Japan’s nuclear policy went back to the drawing board this week, as PM Naoto Kan signalled a change from its plans to rely on nuclear for more than half the country’s energy needs. Kan said that more natural and renewable energy would be needed in Japan’s power mix. He mentioned wind, solar or biomass as possible alternative energy sources.
Japan followed Germany in putting plans for a new generation of nuclear plants on hold, following the catastrophic after-effects of the massive earthquake this March. The subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi site, while the company involved, Tokyo Electric, and the Japanese authorities battled to gain control of it, has clearly caused a widespread rethink of energy policy.
The Fukushima meltdown, involving the release of irradiated gas into the atmosphere and radioactive water into the sea, punctuated a run of almost 25 years without serious incident being reported in the global nuclear industry. While Fukushima is the more complex incident, it remains only the 2nd worst nuclear accident. The worst was Chernobyl.
I have written before on the fledging industry making Chernobyl a new visitor attraction. It seems that tourist numbers are building a trend likely to continue, given the recent media interest in tours of the site in the Ukraine. Nuclear power stations on must-see lists, a Jack the Ripper London tour, a visit to Pompeii – wiped out by a volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 – all of these are examples of what is known as ‘dark tourism’.
As the Dark Forum notes, day-trippers can take in tours of the former concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ground Zero in New York or the Cambodian Killing Fields. Gazing on sites which saw the death of others, sometimes in their multitudes can seem a strange way to spend your leisure time. It is nonetheless apparent that visiting ‘sites, attractions and exhibitions…..of death, suffering and the macabre is…growing within contemporary society.’
So today’s disaster zone becomes tomorrow’s attraction. What does this tell us about society’s moral standing? What awkward constraints does it place on managers and the authorities? How should the views of local people, victims’ relatives or descendents be taken into consideration? And how about those visitors, without whose desire to visit there may be no ‘attraction’ at all; how should they behave and what should they be able or be directed to see? Clearly the idea of dark tourism is highly complex.