2011-03-14, 06:15 PM
Devil's Sunrise Wrote:I would not say that the Japanese are incompetent. This 41 year old nuclear reactor got hit by a 9 magnitude earthquake, slammed with a 20 ft. tall wave and an explosion due to the buildup of hydrogen gas that blew off the freaking roof of the building. Yet the core was, at that point, intact and contained. It was, for a small amount of time after the distilled water went under a certain level, under meltdown. However, they did not reach up to the 3000 degree celsius which is required to melt uranium. Therefore, only cesium and iodine was released during a very short amount of time. If you were at the top of the chimneys when the cesium and iodine isotopes came out, you would probably have to quit smoking in order to get the average life expectancy back, but that's roughly about it.
You missed the point entirely. The reactor should have been taken down years ago, but instead the japanese government decided that they would push the plant to it's limits.
Age may or may not have been a contributing factor today, but the point is that it shows the poor choice of the government, and there are claims that they have a history of poor choices. Their poorest choice, obviously being the design and location of the power plants.
And I'll bring this up again, according to ABC regarding events of 2003:
"But they were serious in the sense that lives were threatened, systems broke down, there were failures to report and there were cover-ups. People pretended things hadn't happened."