Fukushima Quotes

Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course—arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it’s hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard.

Accident - A statistical inevitability. Some nuclear power plants are built on fault lines, but ever mine, dam, oil rig, and waste dump is founded upon a tacit acceptance of the worst-case scenario. One a long enough timeline, everything that can go wrong will, however small the likelihood is from one day to the next. The responsible parties may wring their hands about the Fukushima meltdown - and the Gult of Mexico oil spill, and the Exxon Valdez, and Hurricane Katrina, and Chernobyl, and Haiti - but accident is no accident.

I have called this mental defect the Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed. We consider the biggest object of any kind that we have seen in our lives or hear about as the largest item that can possibly exist. And we have been doing this for millenia. In Pharaonic Egypt, which happens to be the first complete top-down nation-state managed by bureaucrats, scribes tracked the high-water mark of the Nile and used it as an estimate for a future worst-case scenario. The same can be seen in the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which experienced a catastrophic failure in 2011 when a tsunami struck. It had been built to withstand the worst past historical earthquake, with the builders not imagining much worse--and not thinking that the worst past event had to be a surprise, as it had no precedent. Likewise, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Fragilista Doctor Alan Greenspan, in his apology to Congress offered the classic "It never happened before." Well, nature, unlike Fragilista Greenspan, prepares for what has not happened before, assuming worse harm is possible.

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. - Mark Twain

Every unmeasured system is assumed to be critical. It is the same as finding a pistol sitting on a table. Assume that it is cocked and loaded.

The Fukushima nuclear complex went on to become the worst man-made engineering disaster in all of human history, outside of war.

Les morts de Fukushima ne sont plus des morts : ce sont des déchets nucléaires. (p. 274)

You’d have thought he would have an opinion about something – the weather, the government, the earthquake in Fukushima, the marriage of Prince William. But he never talked about anything except the matter in hand.

As long as nuclear engineering can strive for new innovations and learn from its history of accidents and mistakes, the benefits that nuclear power can yield for our economy, society, and yes, environment, will come.

The other two famous accidents, at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Fukushima in 2011, killed no one. Yet vast numbers of people are killed day in, day out by the pollution from burning combustibles and by accidents in mining and transporting them, none of which make headlines.

Prior to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, nuclear power provided 30 percent of Japan’s electricity. By 2020, not much more than 5 percent of the country’s electricity came from nuclear. LNG, already significant for electric generation, filled much of the void—in 2020 responsible for almost 40 percent of its electricity generation.

Nassim Taleb writes in his book Fooled By Randomness: In Pharaonic Egypt … scribes tracked the high-water mark of the Nile and used it as an estimate for a future worst-case scenario. The same can be seen in the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which experienced a catastrophic failure in 2011 when a tsunami struck. It had been built to withstand the worst past historical earthquake, with the builders not imagining much worse—and not thinking that the worst past event had to be a surprise, as it had no precedent. This is not a failure of analysis. It’s a failure of imagination. Realizing the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community. At a 2017 dinner I attended in New York, Daniel Kahneman was asked how investors should respond when our forecasts are wrong. He said: Whenever we are surprised by something, even if we admit that we made a mistake, we say, ‘Oh I’ll never make that mistake again.’ But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising.

In the summer of 2011, a Japanese farmer planted sunflower seeds in the tainted soil of Fukushima, a few miles away from the earthquake-damaged Daiei nuclear facilities. The radioactive leakage had continued since the devastating tsunami on March 11, 2011. Why would he do that? It’s because he learned that sunflowers have a unique ability to take up radioactive isotopes and store them in their seeds. The farmer would harvest the flowers, which contained pods of radioactivity, making the earth less polluted.

Yet nuclear power has stalled for decades in the United States and is being pushed back in Europe, often replaced by dirty and dangerous coal. In large part the opposition is driven by memories of three accidents: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed one worker years later (the other deaths were caused by the tsunami and from a panicked evacuation); and the Soviet-bungled Chernobyl in 1986, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day.

L'eau, le vent, les feuilles. L'herbe, les champignons, les baies. Se rouler dans l'herbe. Sentir la pluie sur son visage, au petit matin - odeur de vin et d'algue - dans une rue de Tokyo. Voici quelques échantillons de ce qui, petit à petit, nous devient de jour en jour un peu plus interdit. (p. 289)

Hiroshima était un acte de guerre visant à mettre à terre un peuple (qui était déjà à genoux), quelles qu'en soient les conséquences. Les centrales de Fukushima se présentent au contraire comme une activité économique prétendant assurer l'agrément et l'opulence des populations, dans la sécurité maximale et pour le contentement de tous. Hiroshima est un événement ponctuel, inhabituel et extrême, tandis que Fukushima est l'exemple type d'une certaine configuration technique et économique, qui s'est installée sans crier gare dans la quotidienneté des jours et forme aujourd'hui l'horizon présenté comme indépassable de nos modes de production et de consommation. (p. 301)

Je ne sais pas ce qu'aurait pensé Zhang Heng de la catastrophe de Fukushima, de ce tremblement de terre si puissant qu'il a accéléré la vitesse de rotation de la Terre et raccourci la durée du jour. Sans doute aurait-il eu une pensée pour les milliers de disparus emportés par la boue et se serait-il penché avec toute sa puissance d'analyse, sans faire allégeance à qui que ce soit, sur le mystère menaçant des radiations. J'imagine qu'il aurait eu bien des choses à nous dire - ou à nous rappeler - sur la souveraineté de la nature, la puissance et la terreur de la technique, les ravages de notre habitat, l'asburdité de nos modes de production ou notre frénésie de consommation - famine organisée d'un côté, et de l'autre gaspillage insensé. (p. 16)

Fukushima, Japan. The disaster involving the three General Electric–built reactors on the northeastern coast of Honshu followed a now familiar course, this time played out live on television: a loss of coolant led to reactor meltdown, a dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas, and several catastrophic explosions. No one was killed or injured by the immediate release of radiation, but three hundred thousand people were evacuated from the surrounding area, which will remain contaminated for decades to come. During the early stages of the emergency cleanup, it became clear that robots were incapable of operating in the highly radioactive environment inside the containment buildings of the plant. Japanese soldiers were sent in to do the work, in another Pyrrhic victory of bio-robots over technology.

Um, i-it's Monkfish-Dobujiru Curry." DOBUJIRO A hot stew with monkfish as the main ingredient... it's a recipe that has its roots in the fishing towns of Japan's northern prefectures of Ibaraki and Fukushima. Curry and monkfish? What a strange pairing. What on earth is she thinking? AAAH... "Now I see! This is why she used monkfish! The most unique part of Dobujiru is how it is made by first simmering a monkfish liver- the foie gras of the sea- until it dissolves. Miso paste and sake are then added to stretch the liver and form the base of the broth. But she added curry spices to that... ... to make a "Monkfish-Liver-Curry Miso" base!" "Who would've dreamed that the deep, sticky richness of the liver would meld so well with curry spices! Mmm! I can feel the warmth seeping through my whole body!

Le désir de dire, le souci impérieux de porter témoignage, se trouve immédiatement confronté à toute une série de réticences et de résistances, née de la disproportion entre ce que ces gens ont vécu et le récit qu'il est possible - ou impossible - d'en faire. À peine commence-t-on à raconter qu'on suffoque : nous avons affaire à l'une de ces réalités qui font dire qu'elles dépassent l'entendement ou l'imagination. Je songe à Robert Antelme, au tout début de L'espèce humaine, quand il évoque le sentiment de l'insuffisance ou de l'inutilité du langage pour ces hommes qui ont vu "ce que les hommes ne doivent pas voir". (p. 166)

La situation est "presque normale", "almost normal" comme ils disent - car ils ont leurs réseaux et l'assènent dans toutes les langues. Mais non. Qu'on ne présente pas cette situation comme "normale" ou à peu près normale : ce n'est pas parce qu'on s'y habitue qu'elle est normale. Il n'est pas normal de se promener avec une pastille d'iode dans la poche. Il n'est pas normal de se demander si on prend un risque en mangeant un légume vert. Il n'est pas normal que la pluie soudain devienne notre ennemie. Or, c'est exactement ce qu'ils veulent nous faire croire maintenant, avec leurs arguments doucereux comme des suppositoires. (p. 277)

Perhaps the most remarkable elder-care innovation developed in Japan so far is the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL)—a powered exoskeleton suit straight out of science fiction. Developed by Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba, the HAL suit is the result of twenty years of research and development. Sensors in the suit are able to detect and interpret signals from the brain. When the person wearing the battery-powered suit thinks about standing up or walking, powerful motors instantly spring into action, providing mechanical assistance. A version is also available for the upper body and could assist caretakers in lifting the elderly. Wheelchair-bound seniors have been able to stand up and walk with the help of HAL. Sankai’s company, Cyberdyne, has also designed a more robust version of the exoskeleton for use by workers cleaning up the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the wake of the 2011 disaster. The company says the suit will almost completely offset the burden of over 130 pounds of tungsten radiation shielding worn by workers.* HAL is the first elder-care robotic device to be certified by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. The suits lease for just under $2,000 per year and are already in use at over three hundred Japanese hospitals and nursing homes.21

demonstrating that the first of these, the integral fast reactor, was safe even under the circumstances that destroyed Three Mile Island 2 and would prove disastrous at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), an even more advanced concept developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is fueled by thorium. More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in a reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive waste with half-lives of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years. Running at atmospheric pressure, and without ever reaching a criticality, the LFTR doesn’t require a massive containment building to guard against loss-of-coolant accidents or explosions and can be constructed on such a compact scale that every steel mill or small town could have its own microreactor tucked away underground. In 2015 Microsoft founder Bill Gates had begun funding research projects similar to these fourth-generation reactors in a quest to create a carbon-neutral power source for the future. By then, the Chinese government had already set seven hundred scientists on a crash program to build the world’s first industrial thorium reactor as part of a war on pollution. “The problem of coal has become clear,” the engineering director of the project said. “Nuclear power provides the only solution.

La vie, désormais : la gestion des déchets. Que faire de la terre et des boues contaminées, des feuilles ? Pour les déchets, on brûle comme on peut, on enterre à la sauvette. Quand on brûle, les incinérateurs rejettent dans l'air des poussières radioactives qui se reposent ailleurs, toujours un peu plus loin. On décontamine un lieu en en contaminant un autre : c'est un cercle vicieux. Ou alors, on nettoie à mains nues ou avec des gants et des masques, dans de grandes opérations citoyennes aussi spectaculaires qu'absurdes. Ce faisant, on ne fait qu'appliquer un des principes de base du nucléaire, où le problème des déchets n'est jamais résolu, il est remis à plus tard, infiniment et indéfiniment remis à plus tard. (p. 272)

Face à ces chiffres, comme on ne sait plus quoi faire, on fait n'importe quoi. Le 14 mars, le ministère de la Santé et du Travail augmente la dose maximale autorisée pour les travailleurs de la centrale de cent millisieverts pour cinq ans... à deux cent cinquante mille millisieverts par an ! C'est vrai, quoi, à quoi bon des normes si ce n'est pour les transgresser ? En avril, il fera encore mieux : il élèvera la dose maximale pour les enfants à vingt millisieverts par an... ce qui est tout simplement le taux maximum en France (et pour la Commission internationale de protection radiologique) auquel on peut exposer les travailleurs du nucléaire ! Le gouvernement fera ensuite machine arrière sous la pression des parents et de plusieurs associations, mais c'est dire le degré de cynisme que l'on peut atteindre pour défendre à tout prix la filière : considérer des gamins sans défense au même niveau que les spécialistes du nucléaire les plus exposés, il fallait le faire. ils l'ont fait. (p. 234)

Soused se vrátil k prázdné stodole a napsal na zeď: "Kdyby jen nebyly jaderné elektrárny! Chci umřít." Pak se oběsil na stropním trámu. Otrávili nás! Okradli nás! Podvedli nás! Můj dům měl sto šedesát mikrosievertů! Moje záclony měly sedmdesát mikrosievertů! Moje postel měla padesát mikrosievertů! Moje zahrada měla sto osmdesát mikrosievertů!

male workers were thought incapable of sitting still for hours at a time to do anything useful.

An arsenic compound is still used to treat promyelocytic leukemia, and the isotope arsenic-74 is used as a radioactive tracer to find tumors.

Ivan Pulyui, a college professor at the University of Vienna from the Ukraine, is sometimes credited with having sold the first x-ray tubes, before the x-ray was discovered. The claim is semi-true. His Pulyui Lamp was available perhaps as early as 1882, but it was sold as a light bulb, and Pulyui did not realize that it was streaming x-rays along with a blue glow until he read Röntgen’s paper in 1895. Pulyui immediately saw the medical diagnostic use of x-rays, and his lamps became quite useful.

THE RADIUM WATER WORKED FINE UNTILE HIS JAW CAME OFF.

However, in very low doses strychnine can act as a nerve stimulant, and I can see how Bailey, and most likely others, saw it as a clever treatment for erectile disorder. Known for both its poisonous and medicinal uses in ancient China and India,

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." According to Dante, these lines are written over the gates of Hell. Zen masters, by contrast, have high hopes for going to Hell. For them, out of bottomless compassion, we should want to go to Hell. When asked by a college student in America if he thought people go to Heaven after they die, the modern Rinzai Zen master Fukushima Keidō replied: "Only the ego wants to go to Heaven!

If you find yourself cornered by a force of Brits who rib you mercilessly about the SL-1 explosion, it is correct to remind them of the British Blue Peacock nuclear weapon, in which the batteries were kept warm by two chickens living in the electronics module aft of the warhead.

Carlton Church: Japan Finally Acknowledges Negative Nuclear Effects One of the leading sources of news and information, Thomson Reuters, has just reported about Japan’s acknowledgement of casualty caused by the Fukushima nuclear power plant wreckage. However, it may be too late for the victim as the young man, an unnamed worker in his 30s working as a construction contractor in Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima Daiichi plant and other nuclear facilities, is already suffering from cancer since 2011. The ministry’s recognition of radiation as a possible cause may set back efforts to recover from the disaster, as the government and the nuclear industry have been at pains to say that the health effects from radiation have been minimal. It may also add to compensation payments that had reached more than 7 trillion yen ($59 billion) by July this year. It can also cause a lot of setbacks from a lot of nuclear projects which were supposed to be due in the succeeding years. A streak of legal issues and complaints are also to be faced by Tokyo Electric, mostly on compensations for those affected. According to further reviews, it is estimated removing the melted fuel from the wrecked reactors and cleaning up the site will cost tens of billions of dollars and take decades to complete. Despite the recognition, a lot more people are still anxious. The recognition would mean acknowledgment of possible radiation effects still lingering in Japan’s boundaries. When it was once denied, the public are consoled of the improbability of being exposed to radiation but now that the government has expressed its possibility, many individuals fear of their and their families’ lives. Hundreds of deaths have been attributed to the chaos of evacuations during the crisis and because of the hardship and mental trauma refugees have experienced since then, but the government had said that radiation was not a cause. Yet now, it is different. The trauma and fear are emphasized more. Anti-nuclear organizations, on the other hand, are happy that their warnings are now being regarded. Carlton Church International, one of the non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear proliferation, spokesperson, Abigail Shcumman stated, “I don’t think ‘I told you so’ would be appropriate but that is what I really wanted to say”. She added, “We are pleased that at last, we are being heard. However, we continue to get worried for the people and the children. They are exposed and need guidance on what to do”. - See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot.com

The purpose is to make you aware of the myriad ways that mankind can screw up a fine idea while trying to implement it. Don’t be alarmed. This is the raw, sometimes disturbing side of engineering, about which much of humanity has been kept unaware.

The AEC was tasked with promoting world peace and improving the public welfare while developing weapons that could return civilization to low-population Stone Age conditions in a few seconds.

in

Carlton Church: Australia in Doubt on Building Nuclear Plant With the continuous trend of nuclear proliferation, the nuclear-free Australia is in critical dilemma on whether to start the industry in the country or not. On one end of the coin, the negative effects of nuclear generation will surely cause skepticisms and complaints. On the other side, nuclear fuel industry is worth exploring. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has been reserved when it comes to nuclear talks but he did admit that “Australia should ‘look closely’ at expanding its role in the global nuclear energy industry, including leasing fuel rods to other countries and then storing the waste afterwards”. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill set up a royal commission in March to undertake an independent investigation into the state’s participation in the nuclear fuel cycle. Carlton Church International, non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear use, says there is no need for Australia to venture into nuclear turmoil as they already have an extensive, low cost coal and natural gas reserves. Other critics has also seconded this motion as it is known that even Turnbull has pointed out that the country has plentiful access to coal, gas, wind and solar sources. During an interview, he also stated, “I’m not talking about the politics. We’ve got so much other affordable sources of energy, not just fossil fuel like coal and gas but also wind, solar. The ability to store energy is getting better all the time, and that’s very important for intermittent sources of energy, particularly wind and solar. But playing that part in the nuclear fuel cycle I think is something that is worth looking at closely”. A survey was also conducted among random people and a lot of them have been reluctant about the nuclear issue. Some fear that the Fukushima Daichii Incident would happen, knowing the extent of the damage it has caused even to those living in Tokyo, Japan. Another review also stated, “We only have to look at the Fukushima disaster in Japan to be reminded of the health, social and economic impacts of a nuclear accident, and to see that this is not a safe option for Australians.” According to further studies by analysts, 25 nuclear reactors can be built around Australia producing a third of the country’s electricity by 2050. But it also found nuclear power would be much more expensive to produce than coal-fired power if a price was not put on carbon dioxide emissions. Greenpeace dismissed nuclear power as “an expensive distraction from the real solutions to climate change, like solar and wind power”. - See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot

Joseph Stiglitz, with two colleagues, the Orszag brothers (Peter and Jonathan), looked at the very same Fannie Mae. They assessed, in a report, that “on the basis of historical experience, the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero.”* Supposedly, they ran simulations—but didn’t see the obvious. They also said that the probability of a default was found to be “so small that it is difficult to detect.” It is statements like these and, to me, only statements like these (intellectual hubris and the illusion of understanding of rare events) that caused the buildup of these exposures to rare events in the economy. This is the Black Swan problem that I was fighting. This is Fukushima.

We had therefore invented the perfect weapon for blowing up an entire sky full of multi-engine aircraft in one swat, so we could have defeated ourselves two wars back.

In all, it killed fewer people than the coal industry, it caused less unhealthy pollution than the asbestos industry, and it cannot be blamed for global warming.280

Flying in a modern jet airplane doses the human with levels of radiation comparable to those found in nuclear disaster zones.

Then along came that tsunami that hit the Fukushima Daiichi plant and, well, no one is building nuclear power plants in Japan now, are they?

from a distance of 50 miles, were brought down in 10 seconds by demolition explosives, and that was that. The fuel-reprocessing industry in the UK has reported only one criticality accident in which fissile material managed to come together accidentally in a supercritical configuration. Just about every other country that has tried to separate plutonium from uranium in spent reactor fuel has experienced at least one such excursion, and this was Britain’s. This incident at the Windscale Works on August 24, 1970, is described by the criticality review committee at

What people remember about Fukushima is that nuclear opponents predicted that hundreds or thousands would die or become ill from the radiation.

People who try to blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance or government scandal are often punished, without recourse to the courts. Kei Sugaoka, an American of Japanese descent, was quickly dismissed from his job as a safety inspector for General Electric after he disclosed a cover-up of safety violations at a nuclear reactor in Fukushima. Sugaoka said he watched his supervisors carefully erase videotapes showing cracks in a critical component of the reactor, yet when he “blew the whistle” and told regulators, his name was improperly disclosed to the utility and his employer.

In major commercial reactor accidents, there always seems to be a single operator action that starts the downward spiral into an irrecoverable disaster.

Some never got started. With much fanfare Chávez announced Venezuela would build thermonuclear plants with Russian help. “The world needs to know this, and nothing is going to stop us. We’re free, we’re sovereign, we’re independent,” he said in 2010. For strictly peaceful energy generation, he added, and underlined the point by inviting survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Venezuela. Foreign media took it seriously, producing froth in Washington. Chávez with nukes! In reality, Venezuela’s scientific establishment was hollowed, the once prestigious Institute for Scientific Research a husk. Physicists were emigrating, and the country’s only reactor, a small research facility, had closed from neglect. After a tsunami wrecked Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in March 2011, Chávez closed the curtain on his atomic theater, solemnly halting development for safety reasons and urging other countries to follow his lead in protecting humanity. “It is something extremely risky and dangerous for the whole world.

In 56 years of commercial nuclear power generation in the United States, there has never been a steam explosion, and not one life has been lost.4

but everything else in the history of nuclear accidents has happened for what seem to be the most insignificant, unpredictable reasons,

Chuck Hansen was wrong about one thing. He counted thirty-two “Broken Arrow” accidents.192 There are now sixty-five documented incidents in which nuclear weapons owned by the United States were lost, destroyed, or damaged between 1945 and 1989.

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers, introduced in February 1955, have been in service for an impressive 58 years, and they will probably be phased out around 2045. The grandchildren of people who flew the original batch of B-52s could be flying B-52s today. The last B-52H was built in 1962, and this last group of 85 planes still in service has been modified and improved several times. These bombers can go 650 miles per hour and climb to 50,000 feet with a range of 10,145 miles, and they have broken many flight records. They have flown around the world non-stop in 45 hours 19 minutes with in-flight refueling, and can fly from Japan to Spain with one load of fuel. A B-52 can land sideways in a heavy cross-wind, using its in-board landing gear with coupled steering.

Consider the safety of nuclear reactors. General Electric marketed the Mark 1 boiling-water reactors that were used in Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant as cheaper to build than other reactors because they used a smaller and less expensive containment structure. The same design is used in twenty-three American nuclear reactors at sixteen plants. In the mid-1980s, Harold Denton, then an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), said Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident. But so far, the NRC has done nothing.

For a human, the lethal dose is about a tenth of a gram.

it is correct to remind them of the British Blue Peacock nuclear weapon, in which the batteries were kept warm by two chickens living in the electronics module aft of the warhead.

Seeing the value of publication shown by Röntgen’s disclosure, he wrote three articles for the Electrical Review in 1896 describing what it felt like to stick your head in an x-ray beam. The effects were odd. “For instance,” he first wrote, “I find there is a tendency to sleep and I find that time seems to pass quickly.” He speculated that he had discovered an electrical sleep aid, much safer than narcotics. In his next article for 1896, after having spent a lot of time being x-rayed, he observed “painful irritation of the skin, inflammation, and the appearance of blisters … , and in some spots there were open wounds.” In his final article of 1896, published on December 1, he advised staying away from x-rays, “… so it may not happen to somebody else. There are real dangers of Röntgen radiation.

In general, nuclear workers are allowed to absorb 5 rem per year, and civilians are allowed 0.5 rem per year.

Isotopes of radium, the first nuclear radiation sources to be commercially exploited, are probably the worst examples out of thousands of radioactive isotopes.

Years and years of nuclear waste and radiation leaking from Fukushima, Japan. And still no Godzilla. It's like... it's like they're not even trying.

He realized the human genome, which is essentially the entirety of our heredity information, which programs cell growth, was changing, becoming corrupted.” “By what?” “By what?” Jenkins laughed. “By everything. By what we’d already done to the earth, and by all that we would do in the coming centuries. Mammal extinction. Deforestation. Loss of polar sea ice. Ozone. Increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Acid rain. Ocean dead zones. Overfishing. Offshore oil drilling. Wars. The creation of a billion gasoline-burning automobiles. The nuclear disasters—Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. The two-thousand-plus intentional nuclear bomb detonations in the name of weapons testing. Toxic waste dumping. Exxon Valdez. BP’s Gulf oil spill. All the poisons we put into our food and water every day. “Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve treated our world like it was a hotel room and we were rock stars. But we aren’t rock stars. In the scheme of evolutionary forces, we are a weak, fragile species. Our genome is corruptible, and we so abused this planet that we ultimately corrupted that precious DNA blueprint that makes us human.

I wake up every day thinking: Is this the day the proxy wars have resulted in a nuclear catastrophe?

Such censorship has not been limited to Japan. Timothy A. Mousseau, a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, attempted to research Fukushima radiation but said he was hampered by the Japanese government and three of his associates in the testing dropped out over concerns their future job prospects might be jeopardized.

The horizon of our time is marked by the Fukushima event. Compared to the noisy catastrophes of the earthquake and the tsunami, Tokyo's silent apocalypse is more frightening and suggests a new framework of social expectation for daily life on the planet. The megalopolis is directly exposed to the Fukushima fallout, but life is proceeding almost normally. Only a few people have abandoned the city. Most citizens have stayed there, buying mineral water as they have always done, breathing with facemasks on their mouths as they have always done. A few cases of air and water contamination are denounced. Concerns about food safety have prompted US officials to halt the importation of certain foods from Japan. But the Fukushima effect does not imply a disruption of social life: poison has become a normal feature of daily life, the second nature we have to inhabit.

And the moment a population loses hope, at that instant they become fuel for eternal fascism,’” quoted Clarkson. “You know... the moment Fukushima died, a light went out in the world,” Douglas said. “He deserved to see his words put to good use. Not as lazy justifications for murder.” Clarkson laughed laconically. “You don’t need justifications for that. Just an excuse.

Rock Kox, fishes in Fukushima.

High-profile accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in the former U.S.S.R., and Fukushima in Japan put a spotlight on all these risks. There are real problems that led to those disasters, but instead of getting to work on solving those problems, we just stopped trying to advance the field.

For Davies, what happens in Cancer Alley illustrates the concept of slow violence, a term coined by Rob Nixon, of the High Meadows Environmental Institute, for harms that remain below the level of public perception because they’re too gradual and lack a spectacle. But Davies makes one important clarification: “Instead of accepting Nixon’s oft-cited definition of slow violence as ‘out of sight,’ we have to instead ask the question: ‘out of sight to whom?’ ” A spectacle means something different for those who view it on the news for a week than it does for the people who live in it. “Having spent almost a decade investigating the lives of communities in various toxic geographies—including Chernobyl, Fukushima, and now ‘Cancer Alley’…the last thing I would describe these spaces as, is lacking in spectacle,” Davies writes. “Communities who are exposed to the slow violence of toxic pollution are replete with testimonies, experiences, and bereavements that bear witness to the brutality of gradual environmental destruction.

Since 2011 cherry trees, a symbol of life and rebirth, have been planted in great numbers near Fukushima, in memory of those who died and to help resurrect neighbourhoods washed away during the tsunami.

Enriched uranium dissolved in water or an organic solvent will become an active nuclear reactor, increasing in power, if a specific “critical mass” is accumulated. The hydrogen in the water or the solvent acts as a moderator, slowing the fission neutrons to an advantageous speed, and even a fairly low U-235 enrichment level, like 3%, will overcome neutron losses by non-productive absorption in the moderator. This has been realized since the earliest days of reactor engineering, and those who work with uranium solutions are quite aware of the possibility.

Be that as it may, the problem of human squeamishness at having an A-bomb explode overhead could be addressed. Simply explaining to soldiers that a nuclear detonation at 10,000 feet was not the same as having it go off at 1,000 feet was true but insufficient. To the soldiers it was a matter of degree. At the high altitude there would be no ground disturbance. No radioactive dust kicked up into a mushroom cloud, no neutron activation of the ground, and negligible fallout. It was all a function of range. The fission neutrons could not travel that far in air before they decayed into hydrogen gas, and the gamma ray pulse would be short-lived and dissipated in a spherical wave-front with a diameter of four miles when it hit the ground.

After the war was over, the British were very disappointed to learn that all the camaraderie and warm feelings of brotherhood were blown away by the United States Congress Atomic Energy Act of August 1946, forbidding any sharing of atomic secrets with anyone, even close allies.

In other words, not only have there been no fatalities resulting from Fukushima, but there have been no radiation-related injuries or medically-identifiable health effects either.

In fact the only documented deaths attributable to Fukushima actually happened through panic-stricken attempts to avoid radiation.

Just about any country having some physicists and engineers could figure out how to build an A-bomb, but producing the materials for this bomb was where the secrets lay.

The concept was elegant, very lightweight, appealing to engineers, mechanically complex, expensive, and notoriously subject to random failure.

Radium dial watches were still being made until 1963, when finally they were banned in the State of New York.

The heat and initial nuclear radiation portions of the event were over in about 60 seconds, but the bomb effects continued to develop for 6.3 minutes. The rapidly expanding fireball created a large vacuum in midair, and as the heat dissipated, air from the surrounding territory started to be sucked in. The blast thus blew air both ways: first outward, a pause, then inward, back toward ground zero. This effect is called the “afterwind.” Meanwhile, the residual heated air rose in a strong updraft, like a hot-air balloon. Solid material on the ground, now pounded to dust, was drawn up into the rising column, making a dirt-cloud. In thirty seconds, the cloud reached a height of three miles. When the ever-rising cloud reached an altitude where its density matched that of the surrounding air, at the base of the stratosphere, the cloud started to spread out horizontally. The sight of this feature became an icon, a dreaded emblem of the atomic age—the mushroom cloud.

By 1870 there were competing formulae, and luminous paints were selling briskly. Most used strontium carbonate or strontium thiosulphate. It had been found, probably accidentally, that strontium compounds would seem to store sunlight and would then give it back after the sun went down. We now know this phenomenon as a “forbidden energy-state transition” in a singlet ground-state electron orbital. The strontium, like everything else, absorbs and then returns a light photon that hits it, but in this case the return is delayed. The strontium atom, excited to a higher energy state by the absorption of light, “decays,” as if it were radioactive, reflecting the light back with a half-life of about 25 minutes. After four hours of glowing, the strontium compound needs to be re-charged with light.

Harry Daghlian was the first person to die accidentally of acute radiation poisoning.

Radium has nearly absolute body burden, or a tendency to stay in the metabolism forever, and there are few ways it can escape the biological systems. Its radiations cover a wide spectrum, from alpha to gamma, with unusually energetic rays, and it targets many essential organs. It destroys everything around it, so quickly that cancer doesn’t even have time to develop.

A case in point is Castle Bravo, the code name for the first test of a practical H-bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands archipelago. The concept of a nuclear fusion weapon had been resoundingly confirmed on November 1, 1952, with the explosion of the Ivy Mike thermonuclear device on what used to be Elugelab Island in the adjacent Enewetak Atoll. That bomb weighed 82 tons, sat in a two-story building, and required an attached cryogenic refrigeration plant and a large Dewar flask filled with a mixture of liquefied deuterium and tritium gases. It erased Elugelab Island with an 11-megaton burst, making an impressive fireball over 3 miles wide, and the test returned a great deal of scientific data concerning pulsed fusion reactions among heavy hydrogen isotopes, but there was no way the thing could be flown over enemy territory and dropped.59

The steadfast rule of working in a high radiation field still applied: use a large force of men with each individual given a small slice of time under hazard.

After Hiroshima was annihilated on August 6, 1945, the Japanese knew better what was going on, and a commando raid on the F-31 “Fat Man” implosion weapon assembly hut on Tinian was organized immediately.

Incredible as it seems, the difference between the subcritical neutron population in a uranium mass, making no fission, and supercritical, making wild, increasing fission, is a very small number of available neutrons out of trillions: all it takes is just one neutron.

By December, the Americans had caught up with the Germans and passed them with a self-sustaining chain reaction. Security was so tight, the Germans did not even know they had been beaten. At the end of the war, their only accomplishment had been the world’s first nuclear reactor accident, caused by water leaking past an inadequate gasket.

The World War II bombs, the only nuclear devices ever used as weapons so far, were airbursts, detonated at about 1,900 feet above the ground.31 The air surrounding the bomb instantly heated to incandescence. This feature is called “the fireball.” This rapidly expanding sphere translated a percentage of the thermal energy into blast energy, or a destructive wave of compressed air moving outward at high speed, capable of knocking over concrete buildings.

The burns that injured many survivors of the A-bombs were not caused by gamma or beta rays, but by light.

The first thing hit by this airwave was the ground directly underneath the bomb, or “ground zero.” This was a hard thump, and it resulted in an earthquake-like shock energy traveling outward through the ground. The total energy from the detonation was thus distributed as 50 percent blast and shock, 35 percent thermal radiation, 10 percent residual nuclear radiation, and 5 percent initial nuclear radiation. The scientists had not been wrong in predicting small damage due to nuclear radiation, but they had been way off in considering the damage done directly and indirectly by the intense thermal energy.

Average evacuees from Fukushima got a radiation dose that roughly matches the dose an average Finnish person gets just by living in Finland for a year.

We should reflect on our responsibility as individuals in a democratic society,’ he [Kurokawa] said of the collective failure at Fukushima. That meant strengthening hat he called ‘civil society’. Viewed in this light, Kurokawa’s remarks were not a case of letting people off the hook. They were a call to individual and collective action.

almost never mentioned by the media, no one was killed by the Fukushima accident and no one has subsequently died as a result of it, unless we add in the suicides of those driven from their homes by an overzealous application of radiation safety rules.

An x-ray machine was not necessary to take a cross-sectional picture of his teeth. They would light up a photographic plate with their own radiation output.

Alpha radiation consists of a large clump of nuclear particles, or nucleons, and it represents a sudden, radical crumbling of an atomic nucleus, just happening out of the blue. The resulting alpha particle is a helium-4 nucleus, complete, and when hurled at anything solid it can cause damage on a sub-atomic level. The beta “ray” or “particle” (either term is correct) is actually an electron or its evil twin, the positron, banished from a nucleus and hurtling outward at high speed. It is the result of the sudden, unpredictable change of a neutron into a proton or a proton into a neutron down inside an atomic nucleus. This decay event also completely changes the atom’s identity, its chemical properties, and its place in the hallowed Periodic Table of the Elements. Meanwhile, the traveling beta particle, while much lighter than the alpha particle, is still an “ionizing” radiation. If it is a particularly energetic beta example (they come in all strengths), it can hit an atom that’s looking the other way with enough force to blow its upper electrons out of orbit, break up molecular bonds, and bounce things around, causing the matter in its way to heat up. On

The gamma ray, yet another form of nuclear radiation, is an electromagnetic wave similar to ultraviolet light or x-rays, only it is far more energetic. A gamma ray of sufficient energy can penetrate your car door, go clean through your body, and out the other side, leaving an ionized trail of molecular corruption in its path. It is the product of a rearrangement or settling of the structure of an atomic nucleus, and it naturally occurs often when a nucleus is traumatized by having just emitted an alpha or a beta particle. Gamma rays can be deadly to living cells, but, unlike the clumsy alpha particle, they can enter and leave without losing all their energy in your flesh. It’s the difference between being hit with a full-metal-jacketed .223 or a 12-gauge dumdum. Both hurt.

Painting the numbers on a watch face was not easy. The 2, 3, 6, and 8 were particularly difficult. You had to have paint mixed to the right viscosity, a steady hand capable of precise movement, and good eyesight. One woman did about 250 dials per day, sitting at a specially built desk with a lamp over the work surface, wearing a blue smock with a Peter Pan collar. The brush was very fine and stiff, having only three or four hairs, but it would quickly foul up and have to be re-formed. All sorts of methods were tried for putting a point on the brush. Just rubbing it on a sponge didn’t really work. You needed the fine feedback from twirling the thing on your lips. Some factory supervisors insisted on it, showing new hires how it is done, and some factories officially discouraged it while looking the other way. Everybody did it, sticking the brush in the mouth twice during the completion of one watch dial. The radium-infused paint was thinned with glycerin and sugar or with amyl-acetate (pear oil), so it didn’t even taste bad.

Young women were hired to do the meticulous manual work of applying the paint, as male workers were thought incapable of sitting still for hours at a time to do anything useful. The workers were paid generously, at $20 to $25 per week, when office work was paying $15 a week at most. By 1925, there were about 120 radium-dial factories in the United States alone, employing more than 2,000 women.

The practice of tipping a paint brush started contaminating everybody and everything in a watch dial factory. Painters noticed that after sneezing into a handkerchief, it would glow. You could see the brush twirlers walking home after dark. Their hair showed a ghostly green excitation, and they could spell out words in the air with their luminous fingers. Some, thinking outside the box, started painting their teeth, fingernails, eyelashes, and other body parts with the luminous paint, then stealing away to the bathroom, turning out the lights, and admiring the effect in the mirror. There was no problem finding gross radium contamination in a factory. There was no need for a radiation detection instrument. All you had to do was close the blinds. Everything glowed; even the ceiling. Most workers were each swallowing about 1.75 grams of radioactive paint per day. By 1922, things started going bad in the radium dial industry. In the next two years, nine young radium painters in the West Orange factory died, and 12 were suffering from devastating illnesses. US Radium, the biggest watch-dial maker in town, strongly denied that anything in their plant could be causing this. No autopsies were performed, and the death certificates recorded anemia, syphilis, stomach ulcers, and necrosis of the jaw as causes. The dead and ailing, however, had dentists in common, and these health professionals had noticed unusual breakdowns of the jaws and teeth in all of these women. It was beginning to look like another case of an occupational hazard, following closely behind tetraethyl lead exposure at General Motors and “phossy jaw” from white phosphorus fumes in the match industry. Could it be the radium?

In Pharaonic Egypt … scribes tracked the high-water mark of the Nile and used it as an estimate for a future worst-case scenario. The same can be seen in the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which experienced a catastrophic failure in 2011 when a tsunami struck. It had been built to withstand the worst past historical earthquake, with the builders not imagining much worse—and not thinking that the worst past event had to be a surprise, as it had no precedent.

But there is another possibility, yet more frightening. Of the world’s megacities, Mumbai is one of the few that has a nuclear facility within its urban limits: the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Trombay. To the north, at Tarapur, 94 kilometres from the city’s periphery, lies another nuclear facility. Both these plants sit right upon the shoreline, as do many other nuclear installations around the world: these locations were chosen in order to give them easy access to water. With climate change many nuclear plants around the world are now threatened by rising seas. An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists notes: ‘During massive storms . . . there is a greatly increased chance of the loss of power at a nuclear power plant, which significantly contributes to safety risks.’ Essential cooling systems could fail; safety systems could be damaged; contaminants could seep into the plant and radioactive water could leak out, as happened at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.

A jet engine is basically a large metal tube, mounted with one open end pointing toward the front of the aircraft and the other end at the back. With the plane moving forward, air blows into the front of the tube. An axial compressor spinning at high speed at the front acts as a one-way door, encouraging air to come into the tube while preventing anything from escaping out. In the center of the tube is a continuous explosion of jet fuel mixed with the compressed incoming air. The mixture, burned and heated to the point of violence in the explosion, instead of blowing the airplane to pieces finds a clear path out through the back of the tube. The escaping explosion products create a reactive force, just as would be made by a rocket engine, pushing the engine and the vehicle to which it is attached forward. On its way out, the expanding gases spin a turbine, like a windmill, and it is connected forward to the spinning compressor wheel.