The Phoenix Leader Education Program conducted a short-term fieldwork in Fukushima Prefecture over two days on September 7 and 8, 2022.

The purpose of short-term fieldwork is to understand the current status of reconstruction from radiation disaster in the affected area and to find the issues from a cross-disciplinary perspective beyond the fields for protecting lives from radiation disaster, protecting the environment from radioactivity, and protecting people and society from radioactivity.

Fieldwork activities:

• Interviews with local residents who live in Iitate Village which was contaminated by radioactive materials as the result of the accident at TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
• Interviews with a doctor and a nurse who continued to work at the hospital in Minamisoma city in the chaotic period immediately after the disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant accident
• Visit to the TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi NPP site and TEPCO Decommissioning Archive Center to learn about the response to the accident and decommissioning activities of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi from the time of the accident to the present

Students learned about:

• Psychological distress among the Fukushima residents, Various efforts and activities for reconstruction
• Importance of a multidisciplinary approach to identify and resolve the problems in complex disasters such as radiation disaster

TEPCO FDNPP site visit                                 TEPCO Decommissioning Archive Center