WHO risk warning shows Japan learned little from Fukushima

"Japan was warned in 2018 it needed to improve risk communications by the World Health Organization, but failed to act on the advice until the coronavirus crisis deepened this month."
Today marks the 9th anniversary of the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan's north, most widely remembered for the nuclear disaster they triggered in Fukushima. For years before Fukushima, too, academics and others had warned such a disastrous outcome was possible without safety improvements. Due to "regulatory capture" -- not uncommon in the nuclear industry -- those measures were never enforced and thus never implemented. This story in the Nikkei seems to suggest that very little was learned, which is just about the biggest kick in the teeth you could dish out to the the 160,000 people who were displaced by Fukushima and, along with countless other, were and continue to be severely impacted by the disasters. Every year my thoughts are with those people, some of them friends from my time in Fukushima, and this year even more so. I suspect they might be furious.