[LINK] Some Japan nuclear energy links

[rfmcdonald]

Doug Saunders' "Japan’s Nuclear-Energy Contest of Terrors: Nature vs Technology vs Climate" calls for calm. He, like Edward Hugh, also mentions the Lisbon earthquake.

The Japanese nuclear disaster is bad: Many people could be killed, and the area immediately surrounding the plant could become uninhabitable. But it could not become a Chernobyl-style disaster, with a carbon fire spreading radiation beyond the plant’s vicinity and injuring thousands. No reactors today are built that way.

On the other hand, it is a type of plant – the 1960s-era General Electric Mark 1 – that has been known since 1972 to be flawed and vulnerable to this type of disaster, and it has just been exposed to the fifth-largest earthquake in recorded history.

It shows us that nuclear plants must be better regulated and such cheap designs avoided or decommissioned, but it is hardly a condemnation of the technology. If the earthquake had burst a major dam – an event that would have killed thousands more people immediately – would the world have suddenly turned against hydroelectric generation?

More importantly, though, the Japanese moment represents a global choice, a fulcrum point in history.

We are being assaulted from three sides. First by nature, raw and unfettered, humanity’s oldest and most constant enemy.

Second by our technology, gone terribly wrong and used carelessly – second only to nature as a threat to our being, as the words Auschwitz and Hiroshima ought to remind us constantly.

And third, by nature again, this time altered and distorted by our presence – an atmosphere too dense with our particles and gasses, requiring action to render it less of a threat.

That great Lisbon earthquake in 1755 taught us all a crucial lesson: We are alone in the world, without a beneficent God to protect us. Nature is not our gift from heaven but both our source of sustenance and our most pressing antagonist, and we must use our guile and devices to make nature work with us, not against us.

Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton, after noting that oddly people are not horrified by collapsing hydroelectric dams, dislikes the impoverished public knowledge of nuclear energy.

Not that it's not built to withstand a magnitude 9 megathrust earthquake, hundreds of kilometers away from the fault line where this quake is most likely to occur. Not that its emergency diesel generators are vulnerable to ten-meter tsunamis of the sort that are the actual cause of the Fukushima crisis, which we all know are totally common on the Columbia River. That it uses the same "radioactive fuel rods." You know what? I guess that makes it - gasp - a nuclear reactor! I'm no nuclear engineer, but isn't it safe to say that the problem with Fukushima Daiichi was not that it uses radioactive fuel rods, but that it was designed in such a way that mechanical pumps were necessary to get coolant to the reactors, and not in such a way that gravity would do the pumps' work?

None of that matters to the media, it seems. Right now, people are keyed up and scared shitless about atoms and radiation. The other day I saw a news ticker about how people in British Columbia were stocking up on "iodine" pills - putting aside the question of whether this was a typo or people were actually stocking up on iodine instead of potassium iodide, which is what you want when you want to protect yourself from thyroid cancer - because of fears of a radioactive cloud blowing across the Pacific.

Keep in mind that the Pacific is big. It is, in fact, more than seven thousand kilometers from Tokyo to Vancouver. If radiation is such that iodide would become a good investment here, I very much doubt that any human would be able to survive on Honshu without glowing. But many people only have a surface understanding of it - for many people, it's a case of radiation coming, and radiation is bad.

Gerry Canavan, meanwhile, posted an interesting if essentializing excerpt from a text on the relative weakness of the Japanese anti-nuclear movement saying that--in true Toynbee fashion--after Hiroshima and Nagasaki confronting nuclear weapons was impossible. Yes, Toynbee.

Noel Maurer noted that with rising costs for nuclear plants, perhaps connected to the sorts of safety regulations other plants aren't put through, nuclear energy may not be economic any time soon.