[Oe List ...] Worthwhile read for those concerned about Japan and the universe

Wed Mar 30 10:47:27 CDT 2011

peace, ko shin, Bob Hanson

Ko shin's Blogs: http://chasingwindmillswhynot.blogspot.com/

June 2010:  http://adharmabumreportingfromnaropa.blogspot.com/

Face Book:  Bob koshin Hanson

Tweeter:  1940oldman

920 293 8856   Home    414 234 0954  Cell   skype  920 240 4325

Added June 3, 2010: FACT: More peace activists were killed on 31-May-2010,
than Israelis have been killed, by Gaza rockets, in 10 years  Tweeter on
this day

seeker of truth by  <http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/C/cummingsee/> e. e.
cummings

seeker of truth  follow no path
all paths lead where truth is here

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of
the oppressor."
~ Desmund Tutu.

Without compassion, what hope?    Q: Is there any cause for optimism?  A:
Well, personally, yeah. Everybody's got a life to lead and they've got a
bodhisattva tendency, everybody wants to do good, so I just think on a
personal level, yeah. On a larger scale, there doesn't seem to be any hope
unless compassion becomes a more widespread important teaching on how to
live. Compassion to self and others.-Allen Ginsberg, from "Spontaneous
Intelligence: An Interview with Allen Ginsberg," Tricycle, Fall 1995

There are those who do not realize

that one day we all must die.

But those who do realize this

settle their quarrels.

Dhammapada 1.6

From: info at zcommunications.org [mailto:info at zcommunications.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2011 12:07 AM
To: koshin at centurytel.net
Subject: ZNet Daily Commentary: Fukushima And Low-Probability Events By
Justin Podur

 <http://www.zcommunications.org> zspace

Print <http://www.zcommunications.org/contents/177110/print>  

Fukushima And Low-Probability Events

March 30, 2011 By Justin Podur

Justin Podur's ZSpace Page
<http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/justinpodur>  / ZSpace
<http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/> 

A friend from the movement asked me my thoughts on George Monbiot's article
in the UK Guardian about
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukus
hima> how Fukushima actually converted him to nuclear power. George
summarizes the Fukushima incident as follows:

"A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster
earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out
the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The
disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet,
as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation."

There are several answers to this (and, indeed,
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/24/renewables-nuclear-fuku
shima-japan-environment> Monbiot has been answered in the Guardian and
<http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/47141> elsewhere). The first is that a big
problem with nuclear power is the long-term effects, which create cancers
for decades. I recently read Devra Davis's "The Secret History of the War on
Cancer", which deals with the environmental causes of cancer and the way
that prevention and causation of cancer are downplayed compared to
treatment, all in the interests of the pharmaceutical (and other polluting)
industry. I also read an essay in an interesting little book called "Against
Health" that argued that the nuclear bomb normalized the idea that you might
just die of radiation, but it would be in the national interest (the essay,
by Joseph Masco, author of "The Nuclear Bord erlands", actually made more
subtle arguments and interesting than this). So, on the question of no one
having received a lethal dose, that's not really how radiation-induced
cancer works.

Second, there is a fallacy here that runs throughout all the pro-nuclear
arguments. The probability of something really awful happening is usually
pretty low. It requires a bunch of things to go wrong at the same time -
like an earthquake and a tsunami, say. But if you repeat a low-probability
experiment enough times, the chances of the event occurring go up pretty
fast. Most mathematical models of stock markets and derivatives markets fail
to predict crises because they don't take this into account (mathematician
Benoit Mandelbrot and popular philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb discuss
these issues). The fact that Fukushima didn't go as badly as it could have
(and we still don't know how badly it did go) is not evidence that the
technology is reliable. To me, it is actually evidence of the extent that we
depend on plain luck to save us from our bad decisions, especially where
nuclear matters are concerned. This is even more true with nuclear weapons
than with nuclear power, but the point is valid in both spheres. And in the
case of Fukushima, plain luck did seem to have a role - some of the reactors
happened to be off for planned maintenance, for example.

Indian scientist and activist
<http://newsclick.in/international/fukushima-%E2%80%93-radioactive-cloud-ove
r-nuclear-renaissance> Prabir Purkayastha's analysis, for example, does not
make me want to stop worrying and embrace nuclear:

"At any point the temperature can rise, the containment could fail and
further explosions could take place. An emergency state would continue till
the reactors are effectively de-commissioned People are not talking about
this, but decommissioning of these reactors will not be easy, particularly
as they have stored fuel in cooling ponds in the same buildings that house
the rectors. It is this inventory of stored fuel rods which is likely to be
the major problem. A Chernobyl solution of burying the reactors under tons
of concrete for reactors could work, but not for the stored fuel rods,
particularly as they are not ground level. One cannot pour tons of concrete
on the 4th floor of a building - this will bring everything crashing down."

Purkayastha's article argues that Fukushima should give India pause about
going nuclear - for safety reasons and economic reasons, which, because of
the way the global nuclear industry works, cannot be separated.

The dangers to developing countries are explained further by Pakistani
nuclear scientist and activist Pervez Hoodbhoy, in his own very sobering
take on Fukushima, in which he imagines a Fukushima at a nuclear plant in
Karachi:

"But with the breeze mostly directed towards Karachi, the population would
surely have to be evacuated. The rich and the fortunate would succeed; the
rest would not. Unlike the orderly and disciplined evacuation of
post-tsunami Fukushima, all hell would break loose as millions would try to
flee. Looters would strip everything bare, roads would be clogged, and vital
services would collapse."

The arguments against nuclear - the health arguments, the incredible expense
and opportunity cost of nuclear compared to renewables, and the slight
probability of utter catastrophe presented by each plant - are unaffected by
what happened in Fukushima - certainly it can't be used as a counter to
these arguments. Fukushima shows a scenario of what might go wrong, but
there is much more that can go wrong even in that case, let alone others.

And yes, every other form of energy has problems, and coal does worse than
nuclear, especially for climate change. A colleague of mine at work, Mark
Winfield, who studies energy policy,
<http://marksw.blog.yorku.ca/2011/03/25/response-to-keep-building-nuclear-pl
ants-globe-and-mail-march-19-2011/> wrote a short note about how coal and
nuclear are inferior to renewables in different ways.

I think I understand what George was trying to do in his article, and there
is a formulation of his argument that I could agree with, about the timeline
for replacing nonrenewables with renewables. If he were to say that we
should replace coal with renewables before we replace nuclear with
renewables, I could agree with that. Where Hoodbhoy writes: "Until nuclear
fusion power becomes available after some decades, Pakistan, like other
countries, must rely on a mix of oil, gas, hydro, coal, solar, wind, and
other renewables," George is arguing that coal is actually more harmful than
nuclear.

As Mark Winfield argues, coal and nuclear are pretty much equally bad, just
for very different reasons. In addition to what I've been discussing, and in
addition especially to the economics of nuclear, nuclear is the political
culture inevitably associated with it, are so pernicious that they crowd out
other options.

For the past few years, I have relied very heavily on George's book "Heat"
to argue that a transition to renewables is possible and feasible, against
environmentalists like James Lovelock and James Howard Kunstler who argue
that nuclear is inevitable. I will continue to do so, even if now it's in
disagreement with him on this issue.

  _____  

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
<http://www.zcommunications.org/> 
URL:
http://www.zcommunications.org/fukushima-and-low-probability-events-by-justi
n-podur

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