Waiting for the next tsunami. A study published in the Natural Hazards journal (behind a paywall unfortunately) has identified 23 nuclear power plants with 74 reactors as being in high risk areas for being struck by tsunamis. One of them includes Fukushima I. Out of them, 13 plants with 29 reactors are active; another four, that now have 20 reactors, are being expanded to house nine more; and there are seven new plants under construction with 16 reactors.
Debarati Guha Sapir, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium “the impact of natural disaster is getting worse due to the growing interaction with technological installations”.
Some 27 out of 64 nuclear reactors that are currently under construction are found in China. This is an example of the massive nuclear investment of the Asian giant. “The most important fact is that 19 (two of which are in Taiwan) out of the 27 reactors are being built in areas identified as dangerous,” state the authors of the study.
In the case of Japan, which in March 2011 suffered the consequences of the worst tsunami in its history, there are seven plants with 19 reactors at risk, one of which is currently under construction. South Korea is now expanding two plants at risk with five reactors. India (two reactors) and Pakistan (one reactor) could also feel the consequences of a tsunami in the plants.
“The location of nuclear installations does not only have implications for their host countries but also for the areas which could be affected by radioactive leaks,” outlines Joaquín Rodríguez-Vidal, lead author of the study and researcher at the Geodynamics and Paleontology Department of the University of Huelva.
According to the study, we should learn our lessons from the Fukushima accident. For the authors, prevention and previous scientific studies are the best tools for avoiding such disasters. “But since the tsunami in 2004 the Indian Ocean region is still to take effective political measures,” warn the researchers.
The Fukushima crisis took place in a highly developed country with one of the highest standards in scientific knowledge and technological infrastructure. “If it had occurred in a country less equipped for dealing with the consequences of catastrophe, the impact would have been a lot more serious for the world at large,” claim the experts.
Leftie journalists. On the political scale, journalists can be placed to the left of the public and their elected politicians. And the distance between the two sides has increased significantly in recent decades, although this is more due to the public and politicians having moved to the right than to journalists having moved to the left.
My guess is those findings would apply to Australia but they are the results of a study conducted at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden into their country’s media workers.
If your Swedish is adequate, the book Svenska journalister 1989-2011 is available as a free download and you can get the drift using one of those translation software things. I’ve settled here for the English language version of the university’s press release.
“The transition of journalists farther and farther to the left on the political scale stagnated in the mid-1990s,” says Professor Kent Asp, who headed the study.
The research findings, which are based on questionnaires completed by journalists, the public and members of the Swedish Parliament, are presented in the book titled Svenska journalister 1989-2011.
Compared to the public, journalists generally have much less confidence in banks and the Swedish Royal Court, and journalists in the public service sector are more leftist than their counterparts in commercial radio and television and the daily press. And, as expected, culture journalists and journalists born in the 1940s also tend to be more leftist than their colleagues.
Again compared to the public, journalists are twice as likely to work overtime, and they eat out three times as often. In addition, two-thirds of them use social media on a daily basis. The professional ideals of scrutiny and objectivity are deeply rooted.
The book presents a great deal of results concerning journalists’ opinions and values and how they view themselves and their work. The journalists’ responses have one interesting thing in common, says Kent Asp.
“Journalists perceive that their readers, listeners and viewers are gaining more and more power. The journalists are also becoming more and more positive to tailoring their work to suit their audiences.”
It strikes me that an investigation of the same kind would be an interesting project for one of those journalism schools that keep turning out more graduates than there are jobs for.
Fighting for a lost cause. Some rare but valuable honesty this morning from Australia’s former top commander in Afghanistan, retired Major-General John Cantwell, who described the war effort there as an “experiment” that will not end well.
Speaking on ABC Radio National Major-General Cantwell criticised how politicians are portraying Australia’s role and success in Afghanistan, describing the comments as “misleading”.
The man deserves more medals for speaking words that our political leaders are too scared to.
News and views noted along the way:
- Do Presidential Debates Really Matter?
- Dangerous and deepening divide between Islamic world, West
- Shocker stat of the day: life expectancy decreases by four years among poor white people in the US.
- As the Duchess of Cambridge now knows, privacy is not an option
- Time to Japanic?
I missed the second half of this interview which was broken off due to lost comms but I dont believe he said that “success was misleading”. What he did say was that saying we were “being successful in Afghanistan” was overstating the scope of our involvement as we were only involved in a very small way in one small province. He did not say that our small involvement was unsuccessful.
Having said that he is being a bit fatuous as it would be very unlikely that any one would understand what the government was on about if they didn’t use the name Afghanistan and simply referred to the very small province (whatever it’s name is). And however small our role is, it is indeed a part of what is happening “in Afghanistan”.
Most of the rest of what he said seemed sensible enough – which could be summarised as “war is hell”.
What the Natural Hazards paper (or at least its abstract) does not say is that being struck by a tsunami does not equate to nuclear disaster. It took a wave well over 10 metres high to bring 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi undone – and several reactors (younger, better engineered) on the same stretch of coast, which were actually closer to the tsunamigenic epicentre, were unscathed.
For comparison, one of the most recent scientific papers on tsunami risk for the Chinese coast (shuo-wang.com/Publications/$SBV$/101119181539.spring-pepi.pdf) reckons the probability of a “devastating scenario of a 2.0m wave hitting Hong Kong or Macau at around 10% for this century.” Such an event might well be ‘devastating’ in some respects to those communities, but not to a nuclear power plant. That the tsunami risk level calculated for the Chinese coast (and that of South Korea, India and Pakistan) is considerably lower than that for the east coast of Japan is entirely consistent with their respective plate tectonic contexts. The latter directly faces a subduction zone in close proximity; the others do not. If this paper is implicitly equating their tsunami risk, it is quite misleading.