Large Fierce Mammal

Remember Chernobyl? This kid does.

The damage control dweebs who frame the wordage spoken by media talking heads have been outdoing themselves with the  bag of shit the recent earthquake in Japan has handed to the nuclear power plant industry. A couple days ago I heard a reporter explaining that to cool an overheating reactor core, officials at one plant had found it necessary to vent some “slightly radioactive steam”. He said that exact phrase three times, each time stressing the “slightly” part of it. I’ve studied enough physics to interpret this as a question of how many years it will take for that steam to give you cancer, and whether or not people exposed to it should instantly terminate pregnancies and resign themselves to giving up any hope of breeding in the future.

Japan exists in the world mind as a fount of technological expertise, where what’s in the labs now is twenty-five to thirty generations ahead of what’s in the stores. Revelations of what’s happened to them recently, specifically the nuclear power plant problems, has all the ear marks of a story that is being revealed under protest, little by little, with snippets being dragged kicking and screaming in to the light. As of now, my sense is that they are more than a little fucked, and what’s not being said about it is speaking louder than what is.

I remembered this poem, first heard while I was in university, while watching the nuclear news from Japan this morning, and an interview with an alleged scientist who clearly had no idea of how a nuclear reactor actually operates:

This is the story of Frederick Werms,
Whose parents weren’t on speaking terms,
So when Fred wrote to Santa Clause
It was in duplicate because
One went to Dad and one to Mum –
Both asked for some plutonium.
And so it was, father and mother,
Without consulting one another,
Purchased two lumps of largish size,
Intending them as a surprise,
Which met in Frederick’s stocking and
Laid level ten square miles of land.