Sometimes the dangerous news can't be photographed

At Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, the station that was catastrophically damaged in the March tsunami, reporters have no access to the site and therefore no access to the news. For the most part, journalists are relying entirely on the Japanese government and TEPCO (that's Tokyo Electric Power Company) to provide still and video images of the plant since Japanese officials have prevented reporters from scampering around amid the radioactive debris. Reporters and photographers prefer to gather their own information, but when that's impossible we must rely on others to deliver us the raw information so we can disseminate it and report on it. Of course, with that kind of relationship reporters must be diligent to verify facts since a company like TEPCO has something to gain with optimistic and positive news reports. 


Take a look here, at the TEPCO photo/video site for reporters covering the multiple Fukushima meltdowns. Dig a little further and you can find the sister page with the all the press releases in English and Japanese. This is the page that most of the news outlets are choosing photos from. You'll recognize the better photos because they've run in newspapers and on television when news outlets report on Fukushima.


Seeing these Japanese shots made me recall some photos from Chernobyl in 1986. After the roof blew off Chernobyl's reactor, the workers — called liquidators or biorobots — ran out onto the roof for a minute or two to shovel up radioactive graphite. Their time was limited because radiation could prove lethal with longer exposures. (Most of these liquidators died weeks and months after the disaster.) Several photographers were on the roof taking 35mm pictures. After they developed their film they noticed strange upward-moving blotches on the bottom frames of the photos. They later determined it was the intense radiation that was exposing the film right through the camera casing. Check out the photos samples below, or a short video of the liquidators here.