In The Los Angeles Times today, John M. Glionna vividly recounts his trip to Fukushima. It's a gripping story and well worth reading in full. As he traveled across "deserted farmland" to the nuclear power station in an SUV, Glionna, another journalist, an interpreter, and a driver--all wearing breathing masks--watched nervously as a radiation gauge ticked higher and higher. When they reached Fukushima's gate, they were turned away by security guards--"two figures who'd seemingly stepped out of Star Wars, menacing in their dual-intake respirator masks and head-to-toe white hazmat gear." Glionna describes the area around the plant as a "post-apocalyptic landscape" cloaked in silence.

There's been a steady drumbeat of news about Japan's earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant--just today we wrote about how evacuees will be compensated--but for two journalists, the radiation reports and aerial photos of smoking reactors just haven't offered enough insight into the look, feel, even smell of the place at the heart of Japan's nuclear crisis. So the intrepid journalists decided to do what intrepid journalists do: visit the "place where no one else in the world wanted to be." The decision to travel to Fukushima wasn't made lightly. He explains that a scientist told them it would be safe to travel near the reactor barring an explosion.

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Uri Friedman