First let me say my heart goes out to the people of Japan.
The level of destruction here is unbelievable and this is in a country that is as prepared as one can be. One has to wonder how prepared the US is for a huge earthquake.

The lessons? We can’t build nuclear power plants on or near earthquake zones, period. I know some people will say the chances are small that something will happen. Well something is happening now, and it’s never happened before. I for one do not trust what any expert says about safety. Japan has the safest and best built reactors in the world and yet they failed to shut down safely in this disaster.

Death rate by energy source. Interesting.

Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro – world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html#more

As a society, we can never prepare enough for zero causalities when an event of this magnitude occurs. My prayers are with the people of Japan as they work through their grief in dealing with this disaster. They did most everything right and still had loss of life.
This quake released 100 times the energy of the 2010 quake that devastated Haiti. The power of a log scale is not easily understood in numbers. Around 1812 three quakes between 7.0 and 8.1 (estimated) hit mid America, when another quake of those magnitudes occurs, will America be ready? We have every reason to believe a quake will occur and the only variable left unknown is when. We would not have a tsunami risk in mid America yet water may still pose a threat. Impounded water in man made lakes are only one danger. All man made structures have the potential for loss of life. I am amazed at images of a building in Tokyo with its broken antenna on top could sustain enough movement to break the mast without falling down. I don’t know if there is any building in the US built to that level of protection. Chicago’s distance from the New Madrid fault is comparable to that of Tokyo to the quake in Japan.
Below is an estimate of the expected damage of a 7.7 quake on the New Madrid fault.
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/14810
Nearly 715,000 buildings are damaged in the eight-state study region. About 42,000 search and rescue personnel working in 1,500 teams are required to respond to the earthquakes. Damage to critical infrastructure (essential facilities, transportation and utility lifelines) is substantial in the 140 impacted counties near the rupture zone, including 3,500 damaged bridges and nearly 425,000 breaks and leaks to both local and interstate pipelines. Approximately 2.6 million households are without power after the earthquake. Nearly 86,000 injuries and fatalities result from damage to infrastructure.

Cory is correct that nuclear financing in the USA was already problematic as attested by Lester Brown at Earth Policy Institute. We are also past peak in uranium availability.

Zeno is correct about the voodoo financialization that keeps nuclear power talked up. I’m Worried for My Wallet when i consider the CDOs that could be involved in these new trillions in insurance claims. Another type of “meltdown” (as we saw in 2008) could be on the way. The epithet “GE” chills me to the bone when I think how entangled our government is with this global monster, and how that alone could obligate our taxpayers in this situation.

Your concern and sympathy may go out to Japan now but a financial tsunami could soon engulf our mainland.

Tom,

Nuclear Power is the most efficient and most reliable form of power. The only thing we should learn from the Japanese tragedy is, don’t build a Nuclear power plant in an area that can get hit by a tsunami?

It is not about an advanced culture, folks !

It is about the advanced people of Japan whose DNA produces their advanced and ethical culture without any Torah, the New Testament or Quran.

It is Japanese propensity to absorb and use the highest civilizational achievement–Judeo-Germanic culture developed in the Northern Europe by the most amazing Germanic tribes in collaboration with enviable Jews for hundreds and hundreds of years…

It is Japanese more or less homogenous society. According to professor Putnam, diversity kills the future of societies.

Oh, Fukushima!
My happy island’s plum blossoms
radiate dawn

Fukushima is built the way 20 percent of American nuclear power plants are built. Someone from American administration was saying that on the news yesterday. The person didn’t say whether the other 80 percent are worse or better. There are 102 in all, is what I heard, but I think the guy said 104 at one point. He thought approvals for the go-ahead with new reactors would pause just long enough to confirm that present designs have enough extra protection.
Obama has been a big supporter of increasing nuclear power since the very beginning. Me, not so much.

I can’t say it enough how my heart goes out to the Japanese people!!

The good order that Japanese keep when in danger, when in chaos, is truly enviable. I think back to the unity and coordination with which they conducted their part of World War II. Part of their culture is an awful lot of stoicism and control, and it serves them well on a small island, historically, and it served them well in defeat, apparently, taking the realities and making the most of it. I am thinking of my father, at the time I was born, doing some apparently secret-ish things in that country for many months that are disappeared from what he ever talked about. He must have been dealing with people like this, beaten but still orderly.

Every time some event like this happens–be it a natural disaster or a wacko on a shooting spree–we hear calls to make the world safe. The problem is that we cannot do that entirely. Life that is enjoyable and worth living has dangers. We can do some work to mitigate the risk, but we have to live as well. Events like this are rare, and I don’t want to give up our modern world because of them.

Greg Camp
Springdale, AR
http://gregorycamp.wordpress.com/

There’s “you can’t eliminate every risk”. Let’s not confuse that with the whitewash of “nobody could have predicted”.

From the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/world/asia/13nuclear-industry.html):

Over the years, Japanese plant operators, along with friendly government officials, have sometimes hidden episodes at plants from a public increasingly uneasy with nuclear power….

Last year, [one] reactor with a troubled history was allowed to reopen, 14 years after a fire shut it down. The operator of that plant…tried to cover up the extent of the fire by releasing altered video after the accident in 1995

Wow. Where’s Breitbart and O’Keefe when you really need them?

I have to respond to that woman who called about her son in Okinawa.
First off she would be well advised to look at a map. Second, her son is in the military and I hope she understands that he might be be ordered to help in the relief effort. And so he should be, it’s what he signed up for.

Or maybe you could have done the same research as a blogger:

http://my.firedoglake.com/jimwhite/2011/03/14/tepco-has-scandal-plagued-past/

The second World War wedded science (and its derivative technology) to the State and ushered-in the Atomic Age; commercial nuclear power generation was sold as the answer to Man’s future energy needs, providing “electricity too cheap to meter.”

Often used as synonyms, there is a fundamental – and profound – difference between wisdom and intelligence. Though nuclear power plants are designed and operated by intelligent people to be “fail-safe,” the fact is that no highly-complex system can be made absolutely failure-free; moreover, the actual degree of safety is based on cost. In commercial operations, cost is directly related to profit, and therein lies the “bottom line” – in more ways than one; the Wikipedia page, “List of civilian nuclear accidents” (updated today), should set most readers bolt upright.

Our way of life depends on the availability of reliable economical energy. From cradle to grave, from production to end-point, the true cost of energy derived from nuclear fission – just as with petroleum, coal and natural gas – would astound most people, which is why great effort is expended to keep these costs from the public.

We also inhabit the surface of this planet; we breathe it air, drink its water and consume what we grow and raise on it. All needs must be sustainably maintained. As we are here for the long-term, it would behoove us to make our tenancy as pleasant – and as healthy – as is possible.
Extractive energy technologies are based on privately-owned resources sold at market prices. Their industries – and the politicians they lavish their largess upon – are at the forefront of decrying energy which source-cost is essentially zero – solar, wind and geothermal (among others), and has nothing to do with what is in the best interest of humanity; it has only to do with profit – and the power that great wealth confers.

No matter the industry’s spin, the inarguable fact is that at ground level, the Earth receives from the Sun in two hours more energy than all of humanity consumes in a year; we need harness but a tiny fraction – reliably available, literally, for as long as we inhabit the Earth (as are wind and geothermal).

Technology (especially complex technology) can be seducing. Albert Einstein use to ask profoundly simple questions about the workings of the universe, and he liked to say that when the answers were simple too, it was then that you heard God thinking. As for the question of wisdom, future generations will regard nuclear-fission power plants as monuments to Man’s stupidity.

Just wanted to remark that several guests on this program made unfactual statements to the effect that molten fuel rods create the conditions for criticality (i.e. nuclear fission). Molten uranium fuel pooling on the floor of the reactor cannot go critical. The neutrons emitted by their radioactivity are too energetic to bind to neighboring nuclei and lead to the splitting of the atom. This is why the uranium needs to be fashioned into rods and surrounded by boron-enriched coolant, which moderates the energy of the neutrons and enables fission to take place. These reactors are designed so that if coolant is lost, the chain reaction is broken and fission does not occur.

The radioactive elements being released from the power plants are a by-product of the environment inside the reactor. While they are of concern, this is nothing like the fallout from an actual nuclear explosion. It’s a disservice to the public to perpetuate – or let go unchallenged – inaccurate information about the potential for a nuclear explosion from the events unfolding in Japan.

There are risks and benefits associated with all energy systems. Even renewables carry risks. E.g. an off-shore wind farm or solar panels on the roofs of those homes would be vulnerable to an earthquake followed by a tsunami. I haven’t heard whether fossil-fuel power generators would have fared any better. I fear more lives will be lost because of the loss of electricity to provide heat, food, clean water and medical care than will be lost from the release of radiation from these plants.

I’m sure society can and needs to do much better in terms of developing safer, more stable energy sources, but to have that conversation, we need sober facts, not hysteria, half-facts and outright misinformation.

This horrific tragedy offers Japan a unique opportunity: they can rebuild their country using state of the art energy conservation and renewable energy technologies and abandon dangerous, expensive nuclear energy.

JK writes, “we need sober facts, not hysteria, half-facts and outright misinformation” to make informed decisions.

Here are some facts: When we look honestly at the environmental, health, social and economic effects of all power sources (fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, etc), energy conservation comes out on top with renewable energy a close second. Conventional energy sources lose in a big way – and we will go bankrupt if we don’t look at this with an open mind. The Union of Concerned Scientists just put out a 150 page report on how bad the economics of nuclear energy are.

Half-facts and misinformation have been put out for many, many years about the necessity and safety of not only the nuclear industry but also coal and other fossil fuel industries.

This is one of the tragic prices we continue to pay for a political system where corporations and vested interests have so much power – groups like UCS does not have the same megaphone to spread their views, which are based on sound science and a respect for the truth, rather than corporate profits.

For the record: I am a physicist who has worked in energy conservation and renewable energy for my entire career of over 30 years.