The following is a proposal abstract for a capstone project on resilient communities in Japan.
How can communities be resilient to nuclear disaster?
Nuclear disaster has little precedent and therefore does not have a strong disaster culture. The effects of nuclear disaster are also so complex that the ability for communities to be resilient to them likely depends on a number of variables, which are difficult to determine without a disaster culture to pull evidence from. This can be studied in Fukushima, Japan, because of a triple disaster in 2011 that included an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant meltdown. This type of disaster is the first of its kind and could tell us a lot about how disaster responses differ and why.
Are there specific parts of resilience models that the residents of Fukushima were unable to fulfill due to the nature of the disaster and what does this tell us about resilience to nuclear disaster?
I will choose a resilience model that I feel best applies to disasters and attempt to fulfill each portion with evidenced responses with the area around the nuclear plant. I expect that the community probably fulfills some parts of the model due to cultural practices or other disaster cultures, but I expect there to be large gaps in resilience to nuclear disaster, particularly with psychological distress and the willingness to return to homes during rehabilitation. I think it is likely that trust in nuclear power, the industry, and the government would decrease. This can help us understand how to prepare for other possible nuclear disasters (rather than assuming that they won’t happen). I think it would also help to understand what it means to be resilient and perhaps how the concept can shift in different contexts.
Because nuclear power is a point of contention on many scales, it is important to understand how to safely coexist with the presence and idea of nuclear power plants. By studying the resilience of the Fukushima community to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, I can help understand if it is possible to be resilient to nuclear disaster, and if successful nuclear resilience practices should be increased.Because the resilience of a community (or larger scaled group) is highly dependent on the preexisting conditions (such as education, culture, etc), it is important to research how these disasters could possibly play out in other parts of the world (in the case of increased dependency to nuclear power in particular).