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Looking for the latest on radiation problems and exposure levels, the relative quietness of news is, I believe, of concern. It may be that what we don’t know isn’t necessarily good for us. Any progress on containing or lessening the radiation seems small.

TEPCO are, however, responding urgently to a ‘heavy rain’ forecast. The situation just keeps getting worse.

A Japan report of a rabbit born without ears connects this to radiation at grass level (no pun intended).

“Anti nuclear activist Helen Caldicott says thousands of people living outside the no-go zone around the power plant should be evacuated.” She is criticised, by some, for being alarmist. It is possible she is actually tellling it as it is! An audio interview is linked here.

What I did find extremely interesting was a post at ‘japanfocus.org’ discussing the likelihood of additional serious earthquake occurrences and associated nuclear issues.

 “The Nuclear Disaster That Could Destroy Japan – On the danger of a killer earthquake in the Japanese Archipelago”

Hirose Takashi. Translated and with an introduction by C. Douglas Lummis

I am impressed by the interpreter’s introduction as it waxes philosophical on the ‘accident’ theme, so am including it.

(Nuclear) Power Corrupts

A puzzle for our time: how is it possible for a person to be smart enough to make plutonium, and dumb enough actually to make it? {my emphasis}

Plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years, which means that in that time its toxicity will be reduced by half.  What could possess a person, who will live maybe one three-hundredth of that time, to produce such a thing and leave it to posterity to deal with?  In fact, “possess” might be the right word.  Behind all the nuclear power industry’s language of cost efficiency or liberation from fossil fuel or whatever, one can sense a kind of possession – a bureaucratized madness.  Political science has produced but one candidate for a scientific law – Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. But the political scientists haven’t noticed that the closest thing we have to absolute power is nuclear power.  Nuclear power corrupts in a peculiar way.  It seems to tempt the engineers into imagining they have been raised to a higher level, a level where common sense judgments are beneath them.  Judgments like (as my grandmother used to say) “Accidents do happen”.

At their press conferences, the Tokyo Electric Co. (Tepco) officials say, as if it were an excuse, that the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan were “outside their expectations”.  Look it up in the dictionary; that’s the definition of “accident.”  For decades common-sense opponents of nuclear power, in Japan and all over the world, have been asking the common-sense question, What if there is an accident?  For this they were ridiculed and scorned by the nuclear engineers and their spokespersons.  We, suffer an accident?  In our world there are no accidents!

Playing with nuclear power is playing God, which is by far the most corrupting game of all. {my emphasis}

In Japan, one of the loudest, most persistent and best informed of the voices asking this common sense question has been that of Hirose Takashi.  Mr. Hirose first came into public view with a Swiftean satire he published in 1981, Tokyo e, Genpatsu wo! (Nuclear Power Plants to Tokyo!).(Shueisha)  In that work, he made the argument that, if it is really true that these plants are perfectly safe (“accidents never happen”) then why not build them in downtown Tokyo rather than in far-off places?  By putting them so far away you lose half the electricity in the wires, and waste all that hot water by pumping it into the ocean instead of delivering it to people’s homes where it could be used for baths and cooking.  The book outraged a lot of people – especially in Tokyo – and revealed the hypocrisy of the safety argument. 

In the years since then he has published volume after volume on the nuclear power issue – particularly focusing on the absurdity of building a facility that requires absolutely no accidents whatsoever, on an archipelago famous as the earthquake capital of the world.  Again and again he made frightening predictions which (as he writes in the introduction to his latest book Fukushima Meltdown (Asahi, 2011) he was always praying would prove wrong.  Tragically, they did not.  In the present article he reminds readers that the recent earthquake was not the last, but one in a series, and that the situation at Japan’s other nuclear power plants is as dangerous as ever.  The nuclear power industry would like us to believe the 3/11 catastrophe was an “exception”.  But all accidents are exceptions – as will be the next.  CDL

C. Douglas Lummis is the author of Radical Democracy and other books in Japanese and English. A Japan Focus associate, he formerly taught at Tsuda College.

The complete article is very striking. It is of great relevance to Japan’s future and could well reflect into other countries involving fault-lines.

“Earthquakes and Nuclear Power Plants”

Read it here. 

Related articles

• “Japan city grapples with nuclear doubts after Fukushima crisis” and related posts (newsonjapan.com)
• Nuclear power loses its appeal after Japan crisis (guardian.co.uk)
• Germany pledges nuclear shutdown (bbc.co.uk)