Update, April 13, 2021: Per Reuters, Japan announced today that it will release the contaminated water into the ocean, after cleaning it as much as possible.

Original post

I was curious about this, after the recent M7 Sendai quake, which was nowhere near as strong as the 2011 Great Tohoku earthquake.

An online search yesterday led to lots of words but not all that much meaningful information. I did find this from 2019.

Last year, just before the COVID lockdown, I had gotten Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster from the library just before the lockdown started last year and so reread it several times. Scary. I agree with the commenters about the first half of the book: it is as though you are standing alongside the plant operators just before, during, and after the accident.

The book, by the Union of Concerned Scientists, does get polemical in its second half. Thing is, as I found out yesterday during my online search, there is very little from the industry, government, news media, and business sources anywhere except happy talk. Even in 2021.

In other words, everyone, including the monitors and decision makers, still appears to be unable to discuss real-world details of nuclear power rationally. Nothing about this has changed since the late twentieth century.

This polarization, even more than the disasters at Fukushima and Chernobyl, seems to be the greatest argument against the development of nuclear power, as far as I can see now.

Perhaps as a species we’re not ready for it yet.

But we’ve got it. Sigh.

Featured image: Santiherllor/Shutterstock