While you were couch-planted and taking in all that disaster porn coverage from the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown, you probably thought you were safe, that those bad vibes a world away weren’t going to mess up your weekend, no sir. All TV, no reality. Well, actually, this globe of ours is a lot smaller than we’d care to admit: Three sites in Northeast Ohio have tested positive for radiation originating from the failing Japanese nuclear power plants.
Before you start tearing off your clothes and eating through your fingers: It’s okay. Not dangerous to humans. They say. They being some scientist types, and in times of global catastrophe, you got to listen to the scientists. Right?
This article appears in Mar 23-29, 2011.
Right now Japan is teaching us a lot. I have a lot of faith in the intellectual level of the average Japanese people – and a lot of respect for them as well. I have to imagine they had taken all the precautions possible when their nuclear power plants were designed, built and put online and maintained – the Japanese are very thorough people. However, if the Japanese best efforts were not able to avert the nuclear disaster – then no nuclear energy plant in the world is safe from damage caused by natural disaster. Think Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in Russia and now Japan – all had and have nuclear disasters in their countries. You can catch live CBS News and NHK World Service in English live raw video feeds at MALL 727 website as Japan’s woes unfold. It is a very educational experience of what happens at a nuclear plant when things go very wrong! We need to learn from this, we need to understand it – and we need to come to the honest realization that we may want to reconsider our nuclear energy future. It is also a strong message to the Iranian people if they allow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to continue playing with his nuclear toys, he may very well destroy Iran instead by his folly. But lets get back to what Japan can teach us. We need to put alternative energy strategies in high gear – this is where we should put our research energies. We should have colleges have technical contests to encourage energy developments that have less potentially harmful effects than nuclear energy. Remember, we are not coming to grips with the crisis in Japan – it is out of control – and the genie refuses to go back into the bottle. Our energy future is the mainlining of solar, wind, and hydroelectric generation. It is the creation of home power units using both solar and wind power to run our homes. Right now, there is a group that has invented a way to turn our roadways into a massive solar collector that could potentially supply our electrical residential and commercial electrical needs. I see electric cars in the near future become mainstreamed as we wind down our dependence on fossil fuels like coal, gas and petroleum in general – but only if we roll up our sleeves and make it happen. And by switching to less toxic needs for electrical needs, it will strengthen world economies as well, and turn off the money supply to Middle East terrorists as well. The technology to make it happen is fully on the shelf – we just need to implement it!