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THE MEDIA DID NOT HYPE FUKUSHIMA [View all]
THE MEDIA DID NOT HYPE FUKUSHIMA
Posted by Evan Osnos
In the new PBS “Frontline” documentary, “Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown,” a Japanese colonel named Shinji Iwakuma recalls a moment, shortly after the tsunami a year ago, when he was called in to try to prevent the reactors at the Fukushima nuclear-power station from blowing up. Iwakuma’s mission was to pump water onto the overheating nuclear fuel, and he was in a jeep pulling up to the base of a reactor when the building around the reactor exploded. “Lumps of concrete came ripping through the roof” of the jeep, he said. “Radioactive matter was leaking in through the bindings of our masks. Our dosimeters were beeping constantly.” The soldiers were wounded but somehow managed to get out of there fast enough to avoid serious doses of radiation. “We were lucky,” Iwakuma says. “Just lucky.”
Good fortune is not the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about Fukushima these days. But it is, in fact, one of the clearest—and most troubling—lessons to be drawn from the Fukushima story: plain old luck, along with a colossal dose of heroism and quick-thinking, prevented the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns from wounding Japan even more thoroughly than they did. That is the lesson that comes through in several new projects appearing in preparation for the first anniversary of the tsunami and nuclear disaster.
The “Frontline” documentary by the filmmaker...
Posted by Evan Osnos
In the new PBS “Frontline” documentary, “Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown,” a Japanese colonel named Shinji Iwakuma recalls a moment, shortly after the tsunami a year ago, when he was called in to try to prevent the reactors at the Fukushima nuclear-power station from blowing up. Iwakuma’s mission was to pump water onto the overheating nuclear fuel, and he was in a jeep pulling up to the base of a reactor when the building around the reactor exploded. “Lumps of concrete came ripping through the roof” of the jeep, he said. “Radioactive matter was leaking in through the bindings of our masks. Our dosimeters were beeping constantly.” The soldiers were wounded but somehow managed to get out of there fast enough to avoid serious doses of radiation. “We were lucky,” Iwakuma says. “Just lucky.”
Good fortune is not the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about Fukushima these days. But it is, in fact, one of the clearest—and most troubling—lessons to be drawn from the Fukushima story: plain old luck, along with a colossal dose of heroism and quick-thinking, prevented the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns from wounding Japan even more thoroughly than they did. That is the lesson that comes through in several new projects appearing in preparation for the first anniversary of the tsunami and nuclear disaster.
The “Frontline” documentary by the filmmaker...
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/03/the-media-did-not-hype-fukushima.html#ixzz1nzIi7glX
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