On the flight back from Austin yesterday I started writing a longish post about SXSW. But as the news kept pouring in about the escalation of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant I found myself less and less able to concentrate on what appeared increasingly trivial by comparison. I may still post about SXSW eventually, but for now here are some thoughts about Japan.
All of what is happening there underlines one of my deepest fears: as a species we are woefully unprepared for events that are exceedingly rare but have tremendous impact when they occur. In the US, we have designed much of our infrastructure as if earthquakes don’t exist at all. In Japan they were somewhat prepared given the history of quakes there but did not fully consider the potential damage from a resulting Tsunami (nor the ultimate strength of the quake in question).
Reactors are still being operated there and here that were deemed unsafe as far back as the 70s - on the simple and deeply misguided principle that nothing has gone wrong so far, so why worry. And to top it off, because the resulting nuclear accidents are so rare, we are completely unprepared for what to do about them. Instead of having some technology at the ready that could encase these failing reactors, we are demanding the ultimate sacrifice from a frontline service crew operating with portable pumps!
We fly expensive semi-autonomous drones in the war on drugs and in Pakistan and Afghanistan - and shoot rockets from them. Where are the robots to fight the fire at Fukushima? Non-existant. A depressing sign of how deeply screwed up our priorities are at the moment.
