Conservajerks follow the quick buck. That's all that matters to them. And most who vote with the blockheads will never get any of it.

I was a "no nukes" person in the early 70's and this shit in Japan is what we all were talking about. We all did it, and we all knew it. We just didn't know or do it ENOUGH. We thought the disaster would come from planes or ICBMs.

First, let say I am against Nuclear Power.

The plants in Japan were minimally damaged by the quakes. They are on the edge of meltdowns mainly due to damage done by the quakes to the power grid, followed by the damage done to the backup local power from the tsunami. And lastly by failure of on site batteries to have enough power to shut down the plants smoothly.

The lesson is that whatever we prepare for, something else may break the nuclear power plant. And every time that happens, we will be suprised and every time it will be a catastrophe.

Build windmills, hydro-electric plants, solar panels, invent something new and safe. No More Nukes.

Keith, I didn't like nuclear plants from the start. Never trusted the storage for the waste they made. The disaster in Japan proves they are not the energy source for our future, if we want a future. I lived thru' kerosene lamps and wood cook stoves, surely we can innovate alternate new energy sources that are better. I still have a couple of the old flat irons.............

Hmmm, It seems that teachers are now under fire for doing a poor job and creating so many stupid people. Once again the wingnuts can't look in the mirror and see that you can't cure stupid. No amount of school taught education can overwhelm the insanity perpetrated by the likes of FOX News. If the school teaches us that the sky is blue, FOX will no doubt insist it is red, and that scientists and "smart" people are ruining this country.

Unfortunately a lot of actual smart people still answer to the almighty dollar....

IF this is somehow contained... Then just wait and watch...

The Extremely Narrowly Owned Global Corporate Media/Press is what sways, moves, manipulates and drives far too much of this Nation's mindset in deliberate fashion. So, 'IF' the incredibly smart and disciplined Japanese somehow manage to contain this Nuclear Disaster with minimal Radioactive Release, corporate want will rule the day and this very disaster--- caused literally by all hell breaking loose upon very old Nuclear Reactors with 1960's Stone Age Technology--- will become the very selling point the nuclear industry will try to use for 'selling' the future safety of new Nuke Plants with modern, state of the art safety systems in place.
It will be sold as ---- Look..! This ''antique'' 1960's Nuke Plants and those responsible for public safety, were able to stand up to the most extreme environmental disaster ever witnessed and keep everyone safe. Imagine how 'safe' new reactors will be...'

Corporations rule the world and this country... Not We The People...

Keith,
I miss Count Down but found you here. In my opinion, the right-wing are people that need a "Master" to tell them how to think and how to behave. It is no surprise that they turned away from humanity and turned to the Corporate Elitists to tell them how to think and behave. The Corporate Elitists know that they can control a certain percentage of people through fear and heavy handedness. The right-wing traded the Old Testament’s "God" for "Corporate God". They have been conditioned.

"Let's take the most poisonous substance in the world, distribute it across the country, with no plan of how to store it or dispose of it; and let's put it in buildings on faults and along coastlines throughout the world. And let's build them to withstand only the typical weather and disaters we've encountered in the past. Then, let's tell everyone its for their benefit and make them pay for the cost of building and maintaining the most toxic substance on Earth, but let's make sure it never turns a profit for those peolple."
Dr. Evil to his evil cohorts?
no; actually the nuclear industry

Halliburton, Halliburton, how did we exist before your creation?

There are many appropriate comments here particularly in criticism of FUX 'News'. They have proven all too well that the big lie is alive and well in Amerika. Nuclear energy is dangerous, we all know that, but making the energy grid more diffuse with all the technologies at hand will make us all safer. One third of the energy we make gets used at all, because our grid is so inefficient. Put another way 2/3 of all the coal, all the diesel, all the gas and biomass or whatever is simply wasted. What kind of economy is that?

you are very correct

Hey, are all you commentors sitting in a circle at a Starbucks with a latte and a laptop betting that each can interject their own personal bias on top of the earthquake data from Japan better than anyone else? There's nothing intellegent being offered so it must be a game. Who's winning?

Keith, maybe you should sit down with Rachel Maddow and get a little more information on nuclear energy, on exactly what happened, and what is still possible to happen. We need to exchange facts not emotions on this important subject.

Aren't the natural disasters enough? Isn't the radiation danger from Van Allen belts enough? Do we need another Krakatoa?

The flow of money into Washington is the greatest flow of money the world has ever witnessed. It attracts the vultures and pigs of society who feed on it like mosquitoes on an open vein. The mosquitoes look for any way to "get some" whether it be wars, bailouts or nuclear energy and the biggest mosquitoes are the so-called conservatives. They're clever little devils, too, and find ways to spin what they want as "patriotic" or necessary for the "survival of the country" so I suppose nuclear energy will be the next big feast if we're dumb enough to let them sell it.

Thanks Keith for the mention of the New Madrid earthquake. Bells ringing in DC, river running backwards, huge mobs of squirrels like lemmings running to the river.... But there WERE people living there; Lake Reelfoot is the site of the home of the Reelfoot tribe, all of whom perished.

"we could have saved the planet, but we were too damn cheap"--kurt vonnegut

The only difference between a human and an animal is the brain. We humans were given the brain to look after ourselves, build societies, bring serenity and love in our lives and make the earth an even better living place than what nature provided us. What we have gone and done with our science and technology that now we are capable of not only destroying this beautiful earth but may be the whole solar system. We have polluted the environment to the extent that even the nature has given up on us. Earthquakes and Hurricanes and other natural disasters have become an everyday affair.
For the war machine to survive we have created unnecessary wars and human life has lost its meaning. If we do not learn the lesson from the Japanese experience when we learn? Leaders are supposed to lead us in the right direction but their direction is towards dirty politics and the bread and butter.

Keep up the work Keith. Your voice needs to be heard--
one of the few rational ones out there.

Nuclear plants makes no sense. Never did. France has plenty of problems. They dump 100 million gallons of radioactively contaminated liquids into the ocean every year using a pipeline into the English Channel. It's traveled as far as the Arctic contaminating food supply.

From the French reprocessing plant in La Hague, gases like radioactive krypton are released into the air. More radioactive krypton has been released than from all atomic bombs from the 1940's through the 1960's....Another radio active gas from their reprocessing plant is carbon 14 with a radioactive half life of 5,000 years. Nuclear plants are not carbon free--the nuclear fuel chain releases carbon and it happens to be radioactive.

Plus, the French reprocess high levels of radio active waste.
They extract plutonium to reuse as reactor fuel. They are sitting on a mountain of separated plutonium in France which is weapons useable, and has to be guarded 24/7.

Which address the question of why we do not want Iran to have nuclear power plants.

I have a lot of trouble trusting any country to handle a nuclear disaster of any scope when I look back on the response to Katrina. That was a hurricane predicted for days, not an unknown accident, and still the town has not recovered. Response to an emergency? Give me a break!

I have been an admirer of Keith's for years, but I do not want to rule out nuclear power yet. Many people forget that the plants in Japan did survive a 9.0 earthquake and the aftershocks. It was the tsunami that wiped out the diesel generators that would have kept the rods cooled. Perhaps they could have elevated the diesel generators and stabilized them so they would not have been destroyed, but the engineers did anticipate a "worse (not the worst) case scenario" and built the containment and the secondary containment structures to contain a core meltdown. There will be no nuclear explosion, no mushroom cloud, like many would have us believe or fear. The Japanese plants were far better constructed than was Chernobyl. There are two main issues with nuclear plants -how to deal with the waste and how to ensure they are safe. In both cases, if the support given by the US government to the oil and gas industry was used for research in the nuclear industry we could be far closer to overcoming both challenges. For those of you who do not have a closed mind on the subject you may wish to (critically) read this article:

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

The rich just don't get it. The more they screw the lesser classes, the more they become the despised. This will go on until all of a sudden there's a great upheavel from the masses, and the rich always become the target. This has happened on and on in history all over the world. Just like the rich might think that green living and anti-pollution EPA laws are full of crap, it will be them as well as the rest who will inherit a caustic, barron, and life threatening planet where no one can live for any length of time. Neuke power plants are indeed subject to earth's upheavels, and there's no amount of money that can prevent their destruction and subsequent radiation release. The might work well in a submarine or on a ship, but then again, those vessels are at sea when their in the neuclear power mode. But as Sonny and Cher once sang, "The beat goes on, la de da de da, the beat goes on".

If our planet's inhabitants cannot find ways to co-exist and work together to solve problems like these, it's gonna get bad. I guess we will have to gas up those yet to be built space mass transit vehicles and search for a new place to live.

This is knee jerk sensationalism. Nuclear is still a feasible and important option to have on the table. Trying to create fear based on un-scientific and spurious presumptions is, at this moment, both insensitive and irresponsible. People who advocate ditching nuclear and investing trillions in wind, solar, geo-thermal, etc. don't grasp the limitations of these technologies or the economic implications of massive investment in sub-par technologies such as these. Nuclear, or still higher forms of technology to be developed using nuclear power as a platform may still be an answer, but the so called "renewable" technologies currently on the table can't possibly get us off the globalization fix. Thats gonna' require real power, not power that might be acceptable for supplementary use in a few regions in the country. If you're serious about getting off globalization you must accept this truth and move forward from there.

Sorry Olbermann, you are totally incorrect about the New Madrid fault being the largest earthquake in US history, here is the list from the USGS records:
1. Prince William Sound, Alaska 9.2
2. Cascadia subduction zone 9.0
3. Rat Islands, Alaska 8.7
4. Andreanof Islands, Alaska 8.6
5. East of Shumagin Islands, Alaska 8.2
6. Unimak Islands, Alaska 8.1
7. Yakutat Bay, Alaska 8.0
8. Denali Fault, Alaska 7.9
9. Gulf of Alaska, Alaska 7.9
10. Andreanof Islands, Alaska 7.9
11. Near Cape Yakataga, Alaska 7.9
12. Ka'u District, Island of Hawaii 7.9
13. Fort Tejon, California 7.9
14. Rat Islands, Alaska 7.8
15. Andreanof Islands, Alaska 7.8
16. San Francisco, California 7.8
17. Imperial Valley, California 7.8
18. New Madrid, Missouri 7.7
19. New Madrid, Missouri 7.7
20. New Madrid, Missouri 7.5

Even the USGS records http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/10_largest_us.php clearly say that the New Madrid is not even in the top 4 most powerful earthquakes in US History. So maybe the next time yo want to say something, you really shold know what your talking about instead of making yourself look as stupid as you are.

Electrical power and political power are very close to identical. That's why distributed power, ie democracy, is anathema to the plutocratic fascist gang

I experienced a New Madrid Earthquake: I was about 8 or 9: I'm 51 now, so that must've been 1967/8? I lived across the river from St. Louis, about 150 miles maybe from New Madrid. If memory serves the quake registered between 4 and 5 where we were. However, any observant person looking around my hometown would see it wasn't the first ( our nickname was "little San Francisco".) Yet very few people I know have heard of this faultline.

I read some column or another about the flyover states and my first thought was "what about the New Madrid?".

I lived in Jonesboro (northeast AR near the MO line and about 70 miles from Memphis) during the 70's and experienced one earthquake (relatively minor) and one tornado (major). I'd heard the stories about the Mississippi running backward.

I was the only person in my office who realized it was an earthquake. Some had never heard of the New Madrid fault they were sitting on.

I remember saying to my friends that I was headed back to CA where we needed to worry about only one of the two. I was wrong - we have tornadoes from time to time but nothing like the midwest.

I think it's interesting that President Obama finally caves in to repug demands for more offshore drilling immediately before the worst oil spill in US history.

Next, he gives a speach stating that nuclear is part of America's future with "clean" energy, about 30 seconds before all of this happened in Japan.

Is it just me? Or does GOD also think Obama should quit acting like a repugnican, and want to punish him for doing it?

Pardon my naiveté, but imagine if he'd have acted like he was on our side all along. THEN and ONLY THEN, he could have said, "I told you so". Instead, by acting like one of the very people who gets us in these messes in the first place, he bears just as much of the blame.

I guess what he meant by "change" was that he was going to change his mind about every thing he campaigned for, once elected.

President Obama is right, and Olbermann is wrong. Nuclear power will never be safe, but nuclear emissions are less than coal, and "pebble bed" reactors do not melt down or blow up. GOP has proposed to cut funding for all forms of alternative energy, and Olbermann has joined the tea party in this.
Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

We are headed for a great shift that most of us are not prepared for. There will be much turmoil, with great suffering, and we must work to strengthen our positions and prepare for what is to come. The more open our minds and hearts are, the easier our transition will be. We must stop our bickering and join together as one family if we want to survive. If we hold fast to truth and make it our greatest friend, it will lead us into the new world that is on the horizon. Let us join hands and walk forward into a world where fear is a distant memory, and love is our abiding light.

The Shift Network stephen@theshif tnetwork.com

Are we not hearing as Mother Nature is shouting, pleading and begging us to stop digging holes in the ocean and building nuclear plants? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

Keith, I think there's a typo in this piece. You mentioned the NRA which is the National Rifle Association. I suspect you meant the NRC: Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Thanks for posting this. It's just appalling that Jaczko is so blase about this.

For all of the bashing of conservatives in these comments, there is very little offered in the way of alternatives. I am neither pro-nuclear power nor anti- nuclear power, I am all for cheap energy. If we can't have nuclear power, and we can't have natural gas, and we can't have oil, and we can't have coal, then what can we have? We don't have enough land mass in the US to fill to power our nation, we have no way of storing wind turbine power, we don't have enough places to build water turbine plants, biofuels cause food prices to increase dramatically, etc. Not to mention the ecological impacts of each type of so-called "green energy." What happens to wildlife in deserts filled with solar panels? What happens to migratory birds that can no longer fly freely without being slaughtered by 15th century technology (windmills)? What happens to wildlife and waterways that are dominated by huge water plants? The reality is that every form of power that we have comes with negative impacts. There is also the fact that society is not going to give up energy. I am interested in hearing proposals and alternatives that are reasonable and cost-effective.

Solar is used all over Europe now -Germany has about cornered the market. Tech came from NASA who decided to make the tech free "since research was paid by taxpayers. - who of course couldn't pay R&D to develope. Many patents were bought by oil companies who sat on them. Wish we had those royalties now?
"When I lived in the mountains (where temps can go to -20) we built a food and heat producing greenhouse on to the house. With only a morning wood fire (tall pines blocked a.m. sun) the house was cozy. We built about 50 as a business. We also built a solar 'envelope' house which sold before completion. The buyers sold it 5 yrs later at a good profit. The wife told us they never needed to use supplemental heat. Later we built a big passive solar house which we lived in for years. Photovoltaic cells and batteries keep improving. I know many many who sell their power to the electric company. They are PAID every month -no bills. The downside is they can't use there own power when there is an outage. So many folks just stay off the grid. There are solar roofing tiles and even paint! In 38 years we never got the state to do a decent solar project. Why? Because I live in Arizona! -land of constantly devolving intelligence.