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.
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.
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.
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.
Farming, fishing and transport disasters can be set aside when modern industries are humming and leisure pursuits proliferating.
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.
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.
Several of PIRCA's findings, touching on fishing, sea level rise, disaster planning, and much else, "made it into the final report," she says.
