Japan's Nuclear Power Hara Kari (Will Japan shut down its Nuclear Industry forever?)

American Thinker ^ | 05/07/2012 | Ron Lipsman

[SeekAndFind]

Any discussion of Japan and nuclear power is complicated by that country's history as the only nation ever to suffer a nuclear attack. That event continues to haunt the venerable Pacific nation. This is an immutable truth that one must accept regardless of which side one is on concerning the legitimacy of the US attack 67 years ago.

That said, the Japanese nation nevertheless staked much of its economic destiny on nuclear power. Beginning more than four decades ago, Japan deployed over 50 nuclear power plants to feed the energy needs of its densely packed population. Very limited in domestic fossil fuel sources and running one of the world's leading economies, the country's reliance on substantial nuclear power facilities made eminent sense.

And for over 40 years, this decision redounded to the benefit of the nation and its people. But alas, nuclear tragedy struck again in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The reactor at Fukushima was damaged and a partial meltdown ensued. People died, land areas became contaminated and the safety of the country's nuclear power plants was called into question.

Japan instituted a series of rigorous tests that all of its plants would have to pass (to ensure that they could withstand quakes and tsunamis) before they would be allowed to continue operating. One by one, reactors have been halted to perform the tests. Not one has been restarted, and recently the last operational reactor was taken offline. There isn't a single nuclear power plant operating in Japan today; and it is unclear when, if ever, any will start back up.

Here are some important points to keep in mind:

* The overwhelming percentage of the casualties last spring resulted from the quake and the tsunami, not the reactor meltdown.

[hattend]

I would love to see the saudis squirm when we shut down down their microwave power downlink.

It'd be more fun to watch them squirm if we turned UP the microwave power downlink...to broil!

[Savage Beast]

As someone said here on FR some time back, the people of the Western nations (and that includes Japan) have birth controlled, arborted, and homosexualized themselves into oblivion.

As Mary Steyn observed: The future belongs to those who show up for it.

[Savage Beast]

As someone said here on FR some time back, the people of the Western nations (and that includes Japan) have birth controlled, arborted, and homosexualized themselves into oblivion.

As Mary Steyn observed: The future belongs to those who show up for it.

[flintsilver7]

Mostly forgotten. None of them have reported any radiation sickness, at least not publicly.

For what it’s worth, the radiation levels reported in Fukushima (at least as far as total dose) have not been high enough to cause even minor radiation sickness.

[CPT Clay]

Wonder what they are doing with the fuel rods. Can we have them?’

[FreedomPoster]

Please point to a large windmill installation that was done without subsidies or mandates. They are pretty thin if not entirely mythical.

[chimera]

To correct the record, nobody has died in Japan from radiation exposures from the damage to the Fukushima reactors. Nobody in the general public has been injured as a result of the radioactivity releases from the reactors. There was one person who got an overexposure to the surface of the skin of one of his legs as a result of walking through some contaminated water in the early phases of the incident. His health has been monitored and so far he shows no ill effects. None of the reactor operators has been exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation. None of the recovery workers have had harmful exposures.

So here we have an industrial accident, driven by an exceedingly rare natural event, and the toll so far is:

Fatalities: zero
Injuries: zero

If only all industrial accidents were this "dangerous".