Bruno Santos <besantos1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The japanese government must be held responsible for the disaster as much > as TEPCO. > It is a little difficult to know what you can do to a government. Vote them out of office? The people who authorized this plant retired and died long ago. > Accidents happen, but this was no accident. This was people making bad > judgements on safety issues that they knew were wrong. > I doubt that. They are not fools. Generally speaking, power company officials and engineers are risk adverse. One commentator in Japan remarked that after any major industrial accident, if you go into the files of the plant, you will find someone at sometime did a study and warned this might occur. It does not matter what happens; someone anticipated it. They're supposed to think about every possible scenario. That's their job. In this case someone made careful studies of tsunamis in local history and determined that a large one might come. It turned out this person was right. The problem is, if you were to take action against every accident scenario suggested by every engineer, no power plant would ever be built or allowed to operate anywhere. That is more or less the situation they have now got themselves into, with 50 out of 52 remaining nuclear power reactors turned off. Local citizens and government regulators are now demanding such impossibly high standards of safety that I doubt more than a handful of these reactors will be turned on again. This is bad. At present Japan does not have clean energy replacements for these reactors, so they are burning a great deal more coal and natural gas, and they're having severe shortages of electricity. It would make more sense to implement some immediate short-term fixes such as higher seawalls, and then put in place a 20 or 30-year phaseout of nuclear power. They should live with the risks of another accident for 20 years. It is an unfortunate necessity, better than the alternatives. - Jed
