Seems to me the biggest lesson to be learned from Japan's tsunami event is not that man-made defences are useless against nature at its worst, but that building nuclear power plants in active quake zones is an act of environmental lunacy.
Just as people on the east coast of Honshu discovered at their peril that 6m seawalls are no protection from 10m tidal waves, so the Tokyo Electric Power Co found the supposedly failsafe mechanisms at their Fukushima plant inadequate in coping with such enormous stress.
But surely it doesn't take a nuclear scientist to figure out that building reactors on flat coastal land next to the world's most active oceanic trench is inviting disaster.
Hmmm. Maybe the nuclear scientists were the wrong people to give advice. Maybe they and their bosses were more concerned with being "cost-effective".
And maybe whatever plate tectologists might have whispered into governmental ears - presuming any did - was ignored for expediency. Lesson learned, eh?
Mind you, there are many folk who think nuclear power is madness no matter where it's located - and, given the potential hazards, that's hard to argue against.
Still, about 15 per cent of the world's electricity (30 per cent in Japan) is nuclear-generated. At December 2009, there were 436 active nuclear plants spread across 31 countries - some of which, like Argentina, might surprise.
The first nuclear reactor was built in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project to make fuel to power the first atomic bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to end World War II.
Commercial nuclear power came on-stream in 1956 at Calder Hall in Cumbria, and the number of stations grew quickly throughout the 1960s-80s. But with the accidents at Three Mile Island (US) and Chernobyl (USSR) the pace of nuclear expansion first slowed then halted, peaking at 444 operating reactors in 2002.
However while the current crisis at Fukushima may cause projects to pause to take on its lessons, climate change response has brought a new push for nuclear power due to its perceived lack of greenhouse emissions.
This renaissance is also driven by rapid Asian economic growth. There are 52 plants under construction world-wide, 28 of these in China alone, and the Chinese have plans for 150 more. India, South Korea, and Taiwan are also expanding nuclear capacity.
But is this a false dawn?
To date 123 plants have been closed, after an average 22 years' operation. To give that perspective, the planned new builds will barely maintain current global capacity, especially as their estimated 40-year life appears generous.
Moreover the build-cost of new plants now exceeds US$4000 ($5211) per installed kilowatt, putting nuclear generation at the top-price end of the scale. Meanwhile, some 50,000 metric tons of radioactive waste has been stockpiled in the US alone - waste no one has yet figured out how to properly dispose of and which remains lethal for thousands of years.
And the eight major nuclear power-plant accidents before Fukushima have cost some 5000 lives and an estimated US$15 billion in damage.
Perhaps the killer blow is that known reserves of uranium will only last another 70-80 years at current usage rates - making nuclear as much of an approaching dead-end as oil.
Fission, that is. Fusion, or thorium breeders for that matter, are other stories.
However what struck me about the Fukushima situation is that, like my wife, many people will be going, "How come the Japanese are so slack with safety? These are the guys who got bombed, after all ..."
Yep. But any dirty industry pretending to be clean will pull all sorts of strings. And I'd bet TEPCO pulled quite a few, wouldn't you?
Now, New Zealand lies along the same "rim of fire" as Japan. The Christchurch quake has reinforced that.
Yet National has been quietly manipulating opinion to favour nuclear generation - and in a recent poll some 40 per cent of Kiwis gave fission a tentative thumbs up.
Ah, hello! Perhaps those who did might like to consider that there are no existing international standards governing nuclear power plants.
So, which model would we like? The dodgy Russian one? The unproved Chinese one? Or the cautious safety-conscious Japanese one?
Some iodine-131 with your sushi, sir?
That's the right of it.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
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