Happy Three Mile Island Day

Three Mile Island

Seems like only yesterday but at 4am this morning, 4+ decades ago, Three Mile Island nuclear power plant came within an hour of melting down and making a bit of land from Harrisburg, PA to just about the Atlantic Coast pretty much uninhabitable.  Close call.  I was living near there then. Nothing came of it but frayed nerves and general kerfuffle.

Chernobyl from Pripyat, Ukraine

 A few years later we were treated to a robust display of mismanagement, hubris and nuclear meltdowns. This time in Ukraine.  You can read about it here if you have a mind to. That disaster is still going on and will for a few more centuries...maybe forever.  I visited there shortly after the accident. Mistake.  That brings us to Japan.

Fukushima or Good Fortune Island, Japan

I wrote a little piece about it (here).  Just as an update as this was now four years or so ago, the sailors and armed forces personnel we sent there to help have filed a class action lawsuit against TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Company for, as the company now admits, GROSSLY under-reporting the radioactive levels. A couple of the reactors to this day are kept from melting down and poisoning half the earth only by pouring millions of gallons of water on them, which, of course, runs back into the sea...Pacific Ocean...the big pond. Thyroid cancer in the area is 40 times normal in its occurrence. FORTY times.  Radioactivity has reached our shores. Fish and mammals in the northern Pacific Rim are absolutely threatened and one day will either die or be useless as a food source or recreational view.  TEPCO reports that it will take several decades at the least to bring the situation under control.

I mention this little run down through history because the three biggest accidents or near misses in history occurred within the three most technologically advanced countries on earth.

There simply has to be a better way to boil water.