Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The Political Fallout After the Radioactive Fallout

Anyone care to speculate how Japan's laws and construction codes will change after they clean up the mess that Mother Nature handed them?


 (Click here for an incredible interactive Before/After page put up by The New York Times.)

One unexpected casualty is that Gilbert Gottfried, the American comedian, was fired for making tasteless jokes (his specialty) about the Japan disaster on Twitter, Gilbert being the voice of the AFLAC duck (pictured above) in the American television commercials for AFLAC Insurance.

Anyway, after all this settles down (I'm talking about the brain-challenged media actually learning the details of Nuclear Engineering from the Professionals they should have consulted before launching into panic mode), and then Japan cleans up the mess, I can see that hard-working people going in one of two directions:

1) Much stricter building codes for Nuke plants

2) No Nuke plants and a switch to oil and coal

On the third hand ....

3) Leave Japan

I believe some will in fact take that 3rd option but they will be a very small minority, given the Japanese love of their land.

"Now numbering almost seven billion, [Earth's]  population has doubled since Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb (Oxford, 1968) which warned of mass starvation by the turn- of-the-century. Ironically, the developed nations are today confronted with an obesity epidemic. "  ........ Dr. Robert Park, University of Maryland, March 4, 2011