Published by: Hokkaido University
The events that followed the tsunami were so severe that Masao Yoshida, the director of the TEPCO Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant at the time, himself confessed at a press conference on November 12 that “During the week after March 11th, I thought many times that I would die”. At the height of the immediate crisis the Prime Minister even examined the possibility of evacuating 30 million people from the metropolitan area. As for the causes of the accident, many questions have been asked, yet we wonder how many of them have been answered in the interim report published on December 26, 2011, of the Investigation Committee on the Accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Station4). We canthus understand that what we may call the theoretical concept of “the causes of pollution” is at the root of the concept of nuclear pollution.
For example, does the interim report offer answers to certain basic questions?
・Why, in an earthquake-prone region like Japan, have 54 nuclear power plants been built?
・Why, although closer to the epicenter and also hit by the tsunami, was the Onagawa
Nuclear Power Plant, managed by the Tohoku Electric Power Company, able to prevent a total loss of power, while the Fukushima Power Plant was not?
・Why have measures against severe accidents been left to the voluntary initiatives
of the operator?
・Why had no adequate measures been taken against a total loss of power?
LINK TO FULL REPORT--38 PAGES INCLUDING FOOTNOTES
Modern industrial society is a fanatical religion. We are demolishing, poisoning, destroying all life-systems on the planet. We are signing IOUs our children will not be able to pay...We are acting as if we were the last generation on the planet. Without a radical change in heart, in mind, in vision, the earth will end up like Venus, charred and dead. – Jose Antonio Lutzenberger, Brazilian Minister for the Environment
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