Posts Tagged ‘Fukushima’
“To overcome a desperate situation, make a complete turn in one sudden burst”*…
Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, the BBC’s Tokyo correspondent, on the riddle of Japan…
This is the world’s third-largest economy. It’s a peaceful, prosperous country with the longest life expectancy in the world, the lowest murder rate, little political conflict, a powerful passport, and the sublime Shinkansen, the world’s best high-speed rail network.
America and Europe once feared the Japanese economic juggernaut much the same way they fear China’s growing economic might today. But the Japan the world expected never arrived. In the late 1980s, Japanese people were richer than Americans. Now they earn less than Britons.
For decades Japan has been struggling with a sluggish economy, held back by a deep resistance to change and a stubborn attachment to the past. Now, its population is both ageing and shrinking.
Japan is stuck…
His diagnosis and his prognosis: “Japan was the future but it’s stuck in the past,” @wingcommander1 in @BBCWorld.
* Japanese proverb
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As we ponder progress, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant exploded and released radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
The radiation releases forced the evacuation of 83,000 residents from towns around the plant. The meltdown caused concerns about contamination of food and water supplies, including the 2011 rice harvest, and also the health effects of radiation on workers at the plant. Scientists estimate that the accident released 18 quadrillion becquerels of caesium-137 into the Pacific Ocean, contaminating 150 square miles of the ocean floor.
Causa Mortis…
It’s no wonder, what with Fukushima and all, that there’s renewed worry about the safety of nuclear power. As that tragic episode demonstrates, it’s an altogether justified concern. But what of the alternatives?
The Lifeboat Foundation‘s Next Big Future did the homework, quantifying the inclusive mortality rates from the use of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass/biofuel, peat, solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear to generate electricity. The detailed results, with supporting research, are here; that detail is graphically portrayed here…
By way of putting nuclear into context, Seth Godin summarizes the comparison:
There are objections one might raise to the research used (it doesn’t, for instance, take into account the implications of the long half-lives of radioactive contaminants, nor less-than- or indirectly-fatal effects like impact on the endocrine system). But in any case, the point is not, of course, that one shouldn’t be concerned with nuclear safety; the events of the last couple of weeks are ample evidence that it’s critical.
Rather (and graphically obviously) the point is that one should be even more concerned about– and active in addressing– the risks of fossil fuel generation.
The title of Seth’s post: “The triumph of coal marketing.” Indeed.
As we hustle to harness the wind, we might might recall that it was on this date in 1855 that Canadian physician, geologist, and inventor Abraham Gesner received the first U.S. patent for a process to obtain oil from bituminous shale and cannel coal for the purpose of illumination (No. 12,612); he called the product “kerosene.”
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