It's not acceptable to have nuclear plants keep exploding. I don't need to be a nuclear physicist to know that that isn't supposed to happen, even once! Then they have botched the rolling black-outs, and all of their communication. Never mind that they have a decades long history of lying through their teeth. Now we have to find out from contaminated US sailors that there have been radioactive elements released into the atmosphere. How is it these idiots are still in charge when their incompetence caused this? I don't know about (my native) Canada, but the bloody Americans wouldn't put up with this crap. The President would have their top military nuclear engineers in there, can the top management, and work with the middle managers who might even understand the technology.
Then again... That isn't what happened with Wall Street...Somebody needs to grow a pair and make a decision. Maybe it's time to do a Chernobyl and bury the lot of them in boron laced concrete. "Them" meaning the reactors, not the management of Tepco, but 'two birds with one stone'... Maybe something else. I'm no nuclear physicist but the time for half-measures is well past.
* Letting more than one nuclear plant explode, building it in a seismic zone, building it in a tsunami zone with seawalls too low, and vulnerable pumps...
** Lying to the public at every stage to allay panic or halt the plunge of their share price, causing the public not to trust them even if (they ever) tell the truth.
I've been doing battle in various threads at various sites contending that the nuclear experts from afar can all pontificate how by design these plants aren't the danger the popular press is making them out to be, but as not a single one of them is on site and as no independent (read: non-Japanese) authority has made an investigation, I think we can safely assume that the government is, of course, putting the best face possible on a really ugly pig of a situation.
ReplyDeleteI have no confidence at all that they have things in control at Fukushima Dai-ichi.
Quite. Had this argument with the wife, who tried to take the Party Line (Japanese authority went to Todai, so they must know what they are doing). Nuclear authorities, all authorities, have a long and varied history of lying and cover-up in this country, bureaucratic ossification, and an inability to manage crises. I was here during the '95 Kobe earthquake when they let an extra few thousand die due to incompetence of the 'decision makers'; and during the 'tainted blood scandal'. In the case of the former I do not even remember getting the dubious gratification of a bowing spectacle as the only compensation on offer. In a disaster here, look out for yourself and your own.
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