Japan's Faustian Bargain

Commentary By Ron Beasley�

Japan of all countries should have understood the dangers of nuclear energy.  It was the only country to be on the receiving end of Nuclear Weapons, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and had 23 crewmen of the fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru.contaminated when the first hydrogen bomb was tested by the United States at Bikini Atoll.  In spite of all this Japan had 54 reactors which supplied 30 percent of the country's electric power.  This is even more surprising when you consider the fact that Japan is in one of the world's most active seismic regions as was demonstrated in March of 2011. 

The islands of Japan have little or no coal, oil or natural gas so in order to become an economic power house it made a Faustian Bargain with the nuclear devil.  As the Japanese discovered in March, 2011 such bargains usually go bad eventually.  A best case result of the events at Fukishima is several hundred square miles of that small country will be uninhabitable for generations.  If they are not successful in getting the situation under control that could grow to several thousand in a country that has no land to spare.

Perhaps now Japan will look to Iceland for it's power needs.  Japan may not have fossil fuels but what it does have is  10 percent of the worlds active volcanoes. In spite of this it only gets only .2 percent of it's power from geothermal.  I suspect that part of the reason for this has been the power of the nuclear industry in Japan.  They should have a little less power now.  A little over a year ago Japan announced that it was going to expand geothermal power.  Perhaps now they will accelerate those efforts. 

And of course they are going to have a lot of new real estate that may not be good for anything but wind farms.

Cross posted at The Moderate Voice