Comment 60961

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted March 15, 2011 at 02:58:38

I must say, as someone who's been following this situation since the wee hours of Saturday morning, I really don't see any of it as "under control".

Ever since the crisis broke there's been a mad scramble to downplay it. Every few hours, though, another reactor's lost cooling, exploded, caught fire, venting gas, or "partially" melting down. The attempts to pump in seawater have been fraught with problems (and will probably mean the end of the life for these reactors), and there've been reports of pulling workers off the site due to rising radiation. Reports of radiation large distances away... These are all very bad signs. If only one of these reactors had seen it's respective calamities, this may well still have been the second or third worst nuclear disaster in history.

One reactor would have been unfortunate - two a wake up call. But four at one plant and other difficulties elsewhere? This is a nightmare. And Superman shows up right this instant and fixes everything, it will still have been a nightmare. If this doesn't prompt some serious soul-searching about our energy systems, I really don't know what will.

As for how much radiation has been released, or what effect it will have in the long term, I'm pretty sceptical that anyone can discount it at this point. It's taken decades and we still don't totally understand Chernobyl. Expect to hear about new studies on what "really happened" here to be popping up for years to come.

Click the "Website" link for more coverage.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century." — Lewis Mumford

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