It's now been 16 months since the earthquake and start of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. I haven't mentioned the nuke disaster much lately, but there are a few issues that have been bubbling around in my brain that I want to address, so I'll post them here now.
Yesterday, as has been going on every friday for the last several weeks, there were big anti-nuke protests in Tokyo and all over Japan. The protests started to voice opposition to the restarting of the Oi Nuclear Plant, which has now gone fully online.
But the nuclear energy juggernaut has its tendrils dug in deep throughout Japan so it's hard to go against them. Vast advertising budgets and long term connections give further incentive to keep the power plants running, even if the energy isn't really needed, like it turned out not to be last year. To be honest I kind of hope this summer is a scorcher, so we can get a better idea of how bad our power situation really is. Maybe we do need nuclear power, but if that's true then I think what we really should be doing is looking more at how we can cut back as a society. Find a way to live on less energy.
One other thing I've been wanting to talk about for a while is information sources. How much can you rely on the news, and how much can you rely on citizen broadcasting like blogs and twitter?
The official news sources in Japan started off very timid when reporting on the nuclear disaster. Do a search for shushed news broadcasts and a failure to disclose data about fallout and radiation spikes and you'll find a sobering amount of information.
Things have gotten better. Various news programs have taken up the fight and have reported more on radiation, its dangers and the nuclear disaster. My hat goes off to Ichiro Furutachi at Hodo Station for his outspoken reporting. And the Diet actually declared Fukushima was a "man-made disaster," though what that will actually mean remains to be seen.
But it all started with us, the normal people living in Japan. The first instinct to follow in a situation like this is to say, "Yeah there's a lot of information floating around on Twitter, but you have to be careful what you believe," and blah blah blah, but from what I've seen, there's been a high level of honesty in citizen reporting from the beginning.
I started using Twitter long before 3.11, but in the days after the tsunami and nuke meltdowns it was the best way to get information about anything. The now-infamous videos of the explosions at the plants circulated on Twitter long before the news picked up on them, and it was normal people like me using Geiger counters who first brought attention to radiation hotspots that the officials and experts on the news had declared would only be an issue in the tight area of evacuation around the disaster site.
Yes, there were panic-crazed people making crazy claims from the get go, but from what I saw that came mostly from English language sites trying to ramp up the panic level to get more hits. And of course even now there are sites all over trying to downplay any dangers, but there is a lot of good info out there if you know where to look.
That's all for now. I don't know if this post has a real conclusion, but then when dealing with radiation that's always how it is.
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