A miserable drama about some fishing disaster in the Northeast.
Economically, the situation has become so desperate that Gov. Rick Scott, a conservative Republican who is not inclined to ask for federal help, wrote to the United States Commerce Department last year and asked it to declare the oyster harvesting areas a fishing disaster.
Its carnivorous-fish-disaster thunder might have been stolen by last month's Mega Piranha, but this has the cash and the cast to serve up Jaws parallels, 3D silliness, and an all-you-can eat buffet of Spring Break teens.
The biggest challenge for the Fukushima project comes from local fishermen, who have not been able to fish since the disaster and who fear that the project will take away their fishing grounds.
Just two months ago, two greenling caught close to the Fukushima shore were found to contain more than 25,000 becquerels a kilogram of cesium, the highest cesium levels found in fish since the disaster and 250 times the government's safety limit.
Many fear that if they enter the Great Lakes ecosystem, they could push out all native species of fish, an environmental disaster that would also cripple the region's $8 billion fishing industry.
Bean Jessup, the frumpy protagonist of this first novel by a Times correspondent, opens up to the beauty of Alaska when she falls in love and marries a carpenter in a fishing town; after disaster strikes, she perseveres with the help of her husband's kleptomaniac mother and the two head to San Francisco, and a new life.
Long forgotten are the impressions of great environmental disasters, fish dying in running waters, the disappearance of predatory mammals and birds—scenarios such as these belong to bygone days.
Fishermen south of Fukushima Daiichi have not been able to fish commercially since the disaster, while those north of the plant can catch only octopus and whelks.
For Fukushima's fishing industry, the nuclear disaster has hastened a long decline, and some fishermen say they dare not resume work until more species show low radiation levels closer to shore.
With more than 80,000 residents near the plant evacuated almost immediately after the disaster, and fishing in nearby waters still severely restricted, they say there is little or no direct danger to humans from the latest releases.
