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Fukushima's Fog: Nuclear
Power One Year After Crisis
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
EMF Computer Protection
Magnetic Field Detector
Brian Merchant
March 12, 2012
Nuclear power remains the
frontier that we all wonder whether we should have ever
ventured into. It is the frontier that has remained a
wilderness after decades of exploration; a morass of
incensed politics, popular fears, and persistent hopes. It
is now equated in the minds of millions with Fukushima.
It is now one year since the
crisis began. Little captures the world’s eye like a nuclear
crisis; not war, not famine, fair enough—some
revolutions—but little else. The tsunami was devastating,
and our hearts went out to Japan. But it was only a matter
of days before we were stocking our fallout shelters and
buying iodine pills.
That’s the lift of nuclear
power. It activates the imagination like few other frontier
swamps.
Nuclear fallout, radiation, meltdowns, massive
reactions, mutated cells, steel doubling in on itself in a
warped Promethean display of physics. As the Fukushima 50
(and then 180) diligently worked to stabilize the reactor,
the world watched, and everyone started talking about
nuclear power.
For various lengths of time.
Here in the United States, that length of time was around
twenty minutes. Reenergized activists got busy, newspapers
turned up a handful of plants with dangerously lackadaisical
safety practices, and TV shows reminded New Yorkers that
they lived less that 50 miles from Indian Point. And the
nation sighed. Preoccupied by Tea Party politics, the
ongoing recession, or whatever else, our domestic status
update on nuclear power lasted all of a news cycle.
But here’s what we should
have been talking about: 5 different nuclear power plants
(there are 104 reactors in the US) had emergency shutdowns
last year. Another one was discovered to have run an entire
year with some of its emergency systems activated. As the
NRDC notes, if one reactor “lost both primary and backup
power for even a matter of hours, it could lead to a
meltdown and an airborne radioactive plume.”
We should also probably be
talking about what we’d do if these things did meltdown,
since, oftentimes, the evacuation plans we’ve got are
horribly inadequate: “fantastical” may be better, say
critics. After Fukushima, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
has promised an extensive survey of every reactor in the
United States, and the American Nuclear Society shows that
emergency planning is lacking , too.
Meanwhile, Obama has said
that despite Fukushima, he continues to support expanding
nuclear power. The NRC recently approved two new plants for
construction in Georgia —the first new nuclear reactors to
get the green light since 1978, after Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl sufficiently rattled the public. Nuclear power,
then, is lumbering along in the United States at roughly the
same trajectory it was a year ago.
The discussion carried on
elsewhere, however, in unhushed voices. Outside of Japan,
the debate was loudest in Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium.
Spurred by Fukushima, popular opinion of nuclear power
evaporated at breakneck speeds, especially after students,
activists, and environmentalists rose up and demanded an end
to nuke plants. Governments responded, and the nations are
now en route to bring all of its nuclear reactors offline in
the coming decade. The weight of the risks was too much for
the body politic.
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