The heroes of Fukushima...

...are the clean up workers who may well be quite calmly and rationally comitting suicide. After the Christchurch earthquake the deliberate acts of heroism and compassion were a wonderful testimony to the strength of character of those involved. This altruism is a feature of most of us I think, but is ingrained in the Japanese psyche. One only has to think of their military heroism as exemplified by the WW2 Kamikaze pilots. Their spirit is reflected so clearly in the heroism displayed at Fukushima...

...Apart from that, this post is a brief analysis of the human cost of energy consumption...

...The earthquake and tsunami in Japan delivered a devastating one-two punch to that island nation and to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. So what does much of the world do? You guessed it. They blamed the designers, builders and operators of the nuclear plant for not doing a good enough job. They call for all reactors in the world to be closed down. Electricity has been restored to all the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. That means that the control panels have lit up and banished the inky darkness. Electricity is available to the electrical cooling pumps.The overall situation is looking much better. They are not out of the woods yet, but day by day the residual nuclear decay heat, in the reactor fuel elements, is dropping and the prospect for any major release of nuclear material is diminishing.

It seems likely that the main toll from the nuclear emergency will be to a small number of heroic plant workers and emergency responders who continue to brave exposure to radiation to restore cooling to the reactors.The focus for Japan and the world should remain on recovery from this crisis and we should be wary of any seeking to exploit, rather than solve the situation. Serious risks remain, however, it is appropriate to place the harm and risk from Japan's nuclear emergency in context of the full scope of the tragedy. The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami stands at 9,300 with 13,800 missing. These numbers continue to rise. Any death or injury is tragic, but inside the nuclear plant only one person, a crane driver died from injury sustained, and some nuclear workers may have been exposed to high levels of radiation. Outside the nuclear plant no people have been injured in any way from any radiation...

... The Fukushima plant was forty years old, near retirement. Its staff did a fantastic job under the circumstances. There was no disaster. No people outside the plant got injured, no property outside the plant was damaged by nuclear material. Give the reactor crew a round of applause. Nuclear power just got a whole lot better and safer. Nuclear power survived the onslaught well, and we learned a great deal. The lessons learned will be shared with the rest of the world to the betterment of all. Current designs could withstand even this worst-case scenario. Nuclear power remains, safe, viable and vital.

We should also compare the harm done from this and other nuclear power emergencies with past power plant disasters.

Look at the following list (from “What is the worst kind of power plant disaster? Hint: It's not nuclear” by Annalee Newitz):

1975: Shimantan/Banqiao Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 171,000
Cost: $8,700,000,000
What happened: Shimantan Dam in China's Henan province fails and releases 15.738 billion tons of water, causing widespread flooding that destroys 18 villages and 1500 homes and induces disease epidemics and famine.

1979: Morvi Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 1500 (estimated)
Cost: $1,024,000,000
What happened: Torrential rain and unprecidented flooding caused the Machchu-2 dam, situated on the Machhu river, to burst. This sent a wall of water through the town of Morvi in the Indian State of Gujarat.

1998: Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Jess Oil Pipeline Explosion
Type of power: Oil
Human lives lost: 1,078
Cost: $54,000,000
What happened: Petroleum pipeline ruptures and explodes, destroying two villages and hundreds of villagers scavenging gasoline...read the full article here...

The radiation bogey man...

As an ex-radiographer I remember being taught to respect and avoid radiation. At work each day we used to put on a radiation monitoring badge which was sent every month to the National Radiation Laboratory in Christchurch where our exposure to what we called scattered radiation was assessed. We wore lead rubber aprons when working with prolonged radiology techniques, and some even wore lead rubber gloves when using old out-dated fluoroscopic equipment. Even today I have some distaste for dental xray techniques and the often cavalier attitudes of dental staff when taking them. Health risks from radiation are real, as the effects over a lifetime are cumulative.

However, in "nuclear-free" NZ, the militant anti-US brigade have succeeded in inducing hysteria among the general population over all nuclear issues. Food irradiation for example, to prolong shelf life was mooted and rejected with allegations of "frankenfood" mutations possible. Nuclear propelled ships are not allowed in our harbours because some feel they may become transformed into nuclear explosions.

A healthy respect for radiation is to be aware of its dangers, yet embrace its benefits. Much as we do with electricity and petrol. With this in mind I am delighted to see from a Mr Randall Munroe, a Radiation Dose Chart illustrating the wide range of radiation we may experience or hear about in a lifetime; from sleeping next to someone (0.05 micro-sieverts) to a flight from New York to LA (40 micro-sieverts) to the maximum yearly dose permitted for US radiation workers (50 milli-sieverts)...full chart here...

Another illustration of comparitive radiation exposures compares radioactive seepage of naturally occuring radon gas from rock...Radiation exposures in highly publicized nuclear accidents are thus considerably lower than those received by people in these (high radon) areas every day. Note that the Pennsylvania area includes the region around the Three Mile Island plant; people living near that plant get more radiation exposure from radon in their homes every day than they got from the 1979 accident. Within any area, there is a wide variation in radon levels from house to house. About 5% of us, 12 million Americans, get more than 1,000 mrem (1 mrem = 0.00001 Sv = 0.01 mSv = 10 μSv ) per year, and perhaps 2 million Americans get over 2,000 mrem per year from radon. In a few houses, exposures have been found to be as high as 500,000 mrem per year...more here...

Radiation is and always has been part of all our lives. Its peaceful usage in medicine and in modern well controlled nuclear power plants will remain and help drive modern society into a more prosperous and safer future - Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Windscale and Chernobyl notwithstanding...hat tip PKH

The wearing of the green...

...will last as long as we keep commemorating St.Patrick. Green politics though are of a much less durable nature. Now that the mainstay of the green movement - runaway apocalyptic global warming - has lost its potency, green political impetus has waned, and the hope of global wealth redistribution to save the planet has all but died. Green eco-pornographers though have been given CPR, courtesy of Fukushima. The earthquake that partially destroyed the Fukushima plant and the ensuing tsunami that inundated vast swathes of land were both exceptionally severe episodes however, Fukushima is not the devastating indictment of nuclear power that the greens would like. Indeed, the awful calamity and its aftermath will eventually strengthen the case for an expanded nuclear industry with even more robust safety parameters.

From the BBC... Power hopes rise at the Japan plant...

...Fukushima now becomes the third level five incident in half a century of nuclear power. The first was the Windscale reactor fire in the UK in 1957 - the second, the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979. Richard Wakeford from the Dalton Nuclear Institute, a visiting professor in epidemiology at the University of Manchester, recently re-assessed the effect of radiation released at Windscale. Using data and computer models, his scientific paper concluded that the release could have caused about 240 cases of cancer, half of them fatal. However, inquiries into Three Mile Island concluded it probably caused no deaths.
That raises the question of why both are in the same INES category, given that Three Mile Island did not, in the end, have more than a local impact. "The reason why Three Mile Island was rated a five is that there was major damage to the reactor core and there was potential for a widespread release of radioactive material - it didn't happen, but that potential is built into the event scale," said Professor Wakeford...

As time passes, the (Fukushima) reactors should in principle become less dangerous. The rate at which they pump out heat decreases quickly, and by now the rate should be down to about one-thousandth of what it was a week ago, just before the Tohoku earthquake triggered a shutdown.Prospects of exposure to perhaps the most dangerous radioactive substance, iodine-131, also diminish rapidly. It decays quickly through radioactivity - after eight days, half the atoms present initially will already have decayed away. ..In addition, the continuing efforts to keep seawater flowing into reactors 1, 2 and 3 appear to have been relatively successful on Thursday and Friday. If the reactors have been cooled, fuel rods will have been degrading at a slower rate, again curbing the release of radioactive substances.

On Friday afternoon, radioactivity readings had reportedly declined to less than 500 microsieverts per hour on site - below the level at which operators have to sound the alarm...The cure for the plant's immediate problems could be the restoration of electrical power. A grid connection was hooked up on Friday, although technicians were clearly struggling to power up systems around the site given that some of the plant's internal circuitry had been damaged by the tsunami or the gas explosions. The nuclear safety authority outlined a timescale that would see power restored in reactor buildings 1-4 by Sunday.
If this all works, the prospects of the Greenpeace scenario should recede. Then it will be time to take stock...(and once more re-evaluate the credibility of greenpeace ). And it may turn out, said Richard Wakeford, that no deaths at all will be attributable to the Fukushima incident. "If you take one of the workers who's been exposed to 100 milliSieverts (mSv), that's not going to have any serious short-term effects," he said - "certainly nothing like the situation facing the Chernobyl emergency workers that killed 28 of them.
"The risk of a serious cancer arising from that kind of dose would be less than 1% in a lifetime - and you have to consider that the normal chance of dying from cancer is 20-25% anyway."As for people outside the plant - I can't see any chance of picking out the effect of the Fukushima releases against the general background of cancers." More here...

...and a Sinner Repents...from George (Moonbeam) Monbiot at the Guardian...the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology...full column here...

Green jubilation...

...will be short lived as the damaged Japanese nuclear reactors are brought under control. What will become more apparent as time goes by is the difference between Chernobyl, where safety procedures were absent and where reactor design (rejected by the UK in the 1950's) was inadequate, and this incident, where one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded has tested emergency procedure to the limit.

In Japan, as in Christchurch last month countless heroes are emerging from the devastation. I salute them all.

When reconstruction and reappraisal begins to take place, nuclear energy will come under the spotlight like never before. This time however, unlike Chernobyl, green fear-mongering will be tempered by the pragmatic reality of nuclear versus coal/wind/ solar energy sources. And when the Michael Moore's of the left have had their say, nuclear energy will be seen to have survived with its safety reputation intact. For up to date information and comment re reactor status, see Brave New Climate here...

And as for wind farms...well, courtesy of PKH, this startling news ...According to researchers at the University of St Andrews, the sound of offshore wind farms is likely to mess with the whales’ sensitive sonar systems and drive them ashore, where they get stuck on beaches and die. More here...and the original press release here...

Windfarms KILL WHALES...buy the T shirt !

Clive James...and the death of environmentalism...

....on Climate Change and the recent Aussie floods.

While commentators like Clive James and many others assess the moribund state of climate alarmism correctly, main stream media still run a diluted form of green orthodoxy. Here, Clive James, always a good read, is in fine form poking a sharp stick in the eye of the dying green global warming dragon...

Poetry, said Auden, makes nothing happen. Usually it doesn't, but sometimes a poem gets quoted in a national argument because everybody knows it, or at least part of it, and for the occasion a few lines of familiar poetry suddenly seem the best way of summing up a viewpoint. Just such an occasion has occurred recently in Australia. By the time the heavy rains first hit Queensland early this year, the theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW, to borrow the unlovely acronym) was ceasing to exercise unquestioned thrall in the minds of Australia's progressive voters. But spokespersons for the Green party clung on to it, encouraged by the fact that the theory, in its Climate Change form, was readily applicable to any circumstances.
Before the floods, proponents of the CAGW view had argued that there would never be enough rain again, because of Climate Change. When it became clear that there might be more than enough rain, the view was adapted: the floods, too, were the result of Climate Change. In other words, they were something unprecedented. Those opposing this view — those who believed that in Australia nothing could be less unprecedented than a flood unless it was a drought — took to quoting Dorothea Mackellar's poem "My Country", which until recently every Australian youngster was obliged to hear recited in school. In my day we sometimes had to recite it ourselves, and weren't allowed to go home until we had given evidence that we could...more here...and...

The Long Death of Environmentalism
Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and "An Inconvenient Truth." The latter backfired -- more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out -- the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change...more here...