264 R . Ando et al .: Radioprotection 2024 , 59 ( 4 ), 261 – 269
the end of the project , a festival was organized in Bragin , which gave the opportunity to the project participants to present their achievements and to exchange their ideas and impressions . The videos were also shared around the world , promoting the exchange of messages with schools in contaminated areas . The main assets of this project for the young teachers were to be able to participate actively in the construction of a story telling the life of the territories , then to activate the memory linking the past , the present and the future through the development of a tool for communication and education .
2.4 Innovative local projects with young farmers in the districts of Stolyn and Bragin
Given the radiological but also economic situation of Belarus villages in the late 1990s and early 2000s , young farmers were particularly motivated to experiment with innovative agricultural practices . For example , in the village of Olmany , young farmers have developed a model to optimize the rotation of herds of cows in the meadows in summer and the use of hay in winter when cows are in barns in order to produce " clean " milk , that is to say below the official contamination standards ( Lepicard , 2001 ).
Young farmers from the Stolyn and Bragin districts got involved in the “ potato project ”, developed with French experts to ensure vegetable production without significant contamination . For this project , developed with the help of the Belarus Institute of Soil Science and Agrochemistry ( Bogdevitch , 2003 ), volunteer farmers experimented methods best suited to local conditions . After their development , these methods were disseminated through training provided by the Institute . In addition , specific funding methods implemented by the CORE Programme have enabled them to develop new productions taking into account the radiological context of their territory .
It should be noted that more than 15 yr after the accident , families of young farmers have come to settle in the contaminated territories given the prospects opened up by the innovative projects tested within the framework of the ETHOS Project and the CORE Programme . Some left their village of origin given the socio-economic difficulties with which they were confronted to come and settle in full knowledge of radioactivity and taking the necessary precautions to develop their activities based on lessons in the practical radiological protection culture developed elsewhere . The dialogues with these families revealed that beyond the economic prospects , the new infrastructures put in place after the accident in the affected areas , in particular with regard to education and health , had played a significant role in their choice to change of region .
3 What was learned with the new generation in Fukushima during the 24th Fukushima Dialogue
The 24th Fukushima Dialogue entitled “ The Future of Fukushima Created with the Next Generation " took place in November 2022 in the town of Naraha located within 20 kilometers south from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the Pacific coast ( Ando et al ., 2023 ). Organized by the Fukushima Dialogue Association ( NPO Fukushima Dialogue , 2023 ) with the support of the Japan Health Physics Society ( JHPS ) and the Society for Risk Analysis Japan ( SRAJ ), this Dialogue was also an opportunity to revisit the Chernobyl experience presented above .
The testimonies and discussions collected during the Dialogue were an opportunity for the young generation of Naraha and the surrounding municipalities to express their concerns but also their expectations and challenges regarding their future life in the Prefecture . Included in the 20 km evacuation zone , these localities were totally evacuated in March 2011 and despite some parts of them were not seriously contaminated by the fallout from the accident , the evacuation orders were not lifted until the decontamination programmes ended in each of the municipalities . This happened in 2015 in Naraha . After the evacuation orders were lifted , massive reconstruction work for infrastructure and buildings was implemented and many houses rotten during the evacuation time were demolished . As a consequence , vast vacant lands and new buildings co-exist in the area . The familiar places where the inhabitants used to live have disappeared .
Similarly , demographics have also changed dramatically in the region ( Saito , 2023 ). In particular , the proportion of young and old people is seriously unbalanced . The same is true for women and men , as many workers assigned to reconstruction work are men ( Ozaki and Koenuma , 2024 ). Fear of pregnancy among young women worried about radiation is also a factor preventing young couples from settling in these areas . Although this is a major concern among the younger generation ( Ito et al ., 2023 ), this point was hardly raised at the Dialogue because most of the participants were single , and those who returned to the evacuation areas feel able to cope with this problem . And in fact , those who are concerned about residual radiation but who do not feel able to control the radiation or who simply have not had access to the information to do so , are not returning to these areas .
These gradual transformations of the towns and the local population disorient the inhabitants who , moreover , find it difficult to get an idea of what it will look like in the future . The Nahara situation , which is quite similar to the other affected municipalities experience in the Prefecture , confronts the younger generation with new practical problems that their parents had not faced , creating a feeling of being a stranger to their own homeland ( Reich and Goto , 2015 ; Ando et al ., 2023 ). How to create a link between the inhabitants in such a context ? How to build a community in such a fragmented environment ? How to share the local problems within residents from the Prefecture but also from outside ?
The various initiatives described by the participants during the 24 th Fukushima Dialogue do not have the scale that could be described as a project as in the case of Belarus . Qualified by the participants themselves as small-scale activities , compared to the large-scale projects developed by the government in the Fukushima Prefecture mainly in the field of infrastructure , these initiatives nevertheless contribute , at their level , to the revitalization of the affected regions . On the one hand they reflect the aspirations of the young generation and , on the other hand , they highlight the difficulties and issues which this generation is facing .