Sunflowers were planted after Chernobyl and Fukushima to help absorb radioactive pollution After the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, sunflowers were tested as a natural way to absorb radioactive material from contaminated environments

🇯🇵 Japan’s PM Sanae Takaichi: "Through the maximum use of nuclear power, with safety as the highest priority, we will work to suppress energy prices." Nuclear power is one of the best options, but it definitely requires a long-term approach. After Fukushima, regaining public trust remains the biggest hurdle for Japan. Writer: Samuel

Three times when China paused a new technology it was racing to build: 1) High-speed rail projects after 2011 Wenzhou crash 2) Nuclear plant approvals after Fukushima 3) Robotaxi licenses after Baidu Apollo Go robotaxi freeze in Wuhan this April In these cases, China wasn’t racing with the US like with AI. But it’s still interesting to consider these cases where a major incident caused China to unilaterally decide to pause temporarily. And one incident—Fukushima—didn’t even take place in China.

From @TheAthleticFC: At the age of 59, Kazuyoshi Miura, the world’s oldest professional footballer, has scored his first goal for nearly four years for Japanese side Fukushima United.

How it's done: This is TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station in Niigata. The seven-unit site has 8.2GW of capacity, making it the world's largest power plant. Unit 6 entered commercial operation on 16 April 2026, returning a 1.36GW Advanced Boiling Water Reactor to service and marking TEPCO’s first commercial nuclear operation since Fukushima. Expect a SoftBank/Oracle/OpenAI data center in its vicinity in the next few months.

How do you investigate a catastrophe 3,000 times bigger than the last five combined? Bill Gurley @bgurley answered with a line from Richard Feynman. At Jason Calacanis's @Jason All-In Summit, Gurley sized COVID-19 at 15 million deaths against roughly 5,000 combined for Surfside, the 737 MAX, Katrina, Fukushima and Challenger. Then he recalled Feynman on the Challenger panel, told once to soften his tone, replying: "But seven people died." Gurley's question back to the room: if seven deaths justified dropping the niceties then, what does 15 million justify now? The size of a catastrophe should set the limit on how much anyone gets to protect an institution's comfort while investigating it. That limit moves with the death count, not with who's uncomfortable answering. Podcast Alpha's newsletter breaks down every number behind Gurley's 3,000x comparison and what it leaves out. Source: All-In Podcast -

I'm not of fan of regulation for two reasons - 1) its hard to get right, and 2) its highly susceptible to regulatory capture. That said, if we insist on doing it, we should try to get it correct. As "safety" seems is the primary goal of this AI regulation exercise, I wanted to share that I recently went deep on both the 737 Max (2 crashes) and Fukushima accidents. In both cases, the investigations led to a conclusion that "regulatory capture" was the EXACT failure that led to both safety incidents. Boeing/FAA and Tepco/NISA. As a result, with safety as the #1# goal, the regulator MUST BE someone with authority and accountability "over" the regulated company. The idea that it could be a friendly third party with lots of cross-relationships is structurally broken idea. Ask Mr. Kiyoshi Kurokawa. If we insist on doing this the regulator (1) needs to be 100% independent, 2) the "tests" and "procedures" need to come for the regulator not the company, and (3) the regulator needs to understand their responsibility is to the American people. They need to feel the authority over the regulated company and the responsibility to the nation. It's imperative. Or it will fail.

Been watching Bessent plug the UST market from every direction.. the sovereign cracks are starting to show: buybacks, defending Yen (raising dollars against USTs instead of BOJ dumping them into the market) plus AI capex arms race is now competing for the same pool of capital Hard not to be reminded of the the historical parallels Plaza in 1985, joint yen buying in 1998, G7 yen selling after Fukushima in 2011. historical context is diff but whenever Washington enters fx market the spillover is always bigger than fx itself When the anchor asset of global capital markets, the presumed “safest asset”, needs this much active maintenance, you know something structurally unstable is cooking

Robotics deep dive: WHY JAPAN LOST THE HUMANOID LEAD Honda began humanoid research in 1986. P2 walked unaided in December 1996, the first bipedal robot to do it without a tether. ASIMO arrived in November 2000, 120cm and 43kg, down from P3's 160cm and 130kg. Nobody could ever buy one. That is the pattern, and it repeats across all three programmes. Sony's QRIO was developed, marketed and never sold. On 26 January 2006, inside Howard Stringer's restructuring, Sony ended AIBO and stopped QRIO in the same announcement. Toyota's first humanoid, unveiled in 2004, played the trumpet; it performed at the 2005 Aichi Expo. ASIMO's seventh and last generation shipped in 2011. Development stopped in 2018, reported by Nikkei, NHK and Kyodo rather than announced as a product decision. Then March 2011, iRobot announced on the 18th that it was sending PackBots and Warriors to Fukushima Daiichi. American PackBots went into the reactor buildings in April. Quince, built by Chiba Institute of Technology, Tohoku University and the International Rescue System Institute, got inside in June, two months later. The version that circulates is that Japan had no robots. That part is wrong: JAERI had built a radiation-hardened machine after the 1999 Tokai criticality accident and it was on site. Japan's machines had never been proven in the field, because Japanese makers are barred from exporting military robots, while PackBot and Talon had spent a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. Japan's transmit-power limits did not lift for the emergency either. Procurement, export control and radio spectrum. None of that is an engineering failure. SCHAFT, a University of Tokyo spinout, won the DARPA Trials in December 2013 with 27 points, three weeks after Google bought it for a reported $20M. It did not compete in the June 2015 finals, won by Korea's Team KAIST. Alphabet closed SCHAFT in November 2018 after failing to find a buyer. Honda's Takahide Yoshiike wrote the epitaph himself: "instead of getting hung up on developing ASIMO as a perfect package of all functions, we would like to provide value to society as soon as possible by focusing first on individual functions." Japan kept the part that had customers. Nabtesco puts its own share of the precision reduction gears inside medium and large robot joints at about 60%. The demonstrations left, the gearboxes stayed.