March 16, 2011, 12:54 pm
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Tokyo Electric Power Co., via Kyodo News, via Associated Press The Fukushima Daiichi plant on Tuesday. Reactors No. 3, left, and No. 4, center, are among those that have been damaged.
5:17 p.m. Updated New York Times reporters answered questions from readers about the continuing nuclear crisis in Japan. Readers asked about media coverage of the crisis, health risks from radiation exposure, problems with the reactors and nuclear waste, the workers at the plant, comparisons to Chernobyl and the danger of building nuclear power plants in earthquake-prone regions.
About the Reporters
Keith Bradsher is covering the crisis from Hong Kong, where he is the bureau chief.
Henry Fountain is a science reporter covering the science and engineering of nuclear reactors.
Denise Grady, a health reporter, is covering the impact of the crisis on public health.
David E. Sanger is chief Washington correspondent and a former Tokyo bureau chief.
Matthew L. Wald reports on national energy developments from Washington and is a regular contributor to the Green blog.
Media Hysteria?
Q.Why is the media giving such hysteric coverage to an issue which at its absolute worst might cause some people to relocate away from the immediate vicinity of the power station and leave an expensive cleanup mess… all while there are tens of thousands dead and dying from the effects of the tsunami and a vast swath of devastation to infrastructure which poses a far more immediate and ongoing hazard to both individuals and the greater economy?
— ddblack1, Austin, Tex.
A.From the moment that the earthquake and tsunami hit, The Times recognized this would be a multidimensional crisis, and we began deploying our reporters to cover all aspects of it. There is the heartbreaking human story, as the bodies of thousands are uncovered, as parents go searching for their children, as the residents of the northeast coast — an area many of us who covered Japan have often visited — try to rebuild their lives. Those stories have been told with great compassion through in articles by Martin Fackler, our Tokyo bureau chief, as well as Michael Wines and other reporters who made their way into the devastation zone. And then, of course, there are the broader issues — for Japan as it struggles its way out of two decades of economic stagnation, and for the world economic markets.
But we also quickly realized that the nuclear crisis unfolding at the Fukushima plant was unlike any we have seen in history: multiple failures, fires and radiation leaks from at least four separate reactors. While damage from the earthquake and tsunami was instantly visible, the nuclear impact, we suspected, would take days to unfold, and could affect far larger swaths of Japan and neighboring countries. Unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening. The challenge for us now is to cover both stories vigorously, with the depth, compassion, expertise and investigative zeal that Times readers expect.
— David E. Sanger
Health Risks
Q.I live in Oakland and can’t seem to get clear information about when and if radioactive materials will arrive here from the jet stream. And if so, what dosage or for how many days we should take potassium iodide to protect our thyroids?
— EastBay, Oakland, Calif.
A.This is frustrating for all, because the answer depends in part on the prevailing winds, which can change. However, experts I’ve interviewed strongly doubt that there will be any significant risk on the West Coast, and say there is no reason to take the potassium iodide unless high levels of radioactive iodine develop. But again, scientists consider high levels unlikely in the United States. In addition, about 98 percent of a person’s dose comes from drinking contaminated milk, and if fallout were to reach here (again, unlikely) most people could protect themselves by not drinking milk or eating dairy products. Children are much more vulnerable than adults.
— Denise Grady
Q.Is there a danger in interacting with people who have been exposed to radiation from this disaster? Particularly for young children? Would radiation be left behind in an apartment if someone from Tokyo were to come right now to stay as a guest?
— Concerned, New York City
A.The only risk I’m aware of would be if someone contaminated at the site came into your home wearing clothing full of radioactive fallout. Otherwise, you are O.K. If you are worried that someone who ingested radioactive material could be harmful, that seems unlikely.
— Denise Grady
Q.Like many expats here in Japan I get my news from both Japanese and overseas services. But genuine nuclear experts are so inconsistent in their reactions to this crisis, and so much panic is spreading in Tokyo and throughout Japan in relation to this. With us in mind and the practicalities of our daily living, could you please give some realistic feedback as to how/whether this crisis is going to irradiate us 260 kilometers away in Tokyo, poison our food supply and create long-term serious health risks beyond that 30-kilometer radius around the plant? People here really want solid information about how radioactivity works in layman’s terms, and what we need is solid information that is not laden with fear-mongering doomsday scenarios but real, practical advice.
— Greg, Tokyo
A.In an article in Wednesday’s paper, Denise Grady reported that the Japanese government has “taken precautions that should prevent the accident from becoming another Chernobyl, even if additional radiation is released.”
The Japanese government has evacuated people closest to the plant, told others to stay indoors and distributed the drug potassium iodide to protect the thyroid gland from radioactive iodine.
The great tragedy of Chernobyl was an epidemic of thyroid cancer among people exposed to the radiation as children — more than 6,000 cases so far, with more expected for many years to come. There is no reason for it to be repeated in Japan.
The epidemic in Chernobyl was preventable and would probably not have happened if people had been told to stop drinking locally produced milk, which was by far the most important source of radiation. Cows ate grass contaminated by fallout from the reactors and secreted radioactive iodine in their milk.
Read the full article, “Precautions Should Limit Health Problems From Nuclear Plant’s Radiation.”
— The Editors
Q.Folks in the vicinity of the power plant have been asked to stay indoors to protect themselves from the radiation. Is that really sufficient? How does this kind of radiation differ from an X-ray?
— Callie, East Lansing, Mich.
A.People near the plant have been evacuated. The ones being warned to stay inside are actually miles and miles away. Given that there is some dispersion of the cloud, levels at a distance should diminish, so the risk diminishes, too, and staying inside, though imperfect, seems like a reasonable precaution. The Environmental Protection Agency Web site offers good information about different types of radiation and the effects of various doses.
— Denise Grady
Crisis at the Reactors
Q.How is water currently being pumped into the reactors? Are fire hoses the sole method being used? Reports have indicated that backup diesel generators were brought to the site but were not able to be used to drive the pumps. There have also been reports of pump failures. Have detailed descriptions of the status of each reactor (including cooling methods and equipment failures) been made public? Given the contamination of site, it would seem that finding a way to supply coolant with minimal human presence is essential.
— Rob, Atlanta
A.The Japanese authorities have provided few details of how they are pumping sea water into the three stricken reactors. Nuclear engineers and executives with experience at other reactors say that the Japanese are most likely using several pumper engine firetrucks in a row, with each increasing the pressure of the water and pushing it through a hose to the next truck. This technique is sometimes used in high-rise firefighting and bomb disposal, when the goal is to maximize the flow and pressure of the water actually reaching the target. At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, maximum pressure is needed to force water into overheated reactors in which a significant proportion of the water has turned into very hot steam at very high pressure.
The pumping process has been fraught with problems — at least one engine ran out of fuel at Reactor No. 2 on Monday night for several hours, interrupting the pumping of sea water during this time, because no tanker truck was immediately available to refuel it. Temperature and pressure climbed in the reactor as a result, and may have contributed to damage to the fuel rods and to an explosion at the base of the primary containment building.
Japanese officials have looked for alternatives. One idea under consideration has been to use helicopters to drop water. But helicopter crews who participated in the response to the Chernobyl accident received heavy doses of radiation from the smoke. The United States Navy has already reported that several helicopter crews involved in post-tsunami rescue work over the past several days have shown low-level exposure to radiation; decontamination under these circumstances mainly involves a lot of soap and water to remove radioactive particles.
— Keith Bradsher
Q.Where is the sea water that is being pumped in to cool the reactors going, and is this water contaminated?
— T. Lowen, Minneapolis
A.To the best of our understanding, the sea water is turning to steam. The reactor is still so hot that the sea water they are pumping in is just intended to replace the amount that boils off. In other words, in the best of situations, they are just managing to keep the reactor covered with water.
In the reactors that have had fuel rod exposure (at least three of them, apparently), the steam would be contaminated with radioactive elements from the fuel, which has been exposed because of cracking of the zirconium cladding around it. The contaminated steam leaves the reactor vessel and enters the containment structure. To avoid a pressure buildup, the containment structure must be vented intermittently, resulting in the release of radioactivity to the environment. (In at least one of the reactors, the containment structure is reported to be damaged; if that’s the case then the radiation release could be continuous.)
— Henry Fountain
Q.I keep seeing the phrase “shut down” in reference to the nuclear reactors at Fukushima, but clearly they are not shut down as they are still generating tremendous energy in the form of heat. How is a nuclear reactor “turned off”?
They can’t keep using firetrucks to pump seawater through the reactor cores indefinitely. Since it is apparently not possible to turn off the reactors, what is the long term plan for preventing a meltdown?
— A.J., San Francisco
A.The reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant are shut down, meaning that the nuclear chain reaction (which generated heat to turn water to steam for the turbines that make electricity) has been halted. That happened automatically when the earthquake struck — in such an emergency, the reactors are designed to insert special rods into the core that absorb neutrons and stop the chain reaction.
The reactors were very hot, though (they operate at about 550 degrees Fahrenheit) and it takes a while to remove that heat. In addition — and this is the real problem — even though the chain reaction is stopped, heat is still generated in the fuel by the natural decay of the radioactive elements present. This heat is why they need to keep pumping water into the reactor core — it stays so hot that the water can boil off, exposing the fuel rods. And if the fuel rods are exposed, even for a short time (as happened at at least two of the reactors), they become damaged and radioactivity is released.
Tokyo Electric Power, the operator of the reactors, has not discussed its long-term plans, but it’s probably safe to say that their goal is to restore regular electric service to the plant so that normal pumping operations can resume (although at this point, given the explosions, pump and plumbing repairs will likely have to be made, too).
— Henry Fountain
Related: Interactive Feature: How a Reactor Shuts Down and What Happens in a Meltdown
Q.In the case of a full core meltdown, would the entry/exit ports in the primary containment vessel used for adding cooling water and for venting steam be the first location of release of radioactive materials? Or would a full core meltdown be an explosive event that would destroy the entire containment vessel?
— Dan Baker, San Diego
A.Experts differ on the impact of a full meltdown of the nuclear fuel at any of the reactors. Some say that the molten fuel would be unlikely to burn through the walls of the reactor vessel, which are thick steel. (At the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, molten fuel burned only partly through the steel.) Others say that a burn-through would happen, with the molten fuel then falling to the floor of the containment structure. What would happen next is a subject of debate as well. Some experts think the fuel would not progress very far before it started to cool. Others say that it could reach the walls of the containment structure, which are made of thick concrete with a thin steel liner, and damage it, perhaps through cracking. Some experts are worried that steam explosions might completely destroy the containment structure. (A steam explosion is really an oxygen-hydrogen explosion — the fuel is so hot that if it hits water, it splits the molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, a highly combustible mix.)
Even if molten fuel remains in the reactor vessel, radiation will escape through vents into the containment structure. And even without further damage, the containment structures in at least two of the reactor buildings appear to have been damaged, allowing uncontrolled release of radioactivity.
— Henry Fountain
Q.The Onagawa nuclear plant is much closer to the earthquake and tsunami zone than the Fukushima plant but appears to have shut down safely while Fukushima has not. Can you explain the differences in what happened and is happening at the two nuclear locations?
— R.J.W., Dunkirk, N.Y.
A.We’re still trying to figure it out completely, but the answer appears to lie in the backup cooling systems. At Fukushima, the plants appeared to survive the earthquake without major damage, but the backup cooling was wiped out by the tsunami. The question of why one plant survived so well and another did not will be the focus of many of our questions as we try to reconstruct events.
— David E. Sanger
Q.If the reactors are still so hot, why can’t they turn the turbines back on to generate electricity just for the plant and get the cooling pumps running?
— L. Littlefield, Brooklyn
A.The reactors are damaged to the point where there would be no way to control them enough to restore the steam supply to the turbines. And even if the operators could somehow get one of the turbines spinning, the electricity has to flow through transformers, switches and other equipment, some of which has no doubt been damaged or destroyed. It’s not as simple as just hooking up a few wires from a generator to a pump.
— Henry Fountain
Workers at the Plant
Q.How were the 50 people remaining at the plant chosen? Did they volunteer? What are their genders? Is a medical team included? How are they being supplied with food and other necessities?
— Alan, Hawaii
A.In an article in Wednesday’s paper, Keith Bradsher and Hiroko Tabuchi reported on the technicians who stayed behind at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and were “perhaps Japan’s last chance of preventing a broader nuclear catastrophe.”
They crawl through labyrinths of equipment in utter darkness pierced only by their flashlights, listening for periodic explosions as hydrogen gas escaping from crippled reactors ignites on contact with air.
They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.
They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots.
For more details, read the full article, “Last Defense at Troubled Reactors: 50 Japanese Workers.”
— The Editors
Q.Has human error contributed to the severity of the situation? I’ve seen reports of a critical generator running out of fuel, a valve that was improperly left closed, and I suspect that preventive actions could have avoided the hydrogen buildup that led to at least two explosions.
— Greg Ebert, Hillsboro, Oregon
A.When a fire pump ran out of fuel and shut down outside Reactor No. 2 on Monday night, that was human error. But it is not clear that the rest of the difficulties are related to human error.
I have not seen confirmation that a valve was improperly left closed, and the valves have been under a lot of strain on these overheated reactors. Similarly, some Western nuclear engineers have wondered if the Japanese waited too long to begin pumping in seawater and boric acid, which temporarily cool the reactors and slow the formation of hydrogen gas. But the Japanese technicians faced a tough dilemma in figuring out how much boric acid to use and how to move the seawater after the tsunami disrupted so many of their backup systems.
— Keith Bradsher
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island
Q.The apparent solution to containing the “mess” in Chernobyl was to build a giant concrete sarcophagus around the reactor. Hindsight has shown that to be an error. When all is said and done here, what is the best way to deal with the toxic remnants of the reactors and nuclear waste?
— Marklemagne, Ohio
A.The international consensus is that eventually, reactor wastes will have to be buried. The United States plans to do that with all spent reactor fuel, and that includes the rubble from the core at Three Mile Island, which suffered a partial melt-down in 1979. It is sitting in containers at the Idaho National Laboratory, near Idaho Falls.
In the shorter term, the cores from Fukushima are also likely to go into containers, steel cylinders filled with inert gas and then sealed and placed into concrete silos. Such “dry cask storage” can keep reactor wastes isolated for decades, with minimal requirements for inspection, and no moving parts.
The Japanese “recycle” some of their fuel, chopping it up, dissolving it in acid, and then using a chemical separation process to leach out the plutonium that was created by the reactor’s operation. The plutonium is then formed into new fuel. The remaining materials can be embedded in glass. That could also happen to the reactor core rubble from Fukushima. But those wastes, too, will probably eventually be buried.
— Matthew L. Wald
(Correction: An earlier version of this answer misstated the location of the Idaho National Laboratory. It is near Idaho Falls, Idaho — not Idaho Springs, which is in Colorado.)
Q.In the event that the damaged reactors in Japan cool sufficiently to “entomb” their contents, then what? We know they will not be used again, but how can they be managed; and how long can they sustain an entombing integrity, especially considering that there may be multiple structural breaches within various components of each of these reactors? What should we expect from them in the event of future natural disasters in the same area?
— Leha, Santa Rosa, Calif.
A.At Three Mile Island, the fuel was cleaned out and shipped off site (see answer above) and the reactor vessel, empty, was left to sit until a companion plant was ready for retirement. At that point, probably both will be torn down just as other old reactors have been “decommissioned.” The Fukushima accident is not over, but unless it gets a lot worse, defueling is more likely than entombment, because eventually, someone is likely to want to reuse the site.
— Matthew L. Wald
Q.The Chernobyl plant used a graphite moderator that burned and distributed radioactive fallout over a wide area. The Japanese plant doesn’t use graphite. What, if anything, is the mechanism by which radioactive materials could be distributed over a wide area?
— Matthew, Salem, Mass.
A.There are two potential mechanisms. One is that the only form of cooling now available is to pump in cold water and wait for it to boil off, and then release the steam. The steam propels wastes into the atmosphere. The other is that the spent fuel pools are heating up. If they boil dry, there is a theory that the fuel could get hot enough so that its metal cladding, made of an alloy of zirconium, could catch fire. (The clad in the fuel in the reactors has already produced hydrogen, causing explosions.) A fire would produce enough energy to lift radioactive contaminants into the air.
At Chernobyl, the graphite burned and provided enough energy to lift the radioactive material into the jet stream at high altitude. It is not clear whether a significant portion of the wastes from Fukushima could rise that high. With a little luck, much of the material could stay in the lower atmosphere and be washed out by rainstorms over the Pacific.
— Matthew L. Wald
Nuclear Policy
Q.I read that Japan has 55 nuclear reactors on an island country about the size of California. How did the Japanese government justify this when the region is a hotbed for earthquakes? Were these plants pitched as being earthquake safe? How is it that with the threat of tsunamis that nuclear plants were built right on the beach?
— K.T., Minneapolis
A.Reactors are attractive to Japan because the country has barely any fossil fuels, neither coal nor natural gas, which together make up 70 percent of American power generation, or any significant oil supply.
Almost all of Japan’s civil infrastructure is built with earthquakes and tsunamis in mind. That includes big buildings, bridges and power stations. The country is ringed with tsunami barriers. But this earthquake was the largest in recorded history, and the tsunami was higher than the planners assumed. And along with killing thousands of people, it swamped the reactors.
— Matthew L. Wald
Q.I understand that the Japanese government stated that all prefectures in Japan should start reporting twice a day on any signs of elevated radiation levels and that these reports should be made public. Will The New York Times be providing (translated) access to this information? Have you inquired of the U.S. government, e.g. NARAC, as to the size, direction and radiation intensity of the radioactive plume arising from the Fukushima plant? At what point should radiation monitoring reports in the U.S., particularly in counties on the Pacific Coast, be made publicly available? Have you looked into this?
— Lyndon Comstock, Bolinas, Calif.
A.So far the reporting on radiation levels available from Japanese authorities has been spotty, at best. We have been pursuing more comprehensive data, not only from the Japanese government, but from the United States Navy, whose ships have been offshore from the nuclear site, and more than 40 American experts from the Department of Energy who have now landed in Japan. They brought some sophisticated measuring gear with them, and we expect to soon see new measurements. My colleague Bill Broad wrote about the plume in Monday’s paper. N.O.A.A., the Air Force and others are also tracking the plume, and we will be reporting more of that information once we have vetted it.
— David E. Sanger
Q.It seems that too much is at stake to allow private companies to operate nuclear reactors. They can’t even insure themselves, so of course they will keep operating even if they shouldn’t. If we are to rely on nuclear power, why not have a federal agency analogous to NASA run them?
— R.J.M. Hudson, Champaign, Ill.
A.You raise an interesting policy question that came up, in different form, during last year’s oil spill as well. Nuclear power plants are subject to federal regulation, of course; the question you are raising is whether safety would be better if they were state-owned. The answer to that question is far from clear. And of course, NASA no longer has a monopoly on space flight: One key element of the Obama administration’s space strategy is to encourage more private firms to enter the fray.
— David E. Sanger
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Sunday, March 20, 2011
19/03 Việt Kiều Paris
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"Choáng" với nhà của Ngô Mỹ Uyên
(aFamily) - Bạn sẽ ghen tị với ngôi biệt thự xa hoa như một nguyên thủ quốc gia, trần nhà dát vàng, nằm trên một trong những đường đắt giá nhất Sài Thành, của người đẹp chân dài này!
Ngôi nhà kiểu Pháp cũ trên đường Hàn Thuyên - con đường nằm giữa Nhà thờ Đức Bà và Dinh Thống Nhất - như được phù phép thành một toà nhà 3 tầng rực rỡ. Người phù phép đó không phải ai khác chính là ảo thuật gia, người mẫu Ngô Mỹ Uyên.
đọc tiếp tại đây
Ngôi nhà kiểu Pháp cũ trên đường Hàn Thuyên - con đường nằm giữa Nhà thờ Đức Bà và Dinh Thống Nhất - như được phù phép thành một toà nhà 3 tầng rực rỡ. Người phù phép đó không phải ai khác chính là ảo thuật gia, người mẫu Ngô Mỹ Uyên.
đọc tiếp tại đây
18/03 Risks, Radiation and Regulation
March 18, 2011, 6:00 am
By NANCY FOLBRE
Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Early warnings about potential nuclear dangers in Japan and about Wall Street’s propensity for risk-taking without liability were both dismissed as paranoid anticipation of low-probability events. With both disasters, regulatory failures set the stage, and taxpayers will end up paying most of the social costs.
Effective risk management is central to economic efficiency. Yet major players in both crises have insisted that they should not be held accountable for risks they underestimated.
Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, likened the financial crisis to a once-every-hundred-years storm or an earthquake.
But no natural disaster played a role there, just vast mismanagement (too bad we can’t measure that on the Richter scale). Many economists, including my fellow Economix blogger Simon Johnson, argue that deregulation weakened the very foundations of our financial system.
A major earthquake and resulting tsunami were the proximate causes of the nuclear disaster in Japan. But it was engineering failures and lax oversight that made a bad situation grotesquely worse.
The plant owners, operators and regulators who confidently insisted that the reactors were foolproof and fail-safe apparently miscalculated (as with previous accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl).
In my view, many social engineers, including economists, deserve the larger blame. The widespread view that capitalism is an automatically self-regulating system has weakened the checks and balances — the feedback mechanisms and control rods — that are crucial to the long-run viability of our operating system.
The threat of social meltdown arises not from excessive growth of the state and its regulatory role but from its capture by groups able to translate market power into political power: socialism for big investors, capitalism for everyone else.
Critics of nuclear power, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, have long pointed out that the Price-Anderson Act reauthorized by Congress in August 2005 provides a huge subsidy to the industry by limiting its financial liability in the event of disaster, essentially promising the ultimate bailout at taxpayer expense.
A more detailed economic analysis is provided by Geoffrey Heal of the Columbia University School of Business and Howard Kunreuther of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in a paper, “Environment and Energy: Catastrophic Liabilities.”
Like the United States, Japan has limited the liability of its nuclear power industry, and its taxpayers are expected to bear the brunt of the long-term economic costs of the meltdown. The industry’s track record is hardly reassuring. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, owner of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, admitted in 2002 that it had falsified results of safety tests.
The national agency designed to regulate the industry has often seemed more eager to promote it, failing to inspire much confidence among environmentalists, or, more recently, from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Effective regulation requires effective containment of disproportionately powerful economic interests that can potentially contaminate both public policy and public debate. Considerable evidence suggests that this containment has been breached.
In the last election cycle, the Nuclear Energy Institute, along with a dozen companies with significant investments in nuclear power, spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions.
In the somewhat panicky initial coverage of the Japanese crisis, the institute was not always identified in the press as a trade group, even when one of its representatives answered questions about public subsidies and public safety.
On March 15, as concerns about explosions at Fukushima Daiichi were growing, an online Wall Street Journal article cheerfully reported, “The Nuclear Energy Institute’s top nuclear scientist said Tuesday that U.S. nuclear plants are equipped to handle natural disasters and the crisis in Japan isn’t expected to affect new nuclear projects.”
This wasn’t news. It was just part of the radiation emanating from our own regulatory meltdown.
By NANCY FOLBRE
Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Early warnings about potential nuclear dangers in Japan and about Wall Street’s propensity for risk-taking without liability were both dismissed as paranoid anticipation of low-probability events. With both disasters, regulatory failures set the stage, and taxpayers will end up paying most of the social costs.
Effective risk management is central to economic efficiency. Yet major players in both crises have insisted that they should not be held accountable for risks they underestimated.
Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, likened the financial crisis to a once-every-hundred-years storm or an earthquake.
But no natural disaster played a role there, just vast mismanagement (too bad we can’t measure that on the Richter scale). Many economists, including my fellow Economix blogger Simon Johnson, argue that deregulation weakened the very foundations of our financial system.
A major earthquake and resulting tsunami were the proximate causes of the nuclear disaster in Japan. But it was engineering failures and lax oversight that made a bad situation grotesquely worse.
The plant owners, operators and regulators who confidently insisted that the reactors were foolproof and fail-safe apparently miscalculated (as with previous accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl).
In my view, many social engineers, including economists, deserve the larger blame. The widespread view that capitalism is an automatically self-regulating system has weakened the checks and balances — the feedback mechanisms and control rods — that are crucial to the long-run viability of our operating system.
The threat of social meltdown arises not from excessive growth of the state and its regulatory role but from its capture by groups able to translate market power into political power: socialism for big investors, capitalism for everyone else.
Critics of nuclear power, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, have long pointed out that the Price-Anderson Act reauthorized by Congress in August 2005 provides a huge subsidy to the industry by limiting its financial liability in the event of disaster, essentially promising the ultimate bailout at taxpayer expense.
A more detailed economic analysis is provided by Geoffrey Heal of the Columbia University School of Business and Howard Kunreuther of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in a paper, “Environment and Energy: Catastrophic Liabilities.”
Like the United States, Japan has limited the liability of its nuclear power industry, and its taxpayers are expected to bear the brunt of the long-term economic costs of the meltdown. The industry’s track record is hardly reassuring. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, owner of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, admitted in 2002 that it had falsified results of safety tests.
The national agency designed to regulate the industry has often seemed more eager to promote it, failing to inspire much confidence among environmentalists, or, more recently, from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Effective regulation requires effective containment of disproportionately powerful economic interests that can potentially contaminate both public policy and public debate. Considerable evidence suggests that this containment has been breached.
In the last election cycle, the Nuclear Energy Institute, along with a dozen companies with significant investments in nuclear power, spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions.
In the somewhat panicky initial coverage of the Japanese crisis, the institute was not always identified in the press as a trade group, even when one of its representatives answered questions about public subsidies and public safety.
On March 15, as concerns about explosions at Fukushima Daiichi were growing, an online Wall Street Journal article cheerfully reported, “The Nuclear Energy Institute’s top nuclear scientist said Tuesday that U.S. nuclear plants are equipped to handle natural disasters and the crisis in Japan isn’t expected to affect new nuclear projects.”
This wasn’t news. It was just part of the radiation emanating from our own regulatory meltdown.
18/03 Radiation Plume Reaches U.S., but Is Said to Pose No Risk
March 18, 2011
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Faint traces of very low levels of radiation from the stricken nuclear complex in Japan have been detected in Sacramento, European officials reported Friday, bringing the distant atomic crisis to American shores for the first time.
The readings, picked up by highly sensitive detectors set up to monitor clandestine nuclear blasts, were the first solid evidence of the leading edge of a long radioactive plume that has drifted slowly across the Pacific with the prevailing winds over the past week and has now reached the continental United States.
Health experts said the plume’s radiation had been diluted enormously in its journey across thousands of miles and — at least for now, with concentrations very low — would have no health consequences in the United States. In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spread around the globe and reached the West Coast of the United States in 10 days, its levels detectable but minuscule.
Late Friday, the Department of Energy confirmed the European statements about the arrival of the radioactive plume in Sacramento, saying the federal station there detected “minuscule quantities” of radiation that posed no health hazard.
But the Obama administration’s initial reluctance to release its own radiation information and the haphazard way that thereadings came dribbling out of Europe first — not the United States — raised questions about whether American officials were being as forthcoming as they had pressed the Japanese to be.
Throughout the nuclear crisis, Japanese officials have been accused of withholding information and understating the severity of the risks. But on Friday, pressure mounted on the Obama administration to release information it has gathered on the radiation coming from Japan, with six environmental and watchdog groups sending the White House a letter calling for “transparency on the part of the government.”
In many respects, the plume underscores the lack of a global system for monitoring nuclear emergencies and making the results public. European officials said the system was designed to be hugely sensitive to detect cheaters trying to develop clandestine nuclear arms — but not radioactive plumes from commercial reactor failures, which are easier to detect.
“What we can measure is almost a single atom, which has absolutely no danger” for human health, said Lars-Erik De Geer, research director of the Swedish Defense Research Agency, a part of the monitoring system. “It has to be very sensitive because we are looking for people who are trying to hide the testing of weapons.”
The Sacramento readings were made on Air Force equipment shared with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, an arm of the United Nations in Vienna. Its mandate is to monitor the global ban on the testing of nuclear arms.
The United Nations agency has more than 60 stations that sniff for radiation spikes and uses weather forecasts and powerful computers to model the transport of radiation on the winds.
Earlier this week, its scientists forecast the plume’s arrival in the continental United States around the end of this week.
European officials said that — outside of Japan — its global network of detectors first picked up the presence of the Japanese plume at a station on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia. Then, on Friday, they said, the station in Sacramento began to register the faint radiation. The government declined to release further details.
In both cases, officials said, the detectors found minuscule levels of iodine-131 and cesium-137 — highly dangerous byproducts of reactor operation that in large amounts can cause cancer. The measured levels are judged to be many millions of times lower than concentrations that would pose a danger to human health.
Experts tracking the plume said it would continue to drift east and might arrive in the New York region early next week.
By definition, the current measurements are tracking relatively old radiation that was released into the atmosphere at the start of the Japanese crisis. It began on March 11 when an offshore earthquake with a magnitude now estimated at 9.0 shook the reactor complex. A tsunami rolled into northeast Japan minutes later, swamping six reactors lined up along the coastline.
As the crisis has worsened, the releases of radiation into the atmosphere have increased. So it seems inevitable that the concentrations of radiation in the plume will grow — though still, health experts say, posing no health risk in the United States.
“We’re monitoring the situation,” said Mike Sicilia, a spokesperson in Sacramento for the California Department of Public Health. But he emphasized that no danger was anticipated.
“All data from state and federal sources,” he said, “show that harmful levels of radiation won’t reach California.”
In brief remarks at the White House on Thursday, President Obama said he knew Americans were worrying about radiation drifting across the Pacific. “So I want to be very clear,” he said. “We do not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the United States, whether it’s the West Coast, Hawaii, Alaska or U.S. territories.”
But environmental and watchdog groups cited a growing anxiety in the United States and complained of a lack of adequate information from American officials.
“The U.S. government clearly has information that the public has a right and need to know,” Damon Moglen, climate and energy director at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement.
He called federal insights into the nature of the Japanese radiation “critically important” for the Japanese people, Americans in Japan and “those here at home who are anxious that dangerous radiation may creep towards our shores.”
The California readings were made by an arm of the Air Force Technical Applications Center, an institution of the cold war that monitors for signs of clandestine nuclear tests. Its unit in suburban Sacramento, northeast of the city, has radiation detectors set up at Camp Kohler, near the former McClellan Air Force Base.
In addition to serving the United States government, the unit feeds new readings into the international data system of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, which has 120 member states that share the monitoring insights.
Although the legal mandate of the organization is to scan the globe for clandestine bomb blasts — not reactor accidents — its officials recently decided to start sharing its data more widely in an effort to help international authorities struggling with the Japanese crisis.
In a statement on Friday, the Vienna group said it began sharing the monitoring information Friday with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization. The organization said it was “responding to respective requests” from the two groups that it received Thursday for help in “assessing the situation.”
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Faint traces of very low levels of radiation from the stricken nuclear complex in Japan have been detected in Sacramento, European officials reported Friday, bringing the distant atomic crisis to American shores for the first time.
The readings, picked up by highly sensitive detectors set up to monitor clandestine nuclear blasts, were the first solid evidence of the leading edge of a long radioactive plume that has drifted slowly across the Pacific with the prevailing winds over the past week and has now reached the continental United States.
Health experts said the plume’s radiation had been diluted enormously in its journey across thousands of miles and — at least for now, with concentrations very low — would have no health consequences in the United States. In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spread around the globe and reached the West Coast of the United States in 10 days, its levels detectable but minuscule.
Late Friday, the Department of Energy confirmed the European statements about the arrival of the radioactive plume in Sacramento, saying the federal station there detected “minuscule quantities” of radiation that posed no health hazard.
But the Obama administration’s initial reluctance to release its own radiation information and the haphazard way that thereadings came dribbling out of Europe first — not the United States — raised questions about whether American officials were being as forthcoming as they had pressed the Japanese to be.
Throughout the nuclear crisis, Japanese officials have been accused of withholding information and understating the severity of the risks. But on Friday, pressure mounted on the Obama administration to release information it has gathered on the radiation coming from Japan, with six environmental and watchdog groups sending the White House a letter calling for “transparency on the part of the government.”
In many respects, the plume underscores the lack of a global system for monitoring nuclear emergencies and making the results public. European officials said the system was designed to be hugely sensitive to detect cheaters trying to develop clandestine nuclear arms — but not radioactive plumes from commercial reactor failures, which are easier to detect.
“What we can measure is almost a single atom, which has absolutely no danger” for human health, said Lars-Erik De Geer, research director of the Swedish Defense Research Agency, a part of the monitoring system. “It has to be very sensitive because we are looking for people who are trying to hide the testing of weapons.”
The Sacramento readings were made on Air Force equipment shared with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, an arm of the United Nations in Vienna. Its mandate is to monitor the global ban on the testing of nuclear arms.
The United Nations agency has more than 60 stations that sniff for radiation spikes and uses weather forecasts and powerful computers to model the transport of radiation on the winds.
Earlier this week, its scientists forecast the plume’s arrival in the continental United States around the end of this week.
European officials said that — outside of Japan — its global network of detectors first picked up the presence of the Japanese plume at a station on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia. Then, on Friday, they said, the station in Sacramento began to register the faint radiation. The government declined to release further details.
In both cases, officials said, the detectors found minuscule levels of iodine-131 and cesium-137 — highly dangerous byproducts of reactor operation that in large amounts can cause cancer. The measured levels are judged to be many millions of times lower than concentrations that would pose a danger to human health.
Experts tracking the plume said it would continue to drift east and might arrive in the New York region early next week.
By definition, the current measurements are tracking relatively old radiation that was released into the atmosphere at the start of the Japanese crisis. It began on March 11 when an offshore earthquake with a magnitude now estimated at 9.0 shook the reactor complex. A tsunami rolled into northeast Japan minutes later, swamping six reactors lined up along the coastline.
As the crisis has worsened, the releases of radiation into the atmosphere have increased. So it seems inevitable that the concentrations of radiation in the plume will grow — though still, health experts say, posing no health risk in the United States.
“We’re monitoring the situation,” said Mike Sicilia, a spokesperson in Sacramento for the California Department of Public Health. But he emphasized that no danger was anticipated.
“All data from state and federal sources,” he said, “show that harmful levels of radiation won’t reach California.”
In brief remarks at the White House on Thursday, President Obama said he knew Americans were worrying about radiation drifting across the Pacific. “So I want to be very clear,” he said. “We do not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the United States, whether it’s the West Coast, Hawaii, Alaska or U.S. territories.”
But environmental and watchdog groups cited a growing anxiety in the United States and complained of a lack of adequate information from American officials.
“The U.S. government clearly has information that the public has a right and need to know,” Damon Moglen, climate and energy director at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement.
He called federal insights into the nature of the Japanese radiation “critically important” for the Japanese people, Americans in Japan and “those here at home who are anxious that dangerous radiation may creep towards our shores.”
The California readings were made by an arm of the Air Force Technical Applications Center, an institution of the cold war that monitors for signs of clandestine nuclear tests. Its unit in suburban Sacramento, northeast of the city, has radiation detectors set up at Camp Kohler, near the former McClellan Air Force Base.
In addition to serving the United States government, the unit feeds new readings into the international data system of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, which has 120 member states that share the monitoring insights.
Although the legal mandate of the organization is to scan the globe for clandestine bomb blasts — not reactor accidents — its officials recently decided to start sharing its data more widely in an effort to help international authorities struggling with the Japanese crisis.
In a statement on Friday, the Vienna group said it began sharing the monitoring information Friday with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization. The organization said it was “responding to respective requests” from the two groups that it received Thursday for help in “assessing the situation.”
19/03 Japan Finds Tainted Food Up to 90 Miles From Nuclear Sites
March 19, 2011
By KEN BELSON and HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — As Japan edged forward in its battle to contain the damage at its ravaged nuclear power plants on Saturday, the government said it had found higher than normal levels of radioactivity in spinach and milk at farms up to 90 miles away from the plants, the first confirmation that the unfolding nuclear crisis has affected the nation’s food supply.
While officials played down the immediate risks to consumers, the findings further unsettled a nation worried about the long-term effects of the hobbled reactors.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, with help from the Japan Self-Defense Force, police officers and firefighters, continued efforts to cool the damaged reactors on Saturday to try to stave off a full-scale fuel meltdown and contain the fallout. The latest plan involved running a mile-long electrical transmission line to Reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to try to restore power to its cooling system.
About 500 workers from the utility connected the power line on Saturday. They were checking the cooling system, which has been disabled since the earthquake and tsunami hit more than a week ago, and hope to restart it on Sunday.
Restoring power at the plant could provide a glimmer of hope after days of increasingly dire news that now includes contaminated food.
Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, said that spinach and milk were the only products found to have abnormally high radiation levels. The level of radioactivity found in the spinach would, if consumed for a year, equal the radiation received in a single CAT scan, he said, while that detected in milk would amount to just a fraction of a CAT scan.
“These levels do not pose an immediate threat to your health,” Mr. Edano said, adding that the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry would provide additional details. “Please stay calm.”
Still, Fukushima Prefecture asked all dairy farms within 18 miles of the nuclear plant on Saturday to halt all milk shipments. Officials also halted shipments of spinach from the entire prefecture.
The milk with the elevated radiation levels was found in Fukushima Prefecture on farms about 19 miles from the nuclear plants. The contaminated spinach was found one prefecture to the south, in Ibaraki Prefecture, on farms 60 to 90 miles south of the plants.
Food safety inspectors said the iodine-131 in the tested milk was up to five times the level the government deems safe, and the spinach had levels more than seven times the safe level. The spinach also contained slightly higher than allowable amounts of cesium-137.
Minuscule amounts of radioactive iodine were also detected in the water supply in Tokyo and its five surrounding prefectures. In Tokyo, about 170 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the level was less than 1 percent of that considered dangerous by the government. In Fukushima city, about 50 miles from the power plant, the levels were still below half of the legal limit.
Iodine-131 and cesium-137 are two of the more dangerous elements that are feared to have been released from the plants in Fukushima. Iodine-131 can be dangerous to human health, especially if absorbed through milk and milk products, because it can accumulate in the thyroid and cause cancer. Cesium-137 can damage cells and lead to an increased risk of cancer.
The iodine levels are well beyond what the Food and Drug Administration in the United States considers a cause for concern. But experts say Japan’s reassurances about food safety were probably accurate.
Dr. Harold M. Swartz, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth who studies radiation exposure in people, said that the contamination levels were low and that the government’s advice was “probably reasonable.” But, he added, because people are so afraid of radiation, they are likely to avoid these foods altogether.
“Seems unnecessary to eat these” foods, said another expert, Dr. David J. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. “I wouldn’t.”
That judgment was shared by Katsuko Sato, 76, who was shopping at a supermarket in central Tokyo on Saturday evening. She said she would stop buying spinach and, after watching Mr. Edano’s news conference, she called her family and friends to urge them not to, either.
“I’m not going to believe the government because I don’t think only spinach from Ibaraki will be affected,” she said.
A handful of vegetable-shop owners in Tokyo said they were concerned about the report, but continued to sell vegetables from Fukushima and Ibaraki because they had not been told to stop.
Dr. Swartz said people consuming milk and produce, particularly children and pregnant women, should be taking potassium iodide, which saturates the thyroid gland with nonradioactive iodine, and prevents it from taking in the radioactive form. Children and fetuses have the highest risk of thyroid cancer from exposure to radioactive iodine.
The Japanese authorities recommended Wednesday that people fleeing the 12-mile-radius evacuation zone start taking iodine pills.
Dr. Swartz said the radiation levels detected so far were still far lower than those at Chernobyl, the nuclear plant that exploded in Ukraine in 1986 and is still the world’s worst nuclear accident. He said that in the United States food with similar levels of radiation would probably be taken off the market, but more for political and public relations reasons than for scientific or medical ones.
The Japanese government is considering conducting more comprehensive tests of agricultural products from areas farther from the damaged reactors to address public anxiety about the food supply, Mr. Edano said.
Health inspectors are still trying to determine whether any spinach had been shipped from the six farms in Ibaraki Prefecture, where the contaminated produce was found, said Taku Ohara, an official in the food safety division of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry. The tests were conducted Saturday. No contaminated milk had been shipped from the farm where higher than normal radioactive levels were detected.
Mr. Ohara said Japan was particularly strict in determining what constituted safe radioactive levels. It is also fastidious in inspecting food imported from China and other countries. Leafy spinach is especially susceptible to absorbing radioactive material, he said.
Asparagus, cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes and other vegetables are also grown in Fukushima, but have not been found to be contaminated. But only a small number of farms have been tested because officials have been overwhelmed in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear crisis that followed, Mr. Ohara said.
Though land-poor Japan imports much of its fruit, grain and soybeans, 79 percent of the vegetables eaten here are grown domestically. Japan is the largest net importer of food in the world.
There have been no reports of contaminated fish or meat.
Many of the ports, fleets and processing facilities in Tohoku, the area most affected by the tsunami and nuclear crisis, were so badly damaged that no fish or seafood from there has reached Tsukiji market in central Tokyo, according to the market’s general manager, Tsutomo Kosaka. The market handles 90 percent of the seafood for about 40 million consumers in the greater Tokyo area.
Japan’s leading producers of premium beef, including the world-famous Kobe brand, said Saturday that they had not yet tested their cattle or feed. But they were nervous about the possible spread of radiation from Fukushima, and just as concerned that fear of radiation, even if it is unfounded, could damage the market for gourmet beef.
While only spinach and milk were found to have elevated radiation levels, some countries have been testing food imports from Japan since the day after the quake and tsunami. In Hong Kong, for instance, 216 Japanese products passed food quality screenings, including meat, fish, fruits and vegetables.
In Japan, consumers were also grappling with rolling blackouts ordered after damage to the reactors reduced the electricity supply in the greater Tokyo region.
At the Fukushima plant, temperatures outside the four damaged reactors were lower than expected, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said Saturday, raising hopes that the nuclear fuel could be kept cool by spraying the reactors with water, while technicians worked on restoring power to the cooling systems.
But Mr. Kitazawa was unable to confirm how hot it was inside the buildings, leaving open the possibility that nuclear fuel may still be overheating.
“Currently, we have a level of stabilization, but the situation remains volatile,” said Mr. Edano, the cabinet secretary.
The National Police Agency said Saturday that there were nearly 7,200 confirmed deaths so far because of the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, and nearly 11,000 people remained missing. The authorities have said they expect the death toll to exceed 10,000.
Mark McDonald and Ayasa Aizawa contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Denise Grady from New York.
By KEN BELSON and HIROKO TABUCHI
TOKYO — As Japan edged forward in its battle to contain the damage at its ravaged nuclear power plants on Saturday, the government said it had found higher than normal levels of radioactivity in spinach and milk at farms up to 90 miles away from the plants, the first confirmation that the unfolding nuclear crisis has affected the nation’s food supply.
While officials played down the immediate risks to consumers, the findings further unsettled a nation worried about the long-term effects of the hobbled reactors.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company, with help from the Japan Self-Defense Force, police officers and firefighters, continued efforts to cool the damaged reactors on Saturday to try to stave off a full-scale fuel meltdown and contain the fallout. The latest plan involved running a mile-long electrical transmission line to Reactor No. 2 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to try to restore power to its cooling system.
About 500 workers from the utility connected the power line on Saturday. They were checking the cooling system, which has been disabled since the earthquake and tsunami hit more than a week ago, and hope to restart it on Sunday.
Restoring power at the plant could provide a glimmer of hope after days of increasingly dire news that now includes contaminated food.
Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, said that spinach and milk were the only products found to have abnormally high radiation levels. The level of radioactivity found in the spinach would, if consumed for a year, equal the radiation received in a single CAT scan, he said, while that detected in milk would amount to just a fraction of a CAT scan.
“These levels do not pose an immediate threat to your health,” Mr. Edano said, adding that the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry would provide additional details. “Please stay calm.”
Still, Fukushima Prefecture asked all dairy farms within 18 miles of the nuclear plant on Saturday to halt all milk shipments. Officials also halted shipments of spinach from the entire prefecture.
The milk with the elevated radiation levels was found in Fukushima Prefecture on farms about 19 miles from the nuclear plants. The contaminated spinach was found one prefecture to the south, in Ibaraki Prefecture, on farms 60 to 90 miles south of the plants.
Food safety inspectors said the iodine-131 in the tested milk was up to five times the level the government deems safe, and the spinach had levels more than seven times the safe level. The spinach also contained slightly higher than allowable amounts of cesium-137.
Minuscule amounts of radioactive iodine were also detected in the water supply in Tokyo and its five surrounding prefectures. In Tokyo, about 170 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the level was less than 1 percent of that considered dangerous by the government. In Fukushima city, about 50 miles from the power plant, the levels were still below half of the legal limit.
Iodine-131 and cesium-137 are two of the more dangerous elements that are feared to have been released from the plants in Fukushima. Iodine-131 can be dangerous to human health, especially if absorbed through milk and milk products, because it can accumulate in the thyroid and cause cancer. Cesium-137 can damage cells and lead to an increased risk of cancer.
The iodine levels are well beyond what the Food and Drug Administration in the United States considers a cause for concern. But experts say Japan’s reassurances about food safety were probably accurate.
Dr. Harold M. Swartz, a professor of medicine at Dartmouth who studies radiation exposure in people, said that the contamination levels were low and that the government’s advice was “probably reasonable.” But, he added, because people are so afraid of radiation, they are likely to avoid these foods altogether.
“Seems unnecessary to eat these” foods, said another expert, Dr. David J. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. “I wouldn’t.”
That judgment was shared by Katsuko Sato, 76, who was shopping at a supermarket in central Tokyo on Saturday evening. She said she would stop buying spinach and, after watching Mr. Edano’s news conference, she called her family and friends to urge them not to, either.
“I’m not going to believe the government because I don’t think only spinach from Ibaraki will be affected,” she said.
A handful of vegetable-shop owners in Tokyo said they were concerned about the report, but continued to sell vegetables from Fukushima and Ibaraki because they had not been told to stop.
Dr. Swartz said people consuming milk and produce, particularly children and pregnant women, should be taking potassium iodide, which saturates the thyroid gland with nonradioactive iodine, and prevents it from taking in the radioactive form. Children and fetuses have the highest risk of thyroid cancer from exposure to radioactive iodine.
The Japanese authorities recommended Wednesday that people fleeing the 12-mile-radius evacuation zone start taking iodine pills.
Dr. Swartz said the radiation levels detected so far were still far lower than those at Chernobyl, the nuclear plant that exploded in Ukraine in 1986 and is still the world’s worst nuclear accident. He said that in the United States food with similar levels of radiation would probably be taken off the market, but more for political and public relations reasons than for scientific or medical ones.
The Japanese government is considering conducting more comprehensive tests of agricultural products from areas farther from the damaged reactors to address public anxiety about the food supply, Mr. Edano said.
Health inspectors are still trying to determine whether any spinach had been shipped from the six farms in Ibaraki Prefecture, where the contaminated produce was found, said Taku Ohara, an official in the food safety division of the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry. The tests were conducted Saturday. No contaminated milk had been shipped from the farm where higher than normal radioactive levels were detected.
Mr. Ohara said Japan was particularly strict in determining what constituted safe radioactive levels. It is also fastidious in inspecting food imported from China and other countries. Leafy spinach is especially susceptible to absorbing radioactive material, he said.
Asparagus, cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes and other vegetables are also grown in Fukushima, but have not been found to be contaminated. But only a small number of farms have been tested because officials have been overwhelmed in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear crisis that followed, Mr. Ohara said.
Though land-poor Japan imports much of its fruit, grain and soybeans, 79 percent of the vegetables eaten here are grown domestically. Japan is the largest net importer of food in the world.
There have been no reports of contaminated fish or meat.
Many of the ports, fleets and processing facilities in Tohoku, the area most affected by the tsunami and nuclear crisis, were so badly damaged that no fish or seafood from there has reached Tsukiji market in central Tokyo, according to the market’s general manager, Tsutomo Kosaka. The market handles 90 percent of the seafood for about 40 million consumers in the greater Tokyo area.
Japan’s leading producers of premium beef, including the world-famous Kobe brand, said Saturday that they had not yet tested their cattle or feed. But they were nervous about the possible spread of radiation from Fukushima, and just as concerned that fear of radiation, even if it is unfounded, could damage the market for gourmet beef.
While only spinach and milk were found to have elevated radiation levels, some countries have been testing food imports from Japan since the day after the quake and tsunami. In Hong Kong, for instance, 216 Japanese products passed food quality screenings, including meat, fish, fruits and vegetables.
In Japan, consumers were also grappling with rolling blackouts ordered after damage to the reactors reduced the electricity supply in the greater Tokyo region.
At the Fukushima plant, temperatures outside the four damaged reactors were lower than expected, Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa said Saturday, raising hopes that the nuclear fuel could be kept cool by spraying the reactors with water, while technicians worked on restoring power to the cooling systems.
But Mr. Kitazawa was unable to confirm how hot it was inside the buildings, leaving open the possibility that nuclear fuel may still be overheating.
“Currently, we have a level of stabilization, but the situation remains volatile,” said Mr. Edano, the cabinet secretary.
The National Police Agency said Saturday that there were nearly 7,200 confirmed deaths so far because of the earthquake and tsunami on March 11, and nearly 11,000 people remained missing. The authorities have said they expect the death toll to exceed 10,000.
Mark McDonald and Ayasa Aizawa contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Denise Grady from New York.
17/03 Report Urges Even Higher Global Retirement Ages
March 17, 2011
By MATTHEW SALTMARSH
PARIS — Retirement ages in advanced economies will have to rise more than currently planned if countries hope to cover the increase in costs caused by aging populations, a global economic organization warned Thursday.
Ángel Gurría, secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that more “fiscally and socially responsible” measures would be needed to avoid “a resurgence of old-age poverty in the future.”
He added, “This risk is heightened by growing earnings inequality in many countries, which will feed through into greater inequality in retirement.”
In a report, the organization said that by 2050, the average age in industrialized countries for drawing pensions would reach 65 for both sexes. This represents an increase of about 1.5 years for men and 2.5 years for women from current levels.
But the trend toward later retirement and other recent changes, like promoting private pensions, will still not cover the assumed increase in liabilities as the working population shrinks and the number of retirees climbs.
The report, “Pensions at a Glance 2011,” said life expectancy was rising faster than the increase in pension ages, by an average of two years for men and 1.5 years for women.
The size of the working-age population in the 34 countries belonging to the organization will peak around 2015 and fall more than 10 percent by 2050, meaning that a smaller group of workers will be supporting a larger number of retirees.
Thus, financial sustainability for retirement systems “is not guaranteed unless pension ages are increased beyond current plans in most of the O.E.C.D.,” the report said.
Pension changes in member countries since the early 1990s have already helped to cut estimated future pension payouts by 20 percent on average, the report said. The main tool has been to push up the retirement age.
In October, French lawmakers agreed to lift the minimum age for retirement to 62 from 60, and for a full pension to 67 from 65, despite protests. Britain plans to raise its retirement age to 68 starting in 2044, from 65 now. Germany has agreed to increase its retirement age in steps to 67, from 65, by 2029. In the United States, the retirement age is 66 and will rise to 67 by 2022.
In the organization’s region, public pensions remain the “cornerstone” of old age incomes, accounting for 60 percent on average. The other 40 percent is made up almost equally of income from work and from private pensions and other savings.
As public benefits continue to be reduced, private sources will increasingly need to fill the gap, the report said.
The basic state pension provision varies widely across the organization.
In Britain, the full basic state pension for a single person was £90.70 ($146), a week in 2008, equivalent to nearly 14 percent of average weekly earnings. In the Netherlands, the equivalent was about 265 euros ($371), a week, or 29 percent of average earnings.
“Higher pension ages are only part of the answer,” Mr. Gurría said. “Countries need to do more to fight discrimination, to provide training opportunities for older workers and to improve their working conditions. This would help employers adapt to a grayer work force.”
By MATTHEW SALTMARSH
PARIS — Retirement ages in advanced economies will have to rise more than currently planned if countries hope to cover the increase in costs caused by aging populations, a global economic organization warned Thursday.
Ángel Gurría, secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that more “fiscally and socially responsible” measures would be needed to avoid “a resurgence of old-age poverty in the future.”
He added, “This risk is heightened by growing earnings inequality in many countries, which will feed through into greater inequality in retirement.”
In a report, the organization said that by 2050, the average age in industrialized countries for drawing pensions would reach 65 for both sexes. This represents an increase of about 1.5 years for men and 2.5 years for women from current levels.
But the trend toward later retirement and other recent changes, like promoting private pensions, will still not cover the assumed increase in liabilities as the working population shrinks and the number of retirees climbs.
The report, “Pensions at a Glance 2011,” said life expectancy was rising faster than the increase in pension ages, by an average of two years for men and 1.5 years for women.
The size of the working-age population in the 34 countries belonging to the organization will peak around 2015 and fall more than 10 percent by 2050, meaning that a smaller group of workers will be supporting a larger number of retirees.
Thus, financial sustainability for retirement systems “is not guaranteed unless pension ages are increased beyond current plans in most of the O.E.C.D.,” the report said.
Pension changes in member countries since the early 1990s have already helped to cut estimated future pension payouts by 20 percent on average, the report said. The main tool has been to push up the retirement age.
In October, French lawmakers agreed to lift the minimum age for retirement to 62 from 60, and for a full pension to 67 from 65, despite protests. Britain plans to raise its retirement age to 68 starting in 2044, from 65 now. Germany has agreed to increase its retirement age in steps to 67, from 65, by 2029. In the United States, the retirement age is 66 and will rise to 67 by 2022.
In the organization’s region, public pensions remain the “cornerstone” of old age incomes, accounting for 60 percent on average. The other 40 percent is made up almost equally of income from work and from private pensions and other savings.
As public benefits continue to be reduced, private sources will increasingly need to fill the gap, the report said.
The basic state pension provision varies widely across the organization.
In Britain, the full basic state pension for a single person was £90.70 ($146), a week in 2008, equivalent to nearly 14 percent of average weekly earnings. In the Netherlands, the equivalent was about 265 euros ($371), a week, or 29 percent of average earnings.
“Higher pension ages are only part of the answer,” Mr. Gurría said. “Countries need to do more to fight discrimination, to provide training opportunities for older workers and to improve their working conditions. This would help employers adapt to a grayer work force.”
19/03 Japan, a Crisis That Markets Can’t Grasp
March 19, 2011
By JEFF SOMMER
THE risks are clear enough in hindsight.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company built its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, nearly 40 years ago, to withstand a powerful earthquake — but not one as big as the 9.0-magnitude quake that struck on March 11. Or the tsunami that followed. Now, the terrible “ifs” accumulate, as Japanese engineers work to bring the station’s reactors under control. The ultimate price, in human life, may not be known for years.
The details of this catastrophe were unforeseeable, leading some to conclude this was a black swan event — something so wildly unexpected, so enormous in its impact, that it seems to defy our understanding and expose the fragility of our knowledge of the world. How could anyone have predicted this?
And yet in 2007, Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, escaped a disaster at its huge Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station, on the opposite side of Japan, when that plant was damaged by a 6.8-magnitude earthquake — three times as large as what the plant was designed to withstand. Tepco basically lucked out last time.
So perhaps a bigger question is whether the markets — in which we have come to place so much trust — can put a true price on outsize risks like this.
Many have compared the events unfolding in Japan with 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009, the BP oil spill, and the uprisings in the Arab world — in that all have shown the limits of the collective wisdom of the marketplace. For a moment, all the swans seemed black. And those swans seemed blacker still when viewed through the lens of today’s hyperkinetic global markets.
“There are an amazing number of crosscurrents in the world economy right now, more than I’ve seen in 25 years,” said Shawn Reynolds, a co-portfolio manager at Van Eck Associates in New York.
Like everyone else, corporate executives, economists and financial analysts in Tokyo, New York, London and beyond struggled last week to wrap their heads around the scale of this disaster. But, as they so often do, the analysts quickly fell to work assessing the implications for companies, markets and economies. At times, it was almost surreal: On Tuesday, Laszlo Birinyi, a prominent stock market analyst based in Westport, Conn., e-mailed around a succinct report titled “Nuclear Meltdowns at a Glance.”
This is what happens on Wall Street. If you’re not immersed in the culture, it might be hard to understand the cool calculus that is applied to world events, however dire those events might be. After the quake hit on March 11, the CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow told viewers, “The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that.” He later apologized.
As the week wore on, and prices were gyrating on everything from a share of I.B.M. to a ton of copper, everyone was making back-of-the-envelope calculations. There is still no clear consensus about how far the economic shocks will reverberate. Many analysts are guessing — and then second-guessing — how the disaster will play out in northeast Japan. The first, tentative analysis seemed painfully obvious: the Japanese economy, already weak, perhaps already in a recession before calamity struck, will become even weaker.
On Friday, the Group of 7 industrialized nations took the rare step of intervening on the world’s foreign exchange markets to stem a sudden rise in the value of the yen. The currency had soared all week against the dollar — the exact opposite of what you might expect. But Japanese companies and investors were bringing their money home, to pay for huge rebuilding costs.
After its most harrowing week since the 1987 market crash, the Tokyo Stock Exchange found its footing on Friday. But it was a week like few others on the exchange: the Nikkei 225 stock index, Japan’s equivalent of the Dow Jones industrial average, fell 6.2 percent on Monday, plunged 10.5 percent on Tuesday, rebounded 5.7 percent on Wednesday and sank 1.4 percent on Thursday. It closed up 2.7 percent on Friday, at 9,206.75.
The loss for the week totaled 1,048 points, or 10.2 percent.
IF you happen to visit a Wall Street trading floor, walk over to the nearest Bloomberg terminal, type “WRST” and hit the green key that says “go.”
WRST — that is short for “worst,” as in, “worst-case scenario.” The program enables Wall Street types to measure the level of risk in their investment portfolios under a variety of scary circumstances modeled on past crises, including the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the bankruptcy of WorldCom in 2002 and the devaluation of the Thailand’s currency, the baht, in 1997.
Such “what if” scripts are the stuff of modern Wall Street. Everyone runs them. Entire schools of financial analysis are devoted to examining historical market patterns in the belief that those patterns can predict the future.
Such analysis, of course, depends on — and perhaps even encourages — our belief that tomorrow will be much like today. And all that despite the fine-print caveat on your 401(k) statement that reads, “Past performance is no guarantee of future success.”
Nassim Taleb, the author and market theorist who popularized the phrase “black swan” in his 2007 best seller, argues that we have psychological biases that blind us to the enormous role played by rare events — like a 9.0-magnitude earthquake. And yet we rely on history for guidance. On Wednesday, Mr. Birinyi’s research firm sent out another report, this one titled “S.& P. 500 Enters Modest Correction.” His firm predicted a slight decline in the American stock market.
“If the averages hold,” the report said, “the S.& P. 500 will bottom at 1,232 on 3/31/11.” On Friday, the S.& P. 500 closed at 1,279.19, down 1.9 percent for the week.
Whatever else they may be, markets are immensely complex counting machines. They assign values to products, whether computer chips or potato chips, based on the canny appraisals and gut beliefs of people around the planet. From day to day, it is often hard, if not impossible, to know exactly why a certain price moved the way it did. Those daily movements are often just the white noise of global capitalism.
Then there are stretches of extreme volatility, periods when no one quite seems to agree about where anything is going. That may be part of what occurred last week: in the face of such a disaster, not even a short-term trend could congeal.
As yet, no one has reliable numbers about the scope of the destruction, said Al Tobin, who heads the property practice at Aon Risk Solutions, the risk management brokerage business of the Aon Corporation. The human toll, the economic toll — “no one knows the answer to that question,” he said.
Given such uncertainty, the markets could remain even more volatile than usual, said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, the world’s largest bond manager. “The market right now is trying to wrap its arms around the enormity,” he said.
The verdict is not yet in.
Mr. El-Erian divided market strategists into two camps. The first, he says, views the events in Japan as “more than just a massive human tragedy; it also has significant implications for the global economy.” The second, he says, believes that the effects of this disaster, however heart-rending, will be transitory for most of us.
But he doesn’t yet know which camp is right. “I don’t understand it fully yet,” he said, “but I am worried about it.”
Big economic questions remain unanswered. How would a severe slowdown in Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, affect the rest of the globe? How will Japan, which is already deeply in debt, pay for the reconstruction? Some are already arguing that the enormous, high-cost task of rebuilding could, over time, snap Japan out of its long economic funk.
MARKET strategists pride themselves on being able to digest vast quantities of data quickly. They tend to be practical and versatile people, the kind who can put aside emotions and philosophical questions when business calls.
On Thursday, a sunny St. Patrick’s Day in Manhattan, Jonathan Golub, the chief equity strategist for the giant Swiss bank UBS, said he was trying to master some of the intricacies of nuclear technology. “Now I find myself talking about fuel rods and cooling pools,” he said. It was, he said, not an uncommon type of experience: Before the financial crisis, even many people on Wall Street didn’t quite know what a credit default swap was. Before long, everyone was throwing around terms like “swaps” and “C.D.S.”
Mr. Golub said he felt for the people of Japan. He then went on to say, at a news briefing, that once the current market volatility subsided, this crisis should have only a marginal impact on America’s economy and stock market, whose prospects were quite good. He predicted that the S.& P. 500 would reach 1,425 by the end of the year.
Still, because supply chains have gone global like so much else, the disaster has already had a very real impact in the United States. Last week, Subaru slowed operations of its auto plant in Indiana because it could not obtain key parts from Japan. General Motors said it would shut a truck plant in Louisiana because of a shortage of parts. The semiconductor industry has also slowed because Japan is a major supplier of silicon wafers and other components.
Despite its position as the world’s No. 3 economy, Japan actually accounts for a relatively small — and shrinking — amount of the world’s collective economic output. It contributes about 9 percent of global gross domestic product, down from about 18 percent in the 1990s. And because of the rapid acceleration of the so-called BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — and of other emerging markets, Japan’s contribution to growth of global G.D.P. is marginal.
Lakshman Achuthan, the managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a private forecasting group with an excellent track record, says that Japan’s economy, which he believes is already in recession, won’t appreciably affect the direction of the economy in the United States. The disaster, however, “ensures that Japan is in a recession,” he said.
All of this, of course, assumes that the nuclear disaster, already the biggest since Chernobyl, doesn’t get too much worse.
THE financial markets have always had a difficult relationship with nuclear power, largely because the costs — and potential risks — associated with nuclear plants are so huge. Day to day, nuclear power is cheap. But it is unclear how to accurately assess the cost of disposing of nuclear waste over the long run — or, perhaps, the cost of disasters like the one in Japan.
Robert N. Stavins, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and director of the university’s environmental economics program, has studied this issue for years. In an article in the centennial edition of the American Economic View in February, Professor Stavins said that economists had not yet solved the “tragedy of the commons,” the quandaries that arise when many people, acting in their own self-interest, ultimately pose a threat to the common good. For instance, how should we allocate environmental costs to power producers? How should the environmental costs of various fuels — fossil or nuclear — be calculated?
So far, the markets seem to have failed to provide an answer to all of those questions. A National Research Council study last year tallied up environmental costs for various fossil fuels but did not even try to do so for nuclear power because the “power-plant risk modeling and spent-fuel transportation modeling” required was beyond the scope of the council’s study.
In the United States and elsewhere, governments have capped the liability of nuclear power producers. As a result, Professor Stavins said, “You can argue that the markets have never really had a chance to price nuclear power.”
In the face of black swans — also known as fat-tail events, for the way their occurrences are distributed along a probability curve — market pricing may be impossible.
Martin Weitzman, another Harvard economist, wonders, for example, how Wall Street or anyone else could place an accurate price on the risk that an asteroid would crash into a major population center. In a controversial mathematical proof called, perhaps appropriately, the Dismal Theorem, he found that “it’s very hard to make reliable inferences about rare events on the tails of probability distributions.”
Is the nuclear disaster under way in Japan such a rare event, one that economists cannot accurately price? It is too early to say, Professor Weitzman said. “It might be.”
IT has been more than 30 years since Three Mile Island, and 25 since Chernobyl.
In the ensuing years, one nuclear plant was completed in the United States and shut down before ever going into commercial operation. That was the Shoreham plant, on Long Island, which cost roughly $6 billion. Its fate was decided in 1989, when state officials concluded that Long Island could never be evacuated in case of a disaster.
The Fukushima accident has already caused a temporary slowdown in the nuclear industry. Officials in India and China said last week that they would re-evaluate their plans for building plants. Germany announced that it would temporarily shut seven nuclear plants that went online before 1980. The European Union made plans to test all the other nuclear power plants within its member countries.
In the United States, President Obama, who has promoted building new nuclear power plants, asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week to review the safety of all United States plants.
However imperfectly, the market will pass judgment.
Mr. El-Erian of Pimco says the outlook is unusually uncertain. Investors, like everyone else, should understand that the world is a risky place.
“You need to use a whole range of approaches to understand the market in a situation like this,” he says, “and you need to be humble.”
And, perhaps, accept a sober reality: the next black swan is out there somewhere.
By JEFF SOMMER
THE risks are clear enough in hindsight.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company built its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, nearly 40 years ago, to withstand a powerful earthquake — but not one as big as the 9.0-magnitude quake that struck on March 11. Or the tsunami that followed. Now, the terrible “ifs” accumulate, as Japanese engineers work to bring the station’s reactors under control. The ultimate price, in human life, may not be known for years.
The details of this catastrophe were unforeseeable, leading some to conclude this was a black swan event — something so wildly unexpected, so enormous in its impact, that it seems to defy our understanding and expose the fragility of our knowledge of the world. How could anyone have predicted this?
And yet in 2007, Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, escaped a disaster at its huge Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station, on the opposite side of Japan, when that plant was damaged by a 6.8-magnitude earthquake — three times as large as what the plant was designed to withstand. Tepco basically lucked out last time.
So perhaps a bigger question is whether the markets — in which we have come to place so much trust — can put a true price on outsize risks like this.
Many have compared the events unfolding in Japan with 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009, the BP oil spill, and the uprisings in the Arab world — in that all have shown the limits of the collective wisdom of the marketplace. For a moment, all the swans seemed black. And those swans seemed blacker still when viewed through the lens of today’s hyperkinetic global markets.
“There are an amazing number of crosscurrents in the world economy right now, more than I’ve seen in 25 years,” said Shawn Reynolds, a co-portfolio manager at Van Eck Associates in New York.
Like everyone else, corporate executives, economists and financial analysts in Tokyo, New York, London and beyond struggled last week to wrap their heads around the scale of this disaster. But, as they so often do, the analysts quickly fell to work assessing the implications for companies, markets and economies. At times, it was almost surreal: On Tuesday, Laszlo Birinyi, a prominent stock market analyst based in Westport, Conn., e-mailed around a succinct report titled “Nuclear Meltdowns at a Glance.”
This is what happens on Wall Street. If you’re not immersed in the culture, it might be hard to understand the cool calculus that is applied to world events, however dire those events might be. After the quake hit on March 11, the CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow told viewers, “The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that.” He later apologized.
As the week wore on, and prices were gyrating on everything from a share of I.B.M. to a ton of copper, everyone was making back-of-the-envelope calculations. There is still no clear consensus about how far the economic shocks will reverberate. Many analysts are guessing — and then second-guessing — how the disaster will play out in northeast Japan. The first, tentative analysis seemed painfully obvious: the Japanese economy, already weak, perhaps already in a recession before calamity struck, will become even weaker.
On Friday, the Group of 7 industrialized nations took the rare step of intervening on the world’s foreign exchange markets to stem a sudden rise in the value of the yen. The currency had soared all week against the dollar — the exact opposite of what you might expect. But Japanese companies and investors were bringing their money home, to pay for huge rebuilding costs.
After its most harrowing week since the 1987 market crash, the Tokyo Stock Exchange found its footing on Friday. But it was a week like few others on the exchange: the Nikkei 225 stock index, Japan’s equivalent of the Dow Jones industrial average, fell 6.2 percent on Monday, plunged 10.5 percent on Tuesday, rebounded 5.7 percent on Wednesday and sank 1.4 percent on Thursday. It closed up 2.7 percent on Friday, at 9,206.75.
The loss for the week totaled 1,048 points, or 10.2 percent.
IF you happen to visit a Wall Street trading floor, walk over to the nearest Bloomberg terminal, type “WRST” and hit the green key that says “go.”
WRST — that is short for “worst,” as in, “worst-case scenario.” The program enables Wall Street types to measure the level of risk in their investment portfolios under a variety of scary circumstances modeled on past crises, including the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the bankruptcy of WorldCom in 2002 and the devaluation of the Thailand’s currency, the baht, in 1997.
Such “what if” scripts are the stuff of modern Wall Street. Everyone runs them. Entire schools of financial analysis are devoted to examining historical market patterns in the belief that those patterns can predict the future.
Such analysis, of course, depends on — and perhaps even encourages — our belief that tomorrow will be much like today. And all that despite the fine-print caveat on your 401(k) statement that reads, “Past performance is no guarantee of future success.”
Nassim Taleb, the author and market theorist who popularized the phrase “black swan” in his 2007 best seller, argues that we have psychological biases that blind us to the enormous role played by rare events — like a 9.0-magnitude earthquake. And yet we rely on history for guidance. On Wednesday, Mr. Birinyi’s research firm sent out another report, this one titled “S.& P. 500 Enters Modest Correction.” His firm predicted a slight decline in the American stock market.
“If the averages hold,” the report said, “the S.& P. 500 will bottom at 1,232 on 3/31/11.” On Friday, the S.& P. 500 closed at 1,279.19, down 1.9 percent for the week.
Whatever else they may be, markets are immensely complex counting machines. They assign values to products, whether computer chips or potato chips, based on the canny appraisals and gut beliefs of people around the planet. From day to day, it is often hard, if not impossible, to know exactly why a certain price moved the way it did. Those daily movements are often just the white noise of global capitalism.
Then there are stretches of extreme volatility, periods when no one quite seems to agree about where anything is going. That may be part of what occurred last week: in the face of such a disaster, not even a short-term trend could congeal.
As yet, no one has reliable numbers about the scope of the destruction, said Al Tobin, who heads the property practice at Aon Risk Solutions, the risk management brokerage business of the Aon Corporation. The human toll, the economic toll — “no one knows the answer to that question,” he said.
Given such uncertainty, the markets could remain even more volatile than usual, said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, the world’s largest bond manager. “The market right now is trying to wrap its arms around the enormity,” he said.
The verdict is not yet in.
Mr. El-Erian divided market strategists into two camps. The first, he says, views the events in Japan as “more than just a massive human tragedy; it also has significant implications for the global economy.” The second, he says, believes that the effects of this disaster, however heart-rending, will be transitory for most of us.
But he doesn’t yet know which camp is right. “I don’t understand it fully yet,” he said, “but I am worried about it.”
Big economic questions remain unanswered. How would a severe slowdown in Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, affect the rest of the globe? How will Japan, which is already deeply in debt, pay for the reconstruction? Some are already arguing that the enormous, high-cost task of rebuilding could, over time, snap Japan out of its long economic funk.
MARKET strategists pride themselves on being able to digest vast quantities of data quickly. They tend to be practical and versatile people, the kind who can put aside emotions and philosophical questions when business calls.
On Thursday, a sunny St. Patrick’s Day in Manhattan, Jonathan Golub, the chief equity strategist for the giant Swiss bank UBS, said he was trying to master some of the intricacies of nuclear technology. “Now I find myself talking about fuel rods and cooling pools,” he said. It was, he said, not an uncommon type of experience: Before the financial crisis, even many people on Wall Street didn’t quite know what a credit default swap was. Before long, everyone was throwing around terms like “swaps” and “C.D.S.”
Mr. Golub said he felt for the people of Japan. He then went on to say, at a news briefing, that once the current market volatility subsided, this crisis should have only a marginal impact on America’s economy and stock market, whose prospects were quite good. He predicted that the S.& P. 500 would reach 1,425 by the end of the year.
Still, because supply chains have gone global like so much else, the disaster has already had a very real impact in the United States. Last week, Subaru slowed operations of its auto plant in Indiana because it could not obtain key parts from Japan. General Motors said it would shut a truck plant in Louisiana because of a shortage of parts. The semiconductor industry has also slowed because Japan is a major supplier of silicon wafers and other components.
Despite its position as the world’s No. 3 economy, Japan actually accounts for a relatively small — and shrinking — amount of the world’s collective economic output. It contributes about 9 percent of global gross domestic product, down from about 18 percent in the 1990s. And because of the rapid acceleration of the so-called BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — and of other emerging markets, Japan’s contribution to growth of global G.D.P. is marginal.
Lakshman Achuthan, the managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, a private forecasting group with an excellent track record, says that Japan’s economy, which he believes is already in recession, won’t appreciably affect the direction of the economy in the United States. The disaster, however, “ensures that Japan is in a recession,” he said.
All of this, of course, assumes that the nuclear disaster, already the biggest since Chernobyl, doesn’t get too much worse.
THE financial markets have always had a difficult relationship with nuclear power, largely because the costs — and potential risks — associated with nuclear plants are so huge. Day to day, nuclear power is cheap. But it is unclear how to accurately assess the cost of disposing of nuclear waste over the long run — or, perhaps, the cost of disasters like the one in Japan.
Robert N. Stavins, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and director of the university’s environmental economics program, has studied this issue for years. In an article in the centennial edition of the American Economic View in February, Professor Stavins said that economists had not yet solved the “tragedy of the commons,” the quandaries that arise when many people, acting in their own self-interest, ultimately pose a threat to the common good. For instance, how should we allocate environmental costs to power producers? How should the environmental costs of various fuels — fossil or nuclear — be calculated?
So far, the markets seem to have failed to provide an answer to all of those questions. A National Research Council study last year tallied up environmental costs for various fossil fuels but did not even try to do so for nuclear power because the “power-plant risk modeling and spent-fuel transportation modeling” required was beyond the scope of the council’s study.
In the United States and elsewhere, governments have capped the liability of nuclear power producers. As a result, Professor Stavins said, “You can argue that the markets have never really had a chance to price nuclear power.”
In the face of black swans — also known as fat-tail events, for the way their occurrences are distributed along a probability curve — market pricing may be impossible.
Martin Weitzman, another Harvard economist, wonders, for example, how Wall Street or anyone else could place an accurate price on the risk that an asteroid would crash into a major population center. In a controversial mathematical proof called, perhaps appropriately, the Dismal Theorem, he found that “it’s very hard to make reliable inferences about rare events on the tails of probability distributions.”
Is the nuclear disaster under way in Japan such a rare event, one that economists cannot accurately price? It is too early to say, Professor Weitzman said. “It might be.”
IT has been more than 30 years since Three Mile Island, and 25 since Chernobyl.
In the ensuing years, one nuclear plant was completed in the United States and shut down before ever going into commercial operation. That was the Shoreham plant, on Long Island, which cost roughly $6 billion. Its fate was decided in 1989, when state officials concluded that Long Island could never be evacuated in case of a disaster.
The Fukushima accident has already caused a temporary slowdown in the nuclear industry. Officials in India and China said last week that they would re-evaluate their plans for building plants. Germany announced that it would temporarily shut seven nuclear plants that went online before 1980. The European Union made plans to test all the other nuclear power plants within its member countries.
In the United States, President Obama, who has promoted building new nuclear power plants, asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week to review the safety of all United States plants.
However imperfectly, the market will pass judgment.
Mr. El-Erian of Pimco says the outlook is unusually uncertain. Investors, like everyone else, should understand that the world is a risky place.
“You need to use a whole range of approaches to understand the market in a situation like this,” he says, “and you need to be humble.”
And, perhaps, accept a sober reality: the next black swan is out there somewhere.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
17/03 Chernobyl Study Says Health Risks Linger
March 17, 2011
By GARDINER HARRIS
Nearly 25 years after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, children and teenagers who drank contaminated milk or ate affected cheese in the days and weeks after the explosion still suffer from an increased risk of thyroid cancer, according to a study released Thursday by the National Cancer Institute.
The study confirms earlier research about the risks of radioactive iodine, which can accumulate in the thyroid gland and lead to cancer later. Potassium iodide is often given as a supplement to prevent the accumulation of the radioactive type in thyroid glands, but Russian authorities failed to provide the supplement to all those at risk.
Radioactive iodine has a half-life of just eight days, and it was not thought to be present outside the power plant in concentrations high enough to cause immediate health problems. But the isotope was concentrated by cows in milk, and children who drank contaminated milk or ate affected dairy products are particularly at risk.
An international team of researchers led by the National Cancer Institute, a federal agency based in Bethesda, Md., has been monitoring the health effects of the Chernobyl accident for years. In the study released Thursday, the team screened 12,500 people who were under 18-years-old at the time of the 1986 accident and lived in one of three provinces near the accident site. The subjects’ thyroid glands were measured for radioactivity within two months of the accident.
Those with the greatest exposures were at highest risk for developing thyroid cancer in later years, the researchers found. Sixty-five of the study’s subjects developed thyroid cancer during the study’s 10 years of screening.
Indeed, the increased risks associated with exposures to radioactive iodine have yet to show any sign of declining. Studies done in Japan after World War II suggested that the increased risks of thyroid cancer began to decline 30 years after the atomic explosions but remained above normal even 40 years later.
Some of the participants in the Chernobyl study lived as far as 90 miles from the accident site, demonstrating the risks of eating or drinking contaminated foods among people who were exposed to little or no radioactive iodine from the immediate fallout.
“This study confirms the risk of thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine,” Dr. Alina V. Brenner, a radiation epidemiologist at the cancer institute and a co-author of the study, said in an interview. “But thyroid cancer is largely a nonlethal cancer. If detected and treated in a timely manner, they have a good prognosis.”
That this study was released in the midst of the crisis at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan was a coincidence. Indeed, government officials scheduled the release for Thursday because they feared weeks ago that the government might shut down on Friday as a result of a budget impasse on Capitol Hill.
By GARDINER HARRIS
Nearly 25 years after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, children and teenagers who drank contaminated milk or ate affected cheese in the days and weeks after the explosion still suffer from an increased risk of thyroid cancer, according to a study released Thursday by the National Cancer Institute.
The study confirms earlier research about the risks of radioactive iodine, which can accumulate in the thyroid gland and lead to cancer later. Potassium iodide is often given as a supplement to prevent the accumulation of the radioactive type in thyroid glands, but Russian authorities failed to provide the supplement to all those at risk.
Radioactive iodine has a half-life of just eight days, and it was not thought to be present outside the power plant in concentrations high enough to cause immediate health problems. But the isotope was concentrated by cows in milk, and children who drank contaminated milk or ate affected dairy products are particularly at risk.
An international team of researchers led by the National Cancer Institute, a federal agency based in Bethesda, Md., has been monitoring the health effects of the Chernobyl accident for years. In the study released Thursday, the team screened 12,500 people who were under 18-years-old at the time of the 1986 accident and lived in one of three provinces near the accident site. The subjects’ thyroid glands were measured for radioactivity within two months of the accident.
Those with the greatest exposures were at highest risk for developing thyroid cancer in later years, the researchers found. Sixty-five of the study’s subjects developed thyroid cancer during the study’s 10 years of screening.
Indeed, the increased risks associated with exposures to radioactive iodine have yet to show any sign of declining. Studies done in Japan after World War II suggested that the increased risks of thyroid cancer began to decline 30 years after the atomic explosions but remained above normal even 40 years later.
Some of the participants in the Chernobyl study lived as far as 90 miles from the accident site, demonstrating the risks of eating or drinking contaminated foods among people who were exposed to little or no radioactive iodine from the immediate fallout.
“This study confirms the risk of thyroid cancer from radioactive iodine,” Dr. Alina V. Brenner, a radiation epidemiologist at the cancer institute and a co-author of the study, said in an interview. “But thyroid cancer is largely a nonlethal cancer. If detected and treated in a timely manner, they have a good prognosis.”
That this study was released in the midst of the crisis at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan was a coincidence. Indeed, government officials scheduled the release for Thursday because they feared weeks ago that the government might shut down on Friday as a result of a budget impasse on Capitol Hill.
18/03 Radiation Fears Cloud Japan’s Recovery
March 18, 2011
By ANDREW POLLACK
Add fears of radiation to the long list of troubles threatening Japan’s export-led economy.
As Japan struggles to contain radiation leaking from crippled nuclear reactors, many countries, including China, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand have already started to test food imported from Japan for radiation, and the European Union has recommended that member countries do so. Manufacturers have also begun sweeping cars waiting for oversea shipment. No reports of significant product contamination have surfaced.
Some sushi restaurants in Asia are reportedly dropping fish from Japan from their menus. In Hong Kong there was a run on baby formula from Japan because mothers feared future supplies would be contaminated or unavailable.
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that it was considering increasing the monitoring of imported food and raw ingredients made in Japan, or that had traveled through the country. However, the agency said, “based on current information, there is no risk to the U.S. food supply.”
Despite the excellent reputation of Japan’s Kobe beef, premium tuna belly sushi or toro and fine sake, food is only a minor part of Japanese exports. The country imports far more food than it exports.
Far greater damage could occur if Japanese automobiles or electronics get contaminated with radiation, or if fear spreads among consumers that they could be exposed to radiation by sitting in a Prius or playing a DVD.
Among the steps that Japanese manufacturers are starting to take to reassure customers are trips to ports in Japan. For example, workers at Nissan, armed with radiation detectors, are testing some of the company’s cars waiting to be shipped overseas. On Friday, Carlos Tavares, chairman of Nissan Americas, confirmed the scanning of autos: “It’s clear that we have found nothing, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. We are just doing it to make sure nothing is there.”
Radiation experts said there was virtually no chance of major contamination of industrial products, even if the leakage were to worsen. Particles like the ones containing radioactive iodine or cesium escaping from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant can be deposited on products. But given the nature of the manufacturing industries in Japan, there is little danger of contamination reaching harmful levels, the experts said. For one, most manufacturing in Japan happens far from the nuclear plant (and many of the cars and electronics from Japanese companies are actually made outside Japan).
Moreover, manufacturing is usually done indoors. A product would most likely not be contaminated “unless it sits outside for long periods and gets a significant amount of deposits on it,” said William F. Morgan, director of radiation biology and biophysics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Also he noted, most products were in packages, and the radioactive particles would not damage the product inside. If a product is known to have deposited particles, they can be washed off, or a contaminated box could be opened by someone wearing gloves and thrown away.
Manufacturing is likely to be halted in areas with high levels of radiation. “If the levels are high enough, that there would be a concern for a product being shipped, there would be a much greater concern for the people working there,” said Jerrold T. Bushberg, director of health physics programs at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine.
So if the nuclear accident hurts Japan’s exports, some experts say, it is more likely to be attributable to disruptions in operations and logistics there, much as the earthquake and tsunami have done, not because the reactor damage is contaminating products. A huge plume of radiation heading toward Tokyo could bring commerce and manufacturing in that area to a halt. A nuclear meltdown at Fukushima could cause Japan to shut other nuclear plants as a precaution, adding to power outages.
Food is a much more pertinent issue for radioactive contamination because crops and animals are often raised outdoors and because they are ingested. Still, some experts say the risk is low to Americans because Japan accounts for only 4 percent of American food imports. And even less of that is food with the highest risk of contamination.
“We are not worried about imports from Japan, and we are not recommending that consumers be concerned,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group.
She said that in the five years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which was far worse than Japan’s radiation problem so far, only 1.4 percent of the food products entering the United States from Eastern Europe exceeded standards for radiation. Much of that was meat and poultry.
Imports of raw beef from Japan, including premium Kobe beef, have been suspended since last April, because of concerns about foot and mouth disease, according to a spokesman for the United States Department of Agriculture. Poultry and egg imports are barred because the Agriculture Department has not determined that Japan has a sufficient inspection system for those products. Dairy products can be contaminated if cows eat grass that radioactive isotopes have fallen on; this was a major source of radiation after the Chernobyl accident. But dairy accounts for only 0.1 percent of food imported from Japan, according to the F.D.A. There is also relatively little fresh produce.
Some seafood does come from Japan. However, much of the fish served in sushi restaurants here does not, and even fish caught by Japanese fleets might not be from waters near Japan.
The F.D.A. said it was taking steps to measure contamination in fish, but added, “The great quantity of water in the Pacific Ocean rapidly and effectively dilutes radioactive material, so fish and seafood are likely to be unaffected.”
The United States Customs and Border Protection already monitors incoming cargo for radiation, part of the response to the Sept. 11 attacks. It said in a statement this week that it had instructed its field officers to specifically monitor maritime and air traffic from Japan.
“We don’t have any dirty bombs or nukes coming through here because of these processes,” said Ron Boyd, the chief of police at the Port of Los Angeles. He said he was confident that the procedures would also be able to detect radioactive cargo from Japan.
There are already reports of passengers arriving from Japan setting off radiation detectors at Chicago’s O’Hare and at Dallas-Fort Worth airports, but those levels were reported to be very low. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that no aircraft entering the United States “has tested positive for radiation at harmful levels.”
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By ANDREW POLLACK
Add fears of radiation to the long list of troubles threatening Japan’s export-led economy.
As Japan struggles to contain radiation leaking from crippled nuclear reactors, many countries, including China, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand have already started to test food imported from Japan for radiation, and the European Union has recommended that member countries do so. Manufacturers have also begun sweeping cars waiting for oversea shipment. No reports of significant product contamination have surfaced.
Some sushi restaurants in Asia are reportedly dropping fish from Japan from their menus. In Hong Kong there was a run on baby formula from Japan because mothers feared future supplies would be contaminated or unavailable.
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that it was considering increasing the monitoring of imported food and raw ingredients made in Japan, or that had traveled through the country. However, the agency said, “based on current information, there is no risk to the U.S. food supply.”
Despite the excellent reputation of Japan’s Kobe beef, premium tuna belly sushi or toro and fine sake, food is only a minor part of Japanese exports. The country imports far more food than it exports.
Far greater damage could occur if Japanese automobiles or electronics get contaminated with radiation, or if fear spreads among consumers that they could be exposed to radiation by sitting in a Prius or playing a DVD.
Among the steps that Japanese manufacturers are starting to take to reassure customers are trips to ports in Japan. For example, workers at Nissan, armed with radiation detectors, are testing some of the company’s cars waiting to be shipped overseas. On Friday, Carlos Tavares, chairman of Nissan Americas, confirmed the scanning of autos: “It’s clear that we have found nothing, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. We are just doing it to make sure nothing is there.”
Radiation experts said there was virtually no chance of major contamination of industrial products, even if the leakage were to worsen. Particles like the ones containing radioactive iodine or cesium escaping from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant can be deposited on products. But given the nature of the manufacturing industries in Japan, there is little danger of contamination reaching harmful levels, the experts said. For one, most manufacturing in Japan happens far from the nuclear plant (and many of the cars and electronics from Japanese companies are actually made outside Japan).
Moreover, manufacturing is usually done indoors. A product would most likely not be contaminated “unless it sits outside for long periods and gets a significant amount of deposits on it,” said William F. Morgan, director of radiation biology and biophysics at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Also he noted, most products were in packages, and the radioactive particles would not damage the product inside. If a product is known to have deposited particles, they can be washed off, or a contaminated box could be opened by someone wearing gloves and thrown away.
Manufacturing is likely to be halted in areas with high levels of radiation. “If the levels are high enough, that there would be a concern for a product being shipped, there would be a much greater concern for the people working there,” said Jerrold T. Bushberg, director of health physics programs at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine.
So if the nuclear accident hurts Japan’s exports, some experts say, it is more likely to be attributable to disruptions in operations and logistics there, much as the earthquake and tsunami have done, not because the reactor damage is contaminating products. A huge plume of radiation heading toward Tokyo could bring commerce and manufacturing in that area to a halt. A nuclear meltdown at Fukushima could cause Japan to shut other nuclear plants as a precaution, adding to power outages.
Food is a much more pertinent issue for radioactive contamination because crops and animals are often raised outdoors and because they are ingested. Still, some experts say the risk is low to Americans because Japan accounts for only 4 percent of American food imports. And even less of that is food with the highest risk of contamination.
“We are not worried about imports from Japan, and we are not recommending that consumers be concerned,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer group.
She said that in the five years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which was far worse than Japan’s radiation problem so far, only 1.4 percent of the food products entering the United States from Eastern Europe exceeded standards for radiation. Much of that was meat and poultry.
Imports of raw beef from Japan, including premium Kobe beef, have been suspended since last April, because of concerns about foot and mouth disease, according to a spokesman for the United States Department of Agriculture. Poultry and egg imports are barred because the Agriculture Department has not determined that Japan has a sufficient inspection system for those products. Dairy products can be contaminated if cows eat grass that radioactive isotopes have fallen on; this was a major source of radiation after the Chernobyl accident. But dairy accounts for only 0.1 percent of food imported from Japan, according to the F.D.A. There is also relatively little fresh produce.
Some seafood does come from Japan. However, much of the fish served in sushi restaurants here does not, and even fish caught by Japanese fleets might not be from waters near Japan.
The F.D.A. said it was taking steps to measure contamination in fish, but added, “The great quantity of water in the Pacific Ocean rapidly and effectively dilutes radioactive material, so fish and seafood are likely to be unaffected.”
The United States Customs and Border Protection already monitors incoming cargo for radiation, part of the response to the Sept. 11 attacks. It said in a statement this week that it had instructed its field officers to specifically monitor maritime and air traffic from Japan.
“We don’t have any dirty bombs or nukes coming through here because of these processes,” said Ron Boyd, the chief of police at the Port of Los Angeles. He said he was confident that the procedures would also be able to detect radioactive cargo from Japan.
There are already reports of passengers arriving from Japan setting off radiation detectors at Chicago’s O’Hare and at Dallas-Fort Worth airports, but those levels were reported to be very low. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that no aircraft entering the United States “has tested positive for radiation at harmful levels.”
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18/03 More Foreigners Are Seeking to Flee Japan
March 18, 2011
By MARK McDONALD and SHARON LAFRANIERE
TOKYO — The exodus from Japan grew Friday as foreigners sought to flee the threat of radiation from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
About 20,000 resident foreigners have indicated their intent to leave the country by requesting re-entry permits from the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, according to Kyodo news agency. Tokyo is about 140 miles south of the plant.
Ticket agents said flights out of Tokyo to South Korea and China were booking up quickly. A representative of China Southern Airlines, which flies from Tokyo to the Chinese coastal city of Dalian, said its flights were sold out until April. A representative of China Eastern Airlines, which flies from Tokyo to Beijing and Shanghai, also said seats “are in short supply.” An Air China agent said that the airline added two flights from Tokyo to China on Thursday and that some seats remained on its flights from Tokyo to Beijing.
Xiao Er, a Chinese businessman temporarily working in Inner Mongolia, said he had tried for three days to secure airline tickets to China for his Japanese wife and daughter, who live less than 170 miles from the crippled nuclear plant.
“Right now, my family is extremely panicked,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Nobody is going outside. Everyone is hiding in their rooms, afraid of coming into contact with the radiation.”
He said that neither he nor his wife had been able to buy tickets to China for her and their daughter. Finally, a relative of his wife secured two tickets for about $1,500 each. An air ticket out of Japan at the moment is almost “something that money can’t buy,” he said.
The South Korean government said that Korean Airlines and Asiana Airlines had added 4 to 11 flights a day from Tokyo to South Korea and had switched to bigger aircraft. Should an emergency evacuation become necessary, a Foreign Ministry official in Seoul said, South Korea is prepared to send military planes and warships to rescue its citizens.
“The government will mobilize all means, such as charter planes, vessels, military transport planes, Coast Guard patrol ships and warships to help evacuate our people,” the second vice foreign minister, Min Dong-seok told reporters.
Foreign governments have taken varying approaches toward the evacuation of their citizens. Some countries recommended evacuation for those anywhere near the danger zone around the crippled reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Other countries made arrangements to get their citizens out of Japan altogether.
France, Germany and Hong Kong, among many others, arranged charter flights for people wishing to pull back from Tokyo to Osaka — or to leave the country. Britain said that it was chartering jets to fly between Tokyo and Hong Kong, and that Britons directly affected by the tsunami would not be charged for the flight.
The United States approved plans for voluntary evacuations of families and dependents of its military personnel and embassy employees in Japan, including those at air and naval bases 200 miles or more from the plant.
The American military presence in Japan includes about 38,000 troops plus nearly 50,000 dependents, civilian employees and American contractors.
But not all foreigners were fleeing. One Briton said he was not about to leave.
Michael Tonge, a schoolteacher in Sendai, the closest major city to the quake’s epicenter, said that many of the expatriates in his area were “forming groups using things like Facebook to try to get aid and help to the people who need it.”
“Sendai has been my home for over five years,” Mr. Tonge said, “and the people of this area have taken me in and made me feel very welcome. I can’t leave them now, after this. I think that’s how a lot of the foreigners here feel, too.”
Mr. Min, the South Korean Foreign Ministry official, also said that South Korea had moved its team of rescue workers in Japan farther from the reactors out of concern for their safety. The team moved from the city of Sendai, in the tsunami-hit region, to the western coastal town of Niigata, he said. South Korea and Taiwan both continued to expand radiation checks of passengers arriving on airplanes from Japan.
Since Tuesday, more than 11,000 people have voluntarily submitted to checks at airports in Taiwan, said a spokeswoman for the Department of Radiation Prevention of Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Council. Radiation residue has been detected on just 37 of them, said the spokeswoman, who identified herself only as Ms. Xu. She said the highest level was about three times above normal, not enough to cause any health concern. Those with higher levels were given plastic coveralls and shoe covers. All were advised to wash their clothing and shoes when they reached their destination.
Seoul’s Incheon international airport has established two voluntary checkpoints for radiation. Anyone who does not pass the first one is checked again to see if the levels of radioactive residue are high enough to be considered contamination. So far, according to the Nuclear Emergency Response Team at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, three people have been checked at the second gate. Two were cleared and sent home. A third person was checked again without shoes and coat after a small amount of residue was found on them, and was then cleared as well and sent home. The contaminated clothing was kept by the inspectors.
Mark McDonald reported from Tokyo, and Sharon LaFraniere from Beijing. Martin Fackler contributed reporting from Yamagata, Japan. Su-Hyun Lee contributed research from Seoul, South Korea, and Li Bibo and Jonathan Kaiman from Beijing.
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By MARK McDONALD and SHARON LAFRANIERE
TOKYO — The exodus from Japan grew Friday as foreigners sought to flee the threat of radiation from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
About 20,000 resident foreigners have indicated their intent to leave the country by requesting re-entry permits from the Tokyo Immigration Bureau, according to Kyodo news agency. Tokyo is about 140 miles south of the plant.
Ticket agents said flights out of Tokyo to South Korea and China were booking up quickly. A representative of China Southern Airlines, which flies from Tokyo to the Chinese coastal city of Dalian, said its flights were sold out until April. A representative of China Eastern Airlines, which flies from Tokyo to Beijing and Shanghai, also said seats “are in short supply.” An Air China agent said that the airline added two flights from Tokyo to China on Thursday and that some seats remained on its flights from Tokyo to Beijing.
Xiao Er, a Chinese businessman temporarily working in Inner Mongolia, said he had tried for three days to secure airline tickets to China for his Japanese wife and daughter, who live less than 170 miles from the crippled nuclear plant.
“Right now, my family is extremely panicked,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Nobody is going outside. Everyone is hiding in their rooms, afraid of coming into contact with the radiation.”
He said that neither he nor his wife had been able to buy tickets to China for her and their daughter. Finally, a relative of his wife secured two tickets for about $1,500 each. An air ticket out of Japan at the moment is almost “something that money can’t buy,” he said.
The South Korean government said that Korean Airlines and Asiana Airlines had added 4 to 11 flights a day from Tokyo to South Korea and had switched to bigger aircraft. Should an emergency evacuation become necessary, a Foreign Ministry official in Seoul said, South Korea is prepared to send military planes and warships to rescue its citizens.
“The government will mobilize all means, such as charter planes, vessels, military transport planes, Coast Guard patrol ships and warships to help evacuate our people,” the second vice foreign minister, Min Dong-seok told reporters.
Foreign governments have taken varying approaches toward the evacuation of their citizens. Some countries recommended evacuation for those anywhere near the danger zone around the crippled reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Other countries made arrangements to get their citizens out of Japan altogether.
France, Germany and Hong Kong, among many others, arranged charter flights for people wishing to pull back from Tokyo to Osaka — or to leave the country. Britain said that it was chartering jets to fly between Tokyo and Hong Kong, and that Britons directly affected by the tsunami would not be charged for the flight.
The United States approved plans for voluntary evacuations of families and dependents of its military personnel and embassy employees in Japan, including those at air and naval bases 200 miles or more from the plant.
The American military presence in Japan includes about 38,000 troops plus nearly 50,000 dependents, civilian employees and American contractors.
But not all foreigners were fleeing. One Briton said he was not about to leave.
Michael Tonge, a schoolteacher in Sendai, the closest major city to the quake’s epicenter, said that many of the expatriates in his area were “forming groups using things like Facebook to try to get aid and help to the people who need it.”
“Sendai has been my home for over five years,” Mr. Tonge said, “and the people of this area have taken me in and made me feel very welcome. I can’t leave them now, after this. I think that’s how a lot of the foreigners here feel, too.”
Mr. Min, the South Korean Foreign Ministry official, also said that South Korea had moved its team of rescue workers in Japan farther from the reactors out of concern for their safety. The team moved from the city of Sendai, in the tsunami-hit region, to the western coastal town of Niigata, he said. South Korea and Taiwan both continued to expand radiation checks of passengers arriving on airplanes from Japan.
Since Tuesday, more than 11,000 people have voluntarily submitted to checks at airports in Taiwan, said a spokeswoman for the Department of Radiation Prevention of Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Council. Radiation residue has been detected on just 37 of them, said the spokeswoman, who identified herself only as Ms. Xu. She said the highest level was about three times above normal, not enough to cause any health concern. Those with higher levels were given plastic coveralls and shoe covers. All were advised to wash their clothing and shoes when they reached their destination.
Seoul’s Incheon international airport has established two voluntary checkpoints for radiation. Anyone who does not pass the first one is checked again to see if the levels of radioactive residue are high enough to be considered contamination. So far, according to the Nuclear Emergency Response Team at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, three people have been checked at the second gate. Two were cleared and sent home. A third person was checked again without shoes and coat after a small amount of residue was found on them, and was then cleared as well and sent home. The contaminated clothing was kept by the inspectors.
Mark McDonald reported from Tokyo, and Sharon LaFraniere from Beijing. Martin Fackler contributed reporting from Yamagata, Japan. Su-Hyun Lee contributed research from Seoul, South Korea, and Li Bibo and Jonathan Kaiman from Beijing.
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19/03 Black women ugly? Says who?
By LZ Granderson, Special to CNN
May 19, 2011 -- Updated 1701 GMT (0101 HKT)
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- LZ Granderson: His mom a fiery, caring woman who beat back life's challenges, she's beautiful
- He's offended at Psychology Today blogpost that asked why black women aren't attractive
- He questions writer's methods, but wonders at culture that abides, fosters such views
- Granderson: Some black men help damage black women's image. They must show respect
RELATED TOPICS
Editor's note: LZ Granderson writes a weekly column for CNN.com. A senior writer and columnist for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, he has contributed to ESPN's "Sports Center," "Outside the Lines" and "First Take." He is a 2010 nominee and the 2009 winner of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation award for online journalism and a 2010 and 2008 honoree of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for column writing.
(CNN) -- In a couple of weeks my mother turns 65.
She takes yoga and Zumba every chance she gets and if you sneeze more than twice around her, she'll cook you a pot of collard greens. My mother believes her collard greens can fix just about anything.
19/03 11-year-old girl can't be 'willing' in sex
By Jane Velez-Mitchell, Special to CNN
March 19, 2011 -- Updated 1701 GMT (0101 HKT)
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Jane Velez-Mitchell says people shocked in Texas town where girl allegedly gang-raped
- But she says what was really shocking were comments from residents seeming to blame girl
- She says there's no situation where sex with 11-year-old girl is consensual
- Velez-Mitchell: Question people should be asking is: Where were parents of the suspects?
RELATED TOPICS
Editor's note: Jane Velez-Mitchell hosts "ISSUES with Jane Velez-Mitchell," a topical event-driven show with a wide range of viewpoints that airs every night at 7 p.m. ET on HLN.
(CNN) -- What's more shocking than the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl? The fact that some people are actually blaming the little girl.
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