Thursday, October 31, 2013

Don’t worry: Team Abe is tackling the nuclear crisis at Fukushima

BY JEFF KINGSTON
SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES
Even if the public remains overwhelmingly skeptical about nuclear safety in general, and anxious in particular about the impact of the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on the environment, there is reassuring news that we can now rest easy.
In short, after spending its eight months in power studiously averting its eyes from the gathering troubles some 200 km north of Tokyo, Team Abe is now on the job. But can it deliver? The stakes are very high.
Earlier this year, Abe’s environment ministry dealt with nuclear risks by deleting mention of them from its 2013 White Paper. While the 2012 White Paper termed radioactive contamination the nation’s “biggest environmental issue,” a year later the risk just vanished. But the hapless efforts of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) are a powerful reminder that it’s not quite so easy.
The recent cascade of revelations about radioactive water seeping here and there exposes serious risks and shortcomings, but it is quite likely that more bad news is coming. Nuclear shills endlessly bleat on about how science shows that public concerns about Fukushima are ridiculous hysteria. The only real worry, they say, is worrying.
However, among those “hysterical” citizens there number some 150,000 people who remain displaced from their homes, thousands of farmers and fishermen in Fukushima Prefecture who can no longer earn a living and young women who wonder if, given the radiation stigma, they will ever marry — and whether they should bear children.
What about those massive releases of radioactive water into the ocean? In terms of radiation, they’re about as threatening as 76 million bananas — according to one nuclear advocate. But are they as tasty? At least now we can tell Koreans, who lambast Japan for spewing radiation into the ocean, to vent on the Philippines, Asia’s biggest banana exporter.

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