Dream Island

"I was a bit surprised to find there are adults who don't hide things and who share their honest feelings." - A junior high school student's reaction to a speech by Matashichi Oishi, survivor of fallout from the Bravo hydrogen bomb test. From: The Day the Sun Rose in the West, p. 146.

(this article was slightly revised on 2014/03/01)

A few weeks ago I wrote about Matashichi Oishi, the last survivor of the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru (translated into English as Lucky Dragon #5) that was showered with radioactive fallout after an American hydrogen bomb test in 1954. After learning about his suffering and the heroic efforts he has made to educate people about the significance of his experiences, I knew I had to take my children to the museum that houses the historic tuna boat. At the end of this post there are some photos and a description of our day at the museum on Tokyo’s Dream Island (Yumenoshima).

A map in the museum: Red dots show the position of Japanese fishing boats on March 1, 1954. Many of them returned to port with contaminated tuna that couldn't be sold. Monitoring stopped at the end of 1954, but the contamination did not magically disappear.

Mr. Oishi’s story should be of interest to foreigners in Japan who want to speak out on nuclear issues. I’ve noticed that such people face two problems. Some of us hesitate to criticize our host country, out of politeness, while others fear consequences for their work or visa status. Mr. Oishi’s experience and views on such concerns can do something to lessen these fears.

First, Mr. Oishi states repeatedly in his book that it is a mistake to rely on any government, anywhere, to do the right thing. He speaks as a citizen of the world, and I suspect he would encourage foreigners in Japan to take the same attitude. There is no need to hold back criticism out of politeness to the host country. If you’re here breathing the air and eating the food, your voice is as legitimate as anyone’s.

The other lesson of Mr. Oishi’s life is that he represents the views of millions of Japanese citizens who have spent decades voicing opposition to Japanese energy and foreign policy. He was denied justice by his government, and he had to fight for everything, but he had millions of supporters and numerous ways to tell the world his story. Every year he speaks to thousands of school children, and he teaches them the blunt truth that people must fight to make governments do the right thing.

Meanwhile, there are many foreigners who believe that Japan is a monolithic police state, where the media is censored and controlled, and the people are brainwashed sheeple going along with the big lie. Yet here is Mr. Oishi who has been speaking freely and writing books for many years, invited by school principals (servants of the state, no less) to speak to students. In the 1950s, his experience inspired 30 million of his fellow citizens to sign a petition to ban the bomb. In the 1970s, the mayor of Tokyo backed citizens groups that wanted to build the museum to preserve the Lucky Dragon #5.

Mr. Oishi’s courage stands in stark contrast to both foreigners and Japanese who are now afraid to speak out. Although some people do have good reasons to remain anonymous and are able to share valuable information by doing so, there are many people who are staying anonymous out of convenience and a lack of awareness of what is lost by anonymity. What shape would the world be in if Voltaire to Nelson Mandela had merely been anonymous pamphleteers?

So for other foreigners who are having trouble reading the tea leaves in Japan and wondering about what is safe to say, I can point out a few signs.

1. The farmers, fishermen and mothers are mad as hell. What they are going through doesn’t compare to the dilemmas of people who have a passport out to their home country. 
2. The Japanese mass media has a lot of failings, but still I have the impression the North American media would have been worse in the same circumstances. There has been a wide range of opinions and good critical reporting in the mainstream. In fact, the mainstream media is a principle source of information for bloggers who are quick to disparage the lamestream media. 
3. One morning TV variety show recently aired a very frank and chilling report about the apocalyptic end of Japan that will come if the Reactor 4 spent fuel pool collapses. You can hardly accuse them of worrying too much about scaring away sponsors.
4. The local bookstores are carrying numerous recently published anti-nuclear manifestos.
5. Large business interests, like Softbank, are fighting to shift energy policy away from nuclear. 
6. Local communities are opposing the re-opening of nuclear plants. 
7. Grocery store chain AEON is doing its own food monitoring because they know the public mistrusts the government program.
8. Local governments in Fukushima are attempting to launch criminal charges against TEPCO officials.
9. 10,000 people attended an anti-nuclear conference at Yokohama’s premiere convention center in January 2012, an event which required serious financial backing and organization.

Some people have suggested that I should be careful about what I write, but all I can say in response is that my views have become fairly conventional. While there is freedom of speech here, those in power also have the freedom to completely ignore what is spoken. Many Japanese may seem to be oblivious, but when you look below the surface you can see that many people know the ugly truth so well that they are beyond wanting to talk about it. But Mr. Oishi is still making his speeches to junior high school students, in spite of his advancing years. If you’re afraid to speak out on Japan’s nuclear industry and its future energy policy, you’re missing the boat. If you want to catch it, get down to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall this spring.

東京都立第五福竜丸展示館
Daigo Fukuryu Maru Exhibition Hall
3-2 Yume no Shima, Tokyo, Japan
Tues-Sun 9:00 am to 4:00 pm (closed Tuesdays if the previous Monday is a public holiday), admission free, 10 minutes walk from Shinkiba station (Tozai line)
Access Map, historical background and other info


Related: a blog post written in 2013 citing Mr. Oishi's description of the Matsuhiro General Imperial Headquarters, Japan's futile attempt to build a shelter for the Emperor in the last year of WWII.
About the treatment of Marshall Islanders over the last 60 years:

Beverly Deepe Keever. “Six Decades of H-Bomb Cover-ups.” Consortiumnews. February 24, 2014.

The air quality in Tokyo on March 28, 2012, was horrible. Several garbage incinerators are in the area of Dream Island (the park is a reclaimed garbage dump), and everybody knows they have begun burning "low level" radioactive waste from Northern Japan. In addition, this is the time of year when dust from Central Asia blows eastward over the Pacific, and it's laden with various pollutants picked up over China. Nowadays there is also extra pollution in the air because almost all the electricity is generated from carbon. Finally, the air is full of cedar pollen in March, and this year it is tainted with cesium at a level that is either dangerous, or negligible, depending on which "expert" you want to believe.

After seeing the Lucky Dragon 5, and seeing the view above, it was another ominous sign to see the Tokyo riot police doing drills in this out-of-the-way locale. They were hollering, marching to martial music, launching dummy tear gas shells, and charging into crowds of protesters (role played by fellow officers.) As there was more bad news coming out about the instability of Fukushima Daiichi, this scene reminded me that the authorities must be contemplating worsening scenarios for public order.

Baseless Rumors about Fukushima

Since March 2011 the Japanese government has worried that bloggers and tweeters would spread "baseless rumors" about the dangers of the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. In June 2011, the government passed “The Computer Network Monitoring Law” as a way of policing the Internet and silencing information that it judged to be "baseless rumors."

Because I love Japan too, I became quite alarmed by the harm that these baseless rumors could cause, so I carried out my own search to help the Japanese government fight this great evil. Here is a list of a just a few of the unsubstantiated rumors being passed around the Internet by careless and irresponsible sources. If anyone has information about the parties responsible for initiating these rumors, please leave a comment. 

Quash these rumors now:

1. The Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant is in a stable and safe condition.
2. It's safe for residents to move back to some of the evacuated towns in Fukushima Prefecture.
3. It is possible to decontaminate Fukushima Prefecture and other contaminated parts of Northern Japan.
4. Monitoring of food has been adequate.
5. All people under the cloud of fallout were evacuated in a timely manner.
6. Everyone who should have been given potassium iodide was able to get it.
7. We can say for sure that there will be no long-term health effects from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant.
8. There were only partial meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant. (This rumor was put to rest when the guilty party admitted to lying.)
9. The earthquake and tsunami were beyond expectation. (This rumor also lost its currency some time ago, as it's purveyors realized it had no credibility.)
10. Low level radioactive waste can be safely burned and spread all over Japan.
11. Emissions from the burning of this low level waste will not cause real or reputed damage to the agricultural products grown around incinerators.
12. The burning of low level waste produces ashes with concentrated, high levels of radioactive waste, but these can be safely buried without danger to soil or groundwater.
13. A network of millions of people sharing and evaluating information couldn't possibly sort out what information seems credible. They need a ministry of truth to tell them what to think.

Japanese government's "Eat and Support" campaign has a meltdown

   It is difficult to feel sorry for Tatsuya Yamaguchi, even though this poor fellow has just discovered that he has a load of cesium 137 in his body that measures 20 Bq/kg. Tatsuya is a member of the pop group TOKIO, and like most Japanese bands, they illustrate how entertainment and advertising have congealed into an indistinguishable blob that will sell itself to anyone with fistfuls of yen to offer.

The Japanese government decided that they would rather promote Fukushima’s farm produce than compensate farmers for their irradiated fields and the damage to their farms' reputation, so they turned to Japan’s largest advertising agency Dentsu to manage a campaign called “eat and support.” The members of TOKIO either willingly participated in this project, or were pressed into it as an offer they could not refuse if they wanted to maintain their entertainment careers.

One can sympathize somewhat with the desire to help farmers in the western parts of Fukushima whose produce came up clean and who suffered from baseless rumors about all food from Fukushima. Nonetheless, whether the damage to their food was real or imagined, the blame for this loss is solely on the entities who failed to maintain the safety of nuclear plants. We can also blame the government for numerous failures to monitor the food supply after the accident. If consumers don’t want to buy food from Fukushima that’s their right. Let the market speak.

The members of TOKIO dove into their project with gusto. Since the year 2000 they had been involved with the traditional village called Dash near the town of Minami Souma, Fukushima. They participated in many TV broadcasts about the village, but it had to be evacuated after March 2011. Later, they got involved with a project to grow sunflowers on the land in the hope that they would absorb cesium from the soil. (But if they did, what would you do with the sunflowers?)
Because they wanted to show their support for Fukushima, they went along with the government program to "eat and support." Then, in a recent episode of their show they visited Belarus to see how people there coped with their environment after the Chernobyl accident. It was there that Tatsuya Yamaguchi had himself tested with a whole body counter to see how much cesium 137 his body was carrying.

The producers of the show will, predictably, try to spin this number as well within safety limits, or not likely to have any effect, and so on, but unfortunately there is research that suggests otherwise (listed below).

Thanks to the chosen emphasis of the pro-nuclear lobby, most people have come to think that cancer is the only thing to worry about in radiation exposure. Sometimes a damaged DNA molecule doesn’t lead to cell death but instead is replicated as a mutation, which leads to cancer. However, cancer is perhaps the last thing that happens to the body after long periods of internal exposure to atoms of cesium 137 and other radionuclides. In most cases, the energy from radioactive decay breaks a DNA molecule, and the molecule either repairs itself or dies off. If the damage was vital to cell function, the cell dies. If a lot of cells die, the functioning of the organ concerned diminishes. If the damage continues, the organ fails.

The heart is particularly vulnerable to this sort of damage because it grows slowly and dead cells are not replaced quickly. This being the case, it is very easy to imagine what cesium 137 does to the developing heart of a fetus, infant or child. Children who absorb high loads of cesium 137 develop the heart diseases common to middle aged smokers.

So how much cesium 137 does it take put a child at risk? Bandashevsky et al did research on this question by grouping children from Belarus into three categories:

group 1: <5 Bq/kg body weight [BW]

group 2: 38.4 +/- 2.4 Bq/kg BW

group 3: 122 +/- 18.5 Bq/kg BW

Their conclusions:

“We determined the relationship between the 137Cs load and the children’s main source of food and recorded their cardiovascular symptoms. Cardiovascular symptoms, ECG alterations, and arterial hypertension were significantly more frequent in children with high 137Cs [groups 2 and 3] burden than in children with very low 137Cs burden.”

Some might say that Tatsuya Yamaguchi’s level was within the safe range, but who would voluntarily want to follow his dietary example or inflict it on a child? The only desirable level for one’s child is zero.

In a strange way, the members of TOKIO have, unintentionally, done their nation a great favor. They have inadvertently given us the experimental result we needed to know: Working the radioactive soils of Fukushima or eating its produce is dangerous. We don’t know if they got contaminated by breathing in soil particles during the sunflower experiment, or eating food from various sources in Fukushima, but they prove that the old village lifestyle--the very thing they wanted to celebrate--is no longer possible. The authorities desperately want to keep their promise to restore the lives of Fukushima residents, but it is clear now that the way to honor that promise was to make nuclear power plants safe before a nuclear meltdown happened. It's too late now to revive these lands.

We can hope too that these young men have learned a moral lesson that they obviously never got during their formative years in the Japanese education system. You have to think for yourself and educate yourself sometimes. I’m sure they really wanted to help the farmers in Fukushima, but their managers and their government exploited their ignorance to use them, dupe them and dupe the nation into a false hope that a nuclear meltdown really isn’t that bad after all. They grew up watching models, entertainers and idols whoring themselves out to anyone who put money on the table, and this has been normal for so long in Japan that young people no longer even questioned it. One of the few positive effects of the disaster is that a few people are starting to wake up from this sleep. They are learning that you don’t have to always sell yourself out for a career. The 37-year-old actor Taro Yamamoto set the example by going anti-nuke and then watching an upcoming television drama contract go up in smoke. But he seems happy with his decision. Perhaps he could have a word with the boys from TOKIO.

Sources and Further reading:

Bandazhevskaya GS, Nesterenko VB, Babenko VI, Yerkovich TV, Bandazhevsky YI.
Relationship between Caesium (137Cs) load, cardiovascular symptoms, and source of food in 'Chernobyl' children - preliminary observations after intake of oral apple pectin. Swiss Medical Weekly. 2004;134:725–729

Philip Brasor. It will take more than a pop group to save Fukushima's reputation. The Japan Times. September 9, 2012. 

excerpt below from:

Busby, C. Radiation Exposure and Heart Attacks in Children of Fukushima

It has been known for many years that the nuclide Cs-137 is concentrated in muscle. Let us introduce 50Bq/kg of Cs-137 into this heart muscle tissue. This is 50 tracks per second from the Cs-137 beta particle and maybe another 20 tracks per second from the gamma ray decay of the daughter Ba-137m. This is 70 tracks per second. Each track intercepts about 400 cells. For a child chronically contaminated at this level through living on Cs-137 contaminated areas for one year, the number of tracks is simply 70x60x60x24x365 =2.2 x 10E9 tracks per kilogram per year. This means that the number of cells hit by a radiation electron track, per kilogram is 8.8 x 10E11. For this model we immediately see that every heart cell will be hit by a radiation track about 25 times. If only 1 percent of these tracks caused the cell to die, it means that the child’s heart would lose 25% percent of its functional capability: all the cells would be dead.

Fig. 1 Number of children without ECG modifications as a function of Cs-137 concentration in the organism (Bandashevsky and Bandashevsky).

Fig. 2 The dynamics of cardiovascular diseases in the Republic of Belarus

neoplasm = tumor or cancer

Fig. 3 Structure of the causes of death in Belarus, 2008

Source used by Busby in the excerpts above:

Bandashevsky, Y. I. (2011). "Non cancer illnesses and conditions in areas of Belarus contaminated by radioactivity from the Chernobyl Accident." Chapter 3 in Busby C, Busby J and de Messiered M Eds: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, Lesvos Greece, May 5-9th 2009. Brussels: ECRR (see www.euradcom.org )

UPDATE September 8, 2015

Here is how DENTSU proudly describes how it executed the "support Fukushima" campaign. The description on their website makes it sound like volunteer work done as a public service rather than a contract that boosted their revenue:

Various Support Projects for the Reconstruction of Fukushima Prefecture

Dentsu Group companies led by Dentsu and Dentsu East Japan are advancing projects to support various prefectural government departments in Fukushima Prefecture to dispel damaging rumors about Fukushima associated with the nuclear plant accident.

In fiscal 2013, television commercials and transport ads featuring TOKIO, who support Fukushima, for the PR of local Fukushima produce, under the concept of “we made a delicious Fukushima” were deployed.

Additionally we held regular seminars with local media outlets and experts and on-site tours to dispel damaging rumors. In order to lead to a tangible increase in consumption, we also arranged on-site inspection tours and business meetings for buyers mainly in the metropolitan area and tie-up events and fairs with major distributors.


Dentsu is also involved in a wide range of reconstruction efforts in Fukushima Prefecture from developing the logo for the Fukushima Destination Campaign to be held in fiscal 2014 and running the Smile Caravan for children in Fukushima Prefecture to deepen ties with the local community, to the PR of agricultural and marine products, measures to attract tourists, and measures for children.

Canada's CTV covers the triple disaster anniversary

This week Canada's top private broadcaster CTV made several reports about the anniversary of the the triple disaster. I was quoted in one story, playing the role of expat telling the folks back home what it has been like to live in Japan this year. I spoke of worries about local hotspots in Chiba, 200 kms. south of Fukushima, and of the hassles of finding food that is not contaminated. The most satisfying thing about the experience was seeing that the reporter, Andy Johnson, interviewed Arnie Gundersen, an American nuclear engineer, consultant and activist who has been working tirelessly to report on the Fukushima disaster for the past year.

The kids are not alright

Nuclear Energy is the Energy of a Bright Future
Banner over a street in Futaba near the
Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant

As the first anniversary of the March 11, 2011 disaster approaches, foreign journalists with little knowledge of Japan have started to trot out the standard clichés about the Japanese resilience, patience and peaceful cooperation that has enabled them to recover quickly from their enormous triple tragedy. There is certainly some truth in such reporting, but it can also be condescending and offensive to suggest that the Japanese are not like any other people would be after such events; that is, traumatized, devastated and torn asunder. The list below is a brief description of some the scars and divisions that are yet to heal.

1. Rebuilding coastal towns

The towns destroyed by the tsunami could be rebuilt, but the question is whether they should be. Many of the towns were in decline before the tsunami, with populations that lacked young people. It has been politically popular for national politicians to promise reconstruction, and many influential construction companies are doing all they can to make the government take on more deficit financing to launch a construction boom. Yet people outside the affected areas question the wisdom of rebuilding, and young people from the ruined towns say they won’t return anyway. The young are pitted against the old.

2. Returning to poisoned land

The same divide between young and old has happened in towns that had to be evacuated because of radioactive fallout. The national government has promised to decontaminate the “lightly” contaminated areas and bring people back as soon as possible, but the residents are not convinced that decontamination is going to work, and of course, no one can prove to them what level of contamination will be no danger to their health. Even if it were safe to live in these towns, they will suffer from stigma and so will go into economic decline. As with the coastal towns destroyed by the tsunami, the old want to stay and the young want to leave. But if they leave they know they will face discrimination as being victims of radiation.

3. The suffering of the TEPCO rank and file

Some of the most horrific suffering has been experienced by the TEPCO employees and contractors who stayed at the ruined power plant after the earthquake. One could choose to show no pity for them for having taken the dirty money from the nuclear industry for so many years, but the same could be said of every citizen who failed to oppose nuclear power since its early days. I find it difficult to be cold-hearted toward the workers who were below the upper management level.
Some of the TECPCO workers in Fukushima lost their homes and family members but stayed on the job during the crisis. An excellent interview with a  psychiatrist in Der Spiegel describes the woeful lack of support these traumatized heroes have received in the last year. After losing their homes, they faced discrimination in housing, often finding that apartment managers had posted signs saying, “TEPCO people not welcome.” They have endured miserable working conditions with inadequate medical and psychological care.

4. Let’s all share the pain: redistributing radionuclides far and wide

Another divide has occurred over the removal of tsunami debris. It is an economic boon to the waste removal industry, as are the opportunities in reconstruction and decontamination, but much of it is low-level radioactive waste. If it is burned in modern, well-equipped incinerators in large cities like Tokyo and Yokohama, most of the radionuclides can be filtered out and concentrated in the ash, then the ash can be buried. But proper burial, with proper protection of groundwater, is not likely to happen when large volumes start getting processed. Right now, much of it is being dumped directly into Tokyo Bay. Local politicians, many with shady ties to the waste removal business, have been eager to process this waste over the wishes of their citizens. They claim to be the democratically elected leaders, so they take this as the freedom to decide policy as they see fit, without considering the objections of citizens who never elected them on this policy question. Meanwhile, some of the mayors of the towns where the waste originates are starting to question the rush to haul it away. They note that their towns are small, and the debris has been piled up at the edge of town, out of sight and out of mind. Why force it on people far away who don’t want it?

5. Occupy Tokyo

Alissa Descotes Toyosaki is a French journalist who has covered the encampment of protesters from Fukushima who have been in front of the Japanese government buildings in Tokyo for over 130 winter days. As they set up their camp, security guards put up a brief resistance, but since then the government has made no move on them. Japanese society seems to have matured in the same way as Western democracies. Instead of trying to censor and shut down such manifestations, protests and free speech are tolerated and respected – but also completely ignored. The strongest reaction against these protesters has come from the ultra-nationalists who come by at night in their gigantic sound trucks blaring military music (who finances this?). They too are antinuclear, probably because they see it as an American technology foisted on a subservient Japan, but they disapprove of the unseemly protest methods of these lefties who camp out in front of government buildings.

6. Radiation Divorce

This is the new term coined for families that have been split by fears of radiation. Many people from Fukushima voluntarily got their children out by sending them to stay with friends or relatives elsewhere in Japan, usually with the wife going with them and the husband staying behind at his job. Many couples couldn't agree about whether to stay or go, or whether it was safe for the children to come back. Sometimes it was not a disagreement between a couple but between generations. The older generation thinks the young ones are over-reacting.

7. Hot Deals on Cars
 

The absence of visible crime and looting leads to the false conclusion that there hasn’t been invisible crime and looting. Well-connected construction and waste removal companies have managed to get their hands on a nice slice of the national budget, which is 50% financed by deficit spending.
In other instances, the highly radioactive cars have been detected on car dealer lots, or, more commonly, at ports where the cars are destined for sale in Russia and South Asia. The government started testing the cars five months after the reactors exploded, but since then 500 hundred have been blocked from export. It is impossible to know how many were sent out of the country before monitoring began. If this is not a venal crime, what is? The dealers who brought these cars to port cannot claim to be the innocent dupes of the owners who sold the cars. Inexpensive radiation monitors have been available to them since the spring of 2011. And where was the lockdown on the movement of vehicles out of the exclusion zone? Where was the insurance industry and the government that could have anticipated the problem and made sure that the owners of cars left inside the exclusion zone would be compensated? On so many issues like this, officials showed a complete lack of imagination and anticipation of problems that would arise.

8. Radionuclides show up in the darndest places

Another example of one of the many problems that no one anticipated is in the news of a radiation hotspot on a school ground in Yokohama. The average radiation level in the city is between 0.05 and 0.14 microsieverts per hour, but in a ditch near this school it was 6.85. It turned out that suspected cause is the adjacent business specialized in cleaning commercial air filters for clients all over the city. This meant that radioactive cesium and other dangerous isotopes caught in filters were collected from a wide area and concentrated in the waste water flowing beside this school ground.

9. Food

Who should be protected? Should farmers be allowed to grow food on highly contaminated soil, or should they be paid not to grow in order to prevent the creation of contaminated food that might find its way into people's bodies? People with a normally functioning moral faculty find the answer easy, but the Japanese government is hell bent on denying that land has been ruined, and that means telling farmers they should plant the next crop - farmers who claim a right to sell contaminated food as long as the government refuses to compensate them for their ruined soil.

10. A safety culture that relies on day labor and organized crime

If you still think that Japan is a marvelously crime-free society, read about the excellent work done by independent journalist Tomohiko Suzuki. He took a job inside the Fukushima Daiichi plant during the summer of 2011 and wrote about working conditions of the people trying to tame the radioactive beast. He got the job due to yakuza (ogranized crime) connections, and this was also his topic of interest. The yakuza, the nuclear industry and the government regulators have had a cozy relationship for a long time.

11. Should I stay or should I go?

Finally, the biggest question about a divided Japan might be a great, existential question over who gets to live and who gets to die. I have never before heard people actually talking seriously about the extinction of a nation. It is not just idle speculation. The next great earthquake might produce a nuclear disaster that would be the final punch. Japan doesn’t usually produce refugees, but foreign countries have recently had numerous refugee claims from Japanese citizens. Furthermore, there have been rumors about the super-rich making plans to get out. There was recently the announcement of a plan to build a large Japanese town in Chennai, India. It is definitely an upmarket venture, aimed at Japanese who will do business or retire in the accustomed comfort that they had back home. The timing was curious, and it gave the impression of being similar to a hypothetical colony on Mars that would be needed for humans leaving a doomed home planet.

So to sum up, Japan is not exactly all patched up and back on the road to recovery. This morning, NHK TV news reports that many of the people who last year dug in and resolved to rebuild their lives are now dreading to watch the anniversary news reports. They now feel that their resolve was no match for the insurmountable obstacles they had to deal with. Yes, there has been some incredible progress that was achieved from the ability of Japanese people to persevere patiently and help each other. It was unbelievable that there was so little structural damage from a magnitude 9 earthquake. A massive amount of debris was cleared up quickly, and a commendable job was done or arranging housing for so many of the tsunami refugees. Nonetheless, it would be dehumanizing and cold-hearted to not look deeper into the situation and see the lingering trauma and divisions. This is not Syria, the Sudan or Haiti, but the world can look and learn a lesson about how quickly a black swan event can knock a developed nation on its back.

My brain hurt like a warehouse

David Bowie's concept album
about mankind's foreknowledge
 of the end of the world

As the first anniversary of the earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown syndrome approaches, I thought I would write a more personal account of what it feels like to have experienced life in post-disaster Japan.

On March 11th I was living in Toronto with my wife and children, safely removed from the disasters unfolding in our home country. We had been living there for only one year on a temporary leave, and we were due to go back to Japan on March 30th. As we watched events unfold we became more conflicted about what to do. We proceeded with plans to leave our rented house, sell the car and book a hotel for our stopover in Los Angeles, but all the time we were thinking it may be madness to return to Japan. For two weeks in March we seriously had to consider the possibility that Tokyo was slowly being rendered uninhabitable, and we might never see it, or all our loved ones there, again. But we’d just wave that thought away, wondering if we had watched too many disaster movies.

In any case, how do you call up the boss and announce to colleagues that you’re not coming back because you think they are all doomed? Businesses and schools were all getting ready to carry on as usual, as people believed, to some extent, the official reassurances and at the same time resigned themselves to their fate, and buried their fears in a place they didn’t want to go. Of the fifty million affected people, few of them had a foreign passport or a country to escape to.

 Three days before departure, there still had not been much reassuring news about Fukushima Daiichi, then there was a warning that iodine 131 levels in Tokyo drinking water made it too dangerous to be consumed by infants. This was the major indication that things were much worse than had been admitted, and it hinted that the trend might worsen. We put the brakes on our plans for departure. We cancelled our flights, even though it was too late to stay on in our rented house. We spent the next two weeks occupying my sister’s apartment while we waited for a sign that the death spiral of this nuclear plant was being brought under control. By mid-April this seemed to be the case. We might evacuate later if it became clear that we had to, but in the meantime we had a job and mortgage payments to get back to.

It turned out that the nightmare we contemplated in March, from a safe distance in Toronto, was not at all unrealistic. Later in the year, inquiries revealed that had the people in power been just a little more negligent and incompetent than they actually were, the nuclear contamination would have led to the necessity of a “voluntary migration” over the next year away from Tokyo and most areas of Northern Japan. The US government was aware of the danger at that time, and dependents of military families in Japan were allowed compensated voluntary evacuation, which most of them took. Several thousand of them spent a couple weeks at hotels stateside.

The details of how dangerous the situation really was are only now becoming clear. The New York Times reported today that an independent private study now completed concludes that the risk of a much larger accident was much higher than a previous government study concluded. The Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation “… offered one of the most vivid accounts yet of how Japan teetered on the edge of an even larger nuclear crisis...” After the accident, conflicting reports appeared asking whether TEPCO president Masataka Shimizu had actually called for the evacuation of all staff from Fukushima Daiichi, a decision that would have led to the ruin of Japan. Government reports later claimed that he had said only some of the workers should withdraw, but the private report found that he did, in fact, want to withdraw everyone. This finding suggests that top management did not even understand the fundamental science of the crisis, or the potential dangers of the reactor cores and spent fuel. Or it seems they lacked the reasoning skills needed to conclude that lives would have to be put in danger in order to save many more lives.

 The New York Times report goes on to describe the private report as saying,

“Mr. Kan and other officials began discussing a worst-case outcome of an evacuation of workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. This would allow the plant to spiral out of control, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere that would in turn force the evacuation of other nearby nuclear plants, causing further meltdowns…. The report also described the panic within the Kan administration at the prospect of large radiation releases from the more than 10,000 spent fuel rods that were stored in relatively unprotected pools near the damaged reactors. The report said it was not until five days after the earthquake that a Japanese military helicopter was finally able to confirm that the pool deemed at highest risk, near the No. 4 reactor, was still safely filled with water.”

Thus it was only on March 15 then that they knew that the worst case had been averted. The report credits Prime Minister Kan with making the right decision. Mr. Funabashi, the lead author of the report concluded, “Prime Minister Kan had his minuses and he had his lapses, but his decision to storm into TEPCO and demand that it not give up saved Japan.”

Despite this finding that the worst had been averted by March 15, the fallout from the reactor explosions showed up for months afterwards, in places that had been said to be safe. By a stroke of luck, 80% of it fell over the ocean, but the remaining 20% came down in dry or wet deposition in varying patterns. For example, the unlucky town of Kashiwa, a Tokyo suburb located in Chiba Prefecture, became a hotspot as hot as many places in Fukushima, and this was just because of the way the rain fell on a couple days in March.

Most disturbing of all is that the danger has not really been resolved. The damaged cores of reactors 1-3 are still in a perilous state, and the large spent fuel pool of the reactor 4 building, housing a massive pile of spent nuclear fuel, looks like it could crumble at any time in the next large earthquake, tsunami, plane crash or act of sabotage. Note to Japanese government: Have you ever heard of a no-fly zone? 

The Reactor 4 Building, February 2012

Akio Matsumura, founder and Secretary General of The Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival, has taken up the reactor 4 building as a top priority. He declares on his website:

“I, along with many eminent scientists, are emphasizing the precarious situation of the fourth reactor that contains 1,535 nuclear fuel rods in the pool and is balanced on the second floor, outside of the reactor containment vessel. If the fuel rods spill onto the ground, disaster will ensue and force Tokyo and Yokohama to close, creating a gigantic evacuation zone. All scientists I have talked with say that if the structure collapses we will be in a situation well beyond where science has ever gone. The destiny of Japan will be changed and the disaster will certainly compromise the security of neighboring countries and the rest of the world in terms of health, migration and geopolitics.”

One of these eminent scientists, Bob Alvarez, added, “… the risk of yet another highly destructive earthquake occurring even closer to the Fukushima reactors has increased, according to the European Geosciences Union. This is particularly worrisome for Daiichi’s structurally damaged spent fuel pool at reactor No. 4 sitting 100 feet above ground, exposed to the elements. Drainage of water from this pool, resulting from another quake could trigger a catastrophic radiological fire involving about eight times more radioactive cesium than released at Chernobyl.”

Most people, even the highly educated ones I work with, seem oblivious to the danger they passed through and to the sword that still hangs over them. In addition to the situation at Fukushima Daiichi, there are other hazards in the enormous amounts of spent fuel stored all over Japan. Japan really has few options for long-term storage. In a certain sense, Japan is just one big dirty bomb waiting for an event to set it off.

As I walk in Tokyo these days I keep thinking, ”What would that have been like, for everyone to know that they had to get out within the year?” What an instant, profound awareness of how much we have screwed the future. I have an exquisite appreciation of my daily bread and my family, and as for everyone else, as the song says, “I never thought I’d need so many people.”

(I would like to credit the comedian and superb monologue artist Lee Camp with some inspiration for this post on the theme of carpe diem.)

Five Years

By David Bowie

Pushing through the market square
so many mothers sighing
News had just come over,
we had five years left to cry in

News guy wept and told us
earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
then I knew he was not lying

I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies
I saw boys, toys electric irons and T.V.'s
My brain hurt like a warehouse
it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things
to store everything in there
And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people
And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people
I never thought I'd need so many people

A girl my age went off her head
hit some tiny children
If the black hadn't a-pulled her off, I think she would have killed them

A soldier with a broken arm, fixed his stare to the wheel of a Cadillac
A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest
and a queer threw up at the sight of that
I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlor
drinking milk shakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine
don't think you knew you were in this song

And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
And I thought of Ma and I wanted to get back there
Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you're beautiful, I want you to walk

We've got five years, stuck on my eyes
We've got five years, what a surprise
We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot
We've got five years, that's all we've got

Five Years, written by David Bowie and released in 1972. It was the opening track on the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The song describes a civilization with foreknowledge of Earth dying within five years due to resource exhaustion. More background at The Ziggy Stardust Companion, with excerpts from a Rolling Stone interview in February, 1974 between William S. Burroughs and David Bowie.

The Castle Bravo Hydrogen Bomb Test, March 1, 1954

"It's unreasonable to make such a big deal over the death of a fisherman."

- Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb

In previous posts I’ve argued that the eyewitness testimony of radiation victims provides some of the most reliable data to make judgments about the hazards posed by the present disaster at Fukushima Daiichi. Subjective accounts are often dismissed as being anecdotal, but in an age when hard data gets cherry-picked, filtered and turned toward any desired interpretation, it starts to make more sense to listen to the common message that comes out of thousands of historical eye-witness accounts that get offensively dismissed as "anecdotal."

Today, Japan’s Mainichi News (2012/02/21) carried a story about Matashichi Oishi, the last surviving member of the crew of the Lucky Dragon #5 (Daigo Fukuryu Maru) which was caught in the fallout of the American Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test held in 1954 near the Bikini Atoll.

Mr. Oishi describes how he was covered in ash and pulverized coral from the explosion, receiving a dose that was estimated later to be 2,000 to 3,000 millisieverts. To put this in perspective, keep in mind that the annual permitted dose for children in Japan was raised after the Fukushima accident from 1 millisievert per year to 20, which is 1/100th of the amount Oishi received in a single incident. Nonetheless, no one knows how Oishi’s experience will compare with the experience of a child born this year in Fukushima.

In addition to the hard science, the social science revealed by Mr. Oishi’s experience is perhaps the most valuable lesson to take from his life story. When news of the incident escaped the veil of nuclear secrecy, the reactions of the American and Japanese authorities, followed by the treatment by Japanese society, prove once again that radiation victims are assaulted twice – once in the initial exposure, then again in their pursuit of justice.

The head of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, at first denied the fallout that landed on the Lucky Dragon #5 was radioactive, then he accused the crew of being a “red spy outfit.” Even though they told the Japanese that the ship was not contaminated, the US government quickly banned imports of tuna from Japan. The incident soon grew into a diplomatic nightmare, as it was the second time in less than a decade that Americans had victimized Japanese citizens with atomic weapons. As a nascent Japanese anti-nuclear movement became mobilized by the affair, the pro-American LDP government and the US government came to an agreement about how to arrange an "ex-gratia" settlement (one that gives condolence but does not admit guilt). The US paid $2 million dollars to the Japanese government, little of which was received by the victims. The ship’s captain died of acute radiation sickness soon after the incident, and his widow received $2,500. Mr. Oishi received a settlement of 2 million yen (about $25,000 at today’s exchange rate).

After the Lucky Dragon incident, the Japanese government established the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, which Mr. Oishi visited from 1957-1992. He said he stopped going when he became dissatisfied with their attention to his case. “My liver cancer was detected at a different hospital,” he said, “I began to feel that for the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, we were merely research subjects [as opposed to patients]. Based on what I’ve seen and heard about the slow response of the national government to the plight of people in Fukushima, I get the impression that things haven’t changed. Unless we try to learn from the lessons of past radiation victims, I’m afraid that our painful experiences will be repeated.”

Mr. Oishi outlived all of his crew mates, most of whom died in middle age, but he has had numerous health problems and says he has stayed alive only because of the numerous medical interventions he has had. He takes 30 kinds of drugs each day, and has the same health problems described by the Chernobyl liquidators and other Chernobyl victims, as well as other victims of weapons fallout: cataracts, arrhythmia, angina, asthma, liver cancer, infections, and a lung tumor. Various governments and UN bodies deny that these symptoms are the effects of radiation exposure, and the Japanese government has been no different. Mr. Oishi was never recognized, like the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as officially a radiation victim. He received only the same health benefits as any other Japanese citizen.

Someone might be tempted to hold Mr. Oishi up as an example of how little harm radiation does, saying, “Think of the amount of radiation he received, and look, at 78, he’s still alive!” This way of thinking about radiation’s effects counts only the deaths, as seen in the optimistic reporting about Chernobyl that claims only a few deaths were ever confirmed as directly related to Chernobyl. 

Leaving aside the emotional pain of the bereaved, another way to look at it is to say the deaths are the least of our concerns. The dead are gone and there is nothing more we can do for them. The thing we should be concerned about is the impact on the living – not that lives were ended but that they were filled with suffering and shortened. Mr. Oishi’s tale speaks to this point. What society would tolerate, on a moral level, this suffering for the sake of energy and security, and what society could afford the treatment for the victims of a large nuclear accident? But in fairness to nuclear advocates, we have to admit that this question applies to all forms of energy. The byproducts of fossil fuel burning also shorten millions of lives, a fact which millions of modernized and prosperous Chinese citizens are now painfully aware of.

The current Japanese government has reluctantly announced plans to make lump sum payments to evacuees of the Fukushima crisis so that they can get on with their lives, and this seems sensible and overdue to outside observers, but Mr. Oishi’s experience reveals something that may be a peculiar Japanese phenomenon. The government is perhaps aware that if they are helped to resettle elsewhere, victims of radiation will suffer not only discrimination, but also envy and resentment. It is not always easy to predict their future and conclude whether they will be better off leaving or staying. Mr. Oishi experienced discrimination toward himself and his daughters for having an irradiated bloodline, but he was also resented for his “lucky” windfall compensation payment. The little reported aspect of the Lucky Dragon incident is that the wide-scale testing that Japanese scientists did in the following months revealed that hundreds of fishing boat crews were affected, as was the entire catch of fish from the South Pacific. Fallout was detected on produce and in rainfall over Japan. It was the first time that fallout data had been made known to the general public, and this incident is seen now as the beginning of the end of atmospheric testing.
     Because so many fishermen had also been affected, they resented that only the Lucky Dragon crew received compensation and attention. Otherwise, Mr. Oishi grew annoyed that friends and relatives pestered him to co-sign for loans, so he left his small town for the anonymity of Tokyo. But since the 1990s, and more so since the Fukushima crisis, Mr. Oishi has chosen to step out of his anonymity and speak publicly to honor the memory of his deceased crew members, and all radiation victims. He feels that what he has to say no is no longer just “someone else’s pitiful story.” He added, “What are we going to do about radiation, and about nuclear power? We can’t leave it up to the leaders who don’t want to lose in international competition, because they will resist seeing the health effects of radiation exposure as significant. The public must think this through with raised awareness, or this problem will remain unresolved forever.”

What is most significant is that Mr. Oishi is also speaking for millions of victims like himself whose suffering has been dismissed, or at best, neglected for decades. The American government later admitted that hundreds of fishing boats were hit with fallout from the Castle Bravo test. The bomb yield was larger than expected, and the wind also blew in an unexpected direction. The Lucky Dragon was exceptional in that it got back to a country with a sufficiently vital media and political culture that could turn its story into an international incident.

In addition to the fishing boats affected by this one bomb test, the natives of the South Pacific Islands were affected by numerous British, French and American tests, not to mention the military personnel from these countries. There were victims of Soviet bomb tests in Kazakhstan, British bomb tests in Australia, Chinese bomb tests along the Silk Road, and victims of various nuclear reactor accidents, some large and famous, some small and little known. Finally, there are the uranium miners, and nuclear workers who lost their health doing nuclear fuel processing for bombs and power generation. Resolution 275, a US Senate resolution designating October 30, 2011, as a national day of remembrance (that almost no one remembers or even knows about because it went largely unreported) for nuclear weapons program workers who were “left with debilitating illness that far too often led to their premature deaths,” according to Senator Harry Reid.

Mr. Oishi’s final judgment of the Japanese National Institute of Radiological Sciences is worth reflecting on as we wonder exactly what the Japanese government is doing to help Fukushima Prefecture. The government has promised to establish the best program to monitor the health of citizens for the coming decades, and since government officials deny there is a risk, the purpose of such an expensive program could only be to make a show of responsiveness and to prove a desired conclusion. This is what they do instead of helping people move away to safer locations.

     One can’t help but think that the plan is to repeat the process of the official UN research on Chernobyl. The government will control who can do the research, and then the research parameters, data selection and final interpretations will be massaged to yield the foregone conclusions that confirm the safety of nuclear energy. In the end, the people will feel as Mr. Oishi did, as research subjects rather than as patients, unless we follow his warning: “think this through with raised awareness, or this problem will remain unresolved forever.”

Other Sources:

Oishi, Masashichi. The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, The Lucky Dragon and I. University of Hawaii Press. 2011

Kyodo News. Scientist immediately sought details from U.S. on 1954 Bikini H-bomb test. January 11, 2012.

Hoffman, Michael. Forgotten Atrocity of the Atomic Age. The Japan Times. August 28, 2011.

Links to articles on this topic at the Asahi Shimbun.

The (False?) Promise of Small Modular Reactors

Book Review

The Answer: Why Only Inherently Safe Mini-Nuclear Power Plants Can Save Our World

By Reese Palley

The Babcock and Wilcox MPower  SMR

The nuclear energy debate is framed in what became its fossilized form in the 1970s and 1980s as the global disarmament movement and the anti-nuclear movement had some successes. Even this year, as the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns dominate the discussion, most of the debate is about the wisdom of building more of the familiar, large-scale gigawatt nuclear power plants that have been with us since the 1960s. The public has the image of the old technologies from forty years ago that failed in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Nuclear proponents argue that new designs are going to be “passive safe,” often smaller, and with a less poisonous waste product. Anti-nuclear groups have to focus on how to wind down the old generation of power plants, and also pay attention to this new generation because from now on this is what the debate will be about.

In 2011, American author Reese Palley wrote The Answer: Why Only Inherently Safe Mini-Nuclear Power Plants Can Save Our World, in which he presents a powerful argument that all alternatives except these new SMRs (Small Modular Reactors, or mini nukes) offer false hope as solutions to the energy crisis. The argument for these SMRs has some severe weaknesses, but Palley must be credited with having written some excellent prose that provides a brutally frank description of how bad our energy predicament is.

Reese served in WWII, attended the London School of Economics, and had a successful career in the art business. He then spent two decades sailing the world, pausing in China and the Soviet Union along the way to establish businesses there. And he’s an author of several books who has now turned his attention to the planet’s greatest problem.

Palley agrees with anti-nuclear activists on the point that large gigawatt power plants must be a thing of the past. They were designed to produce plutonium for the build-up of nuclear weapons, while different options for reactor design were pushed aside. They are too expensive and time-consuming to build, and have too many real and perceived dangers for the public and private investors to support.

Anti-nuclear activists, however, hesitate to get on board with his enthusiasm for the new generation of SMRs that are now in the design stage. Palley promotes these reactors as “walk away safe” because they are to be buried in the ground and run for a few decades without human intervention. They are modular and scalable, leaving behind no weapons grade material because they are based on the safer reactor concepts that were passed up in the early days of the Cold War. Some of the designs are said to be capable of using up existing spent fuel, which is sufficient enough, supposedly, to provide the earth’s energy needs for centuries.

Palley’s assessment of alternatives is hard to dispute. He notes that there is no oil, coal or gas shortage. There are enough of these sources to last a few more centuries, but the problem is that ecosystems will collapse from global warming before these resources are gone. We have to stop using them soon, and it is not just a matter of cutting back. We have to get carbon dioxide emissions close to zero to avoid the worst outcome.

Renewable energy sources have severe shortcomings as well. Water behind hydroelectric dams contains rotting vegetation which spews out the greenhouse gas methane. There isn’t enough space to put wind farms in the places where they are needed. The solar energy striking the earth is finite. It has to be used to grow plants, which sequester carbon and feed people, so there is a limit on how much solar energy can be used to produce electricity or biofuels. Geothermal sites contain greenhouse gases and toxins, and there are difficulties in finding sites close to populations that need energy. Finally, sequestering greenhouse gases in underground storage is utterly unrealistic. In short, there is no solution except SMRs, apparently. 

The most fascinating argument that Palley presents is in his discussion of the black swan, civilization-ending massive solar flare which would knock out power grids all over the world. He uses this as an argument for breaking up large, interconnected grids into local isolated grids powered by SMRs. This could save the world from a complete, prolonged blackout. Such a flare actually occurred in 1859 and it caused fires, and destruction of the small telegraph grid that was in place at the time. No one knows for sure how a recurrence would effect electricity grids now. After sufficiently scaring the life out of his readers, he may not have wanted to associate this disaster with its effect on nuclear power plants. He conveniently omits mention of this long blackout leading to hundreds of nuclear power plants running out of fuel for backup cooling systems, after which they would go into meltdowns. Fukushima X 400 (or 400 Chernobyls, as this report explains it).

Palley’s argument becomes suspect when the reader notices that the sharp, critical eye he has for every other energy alternative is not applied to SMRs, or even to conventional nuclear power plants. A few moments of research on the Internet turns up numerous articles that raise safety concerns about these new nuclear power plants, and Palley gives very short shrift to the known extent of radiological contamination from various accidents. The health consequences of Chernobyl are given less than a page, and what is written is just a pat repetition of the big lie that I’ve covered in previous posts. These omissions begin to seem quite disingenuous by the end of the book.

The physicist Michio Kaku voiced criticisms of SMRs in a short interview on CNN. He conceded that these power plants might be used in remote communities, but he felt it was extremely unrealistic to think that they could provide a city like Chicago, let alone the whole world, with all its requirements. As one power plant could supply energy to 20,000 homes, it is inconceivable that Chicago would have dozens of these plants throughout the city. He notes too that even though the spent fuel would not have a potential to be turned into nuclear bombs, it would still be high level nuclear waste that posed a risk of mishandling or sabotage in the form of a dirty bomb.

A more thorough critique was written by Arjun Makhijani and Michele Boyd in a report for The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and Physicians for Social Responsibility. They point out that the low cost estimates of SMRs may be underestimated, as every proposal for new technology tends to be. Mass production of numerous SMRs could be more expensive than the building and maintenance of fewer large plants. There will be thousands of sites that need to be secured, monitored, staffed, and serviced when recalls are required. The existence of thousands of sites also complicates retrieval of waste and decommissioning.

The makers of SMRs also propose that these reactors could be used in developing countries, but many such places are unstable and they lack an educated workforce that can handle this advanced technology.

Makhijani and Boyd also cover the details of different proposed types of SMRs. The ones based on sodium cooling are particularly worrisome considering the history of accidents and delays with this technology (for background, refer to the Fermi I reactor accident near Detroit, and the expensive, unproductive monster that is the Monju reactor in Japan). They point out that one of the many problems of the pebble bed reactor design (which a German company gave up on a long time ago) is that the uranium it uses is more enriched than what is used now in light water reactors. How is this less of a proliferation risk? Finally, the thorium reactors don’t produce the same bomb making material as light water reactors, but they still produce fissile Uranium 233 isotopes.

Worst of all, the SMRs may be a false promise that deflects attention away from the need to reduce population and consumption, and improve efficiency. Palley himself admitted that endless growth and thirst for more energy is the root of the problem, but he doesn’t acknowledge that the proliferation of thousands of SMRs would only feed this endless desire for more energy and lead to more population growth.

The flaw in the logic may be right in the title of Palley’s book: The Answer. There seems to be a faulty assumption that there has to be an answer. The thinking goes that if it is not a, b, c, d or e, then it must be f. People involved in the energy debate often choose their favorite answer, ignore its flaws and defend it at all costs. Meanwhile, they demolish the arguments for all other alternatives. This process ignores the possibility that there may be no answer. The universe doesn’t care if we go the same way as the dinosaurs. If there is an answer, it remains elusive.

Sources:

The Christian Science Monitor on safety concerns regarding SMRs

A CBC report on the possible use of SMRs in Canada’s north

More on the amazing life and times of Reese Palley

Arjun Makhijani and Michele Boyd. Small Modular Reactors: No solution to the cost, safety and waste problems of nuclear power. A fact sheet produced by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and Physicians for Social Responsibility, September 2010.
Is Thorium a Magic Bullet for our Energy Problems? NPR. May 2012.

Reese Palley. The Answer: Why Only Inherently Safe Mini-Nuclear Power Plants Can Save Our World. 2011.

John G. Fuller. We Almost Lost Detroit. 1984.

Hiroko Tabuchi. Japan Strains to Fix a Reactor Damaged Before Quake. The New York Times. June 17, 2011.