Project description
Remembering Fukushima’s decontamination
After the 2011 nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi, which led to a major fallout of radioactive matter, Japanese authorities undertook a massive decontamination effort. The order to abandon the village of Iitate was lifted in 2017, but few people have returned. Two citizen groups monitor radiation levels and look for ways to cope. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme, the RADMemCo project will review the origin of the large-scale radioactive decontamination process carried out after the Fukushima disaster and its impact on collective memory. It will focus on the actors involved in the decontamination work in Iitate, including local peasants and agronomists from the University of Tokyo, who are experimenting with new techniques to remove radioactivity from fields.
Objective
During the years following the nuclear accident of Fukushima Daiichi in Japan, a decontamination work was undertaken by Japanese authorities in the prefecture of Fukushima on a scale unprecedented even compared with the decontamination following the Chernobyl nuclear accident: around 16 000 workers removed more than 20 million m3 of radioactive soil, for a cost estimated at 24 bn €.
My project RADMemCo aims to understand the genesis of this decontamination work, focusing on the collective memory of disasters. In their argumentation concerning the Fukushima crisis, the managers of the plant frequently use analogies with diverse earlier crises to explain and cope with this new type of disaster. They have compared the ongoing decontamination process, for example, with the techniques used in the past by Japanese peasants to remove the ashes of the soils after a volcanic eruption.
The RADMemCo project asks: Did a particular Japanese way of dealing with disasters play a role in the choice of a large-scale radioactive decontamination in the affected areas of Fukushima? Conversely, did this decontamination work influence the perception and collective memory of the nuclear accident of Fukushima Daiichi?
To answer these questions, I will engage in an ethnographic study of actors of this decontamination work in the village of Iitate, situated about 40 km northwest of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The evacuation order was lifted in 2017, but few inhabitants decided to return. Among them, two citizen groups are monitoring constantly the levels of radioactivity, and seek to develop various ways of coping with the situation. One group that I will follow in particular, composed of local peasants and agronomists of the University of Tokyo, experiments with and designs new techniques to remove the radioactivity from the fields. Doing so, they might remove the radionuclides not only from the soils, but also from the collective memory of this disaster.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology other engineering and technologies nuclear engineering
- natural sciences chemical sciences nuclear chemistry radiation chemistry
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01
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08002 Barcelona
Spain
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