Only one third of the heat energy produced in a nuclear reactor is transformed into electricity.  In Japan, the remaining two thirds of the energy that remains in the water vapor– that is, twice as much energy as contained in the generated electricity – is disposed of in the sea.  In the cooling system, seawater is used to cool the water vapor, which condenses again to water and is circulated through the reactor once again.  This heated seawater is called “thermal discharge”.  How much heat does this thermal discharge carry into the sea?  The amount is startling.

Before the Fukushima accident, that is, at the end of 2010, Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors were producing a total of 49,112,000 kilowatts of electricity.  So every day they were throwing away twice that much, approximately 100,000,000 kilowatts of energy, in the form of heat, into the sea.

This means that every day they were pumping into the sea energy equivalent to 100 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. The Hiroshima bomb destroyed the city in an instant and ended the lives of some 140,000 people, but when energy 100 times that great is “dropped” into the sea daily, what effect does that have?  That it would not be destructive of the ocean’s ecology is unimaginable.  Before saying that “nuclear power plants supply one third of the demand for electricity”, it needs to be said that “twice as much energy as the electricity they produce is used to heat up the sea.”

I want to ask, what kind of global warming debate is it that never discusses this fact?

In Japan, the number one global warming agent is the nuclear power plants.

After I left the company I was working for, I spent a long time translating medical books.  In the 1970s I was translating books depicting the suffering of people whose health was damaged by environmental pollution, and at the same time through an agent was accepting work from industry.  At that time I received a request from

TEPCO to translate a 1970s report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).  In it was the following passage.

“When thermal discharge from nuclear power plants is released into the sea, the heat does not immediately disperse.  Rather it concentrates and remains suspended in what are called “hot spots”.  For this reason it has a very large effect on sea life near the shore.  In the shallows, even a difference of two or three degrees can kill fish eggs or young fish.”

I translated this English correctly and delivered the manuscript to TEPCO.  The report of which it was a part was apparently suppressed within the company.  To this day it has never appeared.

Moreover, the claim that nuclear power is a cheap form of energy is also untrue.  Nuclear power plants are located far from the users of the electricity, so they require extraordinarily long transmission systems (In 1964 the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) stipulated that “Dangerous nuclear power plants must not be located in heavily populated areas”).  The nuclear power plants that deliver electricity  to the capital are the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini reactors, Niigata Prefecture’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactor, and Ibaragi Prefecture’s Tokai Daini reactor.   The 14 nuclear power plants sending electricity to the Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe) area are lined up along the faraway shore of the Japan Sea at Wakasa Bay, in Fukui Prefecture.　When you take into account the transmission systems connecting the power plants with the metropolitan areas they serve, you cannot call it an inexpensive source of electricity.

Without Nuclear Power, Will There Be Blackouts?

After the Fukushima Daiichi accident, TEPCO carried out planned blackouts, and the Kan Naoto administration, “in order to avoid a major blackout due to electricity shortages in the summer months” is considering enacting measures enforcing limits on electricity consumption for the first time since the oil shock of 1974. This deep-seated “blackout fear” held by so many seems to be grounded in the idea that we must continue gingerly to maintain the nuclear power industry, which advertises itself as providing one-third of the country’s electricity. What I see in the opinion polls is the attitude, I don’t like living with nuclear power plants, but without them there is no way to get the electricity, so there’s nothing to be done because like they say, you can’t exchange your back for your belly.

This is a huge misunderstanding that must be corrected.

A survey by year of the generating capacity of Japan’s main sources of electrical power compared with the total amount of electricity demand tells a different story.  In no year has the peak demand for electricity – that is, the demand for electricity in the hours between 2 and 3pm on the hottest days of summer – exceeded what could be provided by the combination of fossil fuel and water powered generators.   Moreover, the highest recorded peak demand was in 2001, and has never been surpassed in the ten years since then.  Rather, with the economic downturn, demand for electricity fell in 2008 and 2009.

From whence, then, comes the misunderstanding that nuclear power plants supply one third of the country’s electricity, and that without them there would be blackouts?.  The answer sounds like a joke, but it is true: it is that while Japan has a very large capability for generating electricity from natural gas, these facilities have been intentionally kept operating at only 50-60 per cent of capacity.  Among the major sources of electricity used in the advanced countries, natural gas is the cleanest.  Then there are the petroleum powered plants; amazingly they are operating at only 10 to 20 per cent of their capacity.  (This figure may sound unbelievable, but since the 1970s Oil Shock, most of the developed countries have a policy of reducing oil consumption as far as possible.  Japan’s fossil fuel power plants use mainly coal and natural gas.) The idea that without nuclear power there would be blackouts is nonsense.

The reason TEPCO carried out intentional blackouts after the earthquake is that the fossil fuel reactors in the region also suffered temporary damage. No doubt there was also difficulty delivering fuel.  But repairing fossil fuel power plants is nowhere near as difficult at repairing nuclear power plants.  It’s just a matter of replacing damaged parts.  Once repair work begins, it doesn’t take long before the plant is operating again.  And once the fossil fuel plants are back on line, electricity demand is no problem.

After its nuclear plants were so badly damaged, TEPCO should have put its natural gas and petroleum plants into full operation, but it did not.  Rather it carried out intentional blackouts, bringing confusion to the metropolitan area and bringing losses both to industry and to private citizens.  In this it did not fulfill its responsibility as an electricity provider, and revealed a fundamental problem.  And now we hear  everywhere language fanning the fear of summertime blackouts, but this is only a false  rumor being spread by people who know nothing of electrical power generation. (Translators note: in fact in the summer since this was written, there were no electrical blackouts in Japan.)

A natural gas power plant can be built in a few months.  This was made clear in an article appearing the April 6, 2011 edition of Gasu Energii Shinbun (Gas Energy News) by Ishii Akira, head of the Energy and Environment Research Center, titled “After Fukushima, the Age of Natural Gas”.  In this article, Ishii explains Japan’s energy situation from the standpoint of a professional.  The Fukushima nuclear power plant accident took place on March 11.  Why didn’t TEPCO begin immediately to take action to ensure that there would be no electrical shortage?  If they couldn’t get it done in time, why did they not immediately ask the world’s largest manufacturer of natural gas power plants, America’s General Electric (GE) to do it for them?  An electric company that can’t supply electricity to the public has no right to be called an electric company.

Nuclear power supporters will argue that the supply of natural gas is limited.  But this too is the outdated opinion of one who does not know the energy industry.  As Ishii Akira pointed out in an article of Feb 2, 2011 in Gas Energy News, new sources of natural gas are being discovered one after another all over the world.  In the Mediterranean Sea, offshore from Madagascar, under the sea to the east of India, on the continental shelf in northwestern Australia, in Brazil, in Turkmenistan – in the ten years up to 2009 the world’s known supply of underground deposits has increased by close to 30 per cent.  In addition to this natural gas supply, new, so-called non-traditional gases such as coal bed methane, tight sand gas, shale gas, and methane hydrate are being developed one after another.  According to Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (which is dedicated to locating natural resources for Japan) the underground reserves of these new forms of natural gas total more than 922 trillion cubic meters, more than five times the reserves of traditional natural gas. No doubt there will be future discoveries one after another, so I would say that we have enough gas reserves alone to last well over 200 years.

Translated by Douglas Lummis, ideaspeddler@gmail.com

Takashi Hirose can be contacted at takhi@jcom.home.ne.jp

This is excerpted from the concluding chapter of Takashi Hirose
Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster now available in English from Amazon Kindle Books.

India hopes to acquire uranium from South Africa, which is party to a treaty that bars signatories from conducting nuclear trade with states that do not have a full-scale safeguards agreement in place with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Indo-Asian News Service reported on Tuesday (see GSN, Oct. 13).

Discussions on the uranium supply are under way, even though nuclear-armed India does not allow comprehensive monitoring of its atomic facilities and is not a member state to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, said New Delhi’s ambassador to South Africa, Virendra Gupta.

“It appears to us that there will need to be an exception” to the African Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Treaty, Gupta said (see GSN, May 6).

“But it will not be difficult. We have civil nuclear agreements with several countries. I don’t see any reason why we can’t do it here,” the envoy added.

He spoke in Pretoria following a summit between the leaders of India, South Africa and Brazil. The three heads of state issued a statement that seemingly addressed India as a reasonable nuclear actor.

“The leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the goal of the complete elimination of all nuclear weapons within a specified time frame, in a comprehensive, universal, nondiscriminatory, verifiable and irreversible manner,” according to the statement from Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, South African President Jacob Zuma and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

“Brazil and South Africa welcomed India’s engagement with, and interest in, participation in the relevant international multilateral export control regimes and utilization of their guidelines,” the declaration adds (see GSN, Jan. 31; Arvind Padmanabhan, Indo-Asian News Service/Yahoo!News, Oct. 18).

Source: http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20111019_7101.php

THE COALITION AGAINST NUCLEAR ENERGY (CANE)
PO BOX 82 PLETTENBERG BAY 6600 SOUTH AFRICA

In March 2011, soon after the catastrophe of Fukushima, the Minister of Energy declared for six new reactors as part of the Integrated Resource Plan for electricity production (the IRP2010). This was also in the face of heavy opposition and many submissions by members of the Civil Society Energy Caucus, including affected communities, the labour movement, faith-based organizations, and many Non-Government Organisations (NGOs).

Moreover, in recent months, Eskom has persisted with public meetings in Cape Town, Overstrand and Kouga Municipalities, in desperate defence of their Revised Draft Environmental Impact Report. Indeed, they were met with fierce resistance on the part of individual CANE members, the Koeberg Alert Alliance, the Save Bantamsklip Campaign, the Thyspunt Alliance, and many others. What is most disconcerting is that no nuclear technology has been specified; many specialist studies have not been completed adequate; and no final solution for the spent fuel has been specified.

This failure to prepare the ground properly for the preferred Thyspunt site (but with Bantamsklip and Koeberg to follow, making up two reactors each on three designated sites) will inevitably lead to a series of court challenges in the following years. A “war chest” has already been started for this express purpose.

In the light of these developments, and in response to popular demand, the Coalition Against Nuclear Energy has therefore convened a National Anti-Nuclear Summit at the Country Crescent Hotel in Plettenberg Bay on Friday the 29^th and Saturday the 30^th July.

List of Delegates

Rianne Teule, Johannesburg-based, but Netherlands-born Greenpeace, anti-nuclear campaigner, recently returned from Japan;
Richard Worthington, veteran Climate-Change campaigner, World Wildlife Fund, Johannesburg, and founder of the  South African Climate Action Network;
Dr David Fig, policy analyst, academic researcher, and author of Uranium Road, among other works;
Makoma Lekalakala, (Sustainable Energy Climate Change Project, Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg Branch;
Dominique Gilbert, Pelindaba Working Group, Brooderstroom;
Keith Gottschalk, Senior Lecturer in Political Studies, University of the Western Cape;
Peter Becker, Convenor, Koeberg Alert Alliance, Cape Town;
Rod Gurzynski, Architect, Researcher & Green Building Consultant, Cape Town;
Sibusiso Mimi, Research Officer, National Union of Mineworkers;
Muna Lakhani and Gray Macguire, Earthlife Africa, Cape Town Branch;
Rodney Anderson, Chairman, Save Bantamsklip Campaign & Vice-Chairman, Hermanus Ratepayers Association;
Ebeline de Villiers, Save Bantamsklip Campaign;
John Williams, Stanford Conservation Trust and former Chairman, Save Bantamsklip Campaign;
Lesley Richardson, Agulhas Biodiversity Initiative;
Wilfred Chivell, Dyer Island Trust;
Katja Vinding Petersen, Dyer Island Trust;

Hilton Thorpe, St Francis Residents Association and member, Thyspunt Alliance;
Alison Kuhl, Supertubes Surfing Foundation, Jeffreys Bay;
Derek Luyt, Public Service Accountability Monitor, Rhodes University

Apologies

Len Swimmer (Chair, Greater Cape Town Civic Association);
Louis de Villiers (former Chair, Wildlife & Environment Society of South Africa, Western Cape);
Dave Whitelaw (ABI Initiative, Overberg Region);
Helena Kingwill, Writer-Producer of Buried in Earthskin a TV documentary on nuclear waste dumping in Namaqualand;
Bernedette Muthien, Executive Director. Engender, an NPO focusing on Eco-Feminism;
Brenda Martin, Project 90X2030;
Dr Yvette Abrahams, Commission for Gender Equity;
Bobby Peek, Groundwork/Friends of the Earth.

While all international surfers signed up for the petition, over 1000 members of the audience signed the petition and added their names to the line of yellow flags, one flag per protestor …
Supertubes Foundation also had an excellent stall at the entrance to the Refereshment area, adjacent to the main Billabong stand, all praise to Alison Kuhl of the Supertubes Surfing Foundation.

Pictures courtesy of Keith Lurie

Dangerous Levels Of Radiation Recorded In Multiple Canada Locations As Fukushima Radiation Dangers Continue

Dangerous levels of radiation have been detected in multiple locations in
Canada as governments and the corporate media continues to cover up the
real dangers posed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The Intel Hub, by Alex Thomas, July 19, 2011

Multiple videos have been released [go to the web site link and view the
videos] showing high levels of radiation in Canada as the corporate media
continues to cover up the real dangers posed by the  Fukushima nuclear
disaster.

The tests were taken in multiple places in Canada including Lake Louise
BC, Kelowna BC, Red Deer/Edmonton, and Hope BC.

The radiation tests that were taken near Lake Louise BC clearly showed
harmful radiation levels up to 1.66 mcSv/hr .

So far Canadian and American authorities have remained silent. We must
DEMAND action from local health authorities. If these levels of radiation
are being picked up in Canada it seems only a matter of time before they
reach the west coast of the United States.

This should be a RED ALERT to all Americans and Canadians!

Source: http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2011/07/19/dangerous-levels-radiation-recorded-multiple-canada-locations-fukushima-radiation-dangers-continue-36141/

New research by Ipsos MORI shows that three in five global citizens (62%) oppose the use of nuclear energy – a quarter (26%) of those have been influenced by the recent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan.

The latest Ipsos Global @dvisor survey shows that support for nuclear energy is far below that for solar power (97%), wind power (93%), hydroelectric power (91%) and natural gas (80%) as a source of electricity.

Just one in four (38%) adults across 24 countries support the use of nuclear energy. Support is highest in India (61%), Poland (57%) and the United States (52%).

Britons are split on the issue with half supporting (48%) and half opposing (51%) the use of nuclear energy. One in five (20%) Britons that are against the use of nuclear energy say they their opinion has been influenced by the events in Fukushima.

Managing Director of the Ipsos MORI Reputation Centre, Milorad Ajder, said:

“Nuclear energy is a controversial issue at the best of times and the disaster in Fukushima has clearly had a negative impact on the way people see its use. With mounting global opposition, some countries are already decided to scale back its use, with some abandoning it all together.”
Download the full presentation slides
Technical Note

This survey was conducted in 24 countries including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States of America. An international sample of 18,787 adults aged 18-64 in the US and Canada, and age 16-64 in all other countries, were interviewed between May 6 and May 21, 2011 via the Ipsos Online Panel system.

Approximately 1000+ individuals participated on a country by country basis with the exception of Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Russia and Turkey, where each have a sample 500+. Weighting was then employed to balance demographics and ensure that the sample’s composition reflected that of the adult population according to the most recent country Census data and to provide results intended to approximate the sample universe.

A survey with an unweighted probability sample of this size and a 100% response rate would have an estimated margin of error of +/-3.1 percentage points for a sample of 1,000 and an estimated margin of error of +/- 4.5 percentage points for a sample of 500 19 times out of 20 per country of what the results would have been had the entire population of the specifically aged adults in that country been polled.

More than 3 millisieverts of radiation has been measured in the urine of 15 Fukushima residents of the village of Iitate and the town of Kawamata, confirming internal radiation exposure, it was learned Sunday.

Both are about 30 to 40 km from the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, which has been releasing radioactive material into the environment since the week of March 11, when the quake and tsunami caused core meltdowns.

“This won’t be a problem if they don’t eat vegetables or other products that are contaminated,” said Nanao Kamada, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Hiroshima University. “But it will be difficult for people to continue living in these areas.”

Kamada teamed up with doctors including Osamu Saito of Watari Hospital in the city of Fukushima to conduct two rounds of tests on each resident in early and late May, taking urine samples from 15 people between 4 and 77.

Radioactive cesium was found both times in each resident.

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Much of the grounds at Fort Calhoun nuclear plant in Nebraska are under two feet of water from the rising Missouri River. But the plant’s critical systems sit six feet above the flood’s expected crest.

Pete Spotts, Staff writer, Christian Science Monitor, June 27, 2011

Flooding along the Missouri River has overspread much of one nuclear power plant’s boundaries, forcing it onto emergency generators, and threatens a second plant downstream.

In both cases, regulators and operators say the plants appear to be in no danger of the kind of sequence of events – exacerbated by plant-design flaws – that led to the tsunami-spawned nuclear disaster in March atJapan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

The two plants, nestled along the Missouri River inNebraska, “will be annoyed but not destroyed,” adds David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and nuclear-safety specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.

At the plant facing the biggest challenge, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station, about 30 miles north ofOmaha, the Missouri River is predicted to crest Wednesday at 33 feet above flood stage – some six feet below the level critical buildings at the plant were designed to handle. That flood crest would put the flood level roughly half an inch higher than it is currently.

Much of the plant’s grounds are under at least two feet of water. Through early Saturday morning, the reactor-containment building and its adjacent auxiliary buildings were high and dry, protected by a 2,000-foot-long water-filled berm. But workers operating heavy machinery ruptured the eight-foot-high berm, allowing water to lap at these structures as well. Some water has leaked into the turbine building, which houses no nuclear material.

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Among the issues:

• The plant had stockpiled plenty of sandbags but not the sand to fill them.

• The Omaha Public Power District, which runs the plant, installed floodgates designed to keep floodwaters from overpowering the doors behind the gates. But the floodgates must be shored up on the outside – and topped – with sand bags. The support structures across the top of the gates weren’t strong enough to withstand the weight of sandbags that would be place on top of them.

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VIENNA — The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Tuesday urged a worldwide review of safety measures to prevent new nuclear disasters, but acknowledged that since his organization lacks the authority to enforce  rules any improvements are only effective if countries apply them.

While some countries at the 151-member IAEA’s meeting want any new safety regime to be mandatory, most prefer them to be voluntary and don’t want a regulatory role for IAEA. If the IAEA cannot enforce safety standards, those rules will be only as good as they are being enforced by IAEA nations.

“Even the best safety standards are useless unless they are actually implemented,” Amano said.

Asked outside the meeting if he would like to see the IAEA have the same authority against safety violators as it now has against nuclear proliferators – which includes referral to the U.N. Security Council – he said: “I do not exclude that possibility.”

But he said a sense of post-Fukushima urgency dictated action now under existing rules.

“We have to move by days, weeks, months, and I cannot wait years” – the time it would take to revise the IAEA’s mandate for the 35-nation board – he said. “We need to have a sense of urgency.”

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(Reuters) — Global action to protect the nuclear industry against possible terrorist attacks is urgently needed, a leading expert said, as are safety steps to prevent any repeat of Japan’s Fukushima
accident.

“Both al Qaeda and Chechen terrorist groups have repeatedly considered sabotaging nuclear reactors — and Fukushima provided a compelling example of the scale of terror such an attack might cause,” Matthew Bunn of Harvard University said.

Some countries had “extraordinarily weak security measures in place,” he said in an Internet blog posted this week, without naming them.

“The nuclear industry in many countries is much less prepared to cope with security incidents than with accidents,” wrote Bunn, an associate professor at Harvard Kennedy School who specializes in nuclear issues.

Steps to protect against both sabotage of nuclear facilities and theft of nuclear weapons or the materials to make them were “particularly urgent.”

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