I wrote this article for possible publication in Nautilus Institute’s NAPSNET newsletter about three months ago. Several individuals who read the manuscript, however, noted that my understanding of the technologies involved was mistaken and also suggested that I had not properly assessed the accident because of rather unreliable materials available on the internet.
I decided not to publish the article, but I do think the concept of an alliance for cooperation in the development of technologies to address environmental threats is worthy of consideration. I am placing the manuscript here in the hope that I may solicit the opinions of everyone.
Emanuel Pastreich
September 4, 2011
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“Our Shared Responsibility: A Global Effort is required to Address the Fukushima Crisis and Rebuild the Tohoku Region”
Emanuel Pastreich
Introduction
The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has reached the point that the entire international community must come together to formulate and implement a solution. We have an obligation to collect together the best of our technology and know-how, as well as the most of our compassion and tenacity to respond to one of the greatest challenges of our age.
Such problems as how to effectively cool the three damaged reactors and deal with the large quality of radioactive water that has collected is no longer the problem of TEPCO but of the entire international community. We must formulate a long term strategy for a permanent solution to the damaged reactors and must bear in mind that there is no off-the-shelf solution. The fact that we still do not know the full consequences of this nuclear disaster should not stop us from putting together a wide-reaching coalition to plan for a permanent solution that will require decades of research, development and implementation.
We must act now. We must innovate, and innovate quickly, to come up with solutions to a problem that may exceed previous challenges faced by humankind. We face technological challenges that go beyond the limits of modern science. Like the space race of the 1960s, the response to the Fukushima disaster may be a boon to the development of new technologies and new applications of existing technologies. The first step is a profound international commitment to protecting the global environment which is, to use a phrase of William James that has been invoked by U.S. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter, “The moral equivalent of war.” We are not talking about more speeches, but active coalitions of researchers around the world who will work together on a daily basis to come up with effective solutions and break up the complex task into sections that can be worked on around the world.
We need to put together research teams and coordinated laboratories to work round the clock to respond to the needs of this crisis. Experts need to bring together their expertise without concern for intellectual property rights or personal fame to address this issue. The effort will be the equivalent of the Manhattan Project in reverse. The problem of creating a permanent stable condition within the reactors will require us to employ a variety of known technologies, and develop new ones in global cooperative effort.
Many of the problems we observe in Japanese policy and the current Japanese response are not unique to Japan, but represent a general trend of increased laxity with regard to environmental safety in recent years. The origins of the problem originate in part from lack of interest of citizens in infrastructure issues and in part from an unhealthy emphasis on short-term profit over long-term security in advanced societies. Such trends are by no means unique to Japan and the Japanese case should be a warning to us all.
What we need to do:
We should put together a team of the top experts, and top laboratories, from around the world, not only in nuclear safety and disaster relief, but also in new materials, oceanography, nanotechnology and biotechnology, agriculture and toxicology to contribute their experise.
This crisis should be at the top of all their agendas and these experts should be approached regularly for their input and their assistance. We need immediately a series of global conferences to discuss how the international community can contain the radiation from the leaking reactors and how we can finance the long-term clean up of the plants. We must bring together experts on the environment and nuclear safety to compare notes on the response from multiple perspectives.
We need a commitment of resources and expertise comparable to the United Nations response to the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, in which the danger of the situation is clearly recognized as a global security threat. Funds should be made available for research and development over the long period and also for the design and construction of the final products that will be employed to respond on site. Planning will be complex, involving a mapping out over the next forty years of which technologies we anticipate will be available at which point in history. The point being that the complex challenges should be seen as a totality and planning for its solution will require integrated efforts.
We must put in place sophisticated radiation detection systems to assure long-term safety for the region. In many cases, these will be new devices designed specifically for the task. The detection systems must be accurate, open to the public and extremely sensitive. In addition, the entire field of radiation toxicology should be a target for massive investment globally. Hand-held geiger counters should be subsidized and made generally available to the public.
We need teams of experts from around the world to develop more effective new materials to block the spread of radiation. New barriers to block and absorb radioactive particles will be made from specially designed materials, engineered at the nano-scale. New approaches to treating contaminated water must be developed. Perhaps some system for separating out radioactive water molecules can be developed. Exactly what its nature would be might take years of work, but the treatment of contaminated water (radioactive and otherwise) is one of the most critical security issues for the 21st century and should certainly receive more investment of funds than far less critical issues like missiles and tanks. We need to set the development of new barriers around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant in the next two years as our goal and then muster the assets and the vision.
We need robots that can carry out extremely sophisticated tasks equivalent to that of a human in highly radioactive environments. Such robots are required to clean up Fukushima, a process that has been hobbled by the inability of humans to work directly on site. The adverse effect of radiation on electric circuits has made the use of robots quite limited. But an international team with sufficient resources, rushing against the clock to employ existing technologies, may be able to build new prototype robots that can conduct complex tasks in the face of extreme radiation. Indeed, such a team may well be able to make breakthroughs that would not be possible under the circumstances of normal commercially driven R&D. The use of alternative systems for controlling robots over distance and relaying information from inside a highly radioactive environment has not been taken seriously as a topic. We do not have robot moles, for example, that can bore into the ground and check on leaks from beneath the earth. Development of such tools should be a high priority globally.
The current emergency response should be supplemented by research teams to come up with solutions to problems related to the leakage of radioactive material into the ocean and air, the long term treatment of the reactors and strategies for working in radioactive environments. Some of those responses should be immediate, but others should be in 5 to 10 year projections. The sophisticated creation of virtual scenarios to help analyze those aspects of the crisis which are otherwise invisible will also be critical, making virtual world representations essential to the project.
We can fully exploit new IT capacity to link together research teams all over the world to attack this problem from multiple sides, breaking up the task and coordinating between teams using video conferences and internet-based collaborative programs to come up with solutions faster. Whether it is biotechnology solutions to reduce radiation, or experimental filters to trap floating ions, there is as much room for experimentation available in this project as in the Apollo Program and at least as much possibility for the development of spin-off technologies.
We need to deal with the threat to agriculture and aquaculture posed by the massive release of radiation into the air, soil and water. We have no idea how much radiation will be released in the decades to come, but we know that already there is much land around the nuclear plants that cannot be used for the production of food, with terrible consequences for the local communities. A new generation of enclosed vertical farms especially designed to shield the plants within should be developed that will permit farmers to grow foods on location that can be consumed within the areas contaminated.
For that matter, we have no technology that allows us to restore contaminated farmland to agricultural usage before the radioactive materials contaminating that land have reached a harmless level. But, there has never been a concentrated attempt to bring together the full range of current technology to address this issue. We do not know what is possible, but the topic deserves a large-scale effort.
The same vertical approach should be employed with regards to the devastated fishing industry. Moreover, fishing communities have been devastated by the accident. Vertical farms for aquaculture have been developed in Norway and elsewhere and could be modified to permit the fishermen impacted by this disaster to once again raise and catch fish for a livelihood.
Finally, we must rethink the concept of Intellectual property, recognizing from the start that our purpose is not to derive profit, but rather to address an international crisis. Our innovations must be in the public domain and the benefits should be shared with those around the world who will have to wrestle with such challenges in the future.
Reconsider the meaning of “security” in Northeast Asia
This nuclear crisis is significant in that it poses a security threat to East Asia that is palpable, but is not a military conflict. In Fukushima we have come face to face with the future of security: environmental degradation. Such a common threat can serve to unify the nations of Asia in response to challenges that go beyond traditional conflict between state players. We can create a mood conductive to greater peaceful integration if we can bring together the thinkers on security to work together to address threats like pollution and energy instability as the primary threats of our age. Catastrophes are emerging as the primary security issue for mankind in the 21st century. We see in the case of Fukushima, and also in the case of the Deep Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, profound catastrophic events which our militaries and security systems are completely unequipped to respond to.
If we can build a consensus in East Asia that in the future the military will devote much, even most, of its efforts to preventing, and responding to environmental catastrophes, perhaps we create a new definition of “national security” and a new generation of military officers in Japan, Korea, China, Mongolia, the United States and elsewhere who are trained in environmental sciences and see the environment as the primary part of their portfolios. Such a shift in perspective would relieve tensions in Northeast Asia and usher in an age of mutual prosperity and integration. We call on the nations of Northeast Asia to pledge a substantial portion of their future military budgets to support environmental security, starting with a major initial investment in the response to Fukushima and the retrofitting of existing nuclear facilities.
Let us put together globally the equivalent of Franklin Denlonore Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps that played such a critical role during the depression era: military forces dedicated to the service of environmental preservation. The Civilian Conservation Corps created hundreds of thousands of jobs during the depression, employing men in the replanting of forests that had been depleted or clear-cut by the timber industry. This challenge calls upon us to imagine a response that will remake our global institutions and address this crisis with the commitment that it deserves.