{"id":19707,"date":"2012-06-19T12:39:15","date_gmt":"2012-06-19T11:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=19707"},"modified":"2018-10-10T21:26:20","modified_gmt":"2018-10-10T20:26:20","slug":"fukushima-daiichi-from-nuclear-power-plant-to-nuclear-weapon-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/06\/fukushima-daiichi-from-nuclear-power-plant-to-nuclear-weapon-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Fukushima Daiichi: From Nuclear Power Plant to Nuclear Weapon #1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOur world is faced with a crisis that has never before been envisaged in its whole existence\u2026 The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.\u201d<\/em>
\n— Albert Einstein, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May, 1946.<\/p>\n

Albert Einstein\u2019s Warning and the Ominous Fate of Fukushima Daiichi<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the bad news gradually spreads that the debacle at Fukushima nuclear power plant #1 is becoming more perilous rather than less so, the words of Albert Einstein come to mind. Recall that the legendary physicist, Einstein, helped to set in motion the Manhattan Project whose personnel designed and built the first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In his letter to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939 Einstein warned that if the United States did not enter and win the race to harness the destructive potential of atomic weaponry, Germany would almost certainly do so.<\/p>\n

The Manhattan Project became a primary prototype for the Research and Development\u2013R and D\u2013 partnerships linking the US government and for-profit corporations in what a Dwight D. Eisenhower would later describe as \u201cthe military-industrial complex.\u201d Einstein himself did not directly participate in this huge initiative aimed at defeating the Axis powers linking Japan with Germany and Italy. One of the twentieth century\u2019s most iconographic thinkers watched from the sidelines as other physicists and technologists applied many of Einstein\u2019s theories to the building of atomic weaponry.<\/p>\n

After Japan lay in ruins, not only from the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also from the massive carpet bombing of Tokyo and several other urban centers, Einstein went public with his fears and anxieties. In famous passages that have been subject to various translations and paraphrasing Einstein observed, \u201cOur world is faced with a crisis that has never before been envisaged in its whole existence\u2026 The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Japan as Laboratory<\/strong><\/p>\n

There have been many previews of the catastrophe anticipated by Einstein in the period after 1945 and before the March 3, 2011, 3\/3\/11, the day an earthquake and tsunami set in motion a chain reaction of interconnected crises that ruined Japan\u2019s oldest operating nuclear power plant. The evidence grows every day that this local incident extends to national, regional and global chain reactions that one way or another will end Japan as we have known it and will transform our world in ways that are difficult even to imagine at this early stage of the crisis.<\/p>\n

The direction and quality of this transformation depends very much on whether we can transform our way of thinking to adapt to the transformations brought about by our explorers of science and the innovators of technology that travel in their wake. By charting a course heading deep into inner space and tapping the volatile energy sources emanating from matter\u2019s molecular constitution our civilization has been altered in ways that put us face to face with Einstein\u2019s prophecy.<\/p>\n

The four-decades-old installation on Japan\u2019s eastern coast was at the moment of Fukushima #1\u2019s destruction a virtual museum of nuclear technology. The design of the six GE Mark I reactors had been lifted from that of the power plant developed in the early 1950s for the US Navy\u2019s first nuclear submarine.<\/p>\n

As the tsunami hit, one of these antique GE reactors, number 3, was filled with the newest generation of plutonium-laced Aveda MOX fuel rods. A basic ingredient of nuclear bombs, plutonium isotypes are sprinkled among the 500 or so radionuclides currently being spread into air, ocean and groundwater from the massive explosions that transformed the Fukushima Daiichi power plant into the world\u2019s largest and most menacing nuclear weapon.<\/p>\n

In Japanese daiichi<\/em> means number one. Fukushimi nuclear power plant #2, Fukushima Daini<\/em>, is also situated on the Pacific coast about seven miles closer to Tokyo than Fukushima #1. Fukushima #2 also incurred major damage on 3\/3\/11. Presently all 54 nuclear power plants in Japan save one are completely shut down.<\/p>\n

PLEASE SEE GRAPHS AND CONTINUE READING IN THE ORIGINAL \u2013 veteranstoday.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Albert Einstein\u2019s Warning and the Ominous Fate of Fukushima Daiichi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}