By now, unless you are a slug and live under a rock, you have heard of the disaster in Japan…..the 9.0 quake and the resulting tsunami….which has help cause a nuclear disaster…..it seems that a local nuke plant is exploding and burning and, in short, just a heartbeat away from a meltdown…and that would not be good for anyone on this planet……
But I want to talk about the rest of Japan…..because of the disaster the country has lost about 25% of its total power output…..and the government decide the way to handle this short fall was to have rolling blackouts and the word went out to the people that they needed to conserve as much as possible……
It appears that the people of Japan have taken heed of the word from the government and conserved…..conserved so much that the rolling blackouts were NOT necessary…..let me say that again! The rolling blackouts were NOT necessary!
That means that the Japanese people stepped up in a time of crisis and pulled together to assist the country in its time of need……Again? They were responsible enough to step up and conserve for the good of the nation! Of course this may not be a permanent situation…..but at least they step up……this is also a perfect illustration of what “shared sacrifice” means…..
OK, now look at the US……would that happen here in this country? Of course, it would NOT! The people of the US cannot pull together for something as important as education and to think that they would do so in time of crisis is delusional……very few are responsible enough to help the country, maybe their neighbors in time of crisis….but the whole country….NO WAY!
Yes. A good post. But then the Japanese are largely a decent people (with much fewer exceptions than the US or EU-UK).
I would only pick you up on one small point – a meltdown need NOT be as bad as you suggest – it’s CONTAINMENT that is the key, whatever the problem with nuclear energy and that largely depends on the build, design and facilities at hand, all of which Japan does well.
Thank you…..
The problem is the quake did NOT do this….the back up generations were in a basement…..floods are not a good thing…..I agree that it may not be as bad as I suggest…..but it was failure of back ups that caused the problem and where have we heard that….oh yeah…Gulf oil spill….another point is ….containment does not seem to be working well these days…..I just feel sorry for a nation that was the ONLY country ever bombed with nukes and now nukes are at it again…….maybe they should re-think the whole nuke thingy….just saying
At this point in time, I doubt if the nuclear problem is particularly severe (relatively). It seems to me that, at the current state of affairs, it’s little more than an irritation compared with the rest of the devastation that WAS caused by the quake and the resulting tsunami.
IMO, people are just too paranoid about nuclear energy. Someone in the UK pointed out that NO power source is 100% safe and probably never can be. Another said that a wind turbine is hardly dangerous, but that’s twaddle. Firstly, it would take around 100,000 of them (at a guess) to equal one nuclear plant – maybe a million and (in the uK and elsewhere) many of them are at sea, where they are potentially a serious danger to shipping. The idea of “renewable” energy is a good one, but don’t get “owt for nowt” (anything for nothing) and in any event renewable technology is further away from being a truly viable answer than nuclear fusion, or bloody warp drive for that matter. It’s all pie in the sky La-La Land stuff – but it makes ONE HECK OF A LOT OF MONEY FOR THOSE PUSHING IT – potentially as much as OIL!
I have enjoyed the Nuke industry rolling out its so called experts to deny that there is any problem…..I know that nukes are gonna be one of the answers…..but 40 years ago if Carter had gotten his way we would NOT be having this conversation….
True, I think – remind me…
OF………..?
What Carter wanted – he was a peanut farmer or something, wasn’t he? 😆
Oh okay…..when Carter was in office we had the big oil scare in the 70’s and Carter and his group came up with an pretty good energy plan to include alternatives and the Congress was not prepared to act and we lost the opportunity to lessen our dependency on foreign oil….that is the real short explanation…..
Oh, you mean to outflank “big oil”. Well, that was always going to be a non-starter, wasn’t it?
Yes it was ….but I just thought…..never mind…I was mistaken…lol
I found this article resourceful.
Thanx Jackie…..nice to hear from you again……