Fukushima: A Monument to the Future of Nuclear Power

Fukushima: A Monument to the Future of Nuclear Power
Author: Sit Tsui
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-08-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9789819733439

The book is a collection of essays written by scholars/activists who are continuously concerned about the Fukushima catastrophe. The authors engagingly address the devastating environmental, economic, and social consequences of nuclear disasters, as well as recognize resistance of local communities through searching for alternative life and thought. The book offers a critique of nuclear energy and calls for collective action for social justice and ecological justice.

Don't Follow the Wind

Don't Follow the Wind
Author: Nikolaus Hirsch
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-08-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3956795687

Documenting an invisible, inaccessible exhibition within the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone. The twelfth volume of the Critical Spatial Practices series focuses on “Don’t Follow the Wind,” the acclaimed collaborative project situated in Fukushima’s radioactive exclusion zone. The book explores the long-term environmental crisis in the coastal Japanese region through this ongoing, inaccessible exhibition, which maintains traces of human presence amid the fallout of the March 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown that displaced entire towns. What can art do in a continuing catastrophe when destruction and contamination have made living impossible? The exhibition is located inside the exclusion zone, an evacuated radioactive area established after the nuclear disaster that forcibly separated residents from their homes, land, and community. In cooperation with former residents, participating artists installed newly commissioned works at sites in the exclusion zone. Although the exhibition opened in March 2015, the zone is still inaccessible to the public—the exhibition, like the radiation, is virtually invisible. The exhibition can only be viewed when restrictions are lifted and people are permitted to return. This might take several years or decades—a period that could extend beyond our lifetime. While nuclear contamination has displaced and ruptured communities, new temporary and translocal formations have emerged among the residents who have lent their sites, other former residents collaborating on the project, and the artists, curators, and cultural workers. This book includes new texts by feminist theorist Silvia Federici, art historians Noi Sawaragi and Sven Lütticken, and political philosopher Jodi Dean. The project was codeveloped and curated by the collective Don’t Follow the Wind, whose members include Chim↑Pom, Kenji Kubota, Eva & Franco Mattes, and Jason Waite. The participating artists include Ai Weiwei, Chim↑Pom, Nikolaus Hirsch & Jorge Otero-Pailos, Meiro Koizumi, Eva & Franco Mattes, Grand Guignol Mirai, Aiko Miyanaga, Ahmet Öğüt, Trevor Paglen, Taryn Simon, Nobuaki Takekawa, and Kota Takeuchi.

The Afterlives of Monuments

The Afterlives of Monuments
Author: Deborah Cherry
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2015-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317704517

South Asia is famous for its monuments, past and present. Monuments have been created, destroyed and rescued by competing communities and incoming empires in the making and re-making of history, identity and memory. This collection brings together an international cohort of senior scholars and younger researchers to examine the vast diversity of monuments (and conceptions of monuments) in South Asia from the 1850s to the present. The chapters investigate what constitutes a monument, and interrogate the conditions for its survival, demise or recycling. To explore the afterlives of monuments is to investigate how, where, when, and why monuments have been remodelled, re-sited, destroyed, defaced, or abandoned. It is to investigate the theories of memory, history and community, as well as new forms of artistic practice and global media. As different South-Asian communities claim a stake in the making of national, religious, cultural and local identities and histories, the status of monuments and debates about cultural memory have become increasingly urgent. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian Studies.

What really happened in Fukushima

What really happened in Fukushima
Author: Michael Wenkart
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2014-04-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 373579341X

We all remember the disaster in Fukushima. The questions are: What happened really there? and What did we learn from it? Nuclear power has long been touted as the energy saviour in terms of environmental impact and capacity generation. The incident at Chernobyl nearly 30 years ago cast huge doubts over the safety – and wisdom – of relying on nuclear power too heavily. The recent Fukushima disaster raised the spectre of nuclear safety and the possibly horrendous fallout and consequences from a major nuclear accident for the world to consider and worry about all over again.

Ten Crises

Ten Crises
Author: Tiejun Wen
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2021
Genre: China
ISBN: 981160455X

This open access handbook, Ten Crises systematically traces the economic history of China from 1949 to 2020, unravelling the complex domestic and global factors leading to the cyclical crises identified by WEN and his research team, and examining the corresponding counteracting policies and measures by the government to resolve or defer the crises. The book offers profound insights into China's endeavours and predicaments on the path of modernization, and contemplates opportunities and lessons for the forging of alternative trajectories not only for China but also for the global south: to reconstruct rural communities for integrated cooperation and governance, and to revitalize ecological civilization.

The Palgrave Handbook of Managing Fossil Fuels and Energy Transitions

The Palgrave Handbook of Managing Fossil Fuels and Energy Transitions
Author: Geoffrey Wood
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 671
Release: 2019-11-12
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3030280764

This Handbook is the first volume to comprehensively analyse and problem-solve how to manage the decline of fossil fuels as the world tackles climate change and shifts towards a low-carbon energy transition. The overall findings are straight-forward and unsurprising: although fossil fuels have powered the industrialisation of many nations and improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people, another century dominated by fossil fuels would be disastrous. Fossil fuels and associated greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced to a level that avoids rising temperatures and rising risks in support of a just and sustainable energy transition. Divided into four sections and 25 contributions from global leading experts, the chapters span a wide range of energy technologies and sources including fossil fuels, carbon mitigation options, renewables, low carbon energy, energy storage, electric vehicles and energy sectors (electricity, heat and transport). They cover varied legal jurisdictions and multiple governance approaches encompassing multi- and inter-disciplinary technological, environmental, social, economic, political, legal and policy perspectives with timely case studies from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America and the Pacific. Providing an insightful contribution to the literature and a much-needed synthesis of the field as a whole, this book will have great appeal to decision makers, practitioners, students and scholars in the field of energy transition studies seeking a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and challenges in managing the decline of fossil fuels.

Fukushima

Fukushima
Author: David Lochbaum
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2015-02-10
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1620971186

“A gripping, suspenseful page-turner” (Kirkus Reviews) with a “fast-paced, detailed narrative that moves like a thriller” (International Business Times), Fukushima teams two leading experts from the Union of Concerned Scientists, David Lochbaum and Edwin Lyman, with award-winning journalist Susan Q. Stranahan to give us the first definitive account of the 2011 disaster that led to the worst nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl. Four years have passed since the day the world watched in horror as an earthquake large enough to shift the Earth's axis by several inches sent a massive tsunami toward the Japanese coast and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing the reactors' safety systems to fail and explosions to reduce concrete and steel buildings to rubble. Even as the consequences of the 2011 disaster continue to exact their terrible price on the people of Japan and on the world, Fukushima addresses the grim questions at the heart of the nuclear debate: could a similar catastrophe happen again, and—most important of all—how can such a crisis be averted?

Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters

Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters
Author: Serhii Plokhy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1324021055

A chilling account of more than half a century of nuclear catastrophes, by the author of the “definitive” (Economist) Cold War history, Nuclear Folly. Almost 145,000 Americans fled their homes in and around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in late March 1979, hoping to save themselves from an invisible enemy: radiation. The reactor at the nearby Three Mile Island nuclear power plant had gone into partial meltdown, and scientists feared an explosion that could spread radiation throughout the eastern United States. Thankfully, the explosion never took place—but the accident left deep scars in the American psyche, all but ending the nation’s love affair with nuclear power. In Atoms and Ashes, Serhii Plokhy recounts the dramatic history of Three Mile Island and five more accidents that that have dogged the nuclear industry in its military and civil incarnations: the disastrous fallout caused by the testing of the hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll in 1954; the Kyshtym nuclear disaster in the USSR, which polluted a good part of the Urals; the Windscale fire, the worst nuclear accident in the UK’s history; back to the USSR with Chernobyl, the result of a flawed reactor design leading to the exodus of 350,000 people; and, most recently, Fukushima in Japan, triggered by an earthquake and a tsunami, a disaster on a par with Chernobyl and whose clean-up will not take place in our lifetime. Through the stories of these six terrifying incidents, Plokhy explores the risks of nuclear power, both for military and peaceful purposes, while offering a vivid account of how individuals and governments make decisions under extraordinary circumstances. Today, there are 440 nuclear reactors operating throughout the world, with nuclear power providing 10 percent of global electricity. Yet as the world seeks to reduce carbon emissions to combat climate change, the question arises: Just how safe is nuclear energy?

Idaho Falls

Idaho Falls
Author: William McKeown
Publisher: ECW Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2003-04-01
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1554905435

The little-known true story of a mysterious nuclear reactor disaster—years before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or Fukushima. Before the Three Mile Island incident or the Chernobyl disaster, the world’s first nuclear reactor meltdown to claim lives happened on US soil. Chronicled here for the first time is the strange tale of SL-1, an experimental military reactor located in Idaho’s Lost River Desert that exploded on the night of January 3, 1961, killing the three crewmembers on duty. Through exclusive interviews with the victims’ families and friends, firsthand accounts from rescue workers and nuclear industry insiders, and extensive research into official documents, journalist William McKeown probes the many questions surrounding this devastating blast that have gone unanswered for decades. From reports of faulty design and mismanagement to incompetent personnel and even rumors of sabotage after a failed love affair, these plausible explanations raise startling new questions about whether the truth was deliberately suppressed to protect the nuclear energy industry.