Remember that many of the people making these decision in Tokyo and points north have family members who are now either a. dead or b. missing and presumed dead or c. staying at their relatives place grieving their friends/neighbors who are dead.

People tend not to make good decisions when a, b, or c is true.

Comparing the handling of Fukushima with that for Katrina is uncharitable at best, and more likely should be considered libel. As Will implied, there's not a cultural/class divide motivating any sense of "otherness" and lack of care. I think most of this is just unfortunately disastrous payment for a historical lack of *institutional* care on the part of industry and nuclear regulatory agencies. There's plenty of criticism to throw against that system and its players, but this kind of rhetorical framing seems unwarranted and undeserved.

Don't forget that there is a nuclear power plant 25 miles west of New Orleans (still in the suburbs) right on the Mississippi River and they had no problems after the (now) 2nd largest natural disaster in history.

@3 throw an earthquake into the mix and that might not be true.

but physics doesn't explain the 9/11 building collapses.

Brownie got fired. Take it back!

The problem with this kind of thinking is it's completely open-ended, which is why doomsday alarmism is so dumb. "OMG, they're lying to us!" has no brake between "maybe it's a little worse than we said" and "everybody everywhere is going to die tomorrow".

This is a complex event, and despite the fervent desires of commentators everywhere it is not immediately apparent to the casual observer what exactly has gone wrong and how bad it is. You can shout "coverup!" all you want, but correctly-analyzed decisions can be difficult to arrive at. Even the top experts in the world have different views. It's easy as hell to find guys to go on TV and express panic, but they're not really helping. And governments do, in fact, have an obligation to avoid panic, no matter how bad the situation is.

One way NOT to do that is to issue open-ended statements that everything has gone wrong. Your "things are very very bad, getting worse" is fabulously counterproductive at this time.

Also, if you think the Superdome was the "final step" in the Katrina clusterfuck, you don't know anything about New Orleans. Second or third step, maybe.

One thing's for certain: there sure are a lot of armchair experts who know everything about the crisis even before it happens.

@5 lawl ur right, it must've been magic then. Christ, even in the utterly unsupported instance that it was a planned demolition (waving your hands and saying "nano-thermite" & "fell at freefall speed" doesn't make you a physicist btw) it still would be explained by physics. Using a lil’ Occam’s razor, the fact that the physicists and accredited engineers at NIST don't agree with your moronic conspiracy theories probably doesn't mean the laws of physics are wrong, it probably means YOU'RE wrong, bucko.

great post

I'd feel a lot better if Japan was some backward dictatorship. But Japan is a 21st century democracy. If this is the best Japan can do, what does that say for the rest of the world?

Maybe the Fukushima reactors were obsolete and a bad design. But if Japan can't come up with the political will and the money to replace their dangerous reactors, who can? If Japan got blindsided by a 9.0 earthquake, what hope is there for anybody else to plan for the earthquakes that might happen during the lifetime of their nuclear plants? If Japan can't anticipate a tsunami and put their vital backup diesel generators someplace where a flood won't knock them out, what hope is there for the even more incompetent nations of the world? Most especially the dumb, dumb United States.

Can you imagine what kind of corners get cut in countries with even less transparency, where the watchdogs are captured by the nuclear industry?

It's easy to say that nuclear power would be safe IF we didn't do X, and IF we didn't do Y, and IF we had predicted Z. But since we DID make these mistakes, the burden is on you to explain why we won't repeat them.

The alarmists might be a little crazy, but it's the subtle, insidious kind of crazy that plagues nuclear industry cheerleaders that worries me.

There is a big difference between speculation and facts. Report the facts as they come out and feel free to lose it when the shit actually hits the fan.

Confirmation bias. Nobody notices when something bad happens and it turns out ok with officials saying "everything is under control". It's only when things keeps getting worse.

What Fnarf @7 and decidedlyodd @12 said. (Although the explanation about preventing panic is weakened somewhat by the revelation that some of the announcements in the first days apparently were coverup efforts by TEPCO before the Japanese government stepped in and took over their PR.)

That reality eventually converged somewhat with Goldy's conclusions like time catching up with a stopped clock doesn't validate his reasoning or vindicate his alarmism.

Fnarf, thanks for saying that. I had no idea how to.
I'd just like to add that you will always have conspiratorial numbnuts who assume the worst of the government, and who will always add their own 50% (100%, 1000%) disaster spin to any message they hear from the government or other authority. Get a few of them playing Chinese Whispers, and see what you end up with...

Having said that, what a clusterfuck!

@4 http://www.ca.uky.edu/gluck/q/2007/apr07…
New Orleans is one of the lowest threat zones for earthquakes. As #3 pointed out, most nuclear reactors survive natural disasters just fine.

@7 Thanks for writing that post. You summed up my feelings better than I could put them onto paper. #12 Also points out a serious problem we have in dealing with security and disasters. We always remember when it went bad. Everyone reading this post can tell you about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima. We will remember these three events for the rest of our lives. What we won't remember is the various natural disasters that cause no damage at all.

@ Y'all

My point was primarily about the rhetoric of these sort of situations, the argument/obfuscations deployed to allay fears and cover asses. There is indeed a confirmation bias, and Katrina and this earthquake are complicated things. But I'm with Murphy's Law on this stuff. When things we build to keep populations safe from natural dangers we harness to make our lives easier (the flow of water, the electrons for nuclear power) collapse spectacularly (without hijacked airplanes flying into them), people in charge of keeping the population safe inevitable engage in this particular rhetorical dance.

16: Who doesn't work to cover their own arse (or that of their employer) when the shit hits the fan?
It would be nice if "the system" rewarded openness and honesty, but generally it doesn't. It often doesn't even reward competence / punish incompetence. Thus we have the balancing act of doing the least necessary to gain the most reward. Even people capable of doing things right the first time are caught in that cycle.
And good rhetoric after the fact is generally less costly and more rewarding than competent action before it, at least in terms of profit and personal advancement, if that is the corporate or social culture.