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The Fukushima nuclear disaster didn’t kill a single person, but it may take out an industry: the nuclear power industry. That’s what it looks like — at least in developed countries like Japan — nearly a year after the meltdown began. Of the 54 nuclear reactors in Japan, just two are operating right now, and [...]
The headlines were extraordinary: “Japan Weighed Evacuating Tokyo in Nuclear Crisis,” the New York Times wrote a few days ago. “Tokyo Evacuation ‘Was Considered’,” said the Sydney Morning Herald. “Japan Urged Calm While It Mulled Tokyo Evacuation,” wrote … hey, TIME magazine. The stories detailed the Rebuild Japan report, a deep and independent investigation of the events [...]
Nearly a year after the Japanese tsunami and subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, the good news is that the risk from radiation doesn’t seem to be as high as many initially feared. Take the Pacific Ocean, for example, where most of the radioactive fallout from the plant eventually ended up. Nicholas Fisher, a [...]
-THE BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS (BAS), in a formal statement noting that the Doomsday Clock would be moved five minutes to midnight. The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 and uses the imagery of a apocalypse—the clock striking midnight—to dramatize the risks of nuclear weapons and other catastrophic threats to humanity. The scientists behind the [...]
YOSHIHIKO NODA, the Prime Minister of Japan, talking about the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors in a press conference. Noda declared an end to the nuclear disaster—more than nine months after an earthquake and tsunami ruined the nuclear plants, leading to a meltdown—but other experts aren’t so sure. More than 160,000 people from the area are [...]
New tests show traces of radioactive elements in Japanese baby food, forcing the recall of more than 400,000 cans of infant formula. The news underscores the challenges still facing Japan’s food sector nine months after the Fukushima disaster—challenges that have as much to do with popular perception as science. Read more on Global Spin.
It’s now eight months since a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan, badly damaging the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. That accident eventually resulted in a meltdown, and the accident as a whole was rated a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale’s 1 to 7 rating. Explosions in the plant threw large amounts of [...]
The news has been relatively good recently out of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), the plant’s operator, last week reported success in sharply reducing radiation levels within the plant, and in stabilizing temperatures in the pools of water need to store used nuclear fuel rods. While radiation is still leaking [...]
April 20, the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the Gulf oil spill, has no shortage of news events. Environmentalists and fishermen along the Gulf coast offered tours of the shoreline, to show the spots where the oil still remained. BP—with its impeccable sense of timing—lodged a $40 billion lawsuit against Transocean, the Swiss drilling [...]
Though some of you have expressed a desire to see Ecocentric move past the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, we’re not quite there yet. The good news is that crews have begun to restore power to the reactors, which should help accelerate the efforts to restore cooling to the still hot—and radioactive—nuclear fuel. Elevated radiation [...]
