A brief and intelligent analysis of nuclear power. It’s too expensive.
James Pilant
Does it make any sense to keep expanding nuclear energy in South Florida. As a consumer you will end up paying for the accelerating costs of nuclear reactors, without doubt. Drawing on largely unknown public records, the paper reveals for the first time both absolute as well as yearly and specific reactor costs and their evolution over time. Its most significant finding is that even this most successful nuclear scale-up was characterized by a su … Read More
I like outrage. Much happens these days that produces legitimate anger but too many people divert themselves from the pain of reality by choosing vital moral topics like Charlie Sheen’s job prospects. This willful desire to escape the pain of national and international policy is not one I respect. As citizens we have a duty to our fellow man to act intelligently and at times forcefully to correct abusive policies and poor decision making.
This is some outrage, in fact, quite a bit of outrage. I enjoyed very much. I hope you do too.
James Pilant
Oldspeak: Yes! Brilliant way to deal with this monumental (and curiously underreported in corporate media) public heath and environmental disaster. Raise radiation limits and turn off radiation detectors! That’ll make it all better. 😐 With recent reports of IMMEASURABLE LEVELS of radiation at Fukishima, A meltdown at reactor #2, TEPCO dumping thousands of gallons of radioactive water into the sea, (that will end up in rain in the U.S.), radioac … Read More
There has been progress but I do not consider this an end to the crisis. There are many elements of the crisis that still continues and considering the truthfulness of the Japanese government and TEPCO, I have doubts about the success of the current efforts.
I think the ongoing nuclear crisis certainly contributed. But as time goes by, disastrous economic effects will be ascribed to the nuclear disaster. It’s just a matter of time.
James Pilant
Toyota Motor Corp. said Monday that it’s inevitable that the company will be forced to temporarily shut down all of its North American factories because of parts shortages due to the earthquake that hit Japan.
The temporary shutdowns are likely to take place later this month, affecting 25,000 workers, but no layoffs are expected, spokesman Mike Goss said. Just how long the shutdowns last or whether all 13 of Toyota’s factories will be affected at the same is unknown and depends on when parts production can restart in Japan, he said.
We have gone from contained to desperate and now we have arrived at the surreal. Maybe next they’ll try superglue or shopping carts. Neither will work but like the sawdust, they’ll give the impression that TEPCO, the Japanese utility, cares.
By the way, TEPCO’s shares are publicly traded. If you want to buy low, this is a good time.
James Pilant
Sawdust. It’s not the first thing most people would choose to put between themselves and highly contaminated radioactive water. But a mixture of sawdust — ogakuzu in Japanese — with chemicals and shredded newspaper is precisely what nuclear safety authorities and power plant officials turned to in trying to plug a 8-inch crack in a shaft near reactor 2 at the Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima over the weekend.
Unfortunately, like the concrete they tried before it, the sawdust didn’t work, and as of Monday, the flow of irradiated water into the sea from the shaft continued unabated. “We have not succeeded yet,” Ken Morita, director of the international affairs office at Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), acknowledged to TIME on Monday morning. “We will try again today.”
What will they try next? For the past three weeks, that has been the question hovering in the irradiated air above Fukushima, where each passing day seems to bring a new and unprecedented challenge for the ebattled Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to shut down the reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant safely.
A good take on yesterday’s news about the continuing massive leak at the Japanese nuclear facility. I wish these current events could be followed by more Americans.
It’s a nice blog. It would pay to look at some of the other posts there.
James Pilant
Even bearing this data on radiation exposure in mind, it’s hard to see how today’s news isn’t pretty terrifying. We don’t seem to know exactly what’s going on in these reactors, much less how to stop it, or where the dangerous material is going. The operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and governmen … Read More
TrueNorthist has a daily update on the Japanese ongoing nuclear disaster. I appreciate those elements of the blogosphere that have not grown bored or moved on from the issue. The crisis produces new horrors every few days and these are literally history making events.
James Pilant
This is a continuation of my previous Fukushima info post. Links and comments continue below. As always, feel free to discuss the event in the comments. Approval may take a while, but I check frequently. I run on Pacific Daylight Time which is GMT -8, I think! Updates will be added to the end of the page and separated by a horizontal line. This post will be bumped to the top every morning. Press Release (Apr 01,2011) Plant Status of Fukushi … Read More
Of course, we don’t know the whole story. The United States’ EPA monitoring stations were only partially functioning. Does this make you feel that the U.S. government is taking nuclear safety seriously?
Absolutely, there should be international rules and they should be tough standards as well. A coal fired plant, wind energy, etc. have little change of crossing national borders but a nuclear disaster can travel across nation after nation.
(Another little factoid, advocates of nuclear power leave out. I, for one, believe that endangering lives and land in other nations is irresponsible behavior.)
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for clear international standards on nuclear safety in light of the ongoing crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Speaking in Japan, he proposed that nuclear safety authorities from the G20 countries discuss the issue in May.
Radiation detected in the sea near the stricken plant has again risen steeply.
Meanwhile, the UN has advised Japan to consider expanding the evacuation zone around the reactors.
Mr Sarkozy is the first foreign leader to visit Japan following the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country on 11 March.
From further down in the article.
“The problem is more about establishing safety norms than it is about the choice of nuclear energy, for this there is no alternative right now,” Mr Sarkozy was quoted as saying by Reuters.
“We must address this anomaly that there are no international safety norms for nuclear matters. We want international standards because the world is a village and what happens in Japan can have consequences elsewhere.”
Could nuclear power be used safely? I’m not sure. But it is clear that the humans managing those reactors cannot be trusted. Corporate PR, governmental incompetence and lies have encompassed the industry from the beginning. It hasn’t gotten any better.
Over and over again we are assured that everything is okay. They can’t melt down. The safety mechanisms are foolproof. The containment vessel cannot be breached. Multiple backup systems insure safety. And then the impossible happens. We are of course immediately assured that this was an unusual event, unprecedented and could never happen here.
It is incredible how many pundits and agencies have rushed to out to defend the nuclear industry in the last few hours.
They come right back. They are already back. It doesn’t matter what happens. It doesn’t matter the warnings ignored, the stupid decisions made or even the scope of the disaster, the nuclear power industry keeps right on going.
Is this it?
Do we live in a nation where business gets its way, no matter what the risk?
The timing of the near nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi could not have been more appropriate. In only a few weeks the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear plant disaster ever to affect our planet – at Chernobyl in Ukraine. A major core meltdown released a deadly cloud of radioactive material over Europe and gave the name Chernobyl a terrible resonance.
This weekend it is clear that the name Fukushima came perilously close to achieving a similar notoriety. However, the real embarrassment for the Japanese government is not so much the nature of the accident but the fact it was warned long ago about the risks it faced in building nuclear plants in areas of intense seismic activity. Several years ago, the seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko stated, specifically, that such an accident was highly likely to occur. Nuclear power plants in Japan have a “fundamental vulnerability” to major earthquakes, Katsuhiko said in 2007. The government, the power industry and the academic community had seriously underestimated the potential risks posed by major quakes.
The financialization of our society has become so intense, so pervasive, that profit outweighs all other consideration.
I have serious doubts whether a full scale melt down with thousands of dead and a thousands of square miles of land radioactive for generations will stop the industry from building plants in the United States.
In the pursuit of profit, human intelligence and judgment have largely ceased to exist.
Let me explain this once and then I’ll quit. If there is a nuclear melt down, depending on its location there will a lot of deaths or few deaths, a large area will be permanently contaminated (Chernobyl was 10,800 square miles) and useless for any human activity, and lastly, the radiation will spread causing damage to the genetic code of those it touches. The damage to the genetic code will probably be trans generational working its way through all of humanity as we reproduce.
Compare these risks to the power generated and ask yourself if they balance out.
A brief and intelligent analysis of nuclear power. It’s too expensive.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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