I have to tell you that while I have a lot of respect for many bloggers that have done the service of providing real and valuable reporting and analysis to the world. I am seeing people doing something that they should not right now - taking a stand simply for the record. The biggest offender that I see is Karl Denninger. I have a link to his blog market-ticker.org on my blog list as he usually provides lively debate on many subjects and has consistently done a good job of getting to the meat of the matter. However, Denninger, whom I thought was an expert in internet and web related technologies is now an apparent expert in nuclear physics if I read between the lines in his posts. I think that his posts talking down the niclear risks in Japan represent an ill-advised approach and irresponsible jounalisim, if you want to call it that. While I think it is good to be pragmatic and attempt to be objective about large scale problems, I would certainly prefer to encourage people to be more prepared rather than less and I said as much in post The World Never Changes...
The reality as I see it is rather simple. There are over 90 tons of live fuel in the active reactors and many more tons of spent fuel which is supposedly more dangerous than the live fuel. Each reactor and spent fuel facility is within relatively close proximity of each other. The methods being used to attempt to contain the situation appear to become more and more desperate each day and seem unlikely of doing much to resolve the continuing issues. Moreover, they will have to figure out how to deal with the damage to the vessels, leaks and structures all the while manually keeping the all the fuel rods submerged with water for the next number of years (perhaps hundreds)...this seems like a situation frought with danger and one in which a single mistake may cause a catastophic situation which makes it impossible to get human resources to the site...Denninger and others keep saying this is no Chernobyl. I think they are not experts and even experts are not saying that unilaterally. The reality is the situation is out of control and the amount of nuclear fuel is so much more than Chernobyl and that it is entirely reasonable to prepare for the fact that the results can be of significant impact or worse than officials are suggesting. I certainly hope not, but from where I stand I prefer to acknowledge I am not an expert and that the experts clearly seem to be resorting to non-expert methods so the odds of something surprising negatively are very very high. I HOPE TO GOD that we get some positive surprises and that Denninger is right...but nonetheless, if one has an opinon about something, I think a blog is a fine place for it...however, I think credibility is important too and we should, as a blogging community, not exceed our personal knowledge and skills to drive traffic or get attention. There are still standards and I am seeing alot of them broken down during this tragedy. zerohedge.com has been a terrific resource on the Japan situation and encourage anyone to use them as a resource.
