Japanese Government Will Censor Fukushima "Illegal Information" 411
dgilzz writes "The Japanese government says that the damage caused by earthquakes and by the nuclear accident are being magnified by irresponsible rumors, and the government must take action for the sake of the public good. The project team has begun to send letters of request to such organizations as telephone companies, internet providers, cable television stations, and others, demanding that they take adequate measures based on the guidelines in response to illegal information. The measures include erasing any information from internet sites that the authorities deem harmful to public order and morality."
"Illegal Information"? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Illegal Information"? Orwell would be proud.
Old Sayings (Score:5, Interesting)
When information is made illegal only outlaws will have information.
Re:You free speech defenders (Score:5, Interesting)
Comparing the right of the public to information with crying "Fire" in a theater plainly shows you have no idea what you're talking about. That is especially true for Japan -- a country whose government has a history of covering up industrial disasters (look up Minamata, for example), and whose nuclear industry is practically unanswerable to anyone.
Just last week TEPCO was outed to have ordered subcontractors at the Fukushima-1 site not to record exposures over the legal minimum. Helping these people to cover up information further instead of sending them to jail is a disgrace.
What I think is... (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember seeing an article about how little they were taking care of the really poor workers which did all the 'dangerous' jobs. Something about not letting them leave when they saw the tsunami or something like that.
I think it makes the government look like a bunch of savages and I'm pretty sure that sort of stuff will disappear very quickly. Not just the "Don't eat bananas, they're radioactive" rubbish.
Re:There is no "illegal information"... (Score:4, Interesting)
Be sure you're talking about the Nuclear Power that TEPCO is using. Liquid Salt Thorium and Pebble Bed Reactors don't pose the risks you mention, for example.
Liquid Salt Thorium and Pebble Bed reactors don't exist as commercial products. That's a subtle, but important distinction. While it's potentially possible that some nuclear technology might be relatively safe and non polluting there is very little push to have any industrial level research. Supposedly, the Indians are working on a Thorium based reactor. The Chinese are trying to improve current PWR designs. But MOST of the plants running in the world are older style BWRs or PWRs. And up until Fukushima most of the utilities were hell bent on keeping them going past their original design lives. Now that this behavior has suddenly become politically unpopular, you either have to decommission the things or ???? (who knows what).
We've boxed ourselves in quite nicely as far as nuclear power goes. Long term prevarication by governments and industry has left us with few useful choices in the short term. And the long term is quite a bit away. Might as well work on improving solar and wind.
Re:You free speech defenders (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You free speech defenders (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, should have clarified that I was not talking about nuclear workers in nuclear power-plants working as expected. For them, I completely believe you. Bit here is a British example: The beach at Sellafield/Windscale is radioactive enough that when Greenpeace tried to import a sample into Germany for measurements, it was confiscated because it lacked a permit for the transportation of highly radioactive material. Deaths from this will be single digits per year or lower. But they will continue for a very long time.
I do think that nuclear power can be done safely and that even safe long-term storage of the waste products is possible. But not nearly as cheap as is done today. As is done today, a significant part of this stuff will end up in the biosphere at tremendous long-term cost. Have you read what just the now "containment" at Chernobyl will cost? And that is just good for 100 years at the most. Don't even get me started about some crazy terrorists flying airplanes into that, it basically has no protection against that at all. (To be fair, it did not before either.)
Be careful of sources. This article in particular (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at the byline:
"Makiko Segawa is a staff writer at the Shingetsu News Agency. She prepared this report from Fukushima and Tokyo. She can be reached at shingetsunewsagency@gmail.com"
Look up who the "Shingetsu News Agency" is. Note that they have no real press credentials and their articles, especially those by Miss Segawa fall well into the fear-mongering "OMG!! BIG GOVERNMENT COVERUP!!" end of the scale.
The situation in Fukushima is being watched by nuclear experts all over the world and the basic facts of the aituation are posted on the IAEA's site. Anything beyond the stating of pressure, temperature and radiation readings as well as remediation steps being taken should be taken as pure guesswork. There has been way too much "This could mean that the reactors are undergoing fission and could go critical" kind of speculation.