There's no food. There are no trucks to haul food. The factories that build the trucks can't run because there are no parts. Some of the parts come from factories that have been destroyed. The workers for those factories are mostly dead. The surviving workers are hungry, because there is no food.

What do you fix first>? In today's world, everything in interdependent, and the famous "just in time" manufacturing system that made Japan such an economic powerhouse makes them especially vulnerable to a disaster such as they've experienced.

What Do You Fix FIRST?

So I'll tell you. What you need first is energy. From a humanitarian standpoint, food and medicine come first, but from a recovery standpoint, that's futile. Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish... Japan needs to produce fishing poles and fish nets if they expect to make any gains on this devastation.

And nothing else works unless you have energy. Japan will have rolling blackouts for a long time. They need new electrical production capability, and they need it three days ago.

I've Been Avoiding News Programs

I've been trying to avoid watching the news. It's depressing, and frankly, I resent the fact that Japan's misfortune is trying to steal the thunder of Blondie's medical misfortune. She has been diagnosed with white matter disease (senility) and they found squamous cells in her vagina (pre-cancerous), so we're fighting a battle on two fronts. I'd like to feel sorry for her (and for myself, since I need her) rather than a bunch of people I don't know, and the damned news shows don't make that easy.

Not to mention that the folks at MSNBC raise my blood pressure. They are happy to declare that global warming is "settled science" but global warming theory can't even predict the past, much less the future, and that's the general test for science "fact". Nuclear physics, on the other hand, is straightforward engineering, and they keep playing boogieman games as if nuclear power plants were bombs.

They're All Luddites

Lawrence O'Donnell, who is one of the less wacko hosts at MSNBC, talks with correspondents, asking if the problem in Japan is worse than Three Mile Island. And what happened at Three Mile Island, I yell at him? Some radioactive steam was released, life expectancy in the immediate area actually increased, and one reactor shut down. Whoopie. They talk about nuclear plant "meltdown" and don't explain that in most cases, meltdown simply means that parts warp, and the nuclear plant stops working. Meh!

Then O'Donnell runs a film clip from The West Wing about a fictional nuclear power plant in California having a problem, and O'Donnell explains that he ran the clip so that viewers could realize the reality of nuclear accidents. Fiction is reality? Double Meh.

This followed Chris Jansing reporting from Japan. The question? Do the Japanese feel afraid? They aren't reporting on whether the Japanese have anything to fear, they are reporting on whether they are afraid of the boogieman. Triple Meh.

You'd Expect Japanese Paranoia

After the US became the first, last, and only country to ever use nuclear weapons on a civilian population - using any weapons on a civilian population is a war crime - you would expect the victims, the Japanese to be afraid of nuclear energy. In fact, they've embraced it. They generate a lot of their energy with nuclear power plants, far more than we, the nation of Jack Lemmon "China Syndrome" pussies, do. Never mind the fact that people die in coal-fired power plants regularly, never mind the fact that coal-fired power plants release more radioactivity in their smoke (coal contains natural radioactivity) than is allowed to escape a nuclear power station.

Is Fukushima power station going to turn out worse than Chernobyl? Well, let me put it this way. Fukushima was built in 1976, and were designed to last 30 years, and survive a magnitude 7.5 quake. They've lasted longer than that, and survived a 9.0 quake, 512 times as powerful. In Chernobyl, they had to poison the reactor by dumping bismuth on the core, instantly dropping the reactor temperature hundreds of degrees as the bismuth absorbed neutrons and underwent phase changes - phase changes take a LOT of energy - from powder to liquid and liquid to gas. About 30 people died.

No Mushroom Clouds, No China Syndrome

If you run electricity through salt water, hydrogen is produced, and in Japan, an explosion of hydrogen gas blew apart the reactor building, but the reactor itself is still safely within the containment shell. Chernobyl didn't have a containment vessel. It was vastly worse than this - and yet in terms of body count, when an airliner goes down, hundreds are killed - and when a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India developed a gas leak in 1984, 6000 people died, and over a half-million were injured. Even Chernobyl was small potatoes.

So what is Japan going to do? They're going to build a lot of mini-nukes. They don't really have a lot of choice. They need the power, and no other way to generate it.

S, S, S, and oh, yeah, S

Toshiba has what they call the 4S mininuke. You build it in a factory, load it up with fuel there, truck it to a power substation, and bury it. These new plants produce 10 megawatts of power, which means you'd need 120 to replace one of the power plants that just went offline, but you end up with a smart grid instead of today's wasteful mammoth plants and big distribution lines. These 4S mininukes - 4S stands for Super Safe Small & Simple - are cooled by sodium, so if something goes wrong with the cooling system, they automatically shut down, and the sodium eventually solidifies into a block of metal.

Best of all, the mininukes are never refueled in the field. After 20 years, they get dug up and returned to the factory for refueling. You don't have a problem with aging power plants remaining online because we need the power. They've run out of oomph, and they have to be returned for refueling, so you end up with a newly manufactured (or remanufactured) nuke after 20 years.

Dopin' It Up At Peach Bottom

The drugged-up operators at Peach Bottom and Three Mile Island bother me, although less than the drillers injecting toxic chemicals into our water table in order to get their mitts on Marcellus Shale oil. They'd bother me less, however, if they were operating those much safer mini-nukes.

And Japan's not in much of a position to build those mini-nukes right now. We ought to be building them here in the US, right now, to sell to Japan, and to use them ourselves. Toshiba isn't the only one with a mini-nuke design. Hyperion has a 25MW design that's the size of a phone booth.

Let's Be Pro-Active

And what is smart for Japan is smart for us. Nuclear power will not end our dependence on foreign oil. Crude oil is mostly used for transportation, and running an extension cord to a semi isn't really practical. On the other hand, decentralized power generation is safer, cheaper, smarter, and less vulnerable to terrorists.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Bhopal - bismuth - Chernobyl - China Syndrome - Chris Jansing - drugs - earthquake - Fukushima - humanitarian - Hyperion - Jack Lemmon - Japan - Lawrence O'Donnell - mushroom clouds - Peach Bottom - power plants - rolling blackout - sodium - Three Mile Island - Toshiba - tsunami - Union Carbide - West Wing