Tag: Japan

While thousands protest the restarting of any nuclear power plants in Japan following last year’s earthquake, some scientists have questions about one particular plant.

9:35 am

While thousands protest the restarting of any nuclear power plants in Japan following last year’s earthquake, some scientists have questions about one particular plant.

The article’s headline falsely suggests that the scientists oppose all nuclear power plants, which is not the case. If anything, the overall manner in which the Fukushima power plant withstood the biggest earthquake in history demonstrated that most of Japan’s nuclear power plants are probably safe from future earthquakes. For scientists to have concerns about one particular plant seems reasonable, however, and is not the same thing as opposing all nuclear power.

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The radiation released from the Fukushima nuclear power meltdown in Japan last year will cause almost no cases of cancer according to two separate reports.

11:42 am

The radiation released from the Fukushima nuclear power meltdown in Japan last year will cause almost no cases of cancer according to two separate reports.

This story is almost a week old. I missed it initially because Nature buried the results, headlining the story in the most boring way possible: “Fukushima’s doses tallied”.

These results however illustrate again the success of the engineering at the nuclear power plant. Certainly they did things wrong, and certainly there were engineering failures there. Nonetheless, the safety features allowed them to contain the power plant even after it experienced the most powerful earthquake in recorded history followed by the most powerful tsunami in a thousand years.

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It appears that the floating debris from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year is reaching North America sooner than expected.

10:01 am

It appears that the floating debris from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan last year is reaching North America sooner than expected.

I got a laugh from the last two sentences of this story. The early arrival of “more than 200 bottles, cans, buoys and floats” from Japan was immediately turned into a crisis that required government intervention.

With debris making landfall sooner than predicted, U.S. lawmakers have started to question whether the government is truly prepared. “Many people said we wouldn’t see any of this impact until 2013 or 2014, and now ships and motorcycles and this various debris is showing up and people want answers,” U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said.

And if the debris was taking longer to get here? Cantwell would then argue we need to spend more money to track it more precisely. By her standards, no matter what happens, government has got to get bigger.

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At a conference in Washington DC yesterday both Russia and Japan announced the Moon as their next primary space exploration goal.

8:35 am

The new colonial movement: At a conference in Washington DC yesterday both Russia and Japan announced the Moon as their next primary space exploration goal.

If the U.S. gets a competitive private aerospace industry going — which seems increasingly likely — I’m willing to bet those companies will get to the Moon before either of these governments.

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New simulations suggest that the magnitude of tsunamis predicted to hit Japan have previously been underestimated.

9:20 am

New simulations suggest that the magnitude of tsunamis predicted to hit Japan have been significantly underestimated.

The difficulty here is that these predicted giant tsunamis are still expected to be very rare events. It is thus unclear what is more practical, to build things at great cost so that they can survive these rare events, or to live with the risk and rebuild each time after disaster strikes.

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A Thank You From Japan

7:01 am

One year ago today Japan was hit with one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history, followed almost immediately by one of the most powerful tsunamis in recorded history. Since then, that nation and its people have done an incredible job recovering from that disaster, proving once again that there really is no limit to what humans can do.

The video below is their thank you to the rest of the world for the help and support brought to Japan by people everywhere. As they say, “Arigato.”

I say, bless you all for never giving up.

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Scientists last week published a paper claiming that the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown caused 14,000 U.S. deaths.

9:53 pm

Junk science: Scientists last week published a paper claiming that the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown caused 14,000 U.S. deaths. You can download the paper here [pdf].

I expect the mainstream television press to push this story in the coming days. The story however is crap. I’ve read the paper, and all it shows is a small statistical increase in deaths in the fourteen weeks after the earthquake/meltdown, compared to the previous year. The scientists provided no context with other years, nor did they factor in changes in total population or a host of innumerable other variables that would influence these numbers. Worse, they presented no direct evidence linking the fallout from the meltdown with the deaths.

In other words, this is agenda-driven science, designed mainly to attack nuclear energy. We should not give it much credence.

One more point: the lead author of the paper is the executive director of Radiation and Public Health Project, an organization whose only purpose appears to be to prove that low level radiation has a negative effect on human health. From a science perspective, this is not a good way to do science. The only way the scientists in this organization can justify their fund-raising and research is to find evidence to prove their theory.

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