Air Pollution Damaging Europe's Wildlife Havens



Some farming systems require chemicals to be

added to the soil in order to improve fields' fertility

BBC News
19 April 2011

Air pollution is damaging 60% of Europe's prime wildlife sites in meadows, forests and heaths, according to a new report.

A team of EU scientists said nitrogen emissions from cars, factories and farming was threatening biodiversity.

It's the second report this week warning of the on-going risks and threats linked to nitrogen pollution.

The Nitrogen Deposition and Natura 2000 report was published at a key scientific conference in Edinburgh.

Earlier this week, the European Nitrogen Assessment - the first of its kind - estimated nitrogen damage to health and the environment at between £55bn and £280bn a year in Europe, even though nitrogen pollution from vehicles and industry had dropped 30% over recent decades.

Nitrogen in the atmosphere is harmless in its inert state, but the report says reactive forms of nitrogen, largely produced by human activity, can be a menace to the natural world.

Emissions mostly come from vehicle exhausts, factories, artificial fertilisers and manure from intensive farming.

The reactive nitrogen they emit to the air disrupts the environment in two ways: It can make acidic soils too acidic to support their previous mix of species. But primarily, because nitrogen is a fertiliser, it favours wild plants that can maximise the use of nitrogen to help them grow.

In effect, some of the nitrogen spread to fertilise crops is carried in the atmosphere to fertilise weeds, possibly a great distance from where the chemicals were first applied.

The effects of fertilisation and acidification favour common aggressive species like grasses, brambles and nettles.

They harm more delicate species like lichens, mosses, harebells and insect-eating sundew plants.

Ignored Problem

The report said 60% of wildlife sites were now receiving a critical load of reactive nitrogen.

The report's lead author, Dr Kevin Hicks from the University of York's Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), told BBC News that England's Peak District had a demonstrably low range of species as a result of the reactive nitrogen that fell on the area.

"Nitrogen creates a rather big problem that seems to me to have been given too little attention," he said.
"Governments are obliged by the EU Habitats Directive to protect areas like this, but they are clearly failing."

He said more research was needed to understand the knock-on effects for creatures from the changes in vegetation inadvertently caused by emissions from cars, industry and farms.

At the conference, the delegates agreed "The Edinburgh Declaration on Reactive Nitrogen". The document highlights the importance of reducing reactive nitrogen emissions to the environment, adding that the benefits of reducing nitrogen outweigh the costs of taking action.

Villagers Oppose India’s Big Nuclear Reactor Plan

IOL
19 April 2011

As far as Taramati Vaghdhare is concerned, there is no question of accepting compensation to make way for the world’s largest nuclear power plant.

“If you want the land, make us stand on the land – shoot us – and then take the land,” said the feisty 53-year-old, gesturing with a spatula.

“Our land is our mother. We can’t sell her and take compensation,” said Vaghdhare, who was among villagers detained during recent protests against the plant at Jaitapur.

The stakes are high for chronically power-short India. The plant would eventually have six reactors capable of generating 9 900 megawatts – enough to power 10 million Indian homes.

Long-running opposition to the proposed plant has hardened amid the nuclear crisis in Japan, with village posters depicting scenes of the devastation at the Fukushima plant and warning of what could be in store.

Even if villagers and fishermen derail the plant, India is unlikely to back down from its broader nuclear ambitions given surging power demand and a lack of alternatives.

India suffers from a peak-hour power deficit of about 12 percent that hinders an economy growing at nearly 9 percent and causes blackouts in much of the country. About 40 percent of Indians lack electricity.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh staked his career on a 2008 deal with the US that ended India’s nuclear isolation dating to its 1974 test of a nuclear device, opening up a $150 billion (R1 trillion) civilian nuclear market.

India now operates 20 mostly small reactors at six sites with a capacity of 4 780MW, or 3 percent of the country’s total capacity. It hopes to lift its nuclear capacity to 63 000MW by 2032 by adding nearly 30 reactors.

Shortly after the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the plant at Fukushima and triggered a global rethink of nuclear power, Singh said India’s atomic energy programme was on track but regulators would review safety systems to ensure plants could withstand similar disasters.

“I do not believe that there is any panic reaction in terms of calling for a halt for the nuclear projects,” said MR Srinivasan, the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India, who selected the Jaitapur site.

A recent visit to the site saw little activity other than a group of policemen playing cricket. Defaced signs on the road to Jaitapur are evidence of the opposition to the plant. While the surrounding area is thinly populated, farmers in nearby villages grow cashews, jackfruit and mangoes.

About 120 of the 2 370 families eligible for compensation for their land have accepted it, according to Vivek Bhide, a doctor and mango farmer from the district. Community members say they are unified, and those who have accepted compensation are mostly absentee landowners.

Nearby, the fishing port of Sakhri Nate is home to 600 vessels that bring in about 50 tons a day. Residents fear the plant will disrupt access to fishing areas and raise water temperatures.

“The warm water which will come into the sea will drive away the fish,” said Majeed Latigowarkar, a 45-year-old fisherman. He said officials had offered electronic gear such as fish-finders and GPS systems in a failed effort to win support.

During a December visit to India by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the two countries signed a framework agreement for state-owned Areva to build two of its next-generation 1 650MW EPR reactors at Jaitapur and supply reactor fuel for 25 years in a deal worth e7bn (R69bn).

The Areva reactors would be the first of as many as six at the site, with construction set to start this year and operation to begin by 2018. Final contracts have yet to be signed.

Russia’s state-owned Rosatom plans to build 18 reactors in India, while the General Electric/Hitachi joint venture and the Westinghouse Electric unit of Toshiba are also eyeing opportunities in India.

Opposition to the plant is based in part on worry about seismic activity and concern that India would not be prepared to manage a crisis. India suffered one of the world’s worst industrial accidents in 1984 when about 3 000 people were killed by gas leaks from a factory in Bhopal.

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India, which would own and run the plant, said no active geological fault was within 30km of the site.

Critics also say Areva’s EPR technology is untested and expensive. No EPR reactors are in operation but four are under construction. The power parastatal has said the price of power from Jaitapur would be competitive.

Whether the Jaitapur plant is built or not, India has little choice but to add a lot more nuclear power.

While numerous thermal power projects are in development, environmental and land use restrictions mean power producers are having difficulty securing coal, which accounts for 60 percent of India’s energy use.

Gas output from the KG basin, for which India has high hopes, has lagged expectations, while competition for imports is intensifying. Alternatives including wind and solar are relatively expensive and lack the capacity to provide base load supply.

While New Delhi is committed to nuclear power, India’s leaders are sensitive to public opinion.

Residents in Jaitapur are encouraged by India’s history of civil disobedience and say they are bolstered in their argument by the crisis in Japan.

Praveen Gavankar, a farmer and leader of opposition to the nuclear plant, said villagers planned to start farming on the site and if the government tried to block them, they were prepared to go to Delhi and stage their own hunger strike.

“We will have to change the government’s mind,” he said. “The government can’t do anything to change our minds.” – Reuters

Is Japan Sinking and Liquefying?

By Troy CLE on April 17, 2011

I hope this is a problem that can be fixed because this looks very scary as if Japan could become another Atlantis. I know it sounds crazy but I hope this is:

1. Not what it looks like
2. Possibly a hoax
3. Just exaggerated.

Maybe Louis Proof can take some time off from fighting the eNoli and use his powers as a FAVORITE to fix this. Take a look for yourself and make sure you pay attention to how the large pieces of the street/sidewalk sway back and forth…

Japan Nuclear Disaster Put on Par With Chernobyl

The New York Times
12 April 2011

TOKYO — Japan has decided to raise its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday.

The decision to raise the alert level to 7 from 5 on the scale amounts to an admission that the accident at the nuclear facility, brought on by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, is likely to have substantial and long-lasting consequences for health and for the environment. Some in the nuclear industry have been saying for weeks that the accident released large amounts of radiation, but Japanese officials had played down this possibility.

The new estimates by Japanese authorities suggest that the total amount of radioactive materials released so far is equal to about 10 percent of that released in the Chernobyl accident, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director general of Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Mr. Nishiyama stressed that unlike at Chernobyl, where the reactor itself exploded and fire fanned the release of radioactive material, the containments at the four troubled reactors at Fukushima remained intact over all.

But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric and Power, said, “The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl.”

On the International Nuclear Event Scale, a Level 7 nuclear accident involves “widespread health and environmental effects” and the “external release of a significant fraction of the reactor core inventory.”

The scale, which was developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and countries that use nuclear energy, leaves it to the nuclear agency of the country where the accident occurs to calculate a rating based on complicated criteria.

Japan’s previous rating of 5 placed the Fukushima accident at the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Level 7 has been applied only to the disaster at Chernobyl, in the former Soviet Union.

“This is an admission by the Japanese government that the amount of radiation released into the environment has reached a new order of magnitude,” said Tetsuo Iguchi, a professor in the department of quantum engineering at Nagoya University. “The fact that we have now confirmed the world’s second-ever level 7 accident will have huge consequences for the global nuclear industry. It shows that current safety standards are woefully inadequate.”

Mr. Nishiyama said “tens of thousands of terabecquerels” of radiation per hour have been released from the plant. (The measurement refers to how much radioactive material was emitted, not the dose absorbed by living things.) The scale of the radiation leak has since dropped to under one terabecquerel per hour, the Kyodo news agency said, citing government officials.

The announcement came as Japan was preparing to urge more residents around the crippled nuclear plant to evacuate, because of concerns over long-term exposure to radiation.

Also on Monday, tens of thousands of people bowed their heads in silence at 2:46 p.m., exactly one month since the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami brought widespread destruction to Japan’s northeast coast.

The mourning was punctuated by another strong aftershock near Japan’s Pacific coast, which briefly set off a tsunami warning, killed a 16-year-old girl and knocked out cooling at the severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi power station for almost an hour, underscoring the vulnerability of the plant’s reactors to continuing seismic activity.

On Tuesday morning, there was another strong aftershock, which shook Tokyo.

The authorities have already ordered people living within a 12-mile radius of the plant to evacuate, and recommended that people remain indoors or avoid an area within a radius of 18 miles.

The government’s decision to expand the zone came in response to radiation readings that would be worrisome over months in certain communities beyond those areas, underscoring how difficult it has been to predict the ways radiation spreads from the damaged plant.

Unlike the previous definitions of the areas to be evacuated, this time the government designated specific communities that should be evacuated, instead of a radius expressed in miles.

The radiation has not spread evenly from the reactors, but instead has been directed to some areas and not others by weather patterns and the terrain. Iitate, one of the communities told on Monday to prepare for evacuation, lies well beyond the 18-mile radius, but the winds over the last month have tended to blow northwest from the Fukushima plant toward Iitate, which may explain why high readings were detected there.

Yukio Edano, the government’s chief cabinet secretary, said that the government would order Iitate and four other towns to prepare to evacuate.

Officials are concerned that people in these communities are being exposed to radiation equivalent to at least 20 millisieverts a year, he said, which could be harmful to human health over the long term.

Evacuation orders will come within a month for Katsurao, Namie, Iitate and parts of Minamisoma and Kawamata, Mr. Edano said.

People in five other areas may also be told to evacuate if the conditions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant grow worse, Mr. Edano said. Those areas are Hirono, Naraha, Kawauchi, Tamura and other sections of Minamisoma.

“This measure is not an order for you to evacuate or take actions immediately,” he said. “We arrived at this decision by taking into account the risks of remaining in the area in the long term.” He appealed for calm and said that the chance of a large-scale radiation leak from the Fukushima Daiichi plant had, in fact, decreased.

Mr. Edano also said that pregnant women, children and hospital patients should stay out of the area within 19 miles of the reactors and that schools in that zone would remain closed.

Until now, the Japanese government had refused to expand the evacuation zone, despite urging from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States and Australia have advised their citizens to stay at least 50 miles away from the plant.

The international agency, which is based in Vienna, said Sunday that its team measured radiation on Saturday of 0.4 to 3.7 microsieverts per hour at distances of 20 to 40 miles from the damaged plant — well outside the initial evacuation zone. At that rate of accumulation, it would take 225 days to 5.7 years to reach the Japanese government’s threshold level for evacuations: radiation accumulating at a rate of at least 20 millisieverts per year.

In other words, only the areas with the highest readings would qualify for the new evacuation ordered by the government.

Masataka Shimizu, the president of Tokyo Electric, visited the tsunami-stricken area on Monday for the first time since the crisis began. He called on the governor of Fukushima Prefecture, Yuhei Sato, but was refused a meeting. He left his business card instead.

Japan's Ocean Radiation Hits 7.5 Million Times Legal Limit

Los Angeles Times

April 5, 2011

High readings in fish prompt the government to establish a maximum level for safe consumption.

The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.

The reading of iodine-131 was recorded Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. Another sample taken Monday found the level to be 5 million times the legal limit. The Monday samples also were found to contain radioactive cesium at 1.1 million times the legal limit.

The exact source of the radiation was not immediately clear, though Tepco has said that highly contaminated water has been leaking from a pit near the No. 2 reactor. The utility initially believed that the leak was coming from a crack, but several attempts to seal the crack failed.

On Tuesday the company said the leak instead might be coming from a faulty joint where the pit meets a duct, allowing radioactive water to seep into a layer of gravel underneath. The utility said it would inject "liquid glass" into gravel in an effort to stop further leakage.

Meanwhile, Tepco continued releasing what it described as water contaminated with low levels of radiation into the sea to make room in on-site storage tanks for more highly contaminated water. In all, the company said it planned to release 11,500 tons of the water, but by Tuesday morning it had released less than 25% of that amount.

Although the government authorized the release of the 11,500 tons and has said that any radiation would be quickly diluted and dispersed in the ocean, fish with high readings of iodine are being found.

On Monday, officials detected more than 4,000 bequerels of iodine-131 per kilogram in a type of fish called a sand lance caught less than three miles offshore of the town of Kita-Ibaraki. The young fish also contained 447 bequerels of cesium-137, which is considered more problematic than iodine-131 because it has a much longer half-life.

On Tuesday chief cabinet secretary Yukio Edano said the government was imposing a standard of 2,000 bequerels of iodine per kilogram of fish, the same level it allows in vegetables. Previously, the government did not have a specific level for fish. Another haul of sand lance with 526 bequerels of cesium was detected Tuesday, in excess of the standard of 500 bequerels per kilogram.

Fishing of sand lances has been suspended. Local fishermen called on Tepco to halt the release of radioactive water into the sea and demanded that the company compensate them for their losses.

Fishing has been banned near the plant, and the vast majority of fishing activity in the region has been halted because of damage to boats and ports by the March 11 tsunami and earthquake. Still, some fishermen are out making catches, only to find few buyers because of fears about radiation.

It was unclear what Tepco might offer the fishermen, but the company did say Tuesday that it had offered "condolence payments" totaling 180 million yen ($2 million) to local residents who had to evacuate their homes because of radiation from the Fukushima plant. One town, however, refused the payment.

The company has yet to decide how it will compensate residents near the plant for damages, though financial analysts say the claims could be in the tens of billions of dollars. Tepco's executive vice president Takashi Fujimoto said the company's decision on damages hinges on how much of the burden the government will share.

Edano urged the company to accelerate its decisions on compensation.

For now the company has offered to give 20 million yen ($240,000) to each of 10 villages, towns and cities within 12 miles of the plant, Fujimoto said.

"We hope they will find it of some use for now," he said.

Namie, a town of 20,600 located about 6 miles north of the plant, refused to take the money. Town official Kosei Negishi said that he and other government officials were working out of a makeshift office in Nihonmatsu city, elsewhere in Fukushima prefecture, and that they faced more pressing issues.

"The coastal areas of Namie were hit hard by the earthquake and the tsunami but because of the radiation and the evacuation order we haven't had a chance to conduct a search for the 200 people who are missing," said Negishi. "Why would we use our resources to hand out less than 1,000 yen ($12) to every resident?"

Tokyo Electric Power's Fujimoto acknowledged that there was a "gap" in the views of company and Namie officials.

Tepco's shares dropped to an all-time low Tuesday, falling by the maximum daily trading limit -- about 18% -- to 362 yen, below the previous record low of 393 yen reached in December 1951. The company's share price has lost 80% of its value -- nearly 1.1 trillion yen -- since the quake and tsunami, according to the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

"We take the stock price decline very seriously," Fujimoto told reporters.

Fujimoto said the company's annual earnings report, which was originally scheduled for April 28, would be postponed, but he declined to give any other details.

Space Junk Threat Forces Space Station Crew to Take Shelter

SPACE.com
05 April 2011

A piece of space junk from a Chinese anti-satellite test will fly uncomfortably close to the International Space Station today, forcing the outpost's crew to take shelter in a Russian lifeboat as a safety measure, NASA officials said.

The threatening space debris will zoom within 2.7 miles (4.5 kilometers) when it makes its closest approach at about 4:21 p.m. EDT (2021 GMT) today, NASA spokesman Josh Byerly told SPACE.com from the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The station's three-person crew includes NASA astronaut Cady Colman, Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli and Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev, who is commanding the mission. The astronauts and cosmonaut will close hatches between modules of the station's U.S. segment, and take shelter in their Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft, which can double as a lifeboat in case the debris actually strikes the space station and forces the crew to flee.

NASA is keeping a close eye on the space debris to make sure it passes by the space station without incident.

The space debris is a piece of China's defunct weather satellite Fengyun-1C, which was destroyed during a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007 that created a vast cloud of orbital debris, NASA officials said.

NASA and its space station partners usually move the space station clear of any potentially threatening orbital debris if tracking observations predict the space trash will fly within a preset safety perimeter.

That perimeter, which is shaped like a pizza box, extends just over 15 miles (25 km) around the space station and about a half-mile (0.75 km) above and below the orbiting lab.

But the process of moving the space station using its Russian-built thrusters or by firing the engines on other spacecraft docked at the outpost takes time. The close pass of the Chinese satellite debris was discovered too late to make any maneuvers.

"They need more than just a few hours," Byerly said.

Today's space debris threat comes on the heels of another close call at the space station. That event occurred on Friday (April 1) at 10:36 p.m. EDT (0236 Saturday GMT), when space station flight controllers moved the orbiting laboratory clear of another piece of satellite trash.

The Friday space debris event was spotted with much more advance notice than today's threat, allowing flight controllers time to move the space station using thrusters on a European cargo ship currently docked to the orbiting lab, as well as engines on a docked Russian cargo ship and the station's own thrusters.

The move, called a debris avoidance maneuver, pushed the space station clear of a leftover piece of space junk from a 2009 crash between two satellites.

"The object [was] a relic from a collision between the COSMOS 2251 and Iridium 33 satellites in February 2009 and had been close to the station’s orbit prior to the debris avoidance maneuver," NASA officials said in a statement discussing the Friday space debris event.

Space debris has been a growing threat to satellites and spacecraft carrying astronauts because of the anti-satellite test, 2009 crash and increasing number of satellites in orbit. Today, more than 22,000 pieces of space junk are being tracked in Earth orbit. Some military officials have proposed forming an international response to meet the space debris threat.

NASA officials, however, said that the close timing of the two debris events at the station over the last week is part of human spaceflight.

"It's just coincidence," Byerly said. "The other earlier one, we found out with enough warning to move the space station."

While the three crewmembers on the space station wait out the space debris flyby, another crew is also nearing the orbiting lab.

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying a NASA astronaut and two cosmonauts is closing in on the International Space Station after launching into orbit on Monday. The Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft is carrying the second half of the station's Expedition 27 mission crew. It will dock at the space station on Wednesday afternoon.

Tsunami Alert Triggers Indonesian Panic

The Telegraph UK

April 4, 2011

Hundreds of Indonesians fled to higher ground on Monday morning when an earthquake struck south of Java, triggering a tsunami alert.

Indonesia’s earthquake agency later lifted the warning after the 7.1 magnitude quake struck off Cilacap on the south coast of Java island.

Suharjono, the technical head of Indonesia’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, said shaking from the tremor had been felt in Pangandaran and Cilacap districts in Java.

“This quake roused people from their sleep,” he said. “We have not received any reports of damage or casualties so far.”

The US Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre had said that there was no risk of a widespread destructive wave, but there was a “very small possibility of a local tsunami”.

The earthquake epicentre was 150 miles from the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island, and seismologists said the tremor was felt there, but no tsunami warning alert was issued for Australia.

“We had reports from there that they felt it,” Geoscience Australia seismologist David Jepson said, adding that it was described as a “moderate type quake”.

Geoscience Australia put the quake at 6.7 magnitude

The Battle for Fukushima is Lost

RT
31 March 2011

­Japan has lost the battle to rescue the Fukushima nuclear reactor, where preventing a large radiation release is practically impossible, conclude Western experts.

Meanwhile, Japanese authorities are taking additional measures to prevent a manmade disaster – the European press calls them “desperate.” In particular, they are planning to cover the damaged power generating units with fabric domes. Experts from various countries are urging the creation of an international commission on nuclear safety, which would consult authorities in similar situations and inform the public about health hazards.
  
The British newspaper The Guardian reported that, with each passing day, the risk of a massive release of radiation at Fukushima is rising. “The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and onto a concrete floor, experts say,” the publication reported. It references America’s leading nuclear expert, Richard Lahey, who headed the safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the power generating units at Fukushima. According to him, the major concern is when the fuel reacts with the drywell underneath the concrete floor and releases radioactive gases. The drywell is enclosed in a protective chamber, but it was most likely damaged during the hydrogen explosion.

“It's not going to be anything like Chernobyl, where it went up with a big fire and steam explosion, but it's not going to be good news for the environment,” said Lahey. He advocates creating an international group of nuclear safety experts that could consult the authorities of various countries in emergency situations.  
    
It seems that the concerns of the specialists are being realized. Yesterday, smoke was seen at the nuclear power plant, which also increases the risk of radiation release. The content of radioactive iodine in seawater close to Fukushima was slightly higher than was reported earlier. In an isolated place, located 300 meters from the shore, it exceeded the maximum allowable level by 3,355 times. 

The chairman of the board of directors of the power plant’s operating company, Tepco, Tsunehisa Katsumata, told journalists that the first four reactors of the distressed nuclear power plant cannot be repaired, and confirmed that the situation will remain “unstable” throughout the coming weeks. He added that the first four reactors have not yet been brought under control, but specialists “are making maximum efforts to cool them.”   

Meanwhile, it became known that the Japanese authorities are trying new measures to prevent the consequences of the accident. It is planned to cover the damaged reactors with domes of special fabric, which should prevent further distribution of radioactive particles. This applies to reactors 1, 3 and 4, the buildings of which were severely damaged in the first days of the catastrophe, when hydrogen explosions periodically occurred inside. However, experts are skeptical of the idea, insisting that the real threat is not posed by radioactive dust, but by the contamination of water, which could seep into the ocean and the ground. Collection of the radioactive water that is being pumped from the turbine halls of the reactors will involve a tank vessel, which will be docked at a pier near the nuclear power plant.

Today, French President Nikolas Sarkozy will arrive in Japan – he will be the first foreign leader to travel to the country since the destructive earthquake and tsunami on March 11. He will express solidarity with the Japanese people and offer the assistance of French Avera specialists, as well as “flex France’s nuclear muscles,” reported the Spanish newspaper El Pais. The United States has also become involved in helping with emergency operations at the nuclear power plant – it sent a shipment of radiation-resistant robots to Japan. Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a special address to Russian citizens, in which it asked to abstain from traveling to Japan in connection to the radiation threat. 

Meanwhile, the press noted a decline in consumer confidence toward food products from Japan. Foreign companies are refusing to purchase Japanese seafood out of fears of them being exposed to radiation, Hiromi Isa, the trade office director at Japan's Fisheries Agency, said in an interview with Bloomberg. Since March 11, at least 10 orders for the supply of seafood have been recalled, despite the assurances of the Japanese government that they do not pose any threat. Many countries, starting with Australia and ending with the US and Russia, have reduced the import of Japanese seafood after the radiation levels outside of the evacuation zone around Fukushima nuclear power plant were raised. A fall in demand, however, is often psychological in nature, note restaurateurs and vendors.

Radiation Dosage & Its Sources Explained [CHART]

Ben Parr / Mashable

Fear and uncertainty continue to grow around the condition of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. There has been a fervent struggle to keep the plant’s reactors from achieving a partial or complete meltdown after the devastating earthquake in Japan and Pacific tsunami damaged the plant and knocked out the backup power needed to cool its radioactive fuel rods.

Naturally, the events in Japan have people curious, frightened and confused about the potential impact of not only the Fukushima plant’s radiation, but on the impact of nuclear power plants and radiation in general on the body. Even friends have asked me if they should evacuate the U.S. West Coast just in case radiation from Japan travels across the Pacific Ocean.

Until now, I haven’t had a good way to explain why they shouldn’t worry about radiation from Japan, especially given the many other sources of radiation we encounter on a daily basis. However, Randall Munroe of XKCD has solved that problem by putting together a very informative chart explaining and visualizing radiation doses and their sources. Although we don’t suggest living by this chart, it’s a good general education tool for understanding the effect of radiation absorption.

We encounter sources of radiation every day, from natural background radiation to bananas. (Yes, bananas emit gamma rays, but you’d have to eat 5 million bananas in one sitting to get any kind of radiation sickness.)

The absorption of this radiation is measured in units called the sievert (Sv). As the chart explains, we absorb approximately 0.1 microsieverts (μSv) of radiation per day from eating a banana, 10 μSv from background radiation and 20 μSv from a chest x-ray. That’s more than the radiation you’ll absorb from living within 50 miles of a power plant (0.09 μSv). Even a coal power plant generates more radiation (0.3 μSv) because coal has trace amounts of uranium.

It takes a lot more radiation to actually cause harm to a person, although, the maximum yearly dose permitted for a U.S. radiation worker is 50 millisieverts (mSv), more than 200 times the exposure received from a typical X-ray. It takes double that amount though (100 mSv) for an increased risk of cancer and a full 2,000 mSv for severe radiation poisoning to occur.

For a more detailed explanation of radiation dosage, check out the XKCD chart below. Click on the image below to see a full-sized version:

London: Public Sector Cuts: The Worst is Yet to Come

The Guardian

Wednesday 30 March 2011

Calamitous as they may seem, the spending reductions that begin to take hold on Friday are only the start. The first cuts may well be the deepest, but they will not be the last, and nor will delivering them be the only challenge facing public services.

The UK's public services are about to step into a long age of austerity that will present them with twin agendas, both requiring unprecedented skill and ingenuity: to manage the cuts in as clever, socially just and strategic a way as possible; and to design and create affordable and innovative ways of meeting social need.

It might be tempting to assume that the worst is over. The finance director's spreadsheet might suggest the spending cuts trajectory is "smoother" in future years. But how many of the thousands of cuts plans lined up for implementation on 1 April will be neat and self-contained?

Public sector cuts: what we know so far
Sector	Total cut
The NHS	£20bn
Housing	£5.8bn
Disability services	£4.4bn
Local government administration	£3.4bn
Criminal justice	£3bn
Adult social care	£1.2bn
Children's services	£819m
Libraries, swimming pools and parks	£350m
Homelessness sector	£211m
Rubbish and street repairs	£165m
Domestic violence services	£36m
Drugs and alcohol	£9m
Mental health services	15.00%

What if the elegant savings plans don't deliver? A little-noticed warning a few weeks ago from the public sector accountants' body, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, pointed out that many local authorities, having struggled to set a legal budget, had serious reservations about whether those budgets would hold.

Half of the directors of finance surveyed worried that the complexity of the savings programmes meant they might cost more and deliver less than expected. Almost three-quarters feared that public opposition would mean changes will take longer to implement. An overspend at the end of 2011-12 will mean pain for staff (more job cuts), and for the providers and service users.

The consequences of cuts across the public sector will continue to ripple out. In local government, some difficult choices, which have been "parked" until after the local elections in May, will be revisited. Charities will go to the wall. The NHS cuts programme will heat up, with wards and perhaps even whole hospitals under threat. Cuts to the police frontline, moving on a slower cycle, will hove into view.

The speed and depth of the cuts means that the first part of the challenge – clever cuts – has been even more difficult than it should have been. There has been little time for reflection about what to cut, where, why and how much, and the avoidable waste, individual pain and destruction of skills, value and experience that that is causing will resonate for a long time. The effects will be seen from mental health, substance abuse and homelessness to libraries and swimming pools.

The second part of the challenge is to innovate. Ministers show no leadership or sophistication here: they deliver lumpen soundbites about cutting chief executive salaries, or ill-defined homilies to the "big society". They endorse "charities" and social enterprise as proxies for innovation, and yet oversee a huge, undiscriminating bloodbath of cuts among the civil society economy. The goal is always less: a smaller state, lower wages and lower prices.

Creating smarter, more efficient and socially just public services that deliver demonstrably higher impact and greater social value is the necessary task of the public and voluntary sectors over the next three years.

Investment in innovation at a time of terrible cuts? No one says it's going to be easy, but it just could be public services' finest hour.