The powerful tsunami that today slammed into Japan's eastern coast comes just two days after warnings that the movement of the moon could trigger unpredictable events on Earth.
Astrologers predicted that on March 19 - a week tomorrow - the so-called 'supermoon' will be closer to Earth than at any time since 1992, just 221,567 miles away, and that its gravitational pull will bring chaos to Earth.

Before my phone dies, I want to tell you a short story.

A series of large earthquakes hit Tokyo while I was riding a train. At first it was fun, but turned pretty serious around 7-8 pm when the temperature dropped quickly and there was no hope of taking a train or bus or cab. I've been wandering around the area for about 6 hours and finally settled down in a nice train waiting booth. With about 20 people packed in here and the doors closed, it warmed up nicely. Well, for those in seats, that is. As manners would have it, it was mostly the elderly and women in the seats. After about 30 minutes of a young girl and boy crying to their dad that it was cold, action was taken. A small group of older women went downstairs and somehow procured a large amount of boxes. As they came in, many were perplexed. I, however, was on the same page. As one of the women began breaking down one of the boxes, I took the rest and followed suit. We made a nice barrier from the cold ground and walls for those sitting on the ground. That was the beginning.

A blind man was brought in by another one of these angelic women. They placed two broken down boxed across a gap in the seats to give him a place to sit. Afterwards, two other older women left. I assumed they needed to go to the bathroom..... One came back with a bag full of these awesome little heat strips that stick to your body/clothes! The other returned shortly with chocolates and passed them out.

That's it for now, but I'm sure as the night goes on and grows colder, there will be more that unfolds.

An explosion at a nuclear power station destroyed a building housing the reactor amid fears that it was close to a disastrous meltdown after being hit by a powerful earthquake and tsunami.

TOKYO — Japan’s nuclear crisis verged toward catastrophe on Tuesday, after an explosion at one crippled reactor damaged its crucial steel containment structure and a fire at another reactor spewed large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to official statements and industry executives informed about the developments.

"This earthquake is a lesson in humility," says Emile Okal, a geophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies great earthquakes and tsunamis. Few experts had thought that the seismic zone near Sendai, Japan, was capable of producing earthquakes anywhere near as powerful as the magnitude-9.0 shock on 11 March, the largest on record in Japan. Okal and his colleagues want to understand why the event was so much stronger than many people expected -- and what it means for seismic risks in Japan and elsewhere around the globe.

The film tells the story of the rise of nuclear power in America, Britain and the Soviet Union. It shows how the way the technologies were developed was shaped by the political and business forces of the time. And how that led directly to inherent dangers in the design of the containment of many of the early plants.
Those early plants in America were the Boiling Water Reactors. And that is the very model that was used to build the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Three of them were supplied directly by General Electric.
In 1966 the US government Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards tried to force the industry to redesign their containment structures to make them safer. But the chairman of the committee claims in the film that General Electric in effect refused.
And in 1971 the Atomic Energy Commission did a series of tests of Emergency Core Cooling systems. Accidents were simulated. In each case the emergency systems worked - but the water failed to fill the core. Often being forced out under pressure.

As demand spikes for potassium iodide in the wake of Japan’s nuclear crisis, U.S. poison control centers are starting to receive reports of illness in people who’ve ingested the drug aimed at protecting against radiation sickness.
At least seven people have reported reactions to the drug, often called by its chemical name, KI, including two who said they were suffering from serious symptoms including vomiting, racing heart and dizziness or vertigo.
That’s according to Jessica Wehrman, a spokeswoman for the American Association of Poison Control Centers, which tracks reports from 57 poison control centers nationwide.

A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.
This passed unnoticed –except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts – but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould.