Friday, April 1, 2011
I have no stomach for jokes today. The truth is too sad, and the lies too
numerous.
It may be months before events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant
are sorted out following the massive earthquake on 11 Mar 2011 at 14:46 JST
and the huge tsunami it caused. The major concern involves the fuel
storage pool for reactor #4 which held the entire complement of fuel rods
from the reactor coreand may yet melt down. The rods had been removed just
three months earlier. Reactors 4, 5 and 6 had been shut down prior to the
earthquake for scheduled maintenance. The remaining reactors shut down
automatically during the earthquake, but the 14 meter tsunami flooded the
plant, knocking out emergency generators needed to run the pumps that cool
and control the reactors; damage to transportation blocked help from
elsewhere. It gets worse. Four days later, 15 March at about 06:00 JST,
a hydrogen bubble that had collected above the spent fuel pond exploded,
heavily damaging the rooftop area of the Unit 4 reactor. At 09:40, the
Unit 4 spent-fuel pool caught fire. It was extinguished by 12:00, but not
before huge amounts of radioactive contaminants had been released. That
should not have happened. A hydrogen bubble is explosive only when mixed
with a critical level of oxygen. During the 1979 Three-Mile Island
accident, it was feared that a large hydrogen bubble in the containment
dome would explode rupturing the building. It did not happen, but I have
repeatedly urged that a tuft of "platinum wool" always be attached at the
high points of nuclear containment buildings where hydrogen bubbles would
be expected to collect. The platinum would catalyze the oxidation of
hydrogen back to water before the mixture reaches an explosive level. The
one-time cost would be trivial.
Most of India's newborns are male according to the new 2011 census. The
Census is taken every 10 years. For every 1000 boys born, 917 girls were
born. The imbalance is greater than in 2001. It does not reflect some
biological advantage of Y chromosomes; rather daughters in India tend to be
regarded as financial burdens. Female feticide remains common in India,
even though sex-selective abortion based on ultrasound scans is illegal.
China remains the most populous sovereign nation at 1.3 billion, but India
is closing fast at 1.21 billion, and now makes up 17% of the world
population. India's fertility rate (2.68) is higher than it should be for
sustainability (generally taken as 2.1), but only slightly above the world
average for sovereign states (2.56). For comparison, the fertility rate in
the US is given as 2.06. It should be recognized that a sustainable
population does not mean a sustainable environment. Global warming, ocean
garbage patches in gyres, shortages of fresh water and phosphates,
accumulations of mine tailings and fly ash from coal-fired power plants,
the Hubbert peak in oil, extinction of ocean fisheries and the apparent
onset of the sixth great extinction, demonstrate that we have already far
exceeded the sustainability limit. I would guess that the sustainability
limit of high-technology society is not much over 1 billion. We need to
have a discussion of what an appropriate limit would be.
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