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Here’s something good; Bloomberg News reports the radiation dangers from the Fukushima explosions have proven to be less deadly than expected.
It is two years since Japan’s 9.0- magnitude earthquake, one so powerful it shifted the position of the Earth’s figure axis by as much as 6 inches and moved Honshu, Japan’s main island, 8 feet eastward. The tsunami generated by the earthquake obliterated towns, drowned almost 20,000 people and left more than 300,000 homeless. Everyone living within 15 miles of Fukushima was evacuated; many are still in temporary housing. Some will never be able to return home.
More than 300,000 buildings were destroyed and another million damaged, including four reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the northeast coast. The earthquake caused the immediate shutdown of this and three other nuclear-power facilities. …
… And what of the lasting threat from radiation? Remarkably, outside the immediate area of Fukushima, this is hardly a problem at all. Although the crippled nuclear reactors themselves still pose a danger, no one, including personnel who worked in the buildings, died from radiation exposure. Most experts agree that future health risks from the released radiation, notably radioactive iodine-131 and cesiums-134 and – 137, are extremely small and likely to be undetectable.
Even considering the upper boundary of estimated effects, there is unlikely to be any detectable increase in cancers in Japan, Asia or the world except close to the facility, according to a World Health Organization report. There will almost certainly be no increase in birth defects or genetic abnormalities from radiation.
Even in the most contaminated areas, any increase in cancer risk will be small. …
Bloomberg had the good news, The Independent, UK with some of the bad.
Britain’s health system could slip back by 200 years unless the “catastrophic threat” of antibiotic resistance is successfully tackled, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer warns today.
In her first annual report, Dame Sally Davies says the problem of microbes becoming increasingly resistant to the most powerful drugs should be ranked alongside terrorism and climate change on the list of critical risks to the nation.
The growing ineffectiveness of many antibiotics against infection is being compounded by a “discovery void”, as few new compounds are being developed to take their place. Dame Sally calls for a string of actions to tackle the threat, which is likely to include tighter restrictions on how GPs prescribe antibiotics for their patients.
Declaring that in 20 years’ time even minor surgery may lead to death through untreatable infection, she warns: “This is a growing problem, and if we don’t get it right, we will find ourselves in a health system not dissimilar from the early 19th century.”
Although the problem of antibiotic or antimicrobial resistance has long been recognised, Dame Sally has chosen to give it new prominence, urging that the level of threat it represents to the nation as a whole needs to be sharply re-evaluated. “I knew about antimicrobial resistance as a doctor, but I hadn’t realised how bad it was or how fast it is growing,” she said. …
More bad news from Bjorn Lomborg who tells us the dirty little secrets of electric cars.
Electric cars are promoted as the chic harbinger of an environmentally benign future. Ads assure us of “zero emissions,” and President Obama has promised a million on the road by 2015. With sales for 2012 coming in at about 50,000, that million-car figure is a pipe dream. Consumers remain wary of the cars’ limited range, higher price and the logistics of battery-charging. But for those who do own an electric car, at least there is the consolation that it’s truly green, right? Not really.
For proponents such as the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio, the main argument is that their electric cars—whether it’s a $100,000 Fisker Karma (Mr. DiCaprio’s ride) or a $28,000 Nissan Leaf—don’t contribute to global warming. And, sure, electric cars don’t emit carbon-dioxide on the road. But the energy used for their manufacture and continual battery charges certainly does—far more than most people realize.
A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds. …
This is rich. The bien pensants in CA are trying to figure out how they can get oil revenue without oil exploration and drilling. Bloomberg has the story.
The only thing California’s environmentally friendly Democratic legislators prefer to regulating private industry is spending public dollars. So it’s fascinating to watch them struggle with an unfolding dilemma.
The state can tap into a gusher of new revenue only if legislators resist the muscular green lobby and allow oil companies to take advantage of vast petroleum reserves in the Monterey Shale geologic formation that runs south and east from San Francisco.
The federal government, which auctioned drilling leases in a portion of the Monterey Shale late last year, estimates that the formation holds more than 15 billion barrels of oil.
A Bloomberg report in December said that’s 64 percent of all estimated U.S. shale oil reserves and double the amount in North Dakota’s Bakken Shale and Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale combined.
The lure is enormous, but so is the likely pushback in a state where leaders are trying to craft a myopic alternative future based on subsidized “green jobs.” Historically oil-rich California has fallen to fourth in oil production in the U.S. (behind Texas, North Dakota and Alaska). …
Minyanville says we’ve seen a stock market like this before.
The stock market rally since the beginning of the year is seemingly relentless. Regardless of whether the market-related news is good or bad, stocks seem to fight their way higher day after day. This should not be mistaken as a signal for optimism about the US economic outlook, however. Instead, the recent rally is purely the byproduct of aggressive monetary stimulus from the US Federal Reserve. And recent history has shown that such rallies do not necessarily continue forever.
At the beginning of the year, the Fed added the purchase of US Treasuries to its latest QE3 stimulus program. It has been no coincidence that the market has subsequently rallied almost without interruption ever since, as the stimulus program effectively amounts to the Fed dropping off a $4.5 billion bag of cash on the doorsteps of US banks each and every trading day. Thus far, this cash has leaked its way into the stock market. But such preferences can change at a moment’s notice. …