14 Haunting Portraits of Life After Nuclear Disaster
Mother Jones
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If you lived near Chernobyl or Fukushima, would you stay?
On April 26, 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant changed history, sending radiation and political shockwaves across Europe. Radioactive fallout contaminated 56,700 square miles of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, a region larger than New York state.
A generation later in Japan, on March 11, 2011, the Tohoku earthquake and the tsunami it triggered brought on multiple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In the initial fires, Fukushima released ten to thirty percent as much radiation as Chernobyl, contaminating some 4,500 square miles of Japan—nearly the area of Connecticut. Radioactive water continues to leak from the Fukushima plant to this day.
To the world, Chernobyl and Fukushima seem like dangerous places, but for the people who live there, that danger is simply a fact of life.
In my photography, I explore the human consequences of environmental contamination. I am interested in questions about home: how do people cope when their homeland changes irreversibly? Why do so many stay?
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