I looooves me some electricity.

So, even though I'm presently suffering some annoyances in my daily life here in Tokyo (sporadically contaminated drinking water, suspect milk and other foodstuffs, not enough electricity to maintain our previous standard of living, Internet outages forfuckssake), and even though I bristle any time anybody (this article's author included) ignorantly implies that we know all the bad things that were (or will be) caused by the meltdown at Chernobyl, I am totally 'pro-nuke' in the sense that I want more nuke plants to be built and maintained to produce electricity for us to use.

And, the premise that nuke power is the safest power we've come up with (among power sources that actually have produced a significant fraction of the power we use), is incontrovertibly true. This article is only one of dozens making that point.

However, people take this idea a bit too far, by not putting it into the right time context. A truly bad nuke disaster is forever (not literally, but for all intents and purposes). And we've never really had one yet. The thinking that Chernobyl is as bad as it can get is totally, obviously wrong--but it is implicit in a lot of the discussion.

Maybe Fukushima won't get to the level of Chernobyl--and that's still a maybe btw, as it is still getting worse--but it's easy and plausible to conceive of how it could have been much worse. A couple more serial failures, the epicenter of the quake being closer, whatever--this ancient, obsolete plant could very well have had all six reactors achieve full meltdown.

The woeful, pathetic--even funny, it's so bad--disaster preparedness that we now know TEPCO had implemented confirms a basic thing a lot of us have suspected: collectively, as a society (or separately, as a bunch of disparate societies), we just might not be mature enough in our thinking to strike the right balance of precaution and preparedness to handle nuclear power as safely as it should be handled.

Technologically, I think nuke power is awesome. Societally, our ability to responsibly deal with the dangers it presents is very suspect, IMO. Unfortunately, I think that is a much harder problem to address.

Probably some societies are better than others at this. Much like some seven year olds are responsible enough to handle a pocket knife and others totally aren't.

What we've seen (and are still seeing) in Japan has been much more pathetic, unprepared, and technologically primitive than a lot of us would have expected. Much more like my dumbshit little nephew who cut off the tip of his little finger and then sat there crying about it than like the one who taught himself to whittle sticks into Indian figurines.

Because the response to Fukushima has been so haphazard, reactive, and incompetent, I think many normal people now have this gut-reaction urge to reevaluate nuclear power, and that urge is basically correct. Of course, there is a lot of hysteria and empirically incorrect thinking flying around, but that happens any time a large number of humans discuss just about anything.

Still, the takeaway from this disaster shouldn't be 'nuclear power is teh awesome! no problem, bro!! nukes ftw!!'

It should be that nuclear power is indeed awesome, but our human systems that govern the deployment, administration, safeguarding, and--perhaps most importantly--sunsetting of nuclear power plants needs to be significantly reworked and dramatically improved.

I don't see why we should build even one more plant without the safety planning and preventive measures being an order of magnitude better than they have been so far. OTOH, I hope we can get it together to demand that work be done, and then do it, so that we can build more power plants, so that we can get our electricity back and I can turn on my lights and air conditioner here without feeling like an asshole.