Japanese disasters should kill future nuclear options
Nuclear technology exists in secrecy
By Geoff Olson, Vancouver Courier March 24, 2011
The Japanese excel at small. In his 1961 travelogue The Lotus and The Robot, writer Arthur Koestler interpreted delicate Japanese watercolours, bonsai trees and rock gardens as examples of a cultural impulse to shrink nature to a comfortable scale. For a people cursed with history of tectonic catastrophes—earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions—there is solace in reducing nature’s terrifying otherness to toy-like scales, he insisted.
The Japanese, with one of the most technically sophisticated societies in the world, have long been masters at miniaturization in the arts and sciences. Yet it was the U.S. that introduced Japan to the smallest device ever exploited by science, the atomic nucleus. After the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the surrender to superior technology wasn’t limited to signing papers on the deck of the battleship Missouri. It continued in postwar Japanese labs and factories, where the national talent for adopting, improving, and shrinking gave the world futuristically small radios, home stereos, automobiles and microchips.
The adoption of American nuclear reactor technology was another matter. It seemed almost like a national form of Stockholm syndrome, with the government embracing a force that defeated the nation so terribly. Today Japan has a total 54 atomic reactors, although the number working has been reduced by at least four following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Experts now suspect that given the construction of the reactors at Fukushima, a major accident was not a matter of if, but when.
A friend who lived for 10 years in Japan knew people living in close proximity to the Fukushima nuclear facility. He has not spoken with them for over a decade, he says, but he believes they fall within the 20-kilometre exodus radius the national government is now trying to enforce. “What a shame,” he says. “They were always in the forefront of anti-nuclear protests. I have a photo of a long caravan of people marching, anti-nuclear signs held high, down a road somewhere near there.”
As the radiation count increases in northern Japan, the apportioning of blame has spread. “The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents, and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry,” writes Jason Clenfeld in Bloomberg News. Local officials were hardly alone in their fudging, however. Nuclear technology, with its networks of industrial, financial, and political cross-connections, has been accompanied by secrecy and spin in almost every nation where it has been installed—along with disasters both publicly acknowledged and officially dismissed.
The new book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, from the New York Academy of Sciences, offers a sobering perspective on the fallout from the 1986 Soviet Union nuclear meltdown. “The book is solidly based—on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports—some 5,000 in all,” notes journalist Karl Grossman. “It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004.”
Closer to home in eastern Washington, the decommissioned nuclear production facility at Hanford is said to be the most contaminated atomic site in the U.S. Billions of dollars are required to complete the remediation of the area's soil and ageing nuclear containment vessels, which contain 53 million gallons of radioactive waste.
Can anyone imagine this much of a problem from photovoltaic cells? Solar, wind and geothermal installations may be temporarily compromised by natural disasters, but their failure would hardly result in a decades-long no-man’s land. Sustainable energy resource extraction and production don’t create lethal waste material that will outlive grandchildren for generations to come. Nuclear reactor technology is now more than a half-century old, closer to the horse-and-buggy past than the save-the-planet present. When it comes to the atomic nucleus we humans are like babies in a room full of loaded guns. If we have any smarts worth preserving in evolution’s hall of fame, we’ll stop pulling the trigger, and abandon the nuclear option for both pre-emptive war and poisoned peace.
With the contamination at the Fukushima plant believed “to last for decades and decades,” as France’s Nuclear Safety Authority put it on Monday, the world’s governments are long overdue in shutting the lid on this microscopic Pandora’s Box.
http://www.vancourier.com/Japanese+disa ... story.html
But this doesn't mean nuclear isn't suitable for other, more geologically 'stable' nations.
Had the Japanese listened, this and heeded the warnings prior to disaster unfolding, then this catastrophe could have been avoided.
~A climate change denier is what an idiot calls a realist~https://g.co/kgs/6F5wtU
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