Have you ever wanted your seafood to glow in the dark? As of last Wednesday, your dream of radiant fish sans bioluminescence came one step closer.
At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, approximately 80,000 gallons of contaminated water spilled from a steel container less than 400 feet from the Pacific.
While potentially disastrous, it’s important to remember that this was not some man-made fluke; the plant suffered damage from a tsunami that could have filled screen time in an apocalyptic bomb of a movie like “The Day After Tomorrow.”
Just in case the reader has not been keeping up with the latest nuclear disaster in Japan, here is a little insight.
On March 11, 2011, there was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake about 43 miles east of Japan’s coast that, while doing little to no damage to the plant itself, created a powerful tsunami that had waves reaching as high as 133 feet. For comparison, that’s right below where the clock on Memorial Tower sits.
Besides the toll in civilian deaths and loss of property, the tsunami caused catastrophic damage to the nuclear plant, resulting in several meltdowns and the release of highly radioactive materials into the environment.
With the extraordinarily high rarity of such events, nuclear power remains to be one of the cleanest, most efficient and, above all, safest forms of energy we have at our disposal.
In fact, the entire state of Louisiana benefits from the modern miracle of nuclear power. Thirty miles north of Baton Rouge, we have our own nuclear plant at River Bend, just south of St. Francisville.
The facility provides a whopping 10 percent of Louisiana’s energy needs, as well as countless jobs for our expanding economy. So, any nuclear disaster, no matter what the size, should make us all pay attention.
According to Charlie Pardi, a 62-year-old former employee at River Bend, the Fukushima disaster and its aftermath are simply a case of Murphy’s Law — everything that could have gone wrong, did.
Pardi, a veteran of the United States Navy, served for six years aboard nuclear submarines, where he received his education and training in the nuclear field. He then went on to work at several nuclear facilities, including Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, where, after a partial nuclear meltdown there, he helped write new procedures and training for such scenarios.
In Pardi’s opinion, the technicians at Fukushima could not have done one thing more to prevent the catastrophe, and there simply was no way to protect the facility from such a large tsunami, given its proximity to the coast.
“The facility withstood the earthquake,” he explained. “But there is no way you can control that volume of water.”
He went on to say the US’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission has quickly reacted to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. According to him, every plant has a contingency for every possible scenario. So yes, there is, in fact, a plan at River Bend to react to an earthquake.
The 2011 disaster in Japan was rated a seven (the highest score) on an international scale of nuclear disasters, whereas this new spill rates at a paltry three.
Not so terrible, right? Wrong. There are 300 more steel containers, all filled to the brim with radioactive water, each with the structural integrity of an empty beer can against a frat guy’s forehead.
So as devastating as the consequences of the Fukushima disaster and this new spill will be down the road, there does not need to be a knee-jerk reaction from environmentalists and other proponents of regular tree-huggery.
The mere proximity of a nuclear plant will not cause your hair to fall out and the fact that a plant in Japan suffered damage from a natural disaster does not mean that all nuclear facilities are unsafe.
In fact, the presence of a nuclear plant at River Bend is an economic boon for the area, and keeps the lights on in Tiger Stadium.
Ryan McGehee is a 20-year-old political science, history, and international studies junior from Zachary.