Removing top soil from school grounds to reduce radiation is a positive step. It does however provide a small harbinger of the enormous cost this disaster is going to impose in Japan for as much future as humans can reasonably foresee.

Generally nations recover from floods, chemical spills, rock slides, etc. and dare I say it, combinations of tsunami and earthquakes. Japan may recover economically but the damage to the land is permanent unless you look at history in terms of periods like the Jurassic.

It is questionable business ethics to promote PR that claims such disasters unlikely or impossible. It is questionable business ethics to subvert the government into downplaying or covering up incidents at your nuclear plants. It is questionable business ethics to pretend certainty when you don’t have any.

I expect giant corporations to lie, exaggerate and steal if at all possible. (Small corporations are much less likely to have these faults and are in many cases, excellent examples of morality and patriotism.) But permanently destroying the landscape has to considered unethical in an extreme sense.

James Pilant

Dose reduction actions It looks like the Japanese have started to take actions to lower doses and dose rates. One action has been the removal of the top layer of soil from school property. Due to the fact that children are still growing they are regarded as being more sensitive to the induction of cancer by radiation. I hold the view that this is the reason why no person under the age of 16 is allowed to become a radiological worker, also up to t … Read More

via Mark Foreman’s Blog