Timely. And by "Timely," I mean just in time for the one year anniversary of the Birth of Nuclear Godzilla! CBS News. Truly awesome excerpts:
The one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan is less than two weeks away, but details about the nuclear meltdown that happened that tragic day are just beginning to emerge. (Just. Beginning.)
..
CBS News correspondent Lucy Craft reported that in the hours after the tsunami struck the nuclear plant, Japanese officials huddled in an emergency bunker struggled to grasp the size of the catastrophe.
"As we listened to our top nuclear experts, we politicians had no idea what they were talking about. Was anyone going to suffer radiation contamination? Would this be another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island? No one could give us a straight answer," Fukuyama recalled in the report.
After 300 interviews with officials and nuclear experts, the report said government was partially at fault for not having an emergency plan if a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the country.
However, investigators concluded the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric, was to blame for the majority of the problems. "They were astonishingly unprepared for this nuclear accident," lead investigator Youichi Funabash told CBS News.
It seems that Tokyo Electric was unprepared for a power failure. Without electricity, the cores of the reactor couldn't stay cool, and it triggered explosions and meltdowns. (It's excellent that TEPCO didn't know this, but the rest of us were forewarned simply by watching Simpsons episodes..)
And:
"Terrified doesn't begin to describe how we felt," Fukuyama told investigators months after the scare. A "no go" zone still remains around the plant because radiation levels are too high. Clean up at the plant is estimated to take 40 years. (This is still a conservative estimate, btw..)
"When we learned the reactors had in fact melted down, I was overwhelmed, by our inability," he added. Oh, Mr. Fukuyama, we're all overwhelmed by your, TEPCO's, and Japan's inabilities..
Pretty compelling evidence for allowing private sector industries to regulate themselves, no? For my radioactive superpowers, I'd like invisibility, the power to fly, or to be impervious to bullets and explosions, please!
The one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan is less than two weeks away, but details about the nuclear meltdown that happened that tragic day are just beginning to emerge. (Just. Beginning.)
..
CBS News correspondent Lucy Craft reported that in the hours after the tsunami struck the nuclear plant, Japanese officials huddled in an emergency bunker struggled to grasp the size of the catastrophe.
"As we listened to our top nuclear experts, we politicians had no idea what they were talking about. Was anyone going to suffer radiation contamination? Would this be another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island? No one could give us a straight answer," Fukuyama recalled in the report.
After 300 interviews with officials and nuclear experts, the report said government was partially at fault for not having an emergency plan if a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the country.
However, investigators concluded the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric, was to blame for the majority of the problems. "They were astonishingly unprepared for this nuclear accident," lead investigator Youichi Funabash told CBS News.
It seems that Tokyo Electric was unprepared for a power failure. Without electricity, the cores of the reactor couldn't stay cool, and it triggered explosions and meltdowns. (It's excellent that TEPCO didn't know this, but the rest of us were forewarned simply by watching Simpsons episodes..)
And:
"Terrified doesn't begin to describe how we felt," Fukuyama told investigators months after the scare. A "no go" zone still remains around the plant because radiation levels are too high. Clean up at the plant is estimated to take 40 years. (This is still a conservative estimate, btw..)
"When we learned the reactors had in fact melted down, I was overwhelmed, by our inability," he added. Oh, Mr. Fukuyama, we're all overwhelmed by your, TEPCO's, and Japan's inabilities..
Pretty compelling evidence for allowing private sector industries to regulate themselves, no? For my radioactive superpowers, I'd like invisibility, the power to fly, or to be impervious to bullets and explosions, please!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment