What will spark the next Fukushima?

[CHIMO]

The gung-ho nuclear industry is in deep shock. Just as it and its cheerleader, the International Atomic Energy Agency, were preparing to mark next month's 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident with a series of self-congratulatory statements about the dawning of a safe age of clean atomic power, a series of catastrophic but entirely avoidable accidents take place in not one but three reactors in one of the richest countries of the world. Fukushima is not a rotting old power plant in a failed state manned by half-trained kids, but supposedly one of the safest stations in one of the most safety-conscious countries with the best engineers and technologists in the world.

Chernobyl blew up not because the reactor malfunctioned but because an ill-judged experiment to see how long safety equipment would function during shutdown went too far. So, too, in Japan, it was not the nuclear bits of the station that went wrong but the conventional technology. The pumps did not work because the power supply went down and the back-up support was not there because no one had thought what happened was possible.

Even though Japan had been warned many times that possibly the most dangerous place in the world to site a nuclear power station was on its coast, no one had taken into account the double-whammy effect of a tsunami and an earthquake on conventional technology. It's easy to be wise after the event, but the inquest will surely show that the accident was not caused by an unpredictable natural disaster, but by a series of highly predictable bad calls by human regulators.

The question now is whether the industry can be trusted anywhere. If this industry were a company, its shareholders would have deserted it years ago. In just one generation it has killed, wounded or blighted the lives of many millions of people and laid waste to millions of square miles of land. In that time it has been subsidised to the tune of trillions of dollars and it will cost hundreds of billions more to clean up and store the messes it has caused and the waste it has created. It has had three catastrophic failures now in 25 years and dozens more close shaves. Its workings have been marked around the world by mendacity, cover-ups, secrecy and financial incompetence.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/14/fukushima-nuclear-industry

[villager]

1. No, the industry cannot be trusted anywhere.

n/t

[buddysmellgood]

2. On the other hand, what are the odds of a similar disaster happening elsewhere?

[CHIMO]

3. On

The other hand "What are the odds of a disaster happening elsewhere"?

Not less than it happening where it happened.

[diane in sf]

4. Big faults run thru California, down the Mississippi river bed, under Manhattan

The reactors in Southern California are right on the ocean, the biggest quake in the history of the US took place in the 1800s along the Mississippi--it rang church bells in Boston--check out how many reactors there are in Illinois alone, the Indian point reactor is only 20 miles outside of NYC.

What could possibly go wrong???

[Gregorian]

5. We could be years, or just minutes away from a 9.0 which could take out Diablo Canyon.

The next big quake, whenever that is. It seems totally irresponsible for nuclear plants to go on to these fault lines.

[diane in sf]

6. Irresponsible, hubristic, greedy, dumb--take your pick.