Human nature is alike all over

If you read the news coming out of Japan, we are told that there is no looting. A circumstance that would be unthinkable in the US - witness what happened in New Orleans with Katrina, in Haiti, and so on and so forth. It's a cultural difference, apparently - Japanese value honor above all and to go out and loot is just unthinkable - if a looter was caught his whole family would bear his or her shame.

(Someone has also said that it's because no one in Japan has guns, whereas in places where guns are easily accessible, you have lots of looting. That theory doesn't hold water, I don't think so - people in Chile looted after their recent disaster, and they don't have guns.)

But that's beside the point of this particular article. Another piece of news coming out of Japan is that apparently their nuclear reactors were built amid a lot of "cutting corners" - and that there was a lot of lax oversight of these nuclear reactors.

I've also just come across an article talking about Japan's nuclear future - they have over a dozen nuclear power plants and need more for their energy - they're not going to shut them down.

I thought this sentence was interesting:

The safety systems on all Japanese plants will be upgraded to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami (or worse). [from Nuclear Power Plants in Japan.]

I read that sentence and thought... what the hell? You mean nuclear reactors in Japan aren't already built to withstand a 9.0 earthquake????

Japan has about 1,000 earthquakes a year. Most of them minor, a few high up ther eon the richter scale. They have at least one major earthquake (6.6-7.0) a year! There was an earthquake in 2007 that was rated as 8.1 on the Richter scale. And they are building nuclear reactors that can't withstand a 9.0 earthquake?

That is beyond ridiculous. If you get a 7.0 earthquake every year, you don't build a nuclear reactor that can only withstand a 7.0 earthquake. What if the earthquake goes to 7.1? No, you build in so many safeguards that there will never be any chance of a problem with a nuclear reactor, so you build it to safeguard against something that will never happen - a 9.0 earthquake.

Then your populace can sleep safe in their beds.

Meantime, Germany is panicking and shutting down their nuclear reactors. Last I heard there wasn't much of a chance of tsunamis in Germany. People in the US are panicking as well. Well, if htere are nuclear plants built to withstand a 7.0 earthquake, and they sit on the San Andreas or other fault line, they'd have a right to be panicky. BUt the US is a country that is ten times as big as Japan, and we don't build nuclear reactors along fault lines.

Unfortunately, they probably aren't built to withstand a 9.0 earthquake, either, and they should be. Even if a reactor isn't built on a fault line, considering the danger of nuclear radiation, excessive precautions should be taken including building them to withstand a 9.0 earthquake, even if it's statistically impossible for a 9.0 earthquake to occur.

Nuclear reactors are so dangerous...it's only common sense that "excessive" precautions be taken. The fact that they weren't...is a bit disturbing.