This Japanese Coastal Town Has Been Fighting the Construction of a Nuclear Power Plant for 35 Years

In 1982, Chugoku Electric Power Co. announced a plan to start the construction of a massive nuclear power plant in the small coastal town of Kaminoseki Japan. Kaminoseki boasts some of the best fishing in Japan and it’s the livelihood of the inhabitants of the town, a livelihood locals fear will be taken away from the community if the proposed power plant gets built.

Midori Takashima grew up in Hiroshima until she was 18 and would see the inscription on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial which read “Rest In Peace, we’ll never let this happen again.” She grew up weary of the dangers of nuclear radiation.

Takashima is now a Patagonia grantee and activist founder of the Kaminoseki Nature Conservation Association and physically taking the memorial’s creed into action.

In 2011, Midori and her crew of activists bought a boat for research, and the more they looked into it, the more rare and endangered species they found in the local ecosystem, from the finless porpoise to the Japanese murrelet. In her goal to make sure that ecosystem remains unharmed, Midori teamed with Patagonia to create the short video “Sea of Miracles.”

https://www.tetongravity.com/video/culture/help-protect-japans-sea-of-miracles-from-nuclear-power-plant-construction

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Another glossy new nuclear film advertisement – “The New Fire”

Film review: ‘The New Fire’ and the old Gen IV rhetoric Author: Jim Green ‒ Nuclear Monitor editor NM866.4751, October 2018 The New Fire is a pro-nuclear propaganda film directed and produced by musician and film-maker David Schumacher.It’s similar in some respects to the 2013 film Pandora’s Promise.1,2 The New Fire premiere was held in October 2017 and it can be streamed online from 18 October 2018…..

The film includes interviews with around 30 people (an overwhelming majority of them male) interspersed with footage of interviewees walking into buildings, and interviewees smiling. The musical underlay is a tedious drone ‒ a disappointment given Schumacher’s musical background……..Interviewees are mostly aging but the film’s main message is that young entrepreneurs may save the planet and its inhabitants with their Generation IV reactor projects……..

These climate heroes are contrasted with anti-nuclear environmentalists. One interviewee says that “people of our generation are the first ones that have the opportunity to look at nuclear power without all the emotional baggage that previous generations have felt…..

Another interviewee attributes opposition to nuclear power to an “irrational fear of the unknown” (which surely poses a problem for the exotic Generation IV concepts promoted in the film) and another says that “once people sort of understand what’s going on withnuclear, they are much more open to it”.

The film trots out the usual anti-renewables tropes and falsehoods: 100% renewables is “just a fantasy”, renewables can contribute up to 20% of power supply and the remainder must be baseload: fossil fuels or nuclear power………

Accidents such as those at Fukushima and Chernobyl get in the news because they are “so unusual” according to interviewee Ken Caldeira. And they get in the news, he might have added, because of the estimated death tolls (in the thousands for Fukushima5, ranging to tens of thousands for Chernobyl6), the costs (around US$700 billion for Chernobyl7, and US$192 billion (and counting) for Fukushima8), the evacuation of 160,000 people after the Fukushima disaster and the permanent relocation of over 350,000 people after the Chernobyl disaster…….

Transatomic Power’s molten salt reactor concept The film spends most of its time promoting Generation IV reactor projects including Transatomic Power’s molten salt reactor (MSR) concept. [Ed note. recently failed and abandoned] .

Scott Nolan from venture capital firm Founders Fund says that Transatomic satisfies his four concerns about nuclear power: safety, waste, cost, proliferation. And he’s right ‒ Transatomic’s MSRs are faultless on all four counts, because they don’t exist. It’s doubtful whether they would satisfy any of the four criteria if they did actually exist……. https://nuclear-news.net/2018/10/01/another-nuclear-film-advertisement-the-new-fire/

EVENTS

November-December 2018 International Uranium Film Festival – U.S. Southwest tour

November 29th and 30th and December 1st, Navajo Nation Museum, Hwy 264 & Post Office Loop, Window Rock, Navajo Nation, AZ

December 2nd, Flagstaff, AZ

December 6th, Guild Cinema, 3405 Central Ave, Albuquerque, NM

December 7th, Grants, NM

December 9th, Jean Cocteau Cinema, 418 Montezuma Ave, Santa Fe, NM

PETITIONS

Tell Congress: Stop Trump from ordering a nuclear first strike without a Congressional declaration of war.

PREVENT UNNECESSARY RADIOACTIVE RISKS ACROSS THE USA NATION

Protect Idaho’s water. Stop nuclear waste.

nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope