Japan: The Safety Myth

[monk222]

It looks like our reading of "1984" is coming in handy. Japan, with it's recent nuclear disaster, is giving us a sharp example of the power of pervasive propaganda:

Over several decades, Japan’s nuclear establishment has devoted vast resources to persuade the Japanese public of the safety and necessity of nuclear power. Plant operators built lavish, fantasy-filled public relations buildings that became tourist attractions. Bureaucrats spun elaborate advertising campaigns through a multitude of organizations established solely to advertise the safety of nuclear plants. Politicians pushed through the adoption of government-mandated school textbooks with friendly views of nuclear power.

The result was the widespread adoption of the belief — called the “safety myth” — that Japan’s nuclear power plants were absolutely safe. Japan single-mindedly pursued nuclear power even as Western nations distanced themselves from it.

The belief helps explains why in the only nation to have been attacked with atomic bombs, the Japanese acceptance of nuclear power was so strong that the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl barely registered. Even with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the reaction against nuclear power has been much stronger in Europe and the United States than in Japan itself.

If these were darker times, a more deeply fallen world, more in the vicinity of a true Big Brother, we would be hearing that this nuclear plant disaster was a dastardly work of Islamist terrorists, or maybe eco-terrorists, whichever would be seen as better serving the purposes of the Establishment. We are not so far gone as that.

(Source: Norimitsu Onishi for The New York Times)

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

But the truth - which is that nuclear power, while not 100% safe, is still vastly safer than coal power over the long term - would have done just as well. No form of power generation is 100% safe. I mean, the clue's in the word. "Power". Raw power is always intrinsically dangerous and has to be controlled in some way before it can be used. Even environmentally friendly power sources are dangerous if not properly run - think of a hydroelectric dam bursting.

I personally view nuclear power as a useful stopgap to enable us to stop using nasty dangerous non-renewable coal while we develop more renewable and less dangerous forms of power generation to the point where they're cost-effective. And, believe me, coal is dangerous - more dangerous than nuclear power by a factor of literally thousands, and that's just the deaths. I live in what used to be one of the biggest mining areas in the UK. Everywhere you go round here, you can spot the surviving ex-miners. They all have wheezes that make my asthma, even on a bad day, sound positively healthy by comparison. They have chronic bronchitis, COPD, emphysema, the works. And those are the ones who haven't died young from that set of illnesses or from various forms of cancer brought about by exposure to coal dust (lung cancer being, I think, top of the list there).

The reason we don't have massive scares about the dangers of coal power is, I think, exactly the same as the reason we don't have massive scares about the dangers of motor travel, which of course is another big killer. It's because we had got used to it being there, and were using the benefits, before we found out about the risks. If nuclear power had been invented in Victorian times and regularly used since then, nobody would be bothering their heads about the risks and coal would have been phased out altogether many years ago.

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Especially in America, where there is probably a lot less sensitivity to the plight of laborers, we are probably more inclined to react to the horror of a nuclear meltdown, when a large area beyond the plant will become a kind of no-man's land, and where the effect will linger on for years, for decades.

But I definitely take the general point that we are only getting hungrier for power, and that we simply don't have a great way to supply it. I have long thought that we would have to go nuclear in a big way, just because it can provide a lot more energy, and we would just have to live with the risks, and the rich just won't live within a couple hundred miles of a plant.

We just have to spend more to do what we can to curb the risks, rather than on propaganda. I don't think that a tsunami type of disaster in Japan, for instrance, was unthinkable.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

No, indeed it wasn't. In the same way, in America, you wouldn't build your nuclear power plants in geologically unstable areas, such as Yellowstone or the San Andreas Fault.

To be honest, you have so much space over there that there's no sensible reason why anyone should have to live within 200 miles of a reactor if they'd rather not. It's not like this country, where I grew up within about 30 miles of a reactor (incidentally with no ill effects). Seriously, you could take some of your most unpleasantly uninhabitable regions, and as long as they weren't also prone to earthquakes you could stuff them chock-full of reactors if you wanted and move everyone out of the area. We don't have that option, but then again it doesn't appear to be a problem.

I think one problem you have got in the USA is the knock-on effects resulting from not having a proper health service. When public health is everyone's responsibility, there's a lot more compassion around for people who suffer from industrial diseases or injuries, and therefore an incentive to make people's work safer. I suppose many people become less compassionate when they think it's only the duty of the employer to look after such people.