Japan facing Freezing Hell

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Japan has in the past few days, been buffeted by 

• Earthquakes, including the 3rd strongest ever recorded
• A devastating tsunami and several tsunami warnings
• Three nuclear reactors melting down and exploding, with the possibility of upto three more going the same way
• Homes succumbing to earthquakes, with some heroically surviving due to man's ingenuity in designing and building them 
• Homes being washed away
• People fleeing homes dues to radioactivity - if Tokyo has to be evacuated, it would be the largest evacuation in world history
• Public transport being affected because of roads, bridges, even trains being washed away
• A volcano in a different part of Japan spewing ash 4 km into the sky
• Power supply being disrupted indefinitely in several cities
• Talk about nuclear power option being reviewed and many more plants possibly closing at a later date for an extensive safety review
• A huge stock-market crash, more than 20% down in less than a week 
• Rising prices of coal due to a supplier-oligopoly
• Near-record pre-existing price levels for crude oil (both, spot and futures)
• Civil ferment in Bahrain, which is in the heart of the Persian Gulf  which supplies 100% of Japan's oil. If shipping lanes through the narrow Strait of Hormuz are blocked, Japan literally has nowhere to source the oil from - at any price.  
• Icy cold winds and weather settling over most of Japan - coinciding with record homelessness

All-in-all, Japan will need all their resolve and resilience, and more, to survive these tough times. I would not wish such bad times upon even my sworn enemies.
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Japan and Facebook

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The triple disaster in Japan has been covered very well with umpteen videos and photos on Facebook depicting the horrifying scenes. What's worse, many people have "liked" these posts, as my son pointed out to me yesterday. 


What is the world coming to? How heartless have we become?
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While many of us are enjoying cricket ...

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...The nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan is progressing. This makes it the third disaster -- this time, man-made -- to hit Japan in the last few days. Not to speak of the foreshocks and aftershocks of the 8.9 monster earthquake.

According to World Nuclear News,
"Over the last several hours evacuation orders for local residents have been incrementally increased and now cover people living within ten kilometres of the power plant." This is bound to go up if the seriousness of the incident escalates.

Put this in context: (see www.stratfor.com)

1. Chernobyl is still a no-go zone for a 30-km radius after 20 years.
2. Radiation exposure for the average individual is 620 millirems per year, split about evenly between manmade and natural sources. The firefighters who served at the Chernobyl plant were exposed to between 80,000 and 1.6 million millirems. Exposure rates outside the plant were at about 620 millirems per hour, though it is not clear whether that report came before or after the reactor’s containment structure exploded.
   
3. Japan’s troubled Fukushima Daiichi reactor site is only about 300 kilometers from Tokyo. While current wind patterns indicate that any radioactivity in the air would be carried out to sea, that can change at no notice at all. 

When the dust settles down on the disaster, it is time to re-examine whether nuclear power is really clean.

Nuclear Plant Meltdown

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10 minutes back, came reports of a meltdown in a Japanese nuclear power plant. This will be the third, after the Chernobyl and the Three-Mile Island disaster.

Keeping fingers crossed that things don't go out of hand - earthquake, tsunami followed by ... nothing else serious, I hope.
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