Thomas Bass has written a timely and important book on what we should learn from the 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear energy plant. Bass, who teaches journalism at the State University of New York at Albany, has written extensively on the subject of nuclear power and has visited accident sites, including Chernobyl as well as Fukushima (twice). Although Return to Fukushima focuses on the world’s worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl, its implications are far-reaching.
Besides providing a detailed account of the explosions of the nuclear reactors at Fukushima, Bass situates this accident in the larger context of nuclear accidents in other countries. The clear implication is that the nuclear option is far too perilous to use as a source of energy. Just the same, a nuclear “ideology of boundless energy has a hammerlock on government policy and propaganda.”
Fukushima is one of 47 districts, called prefectures, into which Japan is divided. It contains two coastal nuclear energy plants, one at Daiichi and another at Daini. The Fukushima accident followed a powerful earthquake and an ensuing tsunami that shut down electricity and cooling water pumps at Daiichi’s nuclear reactors, setting off explosions and meltdowns in four of them. Two days after one reactor’s explosion “began spreading radioactive material across the Pacific,” another reactor exploded as television viewers watched on a split screen just as a government spokesman reassured them that “everything at Fukushima was under control.”
The government followed up by prohibiting images of the explosion on TV and banning the use of the word meltdown. Observers, as Bass notes, “were also watching the myth of nuclear safety being blown sky-high.” A day later, a third reactor exploded, prompting the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) to begin planning for an evacuation of its personnel. Prime Minister Naoto Kan stopped the evacuation plan and later wrote that “abandonment would mean the end of Japan.”
The meltdown of three of the reactors posed immediate and still ongoing dangers; in each, hundreds of fuel rods still sit in pools, bristling with radioactivity; they can be contained only by being constantly cooled with water. If “one or more of its fuel pools, open to the sky and filled with exposed fuel rods,” were to catch fire, it could spread radioactivity around the world. This danger, Bass emphasizes, will remain a possibility as long as the rods stay where they are. A full assessment of the reactors’ condition is impossible to determine because the intense heat prevents anyone from making a close inspection; even robots sent in to inspect things “were fried in minutes.” No solution is forthcoming.
Fukushima is only one instance among a number of nuclear power plants that have suffered serious accidents: Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are only the best known. Every nuclear plant is a disaster waiting to happen. Accidents can happen to any technology, but nuclear ones involve permanent consequences from the release of radioactive poison into the air, water, vegetation and more. Furthermore, not only do we have no solution for dealing with the leaking of radioactivity from Fukushima’s reactors; no one has even figured out how to dispose of nuclear waste. Bass deals at length with the problem of the radioactive waste produced by all nuclear reactors and also accumulating from the cleanup after nuclear accidents.
The ocean has been a disposal site since shortly after World War II, when the United States used a ship to collect steel drums of radioactive waste and dump them into the sea. Other countries have followed the same practice. Nuclear generators produce 20 to 30 tons of radioactive waste a year, most of which, Bass writes, “lies scattered in cooling pools and thin-walled canisters stacked next to the reactors from which it came. The reactor buildings themselves have become radioactive waste that has to be disposed of.”
Fukushima, meanwhile, has stored reactor cooling water in more than 1,000 tanks; treated but still radioactive water is being released into the Pacific. The Japanese government also “redefined recommended radiation exposure” upward—which meant avoiding much cleanup and the filling of thousands more vinyl bags with contaminated topsoil.
All of this sounds like madness, yet it has gone on in all directions. As a nuclear engineer and reactor inspector tells Bass, Tepco cut corners in construction, practically inviting an accident. The company neglected to address signs of structural weaknesses and corrosion, “with Tepco and the government hiding what was happening.” Enabling much of this madness was the “nuclear village,” the term for “the country’s pro-nuclear lobbyists and officials,” a mix of vested interests that succeeded in ringing “Japan’s earthquake-prone shores with nuclear reactors.”
The nuclear village is not a phenomenon confined to Japan. “Every country with atomic bombs or nuclear power plants has one of these villages,” Bass writes. They promote nuclear energy even as cancer victims continue to increase in accident-contaminated areas and as thousands of square miles of radioactive sites remain sealed off from habitation as “exclusion zones.” Yet support for nuclear energy comes easily because we are “fatally attracted” to “the force that holds the atom together.” Bass recalls Albert Einstein’s warning: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything…and we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.”
Some might wrongly conclude that the Fukushima disaster was unique because of its specific causes. Bass, however, sees it as an example of one set of variable circumstances and says that each accident has its own set. In an appendix, he lists and comments on several earlier nuclear accidents, including one in 1952 in Canada and another in 2021 in China, where 500 nuclear reactors are currently in the planning stage. The meltdowns and attempted cover-ups in his list are convincing enough for many readers to conclude that nuclear energy is unsafe at any size.
This is also the conviction of the nuclear physicist M. V. Ramana’s important 2024 study, Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change. Ramana ranges much more widely than Bass, though both are fully convinced that nuclear power reactors are too unsafe as well as exorbitantly expensive and too time-consuming to construct—15 to 20 years—to be feasible in the long run.
Bass points out that nuclear energy is not “green,” while Ramana argues that neither is it economically sound, both rejecting what proponents claim. Ramana writes most engagingly, as for example when he compares the difficulty with disposing of both the ring in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and nuclear waste. For the ring, wrote Tolkien, “there are but two courses…to hide the Ring forever, or unmake it. Both are beyond our power.” To which Ramana adds, “Likewise, we can neither unmake radioactive wastes once they are created nor bury them in a manner that we can be absolutely sure that they will never come back out.” He gives examples of waste disposal accidents on top of all the reactor accidents he cites, including one at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico in 2014, where a waste-filled drum stored underground exploded and released plutonium to “make its way to the surface.”
The disposal plant accident resulted from a cost-cutting, human failure, but Ramana cites nuclear energy reactor accidents set off by all sorts of other failures—design, maintenance and even climate change. He compares nuclear energy with solar and shows how the latter is far more practical, and far cheaper. The cost of solar power is decreasing while nuclear’s construction and maintenance costs are steadily rising. And, unlike nuclear, solar has minimal maintenance costs.
Both of these books are filled with arresting details and deserve a wide readership to help dispel the misleading claims of the promoters of nuclear energy. Both have been released by small or marginal publishers, which unfortunately can work against their distribution and publicity.
Next to global warming, the danger from atomic technology is the greatest danger the earth faces, something we must all become aware of. Ramana concludes by recalling James Baldwin’s admonition, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
This article appears in July/August 2026.
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