Fukushima Flowers

August’s Son of Pictonaut effort ended up being very “stream of consciousness” on my part, as I mashed together bits and pieces as I wiki stumbled down a rabbit hole from Fukushima’s Wikipedia entry. As bizarre as it might sound, I actively encourage you to google snippets of the story as you encounter them and see how everything fits together. Or don’t. I’m not a cop.

The Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster (2011) was a watershed moment for the nuclear power industry. It never quite found the same memetic heights in the collective consciousness as Chernobyl (1986), or Three Mile Island (1979), but it never the less made its mark being only the second event to warrant a 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, or INES (Nuclear Accident Magnitude Scale M=7.5), Chernobyl (NAMS M=8.0) being the only other previous entry. It started out being rated as only a 5, putting it squarely in Three Mile Island (NAMS M=7.9) territory, but that was before they got into the real details of exactly how fucked everything was. Admittedly there was also the Kyshtym disaster (1957) at the USSR’s Mayak facility (which was an INES 6 (NAMS M=7.3), by the way) but that was covered up until the 1980s so unless you’ve managed to scrounge up a very detailed encyclopaedia then you’ll likely never have even heard of it.

The only reason I’ve even heard of it is because there’s like three chapters about it in the operators almanac. The main salient point to take from that particular catastro-fuck is that even though it may have almost entirely escaped the bombings, don’t head into what was the Eastern Ural “Nature Reserve” expecting a fun-time. As the old saying goes “we do not go swimming in Lake Karachay.” The margins of these chapters are filled with a lot of expletives in at least 14 distinct languages that I can recognise and at least 5 I can’t. People have had a lot of “opinions” about Kyshtym over the last few centuries.

(And before we go any further; no, I will not be drawn into another INES Vs. NAMS bun-fight. I am not getting involved in that schism, and nor should anyone with an ounce of sense left.)

In Fukushima’s defence, unlike the other big name “whoopsies” highlighted above, it didn’t happen because someone dropped the ball only to find out that the aforementioned ball was a demon-core of solid plutonium and that they’d just killed everyone with a mass criticality event. No, Fukushima happened because there’s not a huge amount you can you really do when you get hit by an earthquake rocking a 9.1 on the Richter scale. Especially when it’s followed up with a 46 foot tsunami. But I’m getting side tracked; I should lock my operators almanac back in its lead slipcase before my fingers have a chance to inadvertently smear any isotopic rich dust on its pages.

The point is, as circuitous as I am at approaching it, Fukushima was a the final nail in the coffin of nuclear power. Not long after countries started shuttering their plants, abandoning plans for new ones, and pivoting back to gas and coal just at the moment the world was literally starting to catch fire. The point at which an alternative to fossil fuels would be really handy while everyone got their collectives heads out of their collective asses and spooled up the infrastructure for full scale renewables. Now I’m not saying that this decision ultimately destroyed civilisation and (irony of ironies) sent the world spiralling toward full-scale nuclear war as nation states fought over dwindling resources and habitable land in the face of a climate apocalypse, but it certainly didn’t fucking help!

Which left all of us to inherit a blighted nuclear wasteland and pick through the ruins for enough to survive.

How exactly we went about doing that has been built on a lot of hard earned lessons, wrung out of the flesh and blood of generations of wardens like myself. Not everyone survived those lessons. Especially in the early years. But we can trace nearly everything we do back to the spirit and will of a handful of people. After Fukushima there was Naoto Matsumura and Sakae Kato who headed back into the exclusion zone to feed and care for every animal, pet, and livestock animal that got left behind during the evacuation, with complete disregard to all legal prohibitions and enforcements against doing so.

There was also the loose collection of women I affectionately refer to as the Babushkas of Pripyat. My personal favourite being Hanna Zavorotnya who was responsible for my two favourite warden mantra: when she broke into the Chernobyl exclusion zone to return home she told the guards to “Shoot us and dig the grave.” And then there’s the one that so perfectly captures everything we do: “Radiation doesn’t scare me. Starvation does.”

These were the people we so ardently try to emulate. They may not have worn our mark, or used the name, but goddammit, they were wardens every one.

I don’t know why I ramble so much when I fill in these log entries. I know wardens who barely crank out a couple of lines: location, activity, exposure, dose, remediation; and leave it at that. Arguably more useful for whoever comes after them, but a lot less personal. And I think there’s merit to there being at least some kind of record somewhere of what was going through our heads while we were doing this shit.

So you might be asking: “Why Fukushima? What’s brought that noxious turd bubbling to the surface?” Well… I passed through here maybe two or three years ago on a loop heading south to dodge the worst of the winter. I took the standard measurements, made my observations, and started on the usual flora and fauna husbandry. The animals all seemed more or less to be managing and making do, but there were some BIG problems developing with soil erosion. And the last thing you want to happen with irradiated top-soil is for it to start getting washed into watercourses or blown away in a fine particulate dust that’s going to get right deep down into the lungs of anyone nearby and give them even worse kinds of cancers than the ones they’re already at risk of. The problem was I didn’t have any stock left of the usual sorts of plants I’d use to handle this having needed them on a big job earlier that summer. All I had left were the wild flower seeds I’d kept for meadow and verge work. I’d figured that they’d do the trick, but I knew I’d need to use a lot of them. Looking back I think I might have gone a bit over the top with them. But so long as it works right?

So here I am a few years later and the whole hillside is drowning in flowers as far as the eye can see. And up against one of the old walls someone has spray painted a small mural! A mural! I don’t even know where they could have found spray paint, I have enough bother sourcing ink for these logs. But there it is, bold and brass, and bright as day. A figure in a warden’s gas mask and holding a bouquet of wild flowers. Daubed across the top are the words “Fukushima Flowers” is thick, black letters. Of course it’s geographically completely inaccurate, and this place doesn’t even have the same sort of isotope contamination. But it made me do something I haven’t done in a long time: it made me smile.