When the Architect of Fukushima Reactor 3 Is Scared, So Am I

About once a week, someone asks me for my take on the latest about Fukushima, how concerned we should be, or what the upshot will be in terms of world energy policy (as if there is such a thing).  I immediately refer them to Ace Hoffman of Carlsbad, CA, who’s been studying the nuclear power industry for more than 40 years — since he was about fourteen years old.  He writes with depth and passion, and I recommend that anyone interested in the subject follow his blog here.  

He’s testified at over 100 nuke hearings, and written over a thousand essays, including the one I’ve excerpted here:

It’s not often I read a headline about nuclear dangers that scares the daylights out of me.  They all distress me, but I don’t lose my daylights (wherever they happen to be) very often.  However, here’s a headline that DOES scare the daylights out of me:

“Architect of Reactor 3 warns of massive hydrovolcanic explosion.”  (Full article linked above).

Here’s my take on it (with a little history to set the scene):

In the fall of 1945 Vern Partlow was a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News.

After interviewing scientists about the atomic bombs that were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he became so alarmed that he wrote a song about the dangers, called Old Man Atom.

The song was an enormous hit among folksingers of the time (Pete Seeger among them) but was (famously) banned during the McCarthy Era.  (Even the New York Times editorialized that the song’s ban was “a threat to freedom.”)

The song has a line that describes “the atom” as: “…the thing that Einstein says he’s scared of” then goes on to say: “And when Einstein’s scared, brother, I’M SCARED!”

If Einstein were alive today, I think he’d be VERY scared.

Of Fukushima.

Professor Haruo Uehara is a former president of Saga University and the primary architect of Fukushima Dai-ichi Reactor 3.  Professor Haruo is scared.  So I think we should ALL be scared.  Not that Professor Uehara is saying anything significantly different from what I — and others — have been saying we thought happened in Fukushima, or is happening, or will happen.  But now it’s coming from someone with very heavy credentials AND close ties to Fukushima Dai-ichi itself.

There may be nothing we can do about Fukushima, but ADDITIONAL nuclear catastrophes can be relatively easy to prevent:  Shut the reactors down.  Shut ’em ALL down.