Fukushima

Well as you might imagine there is a lot of hype and misinformation surrounding this incident....Japan is the only country ever bombed with nuclear weapons, as such the mere mention of the word 'radiation' sends people into a panic....Employees of the responsible company Tepco have made the containment even worse by leaving the company, politicians have added to the problem by yielding to public panic and over reacting to the situation....Wiki gives a good write up here....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

http://www.wunderground.com/news/nuke-agency-urges-drastic-steps-fukushima-20131028

This is the crux.....

"Cooling requirements.....

Power reactors work by splitting atoms, typically uranium, in a chain reaction. The reactor continues to generate heat after the chain reaction is stopped because of the radioactive decay of unstable isotopes, fission products, created by this process. This decay of unstable isotopes, and the decay heat that results, cannot be stopped.^[49][50] Immediately after shutdown, this decay heat amounts to approximately 6% of full thermal heat production of the reactor.^[49]The decay heat in the reactor core decreases over several days before reaching cold shutdown levels.^[51] Nuclear fuel rods that have reached cold shutdown temperatures typically require another several years of water cooling in a spent fuel pool before decay heat production reduces to the point that they can be safely transferred to dry cask storage vessels.^[52]"

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Cooling_requirements}

"Population increases by 148 per minute"! Does that take into consideration deaths?

Yes....Births - Deaths = Population growth...... I might add this is accelerating.....The human population is in the start of a bubble, a period of vertical growth that continues until the system collapses....

So I am not getting an answer here, maybe I should be more specific. When they say the situation is "Out of control" what does that mean? If you ducking the question to avoid a worldwide panic that is understandable, however, if we are on the verge of something really bad should we not be preparing for that?

Out of control can mean just about anything. Might have a cooling system out of control, might be the earth, or could be just the people. We don't know what is being referred to and it makes it hard to explain. You might read a bit about 3 mile island and the accident in the 80's in Russia with that unit. Many of these nuke plants have been built using the best safety devices made to date. But mother nature is one mean lady if she wants to be and protecting ones self from her is almost impossible. So care must be maintained in the face of this knowledge. Designing systems and machinery to the best of ones ability. But, also we need to know when we should not put something together that can harm many many people.

The last few days it has been reported on the internet the workers at fukushima are quitting and walking off the jobsite. So if they completely abandon the plant and nobody is there, and its out of control, whats the worst that could happen? Please feel free to tell me everything will be fine.

This article cuts through the BS.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-13/tepco-official-admits-fukushima-out-control

Yeah, I also heard that you can meet a French model on the internet.

Well unless you're living near Fukushima, you certainly have nothing to fear from any leaking of contaminated water....When they say "out of control" I take that to mean proper management control, as the management seems to be struggling with maintaining proper procedure and control of the damaged reactor containment methods....This has been a tragic comedy of errors from the beginning imo...the decision to leave the emergency backup cooling pumps in the basement level is really a fantastic lack of foresight on the part of the builders...even though it was brought to their attention....The three stooges type of management that has followed is clearly why new designs that take human intervention involvement to prevent meltdown scenarios is necessary....if even the smallest amount of doubt remained.....

Dude?! are you wearing Crocks?!

Actually, unless one has an open wound on your foot, a pair of easy to wash Crocks sounds like a good idea to me. You have to remember, this is a contamination area and cleanup is a critical concern.

Wouldn't the dust and grit get in the shoe, you know, because of all of the holes, and be ground into the skin..? Necessitating the removal of the outer layer of skin to decontaminate....?? ...after all it's not the goal to keep the shoes clean, but the feet....

The soft silicone of a Crock makes it unlikely to grind debris into the dermis and more likely into the Crock. You forget that unlike non-radioactive contaminants, if any radioactive debris does get ground into a callous or other dead epidermis layer a methodical frisk with a sensitive detector will find it. This can lead to the very annoying and occasionally painful treatment of debris removal. Now a Crock and an absorbent sock could be a problem because of liquid dispersion (contaminated wet sock) into the circulatory system. A Crock and no stockings (if no open wounds exist or are created) is not a bad idea.

I don't know. I wear Crocks a lot during the summer, and usually wear socks with them; but I also go sockless for yard work, fishing, etc. Over the course of a day, dirt and debris get inside, mix with the sweat from my feet, and forms a sticky goo.

I can't come inside and kick the Crocks off. Both, feet and Crocks have to be washed outside with the hose.

He may be wearing his booties under the Crocks, and wearing the Crocks because they are so easily washed off.

100,000 pairs were donated to the tsunami victims, by the croc company. That might explain it. I was going to post a link, but the site was acting strange.

They have come up with a cooling version!

The media sensationalizes EVERYTHING.

Japan is not a rich nation.

They have no experience with nuclear damage control.

Their people, culturally, believe what they are told, a hold-over from Imperial days, so there was/is not much internal urgency to "get this under control, NOW".

TEPCO has not been honest in its assessments of the situation, nor its ability to control the contaminated water that will still be there 10 years from now.

This reminds me of BP's cover-up, and subsequent bungling of the USA Gulf oil spill, which is still not cleaned up.

I think they were prepared for just about every scenario they could imagine...they just never imagined a tsunami.

They even anticipated a tsunami. They did not anticipate a tsunami large enough to over-top their 10 meter sea walls.

"The Japanese mayor who was laughed at for building a huge sea wall - until his village was left almost untouched by tsunami "

Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall--village-left-untouched-tsunami.html#ixzz2jax0jAWu

Good link - I never read that before.

On a different tack: One of the reasons that we have not, and might never be able to contact other beings on other planets is that their civilizations never last long. According to this idea, any civilization will eventually destroy itself. I always found that thought rather pessimistic, but now am beginning to wonder.

Wow! 25,000 missing or dead from the tsunami itself.

How many has the nuclear plant killed?

Kind of puts things in perspective.