Loud Thinking

Posts Tagged ‘Destruction’

A ferocious tsunami unleashed by Japan’s biggest recorded earthquake slammed into its eastern coast Friday, killing hundreds of people as it carried away ships, cars and homes, and triggered widespread fires that burned out of control.

An 8.9 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Northeast Japan spawned a ferocious tsunami that’s caused massive destruction; flattening whole cities, starting raging fires, and killing hundreds.

Nearly 88,000 people are reported missing, according to the official Kyodo news agency. Nuclear experts said the solutions being proposed to quell radiation leaks at the Daiichi nuclear plant in Fukushima were last-ditch efforts to stem what could well be remembered as one of the world’s worst industrial disasters.

Situation has turned so grave that workers were ordered to withdraw briefly from a stricken Japanese nuclear power plant on Wednesday after radiation levels surged, Kyodo news reported, a development that suggested the crisis was spiraling out of control.

Now it is high time that world must wake up for launching a campaign of getting rid of ALL nuclear reactors from the face of the Earth, before another major catastrophe hits in some other country after Japan.

Now this issue has become a matter of life and death for the humanity. UN Secretary General must immediately summon a meeting of the Security Council to chalk out a unified strategy to combat the menace of nuclear radiation from destroying the life from the face of the Earth.

In this regard, as a first step towards making planet earth safe and free from accidents at nuclear reactors, which produce electricity using uranium/plutonium as a fuel, the world leadership must also look into the possibility of using ONLY thorium, as a fuel for producing electricity from nuclear reactors.

Unlike current nuclear power stations, that use uranium, the thorium plant won’t use a material that can be weaponised. It would also mean there is much less danger from a meltdown. Thorium is also more abundant than uranium, so it will be cheaper and easier to supply.

The safer material means it can be supplied at a lower cost with far fewer security needs. Security measures are actually the most expensive part about building current nuclear power stations. Thorium reactors, on the other hand, don’t require special containment buildings and can even be set up in normal structures.

The proposed thorium reactor is made to run by itself without any need for intervention. It will only need to be checked by a person once every four months.

Since thorium reactors are far safer than current nuclear reactors there has been talk of miniaturising them so a $1000 unit could power a ten house street for a lifetime.