After a preliminary discussion on how and where opinion, resilience and/or resistance against a nuclear power plant might emerge, Chapter 5 profiles three people—Josef, Savitri and Rajesh—from different walks of life who navigate competing challenges in their lives. It will be made evident that perceptions of risk were the main catalysts in altering the calculus of criticality, and that these risks need be viewed through a socially embedded lens rather than through a focus on the nuclear power plant alone or an abstracted theory of modernity. Nuclear risks did not emanate from the solar plexus of the reactor alone, but in a circuitous fashion, were rerouted through mundane practice—revisited in terms of changes and challenges to peoples’ health, diets, homes, livelihoods, the expense of living, the future of their children, marriage prospects, and worldviews. Significantly, a focus on their lives demonstrates how resistance was fermenting indigenously and not at the behest of outsiders such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and foreign funders or agencies as state officials were wont to say.
The Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant Disaster and the Future of Renewable Energy