This is just unbelievable. WTF are these people on? Hopefully Cameron will smack a few heads together for such stupidity. Meanwhile the British Ambassador must be the leading candidate for “Wanker of the Week”!
Category Archives: environment
Japan Nuclear Update
Referring to my Sunday post about the events in Japan, a friend in the US has asked me “Are you still this non-apocalyptic after the latest explosion?”. And given what has been reported about the situation at the Fukushima reactors since Sunday I feel I should update my opinions.
So where are we? Well it’s really difficult to tell. There have now been three explosions, and a further significant release of radioactivity. Albeit the radioactivity appears to be relatively short-lived nucleotides. But we now really don’t know enough about what is actually happening in Fukushima. In fact nobody knows exactly what’s happening apart from the engineers on the ground. All we are getting is the third- or fourth-hand account which the Japanese government are putting out and which is then being spun every which way by the media.
Do I trust what we’re being told? Again it is hard to say. All nuclear authorities (and governments) have a poor track record of owning up to bad news; the Japanese are no better or worse that anyone else. That means I am very skeptical about what’s being admitted to. What is being said may be true, but it may not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But as I say, we really don’t know, and cannot know.
However as I understand it, and despite the latest reports, the worst case scenario still cannot be as bad as Chernobyl due to the design of the reactors. Of course that doesn’t mean it couldn’t still be really very nasty. Remember that these nuclear plants have three or four levels of containment between the fuel rods and the open air. A full meltdown and fire, as happened at Chernobyl, would require all the levels of containment to be breached, all the cooling to have failed and at least some of the control rods to not be in place between the fuel rods. Given that we are told the reactors shutdown correctly, all the control rods should be inserted amongst the fuel rods which, if I have understood correctly, makes the worst case Chernobyl scenario highly unlikely.
Let’s also be clear. This situation has not obviously been caused by the earthquake – the facility appears to have withstood a quake some 5 times more severe than its design limit. (I have read that the design limit was to withstand a quake of magnitude 8.2, so this 9.0 quake is way above that design threshold; remember the Richter Scale is logarithmic.) It was the subsequent tsunami taking out the nuclear plant’s backup power generators which triggered the problems, and that clearly was not designed for. One has to question the wisdom of building nuclear facilities so close to such an active geological fault, especially one know to trigger tsunamis.
It’s undoubtedly a nasty situation, and extremely scary for the local population. But as far as one can tell the Japanese authorities are probably handling this as well as anyone could. We just have to hope that the authorities and the engineers are doing enough.
But we just don’t know (and may never know) enough about what’s really happening inside those reactors – no-one does except the engineers on site.
if you want to know more technical details there are good posts here, here and here, and regular technical updates here.
Japan Disaster Appeal
A friend in London with many Japanese contacts and a Japanese friend in Tokyo have suggested that if anyone wishes to assist the Japanese people at this difficult time then donations to the Red Cross Appeal are possibly the best way to do so. Readers in the UK can donate online to the Japan Tsunami Appeal or by calling 08450 535 353.
Japan
No, I’m not going to write in any detail about, what I suspect we all agree are, the horrors of the recent events in Japan; I’m not going to indulge in ghoulish voyeurism. However I find these events fascinating from a forensic viewpoint: what happened; how and why did it happen; how did it unfold. So I will content myself to comment on one or two things which have stuck me, as a scientist, over the last few days.
First of all the size of the quake. Initially assessed at Richter 8.9 it has now been upgraded to 9.0. This is normal as further seismic data becomes available. According to Wikipedia this makes the Sendai quake equal fourth largest in the last 150 years. This should not be surprising given the geology of the area.
There were some fore-shocks; but that is only known with hindsight. This brings home to me just how impossible it is for even the best experts to predict earthquakes. A lot of progress has been made in recent years on predicting volcanic eruptions, if only in the short term. But earthquakes are a totally different problem. Predicting when a geological fault is going to move is next to impossible. Japan has regular (almost daily) relatively small earthquakes because of where it sits on the fault lines. The scientists had predicted a big quake “sometime in the next 30 years”, which is about as precise as earthquake prediction appears possible at present. Is the Sendai Earthquake this big event? Well who knows. It isn’t impossible that a larger quake might happen, although my guess is that it is now much less likely.
Earthquakes impossible to predict with accuracy; so are tsunamis. As I understand it whether a quake generates a tsunami depends on many factors: the way the fault moves, the size of the movement, the seabed topography. The area around Japan is at high risk of tsunamis because of the type of faults in the nearby seabed and they have had tsunami monitoring and warning systems in place for some 40 or more years – but all they can do is send out alerts once a tsunami has been created and detected. And then tsunamis travel so fast (up to 500 miles an hour, apparently) that for nearby coasts any warning is almost too late.
It is in the nature of Japan that they are one of the most naturally controlled of societies. They are not people to leave things to chance if they can have a process to ensure it works properly. And they are world leaders in earthquake-proof design. In consequence they are possibly the best prepared of nations for earthquakes: they have very strict building codes, everyone is taught the drills almost from birth, there are excellent communication channels and warning systems. That is fine as far as quakes go, and as we have seen on the TV footage the majority of buildings (at least the more modern buildings) remained intact following the quake.
What is infinitely harder is to defend against a tsunami. Tsunami can be so large and generate such power that protecting against them is almost beyond our engineering (and almost certainly financial) capabilities. As protection one would have to build enormously high (50 feet?), thick and strong sea defences along every inch of low-lying coast. Sure it could be done, but probably no country on earth could afford to do it, especially for such relatively rare events. Physically preparedness is hugely hard; preparing the people, as is done for earthquakes, is almost impossible.
What is clear is that in much of the affected coastal areas it is the tsunami which has caused the vast majority of the damage. Again the TV footage shows buildings remaining intact after the quake but being simply washed away like matchsticks by the tsunami. Avoiding even that would be a huge engineering problem, but one I suspect Japan may now try to address.
This brings me to thinking about the situation at the Fukushima nuclear facility. As a scientist what has impressed me here is that all the fail-safe systems in the nuclear plants have worked as designed. Notwithstanding there do appear to have been issues. Fukushima 1, which blew the lid off it’s “shed” on Saturday, was working as designed until the backup generators were swamped by the tsunami (again it is the tsunami which has caused the problems!) and even then backup batteries were available. Even the venting of steam (and thus small amounts of short half-life radio-isotopes) is a planned and controlled event. And the “shed” is designed to fall apart (outwards, as it did) in the event of an explosion, so that explosion (however spectacular) wasn’t a majorly significant event.
Let’s be clear that, from what we’re being told, there is no nuclear meltdown at these plants; the reactors were automatically closed down when the quake struck, just as designed – this itself ensures that there can be no meltdown. (If meltdown were going to happen it would almost certainly have done so by now with far more major consequences than we’ve seen.) However there could well be some damage to the casings of a small number of fuel rods (as I understand it, it is this which caused the explosive hydrogen to be created). The reactors, having been shut down, do still generate heat which needs to be removed but this reduces quite quickly over a matter of days and (notwithstanding the problem at Fukushima 3) the worst of the heating problems should now be past.
What is of concern is whether the Japanese authorities are being truly open and honest about the situation at the nuclear plants; like most nuclear authorities they do not have a track record of transparency.
What I suspect will also happen is that Japan (indeed all the nuclear industry) will question the advisability of putting nuclear plant in areas most open to tsunami – like maybe not on Japan’s east coast?!
Of course those in the anti-nuclear lobby will use this same information to draw totally the opposite conclusions. As scientists we need to remain clear about what is designed for and whether it worked. I shall be most interested to see the reports from independent international inspections.
Finally a comment about the planet we live on. Many things in these events have stunned me, not the least being the awesome power of the tsunami. But perhaps the most staggering of all I found on the Scientific American website where there are many good reports:
Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology said the earth’s axis shifted 25 cm as a result of the earthquake, and the US Geological Survey said the main island of Japan had shifted 2.4 metres.
That doesn’t sound a lot, but they are incredibly large effects for the planet!
Our thoughts and hopes are, of course, with all the people of Japan.
Food for Thought
I came across the following a few days ago. I had to think hard to grasp exactly what was being said, but having done so I think the message is powerful. It relates to false life, as propounded on my Zen Mischief website. Sentimentality is a manifestation of false life, through false emotions. True sentiment (“what one feels with regard to something; mental attitude; an opinion or view as to what is right or agreeable; a mental feeling, an emotion; those feelings which involve an intellectual element or are concerned with ideal objects” – OED) is part of a considered reaction to and engagement with real life in the raw. There is a rather large difference …
Sentimentality creates the CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations] farm – the sentimentality that says we are too weak to bear the pain of knowing animals and watching them die. This is what turns our food into Styrofoam packages and allows CAFO agriculture, where animals are carefully hidden from our view, and the relationship of our purchases carefully concealed. Sentimentality allows us to care about the extinction of the preferred charismatic mega-fauna of our choice […] but that we see no connection between our purchases, our acts and the habitat destruction of the animals in question. Sentimentality enables us to care about the child Pakistani-flood victim on nightly TV enough to send some money – but not enough to try and reduce the number of climate-related natural disasters by giving up some of our privileges. Sentimentality enables the patriotic fervour that allows us to not know how many Iraqi or Afghani civilians die in the interest of our national “greater goods.” Sentimentality is the emotion that emerges from the condition of not knowing – and it is what you have left in a society that conceals at every level real knowledge. It too is both cause and effect – it permits great evil, and it facilitates lack of knowledge of the real.
Sentiment – love, anger, attachment, affection – real emotions – these derive from knowledge, and they can’t be faked. And when you know things, the choices you make get more complex. The realities you live in get harder and greyer. Sometimes love means you have to kill something. Sometimes one love means that another loved thing get sacrificed. Sometimes you have to go against your feelings. But the only way that never happens is when you substitute sentimentality for real feeling.
We live in a world where sentimentality poses as real emotion, where we are often actively discouraged from understanding consequences, from developing real love for people and things, and from paying attention. It is easy to miss the distinction between the two entirely – because we have blurred so many things together.
[Sharon Astyk at Casaubon’s Book Weblog]
Prospect Cottage Garden
Another images from our recent visit to Rye.
This is a detail from the garden at Prospect Cottage, the late Derek Jarman‘s home at Dungeness. The stone circle is probably just under 3 feet across and is built on the natural gravel surface.
Quotes of the Week
Another in the series of things which have struck me, or amused me, this week.
So look, I’m going to say this thing, and you’re going to listen and believe me because … I don’t know, why would you believe me if you haven’t believed it from anyone else? […] Because in the patient corners of your heart, you’ve ALWAYS known it’s true. It’s this:
You’re not broken. You are whole. And there is hope.
[Emily Nagoski at ]There is evidence that male babbling (what you kindly call Punditry) is a Zahavian handicap.
During both foetal development and puberty, male brains are subject to damage from hormonal processes that convert the female body and neural system into a male one (more or less). This causes males to be, on average, poor at communication. They don’t understand what they hear as well as females, can’t form their thoughts into words as well, and most interestingly, can’t think about one thing while carrying on a conversation with another human at the same time, as females routinely do.
Therefore, ability to communicate at all, let alone well, is very difficult given the handicap of this developmental brain damage. Public communication (babbling/punditry) would indicate relatively high quality for any male that could do it. Thus, all that male babbling.
[Greg Laden in a comment at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/]The Chap Olympiad has a number of things to recommend it, apart from the variety of potential experiences. One is that its resolute promoting of amateurism, eccentric sporting and events cocks an elegant snook at the revolting orgy of corporate arrogant dullardism that infuses all major sporting events. We don’t need their cocacolaMacanike extravaganzas in citizen murdering nations. Stuff ‘em.
[“Minerva” at http://redlegsinsoho.blogspot.com]There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
[Albert Schweitzer]Just as we should cultivate more gentle and peaceful relations with our fellow human beings, we should also extend that same kind of attitude towards the natural environment. Morally speaking, we should be concerned for our whole environment.
[Dalai Lama]Minds are like parachutes: they only function when open.
[Thomas Dewar]
Moth of the Week
Found this wonderful specimen of a male White Ermine Moth, Spilosoma lubricipeda, resting on our bathroom windowsill this morning. It really was absolutely beautiful.
A Question of Sandblasting
There’s a lot of fuss around at the moment about the inconvenience being caused by a bit of Icelandic ash causing disruption to air travel. There are, naturally two major schools of thought.
First. Volcanic ash cases major problems with jet engines (see at least two near-miss major disasters in the 1980s). Given that the ash is being blown across northern Europe, one of the most densely used pieces of air space in the world, we have to exercise real caution and ground flights. We must not take the risk of anythinggoing wrong; after all we don’t want another Locherbie-style disaster (different cause, of course, but similar effect) and inconveniencing a few (hundred thousand) people.is better than the repercussions of killing a couple of plane loads.
Second. The naysayers are of the belief that this is health and safety gone barmy. They contend (seemingly on little evidence) that a disaster is unlikely and that the world economy cannot be held to ransom in this way by disruption that could last weeks (at best) by a load of risk-averse numpties. In their favour there are reoprts that KLM have flown a plane through the ash cloud in Dutch air space without any damage (Lufthansa have also reportedly flown test flights); KLM are now pressing for the restrictions to be lifted.
As always there is a degree of logic on both sides. How does one weigh the cost (monetary or otherwise) of the potential for a major disaster against the inconvenience of not flying? This is hard and depends entirely on one’s underlying philosophical approach to life (see the last section of this). I feel sure when the original “no fly” order was given the expectation was that the ash cloud would clear in a day or so. Now it seems the disruption may last weeks, even months or years, depending on the course of the eruption.
Is the disruption of air travel over much of northern Europe viable (even justified) for a protracted period? The powers that be seem to be working on the assumption that they have no option and that they have to be risk-averse. The naysayers contend that such disruption is not justified. Let’s look at some aspects of the disruption:
- There are large numbers of people, who are through no fault of their own, are in the wrong place. They’re either on holiday or away from home on business and unable to return. Or they are at home when they should be away on holiday, business or attending to family emergencies. Some are managing to travel, and anyone on mainland Europe has a chance of travelling over land or sea – capacity permitting. But anyone across the sea, eg. in the Canary Islands (as is at least one friend), in the Far East, the Americas or Africa is basically stuffed until air travel is resumed. Clearly anyone who is away and cannot get home may have issues with employment, studies, animal welfare, supply of essential medicines etc.
- This naturally has a knock-on effect on business. Business people can’t travel to/from where they (think they) need to be. Is this a really justified concern? I suggest that in these days of efficient audio- and video-confereceing this should not be a concern for a large number of businesses. For the last several years before I retired I did almost no business travel despite running geographically spread teams – and I don’t just mean people spread across the UK; I regulalry worked with, managed or worked for people right across Europe, in South Africa, the USA, India and Australia without once leaving the UK! What it does demand though is (a) more thought about organising teams and tasks, (b) reasonable telecomms and IT facilities, (c) most importantly a “can do” attitude on the part of those involved. By reducing travel in this way organisations can save millions of (select currency of your choice); that’s millions a month for large companies (in 2005-ish just one sector of the company I used to work saved over $1m a month in travel). Clearly there are jobs which cannot be done remotely: anything which requires specifically my bodily presence, for instance anything medical or where I (and not anyone else) have to handle a specific object; but the range is increasingly small.
- The third aspect is the disruption of trade – or at least that part of it which has to be done by air-freighting stuff around the globe. This of course includes food supplies and the postal service. People are beginning to worry that we are going to run out of food. While my feeling is that this is unlikely, I concede that our choice of food may be restricted somewhat with anything being air-freighted around the globe dropping off the market – prices will get too inflated to be viable or it won’t be possible to get the commodity from source to shop quickly enough. Indeed all prices may rise as a consequence of supply and demand. Is this a bad thing? Well clearly price rises are a bad thing, but beyond that it depends how one views food miles. For my part I suggest the reduction of food miles is a good thing.
It’s a tough call, and one I’m very glad I don’t have to make. Who would want to be the person responsible for either closing air space and risking such massive disruption or (perhaps worse) saying it’s OK to fly and then watching 100, 10, even just one, 747 fall out of the sky? Undoubtedly there is no right answer, but I can’t help feeling I too would err on the side of caution.
So what of the long-term effects of all this? Well the following seems at least plausible:
- There will be a permenant downturn in business travel, as businesses discover they can save lots of cash for a small investment in remote working. Bad for the airlines; good for business generally and probably good for the work-life balance of many professionals.
- There will also be a further downturn in foreign holidays – at least where air travel is required. Again bad for the airlines and the holiday companies; good for trail/ferry companies, the indigenous holiday sector and maybe even, longer-term, for heavy engineering like shipbuilding.
- Also there might, with luck, be a downturn in the amount of food we ship (specifically air-freight) around the world; either because we get used to doing without it, because it can’t be shipped fast enough or because Joe Public won’t pay the inflated prices. Undoubtedly this will be bad for the producers and the airlines. But it should be good for local farmers who might be encouraged to put land to better use and it could lead towards the much needed restructuring of world-wide agriculture (which I’ve written about before, see for example here and here).
- All of this leads to a long-term downturn in aviation with (if ones believes in it) a positive effect on climate change and probably several airlines going out of business.
As one of my friends on Facebook has observed: “perhaps we need to get used to the fact that the modern ease of transporting ourselves [and our stuff – K] across continents is not something that should be taken for granted”.
And as a final thought: who can now justify the expansion of Heathrow, or indeed any other airport?
Join Airplot
An unusual piece of campaigning from me as in general I don’t actively promote specific campaigns.
Airplot is a small piece of land acquired by Greenpeace, in the village of Sipson, on the edge of London’s Heathrow Airport. If Heathrow’s third runway goes ahead, both Airplot and Sipson would be destroyed. You can find more details of what Airplot is about here.
So far, an incredible 77,500 people have signed up as beneficial owners to Airplot, along with Greenpeace, Greenpeace, Emma Thompson, Alistair McGowan and Zac Goldsmith. The target is to reach 100,000 beneficial owners by 1st May. Being a beneficial owner costs nothing but makes life far more difficult if the land has to be aquired by the government (or its agents) to build Heathrow’s Third Runway.
If Heathrow expands, Sipson and the surrounding area (homes, farmland and jobs) would be completely destroyed and the airport would become the single biggest source of climate pollution in the country. Although the current government’s plans for Heathrow received a major setback in the courts last month (see here and here) the battle is not over; the project has to be completely scrapped.
If the incoming government on 6th May tries to restart the project, Greenpeace will continue challenging the proposals through the planning system and if necessary by peaceful direct action.
I signed up as a beneficial owner a long time ago because the Third Runway is something I feel very strongly against, both from an environmental standpoint and because I am far from convinced the suggested expansion of air transport capacity is required.
Will you also help the environment and support Londoners by becoming a beneficial owner: an Airplotter? There’s just three weeks left to do this; when the deeds are finalised on 1st May the names of all Airplotters will be included and everyone will be issued with a certificate of beneficial ownership.
Sign up here.