A massive 7.5 magnitude earthquake just hit central Japan this morning. The last big earthquake there caused the collapse of a couple of nuclear power plants and the flooding of vast amounts of seawater into them to cool them down and keep them from melting down and then blowing up in a repeat of Chernobyl. All that radioactive water was of course released into the ocean, totally fucking over the world’s fish. Thanks, Japan. But hey, who would have thought there’d be any problem building nuclear power plants on earthquake faults? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Which makes me think of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant a little west of Morro Bay on the coast, also situated on an active earthquake fault. That was started up around 1985 and so far hasn’t blown up or melted down.
It seems the best way to build one of these plants is to just build it and check afterward if a safe spot was chosen or not. If not, too late, run it anyway because it cost a lot of money to build and we don’t want to waste that, now do we? Why does this remind me so much of the way our government works?
So Happy New Year, Japan. and watch out for those tsunamis. Blub blub blub.