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Nearly a year after the Japanese tsunami and subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, the good news is that the risk from radiation doesn’t seem to be as high as many initially feared. Take the Pacific Ocean, for example, where most of the radioactive fallout from the plant eventually ended up. Nicholas Fisher, a [...]
If you’ve felt jumpy since Fukushima, you’re not alone. Even the tiniest burp from a nuclear power plant gets people fearing the worst, so it was scary news indeed when the San Onofre plant in San Diego County announced at 6:30 PM (PST) on Tuesday night that one of it’s reactors might have begun leaking [...]
-THE BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS (BAS), in a formal statement noting that the Doomsday Clock would be moved five minutes to midnight. The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 and uses the imagery of a apocalypse—the clock striking midnight—to dramatize the risks of nuclear weapons and other catastrophic threats to humanity. The scientists behind the [...]
The sun will set early in Haiti tonight. By 5:23 PM, night will have come to the island nation, and while night comes to virtually every part of the world virtually everyday, throughout much of Haiti, the darkness will be much deeper. It’s been nearly two years since the January 12, 2010 earthquake that killed [...]
YOSHIHIKO NODA, the Prime Minister of Japan, talking about the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors in a press conference. Noda declared an end to the nuclear disaster—more than nine months after an earthquake and tsunami ruined the nuclear plants, leading to a meltdown—but other experts aren’t so sure. More than 160,000 people from the area are [...]
New tests show traces of radioactive elements in Japanese baby food, forcing the recall of more than 400,000 cans of infant formula. The news underscores the challenges still facing Japan’s food sector nine months after the Fukushima disaster—challenges that have as much to do with popular perception as science. Read more on Global Spin.
The tsunami that tore through northern Japan on March 11 was catastrophically strong. The waves—triggered by a 9.0 earthquake—swamped coastal towns, destroyed homes and offices and led to the deaths of nearly 16,000 people. (For a chilling look at the devastation, check out these photos by the Japanese photographer Kishin Shinoyama.) The tsunami also led [...]
Earth history is different from ordinary history: it’s much harder to nail down specific dates when everything happened millions of years ago and over huge, slow timescales. But it can be done, as shown by paleontologists who have pinpointed the exact date of the largest mass extinction to ever occur on earth. The end-Permian mass [...]
Maybe we should retire the term “global warming,” which makes climate change sound like a nice, pleasant bath. It’s true that climate change—caused chiefly by the rapid increase in manmade carbon emissions—will result in warmer temperatures, fewer cold days and longer and more intense heat waves. But the real damage, both economically and in human [...]
It’s now eight months since a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan, badly damaging the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex. That accident eventually resulted in a meltdown, and the accident as a whole was rated a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale’s 1 to 7 rating. Explosions in the plant threw large amounts of [...]
