MouthForWar wrote:Godzilla started as an anti nuclear war message... and that message will always be relevant.
Fission stirs anew at Fukushima, as Japan grapples with nuclear future
[quote="Ron Meador "]You could say it was a good news/bad news kind of week for nuclear energy.
On the bright side, the Kyushu Electric Power Co. was allowed to restart a reactor at its Genkai power station, the first time a reactor has been brought back online since the Fukushima disaster last March.
On the dark side, readings from Fukushima Daiichi No. 2 suggested that fission has resumed in its pile of melted fuel. This may be turn out to be a trivial development, or the first sign of renewed crisis emerging, like Godzilla, from wreckage of the world’s second-worst nonmilitary nuclear catastrophe.
The people in charge are saying that there’s nothing to worry about, that some resumption of fission was always a possibility, that the worst-case scenario is for a gargantuan cleanup task to grow just a bit more complicated. It was going to take 30 years anyway.
But as the Fukushima saga has unfolded over the last eight months, one theme has been quite consistent — pronouncements from the people in charge could not be trusted. Often, especially in the first weeks, they had no idea what was going on inside the trashed reactor buildings. Sometimes they knew but didn’t tell. And sometimes they simply lied — about the scope of the damage, the volumes of radiation released, the effectiveness of responses, the threats to public health.
This may explain why in city after Japanese city, local officials have been exercising the peculiar local option granted them by the country’s system for regulating nuclear plants. They can’t order a plant offline, but they can veto its return to service after it’s taken down for repair — or for routine inspection and maintenance, which is required every 13 months.
Indeed, the green light that Kyushu Power got from Genkai may only be temporary. The reactor allowed to restart last week goes down again, for inspection, in December.
How Japan lost its 'nuclear allergy'
The Fukushima disaster and its aftermath have been amply chronicled by the world press but a particularly compelling retrospective, by Evan Osnos, appeared in the New Yorker for Oct. 17 (it's available online only to subscribers, though).
Especially fascinating is Osnos’ account of how Japan struggled with, and eventually recovered from, the “nuclear allergyâ€