At the fire station

I saw something interesting while passing the fire station on my way to Yaotome. I did not get a picture of it but the fire fighters were working with what looked like a little inflatable building. I would not have thought much about it, except that twice since the earthquake they have been down in the park by my condo practicing pumping water from the river in what looked like preparation for cooling a nuclear reactor that was in trouble.

The inflatable building was about two and half meters tall, one and a half wide, and three long. The inflatable structure was colored bright red and bright yellow. The two long walls were transparent and at each end there were entrances made from hanging strips of clear plastic. Along the ceiling there was a series of nozzles that were connect to a hose that led to a portable pump. As I looked at wondering what it was for, it hit me. It was a portable decontamination room. The fire department was still preparing for a potential problem at one of the nuclear reactors. There is one not too far north of Sendai.

With our newspaper yesterday, we got a special section produced by the electric company. It said that, in addition to the nuclear reactor that suffered the meltdown, they have closed the reactor north of here and four of the fossil fuel fired generating plants in the area were destroyed by the tsunami. The section has all sorts of suggestions on how reduce electric consumption. They are expecting that once it gets hot the demand will exceed capability and they will have to have scheduled blackouts in order to keep the system from collapsing. Air conditioning is supposed to be set no lower than 28 degrees C and the government is pushing what they call "super cool biz" clothing. This means that you are not supposed to wear a suit and tie, but rather you should wear short sleeved pullovers, shorts, and sandals to work, even in government offices.

Some of the other suggestions were to reduce the temperature in your refrigerator, unplug and appliance that you are not using so that it won't be using electricity on standby status, reducing the wattage of your lighting, changing to LED bulbs, turning off lights, opening windows rather than using fans.

This summer may be very interesting, because this is a problem for the whole country and not just the Tohoku region. As the weather warms up and scheduled blackouts start to occur, I may have trouble keeping my entries to this block on a daily basis. Also it will be interesting to see what happens to my classes that are conducted on computers.

Oh, well, as the old Chinese curse goes "May you live in interesting times".