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Japan Disaster Gets Worse: Meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant UPDATE: Meltdown or Not? Also: Cooling Failure Reported at 2nd Plant UPDATE: Now 3rd Reactor in Trouble?

Posted on | March 12, 2011 | 49 Comments

BUMPED FOR UPDATE 5 p.m. ET: Just when I was thinking about eating lunch and taking a nap, I decided to check Drudge and saw this:

The link is to a Reuters story:

A quake-hit Japanese nuclear plant reeling from an explosion at one of its reactors has also lost its emergency cooling system at another reactor, Japan’s nuclear power safety agency said on Sunday.
The emergency cooling system is no longer functioning at the No. 3 reactor at Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, requiring the facility to urgently secure a means to supply water to the reactor, an official of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told a news conference.

So the earlier “everything-under-control” claims from Japanese officials now seem to be unraveling. And there goes my Saturday nap. Please, somebody hit the tip jar for a few bucks, just so I can plausibly explain to my wife that this constant updating is worth the effort.

UPDATE 6:30 p.m. ET: Allahpundit started aggregating the Fukushima nuclear crisis nearly 18 hours ago and finally confesses that he is “now completely confused” by “a perfect storm of journalistic confusion” in which the “facts on the ground are changing rapidly” — and this really isn’t surprising, given the nature of the story.

Look: All of this is taking place on the other side of the world, where people speak another language. It involves highly complex technical issues. Obviously, safety concerns prevent reporters from going directly to the reactor sites and providing us with eyewitness accounts. You have multiple news organizations, each competing to have the latest information or to get the next exclusive scoop. And you have Japanese officials with a clear interest in minimizing the perception that this is a total unmitigated clusterfark.

Ergo: We must recognize that we don’t know what we don’t know, and must avoid the temptation to believe that we know stuff we actually don’t.

I don’t speak Japanese and I’m not an expert on nuclear power. However, based on my gut-instinct from 25 years in the news business, based on the way official no-need-to-panic statements keep getting contradicted by developing events, and based on the principle that it’s better to be safe than sorry, my current best estimate of the situation is either (a) catastrophic apocalypse or (b) apocalyptic catastrophe.

(Your mileage my vary.)

My advice: Get some sleep. And when you wake up Sunday morning, go to Denny’s and have their Grand Slam breakfast while reading the local newspaper. Then go back home and drink a couple brews while watching a basketball game on TV. At that point, you can then safely log back onto the Internet and try to figure out what actually happened Saturday.

Trust me, you’ll thank me for this advice. If Charlie Sheen had listened to my advice, he never would have lost his CBS show (and he wouldn’t be shagging skanks, because Denise Richards would be begging him for a second chance to make their marriage work out).

Now, hit the tip jar.

Linked by Bob Belvedere: Japan Goes Nuclear — The Nippon Syndrome?

BUMPED FOR UPDATE 3 p.m. ET: Officials in Japan say that they have so far averted a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant — site of a Saturday explosion — but the most recent report from CNN indicates increasing cause for concern:

Reactors at two Japanese power plants can no longer cool radioactive substances, a government official said Saturday, adding that a small leak had been detected at one of the facilities.
Atomic material has seeped out of one of the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s five nuclear reactors, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo, said Kazuo Kodama, a spokesman for Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency.
Potentially dangerous problems in cooling radioactive material appear to have cropped up there, as well as at another of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. nuclear plants, Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan’s ambassador to the United States, confirmed to CNN. . . .
The Fukushima Daini and Fukushima Daiichi power plants are separate facilities located in different towns in northeastern Japan’s Fukushima prefecture. . . .
Kodama said the cooling system had failed at three of the four such units of the Daini plant.
Temperatures of the coolant water in that plant’s reactors soared to above 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported, an indication that the cooling system wasn’t working.
Authorities subsequently ordered residents within 3 kilometers of that facility to evacuate as “a precaution,” Fujisaki said. That plant was also added to the Japanese nuclear agency’s emergency list, along with the Daiichi plant.

So there are indications of cooling-system failure at Daini as well as at Daiichi. If this CNN report is both (a) accurate and (b) based on the latest information, then the problems may actually be growing worse. Japanese officials have ordered evacuations around the endangered plants, involving throusands of people.

Please see the massively updated aggregation at Hot Air, which has a lot of useful background.

UPDATE 3:15 p.m. ET: Both reprehensible and incomprehensible: Idiots using Facebook to vent sadistic revenge-for-Pearl-Harbor sentiments. No decent American could possibly harbor ill will toward the Japanese people more than six decades after Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Japan’s unconditional surrender. From a quick glance, I’d guess about 95% of the Facebookers saying this stuff are adolescents or college-age and — no need to guess about this — 100% of them are stupid assholes.

UPDATE 4:15 p.m. ET: In the comments below, longtime commenter and loyal tip-jar hitter Jeff S. from Walla Walla describes the cable-news chatter:

[W]e are seeing yet another aspect of Rumor Control during a disaster: “There’s not enough real news, so let’s get some experts to speculate and offer their opinions. Because, y’know, we need C. O. N. T. E. N. T., regardless of the source.”
Next: survivors of Three Miles Island and Chernyobl are interviewed for their perspective.

This business of TV networks covering a breaking news event by filling the time with whatever comes to hand — “And now, a child psychologist tells parents how to cope with children’s questions about the nuclear meltdown …” — is one of the great evils of modern journalism.

When I worked as a national news editor at The Washington Times, sometimes one of the bosses would come over and say, “Hey, CNN just said so-and-so — make sure that’s mentioned in Ralph’s story.” Sometimes this latest item from TV would be true, important and clearly relevant. But sometimes it would be dubious, trivial or a mere sideshow to the main subject of the story.

There were times when I’d get one of these “CNN-just-said” items thrown at me, right on the verge of deadline to send the story to the copy desk, so I’d just jam it in somewhere and hit the “send” button. And then the reporter whose byline was on the story would look in the copy queue — checking to see what the edited version looks like, as every smart reporter always should — and come storming over to my desk: “What the hell? That CNN item is a piece of thinly-sourced rumor that I already checked out and my sources say it’s crap. Get it the hell out of my story, and if you ever do that again without checking with me first, so help me God, I’ll strangle you!” (That rant is a near-verbatim quote of longtime crime-and-justice reporter Jerry Seper chewing me out at the top of his lungs, a traumatic experience that tends to imbed itself deep in the neural pathways, and one which I would not recommend for sensitive souls.)

See, print journalism creates a permanent record. It’s not just Pretty People running their yaps to fill time between commercials. But sometimes newspaper editors forget that, and start trying to match their coverage to what the Pretty People are saying on TV, and bad results ensue. Here on the Internet, the blogospheric medium is kind of like TV in that, when a big story is breaking, you can update-update-update to keep pace with developments. But it is also a matter of the written word, which has the permanent-record quality we associate with print journalism. If the medium is the message, as McLuhan said, then being a good messenger requires us to study and understand the nature of the medium.

PREVIOUSLY (11:57 a.m. ET)

What horrible news to wake up to:

Japanese officials said on Saturday there had been an explosion at a nuclear power plant following Friday’s huge earthquake, blowing off the roof of the structure, bringing down walls and causing a radiation leak of unspecified proportions.

Stratfor is calling this a meltdown, and so my plan to spend Saturday afternoon mocking David Brooks — who deserves to be mocked, and often, and by someone who knows how — kinda got bumped off the schedule.

UPDATE: Lots of ominous stuff in that Stratfor report, including this sentence: “At this point, events in Japan bear many similarities to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.”

Here’s a video report about the explosion at the plant:

?

Japanese officials are evidently in denial:

Japanese officials battling to prevent a meltdown at a nuclear power station after Friday’s record earthquake are using seawater to try and cool a reactor and prevent damage to the chamber holding its radioactive core.
An explosion at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai- Ichi nuclear power station yesterday destroyed the walls of its No. 1 reactor building and injured four people. A hydrogen leak caused the blast, which didn’t damage the steel chamber, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a briefing yesterday.
Asia’s biggest utility “has decided to fill the containment with seawater,” Edano said. Japan’s Nuclear Safety Agency couldn’t confirm a meltdown at the plant and monitoring around the reactor is showing that radiation is falling, spokesman Shinji Kinjyo said today.

Trying to spin a nuclear reactor meltdown? Charlie Sheen should hire those guys to do his P.R.

UPDATE II: There is an apocalyptic quality to the sequence described in this Economist report:

First came a violent earthquake. Then a devastating tsunami followed. Now an explosion at a nuclear power plant — and the release of radioactive material — has added to Japan’s woes.

And still, the spin:

There was a momentary sense of relief on Saturday evening when the government assured the public that the explosion had not been caused by the meltdown of the reactor.

Let’s presume — as is always the safe presumption in such scenarios — that the situation is actually worse than officials say it is. As Bill Clinton might say, “It depends on what your definition of ‘meltdown’ is.”

On the one hand, there is a specific, technical, scientific meaning for the word “meltdown” and, if officials are to be believed, has not happened at Fukushima Daiichi. On the other hand, there is the ordinary layman’s understanding of “meltdown,” which is less precise: Something very, very bad has happened, resulting in a significant release of radiation and OMIGOD RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

Whether or not this situation meets the first definition, it certainly meets the second and — unless and until we see Fukushima Daiichi erupt in a fireball mushroom cloud — I doubt any Japanese officials will ever publicly call this a “meltdown.”

UPDATE III: NewsMax got an expert, Mark Hibbs, to analyze the danger:

The Japanese situation appears to be roughly analogous to the Three Mile Island incident in the United States, where authorities struggled for days to contain an improperly cooled reactor core but were able to avert a widespread release of nuclear material.
“We were in a situation as I recall then very similar to where we are now, where we were told by news media in 1979 that there was a core melt accident unfolding, we didn’t know how serious it would become, and what would happen,” Hibbs tells Newsmax.
At least one of the reactors in Japan, and perhaps more, “are on the path of a core-melt accident. It’s called a loss of coolant accident. . . . And it’s up to the Japanese authorities, together with the industries in that country, to find a way to stem this problem,” he said.

Dava Castillo notes that “meltdown” is a colloquial term — a catastrophic event resulting in the release of radioactive material — and in the colloquial sense, I think Fukushima Daiichi has already passed the point of being a “meltdown.”

UPDATE IV: Linked by The Lonely Conservative who has more video:

In the comments below, Richard McEnroe asked about this Christian Science Monitor report:

Fears of a nuclear meltdown in Japan have subsided after a reactor that was damaged in Friday’s devastating earthquake reportedly emerged intact from an explosion.
A day after the country was thrown into chaos by a fierce tsunami triggered by the largest earthquake in Japan’s history, the country was, for a few terrifying hours, bracing itself for a possible nuclear catastrophe. . . .
After a few nerve-wracking hours, however, the government and the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, said the damage had been confined to the walls and roof surrounding the reactor, sparing its metal casing.
The chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, told a televised press conference that radiation around the plant had, in fact, started to decrease.
A “tiny” amount of radiation had leaked earlier in the day when officials attempted to relieve pressure inside the reactor.

So, Richard asks, which are we to believe, the Stratfor report that calls the incident a “meltdown” or this report with its Chip Dillard “all is well” tone of reassurance?

THE FUCKING ROOF BLEW OFF!

OK? I mean, sure, “officials say” everything’s just hunky-dory with the reactor itself, but when there’s a massive explosion that destroys the building that houses the reactor, excuse me for suspecting that the “officials say” version of the story might be a bit too sunny-side-up.

A reporter for the Christian Science Monitor is professionally obligated to accept what officials say at a press conference as legit, unless there is some specific information that contradicts the “officials say” version. But I’m not doing a dateline-Tokyo straight-news report here. I’ve got no inside sources or special expertise in nuclear-power operations. Right now, I’m just a guy aggregating stuff I’ve found on the Web and trying to determine whether the panic-induced stains in our pants should be yellow or brown.

Also: Commenters have noted a surprising absence of Godzilla jokes. Obviously, it has been an intense struggle to resist my natural instinct to treat the news as an endless series of straight-man set-ups for which I am expected to deliver the punchline. But given that the death toll from the Japanese earthquake-tsunami disaster is feared to be in the thousands, I think it’s best to continue to resist.

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Category: Japan

Comments

  • http://thatmrgguy.wordpress.com/ Mike

    So Japan gets it’s very own Three Mile Island. As much as I feel sympathy for the Japanese people, at least the silver lining is that We didn’t do it to them this time.

  • Guest

    The Strafor story is marred with physically dubious details. The Japaneses are claiming the core containment vessel has maintained integrity, which from the pictures looks to be the case. Beware first reports….

  • http://twitter.com/darleenclick darleenclick

    Unlike Chernobyl, Japan’s reactor is actually enclosed. And “meltdown” is not a technical term.

    I guarantee you that far more people have died already in Japan from drowning in the tsunami … any hysteria over banning people from living near the shore yet?

  • Pingback: Blast at Japanese Nuclear Plant, Meltdown Feared, Death Toll Rising | The Lonely Conservative

  • Dan

    When one ponders the level and the scale of the force that has hit Japan, the Japanese and their infrastructure, ——– the mind reels.

    And although we see incredible scenes of destruction, and the whole world is trying to get a handle on what’s happening inside Fukushima 1 and 2, —- despite all of that and more, ————— the thing that that is TRULY AMAZING and is overlooked in all of this is how well Japan and the Japanese have stood up through all of this.

    Buildings swayed, —— but didn’t topple. People were forced to evacuate, but most did. Transportation has been brought to a halt, to be sure, but still Japan is beginning to respond, even if at first haltingly.

    Japan is enduring enormous hardship.

    But Japan is also proving themselves to be an amazingly gifted and resourceful people.

  • http://www.redstateeclectic.typepad.com AngelaTC

    I’m not disagreeing. But the news reports indicate that it isn’t known if the explosion damaged the containment dome.

    And some of the more enthisiastic conspiracy theory types are pointing out that the “steam explosion” actually ignited in a ball of fire.

    If I were there, I’d be in the OMYGODRUNFORTHEHILLZ mode. After all, one can always return home if one is wrong.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1385852725 Richard Mcenroe

    Christian Science Monitor is running with the story that the reactor core containment is intact. which article is more current, do you know?

  • http://www.redstateeclectic.typepad.com AngelaTC

    No Godzilla jokes??? Stacy, I’m disappointed.

  • Anonymous

    Where’s Godzilla when he’s needed to the most? He could absorb the radiation and seal off the core.

  • JeffS

    Stacey, it’s possible that the Japanese are in denial. That’s a normal reaction in any disaster scenario.

    But it’s also possible that the reporting discrepancies are due to differences in time lag; poor communications (not unexpected after an 8.8 magnitude quake); misinterpretation of official reports; unofficial reports from sources who may or may not have direct access to the situation; deliberate misreporting (for whatever reason); and last (but no means least) erroneous or incomplete reports from the sources, who are likely under considerable stress at this moment.

    Plus, there’s one other factor, and it’s key to the situation: as a rule, people freak out when they hear the word “radiation leak”. People generally don’t understand radiation, and reporting tends to be, shall we say, sensational.

    I am not, by any means, saying there are no problem at the plant. The situation has dire potential. But I have considerable personal and professional experience with information flow during a disaster, and this has all the classic signs of Rumor Control being in full control. This is how myths are born. Look at the Truthers.

    For example, I’ve read that the radiation levels in the control room there was “1,000 times above normal”. What’s “normal” mean? Is that below the safe exposure level? Above it?

    For there are “safe” exposure levels. EPA says so. And by EPA standards, the US Capitol is unsafe.

    So I’m waiting until the situation, ummmmm, cools down a bit, and we can get reliable and consistent reports before reaching a conclusion.

  • JeffS

    Where are you, Godzilla!

  • Gaijin-san

    I worked for a Japanese company for a number of years. Denial seemed to pretty much be Plan A in any situation.

  • JeffS

    Good points, Darleen. This goes back to the typical public reaction to radiation. People who don’t hesitate to get a dental x-ray will panic over any bad news — however vague it is — from a nuclear power plant.

  • JeffS

    Heh! You’ve never worked for the Federal government, it appears. Denial within the bureaucratic ranks is a high art form.

  • Anonymous

    Japan’s reactor HAD a containment structure, the video appears to show the cladding being blown off the steel skeleton by what appears to be a steam explosion. Chernobyl had no such structure to start with.
    I believe that American nuclear plants are required to have reinforced concrete, cast in place containment structures. Those would be much stouter than what looks like the steel frame precast concrete clad containment structure in the video. If the reactor itself has melted down radiation readings in surrounding areas will spike immediately. Apparently the Japanese hadn’t anticipated multiple failures created by an quake followed by a tsunami. The tsunami has taken out all the backup systems, the quake may not have done any significant damage to the reactor at all.

  • Dodd

    A considerably more sanguine view from some subject matter experts: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_japan_quake_experts

  • Guest

    “steam explosion” in a way. It was a hydrogen explosion in the turbine building not the containment vessel. If you remember the same thing happened at TMI (and most likely from the same cause). If, as reported, they’ve are pumping sea water over it then most of the excitement is behind us.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_6OOPHMPLPN4PBGSMYIAETYM72Y Doug

    “THE FUCKING ROOF BLEW OFF!”

    “The explosion at Fukushima has apparently disintegrated the upper third of the reactor building. The video and pictures currently available indicate that the “blow out panels” of the reactor building and roof cover were blown away by an energetic explosion likely due to a hydrogen gas detonation.”

    http://www.beyondnuclear.org/home/2011/3/12/fukushima-dai-ichi-unit-1-reactor-schematic.html

  • Tim Z

    “Meltdown” refers to a cooling failure that results in a heat spike of sufficient magnitude to cause the fission material (uranium in this case) to melt.

    It is a specific term and it carries specific dangers that have apparently not happened in Japan.

    Specifically, the molten uranium could cause the steel case around it to melt thus breaching the primary containment. The uranium would begin burning into the ground (source of the term China Syndrome), though all reactors have secondary containment to prevent this. Some secondary containment systems force the molten uranium to divide and separate, thus spreading it thinly enough to stop runaway heat generation.

    Breached primary containment by a runaway core results in large amounts of uranium boiling off the hot core and venting directly into the air. This has not been reported.

  • Joe

    It is probably not anywhere as bad as Chernobyl, but it seems to be a lot worse than 3 Mile Island.

    In a lay persons perspective, that seems pretty bad.

  • Joe

    But I would love to be proven wrong and shown it is more a TMI incident and that disaster has been adverted.

    Otherwise, we might have to keep using coal for electricity and that would be bad for Gaia.

  • Joe

    I watched Mothra the other night on Netflix just before this whole mess started. Coincidence. I think not.

    I am glad that this is far less than Chernobyl and more of a TMI incident (at least it seems so). Otherwise we will need to mine more coal.

    http://cbullitt.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/how-could-i-have-missed-this-its-so-obvious/ This is how it will work.

  • Anamika

    But given that the death toll from the Japanese earthquake-tsunami disaster is feared to be in the thousands, I think it’s best to continue to resist.

    And then there’s this, from PZ Myers’ blog: I hope these people aren’t your friends

  • JeffS

    A great link, Dodd. Thanks for posting it. Excellent and thoughtful comments on a scary subject with changing information.

    But now we are seeing yet another aspect of Rumor Control during a disaster: “There’s not enough real news, so let’s get some experts to speculate and offer their opinions. Because, y’know, we need C. O. N. T. E. N. T., regardless of the source.”

    Next: survivors of Three Miles Island and Chernyobl are interviewed for their perspective.

  • Lilacsundayblog

    I knew we would not be able to rely on journalists’ reports regarding the nuclear events in Japan as soon as the media breathlessly repeated Hillary Clinton’s assurance that we were sending some “important coolant” to Japan. The reactors in question use water for coolant.

    After an 8.8 quake and a tsunami, the reactor situation doesn’t seem *that* bad, at least not yet. Meanwhile, last year in San Bruno California a gas pipeline exploded without the help of a quake or tsunami, killing 8 people and incinerating a neighborhood. While everybody is wetting their pants over nuclear power, you’d be better off inquiring if you live near a gas pipeline, especially if you live in California.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1385852725 Richard Mcenroe

    Doug thanks for the clarification on the blow-out panels, which are designed to specifically relieve pressure on the core housing.

    I’ve been skeptical of a lot of the more alarmist reporting on this issue since the present went monkeyshit on the phrases “20% increase in radiation” and “1000 percent increase in radiation in the control room” without pointing out that NEITHER of those numbers is remotely life-threatening.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1385852725 Richard Mcenroe

    Adobe Walls — In the one reactor, where the containment vessel held, where radiation levels are reported to have dropped it is possible that the core has been scattered inside the containment vessel, which would make for a messy cleanup inside but zero further chance of a meltdown.

  • http://www.redstateeclectic.typepad.com AngelaTC

    I hear the point about the truthers, but their version of truth was concocted after the fact. I was watching some people who know more about Japan and nuclear plants that I ever will on Twitter last night, and so far everything they’ve said has proven to be true.

    Note that none of them were screeching that this is an inside job, but they were backing up their suspicions with statements like “If too much hydrogen builds up, it will explode” and “If it starts to fail, the 10 km radius will need to be expanded.” I went to bed, woke up this morning, and both those predictions (if that’s even the right word) had come true. So , and this is out of character for me, I’m not inclined to dismiss this as much drama over nothing.

    The government doesn’t have the luxury of speculation here. They have to try to control the situation as well as prevent a panic. I don’t envy their position at this juncture.

  • Anonymous

    I read somewhere but can’t find now that the building exploding in the video is the “turbine house” where some hydrogen gas may have been vented, thus providing fuel for the explosion.
    If I’m not mistaken all of our reactors have two containment structures I’d imagine so do the Japanese where the Russian designed reactors didn’t.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    RE: Being In Denial…
    I would worry because bureaucrats are known for being in denial most of the time. I have worked over 30 years in the government and most career government employees are very well practiced in the art of convincing themselves that everything is just ‘A-Okay’ – that their actions and programs are working just fine [‘Nothing to see here – move along’]. Throw a disaster into the mix that requires straight-shooting with the public and you’ll see them engage in overkill, to one extreme or the other. My moderate knowledge of Japanese Culture leads me to worry that they are in serious denial – they have a history of this.

    That being said, the information provided here by your more thoughtful and clear-headed commentators makes me think the situation may not be as bad as the TV Panic Facilitators would have us believe.

    I am concerned about one matter however: how do I cope with my cats’s questions about a nuclear meltdown?

    PS: The RETRO Movie Channel has on their regular schedule for 8PM EDT The China Syndrome.

  • Anonymous

    Given the dizzying variety of conflicting and inaccurate reporting from both the media and apparently government agencies I have complete faith we shall have an accurate assessment of what exactly has transpired before the decade is out.

  • http://www.redstateeclectic.typepad.com AngelaTC

    History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men.

  • PCPSmoker

    “Temperatures of the coolant water in that plant’s reactors soared to above 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported”

    Hilarious and stupid. Those reactors are likely pressurized water reactors and under NORMAL operations, the outlet cooling water is by design over 212F. Keep in mind the rods are down, no fission is taking place. The problem is figuring a way of cooling the core during shutdown and controlling the discharge water, which is radioactive.

  • Joe

    Sorry about the joke. I want this to turn out well (relatively, obviously things are not very well at the moment). A major nuclear failure would be a disaster arguably worse than the earthquake and tsunami. I wish the Japanese people the best and hope Hillary and Obama can stop blinking and start helping. Good news that the U.S. Navy (which actually has a lot of nuclear plant experience) is on the way.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    I forgot to mention: thanks for the reporting and commentary, Stacy.

    Quoted from and Linked to at:
    Japan Goes Nuclear – The Nippon Syndrome?

  • JeffS

    True enough, AngelaTC, but a lot of the speculation is NOT from the Japanese government. It’s from the media. Or experts contacted by the media.

    One “blessing” (and I use the term very loosely) of this situation is that nuclear power plants use the same general designs and technology, so at least the experts aren’t pulling assumptions out of their back pockets. As has happened in past disasters. But they are still speculating. A lot more data is coming forth now, and it appears to have been sound speculation.

    But the fact remains that if a person offers an opinion about a situation where they have NO direct input from the incident site, they are guessing. An intelligent guess, perhaps based on good assumptions, but still a guess. No one will really know what happened at the plants until an objective afteraction is completed. And maybe not even then, if the evidence was destroyed. Last night and this morning? Pure, 100%, unadulterated speculation. That’s changing now, as the situation becomes more and more “controlled”. Or at least, reporting is more consistent.

    As for the truthers……my point was that no one really knew what happened for a couple days after the terrorist attacks, and media speculation was intense. The truthers took the lack of information from the government (who was way too busy with search and rescue and crime scene investigation to realize that the media was spinning out of control) as proof of a conspiracy…..and ran with their own “analysis”, somewhat based on the speculation in the media.

    If there isn’t an explanation forthcoming, people will invent their own.

  • JeffS

    Concur. This is Good Stuff.

  • Mork

    I think we should be worried about women and minorities. They are bound to suffer more.

  • JeffS

    There were times when I’d get one of these “CNN-just-said” items thrown at me, right on the verge of deadline to send the story to the copy desk, so I’d just jam it in somewhere and hit the “send” button.

    You weren’t alone on that, Stacey. I know of at least one incident that caused the chief administrator of a major Federal agency to make life unpleasant for the employees at a nearby field office because CNN showed footage of a “disaster”.

    CNN ran footage that showed “horrendous” damage to a neighborhood. What they DIDN’T show was the damage being limited to a 1 block area, and mostly to the street. No injuries or deaths. County and state officials had the matter well in hand. No Federal response required.

    And it’s still the norm in that agency. A single news item is enough to send the executives into the full range of conniptions, even though the facts are unconfirmed.

    It’s one reason why I’m very choosy about my news, and insist upon multiple sources. Ideally, at least one is NON-media. This drives my superiors bananas, but it has saved my butt more than once.

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  • Anonymous

    I’m concerned that we have to wait until after we return home from Denny’s on Sunday to have a couple of brews.

    This seems to be wrong, somehow . . .

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Thanks for the link, Stacy.

    And in non-Nipponese news: Atlantis has been found.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1385852725 Richard Mcenroe

    When making comparisons between TMI and these reactors, something else to consider. The TMI incident grew out of corporate cost cutting and employee errors.

    These reactors got hit with a freaking PLANET.

  • Pingback: ‘Remain Calm! All Is Well!’ : The Other McCain

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