Earthquake off Japan

[Broomstick]

What is REALLY scary about this is that a lot of that land was previously farmland.

It's not like Japan had an overabundance of farmland prior to this.... That, and even where there weren't toxic contaminants, the salt water will not be good for the soil used to grow food.

[Todeswind]

What is REALLY scary about this is that a lot of that land was previously farmland.

It's not like Japan had an overabundance of farmland prior to this.... That, and even where there weren't toxic contaminants, the salt water will not be good for the soil used to grow food.

You misunderstand me. The issue isn't food production so much as it is people's livelihoods. It may be a small portion of the population overall but it is a portion of the population that is now effectively permanently unemployed in addition to being displaced.

[wautd]

Some before & after pics

[Broomstick]

What is REALLY scary about this is that a lot of that land was previously farmland.

It's not like Japan had an overabundance of farmland prior to this.... That, and even where there weren't toxic contaminants, the salt water will not be good for the soil used to grow food.

You misunderstand me. The issue isn't food production so much as it is people's livelihoods. It may be a small portion of the population overall but it is a portion of the population that is now effectively permanently unemployed in addition to being displaced.

I understand loss of livelihood and unemployment - but less domestic food production means more imported food which means food prices rise... making it harder for the unemployed/underemployed to purchase food. It's a double-whammy - getting enough food for Japan will be more expensive, and many Japanese will have less money with which to purchase that more expensive food.

And, like I said, Japan isn't known for an abundance of suitable farmland - if, as a comparison, a comparable area of the US farmland was taken out of production there's enough suitable land elsewhere in the country that displaced farmers at least have a chance of relocating and resuming their livelihood (with some help). Can Japan replace that farmland and/or relocate those farmers?

[His Divine Shadow]

Michio Kaku just called nuclear power a "faustian bargain", so apparently you can be highly educated in theoretical physics, yet stupid.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Michio Kaku just called nuclear power a "faustian bargain", so apparently you can be highly educated in theoretical physics, yet stupid.

Theoretical Physicists in general cannot be trusted to be near a proper experiment anyway.

[FSTargetDrone]

Many bodies are staring to wash ashore:

Tide of bodies overwhelms quake-hit Japan
By JAY ALABASTER and TODD PITMAN, AP
27 minutes ago

TAKAJO, Japan — A tide of bodies washed up along Japan's coastline Monday, overwhelming crematoriums, exhausting supplies of body bags and adding to the spiraling humanitarian, economic and nuclear crisis after the massive earthquake and tsunami.

Millions of people faced a fourth night without water, food or heating in near-freezing temperatures along the northeast coast devastated by Friday's disasters. Meanwhile, a third reactor at a nuclear power plant lost its cooling capacity and its fuel rods were fully exposed, raising fears of a meltdown. The stock market plunged over the likelihood of huge losses by Japanese industries including big names such as Toyota and Honda.

On the coastline of Miyagi prefecture, which took the full force of the tsunami, a Japanese police official said 1,000 bodies were found scattered across the coastline. Kyodo, the Japanese news agency, reported that 2,000 bodies washed up on two shorelines in Miyagi.

In one town in a neighboring prefecture, the crematorium was unable to handle the large number of bodies being brought in for funerals.

"We have already begun cremations, but we can only handle 18 bodies a day. We are overwhelmed and are asking other cites to help us deal with bodies. We only have one crematorium in town," Katsuhiko Abe, an official in Soma, told The Associated Press.

While the official death toll rose to nearly 1,900, the discovery of the washed-up bodies and other reports of deaths suggest the true number is much higher. In Miyagi, the police chief has said 10,000 people are estimated to have died in his province alone.

The outspoken governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, told reporters Monday that the disaster was "punishment from heaven" because Japanese have become greedy.

Across Japan, most people opt to cremate their dead. With so many bodies, the government on Monday waived a rule requiring permission first from local authorities before cremation or burial to speed up funerals, said Health Ministry official Yukio Okuda.

"The current situation is so extraordinary, and it is very likely that crematoriums are running beyond capacity," said Okuda. "This is an emergency measure. We want to help quake-hit people as much as we can."

Friday's double tragedy has caused unimaginable deprivation for people of this industrialized country — Asia's richest — which hasn't seen such hardship since World War II. In many areas there is no running water, no power and four- to five-hour waits for gasoline. People are suppressing hunger with instant noodles or rice balls while dealing with the loss of loved ones and homes.

"People are surviving on little food and water. Things are simply not coming," said Hajime Sato, a government official in Iwate prefecture, one of the hardest hit.

Sato said deliveries of food and other supplies were just 10 percent of what is needed. Body bags and coffins were running so short that the government may turn to foreign funeral homes for help, he said.

"We have requested funeral homes across the nation to send us many body bags and coffins. But we simply don't have enough," he said. "We just did not expect such a thing to happen. It's just overwhelming."

The pulverized coast has been hit by hundreds of aftershocks since Friday, the latest one a 6.2 magnitude quake that was followed by a new tsunami scare Monday.

As sirens wailed, soldiers abandoned their search operations and told residents of the devastated shoreline in Soma, the worst hit town in Fukushima prefecture, to run to safety.

They barked out orders: "Find high ground! Get out of here!" Several soldiers were seen leading an old woman up a muddy hillside. The warning turned out to be a false alarm and interrupted the efforts of search parties who arrived in Soma for the first time since Friday to dig out bodies.

Ambulances stood by and body bags were laid out in an area cleared of debris, as firefighters used hand picks and chain saws to clear a jumble of broken timber, plastic sheets, roofs, sludge, twisted cars, tangled power lines and household goods.

Ships were flipped over near roads, a half-mile (a kilometer) inland. Officials said one-third of the city of 38,000 people was flooded and thousands were missing.

Though Japanese officials have refused to speculate on how high the death toll could rise, an expert who dealt with the 2004 Asian tsunami offered a dire outlook.

"It's a miracle really, if it turns out to be less than 10,000" dead, said Hery Harjono, a senior geologist with the Indonesian Science Institute, who was closely involved with the aftermath of the earlier disaster that killed 230,000 people — of which only 184,000 bodies were found.

He drew parallels between the two disasters — notably that many bodies in Japan may have been sucked out to sea or remain trapped beneath rubble as they did in Indonesia's hardest-hit Aceh province. But he also stressed that Japan's infrastructure, high-level of preparedness and city planning to keep houses away from the shore could mitigate its human losses.

According to public broadcaster NHK, some 430,000 people are living in emergency shelters or with relatives. Another 24,000 people are stranded, it said.

One reason for the loss of power is the damage to several nuclear reactors in the area. At one plant, Fukushima Dai-ichi, three reactors have lost the ability to cool down. A building holding one of them exploded on Monday. Operators were dumping sea water into all three reactors in a final attempt to cool their superheated containers that faced possible meltdown. If that happens, they could release radioactive material in the air.

Though people living within a 12-mile (20-kilometer) radius were ordered to leave over the weekend, authorities told anyone remaining there or in nearby areas to stay inside their homes following the blast.

Military personnel on helicopters returning to ships with the U.S. 7th Fleet registered low-level of radioactive contamination Monday, but were cleared after a scrub-down. As a precaution, the ships shifted to a different area off the coast.

So far, Tokyo Electric Power, the nuclear plant's operator, is holding off on imposing the rolling blackouts it earlier said it would need but the utility urged people to limit electricity use. To help reduce the power load, many regional train lines were suspended or operating on a limited schedule.

The impact that lack of electricity, damaged roads and railways and ruined plants would have on the world's third-largest economy helped drag down the share markets on Monday, the first business day since the disasters. The benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average fell 6.2 percent while the broader Topix index lost 7.5 percent.

To lessen the damage, Japan's central bank injected 15 trillion yen (US$184 billion) into money markets.

Beyond the stock exchanges, recovering from the disaster is likely to weigh on already debt-burdened Japan, which has barely managed weak growth between slowdowns for 20 years.

Initial estimates put repair costs in the tens of billions of dollars, costs that would likely add to a massive public debt that, at 200 percent of gross domestic product, is the biggest among industrialized nations.

___

Pitman reported from Sendai. Associated Press writers Eric Talmadge in Soma, Kelly Olsen in Koriyama, Malcolm J. Foster, Mari Yamaguchi, Tomoko A. Hosaka and Shino Yuasa in Tokyo and Niniek Karmini in Jakarta contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS that the reactor where fuel rods were exposed is the same as the one that lost cooling capacity.)

[Magis]

I myself am a bit confused on the radiation leakake though: some steam escaped and all, but how large (also, how much) and how dangerous material are we talking about?

The steam venting caused radiation levels near the plant to rise to eight times their normal level, which is basically still zero (probably still much less than 1 micro-Sv/hour). There wasn't a significant rise in radiation until after the hydrogen explosion. 30 minutes after the explosion, a dose measurement was taken at the entrance to the facility and the reading was 20 micro-Sv/hour (which is equivalent to 2 milli-rem per hour). To put that into perspective, an acute dose, accumulated over the period of one day, of 2 Sv will cause nausea in some people. So the dose level is 4,200 times less than what is necessary to cause nausea. For reference, nausea is the earliest symptom of the smallest health effects caused by an acute, full-body dose.

[CaptainChewbacca]

According to CNN's news alert, the rods in reactor #2 are exposed again, which means the cooling efforts are failing.

[JME2]

According to CNN's news alert, the rods in reactor #2 are exposed again, which means the cooling efforts are failing.

Well, crap.

[Patrick Degan]

Michio Kaku just called nuclear power a "faustian bargain", so apparently you can be highly educated in theoretical physics, yet stupid.

Theoretical Physicists in general cannot be trusted to be near a proper experiment anyway.

Yes, well... let's face it; Michio Kaku and Greenpeace are going to have the public ear on this one. After Fukushima, nuclear power will be politically impossible to get going on a large scale for at least a generation, and you can expect a renewed push in multiple countries to decommission reactors and go for complete phase-out as quickly as possible. Chernobyl and Fukushima are already being linked rhetorically. The budding nuclear renaissance is dead. Which, I'm sure, just pleases Big Oil and Big Coal no end.

The only things to worry about now are containing the radiation release and how much land area is going to wind up contaminated as a result of the breach; after that... combined with the other quake damage, just how far back Japan is going to be set as a result of these multiple disasters.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Michio Kaku just called nuclear power a "faustian bargain", so apparently you can be highly educated in theoretical physics, yet stupid.

Theoretical Physicists in general cannot be trusted to be near a proper experiment anyway.

Yes, well... let's face it; Michio Kaku and Greenpeace are going to have the public ear on this one. After Fukushima, nuclear power will be politically impossible to get going on a large scale for at least a generation, and you can expect a renewed push in multiple countries to decommission reactors and go for complete phase-out as quickly as possible. Chernobyl and Fukushima are already being linked rhetorically. The budding nuclear renaissance is dead. Which, I'm sure, just pleases Big Oil and Big Coal no end.

The only things to worry about now are containing the radiation release and how much land area is going to wind up contaminated as a result of the breach; after that... combined with the other quake damage, just how far back Japan is going to be set as a result of these multiple disasters.

Yeah, I'm already looking into getting my Masters' degree in Marine Engineering instead of Nuclear Engineering. This accident should have been a shining example of the safety of nuclear reactors, since that's exactly what it was, as they took everything the world could throw at them and still haven't killed anyone, but instead it will destroy the last chance we have to escape the trap of fossil fuels due to the retardation of our democratic system as controlled by mass media hysteria, which is probably going to be directly responsible for destroying all of my existing life aims, beyond the more serious consequences, leaving me frustrated and impartial about all of the developments. I want to strangle these morons and start censoring the media.

[His Divine Shadow]

Hey I remember this Michio Kaku guy now, he was in this "documentary" on BBC about what happened before the big bang or something. God that was such a load of tripe with pseudoscience vibes that I turned it off after 20 minutes, you'd just get dumber watching it.

[Simon_Jester]

Maybe I'm being overoptimistic here, but I think it might be premature to count the global nuclear industry as down and out over this.

Countries that already make extensive use of nuclear power aren't going to be stampeded as easily as the US, and they already make up the bulk of the demand for new nuclear plant production anyway- especially China. As long as there aren't any Chernobyl-scale disasters coming out of this, and we can say "the plants got hit by a tidal wave and no civilians were endangered," the worldwide industry is liable to wind up doing all right even if US attitudes toward nuclear power get knocked back into the Stone Age for another decade or two.

Moreover, many of the imperatives pushing toward nuclear power are inevitable- coal on the scale needed to power the modern world pollutes horribly, oil is going to hit peak soon enough if it isn't in the process of doing so already, and the 'light sustainable' power sources like solar and wind aren't likely to be feasible for construction on the necessary scale any time soon. None of that's going to go away because of this, and so the industry may weather the hit a lot more easily than it weathered Three Mile Island, which occurred at a time when the problems of fossil fuel power were less glaring and there weren't huge Third World nations scrambling towards electrification at full steam ahead.

[The Yosemite Bear]

I ran into some greenpeacers at work, I pointed out that the sun converts hydrogen to helium,

[Skgoa]

...and then?

[Julhelm]

...they went into denial?

"Nooo! The Sun is NATURAL I tells ya! It has nothing to do with nucular power"

Yeah, never heard that one before.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Yeah the anti Nuke hysteria is really sickening. In the last 40 years we have had, what THREE accidents? Three mile island, Chernobyl, and now this in Fukushima Japan. That is THREE in the whole history of Nuclear Energy. Please feel freel to point out any I missed, but as far as I'm concerned that is a hell of a good saftey record for power plants in general.

The incident at Fukushima if anything should be a steller show of the resiance of a modern Nuclear plant. It gets hit with a friggen Tsunami and minor problems.

[Zixinus]

Actually there were several more than that and some of them were serious: some even managed to pollute lakes or rivers for a while. These were usually first or second generation plants or reprocessing facilities though, usually the first of their kind.

Nuclear has a pretty good safety record yes, but there have been accidents, it's just that most of those accidents weren't as dangerous as the public thinks.

[Broomstick]

OK, this is where I'm starting to get irritated with the media. There misinformation, hysteria, and just plain wrong stuff out there. Not to mention the wrong emphasis on things. I can understand that, at a certain point, the media stops showing video of bodies and rubble because it puts viewers off their dinner and makes the ratings drop, however...

A tide of bodies washed up along Japan's coastline Monday, overwhelming crematoriums, exhausting supplies of body bags and adding to the spiraling humanitarian, economic and nuclear crisis after the massive earthquake and tsunami.

Nuclear crisis? In true perspective, the nuclear situation, while having a certain level of severity that shouldn't be minimized, is NOT a major crisis compared to what else is going on. I am getting quite perturbed that with tens of thousands of people dead and hundreds of thousands of people without such basics as food, water, and shelter there is so much focus on power plants in which less than a dozen workers have been hurt and no one has been killed – seriously, there are ordinary house fires that produce greater casualties.

And no mention of “oil refinery crisis”? Some of those burning oil refineries and petroleum storage facilities burned for days, if they aren't still burning and they are equally capable of producing toxic shit that can make you sick, kill you in short order, or give you cancer down the road (we even have an SD.net member who recently suffered lung cancer due to expose to petroleum products while on the job). THOSE crisis sites are FAR more likely to have actually killed people, made them sick, or doomed them suffer horrible disease later in life. But no mention of that, right? When are we going to wake up to the “Faustian bargain” we've made with coal and oil? When are we going to start totaling up the human cost of that form of energy?

Millions of people faced a fourth night without water, food or heating in near-freezing temperatures along the northeast coast devastated by Friday's disasters.

THIS is the real crisis here – people in Japan are far more likely to be harmed by lack of drinking water and hypothermia than they are by the minimal release of radioactivity into a small area of the environment.

Meanwhile, a third reactor at a nuclear power plant lost its cooling capacity and its fuel rods were fully exposed, raising fears of a meltdown.

Can we stop it with this “fear of a meltdown” shit? We already had a partial meltdown in Fukushima #1. Nobody died. At most, a few people got ill, but they'll most likely be better in a few days. There are NO massive swaths of real estate ruined. The reactor is under seawater now and won't hurt anyone anymore ever. Get a grip, people!

We had a partial meltdown at TMI, too. You know what happened long term? NOTHING!

The stock market plunged over the likelihood of huge losses by Japanese industries including big names such as Toyota and Honda.

Thank you, Captain Obvious! Yes, I do believe Japan's economy has taken a massive hit, do we really need experts to tell us that? Actually, given that major Japanese corporations like Toyota and Honda have major overseas facilities and markets I expect they'll do alright after taking an initial hit – I mean, really, the Toyota factory in my area is a major employer, Toyota will remain in business. It's the smaller companies that are most likely to be wiped out.

In one town in a neighboring prefecture, the crematorium was unable to handle the large number of bodies being brought in for funerals.

This is also a major, major problem. I know the Japanese tend to prefer cremation, but there are thousands of bodies to deal with. Supposedly, the problem of disease from the dead isn't as bad as usually assumed (assuming they aren't fouling sources of drinking water) but the psychological trauma of dead neighbors and relatives stacked like cordwood is completely unacceptable. There is an emotional need to properly care for the dead. I don't know how open the Japanese are to mass burial. That's usually regarded as unacceptable by most people, but usually better than letting the bodies lie in the open. It is a way to deal with the problem that is fairly quick. If the sites are well marked at least a memorial can be put up later to allow survivors a place to mourn and visit the dead, as so many need to do.

The outspoken governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, told reporters Monday that the disaster was "punishment from heaven" because Japanese have become greedy.

Friday's double tragedy has caused unimaginable deprivation for people of this industrialized country — Asia's richest — which hasn't seen such hardship since World War II.

This tends to give the impression ALL of Japan is in this state. Actually, quite a bit of the country is fine – yes, they also felt the quake but not everyone got hit with a tsunami. Many people are still in their intact homes with food and running water and flush toilets. That does not, in any way, lessen the emergency going on, but it's the northeast part of Honshu. Hakkaido suffered much less damage, and that just on the south of the island. Shikoku and Kyushu are largely unscathed (some quake damage, but nothing major given the way the Japanese build). The Ryukyu chain, including Okinawa, are fine, and in fact were among the first if not the first to launch relief and rescue operations.

Yes, it's horrific, but Japan isn't destroyed. It will take years, but they will rebuild.

A building holding one of them exploded on Monday. Operators were dumping sea water into all three reactors in a final attempt to cool their superheated containers that faced possible meltdown. If that happens, they could release radioactive material in the air.

Here we go again – folks, we had a meltdown at Fukushima #1. Can we stop scaring people with this? Everything was brought under control. There will not be a “Brazil Syndrome”. Yes, a small amount of radioactivity got into the air. The vapor cloud was never dense enough to hurt anyone beyond the plant boundaries. You'd get more radiation from medical CAT scan than you would standing 5k from the power complex.

Military personnel on helicopters returning to ships with the U.S. 7th Fleet registered low-level of radioactive contamination Monday, but were cleared after a scrub-down.

Basically, some helicopter crews flying over the plant got a small bit of contaminated dust on them. They took a shower. It's gone now.

The impact that lack of electricity, damaged roads and railways and ruined plants would have on the world's third-largest economy helped drag down the share markets on Monday, the first business day since the disasters.

In other words, this is not good for the world economy at large given that Japan is a big enough share that a big hit on them will affect everyone to some degree. This is the downside to globalization – my neighbor's bad fortune affects me, too.

Initial estimates put repair costs in the tens of billions of dollars

Oh, please – it's going to be trillions to rebuild the affected parts of Japan back to pre-quake/tsunami levels. I'm sorry, but that's reality. Let's face it and deal with it rather than painting too pretty a picture. I'd rather be wrong in estimating too high of repair costs than too little.

The steam venting caused radiation levels near the plant to rise to eight times their normal level, which is basically still zero (probably still much less than 1 micro-Sv/hour). There wasn't a significant rise in radiation until after the hydrogen explosion. 30 minutes after the explosion, a dose measurement was taken at the entrance to the facility and the reading was 20 micro-Sv/hour (which is equivalent to 2 milli-rem per hour). To put that into perspective, an acute dose, accumulated over the period of one day, of 2 Sv will cause nausea in some people. So the dose level is 4,200 times less than what is necessary to cause nausea. For reference, nausea is the earliest symptom of the smallest health effects caused by an acute, full-body dose.

I'm sorry, but we did cover this already – the peak reading at the plant was 1,015 mSv/hour. That's “millisieverts”, not “micro”. After about an hour at that level about 50% of people would experience some mild nausea and perhaps some vomiting for a day or two. And that's about it – no loss of hair or death or anything. Now, clearly you wouldn't want to stand on top of that for any longer than necessary, not even an hour if you could avoid it, but if you had to you could do so for a couple hours without terrible risk. Certainly, to avoid a worse situation emergency workers would do that. The 1,015 mSv number is based on official Japanese agency reports, which are the best we have to work with right now.

There was also some cesim and iodine released, indicating core damage. It was shortly after that was detected that they used the “permanent shut down” seawater dump to end the hazard.

It should be emphasized that the nuclear reaction, the fission, halted as soon as emergency systems detected the quake and shut down the reactors, even before the tsunami hit. This is strictly a combination of leftover heat and the heat generated by already-formed isotopes undergoing decay. The seawater is cooling that down, with the core covered and thoroughly flooded there is no chance of the temperature rising again, and over a matter of days it will cool down and the radiation decay to the point that they can start cleaning up the mess with minimal exposure to workers nearby.

In other words, Fukushima #1 is DONE. It will never produce a fission reaction ever again. If necessary, they'll do the same to the other reactors at that location. The only reason it wasn't done immediately is because keeping the reactors viable as power plants would be so damn useful.

According to CNN's news alert, the rods in reactor #2 are exposed again, which means the cooling efforts are failing.

Well, crap.

Worst case, they do another seawater dump and lose another reactor. “Lose” in the sense “it will never produce power again”, not in the sense of OMIGOD-IT'S MELTING!!!!shift11shift!!!!

Chernobyl and Fukushima are already being linked rhetorically. The budding nuclear renaissance is dead. Which, I'm sure, just pleases Big Oil and Big Coal no end.

Yeah, but it's still a stupid comparison. Fukushima is NOTHING like Chernobyl.

The only things to worry about now are containing the radiation release and how much land area is going to wind up contaminated as a result of the breach; after that... combined with the other quake damage, just how far back Japan is going to be set as a result of these multiple disasters.

Outside of the plant area the contaminated land area is going to be... zero. Just like TMI. The winds have been blowing out to sea the last few days, so very little was ever over land at all. There's no “containing” the radiation release – what went into the air has already dispersed. Any activated pure water (what generated the hydrogen bubbles and exploded) has a half life so short that in areas of a power plant that stuff flows through normally workers can safety enter something like 10 seconds after a shut down, it goes away that fast and is that minimal. What blew off into the atmosphere was incredibly diluted by the air and is already gone. The released iodine was minimal, but in an abundance of caution potassium iodide pills were distributed. The cesium is more problematic, but again, there wasn't much. Just don't plant vegetables you intend to eat on the plant grounds. Don't graze dairy cows on the plant grounds for a couple years.

Yeah, I'm already looking into getting my Masters' degree in Marine Engineering instead of Nuclear Engineering. This accident should have been a shining example of the safety of nuclear reactors, since that's exactly what it was, as they took everything the world could throw at them and still haven't killed anyone, but instead it will destroy the last chance we have to escape the trap of fossil fuels due to the retardation of our democratic system as controlled by mass media hysteria, which is probably going to be directly responsible for destroying all of my existing life aims, beyond the more serious consequences, leaving me frustrated and impartial about all of the developments. I want to strangle these morons and start censoring the media.

Kiddo – stick with nuclear engineering. France, for example, is MUCH more sane about nuclear energy than the US, and you were thinking of moving there anyhow, right?

It's not the last chance, m'kay? I heard that after TMI. I heard that after Chernobyl. Nuclear power is here to stay. In fact there were two new reactors under construction at Fukushima before the quake, unlike the US which hasn't built a new one in decades.

You are CORRECT – this does, in fact, demonstrate that even under horrific conditions nuclear power can be safely managed.

As for having to change your life aims – it's happened to me twice already. It's maddening as hell, but it's not the end of the world. If you have to do it, I have no doubt you'll be able to – but don't give up on nuclear energy just yet. We need smart people in the industry. Remember you want your fusion reactor to burn with the heat of a millions suns, NOT your own anger!

[Broomstick]

Actually there were several more than that and some of them were serious: some even managed to pollute lakes or rivers for a while. These were usually first or second generation plants or reprocessing facilities though, usually the first of their kind.

Nuclear has a pretty good safety record yes, but there have been accidents, it's just that most of those accidents weren't as dangerous as the public thinks.

Look at it this way - that pink industrial sludge that flooded through part of Hungary recently killed more people and contaminated more land than the Fukashima plants have done. Yes, there have been bad nuclear accidents. This is NOT one of them.

Other industries have had much worse accidents. Hence, there was once a molasses accident in Boston that killed 21 people and injured 150! We haven't stopped eating molasses. People don't fear jars of molasses sitting in their pantries.

People need to have reasonable fears about radiation, not ones based on ignorance or lack of perspective in the media. It needs to be respected, but it can be controlled and managed.

[Edward Yee]

From Yahoo! (yes I know MSM and so on):

Yet some experts and officials say those fears are overblown, given the exceptional nature of Japan's earthquake and ensuing tsunami. The Japanese blasts may slow the push for more nuclear plants, but appear unlikely to stop it, given the world's fast-growing energy needs.

The governments of Russia, China, Poland and even earthquake-prone Chile say they are sticking to their plans to build more reactors. Spain warned against hasty decisions.

Japan's nuclear plant explosions come as the U.S. government looks to expand its nuclear energy industry by offering companies tens of billions in financial backing. Administration officials said the U.S. would seek lessons from the Japanese crisis but said the events in Japan would not diminish the United States commitment to nuclear power.

"It remains a part of the president's overall energy plan," white House spokesman Jay Carney said. "When we talk about reaching a clean energy standard, it is a vital part of that."

Elsewhere, governments began questioning their vision of a nuclear-energized future amid rising threats of a meltdown at one Japanese reactor.

Switzerland ordered a freeze on new plants or replacements "until safety standards have been carefully reviewed and if necessary adapted," Energy Minister Doris Leuthard said. The decision put on hold the construction of nuclear power stations at three sites approved by Swiss regulatory authorities.

Switzerland now has five nuclear power reactors that produce about 40 percent of the country's energy needs. It also has nuclear research reactors.

In Germany, the government said it is suspending for three months a decision to extend the life of its nuclear power plants. That also means that two older nuclear power plants will be taken off the grid shortly — at least for now — pending a full safety investigation, Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters.

A previous government decided to shut all 17 German nuclear plants, but Merkel's administration last year moved to extend their lives by an average 12 years.

"The pictures from Japan show us that nothing, even the worst, is unthinkable," EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger told Germany's Deutschlandfunk radio.

The European Union called a meeting Tuesday of nuclear safety authorities to assess Europe's preparedness in case of a nuclear emergency.

Individual EU members including Britain, Bulgaria and Finland also urged a nuclear safety review.

Meanwhile, opposition voices rose up in Turkey to renounce or scale back governments' nuclear expansion plans. And anti-nuclear groups staged rallies around France, the world's most nuclear-dependent country, as the government sought to reassure the public that the risks remain minimal.

Environmental group Earthlife Africa said it wants South Africa, the only African country with an existing nuclear plant, to follow Germany's example. But South African government officials want to expand nuclear power.

German popular opinion continues to favor non-nuclear sources of energy. But elsewhere in Europe, people have become increasingly open to using nuclear power as memories fade of the accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine — the world's worst nuclear accident, 25 years ago next month. Eastern Europe sees nuclear energy as a way of gaining a measure of independence from Russia's burgeoning gas and oil empire.

Statistics from the International Atomic Energy Agency show there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation worldwide, with 65 new facilities under construction.

Construction last year was started on 14 new reactors — in China, Russia, India, Japan and Brazil. In 2005, in comparison, ground was broken for only three reactors.

Boosters have argued that new-design reactors pose fewer safety risks, and that nuclear-produced electricity doesn't emit the pollution that causes global warming.

Even as Japan's damaged reactors were beginning to deteriorate Friday, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera told state television that "the new so-called smart technologies, are technologies that are absolutely earthquake-proof in terms of security. And that's why we are studying this option, because Chile can't categorically reject any alternative in energy generation."

Pinera is planning to sign a nuclear energy accord with the U.S. during President Barack Obama's visit to Santiago next week.

Experts said it was too early to evaluate all the consequences of the Japanese explosions.

"This is a massive earthquake, followed by a massive tsunami," said Physics Prof. Paddy Regan of the University of Surrey at Guildford. "Imagine if this would have been next to a chemical plant or a gas plant that would have exploded. ... There is a risk here but we have to keep the fears rational."

[Duckie]

Nuclear power will never die- not while patriotic china forging forward

Their response to the fukushima thing, rather than suspending their production of new plants and essentially guaranteeing the closing down the old ones like Germany, or flipping out like the American media?

"Yeah we'll take a look at security to make sure our new reactors will respond well to crisis" [read 'no change in policy'] they say while simultaneously building like 17 of the things, a 50% increase over their current level. [for comparision, the rough numbers I remember are 400 nuclear power plants supplying 15% of the world's energy, and 80% of france's energy comes from their 59 plants (which export 18% of their power to their neighbours too)]

in fact, the current chinese worry is that they'll build too many too fast, and not have enough skilled workers to operate the things.

I'm no expert, also, but I'd like to see France even try to transition from nuclear. They have 80% of the country hooked up to it, and make a killing on exporting electricity I imagine. Even if they somehow close half their plants, they'll still have the most nuclear powered electrical grid in the world and provide power to half the damn country. Money is a big motivation for these things- despite public outrage, I doubt France can afford to remove its plants and cause the national GDP to fall while the price of utilities rises, especially given its problems with impoverished youths already.

[Zixinus]

Broomstick

I agree on you on that. And I know quite well what the Red Sludge did, I was a single-day volounteer for the cleaning up group. Saw what it did to a few households first-hand.

Nuclear technology has a pretty good safety record, yes. However, it is not a PERFECT safety record, even if you don't count Chernobly (I myself consider Chernobly somewhat a special case).

Nuclear technology can be pretty safe and sound, a superior option to regular heat power plants and a viable alternative to various other "green" power generation technologies. However, it is not perfectly safe and there have been accidents.

I'm not saying that Fukushima is a MASSIVE CATASTROPHY THAT WILL KILL US ALL. However, it is a pretty serious incident that shows something that anyone who is clear on the subject already knows: it is a technology that must be respected and CAN be dangerous is it is not.

[Broomstick]

Reviewing the current situation at Fukushima to analyze what did and didn't work, with an eye to improving safety is an entirely rational response to the events. That sort of approach is what made aviation the safest form of transportation in the world. I see no reason such an approach can't do the same for nuclear energy.