32 years of accidents

I'm actually a fan of nuclear reactor created energy.  I've lived in Kentucky and the coal industry and let me tell you they have as much to do with societal responsibility as the man in the moon.  Living near Savannah River in S. Carolina for a while as a clear bell weather as to how good and bad the industry could be.  The bottom line there was if you weren't dying a horrible death at that very moment, you were in the clear.

Earlier in my life I lived in S.E. Pennsylvania, 90 miles as the crow flies from Three Mile Island when it lit up.

A few years later, I happened to be in Kiev shortly after Chernobyl went to the winds.  Suffice to say I've had enough ambient radiation to last a lifetime.  So to this business in Japan.

These reactors - the ones they have pumped sea water into as a "hail Mary" to cool them, well it will probably work but these reactors are done and gone for - poof - dead. They have a lot of fuel that now sits in some of them like a blob of melted marshmallows and that stuff has no place to go and absolutely no volunteers to haul it out. 

A few years ago, the infamous Long Island Power Authority (now renamed "national grid"), against all common sense, started up the Shoreham plant on Long Island.  It was a last ditch plea by LIPA to start this baby up and keep it running so that the stupidity of building this nuclear graveyard's cost could be, somehow, recouped.  It started. It was shut down and instead of a padlocked plant, we now have a billion dollar white elephant.

The point is, and this is Japan in a nutshell, is that the idea of a nuclear plant makes great sense.  The operation of the plant, no matter how you phrase it, costs a lot but it is, during safe operation, a VERY good source of energy.  When things go off the rails - jump the tracks so to speak - then you can simply think about spending a fair amount of the national income in just keeping deer from growing another head and 3 additional legs.....and we are always thinking 100 centuries down the road before things get half as worse as it is right now.

Just sayin'.