Panic On The Streets Of... Well Pretty Much All Over Japan

Americans are buying up all the Potasium Iodide pills on the market-- even to the point of causing shortages in Japan, where they are desperately needed. People on the West Coast are worried and there is a distinct lack of trust in the bland reassuring, daily-debunked bullshit spewing forth from the Japanese nuclear industry, so-called experts-- think of the engineering majors who went to your college-- and Japan's version of Baghdad Bob, sleepless Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano. Everyone in Japan I've heard interviewed on the radio says he and others like him are just saying anything they can to prevent a panic... which is causing people to panic.

There's been a steady exodus of ex-pats out of Tokyo and out of Japan. France and China have sent emergency planes to evacuate their citizens. Austria moved its embassy to Osaka and even the U.S. State Department and Britain are quietly urging their nationals to "postpone" travel to Tokyo-- even if that goes counter to official policy that tries maintaining that everything's just hunky-dory. Safety of American citizens always last for our loathsome political elites.

And what about cities between Tokyo, where radiation levels are already rising, and Ground Zero? Sendai, the City of Trees, founded in 1600 and with a population of over a million people-- at least before the catastrophe-- is the capital of Miyagi Prefecture. Will it even be habitable? Yamagata, with the famed temple of Yama-dera (Ryushakuji, pictured above) is the capital of Yamagata Prefecture and has a population of around a quarter million. Will it be habitable? Mito, capital of Ibaraki Prefecture, and slightly larger than Yamagata, lies between Tokyo and the disaster area. If people who can, are fleeing from Tokyo... what about these cities?

China, "in a dramatic reversal," has suspended approval for all new nuclear plants and Germany stop the re-licensing process for two plants that are up for review. Chancellor Angela Merkel said the seven nuclear power plants built before 1980 in her country would be shut down, at least for now, while safety checks are conducted and Switzerland announced Monday that it would freeze plans to build or replace nuclear power plants. Under pressure from Drill, Baby, Drill Republicans Obama, as weak and ineffective a president as I've ever seen, thinks this would be a good time to expand loan guarantees to the nuclear industry-- loans they routinely use to bribe politicians to allow them to set the stage for the annihilation of the human species... if not the planet. Obama's confident... or delusional. Or maybe just confident in the passivity of fat, happy Americans. This country has become so dysfunctional, in large part because of the way our political elites have sold out to corporate interests that are antithetical to reasonable, let alone "good" or "fair"-- governance, that the two things they seem to have learned from Japan's catastrophe are to double down on nuclear energy and to defund tsunami preparedness



It's now been widely reported, as a reminder, that during a presidential campaign stop in October, 2008, one of the Senate's worst corporate whores, John McCain, derided his opponent, Barack Obama, with this report:

"You know, the other night in the debate with Senator Obama, I said his eloquence is admirable, but pay attention to his words. We talk about offshore drilling and he said he would quote, consider, offshore drilling. We talked about nuclear power, well it has to be safe, environment, blah, blah, blah."

(Hoots, hollers and applause.)

..."I have news for Senator Obama, nuclear power is safe, we ought to do it now. The British, the French, the Japanese, all reprocess spent nuclear fuel. We can do that, too.

He must have scared Obama, who, once elected, basically adopted most of his policies. I think McCain should lead a bipartisan delegation of senatorial nuclear energy hawks to Japan this week to investigate. It'll be as safe as a stroll around Baghdad was-- only a small army of soldiers won't be able to protect him this time. During 2010, 1,614 different companies or special interest groups lobbied the federal government on energy or nuclear power issues including energy behemoths Southern Co., General Electric, Peabody Energy and Duke Energy. And these companies have spent millions on legalistic bribes to politicians, particularly corrupt corporate conservatives like Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD). Yesterday CALPIRG urged its members and supporters to be aware that the nuclear industry and its political shills are not looking out for the public safety.

Nuclear power is not safe, whatever the industry may be telling the press.

Take just one example here in California: the PG&E-owned Diablo Canyon plant, built near a fault line in San Luis Obispo, which started generating electricity in 1985. It was built to withstand a 7.5 magnitude earthquake, but what they didn’t know then is that the plant is located just 1,800 feet-- the length of 6 football fields-- from a shoreline fault that wasn’t discovered until 2008.

PG&E has yet to complete an independently-reviewed seismic study for that newly discovered fault line, so it’s hard to say whether the plant could withstand a quake. What’s worse, they don’t plan to complete that study for at least two more years. Instead, they’re already working on an extension to operate the plant until 2045.

...At the urging of CALPIRG and other public interest groups, the governor signed legislation in 2009 that requires PG&E to conduct a new seismic study, but PG&E has dragged its feet.

In the meantime, PG&E has requested that the CPUC allow them to spend ratepayer dollars on activities related to getting approval of an extension on their license to operate Diablo Canyon until 2045. For the last two years, CALPIRG has urged the CPUC to deny this funding until they complete the seismic study and have it independently peer reviewed.

The unfolding crisis in Fukushima shows us just how quickly disaster can strike. We cannot afford this risk in California. Not at Diablo Canyon. And not at San Onofre, the Southern California Edison-owned reactor on the coast in San Clemente.

The first thing we can do is demand that PG&E complete its seismic study and immediately stop their plans to relicense the plant.

UPDATE

Recent developments since I wrote the post above are all pointing in the wrong direction:

Japanese engineers worked through the night to restore a power cable to a crippled nuclear power plant in the hope of restarting pumps desperately needed to pour cold water on overheating fuel rods and avert a catastrophe.

Officials could not say when the cable might be connected, but said work would stop on Friday morning to allow helicopters and fire trucks to resume pouring water on the Fukushima Daiichi plant, about 240km north of Tokyo.

"Preparatory work has so far not progressed as fast as we had hoped," an official of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) told a news briefing, adding that a cold snap was hampering the effort.

Earlier, a Russian expert said attempts to use helicopter water drops to cool reactors were pointless.

The nuclear power plant has been struck by a series of explosions and fires since last Friday's magnitude 9 earthquake sent a devastating tsunami into Japan's coast, wiping out entire towns and killing at least 10,000 people.

Gennady Pshakin said "one can only put out forest fires like this". Pshakin said the plant 's cooling systems needed to be restarted, which required power.

Washington and other foreign capitals have expressed growing alarm about radiation leaking from the earthquake-shattered plant, 240km north of Tokyo. The United States said it was sending aircraft to help Americans leave Japan.