AWKWARD ZOMBIE

A bit late but he probably survived. Some sources say he jumped out at the last moment once he got to an empty lot and others say no one was harmed.

The power plant wasn't damaged because of the quake but because of the tsunami.

Nobody predicted this. If you built your reactor on "safe" land, unpredictable catastrophes are always a possibility (e.g. (forest) fires,meteorite (yes, that's incredibly farfetch'ed, but still),... ). That's not to say there were no mistakes made:

Fukushima was built 40 years ago, so the protecting concrete etc. weren't as technically advanced as the newly built reactors in Japan. They could have closed down the plant and renovated (admittedly, that would have cost a lot of cheddar).
The backup generators were all built on the same spot and way too low. This caused them to be flooded by the tsunami, and basically fuck everything over. Again, this is something which is no longer allowed in new reactors.

Also, there are few places which are truly disaster-free, so you'd be putting them way too close to each other. In that case, it's better to built them on lands where catastrophes may happen, but to make sure they should last through it.

Double post for news update:

Read in a paper that Japan is finishing a power line to Fukushima, which should resupply the plant with the energy to cool off again and prevent meltdown.

Sounds like everything is being taken care of, then?

A good thing to come from this disaster will be safety measures to make sure it doesn't happen again. The reactor with the big problems was only built and tested for 7.9, this was an 8.9. Methinks the rebuilt plant will be tested for 9.something.

Of course, the reactor troubles in Japan, although they're being dealt with efficiently and effectively, are scaring the hell out of Americans, of all people. I knew it wouldn't be long before I started hearing Chernobyl and Three Mile Island regularly on the news. One hiccup, and suddenly everyone is afraid to have a nuclear-powered nation. Coal is so much safer, right?

Yeah, but then everyone complains about you shitting all over the environment. :/

Also there is a veeeery slim chance that if the reactor does release a "radioactive cloud" the cloud will reach American Shores. The Pacific Ocean is very big. It is likely that a radioactive explosion in Japan will not effect us at all. Health-wise. We get a lot of stuff from Japan, so economy-wise it'd still be damaging to the US.

I think Exeres might have been sarcastic, but whatever. Actually, according to this, coal fired power plants provide 49% of consumed electricity in the United States. The problem with coal however, is that at the rate we're consuming it now, we're already going to run out in less than 200 years, if my memory serves correct (that's of course a very inaccurate estimation).

Fossil fuels are safer in the sense that they don't randomly explode and cause cancer OH WAIT YEAH THEY DO. I can't believe we're still stuck on using oil and whatnot. Even natural gas would be a little better, but we've had nuclear technology for what, sixty or seventy years now?

Whatever, conservation is for someone else.

And to add to that, it's not like coal incidents cause whole towns to be evacuated OH WAIT CENTRALIA.

A population of seven. The seven most stubborn people in the world.

I heard about that before. It's awful, yet extremely interesting.


Also like Exeres said, seven of the most stubborn people in the world.


Also natural gas will turn your mining equipment and site to shit for 40 years.

At least no one died from it (at least directly), so it would have been a lot worse if it did. But anyway, this is "Current events", not "events that happened 30 years ago." But it was tangentially related so I thought it would be interesting. Also I like learning about abandonded towns.

Nuclear is hardly perfect, and I wonder if there will ever be a form of power/fuel which does not produce some kind of waste product; Though geothermal seems to be one of the better, cleaner ways of obtaining energy.

It's interesting to note that way we draw energy from almost every kind of fuel is by driving turbines with air, steam or water.

I often wonder if there's a better/more direct way of obtaining power from fuels than by making magnets spin inside a coiled wire.

Centralia CURRENTLY has only seven people in it. How's that?

Also, I need to visit the Door to Hell before I die.