Mar
2011
Open Letter About Japan
Open Letter About Japan
Hello,
This is an open personal letter from me, Craig Hesser, to those who read this blog.
The news media these days are full of the horrors of what has happened and what is still happening in Japan. I have the greatest sympathy for the Japanese people and I hope that their nightmare will soon end. Rebuilding – both psychologically and materially – will take years, and in some cases, generations.
The ultimate story of what will happen to the nuclear reactors at Fukushima is still untold. We can only hope for the best and support the owners, the technical people, the people of the surrounding areas, and the country as best we all can.
GEOCOGEN is an alternative to nuclear power. We believe that GEOCOGEN is the only viable base-load, large scale, sustainable power generation system available today, and that it is safe for the local population and the rest of the world as well.
We at GEOCOGEN are not out to stop nuclear power, and we do not have the resources to take on the nuclear power industry. We do believe that nuclear power will die a natural economic death in the next 2 to 4 decades. These beliefs are based on increasing costs of uranium production as the “low hanging fruit” ores are depleted, and on the additional construction requirements that will be required to obtain the measure of safety that individual governments believe will protect them from a Fukushima-style disaster.
I read that the conditions of the mechanical design at Fukushima were for a force 8,3 earthquake, and a 5-meter (17-foot) tsunami wave. This report indicated that TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner) had determined that both of these conditions were exceeded in the earthquake (9,0) and the tsunami (23 meters = 78 feet). I cannot blame the engineers or the designers for this apparent oversight. There had been no 9,0 earthquake in the recorded history of Japan. The tsunami wave design could have been for a greater height, but no one would have suggested a 20-meter design criteria. I read in the same article that the highest recorded tsunami in Japan was 35 meters in the late 19th century.
There were apparently other problems at Fukushima that should not have been allowed to continue, but that seems to be the case at many nuclear power plants, in Japan, in Russia, in North America, in the European Union, and even in our own Switzerland.
I have worked with a number of technical people in Japan. I have felt small earthquakes in Japan. It may sound strange to say this, but in my mind, the World is lucky that the accidents that were provoked at Fukushima were in Japan, and not some other, less regimented and less responsibly organised country. I am convinced that, in most other countries, what happened at Fukushima would have gone totally out of control and Fukushima 1 and Fukushima 2 both would have been completely destroyed, with the result that radioactive dust and aerosols would have circled the globe for years, and maybe even for decades or centuries.
I personally do not like nuclear power – not for what it is, but for what it has the potential to do to the world in general. The dangers from nuclear power take the form of a disaster similar to Chernobyl (regardless of the cause), and also in terms of the safe disposal of radioactive wastes. In Japan, there are very few options available for ways to produce electricity (relatively) inexpensively – Japan has essentially no fuel resources. Hydropower is used to the extent possible, but there are potential problems with earthquakes there as well. Wind, wave, OTEC, solar, biogas, geothermal, and other technologies are not capable of producing the amount of power that the crowded Island Nation needs. Nuclear power seemed to be a good fit, but now, there are many questions and afterthoughts. It is ironic that the only country to suffer from the use of atomic weapons during wartime now apparently will suffer from the peaceful use of nuclear energy as well.
Again, my heartfelt sympathy goes out to the Japanese people and particularly to the technical people who are working so hard to try to prevent the situation from becoming even worse.
Craig Hesser
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Your readers might be interested in the pertinent question, their probably most pressing concern of how to treat their radioactively contaminated drinking water:
http://crisismaven.wordpress.com/2011/03/22/dangers-properties-possible-uses-and-methods-of-purification-of-radioactively-contaminated-drinking-water-e-g-in-japan/
A Japanese translation seems underway, see comment by Takuya there.
It would seem that Japan’s geothermal potenal is huge. Any idea as to why they have not done more to develop it?
Hi John,
I have only seen a little about this in print. The jist of it seemed to be that “conventional” power generation – including nuclear power – was easier and less complicated to initiate, and also fed the Japanese national industrial machine. Japan has started with wind power – witness the wind turbines on the coast near Fukushima that withstood the tsunami wave. I am sure that, under the present circumstances, the country will explore every renewable energy source, even the only marginally feasible ones, and come up with some winners. The general problem I see with geothermal in Japan is that the “convenient” heat, i.e., close to the surface, is located in zones that are likely to experience serious earthquakes and earth movements. This makes investing large amounts of money in such endeavours a somewhat questionable exercise.
On the other hand, Iceland has the same style of problems, and to an even greater extent, so this should not be an insurmountable situation. Since “Iceland Inc.” is trying to sell it’s technology world-wide using the President of the country, etc., I expect that we will see many visits of Icelandic groups in Japan starting soon, if they are not already there.