#Radioactive Japan: JAEA Compares Angry Wife to Radioactive Material

(UPDATE) The page at JAEA is now "Under Construction".



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For record before it disappears... JAEA (Japan Atomic Energy Agency) tries to do the "risk communication" to ordinary citizens and blows itself up on Twitter.

JAEA's Tokai Research and Development Center Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engineering department has created the page below, to communicate things nuclear more effectively to general public who are not familiar with special terminology and numbers. The target is women, who they say have less understanding of technical aspect of nuclear energy than men. Therefore, the key to better communication is to how to adopt women's point of view, they say.

So what have they come up with? Using a quarrel between husband and wife to illustrate what radiation, radioactivity, radioactive material mean.

If we compare radiation and radioactivity to a quarrel between husband and wife...

Angry voice of the wife is "radiation",

The excited state in which the wife is in and which causes her to shout angrily is "radioactivity",

The angry wife shouting to the husband is "radioactive material" itself.

It would be the same if the shouting party is the husband instead of the wife. But they target women, because, as they say, women are considered to have less understanding of matters related to nuclear technology.

In general, it is what has been expected in Japan for long time - that women are not good at math and science.

Even the so-called "pro-nuke" people are appalled at this clumsy "risk communication" by JAEA. "What is this? JAEA, what's the matter with you?" was the tweet from a female theoretical physicist.

The JAEA page does say it has come up with the idea by talking with 6 women who live in Hitachinaka City where the JAEA Tokai Research and Development Center is located.

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