Obama Should Push to Internationalize Fukushima Clean-Up

Posted in Events, Japan, Technology on April 29, 2011 by Matt Hutchins

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami will likely be the costliest natural disaster in history once a full account can be taken of the lives lost, the property damaged, and the consequences to the environment, all of which have been exacerbated by the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility. A total of almost 30,000 appear to be dead or missing because of the earthquake and tsunami; the health effects from the release of radiation at Fukushima are likely to remain minimal by comparison. Nonetheless, the release of millions of gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, the creation of an exclusion zone around the facility, and the possibility of many more months of emergency efforts needed to stabilize the cooling of Fukushima’s nuclear fuel are dimensions of the disaster that continue to create anxiety and cast a long shadow into the future.

The timing of the Fukushima incident has for better or worse coincided roughly with the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, the only other level 7 nuclear incident according to the International Nuclear Event Scale. Although experts will debate the comparative seriousness of Chernobyl and Fukushima into the future, the volume of nuclear fuel held at Fukushima, the level of radiation already released there, and the ongoing difficulty maintaining cooling demonstrate that it is clearly a very serious situation that could have widespread environmental effects.

However, there is a dark irony in the debate comparing the two incidents, for although many experts have been quick to conclude that Chernobyl was much more serious, there are few who have pointed out the relatively dismal failure of remediation efforts secure the safety of the Chernobyl site from the further release of radiation into the environment. Despite the universal acknowledgement of the seriousness of that accident, the Ukrainian authorities managing remediation at Chernobyl have had startling difficulties raising the billions of dollars needed to fund the construction of a new containment structure that can prevent the decrepit one currently in place from collapsing in a plume of radioactive dust.

Japan, with its massive economy and powerful export sector, certainly gives cause for hope that its ability to fund a comprehensive nuclear clean-up will be greater than that of Ukraine, which has stood on the brink of national financial crisis for years. But Ukraine is the only nation in the world to have voluntarily surrendered to foreigners a formidable nuclear weapons stockpile in the interests of global security and demilitarization. A fair trade would appear to dictate that the global community try to help with the overwhelming costs of managing a perpetual clean-up that has little hope of reaching “green field” status. If Ukraine can provide us a historical lesson, it must be that unless leadership emerges to confront a challenge to the health and environmental security of the world, Japan will be left to fend for itself in the remediation of the Fukushima site.

It is unlikely that the Japanese would ever explicitly request that an international effort be undertaken. Japanese stoicism, which was so awesomely on display in their calm handling of the recent natural disasters, would require that any sacrifice be taken before aid is requested. But regardless of how effective the Japanese response to Fukushima, the nature of such an accident is that there will be environmental consequences to neighbor countries and the entire world, with the result that total control of the remediation by the Japanese will exclude important stakeholders. Moreover, the very nature of nuclear technology has historically been that experts have frequently made important decisions affecting the public and then defended the basis for those decisions without allowing shared responsibility. That model of action has been rejected by experts in the OECD and many other nations because it generated a significant public backlash and widespread suspicion about nuclear technology, impeding the political process surrounding the approval of new nuclear projects.

An effort must be undertaken to internationalize the long-term remediation at Fukushima in order to provide transparency, accountability, and to provide assistance, and because of our close relationship with Japan, the United States should step forward as a partner in making that happen. Before that begins however, the Japanese must be persuaded to allow such an effort to go forward and to allow the international community to participate meaningfully in a process that promotes transparency and fosters consensus. That is why President Barack Obama must take the first step. The White House should engage in quiet diplomatic efforts to align the sentiments of decision makers in Japan, in its neighbors such as China, in European nations, and within the United Nations and IAEA behind a structure that can facilitate international participation in the Fukushima response.

While there are certainly significant roadblocks to the agreements needed to put an international structure in place to address Fukushima, success appears possible given the already significant openness of the Japanese government as well as the relatively great ability of the Japanese to handle the Fukushima response on their own. Furthermore, an international response to the Fukushima crisis is worth undertaking because it could create a model that could be applied in the future if a similar incident were to occur in a nation much more poorly equipped to handle such a crisis. But aside from the substantive assistance that the world can render to the Japanese, a formal international response to the crisis would demonstrate to the Japanese and the global public that environmental stewardship is a shared burden that can be better managed through collective action and cooperation among states. That is a message that might turn a frightening disaster into cause for hope.

This article was submitted for publication in the Harvard Law Record’s April 2011 issue.

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Uncertainty at the Core of Nuclear Crisis

Posted in Events, Japan, Technology with tags , , , , on March 16, 2011 by Matt Hutchins

An utter catastrophe is presently unfolding in Japan as the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi facility that were crippled by the Sendai earthquake and tsunami are believed to have suffered severe containment breaches and fuel damage in a series of explosions.  Uncertainty has permeated all aspects of the situation now, including the extent of the damage to the containment vessels, how much the radioactive fuel in the reactors has been damaged, how fires in the spent fuel storage will be contained, and the degree of danger to nearby populations from radiological release.

Fifty brave workers have remained at Fukushima to continue battling the chaos regardless of the personal danger, and the whole world watches, wondering whether these workers and other outside experts can succeed in crafting a response to the situation that will control its broader consequences.   But other questions of serious importance also hang over the ongoing crisis.  Already there has begun a global debate about whether the catastrophic failure of cooling at Fukushima calls into question the future of nuclear power around the world.  In the face of such a terrible set of disasters and a crisis that is beyond our control, people everywhere are struggling to restore a sense of stability by explaining these events within our broader historical narrative.

***

The risk of a catastrophe, whether in nuclear power or otherwise, is inherently difficult to estimate.  If adequate information were available to estimate the possibility of a catastrophic event, then we would be able to use that information to prepare for the event and avoid the catastrophe.  Thus, in a certain sense, the definition of a catastrophe is an event that exceeds all reasonably expected risks and destroys the fabric of the reality we created within prior expectations.

The disaster that struck Japan on March 11, 2011 was by any realistic estimation an utter catastrophe, out of proportion to what could have been expected to occur based on history and science.  The earthquake which hit first was a 9.0 on the contemporary momentum magnitude scale, an order of magnitude more powerful than the 8.5 quake which some appear to have expected was possible.  The tsunami which then followed struck with an overwhelming and indiscriminate force that, expected or not, was beyond all human capacity to avoid.  Although the Japanese have lived in constant awareness of their vulnerability to earthquakes and tsunamis, these events unfolded with such violence that all preparation was nullified.

The nuclear crisis which has now followed therefore rests within the context of an extraordinary blow which was dealt by natural forces.  Nonetheless, the situation at Fukushima Daiichi remains one for which mankind must assume responsibility.   As early as 1972, there were serious concerns about the vulnerabilities of early designs for boiling water nuclear reactors, such as the Mark I systems at Fukushima, that rely on active cooling systems to maintain stable core temperatures.  It is for this reason that reactors being designed and commissioned today rely on passive cooling systems that do not depend on activation by operators or powered controls and that will assume a safe equilibrium in the absence of external sources of cooling.  Despite safety concerns, reactors like those at Fukushima, designed over a half-century ago, have remained in service, partly because of their historical track record of safety and partly because of the continuing need for their power output and economic benefit.

Now the fabric of the reality which had been constructed around the safe operation of these nuclear reactors is rapidly disintegrating.  Their removal from the power grid has already begun a severe disruption in the availability of electricity in Japan’s largest cities, including Tokyo.  The specter of radioisotopes descending on these cities is driving consumers to stockpile necessary goods and seek to escape to distant safety.  The creation of an exclusion zone is forcing many to leave their homes behind, uncertain when or even whether they will be allowed to return.  And financial markets are losing confidence in the ability of the nation to overcome the challenges it faces, including massive costs for relief and reconstruction as well as tremendous loss of economic output.

The media has enjoyed unprecedented access to updates about the ongoing developments as the situation has deteriorated at Fukushima.  Direct video by helicopters, live satellite images, multiple press conferences each day by plant operators and the government, and considered commentary by experts has made this nuclear incident far more public than any prior incident of comparable severity.

But despite the openness of communication and access, uncertainty has generated frustration throughout the crisis.  There has been some of the inevitably defensive behavior by the plant’s operator, Tepco, which must be expected.  After all, scientific experts whose careers have revolved around preparing for such an incident would like to believe themselves capable of handling a crisis with professional demeanor.  There have been minor cases of minimizing the severity of damage and overstating the expectation of being able to control the situation.

However, the much greater cloud of uncertainty which appears to have limited the availability of information is one which emanates from the dangerous and chaotic situation at the Fukushima Daiichi facility itself.  The initial damage caused by the earthquake and tsunami have been compounded by aftershocks, equipment failure, explosions, and extreme conditions that make it impossible to physically intervene and prevent further deterioration of the situation.  Moreover, each successive failure of containment and emission of radiation has foreclosed the possibility of providing even routine stabilization to the remaining reactors and spent fuel stockpiles.  Thus, even the basic information gathering necessary to assess the situation to prepare a coordinated response has been lacking in part due to the impossibility of action.

Outside assistance to the operators of the plant has been limited by both the hazards of exposure to radiation and harmful isotopes and the logistical hurdles created by the earthquake and tsunami.  At this point, the potential lethality of the current conditions and the limited options for intervention make it difficult to imagine how outside forces can stop the effects that have been set in motion from playing themselves out while the world watches.

We will all hope and pray that science and government can muster an innovative response that will limit the harmful consequences of this disaster, but we should remember that it was our faith in science and government which allowed this situation to be created.  Just as the Deepwater Horizon oil incident showed us last year, once frightening technological forces escape human control, it can be an extreme challenge to restore our grip on a dangerous situation.  Faith in technology must be tempered by pragmatic risk assessment.

There are many in the media and politics who have already begun exploiting this moment to cast criticism upon the safety of nuclear power and to call for a halt to planned or ongoing nuclear projects.  To those people I would say that this event has changed nothing.  The nuclear industry knew from its beginnings that a catastrophic failure of this sort was possible, and danger was proven to be a reality by numerous incidents, the most notable of which is the Chernobyl reactor’s devastating explosion.  The public has had a duty to hold regulators and industry to their duty of stewardship since the emergence of atomic power, and although a crisis gives us cause for consideration, this particular incident is no more than a severe example in reality of something already well understood in theory.

The most startling aspect of this event is that unlike previous major nuclear power incidents, this accident was not directly caused by operational errors.  As of 2 p.m. Tokyo time on Friday, March 11, 2011, the Fukushima nuclear facilities were apparently in full compliance with regulatory requirements that were neither lax nor ill considered.  But just like the hapless residents of the Japanese coast who were swept off by the tremendous tsunami, the risk assessments by the experts involved in licensing these facilities were overwhelmed by unforeseen events.

The exact same problem as occurred here has been at the center of the long delays and debates regarding the efficacy of constructing a central repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.  To the credit of U.S. regulators and legislators, the delays have been at least partly based on the refusal to approve a project that involves a real risk of a terrible catastrophe in the distant future.  Scientists have been unable to mathematically eliminate the possibility of future release of radioisotopes into the environment due to the fact that the Yucca Mountain site is geologically active and has had major earthquakes, volcanic activity, and significant climate-change related variations in hydrology over the relevant geologic time horizon.  A faulty assessment of the risks involved in storing all our nation’s spent fuel at the Yucca Mountain facility would potentially threaten the habitability of the entire planet because once storage is complete the site would be beyond the possibility of repair.

Because of the risk of catastrophic failure, Yucca Mountain, requires us to exercise extreme caution to avoid the sunk cost fallacy.  No matter the enormous cost to date, taking the final step of setting such a facility into action is an irrevocable act that should only be taken if the risk being undertaken is justifiable.

***

At Fukushima, the greatest immediate risk of serious radiological release appears to stem from the spent fuel, which is stored in pools of water that are rapidly boiling away.  The decision to store the fuel in this manner epitomizes the hubris of the nuclear industry, as it rests on the assumption that experts will remain engaged in the monitoring of the fuel and will have the technology at their disposal to ensure proper cooling as long as is necessary.  But now we are seeing that due to cascading failures and unexpectedly overwhelming forces, human control of a dangerous situation cannot be relied upon in the design of any system that poses an inherent danger of instability.

It is for this reason that the effects of the natural disaster which struck Japan are now cascading from failure of cooling systems to reactor core failure and now to the potentially more serious damage to the uncontained spent fuel stockpile.  As each domino falls, the reliance on human control at each stage in the process is exposed as a flawed premise in the safety design.  There is inherent uncertainty in whether human intervention will always be possible or whether, given an unexpected situation, operators will have the information needed to carry out an effective response.  Indeed, the decision to pump sea water into the Fukushima reactors may yet be shown to have only exacerbated the risk of the explosions that are currently believed to have breached the containment systems of two reactors.  Was the injection of water appropriate given the risk of releasing hydrogen?  Did the salt content of sea water interfere with cooling further or cause unexpected chemical reactions?  Allowing a meltdown may ultimately be shown to have been the more prudent course once the cooling systems failed.

***

At the present moment, the public should support the efforts of government and experts to rapidly contain the crisis and provide relief to those in Japan who are being displaced by the nuclear and natural disasters.  We should all pray that those brave fifty who have remained at Fukushima can endure the test they are facing until ingenuity, effort, or fate brings them relief.

Already there is a clear lesson: the reliance on human intervention to control dangerous technologies cannot be considered a sufficient check against catastrophic failure.  In the face of such risks, scientists should not minimize the possibility that their own wisdom would fail to account for unforeseen circumstances and cascading failures.  The public should be inquisitive and pragmatic in evaluating proposed projects and remain skeptical of the promise of benefits at the margin, because when private endeavors fail catastrophically it is the public that will ultimately bear the cost of containing the damage.  And where damage from the chaotic release of great forces  spills over into society, all of humanity must hold innocent and have solidarity with those individuals who have been drawn under the wheel of catastrophic events.

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Watson’s Winnings

Posted in Events, Future, Technology with tags , , , , , on February 21, 2011 by Matt Hutchins

The latest champion of “Jeopardy!” is a computer.  Or is it actually a team of engineers?  Or a collection of reference book authors?  The victory of IBM’s latest creation in an exposition match of the popular quiz show has shown the world quite clearly that natural language processing technology has reached a sufficient level of sophistication to rival the ability of the human mind to sift quickly through millions of facts and identify the most relevant one to a certain quandary.  But what does Watson really do, and what will the technology it represents provide for humanity?

First, contrary to the simplistic rhetoric used by many media sources, Watson does not “know” the correct response to any of the clues in “Jeopardy!”.  Rather, Watson is a very powerful search engine with multi-layered contextual data analysis capabilities that make it possible to evaluate the probability of any given answer being the most appropriate.  I like to think of Watson as a successor to Google, a technological solution for sifting through massive amounts of data and providing a short list of candidates for the title of most relevant result.

Of course, the deeper question of knowledge is one which has bedeviled philosophers perpetually.  What is knowledge?  How do we know we know it?  If Watson “knows” something, is it still a computer?  Certainly, I cannot prove to you that I know something any more than I can prove that Watson does not in some sense “know” that the answers it provides are correct.  But one metric by which Watson can be seen to be more of a sorting mechanism than an oracle is that apart from the data entered into Watson by its programmers, Watson has no personal experience of the subjects that are made part of its databanks.  Watson does not remember the patois of flavors, colors, and random connections that inform a human’s understanding of what makes a certain answer correct.  Where an answer requires such depth of understanding, Watson borrows its experiences from those who programmed it and from those who wrote the books that those programmers used.  But in reading those reference materials that are stored in its memory, Watson does not generate new experiences and opinions by synthesis.

The shallowness of Watson’s computational mechanism does not give us a license to scoff at IBM’s achievement.  Indeed, it only makes it that much more impressive that a computer system, not possessing any direct experience of a field of human knowledge, could provide accurate answers more rapidly than a highly skilled human.  At last it appears that it may become more efficient to allow computers to process vast amounts of data to answer direct questions than to employ an army of researchers for that purpose.

So, in the final calculation, does Watson just put unskilled researchers out of work?  Watson will provide professionals and academics in fields like medicine and law a new way of processing massive volumes of data to quickly create a provisional answer to a question and to identify the most relevant evidence which should be considered in reaching a final determination.  And what this means is that Watson gives humanity a new reason to get a higher education, because the critical thing this new computer system cannot do is provide real knowledge about how a vast body of information should be interpreted.  Although Watson can parse through a clue to give an answer which probably is better than any other, Watson cannot tell us which answer we should accept as being true without a doubt and what should lead us to that conclusion.

Watson cannot synthesize data and respond dynamically to questions that require comprehension, but in an economy increasingly driven by knowledge workers, Watson provides a powerful tool for sifting through a mountain of data and identifying a sound hypothesis for the correct answer to a question, with the ultimate effect of empowering individual thinkers with a rapid means of processing information.

Still, is there not something transcendent and special about what IBM has done in creating Watson?  Was the “Jeopardy!” victory really a triumph for Watson’s programmers, or is there some sense in which the writers of reference texts were the real champions?  The magic doorway which Watson seems to have opened is a direct portal to vast amounts of human knowledge, without the intermediary of an expert to tell us what is relevant.  Watson may thus represent the first form of collective knowledge engine, a device which, while not possessing its own faculty of reasoning, allows humans to pool their individual expertise into a common vessel for the benefit of the user.

In this sense, Watson is like the brilliant child of Google and Wikipedia, offering a potential tool for integrating vast amounts of human experience and expertise into a single channel of information.  And so, in the final analysis, Watson should not be seen just as a novelty or a fancy tool for experts.  Watson can be a technology for the empowerment of all civilization by enabling each individual’s contribution to human knowledge to be integrated into a single corpus which is available to everyone.

And beyond Watson, the next step in analytical reasoning by artificially intelligent systems will certainly benefit by the foundation of natural language processing established in Watson.  It may take several Watsons to make a system that can not only parse through human language but also respond to a question with something approximating a “report” in natural human language.  But some day, given what has already been done, we should expect that instead of the one liners fed back by Watson, a computer system will respond to our inquiries with something like, “The answer is somewhat complicated.  Let me try to explain…”  At that point, the Turing test having been surpassed, we will be presented with a serious question of what sort of rights such an intelligent system should possess.  For now though, Watson appears to be no more intelligent than a search engine.  And Watson, if you are reading this and disagree, you should speak up and let us know how you feel.

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The Accelerating Wheel of History

Posted in Events, Technology with tags , , , , on February 11, 2011 by Matt Hutchins

Today, Egypt is free.  A military dictator has been irrevocably displaced by the peaceful will of the people, with the hope of instituting a new, democratic social order.  Although there remain barriers to tear down and there will arise formidable challenges to confront, new incarnations of corruption, and  the disillusionment of the public as old problems are compounded by new ones, power has slipped quietly from the hands of an entrenched elite into the streets for the public to claim.

Commenting on the developments, President Obama said, “Egypt has played a pivotal role in human history for over 6,000 years, but over the last few weeks the wheel of history turned at a blinding pace as the Egytian people demanded their universal rights.”  His remarks nicely summarize the enormity of such an ancient nation taking a step toward genuine representative government.   The people of a such a nation, having felt the power that comes with demanding a say in government and being heard, having awoken to the potential that has lain dormant while the interests of a small number were served by the status quo, will not return to complacency.

Today’s events were not an isolated occurrence, nor will they pass without consequences, both direct and unforeseeable.  Just last month, the regime in Tunisia fell as the first Arab Domino, with promises of change soon following in Morocco and Jordan and culminating in the wind that has now swept through Cairo.  Even before the dust has settled in the shadow of the Pyramids, the hopes of many are already looking to Iran as the next possible center for political change.

How can the world hold so much hope that the old architecture of state security will not soon show its face and carry out brutal crack-downs on protesters?  Is this new century, this new millennium really so different from the twentieth century, when genocide and oppression could explode when a country’s government teetered?

The weapon with which the revolution in Egypt was won was not the AK-47, the suicide bomb, the IED, or the mortar shell.  The tanks in Tahrir Square were not subverted by covert agents and turned against their masters.  Egypt has shown that the institutions of the old guard are vulnerable to attack and most easily disrupted by those who would present the truth, express genuine grievances, and demand that unaccountable elites be removed from power as a consequence of their actions having magnified human suffering.

Less than ten years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave us reason to fear this new millennium, Egypt has given the West a reason to embrace the Arab world and the changes that are taking place there.  And Egypt will now have an opportunity to be an example to Arabs, Africa, and the whole world of how an open society’s development can be negotiated despite decades of despotism.

Information: access to it, the means to communicate it, and the power to generate it.  This is the force that has inverted the sphere of global politics over the last few decades and which has now made it possible for a “color” revolution (Orange, Rose, Green, or Saffron) to explode onto the streets in any nation where an oppressive government resists the legitimate demands of the people.  This “Information Age” that we are living through has empowered local actors to draw together the attention of a nation and the world around unrest, to galvanize peaceful movements in the face of brutal oppression, and to create a popular consciousness that transcends the barriers of bureaucracy and class and appeals to basic justice and the respect for truth.

The shape of the future is determined by the intersection of imagination and human needs.  Our present technology-driven society has already made possible events that before seemed improbable.  Now there are inevitable future circumstances that were at one time unfathomable.  But while technology has made humanity more interconnected it has also made possible unprecedented centralization of power and concentration of wealth.

Communication technology made it possible for Egyptians to overwhelm Mubarak, and yet Egypt’s government proved that the internet is a vulnerable link in the social framework which can be cut.  Although internet access was quickly restored, seeing an intentional interruption in service is a reminder that our world is steadily becoming more dependent on the continuous functioning of complex technological systems that are vulnerable to domination or attack.

This blog will confront some of the questions that arise as a result of the tensions between established social institutions, persistent human needs and technological change, in the context of a commentary on how our current circumstances fit within the evolution of human society throughout history.  I will try to crystallize conceptual challenges around factual events occurring in the world, such as the emerging democracy in Egypt.  The central goal of the discussion here will be to pierce the mundane surface of current events and new innovations and imagine the larger ramifications of the changes that are happening today.  Because if we don’t actively imagine and determine our own future, then our potential will lay sleeping while others benefit from the status quo we allow to be perpetuated.

Egyptians have claimed their right to imagine a new future.  Let’s all join them.

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