Japan

[LFC]

Japan has decided that they're going to dump treated water from the Fukushima nuclear disaster into the ocean. Isn't it always the case. The bill gets big enough and the people who assured us it was safe don't want to pick up the tab.

Japan has decided it will start releasing radioactive water accumulated at the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea after treatment, despite local opposition and concerns from neighbouring countries.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s cabinet made the decision on Tuesday morning, which comes a decade after the nation’s worst atomic disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.

The operator Tokyo Electric Power is expected to start discharging the water into the sea in two years.

The operator has stored over 1.2 million tons of water in more than 1,000 huge tanks at the site. The operator said the space for tanks will be running out in 2022, though local officials and some experts say otherwise.

The plant suffered meltdowns at three of its six reactors after it was hit by a powerful earthquake and ensuing tsunami in March 2011.

Since then, the operator has continued to inject water into the three reactors to keep cooling melted atomic fuel there.

Radiation-contaminated water at the site has been treated through an advanced liquid processing system, but tritium - a radioactive isotope of hydrogen - cannot be removed from the water.

The government and the operator say tritium is not harmful to human health in low concentration.

However, Tokyo-based Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy said in a statement that the government "should strictly avoid releasing tritium into the environment as tritium is still radioactive material."

[AnBr]

Couldn't they evaporate it so they are left with a solid waste to dispose of more safely?

[LFC]

Apr 15, 2021 1:57:23 GMT AnBr said:

Couldn't they evaporate it so they are left with a solid waste to dispose of more safely?

No idea. I can see some problems but I don't know if they're insurmountable. First they said it was 1.2M tons of water. If I got my calc right, and it's not metric tons, that's about 3 BILLION gallons. Second I know that the molecules are heavy but does that necessarily mean they'll virtually all precipitate out rather than being lifted with the water vapor? Lastly it's a coastal site, not a desert site. That means evaporation won't be nearly as easy.

[AnBr]

Still sounds preferable over simply dumping it in the sea.

[LFC]

And just like that one bad actor makes the world a more militarized and less stable place.

[pnwguy]

May 4, 2022 17:46:34 GMT LFC said:

And just like that one bad actor makes the world a more militarized and less stable place.

I'd say TWO bad actors.  One of them threatens mushroom clouds in Europe, and the other has a tiny mushroom and would be glad to abandon Japan if Chy-Na or "Love Letter Kim" decides to act against them.

Given how Japan heinously treated China in the mid 20th century, and given how LONG Chinese leaders and culture hold grudges, I can see that Japan needs a Plan B.  Under the Dumpster Restoration, Japan can't trust our security pacts to be honored.

Expecting Dumpster to uphold ANY agreement on ANY subject is a fools game.  It's too bad the GOP is populated through and through with fools these days.  

[LFC]

May 4, 2022 18:19:29 GMT pnwguy said:

I can see that Japan needs a Plan B.

Then it's a good thing they aren't under the control of right-wing partisan hack SCOTUS!

[Bact PhD]

Former PM Abe shot and killed overnight.

www.nbcnews.com/news/world/japan-shinzo-abe-shot-rcna37228

[goldenvalley]

Jul 8, 2022 13:50:42 GMT Bact PhD said:

Former PM Abe shot and killed overnight.

www.nbcnews.com/news/world/japan-shinzo-abe-shot-rcna37228

A do it yourselfer assassin...made his own weapon.  

[LFC]

Wow, Abe was a real piece of shit. I kind of remember some of this. (From 5 years ago.)

Ominously, Abe announced on May 3 plans to dismantle Japan’s postwar democratic constitution and replace it with one that owes a debt to the Nazis’ revision of the German constitution in the 1930s, and this week his political party will ram through a conspiracy bill that is straight out of Imperial Japan’s darkest days: those two decades from 1925 to 1945 when people who criticized the government or wrote the truth about the war effort simply vanished in the middle of the night and were not seen again. It’s a bill so awful that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote Abe a letter raising concerns that the new law could allow police to trample on civil liberties.

On Monday, the Abe administration responded with a very public and not very polite missive which, when translated with an understanding of the subtleties of Japanese language and culture, amounts to, “Fuck off.” Just like the Nazis of days past, Japan’s rulers don’t deal well with criticism.

Comparing a political party to the Nazis in any form is generally considered the lowest form of political criticism, but it’s no longer possible to resist the comparison in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Japan. Because he and his Cabinet admire the Nazis—out loud. And this weird reverence for both the Nazis and the World War II military dictatorship that ran Japan have been there from the start.

In the summer of 2013, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Taro Aso, famous for his verbal gaffes declared in a speech to his political supporters, “Germany’s Weimar Constitution was changed into the Nazi Constitution before anyone knew. It was changed before anyone else noticed. Why don’t we learn from that method?”

Two of Abe’s Cabinet appointees were associated with Japan’s Nazi Party and several of his comrades wrote laudatory blurbs for a book called Hitler’s Election Strategy, published in 1994, and written by a member of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The book was banned after international criticism.

Comparisons with the Nazis are hard to brush off if your Cabinet members are looking up to them as role models.

Let’s not forget that Abe appointed an unrepentant racist, Eriko Yamatani, associated with the internationally condemned Zaitokukai, to oversee the National Police Agency. Neither the prime minister nor any of his senior Cabinet members openly opposed the discrimination against Japan’s Korean residents. Last month, the Cabinet announced in an approved written response to an opposition party’s question on the usage of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as teaching material in classrooms that it was completely acceptable.

After a public outcry, they made the obligatory comment that “if it were used as a tool to promote racism… that would be inappropriate.”

[LFC]

Trump before Trump. And that's what Bannon had to say about Abe.

That didn’t happen. But the man who Donald Trump advisor Steven Bannon famously praised as “Trump before Trump,” leaves behind a legacy that may have forever changed Japan. He reduced it to a perpetual one-party democracy that seems unlikely to change.

Abe certainly seems to have had a playbook that was similar to Donald Trump’s. He was a populist who tapped into racism and fears of change to stoke his base and consolidate power.

During his exile from power, Abe and his cabinet members allied with anti-Korean and other xenophobic groups. Abe drummed up anti-Korean sentiment to bolster his support, and made sure his allies did the dog-whistles while he kept his hands clean. While Trump portrayed immigrants as the boogeyman threatening Japan; Abe latched onto deep-rooted anti-Korean sentiment, towards both the Korean residents of Japan who stayed after the war and citizens of South and North Korea, former colonies of Japan. He appointed Eriko Yamatani, a woman closely associated with the flamingly anti-Korean group Zaitoku-Kai, to be the head of the National Public Safety Commission that oversees the National Police Agency.

He also embraced Nippon Kaigi, a conservative Shinto cult and political lobby. You could aptly compare his alliance with them to Trump’s absorption of The Tea Party and other far-right elements of the Republican Party.

Even while out of power, the Liberal Democratic Party, with Abe exerting influence, developed plans for a new Imperial Constitution for Japan. The removal of the post-war constitution, which was written with the help of the American occupation (not by them, as some claim now).

During his political exile, Abe even briefly became head of an extremist think-tank, Nihon Sosei (Create Japan), made up of LDP lawmakers and other conservative superstars. In May 2012, the organization released a clip of him at a gathering titled, “The Swearing In Of The Revised Constitution For Japan,” in which he and his cronies discussed the LDP’s substitute constitution.

There were some astonishing moments.

A former Minister of Justice Nagase Jinen, appointed during Abe’s first term in office, told the crowd, “The people’s sovereignty, basic human rights, and pacifism—these three things date to the postwar regime imposed by MacArthur on Japan, therefore we have to get rid of them to make the constitution our own!”

Abe loudly applauded this. Get rid of basic human rights, democracy, and wage warfare. Also, restore the emperor to power.

In other words: Make Japan Great Again. It’s no wonder that years later, Steve Bannon would say that Abe was Trump before Trump.

[LFC]

Perhaps Russia's invasion is waking up some nations to the dangers that still exist in this world. Japan is looking at China with a bit of mistrust and has decided to build up its military.

Between China's 20th Communist Party Congress, that began Sunday, and the next one in 2027, Japan will undertake its biggest arms buildup since World War Two in a race to deter Beijing from war in East Asia, according to Japanese government officials and security analysts.

Japan identified China as its chief adversary in its 2019 defence white paper, worried that Beijing's flouting of international norms, pressure on Taiwan and rapid military modernisation posed a serious security threat. That anxiety has intensified since Russia invaded Ukraine, weakening Japanese public opposition to rearming, security experts say.

For Japan, losing Taiwan to mainland Chinese control could be a disaster because it would jeopardise key shipping lanes that supply nearly all Japan’s oil and many of the materials it uses for manufacturing. It would also give the Chinese navy unfettered access to the Western Pacific from bases on the island.

"There are different shades of opinion, but generally, government officials share the same view of the significance of 2027," said a senior Japanese government official involved in defence buildup plans.