Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask, "It's happened there; can it happen here?"
Along much of California's coastline runs the "ring of fire," which stretches round the Pacific plate, from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, round to Alaska, down America's West Coast to Chile. 90 percent of the world's earthquakes happen round the ring.
The late great environmentalist David Brower used to tell audiences, " Nuclear plants are incredibly complex technological devices for locating earthquake faults."
Halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles is the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, planned in 1968 when no one knew about the Hosgri fault, part of the ring of fire, a few miles offshore. Further inquiry established that there'd been a 7.1 earthquake 40 years earlier, offshore from the plant, completed in 1973. The power company—Pacific Gas and Electric—said it would beef up defenses. In their haste, the site managers reversed the blueprints for the new earthquake proofing of the two reactors, and so the retrofit wasn't a total success.
They recently discovered yet another fault and are now worried about "ground liquefaction" in the event of a big quake. In 2008, there was a terrorist attack by jellyfish, which blocked the cold water intake, and the plant was shut down for a couple of days.
Head south another 150 miles, and we get to the San Onofre plant, right on the shoreline. In fact, I've swum in its shadow, in waters highly esteemed by anglers because fish gather there, enjoying the elevated water temp; some also claim the fish there get bigger, faster. There are storage ponds for spent fuel in a decommissioned unit in a spherical containment of concrete and steel with the smallest wall being 6 feet thick, just about the same as the ruptured containment at one of the Fukushima units.
The power company says San Onofre is built to withstand a 7.0 quake. There is a 25-foot sea wall, which is just over half the height of the walls that crumbled like sand last week along Japan's northeast coast. San Onofre is seawater cooled. Environmentalists don't care for that, so they plan to build two cooling towers the other side of Interstate 5, California's main north-south road, thus immune to jellyfish attack, but open to other methods of assault.
The Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast figures the probability of an earthquake 6.7 or higher is 67 percent for Los Angeles, 63 percent for San Francisco. Up where I live, in the Cascadia subduction zone, we have a 10 percent possibility of an 8- or 9-force quake.
There are robust souls who look on the bright side. Some of them are in the pay of the nuclear industry—President Obama for example, who took plenty of money from the nuclear industry for his presidential campaign, and in his State of the Union address last January reaffirmed his commitment to "clean, safe" nuclear power, about as insane a statement as pledging commitment to a nice clean form of syphilis. This week, Obama's press spokesman confirmed that nuclear energy "remains a part of the President's overall energy plan."
The United States produces more nuclear energy than any other nations. It has 104 nuclear plants, many of them old, many prone to endless shutdowns, all of them dangerous.
The benchmark catastrophe amid peacetime nuclear disasters remains the explosion in the fourth reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station on April 26, 1986, in the Ukraine. In 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences published "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," a 327-page volume by three scientists—Alexey Yablokov and Vassily and Alexey Nesterenko—the definitive study to date. In the summary of his chapter "Mortality After the Chernobyl Catastrophe," Yablokov says flatly, "The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout."
Set Fukushima next to Chernobyl and its ongoing lethal aftermath. Think of Southern California or North Carolina. Nuclear expert Robert Alvarez, who advised President Clinton on nuclear matters, writes this week that a single spent fuel rod pool—as in Fukushima (or Diablo Canyon or San Onofre)—holds more cesium-137 than was deposited by all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in the Northern Hemisphere combined, and an explosion in that pool could blast "perhaps three to nine times as much of these materials into the air as was released by the Chernobyl reactor disaster."
In the past few years, there's been an explicit political trade-off here in the U.S. and in Europe, too, between the nuclear industry and many green organizations and prominent environmentalists, fixated solely on the increasingly disheveled hypothesis of humanly caused global warming. When the House of Representatives (though not the U.S. Senate) voted for a climate bill in 2009, the inclusion of a clean-energy bank to provide financial backing for new energy production, including nuclear, was part of the bargain.
This shameful pact has got to end. Nuclear power is over, or should be. Look at the false predictions, the blunders, the elemental truth that Nature bats last and that human folly and greed are ineluctable ingredients of man's condition. There's no middle ground.
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Natural gas and Coal are plentiful for centuries. I could not agree with you more. Drill baby Drill.
A rather silly column. The Japanese plants had an out-of-date design, and were hit by a massive earthquake AND a freak Tidal Wave at the same time. Not to mention some pretty big human errors.
And yet no one's died. So, OK Cockburn lets not build any Nuclear Plants on the California coast, Alaska, or Hawaii. We can just build them in other 90 percent of the country. To me the only *real* safety issue with NP is terrorism.
I wonder how many die every year in the USA from Coal Mining accidents or the pollution caused by Coal Power plants? I also wonder if any issue can discussed in the USA without hysteria and willful ignorance clouding the discussion.
Yes, rocean, so silly. Massive earthquakes and "freak" tsunamis in Japan, who could have seen that coming? Let us celebrate a process for boiling water whose waste will be with us forever, proving infinite opportunity for further unforeseen error and subjection to catastrophe.
Thanks Mr. J. Blum your comment simply make my argument.
Why exactly is this article here? I've only been reading this site for a couple of months, but even when I disagree I've come to expect, well, rational arguments.
to wit:
"... figures the probability of an earthquake 6.7 or higher is 67 percent for Los Angeles, 63 percent for San . . ."
No, it's 100%. Or is it 0%? Are we talking before the Earth is engulfed by the sun, or in the next microsecond? These "statistics" are meaningless numbers chosen to look scientific and scare people.
How about:
". . . calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million . . .
Several hundred million? Really? One would need to include the entirety of the european continent, the middle east, AND the asian parts of the USSR to get that number. Makes me wonder by what criterion are "people affected". Not to mention the questionable veracity of "calculating" a cause of death.
But we are to accept this because it is —the definitive study to date. Is that because a blogger says so or the authors themselves say so?
The lamented "false predictions, blunders, and the elemental truth that Nature bats last" are applicable to anything and provide no rational argument for action or inaction. The space program, for example, or Obamacare, or the national highway system.
Then we end with the classic Bush Doctrine: There’s no middle ground. If you even try to find one, you are the enemy. Well then so be it. I don't know that nuclear is inherently unsafe. I do know that we haven't even tried to make it safe. Political fears of proliferation aborted all research into robust reactor designs and spent fuel recycling/disposal. How can I know that it is inherently unsafe when America-Bloc has never seriously tried to reach that goal?
Nuclear power began as a dream by liberals and it is now a nightmare that must be defended by conservatives. That is how politics works in America world et in saecula seculorum.
As a card-arrying Paleo I welcome Cockburn to the Chronicles site. Outreach to the Left is welcome, since previous outreach to the Libertarians has failed. Any anyway, in his own screwed-up way Cockburn is an honest man!
As a practicing scientist I do have problems with some of Cockburn's essay. For one, the Chernobyl disaster was NOT a diaster. The only cancers uncovered were childhood thyroid cancer outside of the immediate disaster area - and these might only be due to intensive monitoring. The projection of many thousands of late cancer deaths are in conflict with observations that in comparison with the general population of Rusia, a 15% to 30% deficit of solid cancer mortality was found among Russian emergency workers, and a 5% deficit of solid solid cancer incidence was found among the population of most contaminated areas.
Cockburn has referred to a 2009 New York Academy of Science article - which is essentially garbage! And I can prove it!
Alexander Coburn has been writing for this site for a long time.
Of course, every time I go to CounterPunch, I find more hyperbole, rhetoric, and empty political posturing than real substance. It falls far behind Chronicles.
Here is the trick to writing a CounterPunch article:
1) Take the word "neo-liberal".
2) Use the word to describe everything under the sun that one does not like.
3)???
4) Profit?
I was most surprised that the power plant had no back-up generators suffieinet to cool the spent fuel. When the reactors were safely shut down they had no back-up plan. Of course, the worst case would be getting truckloads of diesel down broken up roads.
*sufficient
I wish this site had an edit or delete feature
Supposedly the Japanese reactors had backup generators, but were taken out by the tsunami. In my offshore rig experience was that all rigs I worked on had a diesel Emergency Caterpillar generator for power back up. They were started up about every four weeks as routine maintenance. Fairly simple, and very effective for any power outages.
Whenever a writer turns his eye on a scientific issue, the result is usually a disaster. There is a shrill undertone to this article, but I for one welcome Mr. Cockburn's general contributions to this site.
By squinting my way through a bunch of random statistics, I took the article as a series of general arguments that crescendo thus:
1) Nuclear power is dangerous stuff, and we need to pay more attention to how we do it here.
2) We shouldn't build NP plants on known fault lines or by the ocean.
3) We shouldn't allow energy policy to be cemented by non-scientific politicians making closed door agreements.
The shrill undertone is really one of sad reality. Knowing these things will never happen (Is it possible for us to debate cesium-137 or cancer rates?), perhaps it's best to abandon completely.
Reminds me of when there was much public outcry for the Prez to close Gitmo, then much cheering when he did, then much rejection of moving those gentle souls to "my district", then silence on the issue as it still pretty much is the same after as it was before.
@9: Glad to see there's another South Park fan who reads Chronicles.
I am surprised that I have now seen two articles by writers I thought were skeptical men about the need to end nuclear energy.
One would think they would mention there are regions of many nations where gigantic natural disasters are unheard of, and of strong, stable cavernous areas to store spent fuel rods.
Until scientists come up with a better way to store energy from solar panels, or are allowed to do so by those who pay them, I see no other solution to powering Western nations other than the status quo, which becomes expensive whenever a Muslim monarch has heartburn, bad gas, or stress.
I do not think the crisis in Japan is a lesson for all "world citizens", I think it's a lesson for Japanese political and economic leaders who failed to remember they live in a land where earthquakes and tsunamis are a common occurrence.
The only thing I've learned from the recent troubles in Japan is that the media in America is completely useless. The nuclear crisis turned out to not be so much of one, but not for lack of fearmongering from the cable news idiots. If a community, after doing a serious cost-benefit consideration of nuclear power, declines to partake then that's entirely sensible. But if the whole rationale for a wholesale abandonment nuclear power is that a plant will leak a little radiation after being struck by both an earthquake and a tsunami, then rationality has flown the coop.
@13: I disagree (mildly) with Mr. McCabe's take on the article.
I believe the key is Mr. Cockburn's comparing clean nuclear power to clean syphilis. Mr. Cockburn's choice of microbiology is interesting. Unlike, say, streptoccus (whose complications may well have killed Mozart), syphilis alone has been associated with genius and tragedy. It has the aura of evil.
Given that nuclear energy is evil, there is no need for debate. There is no need to discuss safety procedures, 4th generation reactors, or the safety implications of other -- likely less economical -- power sources. It likely explains why a man of Cockburn's high intelligence employs statistics in a patently nonsensical manner(as Matthew@5 points out).
At the risk of incurring the editor's wrath for introducing unrelated topics, I stopped reading Counterpunch because of a similar view concerning the recent unpleasantness at Duke. The rich white students were evil; hence there was really no need for an examination of the actual facts of the case. (If someone thinks I am being unfair, please go to Counterpunch and look through the archives. I could do so myself, but I went to my internist yesterday and my blood pressure was high.)
That being said, I, like Mr. McCabe, am glad that Chronicles carries the occasional Cockburn column, and I too welcome his contributions to this site. Even this one. I just wish Cockburn would turn down the shrill undertone he so often exhibits, which does not result from his reasoning but rather impedes it.
There's a wonderful paranoid conspiracy website called truth11 which explains why nuclear plants are built on fault lines. It's food for thought anyway.
http://truth11.com/2011/03/24/haarp-japan-scientist-leuren-moret-japan-earthquake-and-nuclear-%e2%80%9caccident%e2%80%9d-are-tectonic-nuclear-warfare-video-japan-not-natural-earthquake-initiated-by-external-energy/