Antinuclear

“Half-life in Fukushima” is a documentary feature in competition at the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival. It represents a Switzerland and France collaboration, with co-directors Mark Olexa and Francesca Scalisi at the helm. While the production represents a European origin, the subject matter had gained world-wide attention no less than Chernobyl in 1986.

The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan directly set off the Fukushima Nuclear Plant disaster. The town surrounding the Plant was evacuated due to radioactive fallout. Filmmakers Olexa and Scalisi entered the Fukushima red zone five years later and documented a resident still living there, a farmer named Naoto Matsumura.

How Naoto was given permission to stay there is not explained in the film. Actually, Naoto was not alone. He remains in Fukushima with his elderly father, the two striving on a life of self-sufficiency. There is no water from the tap, and radioactive fallouts render…

Evaporating demand and few new projects spell trouble for technical know-how

A semicylindrical structure has been built to cover a reactor containment vessel at J-Power’s Oma nuclear power plant in Aomori Prefecture, where construction work has been suspended since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.

TOKYO — Japan’s nuclear power industry is at the most critical juncture in its history. Demand for new reactors has dried up at home following the Fukushima nuclear disaster and dismal prospects for export are dual menaces threatening the fate of the country’s nuclear technology. 

No domestic construction on a new reactor has begun for the past eight years. The catastrophic accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011 blew a hole in the industry’s plans. The picture for exports of Japanese nuclear power technology looks just as gloomy. 

Japanese reactor manufacturers and suppliers of key components are now facing the possible loss of their technological…

It’s becoming more and more clear that the Great Barrier Reef has been pushed onto the ropes by human-caused climate change. That its very future is now in serious jeopardy. That only swift action by a responsible populace will now be able to save it.

During 2016 to 2017, the Great Barrier Reef experienced an unprecedented back-to-back bleaching event. In 2016, more than 60 percent of the corals of the reef’s northern section experienced bleaching. Ultimately, roughly 2/3 of the shallow water corals along this section of the reef perished.

In 2017, warmer than normal waters shifted south. As a result, the central section of the Great Barrier Reef is presently experiencing 60 percent or higher bleaching rates. Now, mass mortality in regions unaffected or minimally affected by last year’s record bleaching is expected.

(New composite bleaching maps show the extent of the 2016-2017 coral mortality event which now…