I Feel Fine

Dear nuclear power supporters: Please buy an airline ticket to Japan and camp out near the Fukushima reactor. Unless you're willing to do that, fuck you.

Update:

Reactors at two Japanese power plants can no longer cool radioactive substances, a government official said Saturday, adding that a small leak had been detected at one of the facilities.

Atomic material has seeped out of one of the Fukushima Daiichi plant's five nuclear reactors, about 160 miles (260 kilometers) north of Tokyo, said Kazuo Kodama, a spokesman for Japan's nuclear regulatory agency.

Potentially dangerous problems in cooling radioactive material appear to have cropped up there, as well as at another of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. nuclear plants, Ichiro Fujisaki, Japan's ambassador to the United States, confirmed to CNN.
The Fukushima Daini and Fukushima Daiichi power plants are separate facilities located in different towns in northeastern Japan's Fukushima prefecture. Each one has its own set of individual nuclear reactors.

Kodama said the cooling system had failed at three of the four such units of the Daini plant.

Temperatures of the coolant water in that plant's reactors soared to above 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit), Japan's Kyodo News Agency reported, an indication that the cooling system wasn't working.

Authorities subsequently ordered residents within 3 kilometers of that facility to evacuate as "a precaution," Fujisaki said. That plant was also added to the Japanese nuclear agency's emergency list, along with the Daiichi plant.

This is exactly why I don't support nuclear power anytime soon for the US:

The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency is trying to confirm a report that an explosion occurred at a nuclear power station in quake-hit Fukushima Prefecture.

The agency said on Saturday that a person at the Fukushima Number One nuclear station reported that an explosion was heard and smoke was seen near one of the reactors at around 4PM.

The power station operator Tokyo Electric Power Company told the agency that 4 people were injured.

Video of the reactor in question shows the outer wall of the building that houses the reactor has disappeared.

Prefectural authorities say the power company informed them that the ceiling of the building collapsed after an explosion.

Tokyo Electric Power had been releasing air from the container of the reactor to lower pressure.

Pressure inside the container had been rising after the reactor's cooling system broke down due to power failure.

Radioactive substances have been detected near the reactor.

Indeed.

Of course, the Republican idiots running congress are on top of it:

Back in February 2009, Republicans found a lot of risible spending in the stimulus bill. In his response to the State of the Union, Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La., derided the stimulus for including "$140 million for something called volcano monitoring." The gripe was mostly that the funding, mostly for U.S. Geological Survey upkeep, wasn't stimulative. (This is a pretty good argument.) But Democrats honed in on that comment to decide that Republicans were going to try to cut funding for natural disaster monitoring.
This isn't wrong. The continuing resolution passed by the GOP House, the one that just failed in the Senate, reduces funding for the federal agencies that monitor and react to disasters.

But wait, there's more:

The GOP budget plan that passed through the House last month aimed to cut funding for a tsunami warning center that issued a slew of warnings around Japan's devastating earthquake.

Complete Coverage: Earthquake in Japan

The budget, which proposed about $60 billion in budget cuts, would slash funding for the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That would potentially cripple the effectiveness of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, which issued a series of warnings over the past several days regarding the situation in Japan, where an 8.9 magnitude earthquake triggered a massive tsunami along the nation's east coast. (The PTWC is a part of the National Weather Service, which falls under the umbrella of NOAA - the organization responsible for providing tsunami warnings in the U.S.)

The Republican's proposed "continuing resolution" to fund the government, which was defeated in the Senate this week, aimed to cut $1.2 billion - or 21 percent - of President Obama's proposed budget for NOAA, ClimateProgress.org reports.

Bastards. Delusional ignorant ideology-above-all-else motherfucking bastards.