The Invisible Terror of Radioactivity

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “U.S. Sees Extremely High Radiation Level at Plant, Focusing on Spent Fuel’s Impact,” depicts a fundamental dichotomy regarding the analysis of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plants between Japan and the United States. The U.S. is recommending that its citizens evacuate an area of 50 miles around the plants compared to the actual Japanese evacuation of a 12-mile radius.

U.S. analysts are particularly worried about releases of radioactivity from spent fuel rod pools because they are not sheltered by any sort of containment structure in comparison to the recently active nuclear reactors. Japanese officials in desperation tried to dump water from helicopters onto the spent fuel rods today.

The crisis is compounded by a weakness in the Japanese culture which involves slowly building towards a consensus when, in this case, rapid reaction is the most critical. The public is confronted by a dizzying array of individual crisises among six different reactor sites; each day seems to bring a different concern, if not an explosion, fire or other incident.

Meanwhile, the “faceless 50,” the remaining workers trying to salvage the situation, are trying to restore power to the plant in the hope that the cooling systems can be restarted. The whole thing is just one big mess, and that doesn’t even include the victims of the earthquake and tsunami.