Minke whales travel in pairs or alone when in the subtropical waters for winter or during migration, but at the polar regions tend to gather into pods of 4-6 individuals.
Aboriginal whalers must take whales to live, they still use small boats, not massive fleets of ships. There are villages here in the US that have depended on taking a few whales in the fall to feed the village through the winter and their operations are not even close to what the Japanese are doing. I was saying that if the Japanese want to harvest whales on this scale, let's see them do it with their original tools. They claim a cultural heritage of whaling, but that just isn't the case, only a few isolated northern villages of Japan have a history of whaling. Some villages use the explosive harpoons, even in those cases the whales actually stand a pretty good chance of getting away before they are harpooned. Sometimes they can only get one whale for the season, sometimes they might have a good hunt and get three.
Oh, and nice job equating the herding of dolphins into a confined space for slaughter to hunting on the open sea. Yeah, those two are equivalent.
As for the nuclear reactor analogy, that's pretty spot-on. DU is used to make projectiles such as Sabot Anti-tank rounds and other AP projectiles. So to say that Reactors produce DU is true. The difference is that the primary purpose of a reactor is to generate power (assuming a civilian reactor), DU is a waste product that is then used to make weapons. The Japanese are harvesting whales primarily for food, not science. You can go on about their stated intentions all you want but they haven't contributed anything of consequence to the scientific understanding of whales through their research. A better analogy would be if the reactors were used primarily to produce weapons and were being operated as power generators to justify the weapons project.
What I don't understand is why you still take this claim of research at face value when it is apparent to pretty much the rest of the world that it's just a loophole to allow commercial whaling? I mean, part of the stated research goals is to kill whales to see what happens to the fish population - which isn't only bad science it's just idiotic logic. By that same reasoning I could justify going and shooting all the Giraffes to see what effect it would have on leaf growth. Whale populations have not recovered from previous whaling and fisheries around the world are being depleted faster than they can be replenished. The CRI haven't controlled for the other variables so any findings are totally worthless and even if they did get a result it wouldn't be worth the cost.
Other things such as measuring ear plugs and stomach contents may be interesting, but you hardly need to take 800+ whales a year to get a big enough sample size.