This dialogue argues that Japan’s media coverage of the Fukushima Daiichi accident is fundamentally distorted. Masayuki Takayama points out that the damaged reactors were designed by GE in the United States and that placing backup power on the seawall side was an obvious design error amounting to product liability—yet this is rarely mentioned in Japan. While Japan panics over extending reactor life beyond 40 years, the U.S. has long allowed 60 years and is now moving to 80. The discussion also challenges the dogma that nuclear power is “unnatural” or uniquely dangerous, citing natural reactors like Gabon’s Oklo deposit and explaining how Hermann J. Muller’s fruit fly experiments and the LNT model were politicized to magnify fear of radiation. Asahi Shimbun and others, they argue, selectively publish only frightening information with no realistic alternative, a tactic likened to that of fraudsters.

June 22, 2024.

Below is from the dialogue book published on October 30, 2016, titled “Japan, America, Germany — Which Country Will Still Be Alive Ten Years from Now?”.
It is something that every Japanese person, and indeed people all over the world, must read.

From page 112, “The Future of Japan’s Economy Is Bright, But…”

Japan’s nuclear reporting is full of lies

Takayama
The reporting on TEPCO’s Fukushima nuclear accident was strange as well.
The media do not even mention that the reactors were made by the American company GE (General Electric).
It was the tsunami that caused the meltdown, but when we investigated the cause, we found that the backup power supply had been placed on the ocean side.
To go so far as to shave down a tall hill and then place the backup power in front by the sea is an obvious design error.
It is a matter of product liability.
In other words, it is the responsibility of America’s GE.
Moreover, earlier I said “forty years,” but in America the permitted operating life of a nuclear plant is already eighty years.
Japan is making a huge fuss about having allowed operation beyond forty years, but in the United States sixty years has long been accepted, and now they have extended it to eighty.
Stories like this are not reported at all in Japan.

Kawaguchi
It really is strange.

Takayama
From the starting point, the nuclear power debate in Japan is wrong.
They use the argument that “nuclear power generation is not natural energy, therefore it is bad,” but even in the natural environment—Gabon’s Oklo mine in Africa is well known—“natural nuclear reactors” have existed.
Until about two billion years ago, the radioisotope uranium-235 made up more than three percent.
Now, through natural decay, it has fallen to 0.7 percent, and Oklo contains only 0.2 percent, the same as spent fuel.
Scholars from Japan and other countries gathered and investigated, and they found fission products, confirming that this was a natural reactor.
For hundreds of thousands of years, it produced 100,000 kilowatts of energy.
In other words, nuclear power is also a form of natural energy.
Another strange argument is that nuclear power is “dangerous” because it was first used by America in the atomic bomb.

Kawaguchi
Recently, research results by doctors from Fukushima were published.
They found no difference in the incidence of thyroid cancer in children between Fukushima and other regions.
You cannot lump human beings together with fruit flies.

Takayama
The basis for the claim that “nuclear power is dangerous” is Herman J. Muller’s fruit fly experiments in America.
Cells actually have aspects that are activated thanks to radiation, and even if malformed cells are generated, there is a system called “apoptosis” in which the cells themselves recognize the damage and commit suicide.
However, the genetic cells of the fruit fly are primitive biological cells that do not have an apoptosis system, so they are born malformed and those mutations are inherited.
Muller received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1946, the year after the atomic bombings, for this research.
Muller was an American communist and a member of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project.
By awarding him the Nobel Prize and spreading the idea that “anything above one millisievert is dangerous” around the world, America emphasized the terror of the atomic bomb.
It was a strategic piece of propaganda: “If you defy America, we will drop this on your country, and then your descendants will be born malformed for generations.”
Now it is the newspapers that are making a big fuss with that same threat line.

Kawaguchi
The tendency to favor fearmongering articles is very similar in Germany.

Takayama
The Asahi Shimbun is terrible as well.
They oppose nuclear power generation all the time and merely write things like “We want to promote a shift to natural energy,” but they provide no alternative anywhere.
If they have no alternative, they should say they have none.
They pick and choose the information that ought to be reported, release only the bad information, and whip up fear with the line “nuclear is scary.”
It is the technique of a con artist.

This chapter will be continued.