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COMMENTARY
March 16, 2011
Fukushima
The term "meltdown" is used figuratively in many contexts. No argument against this, for the term is evocative. Yet even in common speech, it would be more effective were more attention given to its full metaphorical implications. The person, individual or corporate, who "melts down" does not merely fail or cease functioning. He, she or it should be presented as going "radioactive" in a moral or emotional sense, thus poisoning the psychic environment.We are losing the old, judgemental sense that the failure of one may be a catastrophe to others. We take failure too lightly, and forgive it too easily. People fail because the penalties against failure are insufficiently frightening. We have the phenomenon of "moral jeopardy" that is at the heart of all systems of insurance, even those based on honest accounting and adequate reserves. But our term for today, and for the week, is "meltdown." When it is applied to an actual nuclear reactor, it might be used with more caution. For in that context, it has a quite specific meaning; and the meltdown of a reactor core has quite specific effects. We in the media should be especially on guard against using the term figuratively in a context that does not admit of figurative use. Perversely, we have now had an international media sensation equivalent to a Japanese Chernobyl, from a "meltdown watch" on a nuclear power plant wherein there has been no meltdown, and the chances of one are not high. Moreover, the effects of such a meltdown would be relatively modest. This, at least, if one is reading writers with some expertise in nuclear engineering, as opposed to, say, axe-grinding environmentalists. We have seepages of steam, radioactive on the dental X-ray scale, made dramatic by the very rigour of Japanese safety precautions. We have accumulations of a hydrogen gas from a chemical reaction between the melting zirconium alloy in fuel rod casings and this water steam, which -- unsuccessfully vented -- blew the roofs off several buildings. This provided exciting video footage. But the fuel rods themselves remain well-contained; and casualties are likely to remain negligible. We have son-et-lumière, but on the scale of other damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami, this is minor collateral. Whole towns were swept over, people by the thousands swept inland and then out to sea. And the biggest "fallout" from the loss of these reactors is likely to come from the power shortages that will hamper recovery efforts for years to come. Chernobyl failed thanks to a couple of major design flaws, paired in turn with the Soviet way of doing things. And even Chernobyl was not so bad, on the scale of man-made disasters (in Russia, especially). From a strictly "green" point of view, one might even call it a success. For beyond its propaganda value in helping people to confuse apples with oranges, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl has become a wildlife sanctuary in which a number of endangered species are apparently flourishing. The one flaw exposed in the design of the second-generation nuclear facility at Okuma ("Fukushima One") was the dependence on electrical pumps for the water cooling system. They were what the Richter 9 earthquake, and subsequent tsunami, knocked out. In third-generation reactors, the water is circulated by natural convection. Problem solved. The actual destruction, of lives and property, that could be accomplished by an earthquake that cracks a major hydro dam is on a vastly greater scale. There are a string of those, along the tectonic front line of northern India, harvesting the meltwaters of the Himalayas. There is the Three Gorges Dam in China, building its incredibly heavy reservoir near six seismic fault lines, with the whole valley of the Yangtse River downstream from it. When environmentalists say nuclear energy is unsafe, the question must be, "Unsafe compared to what?" Sane policy discussion begins in the knowledge that there is no such thing as safe, or entirely "clean" power. And a world of seven billion souls thrown back on sunshine and windmills would solve our supposed population problem too quickly. Life on this planet is never safe. Ideologues (environmentalist and other) prey on human credulity by comparing real things, not with alternative real things, but with absolute conditions in some paradise of their imagination. That is why, incidentally, religion is so important in politics. It provides a buttress to sanity, against utopian dreaming. For those who recognize a kingdom not of this world are less apt to confuse earth with heaven. Or hell, for that matter. Religion is also a buttress against panic -- that form of failure, or metaphorical "meltdown," in which an insufficient supply of knowledge is contaminated with huge doses of perfervid imagination to produce a poisonous fallout. Paradoxically, the superstitious fear that has been inculcated against nuclear power can lead only to a real-world run on fossil fuels. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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