It all is just too hard to comprehend the mess over there. They can't haul it all to the local land fill because the entire area is nothing but a land fill. Recycle comes to mind but still, where in the hell will they put it all? One big mountain of **** I guess. Dang, what a mess.

As for the Nuke plant, why on earth, or Japan, would they put that thing RIGHT on the water front?? did they not think a big wave could knock it out? Boggles the mind.

Joe

They will recycle as much as possible, burn some, and bury the rest. It will take years. When they are finished, you will never know it happened.

One thing for certain: as a result of all of this, I guarantee that Tide™ is no longer the number one selling laundry detergent in Japan.


Bullseye

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Five screws and 3-1/2 inches.

Bottom of the ocean?

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Misty

It's possible they may take some of it out to sea and dump it. Don

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"Don't worry be happy"

Guys, japan is the worlds expert at recycleing. When I was a kid in the late 40s it was common to buy a cheap toy or whatever, to look inside it and litteraly see budwiser or whatever painted on the inside!

Well, Southern California Edison has its San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant right on the Pacific beach just south of San Clemente.

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The Last Standing Knight

I wonder how long before all that Japanese junk drives the cost of scrapmetal down. I think it has been above ten dollars a hundred around here for a while. I have about ten thousand pounds I need to get rid of. I guess I should stop procrastinating and sell it before the price drops

The reason power plants are build by water is the abundance of water,Dang things produce a lot of heat.Heat=energy.

They use steam to run the turbines.No matter what the heat source is.

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Dum vivo cano

I do expect that Japan will recover. The dicipline of the people overthere is outstanding. But I have some problems with the Nuclearplants.

At first it is a clean source of energy. But if things go wrong as it did in Japan, you cant pull the swich off. The proces will be going true and gives a lott of problems.

I am very affraid that this will be come an melled down. I dont know how many years it will take to recouvre this and what effect it has on the surrounding nature.

I wish I did have an solution for this. But there isnt.

I do know that I have a very deep respect for the ones who stayed behind and strugle with the upcomming dissaster. They are realy hero's.

Sorry for my bad English.

Thuer, I was born here and I am still working on my english too!
Hey what happened at chernobyl? We must have learned something from that!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

That was my first thought, one heck of a lot of barges though. and to haul it to the barges from far away won't be easy. My guess is that the heavy equipment companies will make out find on this deal. Invest in Kabota or Cat or what ever.

I am saddened by the events in Japan. There are a lot of people there suffering and a lot of uncertainty to which few can relate.

Now that is out of the way.

Japan has always been the so called technical experts with the best engineers. Yet when it comes to difficulties, they call on the US for help, for our experts in engineering, our automotive experts to get their factories back into production, our experts in their energy producing plants and other things. Yet they did nothing to help the US when Katrina struck or when the Trade Towers were struck.

Sorry, they did send the US another batch of defective Toyotas that their engineers claim is perfect.

Yes, I feel sorry for the people and their woes but I think Japan over values it's industrial and technology and tries to force it down our throats. A few years back, they asked for help from GM in designing a convertible top assembly for their cars. Two friends of mine went there for a year. They tried to buy a Chrysler to drive while there but the "import" tax on it was $10,000. We need to play on an even field and charge an "import" tax on auto coming in from Japan.

As for their "junk," it will be placed on barges and dropped in the ocean.

No Ferramill (sorry that I spelled your name wrong). I dont think so. If money is involved they gett always greedy.

Oldmann 45. I understand your thougts. But, there are other normal people outthere who need our help. They are not responsible for the dessisions of there gouverment. I dont lower my self to that. Overe ther are poor people who did loose everything. I feel very sorry for them.

You can see what remains of Chernobyl here:
KIDDofSPEED - GHOST TOWN - Chernobyl Pictures - Kidofspeed - Elena
scroll to the bottom and click on chapter 1 I would like for someone who can go through all the pics to tell me how important nuclear power really is. This entire city had to be abandoned & will remain
that way for hundreds of years.

It will get dumped into the ocean like the majority of the waste produced in the US.

Thuer, I said up front that I feel sorry for the people.

I am possibly a lot older than you and I remember things very well. Just about 40 yrs ago, the US owned most of the largest banks in the world. Now Japan owns them and the US is not even in the top 20. Years ago, American workers were pretty much assured of jobs once they had been on the job a couple of years. Now those jobs have gone to Japan because they said they could do the job quicker and cheaper. Yet the electronics like tvs, radios and such are now disposable because it is cheaper to replace than repair and they go out rather rapidly. I remember when the US was making cars that people wanted. You could tell a Ford from a Chevy a mile away. Japan began sending cars over and they all look the same. The US began allowing them to come over and now Japan controls the market because they do not have to pay a $10,000 fee for their exports such as we do there.

A cousin of mine married a lovely lady from Japan and was stationed there for a few years. He tells me the citizens there want American cars but cannot afford them. I know I wanted to buy a 1957 Chevy from an auction recently and the bidding went out of my affordability but was sold to a Japanese investment firm and was shipped to Japan.

So yes, I feel for the people. There is a lot of sorrow and sadness over there right now. Yet we have unemployed people, businesses no longer open and services no longer available due to the superiority of Japan. Then when the brains are needed, they call the US.

Where does that happen? That may have been done 40 years ago, but it's not now.

As to Japan putting it in the ocean, that might not be such a bad idea. Man has been dumping debris at the edge of the ocean to make more land for centuries. They don't have an over abundance of land, so if it's done properly, why not?

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Insert short witty words here

I hope you don't wanna include radioactive trash in the pile of stuff you dump in the water?

...between the reactors in Japan and Chernobyl, is that the Japanese reactors had purpose-built containment vessels and are base on a GE design. The Chernobyl reactor did not have a containment vessel, and the reactor was only protected from the weather.

The Japanese will recycle most of the lost cars, homes, etc. Remember, prior to the outset of WWII, they built their armed forces from American scrap iron and steel. They are very disciplined, and their society is an extremely cooperative one. The Japanese can't be compared to our more individualistic society.

The Japanese badly compared their Bushido military culture to our American military culture. It led to their complete demise in 1945. They did not believe Americans would be in a war for total victory, and would instead sue for peace. Let's not make the same mistake, and miscalculate their resolve to rebuild. They did wonders after September 1945.

China will probably buy all the scrap metal, make small home appliances and sell them around the world . What is happening to the average person in Japan is more than I can fathom . My heart bleeds for them, the people who are going back to the plant are HERO's and deserve our prayers .

Billdeserthills, a special thanks for those picture leads. I was surprised to see that my grandparents were from about only 150 miles west of chernobyl.

Funny thing is... the late Dr. W. E. Deming (1900-1993, American) was invited to Japan by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) in July 1950 after the bombs completely destroyed business infrastructure, and more importantly in my opinion the will of most Japanese in the business sector.

Japan was reeling and they got our best and brightest (Deming, the man's a genius) to help them reorganize and rebuild on new concepts in regards to quality control/statistics/business concepts/philosophies. The Deming Award is the most influential award in Japanese business. That alone is a huge statement.

Americans didn't give Deming much attention stateside...as they rather liked the new models of inefficiency here. While the Japanese headed their American leader's concepts and continually worked for improvement in tolerances/materials/etc, most American companies adopted a, "good enough" philosophy.

It wasn't until relatively recently that Americans were sick of getting whooped by the Japanese and started to heed Deming's philosophies. Their was a Florida power company (Florida Power and Light) who won the Deming Award in 1989. They were the very first American company to do so. That is also a huge statement.

Americans always had the answers...too bad we just ignored them. Until we collectively step up to the plate and start working on these issues, Japan will continue to kick our collective butts. This is of course not taking into account the current struggles with the Japanese economy after this tsunami/earthquake/nuclear issue.

My .02

Nuclear reactors are built near the ocean so that if all else fails you will at least have seawater to try to cool down the reactor. The tsunami eliminated the massive buildings which had the maintenance equipment for cooling and such. The tsunami took out the main power and the back up generators, and the batteries were depleted in eight hours or so. It was a 9.0, folks! The entire country has moved by eight feet. They have been struggling to regain power ever since, and are hopefully close to it.

***ushima is not Chernobyl. A different design, as noted above, and the Chernobyl reactor, after it exploded, was left alone to spew radioactive matter into the sky for 12 days before action was taken. Still, it is my understanding that most of the resultant cancer was caused by eating contaminated food that the government did not warn anyone about.

What impresses many, myself included, who witness how the Japanse respond to this ongoing triple disaster of earthquake, then tsunami, then nuclear crisis, is how calm, orderly and stoic they are. In the hard hit areas up north, they share food with one another, and wait patiently in self-organized lines to buy a carefully limited amount of food at stores in the areas that have yet to receive supplies so that everyone will have something to the extent possible. There is no looting, nor any crime that i have heard of associated with this, despite 100s of 1000s without water, food, or even enough clothing to keep warm. They huddle together for warmth as it snows and the temperture drops, and quietly mourn for their lost loved ones.

Contrast that to how many of our fellow Americans in New Orleans reacted to Katrina.

If at some point in my life it was my destiny to encounter a disaster of this magnitude, as has proved the case, I cannot imagine a better country to be in when it happened. For what it is worth, I am in Tokyo, which other than receiving one helluva jolt followed by days of aftershocks is relatively unscathed, other than transportation and distribution issues. It is my belief, based on looking into it very carefully, that here in Tokyo we do not need to be worried about health effects from the ***ushima nuke plant, some 160 miles to the north. As is often the case, the media has hyped the nuke thing way, way beyond reality.

(By the way, one of the interesting facts I have learned is that during our country's worst nuclear disaster, Three Mile Island, the total amount of radiation released into the environment is equivelant to the amount of radiation put out by 8,111 bananas. Yep. Bananas are radioactive, due to potassium. They are also good for you, so please don't get worried. Turns out your wife is radioactive, too, and so are you. )

When I told my Japanese colleagues that there was a run on iodine pills in the US -- apparently commercial stocks are now totally depleted by worrywarts in California or whatever -- it gave them a good laugh!)

As for Japan's response to Katrina: Japan Proves Truly "A Friend Indeed" After Hurricane Katrina

Edit: I guess the software censor does not approve of ***ushima, the location of the nuke site. No matter.

Good to see you here, Arlo. You and your family are in our thoughts.

Bob

Thanks for the update and relativation of things Onomea.
I am glad that you are alright.

Fearmongering at it's best.

The animals are doing fine in that area. The last Chernobyl reactor was shut down in 2000, 14 years after the accident. The body count for Chernobyl was no where near what was predicted, especially by the fearmongerers in the press.

Finally, there's no Western reactor built like Chernobyl was. Therefore, there's certainly no comparison to what is happening in Japan to what happened at Chernobyl. It's bad, yes. But not nearly as bad as the fearmongerers would have you believe.

And I live about 12 miles east of three nuclear reactors, with pretty much the same Mk I designs as the Japanese plants.

And the congregation said AMEN!

Regarding the Japanese cars sold here and export duties and other stuff. I have not seen a Japanese branded car in the USA that was not made here in years. Mostly in Tennessee I believe.

Bob

All over the country really. Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi all have plants in the US. Japan has made international production, and adapting models for different markets a core part of their business, something the US manufacturers have until recently been unwilling to do.

There was a comment about Japan owning the big banks. Actually, of the ten largest banks in the world, 3 are US, 2 are French (including the very largest), 2 British, 1 German, 1 Swiss, and only 1 Japanese.

The Japanese have been recycling stuff since WWII. My first introduction to having to recycle my household garbage was when we lived in Japan from 1970-1972.

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Rick, W0FG
CTR2 68-72

That was reported on FoxNews. My first thought was the Japanese are a proud people, caring for one another. Then I thought of the disasters here in America. We loot, steal, and kill. Something is wrong in the greatest nation in the world, America.