Nuclear energy 101: Boing Boing goes inside the "black box" of power plants. The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant involved multiple system failures that cast doubt on the guiding principle of the nuclear power industry: that engineers can build enough redundancy into safety systems to overcome any threat. From LRB, Hugh Pennington on the fallout from Fukushima. From The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert on the reactor risk in Japan. Just what is a nuclear meltdown, anyway? Me, Myself, and Iodine: What's in the radioactive vapors leaking from the damaged Japanese nuclear power plant, and how dangerous is it? Japan's victims struggle to understand what's happened. Will Japan’s quake be the costliest ever? Nuclear Hubris: Could Japan's disaster happen here? Cautious reconsideration, not rejection, of nuclear energy in Washington. Trying to take in the scale of the destruction of the earthquake in Japan, Aaron Retica was reminded of what the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa never forgot. Alain de Botton on tsunamis and stoicism. Hereafter's tsunami sequences get it pulled from Japanese theaters. The Boston Globe's The Big Picture on Japan. Want to know which natural disasters are targeting you, right now? Here's a collection of resources. Quake moves Japan closer to US and alters Earth’s spin: The unbuckling of two tectonic plates shifted Japan’s coastline by up to 13 feet, and a 250-mile-long section dropped in altitude by about two feet. Have you watched footage of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on CNN.com? If so, you are one of 60 million global viewers that logged on to CNN to watch — that’s a new record.
