The Solution to Pollution is Dilution

I wrote previously about the varied pricing of rice in Japan this year, and the varied availability of rice from regions near and far from the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns. I found this interesting difference yesterday at a local supermarket in Narita, Chiba Prefecture.

This is Koshihikari Blended Rice, a 5 kg. bag consisting of year 2011 harvested rice originating in "various prefectures" as indicated on this label. Mmm, yummy.

The price on the blended rice is 1,880 yen, about US$23.

For comparison, 5 kgs. of non-blended rice from Chiba Prefecture sells for 2,680 yen, about US$35. Even the soil in Chiba is contaminated, but much less so than the soil of points 100 kms. north. In this store there was no rice available from farther away in Western Japan.

For more background on Japanese citizens' anger at the failure to safeguard the food supply, see the recent article by Martin Fackler in the New York Times: Japanese Struggle to Protect their Food Supply.

The IAEA Loves Women

The IAEA, having suffered a terrible year for its image, has taken refuge under the petticoat of gender politics to sell the notion "Women: A Driving Force in Nuclear Power Programs." Perhaps they have noticed that it is more often women who are the driving force in protecting their children and the human race from nuclear pollution. Something must be done about this gender gap!
If the IAEA wants to play this game, it is important to remember the female voices that have gone unheard by the IAEA and the global nuclear industry since the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986. Here is one such voice:

"I am not yet 32 years old, but I find myself in a hospital bed several times a year. And all of my four children (under 12) are also ill most of the time (they feel weak and listless, they have joint pains in arms and legs, their hemoglobin is below normal, they have enlarged thyroid and lymph nodes, headaches, stomach pains, constant colds). And it is the same in every family. 
We want to live. We want our kids to live and grow up healthy, and have a future. But through heartlessness, callousness and cruelty of those on whom our lives and the lives of our children depend, we are condemned to the worst possible fate, and we are only too well aware of that.... We have had to eat, drink and breathe radiation for years, waiting for our last day."

- Valentina Nikolaevna Okhremchuk, mother of four little boys, and all the mothers of Olevshchina.

Letter written to Soviet Union People's Deputy, Alla A. Yaroshinskaya, published in: 
Yaroshinskaya, Alla, A. (2011) Chernobyl: Crime without Punishment. Transaction Publishers. p. 197-198.

The situation would be a little less worrisome if the international community recognized the moral failure of the past, but it continues now with no expression of remorse. The Japanese government is working from the same playbook as the Soviets in their dying days of empire. Mothers in Fukushima are asking for the right to compensated evacuation, and this perfectly reasonable claim has been thoroughly ignored by the Japanese government. The international community, Japan's friendly allies and the IAEA give their quiet assent to this woeful neglect.

Art shown at the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World

Artwork on display at the Global Conference for a Nuclear Power Free World, January 14-15, 2012, Yokohama. More posters at No Nuke Art. Japan Times report on the conference.

Shakespeare on Fukushima

Credit for concept of this posting goes to David Ritchie, a resident of South Korea who has been writing about the Fukushima Daiichi disaster from the other side of the Sea of Japan, or, as they call it in South Korea, the East Sea.

Living in South Korea, David Ritchie seems to be more concerned with local contamination than most people here in Japan. Some might think that indicates an over-reaction, but he has blogged about recent news in South Korea that locally harvested seaweed is contaminated above safety levels – and that’s seaweed not offshore from Fukushima, but to the west, across the Japanese islands and across the Sea of Japan. How did it get over there?

David’s best posting was his use of Shakespeare’s words to describe events in Northern Japan this past year. He has these first four citations on his blog. I took up the game and added the rest that follow. 

Shakespeare was definitely writing about other things besides nuclear disasters, so it is a bit dubious to put his words in another context like this, but I do it to underscore the power of his language. The extraordinary nature of a nuclear disaster requires extraordinary powers of expression, and Shakespeare's words seem to fill this need.

On radioactive plumes: 

The storm is up, and all is on the hazard

Julius Caesar, Act 5, Scene 1

On radionuclide uptake: 

Yet have I something in me dangerous

Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1

On the beauty of Fukushima, despoiled by invisible dust:

Never came poison from so sweet a place.

Richard III, Act 1, Scene 2

And on post-3/11 realities:

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity,

For wise men say it is the wisest course.

Henry VI, part 3, Act 3, Scene 1

***************

My additions:

On the government regulators, and General Electric and TEPCO executives who hid themselves during the crisis:

Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.

Julius Caesar Act 2, Scene 2

On the fallout and black rain that fell on Northern Japan, March 2011:

Now is the winter of our discontent…

And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Richard The Third Act 1, Scene 1

Something wicked this way comes.

Macbeth Act 4, Scene 1

What, will the line stretch out to th' crack of doom?

Macbeth Act 4, Scene 1

On the health effects of radiation:

Out, damned spot.

Macbeth Act 5, Scene 1

Fukushima Daiichi, Reactor 3 explodes on March 14, 2011 (off by a day, but damn close):

A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

Julius Caesar Act 1, Scene 2

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Twelfth Night Act 5, Scene 1

On the colossal hubris of Japan’s nuclear industry:

Shall we their fond pageant see?

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

A Midsummer Nights Dream Act 3, Scene 2

Merciful heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Splits the unwedgeable and gnarlèd oak
Than the soft myrtle; but man, proud man,
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.

Measure For Measure Act 2, Scene 2

On the confusing and contradictory scientific information about nuclear hazards, and the general abandonment of the irradiated people of Fukushima and beyond:

Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent

Much Ado About Nothing Act 2, Scene 1

On citizens left begging for protection from their perpetrator of the damage:

For in the fatness of these pursy times

Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg.

Hamlet Act 3, Scene 4

On hope lying only in people standing up and rejecting those plans where “expectation failed:”

Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.

All's Well That Ends Well Act 2, Scene 1

We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again
(And by that destiny) to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come,
In yours and my discharge.

The Tempest Act 2, Scene 1

On the wisdom of leaving Fukushima to be uninhabited:

What's gone and what's past help
Should be past grief.

The Winter's Tale Act 3, Scene 2

Using those thoughts which should indeed have died
With them they think on? Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what's done, is done.

Macbeth Act 3, Scene 2


On the profits to be had by a few in the senseless reconstruction and decontamination on poisoned land:
Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.
Henry VI, Part 3, Act 2, Scene 5

On the likelihood of Japanese nuclear plant operators following lawful, sensible and ethical procedures:

...it is a custom more honor'd in the breach than the observance

Hamlet Act 1, Scene 4

On the illusory promise of a technology that could fulfill all our “energy needs:”

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth;
And ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

A Midsummer Night's Dream Act 1, Scene 1

And the final question

To be or not to be?

Hamlet Act 3, Scene 1

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, Fukushima: Japan Nuked Four Times by American Technology

This post will be short so that readers can skip straight to the link below which is a long article that expresses much of what I wanted to say about my year of living dangerously in Japan. Someone wrote it better than I could, so I'm spared the work on this one.


Gayle Greene's article covers the way that research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hibakusha (victims of radiation) was originally flawed, and subsequently misinterpreted over many decades, even though it became the 'gold standard' of studies on the health effects of radiation. Because these faults have been consistently ignored, the health effects of nuclear accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima, downwinders of bomb test fallout) have also been misrepresented and underestimated.


Ms. Greene also explicitly states the obvious but uncomfortable truth about the Fukushima Daiichi accident: that it was the third time that Japan has been irradiated by American technology. Her only error might be in her omission of the 1954 Lucky Dragon #5 incident which actually puts the number up to four. That story is often understood as the tale of a small crew of one tuna boat that got showered in fallout from the Bravo hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll. It is falsely understood as having set off a panic that made everyone afraid to buy tuna for months afterward because of one shipload of contaminated fish, but actually the discovery of this one badly affected crew instigated monitoring of bomb test fallout for the first time, and widespread contamination was discovered on the Japanese archipelago, in the crews of many other ships, and in the entire catch coming out of the South Pacific that season. For the first time, the world got an inkling of the widespread effects of secret bomb tests that had been going on since 1946.

Some might say that American responsibility for the accident at Fukushima Daiichi is exaggerated. It certainly could have been prevented if the plant had been properly operated, but the decision to bend to American trade pressure meant that Japan chose General Electric's flawed, dangerous light water reactors that were dependent on enriched uranium. For a short time in the late 1960s Japan had the option of going with a heavy water reactor design from Canada that didn't use enriched uranium, but that's another story.


Read on:
Gayle Greene, 'Science with a Skew: The Nuclear Power Industry After Chernobyl and Fukushima,' The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 10, Issue 1 No 3, January 2, 2012.

Why Most Research Findings Are False

Previously I wrote about the wide disagreement in the scientific community over the effects of low-level radiation. Both sides of this divide express contempt for the other side’s bias, while the general public has no way to makes sense of the experts’ contradictions and determine where the truth lies.

Some good insights into this dilemma are to be found in the work of Dr. John Ioannidis who published in 2005 a paper called Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. Since then, this paper has been reported on in popular media such as The Atlantic magazine and CTV News in Canada.

So many studies contradict each other, or have to later be retracted, due to several flaws that Dr. Ioannidis has categorized as follows:

A. Confirmation bias

This is the tendency to cherry pick data, design the parameters of experiments in ways that will yield the expected results, then make interpretations and value judgments according to these biases. The CTV article mentioned the satirical paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal to illustrate the point. The writer concluded that smoking is good for health because it helps marathoners increase lung capacity, boost hemoglobin levels, and lose weight (all true according to real research that was not part of the joke). The satire underscores the point that interpretation and value judgments matter more than the raw data.

B. Not accounting for confounders

If tobacco addiction didn’t exist, many industries would feel that it would have to be invented because it has been the perfect confounder in many lawsuits against industrial polluters. When it comes to research on the health effects of radiation, all findings are confounded by coexistence of chemical pollution.

C. Conflicts of interest

Obvious point. Confirmation bias is created by the money and interests that finance research. In the nuclear industry, there is a large number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs, and a huge financial investments at stake. One would have to be very naïve to believe that these interests haven’t contributed to the production of research findings that find, for example, that the Chernobyl catastrophe had a very minimal impact on human health. Nuclear proponents are also deeply invested in their own positions and the imperatives of the groups they belong to, but compared to the nuclear industry, they have much less at stake. Ultimate victory would not make them wealthy or create lucrative jobs for themselves. In fact, it would free them to do something else with their time. The same cannot be said of supporters of the nuclear industry.

D. Publication bias

This is the tendency to publish only findings that don’t diverge too much from what has been published before by a publication or an institution. Peer review has its obvious advantages, but it also tends to shut out innovative thinkers with radical new ideas. Some researchers are trying to get away from this blockage by crowdsourcing their research findings. They “advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.”

E. Institutions tend to overhype their studies’ conclusions

Financial pressures and fundraising drives create the temptation to overstate the limitations of research results as they become part of public relations and advertising campaigns.

F. Misinterpretation

The general public, reviewers and science journalists often ignore the tentative nature of the conclusions and play up findings if doing so suits their interest or makes for sensational news.

Ioannidis claims that research findings are also likely to be flawed…

1. when effect sizes are smaller.
2. when there is a greater number and lesser pre-selection of tested relationships.
3. where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes.
4. when more teams are involved in a scientific field in a chase of statistical significance.

In the summary of his paper Dr. Ioannidis states, “Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” This is the state of affairs in rigorously controlled and reviewed medical research. All of the factors above are sure to be even more pronounced in the social sciences where the scientific method is less strictly applied and studies have more confounding factors that cannot be controlled in a laboratory.

When faced with the wide, irreconcilable disagreements in the scientific community, what are the victims of the Fukushima Daiichi catastrophe to do? If the ICRP says only a few thousand people died from the Chernobyl catastrophe, and the ECRR says it was a million, shall we just split the difference and say it was 490,000?

When I consider the biases of the nuclear industry and anti-nuclear advocates, I tend to think that we could actually ignore all the peer reviewed studies and just listen to the voices of people who lived through the catastrophe. We don’t need forensic evidence to prove to us that the Nazi holocaust really happened. The corroborated stories of the victims, perpetrators and liberating armies tell the story. In the same way, the accounts of medical personnel and patients who have lived in the aftermath of the catastrophe should be the evidence that nails the case shut. I leave the last word to a doctor from Belarus:

“Doctor Smolnikova checks baby Christina's heart through her stethoscope, and advises Valia on the chances of an operation. She has a long list of other patients like them.

‘Those who say there is no link with Chernobyl should open their eyes and look at the medical statistics,’ Doctor Smolnikova says.

She has been the village doctor here since long before the nuclear disaster.

‘Before Chernobyl I'd never seen a child with cancer. Now it's common. I treat many more children now with heart defects and kidney damage. To say it's nothing to do with Chernobyl just isn't honest.’”

Belarus Cursed by Chernobyl

by Sarah Rainsford 

BBC News, Gomel, Belarus

April 26, 2005

Pray for Japan

In the wake of the Japan tsunami disaster last year, this phrase “Pray for Japan” became a widespread call to rally global support for Japan. It might have been Lady Gaga’s “We Pray for Japan” bracelet and fundraising drive that did the most to spread the popularity of the phrase. 

Right from the start, however, the phrase struck me as a bizarre reaction to the catastrophe. In idiomatic usage, this phrase has become the thing to say to someone who can't be dissuaded from following a foolish course of action. When all else has failed we say, "Oh, man, I pray for you."

In this sense, the phrase is perhaps apt, though not the intended message of the bracelet. Various national and international governments, corporations and regulatory agencies have bungled the response to the nuclear disaster and left the victims of it largely to fend for and fight among themselves. So, yes, maybe we really should say “Pray for Japan.” It doesn’t seem capable of helping itself much of the time.

However, the whole “Pray for Japan” concept was an insulting, flawed and dangerous idea to put into the minds of disaster victims. It calls to mind the old joke about the drowning man who rejected help from a passing ship, then again from a passing helicopter. When he meets God in heaven, he asks the incredulous Lord why divine intervention didn’t come. Perhaps God shook his head and said, “I pray for you.” In the case of the recent triple disaster, it was a mistake to speak of prayer at a time when the public needed reliable information and ethical and compassionate treatment from authorities.

It is curious that the voices urging “Pray for Japan” focused on the tsunami victims and had little to say about the controversies surrounding the treatment of victims of the nuclear disaster. The former group did in fact have much bigger losses, but the official response to their needs was comparatively much better than the official response to the nuclear disaster. The tsunami victims didn’t really need overseas charity (and who will ever know how it was spent?) because the Japanese government was able to look after their needs.

Lady Gaga and other celebrities have steered clear of discussing the nuclear crisis because doing so would make them controversial and unwelcome guests in Japan. They were welcome to come to Japan and get copious media coverage as long as they refrained from criticism, stayed positive, and mouthed the government line that Japan was back on track.

Another tangential point is that the Japanese government has paid no attention to Lady Gaga's frank admission of her use of illegal drugs. Japanese society is highly intolerant of any endorsement of illegal drug use. In the recent past Japanese immigration and customs authorities have been known to demand urine samples from suspicious foreigners entering the country. The police have even detained pedestrians on Tokyo streets (in areas known for drug dealing activities) for random drug testing. I don’t know if they still get away with doing this, but it would be nice if they offered the same service to mothers in Fukushima who want their children's urine tested for cesium 137. 

In the past, several foreign entertainers have been persecuted in the media and prosecuted for possession of drugs, but Lady Gaga got a pass on this issue from Japanese officialdom. To her credit, she has openly admitted she didn’t want to hypocritically hide the fact that she uses marijuana. If the Japanese authorities know about her habits, it’s interesting that they selectively overlooked it when the person involved had a useful role to play in the response to disaster.

From Lady Gaga’s 60 Minutes interview, February, 2011

"I smoke a lot of pot when I write music. So I'm not gonna, like, sugar coat it for 60 Minutes that, you know, I-- I'm some, like, sober human being 'cause I'm not. .. I drink a lot of whiskey and I smoke weed when I write. And I don't do it a lot because it's not good for my voice…. I don't want to encourage kids to do drugs. But when you asked me about the sociology of fame and what artists do wrong--what artists do wrong is they lie. And I don't lie. I'm not a liar. I built goodwill with my fans. They know who I am. And I'm just like them in so many ways."

Self-Important Swine Ass

Saturday Night Live, May 14, 1979 (season 4, episode 19)

Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin debate the merits of nuclear energy in their famous satirical news program, Point/Counter-Point

The photo is from an episode of Saturday Night Live that aired in 1979. Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd did one of their famous Point/Counterpoint debates, which were a parody of the three-minute debates between James Kilpatrick and Shana Alexander that appeared on CBS' 60 Minutes program in the 1970s.

In this installment they debate the pros and cons of nuclear energy, at a time when the Three Mile Island accident and the plutonium poisoning of Karen Silkwood were in the headlines. As horrible as those events were, it now seems like a more innocent time, before the world knew of places called Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Plus ca change.... 34 years have passed and still no one has figured out what to do with nuclear waste--what Jane Curtin referred to as "... one pile you just can't flush down the toilet, Dan." It is remarkable to see how little the issues and the nature of the debate have changed. Both debaters hit on the same issues that have not been resolved to this day, and each paints the opposing side in the familiar demonizing strokes.

This video appears on YouTube occasionally, but NBC is very efficient about getting it pulled off. Readers who are familiar with the 70s version of SNL can recall the actors delivery as they read the transcript below.

*******************************

Hello, I’m Dan Akroyd, station manager for Weekend Update. Yesterday a federal jury awarded 10.5 million dollars to the estate of Karen Silkwood, a 28-year-old laboratory technician contaminated by radiation in 1974 while employed at a Kerr-McGee Corporation plutonium plant. The verdict could have an impact on the future of the nuclear power industry, already clouded by the Three Mile Island incident. This will be the subject of tonight’s Point/Counter-Point. Jane will take the anti-nuclear point. I will take the pro-nuclear counter-point.

CON

Dan, you self-important swine ass. There’s no future for nuclear energy because Three Mile Island taught everybody what some of us already knew: that nuclear power plants are time bombs ready to melt down, and even if nuclear power plants were safe, which they aren’t, there’s still the potentially more dangerous nuclear waste problem. But you don’t care about waste, Dan, you’re content to wallow in the short-term profits the corporate pigs reap for themselves. But unlike real pigs, the corporate animals haven’t learned that you don’t excrete where you eat. Their radioactive excrement will be with us for 250,000 years. That’s one pile you just can’t flush down the toilet, Dan.

PRO

Jane, you magnificently ignorant slut. Aren’t the gas lines in California proof enough that the energy crisis is for real? Nuclear energy provides 12% of our nation’s electricity, and who’d be the first to complain when the electricity goes out, Jane? You and your horde of promiscuous anti-nuclear harpies. I can just see you now sitting alone in your darkened apartment staring forlornly at your now useless vibrator. You’ll be humming a different tune then, Jane. But let’s talk about risks for a minute, Jane. Sure, nuclear power has risks, even though there has yet to be an industry-related fatality. But even so, this is not a risk-free society. Where is your liberal compassion when coal-miners die in the mines? And how about the 50,000 a year killed on our nation’s highways. You undergo a bigger risk of cancer taking one of your birth control pills, Jane, than you would living next door to an atomic plant, and all for the convenience of hopping indiscriminately from bed to bed with your fellow no nuke-niks. As for the waste problem, Jane, I, for one, have confidence in good old American technology. You just don’t understand the scientific mind. Let us thank God almighty that this country has dedicated sober scientists solving our problems through the long nights, while ignorant sluts like yourself writhe in coitus at anti-nuclear toga parties.

Japanda: Panda Nation

"I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn't screw to save its species."

- the protagonist of Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk

The Japanese government has hit another low in its reaction to the triple disaster that struck northeast Japan this year. The news today is that Prime Minister Noda is backing a plan to spend money on building a panda facility at Sendai Zoo in order to cheer the local children after their ordeals this year. (Noda to lobby China for Sendai panda deal).

Some might think this is a nice idea, but really, we have to wonder about priorities here. I feel sorry for the thousands of people overseas who donated so generously to disaster relief because the Japanese government is ignoring its responsibility for giving the proper assistance to victims in the form of practical, material support for such things as heaters, housing, relocation expenses, or guaranteed income through a period of resettlement. Instead, it is wasting money on meaningless boosterism and giveaways to local construction firms to build panda shelters at zoos, or to “decontaminate” buildings with spray washers. In the most egregious case, money intended for disaster relief has been funneled to security costs for the Japanese whaling expedition to Antarctica. By some stretch of logic, the money is supposed to provide jobs and stimulus spending to “whaling communities” on the northeast coast.

In many ways, however, the obsession with pandas is perfectly fitting for Japan. The news today called to my mind the above line from the film Fight Club. I wouldn't wish the violence on the creature, but I feel the same way about a people that has lost the will, and perhaps the ability, to save itself. This forlorn, listless animal with a failing survival instinct is the perfect symbol for the occasion.

The New Normal

On Christmas Eve children around the world watch the weather forecast to see where Santa Claus is on his flight around the world. This year, Japanese children will see this image on the left, as they have every evening since last March. This is the radiation data for the Tokyo area broadcast by NHK at the end of the newscast. 
Numbers on the black background show natural background levels before the nuclear catastrophe, in microsieverts per hour. Numbers in red font show the readings for the present day. 
The numbers look encouraging when you consider that in Fukushima many areas are 10 to 50 times as high, but this map is misleading. The measurement for Chiba prefecture, for example, is taken always in a city in the south that escaped the fallout. In the northwest part of the prefecture, the city of Kashiwa has average levels ten times as high (0.5 microsieverts / hour), with some super hot spots scattered throughout the city where drainage made radionuclides accumulate. In the Narita area in the north, the level is 0.10 ~ 0.20.
In any case, the average external exposure of individuals in the Tokyo area is not much of a concern, even in the hotter zones not indicated by the map, but for those who are concerned, dosimeter badges (showing accumulated dose) are available in local drug stores.

Dosimeter badges sold in a local drug store in Chiba: about US$50

The purpose of putting the map up every night is to reassure the public that levels are close to the previous normal background radiation. It is a deceptive reassurance because the true hazards are:

1. The internal contamination people are going to get over many years through the food supply, if proper precautions are not taken
2. The problem of how to dispose of radioactive debris, incinerator ash, and sewage in which the fallout became highly concentrated
3. The risk of another nuclear catastrophe caused by another earthquake - the Japanese nuclear industry is deliberately ignoring the evidence that the earthquake damaged the reactors before the tsunami hit and caused the station blackout. They don't want to consider this because it means the design basis for all nuclear reactors in Japan is built on shaky assumptions.

Regardless, this radiation broadcast is just another sign of the idiocy of the official response to this disaster. Someone probably thinks this is the honest disclosure that everyone wants, but everyone knows this data, and we no longer need to see it. Anyone who wants to check can use his own dosimeter (they are common possessions now), or check on the Internet. The display of this map every evening is just a depressing reminder that this is our new reality. If someone had told me thirty years ago that I would be living in a place where they broadcast the radiation levels on the weather report every night, I would have said that's straight out of a dystopian novel. 

Source:

25 October 2011 | Nature 478, 435-436 (2011) | doi:10.1038/478435a

"The latest analysis also presents evidence that xenon-133 began to vent from Fukushima Daiichi immediately after the quake, and before the tsunami swamped the area. This implies that even without the devastating flood, the earthquake alone was sufficient to cause damage at the plant."