It’s too bad our government is paralyzed by ideologues or we might be able to take advantage of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl to get serious about alternative energy. It’s hard not to get depressed about things these days. I feel very badly for the Japanese people, but I am also angry that they didn’t have the safety features in place to deal with a massive earthquake and tsunami. Government officials are charged with keeping people safe and now radiation levels are rising even in Tokyo. Even the reactor that was turned off is spewing radiation after the spent fuel rods caught fire. This could get unimaginably bad.
Meanwhile, a bunch of people are discussing it on MSNBC without disclosing that they’re terrified to be candid because their parent company is General Electric.
Update [2011-3-15 10:6:13 by BooMan]: I had forgotten that Comcast bought the majority share of NBC earlier this year. General Electric still owns forty-nine percent of the company.
Don’t think what happened in Japan can’t happen here. Our government isn’t any more functional than Japan’s. Our media is probably worse. And our people are certainly less educated.
Yes, I am grumpy this morning.
Technically, their parent company isn’t General Electric any more. It’s Comcast. As I believe Comcast bought 51% of the media empire from GE.
Ah, yes. I had forgotten that.
When a country that is supposed to be the most prepared in the world for this type of disaster is caught flat footed and we find out that even they appear to have scaled back the necessary robustness in the construction of their facilities that are now spewing radiation, I cannot help but wonder how much more unprepared and under-designed our nuclear systems in this country might be. Not to mention our preparedness, or lack of it, to deal with the logistical nightmare that will undoubtedly result when something like this eventually occurs in this country. And it is all but certain that it will occur here.
We wear collective national blinders in this country. This is due to a combination of corporate collusion, media ignorance and our blind faith (some might call it arrogance) that because we are Americans we are somehow naturally immunized or enjoy the special favor of some ethereal god from an event such as this occurring on our soil. This combination puts us in terrible peril. A peril we continue to ignore.
When I remember back to the totally failed response to Katrina, I am not left with anything but a feeling of dread and despair for what will happen when our next moment of truth comes and the forces of nature are unleashed on us once again. American hubris is no match for something the likes of what has happened in Japan. I just don’t think we in this country truly appreciate how resoundingly screwed we will probably be.
You are talking about Japan?
Look at the situation. You have a 9.0 earthquake at a shallow lever an a 40-foot tsunami. The nuclear power plant survives; the reactor vessels survive. What fails is the electricity to power the primary cooling system and the backup electricity. You have a scramble to get to the plant, determine the damage, and they you have almost immediate pumping of sea water to act as a tertiary cooling system. The Japanese were definitely not caught flatfooted.
With regard to the US, there are only a few nuclear sites in areas subject to a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami, and they all are in California. There are inland sites around the New Madrid fault subject to earthquakes but not to tsunamis. The US in fact is somewhat immunized compared to Japan.
The failed response to Katrina was worse than being caught flatfooted; there was benign neglect going on. And that neglect was in adequate funding for improvement and maintenance of the levees on the Mississippi River. And in the lackadaisical response of a White House more interested in winning the election of a Republican governor than dealing with a disaster.
If climate change produces more Katrina-level hurricanes more frequently, we will see whether we have learned anything or whether botched response to Katrina was the result of one particular nitwit in the White House.
The currently destructive hubris of the United States is financial rather than technological or complacency in the face of natural risks. And we might be screwed as a result of the financial aftershocks of the Japan earthquake quicker than a similar disaster here.
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Guess we know who is supposed to lose face in this situation.
I’m surprised they could get a report in less than a day under the circumstances. One might think the priority would be on beginning to deal with the situation before it came to reporting to the TEPCO head office, much less Mr. Kan.
What Kan is asking of the 50 crew remaining behind is that they keep working on cooling the reactors even if the radiation dosage levels rise to dangerous levels. His assessment that they are the only ones who can resolve the crisis is true, but the situation is much more dicey. They are the only ones who can keep the situation from getting worse. It will take access to replacement parts, sources of electricity, and much work to resolve the situation.
as susie madrak pointed out, TEPCO’s lied at least 200 times on their safety reports. And guess who’s building two nuke plants on the Texas Gulf Coast? That’s right: TEPCO.
you have every right to be upset.
As a former resident, I’d actually argue that Japan’s government is far more prepared to handle a crisis of this magnitude than ours is. They tend to promote technocrats, not ideologues, within their political system. It’s unthinkable that you could have a completely unqualified “heckuva job, Brownie” hack in charge of that country’s emergency response, and Kan himself, for all his faults, has been far more hands-on than any US president could be. We simply don’t promote people with that skill set at our higher political levels.
Similarly, Japan also invests far more in its infrastructure than we do. And you know that the first response of at least some in our political system for a crisis of this magnitude would be to look to gain political advantage rather than help solve problems. All of which suggests that if events can spiral out of control this badly there, how vulnerable are we here?
Guess I’m grumpy this morning, too.
Since this is time for bizarre thoughts I’ll bend toward the proactive bizarre. Japan is certainly faced with near extinction here…literally. With 3 or 4 reactors closing in on meltdown and no way to evactuate it’s an outside reality.
That said, if they somehow survive they face an infrastructure rebuild not seen in modern times on this planet. Their choices as a people are pretty black and white; sink into a 3rd world status or recreate themselves and put everything they have into reinventing themselves
The Japanese are a tenacious lot. They are also community driven and certainly are realistic. They have a govt that has been racked by scandal and has driven their debt over a cliff and it will need to be tossed.
I have thoughts that when one has to replace so much infrastructure this would also be the moment to install wind turbines which would probably be a reasonable turn as they can be installed relatively quickly but don’t carry the baggage that replacement of nukes would.
When I was a kid we sailed to Japan and stayed for a bit at a village where many of the Japanese were elderly who were disfigured from radiation effects of Hiroshima. Everywhere you turned there were faces of people who had suffered and still suffered. It is a cruelty that to this day I can’t get out of my head.
Now you’ve got me grumpy.
Me too.
In fact, the word “grumpy” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Whatever you do, don’t read my latest post.
Nuclear Roulette- Finally…A Bullet In The Chamber When The Hammer Went Down
You’ll just feel worse.
And we wouldn’t want that.
Would we?
AG
Now is not the right time to push an political agenda on energy (except for the let no crisis go to waste strategy).
But there are some things to consider about what this situation shows about nuclear energy:
Japan suffers the greatest catastrophe since World War II, caused not by nuclear energy but by an earthquake and tsunami that certainly has killed in the tens of thousands of people. But people are fixated on a nuclear plant that has killed no one and had its primary and backup cooling systems disrupted by the earthquake and tsunami. The radiation dose rate of leakage is not enough to cause evacuation of the workers pumping sea water in to cool the power plant. And the assumption is that the availability of sea water for cooling was a fortunate by-product of the plant’s siting instead of part of the design by Kajima.
The reactors were made by General Electric, Toshiba, and Hitachi, but progressives are focusing only on GE. Both Toshiba’s and Hitachi’s reactors have problems. And one GE reactor is not yet affected and is shut off (but still needs cooling). There is no evidence that either design or construction were responsible for failure. And every evidence that the engineers who designed the reactors in the 1960s and 1970s made just one design assumption that was not true: that there would be a 9.0 earthquake during the service life of the reactor.
In the US, the nuclear power plants most in danger of similar events are those near the San Andreas fault and the New Madrid fault. Those near the New Madrid fault are not at risk of tsunami.
Now, about energy policy in general. What this Congress, even a lot of Democrats, do not understand is that the market cannot accurately price infrastructure development because of its long time horizon. The payback period in an ROI calculation is too long for private investment without subsidy. But the service life is very long. Almost every nuclear power plant in the US is over 30-40 years old. How much capital equipment in most industries is that old? The interstate highway system is 50 years old. The return on investment in education does not occur for 12 to 16 to 25 years or later after the costs begin. So energy policy requires subsidies, either as tax breaks or as government-owned infrastructure. The question for energy policy is who gets subsidized and what the relative mix of subsidized energy sources is.
From a policy perspective, pursuing a policy of sustainability requires the government stop subsidizing extractive industries either through tax breaks, below-market leases, or direct payments. That means an end to oil subsidies, coal subsidies, natural gas subsidies, and metal and nonmetal mining subsidies. That includes uranium. That one policy changes the economic decisions that investors make.
Second, the government must identify and plat for leasing the most promising wind and solar generation sites. And for wind, the government should adopt an “over-the-horizon” siting policy to avoid opposition from beach and other coastal areas. And then actually put the leases on the market for sale. There are already tax breaks in place to subsidize deployment of wind and solar.
Now, what happens to nuclear, given the fact that it accounts for 20% of US generating capacity? And what is its future? In a peaceful world, the appropriate uses of nuclear power are where other sources of energy cannot generate enough electricity or handle the load, or operate over as long a period without refueling as a nuclear plant can. Japan, given its heavy industry, its geography as an archipelago and its large population, likely will be dependent on nuclear power for quite a while.
Nuclear power is suited for powering industries with heavy load requirements – smelters, for example. It is suited exceptionally well for maritime uses. It is well suited to providing sea-borne emergency power in disaster situations. And it is the best solution for some island economies with high population densities.
The US Navy has been powering surface and submarine vessels with nuclear power plants for 55 years. In the 1950s, the US created a demonstration commercial vessel, the NS Savannah. No private shipping company was willing to invest in the land-based infrastructure required to keep such a ship operating. But massive retrofitting of existing container ships with nuclear power plants could make a big cut in the use of oil.
In a peaceful world. And there is the major policy issue.
Military requirements drive wars that drive military requirements that drive wars. That was true of coaling stations in the imperial age and of the strategic importance of oil today. And it is equally true of nuclear power. But nuclear power turns out not to be good for powering aircraft or land vehicles. It makes good explosives — too good to be used, in fact.
The key to rational thinking about energy policy is to deconstruct the military requirements from the civilian requirements for energy. How much of the energy we assume that we require is for the sake of military equipment, military operations, or military reserves?
It is time to start thinking outside of 30-year-old frameworks about energy policy. Our media won’t. Our government won’t — yet. And it seems the entire left blogosphere is in a nuclear freak-out, which is not helpful to moving policy along.
The administration apparently sees “clean coal” and nuclear energy like nicotine patches for curing tobacco addiction. Notice there is no such effort for “clean oil”. That has to do with a strategy of rapid achievement of energy independence earlier than can be achieved through the best case of deployment of alternative energy technologies.
Change “our media is probably worse” to “our media is worse.”
Sorry- link for below.
Reading Greg Palast is never likely to improve your mood.
“Tokyo Electric to build US Nuclear Plants”