March 16, 2011--So What Else Is New?

You knew this was coming. From the moment it was reported that the Fukushima Daiichi atomic energy plant was exploding, you knew, without knowing, that there had been warnings for decades that building these kinds of facilities on known earthquake faults was an disaster waiting to happen.

You knew, without knowing, didn't you, that the specs for nuclear reactors like the ones in Japan were designed to withstand 7.0 magnitude earthquakes, not 9.0s. And you knew as well, without knowing, that there had been for many years warnings that the fundamental design for these kinds of plants had been questioned as fundamentally flawed.

But, like most of us, you (and very much I) chose not to think too much about these Cassandra warnings, suspecting that they were the ideological views of extreme environmentalists or those who wanted to see industrialization and its evils turned back because of inadequate energy resources to a simpler, more self-sufficient time. Later day romantics and Luddites.

And don't you, like me, suspect that we are not being told the whole truth about what is happening in northeastern Japan and that the tragic disaster at Fukushima will turn out to be less like our own Three Mile Island "event" and more like Russia's Chernobyl? That the spent uranium fuel rods will soon burn and for many days release massive amounts of radioactive gases into the air? You know that without knowing, as do I.

Here's what the New York Times has to say about this:

The warnings were stark and issued repeatedly as far back as 1972: If the cooling systems ever failed at a [GE] Mark 1 nuclear reactor, the primary containment vessel surrounding the reactor would probably burst as the fuel rods inside overheated. Dangerous radiation would spew into the environment. (Italics added. Full article linked below.)

So now we know.