we'll talk about that. welcome to al jazeera america i'm john siegenthaler here are tonight's top stories. new spying orders from the president in a major speech president obama redefined how the national security agency collects information. the change has come after a barrage of crit sixg following months of crit sixg about nsa surveillance programs. >> it was clear to me, that changes in our technological capabilities were raising new questions about the privacy safeguards currently in place. >> president obama signed off on the $1.1 trillion federal bill today, it funds many of the parts of government from the cost of war to airports. keeps the government financed through september 30th. the next hurdle for lawmakers is raising the federal debt

sealing. the company behind the water contamination in west virginia is facing bankruptcy. faces several investigation he after last weem's chemical spill near charleston, west virginia. those are the headlines. i'm john siegenthaler. i'll see you back here at 11:00 eastern. america tonight is next. i'll see you tonight at 11:00. >> there were explosions at reactor 2 and reactor 4. that's when i started thinking, this is it, i'm done for. >> how worried were you?

>> translator: enough to make me crazy. when i needed people they used subcontractors to hire us. i'm among the victims who were thrown by. >> translator: we were walking on a knife's edge, wondering where the worst-case scenario would occur or not. >> it's been almost three years since the fukushima nuclear disaster and once again the stricken plant is in the news. we traveled here to japan to find out what's really happening at fukushima daiichi and to explore the fallout for those who continue to live the worst nuclear disaster since chernob chernobyl. lifelong rancher and his cattle was his life.

he was buying supplies at a hardware store when the magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit. >> translator: there was a huge shaking. i rushed out into the parking lot of the store and there heard reports of a three meter tsunami. i was worried about my cattle so i rushed back here. >> that's where he first heard about the trouble at the nuclear power plant just miles from his home. he lifd close enough to fukushima daiichi to see it will you binoculars. >> i saw helicopters in the air circling over fukushima daiichi. then i heard a noise, a sound like it came from a battle field. >> that sound was a hydrogen explosion caused by a melt down at fukushima daiichi's reactor 1. everyone within 20 kilometers,

12 miles from the plant was ordered to evacuate. >> translator: i could see which began on the 12th but i had 330 cows to care for, i couldn't flee, couldn't evacuate. >> as deeply tied he was to these cattle to this fear it was a decision he feared would cost him his life. >> on the 15th of march there were explosion at reactor 2 and reactor 4. that's when i thought, i'm done for. >> explosions blanketed with esezium and other radioactive materials. after seeing other farms abandoned he simply couldn't bear to leave. >> i heard animals crying out. this is where it looked likely. wherever i looked were scenes of a living hell. i couldn't do the same thing to my own cattle.

>> yoshizawa has tested positive to international exposure to the radioactive sezium 184 and one . he is receiving monitoring and those levels have dropped. >> i'm not going to get hysterical or have a mental breakdown from it. >> but fear of radiation remains strong and yoshizawa is the exception. most heeded the evacuation order and fled in waves leaving ghost towns behind. we went in the evacuation zone, remains empty, eerily silent.

many expected to return once the dust settled and the waters receded. instead even long term residents have stayed away, are afraid of what many call the invisible enemy that haunts the hundreds of square miles around fukushima daiichi. this meter is showing clearly the highest reading we have seen the whole time we have been here in japan. >> the tens of thousands who fled the towns near the stricken plant have yet to return home. these nuclear refugees are scattered throughout japan. katsanobu sakarai, the mayor, is trying to convince residents to come home. the city lost 85% of its population. >> no good comes from agonizing over the past. so i just focused on how to move

the city forward into the future. >> the mayor devoted himself to making sure the city had a future but it was a hard sell. radiation remained high in many portions of manami soma. >> we are letting evacuees know we are doing decontamination to reduce their anxieties. >> reporter: sakurai's quest to decontaminate fukushima prefecture. contaminated shrubs must be pruned, trees cut down and removed. the contaminated soil is dumped at hundreds of sites like that around fukushima prefecture. to give you a sense of the scale of the operation the bags here were taken from only 400 homes

in minimasoma but the city has plans to decontaminate 20,000 in all. keep in mind, this city is one small corner in a prefecture roughly the size of connecticut. a third of the population has yet to return here. kari saito was living in fukushima city with her husband and two young children when the government ordered everyone inside after the explosions at fukushima daiichi. how worried were you? >> translator: enough to make me raisey. i used my cell phone to search the internet for news. i kept searching. fukushima, radiation, i kept searching. it nearly drove me crazy. >> after they were allowed

outside she continued worrying about the radiation. continued worrying about her children. did your husband tell you that it was safe to be in the city? >> translator: he didn't tell me it was safe but i think he believed i was overreacting. my youngest son had blood in his urine and stool. he kept catching colds and had a cough. but when i took ethical a doctor he told me there was no link to radiation. all the doctors there said that. >> reporter: when her husband ignored her fears and refused to leave fukushima the strain was unbearable. she filed for divorce. it's a kind of marital discord so common these days the japanese have a name for it, nuclear divorce. >> translator: i felt like if

i stayed with him i wouldn't be able to keep my children from harm, and that's how i got here. >> reporter: here the matsumoto city far from fukushima, far from the consideration of radiation. >> translator: to be able to see them like this, makes me very happy. >> reporter: do you believe fukushima city will ever be a safe place to live again? >> not in my lifetime. not the same fukushima that existed before. where you could eat the food without worry, where you could drink the water from the river. that would be wonderful. some day. >> they're called nuclear gypsies, preyed pop by the

japanese mafia and paid next to nothing to do some of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs of the fukushima cleanup. to suceeed >> it was my dream to get a high school diploma >> but a failing grade can mean loosing it all... >> i don't know how my life would look, if i would get deported... >> will they make it in america? >> i have a chance... >> i learn america

>> audiences are intelligent and they know that their needs are not being met by american tv news today. >> entire media culture is driven by something that's very very fast... >> there has been a lack of fact based, in depth, serious journalism, and we fill that void... >> there is a huge opportunity for al jazeera america to change the way people look at news.

>> we just don't parachute in on a story...quickly talk to a couple of experts and leave... >> one producer may spend 3 or 4 months, digging into a single story... >> at al jazeera, there are resources to alow us as journalists to go in depth and produce the kind of films... the people that you don't see anywhere else on television. >> we intend to reach out to the people who aren't being heard. >>we wanna see the people who are actually effected by the news of the day... >> it's digging deeper it's asking that second, that third question, finding that person no one spoken to yet... >> you can't tell the stories of the people if you don't get their voices out there, and al jazeera america is doing just that. >> in the departments of japan's nuclear crisis when each day's news seem to predict darker days

ahead, a small band of workers offered a ray of light. tepco employees faced daily doses of radiation to bring the plant under control. they became known as the fukushima 50. >> translator: the so-called fukushima 50 was a group that stayed behind during fukushima's darkest hour in order to fight to the end. >> reporter: did you think you were going to die? >> translator: of course there were times when i thought the situation was critical. >> reporter: why did you do it? did you ever think of not doing it? >> translator: we felt we had a responsibility to put things right. and we felt that we were probably the only ones that could deal with the situation. >> reporter: the courage of employees like yoshizawa made

them heroes in japan. tepco uses them as symbols of who they feel their company is. workers who put themselves at great risk every day only to be fired when their radiation becomes too high. the nuclear gypsies, doing a job at low pay, to do the core of the cleanup. the tepco workers, the rest of them are contractors, subcontractors. >> reporter: tepco reliance on thousands of these workers to clean up radioactive debris and to build tanks to store the unending flood of radioactive water to keep the generators cool. >> how are they recruited?

>> by the subcontractors that poured into fukushima prefecture. there is a enormous amount of money scattered around. >> reporter: "america tonight" found that very little of this money makes it into the workers hand. >> they make $100 a day, the lowest $60. >> a city near fukushima many laborers find lodging. many workers often contact him worried about their exposur expo radiation. >> there are many that have been exposed to over 50 milliseverts. >> this is where i worked. this is the floor of the work room. the boots are extremely contaminated. off the charts of the radiation

monitor. >> a worker who we'll call tanaka has traveled to japan as a laborer for most of his life. tanaka didn't want to be identified for fear of retribution. >> there are some people who work with their bare hands, they would contaminate not only themselves but would spread contaminated particles to others. >> reporter: cost cutting measures by the subcontracting company he worked for put him at further risk. >> we used to wear charcoal filters, but because of the cost cuts we got dust filters like those that you buy at a convenience store. tepco workers wear charcoal filters. >> reporter: it sounds like there are different levels of

workers. >> tepco is king. >> it's unlikely he'll ever be hired at fukushima again, he has since lost his apartment and he's constantly sick. >> what are you suffering from? >> translator: fatigue, tiredness, i get really tired. i can't say whether radiation is the cause but since used up nuclear workers don't get any compensation, i'm worried about my future. some of it could be psychological. >> while workers like tanaka suffer the high labor has been boon to one group, organized crime. >> translator: the yakusas have historical been deeply involved in the construction industry. >> reporter: helps workers exploited by the japanese mafia, or yakusa. target low skilled occupations.

>> to quickly gather 4,000, 5,000 decontamination workers in fukushima you need to do it the traditional way using the yakusa. >> reporter: what do workers tell you about the conditions that they're dealing with? >> translator: from the decontamination workers i mainly hear about money problems like not getting danger pay. >> reporter: the government promises danger pay to workers who risk exposure to radiation while cleaning up hundreds of square miles of contaminated country side. that promise is used to lure many workers to fukushima. that's what brought this worker who we'll call sato to iwaki city. >> translator: the government says it will pay $100 a day. but i initially got 20. the contractors and subcontractors took the remaining 80. >> reporter: when satoo

complained he was told his contract had changed, that now hhe owed money for food and lodging. >> reporter: did the yakuza have anything to do with your employment? >> they were a former member of the fukushima branch of a right wing group. >> reporter: but he says the japanese mafia is only a tiny part of the many companies that are getting rich of a $50 billion cleanup effort. >> translator: it is the structure that is evil. wages are skimmed all along the way and the worker at the very bottom actually doing the work sees their pay going down. >> reporter: i spoke with a tepco spokesperson in tokyo who defended the company's handling of workers. isn't this tepco's responsibility, after all these

workers are working for you. >> translator: if there are labor practices occurring that violate the law, there is a legal process to remedy those situations. however, it is our responsibility to improve the working environment inside the plant. we've made a lot of progress but we do aim for an even higher level of improvement. >> reporter: but any improvement wit will be too latr the invisible army of workers, many of whom fear they no longer have a future because of a system they feel puts profit before safety. >> when they needed people they used subcontractors to hire us. when our services are no longer needed i'm one of the victims who are thrown away. >> reporter: in the next segment we explore the nuclear

raging in japan. sports... business... weather... live news...every hour, on the hour only on al jazeera america mead is.

>> so far we've seen the human and environmental impacts of the ongoing fukushima nuclear disaster. but if japan abandons the nuclear policy, what then? how will the oil-poor nation sustain its economy? in our final segment we'll explore the battle that's raging over nuclear energy in japan. nato khan was prime minister when japan's nuclear nightmare first began. >> about an hour after the earthquake hit i first received the news that the fukushima

power plant had lost all power and all cooling functionality. >> reporter: within days three reactors at fukushima had melted down. multiple hydrogen explosions ripped through the plant causing khan to consider the unthinkable. >> translator: i had experts simulate a worst-case scenario showing how far the accident could spread. if conditions were to deteriorate there were 50 million people within a 250 kilometer radius of fukushima daiichi. all those people would have to evacuate. >> reporter: the country and the world held their breath as the disaster that could have turned tokyo into a ghost town was slowly brought under control. >> we were walking on a knife's edge wondering whether the worst case scenario would occur or not. >> reporter: the close call

caused the prime minister to reassess everything he believed about nuclear energy. >> while you were priements in the middle of this crisis is when your view often nuclear power changed. >> translator: nearly one-third of japan would have had to evacuate from their communities. i came to believe that we should halt further operation of nuclear energy that entailed such huge risks. we can't have another nuclear accident. i came to believe that the only way to keep that from happening is to get rid of nuclear energy itself. >> reporter: after leaving office, khan made it his mission to rid the country of nuclear energy. other ministers have since joined him. the political movement he helped build have forced all of japan's

50 reactors off line. but that success has come with a price. the sudden shock of losing nuclear power has driven up electricity prices in japan. emissions have spiked and japan has a trade deficit for the first time in decades due to massive importation of fossil fuels. japan has mounted a drive to bring the nuclear plants back on. prime minister abe is aggressively promoting nuclear energy abroad. he has recently signed an agreement to sell reactors to the middle east. major manufacturers like hitachi

are vying for a share of the trillion dollar international market and the 370 reactors that are expected to be built by 2070. >> i would think it's our responsibility to respond to that kind of expectation. >> reporter: japanese nuclear manufacturers received $50 billion in international orders last year. new technology and reactor designs they say ensure that this time, it will be different. >> translator: we know what happened and we apply what we think is necessary countermeasures into our technology. so the technology is always improving to overcome any you know, events that happened past. >> reporter: for nato khan the current administration is learning the wrong lesson from

fukushima. >> until 3-11 i felt the same about nuclear energy that priessments abe does. but i no longer feel we should be selling nuclear energy either domestically or internationally. >> reporter: khan is confident that now is the time to transition to renewables. >> japan can supply sufficient energy without nuclear power. over half of japanese citizens are demanding that. but whether or not that voice will be crushed will be decided in the them one or two years. is is -- in the next one or two years. >> reporter: who is going to win that battle? >> i believe in the not too distant future japan will stop using nuclear power. i believe that to be true. >> whatever path japan chooses the specter of fukushima will haunt the nuclear industry for decades to come. in tokyo i'm michael oku.

ago >> ...i come around that corner... >> you don't want this? >> no, i think we should do it how we would normally... no exceptions >> should i also be in the picture? >> yeah [laughs] are you alright with that? >> no, i'm alright with that... >> ok, we're just gonna have to do it right? >> yeah