Quote:

Prior to the release of the 2010 GSS data set, finding questions on the perceived danger of nuclear power generation required going back as far as the early nineties. In response to a commenter, I attempted just that. Now, more contemporary responses are available, albeit still prior to the Japanese tsunami. Responses are on a 5-point scale that has been inverted from the GSS for ease of viewing. A 1 indicates the belief that the perils of nuclear power are minimal, a 5 that nuclear power is extremely dangerous. Respondents are broken up into five categories; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Really Dumbs (0-3, 12%). The average (mean) response for members of each group is shown. One standard deviation for the entire respondent pool is 1.14 (n = 1301): IQ group                       Danger Really dumbs                      3.82 Pretty dumbs                      3.64 Normals                      3.55 Pretty smarts                      3.21 Really smarts                      2.87 Although there is some perception that SWPL **-types oppose expanding nuclear power generation because of the environmental dangers it putatively imposes, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming concerns mitigate this. Nuclear power is the only way to viably produce power on a large scale without significant carbon dioxide emissions, so opposing nuclear power while simultaneously maintaining good standing in the Gaia church means putting modernity on the very weak backs of wind and solar, or simply looking like a luddite. So it comes as little surprise that more intelligent people are more supportive of nuclear power generation than less intelligent people are. Parenthetically, over the 16 year interval since the nuclear question was posed in the GSS, the pretty smarts and really smarts have become even less fearful of nuclear power than they had been, while the sentiments of the other three groups have remained the same. Will the Fukushima Daiichi evacuation and closure change that? Smarter people will more easily discern that had the emergency generators required to cool the reactors been on higher ground (they could handle 20-foot high waves, but needed to handle 50-foot high waves last March), no meltdown would've occurred--an unfortunate shortcoming, but an irrelevant one for most of Europe and the US. Germany has announced that it will close all of the country's nuclear power plants by 2022, but other European nations haven't followed suit (and if that remains the case, Germany will probably end up buying energy generated by nuclear power from places like France in the future).

** http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=SWPL

http://anepigone.blogspot.com/

Hmmnnn....

My understanding is that the powerful earthquake damaged one of the reactors and triggered the first meltdown - and that the impacts on the cooling systems, due to the tsunami, simply compounded the damage in that particular reactor...

Apparently, the meltdowns in the other two reactors could be put down to the cooling issues following the tsunami...

Clearly, therefore, the plant wasn't engineered to cope with a predictable magnitude earthquake in the first instance...

On top of this, the design of the facility rendered the cooling systems vulnerable to a predictable height tsunami...

Oh, and the plant's spent fuel storage arrangements have proved to be predictably-dangerous!

Either way, it is clear that the international public is yet to be fully appraised of the nature and extent of both the engineering and emergency planning deficits - and the associated radioactive and socio-economic fallout...

It would have been easy enough to design and pay for a higher seawall to guard against the tsunami... why didn't they do this? Maybe the answer is it's not that easy...

MY QUESTION IS ACTUALLY BECOMING, "HOW VISUALLY SUSPECT WOULD SUCH A WALL APPEAR IF IT WAS BUILT TO COPE WITH THIS WAVE?"

(I WOULD LIKE TO GET AN ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION OFF SOMEONE!)

Equitist wrote on Jun 13^th, 2011 at 3:55pm:

Hmmnnn.... My understanding is that the powerful earthquake damaged one of the reactors and triggered the first meltdown - and that the impacts on the cooling systems, due to the tsunami, simply compounded the damage in that particular reactor... Apparently, the meltdowns in the other two reactors could be put down to the cooling issues following the tsunami... Clearly, therefore, the plant wasn't engineered to cope with a predictable magnitude earthquake in the first instance... On top of this, the design of the facility rendered the cooling systems vulnerable to a predictable height tsunami... Oh, and the plant's spent fuel storage arrangements have proved to be predictably-dangerous! Either way, it is clear that the international public is yet to be fully appraised of the nature and extent of both the engineering and emergency planning deficits - and the associated radioactive and socio-economic fallout...

Then you're understanding is WRONG.....The problem with the reactors was due to the tsunami wiping out the coolant system generators..The ONLY response to the quake was an automatic shutdown, which wouldn't of had ANY affect if the backup generators hadn't been hit by the tsunami wave (other than causing a blackout, of course)