular.
During his NEIS presentation, Bass pointed out that nearly 15 years after the accident, the spent fuel pools still have not been unloaded and nobody knows exactly where the melted cores are. Fukushima is an ongoing disaster that the Japanese government and the nuclear industry worldwide refuse to acknowledge. Japan is doing everything possible to avoid building a sarcophagus at Fukushima-Daiichi and the word "meltdown" is forbidden.
Additional comments: Challenges of Tracking Radiation Damage
Let's consider what it means to be among the worst "industrial disasters" in history, nearly all of which are nuclear — except one:
Wikipedia lists Bhopal as the "worst" industrial disaster: A Union-Carbide tank leaked poison gas (methyl isocyanate) in Bhopal, India in 1984. The Union-Carbide disaster is now estimated to have killed 22,000 people according to Amnesty International. Many more were permanently harmed, but there is no way of knowing the exact amount of harm done by that one event.
Radiation deaths -- other than from acute radiation poisoning -- can take years or decades to present themselves and harm or kill their victims, and there is never any certainty about the cause. According to the most widely accepted estimation of radiation damage (known as LNT or Linear, No Threshold), ANY dose can cause cancer, and the likelihood roughly corresponds to the dose. Of course, just as not all cigarette smokers get lung cancer and not all non-smokers don't, the same amount of radiation poisoning might cause a cancer to start that day for one person, and twenty years later or never in their lifetime for someone else. Even if it starts that day, it may not be noticed... until it's too late.
There are also many confounding factors that can affect who gets sick or dies. These factors include age, gender, health, whether or not the person smokes, environmental factors, the specific radioactive isotopes, and whether the radiation exposure is internal or external. People also move from one unhealthy environment to another, and no environment is perfectly healthy. Tracking people for a whole lifetime after an exposure is difficult at best.
The nuclear industry doesn't want to take ANY of this into account! So in their view, the Chernobyl accident caused ONLY deaths from doses known to be quickly and inevitably fatal: High radiation doses cause nausea, vomiting, breakdown of body functions, and death. From Chernobyl, the nuclear industry counts only those "prompt" or near-prompt fatalities, numbering in the dozens, and that's it. Latent cancers? Can't prove the cause because thousands of other factors confound any attempt to definitely assign any particular outcome for any particular patient to any particular source. And statistical data? Takes decades to collect when it's even possible, and inevitably is full of natural human errors.
The nuclear industry and the governments that permit/finance/encourage them all thrive in all this confusion.
Independent scientists have tried to do a better job of estimating the real death toll from Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters. Many independent estimates for Chernobyl are MUCH higher than Bhopal -- 35,000 deaths, for example or even a million or more -- and these are NOT "wild speculation" -- they are uncovering data that authorities INTENTIONALLY never considered! In America and around the world, official epidemiological studies of health effects from nuclear disasters are diligently avoided, year after year.
After Bhopal and Chernobyl, the March 2011 triple nuclear meltdown at Fukushima-Daiichi is often considered the next worst industrial accident in history... but who's to say for sure, with so many unknowns and so little careful research? There are many other contenders, but most of the necessary information about them is unavailable to assess the size of the damage: Mayak, Windscale, Hanford (to name a few) all have multiple cumulative problems...
-- Sharon and Ace Hoffman
Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download:
acehoffman.org
Blog:
acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube:
youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at]
acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner,
The Animated Software Company
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