[virgil]

I thought the US did provide generators, but they were not compatible with Japanese equipment. Is this article saying that was not the case? If he did do this, it just doesn’t surprise me as serious as it is. Has he gone Blago? That is, he’s so used to pulling this kind of crap that he doesn’t think there something wrong with it anymore, or that nobody’s watching or listening or cares?

[HeartlandOfAmerica]

Well, jeez! In all of Japan, a country with 56 nuclear reactors, there was no possibility to beg, borrow, steal, dismantle or cannibalize a few stinking generators that have the same connections, that could have been hung from choppers and dropped into a clear space in the plant's yard?

They couldn't have beached a ship off the shore and run lines from it to the reactor plants?Heck, they could have flown the danged things from the states over to there in 12 hrs if necessary.

We're not talking about having to move the world here. We're talking about having to get enough power to get those water pumps back online so that they didn't have to spend the next 8-10 years in a radioactive cleanup. And where are the now? At the very start of an 8-10 year cleanup.

I've had all kinds of people tell me why it couldn't be done and hey, I'll grant you that I'm only a computer guy and not an engineer, but we're not talking about an engineering problem here. We're talking about a power problem here.

I think that it's a shame that the two most technologically advanced countries in the world, BAR NONE, allowed this to happen because they couldn't between the 2 of them, come up with an original solution.

It's disgraceful.

[Fresh Wind]

I thought the US did provide generators, but they were not compatible with Japanese equipment.

I believe that part of Japan is 50 Hz, and the US generators would have been 60 Hz, so there may be some truth to that.