Like most Japanese parents, two months ago Sasaki Takayuki barely knew what radiation was. Today, he thinks about little else. “I’ve sent my kids to my wife's family in Tokyo,” says the baker and father of two. “I told her to stay there till it's safe but who knows when that will be? We’ve all been left in the dark.”

Seven weeks since the start of Japan's worst nuclear crisis, political tremors are intensifying in the prefecture that hosts the ruined Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Mr. Sasaki is among thousands of parents in the prefecture, about 250 km northeast of Tokyo, demanding that the government of Prime Minister Kan Naoto reverse a decision to hike radiation limits for schools in the area by 20 times.

How was “risk” to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant calculated? Could risk projections run by successive cabinets and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency predict internal cover-ups of safety defects or plant-owner TEPCO's shelving of arguments by scientists and anti-nuclear activists that securing the plant against tsunami up to 5.7 meters, a number that now seems woefully small given the 15 meter wave that struck on March 11, was inadequate?

The Japanese government's decision to increase the maximum yearly radiation exposure limit for Fukushima school children by a factor of 20 – from 1 to 20 millisieverts – continues to spark outrage in Japan and internationally.

Sleepy, idyllic and dangerously irradiated, Iitate is preparing to evacuate. The junior high school is closed, its children bused every day to nearby towns. Tractors sit idle and weeds poke through rice and cabbage in the fields. Half-empty shelves greet customers at the A-Coop supermarket. By the end of this month, this mountainous farming village of 7,000 people, recently voted one of Japan's most beautiful places, will join the Ukrainian ghost town of Pripyat in the planet's short list of nuclear casualties.

On April 25, UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon published an opinion piece in the New York Times marking the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl tragedy. In it, Ban highlighted the parallels between Chernobyl and the ongoing crisis in Fukushima. While the Chernobyl crisis saw a much larger initial radiation release, reports now indicate a series of meltdowns at Fukushima. Reactor No. 1 is now known to have melted down just hours after the initial earthquake hit. In addition, reactors No. 2 and No. 3 are also thought to be in a state of meltdown. In this context, Ban calls on the world to rethink the place of nuclear power in global energy strategies.

What happens when a nuclear reactor overheats?

When nuclear cores overheat due to a lack of water coolant, they ultimately melt. Remaining water quickly turns to steam preventing replenishment of the water and endangering the integrity of the pressure vessel. Furthermore, the reactor pressure vessel may also melt leaking the melted fuel which may escape into the environment if the primary and secondary containment structures (concrete) have been damaged. Spent fuel is kept at around 25 degrees in cooling ponds for a few decades. The water must be continually replenished to maintain this temperature. If there is a loss of water or a failure of replenishment, the spent fuel will overheat and catch fire, releasing its radiotoxic contents. Note that the longer fuel is irradiated in the reactor core, the more radioactive it becomes due to the build-up of fission by-products which also contaminate the fuel limiting its usable life. Only about 1-2% of the uranium in fuel rods is actually used up in a reactor. It is these fission by-products that pose the greatest immediate danger if released into the environment.

Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun has published a letter from Nishioka Takeo, the House of Concillors President and an important member of Kan's own Democratic Party calling for Prime Minister Kan's resignation.

The original link in English and a reproduction of the original in Japanese (not available in full on the Yomiuri website).

As heroic workers and soldiers strive to save stricken Japan from a new horror–radioactive fallout–some truths known for 40 years bear repeating.

An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors. The 1960s design of five Fukushima-I reactors has the smallest safety margin and probably can't contain 90% of meltdowns. The U.S. has 6 identical and 17 very similar plants.

On April 19, the Japanese government raised the allowable annual radiation exposure limit from 1 mSV (millisievert) to 20 mSV. The decision has been heavily criticized by experts inside and outside Japan, as it is applied to children who are more susceptible to radiation, and this limit does not take internal radiation dosage into consideration. 20 mSV is the yearly average of what is allowed for Japanese nuclear plant workers under normal circumstances. On this website, we have so far primarily written and provided information in English on this “20 mSV” issue and on the Fukushima nuclear crisis in general. In this post we attempt to compile a list of articles, video news, press releases available in English and other languages.

Popular culture has long been an important tool used by the Japanese government and energy companies to promote nuclear power. In the two months since the 3.11 quake and the beginning of the Fukushima crisis, Japanese netizens have circulated key examples as a reminder of past propaganda. This 1993 video “Our Reliable Friend Pluto” was produced by the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation, a group associated with the Japanese government. In it, a cute cartoon stand-in for radioactive element plutonium tells children that not a single case of cancer can be traced to him and that he is even safe to drink!

On June 8, the Wall Street Journal reported that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which promotes itself as “the world's center of cooperation in the nuclear field”, has come under fire for its handling of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi crisis. NGOs accuse them of whitewashing, while officials from G8 countries have expressed concerns that the IAEA has been slow in providing clear information about the Fukushima radiation release and the situation at the Daiichi plant. The organization is also accused of not being sufficiently critical of the Japanese government.

Of Japan's prefectures, Okinawa lies farthest from Fukushima Daiichi. At over 1000 miles from the plant, even Seoul is closer. Okinawa also has no nuclear plant and seems to be distanced from the consequences of Japan's nuclear policies, but is this really the case?

According to a survey conducted by the Asahi Shimbun in mid-June, nearly three-quarters of Japanese voters favor an immediate or gradual phase-out of nuclear power.

In mid-April, the Japan Research Center and Gallup released poll results indicating that Japanese support for nuclear energy had declined from 62% before the earthquake – one of the highest support levels internationally – to 39% in the aftermath of 3/11 and the Fukushima crisis. Rates of opposition increased from 28% to 47%. The more recent Asahi poll shows an even more dramatic shift to antinuclear positions.

Most coverage of the plight of Fukushima Daiichi workers has rightly focused on the dangers of radiation exposure. On June 20, it was announced that another worker, the ninth since the crisis began in March, may have exceeded 250 mSv of radiation exposure, the absolute limit in emergency situations. One individual is reported to have been exposed to over 500 mSv. 115 have been exposed to more than 100 mSv. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare and TEPCO are cooperating to organize health checks for Fukushima Daiichi workers, but it is unlikely that this will mitigate serious health problems, including dramatically increased risk of cancer. It is also unclear how potentially much more dangerous internal radiation exposure is being measured.

Japan's leading business journal Toyo Keizai has published an article by Hokkaido Cancer Center director Nishio Masamichi, a radiation treatment specialist. The piece, entitled “The Problem of Radiation Exposure Countermeasures for the Fukushima Nuclear Accident: Concerns for the Present Situation”, was published on June 27 and is consistent with the critical coverage of the Fukushima crisis that has appeared in independent weekly magazines, notably Shukan Kinyobi, which have taken a strong anti-nuclear stance since the March 11 earthquake-tsunami-meltdown, and have repeatedly focused on the dangers of radiation exposure while calling for far- reaching measures to protect those at risk.

Read this fascinating and timely piece by Bloomberg for a succinct, “you are here” perspective on Japan's power politics. Bloomberg nicely captures the essence of what Softbank's CEO Son Masayoshi is doing in Japan. We have heard for years from LDP regimes that Japan was head of the pack when it came to the industrialized states' comparative environmental awareness, energy efficiency and expansion of renewable energy. Certainly it is true that many Japanese companies have highly efficient manufacturing processes and a strong presence in the production of geothermal, solar and other sustainable energy technologies. But we all learned in the wake of the Fukushima incident that Japan's domestic energy market is dominated by the nuclear village people. Their schemes included reprocessing waste on top of fault lines and ramping up nuclear energy to secure no less than 60% of all of Japan's energy needs by 2100. Fortunately, those plans are melting into air. Moreover, it has also become clear that Japan's nuclear policy relied on massive state aid and collusion to defray the immense costs through public budgets and other means. As Softbank's Son declares in his frequent public events, nuclear power is at least three time more expensive than the roughly YEN 6/kWh routinely asserted by its advocates and their cheerleaders. That financial cost (not to mention the essentially incalculable health and other risks) is the door that Son points to in describing his plan to open up new frontiers with increasingly cheap renewable power production.

A group of Japan's most prominent public intellectuals have launched a movement to amass ten million signatures calling for an end to Japanese nuclear power. The group, which includes Uchihashi Katsuto, Ooe Kenzaburo, Ochiai, Kamata Satoshi, Sakamoto Ryuichi, Sawachi Hisae, Setouchi Jakucho, Tsujii Takashi and Tsurumi Shunsuke, also plan a nationwide series of protests on September 11, the six month anniversary of the tsunami and the beginning of the Fukushima crisis.

In the midst of the Fukushima crisis, Japanese Prime Minister Kan has tied his political future, and likely that of his party, to an anti-nuclear direction.

At the G8 in May, he pledged to forge an energy policy that would see the percentage of Japan's energy needs met through renewables such as solar energy double to 20% in the 2020s. This is a decisive turn away from the previous government mandate to increase the amount of Japan's energy generated by nuclear power from 30% to 50% in the same timeframe. He has followed this up by appointing an energy review board that includes proponents of solar and other green energy technologies.

Scholars have long recognized that the United States government and bureaucracy considered Japanese anti-nuclear sentiments in the 1950s to be irrational prejudices working against American interests or even part of an anti-American communist conspiracy. In the wake of the Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident of 1954 in which 23 Japanese fishermen were hit with fallout from the Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb test, United States Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss claimed that the fishermen, one of whom died from radiation exposure, were a “red spy outfit” who had either faked their injuries or deliberately sought to be irradiated to discredit the America's atomic weapons program. There were also efforts to control the release of Bikini fallout information to the Japanese public.

On July 27, Tokyo Shimbun, a leading critic of the Japanese government's approach to the Fukushima nuclear crisis, ran an editorial which lays bare the many contradictions and problems of the compensation bill currently under discussion. The editors accuse the government of supporitng vested interests at the expense of taxpayers and protecting TEPCO in ways that may make alternative energy strategies impossible.