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A man who landed a small drone carrying slightly radioactive sand onto the roof of the Japanese Prime Minister's office in Tokyo has turned himself in to authorities:
Yasuo Yamamoto, 40, was protesting over the Japanese government's nuclear energy policy. He turned himself in late on Friday, police said. No-one was hurt. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was out of the country.
The drone landing triggered a security alert and raised fears of extremists using drones to carry out attacks. The small amount of sand in the drone - which was equipped with a small camera - carried traces of radiation. Police said the radioactive material was likely to be caesium but the levels were too low to be harmful to human health.
Yasuo Yamamoto said that he was protesting the restart of nuclear reactors across Japan. Prime Minister Abe is backing the restart of Japan's nuclear reactors, which have been offline since the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in 2011.
Yamamoto claimed that the sand came from Fukushima Prefecture (福島県), and was carrying some of the sand and a drone controller when he surrendered himself to police. He faces a maximum of three years in prison if convicted of "obstruction of official business". The drone is said to be a DJI Phantom 2.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2015, @12:39AM
Plausible analysis from a poster on ars technica: [arstechnica.com]
I realize your question is rhetorical, and I do not intend to be snarky with this response, but he's basically proposing the use of non-nuclear energy. I only say this because I've been following the case on a daily basis, and the comments from this guy that have been officially released to the press until now suggest that his opposition to nuclear is not mainly motivated by human health concerns, but mostly by a spiral of political deceit associated with the institutions that handle nuclear power in Japan. At least, nothing so far seems to suggest that he was strongly opposed to nuclear power before the 2011 earthquake.
I've noticed from previous threads on the topic of nuclear energy that a significant portion of Ars commenters are in favor of nuclear energy. I don't want to open yet again that can of worms; but I feel there is some value in clarifying how people are experiencing the situation here in Japan, where I am living.
As of now, approximately 20000 people are dislocated from their homes in the Iwate and Fukushima prefectures; a part of them because their homes were destroyed by the tsunami, but for the majority, they either lived in the 30km radius of the power plant that was declared uninhabitable by the government, or lived in a 40 to 50km radius from the plant, in areas that were not declared as risky by the government, but in which nevertheless worrying amounts of radiation were detected by independent groups. Faced with doubt, many families preferred to flee rather than try their luck. Or to be more specific, in many cases wives and children fled to other prefectures, while the fathers stayed to continue working. The long distances and arguments between couples have caused the number of divorces to skyrocket.
But the majority of dislocated people are middle-aged or elderly people. Many of them feel lonely and depressed as they will probably die before they can return to their lands, and are separated from their former neighbors and community. Tepco envisioned a scenario of 30 years to decontaminate the area, but as of now, they are already 1 to 2 years behind schedule, and they themselves admitted to the press that there are no guarantees that this 30-year deadline can be met.
Dislocated people face another difficulty, which is that even if it is possible to sell their lands, no one would want to buy them due to real or suspected contamination. Many people who used their land for farming, cattle raising, fishing and other industries are facing severe money problems, because the government subsidy is barely enough to support them, and they have no other means to obtain income to restart their businesses elsewhere, or even buy a new house. Furthermore, the abandoned areas have seen an epidemic surge of huge wild rats, cows, and warthog-like animals (cannot remember the exact species name now), who have fed on the food from the abandoned homes and factories, and are causing problems for the local authorities. To add insult to injury, the government has begun to re-open a few villages for habitation, after claiming that they had been decontaminated, and placed public radiation meters to prove the fact. But almost immediately news stations proved that all you had to do was walk 50 to 100 meters away from the meters, and radiation levels would rise considerably. Many people have refused to return under these conditions, but the government's reopening of the areas means they can now decrease their monthly compensations to those people, or even terminate them. This has led to considerable resentment.
There's also been rampant scandals in the way that the recovery works at Fukushima are taking place. On several occasions, many tons of contaminated water have leaked to the sea, and rainwater that accumulates on the roof of the plants partly becomes contaminated as well, and turns into steam, leading to occasional radiation spikes in the prefectures around the plant, depending on wind direction. In almost all of these cases Tepco denied that there was any problem, only to later being forced to admit that indeed there was a problem. Lack of transparency in the sharing of information is also a constant problem. There are also reports by an investigative reporter, claiming that Tepco allied with criminal organizations in order to obtain extra people to come work at Fukushima by force, that is, mainly people who owed money to the Yakuza, without relatives who could care in case they died.
Some people in the western media have claimed that not a single person died because of radiation. That might very well be true, but there will never be any way to prove or disprove that, because cancer (as counted in its various forms) has been for many years the main cause of death among Japanese people. Proving that there is any correlation between the Fukushima incident and human deaths or diseases outside the 30km zone is likely an impossible task. Last year, a couple of kids were found to have thyroid cancer, but there really is no way to unequivocally prove that these were caused by the leak. Still, in terms of public opinion, it certainly hasn't helped the nuclear cause at all.
Last week, a children's park in Ikebukuro, which is close to the center of Tokyo, was found to have radiation levels far above normal (although still safe for humans), and is now closed for further investigation. Stories of several incidents that occurred in nuclear plants across Japan have sprung up to surface, a small number of which caused human deaths (apparently not because of radiation, but I'm not aware of the details). These have led to increased resistance among the communities towards allowing the nuclear facilities to reopen.
There are debates on tv almost every week about what to do with the nuclear plants and nuclear energy altogether. The Tv is also regularly introducing people who are in a state of ruin or distress because they
cannot do anything with their lands within the 30km zone, many of whom will die of natural aging before the area is decontaminated. Even if someone says that energy consumption is expected to increase, especially among developing nations, others quickly counteract that there's too much money involved in nuclear energy to ever expect that developing nations could handle it properly. They resort to examples in countries like China, where most construction companies do not carry out what is planned in the original architectural and engineering designs, in order to put more money in their own pockets, which has already led to several thousand deaths in recent floods and earthquakes. Some also mention the terrible response by the government of the Phillipines to the typhoon that took place a few years ago, claiming that things would have been even worse in the case of a nuclear disaster. Many other people in these debates are just exasperated, unhappy with the whole situation, but not knowing what direction to choose.
And now I know, coal kills a lot of people, which is what Japan is using right now. I understand this is hard for many people to accept, but my impression from living here is that people are more concerned with the long-term economic damage and corruption schemes caused by nuclear power than the loss of lives.
This long post is not intended to convince you to change your stance regarding nuclear energy; it's only to explain the context behind this man's actions, that there is a constant exposure to the problem here, even though it's been 4 years, and why a growing number of people have become resentful of nuclear, even though the main causes of this resentment are not directly related with nuclear energy itself.