ENGL1302 - Japan: Nuclear Disasters

This video shows footage of the cleanup efforts in Japan five months after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster.

August 21, 2014 - Bob Simon reports on the aftermath of the disaster in Fukushima, Japan, and finds toxic ghost towns frozen in time. Watch Simon's report.

The article discusses a report on the 2011 nuclear accident at Fukushima, Japan, which blamed the accident to organizational and regulatory systems that supported faulty rationales and collusion between the government, regulators and plant operator Tepco.

It is tempting to attribute variations in support for nuclear power to prominent accidents such as Three Mile Island in the United States or Fukushima in Japan. To illuminate how such attribution can be problematic, the authors discuss the historical context of the Three Mile Island accident in the United States. They point out that the US nuclear industry faced major challenges even before the 1979 accident: Forty percent of all US reactor cancellations between 1960 and 2010, they write, occurred before the accident in Pennsylvania. While safety concerns were undoubtedly a driver of public aversion to new nuclear construction in the United States, the nuclear industry already faced substantial economic and competitiveness obstacles, much like the nuclear industry worldwide before Fukushima.

We revisit long-term politically active citizens at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the wake of ongoing environmental and nuclear crises in Japan to better understand how long-term citizen participation focused on environmental disasters might be fostered and sustained. In our qualitative study of 31 long-term antinuclear activists, we examine the confluence of psychological and sociopolitical dimensions of active citizenship for over 3 decades. Psychological dimensions include moral obligations and civic-mindedness, emotions, such as anger, stress, and deepened convictions, and the importance of social solidarity and silent supporters. Sociopolitical dimensions include the lack of social power, the importance of formal groups, and strong leadership. Additionally, we compare first-time active citizens with those with prior political experience and argue that at least 2 types of active citizens may exist: those who are intrinsically inspired and those who are motivated by a direct threat. Implications for promoting increased active citizenship around environmental and technological crises are discussed.