Fears of Fission Rise at Stricken Japanese Plant

TOKYO — Nuclear workers at the crippled Fukushima power plant raced to inject boric acid into the plant’s No. 2 reactor early Wednesday after telltale radioactive elements were detected there, and the plant’s owner admitted for the first time that fuel deep inside three stricken reactors was probably continuing to experience bursts of fission.

Sure, it only merits page A17 in today’s New York Times, but the story is still a bombshell for the troubled nukes:

On Wednesday, the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that gas from Reactor No. 2 indicated the presence of radioactive xenon and other substances that could be byproducts of nuclear fission. The presence of xenon 135 in particular, which has a half-life of just nine hours, seemed to indicate that fission took place very recently.

Trade Minister Yukuo Edano censured Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, for failing to report the discovery to the prime minister’s office for hours, according to local media reports.

The developments added to disquiet over how information related to the disaster has been handled. For almost two months after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out vital cooling systems, setting the stage for disaster, both company and government officials declared it was unlikely that any meltdowns had occurred. They finally conceded that melted fuel had likely breached containments in three reactors, and that it was likely pooled at the bottom of the vessels.

A 12-mile exclusion zone is still in effect around the plant. More than 80,000 households were displaced.

I should say upfront that cost, not safety, is the real problem with nuclear power as a climate solution today (see “Does Nuclear Have a Negative Learning Curve?” and “An introduction to nuclear power.”

But safety is a genuine concern.  Here’s the “good news” on Fukushima’s fears of fission:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

On Wednesday, Tokyo Electric said that the amount of xenon detected was small, and there was no rise in temperature, pressure or radiation levels at the reactor. Researchers were double-checking the data to make sure there were no errors, the company said. Experts concurred that it was possible that Tokyo Electric had made a simple error in its measurements.

But the urgent injection of boric acid underscored that the company was operating on the assumption that the measurements were valid. A naturally occurring element, boron, soaks up the neutrons released when an atom is split so that those neutrons cannot go on to split other atoms when material “goes critical” in the process of fission. Nuclear power plants harness the energy released in the form of heat to produce electricity.

It is impossible to determine exactly what state the fuel is in, given that even an intact reactor can offer only gauges for temperature, pressure and neutron flow, not visual observation. That lack of clarity is one of the most resonant lessons of the Fukushima disaster, when those trying to guide the response and assess the danger had to operate by what amounted to educated guesswork.

So what is happening?

In reactors of the design used at Fukushima, that chain reaction is normally stopped when the operator gives a command to insert control rods, which rise up from the bottom of the core and separate the fuel assemblies. But when the cores of three reactors at Fukushima melted, a large part of the fuel presumably formed a jumbled mass in the bottom of the vessel, and without a strict gridlike geometry, the control rods cannot be inserted. Some of the fuel has escaped the vessel, experts believe, and is in spaces underneath, where there is no way to use control rods to interrupt the flow of neutrons.

The jumble of material and conditions had seemed very unlikely to be able to produce sustained fission, but intermittent criticalities have long been suspected.

Junichi Matsumoto, a Tokyo Electric spokesman, acknowledged episodes of fission, telling a news conference: “There is a possibility that certain conditions came together temporarily that were conducive to re-criticality,” and that the measurements indicated a burst that occurred at a slightly higher rate than prior cases. “It’s not that we’ve had zero fission until now,” Mr. Matsumoto said. “But at this point, we do not think there is a large-scale and self-sustained re-criticality.”

No, that would be hard to imagine.  But if the fission is real, then it is something to worry about:

The three reactors — together with spent fuel rods stored at a fourth damaged reactor — have been leaking radioactive material since the initial disaster, and new episodes of fission would only increase their dangers.

“Re-criticality would produce more harmful radioactive material, and because the reactors are damaged, there would be a danger of a leak,” said Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, whose prescient warnings about nuclear safety have won him respect in Japan.

Mr. Koide holds that the nuclear fuel at the three reactors probably melted through containments and into the ground, raising the possibility of contaminated groundwater. If much of the fuel was indeed in the ground early in the crisis, the “feed and bleed” strategy initially taken by Tokyo Electric — where workers pumped cooling water into the reactors, producing hundreds of tons of radioactive runoff — would have prevented fuel still in the reactor from boiling itself dry and melting, but would not have done anything to reduce danger from fuel already in the soil — if it got that far. Workers have now put in place a circulating cooling system that recycles water, which results in less runoff.

Tokyo Electric does not deny the possibility that the fuel may have burrowed into the ground, but its officials say that “most” of the fuel likely remains within the reactor, albeit slumped at the bottom in a molten mass.

But even in their most dire assessments, some experts had not expected even bursts of re-criticality to occur, because it was unlikely that the fuel would melt in just the right way — and that another ingredient, water, would be present in just the right amounts — to allow for any nuclear reaction. If episodes of fission at Fukushima were confirmed, Mr. Koide said, “our entire understanding of nuclear safety would be turned on its head.”

Other experts are concerned, too:

A former nuclear engineer with three decades of experience at a major engineering firm, meanwhile, said that sustained re-criticality remained highly unlikely. But his main concern was that officials could not pinpoint the exact location of the nuclear fuel — which would greatly complicate the cleanup.

The engineer, who has worked at all three nuclear power complexes operated by Tokyo Electric, spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified by his former employers. He said that tiny fuel pellets could have been carried to different parts of the plant, like the spaces under the reactor during attempts to vent them in the early days. That would explain several cases of lethally high radiation readings found outside the reactor cores.

“If the fuel is still inside the reactor core, that’s one thing,” he said. But if the fuel has been dispersed more widely, then we are far from any stable shutdown.”

Stay tuned.

Related Post:

• Fukushima Surprise: Radioactive Rice “Far Exceeding” Safe Levels Found in Japan
• Japan scraps plan for 14 new nuclear plants
• Siemens Stunner: Global Energy Giant Quits Nuclear Industry

Report: China to set regional energy caps

China’s efforts to curb its greenhouse gas emissions are poised to take another major step forward, according to reports from the state-backed Xinhua news agency detailing plans to set binding regional caps on energy consumption.

Quoting Jiang Bing, head of the planning department of the National Energy Administration, the news agency reported that the proposals for energy quotas would be released in the near future, although it added that the plans would need approval from China’s State Council.

Jiang also signalled that the quotas would only apply to energy derived from fossil fuels with hydro, wind and solar power exempted from the caps.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

The Chinese government has previously said it will impose a cap on energy consumption as part of its latest five-year plan, which has set a series of targets designed to enhance energy efficiency and cut the carbon intensity of the country’s economy by 17 per cent by 2020. The plan is seen as essential to meeting China’s stated goal of cutting its carbon intensity by between 40 per cent and 45 per cent by 2020.

The proposed energy consumption quotas are the latest in a series of mooted green policy announcements from Beijing designed to curb emissions and accelerate investment in clean technologies.

Warming could exceed safe levels in this lifetime

Global temperature rise could exceed “safe” levels of two degrees Celsius in some parts of the world in many of our lifetimes if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, two research papers published in the journal Nature warned.

“Certain levels of climate change are very likely within the lifetimes of many people living now … unless emissions of greenhouse gases are substantially reduced in the coming decades,” said a study on Sunday by academics at the English universities of Reading and Oxford, the UK’s Met Office Hadley Center and the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Large parts of Eurasia, North Africa and Canada could potentially experience individual five-year average temperatures that exceed the 2 degree Celsius threshold by 2030 — a timescale that is not so distant,” the paper said.

Two years ago, industrialized nations set a 2 degree Celsius warming as the maximum limit to avoid dangerous climate changes including more floods, droughts and rising seas, while some experts said a 1.5 degree limit would be safer.

It is widely agreed among scientists that global pledges so far for curbing greenhouse gas emissions are not strong enough to prevent “dangerous” climate change.

Next month, nations will meet for the next U.N. climate summit in Durban, South Africa, where a binding pact to reduce emissions looks unlikely to be delivered.

Instead, a global deal might not emerge until 2014 or 2015.

The study found that most of the world’s land surface is very likely to experience five-year average temperatures that exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2060.

Draft plan for global Green Climate Fund handed to UN

The group of politicians, diplomats and economists working on plans for a new Green Climate Fund capable of investing up to $100bn a year in climate-related projects by 2020 has completed its draft proposals, according to Reuters reports.

The news agency said that the draft document was finalised at a meeting of the UN-appointed committee in South Africa last week, paving the way for the plan to be presented at next month’s crucial climate

Christiana Figueres, head of the UN climate change secretariat, confirmed that the draft plan had been completed, telling Reuters via email that the group had put forward a draft proposal for how the Green Climate Fund would work, and recommendations on “transitional arrangements” that would allow it to be launched as early as 2013.

“The submissions … include a strong signal to engage the private sector and a solid basis to develop country-driven operations through direct access to funds,” she added.

The structure of the proposed fund is likely to prove one of the main points of contention at the Durban summit next month.

Countries agreed at last year’s summit in Cancun that up to $100bn a year should be provided to poorer nations from 2020 to help them cut emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Corporate leaders at UN-backed meeting urge reforms to reinvigorate economies

Corporate executives and prominent political figures today at a United Nations-backed meeting called for investment in emerging sectors that support sustainable development to reinvigorate the flagging global economy and address the deepening rift between rich and poor.

Amid growing protests over financial and economic uncertainty across the world, more than 500 leading executives met at the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative Global Roundtable (UNEP FI) summit in Washington to discuss possible solutions.

Among those calling for change include former United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Ireland’s former President Mary Robinson, as well as decision-makers in the investment, banking and insurance sectors. The meeting also heard from the United States Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Recommendations included the implementation of policies that can mobilize investment by the banking and investment sectors into emerging industries associated with sustainability – including the clean energy sector, renewable energy, green buildings and retrofitting, clean vehicles and fuels.

EU Should Focus CO2 Incentive on Renewables, De Boer Says

The European Union should rethink its plan to restrict use of emission credits from the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas offsetting program, said a former United Nations’ chief climate official.

“The last thing we need at the moment is a sense that Europe is reneging on its commitment” to emissions trading, said Yvo de Boer, former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, who is now a climate change and sustainability adviser to KPMG LLP, the consulting company. The EU instead should allow use of credits from projects in emerging nations that provide renewable power to poor people with no current access to electricity.

De Boer was speaking in London after Clean Development Mechanism offsets dropped to a record 6.69 euros ($9.28) a metric ton on Oct. 20. A record number of emission-reduction projects are seeking registration by the end of next year, boosting supply because of a deadline imposed by the EU, whose factories and power stations are the main buyers of credits.

From 2013 the EU will accept only new offset projects based in least-developed countries. Additionally, the import of credits generated by reducing industrial gas hydrofluorocarbon-23 and of those tied to some nitrous-oxide projects will be banned as of May 2013.

Japan seeks CO2 cuts as talks on new plan continue

Japan plans to propose next month in South Africa that while negotiating an agreement on a future climate framework, all major polluters make emission cuts to meet their pledged goals, a foreign ministry official said on Friday.

U.N.-led climate talks failed to meet a 2009 deadline to agree a new pact to start after the Kyoto Protocol’s first period ends in 2012. A major conference in Durban is under pressure to launch a process to negotiate a new treaty.

“In the Durban meeting, we’re calling for clarified steps to agree on a future climate framework,” said Takehiro Kano, director at the ministry’s climate change division.

Japan, the world’s fifth-biggest emitter, plans to propose that countries agree on guidelines to monitor and verify that they are doing what they have pledged to compile biennial reports, he added. Countries agreed to the reports at last year’s climate conference in Cancun, Mexico.

What happens when a community dependent on a finite fossil resource can no longer go on exploiting? These powerful pictures tell the story.

The dead island of Hashima delivers a lively warning about the importance of foresight. It offers a view of the end result of “development,” the fate of a community severed from Mother Earth and engaged in a way of life disconnected from its food supply. In short, Hashima is what the world will be like when we finish urbanizing and exploiting it: a ghost planet spinning through space—silent, naked, and useless.

— Brian Burke-Gaffney, Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science

Located 18 miles off the coast of Nagasaki, the island of Hashima was once the hub of Japan’s coal mining activity. From the early 1900′s to the 1970′s, the island played a major role in Japan’s economic growth. Owned by Mitsubishi, it was home to dangerous undersea mines that killed hundreds of people. At its peak, Hashima was producing about 400,000 tons of coal per year — more coal than the U.S. exported to China in 2009.

Hashima was was completely dependent on the outside world. It had coal, and that was it. The community, which peaked at over 5,200 people, had to import everything — food, fresh water, building materials and clothing. So when Japan started transitioning from a coal-based economy to an oil-based economy, the island had nothing else to rely on. Mitsubishi began laying off workers in the 1960′s and eventually shut down the entire community in 1974:

According to Brian Burke Gaffney of the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science, who wrote a history of the island in Cabinet magazine, the Japanese government as used pictures of Hashima in newspaper ads promoting energy conservation — reminding people of what happens when a community (or country) uses up everything it has with no back-up plan.

Now desolate and forgotten, Hashima guards the entrance to Nagasaki Harbor like a strange, dead lighthouse, attracting little more attention than the visits of tired seagulls and the curious stares of people on passing ships. But the symbolism is hard to ignore. The tight-knit Hashima community was a miniature version of Japanese society and it straddled a landmass that, except for the lack of water and greenery, mimicked the entire archipelago. The island’s present forlorn state is a lesson to contemporary Japan about what happens to a country that exhausts its own resources and depends solely on foreign trade.

Below are old comments from the previous Facebook commenting system:

Leif Erik Knutsen

Fortunately those folks had somewhere to go. Quite unlike the children of Space Ship Earth.

July 30 at 12:09pm

Colorado Bob

Torrential Rain Hits Niigata & Fukushima – More Than 650mm of Rain Since Wednesday – 30/07/11.

This is 25.59 inches.

July 30 at 12:58pm

Joan Savage

Torrential rains on disabled nuclear reactors that were hit by an earthquake and tsunami might edge things towards Joe Romm’s category of “different in kind.”

July 30 at 2:51pm

Colorado Bob

In Fukushima Prefecture, the town of Tadami issued an evacuation advisory to all of its residents — about 4,800 people in 1,800 households. Local firefighters said they were notified that one person was swept away in a mudslide.
The Meteorological Agency said some areas in the two prefectures saw precipitation of 100 mm per hour and warned that torrential rain would continue through Saturday morning.
http://search.japantimes.c​o.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110730a5.​html

July 30 at 4:05pm

Jon Warren Lentz

not a lively warning but a deathly one, heard by nearly no one.

July 30 at 1:02pm

Colorado Bob

Forecasters warned that the rains could continue to be torrential after reaching 1,000 millimetres (40 inches) to date in Sanjo City, Niigata, 250 kilometres (155 miles) northwest of Tokyo, since they started Wednesday.

http://www.google.com/host​ednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i​jZ08b6_UaTV0m3ISlYZShE3sDu​Q?docId=CNG.b802f980032bd7​c04d75f200f787b575.341

July 30 at 1:03pm

Joan Savage

The article mentioned the risk of earthquake tremors generating mudslides.

July 30 at 2:51pm

Paul Magnus

Apparently it is also possible the other way around, rain and weather phenomena aslo possible to trigger earthquakes…

July 30 at 5:06pm

Paul Magnus

How does the flood affect the radiation fall out impact…. I guess most will run off in to the ocean…

July 30 at 5:09pm

Paul Magnus

http://uk.reuters.com/arti​cle/2011/07/30/uk-japan-qu​ake-idUKTRE76T1PL20110730
Strong earthquake jolts northeast Japan, no tsunami

July 30 at 5:16pm

Paul Magnus

In Japan, 400000 told to evacuate
TODAYonline – 9 minutes ago
TOKYO – About 400000 residents have been advised to evacuate Japan’s North-east Niigata and Fukushima prefectures due to torrential rain, China’s Xinhua news agency reported, citing a local media report. Two men have been killed and five others missing

July 30 at 5:29pm

Joan Savage

A Japan Times review of Japan’s renewable energy options.
http://search.japantimes.c​o.jp/cgi-bin/fl20110724x1.​html

July 30 at 8:45pm

Paul Magnus

Amateur video of tsunami-like waves as mad floods hit South Korea
http://www.youtube.com/wat​ch?v=UeOgKjGUerw&feature=p​layer_embedded

July 30 at 11:35pm

John Earl

A fossil fuel town that fossilized…

July 30 at 1:14pm

Colorado Bob

July 27th CLIMATE SUMMARY…

THE EXTREME DRYNESS AND VERY HOT TEMPERATURES THAT HAVE PLAGUED THE.
REGION THIS SUMMER CONTINUE TO PERSIST. NO RAINFALL WAS MEASURED AT.
EITHER LUBBOCK OR CHILDRESS DURING THE LAST TWO WEEKS…LEAVING YEAR.
TO DATE RAINFALL TOTALS OF 1.13 INCHES AT LUBBOCK AND 3.64 INCHES AT.
CHILDRESS. OTHER YEAR TO DATE RAINFALL TOTALS AROUND THE AREA.
INCLUDE 1.37 INCHES AT FRIONA…2.23 INCHES AT SILVERTON…2.35.
INCHES AT MORTON…1.56 INCHES AT PLAINVIEW…AND ONLY 0.72 INCHES.
AT BROWNFIELD.

WELL ABOVE NORMAL TEMPERATURES HAVE ALSO PERSISTED ACROSS THE REGION.
THROUGH LATE JULY. THE AVERAGE HIGH TEMPERATURE AT LUBBOCK FROM JULY.
1 TO JULY 27 IS 99.2 DEGREES OR 7.3 DEGREES ABOVE NORMAL. DURING MID
JULY…LUBBOCK BROKE THE ALL-TIME RECORD FOR THE MOST 100 DEGREE.
DAYS FOR A SINGLE YEAR. LUBBOCK HAS NOW SEEN 33 DAYS THIS YEAR AT OR.
ABOVE 100 THROUGH JULY 27TH.

HIGH TEMPERATURES AT CHILDRESS DURING THE LAST TWO WEEKS OF JULY.
HAVE BEEN SLIGHTLY WARMER THAN THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF THE MONTH. THE
AVERAGE HIGH TEMPERATURE AT CHILDRESS FROM JULY 1 TO JULY 27 IS.
104.1 DEGREES…OR NEARLY 9 DEGREES ABOVE NORMAL. CHILDRESS IS
CURRENTLY ON A RECORD STREAK OF 36 CONSECUTIVE 100 DEGREE.
DAYS…BREAKING THE OLD RECORD OF 32 DAYS SET IN 1943. THE TOTAL
NUMBER OF 100 DEGREE DAYS FOR THE YEAR AT CHILDRESS NOW STANDS AT 62.
THROUGH JULY 27TH…ONLY 10 DAYS SHY OF BREAKING THE ALL TIME RECORD OF.
71 DAYS IN 1934.
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/lu​b/version.php?pil=LUBDGTLU​B&cwi=1&n=0

July 30 at 2:50pm

Colorado Bob

LUBBOCK — Randy McGee spent $28,000 in one month pumping water onto about 500 acres in West Texas before he decided to give up irrigating 75 acres of corn and focus on other crops that stood a better chance in the drought.

He thought rain might come and save those 75 acres, but it didn’t and days of triple-digit heat sucked the remaining moisture from the soil. McGee walked recently through rows of sunbaked and stunted stalks, one of thousands of farmers counting his losses amid record heat and drought this year.

The drought has spread over much of the southern U.S., leaving Oklahoma the driest it has been since the 1930s and setting records from Louisiana to New Mexico. But the situation is especially severe in Texas, which trails only California in agricultural productivity.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/​story.mpl/headline/biz/767​2502.html#ixzz1Tc9EJ4jW

July 30 at 2:51pm

Colorado Bob

1110 AM CDT WED JUL 27 2011

…ALL-TIME WARMEST LOW TEMPERATURE TIED AT LUBBOCK…

THE LOW TEMPERATURE AT LUBBOCK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT FOR JULY 27TH
HAS ONLY BEEN 79 DEGREES. IF THE TEMPERATURE DOES NOT FALL BELOW 79
THROUGH MIDNIGHT TONIGHT…WHICH IS HIGHLY UNLIKELY…THIS WILL TIE
THE ALL-TIME WARMEST LOW TEMPERATURE EVER RECORDED AT LUBBOCK SET ON
JULY 28TH 1966.

…JUNE 2011 WAS THE HOTTEST MONTH ON RECORD AT LUBBOCK…

…JUNE 2011 PRECIPITATION TIES DRIEST JUNE ON RECORD AT LUBBOCK…

THE AVERAGE MONTHLY TEMPERATURE FOR JUNE 2011 AT LUBBOCK
INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT WAS 85.9 DEGREES. THIS NOT ONLY MAKES JUNE
2011 THE HOTTEST JUNE ON RECORD…BUT ALSO MAKES JUNE 2011 THE
HOTTEST MONTH EVER ON RECORD FOR LUBBOCK.

THE PREVIOUS HOTTEST JUNE ON RECORD WAS 84.4 DEGREES IN JUNE
1990…AND THE PREVIOUS HOTTEST MONTH EVER ON RECORD WAS 85.4
DEGREES IN JULY 1966.

ONLY A TRACE OF PRECIPITATION FELL AT LUBBOCK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
FOR JUNE 2011. THIS TIES THE DRIEST JUNE ON RECORD…WHEN A TRACE
FELL BACK IN JUNE 1990.

July 30 at 3:13pm

Paul Magnus

I think after the last 12 mths the insurance industry will not be insuring floods of any sort no more…. the cost of china, seoul, canada, US, Auz and now Japan is just going to ruin their profits for a long time.

Problem is how are they going to return to the black with ever increasing extreme events ramping up year on year? If you have investments/pensions in the insurance sector I would recommend you sift them somewhere else…. maybe gold….

July 30 at 5:22pm

Paul Magnus

http://www.reuters.com/art​icle/2011/07/29/usa-weathe​r-disasters-idUSN1E76R1ZK2​0110729
The United States is on a pace in 2011 to set a record for the cost of weather-related disasters and the trend is expected to worsen due to climate change, officials and scientists said on Thursday.

July 30 at 5:23pm

Paul Magnus

“…nothing is entirely ‘natural’ anymore,”

July 30 at 5:25pm

Paul Magnus

This is the sad other side to it all…..

Slow Stirrings Among Conservatives on Adaptation — Just Don’t Mention Climate Change
nytimes.com
Tony Allender believes in climate change, but his Texan bosses are more skeptical. That disconnection might have made his job…
http://tinyurl.com/3jyy6x7

July 30 at 5:28pm

Paul Magnus

wow… S. Korea landslide video…
http://tinyurl.com/3ldz6hn

July 30 at 5:45pm

Paul Magnus

Amateur video of tsunami-like waves as mad floods hit South Korea
http://www.youtube.com/wat​ch?v=UeOgKjGUerw&feature=p​layer_embedded

July 30 at 11:38pm

Colorado Bob

The New Normal : The 1,000 Year Rain Events Come Every Other Day.
http://coloradobob1.newsvi​ne.com/_news/2011/07/30/72​05562-the-new-normal-the-1​000-year-rain-events-come-​every-other-day?threadId=3​186156&commentId=56522133#​c56522133

July 30 at 8:31pm

Paul Magnus

will they recover before the next event….

“The forecast is for the lake to be below flood level by next April.”

July 30 at 11:47pm

Paul Magnus

Even without the 1 in 1000 year events, the 1 in 10 yr events are starting to happen on a seasonal basis and are severely disrupting normality….

July 30 at 11:50pm

Paul Magnus

Farmers can not predict the seasons and the chaotic events even if they aren’t extreme are severely disrupting food supplies.

July 30 at 11:53pm

Paul Magnus

When you can’t predict the season, you can’t farm
http://www.bclocalnews.com​/richmond_southdelta/richm​ondreview/opinion/12625776​8.html

July 30 at 11:53pm

Joan Savage

The pictures prompt me to think of what other energy extraction ventures might look like after 37 years’ abandonment like Hashima. Rust and crumble, in many cases. Toxic leachates often. The mountaintop removals and tar sands are wretchedly ugly already. These things don’t age gracefully.

July 30 at 8:48pm

Colorado Bob

The heavy rains also battered North Korea, causing “great damage to the people’s economy”, the official news agency said late Thursday.

According to a preliminary tally, 35,700 hectares (88,223 acres) of rice paddies were inundated, thousands of homes and hundreds of workplaces, schools and public buildings were destroyed, it said.

The south and east were the worst-hit regions, where downpours of up to 500 mm fell from Tuesday to Thursday, it said. The impoverished communist state is already suffering from serious food shortages.
http://www.terradaily.com/​reports/Seoul_officials_un​der_fire_as_storm_toll_hit​s_59_999.html

July 30 at 9:07pm

Paul Magnus

Even after we’ve disappeared our wind farms and solar panels may still be generating electricity….

How Germany plans to succeed in a nuclear free, low-carbon economy.
WRI: Germany plans to meet ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets while it phases out nuclear power.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/​environment/2011/jul/29/nu​clearpower-energy

Sunday at 1:44am

Kathy Faldt

All mining CSG supporters should see these photos.

Sunday at 3:45am

Marty Weirick

You don’t have to go to Japan to see abandoned coal towns. Just visit eastern Kentucky or Southern West Virginia. Take a drive, for example, from, Bramwell in Mercer County to Gary in McDowell County and count the number of abandoned houses, business, and schools.

Sunday at 5:58pm

Marge Wood

So tragic. Nowadays there are novels for juveniles and young adults that remind me of this article–life after the earth no longer functions for most people, just for the super rich.

Sunday at 6:52pm

Ana Paulina

“Even in the face of ascending ruin, does silence speak and present itself, so well in beauty”.

Monday at 12:23am

Nancy LaPlaca

powerful photos…

Monday at 2:04am

Richard Brenne

Hashima is a metaphor in many ways. It was abandoned like a smaller-island version of Easter Island, which was also unsustainable.

Unlike the Easter Island immense stone heads, the Japanese coal was used to portray human heads on TV by generating electricity and making things like bobble-head dolls, largely for American consumption.

Like Japan and Anthro-Earth, Hashima’s population exceeded its ability to support itself indefinitely. Maybe 50 gardeners and fishers could’ve lived sustainably on Hashima if rainwater use was maximized, or one-hundredth of the 5,000 who lived there with outside inputs. I don’t know how many Japanese could live on Japan’s Islands without external inputs, but I’m pretty sure it’s below their current 128 million in a nation smaller than California (with almost four times as many people).

So Japan has had to get resources from other nations, buying them as peacefully as any industrialized nation since WWII, but acting remarkably similar to the Nazis to take resources especially oil during and before that time.

After the U.S. and then Western Europe, Japan was the next great oil economy. Now virtually all 200 nations on Anthro-Earth either have an oil economy or desperately want one. How sustainable is that?

And if two nations only recently addicted to oil (Japan and Nazi Germany who saw that Allied oil and internal combustion engines had defeated German coal and railroads during WWI) can wreak the havoc and 50 million deaths of WWII, what havoc could nations far more powerful and far more addicted create? (If you want to find out, elect anyone on the Far Right.)

Monday at 3:03pm

Lisa Anderson

given the recent conversations about our ability to keep our farming land and avoid digging everything up for coal..this is a grim reminder of what we are letting nsw government politicians do…

Monday at 11:28pm

Luke Barker

Boooo! How can they look at that outcome and still let it happen?

Monday at 11:50pm

Marc Smith

Spooky – this is what it will look like when we are gone!

15 hours ago

Lars Malmqvist

scary!

7 hours ago

Thanks to JR for bringing my attention to this important development in the international regulation of the barber industry:

The government has given barbers and beauticians a break in areas affected by the March 11 earthquake, easing laws to allow them to clip and style at shelters or makeshift shops near temporary housing sites. The relaxed regulations will last for about two years beginning this month, according to the government.

The current barbers’ and beauticians’ laws ban the cutting of hair at places other than authorized shops, except for customers who cannot come shops due to illness or hairdressers who provide services at weddings. But the earthquake damaged many hairdressers’ shops and has made transportation to and from authorized shops difficult, leading to many requests from local people for the laws to be changed. This is the first time the rules on cutting hair have been relaxed for any reason.

Something important to note here is that the existing framework already included exemptions for key circumstances in which the regulations would inconvenience people. That’s better than a totally inflexible regulatory framework. But it’s also a bit of a giveaway. If a bride on her wedding day is prepared to roll the dice on getting her hair done someplace that’s not an authorized barber shop then why shouldn’t she be allowed to do so six months later? Why shouldn’t I be allowed to do it whenever I want? Surely the issue isn’t that hairstyle quality is uniquely unimportant during weddings and thus we can afford to loosen the regulation. Let’s regulate polluters and banks whose activities pose meaningful risks to innocent bystanders and let people cut hair in peace.

Given that rich country monetary policy (except in Sweden, Australia, and Canada) has been too tight for years, and it’s been especially too tight in Japan, I can’t but approve of the Bank of Japan’s decision to ease in response to the earthquake/tsunami/meltdown problems hitting the country.

That said, I think this is primarily worth thinking about precisely because of how different this set of problems is from the “normal” ones of a great recession. Japan, after all, just got hit with a series of very real negative shocks. Buildings have fallen down. Buildings that are still standing have been damaged by water. Cars, trucks, and other pieces of useful equipment have been ruined. Roads, docks, and other pieces of transportation infrastructure have been blocked by debris. Several nuclear power reactors aren’t generating electrical power. Tens of thousands of human beings are dead or injured.

These are not problems that can be solved on the demand side. If Japan is producing less two weeks after the earthquake than it was producing two weeks before the earthquake, that will be because the quake and associated traumas have in fact degraded the country’s ability to produce goods and services. This is exactly what didn’t strike the United States and Europe during the financial panic of 2007 and 2008. The United States is producing a low less than it could be producing primarily because a large number of people, the unemployed people, aren’t producing anything at all. And yet we have functioning office buildings they could sit in. We have factories running at below capacity they could work in. We have trucks and cranes and other machines they could operate. We haven’t been hit by an earthquake, our power plants aren’t exploding, our roads aren’t blocked by displaced automobiles, we’re just not putting everyone to work. That’s the very definition of a country with inadequate aggregate demand, and we should be fighting the situation with every tool at our disposal. Instead the debate in congress is about how much short-term spending to cut, and voices slamming the Fed for being too loose continue to be heard louder than those slamming it for being too tight.

Japanese Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa

If you look at the region in very abstract terms, close defense cooperation between South Korea and Japan seems like a no-brainer. In practice, however, the relationship between the two countries is actually quite chilly, as detailed in Chico Harlan’s article about efforts to increase defense and intelligence cooperation between Tokyo and Seoul.

The difficulties are attributed largely to the fact that Koreans, especially older ones, feel “intense bitterness over the 35-year Japanese occupation of Korea that ended in 1945.” That’s quite understandable. It’s also the case, however, that if you look at 20th century Europe, the practical imperative to move forward with defense cooperation served as an important driver of reconciliation between Germany and its neighbors.

The danger here for the United States is that while it’s obviously good for our two main allies in the region to cooperate, especially vis-à-vis the DPRK, I don’t think we really want to become the offshore sponsors of an anti-Chinese military alliance. One can easily imagine some future state of the world in which it does make sense for the US to be the patron of a grouping like that, but one can also easily imagine steps in that direction becoming self-fulfilling. Our main concrete interest in the area is simply that war and destruction in Northeast Asia would be very economically disruptive. We want to be preventing trouble, not starting it.

Felix Salmon writes about the Japanese budget situation and observes that “The lesson here, I think, is that it’s very, very hard for a government to enact a serious fiscal adjustment unless and until the bond market forces its hand.”

Well, I agree. But I’m less depressed about the whole thing than Salmon is. I mean, really, why would it be the case that governments enact serious fiscal adjustments when the bond markets aren’t forcing their hand? What I actually find remarkable is the quantity of media and political whining that goes on about the fact that countries don’t do this. Normally, though, we expect human beings and the organizations they run to respond to incentives. If people cease wanting to buy Japanese debt, then the Japanese government will find ways to issue less debt. But demand for Japanese debt is high, so why wouldn’t the government keep issuing more?

That’s not to say these endless debts are optimal policy for Japan. What they ought to be doing is trying to have more economic growth. Finance their government with a bit less debt and a bit more printing of yen. That’ll create elevated inflation expectations and spur growth. More immigrants wouldn’t hurt either. I think the real mystery is why unconstrained governments are so reluctant to really put the pedal to the metal.

(cc photo by LateNightTaskForce)

One remarkable aspect of the recent conservative assault on QE2 is that the conventional wisdom on the American right is now well to the right of where Milton Friedman was ten years ago. Take these remarks on Japan from 2000:

In 1989, the Bank of Japan stepped on the brakes very hard and brought money supply down to negative rates for a while. The stock market broke. The economy went into a recession, and it’s been in a state of quasi recession ever since. Monetary growth has been too low. Now, the Bank of Japan’s argument is, “Oh well, we’ve got the interest rate down to zero; what more can we do?”

It’s very simple. They can buy long-term government securities, and they can keep buying them and providing high-powered money until the high powered money starts getting the economy in an expansion. What Japan needs is a more expansive domestic monetary policy.

The Japanese bank has supposedly had, until very recently, a zero interest rate policy. Yet that zero interest rate policy was evidence of an extremely tight monetary policy. Essentially, you had deflation. The real interest rate was positive; it was not negative. What you needed in Japan was more liquidity.

According to Mike Pence and Paul Ryan, this is left-wing lunacy. The only solution to any economic problems is tax cuts for rich people.

When China’s working-age population peaks in 2015, it will be 20 years after Japan’s crested the wave, but it will do so at a much lower level of prosperity than was Japan’s at that time. The harsh reality is this: Japan got rich before it grew old, and China will grow old before it gets rich. [...]

History has given China this moment to do what Japan could not. The Japanese did not seriously attempt to rebalance until their economy was well-developed, ossified, and allergic to change. So when the jig was up on their longstanding economic model, rather than rebalance, Japan unraveled. In this sense, the global financial crisis was serendipitous for China. By reminding China’s leadership that relying on exports means depending on unreliable foreigners, the crisis put the pain of rebalancing in perspective. It is not out of altruism that we have seen renminbi appreciation accompanying Chinese wage hikes and other rebalancing measures. A slight loosening of controls over media and finance could be in the offing. Deregulating the service sector might be a frightening political proposition, but perhaps less so than not having one when the exports dry up.

It is worth saying, however, that from a different perspective I can see how Japan just looks like a success story to many people. After all, Japan’s PPP-adjusted per capita GDP is about level with France and higher than Spain, Israel, or Italy. Most people around the world, in other words, are poorer than the Japanese. So “you’re going to end up like Japan” isn’t necessarily much of a nightmare scenario to leaders in the developing world. Devine’s point is that China won’t end up like Japan, but instead risks seeing its economic growth stall out at a much lower level of development. But making that argument stick requires at least as much attention to the significant differences between the economies as to the similarities.

One of the oddities of the current crisis is that throughout the 1990s it was absolutely conventional wisdom in the United States of America that Japan, though suffering from some real structural issues, was making things much worse for itself than necessary by failing to coordinate fiscal and monetary policy to stimulate adequate demand. The extent of that conventional wisdom is why many of us thought the same thing couldn’t happen in the United States. And yet as soon as the USA experienced a big crash, suddenly the conventional wisdom started looking like old-timey Japanese conventional wisdom—”nothing can be done, the problems are structural, blah blah blah.”

In that light, it’s interesting to see that western media coverage of Japan still adheres to the old western orthodoxy about the desirability of stimulative policies. Here’s the NYT:

Prime Minister Naoto Kan proposed new stimulus steps, while the central bank, under pressure from the government, eased its already easy monetary policy. But analysts called the measures too timid in the face of the problems facing Japan’s export-oriented economy. A yen that has paradoxically surged to 15-year highs despite weaknesses in the country’s economy, coupled with the damaging phenomenon of falling prices known as deflation, continues to hinder hopes of a strong recovery, analysts said.

“There seems to be a sense of fatalism. The B.O.J. continues to play the same old game of making incremental, but ultimately meaningless, policy changes in response to political pressure,” said Richard Jerram, economist for Japan at the global investment bank, Macquarie.

And here’s the Washington Post:

Both analysts and the markets were underwhelmed by the central bank’s measures. Following the announcement, the yen actually strengthened – rising to 85.12 on the dollar. The Nikkei index, meanwhile, lost its early morning gains following the central bank’s announcement. For the day it rose 1.76 percent.

“The BOJ measures were pretty much as expected,” said Edwin Merner, president of Tokyo’s Atlantis Investment Research. “It helps a little bit – if it’s followed by government action. The government could be adding measures that don’t cost anything. Cutting taxes. Guaranteeing loans for overseas contracts. They could do those things. But they’re not.”

Nothing wrong with any of this coverage. Indeed, I agree with it wholeheartedly. But the exact same basic principles apply to the United States. Economies facing low and declining inflation combined with high unemployment and massive excess capacity benefit from expansionary monetary policy. Monetary policy that merely aims at preventing further collapse is timid and inadequate. Policy should aim at rapidly bringing as much of that excess capacity as possible back into use.

What was necessary was the clean-up and recapitalization of the banking system, the further loosening of monetary policy (to the extent possible given that interest rates were at zero), and the avoidance of any further premature fiscal tightening, as I set out in Posen (1998, 1999a, and 2001b). This was obviously not a simple list, economically or politically. Yet, it was also not a list of the impossible, it emphasized demand side factors, and was a list that seemed all the more plausible when Japanese policymakers recognized that Japan was not doomed to a permanently low trend growth rate – a belief that had bedevilled both fiscal and monetary policy decisions in Japan for much of the 1990s.

Japan’s new economic leadership in the early 2000s, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Cabinet Office and later Financial Services Minister Heizo Takenaka, and Bank of Japan Governor Toshihiko Fukui, turned matters around. They reversed monetary policies that contributed to deflation, turned the fiscal impulse to average net zero (see figure 5), and forced bad loan write- offs and recapitalization by the Japanese banks (figure 6).10 What few seem to appreciate, either inside or outside of Japan, is just how strong the resulting Japanese recovery from 2002-2008 was. It was the longest unbroken recovery of Japan’s postwar history, and, while not as strong as pre-bubble Japanese performance, was in fact stronger than the growth in comparable economies even when fuelled by their own bubbles.

People can get confused about Koizumi-era Japan’s economic performance because demographics were driving a pretty rapid reduction in the number of workers. That drags down overall output. But even though China’s GDP is much larger than Switzerland, Switzerland is still much richer and its workers are much more productive.

Posen’s piece is important, because I fear that historical evidence of poor economic performance in the wake of asset price bubbles bursting is creating a mood of dangerous complacency. You can read that as evidence that we’re destined to experience an extended period of poor growth, but you can also read it as evidence that what normally happens after a bust is that policymakers implement an ineffective response. And as Posen argues, accepting the view that slow growth is inevitable is a major cause of ineffective policy and becomes self-fulfilling. Japan started growing once it got some policymakers who believed it was possible for Japan to grow, and thus that they would try pro-growth things and try them on a large scale.

After three decades of spectacular growth, China passed Japan in the second quarter to become the world’s second-largest economy behind the United States, according to government figures released early Monday. [...] The recognition came early Monday, when Tokyo said that Japan’s economy was valued at about $1.28 trillion in the second quarter, slightly below China’s $1.33 trillion. Japan’s economy grew 0.4 percent in the quarter, Tokyo said, substantially less than forecast. That weakness suggests that China’s economy will race past Japan’s for the full year.

Spectacular growth has certainly been key here, but the other thing is that China has a large economy because so many people live there:

With a population of that size, China would have to have a far, far, far larger overall economy than Japan’s in order to provide people with half Japan’s standard of living. Under the circumstances, I find this sort of commentary puzzling:

“This has enormous significance,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It reconfirms what’s been happening for the better part of a decade: China has been eclipsing Japan economically. For everyone in China’s region, they’re now the biggest trading partner rather than the U.S. or Japan.”

As best I can tell, this is just false. Despite twenty years of very strong Chinese growth and twenty years of very weak Japanese growth, China is still nowhere near “eclipsing” Japan as a prosperous center of high-skill, high-wage work where people enjoy a high standard of living. In East Asia it’s Singapore that now leads the pack in prosperity, and Japan is about tied with Taiwan. China is still well behind Malaysia, to say nothing of South Korea or those three. The recent growth has been spectacular and a hugely important event, but people shouldn’t let illusions of pure scale confuse them about how far China’s come.

Via Ezra Klein, a fascinating Business Week piece about how new CEO pay disclosure rules in Japan have revealed that Japanese executives are merely fancy lawyer rich and not world-crushing American CEO rich:

A drawback of Japan’s low pay is that it’s harder to recruit abroad because junior executives overseas can end up with higher salaries than their peers—or bosses—at headquarters. “They have to make a special case for hiring a VP who’s making more than the president,” says Motohiro Morishima, a professor of human resources at Hitotsubashi University. At Takeda Pharmaceutical in Osaka, the CEO takes home $2.5 million—half as much as the U.S. sales chief. [...]

Nissan’s Ghosn, Japan’s top-paid CEO, took home $10 million in 2009. Over at Toyota Motor, meanwhile, Chairman Fujio Cho earned $1.5 million. CEO Akio Toyoda wasn’t among the four executives who received more than $1.1 million (though as the founder’s grandson, he owns about $160 million in company shares). Sony’s Stringer, Japan’s second-highest-paid executive, made $9.1 million. At rival Panasonic, nobody earned enough to require disclosure under the new rules.

An editorial remark appended to the end of the piece says:

The bottom line: Japan’s CEOs earn far less than Americans or Europeans. The pay gap could be a problem as Japanese companies expand abroad.

I assume that if this was an article about how some Chinese factory workers do essentially the same job as some American factory workers, but they do it for much less money, the bottom line would be about all the efficiencies that can be reaped through outsourcing production to Asia. And to me the bottom line seems to be the same. Toyota is a much larger and dare I say more successful firm than Ford, whose CEO appears to be making over $20 million a year. Surely there’s some senior person over there who speaks English and would be willing to do Alan Mulally’s job for Carlos Ghosn money, right? CEO pay in China also seems to be quite low.

Even within the West, if you look at the CEO’s of the major oil companies the French guy running the French company makes much less than the American and British executives running the other firms. Presumably Chevron could save some money by importing a French CEO, but the magic of class solidarity seems to largely prevent such moves.

Last year, a pretty good movie called The Cove came out, a documentary about cruel treatment of dolphins in Japan. It’s not the kind of thing you expect to get wide release anywhere, but if anyone should be interested it’s Japanese people. But apparently so far no theaters will agree to show it:

And if Shuhei Nishimura and his compatriots on Japan’s nationalist fringe have their way, none ever will.

In a country that shudders at disharmony and remains wary of the far right’s violent history, the activists’ noisy rallies, online slanders, intimidating phone calls and veiled threats of violence are frightening theaters into canceling showings of “The Cove,” which not only depicts dolphin hunting in an unflattering light but also warns of high levels of mercury in fish, a disturbing disclosure in this seafood-loving nation.

Bad times. Ultimately digital distribution and the trend toward everyone having bigger TVs should reduce the gatekeeper role of movie theaters, which will be good news for this kind of controversial film.

Leikha Kihara’s Reuters profile of new Japanese Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda indicates that he shares the current global fad for fiscal austerity whether or not it makes sense. More encouragingly, though, it also reveals that he’s not afraid of picking a public fight or two with the Bank of Japan over the monetary authority’s need for looser policy. There’s a strong case for central bank independence—namely that lack of independence will lead to unduly loose policy—but that’s a contingent, empirical case. The experience of Japan has been of independence leading to unduly tight policy and far too little growth. Recently the European Central Bank has been trending in that direction as well and even though the American Federal Reserve looks good in comparison we’re also erring on the side of doing too little.

The overall dynamic is poisonous, and elected officials need to start challenging it. Japan is as good a place as any to start.

When you read about the heads of the world’s other major central banks, Ben Bernanke looks better by the day:

Masaaki Shirakawa, governor of the Bank of Japan, said that upside and downside risks to the economy were “roughly balanced”.

The median of forecasts by the BoJ’s policy board is now for inflation of minus 0.5 per cent in 2010 and minus 0.2 per cent in 2011 compared with October’s forecasts of minus 0.8 per cent and minus 0.4 per cent.

The BoJ made clear, however, that deflation would be weaker “due mainly to the rise in crude oil prices” while its statement continued to say that “substantial slack in the economy as a whole” was weighing on the consumer price index.

What on earth is balanced about this? Rising energy prices and falling non-energy prices is a recipe for disaster. The Japanese growth fiasco is really remarkable. If you think we have debt problems, note that they’re at 200 percent of GDP. And since their population is shrinking, it’s extremely hard to shrink the debt-GDP ratio even if the economy grows in per capita terms.

In that light, it’s interesting to note that if you look at the world’s fastest cities the United States actually dominates. Here’s a list I made of the top ten cities:

The difference is that these are all relatively small places. The fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth fastest internet cities in Asia are all in South Korea and they include places like Seocho-gu and Masan that have many more residents than Sandy or Charlottsville.

Also note that the generally prevailing speeds in the Northeast are higher and comparable to the faster European countries, though not to the fastest Asian countries:

And just to reiterate, if population density and/or urbanization is the reason the US needs to be slower than Japan and Sweden you need to explain why internet speed in the District of Columbia is also slower than the internet in those countries.

Japan is kind of an odd duck among the world’s democracies in that they have most of the trappings of parliamentary democracy, but when all is said and done the same party always wins. Since 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party has consistently held power except for one brief 11 month spell during which an opposition coalition controlled things. But today that’s changing as the opposition Democratic Party of Japan has swept to a clear win in parliamentary elections and already controls the upper house. Yukio Hatoyama will take over as Prime Minister.

One consequence of this prolonged period of one-party rule is that the LDP is not an especially ideological political party. It’s essentially a “party of government” patronage machine that contains diverse factions and different points of view. The Democratic Party, consequently, is more of a generic umbrella opposition grouping than a clear ideological alternative. Thus the Democrats are riding in on a tide of public discontent, but don’t seem to have articulated much in the way of a policy agenda beyond the obscure issue of bureaucracy reform. The thing that strikes outsiders about Japan is that they should probably let more immigrants in but no Japanese people seem to like that idea.

Courtney at Feministing points to a New York Times article on “hostess” clubs in Japan where, to be simplistic about it, basically you pay a premium to have young women flirt with you and also to an enlightening roundup of expert commentary on the issue.

Meanwhile, in a rare instance of core requirements paying off, in college I fulfilled my foreign cultures slot with what turned out to be an extremely interesting class taught by an anthropologist about contemporary Tokyo. One of the things we were assigned was Anne Allison’s book Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. It’ll be a bit outdated by now, but it’s highly recommended. Allison is a trained and skilled academic who went undercover and worked as a hostess and is very skilled at blending her reporting with theoretically informed analysis.

In a related vein, I also highly recommend The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, a documentary I saw three years ago at SilverDocs. It’s about a (relatively rare) club where the genders are reversed and female clients are catered to by male hosts.