Risks For Nuclear Plants Can Cost Trillions

 

Unlike the Boxing Day Quake/Tsunami several years ago, the Great Nuclear Japanese Quake/Tsunami continues to create refugees, kill people and cause increasing panic and destruction.  In today’s article I discuss coal power plants versus nuclear plants, the refusal of the people of California to buy even government-subsidized insurance and the inability of humans to clearly think things through instead of blindly blundering into catastrophic tragedies.

 

RST :: Radiation Shield Technologies – Creators of Demron (TM): this is the only realistic nuclear radiation protection suit on earth and the Japanese workers don’t have these…but will, soon, despite the government of Japan.

Things are going from bad to worse in Japan, one of the world’s ‘wealthiest’ countries and the world’s #3 (heading fast to #10) economy.  The damage from the tsunami and earthquake is extremely severe but unlike the waves that sloshed all over the Indian ocean countries, this one has taken out significant sectors of the free trade structure.  Factories all over the world are now beginning to shut down and lay off workers due to lack of parts, for example.

The insane and stupid ‘JIT’ (just in time) distribution system has collapsed with dangerous consequences.  If whole factory systems have to be built to replace the ones that are missing, the economic effects will be huge across the planet.  But worse of all is the release of the Dragon of Destruction, the creature that can change our genetic makeup and change evolutionary history of the Japanese people.  Namely, the utter catastrophe of the destruction of several nuclear power plants continues to hammer Japan.  This might destroy Japan as a civilization for it comes at a time when Japan was already giving up and slowly curling up and literally dying.

The median age in Japan is 44 years old and the young are less than 13% of the population whereas the elderly are 25%.  The young are nimble and swift, the elderly are slow and often infirm:  Japanese Unable to Evacuate Struggle to Endure – NYTimes.com

• A week after an earthquake and tsunami devastated their communities and set off the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, the plight of the thousands still stranded in areas near the stricken reactors — many too old or infirm to move — has underscored what residents say is a striking lack of help from the national government to assist with the evacuation of danger zones or the ferrying of supplies to those it has urged to stay inside.

• “Those who can leave have already left,” Nanae Takeshima, 40, a resident of Minamisoma, a city of 70,000 about 16 miles from the nuclear plant that lies within the area covered by the advisory to stay indoors, said by phone from her home. “Those here are the ones who cannot escape.”

Basically, the people there are being left to die. The young and nimble have already fled.  Some middle age people have voluntarily chosen to stay behind but eventually, they too, will flee for their lives.  No one is eager to go in on a daily basis to deliver food, fuel and medicine.  The military should be moving in to remove the people stranded there except they are off trying to save all the people stranded along the entire length of the northern half of Honshu island.

Who are also freezing and starving to death.  The refugee problem seems to baffle the Japanese government which had no civil defense plans for evacuating mass populations.  But then, the US has no realistic program to empty out LA in the case of a major San Andreas quake cutting off all water and much of the electricity that transmits across that deadly, extremely long fault line.

The San Andreas is most interesting since major quakes there disrupt huge, hundreds of miles long stretches of the state.  One tiny sector doesn’t shift, a huge section slips and slides northwards at supersonic speeds and can move up to 30 feet in one jump.

We see from Japan that even if the towers don’t collapse in major cities, the destruction of even distant infrastructure systems can hammer everyone badly.  Tokyo is semi-dark right now but LA will be blacked out and the Japanese are, like under the Shogun rule, disarmed but LA is armed to the teeth with a huge, seething underclass population ready to burst into great violence.

The horror of the nuclear fires in Fukushima are spreading insidiously as all nuclear disasters are prone to do:  Japan radiation sets off O’Hare airport alarms – CBS News

• Travelers coming in from Japan on Wednesday triggered radiation detectors at O’Hare International Airport as they passed through customs. Only very small amounts of radiation were detected….In one instance, radiation was detected in a plane’s air filtration system. Radiation was also found in luggage and on passengers on flights from Japan.

The insidious nature of nuclear fallout is something nearly unique.  You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, is is very, very difficult to avoid and it clings to whatever it encounters or enters deep inside and can’t be gotten rid of, ticking away like a little microscopic time bomb, rearranging your genetic materials, cooking up genetic tragedies deep inside reproductive systems…it is spreading across the planet as planes bring in refugees seeking to flee this invisible terror.

Already it is entering the food chain, a big, big problem for many, many years:  Japan Finds Spinach, Milk Contaminated with Radiation.  We know from history, it will continue to contaminate things eaten by animals and then it gets concentrated in the milk which insidiously shortens the lives of babies.  Baby calfs, baby humans, the babies of ground moles or baby mice, baby kittens, as animals eat each other or plants, the insidious, silent, invisible killer is concentrated in the bodies and cause strange or unfortunate things to happen.  Chernobyl Study Finds Lingering Cancer Risk – NYTimes.com

• An international team of researchers led by the National Cancer Institute, a federal agency based in Bethesda, Md., has been monitoring the health effects of the Chernobyl accident for years. In the study released Thursday, the team screened 12,500 people who were under 18-years-old at the time of the 1986 accident and lived in one of three provinces near the accident site. The subjects’ thyroid glands were measured for radioactivity within two months of the accident.

• Those with the greatest exposures were at highest risk for developing thyroid cancer in later years, the researchers found. Sixty-five of the study’s subjects developed thyroid cancer during the study’s 10 years of screening….Some of the participants in the Chernobyl study lived as far as 90 miles from the accident site, demonstrating the risks of eating or drinking contaminated foods among people who were exposed to little or no radioactive iodine from the immediate fallout.

Tokyo is only slightly further away than the people in this Chernobyl study.  Ask any Japanese mother, the few that are left having children, ‘Do you want your child to have thyroid cancer or leukemia?’  The answer would be obvious.  I know of no women on earth who would answer ‘Sure, bring it on!’

People accept a certain level of air pollution. I dislike air pollution and wish no gasoline or diesel vehicles would be allowed to enter cities.  I am against giant coal power plants due to pollution.  When a huge complex of power plants were built in the Four Corners region in New Mexico, a place I explored since childhood, the ability to see 100 miles deteriorated greatly and it became much, much dirtier.

When Tucson grew from a town of just 35,000 when I was a child into a million people megalopolis, the air went from pristine to disgusting.  This is true all over the planet and it is due to the way modern civilization has evolved since the Industrial Revolution.  If I had my druthers, I would move all industrial production systems into the L-5 orbit or the moon and use many more robots and have humans do other things for a living which allows us to really live.

I consider this planet to be most precious and to be protected, it is a true ‘Garden of Eden’.  The ideal situation would be for a peaceful planet.  Examples of how bad we really are, the US media is huffing and puffing about how Libya’s demented and evil ruler is killing his own people….while we just murdered 41 Pakistanis who were not doing anything wrong, they were holding a meeting to talk about the mineral resources in their province.  That is OK as far as our media and leaders are concerned.   The blood on Obama’s hands is every bit as red as Gaddafi’s.

Humans are basically incapable of really planning for real futures.  We sort of slog along and cry out in dismay when obvious things happen in obvious ways.  Yet, we seem incapable of learning from past experiences or distant lessons.  Why won’t Californians buy earthquake insurance?

• …just 12 percent of Californians who buy residential insurance policies also buy earthquake insurance. Since this number doesn’t take into account people who buy no form of home, renters or condo insurance, the actual percentage is even lower…..”Human beings are hardwired to believe in their heart and soul that disasters don’t happen and won’t happen to them,” says Dennis Mileti, a retired University of Colorado sociology professor and noted researcher. “Human beings are not rational when it comes to risk. Rationality is a myth invented by the Italians in the Renaissance.”…

• …Earthquake insurance is costly, particularly in high-risk areas. For example, it would cost about $4,300 a year for earthquake insurance for a two-story wood-frame house in the San Francisco Bay area with an insured value of $750,000. That’s with a 10 percent deductible and $25,000 in contents coverage.

• The California Earthquake Authority (CEA) provides about 70 percent of the state’s earthquake insurance…

Basically, the government of California will pay for all earthquake damage of any of the 15% who had the foresight and intelligence to buy earthquake insurance!  How dare the developers and bankers build and give out mega-huge loans on houses in a state that inevitably will have huge, nasty earthquakes at regular intervals…and not have earthquake insurance as part of the package?

That is, you can’t buy a home and have a mortgage and have no fire insurance in many places.  Banks are supposed to demand this and it is part of the mortgage payments (at least, before the housing bubble nonsense!).  In many places, there should be earthquake insurance embedded in all contracts.  But there is not.  Hurricanes are taken care of the same way: you can buy government insurance…but don’t have to!

Well, all of this comes out of the pockets of taxpayers!  I don’t hear a peep from the GOP about forcing homeowners to buy necessary insurance.  But if the government is AIG and the government IS AIG!….we have to talk about probability and the losses the government will take in mega-disasters.  California cannot really insure anyone, it is going bankrupt.  Our government will, like we are seeing in Japan, go bankrupt if we have a Japanese-level event in California.  The probability of this happening is somewhere around 100% at this point.

That is, we WILL have a huge earthquake event along the San Andreas.  It WILL wreck LA’s ability to have water and electricity.  It WILL cause mass civil disorders in the slums.  It WILL destroy many houses and businesses and disrupt all train and auto egress to LA…this is going to happen the only question is, when.  And it WILL bankrupt California.  And probably lead to the bankruptcy of the US, too.

Japan went into this present catastrophe with $12 trillion in debt and the US will go into its catastrophe even deeper in debt, the longer it takes for the San Andreas to blow out, the more likely we will go into bankruptcy as a nation.  Part of Japan’s bankruptcy problem is, it can’t have enough services and facilities for saving its own people which is why there is a large town in the exclusion zone and no one in the government is removing the people left stranded there.

One nursing home elsewhere has volunteered to take in some refugees and sent five buses into the zone.  But this is a tiny gesture, there are still people left behind.  To die.  The government can’t even wrap its head around the fact that there are up to a quarter million displaced Japanese who are in need of rescue.  When the troops went north, they took NO water and NO fuel.  They went there to poke around and found I believe, just 5 or 6 survivors.

While letting a quarter million people go without food, water or fuel!  While it is snowing, no less!  More people died during this hunt for survivors that were rescued.  Far, far, far more died.  The inability to ration aid rationally is a sign of emotional disconnection.  The normal story of ‘what you do after an earthquake’ features heroic rescues of various survivors pried out of the rubble.

But in this case, the pressing needs of the survivors who are not in the rubble or who are in intact homes is dire.  It must come first, not last.  The clock ticks especially when it is very cold.  The lack of infrastructure is a severe problem.  In LA, it will be the heat that will be the problem.  The extremely hot desert that surrounds LA once you get past the mountains, is nearly uncrossable on foot.

There might be a huge tsunami of refugees heading towards the Mexican border!  We can guess and if San Diego is also cut off from food, water and energy, this means we could potentially have up to 20 million people in a desperate death march out of that area.  It is not inevitable but it is possible and thus, we have to prepare for this possibility especially if both major nuclear power plants are destroyed like we see so vividly in Japan.

Al Gore imagines we can nuke our way out of global warming.  He isn’t being quoted much in US news this week but he is overseas, defending nuclear power:  Al Gore talks climate change in Costa Rica — The Tico Times:

• On Wednesday night, Gore responded to a question by The Tico Times about the ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan and its impact on future global production of nuclear energy.

• “Many are asking what will be the impact on the way we think about our energy for the future and what role will nuclear power play,” he said. “I always believed that nuclear power will play only a somewhat limited role. I did not foresee this terrible safety crisis, although there have been some in the past, such as Chernobyl. But there is no doubt that many are already asking serious questions about the future of nuclear power. My guess is that, with renewed attention to the plants, nations in the future will not choose to put nuclear plants near faults lines or oceans. However, I do think that some nations will continue to choose to use nuclear reactors. I think it will only play a small role compared to what it plays now.”

• Gore also said that in 15 to 20 years, smaller and safer nuclear reactors could be available and result in more reliance on nuclear power. He followed the comment by saying that more nations need to rely on wind and solar power, including Costa Rica.

Let a thousand small nuclear reactors bloom!  HAHAHA….sigh.  Note how Gore admits he is a crummy seer.  He can’t see the obvious.  He admits, this happened in the past but he also assumed it would never happen again even though variations of this happened more than once in the past.  How crummy is this?  When we go to someone for future indications, who can see the future, we want people who can see the future!  Not blind fools.

I have been for solar power since…well, my father was Jimmy Carter’s head of alternative energy development!  I demand that not one nuclear power plant be built—they are hideously expensive–until every house in America has a solar array on the roof!  Period!  We can’t say, ‘Let’s do both’ because virtually no solar panels have appeared on any American roofs thanks to our government compared to the mega-push to plop dozens of nuclear plants all over kingdom come!

Al Gore is scared our lovely interglacial Garden of Eden will be destroyed if it gets as warm as the Eocene era (I will note here that plants and animals thrived during that era).  Well, how about polluting the entire planet with nuclear waste products and radiation for several million years?  How will that fix anything at all?  An insane and greedy and mindless solution.

Here is a recent study from the Columbit School of Business about nuclear power plant insurance problems:

• Environment & Energy: Catastrophic Liabilities
• Geoffrey Heal, Columbia University School of Business
• Howard Kunreuther, The Wharton School University of Pennsylvania

• Some possible liabilities of the Federal Government are associated with environmental risks, many of which are linked to climate change. For example, the potential for global warming depends on what we do with our energy systems. Moreover, the way the Federal Government manages many environmental processes can affect our vulnerability to a range of natural disasters, not just those associated with climate change.

• One source of energy that is now being seriously considered for addressing the climate change issue is nuclear power….

• …The current resurgence of interest in nuclear power owes a lot to concerns about the environmental impacts of fossil fuels. Nuclear power is largely carbon-neutral and has no significant climate impact, but does have other risks. A move to nuclear power is replacing one kind of environmental risk by another. The Federal Government accepted liability for the lion’s share of the risks from a nuclear power plant catastrophe through the passage of the Price-Anderson (P-A) Act in 1957. Nuclear power stations have a rather unique environmental profile, in that when operating as planned they produce little if any environmental damage, emitting neither gases nor pollutants of any kind. There is however a small chance of a very serious accident such as a core meltdown leading to damaging pollution as in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Ukraine. In this case, clouds of radioactive waste floated over much of the Ukraine, Belarus, Eastern and Western Europe and Scandinavia with fatalities estimate by international agencies to be about 9,000 individuals.

• …In addition to the risk of a core meltdown, nuclear power stations pose problems associated with the disposal of their radioactive wastes. Over its operating life, a nuclear power station will produce many tons of highly radioactive long-lived waste, which pose a health hazard for many centuries....In the meantime, many hundreds of tons of highly radioactive waste sit in containment tanks at the sites of commercial nuclear power stations, often poorly guarded…..A core meltdown is generally agreed to be the most serious accident that can occur to a nuclear power station….

• …A disaster at Indian Point could possibly have a more disruptive effect on activity in the New York metropolitan area than the 9/11/2001 attacks, and for a much longer period of time. Business interruption losses in the range of $50-100 billion are possible, in addition to the costs associated with loss of life and damage to health. It is therefore reasonable to think that the direct and indirect costs of a nuclear accident could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Indeed, a worst-case scenario could lead to the closure of New York City for years, as happened at Chernobyl, which is still closed over 22 years after the meltdown, leading to almost unthinkable costs.

There it is!  Many deaths, long, long times of exclusion zones which decimate whole cities.  The timeframe for catastrophe is in MANY CENTURIES, not many days or many hours.  Centuries!  Thousands of years, too!  Nothing, absolutely nothing on earth has this sort of timeline of destruction.  The timeframe for Japan’s destruction has been only one week.  The deaths continue and will continue relentlessly since the workers at Fukushima are doomed to die:  Japan tsunami: Fukushima Fifty ‘on suicide mission’ to battle nuclear meltdown | Mail Online

• The radiation levels at the plant entrance are at a level which will either kill the workers soon or cause them appalling illnesses in the years to come. Experts have said that the airtight suits they are wearing would do little to stop the contamination.

• The group remained behind after 700 of their colleagues fled when radiation levels became too dangerous….Their heart-rending messages home were made public yesterday by Japanese national television, which has interviewed their relatives.

• One relative said: ‘My father is still working at the plant. He says he’s accepted his fate, much like a death sentence.’…Another said that her 59-year-old father had volunteered for Fukushima duty, adding: ‘I heard that he volunteered even though he will be retiring in just half a year and my eyes are filling up with tears.

• ‘At home, he doesn’t seem like someone who could handle big jobs. But today, I was really proud of him. I pray for his safe return.’

This isn’t bravery alone, it is social responsibility.  The workers, all fine humans who break my heart, they are so brave, know that if they fail, Japan fails badly.  They are sacrificing their lives to save their own people.  This is the antithesis of greed.  The US celebrated greed for many years.  Japan’s greedy elites celebrate wealth, too.

The nature of the Cave of Wealth and Death is, you get rich going in but someone has to die.  If you get too rich, you also die in social disorders or wars.  The virtues of the brave nuclear power plant workers who stayed on the job as the tsunami hit and the stayed to fight the fires are immense and the people who plunked these plants on tsunami/earthquake zones and the government made zero realistic plans to deal with the inevitable.  They sit safe at home, giving orders while doing futile gestures.

Example is those stupid suits the men are wearing: they are as useful as the headbands with religious/patriotic writing on them handed out to the Kamikaze pilots.  When the Plains Indians were desperately fighting the US invaders, they wore strips of cloth to protect themselves from bullets.  It didn’t work.  Nor do these suits work.  They are used to fool workers into going into severe danger, thinking they have protection.

Here is a great story of a good man who is making real sacrifices in his own way to save or help the poor men forced to fight the Fukushima fires:  Florida sends radiation protection suits to Japan – Wire – Lifestyle – bellinghamherald.com

• DeMeo has been selling Demron products to military and rescue staff around the globe for several years, but he first invented the fabric for medical personal. After using a continuous X-ray machine with his patients, he saw sunburn-like skin damage on his arms and hands. And he also saw many colleagues in his field afflicted with different types of skin cancers.

• “I didn’t think we were taking this X-ray machine seriously enough. I started to look into better shielding,” said DeMeo, who runs the medical practice Meridian Pain & Diagnostics in Coral Gables. “I didn’t realize I was venturing into something that hasn’t been invented before.”

• After nuclear reactors following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan were damaged, DeMeo directed his Hong Kong distributors to send suits in stock to Japan. They are expected to arrive this weekend. DeMeo made calls to donate the gear as soon as he saw footage of first responders who lacked protective clothing.

He is organizing a donation system that is operating as fast as possible.  Bravo.  All nuclear power plants should be forced by law to have several HUNDRED of these suits on hand, I would demand, a thousand each, to cope with disasters.  This way, outside forces can come in safely and fight the fires, etc.  Duh!  But that costs money so I expect nothing to come of this.

All people running X-rays all the time should be required to have this.  This way, it is no longer a matter of choice if a hospital has it, it has to be a government REGULATION.  This is a very important function of a government.  The GOP and especially the insaner parts on the Tea Party wing are against regulating nearly anything except for one thing: meddling with women’s reproductive rights.  Then, they hop all over things, screaming that they, not women themselves, get to decide what to do and how to do it.

For people deep in denial, here is another story to digest: A radioactive hazard zone? Chernobyl’s example – CNN.com

• Mutations are the clearest sign of the effects of radiation contamination,” says Anders Moller, a senior scientist at Paris-Sud University. Moller has studied the effects of radiation on animals around Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear energy disaster, for two decades….”In the more contaminated parts (of Chernobyl) there are few animals, in spring there is very little birdsong. If you are a biologist you notice these effects; in plants you have strange branching patterns, strange leaves, you see the same if you catch animals — a high frequency of abnormality,” he said.

Now, on to the issue of coal and gas plants.  Both are quite dangerous in various ways, too, which is another reason why I support a huge government program to put solar arrays on all houses:  3 firefighters hurt in Minn. coal plant explosion

• September 22, 2010

• The fire started in a smoldering coal bin at Xcel Energy’s Black Dog power plant in Burnsville, the company said. As fire crews tried to extinguish the flames, a blast in the bin rocked the plant.

• Two of the firefighters were treated at the scene for minor burns and returned to fighting the fire. A third was taken to Regions Hospital in St. Paul with a leg injury, said Burnsville police Sgt. Jef Behnken….Coal dust is highly combustible so Xcel workers water a plant’s stored coal frequently and monitor it, Nystuen said. Workers are also trained to deal with small fires.

Dust in cement factories, dust in ice houses, dust in cotton processing plants can blow up.  Static electricity+fine dust can =explosions.  Coal and gas are highly volatile.  Coal is less volatile than nuclear rods or gas or oil or cyclic ozone molecules or hydrogen rocket fuel but it can blow up as well as is quite dangerous to mine.  Just as extracting oil is dangerous in many, many ways, and refining it pollutes the air and burning it pollutes the environment and accidents are quite nasty, etc.

The key difference between this explosion and the Japanese nuclear one is simple: this explosion ended pretty rapidly.  The plant can be quickly rebuilt.  No one from a 50 mile radius lost their homes forever and forever until the next Ice Age.  Both nuclear and coal plants need to have lots of water to prevent explosions.  But if the water is lost, the coal plant’s destruction doesn’t come anywhere remotely near the destruction of the nuclear power plant nor does the explosion go on and on and on and on and on…by the way, Japan is now discussing with Russia how to entomb this facility.  As I predicted (my accuracy rating remains very high, thank you!).

Here are more stories:  1 worker killed in explosion during maintenance at coal-fired power plant near Wilmington | StarTribune.com

• March 15, 2011
• Progress Energy previously announced plans to retire the plant’s coal-fired units and replace them with a new plant scheduled to begin operations in 2014.

Five Killed, 12 Hurt in Conn. Explosion – CBS News

• Feb. 7, 2010
• An explosion that sounded like a sonic boom blew out the walls of an unfinished power plant and set off a fire during a test of natural gas lines around Sunday morning, killing at least five workers. At least 12 people were injured in the explosion at the Kleen Energy Systems plant in Middletown, about 20 miles south of Hartford

Finally, more wishful thinking about the mess in Japan:  Fukushima releases one-tenth of those from Chernobyl: France’s IRSN – Electric Power |Chernobyl went on and on and on and on and thus, dumped lots and lots and lots of nuclear nastiness across the entire planet and made hundreds of miles of land nearly uninhabitable.   This happened over more than one week.  The Japanese eruption of nuclear garbage is one week old and showing no sign of stopping.

Ergo: next week it will be 20% of Chernobyl’s mess and then the third week it will be 40% of Chernobyl’s mess, etc.  To infinity or when they finally entomb it and leave it for future generations to worry about when the next 9.0 earthquake reopens that tomb.  

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