When researcher Karen Clark developed the first probability-based model for measuring the threat of natural disasters in the U.S. in 1987, almost no one cared.
How Safe Are We?: How We Got Homeland Security Wrong
Tag Archives: nuclear
Pope John Paul II
In November 1989 word went out that Mikhail Gorbachev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, would stop in Rome en route to a summit meeting with President George Bush. In Rome he would have an audience with Pope John Paul II.
Upgrading the Disaster
It’s the latest evidence that the health and environmental effects of the Fukushima nuclear-power-plant accident will be devastating and long-lasting. After a review of data on the amount of radiation leaked by the damaged plant following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Japanese nuclear-safety officials raised their assessment of the crisis to Level 7, the highest ranking on an international scale of nuclear-incident severity–which puts the Fukushima disaster on par with the Chernobyl explosion in 1986
MIDDLE EAST: Violent Week: The Politics of Death
Even by Middle Eastern standards, it was a week of abnormal tension and turmoil. The carefully engineered truce imposed on that divided nation by Syria had collapsed .
Nuclear Batteries
Nuclear-powered cars! airplanes! Fridges and freezers! In the heady days of the early 1950s — at the dawn of the civilian nuclear power age and President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program — nuclear optimists imagined a world powered by tiny nuclear reactors. Today, in an era of climate change and energy insecurity, the nuclear industry is dusting off some of those old dreams.
CIA Expulsion Suggests Pakistan is Breaking With the U.S.
Pakistan has asked the CIA to all but shut down its operations in that country, demanding that the U.S. intelligence agency pull out 335 officers and contractors currently based there
Japan: Second Blast at Nuclear Power Plant Injures Workers
For the second time in three harrowing days, a hydrogen explosion at one of Japan’s crippled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant blew the roof off a containment building — this time on Monday morning at reactor unit No.
Japan One Month Later: Elusive Royals Out of Seclusion to Help Victims
Apart from some miracle rescues, Japan has seen little good news in the month since catastrophe struck.
A Month After the Earthquake, the Crisis Continues and the Questions Mount
Katsumi Yamauchi’s strawberries didn’t look radioactive. Nor did his tomatoes, or the waxy-skinned turnips nearby, or any of the fresh fruit and vegetables that customers perused on a busy sidewalk in central Tokyo last week
The Energy Source In Our Backyard
Turmoil in the oil-rich Middle East, combined with the nuclear crisis in Japan, has caused a lot of experts to recalculate the global energy algorithm for the future. But people need energy now, and with the ravenous economic growth of China, India and Brazil, demand has grown even more urgent