Being in a same boat

Rain. But less than we expected of a typhoon. With a speed of a bike, it still hangs around off Kii peninsula. It brought a rainfall of over 1000mm to Shikoku within a couple of days, an amount equivalent to the 10 year's precipitation in Saudi Arabia.

We live in a water-rich country. If someone tells us that water is limited resource, we can't really imagine it. In fact water has been reasons for disputes and fights between countries.
Imagine you lived in a country located downstream of other countries. You were totally dependent on the river for your living; food by fishing, drinking water, electricity by hydraulic power plants, transportation by boat. What would you do if one of the upstream countries suddenly decided to build a dam for more power generation which may significantly reduce the water flow of the river? What if a chemical plant was built which may discharge poisonous liquid waste? It must be a serious and critical problem for your country.
The Danube flows from Germany, through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine into Black sea. Thirty three years ago a nuclear power plant was built on the riverside near Vienna, Austria and still stands there. I visited the site several years ago. One thing it's different from the other plants is that it has never run. There was a referendum on yes or no to the operation and, at a mere margin of 0.47%, antinukes won. For all the money, billions of dollars, spent on it, people didn't want it. We easily know today, after the Fukushima, that it was a right decision, but at the time when atomic power was considered as state of the art technology, the decision must not have been that easy. In the people's mind there might have been the river. The countries are connected by the river. They are in the same boat. Austria has in its constitution a ban on the nuclear power plant.
And now after the Fukushima, we learn that more people, probably all the people in the world, are in that boat. Yet Hungary has a Soviet-made nuclear power plant with four reactors in operation using water from the river. There are many others in European countries. But Germany and Switzerland declared the denuke of energy. That's a sensible decision. Japan should have been the first. This is the country of atomic bomb victims and the culprit of the nuclear disaster. Our prime minister has made a slow move toward its removal.