News – April 23, 2012

As you may have guessed, the “News” posts are going to be an irregular feature. They will appear when two criteria are met: I see something interesting, and I have some time to talk about it.

 

Is Fukushima’s Doomsday Machine About To Blow?

The article boils down to this: the damaged Fukushima reactor has a pool that is full of spent fuel rods. If a 7.0 earthquake was to strike the reactor, the coolant would leak out, the fuel rods would overheat, and a really massive amount of radiation would be released – somewhere around 85 times more than Chernobyl. Depending on how things played out, it could put the entire ecosystem at risk. In other words, if a strong enough earthquake hits the reactor before the pool is stabilized – and there’s no telling how long that will take – civilization itself might not survive. In fact, the ecosystem itself might not survive. One earthquake, at the wrong place, could doom life as we know it.

The reason I mention this is not because I think this is likely; it’s because the truth is that doom is always a single slip away. Back in the 19th century there was a huge solar flare that released a massive amount of radiation; it even set telegraph lines on fire. If that flare hit last week, instead of nearly two hundred years ago, we might not have a civilization anymore. The flare would have cooked our electronics and, with it, the Western world.

What people don’t realize is that there are always dangers just like that. An undetected asteroid could hit and pulverize us all. A major earthquake could wipe out most of the East Coast. The Yellowstone megavolcano could erupt and kill us all. The list of purely natural things that could kill us all is quite long – and then there are man-made disasters, like a nuclear war breaking out or biological terrorism.

What amazes me is that, despite our gross sin and depravity, we have not been wiped out. Our society is still going. Western Civilization is teetering on the edge of destruction, and yet it has not been destroyed. It is rather remarkable. I think, if anything, God has actually been acting to preserve this world. If He had wanted to wipe it all out He could have done that long ago. There was a time when a flock of birds tripped the wrong sensor in Russia, and made them think the US had launched their nukes at Moscow. The reason the world wasn’t destroyed that day was because the Russian on duty at that time thought the data didn’t make sense, and disobeyed protocol and refused to strike back. If a different person had been on duty we would all be dead right now.

I have no doubt that judgment will come eventually. Revelation is full of truly awful things, and those things will come to pass. It just amazes me that we have been allowed to go on for so long. Technological civilizations are fragile; it doesn’t take much to wipe them out. It is relatively easy to destroy a space-age society; it is all-but-impossible to wipe out a stone-age civilization.