Its chairman, Gregory Jaczko, set up a special team straight away and at the request of his government, NRC experts were dispatched to Japan. The NRC in Washington, D.C., was one of the agencies working round the clock on the issue. I think they felt that the enormity of the situation put them in a position where they had to be directly involved." John Roos, former US Ambassador to Japan, speaking to NHK "They were receiving daily briefs not only from higher-ups at the State Department, but also from the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and experts at the White House. "I felt that the US leaders were really doing everything they could," he says. In the immediate aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, the US State Department made an unusual offer of around-the-clock support to Japan.įujisaki Ichiro, then Japan's ambassador to the US, was deeply impressed. "My instincts were to what can we do to marshal the tremendous resources that the United States has both on the military side and the civilian side in order to help address this crisis. We thought it was probably going to be bigger than the Chernobyl situation. "The Fukushima situation was.almost unprecedented in those initial days. very gladly," he said.Roos, who served as ambassador to Japan between 2009-2013, played a central role in the joint efforts between the two governments in response to the nuclear crisis. we have uranium enrichment, so there is still a lot that needs to be discussed here and I will be on the street a lot. "We have a uranium fuel assemblies factory in Germany. Yet for Smital, the reactor closures do not mean the end of his activism. "We have no other choice but to accept the phase-out for the time being," Klute said. On Saturday, both Smital and Klute stood as protesters at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, one celebrating the end of nuclear power, the other lamenting its demise. and all parties have practically adopted it," said Rainer Klute, head of pro-nuclear non-profit association Nuklearia. "The nuclear phase-out is a Greens project. It was a Greens-coalition government that introduced the country's first nuclear phase-out law in 2002. Moving from street protests to organised political work with the establishment of the Greens party in 1980 gave the movement more power. "This produced a strong peace movement and the two movements reinforced each other," said Nicolas Wendler, a spokesperson for Germany's nuclear technology industry group KernD. In parallel, a divided Germany during the Cold War also saw a peace movement evolve amid concerns among Germans that their land could become a battlefield between the two camps. One of the long-running movement's early successes came in the 1970s when it managed to get plans for a nuclear plant in Wyhl in western Germany overturned. a very nice, communal, exciting feeling that also develops a power," Smital said. "That was a great feeling of a movement and also of belonging. "I can look back on a great many successes where I saw injustice and many years later, there was a breakthrough," Smital said, showing a photo of himself in 1990s in front of the Unterweser Nuclear Power Plant, which was closed in 2011 following the Fukushima disaster in Japan. On Saturday (15 April) Germany shut off its last three reactors, ending six decades of nuclear power which helped spawn one of Europe's strongest protest movements and the political party that governs Berlin today, the Greens. That made an impression," Smital, now 61, said as he said about his life-long activism against nuclear power in Germany. "Technetium, Cobalt, Cesium 134, Cesium 137. Heinz Smital (pictured) was a 24-year-old nuclear physics researcher when he first saw how far nuclear contamination could spread after the Chornobyl disaster in 1986.Ī few days after it occurred he waved a damp cloth out of a window at the University of Vienna to sample the city's air and was shocked by how many radionuclides could be seen under a microscope.
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