Category Archives: environment

amusements, environment, memes, quotes, topographical

Facts of the Week

This is the first in what will probably be an occasional series highlighting unexpected, unusual or just amazing facts I come across. It is really for curiosity value rather than a resource of those who take part in pub quizzes. Wherever possible I will, as always, provide a source for the information. So here is the first selection of factlets …

Each year, an estimated 10,000 shipping containers fall off container ships at sea.
Between five and six million containers are in transit at any given moment.
[]

The Sendai earthquake shifted the earth’s figure axis by about 17 cm and moved the main island of Japan [Honshu] around 2.4 metres.
[US Geological Survey]

The Sendai earthquake also shortened our day by about 1.8 milliseconds (thousands of a second).
[NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory]

The original Polynesian and South Pacific origin of the word ‘tabu’ actually refers to that which is sacred: the application of a taboo actually designating that which is holy.
[OED]

environment, topographical

More Thoughts on Japan

I continue to watch the news coming out of Japan, especially that about the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi neuclear plant.

I’m astounded at the lack of assistance the nuclear plant authorities are getting. They have now been struggling with (and losing) the battle to stabilise their reactors after the tsunami took out their backup cooling system on Friday.

I have to wonder (a) why they didn’t shout for outside back-up much earlier on Friday, (b) where the Japanese military are and (c) what priority is being given to getting grid power restored to the Fukushima plant. Why have the Japanese government not flooded the power plant with regiments of Engineers and Logistics experts. And why haven’t they deployed every available military pumping unit and bowser to the site, to help shift water (if only seawater).

Before anyone says it, I know they’ll need bowsers to deliver water to refugees, but I would have thought the nuclear plant needs to take priority, and their water companies should have bowsers too. Moreover the military will have bowsers which may be usable (for seawater) but not for drinking water. And pumping units are, I would have thought, not going to achieve a lot at present in the disaster area (there’s much else to do without worrying about pumping water away) and in any event, again, I would think the nuclear plant should take priority. Clearly too they would need a secure supply of fuel and other supplies – but that’s what logistics is all about.

Yes, I know the military won’t be skilled at managing and operating a nuclear plant. No-one would expect them to be. But their equipment, logistics skills and manpower should be invaluable. We proved in this country how valuable military logistics skills are during the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001, where the military were eventually called in and sorted out the problem very quickly. Good senior officers cut through obstructions and get things done quickly and efficiently; they’re trained to do just this; trained in logistics; and trained to deal with horrors like this in warfare.

Should we be exposing soldiers to such an undoubtedly dangerous environment? It’s a tricky ethical problem. But at times of national emergency such as this I would tend to the view that this is part of the military’s role; and indeed the military would expect such a role. After all we expect soldiers to go into battle, kill people, possibly get killed themselves and be exposed to depleted Uranium shells and worse. And they will have NBC suits; although they are by no means a comfortable environment to work in they’re available.

Would any of this have averted where we are now? We can never know. But it seems to me that it probably should have been given a shot. Maybe it has been and we just haven’t been told. We just don’t know.

All we can do is watch, hope and pray.

environment, science, topographical

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.

environment, topographical

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.

environment, science, topographical

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.

Images from 123RF

amusements, beliefs, environment, food+drink, quotes, thoughts

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]

amusements, beliefs, environment, medical, music, pleasures, science, thoughts

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]