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...