People don’t want to believe it, but Russia can win a conventional war against Ukraine without nuclear weapons. It doesn’t mean they will.
Outcomes of conventional wars are simply not predictable… too many variables, too many unknowns. Another problem is that all sides of a conflict tend to lie—both to themselves and others. During war, it’s hard to know what’s true.
One thing thinking people seem to know for sure: war always turns into a mess, which ruins the lives of people who experience it up close and personal. People who fight on the ground in war say that combat is loud, remote, confused, and incomprehensible. They are unlikely to meet anyone on the other side until they drive over their corpses.
And that is on a good day.
War wears folks down, weakens physical and mental health, and imprints on warrior-minds vivid sights, smells, and sounds they don’t forget.
A cousin who fought in Vietnam shakes like a leaf when in public spaces. He is unable to stand in lines, even to buy a sandwich. Somehow, crowds, and people standing in lines, trigger bad memories he can’t set aside.
Of course, he’s stone deaf as well—his ears ring like bell towers. The constant roar doesn’t stop until he sleeps. A Marine helicopter gunner, he blew out his ears with the sound of his own fires.
As for nuclear war, the most important rumor I’ve heard is that the USA modernized its nuclear fleet during the Obama years. Though classified, reliable people have published reports, I’m told, that money spent on upgrades soared to as high as two-trillion dollars. If true, Americans can be assured that the USA nuclear fleet is modernized and probably works damn good. It’s a staggering state of affairs, which adversaries are wise to take to account.
Maintaining nukes is not cheap or easy, right? It requires frequent replenishing of triggering elements which, unfortunately for war-planners, possess half-lives which last months, not years. It is why nuclear power plants are essential.
As for power plants, do readers know that neutron-emitting elements tend to poison fuel rods? After rods expend a mere 5% or so of their fuel, neutron-generating elements called poisons gum-up fuel rods to make them useless for power generation. Spent fuel rods typically are stored on-site in cooling ponds until their poisons can be extracted to boost quickly decaying trigger elements essential for bomb detonation.
Need for neutron-emitting trigger materials is why every country that builds nuclear bombs builds nuclear power plants. The secret keys to success hide in spent fuel rods.
It’s obvious, right?
Why would any right-minded country risk building future Chernobyls and Fukishimas unless it had really good reasons? One good reason is trigger materials. Isn’t it true that almost anyone can make cheap electricity from almost anything? — water, coal, sun, oil, natural gas, wind, or whatever, right?
Why nuclear?
Yes, plutonium lasts for millennia, but triggers don’t. To keep nuclear weapons viable for years and decades, not weeks or months, bombs must be continuously resupplied with reliable sources of neutron-emitting elements, which can be harvested most easily from fuel rod poisons.
It is easy to understand.
Most Americans assume USA concentrates its intelligence resources to keep up to date on the status of others’ nuclear inventories. What do they have, where is it hidden, how well is it maintained? Some understand that USA super-computers connect with hi-tech surveillance systems to track every piece of nuclear hardware and every kilogram of plutonium and bomb-grade uranium anywhere on planet Earth.
It’s true.
The technology is not new.
Here is a video from 2017 that lays it out. No excuses to anyone for choosing ignorance. Try to understand.
Some don’t believe blanket surveillance is possible. Listen folks. The system is already built. Artificial intelligence assesses threats and then tells leaders who it will be who prevails after a nuclear exchange on any given day.
Hint: most days, it doesn’t seem to be Russia or China.
Prolly not the USA, either.
Joe Biden insists that winning nuclear war is simply impossible. I have no way to know; neither does any civilian or any other person who lacks access to the super AI technologies of the United States.
Is there anyone out there who believes delusional dictators can be trusted to safely possess weapons of mass destruction? These strongmen threaten to unleash hell, presumably, using anything from viruses to chemical poisons to nuclear fires to cyber implosions that collapse civilizations. Who’s going to tell them, no…
Shouldn’t humanity be working to outlaw dictatorships? Individuals who have accumulated enough wealth and unchecked power to make war are a clear and present danger to humanity and all non-human life on Earth as well.
A line needs to be established; anyone who crosses becomes a felon — subject to arrest by the international community. The line divides those who have seized unlawful wealth and excessive power. The line must be defined and defended by international courts established by free nations. How hard can it be?
Limits are necessary or humanity is destined to be driven to extinction by a handful of folks driven mad by reckless power.
Can we face some unpleasant facts? Russian and Chinese elites hold at least 1.2 billion people under some kind of house arrest inside their territories, right? It’s a style of living that seems alien to Americans. Doesn’t everyone long to live free and unafraid? Doesn’t everyone want to shout whatever they think is true without fear of prison or worse?
If Putin and his ilk continue down the path they are on—threatening others with nuclear terror on their Fox-equivalent state media—maybe those who oppose their catastrophic ambitions might, with a little luck and a lot of bravery, prevail to someday see dreams of freedom and peaceful living come true at last.
It’s gotta be possible, right?
Who disagrees?
Does anyone want to live in a post-apocalyptic world—especially one where one side “wins bigly?”
Some folks say nuclear Armageddon is impossible. One side wins, and life goes on as it always does.
My problem with such views is fear that survivors of nuclear war might look like jellyfish and live at the bottom of oceans.
It’s why monsters who possess WMDs should be given no quarter in a world where folks plan to live free someday without fear.
Update: March 25, 2021 Today, Japanese public broadcaster NHK News(the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) reported that the intruder detection sensors at the Kashiwazaki-Karina Nuclear Power Plant have been broken for at least one year; inspectors and regulators rank it a terrorism risk at the “most serious level”.
The plant has not operated since the Tsunami of 2011, which damaged and closed many of Japan’s nuclear power plants including the catastrophic meltdown and fires at Fukishima — which remain on-going. Sensor readings at the complex suggest that one of the reactors could re-ignite. The area of concern is inaccessible.
Update: May 16, 2020 Today, NHK News announced that Japan has officially launched a Space Defense Unit, otherwise called the Space Operations Squadron (SOS). It’s mission is to protect Japan’s many satellites from debris and other space hazards and threats. A spokesman said that communication protocols between Japan and the US are yet to be worked out.
Update: May 11, 2018 In April Congress approved Japanese American Paul M. Nakasone to lead the National Security Agency, the Central Security Service, and the U.S. Cyber Command. Paul’s grandparents were Japanese citizens born in Japan. His father worked for Army intelligence services during World War II when Japanese Americans, many of them, were rounded up and detained in USA internment camps. Nakasone is an Army General appointed to lead an agency (the NSA) that has been led by a rotation of Navy Admirals, Air Force and Army Generals. The Editorial Board
47 TONS
While the Little Rocket Man and North Korea capture the world’s attention, our president is in Tokyo to deal with a threat that dwarfs anything we have faced since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 76 years ago.
The surprise attack against our Navy on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, started a cascade of retaliation against the Japanese that three-and-a-half years later resulted in 67 Japanese cities burnt to ashes during a few months of sustained “fire-jelly” attacks by hundreds of Boeing-29 Superfortress bombers and other aircraft. After napalming the cities to ashes and dust, the United States followed the horror with a “preemptive” nuclear strike against the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Nine million Japanese civilians were left homeless. The death toll has never been definitively calculated, but two million souls is a reasonable guess.
(Click map to enlarge.) The distance from Pyongyang, North Korea to Tokyo, Japan is 800 miles; Hawaii, 4,400 miles; Los Angeles, 6,000 miles; Seattle, 5,150 miles; Alaska, 3,200 miles. The border of North Korea meanders 25 to 50 miles from downtown Seoul,South Korea.
A few years after the stalemate of the Korean War, General Curtis LeMay — head of Strategic Air Command — claimed that his pilots had killed a similar number of Koreans by aerial bombardment — 20% of the population.
The United States killed an estimated million Iraqi civilians in the more recent wars in the Middle East, which included the Gulf War and the Iraq War.
It killed 2 million Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam genocide of the 1960s and 70s. In the region of southeast Asia, the USA killed 3.4 million souls, military and civilian, by the war’s end.
In August 1945, USA bombers killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Millions were burned alive in fire-jelly (napalm) bombings, which decimated 67 cities over several months. Evacuation of cities helped to reduce casualties.
Why am I bringing up a bunch of disturbing statistics? What’s the point? Why not leave unpleasant memories forgotten in a distant past where they can’t impact the happy lives we live now, not then?
What possible benefit can remembering the past confer upon our contented present? Why bother puking up a sour history that only the old-timers among us experienced?
May I ask one more question? Maybe thinking about the answer will help some to make sense of current events that seem to have no rhyme or reason.
Of the fifty countries against which we have directed our military wrath since World War II, which among them has a right to the biggest grievance? Who did we hurt the most?
Which country has been forced to endure the shame of a military occupation that never ends? Ok, maybe it sounds like more than one question. Deal with it.
America fights secret and not so secret wars against communist, Islamic, western hemispheric, and, it turns out, African countries all the time. We have conducted strategic operations against friend and foe alike since World War II.
We have meddled in the internal politics of super powers like Russia and China. The Dalai Lama of Tibet wrote in his book Freedom in Exile that the United States gave him millions of dollars to incite violence against China, for example.
The USA has attacked militarily one in four of the 190 countries on the earth during the modern era. Which country is the one most likely to harbor a secret ambition for revenge?
America keeps itself in a state of perpetual war to feed the appetites of voracious weapons manufacturers whose stockholders are among the world’s most affluent. The AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force against terrorists) passed Congress, and President Bush signed the bill in August 2001 for a reason — to fuel the ambition of arms dealers by freeing them from the inconvenience of securing approval of Congress to declare wars — which the Constitution demands. Only California’s Barbara Lee (no relation to Billy Lee) voted against it.
Since 1991 Congress has passed and the president signed four AUMFs, mostly to cut down on the amount of work and delays that are inevitable when large elected groups of representatives are compelled to go on record for or against any particular conflict.
We in America live under a lot of illusions. We tell ourselves a lot of lies about how wonderful we are and how everyone wants to be like us. Our enemies who fear us the most insist — some of them, anyway — that they love us; they want to live with us and be like us, and we believe them.
No one tells a command officer who is carrying an automatic assault rifle that he is a pig; the term “butt-wipe” is never used. No one wants to die for a no good reason like name calling. Our subjugates place flowers in the barrels of our guns and tell us they love us.
Everyone who has been shamed and humiliated prays for their day of liberation; the day of their revenge; the day the world is finally set right. It’s human nature. The desire to settle scores crosses cultural, religious, and geographical boundaries.
Few countries that have suffered cremation by fire of millions of their citizens forget. They don’t forgive. Not really. Think long and hard.
It’s true.
For almost a year Billy Lee lived where he could view Mount Fuji from his bedroom window during his two-year stay in Japan. The Editorial Board
The situation in Japan is dire; it is. The United States for some insane and goofy reason permitted the Japanese over the past 30 years to build the most sophisticated nuclear power grid the world has ever seen.
The USA sold the Japanese uranium-impregnated fuel rods. A by-product of their use, which is to produce the intense heat required to generate electricity, is plutonium. Instead of collecting and disposing the spent fuel rods, the Japanese built facilities to extract the plutonium. They promised to use the plutonium for fuel in advanced power generators called “fast reactors.”
Fast reactors are in principle cheaper and less complicated; they are also more volatile; more dangerous to operate.
After the earthquakes and tsunami of 2011, the Japanese abandoned “fast reactors”. They discovered during audits following the disasters at Fukushima and other facilities that their fast reactor safety records bordered on terrifying. They stopped using plutonium for fuel. With no place to “burn” what they continued to harvest, plutonium began to accumulate, bigly.
In the entire universe plutonium is found above trace amounts at one location and one location only: planet Earth. Plutonium went extinct due to radioactive decay billions of years ago.
Plutonium can be created during rare cosmic events, but the bomb-making kind — Pu 239 — is a manufactured element that does not occur in nature. It is a byproduct of nuclear fission reactions that hides within the matrix of poisons that make the remnants of spent fuel rods.
Plutonium is among the most poisonous substances known. The speck of plutonium dust that kills you, you will likely never see. Some scientists today have downplayed the lethality of plutonium 239. My advice is to be skeptical whenever vast amounts of money and power fuel a controversy.
Regardless of its lethality as a poison, no one argues that fourteen pounds is enough plutonium to make an atomic bomb of a construction so unsophisticated that a high schooler could fashion the necessary components in shop class. Sophisticated bombs require even less plutonium — a mere nine pounds.
This is what plutonium powder looks like. Japan has 94,000 pounds of it. 14 pounds are required for an unsophisticated bomb; 9 pounds for a sophisticated version.
Japan has harvested 47 tons (94,000 pounds) of high-grade plutonium from its nearly one-hundred or so nuclear power and processing plants, which include power plants, research reactors, fast reactors, reprocessing installations, and recently decommissioned facilities — decommissioned due mostly to safety concerns.
Japan’s production schedule is running at a frenetic pace — adding eight tons of surplus plutonium to its stockpile every year into the foreseeable future unless the United States is able to shut down Japan’s reprocessing installations with an agreement scheduled for negotiation in 2018. Our new president has said the old agreements won’t be changed.
By this time next year the Japanese will have accumulated enough high-grade Pu 239 to make as many as 12,000 atomic bombs. Should it ever make that choice, Japan will possess the world’s largest nuclear arsenal almost overnight.
Plutonium is heavy. Fourteen pounds of Pu 239 is the size of a softball. Nine pounds is the size of a baseball. It is exactly the right amount to construct the 4.38″ diameter ring used in a typical bomb. By this time next year Japan will possess enough plutonium to make 12,000. Depending on how the bombs are tampered, configured, and initiated such bombs can release an equivalent explosive power in a range from 20,000 to 100,000 TONs of TNT. The bombs can be launched by artillery, dropped from planes, or delivered by missiles, drone subs and boats.
What follows next in this essay is the scary part. Some readers might want to bail and maybe find a good comic book to occupy their imaginations.
Despite agreements with the United States that followed World War II, Japan has one of the largest military budgets in the world. The country spends 42 billion dollars per year on its military. This expenditure does not include its civilian nuclear power system or its civilian space exploration programs.
The Japanese consolidated three civilian rocket launching companies into one (named JAXA) in 2003. They are launching rockets into space all the time. JAXA designed, built, launched, and maintains the largest module on the International Space Station. The Japanese have spacecraft in the asteroid belt and spy satellites in Earth orbit. These are civilian programs.
The Japanese have, over the past fifty years, resurrected RIKEN, the laboratory complex used in their atomic bomb program during WW2. The lab employed two cyclotons, which the United States destroyed in a bombing run in 1945.
Today RIKEN labs sprawl across the islands of Japan in dozens of complexes that are impossible to police. The labs are involved in so many areas of research that no one can keep track of it all even if they wanted to. Some of the research is diabolical. One administrator was found hanging by the neck in his office in 2014. Enough said.
Although the military budgetof the United States seems huge, people might want to consider that the USA spends one-third of its military dollars on salaries and pensions. No other military spends as much. It maintains 800 military bases in 70 countries at an expense of $200 billion — an expense that other militaries simply don’t have. Japan spends about the same amount on defense as England, France, and Germany. A controversial argument can be made that the combined military might of Russia, China, Japan, and North Korea exceeds that of the United States. It is an argument that is hard to prove, because countries lie about their military expenditures, war-fighting readiness, and technical capabilities. The chart above is misleading in another important way, because it doesn’t include expenditures on nuclear weapons — their production, maintenance, and modernization — which are state secrets in all the countries that possess them.
The Japanese don’t have to make bombs from their plutonium stores to wreak havoc on an adversary. They can pulverize the metal into aerosols and release plutonium dust into the air over cities.
They can load plutonium into drone subs like rumors say the Russians have done and set hundreds of them in the coastal waters of our country. The subs can lie in ocean sand and silt for decades before releasing their poisons, should it ever become necessary.
Their advanced missile technology might enable Japan to overwhelm our defenses by launching multiple warhead missiles over our homeland. It might take a few months, but poisoned populations would eventually succumb to the release of toxic dust.
And, should they choose to make bombs, well, any country with the resources of a country as sophisticated as Japan can turn high-grade plutonium into bombs in a few days; they can possess the capability to create hell on Earth in the blink of an eye, anytime they choose. With the right (or wrong) leadership they can unleash a nightmare of suffering far worse than the inferno we inflicted on them 72 years ago.
This plant is the place where the Japanese extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods. The Japanese have admitted on NHK television that they have 94,000 pounds of plutonium, which they have no use for nor any place to safely store.
Plutonium is an artificially produced killing material that no human being, company, or country should ever be allowed to possess or use. It is a forbidden apple of physics that can only bring anguish to whoever uses or shares it with others.
Japan has the potential to threaten the world with the same level of terror as the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, and who knows what other countries. Many countries are conducting (in secret) diabolical engineering even now and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.
What could be worse? Believe it or not, our predicament might already be much worse than anyone in the USA is willing to think about or imagine.
What about the possibility that North Korea and China are playing a game of good cop / bad cop with our military planners? What if Japan is toying with the idea of leading an unholy alliance? Behind our backs? Do we really have enough Japanese-speaking spies to keep track of all the secret Samurai cults that might be conspiring at the highest levels of government?
Do we?
What if Vladimir Putin thinks: The United States lied to me. I helped to elect an American president who is ineffective — a buffoon who can’t help me the way he promised. Let’s get ’em!
Imagine an alliance of China, North Korea, Russia, and Japan; an alliance led by the one country that has the greatest lust for payback; the strongest ache to settle scores once and for all.
A HunkpapaLakota holy man, Sitting Bull, had the vision that led to the defeat of the USA’s 7th Calvary Regiment on June 26, 1876 — one week before the USA’s 100th anniversary. Five of seven battalions were decimated — one led by Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. Sitting Bull became a celebrity who worked in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Later in life he became a leader of the Ghost Dance movement, which terrified whites, because it prophesied the exodus of white people from native American lands. Ten days before Christmas — on December 15, 1890 during an arrest by police on reservation property — Indian Affairs agents shot Sitting Bull in the head and chest in front of his family and friends. Agents removed his body to Fort Yates, where they buried him in a makeshift coffin.
A surprise attack by such an alliance would be nation ending. It might end like the Battle of the Little Bighorn. We don’t have enough soldiers or missiles or ships to fight a gathering of tribes who possess tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
The USA has the power to destroy the whole world if we must, but we can’t save ourselves; we can’t save our country; we can’t save the planet.
In the conflagration that took the hyper-alert Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer by surprise, all his ribbons and medals; all his accolades; all his friends in high places couldn’t save him, his men, or even his horses. The battle of the Little Bighorn was a massacre that dwarfed Custer’s reputation for being a really good person; a hero of the Civil War loved by every patriotic American.
To those who say, Billy Lee, you’ve gone paranoid on us… the Japanese would never organize an attack against America unawares… not a nuclear attack… they know how bad it would be… they suffered through one… they know better than anyone… and look at them, how they smile when we tell bad jokes. The last thing on their minds is revenge. The very last thing!
I say, you are so right! The Japanese would never hurt us. I lived in Japan for two years after the war. The Japanese have their quirks, yes, but most of them are not cruel or insensitive. They don’t enjoy watching torture videos for entertainment, most of them. Tying up women and twisting their bodies to prepare them for rape is not something most Japanese men would have any part in. Am I right? Of course I am.
The Japanese are not monsters. They are a kind and gentle people who don’t farm or ranch or mine, because they are resource impoverished. When I lived there our Japanese house-maids and yard-boys were as sweet as they could be. They meant us no harm. I see that now.
How on Earth are the Japanese going to get rid of the 47 tons of plutonium poison they have produced? And how will they dispose of the eight tons they plan to produce each year into perpetuity — plutonium which they admit has no longer any peacetime applications whatsoever?
Hayabusa2 Rocket on pad at the Tanegashima Island Space Center off the southern tip of Japan. The rocket landed a probe on the asteroid Ryugu on 4 October 2018. The Editorial Board
Everybody knows plutonium has a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years. It’s never going to go away. Someday, through inattention or from whatever other cause, plutonium containment structures are going to rot, and the poison will leach into the soils, the oceans, and the atmosphere to kill all living things. It is Earth’s best case scenario — the scenario where nuclear war never happens, the world disarms, and plutonium is tucked away out of reach and out of sight of war makers and other terrorists.
The process that will sterilize the planet of all life is already well underway and cannot be stopped — not over a period of tens of thousands of years. Read the essay, RISK, elsewhere on this site. Humans are likely to be extinct by the time the unnatural poisons of war and opulence first make their advance against the innocent, less intelligent life-forms that we will leave behind — like chipmunks and kittens, for example — who will never be able to understand what is killing them or why.
Our new president is in Tokyo as I’m writing this essay. Anyone who asks him will learn — because he’s not afraid to say it — he is really smart and bigly educated. He understands people and how best to manipulate them to maximize his advantages and get what he wants. You don’t believe it? Ask him — for the love of God — ask him.
Maybe we should help the Japanese store their plutonium in a safe place — a place much safer than their earthquake tormented islands that float within the largest fisheries of the Pacific Ocean. We could store the plutonium perhaps deep in a cave somewhere. Maybe we could store it beneath the volcanic calderas southeast of Yosemite — or some other remote location, like a trench astride the San Andreas fault.
Yeah, that sounds good. Let’s do that.
If we talk nicely, will the Japanese listen? Maybe they will, if our new president has the sense to ask. Does anyone have a better idea? For the love of God, tell someone.
Here is an excerpt from a 1975 resume about my experience in the nuclear power industry:
Engineering Technician at Ingersoll-Rand Company. Designed and serviced pumps and condensers for nuclear power plants; assisted engineers on service calls; toured and worked inside nuclear power plants; trained in construction and operation of nuclear power plants.
I didn’t last long at Ingersoll-Rand before they fired me for incompetence. But during the six months before my meltdown they sent me inside nuclear power plants to learn how to operate and maintain the pumps and condensers used to move and cool liquids inside the plants. Under the supervision of licensed nuclear engineers I learned how to inspect and fix pumps — some of them the size of little houses.
The plant executives had the habit of inviting visiting engineers and technicians to lunch, where their supervisors would present short overviews of plant operation, describe safety features, and speculate about the future of nuclear energy in the United States.
They promised that the government planned to approve the construction of a thousand nuclear power plants by the year 2000. The facilities would be “fail-safe” due to their many redundant safety features. As it turned out, their enthusiasm was misguided.
As of today, 438 nuclear power plants have been built in the entire world. The United States operates 61. The safety record is abysmal.
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown in March 1979 — twelve days after Michael Douglas released the movie China Syndrome. The meltdown catapulted the movie to international success as people struggled to understand what happened. After the accident, cancer rates within ten miles of the plant increased 64% according to a team of Columbia University researchers.
Currently, there are 30 operating nuclear reactors at 12 generating stations on 11 sites in the Great Lakes basin. Almost all are located on the banks of our great fresh-water lakes. Radioactive waste-products are stored in cooling-ponds at each of these sites yards away from the purest fresh-water on planet Earth.
Highly radioactive, spent-fuel rods are collected and dry-stored at Chicago’s Lake Michigan Zion facility, which experts warned in 2015 pose risks not only to the Great Lakes but to the entire region. The lethal dry-storage facility and the contaminated ponds at power-plants located on the shores of the Great Lakes grow in size and radioactivity year after year after year.
Editors note: On 25 October 2016, Energy Solutions announced that the Zion plant is 88% shut down and that all of its high radiation fuel rods are now contained inside an on-site ISFSI (Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation) where they will remain until someone figures out what to do with them. The entire facility is scheduled for closure by January 1, 2027 at a cost of 1 billion dollars.
We are one earthquake away from catastrophic contamination of up to ten percent of the world’s freshwater supply.
31 people died at the Russian Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in April 1986. Today the number of deaths stands at nearly 100,000. The plant released 400 times the radioactive material of the bomb dropped by the USA on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Authorities evacuated the city; it remains uninhabited. Click this link for a drone-video of the site.Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan experienced catastrophic failure during the March 3, 2011 tsunami, which swept away nearly 20,000 people. The accident irradiated over 300 workers and killed six. The site will never recover.
Editor’s Note added 3-11-2021: The Japanese government announced this week that 3,775 people died during the past decade from health problems caused by what officials now admit was a “triple meltdown” at Fukushima. 41,000 remain forced to live outside their hometowns.
Several districts near the plant continue to be off-limits to everyone. The government hopes to decommission the power plant by 2051.
The ruined facility houses 900 tons of highly radioactive debris and 1.2 million tons of radioactive water that must be removed and isolated before the plant can be safely closed. The coronavirus pandemic slowed progress at the site, according to NHK News.
Anyway, after the lectures — which were accompanied by short films and slide presentations — executives opened the sessions for questions from the audience. I was one of those nerds who believed they were serious so I did ask a lot of questions. (I was a pontificator even then).
I asked: What is the half-life of the radioactive waste produced in this plant? Where is waste stored? How much of it will this plant produce over the next 30 years? What happens during an earthquake? How are meltdowns prevented? What are the consequences of operator errors? What happens when the plant gets old and comes to the end of its useful life?
It wasn’t long before my supervisor called me into his office and advised me to keep my questions to myself and do my job better. But it was not to be. I learned a life lesson: when the boss tells you to be quiet and just do your job — hold on to your hat. It’s too late. You will be fired as soon as the permissions and the paperwork are done.
Maybe I was incompetent. I don’t know. After being fired I went into counseling for depression. I re-entered MSU and studied mathematics and electrical engineering. I ended up designing machinery — mostly in the food and beverage industry — until I retired six years ago in 2008.
Everyone uses tear-spout coffee lids on foam coffee cups. Folks drink their coffee without removing the lid. Yeah, I designed the first one and the tooling to produce it; it was a team effort, of course. Everyone buys orange juice and milk cartons with tamper-proof safety caps. Yeah. I did those too. I share a patent, which proves it.
What am I most proud of? I didn’t design a damn thing on that Fukushima disaster, which is contaminating the Pacific Ocean and its fish stocks, perhaps to the end of time.
Billy Lee
NOTE from the EDITORIAL BOARD:In May 2019, HBO released its award nominated series on the Chernobyl disaster of April 25, 1986. The producers speculate that up to 93,000 Russian citizens died in the aftermath from radiation poisoning. The video below is a promo of the series.
