Nuclear Safety
The situation in Japan continues to be worrying, and you’d have to wonder what can be done and what’s next. Reading about six-inch thick steel containment vessels and explosions capable of damaging them shows both how much effort has gone into safety and how much can still go wrong.

Power generators are dealing with tremendous forces, and things can go badly wrong with any of them, nuclear or otherwise. The BP Gulf spill is evidence that just dealing with the substances is risky enough, let alone refining them, and then utilising them.

Granted 9.0 earthquakes and tsunami incursions of over 4 kilometres aren’t common, but if a building designed to withstand a direct hit by an airliner in a country with earthquake building codes second to none can fail as dramatically as these reactors, the question of how safe is safe has to be asked. Are we really prepared to continue using nuclear power? Is this just an old, flawed design that has been superseded elsewhere, even in Japan – where one of the reactors was already scheduled to be decommissioned?

I hope for the best, that the situation gets under control soon, and without catastrophic radiation release.

Elsewhere: Germany is now thinking ahead.

8.9
That's about as big as these things get - the scale essentially only goes up to 10. Japan, now, after two big hits in NZ - and orders of magnitude greater than those, and a tsunami on top of that - must be reeling. You'd almost think it's spreading.

Devastation
Haiti would have been entirely unprepared for the earthquake, such events being probably quite rare in the region, not to mention decades of endemic poverty and governmental corruption. I don’t doubt that the death toll will be terribly high and that recovery will be a very long time coming. I can’t even imagine coming back from this without some very open and forthright assistance from the wealthy nations of the world. I worry that the response will be great pledges of aid that come to little actually spent and less spent where it’s really needed. This is often the problem with underdeveloped countries with entrenched governments with high levels of corruption or despotism, that they insist on sovereignty and keep much of what passes through their hands, favoring this contractor or that who themselves operate similarly, not to mention that charities and even donor nations have “administrative” costs built into their pledges. A million dollars pledged in aid isn’t a million dollars spent on the ground rebuilding homes and hospitals. A better system is needed. Humanitarianism needs to be more open at both the giving and receiving ends.

Meanwhile, could God please call Pat Robertson home, heaven or hell, I don’t care, just please get him off the planet: who knew that Toussaint L’ouverture was the Devil? (Maybe if a white man had freed Haiti from the French it would have been o.k. with Pat?)