Not A Good Time To Invest In Fukushima Sushi March 31, 2011
Posted by Benjamin Wendell in Environment, Politics, World Events.trackback
As I predicted, the news coming out of the stricken nuclear reactor complex in Japan just keeps getting worse and worse. Now they’re finding levels of I-131 in the seawater off Fukushima that are over 4000 times normal. That wouldn’t be so bad if I-131 was the whole story, since it has a half life of 8 days, meaning that the radiation level drops by half every eight days. Nope, it’s the other minor contaminants like cesium, strontium, and plutonium…the last with a half life of basically forever. The International Atomic Energy Commission has recommended extending the 20Km evacuation zone, but the Japanese insist that there’s little danger to humans beyond that range…even though there’s measurable increases in radiation on the US east coast, as far from the reactors as it is possible to get without an Apollo lunar module. Rescuers can’t get close enough to some of the nearby villages to recover any bodies that might still be lying around, so there’s about five thousand Japanese in the zone who are still unaccounted for. Aside from all of that, the bean counters at Merrill Lynch estimate that Tokyo Electric may be liable for something like $13 billion in damages, which is part of the total disaster cost of the earthquake and tsunami that’s estimated at $300 billion (which seems on the low side to me). Huge Japanese corporations like Toyota are basically closed until further notice, so my wife’s and son’s Priuses had better stay healthy, because if they break and need a part, someone’s going to have to build it from scratch.
So, in regard to my blogmate’s post below, I hope Obama succeeds in decreasing US dependence on foreign oil and oil in general, but if that’s going to require building a lot more nuclear power plants, we might want to reconsider. Again, what happened to plans for all those windmills and solar panels? It’s no longer a question of whether we can afford alternative energy. We can’t afford to NOT develop alternative energy.
BW
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