AL
OOK AT
NUCLEAR
POLLUTION
THRE TS
A
TO THE OCEANS
Long and long has the grass been growing.
Long and long has the rain been falling.
Long has the Globe been rolling around.
“Song of Exposition” By Walt Whitman
W O R D S + P H O T O S B Y D AV I D P U ' U
I
began to study aspects of the disaster at Fukushima-Daiichi the moment the Tohoku quake occurred. The disaster didn’t begin on
March 11, 2011, as common knowledge would have us believe, but during the throes of the Cold War in the late 1950s. Some
aspects of it actually date back to the turn of the century.
After watching the tsunami wash ashore with some of my colleagues from K38 Rescue—we were online simultaneously and
saw the quake take place on the United States Geological Survey event reporting site—I knew the long range repercussions would be nuclear
in nature. At the time however, I had no idea regarding the education I would acquire in the next several years.
Shortly after the initial disaster, I found myself at the home of my friend George Orbelian, the head of the San Francisco Global Trade Council
and Project Kaisei (an ocean cleanup initiative of Ocean Voyages Institute, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco). Orbelian sat me
down in his living room on a warm sunny afternoon in San Francisco, high above the surf at Ocean Beach, looked me in the eyes and said,
“David, what are we going to do about Fukushima?”
My first response was to laugh, and I said, “George, what in the heck do you mean? What can we do?” The implausibility of two guys even
being able to grasp the enormity of what we knew then would likely be the largest disaster of its type in history, and it hit me square in the chest.
“There is a man in our group who is an engineer. He worked for General Electric in the design and implementation of the plant (as well as)
the nuclear program in Japan. He understands it well. We can start there,” said Orbelian.
So we did, and after immersion in the programs of Blue Mind, Arup, The Sea Space-Initiative, Blue Ocean Sciences, Triiibes and countless
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DEEP SURF MAGAZINE April 2014