The Nuclear Situation in Japan is Being Downplayed Internationally
International media agencies have been forced to downplay the situation in Fukushima, Japan because they want their respective countries people not to start questioning the use of nuclear power.
Fact 45 percent of the children in Fukushima have thyroid damage, according to Japanese papers in the last few days.
100 percent of the bizarrely small sample of 15 people in Fukushima (including a 4 year old boy) had high levels of caesium in their urine.
Fact - milk, berries, mushrooms, green leaved veg/tea is being sold whilst being contaminiated.
Imagine if this happened in Selafield, UK, or California.
Please read up as much as you can about this, I would love to see more anti nuclear protests happening again in the world outside Japan. It did seem to start a little in March, then the media went dead on the subject and people stopped. Noone wants to be seen as a crazy person. To panic about this, and be concerned was painted in the media as being unpatriotic.
Dont let them manipulate you!
Dont let the vast machine win! We are not tabula rasa to write their own stories on! Protest!
I'd like to start by saying that I dont disagree with you.
But, with that said, where would giving up nuclear leave us? assuming that oil/coal/natural gas are all bad for the planet and finite, and that there is currently no feasable way to produce the volume of energy that we currently consume by 'green' methods (and there isn't).
Just interested to hear your view.
I promise you I was not trying to belittle the situation in Japan - far from it.
I was more trying to highlight the issues which you have so eloquently expressed.
We have a government backed environmental movement in the uk to 'reduce, reuse and recycle' - of these three valid aims the only one which is in anyway actively worked on by either government or business is to recycle; reducing consumption or reusing available materials would negatively affect the economy.
It seems to me that you have the right mindset in relation to these issues - my hope here is that others will see this thread and realize quite how destructive the path we are on is.
Skimmer's Comment: From my standpoint if the government's of our world were willing to make the investment oil, coal, and natural gass could be given up and replaced with nuclear fission power generation complexes. We have the technology to create naturally cooling powerplants that operate on the proven fact that hot air rises. This would prevent such catastrophies as we saw in Japan as there would be no sea water to continually keep pumping into the powerplant to cool the fuel rods. Also people of intelligence should be involved in the planning of building more power plants so that they're not built on or near techtonic fault lines.
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a better solution would be geothermal plants - almost ideally suited to faultlines.
Im right here in the middle of this, in Eastern Japan, Kia.
The fear of buying contaminated food, which is not being taken off shelves, of our children getting cancer, of birth defects, of this nuclear monster belching out all manner of radioactive particles leading people to be displaced from their communities and homes has led me to re evaluate how we use energy.
Tokyo has turned of its light show, turned off or down the airconditioning, people are having to evaluate how much energy we have and how best to use it. Factories are having to work nights or weekends. Car production is having to be stepped down. We Do have enough energy as long as it is not wasted. Did you know that 2 vending machines use as much energy as one Tokyo household? We dont need them. We have become wasteful and dependent.
If all surfaces were covered in solar energy panels, if people used wind energy, tidal power (which is now propping up Tokyo), and also reviewed their energy usage, then we would stop destroying our beautiful planet and start living sustainably rather than raping natural resources and making deals with nuclear devils. Japan can power itself with geothermal energy, beign on the ring of fire. Individual generators have helped a lot here as well. Necessity is the mother of invention, I bet if it was needed new and sustainable ways to power things on a personal level would be created.
We dont need microwaves, vacume cleaners, not even washing machines or tumble driers. The human race is not living within its means, we are consuming more and more and at a huge huge cost. Was one Chernobyl child worth that nuclear plant? Is one Fukushima child with thyroid damage worth all those Honda's that plant helped to make? What is more valuable?
We cannot continue to live in the way we have been. A disposable lifestyle is no longer sustainable, and never was. We do not need disposable plastic crap, nor wasteful luxury. Cars should be used until they are no longer drive-able, not thrown away. We dont need hundreds of thousands of new cars every year.
We will have deaths in Japan in the medium to long term due to Fukushima. Suffering, and those who suffer most are the unborn and the young.
Nuclear waste cannot be made safe, it has to be stored for thousands of years. What right do we have to do that to our children's children? When things go wrong - and they will always go wrong, we are fallible and money talks - then look at the results. The sea has been made toxic, the land ruined, people contaminated.
There is a word for ernergy conservation in Japanese - setsuden. There needs to be a world-wide effort towards setsuden, instead of burying our heads in the sand and only waking up to find we have destroyed everything we love by our inaction.