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I live in Japan too and the whole thing is frustrating as hell. What happened here last year ought to be an example of how safe nuclear power is, but instead it

I live in Japan too and the whole thing is frustrating as hell. What happened here last year ought to be an example of how safe nuclear power is, but instead it's nothing but ATOMS fear-mongering and total willful ignorance of the dangers of coal power. What's weird to me is how long it took for public opinion to turn as it has. For the first few months it dropped of course but there wasn't any overreaction even as people were checking Geiger counters online every day. But as things got under control public opinion continued to slide. I blame the institutional fuck-ups, and can sympathize with that. But Tokyo air quality is going to go to shit again, which is something this city has historically had problems with. And electricity prices continue to rise.

potatolicious 14y ago
Japan has to own a lot of that failure though - nuclear power is something you can only get behind if you have a tremendous amount of trust in the people running it. The potential catastrophic failure modes are, well, sobering. With the Fukushima disaster, we've seen an awful lot of finger-pointing, buck-passing, carpet-brushing-under-ing, and an utter lack of transparency (some of it IMO bordering on criminal). If you cannot trust your government and/or power utility to be transparent about their handling of nuclear power, both in a day-to-day and disaster context, of course you can't sell it to the public.