Wednesday, March 14, 2012

More on the Fukushima Follies

...no one has died from radiation exposure at Fukushima and...the health effects from radiation exposure are too small to measure.

"Fukushima was no Chernobyl." _Dan Yurman
One year after Fukushima, independent scientists working for the UN say bluntly that irrational fears of radiation poisoning will cause far more harm than the radiation itself. Not a single individual from the Japanese public received a dangerous dose, according to the early and informal analyses by the scientists. (Conspiracy theories cannot survive against the constant independent radiation measurements uploaded on Twitter.) Even the 70 altruistic plant workers who stayed behind gained an additional cancer risk of just 0.002% -- effectively zero in a country where four out of ten people get cancer. _Breakthrough Institute
As skankstream media outlets from Japan to Europe to North America continue to spew their anti-nuclear hysteria, the sober reality of the situtation is that no one died or was harmed by radiation exposure at the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown.

Skankstream thug-monkeys of a green-dominated media want you to forget that both the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami were exceptionally catastrophic events, killing tens of thousands of people. Instead they want you to adopt their own anti-nuclear hysteria, and to insist that all other nations adopt the irrational and reflexive flight from nuclear which was adopted by Japan and Germany, following the natural disasters in Japan.

How does one explain such a headlong rush away from reality?
Bending to a panicked public, Japan shut down its nuclear plants, and has had to spend the eye-popping sum of $100 million more every day to import and burn fossil fuels. Cancer-causing pollution fumes are up, as are greenhouse gases (four percent despite reduced overall energy use, according to a Breakthrough analysis). The turn back to fossil energy has turned Japan's decades-long trade surplus into a trade deficit. Higher energy costs exacerbate the nation's ability to deal with its $12 trillion debt, which at 212% of its GDP is far higher than even that of Greece (165%) or Italy (128%).

Despite the over-reaction in Japan and Europe, Fukushima has not slowed the pace of new nuclear plant construction globally (something we predicted last year). Against claims made in this week's Economist, the number of reactors planned and under construction is virtually unchanged. In the US, the main obstacle to the expansion of nuclear has not been fear of radiation but rather the abundance of cheap natural gas from shale -- a reality which similarly challenges the expansion of renewables.

There was nothing inevitable or natural about Japan's panicked reaction to Fukushima. Growing mistrust of the government long pre-dates the tsunami. "The hysteria about radiation reflects a breakdown in trust, as witnessed by endless media accounts quoting people who doubt the government's monitoring of food and soil," wrote former Tokyo correspondent for the Washington Post, Paul Blustein.

...Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from Japan's radiation scare is the need for new, credible sources -- independent of both electric utilities and governments -- able to soberly put the risks and benefits of energy technologies in context. Alas, if the Natural Resource Defense Council's slickly demagogic "nuclear fallout crisis" map is any indication, such credible sources won't likely come from the traditional environmental movement. _BreakthroughInstitute
No, the "traditional environmental movement" is too closely tied to the big money green supported dieoff.orgy movement, which wants to abolish all reliable and affordable forms of large scale energy, in favour of exorbitantly expensive and dangerously unreliable green forms of energy such as big wind and big solar.

We know that the sun doesn't shine at night or in cloudy weather, making big solar a huge joke in terms of supplying reliable baseload power. We also know that the wind does not usually blow its best during peak load hours, but tends to blow either too hard or not hard enough. And now we learn that wind turbines may need to be turned off at night, to satisfy environmental regulations and laws.

If the dieoff.orgy greens do away with nuclear power, coal power, and gas power, what are we left with? Unreliable and expensive solar -- which does not generate power at night -- and capricious wind, which will have to be shut down at night, whether the wind is blowing or not?

The most likely conclusion one is left with, is that the big money greens of the lefty-Luddite persuasion, truly do want to starve modern societies of energy, with necessarily catastrophic economic impacts. And it looks as if governments in the US, the EU, Australia, and elsewhere, are closely tied to this movement -- politically and ideologically.

Sooner or later, thinking people of the western world will have some difficult decisions to make, if they are to avert an existential crisis foisted on them from above.

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