Nuclear Stuff

Krugman wrote Meltdown Macroeconomics "So, back to Japan: I’m terrified about the possible loss of life; nervous about the disruption of world production; not worried at all about the impact of Japanese borrowing on world bond markets."

Brad DeLong points out that people are buying US Treasury's as a flight to safety. Tyler Cowen wonders if this means the government should spend more or less money (we know what the GOP says). DeLong answers, "If people thought that government debt was risky, its price would be falling as well. The fact that people are willing to pay more for government debt indicates that it is increasingly valuable--and so we should make more of it." There's a followup here.

The New York Times has some very nice graphics of the Fukushima reactors and what's known to have happened there. How a Reactor Shuts Down and What Happens in a Meltdown. I note they make a comparison to Three Mile Island and I've been seeing more of those in the last two days. One of the MIT professors said that his students had never even heard of it. That surprised me but it surprised me more that other professors on the panel were referring to "TMI" without defining the term.

The Sunlight Foundation put together a graphic Nuclear power plants live along fault lines. "As recent events have shown in Japan, nuclear power plants are just as vulnerable to natural disasters as anything else. So here at Sunlight we were curious about the locations of domestic nuclear reactors. Using data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Geological Survey, we generated the following map, which shows the location of the aforementioned reactors (there are 104 of them) vis-a-vis geological fault lines. We also included locations of significant historical earthquakes. Take a look and see if we might be vulnerable to a nuclear disaster if/when "the big one" hits, and click on the red dots to learn more about each nuclear power plant."

Good points to two Charts to Better Understand Radiation Levels and Their Effects on People. Be sure to click through for the full charts.