A picture of the Rockfeller center (Wishdom and Knowledge Shall Be The Stability of Thy Times) the day a 5.8-magnitude earthquake strikes New York. Limited damage reported near the quake’s epicenter in Virginia, where a nearby nuclear power plant was taken offline. Apparently the situation is under control. Dominion Virginia Power said both reactors at North Anna plant, less than 20 miles from the epicenter, shut down after the first tremors. Amanda Reidelbach, an emergency management spokeswoman for Louisa County, said the plant vented steam, but there was no release of radioactive material.
Vanishing from the mainstream headlines, the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima seems more and more eclipsed from our eyes. Out of sight, out of mind, so would the governments like it to be. If you visit The Japan Times website, you will see at least some information on the ongoing crisis. 'Radioactive beef already sold, eaten'. A few days ago, the headline 'Cesium found in Fukushima cattle feed' outlined in its article that 'the contaminated beef did not reach retailers, the officials said'.
Where are all these headlines in our newspapers?
Yesterday, TEPCO announced that it hopes to reduce the highly radioactive leaks by end of July and to cool the reactors by January 2012. And across the ocean, in America, two nuclear incidents are escalating with minimal press reporting. The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Facility in Omaha, due to be re-licensed until 2030, is being submerged by dangerous flooding, with its surrounding area now designated a 'No Fly Zone' since early June. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, a 93 square mile wild fire approached the Los Alamos' nuclear lab dump site, where an estimated 20,000 55-gallon drums of nuclear waste are being inadequately stored above ground. After burning an acre of lab property, crews are now preparing for flash-flooding in the area triggered by the fire. This would not be the first time that governments, particularly the U.S. Government, withhold data and violate free exchange of information 'for national security purposes'. Sites such as Fort Calhoun and Los Alamos, essentially produce enriched material for nuclear weapons and bombs, holding close ties to the military. In 1959, Boeing Rocketdyne nuclear testing facility released the third greatest amount of radioactive iodine in nuclear history. The incident went unreported for 40 years.
'It is a great error to believe that by making the political choice of its energetic turnaround, Germany is breaking with the European concept of modernity and turning towards an archaic age...What is irrational is not the exit from the nuclear power, but continuing to defend it after Fukushima...refusing to take our lessons from history's experience', says the German sociologist and philosopher Ulrich Beck in Le Monde. And moreover, who wants to trust our future with an industry that keeps its lips so tight?
The small bars at Ginza 4-chome's shut down (around one third of the restaurants have been closing because of the nuclear crisis), Tokyo. Photo Noritoshi Hirakawa
Presented at Berlin's KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Japanese artist Leiko Uemera proposes an exhibition to reflect on the nuclear cataclysms of the past and present. In turn, works by Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Boris Mikahilov, Wim Wenders, Yutaka Takanashi and others, explore the conflicts of the nuclear age. Film director Win Wenders' photograph of the Holy Ganjin statue in a temple of the city of Nara, unexhibited to the public, is lit from beneath. As a portrait of a great spiritual leader, Wenders' rendition appears like that of a burnt victim. Today, Leiko Shiga, coming from a small village of 400 people where many lost their homes and took refuge in shelters, presents a photographic diary reportage after the earthquake in Japan. Works from past decades predate today's Fukushima nuclear disaster - or the paradox of a nation once ruined by atomic power adopting it again as source of energy. Product of so-called progress, civilization, points out Uemera. Tomatsu's photograph of a melting watch, damaged by the blast and forever stopped at 11.02am on August 9, 1945, reminds of Japan's wounded past with the war's culmination of nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fifty years later, the artists' sense of disaster and warning seem deja vu: the same conflicts between nature, man, progress and economy. The perspectives change but these works can still be looked to for political discussion. With the media's reporting over Fukushima now largely silenced, the problems continue - and what can we turn to then? Photo Yutaka Takanashi and text Sophie Pinchetti
Dated from June 15, this video has been removed by Youtube and other channels over fifty
times. Alex, a French expat who has been living in Japan through the events, gives the real coverage from Japanese newspapers of the escalating nuclear disaster at Fukushima - or how we can no longer trust the international media coverage and how serious the situation is in Fukushima, with children now required to wear a radioactivity dosimeter to school. Many schools in Fukushima Prefecture have already acted on their own
and banned students from using their school grounds over fears of
radiation exposure.
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