edit: changed title from ‘False Fukushima Fears’ to ‘Exaggerated Fukushima Fears’, sacrificing my lovely alliteration as others have pointed out that it would be too much to say that the fears of radiation leakages are unfounded, but merely to say that this is the least bad option given previous precedent as cynesthesia has pointed out.
Image is of the large array of water storage tanks holding the tritium-contaminated water.
This week’s preamble is very kindly provided by our beautiful poster @[email protected], with some light editing. In periods where not much of earth-shattering importance is happening in the news, I hope to do this more often!
In 2011, the Fukushima nuclear incident occurred. Since then, water has been used to cool radioactive waste and debris, which contaminates the water with radioactive isotopes. Currently, TEPCO, the Japanese energy company that is reponsible to Fukushima, is storing about 1.3 million m3 of contaminated water (equivalent to about 500 Olympic swimming pools for our American friends) in about 1000 tanks. Approximately 100,000 m3 of contaminated cooling water is generated per year to this day. TEPCO doesn’t want to store escalating volumes of nuclear waste for decades until half-lives are spent. This would mean adding substantial storage capacity every year at increased cost and risk of tank spills.
The contaminated water includes heavier isotopes like caesium as well as hydrogen’s isotope, tritum. Caesium is a big atom at 137 molar mass (we love our tremendous atoms, folks) while tritium is heavy hydrogen and has only a molar mass of 3 (pathetic, low energy). The TEPCO people are using water treatment to remove heavy isotopes from water, but not tritium. The large adult isotopes are easy to remove with treatment but tritium is incorporated into water, so it blends in with the others. The treated Fukushima water contains low levels of the big isotopes but still contains tritium.
Isotopes release radiation that damages the body’s cells. The longer an individual molecule containing an isotope is in a body, the more likely it is that the isotope will go BRAZAP and release radiation that fucks up the cells. Bioaccumulation is a toxicology term for how certain contaminants can accumulate in the food cycle. For example, algae eat contaminants, then the algae is eaten by bugs, then bugs by fish, then fish by people. Isotopes that are bioaccumulative like our large adult son caesium are more hazardous. Tritium is not bioaccumulative because it is effectively part of water. Water cycles through bodies quickly - that’s why you sweat and pee and get thirsty. 
Fukushima water would be treated and then then mixed with seawater at a ratio of 1:800 before it is pumped 1km offshore. Each year approximately 166,000 m3 of treated water will be released, which will draw down the volume of contaminated water being stored over a few decades. Real-time stats associated with the release are found here. At the point of discharge, water contains about 207 Bq/L of radioactivity, about 16 times greater than the 10-15 Bq/L background level in the ocean overall. Drinking water guidelines for tritium radioactivity range from 1,000-10,000 Bq/L, if one were to drink seawater.
In wastewater treatment terms, this is a small amount of dilution in a very large body of water. It is unlikely to have any measurable impact per the terms of Western science. In the context of mother nature taking yet another one for the team and environmental distress, this sucks. In the context of making the best of a shitty situation, the Fukushima water release is peanuts compared to the many other environmental liabilities that are not addressed. For example, the Hanford Site is an example of a nuclear wastewater storage facility gone/going wrong in Oregon.
Ending note by 72: By far the biggest impact of the release of this water won’t be its direct effects, but those on commerce and international relations. Almost half of Japanese aquatic exports go to China, comprising 8% of all Japanese firms shipping goods to China, and they have now been cut off due to their anger at Japan. Perhaps this reaction and the cancellation of imports was inevitable, as nuclear power and radiation in general is a poorly understood, frightening, and thus easily exploitable topic in every country. China is not the first country to use a misunderstanding of radiation risk to try and achieve a goal - Germany seems very pleased with itself - and they will not be the last.
In all: it is unequivocal that China is massively exaggerating the risks of this water’s release. However, the bellicose rhetoric and actions of Japan, South Korea, and America are a much greater danger to the region, and none of the three seem to be in any hurry to try diplomacy instead of increasing military budgets and gearing up for war.
It’s that time again - every two months I give myself a week off, to rest and recalibrate. Your regularly scheduled programming will resume next week.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week’s discussion post.
been thinking about our (and my) blindspots, like with Gabon for instance, and maybe we should have a newsmega theory list
I would imagine it being a few of the regular bits and pieces of Marx and Lenin and others, State and Revolution, etc, enough to have an understanding of geopolitics and imperialism in the abstract without getting too deep into the weeds of arguments between long-dead theorists about the French Revolution and 1848, together with newer things like Hudson’s Superimperialism and Desai’s Geopolitical Economy, Bevins’ Jakarta Method perhaps as we’d want to talk about how socialist movements are destroyed abroad. and then books that explicitly deal with different parts of the world. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa for instance.
should make sure to have a lot of, if not mostly, specific works on countries or small regions, especially if they aren’t already well-known rather than too many broad-brush works (though those are crucial too). analysis of West Africa, even specific countries there. analysis of central asian states. analysis of central american countries. books and essays ideally, but also long-form articles, even videos.
I demand homework assignments.
Maybe we get assigned a country at random and we need to figure out “what’s the deal with X”
The questions could be standardized:
And, if applicable, some sort of chad to virgin-cuck rating of them
This does sound like an interesting idea actually, if people actually engaged with it (I’ll certainly give it a shot but I already spend a lot of time on the updates). I enjoy the compliments but I’ve always found that the best part about the megathreads isn’t myself but the people who come here and comment with their specific knowledgebases.
maybe we could have a Country of the Week (in addition to or alongside whatever the week’s topic is) and people can come in with bits and pieces on whatever they know about it, books or essays they’ve read, etc.
Country of the week sounds like a great idea
I’d love to help contribute to this; these kind of resources are so rare and need to be cultivated.
I also think we need “Hexbear News Summaries” covering longer timespans. Or maybe just a hexbear wiki. We would have a dedicated Ukraine Conflict page, for example.
Every time I think I’m finally happy with the format I do these in, a few months later I start to feel a malaise again, and that’s where I am right now. It’s sort of, like, what am I actually doing? What am I actually trying to achieve? Am I just here to cover the news as it comes out and offering takes, or is there something more long-form, more analytical, that I ultimately want to achieve? Is what I’m doing actually useful, and if it is, then is it the most effective method or am I doing it inefficiently and there’s a better way?
The issue is that I also just have finite time. By far the biggest abstract problem in my life (obviously not the biggest material one lol, I’m not that rich) is that there just isn’t enough time in a day to do everything I want to do.
The updates have changed notably over the year and a half I’ve been doing them, but one trend is that I’m putting them out less and less often, though with the same amount of content; it used to be one every single day, so 7 days per week, then one every day except Thursdays and Sundays, so 5 days per week, and now Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so 3 days per week.
Is the endgame to do them once a week? Or even once a month? Do I summarize them more fully, or do I just list headlines? Do I organize them by region, or alphabetically, or according to pre-established themes, or even return to the old economically-diplomatically-militarily scheme? Is my entire framing of the issue wrong - do I need to switch to like, a continuous feed and make a Telegram channel? Do I need to do a Rybar or DPA and get a world map that I annotate? Do I need to make a youtube channel? Do I need to make a wiki, as you say? And what about the news megas - should they be around for longer, or shorter, before I switch to a new one? What topics should I focus on? Should I let others post them like how the general megathreads are (though obviously thelastaxolotl does them a lot of the time) or just always host them myself? Should I be using AI more?
These, and more, are the questions I struggle with quite a lot behind the scenes. I don’t feel a need to quit doing them, I just don’t know if I’m mid-transition to some near-perfect endstage that I will one day figure out or be inspired by another’s workflow and that I’ll crack the code on how to do news summaries and accumulation efficiently and effectively, or if this is essentially how it’s gonna be for the months and years to come.
What I will say is that I have changed my mind over time on the effect these have. I struggled for basically the whole of the first year of doing them with a feeling that it’s just a pointless Sisyphean task - like, sure, I’m informing and thus at least minutely influencing a number of people (counting lurkers, possibly even hundreds) but that stuff on the internet essentially remains in a harmless insulated sphere which can have little effect on the real world - but now I think it actually is at least vaguely meaningful. I wouldn’t go so far to say “posting is praxis”, but I no longer think “posting is pointless” either.
Well really what you need is help imo. I think you’re trying to find the optimal way for one person to do a multi-person job. Just seems like too much for one unpaid person to gather all the headlines, aggregate and organize them over time, and form them into narratives. A wiki might help get more people in on it, maybe with threads or a comm where changes can be discussed, maybe with some other media associated with it like a YouTube channel that multiple people help with — a lot of YouTube channels have a team working behind the scenes. But, in the meantime, I do really enjoy what you do already.
I’m not sure what the optimal format is if you’re working alone, but maybe one way to frame it would be — what format would let you look back on your own research and make sense of it in the future? Like taking notes for a class maybe. I don’t know. I think you’re providing an amazing service to the community already, and I think ultimately the next step is to bring more people into it.
Since you want to read some theory to understand the world better, why not read a bit on world system theory of ? Its a marxist international relations theory based on lenin theory of imperialism, its the one that uses the terms imperial core and perifery nations
Yeah Wallerstein and Arrighi to name just two would have to be on this list. Maybe even Braudel if you want the historical angle.
I found this reading list this morning which hits some good ones
https://thecadrejournal.org/reading-list