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.

Whatever happened to climate change in Australia?

From what you might have been reading or hearing about in Australia, climate change might as well have stopped, as it was barely mentioned during the election campaign. Far from being the great moral challenge of our generation it seems no longer to exist at all...

This is very curious because it was climate change and how Australia should best address it that has been the churning engine of the country's insane politics over the last 6 years.

First it was Kevin Rudd who first opened the game with his pulse-raising claim, then let everybody down when he couldn't actually follow through and implement an emissions trading scheme (ETS). To further compound the irony, the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, faced rebellion within his party when he supported an ETS and eventually lost the leadership to Tony Abott, with the rivalry pivoting around this issue. The madness continued when Rudd's public backflip on the policy helped contribute to his image of unreliability when in turn led to the leadership spill and his loss of prime ministership to Julia Gillard.

But all that constitutes only half of the craziness. The Labor party was heavily damaged by the backstabbing of Rudd by Gillard, and barely squeaked into power in the next election by negotiating with independents. Gillard had promised never to introduce a carbon tax in her government, but then found herself in a hung parliament in which her party could only retain power by allying itself with the Greens, who demanded a carbon tax leading to an ETS as their price for support. This unfortunate situation helped cement her image as untrustworthy, a supposed character flaw which the oppostion, led by Abott, harped on relentlessly. The Greens exacted their price and the Clean Energy Bill did eventually became law in November 2011, but has been controversial the whole time.

Gillard's declining popularity and the looming disaster of the upcoming election led to a comeback by Kevin Rudd, but that seemed to have done almost no good at all in reversing Labor's fortunes, and Tony Abbott is now prime minister. It's no secret he is a climate change skeptic and one of his policy stands is a repeal of the Clean Energy Bill. He plans to replace it with a $2.5 billion 'direct action' policy which nobody (let alone Tony Abbott) seriously believes will achieve anything.

All of this raises the question of why the Australia electorate has lost interest in climate change. Well, that's a question for another day.

The last and greatest irony of this whole debacle is that ETS schemes and carbon taxes are almost completely ineffective at mitigating climate change. This entire drama has been unnecessary.

Only nuclear power can both massively reduce emissions and keep global living standards rising.

There's no getting around that fact.

Tokyo gets Olympics despite Fukushima

Yesterday the IOC awarded the 2020 Olympics to Tokyo.

The Japanese delegation to Buenos Aires, where the decision was made, was forced continually to defend Tokyo from the accusation that it was in danger from Fukushima radiation. Even prime minster Shinzo Abe had to answer questions from IOC delegates and reassure them that radiaton levels in Tokyo were lower than in Paris or New York.

While it's some comfort to know that IOC delegates were not disturbed enough by Fukushima misinformation to vote against Tokyo, it is far from ideal that the issue had to be raised at all.

It is hard to imagine anything in the universe that will affect the Tokyo Olympics less than radiation from Fukushima Daiichi. Radiation from the accident is measurable now only in parts of Fukushima prefecture itself. Athletes will receive massively more radiation in the international flights going to Japan than from radiation in Tokyo. The irony is that genuine (or at least measurable) threats to health in a big city, such as smog, went completely unmentioned by the IOC or journalists covering the announcement. On the other hand, if actual contamination - in the form of air pollution - were taken seriously, perhaps the Beijing Olympics, for example, would not have been held at all.

The Possible Future

“In 20 years the West’s third world bankrupt ghg spewing economies will be running on 40 cents a kwh wind and 90 cents a kwh solar but getting all its energy from 17 cents a kwh gas, while the BRIC country’s zero GHG populace will be laughing at our dumb butts while running their prosperous country on penny a kwh Gen IV nuclear.”

TEPCO's yearly financial report - drowning in crap

Today Japan's electricity providers released their end-of-year financial reports. All but 2 are in arrears, because of fuel costs for 'thermal' power generation (ie, greenhouse-gas intensive fossil fuels). Costs have been rising both because the importation of LNG has become more expensive in general, and because of the weakening yen. These costs are on top of the extensive expenditure needed to keep their nuclear power plants maintained in the hopes of eventual restart.

TEPCO announced a massive loss of 685 billion yen (6.8 billion dollars). In addition to running their power plants on imported fossil fuels, the electricity provider has also had to deal with the situation at Fukushima (408 million dollars) and pay compensation claims for the evacuees and cleanup (another 11 billion dollars!).

It hardly needs saying that the vast bulk of this expenditure is unnecessary. As the accident neither killed or harmed anybody, evacuation and its associated problems were avoidable. Costs of decommissioning Fukushima Daiichi would of course be considerable, but nothing like the massive losses that have been incurred as a result of Japan turning its back on nuclear power.

Nuclear power -saving millions of lives.

James Hansen was NASA's former point man on climate change and is famed for his testimony on the issue for congressional committees in America. Recently he has become a high-profile advocate for the more widespread adoption of nuclear power, both in the fight against global warming and because of its other obvious advantages over fossil fuels.

The health dangers of burning coal are well-documented; coal pollution kills between 1 and 2 million people annually. On the other hand it has long been known that nuclear power is a much safer way to produce electricity. The number of people killed by nuclear power is orders of magnitude fewer than the number killed by coal, even with the most pessimistic of unproven assumptions.

But until now nobody has tried to estimate the number of lives saved by nuclear power. James Hansen and co-author Pushker Karecha have published a new paper with NASA's Goddard Institute that has put a figure on this. The study is a masterpiece of understated but hugely important findings. The most important finding is that from 1971 until now, nuclear energy has prevented 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths, including 160,000 in Japan alone.

And depending on how many nuclear plants are built and on what fuel it replaces, nuclear power will prevent between 420,000 and 7.04 million deaths by 2050.

These statistics do not take into account damage and deaths caused by climate change. If used to prevent global carbon dioxide emissions by substituting for the burning of coal, nuclear power could be even more effective at death prevention.

This is the kind of story that many so-called environmentalists chose to ignore. Others such as James Hansen have accepted that the only realistic way to both address the world's energy needs and reduce global carbon dioxide emissions is through the embrace of nuclear technology.

More from the Japan Times

The J.Times is turning into a battlefield over the nuclear issue. This may be good for its circulation, but it demonstrates neatly part of the whole problem: the media benefits by keeping an artificial controversy alive. If decisions were made on a rational basis, and newspaper articles were fact-checked against the scientific consensus, there would be no 'battleground'.

So in the last few weeks,

I wrote a letter in reply to this misinformed piece, which makes the common fundamental mistake of supposing that the Fukushima accident is part of Japan's decline, rather than the country's nuclear retreat being the problem.

Nuclear retreat signals decline

In his March 12 Community page article, “Do dire predictions for Japan factor in a rush for the exits?,” Colin P.A. Jones makes a tragic error, an error repeated all too often in the media by those critical of both nuclear power and Japan’s general direction. He sees the government’s response to the Fukushima accident as symptomatic of a deeper malaise in Japan itself. This is wrong for two reasons.
For one, the government’s handling of the situation, despite problems, has been praised by international bodies like the International Atomic Energy Agency. If anything, authorities were overcautious in response to an accident that resulted in zero deaths or injuries. More importantly, far from the Fukushima accident illustrating the government’s misplaced priorities, Japan’s retreat from nuclear power is part of its general decline.
This irony is not lost on observers of Japan’s economic and diplomatic rival, China, which has displayed a much more pragmatic and rational approach to nuclear energy.
Following the accident at Fukushima, that country launched a nationwide safety review. Construction resumed last year, and there are now 30 plants under construction.
China’s nuclear boom is emblematic of the country’s economic and technological growth, and those plants will provide power to the nation’s factories, many of which, by the way, are busy making things once made in Japan. By comparison, Japan seems obsessed with navel-gazing and is even considering a permanent return to the evils of coal, oil and gas.
It’s enough to make anyone “rush for the exits.”



I thought at first the letter had dissappeared without making much of a splash, but in fact it elicicited this counter-letter. The author brings up the issue of '13,000' deaths caused by the evacuation, when in reality people who died in the evacuation were killed not by radiation, but by Fear of Radiation, a very different beast indeed.

Then, like every other person opposed to nuclear power he is faced with the dilemma of how to deal with its ability to generate electricity without producing carbon emissions. In response he chooses to deny the reality of global warming.

When it comes to the issue of climate change, nuclear power has the incredible ability to mitigate global warming while still providing colossal amounts of energy. This is a truly game-changing capability. Every person opposed to nuclear power must either ignore this ability, an indefensible hypocrisy, or argue the route of climate change denialism.

This is a stark choice indeed.



 

The NRA approves new safety guidelines - Human incredulity tested.

The Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority today approved a new set of safety guidelines for nuclear power plants, possibly as a test of human wastefulness, overreaction and incredulity.

The draft guidelines, which will be finalised by July, include requirements for the construction of earthquake-proof command centres that have food and supplies to last a week without outside aid. Also required is the installation of filters designed to release pressure from containment vessels but filter out radioactive substances in the case of accident. The most absurd rule (in my view) is that plants build seawalls that can protect the site from the maximum predicted tsunami height.

Plant operators have estimated that upgrading existing reactors to comply with these guidelines will cost about 10.8 billion dollars.

Is it really possible that such overreaction can take place as a consequence of an accident that killed or injured noone? It's like some kind of surreal dream.

The seawall requirement I find to be particularly irksome. It was not the lack of a suitably high seawall that caused the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, it was simply the fact that generators that powered the cooling systems were not placed above flood level, leading to the meltdowns.

Building massive seawalls around every seaside nuclear plant in Japan will achieve nothing except the enrichment of concrete and fossil fuel companies. That Japan is ordering plant operators to prepare for a tsunami event that occurs every 800 years yet is easily mitigated by placing generators on higher ground is bad enough. Worse is the naked disrespect for actual people's lives this demonstrates. If the NRA really prioritized human safety, it would mandate the construction of seawalls around residential areas. In the current plans, the only thing that will happen in case of a disastrous tsunami is that the nuclear plants will be untouched while nearby residents drown in their thousands, which indeed is what happened in Fukushima two years ago.

Perhaps the NRA should consider the human implications of the construction of a 20-metre seawall.

Radioactive ... water!

Wide news coverage today over new leaks from the storage tanks at Fukushima Daiichi.

It seems there have been leaks from two water tanks built to store contaminated water used in the cooling of the three stricken reactors. Last Friday one of the pools leaked 120 tons of contaminated water. Last night a further 3 liters leaked from another storage tank.

The Japan Times weighed in with a fairly measured piece that reported the larger of the two leaks poured 710 billion becquerels of radiation into the environment (apparently the ground under the tank). What they didn't attempt to include however was any assessment of what 710 billion becquerels might mean. Which is, basically, not a lot. Once diluted in the largest body of water on the globe - the Pacific Ocean - this radiation will be far below natural background levels. It will still be detectable over large areas, but only because scientists have the means to measure extraordinarily low concentrations of radioactive particles from artificial sources.

Essentially this leak, like all the other leaks since the end of March 2011, is not an issue that seriously concerns nuclear scientists. What is far more interesting than yet another minor hiccup in a huge industrial clean-up is the usual overreaction on the part of the anti-nuclear press.

Just the comments after this cherry-picked rubbish piece should give pause to any skeptical thinker. There is an unbelievable level of confirmation bias and unwarranted extrapolation that, well, you just don't find on pro-nuclear sites. The level of groupthink is truly depressing.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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...

China invades Japan!

With P.M. 2.5 that is.

Tonight NHK news broadcast only the latest and most alarming story about air-borne particulate matter drifting over from China and polluting pure, pristine and increasingly prissy Japan. Concerns have focused almost exclusively on particulate matter of 2.5 micrometers in size, said to be particularly dangerous to health and particularly prevalent in the pollution coming over the sea. Cities near the coast monitor particulate levels and warn people to stay indoors and close windows when the pollution level is above a certain level, while children are said to be especially at risk.

There are several elements to this story. One is the undercurrent of anti-Chinese sentiment in Japan, where ill-feeling, always present to some degree, is currently heightened with the confrontation at the Senkaku Islands, which are claimed both by Japan and China.

But of most interest to me is the lack of ability on the part of Japanese authorities to connect the dots. Particulate matter is drifting over from China because of the massive coal-burning that is constantly taking place there, driving the country's industrialization and powering the factories, many of which are making things that used to be made in Japan. China uses a colossal amount of power, and this amount is increasing every year. Nuclear power is an obvious candidate to replace this coal-burning, and indeed China does have an expanding nuclear industry, it's just that the country's needs are growing so fast it will be a long long time before coal usage is reduced.

Meanwhile Japan's own levels of pollution are increasing because all but two of the country's nuclear plants are in shutdown. Would it be too embarrassing for Japanese authorities to acknowledge the pollution-reducing abilities of nuclear power?

Oh yes.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority: What Gives?

I'd like to comment on one of the 'only in Japan' aspects of the nuclear energy issue, the kind of thinking that infects other areas of Japanese life, from education to sports to just about anything. This is the Japanese tendency towards excessive cautiousness, past the point of irrationality.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority was set up in the politically chaotic months after 3/11 as an attempt to address the perceived in adequacies of the former Japanese nuclear watchdog, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. Inaugurated in Sept last year, the chairman is Shunichi Tanaka.

While the ostensible purpose of the NRA is to regulate and ensure the safety of Japan's nuclear power plants, one could be forgiven for thinking that its real intent is to prevent any of them being used ever again. Such is the slew of useless, outdated, unnecessary and downright environmentally criminal regulations drafted by the NRA.

Some of the safety measures now mandated for nuclear plants in Japan include the installation of multiple power sources near each reactor; on-site storage of multiple power-supply and fire-fighting vehicles; relocation of pumps, generators and storage tanks to high ground; and the installation of filtered venting equipment at each reactor. In addition, each power plant needs to start the construction of an emergency disaster response center that must be earthquake, tsunami and radiation proof. The list of requirements goes on and on; a more complete description can be found here.

Few people seem to be questioning the real outcome of these measures, which is the extended delay in restarting Japan's nuclear fleet. In fact, it is very possible that many plants will never restart at all, due to the tremendous costs involved in meeting all of these new standards, which have been estimated at over $100 million per reactor unit.

These measures are intended to prevent a 'disaster' like that in Fukushima ever happening again. This 'disaster' was the consequence of geological events that occur about every 800 years, and was preventable by relatively simple planning or plant modification, and which nevertheless caused no deaths or serious injuries at all.

The new NRA's new strict regulations and recommendations have generated scores of news stories on NHK news and other media. For the last several months there has been continual coverage especially of the effects of the NRA's new larger evacuation zone around a nuclear plant in case of accident. The new zone is now 30km in radius whereas the old zone was 10km. The new radius around every nuclear plant in Japan encompasses several million people across the country. Local municipalities have been thrown into a frenzy drafting up new evacuation plans for each locality, all of which of course will be completely useless in the event of a real emergency.

Rather than questioning the necessity of this new expanded evacuation zone, the media has been covering the effect it will have on local people. For example, two days ago on NHK news there was a report on the number of islands affected by the new rules...yet local authorites have yet to secure boats for 15 of the islands.

NHK even interviewed a priest at a picturesque shrine on one of the islands inside the new evacuation zone. 'There is no boat to leave the island and residents will have to find a way to evacuate on their own,' he laments. It never occurred to the priest to ask whether an ill-informed and unquestioning bureaucrat in Tokyo has the authority to order him to leave his own Shinto shrine in the event that a nuclear power plant 20km away released a puff of radiation equivalent to, say, 1% of normal background levels.

Arguably the most important outcome of this media blitz is the construction of an image of nuclear plants as troublesome, expensive and above all dangerous. To the casual viewer, nuclear power necessitates much more stringent safety measures than other kinds of industrial activity, despite the fact that in reality nuclear power is much, much safer than other forms of large-scale energy production.

These excessive regulations on the part of the NRA can be seen as an expression of the Japanese tendency towards overcaution, even paranoia. Other examples include people wearing helmets on the street during the Skylab paranoia; English language schools teaching 'Emergency English' after a tourist was shot in America when he misunderstood the word 'Freeze'; and schoolkids being prevented from making snowballs in the playground because 'one may contain a rock'.

Renewables, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

In an example of the kind of story that people who oppose nuclear power hate to read or consider, Japanese Prime Minister last week reneged on Japan's promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions 25% by 2020, because of Japan's future reduced reliance on nuclear power.

For the large number of well-meaning people who believe that renewable power (chiefly wind and solar) can take up the slack if fossil fuel usage is reduced, this kind of information must induce a level of cognitive dissonance that could cause an aneurism. Much easier to just ignore it. That is why articles like that receive relatively little coverage in the Japanese (indeed, the world) press while the announcement that TEPCO is releasing a little treated water sparks outrage.

The belief on the part of many people that renewable power can replace both fossil fuels and nuclear is rarely critically examined. The connection between rising emissions and a nuclear-less energy production industry is rarely made.

When the need for nuclear power is overtly pushed by scientists, even scientists who are famous for their contribution to climate change study, the result makes the green left very uneasy indeed. Known as NASA's point man of climate change, James Hansen is one such scientist. For decades he has researched climate change and has been informing governments about it. As such he is revered by green movements around the world and vilified by climate change deniers, but when it comes to his scientifically-backed assertions about how to deal with the problem, his green supporters just tune him out. In what I find to be an extraordinary document, clear and concise, Hansen lays out the case for why renewable energy, although being an important part of the mix, is never going to make the big time, and that people who believe otherwise may as well believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

Perceptions of safety, illusions of danger

A few days ago TEPCO announced that it would be releasing contaminated cooling water into the ocean, water that has been treated to remove radioactive substances so that it is below the legally permissible level of radioactive contamination.

This is necessary because water has been accumulating from efforts to continue cooling the three melted down reactors and the radiation will be reduced through a new process that removes 60 different kinds of radiactive substances. The resulting release will be orders of magnitude less radioactive than is necessary to cause harm to humans, and will then be diluted by nothing less than the Pacific Ocean, so that the radioactivity will be diluted billions of times more, to way, way below normal background levels of radiation in seawater.

You will not be able to find a respectable scientific source stating that this release will endanger the environment in any way. Yet the Japan Times article, as well as other pieces in the net, is followed by comments implying some kind of crime being committed by TEPCO.

This small example neatly illuminates much of the difficulty the nuclear power industry faces in dealing with public perception of safety. The excessive standards of safety and reporting forced on the industry do little to allay fears. On the contrary, they seem to merely enforce the perception that nuclear power is dangerous. Coal power plants, which emit radiation as part of their normal operations, never make any announcements about this at all. Behind all this is the false assumption that nuclear power is inherently more dangerous than other forms of energy production.

That this assumption has nasty add-on effects should hardly be surprising. One of the most important is that the extraordinary standards of safety that are forced upon nuclear power result in massive cost overruns in plant construction. ANS cafe has an extraordinarily informative post on this topic, finding that much of the cost of plant construction originates in unrealistic and self-defeating standards of Quality Assurance.

It is ironic that 'cost' is one of the main reasons given by anti-nuclear campaigners as to why nuclear power cannot provide electricity for the entire world. If those anti-nuke proponents were willing to rationally compare safety standards in terms of health effects across differenct forms of energy production, the costs of nuclear power plant construction could drop dramatically. Construction costs in China, for example, are a fraction of those in the West, much of which cannot be explained merely by the lower cost of labour.

Hopefully the Prime Minister takes my advice

The Japan Times this week has published my letter to the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, where I invite him to consider reason and common sense when it comes to the nuclear issue in Japan.

My little letter was sandwiched between two rabidly anti-nuclear opinion pieces. One is an emotionally-charged use of the 'nuclear waste is bad' argument. One could, of course, use 90% of it and just change the topic to 'not using nuclear power'. At least that way the charge of generational betrayal would be appropriate. Regarding the issue of waste, suffice it to say that 95% of nuclear waste can be recycled, and the disposal of the remainder is not so much a safety or technical issue as a political one.

The second piece is a somewhat random scare piece about the accumulation of strontium-90 in childrens' teeth. It's notable for its complete lack of claimed health effects - leading the reader nonplused as to what it was written for. I suspect the editor demanded scientific references for the supposed ill-effects of the reported strontium-90, and the authors were unable to come up with any.

One thing for sure. Now that I have read many, many anti-nuclear articles I am no longer afraid of trying to get my own stuff published. These writers may or may not be professional journalists, but if they are, they are professionals who are either deliberately deceitful or have an extraordinarily poor understanding of the scientific method.