Japan, Doha, and other dreams

Japan was once the host and most ardent support of the Kyoto Protocol - the closest thing the world has come to a real agreement as to how and when to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. When historic international agreement was reached in Kyoto in 1990 Japan led the world with a pledge to reduce its greenhouse emissions by 25% before 2020. With 30% of its electricity being supplied by nuclear energy and more plants being constructed, it seemed achievable.

Yet that dream seemed far in the past when on Wednesday Japan was awarded the 'Second Fossil Award' by the international environment organization The Climate Action Network for failing even to mention its own Kyoto Protocol pledges in its speech at the Doha Climate Change Conference.

Japan had earlier been awarded 'First Place Fossil Award' on the opening day of the conference for its lack of effort against global warming.

The dismal effort on the part of Japan has served to undermine an already fragile conference. Among the conference's mild ambitions was to gain international agreement to extend the Kyoto Protocol, as the original pledge made by 40 countries- to reduce greenhouse emissions by 5.2% below 1990 levels between 2008-2012 - is in no danger of actually being realised.

Now it looks as if even that modest goal -of extending the Kyoto Protocol - is unikely to be realised.

Few of the developed countries back the extension. The United States didn't even ratify it in 1990, arguing that it was useless to do so when developing countries such as China and India were exempt.

Some might argue that that refusal alone rendered the Kyoto Protocol an empty agreement, but hey, only a cynic would say that right?

Russia, Japan and Canada are pulling out, while major developing countries (including China, now the world's largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions) still have no binding targets.

That leaves, um, well, mainly Australia and the European Union.

The conference has become so ineffective that, in a massive display of unintended irony, Kumi Naidoo, the head of Greenpeace, called on conference delegates to prevent Doha becoming a disaster, saying 'This has been almost a laughable exercise.'

Perhaps Kumi was unable to see the link between Japan's failure at the conference and the mothballing of its 54 nuclear power plants? Perhaps Kumi believes that the risk of, um, well, nothing really, outweighs the benefit of having a Japan able to pursue a greenhouse emissisons reduction target of 25%.

That must be an extraordinary level of doublethink.

Japan backpedals on greenhouse emissions pledge

Some chickens came home to roost yesterday when an Environment Ministry official was forced to admit that Japan's 2009 pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% would be difficult to fulfill.

"Japan is discussing how to achieve its pledge of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020, including the possibility of revising it," said ministry official Shuichiro Niihara on Wednesday

As well as being an implicit admission of failure, the statement also includes the interesting claim that you can 'achieve' a pledge simply by changing it and fulfilling the new pledge.

The official did state that the goal of cutting emissions by 6 percent by 2012 was likely to be reached. This would be great if true but of course it is impossible; I would dearly like to see the numbers which show that Japan can produce less greenhouse gas than in 1990 while closing down its entire nuclear industry in 2012.

Unfortunately the confidence of the ministry official has little to do with emission cutting and much more to do with carbon trading. In the carbon trading system, Japanese companies, if unable to cut emmissions enough on their own can buy the rights to pollute from other countries that have not reached their own 'emissions cap'. The thinking behind such systems is that if a price is put on carbon emission, the free market will start to operate on carbon, and those who can reduce carbon emissions most cheaply will do so, thus achieving the pollution reduction at the lowest cost to society.

The end result of all this is that Japan can claim it has reduced emissions by keeping under its emissions cap. The fact that they have merely bought another country's right to pollute is usually and conveniently ignored. Whatever carbon trading schemes are capable or not capable of doing, Japan hasn't actually reduced its carbon emissions.

As I observed in my previous post, world carbon emissions, rather than being affected by the Kyoto Protocol or other international agreements, are actually increasing every year. Without widespread adoption of nuclear power this trend will continue and the world will suffer.

Global carbon dioxide emissions up

The journal Nature Climate Change has published a new study with estimates of last year's global carbon emissions, which topped out at 38 billion tons of carbon dioxide. This is a huge number, and it increases every year, despite all the best efforts of scientists and diplomats.

Global warming is a reality. And although there is room for debate regarding the impact this warming will have on the Earth in terms of temperature increase and sea level rise, the scientific mainstream is united in the assertion that global warming is happening and is a serious problem. And though how serious it all becomes remains to be seen, it is worth noting that former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd memorably (and, for him, regrettably) called it the Greatest Moral Challenge of Our Time.

I am always intrigued how this issue tends to take a back seat when it comes to environmentalist groups criticising nuclear power. They are very keen to talk of 'safety' and 'protecting our childrens' future', but don't seem to have available the plans for a working fusion power plant and are always quite happy to plug into a power point that inevitably draws electricity from fossil fuel sources. If pressed, green groups wax lyrical about renewable energy, yet seem immune to answering the hard questions that inevitably arise.

The truth is that renewable energy just doesn't cut it. Essentially, wind, power and tidal are just too diffuse and too unreliable. In practice no large country or city can expect to get more than 10-15% of its power from renewable energy. The problems of distribution, storage and base load provision are just too insurmountable. Germany is finding this out right now.

Just for fun, let's do a little thought experiment with wind power. The electricity generating capacity of Japan in 2010, according to wikipedia, was 283 gigawatts (GW). A typical large wind turbine has a capacity of 3 megawatts (MW), and needs spacing of 6-15 rotor diameters. Generally they are placed 1-2 kilometers apart. As turbines only produce about 15-20% of their capacity on average (and often less than that) to produce 283 GW (283,000 MW) you would need 471,000 huge turbines spaced out at least 1 kilometer apart. This would go around Japan's coastline (34,751 km) more than 13 times, extending 13 km inland, and pretty much making the archipelago uninhabitable. It would cost tens of billions of dollars and be a construction effort rivaling anything yet produced by humanity. 

And what you would do when the wind doesn't blow, well, I can't imagine.

The problems are much worse for developing countries such as China and India, which can't supply more than a small percentage of their power from renewable sources now, let alone in the future with a vastly increased electricity demand. India alone has 400 million people without electricity.

It is obvious that without a reliance upon nuclear energy, the vast bulk of future electricity production will come from fossil fuels, making a mockery of the Kyoto protocol and other international agreements intended to control global carbon emissions.

Coal, mercury and green hypocrisy

 

 One of the things that pro-nuclear advocates find so irritating is the obsession on the part of many with nuclear waste, as if the waste products from nuclear power were in some way more toxic or uncontrollable than other kinds of industrial waste.

Mercury that is released into the atmosphere becomes methylmercury that is easily absorbed by plankton in the oceans and works its way up the food chain through the process of biomagnification. At each stage in the food chain the mercury is concentrated more and more, so that end stage predators such as swordfish, shark and tuna can sometimes have toxic levels of the element in their flesh. This can cause a serious problem, especially for pregnant women. In the U.S., the largest single source of mercury contamination is the coal industry.

While this is a serious environmental problem it is never accorded the same danger status as minute amounts of nuclear contamination in the flesh of seafood, far too low to actually cause illness to humans, and in fact only detectable because the instruments that can detect the contamination are extraordinarily sensitive. This is the case for various fish catches around the Pacific that have minute levels of caesium that have been attributed to the Fukushima accident.

While reports of radioactive contamination in fish invariably elicit reactions of horror, contamination by mercury while acknowledged as dangerous is considered to be much more routine. In the movie The Cove, which critically examines the dolphin hunting industry in Japan, this mercury contamination is continually mentioned as a reason for humans to avoid the consumption of dolphin meat. Yet the source of the mercury is not mentioned, let alone the only real alternative to this constant release of mercury into the environment, which has to be nuclear power.

I very much doubt that the people who made The Cove (or indeed, many of the people who saw the movie) are realistic about the implications of their obsession with mercury. If followed to the rational conclusion, if indeed people have the goal of reducing the danger of pollutants in the atmosphere and oceans, it is inevitable that the best way to do that is to replace coal power with nuclear.

Letter to the Prime Minister of Japan!

Dear Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda,

For the sake of Japan, and for the sake of the world, I implore you to consider the issue of nuclear power in the spirit of moderation and reason, and resist efforts by the anti-nuclear lobby and elements of the media to promote fear and panic.

The most false and distressing of the efforts is the attempt to conflate the peaceful use of nuclear power with the terrible atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War Two. The events are incomparable, as is clearly showed by the human cost. On the one hand, over 100,000 people were killed by the Hiroshima blast. On the other, nobody has been killed or injured by the Fukushima accident. Yet an extraordinary example of this propaganda was published by the Japan Times’ Hotline to Nagatacho on the 9^th of October, when the article, incredibly, decried the reopening of schools within the former evacuation zone, protesting at the temerity of people wanting to return to their homes, reform their communities and start the rebuilding of their lives. The author, who didn’t deign to offer anything as prosaic as radiation measurements, implied that the children going to the schools would suffer the same fate as the children of Hiroshima sixty-seven years ago!

It is well-known that low dose radiation is of zero or negligible risk to humans, yet the unwarranted fear of radiation is destroying the future of Japan.

A clear example is the Nuclear Regulation Authority’s decision to expand the evacuation zone around nuclear power plants to 30 km, massively compounding unnecessary fear and sending municipalities nationwide into a frenzy of useless planning. Was it not enough that 573 people died because of unnecessary and panicked evacuation after the Fukushima accident, including dozens of elderly patients simply abandoned in hospital to die a degrading death? Not only that, but the NRA is said to be considering expanding the definition of an active earthquake fault line to one that has moved within the last 400,000 years, thus putting into doubt the restarting of nuclear plants all over the country. Is it really possible that humans could be so foolish as to curtail a vital economic activity at a given site because of the hypothetical risk of an earthquake every 400,000 years?

The linking of the use of nuclear weapons with last year’s accident at Fukushima is specious. It is also unethical. Yet ironically, there is a useful lesson to be learned in this attempt at conflation by the anti-nuclear lobby. It reveals the real source of public anti-nuclear sentiment – an unconscious equivalence of nuclear power with the destructive terror of nuclear weapons. Never mind that when considered rationally, nuclear power is the safest large-scale source of energy available to humanity. Never mind that nuclear energy is incomparably healthier than energy produced by fossil fuels, or that it is vastly cheaper and more reliable than renewable energy or that it produces close to zero CO₂ emissions. Never mind those things; because at some deep level of the public’s unconscious nuclear power equals terrible danger.

Mr. Prime Minister, the government has the right and indeed the duty to make decisions based on science and reason, and not be swayed by the irrational. The fear of radiation is a phobia that defies reason, and rather than pander to this fear Japan should recognize the advantages of nuclear power and continue its steady expansion. The benefits are undeniable and the bulk of the criticism it attracts is simply ill-founded. To paraphrase the words of American liberals, reality has a nuclear power bias.

 

Evidence for Linear No-Threshold Theory?

A new study has just been released that casts doubt on the theory of radiation hormesis, the idea that low doses of ionizing radiation can be good for you. It seems to provide some evidence for the Linear No Threshold theory, which assumes that cancer risk is directly proportional to the amount of radiation taken in, so that there will always be some risk, even as very low doses. What this theory means is that while the risk for the individual may be very low, over a large number of people there will be some cancers that are induced by radiation.

The model has always been controversial, and extremely difficult to measure, because at such very low levels of risk it is difficult to separate confounding factors in statistical studies. Even things like different populations being more reliable in self-reporting smoking rates can confuse things so that results are not reliable.

This Linear No-Threshold Theory (LNT) has always been doubted by pro-nuclear experts. After all, what other substance in the universe has new threshold for effect? Even poisons like arsenic have a minimum does below which no effects at all can be expected. Wade Allison sums up this skepticism:

"In earlier decades knowledge of cell biology was too primitive to provide confident understanding, and adequate evidence of the effect of radiation on humans was no available to corroborate any particular view. In their absence, and for lack of anything better, the knowledge gap was bridged by a rule of thumb - a model in science speak. This is the LNT model. This assumes that clinical damage is in simple proportion to the initial radiation energy dose. No justification was given for it, but it was a reasonable working hypothesis at the time. Despite the poor state of knowledge, a start had to be made somewhere."
(From Radiation and Reason, p. 44)

Now the most rigorous support for LNT, at least to my knowledge, has come in the form of a study of 110,645 people involved in the cleanup after Chernobyl. It concluded that despite the relatively low doses of radiation received, there was a significant increase in the risk of getting leukemia.

We are talking about a very small number of cases, 117 cases of leukemia. It was estimated that 16% of leukemia cases were attributed to radiation exposure, that is, 19 cases. The cleanup workers also received considerably more radiation that residents of Fukushima. Just to put this in perspective, 19 cases is 0.0019 % of the deaths that can be attributed to coal dust every year.

Nevertheless it has thrown the pro-nuclear community into a bit of a tizzy. Any evidence for LNT will be more fuel for people who say that any level of radiation is dangerous. The inevitable claim will be that there is actually some risk for people up at Fukushima. If you crunched the numbers you might come up with 2 or 3 cases of leukemia, at a guess.

You can read the paper here. If it is deliberately anti-nuclear, it is massively more sophisticated that the propaganda put by Arnie Gundersen or Helen Caldicott.  Certainly it is beyond my skill set to critique.

You can read an early response by a pro-nuclear blogger here. I will be watching carefully how this all goes down

Nuclear regulator changes looks to change definition of 'active fault'.

Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) has announced that it will review what constitutes an active earthquake fault in a nationwide survey of nuclear power plants.

Currently faults that have moved sometime within the last 120,000-130,000 years are considered active.  The NRA reportedly intends to extend the definition to cover faults that have moved within the last 400,000 years.  As the government does not allow nuclear power plants to be built over 'active' fault lines, this could put into doubt both current construction projects and the planned re-starting of power plants that have already been built.

The NRA is not overt about why they are making this decision, but I think that one can assume that activity within the past 400,000 years is dangerous because of the complementary possibility of activity within the next 400,000 years.  In other words, the NRA is intending to prohibit the operation of nuclear power plants because of the possibility of an earthquake under the plant sometime within the next 400,000 years!

Am I the only person in Japan who finds this idea completely preposterous?  Am I really living on a planet where people can curtail economic activity because of the possibility of an earthquake 400,000 years in the future?  Is my species truly that idiotic?

Let's consider some of the real threats humanity will likely face during that timespan.  The next ice age is expected anytime within the next 30,000 to 100,000 years.  A supervolcano along the lines of the TOBA eruption, which almost caused the extinction of the human race, is estimated to come along about every 50,000 years.  Then there are asteroid strikes; a hit with a space body of 1 kilometer in diameter, more than big enough to destroy civilization, occurs every 500,000 years or so.

This is the category into which an earthquake-caused nuclear accident is being placed.  Despite the fact that the largest quake in a thousand years of  Japanese history did not seriously damage Fukushima Daiichi. That despite 3 meltdowns, nobody was killed or injured.  Despite the fact that no nuclear power station has ever been seriously damaged by earthquake, anywhere.

Ah, the irony.  The only effect this ludicrious regulation will have will be to increase the chances of the Japanese nuclear industry not rebounding fully.  This in turn will seriously impact on one of the most urgent of humanity's real challenges: mitigating climate change caused by CO2 emissions.

In which the Japanese government inadvertently perpertuates fear

Since March 11 last year, the Japanese government has been between a rock and a hard place in regard to its public policy on nuclear power and radiation.

On the one hand, the Japanese economy depended on (and, in truth, still depends on) its large fleet of nuclear power stations to provide reliable power.  In addition, I am quite sure that those who make decisions have been informed about the scientific and engineering realities and are quite aware that the radiological effects of the accident were minimal, at least after the panicked days of the middle of March.

On the other hand, an increasingly fearful public has made ever-more desperate and irrational demands, whipped into paranoia by a global overreaction and a general fear of the unknown.  In retrospect, this was entirely predictiable.  In the Japanese psyche, the world is a dangerous place.  These are a people who are afraid of sunlight (which, admittedly, is far more dangerous than nuclear radiation and causes millions of cancers every year). So it is little surprise that something which is invisible, esoteric and known to be dangerous could generate such fear.  The only surprise is that public reaction has been so vocal and vehement, a rarety in Japan.  In fact, the misdirection of dissent is a real tragedy. If only this anger could have been directed at government-industrial corruption, or the abusive education system, or the entrenced gerontocracy, all things which might have been the targets of a real revolution.

But this fear of radiation is a fear that knows no boundaries, that is not susceptible to reason or concession.  Arguments about dosage and safety limits fall on deaf ears.  Thus the Japanese government has been forced, in a futile and self-defeating attempt at placating public concern, to assume a stance that publicly presents minute amounts of radiation as a threat to public health, and perpetuates the belief that the accident is a continuing crisis.

A number of examples can demonstrate this problem:

• The government has repeatedly revised safety limits of various isotopes in foodstuffs downward, to where the limits are significantly below safety limits in other countries, which are already extremely conservative.
• There is an actual ministry devoted to perpetuation of fear, with its own 'nuclear crisis' minister, Goshi Hosono.  What his duties are it is challenging to imagine.
• The government is going ahead with expensive and unnecessary 'decontamination' in areas that were evacuated, right down to areas getting 5 millisieverts of radiation a year, a level barely above background radiation.
• 'Public hearings' were staged which were designed to give people the chance to discuss Japan's energy policy, but the meetings were so vitriotically anti-nuclear that when a pro-nuclear speaker received hundreds of complaints Mr Hosono was forced to step in and promise that such a speaker would not be heard again.
• Even the word 'crisis' is still being used, months after the plants achieved cold shutdown.

A nuclear wasteland?

Here is a picture of downtown Hiroshima.

On the 6th of August 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic weapon on the city, killing 90-160,000 people, of whom 15-20 % were killed by the radiation produced in the explosion and not by the explosion itself. 

It looks quite nice now, and I quite fancy the Starbucks frappaccino.

Although a direct comparison between Hiroshima and Fukushima is not possible as the events were very radiologically different, it may be useful to think of the image of a bustling modern Hirshima when considering claims made by some anti-nuclear activists, such that large areas of Northern Japan will be 'uninhabitable for centuries', or that Fukushima will be a 'wasteland for a thousand years'.

Why we don't need Fukushima 'decontamination'

Yesterday Prime Minister Noda visited reactor 4 up at Fukushima Daiichi.  Amongst other things, he was seen inspecting the spent fuel pool, yes the one that will supposedly kill everyone when it collapses.  The PM was wearing a protective suit, probably a good idea as a precaution, though it might have been more useful were we granted updated reports of actual radiation levels at the plant.

During the day Noda also visited an elementary school in Naraha, a town in Fukushima prefecture within the 20km radius of the plant that is currently undergoing 'decontamination'.  There the Prime Minister gave a speech stressing that decontamination efforts must continue in order to 'revive' Japan.  According to information released to the media, Naraha is in the 'first zone', which is receiving 'less than 20' millisieverts of radiation a year.  Those watching were treated to pictures of workers wearing ludicrous protective masks clearing rooftops of leaves and other rubbish...

It is worth pointing out that moving to Naraha today and living there for a year, you would receive rather less than 20 millisieverts of radiation, because radioactive isotypes have been decaying steadily since the accident, when these radiation estimates were made, and will continue to decay.  To my knowledge, radiation levels on the day the measurements were taken were simply extrapolated for an entire year, leading to a yearly measurement that wildly overestimates the actual radiation level.  This kind of thing is regularly done when radiation is concerned just in order to be conservative, to be 'on the safe side'.  I wouldn't suggest that it is not advisable to have a margin of error, but it is a good idea to keep overestimation in mind when these issues are discussed.  In this context, it is a shame that current radiation levels in Naraha town weren't made available on the same broadcast as the Noda speech; that might have been interesting.  My guess is that they would be very close to background level in the rest of Japan.

Even if the radiation level in Naraha is accepted as 20 mSv/yr, this is one-fifth of the dose estimated by a plethora of respected international bodies to be the minimum that could possibly expose a human to possible health risks.  And we are talking about highly conservative ultra-safe judgements made with the goal a having a wide 'safety margin'.  For example, UNSCEAR's conclusions are made reflecting the background of the most rigorous scientific studies on the planet, capable of detecting the elevated cancer risk of a minute fraction of a per cent that results from being exposed to radiation of more than 100 mSv/year, and then only if the most pessimistic of unproven theories of radiation is accepted.

20 mSv/yr is also about one twentieth! of the radiation that residents of Ramsar, Iran receive as natural background radiation every year, without any known deleterious effects.  It is no higher than the natural background in many other parts of the world, and comparable to many many others including Denver, Colarado.  It is the equivalent of a single chest scan, and much much less than a full-body CT scan; yet medical scans deliver this radiation over a single dose, not spread out over an entire year.  Yet nobody seems to be complaining about chest scans, or demonstrating outside hospitals waving pictures of deformed fetuses.

When I think of some of the likely things those workers have done in their lives that have measurably increased their actual risk of cancer before they started cleaning rooftops in Fukushima prefecture I feel a certain amount of righteous anger.  Have they ever lived in a major city with smog?  Do they eat fried chicken? Drink too much? Go out in the sun? God forbid, did one of them whack a cigarette in his mouth a minute after taking off his mask?

I'm thinking here that if Noda really wants to 'revive' Japan, he might be better off trying to 'revive' a sense of perspective and start dealing with problems that really exist.