FUKUSHIMA AT 15 – Meet journalist Thomas Bass, author of ‘Return to Fukushima’
Fifteen years ago, on 11 March 2011, four nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan were destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami, a disaster that still impacts the world today. Thomas A. Bass, journalist and author of the book ‘Return to Fukushima,’ joins Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) in a live and livestreamed event to discuss the ongoing disaster, the staggering costs of containing it, the lives of people living near Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zone, and the broader implications of Fukushima for the world at large.
The live and livestreamed discussion with Bass will take place on Friday, March 13, 2026 at 118 Elliot, 118 Elliot Street in Brattleboro, Vermont. Doors open at 6:30 pm; A reception with the author will follow. Copies of the book will be sold by Everyone’s Books before and after the event for author signing. BCTV will begin a livestream starting at 7:00 pm. A suggested $10 donation helps cover costs, but all can attend. To register for the event and connect to the livestream, visit https://Fukushima.eventbrite.com. The event will broadcast live on Comcast Channel 1078, on YouTube (@BrattleboroTV), and the BCTV website at: https://www.brattleborotv.org/.
“Fukushima is an ongoing nuclear disaster. The four reactors that melted down and exploded in 2011 are still deadly, even to the robots that get burned up trying to explore them,” Bass says. “The Japanese government has been releasing radioactive cooling water into the Pacific Ocean since 2023. A hundred thousand people remain displaced from their homes, but grassroots efforts, propelled by the ingenuity of local farmers and entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, artists, and immigrants intrigued by starting new lives in the red zone, are reviving Fukushima.”
Thomas Bass writes for The New Yorker, Wired, Smithsonian, American Scholar, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and other publications. He is the author of eight nonfiction books on subjects ranging from beating roulette with toe-operated computers (The Eudaemonic Pie) to using chaos theory to predict the world’s financial markets (The Predictors). His other books include The Spy Who Loved Us, Vietnamerica, Camping with the Prince and Other Tales of Science in Africa, Reinventing the Future and Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World.
The discussion will be moderated by Lissa Weinmann, Chair of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel’s Federal Nuclear Waste Policy Committee.
