Sensational reporting on Japan’s first nuclear-powered ship “Mutsu” turned a minor technical issue into a national crisis.
Decades later, similar exaggerations persist, revealing a failure of journalists to learn basic scientific facts.

Ignorant reporting turned minor technical issues into national crises.
From the nuclear ship Mutsu to later exposure incidents, exaggeration replaced science.
Japan’s progress was delayed not by technology, but by media hysteria.

2017-07-06

Soon after the end of the 1970 Security Treaty protests, Japan’s nuclear-powered ship Mutsu was launched.
Ishikawajima-Harima built the hull, while Mitsubishi supplied the pressurized light-water reactor generating 36,000 kilowatts.
As Japan’s first domestically produced nuclear ship, it stood alongside America’s Savannah and Germany’s Otto Hahn, and the Japanese people were proud.
However, soon after the test voyage began, neutron leakage was detected from gaps in the shielding of the containment vessel.
Controlling free-roaming neutrons was something Japan, still new to the field, had not yet fully mastered.
The leakage was minor, and could be addressed by covering the area with neutron-shielding material.
Boric acid, effective alongside water, was chosen.
Rice was cooked with boric acid, turned into a paste, and applied to the gap.
It may have seemed like a grandmother’s trick, but it stopped the leakage.
The next step should have been to return to port, improve the shielding, and proceed toward full operation.
Instead, foolish newspapers made a great fuss, shouting “radiation leakage,”
and repeatedly emphasized the ship’s supposed shoddiness by mocking the use of “rice grains to plug the hole.”
The Asahi Shimbun incited residents of Mutsu City, claiming that farmed scallops would be contaminated.
As a result, Mutsu drifted without purpose for sixteen years.
There was only one cause.
The reporters did not understand what boric acid was.
Have the journalists who obstructed Japan’s scientific progress learned anything since then?
It does not seem so.
Recently, there was a plutonium exposure incident at the Oarai research facility.
Once again, the newspapers panicked.
“The workers were exposed to more than ten times the danger zone of the Hiroshima atomic bomb,”
and “plutonium inhaled into the lungs cannot be removed,”
claims repeated by the Asahi Shimbun.
For days, they portrayed the workers as if they were on the verge of death, inflaming nuclear hysteria.
Eventually, when it became clear that most of it was false, the coverage quietly disappeared.
This is what is called a deliberate commotion.
One can only hope they will learn something.