Back on board–kinda

So, what did I miss while touring Australia’s South Island (a.k.a. Tasmania.  Photo post to come.)

Labor in more than a spot of bother with refugees; Labor and Gillard’s popularity still down.  Ho hum: there is obviously not going to be any change for Labor until they have some sort of circuit breakers of success; we all know the government is going to look ineffectual until something starts to appear to be a decent policy well implemented.    Could Gillard be the opposite of Rudd:  too reliant on her Ministers working out the details when the country really wants to know what they are?  Time will tell, I guess.

The PM’s de facto having a chat with the Empress of Japan:  I bet he never saw this future role for himself 5 years ago.   I do wish they would marry – Tim and Julia, I mean, not Tim and the Empress.  While some would bemoan this as a cynical move to reverse the popularity slide, all conservatives should rightly welcome it as a good example for the institution of marriage, and visited Asian royalty and leaders would no doubt be much relieved.   But while ever they continue to do things like attend a royal wedding, they keep inadvertently bolstering the image of opportunism if they were to marry soon afterwards.   Who cares – just do it, I say.

Andrew Bolt still banging on about Fukushima not being such a bad thing because no one has (yet) died of radiation.  Meanwhile, in Japan, where the 80,000 odd people who had to leave the 20 km evacuation zone have been given 5 hours to collect stuff from home before the enforced exclusion from the zone, and people in the band of higher contamination to the north west well outside of the evacuation zone have been told to leave their towns within the month, they might feel somewhat less sanguine about nuclear power.

(OK, let’s assume the Japanese government is being overly cautious.  Yet they are acting on scientific advice, and hey, would Andrew Bolt or Gavin Atkins move back into the area with his own children if that was the advice being given?   Look – Atkins is right to bemoan anti nuclear drama students that even want to shut down the small, medical isotope providing facility at Lucas Heights; but fair’s fair.   Stop acting as if the indefinite abandonment of huge swathes of land and townships – a 20 km radius is a lot of area, and there are towns 30 or more km away about to be largely abandoned too – is just worth a shrug of the shoulders.   Your much proclaimed low number of radiation deaths comes at a very, very high human and economic price – in both Chernobyl and now Fukushima.) 

As for other areas of the world which might have some major human issues if there is a nuclear accident – Nature ran an interesting article pointing out that many plants are much closer to large population areas:

An analysis carried out by Nature and Columbia University, New York, shows that two-thirds of the world's 211 power plants have more people living within a 30-kilometre radius than the 172,000 people living within 30 kilometres of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, who have been forced or advised to leave. Some 21 plants have populations larger than 1 million within that radius, and six have populations larger than 3 million.

Yet working out the risk position of such areas is complicated, as the rest of the article argues.  Well worth a read.  I would say it largely supports my hunch:  smaller nuclear is better; passive safety should now be the over-riding feature of future design.  (And keep them away from large population centres anyway.)

Speaking of Andrew Bolt – remember him pooh-poohing the European flight bans last years during the Icelandic volcanic eruptions?  Because computer modelling was used to try to track the ash?   (As someone else already noted, this was a ridiculous comparison of climate models with computer forecasts for a few day’s of wind; but Andrew is very opportunistic with his anti-modelling line.)   Well, a couple of scientists have published a paper begging to differ.   The ash stayed dangerous for a long time.  (And I am betting there was no easy way to track its precise path in the sky.)  

It seems it doesn’t matter what safety issue it is – radiation, volcano ash, climate change – the right of politics has taken such an ideological position against AGW that it distorts their attitude to all other issues of public safety too.  

Conservative politics hasn’t always been like this – they used to like and trust science, I think.  One day it will swing back that way, but it seems a long, long way off in the future.