It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Let’s talk Confirmation Bias
Why do some people hold fast to apocalyptic ideas, like Fukushima radiation, even when the best available evidence suggests that the world is not about to end? Confirmation bias is the term psychologists use to describe the behavior of testing an idea by searching for evidence that supports it. This tendency to confirm pre-existing beliefs creates and maintains false perceptions of reality because people fail to acknowledge information to the contrary, even when readily available.
The strongest type of confirmation bias arises from a motivation or a need to see the world as we want to see it. Here, confirmatory information is purposely sought out and any information challenging our preconceived notions is ignored, discounted, or dismissed.
Confirmation bias can play a role in the angry reactions to scientific evidence regarding the scope and effects of the Fukushima accident. Although evidence suggests that radiation emanating from Fukushima will not reach a catastrophic level on an ocean or global scale, many people remain convinced that the risks to human and ocean health are enormous.
A person with deep concerns about environmental impacts of radiation will likely seek out evidence to confirm the belief that the radiation from Fukushima has spread in high levels to the American West Coast and beyond, contaminating fisheries, and killing off species in the Pacific Ocean.
This person may unknowingly exhibit confirmation bias by focusing on information in the media consistent with these ideas and discounting information that would challenge them.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) handed Japan the final report from an expert mission that reviewed remediation efforts in areas affected by the Fukushima Daiichi accident.
The IAEA report, which is available online, describes the findings of the Follow-up IAEA International Mission on Remediation of Large Contaminated Areas Off-Site the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, held on 14 to 21 October 2013. The report highlights important progress in all areas to date, and offers advice on several points where the team feels it is still possible to further improve current practices.
Juan Carlos Lentijo, Director of the IAEA Division of Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology, led the 16-member mission team, which comprised international experts and IAEA staff working in a range of disciplines including radiation protection, remediation approaches and technologies, waste management and stakeholder involvement.
"The Mission Team was impressed by the amount of resources allocated and by the intense work that Japan is carrying out in efforts to remediate the affected areas and promote the return of evacuees to their homes, together with efforts for reconstruction of those areas," he said.
The team welcomed progress achieved following the first IAEA remediation mission in October 2011, including the remediation of farmland and forest areas. The team also welcomed significant progress by municipalities and the national government in the development and establishment of temporary storage facilities for contaminated materials generated by on-going remediation activities. In addition, the mission team noted the progress made towards the national Government's creation of interim storage facilities, with the cooperation of municipalities and local communities.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has told the Diet that technology for safely burying nuclear waste deep underground has been established, but doubts have been raised as to whether the technology is viable in quake-prone Japan. The head of the Science Council’s expert panel said it is difficult to predict what changes would occur in the structures of ground layers at a disposal site in the next 100,000 years — the estimated time needed for the radiation emitted by the high-level waste to reach safe levels. It is therefore impossible, he said, to convince people of the safety of the disposal method. The council observed that disposal site selection was going nowhere because the government pushed ahead with the process without a public consensus on the nation’s nuclear energy policy, including the final disposal of high-level radioactive waste. It urged the government to fundamentally review the disposal method and set a direction of nuclear energy policy that can win broad public support and then specify what amount of radioactive waste needs to ultimately be disposed. No such discussions seem to have since taken place within the government. Rather, the Abe administration appears bent on seeking a return to the pre-Fukushima disaster nuclear power policy without any public discussions, even though much of the mess from the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns remains unresolved and people continue to harbor fears over the safety of nuclear power, as indicated by media opinion polls. Japan does need a permanent disposal site for its nuclear waste given that there already exist piles of spent fuel from past nuclear power generation, which will further increase if idled reactors are restarted.
Japan Times, Jan. 22, 2014: Freelance TV and radio commentator Peter Barakan said he was pressured by two broadcast stations to steer clear of nuclear power issues on his programs until after the Tokyo gubernatorial election on Feb. 9, causing concern among some about possible media censorship
medical experts criticize UNSCEAR report for playing down consequences of Fukushima nuclear accident
Asahi: ‘Underground holes’ may be needed to search for Fukushima’s 3 molten cores — Did fuel ‘escape’ via basement? — Experts unsure if Tepco will allow them to search for corium
Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 24, 2014: [Tepco] has yet to learn where the nuclear fuel currently lies. The locations and amounts of the melted nuclear fuel should be identified by the time the government and TEPCO plan to start extracting it in the first half of fiscal 2020. Even if the melted fuel has escaped into the basement levels, it can still be located by installing [muon] sensors in underground holes, the scientists said.
Kyodo News, Jan. 23, 2014: The condition of the melted nuclear fuel remains unknown […] “The (cosmic ray) measurement system can be installed easily,” said team member Hidekazu Kakuno, associate professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University. “We are ready to use it at the Fukushima Daiichi plant if TEPCO cooperates.”
RT, Jan. 23, 2014: [Fumihiko Takasaki, a researcher at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation] claims that TEPCO has not yet officially confirmed that it will use the technology it is being offered.
Japanese researchers use cosmic rays to see nuclear fuel Japanese researchers use cosmi 1 2 3 Featured Post Ralph Nader Explores the Fukushima Secrecy Syndrome
Week after week, reports appear in the press revealing the seriousness of the contaminated water flow, the inaccessible radioactive material deep inside these reactors and the need to stop these leaking sites from further poisoning the land, food and ocean. Officials now estimate that it could take up to 40 years to clean up and decommission the reactors.
Other factors are also feeding this sure sign of a democratic setback. Militarism is raising its democracy-menacing head, prompted by friction with China over the South China Sea. Dismayingly, U.S. militarists are pushing for a larger Japanese military budget. China is the latest national security justification for our “pivot to East Asia” provoked in part by our military-industrial complex.
Draconian secrecy in government and fast-tracking bills through legislative bodies are bad omens for freedom of the Japanese press and freedom to dissent by the Japanese people. Freedom of information and robust debate (the latter cut off sharply by Japan’s parliament in December 5, 2013) are the currencies of democracy.
Now that Japan’s state secrets bill has become law, leaking sensitive information concerning Fukushima could technically be considered a crime, both for the whistleblower who leaks it and for any journalist who reports it. The extended “war on terror” has now joined hands with “atoms for peace,” with truth becoming the first casualty. As of the end of 2013, nearly three years after the crisis began at Fukushima, there are an estimated 150,000-plus Japanese residents evacuated from the Fukushima area, many living in temporary housing. Some of that housing is reportedly now in substandard condition, with residents essentially being left to fend for themselves. Confirmed cases of thyroid cancer are now appearing in some children from the Fukushima area, and the numbers of such cases are certain to rise in the future. Reports of increased levels of radiation, of varying degrees, have also come up throughout Japan and beyond its borders. Meanwhile, TEPCO and two government ministries are busy arguing about which one of the three parties is responsible for cleaning up the contaminated water that is seeping into the ground and into the nearby sea. And yet, in spite of these and many other problems along the way, the IAEA has wavered little in its praise for Japan’s handling of the Fukushima accident and the quote-unquote “good progress” that has resulted.
According to author and independent journalist Osamu Aoki, a former reporter for Japan’s Kyodo News wire service, “Newspapers, TV, magazines—it makes no difference: because they receive these huge advertising monies, it’s hard for them to criticize the power companies, especially with nuclear power. It’s a taboo that’s been going on for some time.”51
Where Japan differs from the US and other developed countries is in the sheer breadth and depth of external press controls and media self-censorship in the form of the “kisha club” (reporters’ club) system.52
The kisha clubs are press clubs attached to various Japanese government agencies (from the highest levels of government down to local government agencies), political parties, major corporations, consumer organizations . . . and electric power companies. At last count there were an estimated 800 to 1,000 kisha clubs nationwide. Membership in such clubs is mostly restricted to the big Japanese newspaper and broadcasting companies, with smaller Japanese media and the foreign press normally not allowed in. One important rule: kisha club reporters are not usually allowed to “scoop” fellow club members on any given story, even if they are reporters for rival Japanese news companies. In most cases a kisha club is based on the premises of the institution that the reporters are covering, with the operating expenses of the club paid by that institution. The kisha club rooms generally are off-limits to the average Japanese citizen, even when located inside of public buildings.
TEPCO, like other power companies around Japan, has its own in-house kisha club. And what was the chairman of TEPCO doing at the time of the March 11 quake/tsunami and subsequent Fukushima nuclear plant disaster? He was hosting Japanese journalists on a press junket in China, courtesy of the power company.53
According to an independent journalist attending a press conference hosted by TEPCO soon after the accident on March 11, 2011, not one of the power company’s kisha club reporters got around to asking the TEPCO chairman at press conferences about the possibility of plutonium leaks from the Fukushima plant until the independent journalist himself raised the critical question two weeks after the accident. Another independent Japanese reporter working for Internet media was shouted down by the TEPCO kisha club reporters when he tried to ask the TEPCO chairman a question at the same press conference. These are not uncommon occurrences at kisha clubs in Japan.54
Demands have arisen in the wake of Fukushima for Japanese government nuclear regulators and politicians to be more independent of the nuclear power industry that they are supposed to be keeping an eye on.71 But looking to the future, there is one more party that equally needs to be separated from Japan’s nuclear power establishment (or “nuclear power village,” as it’s called), and that is the Japanese press. The media in Japan, like the government regulators, have been intimate with the nation’s atomic energy club from the very start. Until the day when the Japanese news media are finally weaned off the nation’s nuclear power village, the whole truth about nuclear energy—and the corruption and great public dangers surrounding it—will continue to be mostly unseen and unknown in this country. Disengaging the Japanese press from the nuclear powers-that-be will not be easy, but it must be done.
One place to start would be to begin dismantling the Japanese kisha club system. This too will be no easy task, given the deep historical and institutional roots of the system. But if the toothless Japanese lapdog press of today is to regain the public credibility at home and abroad that it lost in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—and if it is to earn the respect that it would deserve as a true watchdog of the people over Japan’s centers of power in the future—then it is the Japanese news media that must now take the first steps in that direction on this long and uncertain road away from Fukushima.
But if the toothless Japanese lapdog press of today is to regain the public credibility at home and abroad that it lost in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster…
I dont really want to follow that post because I think it is so important, but someone has to, so I will just post a link to the Poolium search results.
I am really sad that the Japanese people have so much corruption going on in their country (as we all do) which makes it more difficult for them to get at the truth about Fukushima. Maybe it is a learning experience for them to rise up against the cover stories and falsehoods and show who is boss. I fear that the culture will not allow them to do it, but maybe we will be surprised.