Public Affairs Forum: Lessons from Fukushima

It has been over four years since Ivan Stout and Chiaki Kasahara evacuated with their three-year-old son from East Japan during the Fukushima meltdown. This ongoing crisis has had a significant impact on their lives and galvanized them to better educate themselves on the issues they were so ill-informed about before the crisis. This presentation is their attempt to summarize what they have learned so far from their costly experience so that they can help push forward the debate on this extremely important topic. In short, this is the presentation they wished they had seen before originally deciding to live so close to nuclear power plants.

Ivan Stout and Chiaki Kasahara are both UT graduates who first met and were married in Austin almost 18 years ago. Before meeting, they were both exchange students to each other's country and both speak each other's native language fluently. They had been living in Japan for nearly 8 years before having to suddenly evacuate Japan and abandon their long-term plans there. After coming face to face with one of the world's worst environmental disasters, they found sanctuary in the ecologically focused city of Austin. Ivan currently works in the finance industry as a data analyst and Chiaki works in the semiconductor industry as an operations analyst.