If you think the reactors are glowing hot and about to blow, wait until you see the parents.
Japanese society may well be transformed by fallout, both radiological and political, from the multiple disasters centered upon the dying Fukushima nuclear powerplant.
For two months, the children at the Soramame Children’s House, a day care center about 37 miles from the stricken plant, spent their days indoors, windows sealed shut to keep out radiation, their favorite buckets and spades contaminated and strictly off limits.
But when the local authorities made no effort to decontaminate the area, caregivers took matters into their own hands. On the advice of local environmental groups — they said local officials had none to give — a group of parents and teachers donned makeshift protective suits and masks, took up spades and disposed of the playground’s topsoil.
After the topsoil removal, radioactive materials, which tend to be deposited in the soil, fell from about thirty times the levels naturally found in the environment to twice those levels.
In Japan, Fukushima Parents Grow Angry Over Radiation – NYTimes.com.
The government is largely paralyzed on communicating or taking action, and it seems that those who know the truth are lying, as expected and predicted on this blog and elsewhere.
A meltdown occurred at one of the reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant three and a half hours after its cooling system started malfunctioning, according to the result of a simulation using “severe accident” analyzing software developed by the Idaho National Laboratory.
Chris Allison, who had actually developed the analysis and simulation software, reported the result to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in late March. It was only May 15 when Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) admitted for the first time that a meltdown had occurred at the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima nuclear plant.
(Mainichi Japan) May 23, 2011
There have been a handful of sensational examples of Japanese officials balking at their higher-ups or in one laudable and high-profile case, the resignation of a top advisor to Prime Minister Kan. That one was due to the revision upward of the “allowable” level of annual radiation exposure for school-aged children by a factor of twenty, which put the children on par with pre-disaster workers at the nuclear plants.
That senior nuclear advisor, Tokyo University professor Toshiso Kosako said:
“It is quite rare for nuclear power plant workers dealing with radioactive materials to be exposed to 20 millisieverts of radiation per year. I cannot allow infants and children to be exposed to such high levels of radiation from an academic as well as humanitarian point of view.”
He also pointed out that the government was slow in applying the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI) and disclosing its data, even though nuclear safety guidelines stipulate the system be implemented immediately in an emergency. “The government has ignored the law and taken stopgap measures, failing to bring the crisis under control promptly,” he said.
(Mainichi Japan) April 30, 2011
It’s only getting worse. The news is leaking out just as the contaminated water and toxic particulates are. It turns out that all three operating reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi complex produced partial or complete meltdowns in the first few hours of the disaster. Two months later, as TEPCO installs more and more sensors, three trends are apparent:
- Readings are all over the place. Few trends are reliable, as contrary indications create confusion as to what is actually happening in the reactors.
- Pressure is probably still rising in #1, and flat in #2 and #3. Pressure increase in #1 may be due to nitrogen injection, but nobody seems to know.
- Official response to the disaster has been understandably confused in light of the missing information, but has also consistently attempted to cover-up and delay the worst of the obvious truths. All three active reactors melted down, and this was known long before it was admitted.
I don’t wish to sound unreasonable in my criticisms of TEPCO and the Government of Japan. The problem is that they have been making cost-benefit decisions regarding public information based on old habits rather than new information, and the Japanese people are sick of it. Foreigners who know more about Japan than what they learned from watching Mr. Baseball know that the Japanese bureaucracy is the human lizard-brain at its worst. Japanese corporate and governmental systems make the Russian Mafia look progressive and innovative by comparison. You know why Godzilla stumbles and tantrums his way from one disaster to the next as he crosses Tokyo? He’s trying to blend in.
[pullquote]Prime Minister Kan was right to holler at the TEPCO executives[/pullquote]
Prime Minister Kan was right to holler at the TEPCO executives who were paralyzed in the first month, and his advisor was right to resign while his government adjusted numbers upward until “allowable dose” matched “likely dose” to reduce the evacuation burden at the outset of the school year. French Nuclear industry leader Areva produced a series of presentations as well as a comprehensive overview (as of the end of March, and an alternate link), which clearly indicated that TEPCO was not forthcoming with the best state-of-knowledge information available. That, in fact, is the last line of the overview: “Apparently not enough information is provided by TEPCO”.
Japan is a socialist country with a veneer of running-dog yankee imperialist capitalism. It is also an environmental basket case, entombing itself in concrete even as it spews every substance known to man so long as it doesn’t make visible smoke. The Japanese people have long suffered along with this because in Japan, if you are not one of the big people, then you are merely little people, and may aspire to become whatever you are allowed to be. He who rocks the boat is tossed out of it.
These things are changing, and like any social change, the reasons are complex and only partly visible. Nonetheless, the earthquake, tsunami, nuclear disaster, and miserable official response, in increasing order to my estimation, are catalyzing the process. I suspect that within a year or two, popular Japanese media will be reflecting upon the changes in society ever since the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011. They will never admit it, but I believe that what they will have is a Tea Party of sorts. Japanese politics has the people at a step further removed from the process than in the States. I predict, as a testable hypothesis, that there will be ballot initiatives (or the equivalent, however that works here) to increase voter participation in high-level elections, rather than having the government select its own leaders.
If TEPCO doesn’t kill everybody first. Nothing to see here. So Sorry. Move along.
