Voyage to Fukushima Daiichi

[Octafish]

Two brave and crazy guys got in their SUV and drove through no-man's land to within sight of the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.



They took geiger counters and a video camera. (VIDEO)

Going from the discussion and readings, I imagine their conversation includes reference to the inverse-square law and radiation.

The clip's about 12 minutes in duration. It is billed as "riveting" -- an understatement, IMO.

[aquart]

1. I'm going to have nightmares about those dogs, thanks.

[femrap]

2. thank you for the warning......

I won't watch it....I simply cannot stand to see animals suffer in any manner.

My mind has enough horrid images to sustain eternity.

Fook nuclear power and the evil people who discovered/invented it. Oh...and fook General Electric 'who brings good things to their DEATH'.

[Octafish]

3. The dogs were wanderers. What's chilling are people who are still there.

Man stranded in empty Japanese town since tsunami



The 74-year-old doesn't know where his wife is.

[aquart]

4. The dogs were PETS. They also have no idea where their families are.

[Art_from_Ark]

5. The video was created by Tetsuo Jimbo, a 49-year-old

Japanese journalist who received a Master's Degree in Journalism from Columbia University and is currently running a web-based news site.

[Octafish]

7. Look forward to more reportage from Mr. Jimbo. Thank you for the heads-up.

He is a real journalist:

http://www.jimbo.tv/

http://www.ojr.org/japan/internet/1053489132.php

PS: How are you and yours doing, Art_from_Ark?

[Art_from_Ark]

8. We're doing OK, all things considered

We've been having way too many aftershocks around here though-- 22 that have been centered here in Ibaraki prefecture alone in just the past week, plus we've felt quite a few others that have been centered in other prefectures, especially Fukushima and Miyagi. The people in eastern Fukushima and coastal Miyagi really have it bad, though, and according to a recent Japanese TV program, Post Trauma Distress Syndrome is becoming a problem up there.

[Octafish]

10. The people of Japan are incredible, in every good way.

National Geographic published a beautiful article on that part of Honshu, as experienced by the great poet, Basho:



On the Poet’s Trail

Thank you for the kind reply. We here in Detroit keep you all in our thoughts and prayers. I promise to help in every way I can.

[Art_from_Ark]

22. One of the "Three Great Views of Japan" is in that area

Matsushima, a group of pine-covered islets just off the coast of Ishimaki/Matsushima in Miyagi Prefecture, has long been a favorite tourist destination in Japan. I was up there a few years ago hoping to catch a boat tour of the islands, but the traffic jams of cars just waiting to pull into boat tour parking lots extended for 2 or 3 miles in both directions. Here's what I might have seen if I had been able to take a tour:

http://nihonsankei.sakura.ne.jp/eng/matsushima.html

I imagine that those boat tour places were pretty hard hit, like everything else along the coast up there :cry:

[Mira]

6. A 12 min. voyage I will never forget. Highly recommended!

[Octafish]

17. Voyage to Chernobyl

Thanks, Mira! From Ukraine, Ms. Elena documented her motorcycle trip to Chernobyl: Kidd of Speed



It's heartbreaking, too. However, as you know, these are things people need to know in order to create a better future.

[Mira]

21. Details about Chernobyl have always been of interest to me, little did I know

my comment to you would produce the link it did.
I just watched every minute of it. And there are no words. None.
I remember Chernobyl. My family lives in Germany and I remember the concern about radiation in their produce.

Like I said.
No Words. Except: thank you!

[Overseas]

9. K&R.

Thanks for posting this eerie video.

[Octafish]

18. Unlearned lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima

Unlearned lessons from Chernobyl and Fukushima

Do we collectively care about our planet, our home, this Earth, or don't we? When the economic bottom line rules decision-making, losses elsewhere can be staggering.


By Henry Shukman
Op-Ed
Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2011

EXCERPT...

After Reactor No. 4 blew up at Chernobyl power station on April 26, 1986, the resulting disaster took two years and 650,000 people to clean up. Except it will never really be cleaned up. Nuclear fallout and waste can be moved and sequestered, but not deactivated. Even today the meltdown at Chernobyl leaks radiation through cracks in the vast "sarcophagus" of steel and concrete that was intended to seal it. The whole area around it is still deeply, if unevenly, contaminated.

And that contamination isn't confined to Ukraine. A quarter-century later, there are farmers in Wales whose lamb is too radioactive to sell, and just last summer thousands of wild boar hunted in Germany were declared unfit for human consumption for the same reason.

In 1973, the ecological prophet E.F. Schumacher wrote, "No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an intangible danger to the whole of creation." He was talking about nuclear waste from the relatively young nuclear power industry. To pursue nuclear power, he declared, meant "conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all."

Does anyone still read Schumacher's "Small Is Beautiful"? It came out nearly 40 years ago, but it might as well have been written last year for its relevance today. Its central thesis is that we have allowed economics to overtake philosophy, religion and morality as the dominant ideological force in our world. Does it make sense to do X or Y? The answer will be found in the numbers, in the bottom line. No other concerns need be considered.

CONTINUED...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-shukman-chernobyl-20110403,0,1898317.story

You are welcome, Overseas. It is strange to see a world abandoned due to an invisible danger. Going from what Schumacher wrote, man's greed portends a dark future for humanity.

[Overseas]

23. Yes, I remember Schumacher's work.

And I remember being filled with hope that the Bush Crash would have given my Democratic legislators the courage to take the mantle for 21st Century FDR moves that would have included lots of greening as "jobs programs" to help our desperate fellow citizens and rebuild the infrastructure so crudely neglected by the Bush Gang so they could finance their wars of choice and tax cuts for the wealthy.

I thought my Democrats might really push the case for greening as part of Democratic national security. Understanding that we all know we will need to use oil for decades so we would need to be more judicious in its use-- developing alternatives and improving safety to the extent that millions of barrels were not wasted in explosions relying on faulty technology. And funding more mass transit systems as part of our defense budget too.

And the Small is Beautiful ethos could have been used to strengthen communities and have nationwide friendly competitions to see which places could save the most energy, install the most solar roofs, and otherwise do more with less. Our straightened circumstances after the markets were crashed by Trickle Down Economics could have had some positive elements as we rebuilt our communities.

But we needed a team effort to move away from the Supply Side dogma that crashed our economy and we did not get that. We needed our president and others to tell the modern GOP that unfortunately their dogma had crashed our economy because it hasn't worked. We would be "bipartisan" with what the GOP said they represented-- fiscal responsibility -- demand side dollars pay bigger dividends to our GNP. They said they represented a strong national defense-- well, developing alternative energy to reduce our need for imported oil is an important part of our national security.

Demand Side Economics works so much better. I'd hoped that's what having a practical pragmatic president would mean. Their Supply Side crashed the economy for 90% while benefiting the Top Ten, and now it was time for Demand Side to focus on securing the future for many more of us over the long term, not just the next quarter's profits for the richest corporations.

And when was the case for single payer stronger than after the Bush Crash, with millions losing their savings and being evicted from their homes? Having national health security makes enduring economic upheavals far more tolerable. We used to have a basic compassion that could be called upon at such times. It was really disheartening not to see a very strong case made for single payer by every Democratic leader at that time. Hard to imagine they did not know that if we gave the Modern GOP the opportunity, they would use their prodigious well-funded right wing PR firms to stir up groups of desperate citizenry against the good government that Democrats know can work to lift all boats and not just the luxury yachts.

I'm still in shock that the Democratic party gave the fanatical cruelty of the GOP so much room to push us further in the Hooverian direction when we needed the opposite. And that it is still going on. And that we and they didn't insist on letting all the tax cuts expire on schedule. I would have given up my $300 to prevent cuts in Low Income Heating Assistance and Head Start.

And if we had instituted Medicare for All as our line in the sand at the outset, I don't think 2010 would have been such a Republican triumph, ushering in their fanatically cruel governors and budget policies of 2011.

Still sighing.

[Old and In the Way]

11. Thanks for posting this, Octafish

What a contrast in devastation...the physical and the invisible.

[Octafish]

19. It is an unprecedented and almost unimaginable disaster.

Yet, a couple of people did:

Toshiaki Sakai: Utility Engineer Warned of Tsunami Threat at Japanese Nuclear Plant in 2007.

Masanobu Shishikura: The Man Who Predicted the Tsunami in 2009.

They connected dots that the corporate overlords refused to see. Glad you can see, Never-Old and In the Way.

[Logical]

12. Wow, amazing!

[Octafish]

24. Heroes

...and some more heroes on radio silence:

Japanese Workers Braved Radiation for a Temp Job

By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: April 9, 2011

KAZO, Japan — The ground started to buck at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and Masayuki Ishizawa could scarcely stay on his feet. Helmet in hand, he ran from a workers’ standby room outside the plant’s No. 3 reactor, near where he and a group of workers had been doing repair work. He saw a chimney and crane swaying like weeds. Everybody was shouting in a panic, he recalled.

Mr. Ishizawa, 55, raced to the plant’s central gate. But a security guard would not let him out of the complex. A long line of cars had formed at the gate, and some drivers were blaring their horns. “Show me your IDs,” Mr. Ishizawa remembered the guard saying, insisting that he follow the correct sign-out procedure. And where, the guard demanded, were his supervisors?

“What are you saying?” Mr. Ishizawa said he shouted at the guard. He looked over his shoulder and saw a dark shadow on the horizon, out at sea, he said. He shouted again: “Don’t you know a tsunami is coming?”

Mr. Ishizawa, who was finally allowed to leave, is not a nuclear specialist; he is not even an employee of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the crippled plant. He is one of thousands of untrained, itinerant, temporary laborers who handle the bulk of the dangerous work at nuclear power plants here and in other countries, lured by the higher wages offered for working with radiation. Collectively, these contractors were exposed to levels of radiation about 16 times as high as the levels faced by Tokyo Electric employees last year, according to Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which regulates the industry. These workers remain vital to efforts to contain the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plants.

CONTINUED...

PS: A most hearty welcome to DU, Logical. I very much appreciate your approach.

[Rex]

13. What were they doing there without protective gear on?

Don't get me wrong...I am just wondering what the were thinking wandering in that far without protective gear. I don't know if they are brave or foolish.

[Octafish]

25. Under the circumstances, I'd go full effect.

Speaking of which, did you see what TEPCO had their Team wearing?



Even with the best gear, or with none at all, they are the bravest of the brave.

[Prometheus Bound]

14. Wow.

[mdmc]

15. ..

[upi402]

16. interesting

thanks for passing it on

[leftstreet]

20. K&R

wow

[mod mom]

26. exposure rate at a given distance is inversely proportional to the square of the distance

ie distance is your friend.