In a civilized society would we collectively decide to build nuclear reactors on an earthquake fault? Would we even build them at all? I don't think so.

Makes you feel puny

News from Japan is saying that so far it appears more than 10, 000 people may have been killed by the earthquake and tsunami. It turns out now that three nuclear reactors north of Tokyo are at risk of overheating with the possibility of a radiation leak they won't be able to control.  The earthquake knocked out the power and the tsunami knocked out the backup generators and they've been using sea water to cool things down.

According to Reuters there are some 2 million households without power and in northern japan it is freezing at the moments and another 1.4 million or so have no running water. One town, Rikuzentakata, with a population of 25,000 was completely flattened and its not known if there are survivors, if people are missing or dead there's so much destruction. 180,000 people have been evacuated from a 20-km  radius around the nuclear plant, according to reports.

This is massive devastation and makes us think about the logic of building nuclear reactors on earthquake faults.  I look across the San Francisco bay here and can see the results of human population centers being designed and built on the basis of profit--skyscrapers sitting on an earthquake fault.

It is important to remind ourselves that the massive death tolls that natural disasters cause in the former colonial world compared to the US for example are not due to the severity of the quakes but the failure of capitalism to develop the social infrastructure of the society.  Even here in the US, Katrina was not a natural disaster.  Not one city bus took one person out of that city.  The levies  that were supposed to protect the population were known to be weak and need replacing.  These disasters that kill a few dozen people in the advanced capitalist economies kill thousands in the third world. The difference has nothing to do with the quake and everything to do with society's resources, their ownership, management and allocation.

It's the same with disease and deaths.  These are due overwhelmingly to lack of resources and social infrastructure, water, sewage, access to medicine and medical care, that natural causes. It is a the crisis of an economic system that is hostile to human life an the natural world. Capitalism always puts the extraction of profit form human Labor power and the accumulation of capital before human needs and the natural word.  Capitalism will destroy life as we know it.

I say as we know it because it does not destroy nature.