Visiting abandoned towns can be hazardous for a number of reasons, including crumbling structures and guards who will shoot trespassers on sight. But some ghost towns have toxic legacies due to chemicals, radiation, or even biological weapons.
This is the future of Japanese train travel. And boy, it doesn't get much faster—or interesting—than this.
Radiation is serious—especially in Japan. With the country still dealing with a nuclear disaster, people need to protect themselves.
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Japan's nuclear agency wants to raise the severity level of the new radioactive water leak at the Fukushima because the problem is more serious than initially expected.
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The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake devastated the town of Namie in Fukushima. The surviving residents still cannot return to their homes. The area has been evacuated due to radiation.
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It's been well over a year since the earthquake and ensuing Fukushima nuclear disaster took place. The crisis is not over, and people living near the reactors have been cleared out. They are yet to return. In their place, the plants are taking over.
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And now here's a cell phone that might make things better—or worse.
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A Seattle-area man who lived in Europe during the Chernobyl disaster, now wary of radiation from Japan's Fukushima nuclear accidents traversing the Pacific, built that, the a Fallout-themed case for a Geiger counter that reports its findings automatically via Twitter.
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The badly damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant has been upgraded from 5 to 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. That's, in case you were wondering, out of seven—the only other nuclear crisis to reach the same level is Chernobyl.
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A second earthquake—magnitude 7.4—has hit northeastern Japan, prompting a tsunami warning. The quake, strong enough to move buildings in Tokyo, hit 78 miles north of the devastated Fukushima plant at 11:32 pm, local time.
As fears rise in Japan about nuclear disaster at the Fukushima plant, the first and best line of defense are the reactor's six inch thick steel-walled chambers, made by a company that still forges samurai swords by hand. [Jalopnik]
