It has been Just over six months since a magnitude 9 earthquake and ensuing tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. In the hours following that incident, nuclear power protagonists filled the blogosphere, the news outlets, and other media with assurances that little could go wrong, that the reactors would be managed, that the disaster would demonstrate, once things had settled down, that nuclear power was, indeed, safe.

One of the first things Ana and I noticed, and we were not alone, is that some of the same stories … in some cases the same exact wording … was showing up in various places, as though planted by apologists for the nuclear power industry. But more worrying than that may have been the naivete of many who were seemingly very trusting of the nuclear power industry than they probably should have been, quite innocently. And, it was becoming increasingly clear that many members of the skeptics community had become convinced over the last several years that anti-nuclear sentiment was irrational, and that somehow this translated into a blind trust for the nuclear power industry being the most rational course. Today, six months after the earthquake, we know that three of the plants fully melted down. We have a rough estimate of how much nuclear material was released from a point in time a few days after the accident to the present, but for the first few days, the estimates are very poor and the amount being released was probably very high, because that is when the meltdowns were occurring. And, there is reason to believe that most of the radioactive material released from this plant was released (and is still being released) into the sea, pretty much uncounted.

The following is a non-comprehensive timeline of some of the events over the first several days of the disaster mixed in with selected comments on this blog, mostly just the very few updates in this series or related posts.
Continue reading Japan Nuclear Disaster: Update # 35 →