Ippoippo

Wooohooo.

Some new reading for me. I’ve been reading through the older posts, and there are quite a few amusing ones.

Quite an interesting article over at the BBC, Fukushima: Nuclear power’s VHS relic?

The most obvious cause of the disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station was the massive wall of tsunami water that swept the site clean of back-up electricity generation on 11 March, removing cooling capacity from reactor cores and resulting in serial meltdown.

Would a newer reactor have fared better? Was the relationship between industry and regulators too close? Perhaps.

A question less often discussed, but equally intriguing, is whether decisions made half a century ago for reasons of commercial and geopolitical advantage have left the world with basic designs of nuclear reactor that are inherently less safe than others that have fallen by the wayside.

To make an analogy with the world of videotape: have we been guilty of rejecting the nuclear Betamax in favour of an inferior quality VHS?

Some interesting points, but what the article doesn’t talk about is that these reactors have very ‘useful’ byproducts… if you want to build nuclear weapons. Lets face it, reactor design was also done to enable the ability to produce weapons (something you can’t do with Thorium reactors for example).

Japan can’t say when nuclear reactors will restart

Link here

Wonder how long it will be before they finally get rid of Kan. He really is stirring up the status-quo in the comfy industrial-government relationship.

Some 50 utility workers posed as citizens to back atomic power on TV

Link here.

Ahhh, good to see some openess in the industry still.
Wouldn’t have a problem if 50 workers went on TV, and were up front about who they worked for, before putting forward their arguments. It’s the whole hush-hush thing that stinks.

This…

Link courtesy of Kurushii.

That said, I want to see more of the original Kenjutsu footage now.
Ahh, here you go

Awesome!

Found this documentary, about working in the Japanese nuclear industry. It was shown on Channel 4 back in 1995. Rather relevant now.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Röhl, Nicholas. 1995. Kakusareta Hibaku Rōdō: Nihon no Genpatsu Rōdōsha. 隠された被曝労働 – 日本の原発労働者 物語 [Nuclear Ginza].

Nicholas Röhl, a student of Japan’s master director Imamura Shohei, produced this 30-minute documentary in 1995 for Channel 4. The film exposes how Japan’s nuclear energy industry used disadvantaged people in the 1970s and ’80s to carry out highly dangerous manual labor inside their power stations. The story follows the photojournalist/anti-nuclear activist Kenji Higuchi as he exposes the exploitation of the “untouchables” who were pulled out of the slums of Tokyo and Osaka in order to work while exposed to radiation, often without their knowledge. Referring to the tacit cooperation and close ties between the Japanese government and the country’s nuclear industry, a man notes in one scene that “democracy has been destroyed where nuclear power stations exist.” The film shows how Japan, having suffered nuclear attacks in the past, remarkably transformed itself within a few decades into one of the most “nuclearized” nations worldwide. This documentary film has special significance in the light of the recent Fukushima nuclear crisis, in which media reports about the exploitation of unskilled laborers in the plant spawned a major controversy.
– Christian Dimmer