Tokyo

[giandujakiss]

a view from the ground. Really chilling.

But umm ... here is a picture of a very pretty, very expensive puppy?

Comments

[sapote]

I, too, would be freaking out about trying to leave now now now if I lived in Tokyo. However, I found this information very reassuring, not just because it's registering a still-low level of radiation at most non-evacuated distances, but because the international people tracking this information knew about the fire in the reactor pool before the news media did, to my mind lending firm credence to the idea that this information is reasonably unfiltered.

I cannot start to talk about how I feel about the situation for plant workers without getting very, very upset, though. The radiation levels near the plant do not seem to have risen to "absolutely appalling", but they certainly look to be bad.

[giandujakiss]

I honestly have no idea how reassuring to find any of it. I mean, my understanding is that they aren't releasing information on radiation levels at Fukushima - see http://chemtrailsnorthnz.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/massive-cover-up-of-radiation-levels-in-fukushima-prefecture/

Which bodes pretty poorly, and makes everything from Japan untrustworthy. And then there's the one reactor with mox where if it melts down, the radiation will get a billion times worse, so ..

honestly, I haven't really tried to follow the technical aspects, but the reporting I've seen has basically been somewhere between "We just do not know" and increasing panic by, like, US government sources.

[sapote]

Mm. I'm making a personal choice to exclude chemtrails websites from my search parameters, but we all have to make our individual call as to what counts as a valid source these days. (For the record, Ex-Rad is in Phase 1 clinical testing for general release - I am not sure if I'm convinced that they're handing this out to soldiers, but if they are, it's because the US Military is legally exempt from certain medical ethics and safety regulations, which historically has been a bad thing for soldiers, not a good thing.)

The fact that people with home geiger counters are streaming the information realtime - or at least seeming to - and international monitoring of MEX's self-reported information reflected a major breach of containment before the news media did is, to me, compelling. I do think that the situation at the plant itself is very, very bad, but I am seeing no evidence of the kind of widespread media blackout that it would take to falsify information further afield.

[ybbravo]

(Sorry for butting in several days late... I'm a lurker expat living in Tokyo who evacuated on the 18th.)

IMHO, the *current* radiation levels in Tokyo and similar outlying regions are not what people are worried about. People are worried about the *future* radiation levels. If the worst case scenario came to pass, there's really no way for all of Tokyo to START evacuating; it'd really just be time for people to lock their doors and hold on.

The general feeling (at least of several days ago) was that no one really understood what was happening with the Fukushima Daiichi; there was increasing mistrust that in Tokyo Denryoku's ability to solve the problem, and the general feeling was that Tokyo Denryoku and the government weren't properly sharing all of the information. (This relates to the apology for *not* having blackouts... Even if it's somewhat unreasonable, because it probably just means that people are trying to save power, failing to have the blackouts as scheduled just increases the perception that Tokyo Denryoku doesn't know what's going on. Many people would rather have a routine than wait around in a will-they-or-will-they-not suspense.)

With this mistrust in place, people don't know if they can really count on the ability of Tokyo Denryoku to prevent a worst case scenario from coming to pass. I still have mixed feelings about evacuating, personally, but I can honestly say that my stress levels have fallen dramatically.

[giandujakiss]

Wow - hello! I hope you're relatively comfortable/okay where you are now!

And yeah, I definitely got that people were concerned about future radiation - I think that's what we're all concerned about. And it's got to be awful being right there and not trusting the information - it's got to be so terrifying. I'm glad you're out, at least, and I hope things can get fixed and people can start returning soon, though I have no idea how long that's likely to take!