Fukushima Refugees - Will they return or won't they?

Some interesting news tonight on the NHK 7 o'clock.

It seems there is some new government policy being formulated regarding Fukushima refugees and whether they will be allowed to return and, if so, when.

As I understand it, there are 80,000 refugees currently receiving compensation payouts. According to tonight's news, 25,000 don't know whether they will be allowed back at all.

The most polluted area is around the town of Namie. Tonight it was reported that the level of radiation was 4 microsieverts/hr. It was also stated that some areas are over 50 mSv/year. Since 4 microsieverts an hour only adds up to about 35 mSv/year, something is a little out already, but, whatever.

It's worthwhile noting that adverse human health effects have never been reported in areas with 35 or 50 mSv of radiation a year. In fact, the lowest level at which negative health effects have ever been observed is 100 mSv, and that was in a single dose (at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), not a very low dose spread out over an entire year. But that's a topic for another day.

So what is the Japanese government now considering while they prevent stressed and elderly residents from returning to completely safe homes in the clean and fresh countryside? Under the new proposals, some residents may never be able to return, and will receive sizable compensation payouts (paid from taxpayers funds) instead.

And because the Japanese government will obviously still have too much money left over, there are additional plans for further decontamination work, which (surprise surprise) has been unable to significantly reduce decontamination in many areas.

Since tens of millions of dollars have already been spent on decontamination efforts, successfully reducing radiation levels from completely safe to 'not significantly' lower than that, what's a few million more spent?

692 million dollars a week

Since all but two of Japan's nuclear power plants have been shut off since the Fukushima accident, Japan's utilities have had to pay huge sums of money for imported fuels to burn in order to replace the energy the nuclear plants would have generated.

In fact, according to Bloomberg in this fiscal year TEPCO and eight other power companies will pay 3.6 trillion yen more in fuel costs. These companies have been importing huge amounts of oil, LNG and coal.

This works out to an astounding 692 million dollars a week.

3.6 trillion yen is about 36 billion dollars, depending on the exchange rate. This increase in fossil-fuel imports is also forcing Japan to have a third annual trade deficit in a row.

Of course Japan can completely afford that. It's not like they any problems with massive debt or anything like that, is it?

TEPCO applying to start up reactors

TEPCO today formally applied for safety assessments from the NRA for two of its reactors at the currently idle Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata prefecture. The nuclear plant is the largest in the world, with a total of 7 reactors capable of producing 8.2 gigawatts of power - enough to power a small country.

TEPCO is desperate to get some of its reactors started up again as it is currently haemorraghing cash while its reactors are idle. It is due to receive 380 billion yen in loans from the government later this year just to keep ticking over, and it is estimated that turning on 2 reactors could cut fuel costs by 200-300 billion a year.

However it's not clear when or if the NRA will judge the nuclear plants to have fulfilled the new stringent guidelines that are now in place. Among other things, it seems that these days nuclear plant operators seem vulnerable to the accusation that their nuclear plants lie over active geological faultlines. Of course it doesn't help that the definition of 'active' seems to be very generous indeed.

In another entry into the irony files, NHK tonight featured a lengthy broadcast about the new IPCC report on global warming, just after the stories about TEPCO.

The phrase 'a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is needed' was uttered. Oh dear.

"Tainted" rainwater dumped at Fukushima

During Monday's typhoon, massive amounts of rain fell on the Fukushima plant. Some of the rainwater accumulated in the barriers that surround the storage tanks holding contaminated water, and staff allowed about 1000 tons of rain to sluice out into drainage ditches and into the sea. The level of radioactivity in this water was minute - according to the Japan Times 24 becquerels per liter or less - which is thousands of times less radioactive than some of the water being stored in the tanks.

Even this discharge is viewed by some as disastrous. What anti-nuclear activists think might be done with rainwater falling on a damaged nuclear site was never made clear, especially as such rainwater is less radioactive than coffee or Brazil nuts or bananas or any of a hundred different mundance substances.

Although, to be honest, I do know what they would like to be done with it. I think people like Arnie Gundersen and Chris Busby would like all the rain captured and stored, so that they can then proclaim that the amount of contaminated water stored on site has increased by thousands of tons...

Massive typhoon ... causes no damage to anything nuclear

Japan today was lashed by a large typhoon that hit the island of Honshu. There are a few people dead, others missing.

There's a chance this may turn into another fearmongering session (depending on the news cycle) because TEPCO released water that had accumulated between storage tanks due to the excess rainfall. The radiation level was lower than the accepted level so TEPCO just released it into the sea. It remains to be seen if this becomes a fearful news item.

It's worth making the point that nuclear reactors are much more resistant to natural disasters than non-nuclear facilities, due to layers of stringent engineering. Despite claims to the contrary, for example, it seems clear that the earthquake of 3/ll damaged Fukushima Daiichi not all.

Nuclear plants on board submarines have continued to operate after collisions with undersea mountains, other vessels etc.

Anti-nuclear activists love to press the meme that nuclear power plants are vulnerable to natural disasters like earthquakes or typhoons. They would do better to worry about non-nuclear facilities like dams and oil refineries, which can sometimes fail catastrophically.

Fukushima Mutant Fish to Destory Tokyo!

Over the last few weeks there have been a stream of fearmongering articles in the press detailing leakage of contaminated water from Fukushima Daiichi.

The most feverish have described a leaking storage tank said to have discharged up to 300 tons of contaminated water into surrounding soil. Apparently a seal on the tank has failed and water has slipped out, over a rainwater dam and seeped into the ground. The water has been described as highly radioactive - up to 1800 mSv/hour.

Well, 1800 mSv/hour seems a lot, until you read that the vast bulk is beta radiation which only goes 1-2 meters through the air and is stopped by paper or clothing. The reading is so high because the measurement was made right next to the source. In fact, what the fearmongering articles do not say is that this water is nothing special - it's just the same water that has been leaking on and off since March 11 2011, without anybody caring too much, and completely insignificant next to the radiation releases of March and April 2011, which themselves have not impacted anybody's health in any observable way.

For some reason it is only now that these irrelevant figures are being bandied about. The water has not affected worker health in any way and no contamination has been detected offsite. Indeed, there is no special reason to believe that any of this water has entered the Pacific Ocean at all.

Even if it did, any radiation in the water would be swamped by the natural background radiation that exists in every ocean around the world; its impact would be negligible, and, if measurable at all, only because humans are extrememly adept at creating instrumentation that can measure minute traces of radioactive products that would otherwise not be noted by anyone and have no effect on anything.

This hasn't stopped massive overreactions in differernt parts of the world. The Korean government, for example, has banned seafood imports from a bunch of Japanese prefectures based on fear of these leaks. Even my otherwise harmless aunt in Sydney is afraid of the water in Fukushima!

The nuclear debate is filled with ironies that frustrate those who approach the issue rationally. Beta radiation is chump change. So far from these leaks being a real problem, probably the best thing to do with the entire quantity of waste water being stored at Fukushima is to filter out what you can, and just dump the rest into the Pacific!

This New Scientist article points out exactly that.

How to lose your faith in the environmental movement.

The Greens have always suffered from a bad image outside the urban middle-class. They are seen as supported by lefty latte-sipping yuppies, a charge I've always thought rather harmless (what's wrong with drinking latte anyway?) A more serious accusation in my view is the common opinion that the Greens are watermelons, green on the outside and red on the inside. Another way of saying this is that if you dig through the envirnomentally-friendly exterior, the Greens are rabid socialists who are bent on destruction, and desperate to start waving red flags around before seizing control of the state and returning control of the means of production to the workers. Followed by bloodbath.

While I don't think there's much truth in this, it appears to me now incontrovertible that the Green movement is compromised by ideology. The Autralian Greens embody this as much as anybody. Their ideology is 100% in line with a vague 'harmony with nature' position that is never really thought through, and which in many cases actually causes conflict with efforts to improve our environment and work towards a sustainable global future.

The regrettable blindness of the Greens is demonstrated in a video debate which featured, amongst others, the leader of the Greens Christine Milne, and the nuclear advocate Ben Heard. The video can be seen here and her answers clearly demonstrate that the Green oppositon to nuclear power is ideological and not rational. The same applies to her clearly unrealistic hopes for renewable energy to produce massive amounts of reliable power in the future.

I have seen and fought the whole Fukushima debacle from the very beginning and it gets my goat to see it brought up as a negative. Even more disconcerting is the realisation that the ultimate source of the Green objection to nuclear power is the natural fallacy. When the natural fallacy is allowed to overrule scientific reality, well, it's all downhill from there.

The whole thing is so regrettable because environmentalists should be rushing to support and demand nuclear power. There is hardly anything in the world which could have such a beneficial effect upon the Earth's environment as the widespread adoption of nuclear technology.