(Blog Post) Tsunami is a Japanese word – one sign of the island nation’s intimate relationship with the destructive forces of the ocean that surrounds it. Despite the fact that the word is one of the few from the Japanese language to attain universal use, “tsunami” didn’t even appear in Japanese government guidelines and standards for nuclear plants until 2006... Full Story »
Posted by Rory O'Connor - via Kaizar Campwala (t)
Fascinating observation about language limiting vision. O'Connor conjectures that lack of appropriately terrifying terminology in "Nukespeak" has capped the limits of scientific imagination and limited precautionary engineering standards to levels below known prior events.
The language of Nukespeak, as we have pointed out for decades, (ever since co-writing the book Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Visions and Mindset) is one of euphoric visions and euphemistic language, and its mindset renders it impossible for them to “imagine the unimaginable,” much less plan ahead adequately.
Hence nuclear proponents have no words to describe events they deem impossible to happen – although in the real world, outside their limited imaginations, tsunamis and meltdowns do in fact occur.
Are the nuclear developers and regulators stupid or evil? Did they willfully put hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars at risk? Or were they simply unable to imagine, and thus to prepare for, a worst-case scenario they literally had no words or concepts for? Judge for yourself. “We can only work on precedent, and there was no precedent,” Tsuneo Futami, a former Tokyo Electric nuclear engineer who was the director of Fukushima Daiichi in the late 1990s told the Times. “When I headed the plant, the thought of a tsunami never crossed my mind.”
Are they “stupid or evil”? Or are they unquestioning drones who can’t imagine something they haven’t yet seen? Perhaps there are no hard lines between the two options.
Moreover, who held the responsibility to raise the question about the possibility of tsunami off the coast of Japan? This is the same Japan where the term originated, presumably because they had happened before, often enough to warrant a unique noun to name them.
George Orwell argued that controlling language was the ultimate tool for getting people to accept the unacceptable — like the catastrophic risks of operating nuclear power plants. Without the words to describe it, elected officials, government regulators, investors, and nuclear utility plant operators literally cannot imagine a worst-case accident scenario at a nuclear plant. In such an imaginative vacuum, it’s all too easy for everyone involved to minimize the risks involved—resulting in the previously unimaginable results that we have seen at Three Mile Island, at Chernobyl, and now at Fukushima.
There’s a history in and between Japan and the USA of actualizing the unimaginable. One would hope that, by now, imaginations are no longer confined to precedent.
I can imagine a diplomatic realm wherein nobody says "no one could have imagined" something predictable. It isn't that we don't have enough information. One has only to take a good look at the hybrid map of the "Earthquakes in the Last Week" by Terrametrics: http://earthquakes.tafoni.net/. Invest some time in this tool to take a good look at what satellite images show of the ocean floor. Read a bit of general geophysics, and connect the (earthquake) dots. The Pacific Rim, aka The Ring of Fire, is precisely that: an active geological zone of earthquakes and volcanoes that are very much alive and kicking. Earth is shaped by dynamic processes, and it hasn't stopped changing yet. Pretty easy to see that the edge of a dynamic abyss isn't a great place to concentrate record amounts of hazardous nuclear waste on the shore. It's about time we limber up our imaginations and make more prudent decisions before messing with technologies that have the capacity to cause results so catastrophic that we can't grok their scope.