Electric Cars' Appeal Waning In Japan After Nuclear Disaster?

March 11, 2011 changed Japan forever. Just before 3pm local time, a magnitude 9 earthquake created a Tsunami that devastated a large region of the Eastern coast of Japan, killing thousands.

It also triggered meltdowns in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing explosions in three reactors, with the surrounding area now likely to be contaminated for decades.

Such instances are rare, but the disaster turned the tide of opinion against nuclear power in Japan. It may also have shifted customers' opinions of electric cars, reports Detroit News.

As zero local emissions vehicles, electric cars are immediately cleaner than internal combustion vehicles. However, they typically rely on power stations to generate the electricity they use. The cleanliness of this varies depending on how the power is being generated.

Renewable sources like solar, wind and hydro are ideal, and many would say idealistic. Coal, gas and oil, as fossil fuels, aren't so good. Nuclear is a compromize that many accept, with the generation being essentially clean, but with dubious longer-term issues.

In the event of a catastrophe rendering some of your country uninhabitable, even the short-term benefits of nuclear power become moot. The Japanese government had intended to increase nuclear power from a third of Japan's energy mix, to a half.

The image of electric cars has become a further casualty of the disaster. With Japan currently relying mostly on fossil fuels for electricity generation, their green image has suffered. Now that nuclear also has a tainted image, even EVs run on nuclear-generated electricity have an unfortunate association in the country.

Ryuichi Kino, an author who has written books on nuclear power and hybrid technology, told Detroit News that if nuclear remains a key power source, "then the green image of the electric car will get bashed to bits, maybe to the extent it will be irreparable."

Sales of electric cars have still been relatively impressive in Japan. Nissan has sold 12,000 Leafs in the country since its launch in late 2010. Compare that with the 10,000 sold in the U.S. since launch, despite a population over twice that of Japan.

That's clearly illustrative of Japan's suitability to support an electric car network, but while the country finds its feet in the years following the Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima disasters, the rise of electric cars may be a little slower than manufacturers were hoping.

Scientists judge a jury's brains

Sympathetic jurors show a characteristic pattern of brain activity when they decide to be lenient on a criminal, and the strength of that pattern can vary from juror to juror, researchers report. Such findings aren't of merely academic interest: Someday, this kind of neuroscience could well have an impact on the legal process itself.
The latest study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, is consistent with earlier research into the neurological roots of moral cognition. It's also in line with the well-supported view that mitigating circumstances can make a big difference when people consider how other people should be punished. This study, led by Makiko Yamada of Japan's National Institute of Radiological Sciences, bridges the gap by investigating how the brain turns information about mitigating circumstances into a legal outcome.

"Jurors are really like workers," Caltech neuroscientist Colin Camerer, one of the study's co-authors, told me. "They're chosen and instructed to do things with quite a bit of restraint. It's like you're 'hiring' these workers to do something that's literally life and death. But almost nothing is known about whether they're using their tools — brain activity — in an appropriate way."
To study that question, Yamada and her colleagues recruited 26 subjects to read 32 real-life stories about Japanese defendants facing sentences for murder. Half of the stories presented scenarios that were likely to elicit sympathy — for example, tales of life in poverty, or victimization by domestic violence, or a struggle with disease. The other half were "no-sympathy" scenarios.
After reading the stories, the subjects were put into MRI scanners and asked to modify a 20-year sentence for each defendant, either up or down. Then they rated themselves on how much sympathy they felt for the defendants, and how empathetic they considered themselves to be. Readings from three of the subjects were not included in the analysis because they moved excessively during the brain scans, and one subject fell asleep during the experiment. That left 22 people in the study.
The MRI results showed that brain areas known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the precuneus and temporo-parietal junction were activated during a sympathetic response, and that the precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex were activated during sentencing. These regions are generally associated with mental deliberation and moral conflict, as well as emotional pain.
The jurors who were more inclined to be lenient tended to show more activity in the right middle insula, an area known to be involved in the mental perception of visceral states. Camerer said the most sympathetic subject, as measured by brain activity, exhibited a 28-year range in sentencing: six years for the most forgivable murderer, and 34 years for the least forgivable. The jurors with the least sympathetic brains kept their sentences in a 10-year range — for example, from 15 to 25 years.
"This kind of variability is similar [but] probably much less than that seen in experimental studies of translating moral judgments to large dollar sums in punitive-damage tort cases," Camerer said.
The researchers said the variability in brain function could become a factor in future court cases. "Not every brain maps sympathy to prison sentences in the same numerical way. ... Differences in these brain circuits between individuals suggest that differential juror responses might need to be considered unequally," they wrote.
Camerer said another intriguing issue has to do with how individual jurors activate or deactivate their emotions during a criminal case. When they deliberate over a defendant's guilt or innocence, jurors are expected to hold their emotions in check. But when jurors consider the sentence of a convicted criminal, their emotional response to mitigating circumstances should become part of the  process.
"I could imagine where, on appeal, the argument would be that some of these jurors didn't override their emotions adequately," Camerer said. "If that's permitted as a legal issue, how do you know? We say, don't ask the person, ask the brain."
In the future, will jurors find themselves subjected to brain scans before or after a trial? If you were a defense lawyer, wouldn't you want to know you had 12 sympathetic brains on your side? If you were a prosecutor, wouldn't you want to make sure that jurors didn't let their right middle insula unduly influence their right temporo-parietal junction? Or does all this sound way too Orwellian?