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Radiation is usually our friend, because it provides us with ample power and is reasonably easy to manage under most circumstances. However, there are occasions when the situation gets a little bit out of control. When a situation of that nature comes around, nuclear technology goes from being our wonderful benefactor of power and ease to being an instrument of long-term suffering.
When nuclear power plants fail as several have in Japan, the situation goes from bad to worse. Simply put, people are going to be sick for generations to come because of one day’s natural disaster. While Japan will no doubt survive and continue to thrive as it has since ancient antiquity, the damage done by one earthquake will echo far beyond the physical aftershocks of the event. While the physical harm to structures may be fairly easy to repair, the long-term damage to people and infrastructure will take a long time to mend.
With all of the ambient radiation released by the nuclear power plants compromised by the quake, there have already been problems with local beef. In time these problems may very well escalate into higher than average incidences of cancer in the human population. This may even eventually lead to a level of mutation among Japanese people, as the radiation slowly changes the way their cells reproduce themselves. Generations from now the Japanese may actually look different from the rest of the world in a way their ancestors never could have imagined. All of this from a single day’s events.
