Japanese Nuclear Crisis Is A Downer On Many Levels

You know these Japanese people are good at math and science so if they can't figure out how to fix this, it must be pretty bad. The annoying issues and problems with nuclear power have never been addressed, like disposing of radioactive waste, etc., and that's when things go WELL. When things go badly, it's clear we are at the mercy of all those tiny atoms, and when all of them get together and go bad, it's a great big mess.

But here in the States, there's a lot of - "aw shucks, we had this whole thing licked and now everybody's gonna slow down on nukes." The facts in this article make it clear that nobody really knows how this will be resolved. But this would have no impact on the people that want to build US nukes. Maybe they are right. There may never be a problem.

That's the problem with so much "planning," you plan for everything to go wrong! Let's just plan for everything to go RIGHT for a change. Huh Gloomy Gus? Come on. There's nothing to be learned from this Japan thing. Bunch of worrywart pansies hold everything up here and ruin it for the rest of us. So there's the downer of this nuclear disaster and then there's the other downer of the worrywarts screwing us. Double downer.

Once Japan's leaky nuclear complex stops spewing radiation and its reactors cool down, making the site safe and removing the ruined equipment is going to be a messy ordeal that could take decades and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Radiation has covered the area around the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant and blanketed parts of the complex, making the job of "decommissioning" the plant — rendering it safe so it doesn't threaten public health and the environment — a bigger task than usual.

Toshiba Corp., which supplied four of Fukushima's six reactors, including two on which General Electric Co. collaborated, submitted a roadmap this past week to the plant's operator for decommissioning the crippled reactors. The study, done with three other companies, projects that it would take about 10 years to remove the fuel rods and the reactors and contain other radioactivity at the site, said Keisuke Omori of Toshiba.

That timeline is far faster than those for other nuclear accidents and contains a big caveat: The reactors must first be stabilized and cooled, goals that have eluded emergency teams struggling with cascading problems in the month since the devastating tsunami damaged their cooling systems. Omori said the extent of damage to the reactors and other problems still need to be assessed.

[Associated Press]