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Masao Yoshida, Director of Fukushima Daichii Nuclear Plant, Has Died
Doofus writes "Masao Yoshida, director of the Daichii Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, has passed away. Colleagues and politicos in Japan praised his disobedience during the post-tsunami meltdown and credited him with preventing much more widespread and intense damage. From the article: 'On March 12, a day after the tsunami, Mr. Yoshida ignored an order from Tepco headquarters to stop pumping seawater into a reactor to try and cool it because of concerns that ocean water would corrode the equipment. Tepco initially said it would penalize Mr. Yoshida even though Sakae Muto, then a vice president at the utility, said it was a technically appropriate decision. Mr. Yoshida received no more than a verbal reprimand after then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan defended the plant chief, the Yomiuri newspaper reported. "I bow in respect for his leadership and decision-making," Kan said Tuesday in a message posted on his Twitter account.'"
If you want to make the preposterous claim that Yoshida's esophageal cancer was induced by the radiation released in the Fukushima incident, fine, go ahead, make a fool of yourself. His cancer went symptomatic mere months after the incident, which is a timeframe that makes it all but certain that the neoplastic changes leading to the malignant growth in his esophagus had been going on for years before that and that the timing is mere coincidence. Although there have been cases of fast-acting radiation-induced cancer, such cases are associated with massive doses of radiation leading to severe acute radiation poisoning, which, AFAIK, he hadn't experienced (from what I know, only two workers were treated for acute radiation poisoning, and he was not one of them), and the fast-acting cancer usually happens to be leukemia (and it takes at least year and two to develop anyway, not months), whereas other kinds of tumors (hint! Hint! Esophageal cancer!) take something like ten years to develop, at the minimum.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yeah, because the US Navy's nuclear propulsion program and France's government run nuclear power program have had SO many problems...
Wake up, the only way to SAFELY run a reactor is to put operational safety ahead of making money. Ironically you will probably make more money that way...
But what he did was heroic. Especially in a society that empahsizes respect for superiors. In the US, we wouldn't think twice about second guessing a higher up if we thought there was an inherent risk but this is almost unheard of in the Asian culture. Anata ni keii, Yoshida-san.