Explosion At Fukushima Sends Jitters Across Japan-Is Another Chernobyl In The Offing?

Fukushima nuclear power plant,
Fukushima, Japan.

The vagaries of the great earthquake that struck northeast coast of Japan on Friday afternoon are not over yet.  After the horrendous tsunami following devastating earthquake, Japan is bracing for yet another catastrophe.  This time, it is the turn of nuclear explosion. Earlier today, there has been an explosion reported in the reactor No. 1 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant sending jitters across Japan and the neighboring countries Russia, China, Korean peninsula and surrounding islands.  Though this explosion has been attributed to a minor hydrogen ignition, if the failure of the coolant system of the nuclear reactor as reported earlier is anything to go by and the ensuing high temperatures within the system are not brought under control, this could lead to a catastrophic event like nuclear meltdown.  Nuclear meltdown, a term used to describe the phenomenon of overheating of the nuclear fuel rods within the core reactor system in the absence of coolant causes fuel rods to meltdown like a molten mass, which in turn is susceptible to uncontrollable fission reaction and releases enormous amount of energy within the core system.  This triggers a series of massive explosions, breaches the steel containment vessel, and thereby releasing large amounts of radioactive nuclides such as plutonium, zirconium, cesium, and iodide among others into the atmosphere.



"Sarcophagus" of Chernobyl 4
Nuclear Reactor, Ukraine.

This, no doubt reminds one of what happened on that fateful Friday night of April 25, 1986 and the worst man-made tragedy that shook the world when two catastrophic steam explosions occurred in the Reactor Number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant located in the erstwhile Soviet Union (now in Ukraine) resulting in fire, a series of additional explosions and a nuclear meltdown releasing large amounts of radioactive elements including plutonium, iodine, strontium, and cesium into the atmosphere, the repercussions of which are being felt even today.  More than one hundred types of radioactive nuclides have been detected in the atmosphere days after the accident, says IAEA report. Nearly 200,000 people are believed to have been relocated as a result of this accident.  More than 30 firemen and emergency clean-up workers died within three months of the accident due to Acute Radiation Sickness and nearly 1800 cases of thyroid cancer have been documented in children.  Many more developed psychological disorders became addicted to widespread drinking and suicides. The effect of Chernobyl radiation was felt much of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine,  much of northern hemisphere and as far as Sweden and Finland due to northerly wind patterns.  According to IAEA, the accident at Chernobyl was approximately 400 times more potent than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  It is the sheer magnitude of nuclear explosion that is frightening and a cause for much concern. 

Radioactive cloud (Red & yellow) seen
days after Chernobyl accident spreads
across much of northern hemisphere and
Europe.

There are already several reports indicating that the radiation levels are reaching more than one thousand times above the normal near the plant site in Fukushima though the Japanese authorities later trounced these reports.  Yet the manner in which the evacuation zone is being extended from the initial 5 km to now 20 km zone certainly gives a reason for suspicion. The official communiqué of Japanese government however puts the radiation levels at about eight times to that of the normal level near ground zero. Some scientists argue that the security systems at Fukushima nuclear power plant are far more advanced than that in Chernobyl at the time of the accident and a protective dome will cover the Fukushima plant in the event of any catastrophic incident, thereby preventing any radioactive material leakage into the atmosphere.  However, it should also be noted that the more sophisticated Fukushima plant is one hundred times more powerful than the one at Chernobyl and therefore the devastation could also be huge should security systems fail.  As of now, there is very little information that is coming out of Fukushima and that the situation is still unclear.  We all pray and hope the damage will be contained and minimal if any.

Egypt: A Nation Liberated

After 30 years of oppression, Egyptians breathes freedom. Take a look…


The jubilant Egyptians celebrate in the streets of Cairo
soon after the resignation of President Mubarak was
announced on live television.

Another dictator falls and a nation is liberated from the clutches of its own favorite son!  What an irony indeed for President Hosni Mubarak, sorry, no longer the president, simply Mubarak.  I grew up watching him rule Egypt with an iron fist as he used to don the newspaper headlines almost every other day during my student days, though I kind of lost track thereafter as my priorities changed and my career shifted to different avenues of science.  But then, as a vivid follower of the current events as anybody else and being a political animal myself, I thought I share some of my observations on this historic occasion of The Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the most disgraceful exit of Mr. Mubarak and his 30-year autocratic rule as President of the most populous Arab nation, and the power of information age and the internet on the recent and ongoing modern day revolutions in Middle East, North Africa and Southeastern Mediterranean .



 

Thousands of protesters gather at Tahrir Square in Cairo demanding
the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.

At last, after 18 days of furious anti-government protests by the people of Egypt and a toll of nearly 300 (as some estimates put it), as the dusk sets in soon after the Friday evening prayers on 11th day of February 2011, the Vice President of Egypt Omar Suleiman announced the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak on national television.  A history was made and the Egypt erupts into celebration.  From Cairo to Alexandria across the  country people started jumping with joy, dancing, and honking from their cars wherever they may be.  “This is a triumph of democracy,” said one protester on live TV camera at Tahrir Square in Cairo, as I turned  my television set on to embrace the moment of history.  And they have a reason to celebrate too, for Egyptians have long been disillusioned by their rulers with their most draconian policies of the government, the tough bureaucracy, growing unemployment, the falling income levels, and rising food prices. What has really changed for Mubarak in the past two weeks is surely a warning sign for many more nervous dictators out there in the Arab world who may be watching the events unfold in Egypt and thinking one step ahead of the crowd, opined CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.   "What made this Egyptian revolution unique is that this is the most genuine, homegrown, and spontaneous uprising of people among them mostly youth and there is no involvement of any outside elements," said one television analyst. The ample television coverage provided by the international media as they always do in times of crisis when history is being made despite heavy crackdown, also helped in sending the message across to the foreign governments, especially to the West, in not backing Mubarak anymore, in gazing the public mood, in rethinking their strategies while taking positions and the position they took, and it’s loud and clear - “Step-down Mubarak.” This is also a revolution of its kind, where the internet has been used to the hilt by the demonstrators for  the first time in its history. The unfiltered access to the internet in Egypt, thanks to the CIA and the  all pervasive social networking sites like facebook and twitter further the cause as thousands of young Egyptians swamped the sites and posted impromptu messages, though the sites were later shutdown by the dictator’s regime. Interestingly, Mr Wael Ghonim, a Cairo-born Egyptian techie from Google Inc. has become a sort of figurehead of this revolution and whose facebook pages have been credited with triggering this very popular uprising.  Some even dubbed it as  a Revolutionary Revolution while Ghonim called it a Revolution 2.0. Internet thus became the virtual weapon of the demonstrators and in a way signified the furtherance of democracy, a great step forward in the region marred by decades of oppression.


Skeletal remains of victims recovered from the mass graves of the
Killing Fields of Cambodia.

Ironically, 11th  February was also the day of 32nd anniversary of the ghastly 1979 Islamic revolution of Iran, which saw the overthrow   of Iran’s monarchy under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and replaced it with an Islamic republic under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after months of protests and blodshed.  Various estimates put the death toll of Iranian revolution anywhere between 3000 to 60,000 depending on whether the estimates used are those of Islamic government or those of historians from western nations (Wikipedia). The 18- day-long Egyptian revolution comes close on the heels of 23 days long popular Tunisia’s Jasmine revolution that removed Ben Ali’s decade-old oppressive regime, which claimed more than 50 lives. Interestingly, the modern day revolutions of Egypt and Tunisia have been able to successfully replace the dictatorial regimes in rather relatively short span of time with lot less bloodshed, thanks to the information age and the internet.  In contrast, the  revolutions of the pre-internet and pre-cable era, as was the aforementioned 1979 Iranian revolution or the ruthless execution of millions of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge regime, what was aptly termed as the Killing Fields of Cambodia during the unique Cambodian revolution between 1975 and 1979, the death toll was even higher.  According to the Mapping Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) and Yale University estimates, the death toll in this massacre was at least 1,386,734 (Wikipedia). This further shows the  power of information age and internet, which is instrumental in propagating the  democratic winds of change in some of the most oppressed societies in the Arab world as well as North Africa and Southeastern Mediterranean.


The then-President Hosni Mubarak shaking hands
with US President Barak Obama during hay days
in office.

One possible successor to Mubarak if and when the elections are held could be the Egyptian opposition leader Mohammad ElBaradei, a Nobel Laureate and English speaking former head of United Nation’s nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency  (IAEA).  Mr. ElBaradei had a long and distinguished career spanning more than 30 years in the United States and has the full backing of US, whose support Egypt needs the most in rebuilding its democratic institutions, stymied by the successive dictatorial regimes.  Reports indicate Mubarak fled from Cairo with booty of US$70 billion to a Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. The immediate priority of the successive government should be to bring this money back to the nation’s exchequer where it belongs.  According to the latest reports, Swiss government is freezing the assets owned there by Hosni Mubarak to avoid any risk of mis-appropriation of state-owned Egyptian assets. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, Mr. Mubarak!