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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