On the First Day of Spring, All is Not Right With the World

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

The birds are singing. The bees are buzzing, and the dogwood blooms are popping out here on the official first day of spring, known in science as the vernal equinox, the day each year when the day and night are almost exactly 12 hours long as the Sun crosses the celestial equator going northward, rising exactly due east and setting directly in the west.

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Sitting here contemplating the surroundings in this little human-engineered slice of suburban heaven, if one can call it that, it is temping to sip the good coffee and imagine that all is right with the world, as the saying goes.

But of course, as much as we would like to put the problems of the world out of our minds and escape, we know all is not right with the world, our country or our state.

As I write this there is another large oil slick spreading in the Gulf of Mexico, while the poor people of Japan are dealing with another nuclear holocaust — and not just the result of a double-whammy natural disaster, the major earthquake and tsunami.

If it wasn’t already obvious, it is now as clear as a crystal ball that no matter how sophisticated humans become at engineering electrical power systems, they are all bound to fail at some point, to kill a bunch of people — and cost way more than the economists can ever predict. That goes for coal as well as oil and nuclear power. It’s just that we haven’t suffered from a major coal mine collapse — this week.

Since the mainstream, traditional news media, as hard as they work sometimes, is not always as forthright as they would have people believe, sometimes you have to dig around on the Web over time to find out what is really going on in the world.

One of the best examples of that is right here in Alabamaland, where it took a massive disaster in Japan — and 35 years to go by — for one of my favorite reporters to tell the real story of what happened at the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in the northern part of the state.

As it turns out, the infamous Browns Ferry plant nearly melted down and killed hundreds of thousands of people in 1975, but you would not have known that from reading the newspapers at the time — or if you are a historian depending on newspaper accounts for an accurate record of what happened. Nor could you have learned it from local television news reporting, and widespread public use of the Internet was years in the future.

As it happens, the Boiling Water Reactor Mark I at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan, which will now most likely have to be buried in seawater, sand and concrete — never to produce another kilowatt hour of power after the billions it cost to construct over there on that Ring of Fire fault-line — is the very same General Electric reactor design that sat dead for a couple of decades in Athens. It was only restarted again last year, and of course, all the officials — and the local news media — declare it to be perfectly safe.

Don’t worry.

Be happy.

The birds and singing. The bees are buzzing, and the dogwood blooms are popping out here on the official first day of spring.