Canada’s classy cool on the Japanese nuclear emergency

Last week, western governments scrambled to keep up with the direst scenarios about the nuclear emergency in Japan. Canada didn’t and stands out for its cool.

Great Britain, France, the Czech Republic and the United States brought in chartered planes to help their nationals leave Japan. Canada only chartered two buses to move Canadians out of the hardest-hit region of Northern Japan. China effectively did the same. Harper even asserted that Canadians could decide for themselves whether what they wanted to do:

“. . . Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who said there was no evidence of any scenario that presents a risk to Canadians. He noted that Canadians who wanted to leave Japan could book flights on commercial airlines.

Click on: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-charters-buses-for-canadians-stuck-in-northern-japan/article1945870/

Canada’s modest response probably embarrassed some Canadians and probably will not improve Canada’s influence in the General Assembly of the United States. However, it showed appropriate respect for Japan and for the facts on the ground.

Nuclear power generation is not black magic. And Japan is not a secret society like the old Soviet Union. Nuclear power generation was fashioned by human ingenuity and science. Its risks are not incalculable. International and Japanese experts are freely volunteering that Tokyo and the Pacific region generally are not at risk. There is no basis to suspect that Japanese officials are systematically withholding information from their own people or ours.

Foreign citizens in Japan are free to draw their own conclusions, even assume the worst about the crisis in Japan. However, responsible national allies are not. Governments can’t respond to every scenario that makes it on CNN, the CBC, or the BBC. Japan is the world’s third biggest economy, a vigorous democracy, and a technological wonder. Furthermore, is there any place on earth more intensely sensitive to the menace of nuclear fallout?

The Japanese nuclear crisis could get worse and the area of plausible danger could have been expanded. However, the decision of so many Western countries last week to so quickly bet against Japan was uncalled for. Pandering to wild speculation doesn’t help make it easier for Japan to deal with a concrete problem and may be long remember by the Japanese Government.

Mini nuclear reactors could make green electricity possible

For a century, technology, ideology, and deep government pockets have combined to favour electricity mega projects, high costs and government monopolies. Yet, technology may again start disrupting things for the better.

The Economist Technology Quarterly of December 2010 glimpses at a way out of the Hobson’s choice of financial or environmental collapse.

“Hyperion Power Generation, a firm based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is building components for what it calls a “nuclear battery”. The refrigerator-sized Hyperion Power Module (HPM) reactor will shift much of the building from field to factory, where a controlled environment reduces costs. Also, fewer workers and families must be moved, at great expense, to distant building sites. HPMs would be delivered by truck with enough uranium to run for about ten years. They would be constructed in batches with interchangeable parts and cost about $100m each. And they need little human oversight to operate. “Forget huge—let’s make a hand-held version of a power plant,” says John Deal, the firm’s boss. Five companies, located in America, Britain, Canada, China and India, have put down deposits for an HPM.”

Click on: http://www.economist.com/node/17647651?story_id=17647651

The simplicity and scalability of small reactors, it is argued, makes them an ideal source of future demand for communities in developing and developed economies—where future demand is uncertain and investment in larger plants and transmission grids is not economic.

Various companies, labs and countries are developing small reactors.  One day soon, they could compete with the flexibility of fossil fuel and solve the daunting cost problems of other available renewable technologies: wind, solar and ever more giant nuclear reactors.

Big nuclear reactors have consistently used up the lion’s share of nuclear R & D dollars, not because big is better, but because the builders and the buyers are very big as well. In light of the continuing failure of massive public and private monopolies to control costs let alone drive them down, it is welcome that entrepreneurs in mini-nuclear reactors are coming to the fore.

The big nuclear “renaissance” is clearly stalled in North America and elsewhere. It will be interesting to see whether government’s and their entrench energy planning organizations will start looking aggressively at ways to facilitate mini nuclear reactors.