Costs
rise in 'worst industrial
disaster' By Victor Kotsev
The day after the disastrous level-nine
earthquake that triggered the tsunami and the
Fukushima nuclear crisis, March 12, an Israeli
expert on air quality and poisoning, Professor
Menachem Luria, told Israeli Channel 2: "From what
we can gather, this disaster is even more
dangerous than Chernobyl."
At the time,
his was a minority opinion in the scientific
community; very few believed that a nuclear
accident as bad as the 1986 meltdown in Ukraine
would occur again. "I think that's basically
impossible," said James Stubbins, an expert at the
University of Illinois, and many others agreed.
Yet, as we are now slowly coming to
realize, Fukushima is worse than Chernobyl. In a
revealing recent feature article published by
al-Jazeera, Dahr Jamail conveys the comments of Arnold
Gundersen, a senior former
nuclear industry executive in the United States.
"Fukushima is the biggest industrial
catastrophe in the history of mankind," Gundersen
asserts. "We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the
fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20
times the potential to be released than Chernobyl
... The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding
hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl,
and the amount of radiation in many of them was
the amount that caused areas to be declared
no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square
kilometers being found 60 to 70 kilometers away
from the reactor. You can't clean all this up."
[1]
The Japanese government and Tokyo
Electric Power (Tepco), the operator of the
crippled plant, now grudgingly acknowledge that
their timeline for bringing the situation under
control, by the end of the year, "may be"
unrealistic. They also acknowledge that Fukushima
has "probably" released more radiation than
Chernobyl. Both have come under strong criticism
in the past for withholding information and
releasing overly optimistic estimates.
Yet
even scientists working at the plant apparently
have trouble comprehending the severity of the
crisis. Last week, they attempted to install a
filtration system to decontaminate and recycle the
vast amounts of highly radioactive water
accumulated as a result of the continuous efforts
to cool the reactors. Fukushima is running
dangerously low on storage capacities for the used
water. However, the system jammed after just five
hours of operation.
"The company said that
the sprawling system, which is designed to siphon
oil, radioactive materials and salt from the water
used to cool the reactors, was shut down because
of readings that indicated one of the filters had
filled up with radioactive cesium," The New York
Times writes. "The rapid depletion of a filter
that was supposed to have lasted several weeks
suggested the presence of far greater radioactive
material than anticipated." [2]
According
to another New York Times report, the Japanese
government was initially in complete disarray over
the crisis, issuing contradictory orders and
finding itself unable to make use of available
resources. Coordination with Tepco, which was in a
state of panic itself, faltered. The plant manager
likely prevented a greater calamity by disobeying
an order to stop using sea water to cool the
reactors.
"We found ourselves in a
downward spiral, which hurt relations with the
United States," a close aide to Japanese Prime
Minister Naoto Kan told The New York Times. "We
lost credibility with America, and Tepco lost
credibility with us." [3]
Reportedly,
American pressure for more information and
concerted action eventually helped jerk the
Japanese authorities from their shock. This
narrative carries the seeds of another narrative
which most of us would very much like to believe:
a story of international cooperation and the
coming together of the world's finest
technological achievements to combat a natural
disaster.
Yet American officials were also
caught unprepared. Most continue to deny outright
that the radioactive pollution will have a
palpable effect on the United States. Recent
reports, however, indicate that infant mortality
rates in eight major cities in the northwestern
United States, where the fallout was greatest,
jumped 35% in the four weeks following the
accident. This is consistent with the biological
effects of radiation. [4]
Previous reports
have indicated the presence of radioactive
particles in rainwater as far east as
Massachusetts, and in milk and other products
throughout the country. The American authorities,
as indeed most authorities in the world, appear to
be in denial. Many important reports continue to
be classified, and there is a sense that
governments are lying to their people for lack of
a better response.
In all likelihood, the
scope of the disaster continues to evade us. There
is little doubt that "the biggest industrial
catastrophe in the history of mankind" will force
us to learn painful lessons, and that we are only
just beginning to grapple with its meaning.
Some of the consequences are fairly
mundane, if hard to pinpoint very precisely yet,
in that they are economic and technical. The
nuclear industry will be doing some major
soul-searching, and seems set for a period of
decline; numerous countries are already
reconsidering their reliance on nuclear plants.
The global economy will face reshuffles, as will
the global energy market.
It has the
potential, however, to go much deeper than that,
shaking the very foundations of our sense of
collective security. Certainly if some of the
worst-case predictions materialize, and a sizeable
part of Japan turns into a nuclear desert, we'll
face urgent questions about where we are heading
as a species; this may happen even in a more
optimistic scenario.
It is possible, for
example, that people's trust in the state system
will be shaken, and on many levels. This is not to
say that the predominant current form of political
and social organization will disappear, at least
in the near future. But it has been under stress
for quite some time now, and this disaster seems
capable of bringing the existing stresses into
public attention; so far they have been mostly
confined to academic discourse.
A few
leading anthropologists and political theorists
have concluded that the current state system
(whose origins arguably lie in the distant 1648
when the treaty of Westphalia was signed) is
obsolete, and that it is incapable of adjusting to
the ever more fluid borders and rapid rates of
communication that come with globalization. Their
argument is that new types of organizations, some
criminal while others representing legitimate
economic, political, and other interests, will
rise up to challenge the national state; we have
started to see some of this in the proliferation
of multinational corporations, international
political organizations, and international crime
networks of the last decades.
But while
these former developments draw on the positive
aspects of globalization - the availability of new
resources to which new types of structures are
better adapted - there is also a darker side. It
is visible in Fukushima. The new possibilities
have led to the manufacture of technology that is
too powerful to control; its effects cannot be
confined to national borders - and what better
example than Japan of the fact that, to paraphrase
John Donne, no society is an island nowadays.
Add to this that increased global
interdependence comes with increased global
vulnerability to crises in distant parts of the
world, and we have a situation where our sense of
security is not guaranteed any more.
The
concept of the state, in a sense, offers a
counter-balance to all these powerful and often
blind forces, a regulatory mechanism that we like
to believe works well and in the public interest.
This is part of why the scale of the
Fukushima disaster is so hard to grasp, both for
experts and for lay people. In the face of the
increased vulnerability of modern societies, we
desperately need something that gives us a sense
of security. What better safeguards than progress,
technology, and order, exemplified by the
spectacular ability of nation states, separately
and in concert, to mobilize unprecedented
resources to achieve an urgent goal? And where a
more safe expectation for all these forces to
produce the desired effect than in Japan, one of
the top industrialized world economies and a
paradigm of social cohesion and discipline?
In many ways, Fukushima is the perfect
paradigm for the failure of our source of security
at its finest. The confusion and panic of the
government and industry officials in the wake of
the disaster should humble us all. So should our
face to face encounter with our limitations, and
the contrast with how we like to imagine
ourselves.
In some of our most popular
science-fiction narratives, the best astronauts of
the leading world powers destroy asteroids that
threaten the Earth with nuclear weapons
(Armageddon grossed over half a billion
dollars, attesting to our eagerness to consume the
images; suffice it to mention that early on in the
Fukushima crisis, some observers suggested nuking
the reactors). [5] Yet in reality, we can't deal
with a sizeable pile of radioactive waste, even
long after the chain reaction has stopped.
Gundersen's conclusions speak loudly:
"Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in
there and manage to put it in a container and
store it for infinity, and that technology doesn't
exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core
from the floor, there is no solution available now
for picking that up from the floor."
So do
those of Dr Sawada, another scientist interviewed
by Dahr Jamail: "Until we know how to safely
dispose of the radioactive materials generated by
nuclear plants, we should postpone these
activities so as not to cause further harm to
future generations."
Fukushima is worse
than what we are being told. There is no doubt
about that. How bad exactly it is may not become
clear for years. Debates about its meaning are
likely to stretch much longer. The crisis brings
some fundamental questions about our system of
social organization to the fore, and the answers
may influence what the world looks like in the
future.
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