Our World Today

FUKUSHIMA :

A fuku-shame

Back to the scourge of the season: nuclear power. I remember when, in 1977, the people in Chalk River, where Canada has its Atomic Energy Headquarters, wanted to bury Ontario’s nuclear waste on a site just north of us. At the community discussion in the auditorium of the Centre Hastings High School in Madoc some 1,000 people gathered to protest with banners and placards and chants. The experts soon abandoned the burial. Even now, 35 years later, no solution has been found for nuclear waste disposal. And the toxic waste accumulates. It takes a million years to de-activate the radiation. With the Lord a million years is as one day, but we, in human time, we have to safeguard the poison forever. Poor next generations: another burden on their already over-burdened shopping list. One of the banners at that gathering suggested an alternative site: “Bury it on Parliament Hill!”

True, the world was shocked following the 1973/1974 oil price increase. After that France and Japan covered their respective territories with new reactors. These countries have a history of high-handed policies where the voice of the ‘experts’ prevail, while in other countries, Germany, Finland, Italy the “Greens” were able to block the development of any new nuclear power project. In the United States, despite the accident at Three Mile Island it was the oil lobby, not the “Greens”, who organized the shutdown of nuclear power development.
Now with constant high fossil fuel prices, courtesy of China, India, Brazil and other emerging countries, and the desire to limit CO2 emissions we saw a return to nuclear power. All the countries that had frozen their programmes were beginning to dust them off, planning the construction of dozens of new plants. The world’s stock of nuclear plants was getting ready to double in a decade, until……

Japan has no oil or gas, so it went nuclear in a big way, quite ironic because Japan is the only country in the world where, in 1945, two atom bombs obliterated Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No wonder the people there vouched never to pursue a nuclear arsenal.

Now another Japanese tragedy is in the making, a frightful Fuku-shame, thanks to an earthquake on a scale rarely experienced, accompanied by a tsunami of unimaginable height, and the shocking discovery that the FUKUSHIMA nuclear plants were unable to cope with these two highly improbable events. This happened not in India, where one would expect it, or in Russia, which saw its Chernobyl disaster, but in Japan, over-regulated, hyper cautious, terribly afraid of nuclear incidents.

Coming to a location near you.

Nowadays the impossible has become the probable and the unimaginable a reality. A month ago our entire family spent a week in Colorado near the Rocky Mountain National Park. Today that entire area has been flooded, a year’s rain in a few hours. Too often the 1 in a 1000 year event is now commonplace. It used to be that a waterfront location sold at a premium. The premium now is the extra insurance cost. Look what happened in Calgary this past summer. Nothing is safe anymore. Prepare for the unexpected. Yes, disaster, weather related or connected to the environment, can come anywhere, anytime. It is prudent, I believe, to be ready for any emergency.

I don’t know whether it has anything to do with it, but Japan has always resisted Christianity. Only one percent is affiliated with one of the scores of Christian expressions. I remember reading that in the 17^th century Japanese authorities sent a delegation to the Netherlands to explore religion there. Then the Netherlands was a leader in all fields: highly successful in commerce, arts, medicine, science and tolerant in religion. These delegates were not impressed apparently. Blame those dour Dutchmen. Perhaps the absence of the love commandment has given the Japanese overconfidence in technological prowess, because this very faith in technology has terribly misfired. Even though the Western world is now totally secular, yet there is a basis of Christianity there, evident in their monetary support for disadvantaged countries, something Japan does not have.

Are disasters a punishment?

Last week I read Psalm 107 at breakfast time and was struck by verse 34: “(He changes) fruitful land into a salty waste for the wickedness of those who live there.” There is a definite connection between faith in the Creator and the way we treat his work of art. When we regard creation as holy, then the land- and humamnity – benefits. Substitute salty waste – a result of irrigation or overgrazing (greed in other words) – for Monsanto seeds or monoculture or, yes, nuclear power, all the result of the wickedness of the people, and disaster is waiting in the wings. Actually there are numerous bible passages that confirm that: “they will eat the fruit of their ways” (Proverbs 1:31); and “the evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them; the cords of their sins hold them fast” (Proverbs 5: 22); “Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you.”(Jeremiah 2: 19). Climate change world-wide and Japan’s plight are of our own making.

Yes, Japan is in a real fix. The damage to the 4 nuclear reactors is a threat not only to the land of the rising sun, but to the entire world. The country has an insurmountable problem: they don’t know how to fix the nuclear damage. Fact is that the Fukushima reactors have been leaking huge amounts of radioactive water ever since the earthquake 2 years ago. Some 330,000 metric tons of contaminated water has been pumped into storage pits and above-ground tanks. If one of these above-ground tanks collapses or catches fire, it could have severe adverse impacts not only on Japan, but also for the rest of the world, including North America. These storage bins offer no protection against another earthquake or the onset of a severe hurricane.

Fukushima’s extensive leakage spreads highly radioactive water not only into the surrounding soil but also into the Pacific ocean on the way to the shores of Korea, China, and the West Coast of North America. Water contaminated with nuclear radiation is a source of cancers and causes birth malfunctions. Since the engineers cannot approach the damaged buildings, they have no idea where the cores of the nuclear reactors are.

Last week Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant that “the future of Japan” depends on their ongoing struggle to contain leaks of highly radioactive water at the site. Fat chance: they, the owners of TEPCO, which stands for Tokyo Electric Power Corporation, have been fumbling the issue from Day 1. The utility needs to keep pouring water over the reactors to keep fuel in the cores from overheating. But that has been complicated by the estimated 400 metric tons of groundwater that seeps into the area from higher ground each day.

The looming danger

Here is what the new fuzz is all about. The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is preparing to remove 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building, a dangerous operation that has never been attempted before on this scale. This spent fuel contains radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago. There are more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together. They need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area. Each fuel rod assembly weighs about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) and is 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. There are 1,331 of the spent fuel assemblies and a further 202 unused assemblies are also stored in the pool. These rods also contain plutonium, one of the most toxic substances in the universe. Plutonium gets formed during the later stages of a reactor core’s operation. There is a high risk of accidents if these bundles get too close to each other. The real danger comes when TEPCO tries to de-commission the fuel pools.