Geoffrey Sea holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Science from Harvard. He did graduate work in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and in radiological health physics at San Jose State University. He is co-founder of Southern Ohio Neighbors Group, which successfully defeated plans for the centralized storage of spent nuclear fuel at Piketon, Ohio. He is the director of Adena Core, a historic preservation group in Portsmouth, Ohio. He has published in the American Scholar, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and many newspapers. He can be contacted via email at SargentsPigeon@aol.com
The New Republic carries a good article exposing some of the background on how Japan overcame public resistance to site the Fukushima reactors: How The Japanese Government Manipulated Commercial Nuclear Power. | The New Republic What the article suggests but doesn’t quite say is that the madness of putting six reactor units plus spent fuel storage pools all at one location is a direct product of the native resistance to nuclear power in Japan after 1945.
In my Bulletin #11, I forecast that entombment of the entire facility in sand and concrete was the likely, or only possible, conclusion of this drama. I did not, however, think that would be acknowledged for quite a while.
17 iii 11, 5:45 PM GMT—I’d like to step back and talk about the aspect of Fukushima so far escaping attention, and that can be called the Management Problem.
Apparently it has seemed to some as if I have been downplaying the effects, because I have said consistently that the geographic long-range consequences will be far less than Chernobyl. I stick to that assessment, even if the spent fuel melts down, and even if cracks widen in the containment vessels. In Japan 2011, as opposed to Ukraine in 1986, there is enough time for authorities to adopt fallback measures to stop massive cesium plumes. They can drop a million sand bags if they need to.
17 iii 11, 1:45 PM GMT—The general headline this Thursday is: “Cracks are Appearing.” Cracks are appearing in one or two of the containment vessels at the Fukushima reactors (reports are unclear). Cracks are appearing in the bottom of the pool that holds spent fuel rods at Unit 4, possibly explaining why water is draining from the pool. Cracks are appearing in the US-Japan relationship as Japan officially disputed the congressional testimony of an NRC Commissioner on whether the spent fuel rods are now exposed. Japan would prefer to keep blame on the reactor design, which was American.
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