the human costs of different types of energy

Propublica | Since this time last year, we’ve seen a deadly mine disaster [1], the worst oil spill in U.S. history [2], and now a nuclear crisis in Japan [3]. That got us wondering—how does one compare or quantify the human cost of different sources of energy?

As it turns out, a Swiss research organization, the Paul Sherrer Institute, has been doing just that. Using data from the institute, we pulled together a few visualizations.

The top part of the graph shows the actual number of deaths from severe accidents in developed countries [4] from 1970 through 2008. The bottom part of the graph shows the number of deaths that might result [5] from a catastrophic event at an average site in the developed world. This does not show the worst case scenario for any situation, but it gives a sense of the relative risks associated with different sources of energy.

These numbers represent deaths in the developed world from severe accidents only, where at least five people were killed. The accidents have occurred at many stages of the energy supply chain, from coal mining to shipping oil to accidents at actual power plants.

It’s important to note that every-day energy use from fossil fuels kills far more people than accidents. By one estimate from 2000, pollution from power plants results in at least 30,000 premature deaths every year [6] in the United States alone.

the amount of fuel at fukushima DWARFS chernobyl

Video - 2006 The Battle of Chernobyl

Washington Blog | Science Insider noted yesterday:

The Daiichi complex in Fukushima, Japan ... had a total of 1760 metric tons of fresh and used nuclear fuel on site last year, according to a presentation by its owners, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco). The most damaged Daiichi reactor, number 3, contains about 90 tons of fuel, and the storage pool above reactor 4, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC's) Gregory Jaczko reported yesterday had lost its cooling water, contains 135 tons of spent fuel. The amount of fuel lost in the core melt at Three Mile Island in 1979 was about 30 tons; the Chernobyl reactors had about 180 tons when the accident occurred in 1986.

And see this.

That means that Fukushima has nearly 10 times more nuclear fuel than Chernobyl.

It also means that a single spent fuel pool - at reactor 4, which has lost all of its water and thus faces a release of its radioactive material - has 75% as much nuclear fuel as at all of Chernobyl.

However, the real numbers are even worse.

Specifically, Tepco very recently transferred many more radioactive spent fuel rods into the storage pools. According to Associated Press, there were - at the time of the earthquake and tsunami - 3,400 tons of fuel in seven spent fuel pools plus 877 tons of active fuel in the cores of the reactors.

That totals 4,277 tons of nuclear fuel at Fukushima.

Which means that there is almost 24 times more nuclear fuel at Fukushima than Chernobyl.

global energy crunch: how different parts of the world would react to a peak oil scenario

Global Energy Crunch | Peak oil theory predicts that oil production will soon start a terminal decline. Most authors imply that no adequate alternate resource and technology will be available to replace oil as the backbone resource of industrial society. This article uses historical cases from countries that have gone through a similar experience as the best available analytical strategy to understand what will happen if the predictions of peak oil theorists are right. The author is not committed to a particular version of peak oil theory, but deems the issue important enough to explore how various parts of the world should be expected to react. From the historical record he is able to identify predatory militarism, totalitarian retrenchment, and socioeconomic adaptation as three possible trajectories.

why so little looting in japan?

Slate | If your home was hit by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and radiation from a nuclear power plant, you'd be forgiven for not remaining calm. Yet that's what many Japanese quake victims appear to be doing. People are forming lines outside supermarkets. Life is "particularly orderly," according to PBS. "Japanese discipline rules despite disaster," says a columnist for The Philippine Star.

Anyone who has seen Big Bird in Japan knows the shorthand for Japanese culture: They're so honest and disciplined! They're a collective society! They value the group over the individual! Of course they're not going to steal anything after the most devastating natural disaster of their lifetimes—unlike those undisciplined thieves in post-Katrina New Orleans and post-earthquake Haiti. Even if they're desperate for food, the Japanese will still wait in line for groceries.

There's a circularity to these cultural explanations, says Mark D. West, a professor at University of Michigan Law School: "Why don't Japanese loot? Because it's not in their culture. How is that culture defined? An absence of looting." A better explanation may be structural factors: a robust system of laws that reinforce honesty, a strong police presence, and, ironically, active crime organizations.

Honesty, with incentives. Japanese people may well be more honest than most. But the Japanese legal structure rewards honesty more than most. In a 2003 study on Japan's famous policy for recovering lost property, West argues that the high rates of recovery have less to do with altruism than with the system of carrots and sticks that incentivizes people to return property they find rather than keep it. For example, if you find an umbrella and turn it in to the cops, you get a finder's fee of 5 to 20 percent of its value if the owner picks it up. If they don't pick it up within six months, the finder gets to keep the umbrella. Japanese learn about this system from a young age, and a child's first trip to the nearest police station after finding a small coin, say, is a rite of passage that both children and police officers take seriously. At the same time, police enforce small crimes like petty theft, which contributes to an overall sense of security and order, along the lines of the "broken windows" policy implemented in New York City in the 1990s. Failure to return a found wallet can result in hours of interrogation at best, and up to 10 years in prison at worst.

Police presence. Japan has an active and visible police force of nearly 300,000 officers across the country. Cops walk their beats and chat up local residents and shopkeepers. Police are posted at ubiquitous kobans, police boxes manned by one or two officers, and in cities there's almost always a koban within walking distance of another koban. A survey in 1992 found that 95 percent of residents knew where the nearest koban was, and 14 percent knew the name of an officer who worked there. Cops are paid well—the force attracts many college graduates—and can live in cheap government housing. They also care a lot about public relations: The Tokyo Metropolitan Police even has a mascot, Pipo-kun, whose name means "people + police." They're good at their jobs, too: The clearance rate for murder in 2010 was an unbelievable 98.2 percent, according to West—so unbelievable that some attribute it to underreporting.* Fist tap Dale.

how much competition do we need in a civilized society?

Springerlink | Francesco Duina is an American associate professor and chair of the Sociology Department at Bates College, in Maine, USA, and visiting professor at the International Center for Business and Politics in Copenhagen, Denmark. His latest book ‘‘Winning’’ is about the American love for competition; a love not shared by all Americans, but dominant enough to shape how many Americans live. In the rest of the world, and certainly in more egalitarian nations like Denmark and the Netherlands, people have more reservations about competition (Data World Values Surveys). Duina describes the ‘‘American obsession’’ with competition and winning and losing very vividly. The bulk of the book is descriptive but in the last chapter Duina makes some critical normative remarks and proposes an alternative mind-set for the USA. This book is important because it poses the question how much competition we really need in rich nations, with high levels of economic and cultural productivity. The answer to this question is relevant in discussions about the role of governments and about the optimal levels of liberalization or regulation of markets. Duina’s suggestions to moderate and redirect competition by changing the American mind-set are valuable. His suggestions might have been more adequate, however, if he would have made a distinction between ‘competition for fun’ and ‘competition to survive’, and if he would have paid more attention to their different effects on happiness.

i call'em knuckledraggers for a reason...,

Physorg | The tendency to perceive others as "us versus them" isn't exclusively human but appears to be shared by our primate cousins, a new study led by Yale researchers has found.

In a series of ingenious experiments, Yale researchers led by psychologist Laurie Santos showed that monkeys treat individuals from outside their groups with the same suspicion and dislike as their human cousins tend to treat outsiders, suggesting that the roots of human intergroup conflict may be evolutionarily quite ancient.

The findings are reported in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"One of the more troubling aspects of human nature is that we evaluate people differently depending on whether they're a member of our 'ingroup' or 'outgroup,'" Santos said. "Pretty much every conflict in human history has involved people making distinctions on the basis of who is a member of their own race, religion, social class, and so on. The question we were interested in is: Where do these types of group distinctions come from?"

The answer, she adds, is that such biases have apparently been shaped by 25 million years of evolution and not just by human culture.

why inequality matters

Richard Wilkinson has played a formative role in international research on the social determinants of health and on the societal effects of income inequality; his work has been published in many languages. He studied economic history at the London School of Economics before training in epidemiology. He is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College London and a Visiting Professor at the University of York. Richard co-wrote The Spirit Level and is a co-founder of The Equality Trust.

the method is transparency, the goal is justice

Technology Review | Perhaps the best way to conceive of WikiLeaks is like this: it is a stateless, distributed intelligence network, a reverse image of the U.S. National Security Agency, dedicated to publicizing secrets rather than acquiring them, unconstrained and answerable to a single man.

The future of WikiLeaks
If WikiLeaks is not a media organization, is it another example of the Internet overthrowing our settled habits? That question is more interesting. By this formulation, WikiLeaks is to the state and corporations what Napster was to music or Google is to media as a business.

Shakespeare, Lord Annan recalled in his war memoirs, gave to Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida the haunting phrase "There is a mystery ... in the soul of the state." "That mystery is the intelligence services," Annan explained. He was thinking of his service on the United Kingdom's Joint Intelligence Staff 70 years ago. But the modern state has many allied organizations besides the intelligence services, including the management of large corporations and banks, who partake in its mystery. Julian Assange, the disordered soul of WikiLeaks, wants to explode the soul of the state.

The modern state, with its monopoly on violence, is not like the music industry or the media. It is properly jealous of its secrets, and more powerful and able than Assange understands. It will bitterly resent an attack by a crypto-utopian on its ability to "think." Assange has declared himself the state's enemy, and he will, in all likelihood, be comprehensively destroyed. WikiLeaks will vanish.

Once imagined, however, the technology of WikiLeaks cannot be forgotten and can easily be imitated. Other organizations, less radically activist, will create secure drop boxes for anonymous leaking. Already, the disgruntled former WikiLeaks volunteer, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, has said he will create a less threatening platform called OpenLeaks. It will, he says, publish nothing but, instead, function as a pipeline where sources designate the media organization to which they wish to leak: "We want to be a neutral conduit. That's what's most politically sustainable." Still more leak platforms are sprouting, including GreenLeaks, which will publish "information of environmental significance"; Brussels Leaks, which will expose the European Union; and Rospil, which will uncover Russia's secrets.

Predictably, media organizations want to replicate WikiLeaks's secure drop box, too. Recently, Al Jazeera launched a "Transparency Unit," which encourages its audience to submit "all forms of content" for "editorial review and, if merited, online broadcast and transmission on our English and Arabic-language broadcasts." The first product came in January, when Al Jazeera published the "Palestine Papers," 11 years' worth of secret documents created by the Palestinian Authority, describing negotiations with the Israeli government. The impression that emerges from them is that the Israeli government is no longer interested in securing a Palestinian state: it is a scoop that could not have existed without the Transparency Unit's drop box. Now other publications are considering their own. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, is pondering how he can make it easier for sources to leak to his journalists.

WikiLeaks may not be with us for the long haul, but others will imitate its innovations, and they are likely to be more constrained and more responsible.

nuclear boy "explains" fukushima daiichi for kids...,

Video - Nuclear Boy explains Fukushima Daiichi Fist tap LongdeShizi.

science vs. money

From: "THE LEADING EDGE" Feb. 1983 M. King Hubbert: Science's Don Quixote ... (Published By: Society of Exploration Geophysicists (Pg.22)):

Hubbert first joined SEG in 1945 and quickly became an active member. He has served on the standing committee geophysical education, the standing committee on publications, and as editor of Geophysics (1947-49).

Hubbert has had serious health problems for several years... But, neither his ailments nor the recent adulation have eroded his zest for intellectual combat. In recent years, he has assaulted a target which he labels the culture of money that is gigantic event by Hubbert standards. His thesis is that society is seriously handi-capped because its two most important intellectual underpinnings, the science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance, are incompatible. A reasonable co-existence is possible when both are growing at approximately the same rate. That, Hubbert says, has been happening since the start of the industrial revolution but it is soon going to end because the amount the matter-energy system can grow is limited while money's growth is not.

"I was in New York in the 30's. I had a box seat at the depression," Hubbert says. "I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. We had manpower and abundant raw materials. Yet we shut the country down. We're doing the same kind of thing now but with a different material outlook. We are not in the position we were in 1929-30 with regard to the future. Then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it's not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It's unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can't possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered."... That is obviously a scenario of catastrophe, a possibility Hubert concedes. But it is not one he forecasts. The man known a pessimist is, in this case, quite hopeful. In fact, he could be the ultimate utopian. We have, he says, the necessary technology. All we have to do is completely overhaul our culture and find an alternative to money. We are not starting from zero, he emphasizes. We have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. It's just a matter of putting it all together. We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time.

A non-catastrophic solution is impossible, Hubbert feels, unless society is made stable. This means abandoning two axioms of our culture the work ethic and the idea that growth is the normal state of affairs. Hubbert challenges the latter mathematically and concludes the exponential growth of the last two centuries is the opposite of the normal situation "It is an aberration. For most of human history, the population doubled only once every 32,000 years. Now it's down to 35 years. That is dangerous. No biologic population can double more than a few times without getting seriously out of bounds. I think the world is seriously overpopulated right now. There can be no possible solutions to the world's problems that do not involve stabilization of the world's population."

Hubbert's ideas about work are even more heretical. Work is becoming, he says, increasingly unimportant. He thinks it is conceivable that the future work week might be on the order of 10 hours. Indeed, because production will have to be limited by increasingly limited mineral resources that might be inevitable. And that, Hubbert stresses, could be the foundation of an earthly paradise...Most employment now is merely pushing paper around, He says. The actual work needed to keep a stable society running is a very small fraction of available manpower.

The key to making this cultural alteration is to come up with limitless supply of cheap energy. Hubbert feels the answer is obvious solar power and he does not feel more technological breakthroughs are needed before it can be made universally available. His faith is not that of a kneejerk trendy but that of a doubter who did much studying before his conversion. Fifteen years ago I thought solar power was impractical because I thought nuclear power was the answer. But I spent some time on an advisory committee on waste disposal to the Atomic Energy Commission. After that, I began to be very, very sceptical because of the hazards. That's when I began to study solar Power. I'm convinced we have the technology to handle it right now. We could make the transition in a matter of decades if we begin now.

Solar power is limited by astronomic time but not in human time frame. It's been there for billions of years and it will be going on for billions of years after we're gone. It also has another great advantage over conventional sources -- once the system is in place it is permanent. All that's required to keep it going is routine maintenance.

Harnessing an infinite supply of cheap energy is the key to Hubbert's technate, because of the leisure time it would generate. Look at the people who did remarkable things in the past. The Greeks. The English of a century ago. What did they have in common? They were highly educated and had a lot of leisure time. Of course not everyone with that combination did remarkable things, but the people who did do remarkable things generally had that combination.

In both cases, though, the opportunities for intellectual greatness were limited to a very few. The intellectual life of Greece was made possible because it was a slave society. England's was supported by great masses that lived in terrible poverty. But if the sun is conquered, education and leisure could be universal. It could result in the greatest intellectual renaissance of all time, Hubbert says.

His nominees for the leadership role in making this cultural change? His earth science peers... Intellectual leadership is, he says, their natural function.

A handful of men like Hutton, Lyell, and Darwin (1780-1880) changed the world. They gave us a geologic view of history instead of a Biblical view.

In the second stage, from 1880 until now, earth scientists became utilitarian and concentrated mostly on the search for ores, metals and fossil fuels. They did very little thinking about the broader subjects.

Now is the start of the third phase when the world is heading into intellectual turmoil... It needs guidance. The knowledge essential to competent intellectual leadership in this situation is pre-eminently geological "a knowledge of the earth's mineral and energy resources." The importance of any science, socially, is its effect on what people think and what they do. It is time earth scientists again become a major force in how people think rather than in how they live.

If Hubbert is right about man being on the brink of an unparalleled crisis, then men are going to have to make fantastic decisions “species-wide decisions" imminently.

This ability to make people, particularly the right people think, will be of inestimable worth. It may be Hubbert's greatest legacy.

technical information on fukushima daiichi

In the aftermath of Japan's earthquake and tsunami, reliable technical information about the crisis affecting the nuclear power plants at Fukushima has been difficult to discern from the media coverage. The demand to know what is happening, however, is very great. The Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering held an information session for the MIT community about the current situation at Fukushima on March 14, 2011. Topics discussed include: the characteristics of the boiling water reactors at Fukushima; the possible causes of the accidents; the current status of the reactors; the technical options that may now be available to the reactor operators; and the possible future implications. NSE students, with support from our faculty, are maintaining a technical information blog at mitnse.com to continue to provide non-sensationalized, factual data from engineers in a manner that can be understood by the general public.

archaic superpowers in the age of superorganismic explosion (redux)

Video - J. Robert Oppenheimer we knew the world would not be the same.

Originally posted 1/30/11
America had made the bomb, and it could not escape the decisions that the possession of the bomb entailed. We had it. No one else did. Having it, what should we do with it? Should we share our knowledge or seek some international custodian of the "secret" we had discovered by prodigious wartime effort and the expenditure of some $2 Billion? Or, should we husband it, should we keep it all to ourselves? These were the fateful questions, and on the answers to them depended in large degree the climate of the postwar world and the direction that world would take.

The answers lay in the realm of science, which alone could gauge the validity of our secret and estimate the degree of our true choice; and because these answers, like the questions, involved entire new worlds of techniques and knowledge, it could not be expected that they would be widely and clearly understood. Inevitably, the issue of the bomb, the most momentous issue of our time, would be debated and settled in the inner councils of government; and, inevitably, under these circumstances, with knowledge largely confined to the high-circle inner club, it was foreordained that the Military, which already dominated this club, would define the argument in its own terms and dictate the decision. For this was clearly the Military's province, was it not? Who else could possibly know with their certainty?

The simplicity of this logic, viewed in the perspective of the years, now seems to have been the great delusion of our times. For anyone studying the record is forced to the conclusion that the Military, preoccupied with their own narrow professional interests, simply did not know best. Trained always to seek out the more powerful weapon, drilled to the point of instinct to protect such weapons by the tightest of secrecy, the military mentality was precisely the worst possible type of mentality with which to meet the special challenges of the new and infinitely complicated age of nuclear science. Great vision would be needed to recognize and deal with the unimaginable host of problems that we had willed ourselves in the birth of our horrible brain child.

But the military mind, by its very nature, would fall prey to the obsession that it possessed a great and final "secret" when in reality it had no secret at all, or at best only one of fleeting duration. This first delusion of the military mind would lead directly to a second. Convinced we alone held the "secret" of this supreme power, we would soon envision ourselves as the guardian of the world, the policeman of its security and its peace - a decision that ignored the elemental fact other nations almost certainly would not desire a guardian and one of them, Russia, would not trust or countenance our policing. Along such paths were we to be driven into the ever-mounting tensions of the Cold War that sane men can hardly be expected to continue and remain forever cold.

The tragedy is that we need not have walked so often to so many precarious brinks. There were men who saw the issues clear and whole. But these men were not of the Military. They were civilian scientists whose only claim was that they had created the atomic monster. They knew its terrible power. They knew that the scientific knowledge on which it was based was world-wide, not the exclusive province of any single country. They could glimpse the still more horrifying potentials that lay in the nuclear future now that the door was open, and they clearly saw that an arms race to achieve these higher horrors would escalate into the most desperate competition the world had ever seen. The views of the scientists were reflected in the eleoquent voice of one far-visioned statesman in the top-level councils of government, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. The scientists raised their voices in protest. Stimson tried to bring to the issue the power of prophetic vision and common sense and high ideals. But the scientists and Stimson lost. Inevitably, because the Military was against them. This is the story of that defeat - a defeat that led directly to all our future points of no return.

Video - FDR warns of a fifth column.

you made the rain black and shoved your values down our throat...,

Video - You made the rain black, and shoved your values down our throat.

Yale | The chaotic events unfolding at the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi reactors along Japan’s northeast coast have inspired intense new scrutiny of the country’s nuclear policies. While Japan excels in some anti-pollution measures, the lack of a vigorously independent press and a strong judiciary has enabled Japanese industry to resist legislation to safeguard the environment and human health. The nuclear power industry, a powerful player in Japan’s politically dominant construction industry, has pressed ahead with its plans — endorsed in 2006 by the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry’s “New National Energy Policy” — to mold the country into a “nuclear state.” In addition to 54 existing nuclear power plants that until last week supplied 30 percent of the country’s electricity, a dozen new nuclear plants are planned or under construction.

One in particular has exposed a deep public divide. The proposed Kaminoseki nuclear plant is to be built on landfill in a national park in the country’s well-known Inland Sea, hailed as Japan’s Galapagos. For three decades, local residents, fishermen, and environmental activists have opposed the plant, saying it should not be built in the picturesque sea, with its rich marine life and fishing culture dating back millennia. The Inland Sea has also been the site of intense seismic activity, including the epicenter of the 1995 Kobe earthquake that killed 6,400 people.

But in a sign of the immense clout of the nuclear power industry, a utility has barreled ahead with plans to build the Kaminoseki plant, despite what may be the most intense opposition yet to a Japanese nuclear project. In 2009, the utility began clearing forests for the project — located just 50 miles from Hiroshima — and reclaiming land from the sea. Nothing, not even intensifying protests, seemed able to stop the plant’s construction — until, that is, last week’s earthquake and tsunami set off the crisis at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant. Now, for the time being at least, work has halted on the Kaminoseki project.

“We have to stop it,” Masae Yuasa, a professor of International Studies at Hiroshima City University and a leading opponent of the plant, told me when I visited Japan last fall. In words that have a chilling resonance now, she continued, “Once an accident happens, there is no border. I want to be more polite, but we have to stop it. I am a person from Hiroshima. I cannot be quiet about it.”

Video - Fallout came in the form of thick black rain.

fallout fear returns...,

Video - Excerpt from "White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki".

CNN | The cities flattened by last week's earthquake look eerily similar to the decimated buildings Shigeko Sasamori saw after an atomic bomb was dropped on her hometown in 1945.

The floodwaters from the tsunami -- the waves of debris and bodies -- remind her of the rivers in Hiroshima, Japan, swamped with corpses.

And the struggle to contain radioactive emissions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant makes Sasamori, 78, wonder if the crisis there will plague a new generation in Japan.

"Radiation is the most horrible thing, and it's more horrible to me because humans make it," she said from her home near Los Angeles. "We don't have to make that."

Sasamori is a hibakusha, or heat radiation survivor -- a name given to those who lived through the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II.

For them, radiation is an invisible enemy that has haunted them, claimed their loved ones, altered their bodies and threatened their lives.
WWII survivors' second nuclear crisis

The parallels between the devastation from the 1945 atomic bombs and that of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis have reopened old scars.

Sasamori wakes up at night and watches Japanese TV coverage of the disasters from her living room. A slender woman, dignified and gray-haired, Sasamori is shaken. Her body is sleepless, and her heart feels heavy, she said.

And she waits for news, because her daughter-in-law's extended family has yet to be located in the oceanside prefecture of Iwate.

As a nervous world watches the situation at Fukushima, some hibakusha worry that more Japanese people may have to endure the ordeal of radiation exposure than they did after World War II.

"This is like déjà vu," said Dr. Ritsuko Komaki, another Japanese American who grew up in Hiroshima after the bomb fell when she was 2.

Japan's modern history has now been haunted by two major nuclear events: the atomic bombs and the struggle to contain the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which the Japanese prime minister described Friday as "very grave."

response delayed by concern over asset damage

Video - The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency says he's heading to Japan - almost a week after the nuclear crisis began.

Bloomberg | Efforts to control Japan’s nuclear crisis were delayed by concerns over damaging valuable assets at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant and initial passivity from the Japanese government, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. was reluctant to use seawater to cool one of the six reactors at the plant and hesitated because it was concerned about harming its long-term investment in the plant, the Journal cited people involved with the response as saying.

Japan’s government waited more than a day to order seawater flooding at the plant after waves generated by the largest earthquake ever recorded in Japan knocked out power for cooling systems, allowing heat to build to dangerous levels within the reactor chamber. Tepco, as the utility is known, earlier refrained from using seawater because it would corrode metal and render the reactor useless.

“I’m aware there are many criticisms, and rightly so,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said today in response to a question about the Journal report. “We did our best during the whole process, and we aren’t at a stage where we can make any judgment on that.”

privatized nuclear power means cutting corners

Video - Russia Today video examining the risk-reward conflicts intrinsic to private, for-profit nuclear energy.

Russia Today | In light of the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant, the privatization of nuclear energy in the country has come under fire. Some question whether the accident could have been averted if the plant had been run by the state.

No matter how hard Tokyo Electric Company's workers try, disaster still looms at Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant. Attempts to cool the reactors have been applauded for bravery, but it has been a week since cooling capability was lost, and there is no end in sight to this crisis.

"The implications are that the radiation has already spread a fair distance, there will probably be an area around the plant like Chernobyl that will be uninhabitable for the foreseeable future and will get far worse than this,” said Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, an expert on radiation exposure and professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

The plant's cooling systems may have been crippled by a natural disaster, but some are now questioning the merits of the decision to build reactors near the so-called Ring of Fire.

“This is completely a human-made disaster, because that plant should never have been located there in the first place, and citizens have pointed that out,” said Aileen Mioko Smith, executive director of the Green Action environmental group.

The fact that Japan's nuclear industry is in private hands has also led to accusations that profits were put before safety.

Fukushima's owner already has a questionable past, with a history of falsifying safety records at the site back in the 1980s.

“I think we also have to review the idea of privatized nuclear power because it means cutting corners, and we're watching those corners being cut today,” argued journalist and author Afshin Rattansi.

“What we would like to see is for the government to take control of these nuclear reactors from private corporations, because private corporations’ main purpose for existence is to maximize profits, and by maximizing profits in the nuclear sector, we are talking about minimizing concerns for public health and safety,” added Keith Harmon Snow, a war correspondent and former UN investigator.

It may be down to private investors to get the ball rolling. It is the other way around if things go wrong.

“I think that it is going to be inevitable that the state will take over to contain these plants. They will probably need to be covered with concrete and sand much like Chernobyl was. I think the state will take over the responsibility for that. I think that whether the state does it or private companies do it, it's very difficult for anyone to do this job,” said Dr. Jeffrey Patterson.

Japan has experienced nuclear tragedy before, in 1945 when the US dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today the Japanese are trying everything they can to avert another nuclear disaster, this time at Fukushima, while the world waits for the wider consequences, unsure of how many will be affected.

authorities restrict news you can use on reactor disaster

Video - Authorities restrict news you can use on reactor disaster.

National Journal | Fearing shortages of bandwidth might inhibit military operations after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, U.S. Cyber Command blocked some commercial websites that generally use “extraordinary bandwidth,” a spokesman said on Tuesday.

The partial cyber ban was imposed at the request of U.S. Pacific Command and is a “regional action,” a Cyber Command spokesman told National Journal. It affects websites like Amazon, YouTube, ESPN, eBay, and other “recreational websites... that have low mission impact,” the spokesman said. Social-media websites were not restricted.

The U.S. military has about a dozen ships assisting in the crisis in Japan, either based off the coast or en route, and is engaged in air operations there. The spokesman said the partial ban is seen as a necessary precaution to ensure that mission-critical communications can continue even after significant damage to structures, facilities, and infrastructure in the region.

Misawa Air Base, a forward operating base for these missions, warned its personnel in a blog post Friday that the Defense Switched Network, which handles voice calls, was in backup mode and had only limited capacity, according to NextGov.com. "We have a number of connectivity issues. Internet has been up and down due to our connections through other places in Japan,” the blog post said.

Col. Daniel King, deputy public affairs director for Pacific Command, said he was unaware of any concrete communications problems that prompted the partial ban. “It was precautionary,” he said, while declining to discuss any damage caused by the earthquake. When asked about the blog post, of which he said he was unaware, King noted that any posting on Friday was “literally hours after a 9.0 earthquake -- that’s a significant shock to any infrastructure.”

Right now, “communications are good” for the U.S. missions, King said from Hawaii.

The Pacific Command area of responsibility encompasses about half of the earth’s surface, according to the command’s website, and stretches from the waters off the U.S. West Coast to the western border of India, and from Antarctica to the North Pole. “Even what happens in the Pacific Command area of operations impacts operations worldwide,” another official from U.S. Cyber command said. “Even though the majority of the damage was isolated... in a specific area of operations, it still affects communications worldwide,” the official said.

A public affairs officer for U.S. Pacific Command, Lt. Cmdr. Bill Clinton, said the missions will prompt “a lot of demand on our networks.” Blocking the sites is “just a precaution to make sure that information is flowing back to us.”

authorities resume failing cooling operations

Video - Japan resumes cooling operations.

Xinhua | Japan's Self-Defense Force and firefighting personnel resumed shooting water over the No. 3 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant on Saturday afternoon, in an effort to cool down the reactor and overheating spent fuel pools.
A spokesperson for Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), operator of the faltering Daiichi facility, said a total of 1,260 tons of water will be discharged over the next seven hours.

An unmanned vehicle with a 22-meter high platform was utilized in the efforts to avoid personnel coming into contact with excessive amounts of radiation.

The Tokyo Fire Department's special "hyper rescue team" also joined the SDF in spraying water to cool down the No. 3 reactor and the combined effort discharged 60 tons of water in 20 minutes, in the first phase of the operation on Saturday morning.

Efforts to cool the reactor were suspended as the TEPCO workers tried to reconnect electricity to the plant by using outside power sources.

TEPCO said Saturday that reconnection of the No. 2 reactor is expected to be completed during the day, but it may take some time before cooling devices can be reactivated as a lot of damage may have been caused to electrical systems when the tsunami hit the plant following Friday's 9.0 magnitude quake that struck the region.

The utility said that at the time of the quake, the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors at the Daiichi facility were the only ones operating and shutdown automatically as they are supposed to.

But due to lost cooling functions in the reactors some of the cores are believed to have partially melted.

The buildings housing the No. 1, No. 3 and No. 4 reactors have been severely damaged, TEPCO said and fuel pools in the reactors have been left uncovered.

authorities seek to systematise social media sock-puppetry

The Rise of the Autobots: Into the Underground of Social Network Bots from Tom on Vimeo.

Guardian | The US has a chance to move on from a history of clandestine foreign policy – instead it acts like a clumsy spammer. The US government's plan to use technology to create and manage fake identities for social interaction with terrorists is as appalling as it is amusing. It's appalling that in this era of greater transparency and accountability brought on by the internet, the US of all countries would try to systematise sock puppetry. It's appallingly stupid, for there's little doubt that the fakes will be unmasked. The net result of that will be the diminution, not the enhancement, of American credibility.

But the effort is amusing as well, for there is absolutely no need to spend millions of dollars to create fake identities online. Any child or troll can do it for free. Millions do. If the government insists on paying, it can use salesforce.com to monitor and join in chats. There is no shortage of social management tools marketers are using to find and mollify or drown out complainers. There's no shortage of social-media gurus, either.

Tools are quite unnecessary, though. Just get yourself a fake email account, Uncle Sam, and you can create and manage anonymous and pseudonymous identities across most any social service.

Hell, if the government wants to spread information around the world without being detected, why doesn't it just use WikiLeaks? Oh, that's right. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called WikiLeaks disclosures "not just an attack on America [but an] attack on the international community". The leaks, she said, "tear at the fabric" of government.

Yes, indeed, they tore at the fabric of the Tunisian government and helped launch the revolts in the Middle East and a wave of freedom – and, we hope, democracy – across borders. The movement of liberation we are witnessing came not from war and weapons or spying and subterfuge but from a force more powerful: transparency; openness; honesty.

I remain sorely disappointed that the Obama administration's reflexive response to the WikiLeaks revelations was to clamp down and then condemn, attack, and reportedly torture the alleged leaker and his allies in accountability. Obama missed the opportunity to separate himself from a secretive and sometimes deceitful history of government.

He could make good on his campaign pledge to run the transparent administration. Even while disapproving of the theft of documents, he could acknowledge the lesson of the leaks: that government keeps too much from its people. Government is secret by default and transparent by force when it should be transparent by default and secret by necessity.

coming in the air tonight?

The Independent | Even before Japan's devastating earthquake struck Honshu, certain sections of the global blogosphere were already warning in breathless tones about an upcoming Moon armageddon caused by the extra gravitational pull of the moon's proximity. Richard Nolle, an American astrologer who claims to have coined the phrase "super moon" and – according to his own website – foresaw the 1993 World Trade Centre bombings, has predicted a whole host of global meteorological nightmares this weekend, including a surge in extreme tides, magnitude 5+ earthquakes and a slew of powerful storms.

"Being planetary in scale," he added ominously, "there's no place on our home planet that's beyond the range of a super moon, so it wouldn't hurt to make ready wherever you are or plan to be during the March 16-22 super moon risk window."

After the Japanese earthquake struck, what further proof was needed, especially once fellow bloggers claimed that the 2004 Asian tsunami and a large Australian flood in the mid-1950s also occurred close to a lunar perigee? Fortunately, seismologists, astronomers and most scientific consensus demand a lot more evidence before we blame the moon for natural disasters.

At its perigee, the moon is about 220,000 miles from Earth; at its furthest point, 254,000 miles. Although the moon's gravitational pull is a factor in oceanic tides, there is little evidence to suggest that its pull is great enough to have any substantial effect the Earth's tectonic activity or lead to freak weather patterns.

"Don't get me started on the blogosphere," says a rather weary Kevin Horsburgh, from the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool which monitors Britain's tidal pattern. "I don't know where they get their ideas. But the great thing about astronomy-driven tidal measurements is that they are completely predictable."