Don’t be fooled by the polite tone at the beginning of this article, which starts by questioning someone who questions the competence of Japanese engineers for building a nuclear power plant right in the path of a tsunami and earthquake. How could they be so foolish! As the article progresses, he takes the gloves off. It’s long. Not for those with short attention spans. It comes with lots of links, which don’t show up in this extract.

A news item in the June 2, 2011 issue of Nature, (page 10) which may be the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, reports that 2010 carbon emissions have reached a new record level, 30.9 billion metric tons per year, roughly 1,000 tons per second after the world’s miraculous “economic recovery.”

Um, um, um…

The World Health Organization reports that 2 million people die prematurely each year from air pollution, which is about one person every 15 seconds, with almost all of this pollution resulting from dangerous fossil fuel and “renewable” biomass burning.

In other news:

Approximately 3,700 workers at the Fukushima nuclear complex have been exposed to radiation since the recent 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tsunami that struck March 11. Of these, 3514 have had medical examinations in which their exposure limits were recorded. Of these, 124 of the workers have exposures exceeding 100 mSv, which is the normal regulatory lifetime load for nuclear workers, although Japan raised the level for this event to 250 mSv. Of these 124 workers who exceeded 100 mSv, 107 had exposures between 100 and 200 mSv, 8 had exposures of 200-250 mSv, and 9 had doses exceeding 250 mSv.

A list of radiation exposures from the 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tidal wave.

According to the Radiation Health Physics Society, which consists of, um, health physicists, the most aggressive diagnostic medical procedure there is involving radiation (other than radiation treatment for cancer which often can, and does induce radiation sickness) is a Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty, (PTCA) which results in radiation exposures of up to 57 mSv. Radiation Health Physics Society: Common exposures to radiation from medical procedures.

One of the major causes of needing a PTCA is, um, eating cows.

The somewhat familiar effects of radiation sickness are generally observed at 1,000 mSv exposures received over a short interval, and the symptoms include alopecia, nausea, vomiting and severe depression of the immune system (the latter being similar in many ways to full blown AIDS.) The chances are overwhelming that if you have ever encountered someone with radiation sickness – and I certainly have – it was as a result of that person being treated with radiation for cancer.

Of course, anyone receiving successful radiation treatment to treat cancer will face a continual risk of getting a new cancer, but the probability of getting such a cancer is not 100% – not even close – or else radiation treatments for cancer would not be attempted since they would be, by definition, futile.

But let’s not talk about medical procedures but say something more about Japan.

The Japanese utility Chubu recently asked for help buying what will ultimately be $31 Billion (US) worth of dangerous fossil fuel to replace its other nuclear plants that have been shut by fear, ignorance, and superstition. All the waste from all those burned dangerous fossil fuels will be dumped into earth’s atmosphere, almost certainly killing many thousands of people from air pollution.

Chubu receives emergency loan.

We can estimate how much dangerous fossil fuel waste will be dumped into earth’s atmosphere by (with extreme generosity and self delusion) that all of this $31 billion dollars will represent dangerous natural gas, although, in fact, it won’t, by looking at dangerous natural gas prices.

Natural gas prices have recently run about $631 per metric ton in Asia.

This suggests about 180 million tons of dangerous natural gas waste dumping for Chubai alone, although the time period is not specified. (Chubai may need this loan for a period of years.)

For the observed record, in April of 2011, Japanese imports of dangerous natural gas rose by 1.25 million metric tons in April of 2011 to 6.65 million metric tons per month. If we assume that this gas was mostly methane and correct for the molecular weight of carbon dioxide (as I did above) relative to methane, we see that the increase for dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping in Japan to shut it’s nuclear plants amounts to a whopping 45 million tons for Japan, resulting in a total of around 230 million metric tons just for natural gas annually.

via The Nuclear Green Revolution: Were the Japanese Engineers Who Built Fukushima Incompetent?.

Tags: fossil fuels, Fukushima, Japan, nuclear power