In a sense it was, in that the nuclear material in reactor four at Chernobyl essentially removed itself.

(Their argument is more sophisticated than that; I’m trying to be as concise as possible.)

Another point they make is that Japan and France, although democracies, allow less day-to-day public involvement in government decisions â?? which is why they were able to push nuclear power farther than most other Western nations.

The Demise of Nuclear Energy?
Lessons for Democratic Control of Technology
Joseph G. Morone & Edward J. Woodhouse
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989

Thanks for assembling and posting these updates; they’re important.

Our other options being … ?

OK, I’ll take it down a notch. We should probably not be laughing about nuclear meltdowns anyway.

Ana @ # 9 – Yes, that does raise some ominous implications – “clarify” has some impressively awesome Orwellian overtones. At minimum, these monitors will be feeding their findings to PR flacks; at max, who knows? (Though I’d think that when bookstore shelves overflow with antinuke screeds, the futility of chasing bloggers would seem self-evident; of course, whoever’s blocking tweets & YT videos may not see it that way.)

For police to be assigned “unlimited” authority to patrol the ‘tubes on behalf of Tokyo Electric raises several questions, including whether anyone’s threatening TEPCO et al with illegal activity (haven’t heard anything about that, though I’ve missed some of yr updates here); what limits they previously operated under; whether some sort of Japanese Civil Liberties Union will do anything about this; and how this will influence William Gibson’s next novel.

Were the Japanese Engineers Who Built Fukushima Incompetent?

METI is contracting internet monitors (â??The Contractor is required to monitor blogs on nuclear power and radiation issues as well as Twitter accounts (monitoring tweets is essential) around the clock, and conduct research and analysis on incorrect and inappropriate information that would lead to false rumors, and to report such internet accounts to the Agency,) and there is now a law that allows the police to monitor internet activity “without restriction.” The author wonders how this will play out. I suspect we shall see.