Should MotoGP go to Motegi?

Rossi says no; Stoner and Lorenzo are undecided. From what I have read, it sounds like it's still pretty bad in Japan and will be for a while. The radiation is still a serious threat.  

As the saying goes, "knowledge is power". The amount of hysteria and misinformation propagated by the mainstream press (and paranoid activist websites) is mind-boggling.

While the situation is far from over at the actual Fukushima Daiichi power plant reactors' location, the plant is located on the shoreline, more than 120km from Mobilityland Twin Ring Motegi circuit. The independent ARPA Emilia Romagna study commissioned by Dorna found radiation levels on the ground, in the air, and on food samples completely negligible. They noted that the radiation levels were basically the same as many towns in Italy and Spain, and that you'd receive more exposure during any international flight at high altitude. Even the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency, which some have ignorantly accused as being "industry shills", which is difficult to understand when the association is completely separate from any power company or national interest because its foundation is in the UN) reports show that the levels outside the 20km evacuation zone are negligible.

Some are crying out that there are reports of "radiation spikes" from daily radiation readings. What they fail to mention is that those spikes (which were all within the few weeks before the fuel rod situation was stabilized-- see below) were from readings taken directly at or near the plant's location...not anywhere outside the 20km evacuation safety zone. Any radiation spike outside the evacuation zone would have to be caused by a far more significant radiation release at Fukushima, which would result in word getting out long beforehand from all the independent agencies monitoring the situation.

Others mention the continuing aftershocks as a threat, that one could possibly cause another reactor building explosion that was shown over and over in the news. When the earthquake occurred, the reactors automatically and immediately shut down. However, the fuel rods still had residual heat that needed to be absorbed, and that's where the problems occurred; the huge tsunami knocked out the auxiliary generators that powered the coolant pumps. The reason the explosions occurred (which incidentally did not damage the containment structure nor the pressure vessels where the fuel rods are actually stored, because the explosion occurred outside those highly reinforced structures) was because the water used to cool the overheated fuel rods was releasing hydrogen-- water is made from hydrogen and oxygen atoms-- which built up too quickly in the reactor building and exploded when the concentration reached a point where any mixture with oxygen would result in an explosion.  Long story short, because the reactor was shut down a long time ago, all the emergency measures like injecting sea water have resulted in the decay heat decreasing to the point that the temperature and pressure has stabilized, and venting the gases (where most of the radiation release came from, due to some of the fuel rods' containers melting and exposing the coolant water to the radioactive fission products) is no longer required. So while an earthquake resulted in a tsunami that caused the original damage, the reactors are made to withstand an earthquake (they handled the original 9.0 earthquake just fine)-- and measures have been taken to ensure that another tsunami won't result in power loss like before.

Conspiracy theorists and paranoid activists are saying that we can't trust TEPCO or the Japanese government because of the misinformation they spread after the initial crisis. Problem with that argument is that much of this information is provided by independent agencies monitoring the disaster-- not TEPCO or the Japanese government.

Casey Stoner has changed his stance on attending Motegi because he actually went and consulted with scientists in Australia with knowledge of nuclear power plants. Others should do the same.