The Tokyo Electric Power Company is less credible at this point than Donald Rumsfeld, and that takes some doing. Japan should ask for some actual experts to take over the job of trying to keep the Fukushima reactors under control. At least outsiders wouldn’t have an incentive to lie constantly about the level of radioactive leakage.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I think when Godzilla is finally done growing-up in that irradiated sea water off the coast, he’ll come and annihilate that nuke plant, personally.
On a serious note, this is why I was an anti-nuke organizer, back in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
Not only because of accidents like this, but because of the spent nuclear fuel, and how and where to “dispose” of it.
By the way, the majority of people don’t, but they should know, that most of the nuclear power plants in this country are built either on, or perilously close, to fault lines.
A couple of years back, someone took their lumps on Big Orange for starting with the Godzilla jokes and Fukushima within days of the meltdown. But, as Woody Allen has the Allen Alda character say in “Crimes And Misdemeanors,” “Tragedy + Time = Comedy.” The Godzilla reference is entirely appropriate. I’m not too keen on namby pambies heaping scorn on bloggers who make the painfully obvious more palatable through dark comedic references. The truth comes in many guises. The trick is to recognize it when it comes.
And a good majority of them with a reactor of the same basic design that totally melted down in Fukushima, boiling water reactors originally designed by General Electric (GE), even using the very same basic spent fuel designs.
But we all are told not to worry, “nothing” could go wrong here, ignore any irrational fears, just because “nothing” did go very wrong over there …. at least till Murphy’s law and the laws of probability strike here like it did in March 2011, over there.
I don’t believe we have any that store the waste suspended over the plant. I had read that the AEC rejected that.
Hate to tell you but we do have exactly the very same design in many of the reactors build in the 1960’s and 70’s that are still in operation.
From the NRC website linked below;
http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/faqs.html
For boiling water reactor (BWR) Mark I and II designs, the spent fuel pool structures are located in the reactor building at an elevation several stories above the ground (about 50 to 60 feet above ground for the Mark I reactors).
If you go to this list and scroll down you will find all the Fukushima reactors listed,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boiling_water_reactors
Looking around at the numerous US plants of the same design, means we do have many many nuclear plants of the very same design in operation today.
Notice the Fukushima plants were MK1 designs, and how many active reactors in the US not to mention all over the planet are using this design. 30 active plants as of today in the US, with 7 more plants inactive but complete. are either MK1 or MK2 designs that according to the NRC do exactly what you claim they don’t do.
BTW given the fact that Fukushima #4 had all the nuclear material removed from the reactor vessel, stored in the spent fuel pools, but STILL exploded destroying the building, a stored reactor that still has fuel rods in the spent fuel pools next to the top of the reactor isn’t as safe as some pretend.
Sorry, I don’t see this at the NRC site that you linked. Can you link it more specifically?
Try harder …. the quote is on the front page I linked to.
Bullshit. The word “several” doesn’t even appear on that page. I’ve read it twice and the words you say aren’t there. It must be your interpretation of something else, but I’m not going to waste any more time on my holiday looking for it.
Au contraire mon frere.
The exact quote I posted is there, you for some reason cannot read simple English and find it.
But more interesting to me, is why this simple fact sets you off like it has here.
Is it because that simple little fact destroys your assumptions and makes your statements less than factual?
Is that why you spent time this weekend, waste any more time on my holiday worrying about that simple little fact?
About a month ago I saw another article about how the solution to energy in the future is nuclear energy. I don’t think it was Saletan, but it was the kind of article that he’d write.
The BBC said overnight that the level of radiation at Fukushima will cook you dead in four hours.
Fukishima is a textbook example of how not to do a nuclear plant. Storing the waste atop the plant in an earthquake zone just compounded the problem of putting a plant in an earthquake zone. It was criminal negligence driven by greed. They wanted to save the cost of land to store the waste. Heads should roll, at least figuratively.
Actually, I think heads should roll literally. TEPCO’s management, at a minimum, should lose their lives for this disaster.
Was the Fukishima plant a unique design?
Are there any parts of Japan that aren’t in earthquake zones?
Unique to the General Electric basic boiling water reactor design:
Like all these;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BWRs
Was posing a rhetorical question and waiting to see if the call to hold the individuals and corporation criminally liable for Fukishima includes GE.
The design had previously been rejected by the US AEC. If they withheld that fact from the Japanese government, then you are right, GE is culpable for withholding a material fact.
After over 25 plants had been built in the US and many more around the planet, with 30 of that exact design still in operation in the USA currently.
Sucks to change the rules and claim something is too dangerous to build but then turn around and allow those that already are constructed to operate as safe doesn’t it????????
Actually kinda defies common sense.
over 35 not over 25
Wanted to post the phony map of radiation dispersion making the rounds. It is actually a projection of wave heights from the tsumami. Note the scale in cms. http://www.thelivingmoon.com/forum1/index.php?topic=4599.0
I’ll agree that the whole “not lying” approach would be a welcome and refreshing change from past policy but it seems to me that the lying is only a second-order problem. The fact remains that Fukishima is a clvsterfvck of such historic magnitude that it redefines the whole clvsterfvck concept.
Even if someone who was scupulously addicted to telling the truth were to somehow appear on the scene and take over from TEPCO — what exactly would they do? And who would want to take on that basket of headaches?
TEPCO is the last, best, only solution. TEPCO is the end game.
You mean, like listen to this guy?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsDldmSUdyo
Note: distant personal connection with Dr. Kodama.
Start at the 12 minute mark and be sure to turn on english subtitles.
This coming spring will make 22 years of living in Japan as an American expat with dual citizenship (European.) I go through cycles of trusting the Japanese, and then reacting in revulsion at the childishness of some of the society’s elites. The group of government officials who embezzled public funds from the Postal Pension system to buy expensive golf club memberships for their cronies comes to mind.
And then, I go through a spell where all is hunky dory again with regards to trusting that at least some groups within this country have their act together enough to get basic governance done, and to keep the economy kind of sputtering.
But this Fukushima travesty is the shit enchilada that encompasses the ineptitude of many segments of this isolated island out in the Pacific doing its own thing on its own time.
The early 90’s European and American stereotyping of an insulated, isolated, slow to respond to change xenophobic Asian island nation that doesn’t endear trust amongst the top tier industrialized nations looms once again. The stereotype of the less than honest Japanese got put to the back burner in the era of George Wanker Bush and weapons of mass destruction that never existed and GitmoLand bringing scorn to America’s own sense of truthiness. But these are the macro level issues that go thump in the night. On a personal level it goes like this:
Once a week, my friend John, the Oxford educated egghead, stops in from the local university where he works and he brings with him one of the Physics department’s Geiger Counters. He runs the sensor over all our produce, poultry, and fish grocery items to help insure that they are not radiated. That’s a pretty serious precaution to take. It feels like a Twilight Zone episode post nuclear destruction scenario because that’s precisely what it is. The painful surreality of running a Geiger Counter over one’s groceries? That’s NUTS! We’re not at all happy about this routine, and we are grateful for our dear friend John. But now our weekly, micro level grocery scan becomes a global nightmare. If any of your fish comes from the Pacific, and if any of your rain water comes from the jet stream that wends its way from Japan up to Alaska and then down to Canada and the lower 48, then I’d be worried, very worried.