• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 718 0

to birds to mammals—which they claim correlate with areas of higher radioactivity.55 However, these results are highly controversial in the scientific community,56 and Møller in particular has been subject to accusations of bias and even fraud.57 In 2001 the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty found against him in a separate case regarding a paper he had published on oak leaves. A 2011 study by the same authors that claimed to correlate smaller bird brain sizes with higher radioactivity also seems to me to be suspect:58 The supposedly observed effect is tiny, just a few percentage points over a 10,000-fold difference in radioactivity and likely a statistical artifact. If, as I think is likely, the effects of radiation on wildlife do turn out to be minimal, there are obviously better ways to create nature parks than conducting ill-advised experiments on badly designed nuclear reactors. But the experience of Chernobyl supports my assertion throughout this book that civil nuclear power is not a serious threat to ecosystems, even when something goes badly wrong—as it so obviously did on April 26, 1986.

Something also went badly wrong in Japan on March 11, 2011: in this case a magnitude 9.0 offshore earthquake followed by a 14-meter tsunami, which swept into coastal towns as a catastrophic black surge, tearing apart buildings and scattering cars in scenes of unparalleled devastation. The wave also struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which—although its operating reactors had shut down safely during the earthquake itself—required electrical power to maintain cooling of the reactor cores and nearby ponds storing spent nuclear fuel rods. Backup diesel generators were swamped by the wave, and without electrical power three of the reactors began to go into meltdown. This is about the worst thing that can happen to a nuclear plant, and the Fukushima workers risked their lives heroically to maintain some level of cooling—pumping in seawater, bringing in fire trucks, and at one point even calling in the army to drop water from helicopters in a desperate bid to maintain water levels in the spent fuel ponds. But at the time of writing (early July 2011) it has been confirmed by the operator Tepco that triple partial meltdowns were suffered, at least one of the containment vessels was breached, and the entire plant will have to be decommissioned at enormous expense.

It is also undeniable that significant releases of radioactive materials took place, in particular in the immediate hours and days after the disaster when steam building up in the overheating reactors had to be vented in order to prevent pressure in the reactor cores building up to dangerous levels. This steam contained hydrogen, which exploded and largely destroyed three of the reactor buildings, further worsening the situation. Spikes of radioactive iodine were measured as far away as Tokyo, and in the weeks that followed, significant contamination also took place in coastal waters as radioactive seawater flowed back out from the stricken plant. Even plutonium particles—probably from one of the spent fuel ponds—were identified nearby. It was also reported that two workers wading through radioactive water in one of the reactor buildings suffered significant and potentially dangerous radiation doses to their legs. This was not Chernobyl, but it was far and away the worst disaster to have hit a civil nuclear plant outside the former Soviet Union, worse even than the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, which so spooked America.

But context is all, and within the context of a tsunami disaster that likely killed 28,000 people, Fukushima’s death toll is still—and will likely remain—zero.60 The increased levels of radioactive iodine measured in Tokyo tap water sounded scary, but even at the height of the crisis were far below legal limits in Europe. Similarly, contaminated seawater offshore from the plant was presented in the media as an ecological nightmare, but there is highly unlikely to ever be any identifiable impact on sea life. Nor should humans be affected.