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.

An Ancestral Thought on March 17th

My father’s family, on his maternal side, settled the New England of 17th Century North America.  Both Mayflower Christian Separatists and Puritan Separatists, their descendant married the American born son, my grandfather-paternal, a man  of  Welsh-English Scottish-Irish (British Isles) ancestry whose parents arrived  in Maine.  They were Irish born, of Scottish and Irish birth.  He found work here, as did my g-grandmother who immigrated to join her family in Maine.

They found work and freedom.  None of my immigrant ancestors from Ireland of the British Isles, spoke any hostility against the Crown or hatred of the English in the 19th century.  No one of them promoted a “political boss “ nor joined organized political crime; nor suffered a non-secret ballot which would have forced them to choose between work or electing an honest man.

That paternal g-grandfather and his wife, had a large family, raised in Catholicism, and their daughter–in-law was the first of  her generation of her father’s family to be raised in Roman Catholicism for about 12 generations since the English reformation.

Those people came here from the Ireland of the British Isles for work and freedom – the greater opportunity of the America commenced by others here.  They found both, and their new and joined family prospered.

My mother, equally planted early in North America, as my father,  but in Canada’s Maritime Provinces in the 18th Century, mainly of Scottish-Canadian heritage, with a Scottish-Irish grandfather;  was joined  by her father’s family, a young German man and his wife , a young Norman-Irish ancestried woman who arrived in Boston about 1845, whose American borne daughter married a Canadian PEI borne “horseshoer”.

This blogger, has been part Irish – all of his life. Has never condemned nor hid it. And would never return nor diminish any other parts of  his non-Irish ancestry.

My family emigrated here from the British Isles and Germany and Canada.  Enjoy St. Patrick’s Day.

And  enjoy on March 17  as well, an anniversary of the Revolutionary War when in 1776, the British were forced to evacuate the port of Boston, by the command of General Washington.  My father’s ancestral relations from Puritan England, settled in the Boston area   150+ years were there too.  They, as the native Americans (and King Charles)  gave them,  gave the reciprocal good welcome and accomodation of new life, work and liberty here to later immigrants.