23/03 Once Rare in Rural America, Divorce Is Changing the Face of Its Families

March 23, 2011

Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
When Nancy Vermeer divorced in 2002, she was the first teacher at her Christian school in Sioux County to do so.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT GEBELOFF

SIOUX COUNTY, Iowa — In the 1970s, the divorce rate was so low in this rural northwest Iowa County that it resembled the rest of America in the 1910s. Most of its 28,000 residents were churchgoers, few of its women were in the work force, and divorce was simply not done.

So it is a bitter mark of modernity that even here, divorce has swept in, up nearly sevenfold since 1970, giving the county the unwelcome distinction of being a standout in this category of census data.

Divorce is still less common here than the national average, but its sharp jump illustrates a fundamental change in the patterns of family life.

Forty years ago, divorced people were more concentrated in cities and suburbs. But geographic distinctions have all but vanished, and now, for the first time, rural Americans are just as likely to be divorced as city dwellers, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

“Rural families are going through this incredible transformation,” said Daniel T. Lichter, a sociology professor at Cornell University.

The shifts that started in cities have spread to less populated regions — women going to work, gaining autonomy, and re-arranging the order of traditional families. Values have changed, too, easing the stigma of divorce.

“In the bottom ranks, men have lost ground and women have gained,” said June Carbone, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and co-author of “Red Families v. Blue Families.”

“A blue-collar guy has less to offer today than he did in 1979,” Professor Carbone added. Those shifting forces, she said, “create a mismatch between expectation and reality” that can result in women becoming frustrated and leaving, because now they can.

Since 1990, class has become an increasingly reliable predictor of family patterns, Professor Carbone said. College-educated Americans are now more likely to get married and stay married than those with only a high school diploma, a change from 20 years ago, she said, when differences were much smaller.

That trend has been particularly important for rural areas, which have fallen further behind urban ones in education, according to census data. Just one in six rural residents have college degrees, far fewer than in cities, where one in three do. Nationally, there were about 121 million married adults and 26 million divorced people in 2009, compared with about 100 million married and 11 million divorced people in 1980.

Education drew a dividing line for Nancy Vermeer, a 52-year-old resident of Sioux County. She had married her high school sweetheart, a young man from a farming family. He never went further than high school, but she went on to college, and later earned a master’s degree. He worked in a window factory. She became a music teacher. He gambled. They grew apart. Eventually, he asked for a divorce.

“I grew more confident,” Ms. Vermeer said. “We were totally different people.”

When Ms. Vermeer divorced in 2002, she became the first teacher in her Christian school to do so. Divorce was more common than it had been in past decades, but she still felt judged, so she developed habits to keep a low profile, like going to the grocery when no one she knew would be there.

“There’s a perception here that you need to be perfect,” said the Rev. John Lee, a young pastor who has tried to encourage change in Sioux County by taking on taboo topics like divorce and mental illness in his sermons.

“Cars are washed, lawns are mowed in patterns and children are smiling,” Mr. Lee added. “When you admit weakness, you invite shame.”

The reason can be traced to Sioux County’s roots. About 80 percent of residents, most of whom are descendants of Dutch immigrants, belong to a major denomination church, compared with 36 percent of all Americans.

Its main city, Sioux Center, issued its first liquor license in the late 1970s. Stores were closed on Sundays for decades, and women’s participation in the work force was far below the national average.

Very few people divorced. In 1980, there were more than 52 married people for every divorced person, according to census data, a rate not seen on a national level since the 1930s.

Craig Lane, a divorce lawyer from the area, described the county’s conservative nature like this: “If steam is coming from your dryer vent on Sunday, you’ll hear about it from your neighbor.”

Time has worn away some of its old values. These days, Sioux Center looks more like a suburb than a village. There is a McDonald’s and a mall, where residents shop to the sound of Christian music. Women’s lives have changed too. More women than men have college degrees, and there are now just 14 married people to every divorced person.

“As we get more education we get more confidence and more income,” Ms. Vermeer said, “women are saying, ‘Look, she finally had the guts to stand up and walk out.’ ”

Sioux Center might be rural, but it is relatively affluent, buoyed by a biotech industry and a stable manufacturing base. Its Christian college, Dordt, is a major presence.

But for less fortunate places, social change is laced with a bitter new economic reality. Brian Janssen, the pastor at the church in Hospers, east of Sioux Center, speaks wistfully about an earlier time, when families were closer and more tied to the land. Now, he can count on one hand the number of young people from his church who have stayed in town.

“The community begins to become like senior housing,” Mr. Janssen said. “Dialysis center, old person living.”

Less educated Americans are far more likely to have babies while unmarried — and to divorce — than those with college degrees, Professor Carbone said.

That trend, once seen as a symptom of urban poverty, has now caught on in rural areas like this one. Leesa McNeil, a court administrator for a district that covers a wide area of northwest Iowa, said that custody cases involving unmarried people used to be so rare that the court did not even have a category for them.

“That was a phenomenon that smacked us 10 years ago,” Ms. McNeil said.

Maria Kefalas, a sociology professor at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and co-author of “Hollowing Out the Middle,” a 2009 book about the migration of the educated class from rural Iowa, said that changes in families have been profound. She noted that the alarm sounded by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 about the rise of out-of-wedlock births among African-Americans applies to the country as a whole today: One in three babies is born to unmarried parents.

“It has hit the whitest, most married, most idyllic heart of America — Iowa,” Professor Kefalas said. “The cultural narrative about marriage — you get a job, you marry your sweetheart, you buy a house, you educate your kids — has been torn to shreds. Without that economic foundation, the story cannot support itself.”

In Sioux County, Ms. Vermeer has remarried. She is happy, she said, and her life makes sense.

“I think women were very miserable for very many years, and that’s changing,” she said. “Things are not so black and white. There are so many gray areas.”

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Sioux Center, and Robert Gebeloff from New York.

28/03 At U.S. Nuclear Sites, Preparing for the Unlikely

March 28, 2011

Mark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Aerial view of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California, on March 17, 2011.

By JOHN M. BRODER, MATTHEW L. WALD and TOM ZELLER JR.

WASHINGTON — American nuclear safety regulators, using a complex mathematical technique, determined that the simultaneous failure of both emergency shutdown systems to prevent a core meltdown was so unlikely that it would happen once every 17,000 years.

It happened twice in four days at a pair of nuclear reactors in southern New Jersey.

The American people, and the regulators whose job it is to protect them from a catastrophic nuclear accident, are watching the unfolding events at a complex of crippled reactors in Japan with foreboding and an overriding question: Can it happen here?

The answer — probably not — from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is meant to reassure. But as the New Jersey accidents in 1983, which did not result in a release of radiation, show, no one can predict what might upend all the computer models, emergency planning and backup systems designed to eliminate those narrow theoretical probabilities or mitigate their effects.

“We can never say that that could never happen here,” said Anthony R. Pietrangelo, senior vice president and chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s main trade association. “It doesn’t matter how you get there, whether it’s a hurricane, whether it’s a tsunami, whether it’s a seismic event, whether it’s a terrorist attack, whether it’s a cyberattack, whether it’s operator error, or some other failure in the plant — it doesn’t matter. We have to be prepared to deal with those events.”

Nuclear safety officers plan for every known contingency, yet there remain what Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, memorably termed the “unknown unknowns,” referring to alleged links between Iraq and terrorists. The threats considered most serious by nuclear engineers are problems, and the human responses to them, that lead to a loss of power, a blackout. Lack of power to run cooling systems for the reactor core and for spent-fuel ponds led to the explosions and release of radiation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan.

American nuclear facilities have backup power systems, and backups to those. All plants are required to have batteries to provide power in the event of a loss of power and failure of backup generators. In the United States, 93 of the 104 operating reactors have batteries capable of providing power for four hours; the other 11 have eight-hour batteries. Fukushima had eight-hour batteries. It wasn’t enough.

No single analysis can discern which nuclear power plants in the United States are most at risk for a disaster, if only because the potential threats vary widely from site to site and region to region. But the probabilities of an accident leading to damage to a reactor core have been roughly penciled out.

A 2003 Nuclear Regulatory Commission report, based on data submitted by plant owners, looked at the risk of equipment breakdowns, power failures and other factors that could lead to core damage.

It found that reactor No. 1 at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pa., would appear to be at greatest risk. By the commission’s calculations, such an episode would occur there roughly once every 2,227 years. By contrast, the expected frequency of a core damage accident at the Quad Cities facility in Illinois is once every 833,000 years.

But nuclear experts say that such statistics offer only an approximate view of a plant’s potential vulnerability — and suggest nothing about when or where disaster might strike next.

“These sorts of big numbers can tell you which plants need to take steps first to fix general problems, or which plants might have wider margins if a problem were to occur,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and the director of the Nuclear Safety Project of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental and nuclear watchdog group. “They’re not going to tell you when that bad day is going to arrive.”

Regulators and federal courts have discounted the likelihood of multiple crises hitting a nuclear facility at the same time. One federal judge, ruling against opponents of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo, Calif., said that the odds of an earthquake setting off a nuclear accident at the plant were negligible.

“The commission has determined that the chance of such a bizarre concatenation of events occurring is extremely small,” the court said.

But the crisis at Fukushima shows that such natural catastrophes can occur. The fact that the odds of a nuclear accident are unknowable and the risks hard to measure make it in some ways more frightening than the known — and greater — risks of driving without a seat belt or breathing the fumes from a coal-burning power plant.

“People are scared of certain things. It’s part of our makeup,” said Robert H. Socolow, a physicist at Princeton University. “The public is more afraid of radiation than the experts who work with it every day. But this is about irreducible irrationality, if you like. We are irrational, every last one of us.”

Fresh Eye on American Plants

Assurances from industry and regulators are unlikely to comfort nuclear critics and newly worried residents living in the shadow of nuclear facilities in the United States that, like the Fukushima plant, skirt known fault lines or tsunami zones, or perhaps stand in hurricane country or 100-year flood plains.

In the wake of the disaster in Japan, concerns were quickly raised, for example, at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in Florida, which sits on Biscayne Bay, 24 miles south of Miami. Critics pointed to the potential for a hurricane to create a storm surge that could simultaneously sever grid power and inundate backup generators — precisely the recipe that crippled Fukushima.

In 1992, Turkey Point took a direct hit from Hurricane Andrew, causing a loss of off-site power for more than five days. Backup systems, however, allowed operators to keep the reactors cool until power could be restored. Paul Gunter, the director of the Reactor Oversight Project for the group Beyond Nuclear, which opposes nuclear energy, joined other critics in pointing to the Dresden nuclear facility in Morris, Ill., and the nearby Quad Cities plant in Cordova, both of which are north of the New Madrid seismic zone. The area registered quakes estimated to have exceeded 7.0 in magnitude in 1811 and 1812, and is known for somewhat more regular temblors of lesser intensity.

“The New Madrid fault line could generate a potentially catastrophic event if we had similar seismic activity to what happened in Japan,” Mr. Gunter said. “There are a number of reactors within the impact zone.”

Exelon, the operator of both facilities, said that all of its plants are designed to withstand substantial earthquakes, but argued that none — including Dresden and Quad Cities, which are hundreds of miles from the New Madrid fault line — are actually considered to be in significant earthquake zones.

Still, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced last week that it would be conducting new seismic risk assessments next year at 17 plants — including Dresden.

Perhaps to the dismay of its opponents, the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is not on the commission’s list. The plant, on an 85-foot bluff above the Pacific Ocean, is owned by Pacific Gas & Electric, about halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Opponents redoubled their efforts when PG&E began seeking early renewal on its two 40-year licenses — chiefly on the ground that the seismic studies that underwrote the original licensing in the 1970s were inadequate, and are now sorely out of date.

A new fault line discovered in 2008, called the Shoreline Fault, runs about half a mile from the front door of Diablo Canyon.

Opponents want new seismic studies before the plant’s license is renewed, but PG&E, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other experts argue that the fault poses no threat that the nuclear facility couldn’t handle.

As at Diablo Canyon, fears of an earthquake near the Indian Point nuclear power facility, about 30 miles north of New York City, were stoked in 2008 when researchers at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University discovered a pattern of small but active faults in the area, suggesting that earthquakes near the plant were more common than once thought.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York has called a special meeting with federal regulators to discuss earthquake risks and preparedness at the facility. Among the concerns: how to execute an orderly evacuation of one of the most densely populated regions of the country — particularly given that the government mandates that officials plan only for a 10-mile escape radius.

With Japan’s area of concern now widened to 50 miles, the American standard strikes many critics as unrealistically small.

How Risk Is Calculated

As part of its mission to ensure the safety of nuclear power, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets two goals: that the public’s risk of death from acute radiation sickness from nuclear reactors should not exceed one-thousandth of the risk of accidental death from all sources, and that the risk of fatal cancer likewise should not exceed that amount.

The commission, looking at how much radiation it would take to kill people in accidents, and how much it would take to raise cancer rates, decided that reactors would meet that standard if there were meltdowns with off-site consequences only once per 100,000 years of operation.

With 104 American reactors now running, that would mean such an event once every 1,000 years or so. The commission asserts that all plants currently meet that safety standard, as demonstrated through an analysis.

The analysis looks at the chance that any piece of equipment will fail, and what other failures that might lead to, under a mathematical method called probabilistic risk assessment, Martin A. Stutzke, the commission’s senior technical adviser for probabilistic risk assessment technologies, said in an interview.

To meet the government’s goal, about 80 percent of the plants have made changes since the early 1990s, industry experts say. Many of the changes were to cope with new calculations of earthquake frequency and intensity. Some plants shored up water tanks outside containment buildings; some reinforced the ceilings in their control rooms to make sure they would not collapse; others reinforced cable trays or electronic equipment racks, or anchored their equipment more firmly to the floor.

“It varied tremendously from plant to plant,” said Mr. Stutzke, with engineers using the probabilistic technique to identify the components that had the highest likelihood of failure combined with the most serious consequences if they did.

But while the safety goal of once in 100,000 years expresses a real number, the component failure numbers are yardsticks that may be wrong. “The numbers have tremendous uncertainty with them,” he said. They could be off by a factor of 10, he said.

Earthquakes are a challenge, Mr. Stutzke said, because the historical record is so short. The Richter scale is 75 years old. For earlier records, he said, experts study old newspaper accounts — “church bells ringing, chimneys knocked over, this sort of thing,” he said. Geologists also use carbon dating and other techniques to estimate the time and scale of older earthquakes.

The inherent problem, risk experts say, is that it is hard to determine the size of the worst natural hazard, said Douglas E. True, of ERIN Engineering and Research Inc., of Walnut Creek, Calif.

Engineers use historical data, add a margin for safety, and then analyze for what will go wrong first.

American reactors may be better protected than those at the Japanese plant were, because of precautions taken after Sept. 11 for a terrorist or military attack, according to industry and government officials and academic experts. American nuclear plant operators are required to have diesel fuel and pumps on site or readily available nearby to provide backup power and cooling capacity. Right after the Fukushima crisis they were ordered to check that they had the required equipment on hand and in working order.

The details are classified, but the industry has emergency supplies of pumps, hoses and generators, and the plan assumes Air Force help in moving equipment when needed.

“We have military capability that’s pretty impressive, a transport system that can move big pieces of equipment very quickly,” said Dale Klein, a commission chairman in the second Bush administration. If the diesel generators fail, he said, it makes no difference whether the cause was attack, tsunami or earthquake; the remedy is the same.

Another former chairman, Richard Meserve, who was in that position at the time of the 2001 attacks, said, “The challenge that we confront is that external events obviously can occur that may be larger than you expected.”

The commission will not discuss the precautions it has in place to contend with such events, citing security considerations.

Alternatives Carry Risks Too

There is no simple or single way to properly weigh the risks of nuclear power against other energy sources, or other risks of modern life, said David Ropeik, an instructor at Harvard University, consultant to industry and author of “How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts.”

“What we’re afraid of determines how we behave, and sometimes those behaviors become risks in themselves,” he said. He cited a study by two researchers at the University of Michigan who found that fear of flying after the Sept. 11 hijackings had caused an additional 1,018 highway deaths in just the first three months after the attacks.

Radiation is a real threat, nuclear physicists say, but not as great as many people believe it is, and not as great as other threats. Indeed, every energy source comes with dangers, from the mine or wellhead to the smokestack or tailpipe.

“One million people a year die prematurely in China from air pollution from energy and industrial sectors,” said Stefan Hirschberg, head of safety analysis at the Paul Scherrer Institute, an engineering research center in Switzerland. More than 10,000 Americans a year die prematurely from the health effects of breathing emissions from coal-burning power plants, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Coal mining accidents in China kill an estimated 6,000 people a year, according to China’s Mining Ministry. In just the past year in the United States, the Deepwater Horizon blowout killed 11 people, the Upper Big Branch coal mine blast killed 29 and a natural gas pipeline explosion in California killed 8.

But such statistics don’t alter the public’s view of nuclear accidents.

Michael A. Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, said there is no right way to gauge risk. It is an intensely personal matter affected by a lot of factors.

“When you hear these arguments that pollution from coal plants costs so many thousands of lives compared to minimal or no deaths from nuclear accidents, that may be technically true, but it leaves a lot of people cold. It’s like saying, ‘Don’t pay attention to the twin towers falling; more people die crossing the street,’ ” he said. “Experts should not say, ‘Here’s how you should feel about risk.’ They should be saying, ‘Here are the facts. You decide what matters to you.’ ”

Fear of radiation is a significant health threat as well. A 2006 study of survivors of the 1986 Chernobyl accident compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Bank and a number of United Nations bodies found that fear had raised stress levels and compounded health problems by increasing rates of smoking and drinking, compared with groups outside the affected zone. The study estimated that perhaps 4,000 of the 600,000 people exposed to radiation from the plant would die prematurely from radiation-related cancers, compared with 100,000 of the same population who would die from other cancers.

The biggest health impact, the study found, was psychological.

“The mental health impact of Chernobyl is the largest public health problem unleashed by the accident to date,” according to the report, “Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-Economic Impacts.” “Psychological distress arising from the accident and its aftermath has had a profound impact on individual and community behavior,” including a sense of fatalism and dependency that has been transferred to the next generation of people in the affected zone.

“There is no question we should be appropriately concerned about nuclear power,” Mr. Ropeik said. “But ‘appropriately’ is the important distinction. On a continuum, there is no question in my mind that the dangers from fossil fuel burning should worry us more.”

27/01 In a Muslim State, Fear Sends Some Worship Underground

January 27, 2011
By LIZ GOOCH

KUALA LUMPUR — Like most Muslims in Malaysia, Mohammad Shah was raised according to the Sunni school of Islam. But when he was about 30, he said, he came to believe that Sunni teachings did not answer all of his questions about Islam. He began reading about the Shiite school of thought, the world’s second largest Islamic sect, and decided that “Sunni was not right for me.”

“I consider myself the new generation of Malaysian Shia,” said Mr. Mohammad, 33, using another term to describe Shiites. “My father is Sunni, my mother is Sunni. They are aware that I’m practicing a different school of thought. It’s no problem at all.”

Such acceptance does not extend to Malaysia’s religious authorities.

The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but when it comes to Islam, the country’s official religion, only the Sunni sect is permitted. Other forms, including Shiite Islam, are considered deviant and are not allowed to be spread.

Mr. Mohammad was one of 130 Shiites detained by the religious authorities in December as they observed Ashura, the Shiite holy day commemorating the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Ali, in their prayer room in an outer suburb of Kuala Lumpur.

There are no official figures on the number of Shiites in Malaysia, but Shiite leaders estimate that there could be as many as 40,000, many of whom practice their faith secretly.

While sectarian divisions are associated more with countries such as Iraq and Pakistan, Islamic experts say Malaysia is a rare example of a Muslim-majority country where the Shiite sect is banned. They say the recent raid reflects the religious authorities’ reluctance to accept diversity within Islam, and was part of the authorities’ continuing efforts to impose a rigid interpretation of the religion.

Although there had been some earlier arrests of Shiites since the National Fatwa Council, the country’s top Islamic body, clarified that Sunni Islam was the official religion in 1996, the December raid on the prayer room occupied by the Lovers of the Prophet’s Household was the first in recent years, according to the Shiite group’s Iranian-trained leader, Kamil Zuhairi bin Abdul Aziz.

Mr. Kamil and the other Shiites who were detained in the raid have been summoned to appear before the Shariah court for hearings scheduled for March and April to answer charges that they insulted the religious authorities and that they denied, violated or disputed a fatwa. The offenses are punishable by a fine of up to 3,000 ringgit, about $981, imprisonment for up to two years, or both.

On a recent evening, a small group of men and a handful of women with toddlers in tow climbed the three flights of stairs to the prayer room where the raid had taken place.

A sign atop the building, which is sandwiched between a mechanic’s workshop and a small cafe on a quiet suburban street, reads “House of Knowledge.” A Koranic verse in Arabic marks the entrance.

Inside the prayer room, the flags of Malaysia and the state of Selangor flank a red and black banner bearing the name of Muhammad’s grandson.

As many as 100 Shiites attend prayers led by Mr. Kamil each week, although he said many Malaysian followers worship privately. “Most of the Shia are in hiding because of the oppression,” he said.

He said some fear they will be discriminated against when they apply for jobs if it is known that they are Shiites, while others are afraid of being detained by the religious authorities.

Some Sunni leaders have claimed that Shiites deviate from the true form of Islam and represent a “threat to national security,” according to Mr. Kamil. He said some Sunni leaders, alluding to violence in Iraq and Pakistan, have alleged that Shiite Islam permits the killing of Sunnis, an accusation he emphatically denied.

Since the raid, the group has installed a security grill in the stairwell leading to their prayer room, where a black curtain divides the men’s section from the women’s.

But Mr. Kamil and others attending the prayer session this evening insisted that they were not afraid to continue practicing their beliefs. “We are not in fear, but we live in difficulty,” he said.

Calling for dialogue with the Sunni majority, Mr. Kamil insisted that Malaysian Shiites, some of whom are married to Sunnis, want to live in harmony with all other religions.

A statement issued by a spokesman for the federal government said the Constitution guaranteed religious freedom to all Malaysians, and that the National Fatwa Council was responsible for guiding the practice of Islam in Malaysia.

“In 1996, the National Fatwa Council issued a ruling that Sunni Islam is the official faith of Muslims in Malaysia. Under this ruling, which is enforced by Islamic affairs departments in each Malaysian state, Shia Muslims are free to practice their faith, but are not permitted to proselytize,” the statement said.

“It would be inappropriate for the federal government to comment further on this state-based matter.”

The Selangor State Islamic Religious Department, which carried out the raid, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Harussani Zakaria, a member of the National Fatwa Council, said allowing different sects to practice in Malaysia could lead to disputes. “It already happens in some countries,” he said in a telephone interview. “We don’t want that to come here.”

Chandra Muzaffar, president of the International Movement for a Just World, a nongovernment organization based in Malaysia, said while there may be differences among the various sects, Shiites are part of the Muslim community. “It’s just wrong to describe Shia as deviants,” he said.

Greg Barton, acting director of the Center for Islam and the Modern World at Monash University in Melbourne, said that Malaysia’s religious authorities had adopted a more rigid approach to Islam in recent decades and that space for public discussion of religion had narrowed under the influence of “Saudi Salafism and Egyptian Brotherhood prejudice.”

“The group that speaks formally for Malaysian Islam is a very narrow group who have taken a very puritanical approach,” said Mr. Barton. “The religious bureaucracy has become a very meddling bureaucracy. It has a very pernicious impact on religious freedom, not just for non-Muslims but for Muslims as well.”

Mr. Barton said while there were no precise figures, there are probably tens of thousands of Shiites in Southeast Asia, most in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Mariyah Qibti, who teaches Shiite Islam to children at the prayer room on Sundays, has experienced firsthand the two countries’ differing approaches to Shiites. Born to a Shiite family in Indonesia, Ms. Mariyah went to Iran when she was 19 to pursue Islamic studies. Two years ago she married a Malaysian Shiite, and moved to Kuala Lumpur.

Feeding her 1-year-old son as she sat on a rug at the back of the prayer room, she said that, in contrast to Malaysia, in Indonesia Shiites could practice their faith freely.

Despite her looming court appearance in March, she says she is not afraid to continue practicing her beliefs.

“This is part of the risk of being followers of Shia,” she said.

27/03 Libyans Call Woman Who Claimed Gang Rape a Prostitute

March 27, 2011

Zohra Bensemra/Reuters
Eman al-Obeidy told foreign reporters in Libya on Saturday that she was raped by members of a pro-Qaddafi militia.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

TRIPOLI, Libya — The Libyan authorities on Sunday attacked the character and credibility of a Libyan woman who burst into a hotel full of foreign journalists to say that she had been abducted and raped by militia members working for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, calling her “a known prostitute and a thief.”

The woman, Eman al-Obeidy, has become well known in Libya and around the world since the episode at the hotel on Saturday.

She told journalists that she had been raped by 15 men and displayed large bruises on her face and legs, as well as deep scratches. But as she tried to talk, security officials and people who had previously appeared to be hotel workers raced to silence her, at one point even attempting to place a coat over her head.

Her pursuers scuffled with journalists attempting to interview, photograph and protect her. Security officials ultimately dragged her screaming from the hotel and drove her away. But her accusations were heard and the scuffle seen on television networks and Web sites worldwide.

And the experience she described was consistent with longstanding reports of human rights abuses in Libya under the Qaddafi government.

Ms. Obeidy’s mother, Aisha Ahmed, a resident of the rebel-held town of Tobrok, told The Washington Post that Ms. Obeidy was a 26-year-old law student in Tripoli. “I am very happy, very proud,” her mother said, calling Ms. Obeidy a hero.

Ms. Obeidy’s parents reportedly said government officials had called them early Sunday to offer her money and a new house if she recanted. Relatives reached through a rebel activist late Sunday declined to talk.

A cousin, Wadad Omar, told Reuters that Ms. Obeidy worked in the tourism industry, and said that three other women, all lawyers, were abducted with her at a checkpoint outside Tripoli and were missing. As she was dragged from the hotel Ms. Obeidy screamed that others with her were in captivity.

Musa Ibrahim, a government spokesman, has cycled through a series of contradictory characterizations of Ms. Obeidy and her case. He initially suggested that she appeared drunk and may have fabricated her story, or “her fantasies.”

Later on Saturday, he said that police detectives had found her sane, sober and in good health. He called her complaints credible and said detectives were investigating them. And he said she would be offered a chance to meet again with journalists.

On Sunday, however, Mr. Ibrahim told reporters that detectives had learned she was a prostitute, with “a whole file of prostitution cases and petty theft.”

“The girl is not what she pretended to be,” he said. “This is her line of work. She has known these boys for years.”

“I can’t see anything political about her situation,” he added, “The men have been questioned, but since she is refusing the medical examination they can’t prove the rape case.” Asked at a press conference about his earlier statements, Mr. Ibrahim declined to repeat them, saying he now wanted to protect her privacy, “without talking about people’s previous crimes, their lifestyles.”

He said that she had been released to relatives in Tripoli, but that could not be confirmed.

In Benghazi, the center of the rebellion challenging Colonel Qaddafi’s four decades in power, residents held a rally supporting Ms. Obeidy. “Eman, you are not alone,” one sign read.

In Tripoli, several residents said they had heard about the episode from satellite news channels. Some said they did not believe that in Libya’s traditional culture a woman would speak so openly of a sexual crime. But others said they believed her. They pointed to her brutal treatment as an example of Colonel Qaddafi’s tight grip on the capital.



MORE IN AFRICA (4 OF 43 ARTICLES)
Libyan Rebels March Toward Qaddafi Stronghold
Read More »
Close

26/03 In Tour, U.S. Nuclear Plant Opens Doors to Make Case

March 26, 2011

Dave Martin/Associated Press
Officials at the Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama say it is well prepared for crises.

By MATTHEW L. WALD

ATHENS, Ala. — The Tennessee Valley Authority opened the doors to its Browns Ferry nuclear plant on Friday to present perhaps the most detailed case so far that American reactors of the same design and vintage as the ones damaged in Japan do not face the same risks.

The agency seemed to be seeking to project a balance of confidence and openness to improvements, a challenge now faced by the entire American nuclear industry as the nation watches the Japanese struggle to contain their crisis.

The containment buildings surrounding the three reactors at the Browns Ferry plant here, all of the Mark 1 variety made by General Electric, are almost identical to the ones at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which were wrecked by a tsunami on March 11. But the T.V.A. says that the devil is in the details, and that, in many small ways that could be crucial, Browns Ferry is better prepared for the unknown than Fukushima was.

In the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says, all American reactors have made preparations to limit damages from potential threats like airplanes piloted by terrorists. Some details have been released.

Yet it is clear that from fire hoses to batteries on wheels to components like a strobe light, the three reactors at Browns Ferry have preparations in place that operators say would help in a nightmare situation like Japan’s, a loss of electricity for running its pumps, valves and safety systems. While a tsunami is not an issue in northern Alabama, more than 300 miles from the sea, the loss of all power is always a threat. The plant sits on the banks of the Tennessee River, where floods can reasonably be anticipated, although plant officials say that water levels have never risen high enough to threaten the reactors.

Still, Browns Ferry is ready for “a one-in-a-million-year flood, or however many zeroes you want to go out,” said Preston D. Swafford, the T.V.A.’s chief nuclear officer, who led a group of reporters on a three-hour tour through the plant.

Inside the reactor building, near the entrance to the primary containment structure, are carefully marked spaces with two lime green carts about the size of hand trucks that a supermarket worker might use to roll cases of soda cans to the proper aisle. Each is loaded with batteries.

One cart could power the instruments that measure the water level in the reactor vessel, an ability that Japanese operators lost a few hours after the tsunami hit. Another could operate critical valves that failed early at Fukushima.

“They’re like a backup to the backup,” said Keith J. Polson, the T.V.A.’s vice president for the Browns Ferry site. “That’s what we think the Japanese didn’t have.”

In the best tradition of an industry whose terminology is ever more impenetrable to outsiders, the battery carts are known as E.D.M.G.’s, a label for hardware derived from the industry’s Extensive Damage Mitigation Guidelines, largely put into effect after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Deeper into the building, in an odd-shaped space in the basement between a corner of the square reactor building and the round containment shell is a steam-driven pump. This is something that the designer, General Electric, intended to be available to deliver up to 600 gallons per minute of cooling water into the reactor core even if the electrically driven pumps failed for want of power. An overheating reactor would be likely to have ample supplies of steam to run it.

That worked at Fukushima for a while but appears to have stopped functioning later; the Japanese plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, has not provided an explanation. Again, the T.V.A. suggests that it has backup tools that the Japanese utility, known as Tepco, probably lacked: a battery-powered strobe light stored in a nearby cabinet, and a valve that usually runs on electricity but also has a hand crank.

While the details of the Fukushima catastrophe may be months in reaching plant operators elsewhere, the T.V.A. hypothesizes that Tepco ran out of battery power to control the steam pump. But T.V.A. engineers say they could use the strobe light to determine how fast the pump’s shaft was turning, enabling workers to adjust its speed with a hand-cranked valve nearby.

In plant stairwells, there are fire hoses attached to hydrantlike fittings that could hurriedly be connected to a reactor’s spent fuel pools. Water would be fed in from the outside — either the purified water normally used around the plant or, in a pinch, raw water from the Tennessee River, operators say.

Fukushima sprayed seawater into its spent fuel pools but appears to have had problems getting the hoses and pumps in place before the water level in at least one of the pools, at the plant’s Unit 4 reactor, became dangerously low or possibly reached the bottom.

Officials at the Alabama plant concede that they do not know exactly what went wrong in Japan. “They let the spent fuel pools get away from them; it’s kind of hard to fathom how,” Mr. Swafford said. “I’m glad I’m not living in their shoes,” he added.

Perhaps more than most American nuclear plant officials, executives at Browns Ferry should realize they can expect the unexpected. In 1975, an electrician looking for an air leak in a cable room lighted a candle to see which way the smoke would blow and set off a fire that disabled most plant systems at Reactor No. 1. The plant was shut down for 18 months. And in 1985 the T.V.A. shut all of its reactors because of a variety of safety problems that industry experts say mostly boiled down to bad management. The others reopened, but Browns Ferry 1 stayed closed for 22 years.

Restarting it required a five-year effort to rip out and replace much of the electric cabling, among other improvements.

The authority also operates two nuclear plants in Tennessee: Sequoyah, in Soddy-Daisy, and Watts Bar, near Spring City. Combined with Browns Ferry, the plants make enough electricity to power more than three million homes in the Tennessee Valley, the T.V.A. says.

The plants have massive, robust structures that assure safety, and many features have been added since they were opened in the 1970s to further reduce the risk of an accident, said William R. McCollum Jr., the authority’s chief operating officer. “Having said all that, we are not going to be complacent or satisfied,” Mr. McCollum added.

Japan’s crisis has already prompted a shift in the T.V.A.’s strategic thinking, said Mr. Swafford, the authority’s chief nuclear officer. “We’ve started doing the what-ifs, what we’ve started calling ‘stacked’ events,” he said. “What clearly has shown up in Japan is multiple, stacked events. We’ve not analyzed for all those things.”

He said the authority would keep exploring “until we’re comfortable we’ve gotten every one that’s humanly imaginable.”

Yet Mr. McCollum said there were limits to the contingency planning. “There has to be a reasonableness to each one of these,” Mr. McCollum said of the plans, “or I think you could take it out to the 10th degree.”

26/03 Japanese Rules for Nuclear Plants Relied on Old Science

March 26, 2011
By NORIMITSU ONISHI and JAMES GLANZ

TOKYO — In the country that gave the world the word tsunami, the Japanese nuclear establishment largely disregarded the potentially destructive force of the walls of water. The word did not even appear in government guidelines until 2006, decades after plants — including the Fukushima Daiichi facility that firefighters are still struggling to get under control — began dotting the Japanese coastline.

The lack of attention may help explain how, on an island nation surrounded by clashing tectonic plates that commonly produce tsunamis, the protections were so tragically minuscule compared with the nearly 46-foot tsunami that overwhelmed the Fukushima plant on March 11. Offshore breakwaters, designed to guard against typhoons but not tsunamis, succumbed quickly as a first line of defense. The wave grew three times as tall as the bluff on which the plant had been built.

Japanese government and utility officials have repeatedly said that engineers could never have anticipated the magnitude 9.0 earthquake — by far the largest in Japanese history — that caused the sea bottom to shudder and generated the huge tsunami. Even so, seismologists and tsunami experts say that according to readily available data, an earthquake with a magnitude as low as 7.5 — almost garden variety around the Pacific Rim — could have created a tsunami large enough to top the bluff at Fukushima.

After an advisory group issued nonbinding recommendations in 2002, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant owner and Japan’s biggest utility, raised its maximum projected tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi to between 17.7 and 18.7 feet — considerably higher than the 13-foot-high bluff. Yet the company appeared to respond only by raising the level of an electric pump near the coast by 8 inches, presumably to protect it from high water, regulators said.

“We can only work on precedent, and there was no precedent,” said Tsuneo Futami, a former Tokyo Electric nuclear engineer who was the director of Fukushima Daiichi in the late 1990s. “When I headed the plant, the thought of a tsunami never crossed my mind.”

The intensity with which the earthquake shook the ground at Fukushima also exceeded the criteria used in the plant’s design, though by a less significant factor than the tsunami, according to data Tokyo Electric has given the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, a professional group. Based on what is known now, the tsunami set off the nuclear crisis by flooding the backup generators needed to power the reactor cooling system.

Japan is known for its technical expertise. For decades, though, Japanese officialdom and even parts of its engineering establishment clung to older scientific precepts for protecting nuclear plants, relying heavily on records of earthquakes and tsunamis, and failing to make use of advances in seismology and risk assessment since the 1970s.

For some experts, the underestimate of the tsunami threat at Fukushima is frustratingly reminiscent of the earthquake — this time with no tsunami — in July 2007 that struck Kashiwazaki, a Tokyo Electric nuclear plant on Japan’s western coast.. The ground at Kashiwazaki shook as much as two and a half times the maximum intensity envisioned in the plant’s design, prompting upgrades at the plant.

“They had years to prepare at that point, after Kashiwazaki, and I am seeing the same thing at Fukushima,” said Peter Yanev, an expert in seismic risk assessment based in California, who has studied Fukushima for the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department.

There is no doubt that when Fukushima was designed, seismology and its intersection with the structural engineering of nuclear power plants was in its infancy, said Hiroyuki Aoyama, 78, an expert on the quake resistance of nuclear plants who has served on Japanese government panels. Engineers employed a lot of guesswork, adopting a standard that structures inside nuclear plants should have three times the quake resistance of general buildings.

“There was no basis in deciding on three times,” said Mr. Aoyama, an emeritus professor of structural engineering at the University of Tokyo. “They were shooting from the hip,” he added, making a sign of a pistol with his right thumb and index finger. “There was a vague target.”

Evolution of Designs

When Japanese engineers began designing their first nuclear power plants more than four decades ago, they turned to the past for clues on how to protect their investment in the energy of the future. Official archives, some centuries old, contained information on how tsunamis had flooded coastal villages, allowing engineers to surmise their height.

So seawalls were erected higher than the highest tsunamis on record. At Fukushima Daiichi, Japan’s fourth oldest nuclear plant, officials at Tokyo Electric used a contemporary tsunami — a 10.5-foot-high wave caused by a 9.5-magnitude earthquake in Chile in 1960 — as a reference point. The 13-foot-high cliff on which the plant was built would serve as a natural seawall, according to Masaru Kobayashi, an expert on quake resistance at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Japan’s nuclear regulator.

Eighteen-foot-high offshore breakwaters were built as part of the company’s anti-tsunami strategy, said Jun Oshima, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric. But regulators said the breakwaters — mainly intended to shelter boats — offered some resistance against typhoons, but not tsunamis, Mr. Kobayashi said.

Over the decades, preparedness against tsunamis never became a priority for Japan’s power companies or nuclear regulators. They were perhaps lulled, experts said, by the fact that no tsunami had struck a nuclear plant until two weeks ago. Even though tsunami simulations offered new ways to assess the risks of tsunamis, plant operators made few changes at their aging facilities, and nuclear regulators did not press them.

Engineers took a similar approach with earthquakes. When it came to designing the Fukushima plant, official records dating from 1600 showed that the strongest earthquakes off the coast of present-day Fukushima Prefecture had registered between magnitude 7.0 and 8.0, Mr. Kobayashi said.

“We left it to the experts,” said Masatoshi Toyoda, a retired Tokyo Electric vice president who oversaw the construction of the plant. He added, “they researched old documents for information on how many tombstones had toppled over and such.”

Eventually, experts on government committees started pushing for tougher building codes, and by 1981, guidelines included references to earthquakes but not to tsunamis, according to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. That pressure grew exponentially after the devastating Kobe earthquake in 1995, said Kenji Sumita, who was deputy chairman of the government’s Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan in the late 1990s.

Mr. Sumita said power companies, which were focused on completing the construction of a dozen reactors, resisted adopting tougher standards, and did not send representatives to meetings on the subject at the Nuclear Safety Commission.

“Others sent people immediately,” Mr. Sumita said, referring to academics and construction industry experts. “But the power companies engaged in foot-dragging and didn’t come.”

Meanwhile, the sciences of seismology and risk assessment advanced around the world. Although the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission has come under severe criticism for not taking the adoption of those new techniques far enough, the agency did use many of them in new, plant-by-plant reviews, said Greg S. Hardy, a structural engineer at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger who specializes in nuclear plant design and seismic risk.

For whatever reasons — whether cultural, historical or simply financial — Japanese engineers working on nuclear plants continued to predict what they believed were maximum earthquakes based on records.

Those methods, however, did not take into account serious uncertainties like faults that had not been discovered or earthquakes that were gigantic but rare, said Mr. Hardy, who visited Kashiwazaki after the 2007 quake as part of a study sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute.

“The Japanese fell behind,” Mr. Hardy said. “Once they made the proclamation that this was the maximum earthquake, they had a hard time re-evaluating that as new data came in.”

The Japanese approach, referred to in the field as “deterministic” — as opposed to “probabilistic,” or taking unknowns into account — somehow stuck, said Noboru Nakao, a consultant who was a nuclear engineer at Hitachi for 40 years and was president of Japan’s training center for operators of boiling-water reactors.

“Japanese safety rules generally are deterministic because probabilistic methods are too difficult,” Mr. Nakao said, adding that “the U.S. has a lot more risk assessment methods.”

The science of tsunamis also advanced, with far better measurements of their size, vastly expanded statistics as more occurred, and computer calculations that help predict what kinds of tsunamis are produced by earthquakes of various sizes. Two independent draft research papers by leading tsunami experts — Eric Geist of the United States Geological Survey and Costas Synolakis, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Southern California — indicate that earthquakes of a magnitude down to about 7.5 can create tsunamis large enough to go over the 13-foot bluff protecting the Fukushima plant.

Mr. Synolakis called Japan’s underestimation of the tsunami risk a “cascade of stupid errors that led to the disaster” and said that relevant data was virtually impossible to overlook by anyone in the field.

Underestimating Risks

The first clear reference to tsunamis appeared in new standards for Japan’s nuclear plants issued in 2006.

“The 2006 guidelines referred to tsunamis as an accompanying phenomenon of earthquakes, and urged the power companies to think about that,” said Mr. Aoyama, the structural engineering expert.

The risk had received some attention in 2002, when a government advisory group, the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, published recommended tsunami guidelines for nuclear operators.

A study group at the society, including professors and representatives from utilities like Tokyo Electric, scrutinized data from past tsunamis, as well as fresh research on fault lines and local geography, to come up with the guidelines, according to a member of the study group who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the situation.

The same group had recently been discussing revisions to those standards, according to the member. At the group’s last meeting, held just over a week before the recent tsunami, researchers debated the usefulness of three-dimensional simulations to predict the potential damage of tsunamis on nuclear plants, according to minutes from those meetings. “We took into account more than past data,” the member said. “We tried to predict. Our objective was to reduce uncertainties.”

Perhaps the saddest observation by scientists outside Japan is that, even through the narrow lens of recorded tsunamis, the potential for easily overtopping the anti-tsunami safeguards at Fukushima should have been recognized. In 1993 a magnitude 7.8 quake produced tsunamis with heights greater than 30 feet off Japan’s western coast, spreading wide devastation, according to scientific studies and reports at the time.

On the hard-hit island of Okushiri, “most of the populated areas worst hit by the tsunami were bounded by tsunami walls” as high as 15 feet, according to a report written by Mr. Yanev. That made the walls a foot or two higher than Fukushima’s bluff.

But in a harbinger of what would happen 18 years later, the walls on Okushiri, Mr. Yanev, the expert in seismic risk assessment, wrote, “may have moderated the overall tsunami effects but were ineffective for higher waves.”

And even the distant past was yielding new information that could have served as fresh warnings.

Two decades after Fukushima Daiichi came online, researchers poring through old records estimated that a quake known as Jogan had actually produced a tsunami that reached nearly one mile inland in an area just north of the plant. That tsunami struck in 869.

Norimitsu Onishi reported from Tokyo, and James Glanz from New York. Ken Belson and Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Tokyo.

28/03 人は他人に支配されようとは思わない――選択理論

2011年3月28日

印刷

    

　米国の精神科医、ウィリアム・グラッサーが唱えた「選択理論」は、私たちの行動は、外からの刺激にどう反応するのが最善か、毎回判断することで成り立っているという考え方です。そのため、人間一人ひとりの行動は、他人に無理強いされても変えられないというのです。

　私たちは「上質世界」という、「こんな形で生きたい」と思うイメージをもっていて、そこに近づくよう行動を選択しています。たとえば一緒にいたい人、所有したり経験したりしたいことなどが含まれています。

　私たちは当然、他人からの影響を受けますが、それは配偶者や親友など、上質世界に含まれている人からの影響が大きいという意味です。

　私たちが、誰を自分の上質世界に入れるのかは、さまざまな付き合いの中で決めています。興味深いのは、この上質世界に、いったん誰かを入れても、付き合う間に「あること」をされ続けると、その人を上質世界から追い出すのです。それが配偶者ならば離婚となるし、親友ならば、単なる友人に格下げか絶交することになります。

　その「あること」とは、「相手からコントロールされる」です。具体的には〈１〉批判する〈２〉責める〈３〉罰する〈４〉脅す〈５〉文句を言う〈６〉ガミガミ言う〈７〉目先の褒美で釣る――で、グラッサー博士はこれを、「致命的な七つの習慣」と名付けました。

　では、この習慣に陥らずに相手から信頼されるには、どうすればいいでしょうか。グラッサー博士は、相手に対して〈１〉傾聴する〈２〉支援する〈３〉励ます〈４〉尊敬する〈５〉信頼する〈６〉受容する〈７〉意見の違いを交渉する――を提唱し、これを「身につけたい七つの習慣」と呼んでいます。

　これらの行動原則は、夫婦や友人の関係だけでなく、親子や企業の上司・部下の関係にも当てはまります。

　上質世界というと分かりにくいのですが、要は、相手を無条件に信頼できるかどうかを、私たちは常に相手の言動などから判断しているということです。そして、自分たちをコントロールしようとする人は、なるべく遠ざけようとしているのです。

　「致命的な七つの習慣」を自分の行動から排除することを心がけていきたいと思います。

　　　　◇

　今週で終わります。

28/03 Japan Fears Nuclear Reactor Is Leaking Contaminated Water

March 28, 2011
By HIROKO TABUCHI and KEN BELSON

TOKYO — Highly contaminated water is escaping a damaged reactor at the crippled nuclear power plant in Japan and could soon leak into the ocean, the country’s nuclear regulator warned on Monday.

The discovery raises the danger of further radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and is a further setback to efforts to contain the nuclear crisis as workers find themselves in increasingly hazardous conditions.

Radiation measuring 1,000 millisieverts per hour was detected in water in an overflow tunnel outside the plant’s Reactor No. 2, Japan’s nuclear regulator said at a news conference. The maximum dose allowed for workers at the plant is 250 millisieverts in a year.

The tunnel leads from the reactor’s turbine building, where contaminated water was discovered on Saturday, to an opening just 180 feet from the sea, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

The contaminated water level is now about three feet from the exit of the vertical, U-shaped tunnel and rising, Mr. Nishiyama said.

Contaminated water was also found at tunnels leading from the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors, though with much lower levels of radiation.

“We are unsure whether there is already an overflow” of the water out of the tunnel, Mr. Nishiyama said. He said workers were redoubling efforts to first remove the water from the Reactor No. 2 turbine building. Government officials have said that the water is probably leaking from broken pipes inside the reactor, from a breach in the reactor’s containment vessel or from the inner pressure vessel that houses the nuclear fuel.

The nuclear safety agency also reported that radioactive iodine 131 was detected Sunday at a concentration 1,150 times the maximum allowable level in a seawater sample taken about a mile north of the drainage outlets of reactor units 1 through 4. It also said that the amount of cesium 137 found in water about 1,000 feet from plant was 20 times the normal level, roughly equal to readings taken a week ago.

Mr. Nishiyama said there were no health concerns because fishing would not be conducted in the evacuation-designated area within about 12 miles of the plant, the Kyodo news agency reported.

Kyodo also reported that Tokyo Electric said on Monday that plutonium had been detected in soil at five locations at the plant. The company said that the plutonium was believed to have been discharged from nuclear fuel.

The disclosure about the escaping contaminated water came as workers pressed their efforts to remove highly radioactive water from inside buildings at the plant. The high levels of radioactivity have made it harder for them to get inside the reactor buildings and control rooms to get equipment working again, slowing the effort to cool the reactors and spent fuel pools.

Workers pumped less water into the reactors Monday in an attempt to minimize the overflow of radioactive water from them, slowing down the cooling process, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of the plant, said.

The company said the elevated radiation levels in the water, which flooded the turbine buildings adjacent to the reactors, were at least four times the annual permissible exposure levels for workers at the plant and 100,000 times greater than ordinarily found in water at a nuclear facility.

Alarm over the radiation levels grew last Thursday when two workers were burned around their feet and ankles after they stepped into highly radioactive water inside the turbine building of Reactor No. 3. A third worker who was wearing higher boots did not suffer the same exposure. Japanese news media reported that the three workers were released from the hospital on Monday.

Over the weekend a worker trying to measure radiation levels of the water at Reactor No. 2 saw the reading on his dosimeter jump beyond 1,000 millisieverts per hour and left the scene immediately, said Takeo Iwamoto, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power.

Under normal conditions the average amount of radiation workers at the plant are allowed to be exposed to is at most 50 millisieverts a year. In emergency situations the limit is usually raised to 100 millisieverts but it has been raised to 250 millisieverts during the crisis.

There was no evacuation of the workers stationed at Daiichi after the high radiation levels were discovered. Naoki Sunoda, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power, said that since the crisis began on March 11, 19 workers had been exposed to radiation levels of 100 millisieverts. Of the workers at the site on Monday, 381 were from Tepco and 69 from a contractor. Firefighters and members of the Japanese military have also been helping at the plant.

Despite the new problem, Mr. Sunoda said, workers on Monday were still trying to determine a way to approach the turbine building of Reactor No. 2 to extract the contaminated water.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant has been leaking radiation since a magnitude 9.0 quake and ensuing tsunami struck northeastern Japan’s coastline on March 11. The tsunami knocked out power to the plant’s system that cools the nuclear fuel rods.

Yukio Edano, the government spokesman, said on Monday that it was too early for people to return to homes within a 12-mile radius of the plant.

“We cannot guarantee safety at the moment as the situation is still under evaluation,” he said.

The chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, was in Tokyo on Monday meeting with senior Japanese government officials and representatives from Tokyo Electric, also known as Tepco. Mr. Jaczko reiterated that the commission is prepared to provide assistance but did not provide details.

“The unprecedented challenge before us remains serious and our best experts remain fully engaged to help Japan address the situation,” he said in a statement.

Mr. Jaczko’s visit came as Japan asked the French nuclear industry for help. A spokeswoman for the French nuclear power company Areva said the firm was providing support to Tepco.

“The whole French nuclear industry has received a request for help from Tepco,” said Fleur Floquet-Daubigeon in Paris. “We’re not sending people at this time; we are just sharing technical expertise.”

"We’re basically in a brainstorming phase right now," she added.

The French energy minister, Eric Besson, said the call for help had also come from the Japanese government, Reuters reported. “Japan explicitly asked EDF, Areva and France’s nuclear research body (CEA) to help them,” Mr. Besson said.

Areva and other French companies, including the giant state utility EDF, the world’s largest operator of nuclear plants, have already provided boron, which can help choke off a nuclear reaction, gloves, measuring equipment and other gear.

Relief supplies are reaching more earthquake survivors, but low temperatures and aftershocks continue to make life miserable.

On Monday morning an aftershock with a magnitude of 6.5 off the coast of northeast Honshu triggered a tsunami alert, which was later canceled.

The public broadcaster, NHK, said the death toll from the quake and tsunami had grown to more than 10,800, while more than 16,200 remained missing. More than 190,000 people remained housed in temporary shelters, it said.

Reporting was contributed by David Jolly, Ken Ijichi and Moshe Komata in Tokyo, and Keith Bradsher in Hong Kong.



MORE IN ASIA PACIFIC (2 OF 51 ARTICLES)
In Deference to Crisis, a New Obsession Sweeps Japan: Self-Restraint
Read More »
Close

27/03 American Thought Police

March 27, 2011
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”

So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.

If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.

The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.

The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records.

Back in 2009 climate skeptics got hold of more than a thousand e-mails between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety; at most, we learned — I know this will shock you — that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike.

But that didn’t stop the usual suspects from proclaiming that they had uncovered “Climategate,” a scientific scandal that somehow invalidates the vast array of evidence for man-made climate change. And this fake scandal gives an indication of what the Wisconsin G.O.P. presumably hopes to do to Mr. Cronon.

After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. In fact, it’s surprising how few such lines the critics managed to find in the “Climategate” trove: much of the smear has focused on just one e-mail, in which a researcher talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a particular series. In context, it’s clear that he’s talking about making an effective graphical presentation, not about suppressing evidence. But the right wants a scandal, and won’t take no for an answer.

Is there any doubt that Wisconsin Republicans are hoping for a similar “success” against Mr. Cronon?

Now, in this case they’ll probably come up dry. Mr. Cronon writes on his blog that he has been careful never to use his university e-mail for personal business, exhibiting a scrupulousness that’s neither common nor expected in the academic world. (Full disclosure: I have, at times, used my university e-mail to remind my wife to feed the cats, confirm dinner plans with friends, etc.)

Beyond that, Mr. Cronon — the president-elect of the American Historical Association — has a secure reputation as a towering figure in his field. His magnificent “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” is the best work of economic and business history I’ve ever read — and I read a lot of that kind of thing.

So we don’t need to worry about Mr. Cronon — but we should worry a lot about the wider effect of attacks like the one he’s facing.

Legally, Republicans may be within their rights: Wisconsin’s open records law provides public access to e-mails of government employees, although the law was clearly intended to apply to state officials, not university professors. But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like.

Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.

What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.

27/03 Facebook Wants to Be Friends With Robert Gibbs

March 27, 2011, 11:54 PM

Facebook Wants to Be Friends With Robert Gibbs

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Drew Angerer/The New York TimesAt a press briefing in November, Robert Gibbs answered reporters’ questions.

¶Robert Gibbs, who recently left his job as press secretary for President Obama, could be headed to Silicon Valley for a high-powered communications job at Facebook, my colleague Andrew Ross Sorkin reports over at Dealbook.

¶The talks between Facebook and Mr. Gibbs don’t appear to have reached any conclusion yet, according to Mr. Sorkin’s reporting. But the possibility is intriguing, especially given the assumption that Mr. Gibbs would spend the next 18 months working on Mr. Obama’s re-election effort.

¶That could still happen as an off-duty pursuit while working at Facebook. Or Mr. Gibbs could decide to turn Facebook down to pursue other options.

¶But Facebook represents a potential financial bonanza for Mr. Gibbs, who is married with a young son. The company is set to go public soon, and the compensation package for Mr. Gibbs reportedly would include stock options that could be worth millions of dollars.

¶If Mr. Gibbs did leave Washington for Facebook — and if that meant setting aside his political duties — it would be a blow to Mr. Obama and his other top advisers, who have been counting on Mr. Gibbs as a central part of the early messaging for the re-election campaign.

March 27, 2011, 8:41 PM

Opportunities and Perils for Obama in Military Action in Libya

By JOHN HARWOOD

ReutersU.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates on “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

Politicians define themselves by choosing enemies, and exemplars. Suddenly,President Obama’s choices on Libya are reshaping his profile in unpredictable ways as he heads into the 2012 election season.

The president and his advisers have already highlighted the central factors that influenced Mr. Obama’s decision to act militarily, a process he plans to explain more fully to the nation at 7:30 p.m. Monday.

In Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Obama saw an autocrat on the verge of committing mass murder.

In Bill Clinton, he saw a president who chose not to stop such atrocities and later regretted it.

In George W. Bush, he saw a go-it-alone style of intervention ill suited to the transformative forces now sweeping across the Middle East.

Those judgments produced the diplomatically chaotic, militarily complicated and strategically ambiguous Libyan action by the United States and an array of allies. Mr. Obama calls it not an act of war but rather a quickly arranged and temporary humanitarian response representing “how the international community should work.”

Yet his choices face withering questions from friends and foes alike. A rapid departure by Colonel Qaddafi and American forces would quiet them; an extended commitment would undercut his oft-repeated focus on economic revival at home.

“If Jeffersonian Democrats take over in Libya, he’s a hero,” said Robert Borosage, who directs the liberal Campaign for America’s Future. “If he gets stuck in an ongoing civil war, then it could be enormously costly to the country, and to him politically.”

At minimum, Mr. Obama has introduced a new measure of his performance that almost no one would have expected when he defined his 2008 candidacy, in part, by his opposition to the Iraq war.

Action and Reaction

Presidential aspirants, in what they offer, and voters, in whom they support, typically react to the immediate past.

After the scandals of Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter promised virtue. After Mr. Carter gained a reputation for small-bore fecklessness, Ronald Reaganpledged robust leadership that did not sweat the details. After George H. W. Bush won the Persian Gulf war, Bill Clinton vowed to focus on an ailing economy.

And after the younger Mr. Bush embraced his role as “war president,” Mr. Obama stood out among his major challengers as an opponent of the Iraq war since 2002, even before it started.

Mr. Obama said then that he opposed “dumb” wars, not all of them. By increasing forces in Afghanistan, President Obama fulfilled a pledge to reinvigorate a mission he argued Mr. Bush had neglected.

The Libya intervention is different. Mr. Obama initiated it, applying two lessons drawn from his predecessors.

One is the “responsibility to protect” innocents from slaughter, as Mr. Clinton failed to do in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Mr. Obama judged Colonel Qaddafi’s vow to show Libyan rebels “no mercy” such a case.

The second is the need for greater international coordination than Mr. Bush relied upon. Mr. Obama did not commit American forces until NATO allies, the Arab League and the United Nations backed the idea — and only for the stated purpose of protecting civilians, not to satisfy his separate call for Colonel Qaddafi’s ouster.

The result: a unique set of political risks and rewards all Mr. Obama’s own.

Great, if It Works

Bruce W. Jentleson, a Duke University professor, Clinton administration veteran and part-time adviser to Mr. Obama’s State Department, called the intervention crucial to the president’s foreign policy and overall political standing.

“If this succeeds,” he said, “he will have demonstrated he’s a president who can make multilateralism work, and use American power in ways that are effective for a 21st-century world.”

Yet Mr. Obama faces skeptics across the political spectrum.

“It should not be assumed that a massacre or genocide was about to happen,” asserted Richard Haass, a veteran of both Bush administrations who is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Colonel Qaddafi, he said, may have been seeking merely to intimidate potential foes. It also is not clear, Mr. Haass added, that Libyan rebels are more humane, democratic or friendly to American interests.

Among Democrats, some liberals support using force for humanitarian purposes. But as Mr. Obama prepares his 2012 campaign, Mr. Borosage predicted “greater and greater restiveness” over a new military commitment amid persistent economic distress.

A Gallup survey last week showed only about half of Americans backed the intervention, about the same proportion as backed the 1999 NATO airstrikes in Kosovo that Mr. Clinton authorized for humanitarian reasons. That finding underscored the political burden Mr. Obama has taken on.

“Approval will almost invariably go down from here,” said Scott Althaus, an expert on war and public opinion at the University of Illinois. “There’s little historical evidence that support can be sustained at even this modest level for very long.”