Well hello everyone, you know I have been watching the news coming out of Japan like most of you. My thoughts and prayers go out to the people living in this disaster area. It seems like it is probable that this thing will just keep getting worse. That is what I would like to talk about today.
I have to admit, I'm angry. This disaster could become so much worse because of the arrogance of man. In our never ending desire to improve we often do not stop to think if improvement is a good idea. In my opinion to build a nuclear power plant on a fault line takes a special kind of stupidity.
The power plants in Japan were designed to withstand a 7.0 earthquake, pretty good eh? Not when you consider that they are in a region that regularly has stronger quakes, and considering they are right on the coast line and strong earthquakes have been causing tsunamis since the dawn of time it is not nearly good enough. To be so arrogant to think that this was not a strong possibility amazes me.earthquakes over 7.0 happen every single year, sometimes several times a year. I mean this area had a 7.2 earthquake just two days before the big one, ten aftershocks over 7.0 since.
I understand that we are always looking for a better way to produce energy, and nuclear energy can be clean, effective, and it takes small amounts of nuclear material to produce decades of energy for an area. Add to that the amount of pollution coming from the average nuclear power plant is so low that it makes nuclear power very attractive, BUT if we think that this type of thing will not happen then it shows us exactly how stupid our so called smart people are.
As a spices we spent the first few million years trying to live as one with the planet we live on. For some reason in the last hundred and fifty years we decided that we would be able to control the planet we live on in the name of progress. In some ways we have come a long way, but our earth has the power to knock us back to caveman technology at will.
Earthquakes will continue to happen long after people are extinct, tsunamis will continue to happen long after people are extinct. The real question I have is..... Will our desire to be stronger than the planet we live on be what makes us extinct?
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Chuck -
ReplyDeleteI fully understand why the Japanese have chosen to embrace nuclear energy. They are, after all, a nation without natural resources to provide energy - a fact that led them to attempt to conquer oil producing fields in WWII.
Your points about where the plants are located are well founded - but I don't think there are many places on the Japanese mainland that are not within the danger zone.
What surprises me most is the lack of redundancy in their systems. Given the high chance of a significant event, one would think they would have had four or five electrical backup systems, not just the two that they had.
God help us all if this issue gets too far out of hand.
JJ