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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