You could be right...but also remember what the Japanese were able to accomplish rebuilding nearly every city and piece of infrastructure after their defeat in WWII. It is amazing sometimes what a community or nation can do when faced with a major challenge. It all starts with attitude.

@1 & @2

It took Japan 30 years to climb from the devastation of 1945 into the economic force of the mid '70s.

I'm not going to disagree that this is bad, but come on. Permanent dead zone? The area around Chernobyl was booming with life just years after all the people evacuated. Some species were affected, for sure, but it's not like the area is an empty moon scape.

"Japan is totally fucked" does not make much sense to me... are you just making sure you say fuck more than the typical Stranger piece? Don't be a hero...

When Japan was coddling their bad banks, people in the USA used to say this sort of thing, like maybe it's their lack of ethnic diversity that allows difficult truths to be ignored, but of course we hard-nosed capitalists in the USA would never coddle our bad banks.

History has surprises I guess. Anyway in the end we are all totally fucked.

I was one of your harshest critics on your earlier posts, which I thought sounded hysterical and grossly inflammatory. I will admit now that I was wrong, at least in part.

I still think you were overreacting (the mushroom cloud rhetoric was a bit over the top). However, Fukushima has turned out to be a much worse disaster than I thought possible. I sought to educate myself in the early days, and read a lot of information about those reactors, and it looked like they had adequate safety measured designed in. But it seems that anything that could go wrong did go wrong, and the safety design isn't quiet as foolproof as they thought. They are clearly operating on the fly now, trying to contain it any way they can, and that they really don't know the extent of the damage.

But... I still think you're being overly pessimistic. Japan is more than capable of bouncing back from this. Japan is fucked for power in the short term, and they'll have a hell of a radioactive mess to deal with in the long term. But they bounced back from WW II, without the benefit of the Marshall Plan. And wile this is a much bigger disaster than I thought possible, it isn't a nation-wide disaster that WW II was. Your post a few days ago threw out a figure of $250 billion, which sounds like a lot. But we spend nearly that much on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan every year.

It will not take them 30 years to recover. Japan is more united politically and culturally than we are. They have the technical and financial capability to recover very quickly. 30 years from now, you are much more likely to see Haiti still not recovered from their recent earthquake, due to government incompetence and corruption, and international neglect. Japan will be back in its feet in less than a decade.

I was right from day one of this disaster, as was Goldy.

The exclusion zone that currently exists will remain permanent. And those outside the exclusion zone are still likely to suffer from significant effects, as well as the thousands of people it will require to cover the reactors and feebly clean up what little they can around the site.

There were at a low end, tens of thousands of deaths as a result of Chernobyl, in a much more sparsely populated region. I fully expect the impact in coming decades in Japan to exceed the ~25,000 dead directly from the tsunami/earthquake.

Most people really have no idea how bad Chernobyl was, and the entire world played that down to such a stunning degree that many people are convinced that the health impacts of Chernobyl were 'minimal' or 'less than expected.'

No one will ever be able to return to this exclusion zone to live.

To understand the full context of the severe thread posed by Fukushima, you must understand Chernobyl:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiCXb1Nhd…

I agree with Goldy that Japan is in for some miserable times ahead, but I'm also hopeful that this disaster may have a silver lining. Japan is the master of figuring out high-tech solutions to problems, and so I hope that in their efforts to overcome this disaster, the innovators in Japan may devise new ways of dealing with and mitigating nuclear power disasters and contamination. In the next century, I suspect we may need those capabilities more often than we'd like to believe.

Japan is too busy developing robot pets and AI-enabled sex dolls to concentrate on creating anything, you know, useful. I see no great upwelling of resolve from within to truly take control and clean this up. Thus far Japan's tactic for managing the disaster has been a combination of denial mixed with obfuscation. Does anyone seriously expect this to change?

Additionally, they have already been mired in a recession for the past 17-18 years. The earthquake/tsunami and its aftereffects just make the possibility for recovery that much more remote.

@10: So you're saying the Japanese will develop some special ability to transcend the laws of physics?

Something that the rest of planet earth (including the Japanese) have not come up with in, well, ever?

At this point, their 'special abilities' appear to be exactly the same plan as the USSR 40 years ago: bury as much of the debris in the ground, and then build a gigantic box around these reactors and then never go there again forever.

I've been stunned by the naivete and stupidity of the "this could never happen" crowd.

Now I can be stunned by the naivete and stupidity of the "someone will develop some new thing and it will be okay."

Maybe we can deploy some plaid shirts and hipster glasses and turn Fukushima into some kind of postmodern ironic joke.

Fucking morons.

It's been three months now.

Have any Fukushima babies been born that have shown the effects of radiation?

Right now, if I were GE or Westinghouse, I would be recording everything there as a mark of how safe nuclear is and how much all the safety requirements were way overblown.

The only deaths so far is for people who walked right up to the thing, which is the equivalent of going into a coal fired furnace and sticking your head in the door.

Nukes Now!

Goldy, you need to read this article:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/12/…

@16: I'm not sure what benefit it is to read a sorely uninformed, and grotesquely out of date piece of drivel that is entirely disconnected from reality.

Mark my words: the deaths from these three complete meltdowns will exceed the 25,000 directly caused by the tsunami and earthquake.

@14: As "Supreme Ruler Of The Universe" you should be aware that human gestation takes ~9 months.

In Chernobyl, there were tens of thousands of people who "put their head in the door." Most of those people died. There were thousands who handled elements of the raw core BY HAND. Robots were unable to function in that environment, so humans went in for a minute at a time.

Maybe you stop putting your head inside your anus. It clearly has not been efficacious for you thus far.

@19: The basis is called history.

It would be nice if you had a clue beyond the bullshit article you linked to, which is so wrong it's not even funny.

I'm sick of reading the nuclear apologists who at first claimed that nothing would melt down, who then switched to saying it could never be anything like chernobyl because the reactor design was "different," who then switched to saying it wouldn't be a problem because "there are multiple layers of containment," who are now essentially pulling an Ann Coulter "meh radiation isn't bad for you, not a big deal."

It's also nice to know that the permanent contamination of huge swaths of land, spilling hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive water into the ocean and our food and drinking water supply, and the long-lasting consequences of huge releases of radioactive materials is as nonchalant to you as traffic accidents.

Let me know the next time there's a death in your family and I'll make sure to point out that sometimes people in cars crash into each other.

I remember the nuclear apologists, most likely paid commenter, who harassed Goldy and talked about how everything would be fine, it was just hysteria and nothing more. Yeah.

Some people still do that? Really?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-06…

QUOTE:

Japan’s nuclear safety agency doubled its estimate of radiation released by Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant, which was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

The station released about 770,000 tera becquerels of radioactive material into the air between March 11 and March 16, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general at Japan’s nuclear safety agency, said at a briefing in Tokyo today.

The agency previously estimated that about 370,000 tera becquerels of radioactive material were released during the period.