Temporary Heroes
The ground started to buck at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and Masayuki Ishizawa could scarcely stay on his feet. Helmet in hand, he ran from a workers’ standby room outside the plant’s third reactor, near where he and a group of workers had been doing repair work. He saw a chimney and crane swaying like weeds. Everybody was shouting in a panic, he recalled. Mr Ishizawa, 55, raced to the plant’s central gate. But a security guard would not let him out of the complex. A long line of cars had formed at the gate, and some drivers were blaring their horns. "Show me your IDs," Mr Ishizawa remembered the guard saying, insisting that he follow the correct sign-out procedure. And where, the guard demanded, were his supervisors? “What are you saying?” Mr. Ishizawa said he shouted at the guard. He looked over his shoulder and saw a dark shadow on the horizon, out at sea, he said. He shouted again: “Don’t you know a tsunami is coming?” Mr Ishizawa, who was finally allowed to leave, is not a nuclear specialist; he is not even an employee of the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company. Mr Ishkikawa is one of thousands of untrained, itinerant, temporary laborers who handle the bulk of the dangerous work at nuclear power plants here and in other countries, lured by the higher wages offered for working with radiation. These workers remain vital to efforts to contain the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plants. They are emblematic of Japan’s two-tiered work force, with an elite class of highly paid employees at top companies and a subclass of laborers who work for less pay, have less job security and receive fewer benefits. Such labor practices have both endangered the health of these workers and undermined safety at Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors, critics charge.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/world/asia/10workers.html
Hideaki Akaiwa
On the afternoon of Friday, 11 March 2011, Hideaki Akaiwa was at his job, dully trudging out the final bitter minutes of his work week in his office just outside the port city of Ishinomaki in Japan's Miyagi Prefecture. Suddenly, something terrible happened -- an earthquake. And not just any earthquake -- a mega fucking brain-busting insane earthquake the likes of which the island of Japan had never had the misfortune of experiencing before. The tremors churned up a raging tsunami that turned a bustling city of 162,000 people into little more than a ten-foot-deep lake. Hideaki's wife of twenty years was buried inside the lake somewhere. She had not gotten out. She was not answering her phone. The water was still rising, the sun was setting, cars and shit were swooshing past on a river of sea water, and rescue workers told him there was nothing that could be done -- the only thing left was to sit back, wait for the military to arrive, and hope that they can get in there and rescue the survivors before it is too late. With 10,000 citizens of Ishinomaki still unaccounted for, the odds were not great that Hideaki would ever see his wife again. For most of us regular folks, this is the sort of shit that would make us throw up our hands, swear loudly, and resign ourselves to a lifetime of hopeless misery. But Hideaki Akaiwa is not a regular guy. He is a fucking insane badass, and he was not going to sit back and just let his wife die alone, freezing to death in a miserable water-filled tomb. He was going after her. No matter what.
http://badassoftheweek.com/akaiwa.html
I Love Nuclear Power
You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology. A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed. The reactors began to melt down. The disaster exposed poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, no one has yet died of radiation. Some greens have exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at this graphic. I am not proposing complacency, but perspective. Atomic energy has just been subjected to the harshest possible test, and the impact on people has been small.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima/print
Maybe Haiti should help Latvia?
Meeting in emergency session today, the Latvian government allocated EUR 15,000 [sic] for dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. The money will be come from the budgetary fund for emergency situations and will be transferred to the UN's Central Emergency Response Fund.
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