While CNN and Fox News are busy trying to scare the pants off of the easily frightened and simple minded by creating a story of nuclear disaster where none exists, Japanese engineers and power plant workers are working around the clock to bring an unimaginable situation under control. After being hit with an incredibly powerful 8.9 magnitude earthquake, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was hit an hour later by a 30 foot tsunami. These two events comprise a one two disaster punch scenario that was never planned for, and that the site was not designed to withstand. It did anyway.
Here are the facts that seem to be so absent in the MSM. Within seconds of the start of the earthquake, the automatic systems in place began to insert control rods into the reactor core that effectively shut down the nuclear processes from 100% down to 7%, 7% being the lowest level that the core will run at due to normal decay processes in the fuel rods. Unfortunately this earthquake was so powerful that it knocked out external power to the plant coming in from the grid, and since the plant itself was not producing power the AC water pumps stopped. This is not a problem because at this point the backup diesel generators kicked in and provided the AC power necessary to run the pumps.
This is how the system was designed to work, and it worked flawlessly for about an hour. That is when the tsunami hit and destroyed the generators. At this point the backup backup plan kicked in, which was to run the pumps on battery power. This also worked as planned until the batteries ran out after eight hours. This is when the trouble started. Without the cooling pumps operating, the water in the reactors core began to boil. In order to prevent excessive pressure inside the containment facilities and possibly compromising the containment building itself, the engineers began to vent the excess steam into the atmosphere. This steam contained hydrogen gas which has a nasty habit of violently exploding when mixing with oxygen. This is exactly what happened when the reactor buildings exploded.
It was the reactor buildings that exploded and not the containment structures. These are all very much intact. The situation on Friday morning March 18th is still serious but stable. As of 17 March at 4:00PM the radiation levels at the edge of the power plant site was measured at .64 millisieverts per hour which means that you would have to stand there for about 15 hours to receive the same radiation levels that a typical airline crew receives flying the New York to Tokyo route in a year. The amount of Radiation released into the atmosphere and its potential effects are negligible at best.
Even if 100 people were to contract cancer and die from this event, it would be more people than have ever died in all nuclear power accidents combined including Chernobyl. Even still this does not compare to the thousands who are dead, hundreds of thousands who are without shelter, food and clean water. Heck this number pales in comparison to the 150,000 children that are estimated to have been aborted in Europe due to fears of radiation induced deformities from Chernobyl that never materialized.
Please remember that the job of the MSM is not to provide you with accurate news and information but is, instead, to sell advertising and make money. They do this best by selling fear and by all accounts they seem to be doing a great job. Let’s see here, by checking the headlines this morning I find that we have a stampede in China to get iodized salt for the iodine content which is ridiculous, retailers on the west coast of the U.S. are selling out of potassium iodide tablets along with gas masks and chemical suits, and panicked residents are fleeing Tokyo. Folks, you just can’t make this stuff up. Thank you MSM.
I have a suggestion. Instead of buying iodine tablets and salt and chemical suits why don’t we all send the money to the Japanese Red Cross who at this very moment are feverishly working to prevent a massive humanitarian crisis from getting worse. Here is a link to a Google Site that has all the info and here is a link to a guy that is selling t-shirts and donating the profits to the Japanese Red Cross. What could be better than helping out some hard hit folks who could really use our help and get a t-shirt to boot?
0 comments:
Post a Comment