1
I”ve been considering the machinery of emotion lately. Some of this came from rereading Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In that (admittedly grim, even for Dick) too near future look at San Francisco, the world has suffered a massive nuclear exchange, and many have left earth. Those who are left live in a world where radiation slowly poisons everyone, where animals are mostly extinct, and where the androids made for those who went into outer space sometimes come back. Of course many of you have seen Blade Runner, which elaborates some but not most of Dick’s plot and hardly any of his vicious satire.
Most people in the novel seem beaten down. Depressed. But there’s a machine – the Penfield mood organ, a machine for artificial brain stimulation – that you can use to feel differently. You can set the machine at night so that in the morning, you’ll feel like going to work; in fact, you are looking forward to it! There’s the setting for “businesslike professional attitude” and one for “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future.” There’s a setting for wanting to watch TV no matter what’s on; there’s a setting (#3) for wanting to use the mood organ. (For a longer post on the Penfield mood organ, Penfield himself, and cyborg mind control, see http://cybunny54.blogspot.com/2011/03/on-penfield-machines-and-cyborgs-1.html)
The wife of Rick Deckard (the main character, played by Harrison Ford in the film) is named Iran; she finds a way to outwit the Penfield and find a setting for six hours of self accusatory depression. Besides the obvious gender satire (guys are supposed to be upbeat, hey! Even in a vast irradiated wasteland! And women are not only moody and sad but somehow seek this out, invite it in…) the novel imagines humans trying to confront ecological and social collapse. As Iran speaks, this (utterly natural and appropriate) emotion of despair is interrupted by the TV:
Her voice had become sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over her.
He turned up the TV sound and the voice of Buster Friendly boomed out and filled the room. “—ho ho, folks. Time now for a brief note on today’s weather. The Mongoose satellite reports that fallout will be especially pronounced toward noon and will then taper off, so all of you folks who’ll be venturing out—“
Despair, false optimism, depression, escape. And later in the novel there are representations of religious awe and transcendent Empathy (often accessed, by the emotionall stunted Earth humans, using an empathy machine that allows one to “be” the Jesus character Mercer).
The one emotion that isn’t offered for dialing, or very prevalent in the novel? It’s the one we should feel, retroactively, toward those who steer us toward such a future.
Anger.
2
"History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man." Blue Oyster Cult, Godzilla
So all of you folks who’ll be venturing out…here is a link to show the plume of radiation leaving Japan:
www.tinyurl.com/radcloud
See those numbers? No, they are cut off. And what do the colors mean? See that unnerving progress? Can you "read" what this is telling you?
It is a wild time. I talked with a friend who said she was going outside in the radioactive rain. The news is both announcing each new discovery of radiation from the plant, and each new reassurance that the amounts are miniscule. Both are of course correct: there are trace amounts of radiation that are not the stuff of running screaming from, and there are news moments when it seems as if the powers that be are making this stuff up. So days after the first Fukushima reactor failed, the Japanese government raised the legal limit of radiation considered safe. And the pronouncement of the “ area of concern” surrounding the plant was met almost immediately with Greenpeace reports that radiation levels outside that area were way beyond anyone’s notion of “within tolerances.”
For many reasons, I began reading more and more reports coming from the plant. I was in my misspent youth an antinuclear organizer, as many of you dear readers will know. But in addition to this long time engagement with the Terminator-like “industry that won’t die,” I am also writing on cyborgs, on human intermingling with technology and technoculture. And on cybernetics, the study of command and control in animals and machines. And on the ways that critical technologies – such as medical tech, power production, war technology, and so on – are narrated in fiction and in the media.
So of course my first take, as I look at the burning reactors and the horrific set of circumstances that led to the crippling of the plant, is: why? Why would the Japanese of all people take such a huge gamble on nuclear power, Atoms for Peace, the idiot brother of the atomic bombs that fell, with such horrifying and education results, on its soil and people?
John Feffer of World Beat (Tuesday, March 29, 2011Vol. 6, No. 13) addresses just this question. Outwardly, he argues, Japan appears orderly and stereotypically risk averse. Yet Japan has built 54 nuclear reactors on some of most seismically active tectonic plates in the world. And this bet was on the rise: the Japanese government was planning to move from 30%nuclear energy, to 40 percent by 2017 and 50 percent by 2030.
Now we are facing some of the same dilemmas as Japan did: a country facing dependence on oil and natural gas imports, for one. Making nuclear power one of the “alternative energy options” (as the industry and its political allies began asserting at the beginning of the Obama presidency) and claiming it as a safe alternative to fossil fuels (and thus carbon-footprint friendly) is what the US is doing now and what Japan has done.
Feffer puts several gambles together, to paint a picture in which the nuclear industry, Japanese military expansion and collusion with the US, and its bubble-that-burst economic greed of 25 years ago:
Of course, it's only…a sector of the society that constructs nuclear plants on active fault lines, builds up a powerful and potentially aggressive military machine in a region that is still deeply suspicious of how Japan uses its power, and deregulates the economy to create a kind of pachinko capitalism that rewards the few and impoverishes the many. In this sense, an oligarchy of gamblers holds sway over the majority of cautious Japanese.
The trouble with gambling is that when the players overplay their cards consistently, when the line between bluffing and lying is blurred, and when they do it with the collective finances of other people (ie Japanese citizens)…then we shouldn’t be surprised to find that the leades knew about most of the problems all along. Who is to blame?
Is it the gamblers at Tokyo Electric? In 2002, Tokyo Electric admitted to falsifying repair reports at its nuclear facilities for two decades. Then, in 2007, it confessed again that it continued to conceal what had been going on, including six emergency stoppages at the Dai-ichi nuclear power station in Fukushima and a seven-hour-long "critical" reaction at Unit 3, one of its six reactors. And this doesn’t even get into issues of the spent fuel rod vulernability, nuclear waste storage safety, or betting huge amounts of the Japanese energy production on plants that absolutely cannot be allowed to fail, and yet which cannot be made fail-proof.
Or is it the gamblers in the Japanese government, who “knowingly constructed structurally inadequate nuclear facilities. The world's largest nuclear facility, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa, sits on a fault line that generates three times the seismic activity it can withstand. Dai-ichi could withstand only a 5.7-meter tsunami, not the 7-meter wave that eventually overwhelmed it.” Should the governmental regulators have known that a 7 meter wave was possible or even likely? You’d like to think they thought that one through before building.
Whichever you pick (go ahead, pick ‘em both), you can see how keeping the real dangers of these plants secret for so many years might not lead to full disclosure of the threat now. And that is what has happened. There are workers who will probably die from their heroic efforts to prevent a worsening of radiation inside the reactors; there are children and elderly who will die from having had the bad luck to live too near the plants, even thosue outside the official “unsafe” zones; and there are people in other countries who will look up and wonder about the falling rain.
What happened in fact was that the Japanese health ministry responded to the worst nuclear power catastrophe since Chernobyl by…raising the exposure limits for teams of workers at the radiation- leaking plants. The legal limit previous was 100 millisieverts (mSv); workers on March 23 were laying cable to get powere into the Number 3 reactor’s turbine building when they were exposed to “between 170 millisieverts (mSv) and 180 mSv of radiation.” This is below the new limit of 250 mSv, which was raised to allow workers to remain in the buildings; this move was, according to Yukio Edano, the main government spokesperson, “was taken on the advice of experts.” (McCurry).
3
“All we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR
“A reading from the book of Punter, chapter four: all we have to fear, is Me.”
Firesign Theatre
Cyborg theory tells us that while we may want to focus on technologically tricked-out human bodies (such as, for example, humans in Rad suits tromping around radioactive pools in exploded nuclear facilities), there are other cyborg fish to fry. We are more like the Borg, tied to each other and to our multiple technological life support systems of power, water, and so on.
In the show, the Borg are surprisingly blasé about what would appear to us as threats. When an away team from the Enterprise boards the Borg vessel, the inhabitants walk right past them like zombies. It isn’t until the away team tries to interfere with the ship that the Borg slowly begin to move toward the threat.
Why is this? Well, I have a theory. The Borg are all listening to mainstream media from Japan and the United States, content conveniently provided by Borg-sized corporate entities and their political servants. What they are hearing is: the radiation is of no concern. It isn’t at high levels. These limits were over-careful to begin with. There are no similarities between the Japanese nuclear reactors and those in the United States.
Those weird headsets and eyepieces the Borg all sport? Direct feeds from Fox News, Tokyo Electric, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and nuclear industry lobbyists.
I’ll give an example of what I mean. When the nuclear crisis at Fukushima was a few days old, I found myself searching articles at the Christian Science Monitor, one of the more respected papers in the United States. The article itself, “Reports: Lax oversight, 'greed' preceded Japan nuclear crisis (March 16, 2011),” was quite good.
The author, Stephen Kurczy, builds a case that “both the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency and the Japanese government failed to properly ensure the safety of the country's nuclear power industry.” Likening Fukushima to the BP disaster, he says the two show “how poor government oversight of an industry that allegedly cut corners to turn higher profits can spawn an environmental disaster.” Evidence includes General Electric’s containment vessel design, which they sold to the Japanese despite three decades old safety concerns. (here GE plays the role of BP). Kurcz also cites Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev, who blames both private corporations and the IAEA for failing to learn from Chernobyl. He points out that after Chernobyl, the nuclear industry did everything they could to hid the event, to bury it. This is precisely what Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has done consistently, as recently as last June, when “a reactor at Fukushima I lost electricity and saw a dangerous drop in cooling water, Bloomberg reported.”
And while the IAEA, TEPCO, and the various multinational corporations involved with the Fukushima reactors are all complicit in the crisis, the supposed governmental regulators are themselves cozy with the nuclear industry, and government/industry partnership in nuclear is the norm. (The article points out that TEPCO and the Japanese government teamed up to successfully sell nuclear power plants to Vietnam. ) And international agencies like IAEA have little or no teeth and often promote nuclear corporate activity instead of regulating it.
Wow, I thought. Terrific article: hard hitting, critical of the entire set of nuclear actors and gamblers. And since – this was the 16th – the crisis was being called “worse than Three Mile Island, “ I was attracted by the companion article touted in the sidebar as Three Mile Island, Fact and Myth.” Well, I thought, perfect; I’ll remind myself of the details of the TMI accident, and see where the similarities and differences are.
The article was written by A. David Rossin, former assistant secretary of energy for nuclear energy (1986-87), and dates back to 1989. 1989? WTF? But I read on, half hoping for a reasonable discussion. Nope.
Turns out the big issue at TMI wasn’t the threat of a core meltdown, or radiation leaks. It was the overreaction of the media, including CBS, and the overreaction of the Pennsylvania governor, who suggested that pregnant women and children be evacuated. They just didn’t have the understanding of the situation that experts, such as Harold Denton of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), had: there was no danger of a hydrogen bubble explosion. And now (that is, in 1989), the country is saddled with – get this – not dangerous nuclear plants, or with their fuel rods swimming in crowded pools, but with unwarranted NRC “emergency planning rules” for reactors. This included reactors being built at Shoreham and Seabrook. The real problem at TMI was alarmist reporting, leaders caving to political pressure to protect vulnerable citizens, and an unreasonable reliance on “local people” and not the designated government spokesperson. He cites a MIT report that analyzed coverage of TMI and found that “the coverage to have been relatively calm and generally factual until noon on Friday. But once the evacuation was announced, the emphasis turned to what local people were saying, worst-case scenarios, charges of cover-up, and visions of disasters. Commentary, much of it alarmist, took over from reporting.”
And so who really died? The poor plants, Shoreham and Seabrook. And what risk was covered up? “ The key questions of future risks from curtailing or giving up on nuclear power were hardly raised at all.”
This is the article that people will certainly go to, in order to understand the comparison with Three Mile Island. And with both too much information to absorb, and with the soothing sounds of “it’s all ok go back to sleep we have it under control” the individual cyborg citizens will return, zombie like, to their wired glass cocoons. Hey, check this out: "Godzilla" is trending on Twitter!
4
I could cite many more articles that kept asserting that things were under control in Japan, getting better, making progress…only to be swept away by the horrific unfolding of actual real events in Fukushima and the surrounding countryside. These articles implicitly and explicitly blame average people for being foolishly fearful of small amounts of radiation; one article even lampooned the average person’s usual source of knowledge about atomic radiation, pop culture. In the article “Nuclear radiation in pop culture: more giant lizards than real science,” the CSM connects the misinformation from popular films about nuclear radiation with the fearful responses to the Japanese nuclear crisis.
As examples the article cites Godzilla and THEM! (see my blog on this film), the Hulk and Spiderman. (Those of us in the comic book know would be able to add quite a few more comic heroes who got super by getting super irradiated). And now that we know that public knows little or nothing about actual radiation, it makes sense to interview someone like Mel Schiavelli, “president of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania, near the Three Mile Island power plant.” Yup, that’s where I’d go to get an impartial view. Sicne people don’t know facts, pop culture plays on this. “We are in a 24-hour news cycle now, and the media has to fill it with something, and fear helps do that,” he notes, adding that “nothing built by human beings will ever be 100 percent perfect.”
But, he adds, a better understanding of the science involved would help the public understand how to properly balance risks. “We are going to run out of oil someday,” he points out, “and then what?”
I guess we’ll learn to properly balance those risks he is talking about.
5
Ok I’ve got my Penfield Mood Organ version 2.0. I’m looking out my window at the air, thinking of how there is no such thing as safe levels of radiation, of how it accumulates, of how according to Harvey Wasserman, people will most certainly die, as did from TMI, and as many others died from radiation and then again from the coverups of their deaths and the causes of those deaths. I’m thinking of the spent fuel rods sitting in their crowded baths in San Luis Obispo, at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which is situated near a major earthquake fault. I’m thinking about the span between December 2009 to September 2010, when according to USA Today, “In at least 24 instances, U.S. nuclear power plants did not report equipment failures to the government.” The reason? The NRC explained it was just “poorly written rules” and that there are other rules "that effectively encompass reporting all defects" and so "plants are operating safely." Sound familiar? I’m thinking about the nuclear industry’s response to the Japanese crisis: the Nuclear Energy Institute responded to Fukashima by sending experts, by promising to investigate our own potential nuclear problems, right? Oh wait, no. They sent rafts of lobbyists to Washington, to brief hundreds of congressional staffer and hundreds of members of Congress in the first five days. For them, the real crisis is the growing movement to call for a moratorium on building nuclear power plants; that is a crisis they know how to address, with green power: $1.7 million for lobbying in just the last year. Along with the utilities and other pro nuclear groups, the nuclear power Borg spent “$54 million on lobbying last year and employed 12 former members of Congress as lobbyists, according to an analysis by The Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money in politics.”
And I’m thinking of President Hopebama, who has consistently supported nuclear plants despite their dangers and their nasty tendency to cost overruns, who spoke within days of the Japanese horror reassuring Americans that nuclear power was on the agenda, exactly parroting the industry’s main talking point: they will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And so, as it becomes clear that no utility would ever build one of these things on their own in a “free market,” last month our President submitted in his 2012 budget a proposal to spend another $36 billion in federal loan guarantees for new nuclear plants.
I’m thinking of these things, and of what just happened in Japan, and why previous accidents happened. I’m thinking of the Gulf Spill, of day after day when it became abundantly clear that the cause was greed, short sightedness, lying, lack of any real regulation, day after day of watching BP try one strategy after another to fix the crippled technoscientific monster, and was reminded again and again of the same images of futility and failure as one after another the huge reactors at Fukushima failed and the responses were pitifully inadequate. As if Fukushima was really Godzilla.
But it isn’t Godzilla. It is the sum total of decisions made by some for all. It is the result of gamblers who are, let’s face it, suffering from an addiction. But they have my money, and my life, and the money and life of millions of their fellow citizens, stacked at the table. Fuck it: put it all on black.
I look out the window at the night sky, the same sky that cups our fragile globe, and I think of the new improved Penfield Mood Organ2.0
The newest setting?
Anger. Or more accurately, “Anger turned into effective political action.”
I’m pushing that button now.
Note: I will submit all the references for this essay soon. But I've got to sleep now. Goodnight and good luck...
