http://links.visibli.com/links/d1066b
“This government is useless,” Masako Kitajima, a Tokyo office worker in her 50s, said as radiation levels ticked up in the city of around 12 million people, more than 200 km south of the nuclear plant where officials battled to avert disaster.
Tokyo resident Masashi Yoshida, 53, agreed.
When asked for his assessment of the government’s performance, he replied: “It’s been awful.”
“They’ve been giving information far too late. They should have consulted with other countries and experts. They tried too hard to do it all themselves. I think they panicked themselves, and couldn’t think straight. Japan would be better off if we went without politicians for 10 years.”
Even the local mayor of a town close to the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex complained that the government had failed to keep his office updated on the situation.
true or not true..I don’t know:
The pools “contain very large concentrations of radioactivity, can catch fire, and are in much more vulnerable buildings,” he warns. If the pools lose their inflow of circulating cooling water, the water in the pools will evaporate. If the level of water drops to five or six feet above the spent fuel, Alvarez calculates, the release of radioactivity “could be life-threatening near the reactor building.” Since the total amount of long-lived radioactivity in the pool is at least five times that in the reactor core, a catastrophic release would mean “all bets are off,” he says.
Of particular concern: cesium-137 in the pool, at levels Alvarez estimates at 20 million to 50 million curies. The 1986 Chernobyl accident released about 40 percent of the reactor core’s 6 million curies. In a 1997 report for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that a severe pool fire—made possible by the loss of cooling water—could leave about 188 square miles uninhabitable and cause up to 28,000 cancer deaths.
Hon, we all would be better off without politicians, period.