PUBLIC MARKS with tag nuclear

People here are working very hard to stay cheerful and live a normal life, or rather to adapt to the new reality. And they're fighting back.

At the Mediatheque, and throughout the city, a policy developed to conserve electricity–rolling blackouts threatened the Tohoku region while the damaged Fukushima power plant conducted extensive safety tests. Indoor spaces remained dark and warm through the summer.

The film is set in post-nuclear Tokyo in a dimension not so distant from ours. Young salary-man's morning commute takes a surreal turn

An anonymous worker at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant has written dozens of blog posts describing the ups and downs of his experience as one of the lead robot operators at the crippled facility.

Borrowing some data from the source below this could be 2.1 mSv for the year to 11 March 2012. Well, the same as the UK average but well above the Japanese recommended  limit.

Safecast Map: This depicts over 500,000 radiation data points collected by the Safecast team throughout Japan.

"Jumpers" is the industry term for people who enter highly radioactive environments to quickly perform a task. The practice was common in the United States in the 1970s and early 80s.

Yet, you may still think we still need those nuclear power plants, that without them we would have an electricity shortage. It is especially those who live in cities, distanced from these plants, who might still view them as a necessary evil.

Tepco said it plans to build and start operating a full-scale circulation cooling system within three years.

“However, this time it was not a bomb being dropped upon us, but a mistake committed by our very own hands.”

However, the moment that invisible boundary is crossed, the scenery changes drastically.

From May 4th 2011 I set out on a 5 day bicycle tour which took me across the 40km diameter Fukushima exclusion zone. My plan was to document the story of the thousands of abandoned pets and livestock, but after meeting a man who has remained in the exclusion zone sine the disaster on 3/11, the project became about him.

One innovation the CBIRFs shared with their Japanese counterparts is the use of colored helmets to help distinguish various roles in a “hot zone” contaminated with radiation. White helmets designate supervisors, red helmets are used to signify search-and-rescue teams, yellow are for decontaminators, and green for identification and detection specialists. Blue helmets are used for medical personnel.

The rescuers are now in a bind. Even if they retrieve the bodies, anyone who comes into contact with them risks being irradiated, too, whether they're in the evacuation zone or not.

And if the bodies are cremated, the smoke could spread radioactive materials as well, the sources said. Even burial poses a problem. When the bodies decompose, they might contaminate the soil with radioactive materials.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki, 15.07.1995