Earthquakes and Tyrants and Leaks, oh my!

I was on vacation last week which you'd think would have been a great chance for me to lay into all of the juicy world events of late (for the record: the 9.0 earthquake in northern Japan with ensuing tsunami on 11 March, and the UN actually approving force against Qaddafi in Libya on 18 March). You'd be correct, but several factors caused me to hold off:

• I was on vacation, after all;


• events were in a state of flux and analysis would be better served waiting for facts, and;


• I got Strategic Command WW1 and had to run that through its' paces.

So where are we on 21 March 2011? The main title link to the Register link talks about the overblown panic about the nuclear accident at the Fukushima reactors. The short version is that even after a 9.0 magnitude earthquake which moved the Japanese islands several feet and the ensuing tsunami which killed an estimated 18,000 Japanese, these 40-year-old reactors have not melted down.

Yes, there have been some hydrogen explosions and a bit more than background radiation has been detected, but it's not and cannot become another Chernobyl. The reactors are compromised by the seawater they had to pump in to cool them and will never operate again, but they have exceeded their design specs and prevented a nuclear catastrophe on top of a natural one. My takeaway is that with what we have learned from this, any new plants can be designed to survive anything which is likely to happen. Let's face it; anything much worse than what happened that day would likely swallow or vaporize a nuclear plant (or anything else for that matter).

Welcome to Nature, people. Terrestrial processes, to say nothing of those of the Universe as a whole, operate on scales we can scarcely comprehend let alone engineer against. People on the other hand are quite manageable, but some effort is still required. That brings us to Libya. Qaddafi has been marshaling his forces and taking towns back from the rebels, and it was the French, of all people to drop the first bombs to slow his progress.

It of course makes sense that the Europeans have much more of an interest in the stability of Libya, if for no other reason than millions of Africans could come drifting to their shores. And oh yes, the oil too, but the immigration problem is much larger; there are other sources of oil. American leadership on this is still lacking, but that will persist until Obama is replaced.

I still don't know what we want to see in Libya, at least of the available options. That I will think about some more and come back to in the next post.