Three Years after Fukushima: Lulled into the Myth of Safety?

[kristopher]

Three Years after Fukushima: Lulled into the Myth of Safety?

Elisa Wood, Contributing Editor
March 11, 2014

Virginia, USA -- World sentiment seemed to steer away from nuclear energy and toward more renewables following the disaster at Japan's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant on March 11, 2011. Three years later, have we forgotten?

A “myth of safety” permeated before the accident — and indeed may have led to it. And the myth continues today, says Kennette Benedict, executive director of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which published a new English version of the book, “The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Disaster: Investigating the Myth and Reality.” The book was released today to commemorate the third anniversary of the disaster.

The book describes minute-to-minute events within the plant, utility and government agencies as the accident unfolded. It is based on the findings of an independent panel that conducted 300 interviews with those who played a role during the crisis — from workers in the plant to government leaders forced to make fateful decisions during the crisis.

Owned by Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant suffered a catastrophic failure when a tsunami flooded the facility and shut down emergency generators, thus halting cooling to the reactor. The 140,000 people who lived nearby evacuated and have yet to return. The disabled plant continues to struggle with radiation release.

The book attempts to bring cultural and historic perspective to the accident. When Japan decided to pursue nuclear power more than 50 years ago....

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/03/three-years-after-fukushima-lulled-into-the-myth-of-safety?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-March12-2014

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. One of the shockers of this incident

is finding out how little those in charge knew about nuclear energy.

DU's bananas posted a story about some radiation showing up in British Columbia,
in which a professor in the school of resource and environmental management at Simon Fraser University said:
“It means there are still emissions ... and trans-Pacific air pollution"
as if he not aware of Fukishima as on ongoing disaster
not aware of how air currents work.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014753140

and a longish story by NY Times about the SS Reagan's contamination ....a nuclear carrier, no less,
reported the captain believed any radioactivity coming from Fukishima would be contained in a plume,
as opposed to being widely dispersed, like.....air.

[kristopher]

2. They are no different than any other part of the MIC

We are three decades past 1984; or maybe that should be into 1984.


Free online
http://www.george-orwell.org/1984

Yeah, 30 years past "the future" it can't hurt to ask, "Where, and what, are we?"

To Noel Willmett

18 May 1944
10a Mortimer Crescent NW 6

Dear Mr Willmett,

Many thanks for your letter. You ask whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade and instance the fact that they are not apparently growing in this country and the USA.

I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers° of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it.1 That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

Two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it.
As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history2 etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope 3 they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils—I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.

Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell

[XVI, 2471, pp. 190—2; typewritten]

Via The Daily Beast:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/george-orwell-s-letter-on-why-he-wrote-1984.html

[caraher]

3. Speaking of time warps...

The Sunday before the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Bob Budnitz gave a talk at the Physics of Sustainable Energy conference in Berkeley whose chief theme was how many orders of magnitude safer the reactor fleet is today than at the time of Three Mile Island. He talked up safety culture and had oodles of graphs showing declining rates of various types of incidents.

Last weekend he again gave a talk on topics in nuclear energy... it was basically the exact same talk! Yes, he did talk about Fukushima for a while, the most memorable part being praise for the heroism of those who fought to keep things at least relatively under control (pointing out that many of them did so knowing they had just lost loved ones in the tsunami). But he ascribed little more significance to that event than most air travelers would to the disappearance of a Boeing airliner this past weekend.

Interestingly enough, I thought the questioning was much more pointed and spirited 3 years ago. My impression was that most of the audience kind of tuned out this time, either because it was a rerun or because the topic seemed less relevant (I think last time he also was also still able to plug small modular reactors as the Next Big Thing in a way that seems less plausible today).