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Our Radioactive World!

Our Radioactive World!

V A. Elin, Ph.D., Chairman of the Board of Directors of Smart Logistic Group (SLG).

Situation reports coming out of the Fukushima-1 nuclear plant, located on the island of Honshu in Japan, tend to leave one feeling astonished at, on the one hand, the fastidiousness of the technically savvy and very careful when it comes to nuclear power Japanese and, on the other hand, the carelessness of the Fukushima plant engineers. During my Skype chats with representatives of the Russian expatriate community in Japan, I learned that the plant's cooling system was not functioning for a rather trivial reason: there was no fuel in the diesel generator intended to generate electricity in an emergency. The well-known Parkinson's law tells us that the most extraordinary things are the results of simple and ordinary actions or events. What happened in Japan only serves to substantiate this theory.

So what's the opinion of the majority of nuclear experts? Some of them argue that we are losing the nuclear industry as disasters like Chernobyl or Fukushima can happen again. Others believe that nuclear power is just one of several energy sources available to humanity – no worse and no better than the rest. Their argument is simple: the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was also carried out to satisfy our energy needs. However, mistakes made by the drilling platform engineers led to an explosion that resulted in millions of gallons of oil being spilled into the water. And now it will take dozens of years for the local ecosystem to fully recover! Another group of nuclear scientists make their point by pointing at the numbers in their calculations: it takes close to 7 years to build a nuclear station whose service life is about 25 years. Now, where are we going to find investors prepared to plow huge amounts of money into an industry notorious for disasters whose consequences are simply incalculable? Who of them is right then?

It looks like the time when all mobile phones should have inbuilt radiation, exposure, etc. measuring sensors has come.  Once people have them, they will be able to know for sure where they and their family members are safe from  harmful effects of radiation and where not. After all, that’s the kind of world we now live in!

Finam info

March 29, 2011