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Learning From Japan's Nuclear Disaster
As heroic workers and soldiers strive to save stricken Japan from a new horror--radioactive fallout--some truths known for 40 years bear repeating.
An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors. The 1960s design of five Fukushima-I reactors has the smallest safety margin and probably can't contain 90% of meltdowns. The U.S. has 6 identical and 17 very similar plants.
Every currently operating light-water reactor, if deprived of power and cooling water, can melt down. Fukushima had eight-hour battery reserves, but fuel has melted in three reactors. Most U.S. reactors get in trouble after four hours. Some have had shorter blackouts. Much longer ones could happen.
Overheated fuel risks hydrogen or steam explosions that damage equipment and contaminate the whole site--so clustering many reactors together (to save money) can make failure at one reactor cascade to the rest.
Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: as Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén said, "No acts of God can be permitted." Fallible people have created its half-century history of a few calamities, a steady stream of worrying incidents, and many near-misses. America has been lucky so far. Had Three Mile Island's containment dome not been built double-strength because it was under an airport landing path, it may not have withstood the 1979 accident's hydrogen explosion. In 2002, Ohio's Davis-Besse reactor was luckily caught just before its massive pressure-vessel lid rusted through.
Regulators haven't resolved these or other key safety issues, such as terrorist threats to reactors, lest they disrupt a powerful industry. U.S. regulation is not clearly better than Japanese regulation, nor more transparent: industry-friendly rules bar the American public from meaningful participation. Many presidents' nuclear boosterism also discourages inquiry and dissent.
Nuclear-promoting regulators inspire even less confidence. The International Atomic Energy Agency's 2005 estimate of about 4,000 Chernobyl deaths contrasts with a rigorous 2009 review of 5,000 mainly Slavic-language scientific papers the IAEA overlooked. It found deaths approaching a million through 2004, nearly 170,000 of them in North America. The total toll now exceeds a million, plus a half-trillion dollars' economic damage. The fallout reached four continents, just as the jet stream could swiftly carry Fukushima fallout.
Fukushima I-4's spent fuel alone, while in the reactor, had produced (over years, not in an instant) more than a hundred times more fission energy and hence radioactivity than both 1945 atomic bombs. If that already-damaged fuel keeps overheating, it may melt or burn, releasing into the air things like cesium-137 and strontium-90, which take several centuries to decay a millionfold. Unit 3's fuel is spiked with plutonium, which takes 482,000 years.
Nuclear power is the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away; the only one whose ingredients can help make and hide nuclear bombs; the only climate solution that substitutes proliferation, accident, and high-level radioactive waste dangers. Indeed, nuclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection.
Here's how. Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about 2-10 times less carbon savings, 20-40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings ("cogeneration"), and renewable energy. The last two made 18% of the world's 2009 electricity (while nuclear made 13%, reversing their 2000 shares)--and made over 90% of the 2007-08 increase in global electricity production.
Those smarter choices are sweeping the global energy market. Half the world's new generating capacity in 2008 and 2009 was renewable. In 2010, renewables, excluding big hydro dams, won $151 billion of private investment and added over 50 billion watts (70% the total capacity of all 23 Fukushima-style U.S. reactors) while nuclear got zero private investment and kept losing capacity. Supposedly unreliable windpower made 43-52% of four German states' total 2010 electricity. Non-nuclear Denmark, 21% windpowered, plans to get entirely off fossil fuels. Hawai'i plans 70% renewables by 2025.
In contrast, of the 66 nuclear units worldwide officially listed as "under construction" at the end of 2010, 12 had been so listed for over 20 years, 45 had no official startup date, half were late, all 66 were in centrally planned power systems--50 of those in just four (China, India, Russia, South Korea)--and zero were free-market purchases. Since 2007, nuclear growth has added less annual output than just the costliest renewable--solar power --and will probably never catch up. While inherently safe renewable competitors are walloping both nuclear and coal plants in the marketplace and keep getting dramatically cheaper, nuclear costs keep soaring, and with greater safety precautions would go even higher. Tokyo Electric Co., just recovering from $10-20 billion in 2007 earthquake costs at its other big nuclear complex, now faces an even more ruinous Fukushima bill.
Since 2005, new U.S. reactors (if any) have been 100+% subsidized--yet they couldn't raise a cent of private capital, because they have no business case. They cost 2-3 times as much as new windpower, and by the time you could build a reactor, it couldn't even beat solar power. Competitive renewables, cogeneration, and efficient use can displace all U.S. coal power more than 23 times over--leaving ample room to replace nuclear power's half-as-big-as-coal contribution too--but we need to do it just once. Yet the nuclear industry demands ever more lavish subsidies, and its lobbyists hold all other energy efforts hostage for tens of billions in added ransom, with no limit.
Japan, for its size, is even richer than America in benign, ample, but long-neglected energy choices. Perhaps this tragedy will call Japan to global leadership into a post-nuclear world. And before America suffers its own Fukushima, it too should ask, not whether unfinanceably costly new reactors are safe, but why build any more, and why keep running unsafe ones. China has suspended reactor approvals. Germany just shut down the oldest 41% of its nuclear capacity for study. America's nuclear lobby says it can't happen here, so pile on lavish new subsidies.
A durable myth claims Three Mile Island halted U.S. nuclear orders. Actually they stopped over a year before--dead of an incurable attack of market forces. No doubt when nuclear power's collapse in the global marketplace, already years old, is finally acknowledged, it will be blamed on Fukushima. While we pray for the best in Japan today, let us hope its people's sacrifice will help speed the world to a safer, more competitive energy future.
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49 Comments so far
Show AllJapanese electric wind turbines survived the earthquakes and tsunamis just fine, and have been asked to ramp up their output where possible to help with electric shortfalls.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/japan-wind-turbines-survive-earthquake-unscathed.php
I have not heard a peep about this on M$M, has anyone else heard it mentioned?
The problem is that Congress and Obama wont do what should be done: take away ALL subsidies and tax breaks from oil. coal and nuclear and give them to alternative energy systems.
But of course, that would involve going up against the whole military-industrial-financial-fossil-fuel complex and the whole Imperial agenda. So in the end, this problem is totally intertwined with the entire insane, dead-end course the elites have put this country on. You cant solve one aspect of the problem without solving all of them: no intelligent alt.energy policy, endless wars, Wall St and MIC control of the government, need for election finance reform, no free democratic media and etc.
I agree, but green energy technology like wind and solar cannot supply the growing population and its growing economy. Only fossil fuels can put out that amount of electricity per unit. The solution is to peacefully reduce the human population with family planning education and safely recycle 100% of all waste and garbage. But I can't get anyone to talk about it, which is odd, because a smaller human population could not support the gigantic corporations and the huge bureaucracies. Only a growing number of people hooked into a growing wage & debt slave economy can produce the growing profits the big boys need to go on being ever more powerful game players.
Enough solar energy strikes the surface of the Earth each day to power the entire world's economy for 800 years.(Gore, 2010) All we have to do is build the infrastructure to capture and convert a tiny fraction of that and it solves global warming and nuclear contamination.
Planet Earth is a living, breathing biosphere that is slowly cooling and shrinking with each volcano and earthquake, so it cannot support a relentlessly growing and polluting human population, no matter what sources of energy are exploited. The people should be informed of their choice: live in peace and balance, or suffer ecocide and self-extinction. To survive two things must be accomplished as soon as possible:
1. Safely recycle 100% of all waste and garbage.
2. Peacefully reduce the human population with family planning education.
The people need to know, before it's too late.
Our current War-mongering and auto-addicted lifestyle is quite simply unsustainable by any means. Climate Change is only 1 factor amongst many examined
in "Limits to Growth" first written in 1972. Before Climate Change (as Limits to
Growth puts it - the "sink" for wastes from endless material economic growth)
sets in we have already begun to hit the barrier of "Peak Oil" as we have
in all likelihood consumed half the oil on Earth. Nuclear is NOT a solution, not only
because of its enormous multibillion dollar costs, nuclear wastes which last forever,
incredible risks as seen in Chernobyl and now Fukushima - but also because
there is "Peak Uranium" - uranium is not a renewable resource it will run out in
50-100 years if used for large-scale energy generation.
So why is nuclear touted as a solution at all to our energy and global warming problems? Because with nuclear electricity powering personal 2 ton electric cars
the powers that be can continue centralized control of energy, selling still more
cars, McMansion developments, strip malls without changing any Business As Usual.
But it is not sustainable for any lengthy period of time.
Capitalism can also continue its cancerous growth addiction at the cost of the
Earth and all natural systems and continue the con game that by having an infinitely growing pie, it doesn't matter about distribution of the pie if everyone
gets a larger slice of a growing pie.
But that deceit is already being exposed as people around the world face
higher food prices, energy prices and even affluent Americans are losing their
jobs, their homes, their savings and in unprecedented numbers forced to get
food stamps, community food kitchen meals, etc.
Unfortunately Amory Lovins, despite his good work in other areas, seems totally blind to the realities of peak oil and in particular auto addicted development.
He has been a ceaseless purveyor of the electric car as the answer from his
secluded Rocky Mountain Institute lair, totally unreachable by any public green
transit. How will the enormous energy, as much energy as a house for each
electric car, be supplied for electric cars to reach his redoubt or to travel
all over the US?
Wars of course are the worst waste of all with no benefits whatsoever except to
insure that those who can afford it will get all the resources they need, of course
along with a huge feast of monopoly Corporate profits at taxpayers expense.
BTW, have you seen the video-documentary from The Post Carbon Institute "300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-J91SwP8w
Harvesting of "vertical winds" (updrafts) is also possible in Japan, a country rich in Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE).
The technology for harvesting this is the Atmospheric Vortex Engine, which can be made immune to damage from seismic activity, due to its simplicity -- http://vortexengine.ca
If one of these were build as a line of defense for each nuclear reactor, a continuous supply of electricity to power cooling pumps could be assured, even in the event of a "station blackout" catastrophe. As protection against tsunami, it would be built 2 km from the coast with a seawall in the shape of a ships hull, <__>, surrounding it.
Ultimately, by deploying the AVEs everywhere, REPLACING NUKES, Japan could recover COMPLETELY from this catastrophe well within a decade.
the MSM shills continue to "reassure" the stupid merkins. Trouble is that most merkins will believe the reassurance.
Most merkuns that I know are so brainbwashed by the media that when the Japanese nuclear meltdown started ,they were on the edge of their seats waiting for the media to reassure them that "it can't happen here".
Now thay are all waiting to hear the media tell them that this event won't slow down new US nuclear power plant construction, since they are all convinced by the media that the lights will go out without more nukes.
What we have learned is that nuclear technology is every bit as dangerous and problematic as its critics say. I know we need the energy and that coal is messy and polluting too, but nuclear is spookier, like a psycho genie that gets out of its bottle and swirls around destructively and can't be stopped.
Wonder how many people will end up being irradiated before they get this thing under control (assuming they ever do).
I think the best way to stop nuclear power revival is to attack it as expensive compared to solar and wind and hydro.
Cost: building the plant, storing the spent fuel, clean up after an accident, just to name a few.
The real cost involves storing the spent fuel rods. At present they are stored in swimming pools on-site. The government has been trying to build a permanent storage facility (permanent used to mean 10 half-lives, which would be a quarter-million years, but now is set at a few thousand years, since that is more palatable). But politics has prevailed. No one wants the facility in their backyard, so it has not been done.
I thought the permanent stash was supposed to be in some remote out-of-the-way hole in the desert mountains of Nevada, but nobody wants it even there, and who can blame them. In the case of this stuff, NIMBY is the only sane response.
Human ingenuity at its most amazing: powering things with something that produces a waste product hazardous to the health of every living thing that nobody knows what to do with.
Fun times ahead.
The Permanent "stash" was suppossed to be in Nevada, because the population is so low it has only one or two members in the House of Representatives. Even the two senators did not have enough clout to kill it - until Harry Reid became Senate Majority leader. Then it got killed.
That is probably good because the Nevada Test Site (on which it was to be built) is moderately seismically active. Even small earthquakes will eventually crack the containers the wastes are in.
But the whole thing is up in the air as long as Reid has the clout he has.
I live near Yucca Mountain on the other side of Death Valley. There are huge mountains all around here which indicates seismic activity and tectonic plate movement. If you climb a peak near Yucca Mountain and look across the desert plain you can see that it is dotted with small volcanic cones that are much younger than the other mountains around. There is one near where I live that is dated to be 800-1000 years old. Yucca Mountain was selected when Las Vegas had a couple of hundred thousand people. Now a couple of million live there and Yucca Mountain will never accept one trainload of used fuel rods. It's over.
GE owns NBC. General Electric stock has been dropping for the past few days with literally billions in value wiped out. The Media has to ensure that they sell to citizens of the USA the "Nuclear Power is Safe" message.
There was a news story where a graduate student was heating one of the zirconium tubes trying to show how resistant they are. Sort of bypassing the logic that for radioactive particles to escape those tubes must have gone some kind of decomposition.
How blind can we be? It is as though the devil is calling in his Faustian bargain
I find the idea abhorrent that a large media corporation such as NBC can be owned by another corporation, whether GE or any other corporation or holding company. But then I find the idea of one corporation owning another abhorrent and can see no public interest in allowing such a practice.
It is time to talk about emancipating NBC and other media companies so that the media are only owned by real living people. And this should be done in a way so as to spread out the ownership as much a practical.
Keep in mind that GE is not the corporation you think it is. It does build reactors and airplane engines, but most of its money is made in the financial industry.
Westinghouse, the other US nuclear power station builder, owned CBS five years or so ago. I don't know if they still do. More recently, Tokyo Electric Power Company bought Westinghouse.
Japan's deadly game of nuclear roulette
By LEUREN MORET
Special to The Japan Times
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20040523x2.html
Kei Sugaoka, a former GE nuclear field engineer, on To the Point (3/18/2011), said GE employees were in Fukushima's nuclear reactors when the earthquake struck and that they all quickly left and flew back to the US. Warren Olney, host of To the Point, did not follow up on that statement.
That filthy jackass, Rand Paul, says that the dangers of nuclear energy are overblown and he wants to get rid of the nuclear regulatory agency!!! Just let the nuclear industry regulate itself, ha, ha. Ship Rand Paul to Fukushima or let's store the spent fuel rods under his house or up his anus.
JJ,
The NRC is recognized world wide as the "gold standard" regulatory agency for nuclear power. I agree with you that abolishing or defanging the NRC would be most foolhardy.
Bill
I wonder if Rand Paul would agree that if the Nuclear Regulatory Agency were to be disbanded, the financial subsidies and insurance provided by the government would also be eliminated. Run that one past GE and Westinghouse and see how many more reactors would be built.
Notr too long ago I had an exchange with someone here about the subsidies, including insurance and the 'promise' to find a place to dispose of the waste. That person refused to see that the real problem is the subsidies. I know Ron Paul would get rid of the subsidies even before he got rid of the NRC, what the son thinks I have no idea.
So help me out. If/when the plutonium blasts into the atmosphere, does that not constitute the end of life as we have known it? Don't mean to be flippant at all but are not most of these discussions about the future a bit out of perspective.
Will the survivors end up thanking the nuke pushers for finally solving the thorny population "problem"?
Already very hard to look into the eyes of the many mothers around here.
TH,
The weapon that was dropped on Nagisaki used plutonium for its nuclear fuel. Not all of the plutonium was fissioned in that weapon. The fallout from that weapon included a significant amount of plutonium as well fission fragments. (The fission fragments are the major source of radiation for several decades after a nuclear detonation. In the long term the plutonium will dominate after the fission fragments decay away.)
The same can be said for all of the above ground nuclear tests that were conducted by the US, USSR, Great Britain, China and France before the test ban treaty if the weapons were plutonium based. Today traces of plutonium can be detected in soil samples around the globe. Essentially, plutonium does not exist in the natural world.
The human population appears to be continuing to expand. In the developed world, life expectancy continues to grow as well.
Bill
Thanks Bill. That helps the understanding a bit.
Are " fission fragments" dust?
I know this is not a bomb designed to blow into smithereens but a quarter ton of plutonium sitting amongst a run away meltdown fire remain persistently disconcerting.
Is this current multi meltdown not a worlds first in several respects?
TH,
When either uranium or plutonium fissions you get the pieces of the broken atom in addition to a whole bunch of energy. Normally, you will get 2 large pieces from each atom fissioned. These pieces or fission fragments are individual atoms of any of about 60 different elements (actually, to be technical, they are highly charged ions). Xenon and strontium are 2 fairly common fragments.
These individual atoms are extremely hot and very radioactive. If the fissioning takes place in the air rather than in a reactor, the individual atoms will be scattered. As they slowly gather together or attach to dust in the atmosphere, they will become radioactive dust and eventually settle down to the surface but may circle the globe before doing so. Any plutonium or uranium which was not 'busted' by fissioning will likewise be vaporized and condense as dust.
In a properly functioning nuclear reactor, the fission fragments remain inside the cladding package and do not even get into the coolant. When a uranium or plutonium atom is fissioned, in addition to the fission fragments you get a couple of neutrons out of the busted atom. These neutrons pass right through the cladding material and can do some mischief in a reactor. If you have radioactivity in a nuclear reactor after the fuel bundles are removed (and you normally do) it is because of the mischief of these neutrons.
Although the problems in Japan are not as serious as the accident at Chernobyl, yes this is the first time that more than one reactor has been involved in a serious accident at a time. One of the lessons learned from this accident I am sure will be not to put reactors so close together.
Bill
Think of Nevil Shute's novel "On the Beach."
You know I can't hear you with these uranium pellets in my ears!
Ironic, is it not, that the head of GE, whom Obama recently named as among his leading consultants, is surnamed ImMELT.
*****
Meanwhile, drolltroll writes, "In the developed world, life expectancy continues to grow..." This would not be true, were it not for the fantastic expense of "life-support" systems paid for by the likes of Medicare.
We really do need formal "death panels," instead of the informal systems we now use to "pull the plug." Or, as the old injun says in Little Big Man, "today is a good day to die."
Interesting, too, how pundits say things like, "the amount of radiation released is less than the background radiation," while the level of the "background radiation" keeps increasing...or, "the amount of radiation exposure from this release is less than you receive from an X-ray," as though the latter is safe. (And who makes those expensive diagnostic machines they use in hospitals to identify difficult illnesses: GE!)
But what do we expect from an American constituency that believes in the existence of a god they cannot substantiate. Don't worry; be happy. Take another pill.
Has there REALLY been a run on potassium iodide pills in the U.S.? Save the thyroids, shrivel your testicles.
Oh well, gotta go fill out my 1040. Over and out out out damn spot.
-30-
"Ironic, is it not, that the head of GE, whom Obama recently named as among his leading consultants, is surnamed ImMELT."
____________________
I believe the family shortened it from "Imminentmeltdown" when they emigrated to Amerika from the Old Country.
Best article I've seen so far that completely debunks the meme that the transition to sustainable energy sources can't be done without nuclear, and coal. Obama being the principle proponent of that meme as one of the worst Republican presidents of my lifetime. (yes I know it is not just a party thing, but i like calling Obama a Republican)
Amory Lovins would make a great Secretary of Energy.
I could support that.
While Secretary, maybe he could declare all (non-medical) nuclear materials to be contraband, and, after throwing those having actual possession in jail (plant workers), throw the executives of the corporations they work for in jail after them.
Hopefully, the latter will have received much longer sentences.
In other news.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T101004003493.htm
>>Stuxnet, a computer virus designed to attack servers isolated from the Internet, such as at power plants, has been confirmed on 63 personal computers in Japan since July, according to major security firm Symantec Corp.
>>The virus does not cause any damage online, but once it enters an industrial system, it can send a certain program out of control.
The creation of Stuxnet was attributed to US and Israeli Intelligence in an attempt to thwart the Nuclear power program in Iran.
Is it possible it has escaped from Iran and now infects systems worldwide?
GwNoth asks:
"Is it possible [the Stuxnet virus] has escaped from Iran and now infects systems worldwide?"
No, it is not possible.
Carefully human-engineered complex systems never do unintended things.
That's why the pro-nuke crowd laughs at us Luddites: we are so ignorant about the reality of carefully human-engineered complex systems, which always function as their designers intended.
"... we are so ignorant about the reality of carefully human-engineered complex systems, which always function as their designers intended."
_________________________
Technophiliacs are also often outraged or exasperated at something else we "Luddites" ignorantly or foolishly refuse to get: that the objective, linear, cumulative methods of science and engineering are phenomenally self-correcting and self-improving.
In their eyes, we doubters and skeptics wallow in the error of dwelling on failure and catastrophe. By training and inclination, the confident scientist or engineer is constrained to downplay and diminish the negative and tragic elements of technical debacles, and instead perceive them as useful feedback.
You know, like the popular misconception that the Chinese word for "crisis" also means "opportunity".
From this perspective, moaning and groaning about horrors like Chernobyl, Fukushima et al seems hysterical and short-sighted. True Believers know that Science and Engineering, and associated technical disciplines, learn from the most unfortunate mishaps and study them assiduously with the goal of implementing improvements and fixes.
And of course, there's ample evidence to "prove" the legitimacy of this perspective-- if one selects the right carefully-punctuated examples. Thomas Edison's famous trial-and-error methods alone seem to make an absolute and irrefutable case for the technocrats' argument that "if at first we don't succeed, or even if we spectacularly fail once in a while, we must try, try again!"
In short, they buy into an intellectualized strain of the post-Enlightenment tradition once expressed as the naïve popular faith in Progress.
You remember "progress", don't you? It's General Electric's most important product!
If one is psychologically-- and yes, emotionally-- invested in this notion of scientific progress, it's natural and inevitable to take the "long view" in promoting large-scale scientific and technical solutions, and decrying faint-hearted "Luddites" who superstitiously cling to pessimism and doubt.
Some might carp disapprovingly of "intellectual hubris". But if mankind paid heed to such pessimists, millions of satisfied travelers wouldn't be zipping around the globe in enormous dirigibles every day!
Big Nuke and Big Oil receive taxpayer funding, then use it to bribe their politician backers and to hire shills to post disinformation on CD, thanx to the SCOTUS cons. We should have a voters initiative and referendum to fire the RATS, Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia for destroying our democracy.
webwalk:" The pro nuke crowd laughs at luddites: we are so ignorant about the reality of carefully human engineered complex systems, which always function the way their designers intended." Citizens against nuclear weapons have the common sense to know the truth. Technology, nuclear especially, has brilliant engineers without wisdom. Americans need to understand that students are being taught what will make them employable for corporations and not wisdom or critical thinking to know what is important for the common good.
I see solar and wind locked in an innovative race with each other to make regions of the country self-sufficient. Both forms of power can be improved.
Moore's law forecasted a doubling in computer chip power every 18 months, and this law stood for about 30 years so far. I can see solar and wind improving in cost-efficiency about 8% per year for at least a decade. In response, petroleum production will probably adapt by surviving in some niche market or other, or maybe the Saudis will cut their prices and still be rich, but nuclear is just a dead corpse laying in a coffin hoping for Dr. Frankenstein's jolt of reanimation.
Amory Lovins' organization RMI has *never* bought into the lie that nukes are necessary in order to combat global warming. That is why RMI is one of my favorite environmental organizations.
One of the biggest lessons should be that accidents can happen, and advice such as evacuations or "stay at home and don't breathe much" are as useless as FEMA's recommendation that we use duct tape ad plastic sheeting.
I doubt we'll ever totally get rid of nuclear plants, but until we do, they may not have problems often, but the risk of death when they do is tremendous.
If the plant near NY City goes critical, how ya going to evacuate 21 million people?
Same issues are serious regarding a rad, bio, or chem attack (or accident).
There is a solution: http://www.rbcshield.com
These tiles are proven to be effective at protection, only the inventor hasn't been able to get the Feds to pay attention and fund their development.
Check out the website, and demand your reps pay attention. Ask the media to cover the real story. Network using social media. We need to be able to make safe rooms.
I'd imagine the 300,000 people evacuated or stuck in their homes in Japan would agree.
And what did we learn from the Three Mile Island or Chernobyl disasters? Those who should be learning aren't and those who have learned through bitter self-experience aren't listened to. The bottom line is always the same: profits before anything else.