Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Nuke?

After the reactors at Fukushima First Power Plant here in Japan melted down in March of 2011, a wave of paranoia gripped Japan. Anti-nuke scaremongers had a field day, and opposition to nuclear power had become quite popular. Before a popular position is adopted, however, it should first be checked against the numbers to make sure it stands up to reality.

  I’m not saying that nuclear power is entirely safe, and nothing ever is, but the dangers of nuclear power have always been blown way out of proportion. It’s understandable that people would be scared of nuclear anything, considering the horrific damage that nuclear weapons did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki back during World War II. It’s especially scary here, since this is the only country in history, so far, to get hit with nuclear weapons.

  But is this fear justified when it comes to peaceful nuclear power? I don’t think so. Too many people look too much at the TV screens showing power plants going kaboom and not enough at the hard numbers. I support stringent safety measures to insure that nuclear power plant workers are working in a safe environment, but I don’t support abandoning nuclear power outright. Such a position is based on sensationalist paranoia and will prove untenable in the long run once fossil fuels become too expensive for Japan, a country with no significant fossil fuel sources of its own. Since renewables are far too limited to take up the slack, nuclear power is, like it or not, here to stay.

  Where I used to work in Fukushima prefecture, I would see the hard numbers every day. At all five schools I worked at were these radiation monitors placed outside. Increased cancer risk, the barest minimum of ill effects from radiation, requires at least ten microsieverts of constant dosage, and it must stay above ten microsieverts to do so, but I have never seen even one of those monitors top the one microsievert per hour mark. They all stayed in the nanosieverts range.

  Finally, we should ask those seeking to ban nuclear power if they’re equally or more willing to get rid of cigarettes. Tobacco, aside from contributing nothing good to society, kills more people in one hour worldwide than nuclear power has killed in its entire history. In fact, nuclear power plant accidents such as Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island make the evening news because events like these happen so rarely. People dying of heart disease brought on from cigarette-induced inflammation happens so often that it’s nowhere near as newsworthy. News is, after all, entertainment as well as information. They know the sight of exploding power plants keeps the viewers coming back for more.

Thoughts on Heavy Metal

I grew up in the 1980s, a time when heavy metal (or more a popular imitation of it) became popular. I got to know big names like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, and I still love both those bands. Granted, the former have produced a few albums not worthy of their name, but the rest have been good, and Iron Maiden have never made an album unworthy of the Iron Maiden name. Along with those two greats have been “glam rockers” such as Mötley Crüe (pronounced “Murtley Cree” for those of you who don’t know how umlauts really change the sounds of vowels), bands that somehow think we all care about their sex lives.
   Metallica gave me a welcome alternative to glam by introducing me to thrash metal. It was far more authentic as metal to me than glam rock. From there, it led me to other thrash metal bands. However, even thrash was sorely lacking, as it was just too political for my taste. Too many thrash songs sounded like news reports. If I wanted news, I’d read it off the internet. I now make fun of some of the bands I used to like at the time.
   Then came the 1990s. Metal was declared “dead,” but it wasn’t. It was just untrendy. The trendy thing at the time was grunge. I listened to grunge greats like Pearl Jam and Nirvana. They seemed weak musically, but lyrically, they were far better than the glam and thrash I was listening to in the previous decade. I remember how the original members of Kiss got back together in the early 1990s with their famous make-up to try to “save” metal, but Kiss, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t metal, so how could they save it?
  Rather, it was another band, one I now love, that truly helped save metal.
  In university, I told someone I was into heavy metal. “You mean like Korn?” they asked. I hadn’t heard of Korn at the time. Eventually, I saw a poster of them, and they looked nothing like a metal band. Honestly, I thought they were gonna be some weak grungy knockoff undeservedly calling themselves “metal.” Then one night, I watched the video for “Right Now” from their album Take a Look in the Mirror. It blew me away. Not only is Korn very much worthy of being called metal, but they’re even more metal than Judas Priest! Their music, however, does have a clear grunge influence, in that their lyrics are at a personal level. Korn’s lyrics, though, convey personal anger and frustration, things that metal ought to be about.
  In short, the 1990s were the best thing to ever happen to metal. By putting the anger and negativity back into the lyrics, bands like Korn, often called “new metal,” take metal back to its dark roots. MTVs Headbanger’s Ball, from which I first heard Korn, showed a remarkable improvement in the quality of the music it played around this time. New metal is true metal!
  Not that it’s the only true metal.
  Not too long ago, I came across (or actually Yahoo search-engined) an online radio station dedicated to extreme metal. Death FM, it’s called, but it plays black and doom metal as well as death metal, and I love all three subgenres. Death metal is an extension of new metal, making it more brutal musically and lyrically. Death metal lyrics take the lyrical negativity one step further, depicting characters surrendering to their dark impulses. Black metal conveys a hostile natural environment and the tribulations it puts its characters through. Both these forms of metal tend to be fast-paced in their rhythm, but metal can also have a slow rhythm. Doom metal is rhythmically slow, conveying a sense of impending death and the dread attached to it. All have one thing in common with new metal: personal introspection.
  I have a rule towards metal lyrics: Tell me about you. Don’t bother telling me about the world, like thrash does. I have eyes to see the world for myself, so I don’t need your input. Don’t brag about your wonderful sex life either. I frankly don’t care, and I don’t believe most of it anyway. Tell me about your anger, as it lets me know that I’m not alone in my own times of anger.