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Why did Japan’s SoftBank pledge $50 billion for U.S. investment?

SoftBank Group Corp.'s recent pledge to President-elect Donald Trump that it will invest $50 billion (5.9 trillion yen) in the United States raises the question, what's in it for Chief Executive Masayoshi Son?

The big-money decision prompted speculation that it is Son’s attempt to thaw the frosty relationship between Trump and Silicon Valley tech giants, including Apple Inc., with which Son and Softbank enjoy a highly lucrative relationship.

Another theory is that Son is keen to befriend Trump so he can revive his stalled attempt to buy out U.S. telecoms giant T-Mobile, a deal previously thwarted by the U.S. Democratic administration.

Japanese tech billionaire Son offered the substantial investment to create 50,000 new jobs over the next four years during a meeting at Trump Tower in New York on Dec. 6.

The article goes on to list other deals that Son that made with other world leaders like South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Softbank Group makes deals advantageous to them and to the politicians who now can claim they brought investments and jobs to their country. This is exactly the kind of deals that Trump claimed he make to bring jobs back to the US.

I wish I could add a third,

3) [Naively] thinking that the small residue of radiation resulting from any kind of dirty-bomb dispersal would result in more fear than anger.

Imagine a world without irrational fear of radioactivity, where the word 'nuclear' would not ring a bell that makes the press salivate with anticipation. I'm afraid I'll have to toss in mdsolar too since 'e posts more nuke fud then solar crud these days. TEPCO has done a fine job gathering water and filtering worse contaminants to leave Tritium, for which only dilution is possible. Unit #4 fuel transfer is complete. The melted fuel in the reactors is stable, contained and cooled (by engineering foresight, not blind luck) awaiting an expensive but not impossible cleanup. Fukushima is an industrial disaster sure, but in terms of human life the evacuation was more costly. Compare it to the Bhopal body count or even Love Canal with its barbed wire fence and dioxins sleeping under a plastic liner... for some real examples of human and environmental fallout.

When you get down to it all radioactive materials are just undesired contaminants. In fact, they're the finest contaminants known to mankind because we can detect and measure their presence down past background levels. No asbestos lurking silently in a school somewhere, no lead paint in the nursery. As easy as spotting fireflies in the dark. Now there are two kinds of people in this world, those for whom spotting those fireflies is a reason to run in little circles crying "I told you so!" and that's it --- they have no other plan. Then there's folks like TEPCO and the rest of the nuclear power industry who see these as challenges of engineering to overcome. Fukushima has even resulted in a generation of new patents for processes to separate and decontaminate, something in which the rest of the world hadn't placed sufficient priority. Which horse would you rather back?

It really costs you big time to fear something. Especially when it's more productive to get mad as hell and find better ways to clean up so you can devote more effort into something productive --- appropriate responses such as revenge.

2) [Naively] thinking that someone being threatened with "help us [or] we'll kill your family" would not be able to figure out that he and his family will be dead anyway.

This is a tough one. Who's going to write off their family, especially if they have been kidnapped?

The most irresponsible and stupidly-contrived security apparatus is that which surrounds pathogen or so-called 'biological weapons' research. You're dealing with things that are not only accessible, they are undetectable at the gate and can be smuggled out on the head of a pin. The lone researcher in such a facility is worse than screwed... they're literally under a death sentence waiting to happen. At any time they may be coerced into taking something out of that facility with practically-100% chance of success and they know it. Even the morons who kidnap their families would know it.

Ironically --- the only conceivable way for stored pathogens to become 'safely' detectable at the gate might be to deliberately contaminate all water used in the lab with tiny but detectable amounts of radioactive Tritium.

But the world press is not talking about bio-labs right now, they're in total idiot radiation mode. They are trying to convince you that the radiation monitors at the gates (and garbage chutes, and sewers) of these facilities do not exist, or are ineffective or can be easily MacGyver'd. These may be true to some degree... but what is the likelihood of that researcher smuggling out anything approaching a Curie? Ra

there are others who try to duplicate the results

Please don't give us that Popper crap. Journals don't generally publish negative results do they. If you want to get published (and you usually do for career and funding reasons) there's a strong motivation to make sure you show what you set out to show. I would trust an area like physics more though, because it's so competitive and tightly focused. Everything else is up for grabs. Replicability of studies is pretty bad elsewhere.

No sorry, you are simply wrong. Your idea of scientists marching goosestep in lockstep, crushing any dissent, and deciding what the truth is and making certain no one strays from it is a ridiculous completel;y incorrect politically based view brought about by politically based people who simply are incapable of understanding that not everyone thinks as they do.

I've worked with scientists for 30 plus years. None of them fit your mold, and since anyone caught falsifying their research is instantly disgraced. Sometimes with terrible results, as when Yoshiki Sasai, the senior researcher who supervised and co-authored a falsified stem cell research paper, committed suicide by hanging himself. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... Haruko Obokata, the scientist who actually committed the fraud, had her doctorates degree rescinded by Waseda University. http://ajw.asahi.com/article/s...

The Italian group was not found engaging in fraud by politicians, Ir was other scientists who found them engaging in fraud.

The Japanese researcher who committed fraud was not found out by politicians, but by other scientists.

Remote sensing, the open access journal, found itself in a mess after Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell published a paper in it named, "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” which in title alone raised some red flags since scientists seldom name reports that way, but http://www.realclimate.org/ind... It was debunked soon afterwards, retracted, and important questions raised about the impartiality of the journal raised due to it's benefactors. http://retractionwatch.com/201... Even a pro AGW paper linking Conspiracy ideation to denials has been retracted, scientists will go after anyone.

http://retractionwatch.com/2014/03/21/controversial-paper-linking-conspiracy-ideation-to-climate-change-skepticism-formally-retracted/ All of the scientists I have worked with take this kind of stuff seriously. Deadly seriously.

that most normal people actually care about things other than tech. For most average people, tech is just a tool. Most do not care about MHz, or GHz or dual- or quad-core or brand name. What's truly shocking to the younger techies in the bubbles of very large cities is that there are a huge number of normal people all throughout society who do not care about the internet and do not waste their time logging onto it - they get up, go to work, get home and care for the kids, then perhaps watch a little TV and then go to bed, all without thinking about the internet.

Facebook and Twitter are not required for day-to-day life. What Bruce/Caitlyn and the Kardashians are up to is simply not important. People who have jobs in small-town America simply do not need LinkedIn, etc. and going onto the net to look for Pizza is idiotic if you live in a town with one pizza place. Who needs Google Earth when you already know all the local roads you need to drive on to do your job and run the errands you need to run for your family?

I am not being a Luddite here, I personally live a life stuffed full of electronics and code and tethered to the web, but I have many friends and relatives who have simply no use to any of it and I am amazed at how internet-centric so many younger people in big cities have become - to the point of becoming completely ignorant of LIFE in the real world. This is at some level toxic to politics and national policy. I recall that when Obamacare was going public and the young "experts" were tasked with helping people in "fly over country" enroll, one of these morons told an older guy in the midwest to enter his e-mail address on a screen and was met with the question "what's e-mail?". This is driving a large cultural divide and that divide is going to become another political wedge.

It is simply an act of supremely ignorant arrogance to assume that everybody is on the net and that anybody who is not is some sort of ignorant backward hick - lot's of people simply know what's important to them and what's not. For every netizen who sees the non-addict as a knuckle-dragging moron (who is almost certainly automatically also assumed to be racist/sexist/homophobe/etc), there's a normal person with a life who sees a shallow, plastic, soulless zombie with an iPad and no original thoughts in his brain. For many, the remote, tabloid nature of the internet and its data-mining advertizing-centric vapid content is simply less important than the real world all around them and their families.

At the end of your life, which will you regret more: the time you spent with your spouse raising your kids, or the time you spent on the web looking at what other people were doing, or were pretending they were doing?/P

What a sad thing has slashdot become that its posters equate internet access with social media. Internet access is an economic and educational enabler. Regions with poorer internet infrastructure will do worse economically and educationally that regions that have better communication infrastructure. Period. This is not about being on FB all the time.

Countries and regions all over the world recognize this. In Japan where mass urban migration and an aging population are decimating rural towns, there have been very aggressive efforts to counter that trend by providing internet infrastructure (to attract young, well-paid engineers, and their families.) Kamiyama in Tokushima Prefecture is the best example of this. http://ajw.asahi.com/article/b...

Finland is another great example at a national level.

Please turn your geek card at your convenience.

Snark aside, my general impression from having worked in and with both federal and non federal agencies, as well as power companies, and seeing contracting in general, the problem of budget pressures and cost cutting isn't unique to either private or public sector, contracting or not. Granted, I'm speaking mainly from an IT Security viewpoint, but everything I've seen and heard indicates it's hardly unique to IT in the energy sector. See the 2009 Gulf Spill, or this article about how TEPCO recognized the risk at Fukushima in 2009, but wound up doing nothing: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0...

And yes, contractors are certainly a poster child for cost-cutting, but let's remember that there's a reason WHY companies/government agencies hire them in the first place, which is (ostensibly) to cut costs.

9/11 made people afraid to fly without all sorts of additional "security measures" in the form of the TSA. That doesn't mean that the fear is in any way rational, or that the answer is to refuse to fix the actual problems (like how TEPCO knew back in 2008 that Fukushima Daiichi was vulnerable to a Tsunami, but did squat about it: http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0... ) and just bury our heads in the sand.

No, instead we're left with aging plants using older, much more questionable designs that are too costly to upgrade or replace, in large part because of that fear. Nuclear should be much more cost effective than it is, for many reasons, and the newer designs are built in such a way that the events that led to all of the incidents you cite would never be an issue. We've learned our lessons, but we're still stuck with the old designs because people don't understand the difference, just like we're largely stuck with the abomination that is the TSA thanks to the same sort of thing.

Actually in identifying some solar/wind promoters as anti-nuclear --- just a few but boy are they shrill --- I think I've hit the nail on the head.

Let's take a look at nuclear power in Japan, shall we. Japan is a small, energy-resource-poor country which has leveraged its technology to become a financial and industrial giant, in many areas out-producing the United States even before we outsourced to China. Some ~50 nuclear reactors were supplying ~30% of the nation's electricity in 2011. But that 30% is a misleadingly small figure in terms of estimable value, for even as rural Japan was finally being electrified those nuclear plants had been powering the factories and steel mills that put it on the world map. From being the first victim of nuclear war to putting its first reactor on-line in 1966, Japan is one of the world's greatest success stories and owes a great deal of its meteoric rise as a world power to those nuclear plants.

The Japanese are aware of this. It is why they responsibly reprocess their spent fuel, it is why they continued to expand their nuclear base even after the US Three Mile Island mishap, even after a pseudo-environmentalist sect (coal barons by proxy) in the United States began to suppress the advancement and innovation of this technology. The Fukushima Daiichi plant went on-line in 1971 and not one person in this part of the world seems to find it appropriate to recognize the many gigawatt-years of service it has contributed. We will honor a retired warship for its years of service, but if a nuclear power plant has fallen on hard times we will kick it like a dying dog and stamp the life out of it. Perhaps my allusion shocks you.

I go even further to describe as twisted and sick the way world press marginalized the unfolding tragedy of ~15,000 deaths to dwell on the minutiae of radiation release, and (worse yet) gathered anti-nuclear celebrities to continually supply worst-case scenarios, most of them absurd, scientifically deceptive and some outright dishonest. It represents a tabloid moment of which the entire human race should be ashamed. And yet? Even in the immediate aftermath of the disaster when all were in shock, merely 70% of Japanese believed that Japan should reduce its reliance on nuclear energy. There is reason to believe that this percentage is falling as the years pass, as they have re-elected a Prime Minister who vows to restore nuclear power to its previous levels. Perhaps the Japanese, for all this tragedy, are possessed of a certain clarity that is slipping away in the United States.

The second issue is nuclear weapons. One reason that the government wants nuclear power is so that it can build weapons at short notice.

Dissing conventional nuclear power on the grounds that it supports weapons manufacture is complicated. Suggesting that it is 'easy' or 'quick' or even 'feasible' (as opposed to refinement of natural uranium) is disingenuous. Rod Adams attempts to dispel this pervasive myth here and more recently here, and it is an uphill battle because politicians take their talking points from anti-nuke celebrities, not scientists or nuclear engineers. When the claim that terrorists could produce true fission weapons from nuclear plants breaks down, many seek refuge in the idea of a so-called 'dirty

In theory right, but in practice not :D

http://www.asahi.com/

The front page alone already has plenty of spaces between words in head lines (not at punctations)

However the same front page also has many head lines (on the right side) without spaces.

Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph.

Were they volunteers?

They were the lucky winners of a lottery, with odds of less than 1%. See http://ajw.asahi.com/article/b...

there is no significant CS-137 contamination even ten miles from Fukushima. Not a danger to humans, and the levels now are less than 1/10,000 from when the disaster happened.

Thanks to the magic of bio-accumulation, trace concentrations can be increased by many orders of magnitude:

Tourism industry officials and restaurant operators have been aghast to learn that wild mushrooms picked far from the site of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima Prefecture last year are showing high levels of radioactive cesium.

Last year, only wild mushrooms picked in Fukushima Prefecture were found to have cesium levels that exceeded legal standards.

This year, however, wild mushrooms from as far away as Aomori, Nagano and Shizuoka prefectures, all more than 200 kilometers from Fukushima, have been found to be contaminated with cesium.

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0...

TEPCO still doesn't have adequate water-processing capacity Fukushima. They installed three units of the "advanced liquid processing system" (which is basically a big ion-exchange resin water purifier) in 2012, and they are still not working reliably. Failures are occuring for dumb reasons: "TEPCO officials believe the cause of that problem was due to a failure to remove a rubber pad from the tank, leading to a blockage in the system." On another occasion, they had to shut down because a crane failed.

Toshiba has overall charge of the project. Why a major Japanese company is having so much trouble with routine industrial tasks is not clear. As a result of all these processing problems, Fukushima has far too much contaminated water in temporary storage.

The process won't remove tritium, but that, at least, has a decay life of only 12 years, and it's not concentrated by biological processes like strontium and cesium, so dumping tritum-contaminated water isn't too bad.)

where they end up is ?????

Parking lots, appartently:

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ2011110216339

Ok, that wasn't an industrial cobalt-60 source, but still.

This article tells us that the tip this turbine rises 106 meters above sea level, so most of it would be visible... but the base itself would still probably be below the horizon I should think. Note that the article includes a photo and a YouTube video.

While wind turbines are clearly not natural, they are clearly a heck of a lot easier on the eyes than the nearby industrial complex that includes the ill-fated reactor.

Note that this is only the first turbine:

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. will install two more turbines, among the largest in the world with a diameter of 167 meters each, within two years. The three turbines, when completed, are expected to cover the power demand of more than 10,000 households

10,000 households is not that much, so I think these turbines are roughly equivilant to the Ecotricity turbines in Swaffham, Norfolk. This first turbine is rated at 2MW, the first turbine at Swaffham was 1.5MW and the second was 1.8MW.( Though I would suspect that offshore winds would be more reliable..)

The parent post is bullshit. And even if it weren't...

Based on the chart you've linked to and the yearly background radiation levels, the levels for 2 weeks in the Fukushima exclusion zone, you might equally conclude something very different with a bit of extra knowledge. The radiation levels are a bit lower than just after the incident (some due to physics and some due to unrealistic assumptions about soil, etc.) and also vary with distances from the radioactive fuel source.

Japan is still trying to figure out if 1mSv or 20mSv or 5mSv is the appropriate yearly limit extra for anyone who would live in the exclusion zone. From the chart you posted 2mSv is what you get for just having a head scan and 4mSv is what an average person gets from background radiation.

Now for a geek that doesn't play with many radiation emitting toys and lives in insulated basements, receiving little UV exposure from the sun or non-concreted ground, might mean he is missing out on 4 or so mSv per year and it might make sense to stick a uranium rod under your floorboards or move to the Fukushima exclusion zone! Well, that or go outside occasionally and eat bananas.

A country that gives a shit about its constitution? Surely some mistake...

Err. I wouldn't move to Japan just yet if I were you:

Through redistricting (or lack thereof), the Japanese electoral map disproportionately favours rural voters over urban residents (up to 5:1), reaching a limit explicitly forbidden by the Japanese constitution.

Because they couldn't come to a redistricting agreement that pleased them (and because that imbalance heavily favoured them), the party in power did call a new Diet election anyway, which was unambiguously called unconstitutional by all parties involved: members of the Japanese SC testified to it, nobody tried to argue otherwise. The election went ahead, the elected MPs have taken their seats and the current prime minister's legitimacy is not in any way questioned by anybody outside of some very limited constitutional scholar circles.

Oh yea: 6 month later, the Supreme Court is finally due to give out an official decision on the matter (not so much on whether the election was unconstitutional, as to what should be done about it), with legal commentators generally agreeing that whatever they decide, probably won't be enforced anyway.

You seem to have a fanciful view on this that is quite far detached from what has actually happened. http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201301110086

I don't know where you are getting your information from, but I'd love to see your source.

How about the Japanese government? "The murasoi fish â" similar to a rockfish â" was contaminated with 254,000 becquerels (Bq) per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of radioactive cesium, according to a study released by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., the Daily Mail reports. "

Do you have a citation for a single dangerous fish being caught outside of that part of Japan?

a marine biologist from Stanford University found radioactive tuna chilling out in California. But I'm sure it was just an isolated case.

Oh, and you know, the disaster was awhile ago, so I'm sure radioactivity has dropped since then. Unless, you know, it increased 8 fold instead...

Well... 300 tons of radioactive death water a day probably isn't anything to be too concerned about... we can always remain skeptical and demand more citations, more proof, etc. Kinda like if I back into your car, we can sit and haggle about how badly your car was hit ("it's only a scratch!"), or that you have a really nice car and I don't, so you shouldn't be so upset... or you know, logic like that. Instead of, I don't know, say... taking responsibility.

Well, what does this slide refer to? It's titled "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station Outline of water processing facilities" and dates from June 4, 2011.

Their water processing facility doesn't work yet. "Recent leaks from a novel type of radioactive water treatment device, currently under trial runs at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, occurred from corrosion holes in welds, Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant operator, said July 25, 2013."

Can someone give an estimate of how much more or less radiation is being introduced by the Fukushima plant than say... the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs?

This is a very good question and as a nuclear layman, it's difficult for me to get a handle on an exact answer. IANA health physicist, just a guy with Wikipedia and Google. But given that, I'll try to give some baselines from what I can see on the net.

First, in terms of "radiation", it seems like we're mostly talking about release of radioactive isotopes, rather than the initial prompt radiation of a nuclear explosion itself. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs ( as, eg, this blog describes) were airbursts, so relatively radiologically "clean" - they did a lot of initial damage from blast, heat and gamma radiation, but didn't leave nearly as many "dirty" isotopes in the way of fallout. This is compared with, eg, a surface shot like Castle Bravo which was a huge dirty contamination event.

So when we're talking about "comparing" Fukushima with Hiroshima, we're talking purely about the isotopes, not the explosive power. Which is not really a straight comparison. But given that, Fukushima (or any other nuclear power station) is and/or has the potential to be much dirtier than a bomb (at least an airburst), because there's more nuclear material stored onsite. You'd want a nuclear engineer to give the precise bequerel ratings of all the isotope mixes in the fuel composition, but for a back-of-the-envelope estimate: Little Boy had 64kg of uranium fuel - Fukushima had 1,760,000 kg of fuel on the entire site.

So all else being equal, which of course it's not because we're not talking weapons-grade uranium and I'm sure power rods have lots of other alloys in them, Daichi has 27,500 times as much raw radioactive fuel as the Hiroshima bomb. Impressive, no?

Now most of that fuel probably won't be released, as not all the reactors were damaged, and the health impact of the various isotopes varies wildly based on the half-life of the isotope, its heaviness (ability to be transported far from the site), whether it can be ingested in air or water, how long it stays in the body, what the affinity is for various body parts, and what kind of radiation it releases - alpha, beta or gamma. Alpha particles are the biggest, so do the most damage, but also the easiest to block - I believe outside the body they're fairly harmless, blocked by cloth or skin. But inside the body, they can do more harm. So you really do need a health physicist to work out all the equations here.

However, the buzz on the net has always centered around three main radioactive isotope families: iodine-131, caesium-134 and -137, and strontium-90.

Iodine has a half-life measured in days to weeks so it was always going to be the initial problem. Theoretically, if all the fission occurred at the first meltdown, there shouldn't be any left. In practice it seems like some short-halflife isotopes are still being detected, which suggests spontaneous fission may still be occurring in the melted cores. Iodine goes for the thyroid and its effect is thyroid cancers, particularly in children. This is starting to show up but there's arguments over what the baseline rate is and how much is due to testing rather than fallout.

In terms of initial (not ongoing) iodine release, Fukushima was 2.5 times bigger than Hiroshima.

Most of the Fukushima-Hiroshima comparisions focus around the caesium isotopes, as these are long-lived (several years) and the body trea

Mar 2011: "Tokyo Electric, the owners of the plant, said five workers had been killed at the site, two were missing and 21 had been injured." link

Apr 2011: "On March 24, three workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant were exposed accidentally to high localised radiation while standing in contaminated water". link

Jul 2011: "A newly released document says the Japanese government estimated in April that some 1600 workers will be exposed to high levels of radiation in the course of handling the reactor meltdowns at the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant". link

Dec 2011: "Masao Yoshida, who led the fight to bring Japanâ(TM)s crippled Fukushima nuclear station under control, steps down tomorrow for medical treatment after almost nine months directing the disaster response from inside the plant". link

Dec 2012: "Dozens of workers received potentially cancerous doses of radiation to their thyroid glands during recovery work at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, according to data submitted to the World Health Organization. link

July 2012: "An executive at construction firm Build-Up in December told about 10 of its workers to cover their dosimeters, used to measure cumulative radiation exposure, with lead casings when working in areas with high radiation, the Asahi Shimbun newspaper and other media said." link

July 2012: "Japanese officials are investigating whether workers cleaning up in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster were pushed to shield their radiation meters so they could keep working for longer on the contaminated plant". link

... because some of the subcontractors were forced to shield their counters. The problem was even discussed on Slashdot. This means that the numbers are underestimated. Probably badly, knowing how japanese usually keep quiet on this kind of problems.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2265732/Mike-Murasoi-fish-contaminated-radiation-Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-2-500-times-legal-limit.html

It was confirmed by Tepco to have amounts of radioactive cesium equal to 254,000 becquerels per kilogram, or 2540 times the limit of 100 becquerels/kg set for seafood by the government.

...

On 21 August last year, Tepco announced that rockfish caught in the Pacific Ocean within the circular area of 20 km around the plant, which is closed to all human activity, had a level of 25,800 becquerels of cesium per kilogram .

It's painfully obvious that this is caused by ongoing leakage of radioactive water from the plant. In contrast, there has be a reduction in radiatons levels on land http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201303120107. It's unlikely that biological concentration in the food chain is the primary cause after two years of radiation decay and sea water dilution.

If you don't trust the Japanese government, this would explain why they are prohibiting non-government organizations from sampling the ocean near the plant location. They say it's still too dangerous.

The motivation for a coverup is that ongoing radioactive ocean contamination would be a huge international incident. China, Korea, Taiwan, Viet Nam, Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines would all protest. There would be reputational repercussions, diplomatic turmoil and possibly economic sanctions. There is still a lot of hostility in the region from WW2, and this would be just the issue to reopen those wounds. Not to mention current rivalry over ocean areas that have China, Tiawan and Japan sending naval vessels to tiny islands with disputed ownership.

It appears that we'll have to wait for the shows to air before we'll see the footage.

January 27th on Discovery Channel for most of us.

January 13th on NHK if you're in Japan.

No, they aren't smart enough to do that. They will just poison the local population. They've already made it legal to sell octopus and sea snails again. http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201207230006

43% of Fukushima children examined in 9/2012, have thyroid abnormalities. (stat for a "normal" population is .5%).

Really? That's funny, I just tried a web search on this to see if I could find where you're getting this stuff from (since you don't like to provide sources...), and I turned up this: Thyroid tests for Fukushima children find no effects from accident

Oh wait, but there's also stuff like this: Japan hiding results of Fukushima children's thyroid cancer screenings in new information blackout Those bastards aren't releasing medical records for thousands of kids! (And yet, you have access to precise percentages quoted from somewhere or other...)

Spare me your assurances.

Spare us your fear-mongering.

English language version:
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201205250024

Wrong.

They are not building any new plants, and definitely not in the Tokyo Metropolitan area. They will be making some changes to improve the output of the gas-fired power plant in Chiba, located here.

Press release here: http://www.tepco.co.jp/cc/press/12010603-j.html

TEPCO has stated several times they will not be building any new thermal power plants.

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201203010064

No, the damage done by Fukushima is massive.

Not only have 80,000 residents been displaced, unable to return to their homes or collect their belongings (nor will they be able to for at least several decades), they also have to write off all the businesses, farms, schools, hospitals and other things left in the area around Fukushima.

The cost to clean-up will eventually be in the trillions, and the reactors not damaged significantly will be retired.

Many thousand businesses have been very hard hit by the fallout of Fukushima, with farmers having to destroy crops and fishermen losing catches.

Fukushima was also the straw that broke the publics trust in nuclear power. People have always been wary of it, but in Japan you have the added problem of it being a badly managed industry that is full of corruption and greed. TEPCO itself has publicly apologised on at least 3 occasions when whistleblowers have come out showing that TEPCO failed to do maintenance on key systems, covered up damaged to avoid costly down-time and repairs, and have covered-up accidents and mishaps to avoid scrutiny by regulations. Internationally the nuclear industry in Japan is well known for having poor, outdated safety standards and useless regulators who are staffed by those who are (quite literally) paid off by the nuclear industry through a system in Japan known as amakudari.

So while the actual health risk isn't going to be huge, the cost to the public in both tax payers money and trust is not an insignificant factor.

An excessively-strong reaction to the tiny bit of the event which can be addressed is a natural, if irrational, response to the larger but completely unmanageable risk of future tsunami damage.

You have no idea. TEPCO knew as early as the 1980's and with 100% certainty in 2009 that its tsunami preparations were woefully insufficient. Building and maintaining a level of defence against tsunami damage in a plant the size of Fukushima Daiichi is not a small thing, but far from impossible. With some very basic changes this disaster would have only have left the reactors as managable scrap. This disaster also highlighted the badly kept secret that Japan's nuclear industry still has no idea or plan of how to deal with its nuclear waste - a very, very expensive problem that is just being compounded over time.

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201103253443

From what I read in the western media, TEPCO is losing incredible amounts of money cleaning up the Fukushima mess.
The Japanese also seem less than happy ("Private panel blames TEPCO's 'systematic negligence'") [note to Slashdot readers: that Asahi Shimbun newspaper doesn't seem to have a paywall].

However, I also read that TEPCO was strongly involved in developing Sodium-Sulfur batteries to help solve the storage problem associated with large rollout of intermittent electricity generators (i.e. solar only when it's sunny and wind turbines only when it's windy). Anything else than Sodium-Sulfur or other cheap redox couples, is probably too expensive for real large-scale use.

So, I really hope that the battery division of TEPCO survives any lawsuits/bankruptcy procedures/government sanctions because they seem to be working on transitioning Japan away from the nuclear addiction and towards a very clean (but slightly explosive) technology that the rest of the world is probably eager to share.
Anybody in Japan please comment if this makes sense. I don't read Japanese and have never been there.

If the US ambassador wrote to the Spanish government and said "If you don't make your country's laws mirror the US drug laws, we're not trading with you any more," would it be any different?

Yes, I think that would be different. In the case of copyright, the US is concerned about people in Spain using material produced by US creators without paying them - hence, Spain's laws affect US creators - it's a trade issue. It's hard to come up with ways that liberal Spanish drug laws affect people in the US (with the possible exception that if a lot of drugs are going through Spain and into the US, then it makes law enforcement of drug laws in the US more difficult). But, other than that case, if the Spanish had fully legalized drugs, that's an issue that affects the Spanish. Copyright is more of a trade issue. (I recall an issue a few years ago, where a piece of hardware would allow the Nintendo DS to use pirated cartridges, and Nintendo saw their game sales cut in half in Spain - so this isn't a theoretical issue - http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201004190412.html ) If, on the other hand, Spain said that Spanish citizens are allowed to pirate everything they want from Spanish creators - that would be an internal affair.

And, it makes sense that smaller countries would benefit from eliminating copyright: being small, they aren't producing much, but because the big producers are outside their territory, they get other people's work for free without needing to send dollars overseas. The best possible situation is to declare yourself a sovereign nation, then you can pirate everything and you can still have other people (outside "your territory") obey copyright law because it's in effect where they live. Of course, I think the whole piracy thing is selfish and unfair to creators. This ultimately cuts to the heart of laws and fairness. Things aren't fair or unfair because the law says so. Pirates are apt to point out that "just because there's a law (copyright) doesn't mean it's a just law that we should follow". Of course, the whole issue comes back to haunt them because it also means the converse: "just because something is legalized in your country doesn't mean it's fair or right".

It's easy to fall back on "they should be allowed to do create whatever laws they want in their country", but I don't actually believe that's true as a general principle. For example, I hate when Saudi Arabia gives a woman 80 lashes for being in a car with a man, makes it illegal for women to drive, or Afghanistan or Pakistan have laws that prescribe the death penalty for converting away from Islam. But, I'm digressing away from issues of copyright and piracy. Or, to use another example, a few years ago, some people discovered a Disney World in China - but it had no affiliation with the actual Disney company. (http://www.japanprobe.com/2007/05/02/disneyland-in-china/) Some Chinese just copied the whole thing. Is this right? Is this wrong? Are the Chinese allowed to do whatever they want in their own country? What if a country allowed for-profit piracy? I don't agree with that either, and some pirates would also disagree with countries allowing "for profit piracy", but if were going to talk about national sovereignty, then I don't see how anybody can complain - it's just a country doing what it's allowed to do by it's own laws, and it the national laws allow for "for profit" piracy, then nobody has a right to complain?

I don't agree with Spain needing a SOPA law, but Spain has been pretty liberal with copyright/piracy in the past (Spain has previously said that non-commercial piracy is legal), so it's not surprising that the US would put pressure on them for that issue. I think a lot of people here are starting with how they feel about copyright and piracy and then arriving at a conclusion - as in: "I think piracy should be legal, therefore, the US should stop meddling in Spain's internal affairs." Perhaps an appropriate

You do know, Google senpai, that there are several methods, none of which have been validated in proper epidemiological studies?

The Techa river cohort is just about all we had, pre-Fukushima.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16238437

Now, there will be the Fukushima schoolchildren to study. Their deaths from cancer and leukemia will further enlighten us, 50 years from now....
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/life_and_death/AJ2011110916955

Fukushima:
1. had its operating license extended to 2021 5 weeks before.
2. had ignored earthquake warnings.
3. had ignored historical precedent and repeated warnings of the risk of tsunamis.

It was and extremely avoidable sequence of events that the reactors should have been designed to withstand.

During the incident, the poor operators on the ground did the best they could, while their bosses ordered them not to.

During court proceedings concerning a radioactive golf course, Tokyo Electric Power Co. stunned lawyers by saying the utility was not responsible for decontamination because it no longer "owned" the radioactive substances.
“Radioactive materials (such as cesium) that scattered and fell from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant belong to individual landowners there, not TEPCO,” the utility said.

So a firm responsible for making atoms into smaller atoms says "not ours" when asked to pay up for contamination. With such examples of leadership - why should fission power be supported?

"the IEA report says why we're not building more nuclear power plants"
Are you referring to: "The public perception of risk also weakens the environmental performance of nuclear power."? If you attribute this to why nuclear power has not budged 14% of world power in over half a century, then I am afraid nuclear power has a very sad future ahead, indeed. You can thank the Japanese government's mishandling of the Fukushima accident for this, as public perception of the risks is at a all time high now.

"as you go forward in time, the estimates for total death-toll from Chernobyl are being reduced"
Funny, as the largest estimate I have seen for Chernobyl (1 million) was just published by the New York Academy of Sciences last year. Again, have you peeked into the future with your time machine to see that future estimates will be decreasing here on out?

"Fukushima released only half the radioactivity Chernobyl"
Amazing, so you have traveled to the future to a point of time where the estimates have finally stopped doubling every couple of months (for instance, the paper you cite below claims Fukushima was just 1/10 of Chernobyl when it was published. . .) and the releases of additional radioactive isotopes have finally stopped! Or are you just claiming more beliefs as facts again . . . ? Oh, and you are confusing external exposure (CT scans) with internal exposure . . . really, I would have expected more from you at this point.

"Very little potassium iodide was distributed in the Soviet Union after the Chernobyl accident. In Poland, however, more than 10 million children, 16 years of age and under, and approximately seven million adults received at least one dose of potassium iodide, reducing their thyroid doses to “negligible levels”."
Interesting you bring this up, because we all know that Japan's distribution of iodide was stellar.

"comparing doses received by residents with typical CT or X-ray"
Thank you for demonstrating why skeptism is so important when trying to establish fact. Up until now, you have been making claims about the safety of nuclear energy, I assumed you understood the difference between internal and external exposure. Only many posts later do you finally reveal that you seem to have a serious gap in your understanding of the risks of fallout. Had I lacked skeptism, I too could have been tainted by your ignorance. Furthermore, any further analysis built on top of yours would also be suspect. Here is a hint . . . gamma readings are only indirect indicators of the true killers: alpha and beta emitters. Alpha radiation cannot even pass through a sheet of paper, but once an emitter is embedded within tissue it causes severe local damage, often leading to cancer. Fallout is nothing like a CT or an X-ray exam.

"is too small to give a statistically significant increase"
Nice, yes let's go back to May before the radiation release estimates were doubled at least twice (two months before meltdowns were even admitted) to quote the head of Japan ICRP, who are considered by many to have far too much vested interest in the success of nuclear to be considered objective . . .

"no other technology has proved itself in high-scale power production"
Again, nuclear is at 13% and coal is at 41%. Together, that only accounts for a little over half world production, yet you act as if that is all there is that is "proven" . . . And, again (and again and again . . .), I have never stated that one is safer or not safer than the other. I have only stated that conclusive data does not yet exist to make such a conclusion. Finally, 13% is hardly something to start screaming the end of the world over . . . I am sure we will get along just fine without it.

And there will never be a melt down in China, because they do such a good job of building infrastructure that is failure proof.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China#2011_Wenzhou_train_accident

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-07-28/china-high-speed-rail-crash-likely-caused-by-signal-flaw.html Beijing National Railway Research & Design Institute of Signal & Communication Co. apologized to the families of people killed or injured in the crash and said it would cooperate with the investigation, according to a letter posted today on its website. The company, a unit of state-owned China Railway Signal & Communication Corp, didn’t say what equipment it had supplied or designed.

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201107250340.html Concerning the burying of a train car after the accident, a source in Japan who investigates train accidents said, "Investigative agencies in China are not very independent, and I have heard that in many cases they are influenced by what the government wants done."

After all the Japanese, one of the most technically advanced countries in the world, had four reactors explode due to regulatory failure. All it took to keep this worse case scenario from occurring was a bigger sea wall. But that would have cost some money, and be a public admission that there was an earthquake problem.

So China, which has no effectively independent regulators, will have no problems with the largest expansion of fission power in the history of the world. Care to bet your life on that? There are literally millions of Chinese citizens who are having that bet made for them, and they have no choice in the matter. Since you are so sure there is no danger, maybe your best move would be to relocate as close as you can to one of their reactors. They will be the leaders of the 21st century, as you said, and you should be where the actions is.

Cs-137 was detected in eight prefectures, with values ranging from 3 Bq/m2 to 44 Bq/m2

How do those figure match with the recent aerial survey of the area?

Gamma dose rate for Fukushima prefecture was 1.7 Sv/h

I guess you must have your units wrong.

There were fuel rod pieces found two miles away from the containment structures. This fact has been completely ignored by the media.

The hypothesis is that there was explosion in the spent fuel rod storage in Unit 3, and it was strong enough to blow rods out of the pool. Unit 3 uses MOX fuel containing plutonium, so it poses a potentially greater health risk. The suggestion is that there was a "prompt criticality" event where a hydrogen explosion mechanically shifted the rods so they went critical and released additional energy resulting in a much stronger explosion.

The follow on video http://vimeo.com/23393101 says that if the fuel rods went prompt critical, that highly radioactive material was vaporized and ejected into the atmosphere. This is the black cloud that was only seen in the Unit 3 explosion. The reason this had minimal impact is that most of the material went out to sea. This is one of the reasons that there are such high levels of radiation on the sea floor by the plant. If the prevailing winds had blow over land then a Chernobyl style uninhabitable zone would have been created in a large area next to the plant.

Currently this is a hypothesis, but if it did happen it would be easy to detect based on the radioactive isotopes at the scene. Both the US and Japanese governments, and perhaps China and S. Korea would also be able to figure this out. Given that there has been almost no mention of how fuel rod components have been blown all over the landscape, It is conceivable that this situation has been kept under wraps.

To give another take on how bad thinks are http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201105120189.html

That means that radioactive water at the No. 2 reactor alone suffices to be classified as a level-7 accident.

That's right, the contaminated water in just one of the units, by itself, is enough to warrant the same international severity level as Chernobyl.

http://www.asahi.com/national/gallery_e/view_photo.html?national-pg/0314/TKY201103140242.jpg (from the Japanese article) I'll post this anonymously. I'm not one to look for penises in everything, but this one was hard to ignore.

I looked at the three websites linked above, and they didn't really seem that bad to me. The author of the blog doesn't say if he can read Japanese or not, and it should not be assumed that he can for the fact that he wrote the blog entry in the first place. I think that probably makes a difference. Just looking at the language itself makes it seem more complicated than it might be.

Something that I've noticed on various Asian sites over the years is that they seem to be mainly text based, displaying a lot of information right when you go to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for the Asahi Shimbun or it's English page. It's a newspaper, it should have a lot of information displayed right in front. So should the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (linked above). The New York Times has one of the best newspaper websites around, mainly because it uses very few images and displays a lot of information right on it's front page. Other local newspaper websites I've visited leave little to be desired. I think if the New York Times website were written in Japanese, one might feel the same way as the blog author.

I looked at the three websites linked above, and they didn't really seem that bad to me. The author of the blog doesn't say if he can read Japanese or not, and it should not be assumed that he can for the fact that he wrote the blog entry in the first place. I think that probably makes a difference. Just looking at the language itself makes it seem more complicated than it might be.

Something that I've noticed on various Asian sites over the years is that they seem to be mainly text based, displaying a lot of information right when you go to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for the Asahi Shimbun or it's English page. It's a newspaper, it should have a lot of information displayed right in front. So should the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (linked above). The New York Times has one of the best newspaper websites around, mainly because it uses very few images and displays a lot of information right on it's front page. Other local newspaper websites I've visited leave little to be desired. I think if the New York Times website were written in Japanese, one might feel the same way as the blog author.

Death by overwork happens in first world countries.

In Japan, they will have to pay a lot of money because of this, but then again, a life was lost because of overwork.

http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201005250384.html

There are other similar to this. Like everyone said, this is work related.

Japanese suicide rate is 24.4%, 5th in the world, 1st on "industrialized" countries (read as "first world countries").

It is a shame. Besides here in Japan is so common. I have been stuck in the train because someone jumped and have been once in the train that actually ran over someone who jumped and I have been only here for just a bit more than a year.

At least here in Japan the laws are trying to change this and reduce the amount of hours required to work (8 hours is always 12 hours in here) for any average job.

Furtive was my favourite word in Junior High. I named my cat Furtive. As the link to the free dictionary points out furtive means "secret and sly or sordid", but I always thought it had to do with being a cat or a cat burglar, and, of course, there's the fur bit at the beginning. Furtivology is my take on futurology. The Japanese English newspaper Asahi has an interview with Mathew Burrows, expert of geopolitical futurology. I've always thought futurologists are well served being furtive and circumspect.

Mr. Burrows makes a number of interesting point by one is, I think, particularly germane to this thread.

"Small is no longer beautiful

Q: Throughout the 1990s, when very dynamic globalization was under way, there emerged the perception that small is beautiful.

Small countries like Singapore, Ireland, Israel, Estonia and Finland are clearly much more agile and much better at adapting to globalization.

Would I be wrong in saying that an era will come where the perception that big is powerful will gain ground over the next 15 or 20 years?

A: No, I think you're essentially right."

What is of note is the perception that big is powerful and highly centralized, large states like China will be in a better position to put in place the infrastructure necessary to compete. As noted in the linked article we, the world population, are facing a population bomb and the rise of states like India, Brazil and China. Intellectual Property is just one barb when it comes to grappling with the problems the next 5 or so generations are going to face. One of the cornerstones of democracy is the checks and balances founded upon the temporal and geographic dispersal of power. The idea of Intellectual Property as a stopgap against losing ground to a country like China is appealing only until it runs up against our basic rights; but federal agencies are obliged to protect the interests of the country in the world at large. It generates a double bind that probably won't be resolved in our lifetimes, if at all, if we fuck it all up big time.

That's funny, because just today there were reports about a couple of people lying unconscious in a hospital due to fugu-poisoning. :p

According to Japanese media, the H-IIB rocket has been successfully launched. The HTV is now in its planned orbit, from which it will transition to a rendezvous with ISS on the 18th. (The transition is much longer than usual because the HTV will be going through a series of tests in the meantime.)

Rain or shine? No problem.

80-knot winds? Screw that. A wind-blown derailment at running speed of 150 MPH would...um... blow, I guess.

The Japan Railways companies that operate the shinkansen are damn proud of their operating safety record (only one derailment in its entire history, and that was caused by a Richter-scale 6.9 earthquake). So, sitting out the typhoon was probably a good idea.

It's right there on the Japanese press release page, you can see at the bottom of the image at the top left of the article, they have the before and after of the word "neuron". Here, I'll make it even easier for ya: http://www2.asahi.com/kansai/news/image/OSK200812100099.jpg

I peruse the English website version of the Asahi Shimbun regularly. They have an editorial on this very subject. http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200803080056.html

• 1.5% of all people is using this system.
• 39.1billion yens are spent for system construction
• maintenance cost is unknown.
• Government says 905 hours of officers have been saved and the overall government's benefit is 91.7 billion yens/year.

It requires some IC card and its reader device to use online authentication system. Totally they cost about 5,000 yens for preparation. We'd better ride a train and go to city office.

I saw this linked above by an AC. http://www.asahi.com/national/update/1004/TKY20061 0040185.html Its an article in the Asahi Shinbun about the feat. My brief non-literal translation follows (if its inaccurate, sorry in advance, for accurate translations you can pay me my hourly):

"Using equivilence rules like 3 = sa [n.b. all numbers in Japanese have a variety of syllables which they can be read as -- thus, you can remember a phone number as roughly a two to three word phrase, like my bank being 555-GOT-MONEY], you can memorize the first N of the infinite digits of pi by constructing a story of sufficient length and memorizing that. His previous record was seven years ago.

After reciting the 100k digits they were checked against a computer printout. Mr. Haraguchi then retired with his family. They brought him his favorite beer, which he proceeded to chug. He commented 'Its good that I was able to relax'*"

* This is ambiguous in Japanese: my guess is he is referring to his ability to have been relaxed while reciting the digits, but eh, doesn't really matter either way.

By the way: my back of the envelope math suggests 100k digits of pi would leave you with a Japanese text about a tenth as long as the Bible, give or take. So its neither impossible nor a mean feat to have memorized a text of that length.

He's not memorizing like a regular person would. It's been talked about on slashdot before using some memorization technique association groups of numbers with memorable patterns.

More specifically, he memorizes the digits by making a story, probably from the sound of the numbers.

In Japanese, you can make a play on words by the sound of the numbers called goro-awase. For example, if there is a sequence of numbers such as "3341", it can be read as "sa-mi-shi-i" which means "sad". By having a series of these play on words, he can make up a story, which is much easier to remember than a sequence of numbers.

If you're curious, here is the article (in Japanese) that mentions that the guy makes a story to memorize the digits.