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  • Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step by Cecile Pineda
  • Louise E. Stoehr
Cecile Pineda. Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2012. 224p.

This is a book that is at once personal, poetic, political, and important. Beginning with reminiscences of her terminally ill neighbor two weeks before the fateful March 11, 2011, on which the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began leaking massive amounts of radiation, Cecile Pineda’s Devil’s Tango chronicles the first three hundred days after what she so aptly and repeatedly emphasizes as “our planetary catastrophe.” Written as a series of daily reflections on the state of our planet since the first atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, referring often to the legacy left us by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and focusing foremost on the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Pineda’s book is a well-crafted poetically-inspired collage of messages, a meticulously-researched documentary, and an invitation for readers to take direct action. And at the same time that the book is hopeful that “the 99%” will take up the cause against nuclear power, cloaked in its frequent references to climate collapse is also the bleak message that the opportunity for meaningful change may well have already passed. With all these messages woven eloquently into an evocative tapestry, Devil’s Tango draws the reader in to the most personal thoughts and feelings of its author and, simultaneously, presents a most devastating picture of planetary destruction brought on by the past seventy years of nuclear weapons and power plants.

Devil’s Tango is a plea that its readers wake up and recognize the real and grave dangers presented by nuclear power, and also the reality of corporate control of energy policies world-wide that are encouraging ever more investment in destructive energy sources, including nuclear energy at the cost of our very survival. It is an indictment of everything connected with nuclear power: an indictment of the corporations that promote it; of the regulatory agencies that continually weaken safety standards even as they approve nuclear power plants to remain in operation well past initial planning dates; of the politicians who do nothing to invest in safer, renewable energies; and, finally, of the greed that drives all these decisions.

Drawing the unambiguous conclusion that nuclear power means murder, Pineda points out direct connections between nuclear power and war, as she recounts the personal suffering and statistically-significant higher rates of birth defects, cancers, and deaths that are coupled with environmental devastation—all of which are caused by mining and processing uranium, building and operating nuclear plants, and ultimately using the nuclear waste from the plants in depleted uranium weapons that have been employed in wars beginning with Israel against Lebanon as early as 1972 and continuing to the present day in Iraq, Afghanistan, [End Page 109] Pakistan and elsewhere.

Devil’s Tango, written as the Occupy Movement was taking hold, issues a call to action. Discussing the STOP NEW NUCLEAR coalition in the United Kingdom, which has been working to prevent Electricité de France from building eight new plants in the UK, Pineda refers to those people who are taking direct action against nuclear power as “do-it-yourself shut-it-downers” (127). She draws hope from the individuals in this and other movements, who, successfully or not, have protested existing and proposed nuclear power plants. Through her recounting of these events, Pineda empowers her readers to use the resources collected in the Appendices to themselves begin taking action in support of those most affected by the fallout from Fukushima and against the nuclear power industry in general.

Equally important and most significant, considering its early 2012 publication date, Pineda’s book is one of the first and, certainly, one of the most meticulously researched accounts published about the Fukushima Daiichi’s nuclear disaster, including detailed information that Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and the Japanese as well as the United States’ governments did not want disclosed as the disaster was unfolding. It is also a primer in nuclear power plant design, with special attention given to the inherently faulty model installed...

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