Probably not....Japanese people are much more willing to put up with personal discomfort for the sake of the collective. A big part of their culture revolves around keeping harmony with the people around them, so speaking up with a complaint is unbecoming. Also having an idea that differs from other peoples' is frowned upon. This summer will probably turn out to be the same as last summer, with the rolling blackouts making a comeback. Although since more power plants have been shut down, the radius of blackouts might be extended. I don't know what my company will do during the blackouts if they come to our area, since we develop software and obviously can't do that with no power ;P.

Actually, kind of. The Tokyo area is overdue for its huge quake that happens approximately very 70 years. The University of Tokyo is giving it a 70% chance of happening within the next 4 years. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/science/T120123004717.htm

Oops, accidentally modded this....replying to clear it

Hah! I usually let my mod points go to waste because I feel like I'd just be trying to use them before they expire otherwise, but in this case I wish I had some!! +1 Funny!

Yeah....the reason that "no company in America can match that" is that any company that tried to would be facing legal prosecution with regards to indentured servitude, a human rights violation which is outlawed in the U.S. as far as I can tell. Nice omission there Apple.....

Good point! It actually works out to nearly exactly 6.7 million Singapore dollars

Amen, everything you have said resounds with me, and especially my father. The only service available in the rural upstate NY village is satellite, or a 3G modem (which has better pings, but much worse caps of around 5GB per month). The entire street petitioned for cable to be run (everyone would agree to subscribe), but the cable company's response? Ok, pay us $10,000 per mile of cable we need to run and we'll do it. A few hundred feet down the next road is a house with DSL, but it is unavailable where my father is. Satellite internet is a mechanism that should only need to be used on Arctic expeditions (akin to Satellite phones). Fuck it, and fuck the state of U.S. internet as well. Other countries seem to love taking American inventions and improving them, while America squanders them. Here in Tokyo I can buy a 40 Mbps WiMax subscription for $40 a month and use it anywhere in the city and surrounding areas with up to 10 devices at once. However, my poor father has too hard of a time even talking to me on Skype because of the 2000ms delays and no alternative choice. To add to what to above poster said, here is an even better tidbit: Back in the earlier days of satellite they DIDN'T EVEN GIVE YOU A BANDWIDTH GAUGE!! You just had to guess, and if you thought you went over because the quality was shit (i.e. half the time in fair weather and 90% of the time in bad weather) you called in to ask them how much you had used.

2001, actually.....

How many on that list are actually "catastrophic"? One of them is even "Instrumentation systems malfunction during startup, which led to suspension of operations".....

What you are referring to is the "effective half life" which is calculated using the radioactive half life (the one everyone is familiar with) and the biological half life (how long it takes your body to excrete half of the material). Let's take cesium-137 for example, its radioactive half life is 30 years and 29 days. The biological half life is 70 days. In this case, the half lives are so different that the radioactive half life doesn't come into play at all and the effective half life is 70 days.

Iodine-131 has a radioactive half life of 8 days 36 minutes, but is absorbed into the body more easily (thyroid) so its biological half life is 138 days. The effective half life becomes 7 days 14 hours

These figures are from WolframAlpha, and it has this data on many many isotopes.

I've been in Japan the entire time :). The offline power is quite a problem, and we may have to go through the rolling blackouts against this winter. That and the tourism hit is becoming really bad for Japan economically.

Here in Japan, the same thing is happening to Softbank. My coworker was told to wait a little while before coming to get his phone because the server had crashed.

Upstate New York, 25 years old and I know about it too (my father has done it many times). It makes sense because it is difficult for a long truck to see how much room they have between the back of their cargo and your car and you are too far back for them to be able to see any hand motions you might make. So it's just a courteous way to let them know that they have enough space.

Yes, but without the tsunami the diesel generators would have been working.....that is the point. For the meltdown to have occurred solely because of the earthquake would have meant it had to melt before the tsunami hit. TEPCO is saying the meltdown occurred around 16 hours after the earthquake.

Nowhere in TFA does it say that the earthquake caused the damage to the reactor that led to it melting. Also, I doubt it is even possible for it to melt in the 40 - 50 minutes it took for the tsunami to arrive. It first has to evaporate or otherwise evacuate the water inside the reactor, and then heat up to about 2800 C to melt. What the article is saying is that the rods had melted much sooner than initially thought. The timeline changed, not the reason. They are also looking into possible complications that may have occurred in the initial hour (there is another report that the cooling systems were manually shut off after a pressure drop, as per the instructions for such a scenario), but nowhere does it suggest that the earthquake, and not the tsunami, caused the crisis. The closest it comes to that is saying that the earthquake may have "damaged" the reactor, but gives no speculation on the effect that it would have had on the cooling system. A crack in the containment vessel without any cracks in the reactor pressure vessel would not have been an issue.