Japan Quake/Tsunami

[hashiriya1]

how does this asshole stay in power? Who votes for this prick??

The Uyoku.

[aaron]

It's also really nice that they don't riot and loot at times like this. We Americans can really learn a lot from Japan.

I'm not American.

lucky.

[Erik_Twice]

I find very sad that the (fortunatedly somewhat low) damage caused to a nuclear power plant by forces five times greater than it was designed to stand is everywhere and exploding oil refineries aren't.

Hell I hear more about it than about the earthquake itself which is the really sad thing.

[gtmtnbiker]

It's also really nice that they don't riot and loot at times like this. We Americans can really learn a lot from Japan.

I'm not American.

lucky.

So you wish you weren't american? Or was that a sarcastic comment? I'm not sure.

I consider myself fortunate to be an american. I think each culture has its own merits, pluses/minuses. We're all different and that's a good thing.
I haven't lived in other countries so I can't comment if they're equal/better/worse than the American life that I lead.

Like any other country, Japan has its own set of problems. The economy is stagnating under the weight of its debt. The population age is higher than other countries leaving fewer young people to support the old. Lastly, the younger generation have difficulty finding good jobs because the older generation is entrenched.

Here's a good article in NY Times to read about some of its issues:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world ... ation.html

TOKYO — Kenichi Horie was a promising auto engineer, exactly the sort of youthful talent Japan needs to maintain its edge over hungry Korean and Chinese rivals. As a worker in his early 30s at a major carmaker, Mr. Horie won praise for his design work on advanced biofuel systems.

But like many young Japanese, he was a so-called irregular worker, kept on a temporary staff contract with little of the job security and half the salary of the “regular” employees, most of them workers in their late 40s or older. After more than a decade of trying to gain regular status, Mr. Horie finally quit — not just the temporary jobs, but Japan altogether.

He moved to Taiwan two years ago to study Chinese.
....

In any case, this disaster is horrible because of the cost of human life and damage to nature & property. The cost of recovery is enormous and it's something that Japan will struggle with for many years due to the enormous debts it has.

[Bradtemple87]

I love being American, but we got issues

Starting with a string of asshats for presidents, regardless of political standing.

[Breetai]

I find very sad that the (fortunatedly somewhat low) damage caused to a nuclear power plant by forces five times greater than it was designed to stand is everywhere and exploding oil refineries aren't.

Hell I hear more about it than about the earthquake itself which is the really sad thing.

Ummmmm, there are very substantial reasons why the nuclear plants exploding (have you seen the footage? Those were explosions) get a lot of attention...

[Jamisonia]

Americans are just naturally afraid of radiation. Look at movies from the 50's, its all about the effects of radiation. The fact of the mater is, after WWII we have two points on a graph for how radiation exposure effected humans. We knew how very low levels of radiation affected humans from lab tests, and how high levels affected humans from the two nuclear bombs we dropped on Japan. We assumed the relationship was linear, and that meant that mid levels of radiation, what could radiate from an uncontainable nuclear plant would be super dangerous. As it turns out the relationship between radiation levels is not linear, its exponential. So radiation does not become dangerous to humans until its gets to very high levels, but it gets very dangerous very quickly when you reach those levels.

[Hatta]

As it turns out the relationship between radiation levels is not linear, its exponential. So radiation does not become dangerous to humans until its gets to very high levels, but it gets very dangerous very quickly when you reach those levels.

There are actually two types of damage due to radiation. There's probabilistic damage, and threshhold damage. The probabilistic damage is the long term damage that leads to cancer, it is linear. If you double the amount of radiation, you double the amount of collisions between radioactive rays/particles and DNA bases. That doubles the rate of cancer.

Acute radiation poisoning is a threshhold effect though. Our bodies can cope with a certain amount of damage to molecules other than DNA. If you think about it, it makes sense. DNA damage will be there forever and you only have one strand per cell, but a damaged protein will degrade after time, and there's lots of other proteins around to take the place of a damaged protein. So you can absorb quite a lot of radiation before you get radiation sickness.

So it takes a fair amount of radiation before people fall ill to radiation sickness. But even much lower amounts of radioactivity can cause cancer later in life. Even a single decay event has a non-zero probability of causing cancer.


It would be interesting if someone did the math comparing this nuclear even to the radiation released by normal operation of a coal plant. We know how radioactive coal is, we know what mass of it gets burned per year. It shouldn't be hard to come up with a number of sieverts that we are all exposed to due to coal vs a nuclear disaster. I bet if you multiplied a low number of sieverts from coal over the entire population of the world, you'd come out with a greater total exposure than if you multiplied a large number of sieverts from a nuclear event over a small number of people in a radius around the plant.

[Breetai]

how does this asshole stay in power? Who votes for this prick??

The Uyoku.

Are there really enough of them to actually get someone into power?

[Erik_Twice]

Ummmmm, there are very substantial reasons why the nuclear plants exploding (have you seen the footage? Those were explosions) get a lot of attention...

I know that there were explosions due to venting of steam. The containment wasn't damaged and the centrals didn't need to be evacuated. I have seen pictures and the damage was small.

It's worrysome but not as much as several refineries/gas plants exploding. The problem is not the attention, it's the disproportionate attention compared to other events.