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historical earthquake in Japan and radiation hazard

Vista Fukushima nuclear plant from Google Earth, March 2011

On Friday last November there was a massive earthquake in Sendai, Japan. The images of the disaster were, as long as there is major disasters, devastating. However, since the same Friday, the world began to see with concern the outcome of this great tragedy, especially since the nuclear plant in Fukushima, about 100 kilometers from Sendai, an explosion occurred in one of its reactors, which has followed an escalating emergency situation.

While on Monday it seemed possible that the situation was controlled, it is clear Wednesday Fukushima plant that has become a major disaster in Chernobyl in 1986.

These notes are more of an effort to sort my mind and allow me to accept, if not better understand what is happening in Japan. The three major nuclear disasters news than I have been at Three Mile Island in 1979 in the United States, the one at Chernobyl in 1986 and now east of Fukushima. To my knowledge, in all three cases the problem has been an excessive increase in temperature in the reactor at Three Mile Island by a fault that was never explained in Chernobyl a nuclear emergency drill during which and plant operators down to a minimum power and plant defenses (Petryna 2002), and now in Fukushima for damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami to the terms of the nuclear plant. In almost half a century has not been possible to remedy the source of these nuclear disaster, which continue as the root problems of cooling infrastructure.

disaster Anthropology (Garcia Acosta coord. 1996, Olivers-Smith and Hoffman eds. 1999) teaches us at least three things:

disaster
1. That tends to be analyzed by those who could be held liable as a strange fact isolated in society and history, but in reality there is continuity between the conditions in which there are and how to deal with them;
2. disasters from happening almost always knew where that could happen. I was surprised that there had been signs that something terrible might happen to the reactors, but at this time the authorities of Japan and the companies operating plants vehemently deny that they had encountered problems earlier. In fact, the fact that the cooling remains a problem to us speaks to the continuity and long-term disasters (García Acosta 2004) and
3. That pre-existing social relationships and the resulting disaster the latter do very difficult for radical transformation of social patterns, technology, culture and behavior, so that each disaster usually results in little preparation for possible replication.

I recently saw a series of photographs of Chernobyl, by David Schindler ( http://totallycoolpix.com/2011/01/chernobyl-25-years-later/ ), and I was struck by the manner in which they resemble the landscapes and structures in 'The Zone 'in the film Stalker (Mosfilm 1979), the great director Andrei Tarkovsky. It's like Tarkovsky and his team had traveled to the future the Chernobyl today, to create that movie. Strangely, in Ukraine people call 'The Zone' to the affected area. Will citing Tarkovsky?

For Chernobyl (Petryna 2002) has developed, after the nuclear disaster, a way of life that Petryna considered a form of 'biological citizenship', directly linked to claims of impairment of health, such and so the residents of 'The Zone' in Ukraine using their own poor health condition to survive, either through grants to households 'affected' or through networks of relationships that allow those who live there survive conditions of great health and psychological problems. The Ukrainian State, meanwhile, has managed to be seen as the benefactor and the people of Chernobyl, despite the economic and infrastructure assistance to the area is limited, and that people have had to give up idea of \u200b\u200bnormal health as in order to survive.

This alerts us to another common feature of the disaster, many people try and sometimes fail to use the disaster as a way to earn prestige in politics and / or obtain money profiting from the international aid itself. Several sites have appeared on the Internet to cheat online money donors, and stay some of the money that people are donating to the relief and rescue efforts for victims of the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear tragedy that is unfolding. This phenomenon does not seem to stop phishing even before the immense pain and hardship that these disasters have caused.

Japan has been characterized by a high level of preparedness against potential natural disasters, beginning with earthquakes and tsunamis. The anti-tsunami barrier separating the city of Sendai coast shows this aspect of Japanese culture. It certainly seems strange that so many reactors are having problems right now, even those that have been completely turned off. It is assumed that when the reactors shut down to almost zero in danger.

The main enemy of Japan and indeed all of us at this point seems to be the air: aerial currents are natural (and perhaps the sea) that will determine the impact that this major disaster in Japan will have , in the near future, about our biological citizenship, and also on our level of concern about our common future in this world that can not only conceptualize only as 'global', but as a biological, ecological and radio-interconnected.

References

García Acosta, Virginia, coord. (1996) History and Disasters in Latin America . Mexico City: CIESAS / Bogotá: La Red

García Acosta, Virginia (2004) "The historical perspective in anthropology and disaster risk." Relations 25 (97) :124-142.

Oliver-Smith, Anthony and Susan M. Hoffman, eds. (1999) The Angry Earth. Disaster in Anthropological Perspective . New York: Routledge.

Petryna, Adriana (2002) Life Exposed. Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton University Press.