This editorial will appear in Wednesday’s print edition.

West Coast states have been bracing for debris from Japan’s devastating March 2011 tsunami, and the vanguard is starting to arrive.

Objects ranging from soccer balls to a 65-foot-long floating dock have begun fetching up on beaches from Alaska to California. Just this week, kayakers looking for debris say they believe they found part of a Japanese house on an Olympic Peninsula beach.

It’s just the beginning. The main debris field is still far offshore, and flotsam is expected to keep washing up for years. Japanese officials estimate that 1.5 million tons of debris is floating in the Pacific Ocean; although some it will sink, much of it will end up on West Coast beaches. Read more »

This editorial will appear in Wednesday’s print edition.

The Quileute Tribal School in La Push is probably unrivaled for its scenic setting, looking out on crashing surf, islands and the kind of picturesque sea stacks that make photographers swoon.

But when the Cascadia subduction zone 80 miles offshore generates a massive earthquake – as it does every couple of hundred years, most recently in 1700 – it will almost surely create the kind of devastating tsunami that recently struck Japan after a similar subduction zone event.

And that schoolhouse – along with a senior center and homes on the Quileutes’ square-mile reservation – would be at ground zero. The ocean that makes La Push such a beautiful setting could be the death of it.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in Tuesday’s print edition.

Maybe radioactivity needs a better PR firm. The radioactive particles leaking from Japan’s stricken nuclear plants are dangerous, but not remotely as dangerous as many people think they are.

Terror of nuclear fallout is rampant in Japan – which is understandable, given that it’s the only country to suffer a nuclear attack. Americans have less reason for panicking over the radioactive releases from the Fukushima reactors.

Every competent scientific authority in the United States has been assuring the public that those releases pose absolutely no threat to the health of anyone this side of the Pacific Ocean.

People up and down the West Coast have still cleaned out retailers’ supplies of potassium iodide pills, desperately trying to protect themselves against a nonexistent threat – thyroid cancer from Japanese radiation.

The pills themselves are potentially harmful to a few people, which makes them a bigger danger in this country than the Fukushima reactors.
Read more »

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

This is not a good week to be the nuclear industry.

Multiple nuclear power plants have exploded and leaked radiation in Japan in a horror show that matches some Hollywood disaster movies.

The visceral fear of radioactivity is such that the spectacle of burning reactor complexes has sometimes overshadowed the vastly greater devastation and loss of life wrought directly by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami.

Many Americans are now understandably nervous about this country’s 104 nuclear plants – including the Columbia Generating Station at Hanford, which is very similar in design to the stricken Japanese reactors.

The crisis is good reason to step back and look at the way America is re-licensing its oldest reactors, some of which have been operating for 40 years. It’s not a good reason to fly into a panic about nuclear energy in general.
Read more »

Here’s a link to The New York Times site with an amazing series of before-and-after satellite photos of areas devastated by the Japanese tsunami.

Click here.

This is an anxious time for those in the South Sound’s large, close-knit Samoan and Pacific Islander community. That won’t change until they are able to make contact with friends and loved ones on islands devastated by Tuesday’s killer tsunami.

Many islanders died when four tsunami waves – each 15 to 20 feet high – struck about 20 minutes after an 8.0- to 8.3-magnitude earthquake south of the Samoan Islands. That’s the strongest earthquake to strike the world in the last two years.

Reports of casualties are flooding in from Samoa, the American Samoa territory and Tonga. At this writing, the death toll is 119 and expected to rise. Read more »