On Saturday I wrote a blog entitled This is not just nuclear melt down - it’s the next world financial crisis too. The usual right wingers (in the main) rolled out to say there was no risk of nuclear melt down in Japan and that I'd got everything wrong. Even yesterday there were economic commentators saying this tsunami would be good for the Japanese economy.
Well it does look very likely that there has been a meltdown.
And evacuation is becoming a serious issue.
Japanese debt has become about the most expesnive in the world to insure.
The Nikkei index is collapsing.
My fears were well founded.
If oil was not going to tip us into recession then this disaster will.
The time to face perhaps the biggest economic and social question the world has ever had to address - how we fuel our future.
It's time for a Green New Deal. Except, and I'll be candid, we did not envisage problems on this scale arising so soon. But the Green new Deal group remains ahead of the pack - at least we saw the issue.
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Its not there has not/will not be a meltdown Richard, its the actual EFFECTS of what has happened. We can’t predict the future with absolute certainty, and there will almost certainly be significant environmental damage to deal with or hopefully prevent in the coming days.
BUT – what has been lost in the breathless media coverage about the impending nuclear catastrophe etc. is that afterbeing hit by one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded human history, followed by a Tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear plant held up extremely well and was releasing radiation at lower doses than a CT scan, raising the overall level of background radiation in the area to perhaps a touch less than a hot springs.
Some info (from progressive commentators) here
http://www.informationdissemination.net/2011/03/new-york-times-us-navy-helicopter.html
And here
http://www.informationdissemination.net/2011/03/fukushima-fud.html
Richard,
The only problem is that, from a green perspective, nuclear is the only game in town. For some equatorial countries solar may be viable, and there is clearly potential for tidal power generation. But for large, urban populations in the temperate regions, nuclear is the only environmentally viable choice (which is why people like James Lovelock support it). Windfarms and biofuels are environmentally catastrophic. If the outcome of the Japanese disaster is that the world turns away from nuclear, there is no positive outcome.
Of course what people really need, and what society needs, is a shift from being acquisitive to being contemplative. Realistically, we have all that we need. But we won’t be happy, and we will destroy the planet, unless we can accept that what we want should be the same as what we need.
@mad foetus
Only a change in life styles can solve this
We cannot burn energy as we have
It’s as simple as that
And as difficult as that
@Daragh McDowell
Of course it’s the effects that matter – although now there is plutonium involved the direct risks have increased too
And I know all you say is true for now
BUT you’re still making the mistake of assuming people are rational
Why not realise they’re not – and that in that case nuclear power is not an option
And incidentally they’re not rational for a good reason – which is that they know they’re fallible. So in this case the nuclear plants have done well. Shame about the designers of the tsunami walls and the diesel back up systems though. They messed up mightily
The weakness is not where we expect it – people know it isn’t, so your reassurance is meaningless
Richard,
Meltdown is not a problem unless there is containment breach. That is the key to all this.
No containment breach = no problem – just a big dead power plant.
More worrying is the spent fuel pools and whether they have cracked. Crazily they are in the containment housing of the main reactors. Who came up with that one!
Reading the engineering reports does show that this design of nuclear plant is ‘not the greatest’. It has severe problems in terms of the supporting infrastructure, and a lot of it comes from the simple fact that it was built for profit, not for service. Therefore as usual corners have been cut. There doesn’t appear to be a core capture with this design and the switching gear is actually underneath the containment shell – where it gets flooded!
What we need to concentrate on is fusion technology, but fusion technology funded by the people in our magnificent universities and with tenured engineers who are there to build the power plants that are well designed and built to last – not built to turn a fast buck.
The weakness in all this outsourcing of public goods is that the outsourcer is required by the laws of profit to cut corners where they think they can get away with it. You get efficiency at the expense of effectiveness.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/106a9bd8-4ea4-11e0-874e-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1Gf3GxIzW
“Everything hinges on Fukushima and that’s it,” said Seiichiro Iwasawa, chief Japan equity strategist at Nomura. “Other things are irrelevant at the moment.”
Interesting that I got that one so wrong according to so many on Saturday when as usual I called it right
@Daragh McDowell
It sounds very impressive to say “one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded human history”, but in fact we have only been recording earthquakes since 1900. “The last 111 years” doesn’t sound so reassuring, does it?
I’m still amazed that no one mentions the risk that nuclear power plants would represent in time of war. History is a long blind bend, as someone observed, and we never know what is coming round the corner next. If anyone had predicted the destruction of the Twin Towers, no one would have given them any credence whatsoever. How many people saw the First World War coming? How many people saw the Second World War coming? Nuclear power stations are a massive liability, it seems to me.
And war isn’t the only thing that could break a reactor open. How many Soviet nuclear submarines were left to rust on the seabed because Russia couldn’t afford to decommission them properly? If we build nuclear power plants, we are saddling future generations with things they may not have the money or the ability to maintain. I don’t see any warrant in history for our casual assumption that what we can afford – or even do – now we will always be able to.
“Japanese debt has become about the most expesnive in the world to insure.”
Err…wrong. It has reached a record price for Japanese government debt insurance at around 125 basis points, but there are plenty of countries with credit default pricing 5 or 10 times that figure.
Huw Spanner,
While I’m not an apologist for the nuclear industry (bear in mind I can see Europe’s largest reprocessing plant from my bathroom), current thinking is that nuclear risks have been massively exagerrated. Chernobyl remains the benchmark, and the UN agency UNSCEAR now believes that original estimates of 4,000 deaths were too high, and that the only other major health impact is 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer among children. Thyroid cancer is treatable with over a 90% 30 year survival rate. There was no increase in mortality, leukemia or other cancers in the areas around Chernobyl. All victims are tragedies, of course, but in the scale of things much fewer than a large earthquake or a major flood.
That is not to belittle what happened at Chernobyl, but the effects of radiation leaks is much much less than the effects of normal substances in the environment unless you suffer extreme and prolonged exposure. In other words, eating junk food once a week will cause you more harm than being 10 miles away from a nuclear reactor that blows up.
Now, while I don’t buy into all of the climate change argument, I think the risks of continuing to burn fossil fuels are potentially of a magnitude far more serious than a realistic estimate of the “worst case scenario” of a nuclear meltdown.
And the clincher with Chernobyl? The site itself is now full of flora and fauna flourishing, unharmed, in greater density and variety than anywhere else in Belarus.
@mad foetus
“And the clincher with Chernobyl? The site itself is now full of flora and fauna flourishing, unharmed, in greater density and variety than anywhere else in Belarus.”
True of many a grave yard too
Not much comfort to those untimely placed there by radiation poisoning
“And the clincher with Chernobyl? The site itself is now full of flora and fauna flourishing, unharmed, in greater density and variety than anywhere else in Belarus.”
Ukraine, I think. I wouldn’t necessarily be encouraged by a “greater density and variety”, but I may have seen too many 1950’s sci-fi films.
On the positive side, I always thought that the Chernobyl area would make a good site for the storage of radioactive waste.
@Richard Murphy
“Not much comfort to those untimely placed there by radiation poisoning”
Many, many more are put in the graveyard due to exposure to the Sun. Are you proposing banning sunbathing?
@Neil Wilson
Respectfully – you just don’t get it, do you?
How many times do I have to say this is about human expectations?
If you can’t add to debate or follow it – please don’t bother
I’m really not interested in basing policy on opinion that does not reflect the human condition – which is what you seem to want
We’ve had ample of that – it’s called neoliberalism
All four reactors are now officially in cold-reactor-shutdown.
@JohnM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/mar/15/stock-markets-slide-japan-panic
and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/15/japan-nuclear-plant-third-explosion
In other words
a) do I believe them
b) so what?
The damage is done
For those who are blas?© about Chernobyl:
“The UN says that overall health effects were less severe than initially expected and that only a few thousand people had died as a result of the accident.
“But a 2009 book by a group of Russian and Belarussian scientists published by the New York Academy of Sciences argued that previous studies were misled by rigged Soviet statistics.
“‘The official position of the Chernobyl Forum (a group of UN agencies) is that about 9,000 related deaths have occurred and some 200,000 people have illnesses caused by the catastrophe,’ authors Alexei Yablokov, Vasily Nesterenko and Alexei Nesterenko wrote in ‘Chernobyl: Consequences of the catastrophe for people and the Environment’.
“‘A more accurate number estimates nearly 400 million human beings have been exposed to Chernobyl’s radioactive fallout and, for many generations, they and their descendants will suffer the devastating consequences.’
“The authors argued that the global death toll by 2004 was closer to 1 million and said health effects included birth defects, pregnancy losses, accelerated aging, brain damage, heart, endocrine, kidney, gastrointestinal and lung diseases.
“‘It is clear that tens of millions of people, not only in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, but worldwide, will live under measurable chronic radioactive contamination for many decades,’ they wrote.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/us-nuclearchernobyl-idUSTRE72E42C20110315?pageNumber=1
One problem is knowing who to trust. Maybe the UN has a vested interest in playing down the damage. Maybe these Russian and Belorussian scientists had a vested interest in playing it up.
Watching this disaster unfold Once again focuses the mind on the fact that England’s neighbours, the Isle of Man and Ireland are exposed to the risk of Sellafield. For years we have campaigned to have this plant closed, and those calls have been consistently ignored.
JAPAN, nuclear and THE SEA – thoughts after the Tsunami
Agreed proliferation and nuclear safety are big issues.
Those who saw the power of the sea for real in action will be shocked as I was as the sea came over. (Much worse than that film on TV about the Thames barrier with the happy ending recently).
Many already know that the original Thames barrier at ~ 6 metres was too low. They may not know that the new Thames Barrier being planned for will also be too low, and possibly too late for big storm surges to come as the seas rise. And built too far in. It should instead be planned for the proper eventual height of about 80 metres and be raise-able up to that height eventually, which will be the final height of seas. With a fixed link rail/road on top, such a barrier could eventually link Felixstowe port with Kent/EU and thus protect Essex and London from inundation.
Such a barrier could also provide access to Boris Johnson’s mouth-of-Thames airport island. Much of the link would be on reclaimed land.
At intervals giant caissons would support sliding sectional gates allowing silt clearance and occasional wildlife transfer. (Locks will eventually be needed for shipping but large vessels would be unloaded using long drop crane-age onto rail on the “land” side as part of port upgrade). All this could provide foundations for wave, wind and tidal generation capacity and be protected from wave action by organic means, growing up as the seas rise (mangroves, coral, etc developed for cold climates). We will need some of that energy capacity to regulate/empty the freshwater storage basin created.
That kind of project is what the Green New Deal money should be diverted to after the much more rapid super-insulation of buildings possible with the intelligent use of money (instead of the super-rich and the general public having virtually free rein to follow habits). Which would help our GDP up, “security” and waste of gas down in the immediate term. It is urgent to get our direction right worldwide to conserve gas reserves and get environmentally and energy sustainable. Even Japan needs to think further ahead as we should be: winding down military budgets further and continuing cross-cultural understanding and global co-operation to meet long-term threats. Ian.Greenwood@STEERglobal.org
I think your headline here relates to a financial meltdown.
However, you have have not explained what you think is happening.
My simplistic view is that one (off the cuff) estimate of rebuild cost after the earthquake and tsunami is one trillion dollars. The Japanese GDP is five trillion.
Where is the problem?
@David Cranch
I don’t doubt Japan can and will rebuild
But $1,000,000,000,000 is a significant sum
It has massive implications
If Japan will not raise tax to pay for it
If the world will not support the yen whilst it focuses on this issue
And if plutonium poisoning prevents it then the risks remain enormous
Of course rebuilding is possible
But so is a Keynesian economic recovery – economically they’re the same
But the world is refusing to do a Keynesian economic recovery
Will they let Japan rebuild then?
“Japanese debt has become about the most expesnive in the world to insure”
Utter nonsense. 5y Japan CDS is at 108bp, and whilst elevated thanks to the crisis is still lower than most similarly rated countries. Want to try and insure some Greek debt? THat’ll be 960bp running and an upfront free.
Oh, and plutonium??? These plants run on Uranium.
@Tyler
a) OK – I misinterpreted a report on the relative price of Japanese debt over time. So I’m human. Apologies for that. I’ll never make a mistake again.
b) Wrong. One reactor, at least, runs MOX fuel which includes plutonium. Your mistake. Shocking I know but libertarians are fallible. It’s contrary to all assumptions you make. But true.