EcocentricEcocentric
From the beginning, the Japanese response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has been a constant improvisation. After the double blow of a quake and a tsunami knocked out power to the plant, officials have desperately tried to keep nuclear material at active reactors and spent fuel pools cool, to prevent overheating and more …
EcocentricUncategorized
Update 3/16/11 3:03 PM: The news doesn’t get better. At an afternoon Congressional hearing, Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko said that the all the water in the spent fuel pod in the number 4 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi has almost certainly boiled away:
We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which
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EcocentricUncategorized
On Monday, my colleague Jeffrey Kluger wrote an insightful post, “Butterfly Wings and Nuclear Disasters,” about how—with all respect to the Greek dramatists— there really is no such thing as a single “tragic flaw”; rather, tragedy results most often in the real world from the accumulation of small but significant mishaps. While that …
EcocentricEcocentric
I’ve been traveling and reporting for the past few days, out of email and cell phone most of the time, so I haven’t been able to blog on the terrible Japan quake and ongoing nuclear disaster. I know little of what’s going on, though an explosion just occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi 3 reactor. I’m thinking about the country I lived …
EcocentricEcocentric
[UPDATE: 5:59 PM ET: The evacuation zone around the power plant has been increased to 10 km, or 6.2 mi.]
[UPDATE: 5:46 PM EST: Japanese authorities announced that radiation inside the stricken Fukushima power plant control room has risen to 1,000 times its normal level. Some has leaked outside of the plant, prompting calls for …
EcocentricEcocentric
One of the surprising facts about the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which struck the island country a year ago today, is that by seismic standards it wasn’t all that big. The temblor was 7.0 on the Richter scale—strong, but hardly record-breaking. The earthquake that hit Chile a month and a half later was an 8.8—some 500 times …
EcocentricWildlife
Even before the earthquake a year ago that killed at least 220,000 people, Haiti was an ecological nightmare. Large-scale deforestation has left less than 2% of the original forest cover standing—a fact that is starkly apparent when flying between Haiti and its neighboring country the Dominican Republic, which has conserved far …
