SOS from Mayor, next to the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant,

The following is a message that I have copied/pasted from the email I received from "C."
"C" is a student from Japan and, as one can imagine, has been closely following the developments there:

Please allow me to spread the words of my friend Kazue Suzuki once again.
Thank you for your support.
[C]

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My hometown, Minami-Soma city in Fukushima prefecture has been having a very difficult time after the earthquake, the tsunami and now is exposed to the radiation.

Many people are still staying at the town including my father and some of my relatives even after so many people in the city evacuated to other prefectures in Japan. The risk of the radiation is still high, therefore foods/supplies are not reaching to them enough, even medias don't want to come into the city, the government is not listening to the SOS messages from MinamiSoma city.

Sending out this SOS message from my hometown to people including you is something I can do right now in a way of reaching to the people in Minami Soma city to help if possible, which is very small thing to do to help but I believe that it is important to spread this message now. 

SOS from Mayor of Minami Soma City, next to the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, Japan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70ZHQ--cK40&feature=player_embedded#at=655

I want to thank you very much for your time to listen to my hometown's SOS.

Sincerely yours,

Kazu

Journalists seem to say "forget the dead and the homeless. We only cover Fukushima"

Everyday, I come across a new YouTube video of the tsunami wiping out a harbor or a village.  Every new video brings about the same level of sadness and horror as the ones before.  I simply cannot even begin to really understand the scale of destruction of life and property and, even worse, how people will gather the needed energy to put one step forward at a time and move on to rebuild.

And, yet, the overwhelming news coverage is about the nuclear power plant.  I do not mean to minimize the complex problems from that plant, for Japan and the rest of the world.  But, to ignore the tens of thousands who are dead, and the hundreds of thousands who are shellshocked and homeless?

Brendan O'Neill deplores this sorry state of "navel gazing" journalism that is always so keen on hyping up versions of doomsday scenarios:

The coverage of the Japanese disaster confirms that, given the choice between reporting what we know (that thousands of people have died in an historic catastrophe) and speculating about what we don’t know (what exactly will happen at Fukushima), journalists will choose the latter. In an era gripped by a culture of fear, where everything from children getting a bit chubbier to a small rise in global temperatures is presented as the harbinger of a future hell whose parameters we cannot precisely predict, journalists have descended on Japan not to report its tragic truths, but to get their rocks off about the apocalyptic promise lurking within Fukushima. It’s not journalism.

Screwed up, we are!

Meanwhile, the rest of Japan is reeling from electricity shortage--homes and businesses alike, and estimates are that it might be more than a year before supplies can get anywhere near the demand.

The places most affected are not only in the earthquake-ravaged area but also in the economically crucial region closer to Tokyo, which is having to ration power because of the big chunk of the nation’s electrical generating capacity that was knocked out by the quake or washed away by the tsunami.
Besides the dangerously disabled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, three other nuclear plants, six coal-fired plants and 11 oil-fired power plants were initially shut down, according to PFC Energy, an international consulting firm.
By some measures, as much as 20 percent of the total generating capacity of the region’s dominant utility, the Tokyo Electric Power Company — or an estimated 11 percent of Japan’s total power — is out of service.

I have always wanted to visit Japan ... I am now all the more convinced I ought to, sooner than later, and get a real feel for the daily lives and ethos there.

BTW, watch this video of the tsunami slowly wiping out the entire harbor front--make sure the sound is on, so that you will hear the tsunami alert sirens and the sound of the furious ocean waters and car alarms ... will make you shudder at the horror:

More nuclear power on the way: It's the energy, stupid!

As I noted a couple of months ago, India is pressing ahead with its plans for a nuclear power plant complex that after completion will be the largest of the kind in the world.  Of course, the reason for this is simple: it is an energy-deprived population that is all of a sudden gearing up for a tremendous growth in demand, which is what I blogged about yesterday.  It is a similar story in China, too.  As today's NY Times reports,

while acknowledging the need for safety, they say their unmet energy needs give them little choice but to continue investing in nuclear power.
“Ours is a very power-hungry country,“ Srikumar Banerjee, the chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, said during a news conference Monday in Mumbai. Nearly 40 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people do not have regular access to electricity, Mr. Banerjee said. “It is essential for us to have further electricity generation.“
And in China, which has the world’s most ambitious nuclear expansion plans, a vice minister of environment, Zhang Lijun, said on Saturday that Japan’s difficulties would not deter his nation’s nuclear rollout.

I hope the officials in India and China are closely watching these developments, because one of the many issues with, for instance, with the proposed nucler power generation complex in Jaitapur in India is the fact that it will be located in a seismic zone.  Though not as active as the Pacific Ring of Fire, the Indian Subcontinent experiences earthquakes, the worst of all in recent times was the quake in Pakistani Kashmir.  China is not immune from shakes either. 

One of the interesting ways in which India is going after its nuclear power program is this: the country:

makes nuclear power plant suppliers, not just operators, liable if accidents occur.
Despite American pressure to change that provision, the Japan disaster could encourage Indian legislators to keep it in place.
G.E. and Westinghouse have said they will stay out of the Indian nuclear market unless the country changes its liability law to conform with international standards.

Interesting how the American suppliers didn't want to play by those stricter liability rules!

Anyway, back to the energy issue itself.  I hope the  Fukushima nuclear incident will be a serious wake up call on the growing energy demands and the limitations related to fossil fuels.  We ought to have woken up to this back in the oil-shock years betwen 1973 and 1981.  We didn't.  We didn't even bother to talk about energy in the aftermath of 9/11.  We simply dusted off the BP oil spill nightmare last year.  And, yet again, I am afraid that we will ignore the energy question all together.

It is not whether or not we are for nuclear power that ought to be the discussion for the moment.  To paraphrase that famous political slogan from years ago, it's the energy, stupid!

My worry is about the cooling pools for spent fuels:

The pools are a worry at the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because at least two of the reactors have lost their roofs in explosions, exposing the spent fuel pools to the atmosphere. By contrast, reactors have strong containment vessels that stand a better chance of bottling up radiation from a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor core.
If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.
“It’s worse than a meltdown,” said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. “The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.”
A spokesman for the Japanese company that runs the stricken reactors said in an interview on Monday that the spent fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini plants had been left uncooled since shortly after the quake.

The exaggeration of Fukushima: I hate fossil fuels more

Last spring/summer, I blogged, a lot, about the big news story at that time--the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Even then, I noted in one post that our demand for energy means that, given the available technology, there will always be environmental impacts associated with how get that energy:

there are no technical answers to those challenges--as in technical answers for zero impacts.  Which is why then we resolve those trade-offs in the political domain. 

I am reminded of these trade-offs as I follow the Fukushima nuclear power story, about the potential for a partial or complete meltdown in one, two, or even three reactors there, out of the six.

Like everybody else, I am no fan of the radiation hazards and the waste issues that always worry us when it comes to generating electricity from nuclear reactions.  But then we so easily tend to ignore the hazards associated with coal, petroleum and natural gas, which, globally, are the dominant sources of power generation.

I don't suppose we have forgotten already the massive spills in the Gulf.  The explosion that killed the workers on that offshore platform.  Images of the ever spreading oil, and birds trapped to their death.  And, this was not even a natural disaster.

And that was merely one oil spill.  There are a lot worse ongoing horror stories in the oil-rich delta areas of Nigeria, in the ecologically sensitive areas of Ecuador, ... one could list them forever.

Coal is no easy matter either.  As I routinely remind students, every step along the process of electricity from coal has horrible impacts on humans, other life forms, and the physical environment.  Surely we haven't forgotten the other gripping story from last spring--the Massey Coal mine accident that killed 29 miners.  Again, this is merely one of many accidents worldwide.  Strip mining and mountaintop removal is are no advantages either.

Yet, for some reason, we time and again overlook all the complications related to fossil fuels, and focus exclusively on nuclear power.

I was afraid that I am in some echo chamber happily listening to my own voice on this matter and, therefore, started looking around.  Boy do I have some good company!

William Saletan expresses similar observations, and advises not to exaggerate the Fukushima crisis:

In advanced countries like Japan and the United States, nuclear plants are built to standards no drilling rig can touch. If a sensor, cable, or power source fails, another sensor, cable, or power source is available. Containers of steel or concrete envelop the reactors to prevent massive radiation leaks. Chernobyl didn't have such a container. Three Mile Island did. That's why Three Mile Island produced no uncontrolled leakage or injuries.

Saletan provides this comparative statistic:

If Japan, the United States, or Europe retreats from nuclear power in the face of the current panic, the most likely alternative energy source is fossil fuel. And by any measure, fossil fuel is more dangerous. The sole fatal nuclear power accident of the last 40 years, Chernobyl, directly killed 31 people. By comparison, Switzerland's Paul Scherrer Institute calculates that from 1969 to 2000, more than 20,000 people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain. More than 15,000 people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain—11,000 in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is 18 times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power.

Of course, it doesn't mean that we can overlook the nuclear crisis.  We need to, and will, learn from this and design additional safety features that nature will later challenge us.  But, we need to keep the destruction to life and property in perspective.  Not too far away from Fukushima was the refinery that was up in flames, and as of the latest reports those fires have not been completely extinguished.  But, above all, we need to place all this against the damage to life and property from the earthquake and tsunami, which were the causes for the nuclear crisis too.  Estimates are that the tally of the dead might exceed 10,000 and many times more rendered homeless.  Spiked tackles this line of thinking:

In contrast to the devastation across Japan, however, the accident has – at the time of writing – so far caused only 15 injuries, just one of which appears to be serious, and a handful of suspected cases of exposure to radiation, none of which appear to be serious. So why is there such a preoccupation with the nuclear power plant? 

Yeah, why such a preoccupation?  Spiked doesn't have a convincing answer, but concludes on a strong note:

it should be pointed out that earthquakes and tsunamis cause much greater problems for humans than nuclear power ever has. Furthermore, where nuclear power is a possibility ie, in wealthy economies, the effect of earthquakes and tsunamis is mitigated, and their consequences more easily ameliorated than in poorer regions. The 2004 Asian tsunami, and the earthquake in Haiti last year, were smaller in magnitude than last Friday’s events, but came at a much higher human cost than in Japan. Poverty, and the earth’s natural forces, are far more dangerous than our attempts to protect ourselves from them.

This affluence has saved lots of lives in Japan.  In contrast to the shakes in Haiti, Pakistan, China, the shaking itself did not kill comparable numbers in Japan because the wealth makes possible better and safer structures.  Even the NY Times has picked up on it:

Japan has gone much further than the United States in outfitting new buildings with advanced devices called base isolation pads and energy dissipation units to dampen the ground’s shaking during an earthquake.
The isolation devices are essentially giant rubber-and-steel pads that are installed at the very bottom of the excavation for a building, which then simply sits on top of the pads. The dissipation units are built into a building’s structural skeleton. They are hydraulic cylinders that elongate and contract as the building sways, sapping the motion of energy. ...
the United States standard is focused on preventing collapse, while in Japan — with many more earthquakes — the goal is to prevent any major damage to the buildings because of the swaying.
New apartment and office developments in Japan flaunt their seismic resistance as a marketing technique, a fact that has accelerated the use of the latest technologies

If you want to get an idea of how much such advanced engineering works, watch the skyscraper sway like a pendulum in the video below:



My point is this: it is easy to worry about the problems related to nuclear energy, and we have to be worried.  But, by focusing exclusively on this, we let the fossil fuel problems slide by as if they don't matter at all, and in reality they are worse.  But, more than anything else, all these mean that we are refusing to recognize the most basic issue: we--across the planet--have enormous demand for energy, and that demand is increasing rapidly.  What alternatives do we have right now for that huge demand for energy?