Emma wrote on Jul 26^th, 2011 at 10:22pm:


And is your dislike colouring your judgement??
It depends on which you consider the bigger 'threat' or bigger danger.....Co2 or nuclear power....

gizmo_2655 wrote on Jul 26^th, 2011 at 10:44pm:


You have to look at the actual effects. One has projected severe effects on a global basis, the other (Fukushima for example) pretty severe effects for the people of Fukushima and that part of Japan, but nil consequences for the rest of the world.

Let's take the effects on marine life.  With Fukushima, it means catch restrictions in a narrow area, and impact on livelihood for about 2,000 people in the local fishing industry.

With increased CO2 emissions, it will mean a shift in pH levels which will impact large numbers of commercial fish stocks worldwide, and a differential migration of marine ecosystems with effective separation of interdependent benthic and pelagic species as a result of changes in surface temperature.

So the nuclear accident will have effects on the local fishing industry whereas CO2 emissions will have much further reaching effects.

Nuclear energy could be a necessary stop-gap whether you like it or not.  Compared to coal-fired generation, it's the lesser of two evils.

Dismissed as a “nobody” by Japan’s nuclear industry, seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi spent two decades watching his predictions of disaster come true: First in the 1995 Kobe earthquake and then at Fukushima. He says the government still doesn’t get it.

The 67-year-old scientist recalled in an interview how his boss marched him to the Construction Ministry to apologize for writing a 1994 book suggesting Japan’s building codes put its cities at risk. Five months later, thousands were killed when a quake devastated Kobe city. The book, “A Seismologist Warns,” became a bestseller.

That didn’t stop Haruki Madarame, now head of Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, from dismissing Ishibashi as an amateur when he warned of a “nuclear earthquake disaster,” a phrase the Kobe University professor coined in 1997. Ishibashi says Japan still underestimates the risk of operating reactors in a country that has about 10 percent of the world’s quakes.

“What was missing -- and is still missing -- is a recognition of the danger,” Ishibashi said, seated in a dining room stacked with books in his house in a Kobe suburb. “I understand we’re not going to shut all of the nuclear plants, but we should rank them by risk and phase out the worst.”

Among Japan’s most vulnerable reactors are some of its oldest, built without the insights of modern earthquake science, Ishibashi said. It was only in the last four years that Japan Atomic Power Co. recognized an active fault line running under its reactor in Tsuruga, which opened in 1970 about 120 kilometers (75 miles) northeast of Osaka and close to a lake that supplies water to millions of people in the region.

Ishibashi says he didn’t start out as a critic of Japan’s nuclear industry. In 1976, when the then 31-year-old researcher at Tokyo University made his first important discovery -- that a fault line west of Tokyo was much bigger than assumed -- the risk to Chubu Electric Power Co.’s Hamaoka nuclear plant in Shizuoka prefecture didn’t occur to him. The plant had opened that year above the fault.

Fukushima Foretold
His view changed after a magnitude-6.9 quake killed more than 5,500 people on Jan. 17, 1995, and toppled sections of elevated expressway.

After a disaster that Japanese engineers had said couldn’t happen, the nuclear regulator didn’t immediately re-evaluate its construction standards. It said the plants were “safe from the ground up,” as the title of a 1995 Science Ministry pamphlet put it. Ishibashi decided to investigate.

The result was an article on Hamaoka published in the October 1997 issue of Japan’s Science Journal that reads like a post-mortem of the Fukushima disaster: A major quake could knock out external power to the plant’s reactors and unleash a tsunami that could overrun its 6-meter defenses, swamping backup diesel generators and leading to loss of cooling and meltdowns.

When the local prefecture questioned industry experts about Ishibashi’s paper, the response was that he didn’t need to be taken seriously.

Ishibashi a ‘Nobody’
“In the field of nuclear engineering, Mr. Ishibashi is a nobody,” Madarame said in a 1997 letter to the Shizuoka Legislature. Madarame, then a professor at the University of Tokyo school of engineering, is now in charge of nuclear safety in the country.

Requests made to Madarame’s office in October for an interview on his current views of Ishibashi’s work were declined.

On Oct. 24, Madarame was asked after a regular press briefing for the commission if he’d changed his opinion about Ishibashi.

“Because of the accident there’s a need to take another look at things, including the earthquake engineering guidelines, and we’re doing that,” he said. “Ishibashi contributed a lot to the revisions to the earthquake guidelines and his comments there are important.” He declined to comment further.

Hamaoka’s reactors, the subject of Ishibashi’s 1997 report, were shut in May after then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan went on television to publicly plead with Chubu Electric to close the plant. The utility estimates it will cost 100 billion yen and 18 months to build a seawall around the reactors.

Link -
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-21/nuclear-regulator-dismissed-seismologis...
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There are always consequences, when anyone disagrees with TPTB AND there are always consequences for all actions &/OR inactions!

It's managable. One good thing that came out of this was the Japanese approach to crisis management.  The old approach was - counsel everybody immediately after the event. However the problem is that the factor that controls well-being more than anything else is the human mind. If you will yourself to be sick or if you think you're sick, you'll be sick.

The Japanese concentrated on vulnerable individuals only. The remainder were provided with basic information.

It's called Psychological First Aid. Only treat those who have a problem. Treat the others and you'll create a problem.

They are starting to adopt that approach in Australia.

Emma wrote on Nov 26^th, 2011 at 4:35pm:


One doesn't....Everything produces radioactivity....The sun, the food you eat,  the water you drink and wash in....

Even the computer monitor you're sitting in front of...(which, incidently, probably produces as much radiation as the Fukushima reactors are right now....)

Emma wrote on Nov 26^th, 2011 at 11:35pm:



What's an unnatural helium nucleus compared to a natural one?

or - do you prefer natural poisons to unnatural ones?

Emma wrote on Nov 26^th, 2011 at 11:35pm:


Well. You're oversimplifying the issue.

Sorry, but nukes are too powerful and therefore too dangerous for humans to play with - at least at this stage of our technological development.

Unfortunately, it seems as though humanity will need to face yet another unmitigated nuclear disaster, before the long-term safety of humans and our environment is put ahead of the short-term economic benefits of nukes.

Apparently, an inevitable BIG KABOOM of FUKUSHIMA wasn't big enough for most of those entrusted with making the relevant decisions. I suspect that this is because the real nature and extent of the disaster has been cynically- buried and/or under-reported.

Alas, we shall see! Meantime, I take some comfort that most of the world's nukes are located in the Northern Hemisphere - where they can share the grave risks amongst themselves - until something goes so wrong with nukes that causes millions (perhaps billions) of them to flee and head south en masse...