The drought of 1976

Embed from Getty Images

When I visited Pitsford Water last summer it looked like the picture below. But the picture above shows how it looked in the summer of 1976.

A BBC News page remembers the drought of 1976. My own strongest memory of that summer is of a coach trip to York.

The fields we passed were burnt up and there was fodder put out for the animals. And there were posters all across South Yorkshire trying to recruit men to the coal mining industry. (It was a long time ago.)

And on Sunday we shall see that at least one pop song was inspired by the drought.

Read More

Six of the Best 567

Are you sure about this? Ed.

Gareth Epps reports that Liberal Democrat Conference has lost a day.

"Contemporary advocates of No-Platforming have so far failed to provide any convincing, rigorous definition of ‘harm’ to justify their practice." Monica Richter argues that only the most noxious of speakers should be banned from university campuses.

Robbie Simpson has been to Tbilisi to visit our liberal colleagues, the Republican Party of Georgia.

"Imagine if Neil Young needed Simon Cowell’s approval in order to get the label backing necessary to become a known musician." POWERevolution thinks many millenials are uncool and think it knows why.

Cal Flyn writes on afforestation and clearance in the Flow Country in the far North of Scotland.

Teenagerdom was a result of jobs and trades requiring training and education, which cast UK society into a bit of uncertainty. Hence the title; the first generation where this phase of ambiguity – no longer a child, yet not quite an adult – existed." Kyle Turner has been watching Absolute Beginners - an unsuccessful Eighties film about the Fifties with a Bowie theme song.

Read More

Radical nostalgia? Helen Macdonald on 'What to Look for in Winter'

'What to Look for in Winter' comes from a time when children were expected to relate sensuously and intellectually to the great profusion of life around us.

Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk and admirer of this blog's hero T.H. White, has written a terrific article on the New Statesman.

'What to Look for in Winter' is a Ladybird book with illustrations by Charles Tunnicliffe (who designed the dustwrappers for three similar titles by Malcolm Saville) that was first published in 1959.

She writes:

Books of this kind were designed to build young naturalists with an in-depth knowledge of Britain’s natural and national heritage. Full of assumptions about the correct relationship between children and the natural world, 'What to Look for in Winter' suggests that the world is full of mysteries, such as the mechanism of the germination of mistletoe, which you, the reader, might one day help to solve. 

And it expects you, too, to interact physically with things outside: shake the branches of ivy so that “drunken insects fall to the ground”; collect fungi that are “nice to take home”; discover that snowberries have a strange softness when you squish them; bite the pungent seeds of cow parsnips, which taste of “earth, and autumn and sunshine, and several other things”.

If this is a personal, spiritual response to the Ladybird world, then back in 2005 Malcolm Clark offered a more political appreciation of it:

Public space was not thought to be dangerous then, and this is not just nostalgic idealisation. I grew up in a small town in the early 1970s. The vast public park really did have attendants. It also happened to have well-tended flowerbeds and a boating pond. These days, you have to train your dog to tiptoe over the syringes. The war memorial is covered in graffiti and there isn't a police station for ten miles. If you sent Peter and Jane there to fly a kite, you'd kit them out in bulletproof vests first. 

In fact, the entire old Ladybird project had an indefinable public-spiritedness about it. This partly reflected a strain in British culture that went all the way back to Samuel Smiles's Self-Help and the Victorian reference libraries. The quest for knowledge was seen as an uncomplicated and enjoyable pursuit, one in which young citizens should be encouraged to share.

Dismissing such analysis as mere nostalgia seems to me an inadequate response.

At the heart of political radicalism is the idea that the world could be different. And the idea that the world once was different is not such a bad starting point.

Read More

Six of the Best 563

The Liberal Democrats should cut their spending by moving their headquarters out of London, argues Simon McGrath.

"Pickering, North Yorkshire, pulled off protection by embracing the very opposite of what passes for conventional wisdom. On its citizens’ own initiative, it ended repeated inundation by working with nature, not against it." Geoffrey Lean explains how one town that beat the floods.

Terence Fane-Saunders dissects Oliver Letwin's inadequate apology.

James O'Malley wants the left to stop retweeting bullshit.

"If it looks completely at home in this northern European setting, that's because a mosque has stood here, roughly 20 minutes' drive south-west of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, since 1558." Tharik Hussain on the Muslims of the Baltic.

The Downstairs Lounge celebrates the career of Kenneth Horne.

Read More

20’s Plenty: The Move to Safer Speeds in the UK

A video by Streetfilms:

For those watching in the United States, this film is like a road map to how to get public support and your community energized around lower speed limits. 

New York City may have recently set it's city speed limits at 25 mph, but to keep driving down serious injuries and fatalities, we should be following the example set by the UK.

Read More

Six of the Best 561

"New research from Leeds University into the impacts of permitted heather burning on upland peat bog shows that for the 20% biggest storms, the flow of water over land is higher than in areas where the moorland has not been burnt."  A prophetic post from Upper Calder Valley Plain Speaker back in August.

A little unexpectedly, David Boyle's take on A Christmas Carol appears on Philosophy Football.

Matt Crowley pays tribute to Malcolm in the Middle: "Far from the wistful nostalgia of The Wonder Years or the chummy bickering of Home Improvement, Malcolm In The Middle presents a childhood that basically sucks. Bullies rule the school, teachers are indifferent, and being smart is akin to being radioactive."

There are still 1500 gas street lamps burning in London. Maev Kennedy meets the people who light them.

Sam Roberts chooses his top 10 London ghost signs.

Judging by its place names, the landscape of Medieval Lincolnshire was haunted monstrous creatures, says Caitlin Green.

Read More

Six of the Best 560

Joanna Ferguson announces the relaunch of Liberal Youth's blogging platform The Libertine.

"Measurement, Bob says, is the big challenge facing the outdoor education industry. You can measure a child's progress in maths, spelling, grammar… so we tend to hone in on those things. But it’s so much harder to quantify how much more confident or empathetic or happy a child is this term versus last. So we don't prioritise these things, and so nor the activities that develop them.'" Dominic Collard speaks up for outdoor education.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent some time teaching in an elementary school in the Austrian mountains. Spencer Robins looks at that period's influence on his thought.

"Self went on to argue that understanding the age of buildings was a key to understanding the built environment. Elderly people were better at it, he said, because they had often seen the buildings being constructed. Young people less so." Steven Morris follows Will Self on a psychogeographic walk through Bristol.

Dave Walker is puzzled by an undeveloped plot in South Kensington. Someone Twitter said it had been earmarked for a new Iranian Embassy that cannot now be built because of economic sanctions.

London Traveller follows the Ravensbourne River through a surprisingly rural landscape from Bromley South station to Caesar's Well.

Read More

Global warming was forecast a century ago

I retweeted this 1912 press cutting yesterday morning and immediately wondered whether I had been taken in by a hoax.

But it does appear to be genuine. It comes from the Braidwood Dispatch Mining Journal, which was published in New South Wales.

So take it as a reminder of how well established the science behind fear about global warming is.

The agreement on the climate signed in Paris was immensely welcome, though I fear some governments will expend considerable energy on trying to wriggle out of what they agreed to over the coming years.

And the controversialists and backers of dirty industry will continue to doubt the science. But as Upton Sinclair said:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Read More

Six of the Best 555

"The key to reducing the risk of more floods like those in Carlisle is to realise that conventional 'flood defence' can never provide security against the ever more extreme weather events that global warming will bring. We must embrace natural solutions to holding back flood waters: more trees; and bring back the beavers!" Oliver Tickell is right.

Dawud Islam looks at the lessons of Oldham West: "All of us from Tim downwards need to hasten the roll out of our new direction and messages. Only when we finally give people something to vote for will the strains of the ‘lost deposits’ songs start to fade into the distance."

Ben Schiller explains how Finland's basic income scheme will work.

"To understand the complexities of the ongoing eurozone crisis, we need to analyze culture, since culture and history shape how policies are accepted, rejected, or modified," says Séamus Power looking at Ireland.

The inventor of Blue Peter has been forgotten because of the glorious, if tyrannical reign of Biddy Baxter. Andrew Martin introduces us to John Hunter Blair.

A London Inheritance goes in search of Park Row - a lost Knightsbridge street.

Read More

Six of the Best 554

Photo: Andreas Trepte

"The real case against the party leader, that most Labour MPs know in their hearts but dare not say openly, is not that a Corbyn government is unlikely, but that a Corbyn government would be disastrous." Peter Kellner gets it right on Labour and Jeremy Corbyn.

Ian Cummins endorses a study suggesting that Work Capability Assessments are linked with an increase in suicides.

"It is no coincidence that the notion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights is spreading globally at the exact moment that old boundaries are collapsing in the era of the digital revolution, mass migration, and international commodity markets." Mark Gevisser explains why repressive states are losing the battle against sexual freedom.

Dr Anna Arrowsmith says we are using the term 'mansplaining' incorrectly.

Dan Brown tells us about the status of the curlew in the UK and the work that needs to be done to safeguard the future of this wonderful bird.

The trap streets mentioned in Doctor Who the other week really are a thing. Londonist will tell you all about them.

Read More

Harborough Tories: £7 off council tax, £40 on bin tax

Tomorrow evening a special meeting of Harborough District Council will consider a proposal to impose an annual charge of £40 for collecting garden waste - the authority's 'green bin' service.

Over to the Harborough Mail and my old friend Phil Knowles:

Lib Dem group leader Cllr Phil Knowles said the plan by the Conservative majority on the district council was “nothing short of a Conservative Bin Tax”. 

“Before the May elections we were treated to the Conservative election gimmick of a £7 per annum cut in Council Tax” he said. “Now they are proposing to charge £40 a year to empty green bins on a part-year service. 

“And if it’s £40 a year at first, who’s to say it won’t soon be £50 a year or more?”

Read More

Six of the Best 553

Richard Kemp has little time for the mayor of Liverpool.

Raymond Smith speaks up for the Green Belt: "The Green Belt may not have turned out quite as it was planned, but it is increasingly used for urban recreation and, if protected, could be of ever greater environmental value.

"During the latter half of the 1930s, a surprising number of Nazi-themed summer camps sprouted across the United States. Organized locally and without the support of Germany, these summer outings bore a startling resemblance to the Hitler Youth." George Dvorsky on a forgotten slice of American history.

Yes you should drag your children round museums, says John Lanchester.

Lynne About Loughborough is pleased by the opening up of the town's Old Bleach Yard.

Wales Online has some fascinating photographs of lost towns, villages and neighbourhoods in Wales - some of them "dismantled for English gain," as it puts it.

Read More

Fukushima Update: Japanese Facing Severe Personal Health Problems

The one and continuing underlying factor in this mega disaster, and the two featured stories, has to be the woefully inadequate, if not criminally complicit performance of the Japanese Government.

What should be noted in the report from Fairewinds Associates, is that the data published was as a result of samples collected and submitted by ordinary citizens.

Arnie Gunderson: The data in Mr. Kaltofen's paper came from citizens. It came from farmers. It came from scientists. It came from bloggers. It was an effort by individuals and not government. I think if we had relied on the government to get us this information, we never would have gotten it. So it is an important achievement for all of us, to recognize that together, using the internet, we can all provide information for scientists to use, to come to rational decisions on public policy.

Staying with government and seemingly its willingness to accept whatever it is told by the nuclear industry, this from the second article, Women Fight to Save Fukushima's Children.

The announcement followed approvals from the government given on the basis that the company had taken sufficient measures after the reactor automatically shut down on Oct. 4, due to procedural errors in repair work.

And I have to make mention, this is the same government that has allocated twenty seven million dollars extra, to assist the Japanese whaling fleet in its endeavour to slaughter whales this coming season in the South Atlantic. 4 min video


The meat from which, they can't sell because nobody wants the wretched stuff. The only reason for this is that the Japanese government doesn't want to loose face by conceding defeat to Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

One might have thought the government had more urgent priorities, starting with doing everything imaginable to safeguard the most vulnerable, the next generation, today's children.

Scientist Marco Kaltofen Presents Data Confirming Hot Particles from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Washington, DC - October 31, 2011 – Today Scientist Marco Kaltofen of Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) presented his analysis of radioactive isotopic releases from the Fukushima accidents at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). Mr. Kaltofen’s analysis confirms the detection of hot particles in the US and the extensive airborne and ground contamination in northern Japan due to the four nuclear power plant accidents at TEPCO’s Fukushima reactors. Fairewinds believes that this is a personal health issue in Japan and a public health issue in the United States and Canada.

Transcript:

Hi, I'm Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds.

It is October 31st, 2011. This is a video that contains scientific information that we have been wanting to share with you for a long time. Today, in Washington D.C. at 8:30 in the morning, scientist Marco Kaltofen gave a presentation to some doctors who are part of the American Public Health Association. The paper is now on our website, next to this video.

To summarize the paper, citizens, some doctors and scientists, some bloggers, some farmers, around the world provided samples to Mr. Kaltofen who analyzed them for Fukushima radiation. An example of what he found is a slide that contains air filters from cars in Japan and in the United States. Cars in the United States hardly have any radiation in their air filters. Cars in Tokyo had quite a lot, way too much. Cars in Fukushima Prefecture were incredibly radioactive.

Now I think it is important because the nuclear industry will say, well everything is radioactive and therefore we should not worry. Well, the Seattle data shows that not everything is radioactive. And it shows that the people in Japan received enormous exposures of particles into their lungs and into their digestive systems, during the course of the accident.

Another piece of information is that Fairewinds viewers were able to send in children's shoes from Japan. Mr. Kaltofen has data that clearly show that the concentration of cesium on the kid's shoelaces was astronomically high, around 80 disintegrations per second. What does that mean? Kids tie their shoes, their hands get radioactive and it goes into their G.I. tract. If it is on the ground, it is in the dust in the playground and it is in their lungs. I think that between the two, the air filters and the children's shoes, it shows that there is a severe personal health problem in Japan that will manifest itself in cancers over the next 10 or 20 years.

Now Mr. Kaltofen did not just look at Japan. He set up monitoring stations in the United States as well. Two of the three monitoring stations in the United States did show hot particles in the air in April. Since then, there have not been any hot particles. But in April, it is clear that, at the worst of the accident, hot particles were wafted across the Pacific and deposited in Seattle and in Boston at least. There is also data that indicates contamination on the ground in the Cascades, which are a mountain range right up against the Pacific Ocean.

So I think we have two problems here. In Japan, there is a personal health issue and what that means is that individuals have received enough radiation that there is going to be a statistically meaningful increase in cancers in Tokyo and especially in Fukushima Prefecture.

In the United States, it is a different story. It is a public health issue and not a personal health issue. What that means is that we will never know who is the individual who got cancer from Fukushima. But we can be sure that the radiation did reach here and that there will be an increase in cancers, especially on the West Coast where the Rocky Mountains stopped most of the radiation and deposited it on the ground.

So, this paper was given to the American Public Health Association. And here it is a public health issue. We cannot run and we cannot hide. But the radiation is up and down the West Coast and then also scattered about the rest of the United States.

In Japan, it is a different story. They need to aggressively go after the contamination that has been discovered. It is so obvious on these air filters and on children's shoes. It takes a concerted national effort, not a haphazard effort of chasing hot spots, in order to reduce the amount of radioactivity that is on the soil and in the air in Japan right now.

And the last thing the paper shows is that it is wrong to have a 10 mile evacuation planning zone. Clearly, the damage can extend out as far as Tokyo. We need to look at emergency planning and evacuations well beyond the 10 miles that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission uses here and the 12 miles that the Japanese used during the accident. You may recall that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that Americans needed to evacuate 50 miles from Fukushima at the peak of the accident. Well, if it is good enough for Americans living in Japan, that same criteria should be good enough for Americans living in the United States.

The data in Mr. Kaltofen's paper came from citizens. It came from farmers. It came from scientists. It came from bloggers. It was an effort by individuals and not government. I think if we had relied on the government to get us this information, we never would have gotten it. So it is an important achievement for all of us, to recognize that together, using the internet, we can all provide information for scientists to use, to come to rational decisions on public policy.

This November we are asking for your support so we can continue our scientific analysis and these educational videos. There is a donate button on the Fairewinds site and we would appreciate it if you considered a financial contribution.

Thank you very much. We will keep you informed. Fairewinds

- - -

Women Fight to Save Fukushima's Children
By Suvendrini Kakuchi
06 November 2011

Tokyo - Hundreds of Japanese women have been converging on the Japanese capital demanding better relief for some 30,000 children exposed to nuclear radiation by the Fukushima meltdown.

"Official recovery policy focuses on decontamination rather than protecting the health of those most vulnerable - children and pregnant women," activist Aileen Mioko Smith told IPS.

"Our meetings with officials to force faster evacuation programmes for high-risk groups are only met with promises to clear radioactive waste. This is totally irresponsible," said Smith, who leads the non-government organisation (NGO) Green Action Japan.

Smith criticised the government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, for focusing energies on defusing public tension by promising to reduce exposure in affected areas to below one millisieverts (a measure of radiation) per year.

On Wednesday, TEPCO admitted that one of the Fukushima reactors showed presence of radioactive material from a burst of nuclear fission, indicating fresh leakage.

After the meltdown - caused by an earthquake and tsunami on Mar. 11 - the acceptable radiation standard for Fukushima residents was lowered to 20 millisieverts per year, and activists like Smith allege that this was done to minimise the number of evacuees.

Smith said the new standards should, in any case, not have been applied to vulnerable sections such as children and pregnant women.

Some 36,000 people have been evacuated from a 22-km radius of the plant while many more of Fukushima’s two million people may be affected, Smith said.

"We will not give up till the government changes its callous attitude," vowed Smith, participant in a women’s sit-in and protest before the ministry of economic trade and industry that determines Japan’s nuclear policy.

The core of the protestors was made of about 200 women from Fukushima who sat on a three-day sit-in outside the Tokyo office of Japan’s ministry of economy. When that ended on Oct. 30, they appealed to women from all over Japan to join them for week-long protests until Sunday.

Women from 47 prefectures have collected more than 6,000 signatures to support their demands. They have been handing out fliers to passers-by that contain detailed information on the dangers faced by the residents of Fukushima.

Rika Mashiko, an evacuee from Fukushima, explained that she joined the protests along with her seven-year-old daughter to show solidarity and to express her disappointment with the government. Her husband continues working in Fukushima to maintain financial stability.

Mashiko left her organic farm in Miharumachi, 50 km from the damaged nuclear reactor, six months ago. She resides in Tama, a Tokyo suburb and works part-time to support herself and her daughter.

"I receive no financial support from the government because officially I left voluntarily - though I am a nuclear refugee. I do not trust the newly established standards for radioactive exposure in Fukushima and cannot risk the health of my young child," she told IPS..

The women have linked post-disaster recovery with achieving stronger protection measures against radiation, transparency and honesty from government officials. They are pushing for a national pledge to end nuclear power generation in Japan.

Ayako Ooga, a representative of the NGO ‘Fukushima Mothers Against Radiation,’ said the success of the government’s recovery programme is under test.

"The way they are going about dealing with the nuclear crisis is not the recovery we envisage," she said. "The policy is to placate the people, but what we want is honest facts from the government."

Ooga fled on Mar. 11 from her home that fell within 10 km of the accident site. She explained to IPS that the high levels of radiation being reported from her area made it impossible for her to return.

"We want an assurance that a similar accident will never happen again in Japan and that the government will do more to protect our friends and relatives from radiation," she said.

The women know they have a long battle ahead. A rude shock came on Nov. 1 when the Kyushu Electric Power Company announced that it would restart a faulty reactor at the Genkai nuclear power station in Saga prefecture, southwestern Japan.

The announcement followed approvals from the government given on the basis that the company had taken sufficient measures after the reactor automatically shut down on Oct. 4, due to procedural errors in repair work.

The plant is at the heart of a scandal following allegations that the utility had manipulated public opinion and pressurised employees to approve restart of the plant.

Hatsumi Ishimaru, a farmer from Genkai who headed a campaign against the restarting of the plant, is among those who have came to Tokyo to join the women's protest.

Ishimaru, who is party to a lawsuit filed by the locals against the Genkai plant, told IPS that she will not rest until her farming village of 3,000 people is rid of the nuclear power generator.

"Women are, today, at the forefront of the anti-nuclear campaign. We value life more than economic returns," she said. ipsnews

Read More

Fukushima Roundup From Fairewinds Associates

I have a been a little lax of late in keeping up with the goings on at Fukushima, so here are the updates for the last month from Fairewinds.

Oldest first, but before that, a couple of links on issues that I have railed against since day one. By no means am I being smug or saying 'I told you so' because the issues were there as plain as day, well they were to anyone other than the Japanese government, who seemed quite content to be led around the ring by TEPCO.

And something Arnie Guunderson raises in the first clip, the far too cosy relationship between operators and regulators.


In line with my pregnant schoolgirl analogy.

Fukushima released 30 times more radiation in ocean than government claims, says French government

And virtually every other previous post of mine has about kids in the affected area.

Unto the children: The nuke thing creeps on

Women stage sit-in protest against nuclear policy, meet with Nuclear Safety Commission

- - -

Nuclear Oversight Lacking Worldwide (Jobs for the boys!)

Nuclear Oversight Lacking Worldwide from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Fairewinds disagrees with a recent New York Times Opinion that claims that Fukushima was caused because Japanese regulators did not properly oversee Tokyo Electric. Fairewinds shows that in the United States, the same cozy relationship exists between the NRC and the nuclear industry. Proper regulation of nuclear power has been coopted worldwide by industry refusal to implement the cost to assure nuclear safety.

- - -

Are Regulators And The Nuclear Industry Applying The Valuable Lessons Learned From Fukushima?

Are Regulators And The Nuclear Industry Applying The Valuable Lessons Learned From Fukushima? from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Fairewinds Presentation to the San Clemente City Council

Fairewinds chief engineer Arnie Gundersen discusses three nuclear safety problems uncovered during the Fukushima accident that nuclear regulators and the nuclear industry wish they could ignore. Why isn't the industry designing nuclear plants to withstand the worst natural events? Why aren't nuclear regulators, governments, and citizens who live and work near a nuclear plant prepared for a nuclear accident? How much does the NRC value human life? Finally, Fairewinds' Gundersen concludes that the NRC is not implementing adequate safety changes because the NRC believes that a serious accident is impossible.

- - -

New TEPCO Photographs Substantiate Significant Damage to Fukushima Unit 3

New TEPCO Photographs Substantiate Significant Damage to Fukushima Unit 3 from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Analysis of new Fukushima 3 photographs released last week by TEPCO substantiate Fairewinds’ claim that explosion of Unit 3 began over the spent fuel pool. Fairewinds believes that significant damage has also occurred to the containment system of Fukushima Unit 3, and that the two events (fuel pool explosion and containment breach) did not occur simultaneously. Video also includes brief discussion of tent system being constructed over Fukushima Unit 1.

- - -

Post Fukushima: All the King's Horses and All the King's Men...

Post Fukushima: All the King's Horses and All the King's Men... from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Fairewinds' Chief Engineer Arnie Gundersen testifies to the NRC Petition Review Board detailing why the 23 BWR Mark 1 nuclear power plants should be shut down following the accidents at Fukushima. True wisdom means knowing when to modify something and knowing when to stop. Sometimes, all the King’s horses and all the King’s men should not try to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Read More

Scientists to Rick Perry 'Not In My Name' as Texas Doctors Report

I don't know Ricky, what would God say about all these porkies?

Officials from Texas Spark Revolt After Perry Appointees Doctor Environmental Report

Scientists are asking for their names to be removed after mentions of climate change and sea-level rise were taken out by Texas officials.
October 18, 2011

Officials in Rick Perry's home state of Texas have set off a scientists' revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state's environmental agency.




By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document. "None of us can be party to scientific censorship so we would all have our names removed," said Jim Lester, a co-author of the report and vice-president of the Houston Advanced Research Centre.

"To me it is simply a question of maintaining scientific credibility. This is simply antithetical to what a scientist does," Lester said. "We can't be censored." Scientists see Texas as at high risk because of climate change, from the increased exposure to hurricanes and extreme weather on its long coastline to this summer's season of wildfires and drought.

However, Perry, in his run for the Republican nomination, has elevated denial of science, from climate change to evolution, to an art form. He opposes any regulation of industry, and has repeatedly challenged the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Texas is the only state to refuse to sign on to the federal government's new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. "I like to tell people we live in a state of denial in the state of Texas," said John Anderson, an oceanography at Rice University, and author of the chapter targeted by the government censors.

That state of denial percolated down to the leadership of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency chief, who was appointed by Perry, is known to doubt the science of climate change. "The current chair of the commission, Bryan Shaw, commonly talks about how human-induced climate change is a hoax," said Anderson.

But scientists said they still hoped to avoid a clash by simply avoiding direct reference to human causes of climate change and by sticking to materials from peer-reviewed journals. However, that plan began to unravel when officials from the agency made numerous unauthorised changes to Anderson's chapter, deleting references to climate change, sea-level rise and wetlands destruction.

"It is basically saying that the state of Texas doesn't accept science results published in Science magazine," Anderson said. "That's going pretty far."

Officials even deleted a reference to the sea level at Galveston Bay rising five times faster than the long-term average – 3mm a year compared to .5mm a year – which Anderson noted was a scientific fact. "They just simply went through and summarily struck out any reference to climate change, any reference to sea level rise, any reference to human influence – it was edited or eliminated," said Anderson. "That's not scientific review that's just straight forward censorship."

Mother Jones has tracked the changes. The agency has defended its actions. "It would be irresponsible to take whatever is sent to us and publish it," Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. "Information was included in a report that we disagree with."

She said Anderson's report had been "inconsistent with current agency policy", and that he had refused to change it. She refused to answer any questions. Campaigners said the censorship by the Texas state authorities was a throwback to the George Bush era when White House officials also interfered with scientific reports on climate change. Go to page two

Did you know, if Texas were a country, it would be the world's seventh largest polluter of the planet. scroll down a bit

Read More

Safety Problems in all Reactors Designed Like Fukushima

Fairewinds Introduces a Japanese Language Edition and Identifies Safety Problems in all Reactors Designed Like Fukushima

Fairewinds Introduces a Japanese Language Edition and Identifies Safety Problems in all Reactors Designed Like Fukushima from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Gundersen expresses concerns that the nuclear industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are not addressing major safety issues that have become evident since Fukushima. These issues include serious design flaws in the BWR Mark 1 containment, fundamental flaws in the Boiling Water Reactor vessel design, and problems with detonation shockwaves. The NRC and the nuclear industry are using a flawed cost benefit computer code that underestimates the value of human life and minimize property damages after an accident, which has the effect of justifying continued operation of reactors without safety modifications.

Also, Fairewinds announces the launch of the Japanese language version of its site, Fairewinds.jp.

-

Transcript

Hi. I'm Arnie Gundersen from Fairewinds.

It's been about three weeks since we posted a video, although there have been a couple radio interviews posted. That doesn't mean we haven't been busy here at Fairewinds. I have been doing expert witness testimony but more importantly Maggie and Kevin Hurley have been busy converting Fairewinds.com to Fairewinds.jp which will be a Japanese translation of our website. I’d like to thank a large number of dedicated Japanese speakers who have worked with us in translating all these videos into Japanese. Today is the first day that Fairewinds.jp and Fairewinds.com will be broadcasting the same material. Thank you very much to those volunteers.

In the last several months the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a review of safety as a result of the Fukushima accident. They just published their report in several key areas that they wanted to look at in more depth. That report is on our website but more importantly the Union of Concerned Scientists, acting as a watchdog over the NRC, has issued a critique of that initial nuclear regulatory report. We posted that Union of Concerned Scientists critique as well, and there are important lessons that the NRC has identified but more importantly there are issues that the Union of Concerned Scientists have recognized where the NRC needs to really put their money where their mouth is and not just study safety issues but actually implement safety changes.

Well today what I would like to talk about are four things that are not in the NRC 's report that I really think should be in the NRC's report. They are the containment, the reactor, the explosion and the last thing called Severe Accident Mitigation Analysis. The first thing is the containment on this boiling water reactor and the 35 other boiling water nuclear reactors that are exactly like that. Back in February, about three weeks before the accident, Maggie and I were walking and Maggie said, “You know we are doing a lot of expert reports and we are finding a lot of problems,” and she asked me, “Where do you think the next accident will occur?” I said I don't know where but I know for sure it will be in a Mark 1 boiling water containment. Well that's what the Fukushima reactors were: Mark 1 containments. This picture of a boiling water container was taken in the 70's. This is identical to the Fukushima reactors. Let me walk you through this.

There's two pieces to the containment, the top looks like an upside down light bulb and that's called a drywell. Inside there is where the nuclear reactor is. Down below is a doughnut looking thing called a torus and that's filled almost all the way with water. The theory is that if the reactor breaks steam will shoot out through the light bulb into the doughnut creating lots of bubbles which will reduce the pressure. This thing is called the pressure suppression containment. At the bottom of that picture is the lid to the containment. When it's fully assembled that lid sits on top.
The containment is about 1 inch thick. Inside it is the nuclear reactor that is about 8 inches thick. We will get to that in a minute. This type of containment was designed in the early 70's, late 60's, and by 1972 a lot of people had concerns with the containment. I want to read to you a NRC memo from 1972 that talks about the problems of this pressure suppression containment:

"Steve's idea to ban the pressure suppression containment scheme is an attractive one. However, the acceptance of the pressure suppression containment system by all elements of the nuclear field including regulatory and the advisory committees on reactor safeguards is firmly embedded in conventional wisdom. Reversal of this hallowed policy, especially in this time could well lead to the end of nuclear power. It would throw into question the operation of licensed plants and it would generally create more turmoil than I can stand."

So in the early 70's the NRC recognized this containment system was flawed. In the mid-70's they realized the forces were in the wrong direction: instead of down they were up, and large straps were put into place. Well then in the 80's there was another problem that developed. After the Three Mile Island [accident], they realized this containment could explode from a hydrogen build up. That had not been factored into the design in the 70's, either. What they came up for this containment was a vent in the side of it. The vent is designed to let the pressure out and a containment is designed to keep the pressure in.
So, rather than contain this radioactivity engineers realized if the containment were to survive an explosion, they'd have to open a hole in the side of it called a containment vent. These vents were added in the late 1980's and they were not added because the NRC demanded it, what the industry did to avoid that [demand] was to create an initiative. They put them in voluntarily. That sounds really in fact very proactive, but in fact it wasn't. If the NRC [had] required it, it would have opened up the license on these plants to citizens and scientists that had concerns. By having the industry voluntarily put these vents in it did two things. One, it did not allow any public participation in the process to see if they were safe and the second thing is it did not allow the NRC to look at these vents and say that they were safety related, in fact, it sidetracked the process entirely.

These vents were never tested until Fukushima. This containment was never tested until Fukushima. In fact it failed three times out of three tries. In retrospect, we shouldn’t be surprised.

Looking at the procedures for opening these vents in the event electricity fails requires someone fully clad in radiation gear to go down to an enormous valve in the bowels of plant and turn the crank two hundred (200) times to open it. Now, can you imagine: in the middle of a nuclear accident, with steam, and explosions, and radiation, expecting an employee to go into the plant and turn a valve two hundred times to open it? So, that was the second band-aid fix that failed on a containment that, forty years earlier, was designed too small.

Well, with all this in mind, I think we really need to ask the question: should the Mark 1 containment even be allowed to continue to operate? The NRC’s position is, “Well, we can make the vents stronger.” I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Now, all those issues that I just talked about are related to the Mark 1 containment. The next thing I’d like to talk about is the reactor that sits inside that containment. So, that light bulb and that doughnut are the containment structure. Inside that is where the nuclear reactor is. On a boiling water reactor, the nuclear control rods come in at the bottom. On a pressurized water reactor they come in from the top. All of the reactors at Fukushima, and 35 in the world with this design, come in from the bottom. That poses a unique problem and an important difference that the NRC is not looking at right now. If the core melts in a pressurized water reactor there are no holes in the bottom of the nuclear reactor. It’s a very thick eight to ten inch (8-10 Inch) piece of metal that the nuclear reactor core would have to melt through. But that didn’t happen at Fukushima. Fukushima was a boiling water reactor. It’s got holes in the bottom. When the nuclear core lies on the bottom of a boiling water reactor like Fukushima, or the ones in the U.S., or others in Japan, it’s easier for the core to melt through because of those sixty (60) holes in the bottom of the reactor. It doesn’t have to melt through eight inches of steel. It just has to melt through a very thin-walled pipe and scoot out the hole in the bottom of the nuclear reactor.

I’m not the only one to recognize that holes at the bottom of a boiling water reactor are a problem. Last week an email came out that was written by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission right after the Fukushima accident where they recognized that, if there’s a core meltdown and it’s now lying as a blob on the bottom of the nuclear reactor, these holes in the bottom of the reactor form channels through which the hot molted fuel can get out a lot easier and a lot quicker than a thick pressurized water reactor design. This is a flaw in any boiling water reactor, and the Nuclear Regulatory is not recognizing that the likelihood of melting through a boiling water reactor like Fukushima is a lot more significant than the likelihood of melting through a pressurized water reactor.

The third area is an area we’ve discussed in depth in a previous video. That area is that the explosion at Unit 3 was a detonation, not a deflagration. It has to do with the speed of the shockwave. The shockwave at Unit 3 traveled faster than the speed of sound, and that’s an important distinction that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the entire nuclear industry is not looking at. A containment can’t withstand a shockwave that travels faster than the speed of sound, yet all containments are designed assuming that doesn’t happen. At Fukushima [Unit] 3, it happened. We need to understand how it happened and mitigate against it in the future on all reactors. Now, I measured that. A scale the size of the building against the speed at which the explosion occurred, and determined that that shockwave traveled at around a thousand miles per hour. The speed of sound is around six hundred feet per second (600 ft/sec) so, if this is what I think it is, it could cause enormous damage to a containment. They are not designed to handle it. Yet, the NRC is not looking at that.

So, we’ve got three key areas where the NRC and the nuclear industry don’t want people to look, and [those are, one]: should this Mark 1 containment even be allowed to operate? Two: are boiling water reactors more prone to a melt-through than a pressurized water reactor? And the third is: can containments withstand a detonation shockwave?

If the nuclear industry wants to implement a safety change, they have to do something called a cost-benefit analysis. What that means is the cost to implement the change has to be exceeded by the benefits to society if the change is made. This brings me to the last point today which is called “SAMA,” S, A, M, A. It stands for Severe Accident Mitigation Analysis. It uses a really fancy computer code that calculates exactly what the costs are to society in the event of a big accident. Those costs are in terms of human life, and they’re in terms of damages to property. The computer code is wrong. It’s been known to have been wrong for a long time, but it continues to be in use. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission puts the lowest possible value on a human life of any of the agencies in Washington. And, the cleanup after an accident is also artificially low. The net effect is that when a cost to make a modification is compared against the benefits to society, this computer code distorts the benefits and lowers them. So, it appears that there’s no need to make the change because the costs are too high and the benefits to you and I, and society, are too low. Fukushima has taught us that that’s just not true. The costs to clean up Fukushima are going to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars U.S. [The costs will be] at least two hundred billion dollars U.S. And yet, this computer code that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission uses never, ever, calculates a high number like that. Unless we adjust the cost/benefit analysis, what will happen is: as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission identifies problems that should be corrected, their own computer code will show that it’s not justified, that the risks to society are really too low, that we don’t need to spend that money. The problem is in the computer code, and until we upwardly adjust the cost of a human life, and the cost of damage to property we won’t be able to come up with an effective way of judging the costs and the benefits of these safety modifications.

Well, that about sums it up. There are at least three key areas that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the nuclear industry, both in Japan and the United States, are not looking at: containment design, boiling water reactor vessels, and detonation shockwaves. But, no matter what they look at, if they don’t do the cost/benefit analysis right and properly evaluate the cost to society, none of these changes will be implemented.

Again, I’d like to thank our Japanese viewers and welcome them to Fairewinds.jp, and also to thank all of our viewers over the last one hundred and seventy days, and thank them for watching Fairewinds.com.

Read More

Fukushima Desolation Worst Since Nagasaki as Residents Flee

Before moving on to the article I would just like to say a few words about this fellow, Jim, I've no axe to grind, Al-Khalili. He has a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics and I don't.

I had the misfortune recently, to watch him present a television program, Fukushima: Is Nuclear Power Safe? Where, from the off, he reassured us of his impartiality.

Oh how I wish, because I can honestly say, I have never watched such unmitigated biased drivel in all my fucking life. So much so, had you watched the program and taken it at face value, you would have come away with the opinion that both Chernobyl and Fukushima were a couple of inconsequential mishaps.



Just my opinion mind, but he did seem to be just the man for the ever so impartial BBC.

BBC: Six months after the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear plant and the release of radiation there, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to discover whether nuclear power is safe.

He begins in Japan, where he meets some of the tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated from the exclusion zone. He travels to an abandoned village just outside the zone to witness a nuclear clean-up operation.

Jim draws on the latest scientific findings from Japan and from the previous explosion at Chernobyl to understand how dangerous the release of radiation is likely to be and what that means for our trust in nuclear power.

Fukushima Desolation Worst Since Nagasaki as Residents Flee
By Yuriy Humber, Yuji Okada and Stuart Biggs
Sep 27, 2011

Beyond the police roadblocks that mark the no-go zone around Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, six-foot tall weeds invade rice paddies and vines gone wild strangle road signs along empty streets.

Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the 100 cows slaughtered on government order after radiation from the March 11 atomic disaster saturated the area, forcing 160,000 people to move away and leaving some places uninhabitable for two decades or more.

“Older folks want to return, but the young worry about radiation,” said Harada, whose family ran the farm for 40 years. “I want to farm, but will we be able to sell anything?”

What’s emerging in Japan six months since the nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant is a radioactive zone bigger than that left by the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While nature reclaims the 20 kilometer (12 mile) no-go zone, Fukushima’s $3.2 billion-a-year farm industry is being devastated and tourists that hiked the prefecture’s mountains and surfed off its beaches have all but vanished.

The March earthquake and tsunami that caused the nuclear crisis and left almost 20,000 people dead or missing may cost 17 trillion yen ($223 billion), hindering recovery of the world’s third-largest economy from two decades of stagnation.

Compensation Costs

A government panel investigating Tokyo Electric’s finances estimated the cost of compensation to people affected by the nuclear disaster will exceed 4 trillion yen, Kyodo News reported today, without saying how it got the information. The stock fell 6.2 percent to 243 yen, the lowest since June 13.

The bulk of radioactive contamination cuts a 5 kilometer to 10 kilometer-wide swath of land running as far as 30 kilometers northwest of the nuclear plant, surveys of radiation hotspots by Japan’s science ministry show. The government extended evacuations beyond the 20-kilometer zone in April to cover this corridor, which includes parts of Iitate village.

No formal evacuation zone was set up in Hiroshima after an atomic bomb was dropped on the city on Aug. 6, 1945, though as the city rebuilt relatively few people lived within 1 kilometer of the blast epicenter, according to the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Museum. Food shortages forced a partial evacuation of the city in the summer of 1946.

Chernobyl Explosion

On April 26, 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl reactor hurled 180 metric tons of nuclear fuel into the atmosphere, creating the world’s first exclusion zone of 30 kilometers around a nuclear plant. A quarter of a century later, the zone is still classed as uninhabitable. About 300 residents have returned despite government restrictions.

The government last week said some restrictions may be lifted in outlying areas of the evacuation zone in Fukushima, which translates from Japanese as “Lucky Isle.” Residents seeking answers on which areas are safe complain of mixed messages.

“There are no simple solutions,” Timothy Mousseau, a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, said. Deciding whether life should go on in radiation tainted areas is a “question of acceptable risks and trade offs.”

To Mousseau, one thing is clear.

‘Consequences’

“There will be consequences for some of the people who are exposed to levels that are being reported from the Fukushima prefecture,” Mousseau said by e-mail from Chernobyl, where he is studying radiation effects.

Japan abandoned any ambition to develop atomic weapons after the 1945 bombings. Two decades later, the nation embraced nuclear power to rebuild the economy after the war in the absence of domestic oil and gas supplies.

Tokyo Electric’s decision in the 1960s to name its atomic plant Fukushima Dai-Ichi has today associated a prefecture of about 2 million people that’s almost half the size of Belgium with radiation contamination. In contrast, Chernobyl is the name of a small town near the namesake plant in what today is Ukraine.

The entire prefecture has been stained because of the link, according to Governor Yuhei Sato.

“At Fukushima airport you don’t see Chinese and Korean visitors like before because of negative associations,” he said. More Bloomberg

Read More

Fukushima’s Contamination Produces Some Surprises at Sea

Fukushima’s Contamination Produces Some Surprises at Sea
By David Jolly
September 28, 2011

Six months after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, the news flow from the stricken nuclear power plant has slowed, but scientific studies of radioactive material in the ocean are just beginning to bear fruit.




The word from the land is bad enough. As my colleague Hiroko Tabuchi reported on Saturday, Japanese officials have detected elevated radiation levels in rice near the crippled reactors. Worrying radiation levels had already been detected in beef, milk, spinach and tea leaves, leading to recalls and bans on shipments.

Off the coast, the early results indicate that very large amounts of radioactive materials were released, and may still be leaking, and that rather than being spread through the whole ocean, currents are keeping a lot of the material concentrated.

Most of that contamination came from attempts to cool the reactors and spent fuel pools, which flushed material from the plant into the ocean, and from direct leaks from the damaged facilities.

Japanese government and utility industry scientists estimated this month that 3,500 terabecquerels of cesium 137 was released directly into the sea from March 11, the date of the earthquake and tsunami, to late May. Another 10,000 terabecquerels of cesium 137 made it into the ocean after escaping from the plant as steam.
Ken Buesseler, a marine chemist, paid his respects at Namiwake Shrine outside the city of Sendai, Japan, before departing on a cruise to study radiation releases into the ocean from the Fukushima power plant.Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic InstitutionKen Buesseler, a marine chemist, paid his respects at Namiwake Shrine outside Sendai, Japan, before departing on a cruise to study radiation releases into the ocean from the Fukushima power plant.

The leakage very likely isn’t over, either. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the plant, said Sept. 20 that it believed that something on the order of 200 to 500 tons a day of groundwater might still be pouring into the damaged reactor and turbine buildings.

Ken Buesseler, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who in 1986 studied the effects of the Chernobyl disaster on the Black Sea, said the Fukushima disaster appeared to be by far the largest accidental release of radioactive material into the sea.

Chernobyl-induced radiation in the Black Sea peaked in 1986 at about 1,000 becquerels per cubic meter, he said in an interview at his office in Woods Hole, Mass. By contrast, the radiation level off the coast near the Fukushima Daiichi plant peaked at more than 100,000 becquerels per cubic meter in early April.

Before Fukushima, in 2010, the Japanese coast measured about 1.5 becquerel per cubic meter, he said.

‘‘Chernobyl might have been five times bigger, over all, but the ocean impact was much smaller,’’ Mr. Buesseler said.

Working with a team of scientists from other institutions, including the University of Tokyo and Columbia University, Mr. Buesseler’s Woods Hole group in June spent 15 days in the waters off northeast Japan, studying the levels and dispersion of radioactive substances there and the effect on marine life.

The project, financed primarily by the Moore Foundation after governments declined to participate, continued to receive samples from Japanese cruises into July.

While Mr. Buesseler declined to provide details of the findings before analysis is complete and published, he said the broad results were sobering.

“When we saw the numbers — hundreds of millions of becquerels — we knew this was the largest delivery of radiation into the ocean ever seen,’’ he said. ‘‘We still don’t know how much was released.’’

Mr. Buesseler took samples of about five gallons, filtered out the naturally occurring materials and the materials from nuclear weapon explosions, and measured what was left.

The scientists had expected to find ocean radiation levels falling off sharply after a few months, as radioactive substances were dispersed by the currents, because, he said, “The ocean’s solution to pollution is dilution.’’

The good news is that researchers found the entire region 20 to 400 miles offshore had radiation levels too low to be an immediate threat to humans.

But there was also an unpleasant surprise. “Rather than leveling off toward zero, it remained elevated in late July,’’ he said, up to about 10,000 becquerel per cubic meter. ‘‘That suggests the release problem has not been solved yet.”

The working hypothesis is that contaminated sediments and groundwater near the coast are continuing to contaminate the seas, he said.

The international team also collected plankton samples and small fish for study. Mr. Buesseler said there were grounds for concern about bioaccumulation of radioactive isotopes in the food chain, particularly in seaweed and some shellfish close to the plants. A fuller understanding of the effect on fish that are commercially harvested will probably take several years of data following several feeding cycles, he said.

‘‘We also don’t know concentrations in sediments, so benthic biota may be getting higher doses and if consumed (shellfish), could be of concern,’’ he wrote later in an e-mail, referring to organisms that dwell on the sea floor.

The study also found that the highest cesium values were not necessarily from the samples collected closest to Fukushima, he said, because eddies in the ocean currents keep the material from being diluted in some spots farther offshore.

The overall results were consistent with those previously found by Japanese scientists, Mr. Buesseler said.

He said more research was urgently needed to answer several questions, including why the level of contamination offshore near the plant was so high.

“Japan is leading the studies, but more work is needed than any one country, or any one lab, can possibly carry out,” he said. NYT

h/t TreeHugger

Read More