Disasters Don't Follow Scripts

[liveonearth]

Nice set of NYT opinion pieces here that offer perspective on how Japan's recent earthquake and tsunami experience bear on our situation here in the US. Their nuclear power plants were designed to be OK for up to 8 hours of a power failure, and because of the quake and wave one-two punch, the power outage outlasted the projection. Here in the US our plants are good for 4 hours without power. But how stable is our power grid? Are we really in better shape than Japan for dealing with what may come? Hard to know...and hope we don't have to find out. But if history is any indicator of the future, the one thing we can say is that unpredictable things do happen.