Who says the mainstream media doesn't cover anti-nuclear power demonstrations in Japan? The Financial Times has. This seems to me to be a very fair report.
My take on this? Japan is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't. The economic miracle of Japan from the 1960s to the mid-1980s is over. The bursting of the bubble in the mid-80s was the beginning; Fukushima is the nail in the coffin.
The protestor who says, "Japan is an earthquake prone country so building nuclear power is crazy," is correct. It is.
But what are the alternatives?
Then prime minister Noda says that its not just energy, it has to do with the entire economy of Japan; he's right too.
Finally comments are made that Japan will try to utilize more "renewable energy sources." Folks the most efficient and cost effective bio fuel resources are oil and coal by far. That being said, for every one person who has died from nuclear power (including Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl) 4,000 have died from coal.
So called renewable energy resources such as solar and wind are expensive, inefficient, and, wait for it... rape the environment (though no where near as bad as coal or oil).
Japan has nuclear power plants that are running on technology that is 50 years old. Those plants should be shut down.... But to reject nuclear power as unfeasible is ignorant.
Throwing out all nuclear power because we have problems with 50 year old plants is like throwing out the baby with the bath water.
How about Thorium?
Japan cannot survive as an economic power without nuclear energy. Japan is too far in debt already to be subsidizing inefficient and expensive "projects" in so-called renewable energy resources (like wasting $78 billion on renewables in 2010)... People need to eat and need to have jobs....
Since the Japanese people and government can't seem to think past their noses, this surely is, the end of Japan's golden economic era.
