2011-03-14, 09:23 PM
CommanderJinn Wrote:Sure there may have been a massive failure. The case is, the 9.0 earthquake did not cause the plant to fail. It was a chain of events that due to sheer misfortune that lead to the plants to fail. I already outlined that the plant did everything it was supposed to do under such circumstances. Something that ALL nuclear power plants are designed to do, regardless of whether the plant is situated near or on a fault line. The fact is Japan in its entirety survived the earthquake, but fell under the tsunami that came right after. No one ever expected a tsunami of that size to ever occur, or else no one would have ever settled there, let alone build a nuclear plant.
Regarding the issue of putting the plant somewhere besides a coastal area. That's an impossibility, it needs to siphon water from the ocean as a precaution for any unforseen event, such as this one, as well as for normal energy production after the water had been treated. Telling Japan to go use different sources of energy is the same as telling the world to stop using carbon as an energy source. It's not going to happen unless there's no other choice. And even then it's probably not going to happen.
If you read, you would see that the scientists point is that the safety features and regulations where not enough. The point is that they should have at least enhanced their safety features and regulations. but instead warnings where ignored, and although the safety features did what they where suppose to do the government did not do what it was suppose to and make the safety features sufficient enough for the potential disasters they where warned about.
Just because the safety features are working, it doesnt mean that everything worked out just fine and that there are no problems.
Not all coastal areas are off limits. What needs to happen is that they should pick areas of low risk. The problem was that these plants where built in areas of high risk with too high of siesmic activity.
And no one will deny that converting from one power source to another is difficult, but if all the power plants are at too high of a risk, they should begin slowly weening japan off of nuclear power.
And If you looked at recent events, Obama and the EPA are doing a pretty good job of weening us off of coal. They just completely forgot to build other types of power plants to replace them, and this winter we saw the effects of that with Texas and other states suffering from rolling blackouts (except the superbowl, that place got power while hospitals suffered).
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[video=youtube;u_l1Kx9ulkc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_l1Kx9ulkc&feature=player_embedded#at=77[/video]