Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?

On a blustery Sunday in Okuma last spring, a crowd was seated under red-and-white tents awaiting the arrival of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. They had gathered to celebrate the opening of a new town hall, and the reopening, just a few days earlier, of the town of Okuma itself. In March, 2011—after a magnitude-nine earthquake, one of the most powerful in recorded history, triggered a twelve-story tsunami—the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant flooded and lost power, prompting three of the plant’s six reactors to partially melt down. Radioactive water flowed into the sea, and plumes of radioactive particles spewed into the sky. The fallout contaminated Okuma and the surrounding towns. More than a hundred thousand people were ordered to leave their homes, with little sense of when, if ever, they would be able to return. Many more people across Fukushima Prefecture—which is slightly larger than Connecticut—self-evacuated, afraid and uncertain about the danger the fallout posed.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to Okuma to celebrate
 the opening of a new town hall, and the reopening of
the town of Okuma itself.

“It’s been 2,956 days since 3/11,” Jin Ishida, Okuma’s vice-mayor, told me, referring to the date of the disaster. We were standing near the entrance to the new town hall, a glass-and-cedar building next to a stubbly field that had once been rice paddies. Ishida, who is sixty-five, had returned to live in Okuma alone, without his family. He had given the day’s opening speech, followed by a parade of officials, including Fukushima’s governor, a member of the national assembly, representatives from Japan’s Ministries of Environment and Economics, and the Okuma mayor. Abe, who was late, was coming from a nearby sports complex known as J-Village, which had, until recently, served as a logistics base for disaster-response workers. In 2020, the Japan leg of the Tokyo Olympic-torch relay will begin on its grounds, to celebrate the region’s recovery—at least, that is the hope.

Read the story from The New Yorker by Carolyn Korman - “Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?”

How climate anxiety is changing the face of Australian fiction

Jennifer Mills says she
 hopes fiction can help
 people work through
their fear and anger
over climate change. 

When Jennifer Mills began writing her Miles Franklin longlisted book Dyschronia in 2011, there weren't a great deal of Australian novels grappling with a post-climate change world.

Fast forward several years and a large number of critically-acclaimed works have featured some sort of environmental catastrophe. Australian publishers and booksellers have even adopted a term to help classify the string of books blurring the lines between genre and literary fiction: cli-fi.

"It's an exciting time to be a novelist," Mills says. "But in some ways I wish it wasn't."

Read the story from The Age by Broede Carmody - “How climate anxiety is changing the face of Australian fiction.”

Meet the Man Bringing Cheap Renewable Energy to His Hometown

When Highland Park, Michigan, a predominately Black city surrounded by Detroit, had its streetlights repossessed in 2011, because of a $4 million unpaid street lighting bill, Ryter Cooperative Industries L3C stepped in to help install solar-powered streetlights in the city’s neighborhoods.

Ali Dirul testing out new foldable briefcase solar generator
design for West Side Academy High School.

Energy cost inequality is a problem in many areas throughout the country. Low-income households spend 10% of their income on electricity—four times higher than the average household, according to a recent report. So while the median electricity bill in the United States in 2013 was around $114 a month, many low-income families paid more than $200 a month.

Some renewable energy advocacy organizations have attributed the cost inequality to the lack of community engagement and awareness of renewable energy programs in low-income communities.

Read the Yes! Magazine story by J. Garbiel Ware - “Meet the Man Bringing Cheap Renewable Energy to His Hometown.”