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Today's commentary is a follow up to several critical tweets that Keith received for posting here that the tragic events unfolding in Japan is the "death knell of American nuclear power."
Critical tweet #1 Keith is a typical liberal who turns tragedy into politics.
That’s right, I’m trying to turn tragedy into politics by pointing out that the super-safe Japanese Nuclear Power complex that even President Obama applauded while trying to pitch the same Doomsday Machines to us two years ago, turned out to be not so safe after all, and there’s no reason to assume our antiquated nukes are somehow even as impervious to disaster as Japan’s obviously weren’t.
Critical tweet #2 America is a "flyover country was safe from earthquakes and tsunamis so cares about the coasts?"
What most Americans don’t know is that the strongest series of quakes in the history of this country took place on the New Madrid fault line in a seven-week span in the winter of 1811-12. “New Madrid” was in Missouri - which last time I checked was definitely in flyover country. On 12/16/11 (that’s right, we’re approaching the 200th anniversary off at the horizon) something around a 7.5 hit northeast Arkansas. Fortunately there was almost nobody living there, or in the future site of Memphis, Tennessee, which also rumbled. Liquefaction was reported – you know, when the solid ground suddenly turns into a kind of quicksand. It’s usually reserved for landfill and other unstable surfaces found in places like San Francisco’s Marina. Six hours later there was another quake of roughly the same magnitude. Then they had a month off, until 1/23/12 when a neighboring fault let go with another quake which would have scored at least a 7.0 on the modern Richter scale. The “big one” in the sequence hit on 2/7/12 at New Madrid, which was promptly wiped out. St. Louis was hit hard and the force was so strong (perhaps an 8.0) that it caused temporary waterfalls on the Mississippi River.
There are also legends that the Mississippi ran backwards for a time, and that the quake was so strong that it rang church bells in Boston, but these stories may be apocryphal. Still – temporary waterfalls are enough for me, thanks.
Keith quotes a 2009 statement from President Obama that he notes has not been been revised by the White House in any recent statements.
“There’s no reason why, technologically, we can’t employ nuclear energy in a safe and effective way. Japan does it and France does it, and it doesn’t have greenhouse gas emissions, so it would be stupid for us not to do that in a much more effective way.”
Stupid. Maybe President Obama would like to circle that word and rethink it’s meaning. It would be stupid to keep pushing nuclear power at the exact hour that the “safe and effective way” in Japan is proving to be ‘that slight increase in radiation in Tokyo is nothing to worry about. But if you’re within 20 miles of the plant please stay indoors because we don’t know if the thing is going to meltdown, blow up, shoot nuclear rods into the sky or into the ground water, or what. Have a nice day.”
I would love to hear what Kieth would have to say about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's chairman had to say about nuclear safety in America.
CHAIRMAN JACZKO: Well, with regard to the U.S. power plants, the U.S. power plants are designed to very high standards for earthquake effects. All our plants are designed to withstand significant natural phenomena like earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis. So we believe we have a very solid and strong regulatory infrastructure in place right now. But of course, as we always do, as an independent regulatory agency, we will continue to take new information and see if there are changes that we need to make with our program.
The European Union is stress testing all of their nuclear reactors. I wish that the American authorities were repeating these European words. "We want to look at the risk and safety issues in the light of events in Japan."
I want to hear less certainty and more questioning from our own public officials about the new awareness of risk inherent in nuclear power that were exposed by the Japanese meltdown.