An anti-nuclear protestor in Japan gets creative.Photo: Matthias LambrechtThis post was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. Last Monday, Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretary, defended the Japanese government's response to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, insisting that the plant complex is in "a stable situation, relatively speaking." That's somewhat like the official description of 11,500 tons of water purposely dumped into the ocean waters off Fukushima as "low-level radioactive" or "lightly radioactive." It is, of course, only "lightly" so in comparison to the even more radioactive water being stored at the plant in its …

Let's hope the future doesn't hold this. This is adapted from a post at TomDispatch; you can read the longer version here. "Not as bad as Chernobyl"? It might be better to describe the situation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant as "remarkably unlike Chernobyl" in rural Ukraine, where, almost 25 years ago, a single uncontained nuclear reactor with a graphite core blew.  We now contemplate the possibility of multiple reactors accompanied by multiple containment pools for what is euphemistically called "spent" fuel (when it isn't "spent" at all) -- at least 11,195 such rods, 1760 metric tons of them -- …

This post was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission. It turns out that you don't want to be a former city dweller in rural parts of southernmost Australia, a stalk of wheat in China or Iraq, a soybean in Argentina, an almond or grape in northern California, a cow in Texas, or almost anything in parts of east Africa right now. Let me explain. As anyone who has turned on the prime-time TV news these last weeks knows, southeastern Australia has been burning up. It's already dry climate has been growing ever hotter. "The …