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WALLACE--While those greenie
environmentalist kooks nance ice-bound about the
South Pole, raising global warming alarums and politicizing the
weather, genuine conservationists are looking westward across the Pacific
with growing concern.
Fukushima doesn't come up in
conversation yet, but it ought to. It's the Japanese coastal nuclear power
plant hammered by a tsunami wave emanating from the underwater Great East
Japan Earthquake on Friday, March 11, 2011.
And just how big was the earthquake,
Johnny? It registered 9 on the Richter scale - the most powerful ever to hit
Japan and the fifth-biggest since record-keeping began in the year 1900. The
quake moved Honshu, Japan's main island, eight feet to the east, shifted the
entire planet more than a half a foot off its rotational axis, and was so
loud it could be heard by low-flying satellites.
The tidal wave it set off towered more
than 130 feet in height and killed more than 15,000 people. The World Bank
estimates the economic cost, insured and otherwise, of the earthquake and
tsunami at $235 billion - the costliest natural disaster in human history
(but doubtless chump-change compared with such man-made disasters as the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and the War on Poverty).
Breaching a seawall an hour later, the
tsunami caused seven meltdowns at three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi
nuclear power plant complex in the ensuing 24 hours. Cooling pumps quit and
three of the reactors just flat blew up.
Now, radiation is oozing everywhere from
the facility, especially into the Pacific, whose friendly currents are
carrying it now to the west coast of the Americas. Radiation levels in water
around the ruined facilities continue to rise.
Be very, very afraid. Consider the
bullet-points in Tuesday's edition of the London Daily Mail:
-- Radiation levels in the snow that
fell on Missouri during last weekend's blizzard are double that of normal;
-- Seawater at a beach off Pillar Point Harbour near San Francisco was found last week to be five
times more radioactive than considered safe;
-- Radiation levels from the leaking
reactors themselves were reported by the BBC to be 18 times those claimed by
the reactors' owner and the Japanese government;
-- The U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services has ordered 14 million doses of potassium iodide, an antidote
to radiation poisoning.
Does all this mean that St. Louis, San
Diego and Juneau are about to start glowing in the dark, or that we ought to
take a Geiger counter with us to the canned tuna aisle? Obviously it's too
early to tell, although one Wallace wag says he might move to Seattle and
open up a new chain of seafood stands with the name, “Dave's Fission
Chips.”
What is clear, however, is that it's
time to start ignoring the Algorians and the global
warmists, and start giving a fuku
about what's going on at Fukushima.
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