> It is now clear that Western use of natural gas and petroleum from aggressive dictatorships—which use cash flows from oil and gas sales to reinforce and expand their hold on power—has backfired badly.
This feels awkwardly over repeated today. Embargos as always of course don't work, still most of the West more easily than all doomsayers expected reoriented (while they ideally could have been off that much dependence already longer).. there is enough market to other countries and also circumventing embargos. Do the Armenians btw dig the uranium out of their soil and refine it?
well, that's wrong.[0]
that disaster will continue killing people far into the future with the way it was handled at nearly every step of the recovery. Tepco was great at playing the victim and spinning every facet of PR at their disposal to avoid looking like jerks.
the 'Fukushima situation that killed nobody' comment is a direct reflection of how well Tepco played it reputationally, even if they did a piss-poor job of handling it practically.
Thankfully the whole thing wasn't entirely unjust[1].
I agree with your points w.r.t. Chernobyl.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/13/fukushima-nucl...
We need to put a fine point on this.
https://apnews.com/article/japan-fukushima-daiichi-radioacti...
There is still melted reactor in the ground, nothing is "cleaned up" we just dont really talk about it. Much like Chernobyl this is going to be a "generational" project for Japan.
Its handling of contaminated materials remains "questionable".
The reason we get less coverage than Chernobyl is that Japan doesn't have its hand out for money and technical support as Ukraine did to get the latest covering built.
Last I checked, Wikipedia is not entirely accurate here. Yes, the worker had worked at the Fukushima plant since 1980, and his cancer was regarded as a work-related injury for insurance purposes. However, it was not actually linked to the accident and such a link would be very difficult to prove.
"A decade after the triple tragedy that occurred in Japan in March 2011, the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) said that future health effects, e.g. cancer directly related to radiation exposure are unlikely to be discernible, in its 2020 Report launched today."
https://unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2021/unisous419....
The empire is not a person to perceive something -- inside the communist party and government, there were many of points of view on the eco-movements. The "empire" had no single stance on the question.