Includes information posted on ENE News, February 28, 2017
Cornell University forum, March 11, 2016
Five years after Fukushima: What have we learned from nuclear accidents?
Charles Perrow, Yale University professor emeritus and Stanford University visiting professor, published Apr 2016 (emphasis added):
Could I just make an observation that’s been missing from this interesting discussion? Fukushima accident is not over – not by any means… The cancer rate in Japan is going to rise steadily. It’s going to be denied by the government because there’s no transparency on this issue in Japan. There’s a particular example of the problem that intrigues me is when they put the plant in, they not only dug it out so it’d be closer to the water source – the sea – but they put it where there was a river flowing underneath that area. They went up the hill and they diverted the river so that it flowed down on the sides of the large area there and that was no problem. They never anticipated an earthquake could wreck their diversion. So know we have a strong underground river flowing directly under the plant where three huge globs of molten fuel are sitting on the bottom, giving off radiation, and sending that radiation into the water through the river that’s underneath the plant. And it’s going out into the ocean and we’re seeing damage in the marine life in the West Coast of the U.S. and British Columbia. There’s no way that’s going to be stopped, until they get the molten cores out of there, and they have no way — that they know of — of doing that. Nobody has any idea what to do about the continuing Fukushima contamination.
Watch Perrow’s comments on Fukushima here (at 1:34:30 in)
Professor Sonja Schmid at 1:39:16
“The question of nuclear becomes a question of democracy and ultimately a question of justice. Who gets to say something? And whether we entrust these decisions to governments and technocrats, or how, if we decide to do so, we democratize the process. And it’s challenging no matter how you plan to go forward, but I think that’s the ultimate lesson of this, that we can no longer have technocrats, scientists and engineers in charge defining “the real risk” and then solving it, and the rest of the population just watches and has no impact whatsoever on these questions or how they are being addressed.”
Charles Perrow’s paper “Nuclear Denial”,published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2013
Click to access Bulletin_of_the_Atomic_Scientists-2013-Perrow-56-67.pdf
Sonja Schmid is a professor at Virgina Tech. From her bio: “Sonja Schmid teaches courses in social studies of technology, science and technology policy, socio-cultural studies of risk, energy policy, and nuclear nonproliferation. She is particularly interested in examining the interface of national energy policies, technological choices, and nonproliferation concerns. “
Heal Fukushima 