Earthquake in Japan

[Anna]

...
Mankind is insane. It is too stupid to live. The longer I live, the more I learn and see, the more convinced I become of this simple fact.

Mankind is insane, yes, but the reason is money.
Behind all stupidity is the hunt for money.
You must be rich to build a nuclear plant, and you want to make money with it, because it was so expensive, so you have to make it tasty to the public.

A small simple effective thing can't make you rich.

Here in Germany there is a discussion about the "Stromlücke", a gap of electricity.
If we take some of the nuke plants from the electric net, we would have a big problem. they say.
Germany is leading in Europe for selling electricity to the neighbour countries, so... there is no gap.
They sell the same percent of electricity what all the nuclear plants do produce.

And a the nuke fuel is also not for eternity, (the final waste of it is), there are calcultions about 50 to 100 years, than it's over, and we need some new ideas.
With a better technology, reprocessing plants, for example, there would be 200 or even 500 years!
Allright, sounds good, but where the hell do they put the radioaktive waste?
And more, the new nuke plants are planed mostly to build them in dangerous territories, India for example plans to build some of it in a region with the danger of heavy earthquakes.
And Turkey is close to buy the nuclear technics from TEPCO, the Japanese who build..., - you know.

Insanity is money, if this problem is not solved then we have no chance.

...
I like thorium, its far cleaner, cant melt down, is more available, and one of the best things, you can not make it in to a weapon, and it wont make weapons, like all CURRENT US Nuclear plants currently do.
...

Thorium was new for me, and what I did found on german websites, seems to be interesting. Indeed that could be the technology which can run nuclear tech for centuries.
• But there is still radioactivity. •
For me it doesn't matter how intensive the level might be, radioctivity is not tolerable, it is always is a danger for live and the enviroment.
There are some weird effects
From the year 2003 on there is the KiKK Study (Epidemiologische Studie zu Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung von Kernkraftwerken) the German Kinderkrebsregister did this on the University of Mainz.
The did find out that in a time of five years inside a radius of 5 Km (Kilometer. about 3.1 miles) around a nuclear plant 37 children had got leukemia. This is unsual, the statistical average says it should to be only 17.
The influence of low radioactivity is not really known, and there is no fact or proof that the nuke plants are the cause. It could be a coincidence.

So I'm still skeptical against thorium reactors.

It's like if a doctor says: you can't walk anymore, but you can choose, a lifelong in a wheel chair or loose your legs and get some wonderful prosthetics and you can walk again.
But what if I could tell you, there is a day that you can walk again on your own feet? But you need patience and you must accept a few unusual strategies.

Do we need a technology which is always dangerous and can not really be under controll?

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

This is the face of Tokyo Electric Power Company Managing Director Akio Komiri. He is crying like a little girl because he is having to admit that the nuclear catastrophe is vastly worse that the government has allowed him to say. For Komuri's entire career, he has believed in nuclear power. He has believed that it is clean, safe, and cheap. He has believed that, one day, some kind of real solution to nuclear waste will be discovered, so he authorized the on-site indefinite storage of lethal nuclear waste in pools on the roof of the plants. He has spent decades signing off on faulty maintenance and aging equipment even while his company has suffered lawsuit after lawsuit for illegal procedures and improper actions. He was a nuclear power booster.

Komuri admitted that the situation was a meltdown, that the radiation was so severe that countless people would die from it, and that it would spread, and that there was nothing to be done; that the situation was overwhelming and impossible to contain. Weeping, he begged forgiveness for his part in it, for the suffering and death yet to come, and for his failure to protect the people and the earth.

Doctor of Physics, Michio Kaku: "It's like a squirt gun, using a squirt gun against a raging forest fire. They're overwhelmed, they're floundering, they just don't know what to do. They're clueless." "It's already worse than Chernobyl."

There are hundreds of reactors of the same 40-year old type as in Fukushima, spread across the world, many in America, many more in Europe, all in the same shape, all the same plan and design. There is likely one near you, now.

Radiation has been detected in California from the Fukushima holocaust.

The US government assures us that "This will in no way impact human health."

Millions died from Chernobyl, despite the same reassurance, and the radiation spread across the entire northern hemisphere.

The Swedish Defense Research Institute warned yesterday, in spite of rosy pictures being constantly pained by the Japanese government, radioactive fallouts from Fukushima would cover all of northern hemisphere in due time.

Currently, the 'Fukushima Fifty', fifty men of the 180 who worked at the nuclear plant, have initiated a suicide mission to try to contain the total meltdown as best they can. Those who could have sent last messages to their loved ones, knowing that they will not ever come home. Efforts to drop water on the molten cores failed because US helicopters could not face the 'gamma spotlight' shining up from the cores; the radiation being too high for the crew to survive.

One of the 'Fukushima Fifty' said they were stoically accepting their fate 'like a death sentence'.

Another, having absorbed a near-lethal dose of radiation, told his wife: 'Please continue to live well, I cannot be home for a while.'

[RaharuAharu]

This is pretty horrible.


Could I get a link to the stories you sited, Id like to read them and see if they link to anything else.


Very horrible.

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

This is pretty horrible.


Could I get a link to the stories you sited, Id like to read them and see if they link to anything else.


Very horrible.

I don't keep links to every thing I read. Try finding the information the way I did, and do: take a term, such as 'Michio Kaku Fukushima Catastrope' or 'Fukushima Fifty', or 'Swedish Defense Research Institute Fukushima Nuclear Disaster' and put them into Google and follow the countless links.

What? Is there an image here that I have a bookmarks folder filled to overflowing with every little bit of data I read as I surf for scraps of information in the case that someone wants to double-check me? No. I just get on the Google and DIG. I dig and dig and cross-reference (because you cannot trust any one source for ANYTHING), and then do that again. And again. For hours, sometimes.

There is no way I could hand out links. I must have visited two or three dozen sites to get the quotes and bits I used there. I have no clue what they were anymore. I've moved on to even newer, fresher info.

But, that said, try:

http://www.zerohedge.com/ a site run by big names in the financial industry who hide behind a 'Fight Club' alias, they were famed a while back. They have quite deep insider information.

http://www.independent.co.uk/ British rag, useful sometimes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ another British rag, same deal.

http://www.france24.com/en/france Not too terrible.

http://www.dw-world.de/ Deutsche Welle is pretty useful, sometimes.

http://www.rawstory.com/ Don't trust everything they print, but if it is current, they have it first, right or wrong.

http://www.truth-out.org/ They sometimes break stories other people won't print, like
http://www.projectcensored.org/ does.

In preference to the usual crap from CNN and the bottom feeder uber-horseshit of FOX or whatever.

But the best thing is to just get on the Google and dig. Dig like a mole.

[Wizard CaT]

I only swing around now and then since the forum more or less died, but I had a feeling I would come see Jen saying more or less what she is saying. Though I did expect more doomsday than was given.

Yes, quite honestly nuclear power is a pure lie. The problem is power doesn't corrupt, it pollutes. There is no clean energy. To make energy you have to pollute, and if you have solar and wind, the backup cost to getting there has how much pollution in it? Solar is based in fossil fuel for production isn't it? Hell, we make throw away Styrofoam cups for no reason and they will exist for thousands of years. The Gulf spill is better than Fuku, but it about 500% more visible (and that is even with the big press black out on sad looking dead/dying animals).

Also, I would say the problem isn't nuclear waste, but that we can't do anything productive with it. I know Bill Gates & Terrapower is looking for a way to develop a self contained reactor using nuclear waste, which would be great.

Eh, all humans are short sighted. Killing the planet for over 500 thousand years isn't much worse than burning fossil fuel and killing it in 150 years is it? Do you know why no one cares about Yuka mountain and later generations? It implies that this civilization would end and that is sad We could always load the waste on a rocket and go pollute Venus. But hey, I cannot see how any new nuclear plants would be created in America. I mean, 3 Mile & Chernobyl were falling out of memory, but even if this incident had resulted in zero radiation escaping, it would have killed any new plants from being built.

But then I'm a nihilist I guess… or something.

[strange_person]

Nuclear power makes deadly waste we have no solution for. Period.

Bullshit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

Nuclear "waste" is mostly perfectly-good uranium with a bit of scuzz mixed in. It lasts so long because the original ore lasted long enough under the ground for us to find it, and after a decade or two that scuzz calms down and what's left is barely more dangerous than the ore. The reactors which crap out that "waste" were designed that way, deliberately inefficient, so they'd produce material which could then be distilled into bombs. Then the USSR collapsed and the Orion Heavy Lifter got canceled, so it turns out we don't actually need that many bombs. There are designs already available for reactors which extract more than 90% of the energy in the fuel, rather than less than 10%. (Yes, through steam. That meanie thermodynamics won't let you have your alchemy, not in this universe. Better luck next time.) It's just a matter of building them.

Speaking of construction, you seem to misunderstand how government subsidies work. People agree to play along with a government, pay their taxes and (mostly) obey the law and so forth, because they benefit by doing so. If they didn't, anarchy would be a hell of a lot more popular than it self-evidently is. One of the main things those taxes pay for is public goods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Goods_Dilemma You know, the stuff everybody wants but nobody really wants to pay for. Highways, national parks, safe trade routes, clean water in every home, and, yes, electrical power. A set of engineering standards and backup systems so resilient that a nuclear plant built in compliance with them needs to get hit with a thirty foot high wall of water before it stops working. Until you've built a 'teakettle' that sturdy, don't denigrate the efforts of those who do. The people in Japan who benefited from the electrical power that plant generated were willing to pay their taxes, in part because the taxes made it possible to build the plant. Would you prefer that it be privately funded? Some rich wacko who'd cut a few corners to line his own pocket, build a plant that would fail during one of their once-a-decade tsunamis instead of lasting as long as it did?

[Anna]

During the last days there were a lot of articles to find, sadly I can't give you the links because they're all in german.
But it exist a nice method to read them, online translators.
I prefere the Google thing.

And so I will give you some links, german off course, but I think it would be worth to switch on the translation engine.
But please, think always to the possiblilty that some words could be irritating.
We all know, a hot dog is not a fine chinese meal.
•
At first, an interview with the japanese philosopher Kenichi Mishima
page 1
http://www.fr-online.de/kultur/debatte/ ... index.html
page2
http://www.fr-online.de/kultur/debatte/ ... index.html
He talks about the situation in Japan and distorted perception the western nations have got.

Another philosopher, Hans Jonas
a reflection about his work, "End Of Our Freedom"
http://www.fr-online.de/politik/ende-un ... index.html
•
A german journalist suspected TEPCO that they send homeless people and minor people into the nuclear plant.
http://www.welt.de/vermischtes/weltgesc ... s-AKW.html
and an other link to this
http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/2/149483
•
An interview with an expert for radiation
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/34/34373/1.html
•
And some alternative solutions
Wind energy for Japan
http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/2/149472
A powerplant with tides for Japan
http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/2/149476
an english link
http://www.renewableenergy.jp/english/index.html

Allright that's a lot to translate.