Tuesday 19 March 2013

Fukushima Daiichi without power - kind of

Last night cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi malfunctioned, leaving the spent fuel pools of reactors 1, 3 and 4 without circulating cooling water for several hours. TEPCO announced that the problem was due to malfunctioning power distribution boards.

According to what I can make of the NHK news site and the TEPCO press release, cooling has been restored to fuel pools 1 and 4; and TEPCO plans to restore power to spent fuel pool 3 this evening and the shared spent fuel pool tomorrow morning.

While temperatures in the affected pools rose slightly, there has been no increase in radiation.

The NHK 7pm news focused on the gap of 3 hours between the loss of power and the announcement to the media by TEPCO 3 hours later, which is being treated as very suspicious in the Japanese media. Interestingly, it also took 3 hours for the Nuclear Regulation Authority to make an announcement, and there was also, somewhat confusingly, video of the NRA chairman Shunichi Tanaka lamenting the delay.

A TEPCO spokesman said "It was considered that the information should be confirmed before being released to the public."

But this is merely the latest incident in a long list of the minor technical issues that have occurred during the clean up of what is, after all, a major industrial accident. I have to tell you, the TEPCO website is not exciting reading.

Of more interest to the skeptical observer is how the incident is being protrayed. This post by ENE 'news' (read: fearmongering) demonstrates my point nicely. It is merely some phrases from a Kyodo news piece cherry picked to provide an impression of imminent destruction. Let's have a closer look:

Kyodo at 2:29p ET: “Tepco hasn’t been able to work out steps to ensure bringing system back online” at Fukushima Daiichi — No ‘major’ changes in radioactivity

The original Kyodo piece has the words 'As of 1.45 a.m.' added onto the beginning of the sentence, which temporally limits the damage to a technical hiccup, instead of giving the impression that TEPCO has been struggling and failing for an extended period (days? weeks?).

The inverted commas around 'major' lend doubt to the word. They give the impression that TEPCO is fudging or lying, that 'no major changes' may in fact be something much more serious and sinister. Neither that ENE piece or any other repeat later Kyodo observation that radiation readings have not been abnormal in any way.

I could go on for hours about that website. After reading it, I am mostly left with the impression that people are way to uncritical. Is it really too difficult, for example, to find and read the original Kyodo article?

Saturday 16 March 2013

The Infinite Promise of Methane Hydrate!

The Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe appeared on NHK 9pm news to answer a few softball questions about economic policy, foreign policy and energy.

Abe is known to be favourable to nuclear power and defended Japan's new Nuclear Regulation Authority, basically saying that the nation's nuclear power plants will be given permission to restart after 'the most rigorous set of safety regulations in the world' have been drawn up and enforced.

He predicted that it would take about 10 years before the nation decided the 'best energy mix'.

There was also the claim that Japan was developing renewable forms of energy and making new sources of energy available such as methane hydrate. He proceeded to talk up methane hydrate quite a bit, and indeed lately this stuff has been getting quite a bit of coverage in the media.

So just what is it and can it help anybody's energy problems?

Methane hydrate is a fossil fuel, originally created by decomposing bacteria, deposits of natural gas trapped within the crystalline structure of frozen water...300 meters or more below the sea.

It is estimated that there is a lot of the stuff around the world - more than the world's estimated reserves of conventional gas, for example. And Japan has a great deal.

The question is whether methane hydrate could be accessed in a commercially viable way. Last Tuesday it was announced by Japan's Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry that a team had succeeded in extracting natural gas from a methane hydrate bed 1300 meters under the sea off the coast of Aichi Prefecture.

Yet there is no promise yet that this new fuel can be economically viable. The best guess I came across was that it would be 4 times the current cost of conventional gas. Not really something to change the world.

Hopefully.

Because it appears that methane hydrate, apart from being an expensive boondoggle and a way for the LDP to divert attention from real energy issues, may be an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen. Methane is highly carbon-intensive, and it is estimated that methane hydrates contain more carbon than all the world's other fossil resources combined.

And while it is hoped that technology may be developed to prevent that carbon reaching the atmosphere, as yet there is no guarantee this is possible.
In any case I will not be holding my breath waiting for methane hydrate to come and rescue Japan. Abe can talk in NHK interviews about 'magic hydrate', renewables, and other fantasies as much as he likes. He knows and we know that Japan's choices come down to ...
 
...conventional fossil fuels versus nuclear.

Thursday 14 March 2013

So what about that WHO report?

At the end of last month the World Health Organization released its health risk assessment of the Fukushima accident. At 172 pages it is not light reading and I am still digesting it.

The main findings are well-known: that outside of Fukshima there are no predicted health affects, and that within the prefecture the risks for 2 or 3 kinds of cancers are raised marginally for people exposed as infants...in two small towns near the plant.

Since the risk is almost immeasurably small, and since the population of those two affected towns is also small, it is thought that any rise in the number of cancers will probably be undectable statistically; such is the importance of the mass of confounding factors when it comes to the health effects of low-dose radiation.

What stands out from a close reading of the report is how careful and moderated it is. The language is couched in terms of maybes and possiblys and likelys.

It is definitely worth noting that the authors have written a report that, if in error, errs on the side of caution. This is stated explicitly in the summary:

"The dose estimates and assumptions used in this assessment were deliberately chosen to minimize the possibility of underestimating eventual health risks."

Another way of putting this is to say that the potential of overestimating the health risks is very real.

Considering the shaky foundations of the LNT theory, it is indeed quite feasible that there will be no health affects at all. In any case, it will probably be impossible to prove one way or the other, simply because the concerned population will most probably end up indistinguishable from any other.

Wednesday 13 March 2013

China defeats Japan!

...in the battle of rational energy policy, that is.

Japan still has all but 2 of its 54 nuclear reactors in shutdown. Meanwhile the Nuclear Regulatory Authority, denigrated by some as being in cahoots with the nuclear industry and thus untrustworthy when it comes to safety, is actually threatening public safety by not allowing as many plants to restart as possible. It's guidelines that have been imposed nationwide are unnecessarily and prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.

Politically and economically, Japan is falling further and further behind a rising China. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the two countries' divergent energy policies. Following the accident at Fukushima, China temporaily halted construction of new nuclear plants pending a nation-wide safety review. Construction cautiously resumed in October 2012, and there are now 30 plants under construction, which will add another 33 GW of production. By 2020, when the total capaciy of China's units will reach 58 GW, the country will have the third largest nuclear fleet in the world, behind the U.S. and France. China is developing its own technology and is now a world leader with the accelerated development of the ACPR1000, as well as the world's first commercialization of 4th-generation nuclear technology that uses a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor.

Yet in the face of this revolution in energy production on the part of its rival, Japan is seemingly obsessed with navel-gazing and is in danger of turning away from nuclear altogether. In fact it is returning to pollution-intensive fossil fuels which immeasurably enrich the coffers of oil, gas and coal companies. Every time an anti-nuclear protest interrupts the traffic in downtown Tokyo, oil and gas company executives open another bottle of champagne. The mothballing of nuclear power in Japan is costing 10s of billions of dollars yearly and is causing the country's ballooning trade deficit, which didn't exist before 2011.

It is no wonder this country is becoming an economic and political backwater.

Japan's untenable position is further demonstrated almost nightly with alarmist reports on television about P.M. 2.5 drifting over from China. This particulate matter is largely created by China's coal-burning power plants, which provide electricity for China's rapidly expanding industries...many of which produce things which were once made here in Japan. It is a serious problem which the Chinese government is genuinely addressing through the best means available - rapid expansion of the nuclear industry. It is truly interesting that anti-nuclear 'envirnomentalists' are nowhere to be found when the issue of PM 2.5 is raised...an irony which does not escape the observant among us.

Tuesday 12 March 2013

Commemorating Two Years of Madness and Paranoia!

Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that led to the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The media of both Japan and Australia marked the occasion with a veritable orgy of fear-mongering and exaggeration, plus a fair dollop of outright lies.

The Sydney Morning Herald led the way with this quite extraordinarily disingenous piece by Helen Caldicott. She got quite carried away about the forthcoming cancers at Fukushima, without even mentioning the recent WHO report which stated that ... there probably won't be any.

The Japan Times made only the slightest effort at balance. There were articles about families living in substandard housing after fleeing the radiation, the dubious links the Nuclear Regulation Authority has to the nuclear industry, and of anti-nuclear rallies all around the nation. Worst of all, there was a dreadful (and, I suspect, almost completely fabricated) propaganda piece about an accident at the Byron nuclear plant in Illnois. Among other outright lies it contained the claim that the accident resulted in several deaths and illnesses. In actuality, there have been no fatalities caused by radiation in the American nuclear power industry since its inception 60 years ago.

Hardly noticeable among all the negativity was a short piece reporting that radiation levels around Fukushima have dropped by half in the last year...