Assessing Risk of Nuclear Disaster

I commented at LoOG: 

I started this as a reply to Pat above, but it just got longer and longer and longer, and it’s probably the most significant thing I’ve written about Fukushima since it all went down, so I decided to start a new thread with it.

I was a proponent of nuclear power before the Fukushima disaster, and I’ve had a long six months or so to think about this, but I’m not sure if I’m still on board with nuclear because: human error rates are always higher than we estimate them to be. I’m not sure the real risks are worth the benefits; so I’m skeptical of the way we usually evaluate risk when it comes to nuclear power.

In the case of Japan, the tsunami affected sparsely-populated coastal areas (Japan’s infrastructure has already been shaped by insider’s knowledge of risk distributed over thousands of years of seismic activity.) Nevertheless, the tsunami still managed to kill almost 30,000 people. This speaks to the sheer power of a 9.2 quake right offshore more than it does to poor planning à la New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. For what Fate dealt it, Japan did a hell of a job minimizing casualties.

In contrast to the 30,000 tsunami victims, the nuclear meltdown so far has sentenced about eighty people to death from various cancers, according to certain epidemiology panels. This number could be way off-base, but even if it wildly underestimates increases in the incidence of cancer, the point is that the number of deaths-by-tsunami is significantly larger than the deaths-by-nuclear-meltdown. Therefore, in consideration of a worst-case scenario like Fukushima, nuclear power is not that much of a threat to public safety. Or so the proponent’s argument goes.

Click to read more ...

Leaving Fukushima

Kevin has written a lot about how his family got out of Fukushima, Japan following the Daiichi meltdown.  Parts I through VIII can be found on this site plus Kevin's own travel blog: Travel. Write. Drink Plenty of Fluids.  As some readers know, I've been working on a book about the whole event to be loosely framed as a creative narrative but altogether more a work of science journalism.  My plan calls for a long and ambitious schedule and party explains why I haven't been writing many articles here recently.  (There are a few other reasons as well, but hopefully I can get some more time for articles soon.)  Anyways, my first thoughts on the disaster have appeared as a functional article on the website Expat Arrivals titled In the Case of Emergency: What's an Expat to Do?  Here is an excerpt: 

In the case of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, the Japanese government was hopelessly inept at pressuring the plant operator to disclose necessary information. When numbers finally came out, they were conspicuously low, and then they got conspicuously slightly less low, and now they’re conspicuously slightly less low than that.

Crowdsourcing and social media surfing is a much better way to stay informed. Basically, we had a dude in Canada who had nothing better to do, so he assembled information from people on the ground and posted it all on his Facebook page. By checking his Facebook page with our Smartphones, we knew which roads were closed, where quarantine lines were, which cities had gas and other supplies and which cities didn’t, the best routes to escape, which way radioactivity was blowing, and what the levels were. We and others challenged the assembled information by commenting and demanding links to credible sources.

The next steps in our constantly evolving plan were decided by piecing together such credible press releases, crowd sources, and scientific articles to get a clear picture of exactly what was happening. The mainstream media was useless for getting accurate information: typically a major news outlet would report what we already knew and had acted on two or three days later, usually riddled with inaccuracies and the trappings of news theatre.

The article is of fairly moderate length (just over 1000 words) and not always relevant to the purposes of the Inductive, but it provides a good glimpse into what it was like getting my family out of Japan for anyone who is interested.  

Cash Rules Everything Around Me

I've written before that it's very important for America to learn to count past "one, two, many".  Case in point: BP's $25,000,000 fine for DPing Alaska's North Slope back in 2006.  From the New York Times:

BP will pay $25 million in civil fines to settle charges arising from two spills from its network of pipelines in Alaska in 2006 and from a willful failure to comply with a government order to properly maintain the pipelines to prevent corrosion, federal officials announced on Tuesday.

The fine is the largest per-barrel assessment ever levied against an oil company in a spill case and represents a new blow to BP’s corporate treasury and reputation.

The aggressive approach of federal prosecutors in this case could portend huge fines and penalties from BP’s much larger spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

I will eat my own arm if $25,000,000 dollars "represents a new blow to BP's corporate treasury and reputation".  BP's 2010 revenue was $309,000,000,000.  $25,000,000 represents 1/12360 (0.008%) of BP's 2010 revenue.

To put this figure in terms the average person can understand, the median annual household income in the United States in 2010 was just under $50,000.  0.008% of $50,000 is four dollars.  BP paying a $25,000,000 fine is like you or me paying four dollars.  (For comparison purposes, a typical bounced check fee represents a six to ten times greater economic burden on the individual than a $25,000,000 fine represents for BP.)  Surely a $25,000,000 fine is not "a new blow to BPs corporate treasury"; hence, I do not have to eat my own arm.

Click to read more ...

A Response to Jane Mayer

typical libertariansI read all of Jane Mayer's New Yorker epic takedown of the American libertarian movement.  "Covert Operations: the Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama" is about the Brothers Koch a.k.a. "The Kochtopus", two - or four, depending on which brothers one considers part of the Koch inner-circle - shady oil billionaires behind the curtain of the libertarian movement from the Cato Institute to the Tea Party.  It's creepy to think there's one devious, eight-armed creature pulling all those levers of influence, like "The Company" from Prison Break.  But Mayer's propagandistic assessment is underhanded, full of political bias, and based on fallacious logic.  And before you suspect me also of being on the Koch's payroll (I live below the poverty line.), I go on the record as saying that I think we should use as little fossil fuels as possible, that big business is obstructionist and has unduly influenced policy-making in Washington, and that oil is the devil.

Click to read more ...

Coherence

Image by British Petroleum via Channel4The young, Distributist conservatives at Front Porch Republic can be respectful and wholesome even while being cynically critical of both corporate and government concentrations of power.  In the words of Gregory Wolfe at Commonweal:

...It is highly unlikely that the FPR will be adopted by Republican Party operatives and become a viable political force any time soon — so you might be tempted to write them off as descendents (sic) of Don Quixote — but these guys are, well, smart, and maybe even a little prophetic.

I may be wrong, but I happen to think that Catholics of whatever political stripe would find dialogue with the FPR crowd invigorating. I mean, if subsidiarity means anything, then Catholics ought to be wary of the path we’re heading down — wedding the Leviathan state to multinational capitalism. We should all care about the preservation of three endangered species: “Place. Limits. Liberty.”

Click to read more ...

Our Visceral (Energy) Policy

Please help me live by writing to your Representative about nuclear power. Photo by Norbert RosingIn "No Energy". the Atlantic's Joshua Green writes about the history of environmental disasters - in particular oil spills - spurring on environmental legislation.  There was the landmark 1969 spill off Santa Barbara which gave birth to Earth Day and the National Environmental Protection Act, thereby putting a moratorium on offshore drilling.  And the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill catalyzed the 1990 Clean Air Act, eight years in the making.  Seems pretty straight-forward.

So why does the most recent Gulf explosion have most politicians defending offshore drilling?  Green suggests that the Democrats have put all their eggs in one basket with the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman Climate Bill, viewed as a final Hail Mary attempt to regulate carbon emissions during this session of Congress.  The bill is a two-headed monster of a compromise, pushing for nuclear energy and offshore drilling investments while simultaneously starting implementation of a cap-and-trade scheme for electrical utilities and gradually expanding to other industries.  The rush to defend offshore drilling is par for the course for soulless Republicans and political maneuvering for sneaky Democrats.  God (or BP) clearly doesn't care.

Click to read more ...

Hot Luntz

Political Consultant Frank Luntz is arguably the most influential man in the world.  His distinguished career as a director of focus groups for the Republican Party, frequent commentator on Fox News, consultant for conservative political parties in Australia and the United Kingdom, and author is tempered with the unapologetic dishonesty of his mission and that of his company, the Word Doctors.  The Word Doctors's work is, as Luntz himself describes it, "testing language and finding words that will help (our) clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate."  In other words, Luntz is an unabashed propagandist in the grand tradition of Big Brother and Napoleon the Pig.

Click to read more ...

There Will Be Blood

This graph of the history of the price of oil shows a long-term price decrease amid progressive speculative bubbles from the mid-19th century to just before the turn of the century.  During this time, extraction was streamlined and consolidated, and there was a large increase in demand due to new oil-dependent, pervasive technologies such as the automobile. 

From the early 19th century until the 1973 oil shocks, the price of oil remained relatively stable as shortages were considered a non-risk and the externality of emissions remained undiscovered.  From 1973, the OPEC cartel began heavily interfering in the market.  OPEC recognized that oil had pervaded much of the economy and, as such, it was an inelestic good: this meant that even at a very high price, people would continue purchasing oil. 

Click to read more ...

Common Sense Considerations for Green Jobs

As someone who generally opposes government intervention in the economy, I am highly skeptical about the efficacy of green job creation.  I believe government economic policy should foster an atmosphere where the forces of the free market are allowed to choose winners and losers.  However, I also believe government economic policy must focus on solving externalities by weighting incentives via taxation or similar soft-touch means. 

Nevertheless, I recently read current American Enterprise Institute Director of Economic-Policy Studies and former George W. Bush and John McCain presidential campaign advisor Kevin Hassett's sensationalist, straw-man editorial on Bloomberg.com and, after cringing a bit and then vomiting in my mouth, felt the compeling need to distance myself from Hassett's argument.

Click to read more ...

Cash for Clunkers and Keynesianism

I recently read this article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, exposing cash for clunkers as an idea that turns out, was as stupid as it sounded:

Cash for clunkers had two objectives: help the environment by increasing fuel efficiency, and boost car sales to help Detroit and the economy. It achieved neither. According to Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, at best "the reduction in gasoline consumption will cut our oil consumption by 0.2 percent per year, or less than a single day's gasoline use." Burton Abrams and George Parsons of the University of Delaware added up the total benefits from reduced gas consumption, environmental improvements and the benefit to car buyers and companies, minus the overall cost of cash for clunkers, and found a net cost of roughly $2,000 per vehicle. Rather than stimulating the economy, the program made the nation as a whole $1.4 billion poorer.

Apparently, it didn't even benefit the automakers, who have seen record sales slides for September in the wake of the program.

Click to read more ...