Meet journalist Thomas Bass, author of ‘Return to Fukushima’

| March 13, 2026| Event

Meet journalist Thomas Bass, author of 'Return to Fukushima'

Meet journalist Thomas Bass, author of ‘Return to Fukushima’

March 13, 2026
12:00 am
118 Elliot

118 Elliot St Brattleboro VT 05301


“Return to Fukushima” is a poignant blend of investigative journalism, environmental critique, and personal reflection that examines the broader implications of the ongoing 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.  Bass brings poetic prose, incisive analysis, and a deeply ethical lens to a subject often buried under technical jargon and political spin. This book is not just a recounting of catastrophe, but a stark reminder that, even in the face of individual and community resilience, science and policy fall short for those haunted by the permanence of radioactive contamination.

“This is a fascinating book… one so crucial that it bears on the survival of the earth.”

Noam Chomsky

Thomas Bass writes for The New Yorker, Wired, Smithsonian, American Scholar, The Bulletin of the American 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, Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World, and Return to Fukushima. Cited by the Overseas Press Club for his foreign reporting, he is a professor of English and journalism at the State University of New York in Albany.

The discussion will be moderated by Lissa Weinmann, Chair of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel’s Federal Nuclear Waste Policy Committee. Weinmann studies nuclear policy and will be representing Windham World Affairs Council at the “2026 Nuclear Deterrence Summit” a national conference in Arlington, VA at the end of January.

The event is free and open to the public with a suggested donation of $10.

Registration open on Feb 1st

A note from the author:

Fukushima at Fifteen

The world’s largest nuclear exclusion zones, depopulated and dangerous, have been produced by civilian nuclear power plants. We are overdue for the next reactor to melt down or explode, which occurs, on average, once every decade. This will remind us—amid all the talk about a nuclear renaissance powering our AI future—that atoms for war never succeeded in becoming atoms for peace.
The reactors at Fukushima are so radioactively hot that the robots sent to explore their interiors are destroyed within minutes. The location of the melting fuel remains a mystery. It will be removed in forty years or perhaps never if the reactors are finally entombed in concrete. In the meantime, Fukushima’s reactors are dumping strontium, cesium and other radionuclides—sixty-two at last count—into the atmosphere and oceans. The villages around the reactors are ghost towns and the forests are filled with radioactive mushrooms.
The disaster forced 160,000 atomic refugees from their homes. They received housing subsidies until 2018, when the Japanese government pushed to resettle the area. In the absence of any national studies on the medical effects of Fukushima’s high levels of radiation, the people living there have opened their own research laboratories. They pay regular visits to the nuclear exclusion zone around Chernobyl, which suffered its own nuclear disaster in 1986. Fukushima’s Argonauts of the Anthropocene are learning how to live with radioactivity, decontaminate their fields, monitor their food, and prepare for the next wave to wash over Japan’s seismically precarious reactors.

Last modified: January 6, 2026

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