Category: Japan

The famous cinematic words of Chip Diller kept replaying in my mind Sunday night after I got an e-mail from a friend telling me that we’d all breathe a sigh of relief when, on Monday or Tuesday, we were told that the Japanese had the whole problem under control. It wasn’t clear whether my friend sent that e-mail before or after the news broke that there had been another hydrogen explosion at another reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Maybe, for all we know, this second explosion was the storm before the calm. Maybe the worst is now behind us (or actually, behind the Japanese, since those reactors aren’t in our backyard). Meanwhile, the brave citizen journalism must go on.

After having been Japan! Japan! Japan! all day Saturday, I gave it a rest Sunday, and was surprised when bloggers began choosing up sides over this story. Seems that coverage of the disaster-stricken Japanese reactors has become a political football: Conservatives are supposed to be completely sanguine about the meltdowns — or “possible partial meltdowns,” whatever — because liberals are in “environmental catastrophe” hysteria mode.

So, unless we want to join Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne for the next “No Nukes” nostalgia concert, we must pretend that the situation in Fukushima praefecture is both hunky and dory.

Meh.

Let’s ditch this false dilemma, shall we? Let’s try to get our minds around two ideas at once. It is possible that both of the following statements are true:

A. Nuclear power is a very important part of meeting America’s future energy needs;

and

B. The situation with these earthquake-damaged Japanese reactors is a total clusterfark.

Both ideas can occupy one brain — mine, to cite one obvious example — without any irreconcilable contradiction. In fact, despite the nuclear clusterfark in Japan, it may be that there will be no really dangerous radiation emissions, and that the precautionary evacuation of several thousand people living near the plants was unnecessary. Furthermore, lessons learned from the Fukushima nuclear clusterfark may help U.S. authorities find innovative ways to prevent future such crises.

And when I say “innovative ways,” I’m thinking of the coolant potential of aging left-wing folk rockers.

That’s why I’ve sent a letter to the the Atomic Energy Commission, suggesting that we send Neil Young to Japan, with instructions to dump him onto one of those troubled Fukushima reactors.

I mean, what the hell, it’s worth a try, right?

If that works (and I’m willing to apply a very flexible definition of “works” here) then we send David Crosby to Japan, and try it again on another reactor. Then we keep going down the list of all these hippy-dippy singers and guitar-strummers who are always having benefit concerts for “causes.” Ship ’em over and  — plop! plop! plop! — right onto those overheating reactor cores.

Just to emphasize that this is a global project, we could ask the Brits to send Bono and Bob Geldof.

“Folkies for Fukushima,” we’ll call it. Or maybe “Rockers for Reactors.”

But why stop there? Why limit this emergency effort to over-the-hill musicians who haven’t had a hit record in 20 or 30 years?

Let Hollywood do their part, too: Janeane Garofalo, Bill Maher, Sean Penn, Margaret Cho, Michael Moore — I bet lots of stars would be happy to “make a difference” by volunteering as human coolant for those Japanese reactors.

What’s important, really, is to be innovative in our approach to this disaster. Science is about exerimentation, after all, and as with human embryonic stem cells, we don’t yet know what wonderous things can be accomplished by the use of progressive entertainers as nuclear-reactor coolant. But we need to know, and this Japanese situation is the perfect opportunity to find out.

Never let a crisis go to waste, I say!

It only took about 24 hours after the explosion at Fukushima Daiichi — an entire day of denial — but at long last we may be starting to get some (carefully qualified) truth here:

Japan’s top government spokesman says a partial meltdown is likely under way at second reactor affected by Friday’s massive earthquake.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Sunday that radiation at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima briefly rose above legal limits, but it has since declined significantly.
Three reactors at the plant lost their cooling functions in the aftermath of quake and tsunami because of a power outage.
Edano said operators released slightly radioactive air from Unit 3 Sunday, while injecting water into it as an effort to reduce pressure and temperature to save the reactor from a possible meltdown.
Still, a partial meltdown in the unit is “highly possible,” he told reporters.
“Because it’s inside the reactor, we cannot directly check it but we are taking measures on the assumption of the possible partial meltdown,” he said.

So we’ve now got confirmation of a “possible partial meltdown,” whatever that means, and I’m sure the networks will be bringing on their experts all day Sunday to explain it.

(When you get to work Monday morning, expect to find the office know-it-all acting like he’s a nuclear physicist by repeating this stuff he got from watching TV news. Everybody knows somebody like that: The same office know-it-all who thinks he’s an expert in criminal forensics because he watches C.S.I. God help him if he ever starts watching Animal Planet. He might start believing he’s a ferret or an antelope or something.)

Thanks to Jeff S. from Walla Walla for the tip in the comments (and also for hitting the tip jar). Meanwhile, from The Washington Post:

Japanese authorities said Sunday that efforts to restart the cooling system at one of the nuclear reactors damaged by Friday’s earthquake had failed, even as officials struggled to bring several other damaged reactors under control.

So that’s more stuff to worry about and if there’s one thing we all need more of, it’s stuff to worry about. Like I said Saturday, I don’t claim to be an expert. I’m just aggregating the news and trying to figure out whether the panic stains in our pants should be yellow or brown.

UPDATE: Wow, thanks to Dan Collins for the e-mail tip about a fascinating post by Bob Cringely:

Though the boiling water reactor has already been turned off by inserting neutron-absorbing control rods all the way into the core, adding boric acid or, more likely, sodium polyborate would turn the reactor off-er — more off than off — which could come in really handy in the event of a subsequent coolant loss, which reportedly has already happened. But that’s a $1 billion kill switch that most experts wouldn’t think to pull.
I’m guessing the US Navy delivered a load of sodium polyborate from some nuclear aircraft carrier reactor supply room in the Pacific Fleet. Its use indicates that the nuclear threat is even worse than presently being portrayed in the news.  Tokyo Electric Power Company has probably given-up any hope of keeping those cooling pumps on after the batteries fail. Eventually they’ll vent the now boron-laced coolant to the atmosphere to keep containment pressures under control.

Which could mean — believe it or not — Hillary Clinton was right!

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.

Few things are more predictable in modern discourse than the instinctive opportunism of those who, as soon as tragic news makes headlines, seek to turn it to some narrow political advantage.

The as-yet-unnumbered innocent Japanese who have lost their lives can speak on behalf of no agenda, and the distraught survivors of the devastation want nothing but help and comfort. And yet . . .

Today’s tsunami: This is what
climate change looks like

And yet . . .

Tsunami Relief And Preparedness Cut In GOP
Budget Proposal: National Weather Service

Decent people are appalled by such posturing. What comes next: The Great Compassion Rodeo, in which liberals display their moral superiority by claiming to care more about Japanese tsunami victims than the rest of us. But you know who’s actually helping tsunami survivors? The United States Navy, that’s who:

Eight warships are headed to Japan to render disaster relief in the wake of a catastrophic magnitude 8.9 earthquake that left hundreds dead Friday. The quake unleashed a tsunami that is tearing across the Pacific. . . .
“Our deepest sympathies go out to our close friends in Japan as they deal with this tragedy,” Adm. Patrick Walsh, Pacific Fleet commander, said statement posted on his Facebook page. “U.S. Pacific Fleet is making preparations and posturing our naval assets to provide assistance when directed. We stand ready to support those in need. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Japan.”
None of the 38,000 military personnel assigned to Japan are dead, Pentagon spokesman Marine Col. Dave Lapan said Friday. He said six ships are headed to Japan to render aid, if called upon: the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan; amphibious assault ship Essex; dock landing ships Germantown, Tortuga and Harpers Ferry; and amphibious command ship Blue Ridge.
In addition, cruiser Chancellorsville and destroyer Preble, along with Reagan, have been ordered to “proceed at best safe speed toward Japan,” Pacific Fleet said on its Facebook page at noon Eastern time.

My co-blogger is a career Navy man, of course, but he’s deployed ashore in landlocked Kabul, and we have no reason to suspect they’ll send him to provide emergency IT support in Japan. Each of us must do what we can where we are, and all of us can give to the Red Cross. I just did.

UPDATE: Now, back to the news . . . Earlier today, I was watching TV and they reported that, despite warnings, surfers were trying to get onto Southern California beaches and ride the tsunami-enhanced waves. Further north, a reminder of the dangerous reality: “A 25-year-old man was declared dead Friday afternoon after being swept out to sea off a northern California beach while trying to photograph a tsunami launched by the massive earthquake near Japan, according to a Del Norte County, California.”

In Japan, meanwhile, the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station remains a source of concern.

UPDATE II: Instapundit finds a news story about those tsunami-loving surfers. If anybody finds a story with names and/or photos of those dudes, please link it in the comments. There is something distinctly American about guys who are willing to risk their lives for a super-gnarly wave. They deserve their 15 minutes of fame.

UPDATE III: Loren Burke Is a Great American!