Japan’s Challenge

Any one of Japan’s current three crises would stay or stall many nations.  A major earthquake, massive tidal waves and now an unexpected and not yet controlled material nuclear power plant accident.

Fukushima the planned, stands ironically to the unplanned but half-readied and unannounced tsunami of the century and its accompanying hardship.  Its safety and capacity should have been a relieving agent to the natural disaster.  it now diverts the nation’s attention and resources from other human rescue.

Japan’s national organization can better prevent the one and may never arrest, as rarely can any such situated people, the other.

Fukushima has become a costly nuclear planning and siting example for the remaining world and the nuclear power industry.  That lesser pollution and cooler gift of abundant energy to a modern world will be publicly taxed more than ever.

Mechanical facilities, as do their designing human beings, fail and wear out.  Future Japanese or other nations plants will require more safety back up and radiation containment.  Japan in post-war import was perhaps too dependent on the wonderful American technology to approach nuclear power in a Japanese way.  (The gallow’s humor of Japan’s profit motive and industry regulation is appreciated here  in this opinion as anywhere.)

BWR nuclear plants, may have outlived their time.  Plants which save space and combine energy and cooling re-utilization but risk inaccessibility or poor controls in an accident, and which hence broaden their prescribed and envisioned risk, must not continue.  Excessively released radiation in a concentration of reactors, obviously risk the maintenance of the safely operating ones.

Modern Japan cannot live without massive electricity.  It can conserve and greenly produce energy; but it is a today, a spectre of all the modernity of Europe or America with automobiles and gasoline – all the same modern scenes here in disaster as in the USA, perhaps except the line-up for ice and more water.