Japanese protest revised school radiation limit

TOKYO: Furious parents at the centre of Japan's atomic crisis and hundreds of their supporters rallied in Tokyo on Monday against revised nuclear safety standards in schools they say are putting children at risk.

Japanese children can now be exposed to 20 times the radiation that was permissible before the March 11 tsunami caused a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant, sparking the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

Around 400 protesters, many from areas around the stricken plant, flocked to the education and science ministry to demand a rethink on the new limit, which allows exposure of up to 20 millisieverts a year.

A group of Fukushima residents submitted a letter for the education minister demanding the ministry do all it can to lower radiation levels at schools and offer financial support.

Protest organisers said the radiation limit for playgrounds was about six times as much as the 0.6 microsievert-per-hour legal maximum under which under-18s are allowed to work.

Demonstrators brandished banners emblazoned with slogans such as "Protect children in Fukushima from radiation" and chanted: "Why is it 20 millisieverts? Come out minister!"

Ministers have defended the increase in the acceptable safety level as a necessary measure to guarantee the education of thousands of children in Fukushima prefecture.

Science minister Yoshiaki Takaki had earlier told a parliamentary session: "We are always thinking that we should never underestimate the risk of radiation."

"Efforts have to be made in order to avoid radiation as much as possible," he said.

But the demonstrators were not placated.

"This is enough. I'm really furious to see the government has no intention of protecting its people," said Ruiko Muto, 57, who had journeyed from Miharu town, about 45 kilometres from the crippled plant.

"We are making the demand in order to protect children, as Fukushima's education authorities are following the guidelines and saying outside activities can be safe."

The nuclear crisis remains unresolved and tens of thousands of people are still unable to return to homes, farms and businesses in a 20-kilometre zone around the radiation-spewing plant.

More than 20 elementary and junior high schools within 30 kilometres have been forced to close since the accident, affecting some 5,000 pupils, the Yomiuri daily newspaper reported on Monday.

- AFP/de

via channelnewsasia.com

and the beat goes on....

Great photos from Japan

James Whitlow Delano Tells Why He Photographed Cherry Blossoms in Devastated Japan - NYTimes.com

some great photos from tohoku

Layer 8: US goes after some game-changing energy projects

In this case ARPA-E will be overseeing the following, from the agency's report:

• Plants Engineered To Replace Oil (PETRO). Technologies for low-cost production of advanced biofuels are limited by the small amount of available energy captured by photosynthesis and the inefficient processes used to convert plant matter to fuel. PETRO aims to create plants that capture more energy from sunlight and convert that energy directly into fuels. ARPA-E will fund technologies that optimize the biochemical processes of energy capture and conversion to develop farm-ready crops that deliver more energy per acre with less processing prior to the pump. If successful, PETRO will create biofuels for half their current cost, finally making them cost-competitive with fuels from oil. Up to $30 million will be made available for this program area.
• High Energy Advanced Thermal Storage (HEATS). More than 90% of energy technologies involve the transport and conversion of thermal energy. Advancements in thermal energy storage - both hot and cold - would dramatically improve performance for a variety of critical energy applications. ARPA-E seeks to develop revolutionary cost-effective thermal energy storage technologies in three focus areas: 1) high temperature storage systems to deliver solar electricity more efficiently around the clock and allow nuclear and fossil resources the flexibility to meet peak demand, 2) fuel produced from the sun's heat, and 3) HVAC systems that use thermal storage to improve the driving range of electric vehicles by up to 40%. Up to $30 million will be made available for this program area.
• Rare Earth Alternatives in Critical Technologies (REACT). Rare earths are naturally-occurring minerals with unique magnetic properties that are used in many emerging energy technologies. As demand for these technologies continues to increase, rare earths are rapidly becoming more expensive due to limited global supply - prices of many have increased 300-700% in the past year. Rising rare earth prices have already escalated costs for some energy technologies and may jeopardize the widespread adoption of many critical energy solutions by US manufacturers. ARPA-E seeks to fund early-stage technology alternatives that reduce or eliminate the dependence on rare earth materials by developing substitutes in two key areas: electric vehicle motors and wind generators. Up to $30 million will be made available for this program area.
• Green Electricity Network Integration (GENI). Recent advances in computation, networking, and grid monitoring have shed light on potential ways to deliver electricity more efficiently and reliably. Today, however, the equivalent of one out of every five electricity dollars is lost to power outages and 30% of the grid's hardware needs replacing. ARPA-E seeks to fund innovative control software and high-voltage hardware to reliably control the grid, specifically: 1) controls able to manage 10 times more sporadically available wind and solar electricity than currently on the grid, and 2) resilient power flow control hardware - or the energy equivalent of an internet router - to enable significantly more electricity through the existing network of transmission lines. Up to $30 million will be made available for this program area.
• Solar Agile Delivery of Electrical Power Technology (Solar ADEPT). The DOE SunShot Initiative leverages the unique strengths across DOE to reduce the total cost of utility-scale solar systems by 75% by the end of 2020. If successful, this collaboration would deliver solar electricity at roughly 6 cents a kilowatt hour - a cost competitive with electricity from fossil fuels. This would enable solar electricity to scale without subsidies and make the US globally competitive in solar technology. ARPA-E's portion of the collaboration is the Solar ADEPT program, which focuses on integrating advanced power electronics into solar panels and solar farms to extract and deliver energy more efficiently. Specifically, ARPA-E aims to invest in key advances in magnetics, semiconductor switches, and charge storage, which could reduce power conversion costs by up to 50% for utilities and 80% for homeowners. Up to $10 million will be made available for this program area.

via networkworld.com

U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant

via nytimes.com

This is very frightening and I am going to try to find out more. Even if they succeed at averting these outcomes, I hope the seriousness of how close we have come to even worse outcomes becomes more fully known in Japan. I am especially concerned about the fact that nuclear fuel was ejected "up to one mile away" by the explosions and that the problems with the spent fuel are severe and not easy to resolve.

via nytimes.com By JAMES GLANZ and WILLIAM J. BROAD

United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

Among the new threats that were cited in the assessment, dated March 26, are the mounting stresses placed on the containment structures as they fill with radioactive cooling water, making them more vulnerable to rupture in one of the aftershocks rattling the site after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. The document also cites the possibility of explosions inside the containment structures due to the release of hydrogen and oxygen from seawater pumped into the reactors, and offers new details on how semimolten fuel rods and salt buildup are impeding the flow of fresh water meant to cool the nuclear cores.

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables: Scientific American

The article below is referred to in another fine article Trashing the Planet for Natural Gas: Shale Gas Development Threatens Freshwater Sources, Likely Escalates Climate Destabilization by Karen Charman which comes via business insider .

The article is further discussed at climate sanity 


what is the best way? Are all ways bad in some way? What if the basic assumption were that there will be pain, how do we make the right decision? How do we convince ourselves that total costs must be accounted for and included in the discussion and create an agreed upon standard for this kind of accounting independent of the solution that might result?

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables

Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here's how

By Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi  | Monday, October 26, 2009 | 166

Image: John Lee Aurora Photos

experts on nuclear power

from
this blog

Track the performance of various expert voices addressing the nuclear crisis in Japan and you’ll get a pretty good sense of the magnitude of this problem. For a complex example of the problem's dimensions: a blog post from an MIT professor that was originally sent to his friends and family to offer an explanation of the reactor's design and of nuclear power, but that also expressed in no uncertain terms the opinion that there would be and could not be any significant release of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Since that time, the post's author has offered an intelligent retrospective analysis of his own credibility or lack thereof, and his work has been incorporated into a wider effort to “clean up” the expert assessment in a more useful ongoing resource for public understanding.

I don't want to single out this author as a conspiracist, and I appreciate his effort to rethink and recontextualize his initial entry into the public debate, something that other highly vocal experts who were quick to debunk fears about the Japanese accident have not done. The problem with expert participation in the online public sphere is not just that our information can iterate wildly across a wide domain almost instantly. It is also that the online public sphere is absolutely loaded with people who really do use their status as experts to serve as mouthpieces for some kind of paymaster outside of their own universities: researchers who shill for Big Pharma, experts who are peddling some rent-a-solution into the NGO ipeline for implementation in development work, and so on. It is not wrong to view a lot of public expertise coming from university faculty with skepticism.

A public intellectual has to engage issues of public concern earlessly, but they also have to try and live by the code of a ronin, to be a masterless samurai, not out of shame or inability to find a patron but because that's what inquiry requires.

Oe on Fukushima

The Atomic Bomb, Nuclear Energy, and Japan : The New Yorker

Tokyo Postcard: History Repeats
by Kenzaburo Oe March 28, 2011

By chance, the day before the earthquake, I wrote an article, which was published a few days later, in the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun. The article was about a fisherman of my generation who had been exposed to radiation in 1954, during the hydrogen-bomb testing at Bikini Atoll. I first heard about him when I was nineteen. Later, he devoted his life to denouncing the myth of nuclear deterrence and the arrogance of those who advocated it. Was it a kind of sombre foreboding that led me to evoke that fisherman on the eve of the catastrophe? He has also fought against nuclear power plants and the risk that they pose. I have long contemplated the idea of looking at recent Japanese history through the prism of three groups of people: those who died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who were exposed to the Bikini tests, and the victims of accidents at nuclear facilities. If you consider Japanese history through these stories, the tragedy is self-evident. Today, we can confirm that the risk of nuclear reactors has become a reality. However this unfolding disaster ends—and with all the respect I feel for the human effort deployed to contain it—its significance is not the least bit ambiguous: Japanese history has entered a new phase, and once again we must look at things through the eyes of the victims of nuclear power, of the men and the women who have proved their courage through suffering. The lesson that we learn from the current disaster will depend on whether those who survive it resolve not to repeat their mistakes.

This disaster unites, in a dramatic way, two phenomena: Japan’s vulnerability to earthquakes and the risk presented by nuclear energy. The first is a reality that this country has had to face since the dawn of time. The second, which may turn out to be even more catastrophic than the earthquake and the tsunami, is the work of man. What did Japan learn from the tragedy of Hiroshima? One of the great figures of contemporary Japanese thought, Shuichi Kato, who died in 2008, speaking of atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, recalled a line from “The Pillow Book,” written a thousand years ago by a woman, Sei Shonagon, in which the author evokes “something that seems very far away but is, in fact, very close.” Nuclear disaster seems a distant hypothesis, improbable; the prospect of it is, however, always with us. The Japanese should not be thinking of nuclear energy in terms of industrial productivity; they should not draw from the tragedy of Hiroshima a “recipe” for growth. Like earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural calamities, the experience of Hiroshima should be etched into human memory: it was even more dramatic a catastrophe than those natural disasters precisely because it was man-made. To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims.