15 March 2011 Beware the ides of March

“Beware the tides of March!”

Beware the tides of marshes.

Blame it upon Shakespeare; it’s too good a line to ignore. It’s too inviting to use un-changed.

The Japanese were handed an earthquake of epic proportion, followed by a tsunami that created new records for statisticians and geo-scientists to catalogue and manipulate, hopefully for centuries, until the next “biggest and worst” event occurs.

Our modern world demands ever-increasing amounts of electrical power. We meet this, primarily by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. We add hydroelectric generation, wind, and solar generated power to lesser extents. An increasing amount of power is generated by nuclear reactors in first world nations and in some developing nations.

All of these sources have faults and are potentially harmful to the world in one or more manners. Auth describes the problem quite simply:



Coal mining is costly in terms of lives. Those miners who avoid death underground die of mining related diseases. The waste products of coal destroy forests, pollute air, water, and destroy wildlife. The mining process is destructive to the environment as entire mountains are scraped from the planet’s surface and discarded to reach coal seams.

Drilling for oil is destructive of land, air, and oceans. Local water sources are polluted and private water wells rendered non-potable. Natural gas production has many of the same hazards.

Hydroelectric and wind farms disrupt wildlife. Dammed rivers prevent returning to spawn. Wind turbines are known to kill birds.

Japan is currently experiencing a nuclear accident involving three reactors that failed to shut down as designed due to loss of back-up power to maintain coolant flow. The scenario is reminiscent of the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in Pennsylvania. There have been several releases of radiation from the Japanese site.

The Fukushima reactors were designed well at the time of their construction. Earthquake damage was anticipated and the plants were constructed to strict standards. The fatal event at Fukushima was the tsunami that obliterated all electrical service, backup service and prevented rapid response by emergency crews when they were called for. It appears that the Japanese did everything possible in correct manner to avoid disaster and were simply defeated by the sheer magnitude of the combined quake/tsunami event.

There is no nation on earth with greater fear of nuclear accidents than Japan. There is, likely, no nation on earth that could have and did respond to such events in so orderly and patient manner as the Japanese. To date, there have been no reports of looting. The normal politeness instilled in Japanese from infancy is very much in evidence as they begin to affect the recovery from an immense natural disaster, linked to a financial emergency, and the radiologic nightmare that will reshape Japan in the next decade.

This will undoubtedly become the most studied and best-documented quake/tsunami in history. The various national SAR agencies are involved using robots to allow access where human safety prohibits human access. The nuclear event will also be highly documented. There appears to have been no attempt at all to conceal the event from Japanese authorities or from the surrounding populace. The lessons learned at Fukushima will help prevent similar failures in the future.

The Russian accident at Chernobyl was a disaster waiting to happen from inception. The design is inherently flawed and operation followed the typical Soviet pattern of poorly trained, poorly maintained, magical thinking that resulted in numerous nuclear accidents aboard Soviet naval vessels at sea and/or in naval yards. These lessons have been taken to heart by Western nations. So have those from Three Mile Island.

There is a highly successful reactor design and construction program that should become the model for all future reactors and reactor operations. Since its inception in 1948, the U.S. Navy nuclear program has developed 27 different plant designs, installed them in 210 nuclear powered ships, taken 500 reactor cores into operation, and accumulated over 5,400 reactor years of operation and 128,000,000 miles safely steamed. Additionally, 98 nuclear submarines and six nuclear cruisers have been recycled. The U.S. Navy has never experienced a reactor accident.

The redundancy and over-engineering insisted upon by Admiral Rickover and his design and operations teams has resulted in safe reactor systems that are designed to endure usage and to contain the backup systems needed for emergency shutdowns and restarts. If the reactors at Fukushima had been up-sized NR models the winds over Japan would not be carrying radioactive particulates and the tides would not be distributing radiation to the ocean.

(Cue Godzilla)