Here's a copy of a letter to the editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press that I sent today. I'll update this post if/when it's published.
Update: The letter was published on November 8, 2013.
Update: The letter was published on November 8, 2013.
We've just learned from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) that more than a million tons – a million tons – of
debris from the earthquake and resultant tsunami-triggered disaster at the
Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, windblown over the waves of the Pacific
for two and one-half years since the event, is now approaching our coast.
According to NOAA models, this diffused, enormous pool of trash – of
unspecified content, except that most of it is indestructible and likely carries
life forms alien to American ecology, to say nothing of an unknown quantity of
radiated matter – has by now traveled five-sixths of the way from its
catastrophic origin and will begin to invade our western – including Central
California's – shores in 2014. And because the pool is so enormous, its debris
will continue to wash up here for years.
How dare those Japanese, we cry out, build such a dangerous
power plant immediately beside the Pacific Ocean, and directly along what's
long been known as the "ring of fire" for its proclivity for
Earth-shattering earthquakes! What idiots! What monsters! Why, you'd think the
folks who planned it were of the same mind (same corporate structure and
mentality) as those who built a similar nuclear power plant along our own
Pacific coast – along our own historically active segment of the ring of fire.
I speak, of course, of the nuclear power plant ninety miles to our north, at
Diablo Canyon.
And, of course, you'd be right.
