By Octopus
Curious how human beings reduce natural phenomena to pithy terms: A Richter scale for earthquakes; five categories for storms and tornadoes; a number seven for deadly sins and nuclear alerts.
Earlier this week, authorities in Japan raised the severity alert of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to a level seven - a Chernobyl scale disaster - reflecting prolonged releases of radiation and wider consequences than previously thought. For weeks, levels of radioactive iodine and cesium in air, rainwater, vegetables, and dairy cattle have far exceeded normal limits.
Despite the catastrophic scope of last month’s earthquake and tsunami, the people of the Rising Sun consider themselves fortunate in at least one respect. Radioactive clouds of steam and smoke have blown eastward over the Pacific Ocean and away from major population centers in Japan. Yet, millions of gallons of radioactive coolant water were discharged at sea, and it may be years before the impact on ocean ecosystems is fully understood.
Ocean dumping of nuclear waste was banned by international treaty in the 1970s. Of concern to scientists now is not the immediate level of radioactivity but the longer-term consequences. Even minute amounts of radiation have the potential to be absorbed by plants and animals and enter the food chain. As smaller fish are eaten by larger fish, heavy metals and their radioactive counterparts bio-accumulate up the food chain until the ultimate consumer – the human population – is put at maximum risk.
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| W. Eugene Smith, Minamata |
Nuclear waste is a subset of the larger problem of industrial pollution, and Fukushima is merely the latest chapter of a long and appalling saga: Minamata, Love Canal, Bhopal, Deepwater Horizon, Libby Asbestos, Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, as the most grotesque examples. Entire ecosystems destroyed for generations, landscapes and seascapes laid waste and barren, dead zones and ghost towns, crippled economies and ruined lives … our world dies by a thousand blows.
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| Paul Fusco, Chernobyl |
To maintain lavish lifestyles, we consume prodigious amounts of energy and pay for it – not just in unit costs per BTU – but in terms of health and human life. In this unholy bargain, we have come to regard consumers and workers as fungibles and expendables, as a necessary sacrifice in exchange for a profligate and reckless economic system gone mad. Yet, incident after incident, and year after year, we continue to place our trust in the infallibility of our technologies and enterprises. It is a pact made with Mephistopheles Inc.
Every country and every one knows that earthquakes are common in Japan so why did they built nuclear power plants? they know very well if they blasts what will be happened. Now they facing that situation it is very bad and unfortunate. Most powerful countries in this world like Russia, America, China and other European countries should help Japan to come out from this situation as soon as Japan come out from this situation they will fulfill their needs as well before this Nuclear blast in fukushima no one dont know where this city and what is the advantage of this city. Now every one can easily identify fukushima.
ReplyDeletePrasad:
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what point you're making, but it wasn't the earthquake that made the power plant go out of control, it was the water. Had the auxiliary generators been protected or elevated to a higher level, this would not have happened.
Octo:
One of the odd things about Chernobyl is that the surrounding ecosystem seems quite unaffected and wildlife is flourishing. Dire things, mutations and cancers were supposed to persist for generations after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet they did not. It may be that our world is not as fragile as we fear and whatever dangers we have introduced are far less deadly than the massive pandemics that used to plague us, the viral and bacteriological and nutritional and environmental things that used to devastate us and that are no longer here because we have technology.
Yes, of course we're constantly told how safe things are when compromises have been made, Power plants, levees, dams -- cigarettes. Defects overlooked with crossed fingers and regulations dismissed as "Liberal" and the product of "Tree huggers" but that's not inherent in reliance on technology, that's short sightedness and deceit fueled by greed. We have always relied on technology. Without it we would be just another extinct ape.
The level of civilization, when we're studying archaeology, is ranked by how much power is available to a person. When that was one manpower, we were hunter gatherers. Later we could work with a horsepower or two -- much later we had steam engines giving us hundreds and civilization: the quality of life expanded proportionately.
Think of what Japan would be if it had only sunlight and wind: certainly not the number 2 or 3 economy in the world.
What I'm trying to say is that yes, wings fall off airplanes, ships sink, bridges collapse, and power plants run amok, but we build better ones. The idea that we can go back to a bucolic, pre-industrial revolution time is romantic and little more. We could never put up with the squalor, the starvation, the disease and billions of people would starve.
Yes, it's a Faustian bargain we've made, but I think we're more damned if we try to back out than if we go ahead. Our future is a more technological world - it always has been.
Captain,
ReplyDeleteThere is a correlation between Mephistopheles Inc. and Octopus Ink. Let me explain.
In this list of examples (each an active link to historical accounts) …
Minamata, Love Canal, Bhopal, Deepwater Horizon, Libby Asbestos, Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl
… there is a narrative thread of chicanery and corruption in each and every instance. Initially, every named enterprise denied responsibility, covered up or doctored evidence, bought off government officials, deceived the public, used subterfuge to avoid mitigation efforts, and delayed litigation for decades (a dying pool of claimants means fewer damage claims over time). In every instance, corporate profits are privatized while mitigation, health, and social service costs are borne by the public. Highlights:
Minamata – only 2,265 victims have been officially recognized by the government (of which 1,784 have died). Over 10,000 other victims remain uncertified … after 40 years of continued abuses.
Libby Montana – an estimated 274 deaths are directly attributable to asbestos-related diseases, and 17% of the residents have pleural abnormalities related to asbestos exposure. In 2009, a grand jury found W. R. Grace innocent of criminal conspiracy charges.
Chernobyl – over 350,000 people have been evacuated and resettled to less contaminated areas. Of the 237 people who suffered acute radiation sickness immediately after the explosion, 31 died within 3 months; 216 non-cancer deaths are attributed to the explosion. Epidemiological studies are grim: 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents (an estimated 500 early deaths); the incidence rate of Down Syndrome climbed from 1.35 per 1,000 births to 2.11; plus a five-fold increase in the rate anencephaly and other CNS malformations, as examples.
Bhopal – the immediate death toll was 2,259; another 3,000 died within weeks; 8,000 died from gas-related diseases; a total of 558,125 injuries including 38,478 who were severely disabled; 200,000 children exposed to toxic gases. Causes of the explosion: Poor maintenance, safety systems switched off to save money; alarms that had not worked in years; refrigeration systems left idle; workers complained through their unions about lax safety standards, and 70% of plant employees were fined by management; the most skilled workers left the company in search of better and safer jobs.
Perhaps I should have written a longer article.
Octo:
ReplyDelete"… there is a narrative thread of chicanery and corruption in each and every instance."
Precisely, yet we get a knee-jerk and mostly Liberal reaction that longs for a pre-technological world rather than a regulated modern society. That's what I'm lamenting. I'm certainly not supporting being so cheap and greedy that we suffer so that a few may be rich.
We get better and better at providing for more people yet, we never get smarter or more honest and in America we call such irresponsible behavior "capitalism" and worship it.
But very, very few of us would survive if we were suddenly plunged into the world of our ancestors, free of "processed" foods, whatever the hell those are; local and seasonal means most people starve in the winter and "organic" means only rich people eat at all. Billions would starve, freeze, broil and die of diseases we've forgotten about.
The reason there are 7 billion of us is technology. For millions of years we were only a few thousand strong and then came the Industrial revolution, affordable food, clothing and shelter and eventually freedom from the plagues that killed 3/4 of us from time to time.
I'm a strong advocate of population control, yet that's not going to happen without a cataclismic disaster. What has to happen until then is to stop the kind of irresponsible behavior we're protecting at worst and praising with faint damnation at best. I don't know if that can happen -- we're apes after all, not brainy cephalopods -- but this dream of living in the Pleistocene without having any affect on the flora and fauna, without modern agriculture and the energy it takes to run a civilization is fatuous and dangerous.
Keep in mind too, that a thousand dead - ten thousand dead - a million dead is proportionately tiny compared to the numbers that used to die prematurely in that golden age that never was. Civilization has a price that must be kept to a minimum, but maybe it's worth it as compared with the alternative.
It is my understanding that the radioactive element being emitted from the Japanese plant is an isotope of Iodine which has a half-life of 8 days; it's not Plutonium being released (yet). Am I correct?
ReplyDeleteRobert,
ReplyDeleteTwo radioactive elements as reported in the news: Iodine and Cesium. Although iodine has a relatively short half-life measured in days, the half-life for cesium is in excess of 300 years, meaning a pound of emissions today will be a half pound in 300 years, and a quarter pound in 600 years. IOW, cesium will stay with us for a very long time. Others unknowns: strontium 90 and plutonium.
Strontium has properties similar to calcium - it settles in milk products and in bones. Cesium and plutonium act like heavy metals and are likely to bio-accumulate up the food chain. According to news account, some unknown quantities of plutonium are in the fuel rods. The half-life for plutonium is on the order of 4,000 years and is the most toxic substance known. Bad news.
Dear Fogg and Octo: at the right odds as usual. The real issue is not the application of technology, nor the return to a pre-technological civilization. The real issue is the perniciousness of the human organism. As we advance our technical skills we become more efficient at displacing other organisms. Thus the most massive extinction of species in the last 60+ million years. Climate change. Ocean acidification. Global freshwater shortages. Soil erosion.
ReplyDeleteIn short, we're too successful and the parasite is now seriously affecting the host. (Back to Lovelock and Gaia.) Interestingly, Lovelock, in his fear, has become a big fan of nuclear, but the Faustian bargain is beginning to extract a very expensive price.
So. How do we scale back on our perniciousness? Especially in a free market culture that advances self-interest as the leading principle.
Add to that the fact that all our technologies are additive, which means we end up with a lot of very inefficient and damaging legacy technologies (such as ICEs in single-unit transportation devices) and you/we have a recipe for catastrophe. And now mini versions are happening with more frequency.
All of this, of course, will hit the fan as we run out of oil. Perhaps not fully in our lifetimes, but within the lifespans of our kids and grandkids. So, as fast as the Roman candle went up, it will come down. 100 years of grown with 100 years of rapid decline. Unless...
And it's the "unless" we should be discussing. Not how we got here or what it is.
BTW, there's apparently Strontium 90 emissions too. Quite uncool.
ReplyDeleteI have been to Libby, Montana several times and am in the building supply business. To this day (and forever) I refuse to buy or sell W.R. Grace products.
ReplyDeleteThe people where the Nuclear Plant blast occurred should be shifted to safety zone where they can live without any deceases without radiation. Japan government take the help from other countries like America, Russia so they can come out as early as possible.
ReplyDeleteThe world is too much with us; late and soon,
ReplyDeleteGetting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
- William Wordsworth -
"This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,"
ReplyDeleteI've never seen that happen, but there was a French woman on our boat last week that gave the sun a good view of hers -- and the deck hands as well.
Edge:
ReplyDelete"the perniciousness of the human organism."
We are that, aren't we? We're at about the 7 billion level and growing and our life span is roughly twice what it used to be and that's only going to make it worse. I'm tired of people laughing at Malthus because technology has limits and the Earth has limits to its tolerance too. Still I think it's more resilient than we give it credit for even if it's less so than the drill baby drill chorus would like to think.
Still I think I have to caution about the chicken little syndrome. Overstating the case in apocalyptic terms makes people tune out, makes them dismiss the arguments and all the hoopla from people like Bill Maher about how technology and the secret manipulations by the Elders of the Drug Industry are making us all sick isn't helping either. When fighting extremists it's important not to become an extremist -- at least not if you want to be effective.
Christopher Busby, a crusader against nuclear power is sounding off about how 400,000 people are going to die from Fukushima derived cancer. http://bit.ly/hxq7uw
I think he's pulling that number out of his Fukushima, but by next week, the cascade effect will have it as 4 million and climbing because crying havoc is a great way to be important and nobody really wants an accurate picture of the risk. We want drama, which starts with D and that stands for Doom.
Even so, divide 400,000 by 7,000,000,000 and you get something like 5.7 times ten to the minus 5th, which is a pretty small personal risk -- and besides the numbers are pure fiction because nobody really knows. Nobody will compare it with the risk of liver failure by taking Tylenol or the chance of being hit by a phone using soccer mom, which would make it not quite so scary.
Jawohl, Plutonium lasts a long time, Pu244 has a half-life of 80 million years and Pu239 is more likely to be involved here and its half life is more like 24,000 years. I may be wrong, but I think that's the isotope most likely present here. But it's awfully heavy and perhaps we'll find most of it being covered by deep ocean sediments before it decays.
You know, there are significant amounts of Pu right at home - a byproduct of irresponsible military development of nuclear weapons. So far, there's been no huge die-off. I'm just sayin'
I'm not dismissing the danger of nuclear power, it's just that this is not the end of the world and more than the open air nuclear testing in the 40's, 50's and 60's was -- unless poor planning, shoddy design, corrupt management, lack of oversight and greed continue to be commonplace. That means of course, no cheap power -- at least not so cheap that nobody will invest in exploiting cleaner sources.
Well Capt., the planet as organism is resilient. But here we are on a economic ideology based on "growth".
ReplyDeleteSo here it is: we keep stoking the boilers with more coal as the Titanic picks up more speed as it crashes into the iceberg, and of course the critters in steerage (biosphere, disappearing species, Malthus-displaced humans at the low end of the income scale) are feeling the terror as we speak.
Now, how fast do you/we think we can turn the Titanic? The danger here is not overstating but UNDERstating the case.
Since the 1930s or before, thinkers have been warning us about the future, from Orwell and Huxley to Jung to Schumacher to Buck Fuller—and their warnings have been generally on target. But have we done much to improve things? Some, but the losses far offset any small gains, and a whole generation of eco-warriors has sold out since the 60s.
But on the upper decks orchestra sounds wonderful and the stars in the night sky look great.
All the people must be shifted to safety zone and take the necessary action to stop the radiation as early as possible they do not pour the water (radio active) into the sea and think another alternative to drop the water.
ReplyDeleteCaptain: "The reason there are 7 billion of us is technology."
ReplyDelete... or perhaps a prodigious amount of shagging. I was thinking the other day about the quality of life today versus what I recall in my childhood of the 1950s. In some respects, I think our progress has been retrograde; we have essentially the same basic technologies available now ... cars, suburban homes, television, and microwave opens ... as we had a half century ago, but our energy and consumption patterns have accelerated beyond sustainability. In the post war period, world population was less than a third of what it is today, but expectations have risen substantially. Prosperity as we know it has only been available to a small percentage of the total population; the vast majority of human beings have lived, and continue to live, rather savage lives.
Although this is a subject of conjecture and debate, intuition tells me a bubble is about to burst ... within the next generation or two ... unless humanity changes course very soon.
The danger in overstatement is that it makes it easier for our Republican pals to dismiss us as hysterical. Sometimes we actually are. One thing's for sure and every lesson we've been given from the Buddha to the Blues teaches that you cannot hold on to the past. It's gonna change. The only hope is that there's new good to replace what we lose.
ReplyDeleteAs to humanity changing course - are we talking about America or about the rest of the world? India and China are raising enormous numbers out of abject poverty very quickly. I don't think our advice to moderate change is going to fall on receptive ears.
I would dispute the idea that we have little in the way of new and important technology really. What we have is a society no longer looking to a bright future but to a fake past and pessimism ( and I mean both sides of America ) Sometimes it's hard for me to separate that good old fashioned Puritan guilt from our fashionable contempt for technology, but Excess energy consumption is going to take care of itself soon enough. We're simply going to run out and it's not going to be my air conditioning or your toaster that does it. It's going to be the hunger for the basic minimums of comfort of the excess billions of humans who now can at least dream of owning a refrigerator and something to put in it - or a motorbike.
It's not going to be pretty, but no revolution is pretty. The Industrial revolution was a horror story, but the dire predictions of those days evaporated and I think our current fears will too. Life will just be different - as it always is. For the Hummer drivers, it won't be so good, but we're not going back to horses ( which are actually more polluting and expensive) unless we refuse to invest in the technology we're absolutely going to need.
Are we the last to live as well as some of us now live? I don't think we can say that. Maybe we'll revert to primitive conditions and billions will die or maybe we'll at last be forced to spend the money to generate cleaner energy and get serious about controlling population when that invisible hand grabs us by the you know what. Maybe we will stop driving to work, work at home more, live in cities more, live in smaller quarters. Maybe we'll finally solve the fusion technology problem. Hard to predict, easy to wail and gnash.
Actually the only hope I see, short of a massive war or plague or both, is technology. Disease and starvation would have killed off millions -- as it used to do -- without antibiotics and vaccines and chemical fertilizers. I'm sure you're not arguing that we bring back smallpox, but the increase in population is the direct result in improved health, improved infant mortality rates and longevity which are the result of technology.
Is it greed or the need to feed more mouths that's decimating the forests, ravaging the oceans, pushing out wildlife and polluting everything?
Some thoughts from a humble masked mammal -
ReplyDeleteAdvancements in medical technology have allowed way too many people to survive. There is a purpose to natural selection.
Greed and the quest for power drives industry and governments worldwide.
OCTO - I think the difference between now and our childhood years was greed and corruptable behavior was considered a bad thing. Now it is a badge of honor. My how things have changed.
At some point it should have been accepted that the integrity of the nuclear plant was hopelessly compromised and have it filled with concrete.
Fogg - we may well have hit that saturation point where there are just too many people in the world.
When animal groups get overpopulated, there is usually a die off of some sort. Perhaps the idea of a Cptain Tripps type virus is not so far-fetched.
Captain: “…. but we're not going back to horses …”
ReplyDeleteToo bad, I prefer horses over yahoos, and I still think Homo sapiens shag too much.
Rocky: “I think the difference between now and our childhood years was greed and corruptable behavior was considered a bad thing. Now it is a badge of honor.”
The Randians have turned character and personality disorders into a cult. Perhaps I should just accept a simple fact of life; as I am resentfully approaching a geriatric time of my life, the past is always romanticized, and the youngins’ are always noisy, cloying and annoying.
I’ll leave you all with a few quotes:
“I’ve found the link between apes and civilized man – its us” (Conrad Lorenz).
“History will doubtless regard this age not only as one of vast wars, disorders and revolutions but also as the Age of Propaganda, of the press agent, the lobbyist, the public relations man, the demagogue and the Cominform. The average citizen in every nation and most of all in the U.S. is bombarded constantly with by propaganda and press releases designed to cloud his judgement, appeal to his prejudices, fill him with deliberate misinformation for a calculated purpose, and generally sell him down the river.” (Louis Bromfield - 1953).
“Man is his own Martian, at war against himself. Over-breeding and extractive agriculture are his weapons and, though he may not know it, his war aims are the ravaging of his planet, the destruction of his civilization and the degradation of his species” (Aldous Huxley).
“We have shown … that in the world model the application of technology to apparent problems of resource depletion or pollution or food shortage has no impact on the essential problem, which is exponential growth in a finite and complex system … It has lead us to one conclusion that appears to be justified under all the assumptions we have tested so far. The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.” (Club of Rome Report – 1972).
You know, there are still places -- but maybe I'd better not say where.
ReplyDeleteBut as I said, if you try to hang on, try to go back, you'll get torn apart and suffering comes inevitably from thinking you can be as happy as you imagine you can.
There is this moment and this moment is perfect.