Fukushima Nuclear Death-throes

There is so much going wrong in the World at the present time that I have been stunned into almost complete silence. So many things wrong and our leaders either doing nothing or making things worse. The two matters at the top of the list of disasters are the chaos in the Middle East and the on-going saga of the nuclear disaster in Japan. I will get onto the Middle East soon but I must comment again on the Japanese power station. It is now 3 weeks since the earthquake hit the coast of Japan and seriously damaged this aging nuclear power station at Fukushima and yet the situation seems to get worse by the day. There is little doubt that the Japanese mentality and quiet stoicism is causing the worst of the facts to be hidden but as contamination is being discovered further and further away from the plant it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to claim that all is well. The pictures from the site now reveal that the installation is totally wrecked. It will never run again and anything being done now is related to getting the whole place permanently shut down - and permanently decommissioned - which will cost many more miilions of pounds. Reports tell us that the power supply has been restored and that this will make controlling the over-temperatures at the reactors easier. This may be true but it remains the case that the machinery for cooling the vessels is wrecked beyond repair. Billions of litres of water are being poured over the vessels to try to get temperatures under control and - they tell us - some radioactive contamination has "leaked" into the sea. The cooling sea water is being pumped over the reactors and the reactors are damaged and inevitably the cooling sea water becomes contaminated. Smoke and steam are still rising from two of the reactor buildings and spreading contamination over many square miles. Periodically now the site workers are being taken from the buildings when pollution levels locally go off the scale. When this happens, of course, things are even more out of control. Anyone who suggests that what is going on here is a controlled emergency shut-down is clearly quite mad. The nuclear lobby world-wide is playing down the problems but the story of this disaster is surely enough to tell the general public and their leaders not to go any further down the nuclear highway. The problems in Japan have stimulated journalists to visit the remnants of Chernobyl. There they have discovered yet again a barren landscape over many, many square miles of territory; abandoned homes, factories, offices and schools still contaminated 25 years after the event. The journalists were taken in and out by buses and each individual was issued with a Geiger counter to check radiation levels continuously and to move fast if a meter reacted - which they did - all the time. Things were reasonably OK along the tarmaced highways - where the radiation was absorbed - but step off the ribbon of road and the Geiger counters went wild. They tell us that the original concrete casings poured over the reactor vessels in 1985 are now in poor condition and need to be renewed - at great cost. Such repairs to the concrete enclosures will be required many times in the next thousand years.

Unless and until the nuclear lobby can say to us that the possibility of these major failures of reactor installations is a complete impossibility, then new reactor systems should not be built. And even when they can say that the risk of failure is zero, there still remains the problem of nuclear waste.

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Mass Trip To London By Northerners

In a couple of weeks time, the FA Cup semi-finals will be played at Wembley on Saturday 16th April and Sunday 17th April. That same week-end, Liverpool play Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium. This means a fairly massive trek of Northerners to London. Manchester United play Manchester City and Bolton Wanderers play Stoke City. All clubs from the north and with about 180,000 supporters making the journey. Then add on the 20,000 or so from Liverpool and you have, as Alex Ferguson has pointed out, a recipe for chaos. Just to add to the fun, the London Marathon takes place on the Sunday. There is absolutely no reason to play the FA Cup semi-finals in London. There is a host of quite suitable grounds in the North, which could be used and this mass trip to London be avoided. Of course, it is being done because the FA needs to recoup the cost of building the Wembley Stadium - a project that went way beyond all initial estimates - as well as most of the revisions.

A betting man will put his money on Manchester United to go to the final. But to play whom? I hope it will be Bolton Wanderers, of course, but they do have a propensity for chucking everything away in the last five minutes and Stoke have been playing well recently. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed. Bolton have not played in the FA Cup Final since 1958, when they beat Manchester United 2 - 0. Nat Lofthouse scored both goals. That Bolton team was made up of players, not one of whom cost Bolton a transfer fee - in spite of the fact that five of them were full internationals. Manchester United had been rebuilt after the Munich Disaster but was still made up of a lot of expensive players. This year Manchester United is still made up of expensive players - like Manchester City. I suppose Manchester United would like to avenge the defeat of 1958 but whether they play Bolton or Stoke I will be supporting the underdog. It worked out OK in the Carling Cup when Birmingham beat Arsenal.

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Nuclear Crisis Continues

Yesterday, we [Great Britain], along with France and the USA with the support of several Arab nations, plus Canada and Italy, started attacking targets in Libya to enforce the UN Resolution 1973 to prevent by all necessary means Col Gadaffi from killing wholesale all those who dared to stand up to his corrupt, deluded, robber baron regime. And this has taken the Japan nuclear disaster off the front pages of the world's newspapers. That is probably what many in governments and nuclear lobbies around the world want. It is vital to them that the truth of this disaster is hushed up. In the end, of course, it will not be and perhaps the reality will sink in.

Let us look at some of the things that have happened in the last few days. First of all, we should note that the crisis is still not over - 10 days after the event. There are about 200 workers at the site who are working in 6 hour shifts, each with 50 men. These men are all being exposed to excessive levels of radiation and already we know that the health of all of them has been permanently damaged. How soon they will start to suffer severe and probably terminal illnesses is impossible to say because we have no information about the exact levels of radiation to which they are being exposed. The temperature control of the reactors and their spent fuel rods is still severely compromised. How is it that even now the sea water cooling flows are still not adequate to bring the temperatures down? Is it because the heat exchange system is totally destroyed or is it because the water flows are inadequate. I suspect that first and foremost it is the first. The damage to the reactor vessels is such that there is no properly defined flow and contact area and this is why they have to rely on showering the vessels with water from fire engines, water cannons and bags underneath helicopters. It is a Heath-Robinson system because the whole installation is wrecked and even with power supplies restored and pumps working the vessels will not be cooled. If they are not, then there will be a total meltdown and radioactive material will pollute the environment over a wide area for a very long time. I cannot say how much of for how long because [a] I am not an expert and [b] the authorities world-wide want to hide the truth.

At this time there is a squad or possibly several squads - because firefighters and riot police [with water cannons] are now involved - of very brave men who are being asked to sacrifice their lives to try to get the installations at Fukushima made safe. Those people who still think that nuclear reactor power generation is the way ahead should tell us on what moral basis they believe that any workers should be employed on the understanding that if anything goes seriously wrong with a nuclear installation, they will be expected to commit suicide in order to make the system safe. The fog, subterfuge and silence come from spin doctors who want to under-state the risks. In a proper risk assessment, a balance has to be struck between disaster magnitude and risk of its happening. In terms of disaster magnitude a reactor meltdown rates pretty highly. That would not matter if the risk of its happening were zero. But it is not zero. Even in a non-seismic risk zone, the risk of a failure for some reason or other is not zero. In these circumstances, the installation has to be looked at very closely to allow the design of a safety system that is fool proof - under all circumstances. These risk assessments have to be carried out step by step until the answer to any question beginning "What if ...........?" is "Nothing." The fact that such assessments have not so far been carried out and satisfactorily leads to the silence and obfuscation that has been the public face of the people who know how bad things are now. It was revealed yesterday that even the UK government's chief scientific advisor had been giving wrong and mis-leading advice - either because he did not know or because he did not want to tell the truth.

In all normal day-to-day circumstances nuclear installations are quite OK. The problem is that when something serious goes wrong the consequences are so severe that it becomes difficult to allow such installations to be built. In many ways it is probably the case that many systems are given the go-ahead because it seems like an easy option. But we should consider also that if all the planned nuclear power stations around the world get to be built, we will soon start to run out of uranium. We do not have an endless supply of the stuff and it is expensive to produce. But when, on H&S grounds we believe that kids should wear goggles and helmets in order to play with conkers, how can we ever believe that it is safe to build nuclear power stations?

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What Next From Japan?

This morning the attempts by the Japanese authorities to suppress the nuclear disaster in one of their power stations has degenerated into farce. It would be hilarious if it were not so deadly serious. Now they are deploying helicopters to drop water onto the problem. What exactly are they bombing with this airborne attack? It has always been my impression that using aeroplanes of any kind to drop water has never been a particularly successful technique. How much water will a helicopter carry? Twenty tonne? How many helicopters have they got? Even a smallish pump could delivery 100 cu m/h or 100 tonne/h - and better directed at the source of the hazard. And the wind and the rotor downdraft blow the water all over the place so it is not very effective. In addition, the anti-riot police are being brought in to help with their water cannons. It all smacks of amateurism, incompetence and complacency. Here we have a row of nuclear reactors sitting across a geophysical fault line in an area with known severe risks of seismic activity and the attention that has been given to the most critical of the safety devices has been so lamentable that the operators are now in this desperate condition. Any system of risk analysis should highlight the protective devices that must be installed to protect against the most severe risks. Every such analysis takes one question after another that asks "What if....?" In the case of the nuclear reactor that analysis has to be taken to the point at which the answer to the last question is "Nothing!" It may be, of course, that such an examination of this power station was not done 40 years ago. But it should have been done in more recent times and if the questions could not be satisfactorily answered then changes should have been made to upgrade the safety devices. At this moment, things do not look good. I only hope for the sake of the whole of the Japanese nation that the workers on site manage to suppress the reactions and shut the place down permanently. Pictures coming from the site suggest that the plant is starting to look remarkably like Chernobyl.

I read a report yesterday which suggested that the total number of deaths that will be attributed to Chernobyl in the long term will be of the order of 200,000. This is a rather different estimate than the ones preferred by the nuclear lobby that says the death toll from Chernobyl was about 70 and ignores the health problems being experienced across Belarus.

Another smoke screen that needs to be avoided is the one about half lives. Half lives for measuring the decay of radioactive material is a convenient way of estimating how slowly or rapidly a substance degrades. If the final degradation to zero was to be considered, the cut-off point could be dragged out to infinity. So measuring the time taken for half the degradation to take place is a useful measure. But it does not tell us how long the substance concerned will be hazardous. That can be very much longer particularly with substances - like Strontium 90 - that degrade only slowly.

We must hope that today in Japan they succeed in their task. But even now, I feel for the workers near the reactors. They have almost certainly been over-exposed to excessive radiation. Snow is now falling across Japan and the atmosphere is getting colder. These will surely help.

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The End Of The Nuclear Option?

The crisis in Japan, with its nuclear reactors and storage facilities getting closer and closer to meltdown, should give the world cause to pause and to reconsider its future - at least as far as nuclear power is concerned. I am in total despair about the inability of politicians to act decisively, in the right way and at the right time on anything. One fundamental problem from which they all suffer, is the fact that they spend all their time talking to each other. So, every crackpot idea and fundamental misunderstanding goes around the world, unchecked, un-discussed and undisputed. Many a problem is ignored, misinterpreted and pushed into the long grass. Some questions, some problems are too difficult and the hope is that they will somehow go away or sort themselves out. They will not and they do not.

The disaster of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan were horrific events - now made worse by an uncontrollable industrial complex that should never have been built. There is no doubt that this event will make it much more difficult for the world-wide nuclear lobby to get the go-ahead to build any more nuclear power stations. If that happens, some good will come out of this. But we can expect in the next few weeks that attempts will be made to spin the news, under-state the levels of radiation; tell us how swiftly any contamination will disappear; the story will be modified in an Orwellian sense; Newspeak will re-write history. But this time I hope they will not get away with it. With Chernobyl they could go along with the Soviet news blackout and the subtle understatement - and claim that Chernobyl was an old fashioned poorly controlled Soviet reactor and such an event could not occur in the west. Now it is occurring and the disaster is already being covered in a thin coat of whitewash. Even Japanese citizens in the province around Fukishima are being kept in the dark and denied the truth. Nuclear power is attractive to politicians; in principle it is simple; doesn't give off CO2 and it seems very modern. And it is supported by a very powerful lobby. But I demand that they abandon nuclear power generation and concentrate on old fashioned systems. If we had spent the last 20 years working on cleaning up coal rather than prevaricating about the nuclear option, we would have had a world lead and we would have been able to deal with the CO2 emission problems.

My belief is that earthquake, floods and tsunami disasters will occur more frequently in the years ahead because of global warming and the uncontrolled growth of the human population. So many countries are now very over-crowded such that every extreme climatic event is certain to be a disaster. But no one wants to face up to controlling the world population - for all kinds of pathetic political reasons. It its present form, the world operates with 2/3rds of the human population living on the edge of starvation. That will get worse. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer - as Karl Marx predicted. If we want the whole of the world's peoples to live a life with a decent standard of living, then we have to reduce the population. It would also help other species. Most large land creatures are threatened with extinction as mankind swallows up more and more of the land area. I expect that the world will have to rely on periodic mega-disasters in order to regulate population. Politicians certainly will never do it. In medieval days we had the Black Death, which in about 3 years knocked off about 33% of the world's population. When will we have our own version of the Black Death? Anytime soon!

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The Crisis Deepens

The world is sinking into the mire. We still do not know what the final outcome is going to be with the nuclear crisis in Japan. And it is a crisis. The Japanese and world-wide nuclear lobby have been less than forthcoming about what is going on and just how bad things are. But as each day goes by the news gets worse. There was another explosion this morning and the team in Fukushima have called for police water cannon to come to help spray water onto the stricken plant. This surely is beyond desperation and, at the same time, the management have taken workers away from the reactors because radiation levels are too high. Meanwhile smoke and steam drift away from the site carry who knows what contaminants and nuclear fall-out. The Americans have now suggested that this disaster is one step [at least] worse than Three Mile Island, which was rated 5 on the nuclear disaster scale - Chernobyl was 7. This suggests that in spite of what the Japanese authorities have said, the situation is becoming very serious. If this does become as bad as Chernobyl, it will surely be the final nail in the coffin of nuclear power generation for a very long time. I have made my own views clear already. It has been suggested in recent days that the big advantage of nuclear power is that it is so clean. Rubbish! It has an effluent problem that makes every other other fuel option look like child's play. And no other option could ever produce a catastrophy like this.

But the world has other problem as well, like Libya, Bahrain, national debts - Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece - and an economic crisis affecting the whole world. Markets everywhere have collapsed and it matters not what our money is invested in, the whole lot has come tumbling down. And if the Japanese reactors go to meltdown, things will get much worse.

The value of my own savings, like everyone, everywhere, have fallen by 10% or so in the last week or so. Already we had paltry interestrates and governments are printing money like counterfieters on steroids. And I am pessimistic about the situation in the short term. I feel particularly aggrieved because so much is outside my control but yet it was very predictable. And just to add to the woes, the bankers who were responsible for so much continue to play with financial con-tricks that will generate buckets of money - providing that they so not also go to meltdown. And they carry on paying themselves vast sums that render them immune to any financial hardships.

And what about Libya. While we involved ourselves in Iraq and Afghanistan - where we should not - we do not involve ourselves in Libya, where we should be doing all possible to help the rebels who are fighting to rid the world of Gaddafi. Where is President Obama? Has he gone off on holiday? What is he proposing to do about anything? We have to support the rebels in Libya and the sooner we do so, the more likely it is that we will get the right result quickly. For once France seem ready to do something but we do have some "surrender monkeys" in Europe and Russia and China will oppose even a no fly zone. Quite why, I do not understand.

I suppose we should hope for the best but plan for the worst. Even then, I do not know what to do. And it's no use waiting for politicians to tell me.

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Everything Is Gone

There are many things that I want to write about but I cannot by-pass commenting on the cataclysmic devastation in Japan. Reports tell us that the earthquake, that hit the north island on Friday 11th March with its epi-centre off the east coast, was one of the most powerful ever recorded anywhere and generated a tsunami with waves well over 30 feet high. These swept across the Pacific Ocean but most of the damage was done as they swept ashore in Japan travelling at speeds approaching 100 mph. The waves swept all before them and devastated whole towns; some were just swept away like so much matchwood. The pictures show devastation like nothing I have seen since the pictures of the aftermath of Hiroshima. But in some ways these pictures were worse. The destruction included boats - and ships, even - lifted from harbours and carried inland to be unceremoniously dumped amid the urban wreckage. Fighter aircraft from military bases were also swept along by the raging torrents of mud and sea water. Power supplies have gone, water supplies cut off and many, many roads torn up. The devastation is on a scale hardly ever seen since wartime and the Japanese PM has said that this is the worst catastrophy to hit his country since WWII. No one will argue with him on that.

The whole of the world community must make a massive effort to relieve and re-build and help Japan recover. One complication on this front is the damage to several of Japan's nuclear power stations. Most are now shut down and there have been several severe explosions. Thousands have been evacuated but the public are being told not to worry; there is no risk of a radiation problem. This may be true. Or it may not. The nuclear industry world-wide has a doubtful reputation when it comes to telling the truth about nuclear "accidents". The pictures I saw this morning of an explosion throwing lumps of metal and concrete several hundred feet into the air did not make be believe that these were little local difficulties. The Japanese engineers are frantically pumping seawater into the reactor jackets to try to cool them down. When this fails there is an explosion. Using seawater like this makes it quite clear that whatever else these reactors are beyond repair. Hopefully, the pressure vessels containing the reactor cores will remain intact. If nay do not, we have another Chernobyl. Indeed, at this moment we have the potential for several Chernobyl's. I have been long term opposed to the extension of nuclear power use because of exactly this problem. If these had been conventional power stations, they could have been shut down without any risks outside the power stations concerned. And immediately afterwards - no matter how severe the disaster - the emergency services and engineers could have moved in to start clearing up the mess and repairing the damage. If we think it is possible to do that with a nuclear disaster, we should remember Chernobyl. That disaster occurred in 1986. All the men who fought to put out the fires and stop the nuclear reactor are long dead - all 2,000 of them. The fall-out drifted across Belarus and, in spite of lots of news blackouts by the former Soviet authorities, we now know that the effects on the population of Belarus were and still are, catastrophic. It is estimated that 80% of the children in the blighted country have health issues that can be directly linked to Chernobyl. I don't know what we will finally learn about the radiation damage from these Japanese power station explosions but yesterday, the US Navy moved one of its aircraft carriers away from Japanese waters because they had detected increased levels of radiation - and they were 100 miles away!

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Sergeant Leonard Lomell

I have been away for a couple of weeks and much has happened that I would like to discuss. But before that I would like to say a little about Leonard "Bud" Lomell. You have never heard of him? Neither had I until a few hours ago and, even then, it was only because he had died. He was not a young many anymore. In fact, he was 91. I would like to have met him because he was an ordinary man of whom America could be proud.

Bud Lomell was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1920, the adopted son of Scandinavian immigrant parents. He grew up in New Jersey and at school was a star player in both football and baseball. He was good enough to win an athletics scholarship to Tennessee Wesleyan College where he edited the student's newspaper. This was the 1930s when America was drowning in the Great Depression and Bud's father was struggling to make some money to feed his family. Bud found a job as a brakeman on freight trains until in 1942 he joined up with the US Army 76th Infantry Division and then volunteered for the US Army Rangers.

In 1944 he found himself in Britain training for the upcoming invasion of France. When the D-Day landings occurred, Bud Lomell played a crucial part in both saving American and British lives but also in guaranteeing the success of the mission. Shortly before H-hour on D-Day, 6th June 1944, Sergeant Lomell with his platoon came ashore on the French coast in an assault landing craft carrying their weapons and grappling equipment to climb the 100 ft cliffs of the Pointe de Hoc in Normandy. Lomell was hit by machine gun fire as he waded ashore but, in spite of his wound, he carried on and made for the ropes up the steep cliff face. The object of the platoon and the 200 men of the 2nd Ranger Battalion was to eliminate six clifftop German artillery guns that threatened the entire D-Day assault on Omaha and Utah beaches. The Americans climbed the cliffs under heavy fire from machine guns and grenades and with the Germans trying to cut the ropes. The Rangers made it onto the cliff top only to find that the artillery guns were not where aerial reconnaissance had shown them to be. The pictures were of dummies. After sustaining heavy losses Bud Lomell and Sergeant Jack Kuhn moved inland and found the real weapons located in an orchard about 3/4 mile from the coast. The Germans who would man the guns had taken cover in a farmhouse about 100 yards away as the area took heavy fire from the US battleship Texas and RAF aircraft. The Americans were starting to come ashore on Omaha beach and the guns were ready to bombard them and probably destroy the invasion. While the guns were unattended, Sergeant Kuhn kept watch while Lomell twice crawled across open ground to put all the guns out of action using incendiary grenades. By that time Sergeant Lomell destroyed those guns he had lost 12 of 22 men, dead or wounded from his platoon and of the 225 men of three companies of the 2nd Ranger Battalion only 90 were left standing, neither injured nor dead at the end of D-Day. Sergeant Lomell made it to Berlin and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his action on D-Day as well as a Silver Star for his bravery in capturing Hill 400 in December 1944, during the long Battle of the Bulge.

After WWII, Leonard Lomell trained as a lawyer, married Charlotte Ewart and had three daughters. He rarely spoke about the war and even when he did, it was with great reluctance. However, in a book published in 1998, The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys, Stephen Ambrose said that Sergeant Bud Lomell was the single American next to Eisenhower most responsible for the success of D-Day. This may have been true but Lomell was concerned more about a different view and said "I lost half my guys. What more is there to know?"

Bud Lomell died on 1st March 2011. The picture above was painted by the young military artist, Larry Selman, who came to know the soldier very well and shows Bud Lomell on Pointe de Hoc, firing at the Germans as his comrades scramble over the cliff top. On hearing of Bud Lomell's death, Larry Selman said that although Leonard Lomell was an ordinary American "His passing makes the world a little poorer but his contribution made it a much better place to be in."

An ordinary American but one who did extra-ordinary things. The Independent newspaper recalls that once, when a group of lawyers refused entry to a Jewish associate into a private club, Leonard Lomell told them flatly that "I didn't climb the cliffs of Normandy to find fascists in my own back yard."

Farewell, Sir, and Rest in Peace.

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