Saturday, May 21, 2011

After Fukushima, Tokyo chooses renewable

It's been more than two months after the earthquake that devastated on March 11 and Japan kicked off what will become the most serious nuclear accident in history. The media have long since ceased to be interested in Fukushima, but the news coming from Japan are increasingly disturbing. In recent days, for the first time, TEPCO engineers entered the building of reactor number 1 and made a bitter new discovery: not only the fuel inside the core is molten, but somewhere in the container that contains it, the steel vessel, because in spite of the losses must have been so far injected over 100 thousand tons of water, the level is still low and fail to respond to half this amount that is expected to find in the basement, where is not possible down to excessive levels of radioactivity.

The TEPCO had to secure the plant by year-end, and then decide how to proceed to dismantle the whole building or a Chernobyl-style sarcophagus. But hardly the date will be maintained for now the priority is to find the leak, which continues to go from the heart of the reactor water. This finding confirms what in truth was suspected from the beginning that the core of the reactor has been damaged and the water that comes into contact with the most radioactive of all the system leaks out.

So far, it was claimed that the earthquake had not damaged and that the tsunami was to cause the accident, but now need to admit the opposite, namely that - at least the first reactor - has been hit by the earthquake in his heart, and then the Its design has not proved adequate. All nuclear engineers have been working for fifty years just to keep even in the event of an accident, nothing comes out of the range of diving suits within which surrounded the nucleus in which nuclear fission takes place.

A Fukushima have failed and that is the fact that very little time with you ostinino enough to declare that the new reactors are safer because we have added a new concrete wall often more than one meter. In the fifty years of nuclear power stations are already too many accidents have occurred, contradicting all their probability calculations that gave and give always infinitely unlikely that something goes wrong.

Japan has had confidence in their promises and now everyone can see that the situation is. In recent days have been shut down the reactors 4 and 5 of Hamaoka plant, plant that Prime Minister Naoto Kan was specifically asked to quit having forecast a possible new earthquake in the region.

The other three reactors were already shut down, two to be dismantled, one for maintenance. With these two stops, two thirds of the 54 reactors in Japan are now off-line later this month will be a total of 35 reactors off. Over the next five months five other reactors will have to stop doing maintenance to remain in the country only 14 active reactors.

The earthquake demonstrated the fragility of the country's energy choice and that is why the prime minister Kan announced a radical change of strategy, promising to lead the country in the world primeggerĂ  in renewable energy, and within twenty kilometers around the Fukushima Government has decided to kill all the animals and to remove the superficial layer of soil from backyards of kindergartens and schools.

This is the practical face of nuclear threat. Nuclear engineers are justified in saying that our every gesture, such as driving a car, involves a risk, but it is a childish excuse: justifying at the surface so the risk of Fukushima indicates no valid reasons to justify the choice to resort to nuclear power for electricity generation.

In collaboration with Roberto Meregalli

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