"It's Just a Flesh Wound..."

Last March I asked where could all the water in the Fukushima nuclear plants have gone (see "Diablo Canyon - America's Fukushima" from March 17th).

Well, according to this WSJ story and others apparently its all going out the bottom of the reactors (No.'s 1, 2 and 3)...

And, surprisingly, it looks like three of the reactors had at least partial meltdowns as well.

How nice!  Clean safe nuclear energy...

TEPCO, after injecting 10 million liters of water into a reactor vessel designed to hold about 400,000 liters, now thinks there might be a leak problem - how fantastically observant.

TEPCO says that the fuel probably did not melt through the bottom and that the water is instead coming out of broken pipes and so forth connected to the reactor vessel (GE's Imelt says "Thank God for careful parsing of sentences... I wonder if his name "I Melt" is some sort of nuclear reactor pun...)?  At any rate the GE-built vessel is safe but the fuel inside is melted and highly radioactive liquid is leaking magically out of the vessels through broken pipes...

This reminds me of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" where the Black Knight, defending the bridge (or perhaps nuclear power) has all his limbs hacked off but remarks "Its only a flesh wound..."
Now in the linked post from March I pointed out that Diablo Canyon was on the coast and by a fault.  But what if a reactor inland over, say a large freshwater aquifer, had the same problem?  Well, if you check out the list of US aquifers you would see a lot of potential problem areas (map of US aquifers). All the highly radioactive waste would leak down through the ground poison the aquifer.

There's nothing under Japan but rock, faults, and the sea - so leaking reactors near the sea aren't a problem for drinking water and aquifers.

Obama's nuclear energy policy will only suffer a "flesh wound" with the Fukushima meltdowns - at least that will be the spin.

I was thinking the other day about the supposed 10,000 deaths a year due to coal fired electricity plants.

I wonder how many people would die decades sooner without electricity?

I wonder how many premature births would end in death without electricity to run the incubators?

How many of us would die young sitting around wood fires instead of in houses powered by electricity.

Before electricity human life expectancy was some decades (two, three?) shorter than today.

Sadly, no one thinks today about the bigger picture. 

In fact, I doubt many people even know their is a picture, much less how big it might be...