Brownouts

Well, here's a new wrinkle on the nuclear power issue here in Japan.

A report came out detailing all the errors and bad procedures which led to the fire/explosion and resulting radiation leak in Fukushima after last year's earthquake and tsunami.  The cause was, surprise, surprise, human error.  The entire glow-in-the-dark, 25-km exclusion zone, modern ghost town mess was, even with the tsunami factored in, completely avoidable; the result of excessive micromanagement by the Prime Minister's office, and general passivity on the part of TEPCO executives (Tokyo Electric Power Co).

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, the bozos at another nearby reprocessing plant actually hand printed a manual that said it was OK to mix sub-critical masses in freakin' buckets that led to an incident in 1999 that killed 2 workers.

A subsequent check of other facilities led to all Japanese power plants being taken offline, while issues of safety and procedure were addressed.

And thus we reach my point for this post, which is brownouts.  Kansai power has asked all residents of the Osaka-Himeji and points west to conserve power (they just restarted the Oi plant, which led to mass spontaneous demonstrations by folks opposed to sloppy handling of the nuclear material.  Kinda reminds me of John Travolta in "Broken Arrow":  "How many times do I have to tell you, please don't shoot at the thermal nuclear weapons!")

So now, at the beginning of the hot-as-hell season, oops, summer, they want us to not run our air conditioners, etc, and will institute rolling brownouts.  My classroom is gonna become one of those toy Betty Crocker ovens, and the lack of power to my fan will make it totally unbearable.