Fukushima: one year on and a continuing disaster

Fukushima: hit by earthquake and tsunami
March 11, 2011

A year since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, so we can expect a dose of anniversary articles. Scientists for Global Responsibility have published an overview by Dr Ian Fairlie of the nuclear disaster's causes and main preliminary lessons. Also its political effects in Europe.

It’s a continuing slow motion disaster. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency privately talk of it continuing for years whilst other scientists say decades.

It’s still uncertain if Japan will succeed in keeping the reactor fuel cool to stop it from melting through the bottoms of the reactor buildings into the soil below.  The 10 m thick concrete bases are an insurance against this. But were it to occur, we would be deep in uncharted territory.

The article notes that the reactor malfunctions, fuel meltdowns and explosions were due not only to the tsunami, but despite official denials, also to the earthquake.

A major headache now is the structural instability of the wrecked reactor buildings which may collapse at any time due to the massive weight of the storage ponds, unwisely situated on top of the reactors.

Interestingly, Dr Fairlie argues Fukushima is not as serious a disaster as Chernobyl.

Political impact

Germany - anti-nuclear demo 26 March 2011
(Organised within a fortnight, if the date is correct!)

Different European countries have responded in opposite ways. In the UK, the coalition government, most political parties and many parts of the media appear to be ignorant of the continuing events at Fukushima.  Or perhaps in denial about them. Certainly most of the UK press and the BBC are heavily pro-nuclear in their outlooks. UK civil servants colluded with the nuclear industry in downplaying the impact of Fukushima on public support for nuclear power.

The result is that the UK remains strongly pro-nuclear. Dr Fairlie illustrates this by citing the nuclear vote in the Commons on July 18, 2011. Only 14 out of 650 UK MPs voted against the government’s Nuclear Policy Statements. In contrast, two weeks earlier, on June 30, the German Parliament voted by 513 to 79 to phase out all nuclear power by 2022.

In Germany, several 250,000-strong demonstrations took place after Fukushima. In addition to the phase out policy, stiff anti-nuclear windfall taxes have been imposed.

And Japan itself

The impact on Japan is truly numbing.  The Japanese people are struggling with the combined consequences of the earthquake, the tsunami and of the Fukushima disaster. Over 100,000 have had to be evacuated from their homes, possibly for decades, whilst an estimated 20,000 were killed by the earthquake and tsunami themselves.

Is the IAEA equipped to monitor nuclear safety?

The competence of the International Atomic Energy Agency isn't touched on in the article, and but I'll mention it here, as it’s a hot topic. The IAEA, it turns out, is an institution whose main purpose and interest is to advocate civil use of nuclear power. The IAEA statute includes: "to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world". As such, it’s often argued that the IAEA is permeated by a fundamental conflict of interest preventing it operating as a regulatory agency in matters of nuclear safety. 

Another topic not covered is the political impact of Fukushima in the USA. Europe is dealt with, but not elsewhere.

For my previous thoughts on the nuclear question, with plenty of links, type "nuclear" into this blog's search box.

Man, the feeblest thing in nature

First edition of Pascal's Pensées 1670

The thoughts of Mr. Pascal on religion and some other subjects
found amongst his papers after his death

       Here is Pensée no 347 ...

       Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.  There is no need for the whole universe to arm itself in order to crush him: one vapour, one drop of water will suffice to kill him.  But when the universe crushes him, man is still nobler than his slayer, because man knows that he is dying, and understands the advantage the universe has over him.  The universe knows none of this.

      All our dignity consists, then, in thought.  Thought alone is what elevates us, and not space and time, which we can never fill.  Let us labour, then, to think well;  this is the principle of morality.

           ... and here it is in French ...

      L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau pensant.  Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'écraser; une vapeur, une goutte d'eau suffit pour le tuer.  Mais quand l'univers l'écraserait, l'homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, puisqu'il sait qu'il meurt et l'avantage que l'univers a sur lui.  L'univers n'en sait rien.

      Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée.  C'est de là qu'il nous faut relever et non de l'espace et de la durée, que nous ne saurions remplir.  Travaillons donc à bien penser voilà le principe de la morale.

Blaise Pascal 1623-1662

There are roughly a thousand of these thoughts. About 300 years ago the original scraps of paper were glued helter-skelter (upside-down, sideways, at all angles) into a large album that is now protected as one of the most precious cultural treasures of France in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris.  I've searched in vain for an image of this album to put up here. The mathematician George F Simmons tells how he had the privilege of spending a couple of hours examining the album, hunting for familiar passages, and occasionally finding them. Pascal is to France what Plato is to Greece, Dante to Italy, Cervantes to Spain, and Shakespeare to England, he says.*

Pascal’s purpose was to write a monumental and irresistible defence of the Christian religion against the unbelievers, but he died aged 39 in 1662 before he could complete the work.   In general the theme of the Pensées is the grandeur and misery of man.

“Pascal's Wager” is a subject for another day.  In essence it’s the argument that were you to take a bet on God’s existence, it is advisable to bet for rather than against, as the consequences of being wrong on the one side are mild, and on the other catastrophic. Expressed thus it sounds like a satire perpetrated by an atheist. But Pascal was devout, so there's actually more to it than that.

* Calculus Gems 2007, p 123. Simmons actually quotes Pascal’s biographer Ernest Mortimer (1959) quoting a Professor Chevalier.

Gösta min morbror

My uncle Gösta as I like to remember him. He died on Saturday morning aged 88 (I think) after a period of undeserved suffering, despite the best medical care. He was a kind man. A phrase I don’t often use, but may he rest in peace. I used to tease Gösta about the small vocabulary Swedish has compared to English, such as the old standbys of pig/pork, sheep/mutton etc. He in turn delighted to cite cases where the opposite is true. For instance, I said just now he was my uncle. But that doesn’t actually tell you all you want to know. In Swedish I would say he is my morbro. From this you would gather not merely that he's my uncle but also that he's my mother’s brother. As another instance, he liked to call attention to the inelegant expression “Swedish has a small vocabulary”. In Swedish you can say Svenska är ordfattig: literally Swedish is word poor. Far preferable. And tends to belie the very point being made. Is there a word for that I wonder. Just the sort of puzzle that would send us scurrying for the dictionaries … 

I took the photo in 1978 at Luleå as Gösta boarded the night train to Stockholm after Hilda’s funeral (his mother, my grandmother, or as the Swedes say, min mormor).

Sombre or Somber?

I hesitated before writing somber. My first thought was sombre and it turns out my first thought was right.  The grammarist blog tells me that somber and sombre are both used,  somber being preferred in American English, whilst sombre is preferred in all other major varieties of English.   It gives three examples of each.

From The Guardian:

      Derek Cianfrance’s film is a sombre, painful portrait of a toxic marriage ...

And from The Washington Post:

      Those events complete a somber week at the White House ...

Delighted to have found this blog which I'm sure I shall be visiting again some time. Actually, the blog says while sombre, not whilst sombre. Whilst is better here.

Happy and somber days in London

In London last week. Spent a couple of happy days in the British Library. Also saw Three Days in May. At the Library, besides trawling through old copies of New Scientist and visiting the manuscripts exhibition (see below and below) I looked up: Einstein quotations, mid-20th century references to the canals of Mars, and John Dover Wilson’s 1936 edition of Hamlet.

Might have something to say about all of these in due course, as well as explaining why I visited this memorial, beside Tower Hill tube station, to merchant seamen who perished in the First World War:- 

At Tower Hill Memorial, 16 Feb 2012

Of microwaves and a physicist-chef

“It is a sad reflection on our civilisation that we can, and do, measure the temperature of the atmosphere of Venus, yet we don’t know what goes on inside soufflés.”

The words in 1969 of physicist Professor Nicholas Kunti.  I stumbled across them last week in the New Scientist edition of 3rd April of that year while looking up the canals of Mars in the British Library.

It seems the good professor enjoyed amongst his friends and closer acquaintances an enviable reputation as a bon viveur and cook.  In furtherance of which, he proposed that physicists get together with the great chefs to invent a new cuisine for the microwave oven.

His own inventions included an inverted Baked Alaska : instead of ice cream surrounded by fruit, with meringue outside (the traditional arrangement), the prof had fruit inside, surrounded by meringue, with ice cream outside. 5 seconds in the microwave cooks the fruit from the inside mingling juices with the meringue, and leaving the ice cream on the outside cold.

He used a hypothermic syringe to inject pineapple juice into roasting pork.

And he devised a system for measuring and reading off the temperature inside a soufflé, fulfilling his ambition of placing this branch of haute cuisine on a par with the exploration of Venus.

A happy housewife shows off the
Amana Radar Range microwave oven in 1967

The surprise to me was that they had microwave ovens so far back. An innovation I thought belonged to the 1980’s.  But I find they were an accidental by-product of Second World War radar research.

Dr. Percy LeBaron Spencer

Radar used magnetrons, these being vacuum tubes that produce microwave radiation (a type of electromagnetic radiation that has a wavelength between 1 mm and 30 cm).  In 1946, the American engineer Dr. Percy LeBaron Spencer was working on magnetrons, and happened to have a candy bar in his pocket. He found it had melted, and linked this effect to the microwaves he was working with.

Experiments led him to the discovery that microwaves will cook foods faster than conventional ovens that cook with heat.

The Raytheon Corporation, his employer, produced the first commercial microwave oven in 1954. It was called the 1161 Radar Range. It was large, expensive, and had a power of 1600 watts.  I have all this from the website of the Southwest Museum of Engineering, Communication and Computation in Arizona, which has photos of the early monstrosities, and informs us that microwave ovens began to be used in home kitchens in 1967 when the first domestic model was produced by Amana (a division of Raytheon). This information is accompanied by the happy housewife illustration above.

I ought to add that the caption is mine not theirs.

I finger parchment in the British Library

Henry IV's Great Bible, 1410

To the Royal Manuscripts exhibition at the British Library. Runs till 13th March. Parchment and vellum on display, with the notice beloved of modern curators “please touch!”  Parchment is sheepskin, vellum calfskin.  You wouldn’t know it, felt like top quality, thick shiny-surface paper.  Well actually you would know it, since it hadn't been cut up, it still had the shape of an animal skin.

The British museum didn’t used to scruple, and maybe still doesn’t for all I know, to disfigure priceless medieval manuscripts with their stamp: MVSEVM BRITANNICVM about an inch square in red ink.

Some truly massive tomes, none more so than the Great Bible of King Henry IV, from about 1410.  630 mm (25 inches) tall, probably used for readings in the royal chapel.  That's it to the left, but for a real feel of it, take a look at this popup image.

Several manuscripts looked as fresh as if they had been made yesterday and boasted large expanses of a startlingly bright blue pigment, of which they were clearly proud. Made from lapis lazuli, a blue stone imported from Afghanistan. This popup is a good example.

Saw the first known instance of a reference book arranged alphabetically. A manuscript encyclopaedia of world knowledge in medieval Latin, dating from about 1370. Omne bonum, about all good things. Open at a page delineating ancilla (servant) and Anglia (England).  By an Exchequer clerk named James le Palmer. Apparently compiled and written for his own personal use, covered topics such as theology, canon law, natural sciences, the history of man, and the liberal arts. A medieval layman's quest for knowledge. A man after my heart you could say.