Nuclear accidents and radioactive fallout

About two weeks after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986 I was at the European offices of WHO in Copenhagen. My mission had nothing to do with nuclear power or fallout, but the entire professional staff, indeed the whole population of the Nordic nations, like the rest of Europe downwind from Chernobyl, was abuzz with the information in the media about radioactive fallout and the risks it posed. The experts on environmental health and radiation risks in WHO/EURO had a few more facts than the media, but not very much hard information. The Soviet authorities remained silent but nobody else was. A week or two later when I went on to Sweden an advisory notice had been issued to hunters: do not eat elk or reindeer meat, because these animals grazed on lichen, which selectively absorbed and metabolized radioactive caesium which was found in high concentration in the fallout from Chernobyl. Nearly 3 decades later the countryside around Chernobyl remains a no-go zone, cordoned off, no humans allowed. Now it's happened again. There is a no-go zone of 20 Km around the damaged reactors at Fukashima, and increases in radiation levels have been reported over Tokyo and elsewhere in Honshu. Increases have been detected in levels of radiation in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of North America. It seems more and more likely with every news report that the Fukashima nuclear power plant disaster will have an environmental impact at least as great as Chernobyl. Possibly it will be many orders of magnitude greater. The news seems to me to be getting worse every day; the authorities are tight-lipped but experts everywhere sound very concerned when they are interviewed. My friends the Tsunoda family, especially Humio Tsunoda's daughter Sawako Takikawa and her husband and children live in Morioka, about 75 Km away. I haven't heard from her or others in the family since an email 2-3 days after the earthquake, saying they were all well but both water and gasoline were in short supply. Like Chernobyl, this nuclear reactor disaster is due to human failings, in this case the foolish design decision to locate emergency generators that could have provided power to maintain circulating water around the fuel rods in places where they were vulnerable to the tsunami that followed the earthquake. Japan relies heavily on nuclear power and will be forced to continue doing so because there are no credible alternatives. Rocks and hard places, irresistible forces and immovable objects come to mind: if Japan's cutting-edge postindustrial economy is to be sustained nuclear power is the only realistic option. Perhaps the Japanese people will decide it simply isn't worth the risk, and may collectively decide to opt for a simpler way of life, less dependent on huge amounts of energy.

Disarray east and west

The media seem to have difficulty focusing simultaneously on two large problems on opposite side of the world, the uprising against the Libyan tyrant Qadaffi, and the earthquake, tsunami and threatened nuclear catastrophe in Japan. If I were editing Canada's national newspaper, I think I would divide the front page into two vertical columns, one on Libya, one on Japan. In long perspective, the triple whammy in Japan seems more significant than the Libyan uprising, which seems now to be settling into a protracted conflict with uncertain outcome, no-fly zone and other interventions not withstanding. It is already having some impact on energy policies in other parts of the world including Canada: the price of gasoline creeps higher almost every day; today it's $1.25/litre. True, events in Libya are probably influencing policies of ruling factions in Bahrein, Syria, Yemen, but I think these are evanescent events, whereas energy policies, especially the use or non-use of nuclear energy, requires really long-range policies and planning, measurable in decades rather than months or years. Public opinion should never direct public policy, although in Canada now, ruled by unprincipled populists who do not seem to have a 'vision' of where they want to take Canada over the next few decades, this truism probably doesn't apply. As for the current nuclear threat in Japan, it seems to have come about as a direct result of the foolish design decision to locate the emergency generators that kept the water cool around the fuel rods in a place vulnerable to tsunamis, close to sea level. Now, a few days after I started this post, things are no better: In Japan, the 'safe zone' beyond the range of dangerous levels of radiation has been extended a further 10 Km, from 20 to 30Km. In Libya, the intervening forces seem unable to prevent mayhem and bloodshed affecting civilians in besieged cities. And here in the little backwater called Canada, whose current leaders take their foreign policy directions from those of Israel, we will know by the end of the day whether there is to be another election. If there is, will it make any difference? We can hope for that at least because it's up to us, even though we can't do much about what's happening in Japan and Libya. I for one would prefer to live in a nation led by women and men with a vision of where to direct Canadian potential than one led by populists with seemingly no vision.

Springing forward

Last weekend was gloriously spring-like: uninterrupted sunshine, temperatures in high single or low double figures, no wind. There is still snow on the ground and ice covers almost all of the Canal. But all sidewalks are bare and dry, and spring is definitely in the air. Everybody has a spring in their step and a song in their heart too. This was evident when I strolled along the nearby streets and everyone I saw was nodding and smiling, often exchanging a few words of greetings or even a brief conversation. When it's really cold and blustery, everybody is insulated with winter coats, hats, scarfes covering them from top to toe and nobody has time or spare energy for such niceties. Longer days and more sunshine lift the spirits too and have undoubtedly helped lift my spirits, draw me up and out of the trough of sadness and gloom in which I've languished since Wendy died -- since well before Wendy died to be accurate; the photos of us in the last few months of Wendy's life don't show me looking happy or smiling. Of course daylight saving time came in earlier than it used to, a legacy of the Bush presidency, one of the ways he chose to be warlike. (A BBC interviewer recently asked George W Bush if in his view, the USA still occupies the moral high ground it once did -- in the days, for instance, of FDR. Bush was unable to face the question, didn't attempt to answer it). Lately I've been distracted from the long drawn out process of clearing up Wendy's papers and art work by the pleasant task of reading and constructively critiquing chapters in Karen Trollope Kumar's memoirs. So far she has sent me 13 chapters of a projected 17 or thereabouts. She's maintaining a consistently high standard in my opinion, blending the story of her discovery of Indian life, culture, medical practice, with the story of her own family's development and growth. What's more, Karen has challenged me in several Skype conversations to get out my own memoirs, dust them off and get them into better and more readable shape than they are now. So I've begun to work again on my memoirs too. The fact that Wendy's life as well as my own, is woven into the fabric of my memoirs from 1955 onward is a powerful incentive: I can't restore her to life but I hope she will live through my memories of her. I mean to try really hard to achieve this!

The earth is angry again

On March 10 Japan was shaken by one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded. The epicentre was just off the east coast of Honshu, the main island, so it was followed closely by a horrendous tsunami, 10-12 meters high when it hit the coast too soon after the tectonic plates shifted for there to be adequate warning. Our televisions have shown many dramatic pictures of both the earthquake and the tsunami. The metaphor that instantly comes to mind is of an angry earth, angry at the excesses and stupidity of humans, shaking itself as if to shake us humans off the surface, and a great wall of water washing clean the detritus of our presence. I've tried in vain to contact Sawako Takikawa and her family in Morioka; I did make email contact with her brother Masashi Tsunoda who was in New York and replied to my email with the news that he had so far been unable to get through to her on the telephone; later in the day I heard on the news that the entire northern half of Honshu is cut off by ruptures of the electric grid and toppling over of most of the cell phone towers. So I'll just have to wait patiently like everybody else, hoping that all members of that lovely family are safe and unharmed.

Karen's story

This is a pleasant time of the year. Spring hasn't actually sprung yet, but the days are perceptibly longer, there's much more radiant heat in the sun, enough so the solar heat raises the temperature in my west-facing office or study to about 30C; unless I strip down to shirtsleeves, I swelter. The downside is that snowfalls like the one we had last weekend, melt very rapidly and there are pools of water everywhere, some of them deceptively deeper than they appear. A shoe-full of ice-cold slushy water can ruin a walk in the sun. There are other grey, windy, sleety days when it's best to stay indoors.

I'm fortunate to have something that absorbs my interest totally on such days. My friend Karen Trollope Kumar has written a memoir and is sending it to me one chapter at a time for critical comment. When Karen Trollope was a final year medical student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she went to Lucknow in India to get experience of medicine in that setting. She met Pradeep Kumar, they had a 4-year courtship, much of it by correspondence like Wendy's and mine. They married in a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony; Pradeep and Karen went to Rishikesh, where the sacred river Ganges changes from a mountain torrent to a broad river. They lived for several years in an ashram. She learned Hindi and learned a lot about the culture and lives of the local people, especially the women whose lives were hard, often hazardous, punctuated by many pregnancies that sometimes ended badly for the baby, mother or both. Her own first pregnancy was complicated but ended happily with the birth of a beautiful daughter, Sonia. They came back to Canada for the birth of their second child, Raman, then returned to a town called Pauri, higher in the Himalayan foothills than Rishikesh. Pradeep ran a network of rural community clinics and Karen focused increasingly on the health of the women, also on upgrading the training and skill sets of traditional village midwives. She became increasingly interested in a common gynecological complaint of the village women that was not caused by infection or inflammation but seemingly was these women's way of "speaking through their bodies" about their unhappy lot in life, in other words it was a culturally determined disease. She wrote up this work for her PhD in medical anthropology -- an elegant and erudite thesis that I had the pleasure of reading some years ago. But the district where they were working was shaken not only by a major earthquake, but by corruption, violence, murder, threats to her life. Wisely, Pradeep insisted on getting her and their two children safely away from all this trouble. They came back to Canada. Karen now works in family medicine at McMaster University medical school. Their hearts are still in India, however: they have bought a plot of land, built a community centre, and intend to go back to live and work there when Sonia and Raman have both left the family nest. So far Karen has sent me nine draft chapters of her book. She writes very well, and after reading each draft chapter as soon as I receive it, I await the next chapter impatiently, feeling rather as I imagine Charles Dickens's readers must have felt as they awaited each chapter of his serialized novels. I know, more or less, what is still to come. Since returning to Canada they have established themselves very well in Hamilton. Pradeep and Karen have been back to India several times, and so have Sonia and Raman; they are wedded to the culture and life of India and would rather be there than here; or at the least, have a foot in both worlds. I should not, and will not, judge the book before I've read all of it. But based on what I've read so far, I'm confident that this book will interest many readers. I hope she and her agent can interest a good quality publisher in publishing it.