Naoto Kan gets a closeup view of nuclear France

The former Japanese PM visits Flamanville and La Hague, and draws 400 locals to an inspiring evening event in Normandy, France

April 8, 2018 By Linda Pentz Gunter

Most of the time you don’t see former leaders of major world powers trudging along windy clifftops as they listen to anti-nuclear activists hold forth. That is why I find the odyssey of former Japanese Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, ever more extraordinary. For a handful of years now he has been traveling around the world speaking out in favor of an end to the use of nuclear power. And he has been talking to us.

Naoto Kan visits a windswept Normandy beach from which you can see the Flamanville nuclear site as well as the La Hague reprocessing facility.

Kan of course was the Prime Minister in power at the time of the Fukushima nuclear disaster which struck on March 11, 2011. For all the mistakes and naiveté swirling at the time, Kan made one monumentally important decision. He picked up the phone and countermanded Tepco’s decision to pull its workforce out of the stricken Fukushim-Daiichi nuclear site.

That saved countless lives and likely the entire country. Untended, the reactors would have melted down and released a radioactive inventory that would have forced the abandonment of the neighboring Fukushima-Daiini nuclear plant. That in turn would have melted and the resulting cascading accident could have led to the evacuation of Tokyo. As Kan says in every speech, losing Tokyo would have been the end of Japan.

Unlike many such statesmen, however, Kan does not limit his addresses to august institutions. He gets down in the weeds with the grassroots. And perhaps never before as much so as during his mid-March visit to France.

Naoto Kan is interviewed during his visit with anti-nuclear activists in Flamanville, France.

Kan was in Normandy, France at the same time that its president, Emmanuel Macron, was promoting his country’s deeply flawed EPR reactors in India, an irony that was not lost on his audience. His visit was hosted by two of the leading anti-nuclear organizations in the region — CRILAN and Collectif anti-nucléaire Ouest.

Naoto Kan with CRILAN’s Didier Anger, one of France’s best known anti-nuclear activists.

Kan came right to Flamanville, the site of the French “flagship” EPR, the very one Macron was flogging in India. Flamanville 3, now fast approaching hot testing, has become a disaster of epic proportions in which nothing has gone right, from a faulty concrete pour for the foundation to the flawed forging of essential safety components. It is massively over-budget and years behind schedule.

At least 400 people packed an evening event featuring Naoto Kan.

Kan’s Normandy itinerary included a public event that drew 400 people along with a press conference. But he also walked the talk, literally, visiting the beach where the first occupations occurred against the first two Flamanville reactors; a site where activists planted granite headstones in memory of the “unknown irradiated”; and the La Hague reprocessing site. After learning about the latter, Kan vowed to campaign to stop the opening of the long in the works Rokkasho reprocessing facility in Japan.

https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2018/04/08/naoto-kan-gets-a-closeup-view-of-nuclear-france/

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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.

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