Nancy Foust comments

Aladdin's comment is both totally off base and rather immature thinking. Not everyone in that region wanted the nuclear reactors and only those in the host town benefited. People's homes, lives and possibly their health were ruined if they wanted the plants or fought them tooth and nail. Radiation doesn't select who it exposes.

If you had everything taken away from you by a greedy company and complicit government you would want compensation too. It isn't a handout, it is the basis for a lawsuit. If the government put as much effort into helping people that they did into trying to deny the scope of the disaster everyone would be better off. Well everyone except the nuclear utilities.

In the US much of the hype about this book was manufactured by the media. I wonder how much they were paid to have features about how this book was sweeping the country. i know nobody in the US who has read it or even has any interest in it. There are copies of it everywhere in the US ,including the grocery store collecting dust so I really think this may have been more of a good marketing hype than an actual trend or popular book in the US. I am sure some people saw the hype on TV that everyone is reading it and went right out to buy a copy.

Tell these Japanese workers about "right to work" states in the US. Right to work = fire you with no notice without needing a reason whenever they feel like it.

Lowly, it already happened in the US at least on a local level. The massive crackdown on any level of intoxicated driving along with a refusal to improve public transit has killed nightlife in many less urban places. It isn't just drinking, being out driving after dark will get you randomly harassed by the police many places. Things like road checkpoints where you find yourself stuck for an hour or so unable to leave and forced to submit to police interrogation happen far too often in some states. You don't have to be guilty of anything to find yourself harassed simply for daring to leave home on a Saturday night.

I had two different reporters from Japanese media companies ask me my age. I was a bit confused since that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the interview.

The actual videos are on the Mother Jones website. They broke the story.

47% of the US doesn't pay taxes? Wrong. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3505

Not only in Romney's pile of drivel really offensive it is very incorrect.

Open it up so other businesses can do what TEPCO is unable or unwilling to do.

Delist TEPCO as a publicly traded company, jail the execs, sell off the assets to pay for the plant decommissioning and victim compensation. Why this has not already happened says loads about the current state of Japan's govt.

BTW, if anyone thinks the GOP isn't running on a platform of oppressing women and taking away their rights they clearly have not been paying attention to what is going on in the US.

This is purely manufactured US political theater. Not real life in the US.

So reading random English language Japan newspapers, people in Japan are not getting their freak on. But they are peeking up skirts and other inappropriate behavior enough that it makes the papers.

There is a serious logical disconnect. Anyone care to explain?

Error or not the US nuclear industry has been running this as proof nothing is wrong at all in Fukushima. :( You can't have 8-10 million bq/hour AND .1 bq/hour at one plant. Unless TEPCO has invented the miracle radiation sucking machine..

TEPCO admitted unit 2 is spewing 8 million bq/hour on July 24th. Did they suddenly solve all the problems at the plant? That number seems impossible, to only have .1 bq/hour leaving the plant now.

An entire news article of IAEA quotes that tell the public absolutely zero. Of course everything is "new and improved". The IAEA is the main nuclear industry cheerleader and business development agency. They need to have their mandate rewritten to only deal with proliferation and safety issues and be specifically forbidden to promote nuclear power.

This is a religious thing with these suits. There are plenty of more normal-ish swimsuits available pretty much anywhere in the US if people want something less skimpy because they are fat or old. Walmart sells them big enough to stuff an entire day care full of children into one suit.

Since this most recent shooting I have heard more people in the US screaming about their right to own a gun than people mourning the senseless deaths in Colorado.

The ones who get horribly upset and paranoid that someone is going to come busting into their home to take their guns away are usually the last people I want walking the streets armed. There is a good deal of cross over between rabid gun obsession and ultra right wing politics and ultra fundamentalist Christianity in the US. Not exactly who I want being heavily armed considering their judgment on other matters.

If Romney wins things in the US are going to go even further down the toilet. That cheap land in Hokkaido is sounding pretty good if that happens. Anyone in Japan need a top notch IT hardware guy and an internet researcher?

The point was supposed to be that they are not a detrimental group since of course the GoJ is flogging them for pointing out their bad lawmaking and weak internet security.

Anonymous also released part of a huge data dump they gathered from a Phillipines data company that included a large amount of non-classified but not public documents from Japan & US nuclear agencies and the IAEA. They are actually doing something to try to help people fight the corruption in govt. Whomever thought their purpose was to download music files is rather clueless. They have gone after corrupt governments and corrupt corporations while everyone else maybe whined in online posts and did nothing. One of the released letters has Japan's nuclear lobby group admitting that there is no energy shortage, nukes are not needed. The missing nukes can be compensated for with existing power capacity and that renewables could easily come on line and make up for the nukes making the nukes totally pointless. The nuke industry in Japan is on record admitting all of this is BS..the restarts, the blackouts the whole thing.

Most of what was printed about this guy in the foreign press was that he was anti-nuclear. Nothing was mentioned about him being a right wing lunatic. What initially sounded like someone growing some spine against the nuclear establishment was quite the booby-prize.

His abrupt turn on nuclear restarts makes me wonder what Noda et al have on him.

"The current alternative has proven to be more deadly... fossil fuels"

Spoken like someone without a clue. Germany is showing it can be done, their alternative energy sector is growing like crazy. Alternatives can and do work. There are some very entrenched interests involved in keeping nuclear power and the status quo of huge power companies in place. Just look at who is/was TEPCO's top 10 investors before the govt. got a cut of the action. The big banks.

I hope the next step is for people to boycott. Boycott the big banks that are big shareholders in nuclear power. Cut your power consumption in protest. Consider solar panels an act of rebellion. Don't spend money with any subsidiary of TEPCO or the other nuke companies.

/This message brought to you via wind and hydro power. They produce the large majority of the power where I live in the US.

Organizers estimate 200,000. After looking at photos from IWJ and every media outlet I could find. I think they are probably right. The crowd snaked down two separate streets and a number of side streets.

I don't think people are going to just go home and give up. Not now.

The people who will be prosecuted are those downloading or watching on YouTube videos the government or certain big corporations find inconvenient. For months videos of the exploding reactors were being taken down of US Youtube for "copyright violation"

A random music video won't get someone arrested. The downloading or viewing of some unfortunate outing of a politician's bad behavior or corporate malfeasance will. Or this will be used as a fall back prosecution when nothing else will stick.

As for NHK's claim that the law doesn't leave people open for prosecution by things like viewing youtube, they provided no specific language in the law to prove that claim.

Has Japan done anything to cut down on night time vanity lighting? That was one thing that was frowned upon during the 1970's in the US and again when the US briefly wanted to conserve power in the late 1990's. Tell office buildings to not leave office lights on at night to light up a high rise. Don't run tons of outdoor vanity lighting or only run it during the peak hours people are out at night.

Now we know who really runs Japan. Public utilities should never be given to private companies to run.

This is about power company profits and nothing more. Without their nukes running they are losing money. Those things become cost centers rather than profit generators. They then have to generate power from other sources and buy more gas or coal for those power plants that need it. They still have to maintain and manage their nukes even when they just sit there. It was cited recently that the only way TEPCO could pull itself out of the financial mess is to restart the units at Kashiwazaki. But nobody asks the question, does it even matter if TEPCO recovers or not. Maybe they are better off just failing as a business.

People are being asked to accept a horrible risk so some companies can turn more of a profit. That is all this is.

Nordstrom in the US has been doing something like this for years.

Could someone please explain why cleavage is such a problem in Japan?

The Fukushima accident has caused job loss, businesses to fail or be wiped out and how much is it going to cost the public in the end? They are feeding TEPCO cash on a massive scale. The govt. is more worried about profits for corporate banks and the nuclear industry like Hitachi etc. Everyone looks at the power generators like KEPCO as the problem when it is likely the companies that supply the technology are more to blame for the business as usual push to restart and ignore reality.

This is being driven by business interests who see keeping the nuclear industry going and an over abundance of electricity as far more important than public safety or the environment. They are also ignoring the very high risk of another disaster like Fukushima. Disasters ruin businesses too but they fail to think that far. In short, they are greedy and insane and need to be run out of office.