Ah, we have a Holdren acolyte. Japan shut down their reactors for safety inspections, and intends to restart all of them after insuring their safety, with particular attention to the diesel backup generators - the source of the problems with Fukushima. Tsunamis are rare, but the Fukushami generators should not have been below sea level. Japan will shortly be completely bankrupt if they need to buy natural gas and oil to keep their plants operating. They have no alternative source, and there is no more desirable source for the electric energy essential to Japan's survival as a manufacturing nation. Japan is already in discussions to add new nuclear plants. The fact is that no one at the Fukushima plant was injured. Twenty thousand died from the tidal wave. Some number of Japanese have committed suicide - forty is the estimate I've read - related to the loss of their homes, their jobs, their ability to support their families.
Suggesting that the reactors at Fukushima didn't have containment is complete nonsense. Their containment is why no one was injured. The hydrogen explosions were the result of the failure of pumps keeping the spent fuel from heating up. Again, no one was hurt by radiation. There may have been a few minor burns.
No one claims safety can't be improved. Fukushima is a forty year old design. The Chinese are modifying a modern Westinghouse design, which will be even safer than no injuries. A new design should protect emergency pumps. Had the diesel generators not failed Fukushima could have been back on line in hours to provide power for pumps, cleanup, and manufacturing. Today Japan is paying the current price for oil, a price which may only increase.
Germany can buy nuclear electric fuel from France for a while, but will build new nuclear plants when the damage to the world's economy caused by the left has been repaired and their propagandists return to the infamy of the fringe where they have lived for forty years. For the moment, there is no realistic alternative to nuclear electric, nothing safer, nothing cleaner, and no technology less expensive when legal/political costs are deducted.
"Nuclear waste, the gift that keeps on giving, making nuclear power the most expensive way of producing electricity, monetarily and environmentally."
The old nuclear waste shibboleth keeps on giving. Nuclear waste is not waste; it is a partially used source of extremely valuable energy. There are relatively so few used fuel rods, and uranium is so plentiful, and politicians so perfidious, that there is no will to reprocess fuel at the moment, at least in the US. As the world becomes more and more nuclear electric that partially used fuel (only about ten percent of the available fission energy is used in a typical fuel cycle) may still be commercially viable. Remember, a typical 1000 megawatt coal plant burns about 100 carloads of coal each day of operation, and produces almost as much ash and slag which must be disposed of. The fuel pools of a typical nuclear reactor fill about a basketball court's size of pools for spent rods, which will cool for a few years before being removed to long term storage or reprocessing, and could always have been put back into the ground from which the uranium came.
Free speech is a double edged sword. In China, where most senior party executives have degrees in science and engineering, propagandists don't flourish. In the US, our colleges are benefiting from the high standards set by Asian students, who typically enter graduate schools here, having done undergraduate work in China, two years ahead of our domestically educated students. In California we pay political activists to monitor the environment, agents for the California EPA, about $150,000/year to obstruct development. Tem years ago there were about twenty thousand of them, and are probably more today. Few of them have degrees in science.
We pay lawyers, through our government, to obstruct low cost energy, preferring to support scientifically impossible schemes such as the recently bankrupt solar thermal electric plant near Barstow (a claimed 1000 MW plant, though Barstow may be another plant - this writer studied that design thirty years ago), or the bird whackers at AltaMont pass, which only get active when the tax rebates make them interesting to the wealthy. They don't say a word about the 60 or so giant condors and bald eagles mashed, and about 40,000 other birds killed by the wind turbines, but make a big fuss about a snail darter becuase there was a politial objective - asserting control over the farming interests to extract payola.
It bears notice what you said about the senior party officials in China - that they tend to have a much higher representation of technical people in their ranks.
Here in the US, I think we have only about 1% of the Congress being composed of engineers and/or people from hard sciences.
The vast bulk of Congress is filled with idiot lawyers, who think they can legislate against the laws of thermodynamics.
I can see why you are delusional, you are fundamentally flawed.
Fukushima (was the 10th largest nuclear power plant site in the world) was well on its way into meltdown mode before the tsunami struck, the site was shaken apart by the great quake and cooling water no longer available to the (3) units that were melting down because the great quake ruptured the plumbing. The other (3) out of a total of (6) were in various stages of maintenance and not operating but the spent fuel ponds were in jeopardy as they lacked cooling water circulation example, Unit 4.
Where is the containment when there is a no go zone and nuclear fallout readings from Fukushima’s explosions throughout the world?...Stop kidding yourself. Maybe concentrate on natural gas, nuclear is a lost cause.