More information is flooding in on the grave state of Japan, as scenes of a post-apocalyptic scale swamp the news. Cars, trains and even ships which have been thrown over mangled buildings now stand frozen like eerie sculptures. As many as 10,000 people from a single town called Minamisanrikusho remain unaccounted for, as whole regions are reduced to wasteland. The Fukushima nuclear plant I mentioned yesterday has suffered an explosion and four workers are being treated for radiation poisoning. This has taken a star role in the news line up – largely because it’s so frighteningly modern in its threat. It sits in the same pen as GM food, stem cell research and chemical warfare. Science-y sounding, new and little understood. The good news here is that it wasn’t a nuclear explosion per se; more an explosion which happened in a nuclear plant. The reactor core is where the real magic happens and an explosion there would have been seriously bad.
It does throw up predictable panic over the growing proliferation of this industry, and whether we should be building nuclear facilities on unsteady ground. Japan lives on the ‘Ring of Fire’ – an arc of earthquake and volcanic zones which span the Pacific and where about 90% of such disasters occur. Zooming out on the issue even further, the jury is still out on whether nuclear power in general is a viable solution to the world energy crisis. It’s probably unlikely that wind farms, solar panels and hemp underwear are going to keep us going once our fossil fuels run out. Nuclear power has the potential to supply us with a lot of energy using comparatively little raw material – which makes sense in a lot of ways. The consequences of the technology malfunctioning however, are huge scale and horrendous. Perhaps worse still, nuclear power getting into the wrong hands = weapons of mass destruction. I suppose people must have been having the same conversations following the invention of gunpowder. Baddies who used to sneak around stabbing each other could now shoot eachother and blow things up en masse instead. Make of that what you will.
News in the Middle East is temporarily playing second fiddle. NATO, the EU and the UN (all letters which stand for the West) are still shuffling around and procrastinating about imposing a no-fly zone over Libya. And it’s not looking good for the rebels. Saif Gaddafi announced today that almost 90% of the country was back under government control. Gunpowder triumphs again.
News everywhere else seems pretty insignificant. But I will leave you with the Daily Mail’s other lead story, simply because I can’t resist:
“Tesco recruits store bosses from SLOVAKIA after British workers shun supermarket jobs.” And yes they capitalized the word Slovakia.
See you tomorrow.
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