Fukushima Daiichi -- "We Nearly Lost Northern Japan"
Michio Kaku (physicist and co-creator of modern superstring theory) says that according to recent government revelations, we now know Fukushima Daiichi experienced a 100% simultaneous meltdown of three of the site's six reactors. The only thing that saved Japan from complete disaster was the government overriding TEPCO and ordering the utility to run seawater into the plant, a last-ditch effort which absorbed the excess heat and prevented the cores from exploding outright.
If the seawater had not worked, Dr. Kaku remarks, we would have had 3 simultaneous Chernobyls, and northern Japan would no longer be habitable.
If the seawater had not worked, Dr. Kaku remarks, we would have had 3 simultaneous Chernobyls, and northern Japan would no longer be habitable.
posted by Ralph Cerchione | Tuesday, June 07, 2011
3 Comments:
"Nearly Lost?" I'm pretty sure, it's a loss. As in, would YOU move there? What's the real estate value going to be? Grow food there? Eat that food?
Not gonna happen. All of Northern Japan is going to be a wasteland; as usual, they're still sugarcoating this.
"Lost" is relative. Much of northern Japan appears to still be habitable, and more importantly, even if the environment is more heavily contaminated than has been officially acknowledged, it's much less contaminated than it would be if the first three reactors had completely exploded (which almost certainly have finished off the fourth as well, if not the fifth and sixth).
Or to put it another way, if Japan needs to move a large part of its population out of the way for a short time, they can send millions of people overseas to wealthy nations whose national bonds they own... simply buying up large tracts of dramatically underused and often high-end housing. That option would be particularly easy to execute in the U.S., which has whole cities that are substantially underpopulated (Detroit, swaths of Miami). There would be legal and logistical issues, to be sure, but the perception of the Japanese is generally positive in America, especially among younger people.
I discussed this a couple months or so ago. But the key thing to remember is that the environment won't get wiped out in Honshu, and over decades will be considerably safer... assuming Fukushima Daiichi can be gotten under control soon, and its worst concentrations of isotopes cleaned up and contained.
Wait until November and December when the first post Fukushima babies start being born...
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