In a white coat and gloves, Ai Kimura is cutting up a fish sample at the Tarachine lab, about an hour's drive from the now-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan's eastern coast.
Four times a year, Ms Kimura and her team of volunteers collect samples of fish from the waters around the plant. They have been doing this since the lab was founded in 2011, just months after a devastating tsunami flooded the reactors, causing a radiation leak.
Except Ms Kimura is not a scientist - and neither are any of the women who run the non-profit lab, whose name Tarachine is derived from the term for "mother" in old Japanese. Shaken after the tsunami, Ms Kimura says locals started the lab to find out what was safe to feed their children because it was hard to come by information on the risks of radiation. So they asked technical experts to train them on how to test for radioactive substances and log the readings, raised funds and began educating themselves.
It was the decision of a shattered community that never thought an accident at the nuclear power plant was possible. Now, 12 years on, they again find themselves struggling to trust the Japanese government as it insists it's safe to release treated radioactive water from the plant into the Pacific Ocean.
Earlier this month, Japan received the green light to start pumping more than a million tonnes - about the same volume as 500 Olympic-size pools - of the treated water that has been used to cool the melted reactors. It has accumulated in more than a 1,000 tanks and now, as they reach capacity, it needs to go somewhere.
In a white coat and gloves, Ai Kimura is cutting up a fish sample at the Tarachine lab, about an hour's drive from the now-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Japan's eastern coast.
Four times a year, Ms Kimura and her team of volunteers collect samples of fish from the waters around the plant. They have been doing this since the lab was founded in 2011, just months after a devastating tsunami flooded the reactors, causing a radiation leak.
Except Ms Kimura is not a scientist - and neither are any of the women who run the non-profit lab, whose name Tarachine is derived from the term for "mother" in old Japanese. Shaken after the tsunami, Ms Kimura says locals started the lab to find out what was safe to feed their children because it was hard to come by information on the risks of radiation. So they asked technical experts to train them on how to test for radioactive substances and log the readings, raised funds and began educating themselves.
It was the decision of a shattered community that never thought an accident at the nuclear power plant was possible. Now, 12 years on, they again find themselves struggling to trust the Japanese government as it insists it's safe to release treated radioactive water from the plant into the Pacific Ocean.
Earlier this month, Japan received the green light to start pumping more than a million tonnes - about the same volume as 500 Olympic-size pools - of the treated water that has been used to cool the melted reactors. It has accumulated in more than a 1,000 tanks and now, as they reach capacity, it needs to go somewhere.