A U.S. medical group has slammed the Japanese government and senior nuclear adviser Toshiso Kosako has tearfully resigned over the levels of radiation exposure Tokyo says are safe for students at elementary and junior high schools in Fukushima prefecture. In a statement quoted by Kyodo news agency, Physicians for Social Responsibility …
An interesting debate showed up in my Twitter feed today. A few followers of China’s green energy policies have taken climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post to task for using some information that undersells what China has accomplished.
I hadn’t read Lomborg’s article, which ran on April …
FUKUSHIMA — A Geiger counter isn’t something you ever want to know how to use. It’s definitely not something you want to need. Not that it’s an intimidating piece of equipment – the one I used last week in Japan was roughly the size of a mobile phone circa 1998. Our Terra MKS-05, made in the Ukraine, almost blended into the …
In the fishing town of Iwaki, uni is sold in the local market steamed, on the clamshell. Starting each May, free divers wearing weight belts and flippers gather urchin from a small cove and haul the spiny globes to shore in woven baskets. For years, tourists have been coming to this port in Fukushima prefecture to taste Iwaki’s uni, …
Assessing the full impact of Japan’s crisis has been a moving target since the first minutes after the 9.0 earthquake struck on March 11. So it’s with a cautious sense of optimism that Sunday’s news from Tokyo Electric and Power Company (TEPCO) – that the crippled power plant could be in cold shut down before the end of the year …
Photos of big tuna hanging from their tails usually leave me a little cold, particularly when those tuna have been caught in Japan, the world’s largest consumer of the endangered bluefin.
But this picture released today by the Yomiuri, a Japanese daily, makes me feel… if not exactly warm and fuzzy… at least a little relieved. It’s …
On Sunday, over 17,000 people took to the streets of Tokyo to let their government know they’ve had it with nuclear power. It was an unusual display of mass disgruntlement in the Japanese capital, but these are unusual times. Residents walked through the neighborhood of Koenji – reportedly the birthplace of Japanese punk – with …
(UPDATED) Japanese officials announced on Tuesday morning that they were planning to raise the event level at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant from 5 to the maximum level of 7, the highest on the international scale for nuclear incidents and the same level assigned to the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl in the Ukraine.
The …
On Friday, Japan faced another round of assessing the damage from a massive aftershock — the strongest in over 400 in the last month — that struck off the north coast late last night. At least three people were killed in the quake and more than 140 injured, and as of Friday evening, millions in the disaster-struck region were again …
Sawdust. It’s not the first thing most people would choose to put between themselves and highly contaminated radioactive water. But a mixture of sawdust — ogakuzu in Japanese — with chemicals and shredded newspaper is precisely what nuclear safety authorities and power plant officials turned to in trying to plug a 8-inch crack …