Sunday Rant

As I sit in my living room on this fine Sunday morning, I am overwhelmed by the events that continue to unfold before, me and helpless to stop them. In the wake of the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami which hit Japan just over a week ago, we are confronted with horrific images of death and destruction, usually wrought only through intense warfare. This destruction occurred in a little over an hour’s time, was biblical in proportion, and affected tens of millions of unaware Japanese citizens. The scope of this disaster has been compounded by several orders of magnitude as a direct result of severe damage done to a number of active and inactive nuclear reactors.


Beyond the shores of Japan, we are now engaging in a third war in the Middle East/North Africa theatre. The purpose of this war is [ostensibly] to remove a harsh dictatorial regime with a democratic one. A noble gesture this, but severely destabilizing at such a time of increased unrest in the entire region. I wonder how long before some of these people we are “helping” turn the guns on us?

Moving west, there is word of another massive oil spill, some twenty or so miles from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Conveniently, there are far too many greater distractions, at the moment, for this little pearl of information to actually get any air time. Adding fuel to these emergencies, wars and disasters is the near total information blackout from Japan. While we were all entertained by the tears of contrition cried out by the Big Kahuna over at TEPCO, we are no longer amused at the incompetence of a government which willingly placed not one, but five, nuclear reactors on a known fault line and adjacent to the sea [without the protection of a flood wall no less]. Remember, the Japanese invented the word Tsunami, and know all too well what the potential for occurrence is.

Further aggravating the situation is the fact that emergency pumps and generators were installed at the lowest point within the facility: the basement. While these facts alone should award the designers of these abominations the Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award, the best is saved for last. These genius nuclear engineers decided that it would be prudent to place the spent fuel rods, some of them containing plutonium oxide, on top of the reactor itself. This means that if the reactor actually blows up, a-la Chernobyl, the spent fuel will be blasted in to tiny particles and ejected across the landscape, rendering everything it touches unusable pretty much forever. The comedy doesn’t end here however, there’s more!

Given the inept designs, poor planning for earthquakes and tsunamis, one would think there couldn’t possibly be anything else going on here. They would be wrong. As it turns out, nuclear reactors need a constant supply of clean water, actually, demineralized water works the best, to keep them cool and moderate the reaction in the chambers. One would think that in light of this bit of knowledge that provisions would have been made in advance, and that great tanks of water would be available, and they would be full of millions and millions of gallons of this critical element, in order to insure that the reactors could never run out. You would be wrong again.

As it turns out, there is actually no back up water on-site. NONE. As each of the details of this unprecedented disaster slowly leak out, I find myself completely dumbfounded. The incompetence is on a level that I never thought possible in an industry with more risks than any other industry in the history of mankind. This is a watershed moment, one in which we have to decide whether or not to sacrifice the planet for our own greed, or live much simpler lives, foregoing a bit of the luxury that a few more megawatts of power provide. I am beyond angry here: I am truly afraid for our lives and the future of the planet. It seems that we have not learned a single thing from Chernobyl, and the thousands of lives snuffed out by cancer and leukemia. It seems that money has indeed become more important than every thing else, humanity be damned.

As I watch the various newstainment outlets, trying to get a clearer picture of my future, I see the spin doctors winding up to promote this disaster as a one-off event, and insure us that nuclear power is the safest form of power on earth. They will point to coal mine disasters and thousands of dead miners in China as the metric for industrial safety. They are singing the praises of the industry even as our own creaking infrastructure falls apart around us.

Had we embarked on a different path forty years ago, and spent the hundreds of billions of dollars on an infrastructure of wind, hydro, geothermal and solar power, we would have still found ourselves looking at a massive disaster in Japan, but we would be responding to something that could actually be fixed. These reactors will never provide another watt of electricity, and over the next decade, during which they will have to be permanently entombed in concrete, it will actually cost Japan and indeed the world, many billions more.

The genie is out of the bottle in Fukushima Dai-Ichi, and will never be put back in. The knock on effects of this tragedy will be felt forever.

Our venerable POTUS has been noticeably absent from all of these tragedies. On Saturday last, less than 24 hours after the Japanese disaster, he was on the links, catching a quick 18 holes. While saying nearly nothing about the Libyan situation, he jetted off to Rio with the wife and kids for a much needed vacation. As of Sunday afternoon, around 1:00, he is still MIA in the media. I guess he has written off Libya for oil and needs to suck up to Brazil to insure our oil supplies. It seems that kissing ass for oil has become his newest forte. To top off our AWOL President, our congress still has not been able to agree on a budget. We are now six months in to the federal fiscal year, and have no budget.

Rome is truly burning, and Nero is fiddling. Our financial centers are being held together with rule changes that would get you or I jail time if we tried to invoke them ourselves, and tons of synthetic paper. This is certainly a recipe for complete disaster. When this house of cards falls, and it will, the entire system built upon it will come crashing down at the speed of light, and all of those pixels they call Dollars, Francs and Euros will vanish in to thin air, taking with them any hope of maintaining the illusion.

May God help us all.