Watching BBC documentary ‘Children of the Tsunami’ is as essential today as it was a year ago. Here is why.
‘Extending the perimeter of the fight’… beyond the Fukushima zone.
(literal English translation of Michel Houellebecq’s title “Extension du domaine de la lutte” published in English as ‘Whatever‘)
Last March marked one year since the Fukushima disaster, and as anticipated a year ago the media caravan has passed. Whilst most of the technical reason of the nuclear meltdown have been analysed to death, the key issues surrounding the long term human toll has moved off the agenda, as if it was something that resilient populations were going to absorb anyway.
Indeed, in the nuclear development debate, human consequences are too often downplayed at the expense of purely technical considerations. As if the strategy adopted by public authorities was to forge a consensus on the reliability of the nuclear technology by preventing the population to even think about the possible social cost of a nuclear incident.
It is because of the need to shade more light on this deliberately obscured issue that the BBC documentary ‘Children of the Tsunami’ (aka ‘Children of Fukushima’) is a must see. (see full video embedded at the bottom of this post)
“Not in my backyard”
One of the key aspects of the politics of nuclear is where to put the power plants, and unfortunately for lobby groups of all sides, they quickly bump into laws of physics that no back-room machination can bend.
Indeed, it is a basic principle of thermodynamics that whether they burn fossil fuel, uranium or use renewable solar power, thermal engines require cold sources to cool down and to keep going through the cycle of converting heat into electric energy. Basically, the colder the source, the more efficient the process.
Applying this principle to Australia and looking at the average temperatures across the country, one doesn’t need be a nuclear scientist to second guess where the power plants would need to be located to be a) close to the water needed for the cooling circuits, and b) in relatively cold areas. And this is just looking at the average temperatures, without even considering peak temperatures which would reduce plant efficiency and limit the expected output even further.
This map clearly says that nuclear units are likely to be build south of the ‘Brisbane Line’ (linking Brisbane to Adelaide), the most populated part of the country, in a ominous parallel to the Japanese case.
To counter this growing generalised fear of power plants located near populated areas, pro-nuclear lobbies have developed the argument that Fukushima was not a disaster due to the Nuclear Energy per se, but rather a disaster of peculiar Japanese mistakes that could not occur in other western nations (as it was the case when Sarkozy defended the Nuclear French exception in the wake of the disaster).
This is obviously pure spin, as we know for example with the Fessenheim units built on the Franco-German border. Despite the dismissive tone of the official propaganda, France’s oldest reactors have been built below the dike of the canal that runs alongside the Rhine River, which water serves as the station’s coolant. We know it clearly sits in a seismic zone (in 1356, an earthquake decimated the Swiss city of Basel, just 30 miles south) and we know it is atop one of Europe’s largest aquifers. All of this has been reported by the NYT here.
If you think the way those issues have been consistently brushed aside by the French Nuclear lobby is rather troubling, then remember it is exactly the same complacency that prevailed about Japan before the Fukushima incident. Japan was presented as a model for nuclear safety (long experience of seismic safety, strong engineering culture, stable government, etc.) as Bloomberg reported here.
So whichever way you cut it, risk management is risk taking
The conclusion of any risk assessment regarding nuclear generation is that whatever the probability of an incident (i.e. whatever the security margins you take to make the probability of an incident as low as possible), the magnitude of the potential consequences are tremendous (thousands years of concentrated radioactivity level to just mention one of them).
To put it more visually, risk managers use the type of table below: we are at the intersect of “major to catastrophic consequences” and “occasionally to unlikely likelihood”: whichever way you cut it, we are in the “extreme” scenario zone.
This assumed “low probability” of incidents ended up in huge actual damages at Fukushima. And we know this will not remain an isolated incident…
The University College London has a good piece examining the statistics of nuclear accidents in countries depending on their numbers of nuclear reactors. It is a really good introduction to the difficulties of probabilities in stochastic systems and it concludes that in a world of 443 reactors (19 in the UK, 58 in France and 104 in the US) we can expect 2.34 accidents within any period of 20 years somewhere in the world. The probability for one or more severe accidents worldwide is 90.36%. Brought back to a single country, the calculation concludes that there is a 9% probability for a Chernobyl or Fukushima accident in the UK within the next 20 years…
Another trouble with this type of risk assessment is that they are based on past probabilistic references, therefore built on the implicit assumption that what happened in the past will determine what can happen in the future. And we know this is a seriously flawed method. As an example, the walls protecting the Fukushima units from a Tsunami had been seized (read ‘restricted’) according to historical references which were lower than the Tsunami of March 2011.
“We can only work on precedent, and there was no precedent,” said Tsuneo Futami, a former Tokyo Electric nuclear engineer who was the director of Fukushima Daiichi in the late 1990s. “When I headed the plant, the thought of a tsunami never crossed my mind.”
At the end of the day, the ’science’ of risk management ends up being a calculated human gamble between risks and rewards (i.e. financial benefits).
Hunting Black Swans with Quantitative Risk Analysis… still more an art than a science
Benefits are all about risk taking, aren’t they?
Since the disaster, risk management experts and engineers have written extensively on how lagging and inadequate TEPCO’s methods were: you can read several very well documented pieces in the public domain:
- “Why Fukushima Was Preventable” http://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-preventable#
- “Fukushima, the Tsunami Hazard, and Engineering Practice” http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2011/03/27/fukushima-the-tsunami-hazard-and-engineering-practice/, and
- “Nuclear Plant and Tsunami Risk: 3,000 Years of Geological History Disregarded” http://coastalcare.org/2011/03/nuclear-plant-and-tsunami-risk-3000-years-of-geological-history-disregarded/
All those analyses conclude that caught in their hubris and confidence, the private and public authorities in charge of the Japanese nuclear program simply ignored thousands of years of geological and seismic history. Because they put financial risks ahead of engineering and public risks on their priority list, and started to behave like an industry which had become ‘too big to fail’, as we reported earlier.
All of this isn’t even touching the mental consequences among the impacted population
In conclusion, despite our modern authorities’ desire to keep the medical risks of nuclear quiet, history has played a rather ironical twist. Indeed, the devastating biological effects of radiations have actually been documented since the very early days, when pioneer Marie Curie died following regular exposures.
French memorial stamp honouring Marie Curie
The modern nuclear industry has relegated those impacts to a past era of low precautions, whilst totally ignoring the psychological and mental consequences of subsequent accidents. A cynical development given the culture of our epoch where emotions and feelings are overplayed in every aspect of the public agenda…. don’t you think?
Yet the psychological trauma, which those Japanese kids will carry with them for the rest of their lives clearly appears as a major public health issue in the BBC documentary the ‘Children of the Tsunami’.
An absolute must (re)-watch.
CHILDREN OF THE TSUNAMI from Daniel Reed on Vimeo.
{ NKN, Paris – leLaissezFaire, Sydney – 18 June 2012 }
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