theSee the CNN story about the plutonium: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/28/3-types-of-plutonium-detected-at-japans-fukushima-daiichi-plant/
This is illustrated with photo of people carrying a large blue plastic tarp around the victims of last week's exposure, as they go into the hospital. The caption is: "Authorities hold a blue sheet over patients exposed to radiation at the Fukushima nuclear power plant last week." The police in Japan love to deploy gigantic sheets of blue plastic tarp to shield crime scenes from gawkers and reporters. In this photo, TEPCO is shielding the victims, ostensibly to preserve their privacy I think. Since the victims are still wearing protective clothing, no one can tell who they are. So I would say this is a cover-up in the literal and figurative sense. I have not seen interviews with the rank and file engineering staff at Fukushima. Since they are risking their lives to protect the nation this is odd. Japanese government and industry has a long history of covering things up. They have frenetically covering this up from day. I just watched an appalling interview with the IAEA General Director Amano. He happens to be Japanese, and he is skilled at the excuse, evasion, cover-up, change-the-subject tap dance routine we have come to expect from officials there. If they could, I expect TEPCO and the Japanese government would cover all six reactors with blue tarps to keep Google from publishing those pesky photos from space. As I mentioned, NHK often shows blurry videos of the reactors after the explosion, which are taken from a helicopter ~20 km away (maybe 30 km?), but as far as I know they have not shown the video of the actual explosion. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPbmPyMxu0Y) I think it highly unlikely that TEPCO does not have video taken closer to the reactor buildings. With 700 people battling the worst nuclear disaster in their history, in a nation chock full of video equipment, it is hard to believe they do not have several close range Internet-connected monitors focused on the buildings 24 hours a day. But they have not released any video, and only a handful of still photos. They seem to believe they can hide the largest conventional explosions in the history of nuclear energy. Another thing I would like to comment on -- okay, grouse about -- is the widespread notion that there has been no looting in this disaster, and there wasn't much after the Kobe earthquake. People contrast that to the widespread looting reported in the U.S. after Katrina. This is mainly nonsense, in my opinion. There was not all that much looting in New Orleans. The press exaggerated it. Mainly it was people getting things like groceries and diapers from stores that were destroyed and could not have sold these goods. The same thing is happening in Japan. As I mentioned last week and anyone can see, there is not much left to steal. There is a sharp line between the devastated areas where the tsunami reached, and the intact areas beyond that. People are still living in the intact areas. There is looting, although the press in Japan seems inclined to ignore it as much as our press exaggerates looting here. Yesterday on NHK the reporters and cameraman accompanied some police officers at the station and on patrol. The police chief tells them "watch out for looters." While on patrol the police use a megaphone to tell the people in the surroundings, "watch out for looters. Report any strangers or suspicious people to 911." (Actually the number is 110 in Japan). Finally -- and this is the key thing -- there will be an orgy of looting starting in a few months when the government lets contracts for reconstruction and rebuilding. Japan's large construction companies have raped, pillaged and looted the nation for 60 years leaving the landscape and the ecology in a shambles. The government will give contracts to well-connected companies who will then give kickbacks to corrupt politicians, corrupt retired officials in shell companies, and gangsters. In the U.S. we have not seen this kind of massive, in-your-face corruption since the construction of transcontinental railway in the 1860s, when the railroad companies handed out at least $20 million in bribes to members of Congress alone (more than $200 million today). The exact amounts of bribes and other financial shenanigans were covered up in a method that I think Japanese politicians would envy. It is better than blue tarp or having your mother give you tens of millions of dollars under the table, as ex-P.M. Hatoyama did. After the project was finished, Leland Stanford and the other railroad owners took their accounting books outside to an open area, built a large bonfire, and burned them. You might say there is no looting because the government, the construction companies and gangsters have already stolen everything not nailed down. I think in any society there is bound to be a certain level of dysfunctional behavior, be a crime, corruption, stupidity or incompetence. In one society, it is petty street crime and in another it is mainly government-sponsored, large-scale, white-collar crime. Theodore Roosevelt described it: "A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad." Japan has more of the latter, although lately on Wall Street and our banks are catching up. This is not to suggest that all nations have the same overall level of crime and other dysfunction. Third world nations are poor mainly because just about everything is stolen, and ordinary people are exploited to the limits of survival. - Jed
