The nuclear power plant's exclusion zone is home to a new population of wildlife In the decade since a tsunami washed over the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, triggering the second-largest nuclear disaster in history, the surrounding towns have struggled to return to normal. But that’s not the case for the wildlife living in the area. For the animals living in this mountainous coastal landscape, the absence of people has allowed them to expand their populations into towns formerly inhabited by people—and, in many cases, thrive in humans’ absence. It began when an earthquake on March 11, 2011, sparked a chain reaction that ended with more than 150,000 people evacuated from their homes and thousands of acres deemed uninhabitable due to high levels of radioactive fallout. This area, called the nuclear exclusion zone, is generally off-limits to humans—although the Japanese government has been working since the disaster to remove contaminated soil and other radioactive materials. While these remediation efforts have allowed some residents to return to the area in recent years, vast swaths of the land once inhabited by people is now home to a larger population of wild boars, monkeys and dozens of other species. Warnell and Savannah River Ecology Lab researcher James Beasley, who has been studying the effects of the nuclear disaster on the area’s wildlife since 2015, said the area’s topography once created a natural boundary between humans and wildlife. Many of the towns and rice paddies were located in the low-lying coastal areas, but as you traveled up the nearby mountains and into the dense forests beyond, the area became more rural, providing habitat and refuge for wild boar, monkeys, Japanese serow and other wildlife species. Read the full story on the UGA news website.
