News 15 Marzo

The Japan syndrome
Mar 15th 2011, 17:05 by The Economist online
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THE precise details of what has gone wrong at the nuclear power plants in north-eastern Japan following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck the area on March 11th remain hazy. But a picture is beginning to emerge as events unfold and information is made available by the plants' operators and the Japanese authorities.
Start with the basics. Nuclear energy is produced by atomic fission. A large atom (uranium or plutonium) breaks into two smaller ones, releasing energy and neutrons. These neutrons may then trigger the break-up of further atoms, creating a chain reaction. The faster the neutron, the fewer break-ups it provokes. This is because an incoming neutron has to be captured to provoke fission, and fast neutrons are harder to capture. As a result, the chain reaction will peter out unless the neutrons can be slowed down sufficiently.
There also need to be enough fissionable atoms about for the neutrons to bump into—in other words, a critical mass. That is why uranium fuel has to be enriched, for only one of the two naturally occurring isotopes of the metal is fissile, and it is much the rarer of the two. In water-cooled reactors like the ones at Fukushima, the right combination of slow neutrons and enriched fuel leads to a self-sustaining process which produces energy that can be used to boil water, make steam and drive a turbine to generate electricity. Besides cooling the fuel (and thus producing the steam) the water also acts as a so-called moderator, slowing down the neutrons and keeping the reaction going.
So what happens when things cease to run smoothly, as when an earthquake interferes with the plant's systems? When designing reactors, engineers attempt to achieve what they call “defence in depth”. The idea is that if any specific defence fails, another will make good the shortfall. This is a principle that Fukushima Dai-ichi, the worst hit of the nuclear plants, has been testing to destruction. The defences have failed badly at all three of the reactors which were running at the time the earthquake hit.
Some defences are simply barriers. The pellets of nuclear fuel are encased in hard alloys based on zirconium (which lets neutrons pass freely through), to make fuel rods. The reactor core which includes these rods, and the water it sits in, are contained within a thick steel pressure vessel. That, in turn, sits within a larger steel structure, the primary containment vessel. Around all this sits the steel and concrete of the secondary containment structure.
Other defences are actions, rather than things, some of them automatic and some of them not. The first action to be taken in the case of an earthquake is an emergency shutdown, which is achieved by thrusting control rods that sit below the reactor up into the reactor’s core. These rods, made of neutron-absorbing materials such as boron, mop up excess neutrons and quench the chain reaction.
However, there are other nuclear reactions in a core that do not depend on neutrons. Some byproducts of the nuclear fission are themselves radioactive. These decay, producing heat. Though that heat is but a fraction of a reactor’s normal power—about 3%, in the case of the Fukushima machines—it is still similar to what comes out of a commercial jet engine operating at full throttle. That can warm things up pretty quickly in the absence of a cooling system.
So, the next action needed is to get a set of pumps running to keep cool water flowing into the reactor vessel and the consequent steam coming out. This seems to have happened according to plan, thanks to back-up diesel generators. At Fukushima Dai-ni, Fukushima Dai-ichi’s sister plant about 11 kilometres away, there were problems with some of the cooling systems. These, though, have been put to rest and the plant is now fully shut down. At Fukushima Dai-ichi, meanwhile, the generators and the power system they drove did not survive the tsunami, which hit about an hour after the earthquake and was much larger than the designers had been told to prepare for. Among the problems was the fact that crucial electrical switching equipment was in a basement, and therefore got flooded.
Attempts to get the cooling system working with batteries and generators brought in from elsewhere were insufficient, and without a flow of coolant, the cores of the three reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi began to heat up. More heat means more steam and less water in the reactor vessel. If the water level drops far enough, the fuel rods of the reactor proper, which are meant to stay submerged, will be exposed to the steam and other gases. That means they heat up even more quickly, possibly beyond the temperature they can cope with. The fuel rods' zirconium casings then begin to react with the steam. This produces, among other things, hydrogen gas. Also, the contents of the rods and then the rods themselves begin to melt.
This appears to have happened in the Fukushima reactors. On Saturday Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency reported that the temperature inside one reactor reached a staggering 2,700°C and the pressure shot up above 8 atmospheres (compared with the 4 atmospheres experienced during normal operation). To prevent the containment vessel from cracking or blowing open altogether, releasing a cloud of radioactive smoke into the air, the plant's operators vented some of the steam and hydrogen, bringing the pressure down to a more comfortable 5.5 atmospheres.
Steam, contaminated with some radioactive elements, flowed out of the pressure vessel and into the larger containment vessel that surrounds it. This primary containment vessel looks like an old-fashioned light bulb turned upside down and balanced on top of a doughnut. The reactor's pressure vessel is a cylinder suspended in the light bulb’s neck. The doughnut contains a large reservoir of water, and steam released into the containment vessel is meant to end up condensed in that reservoir. This, though, seems not to have happened as it was meant to.
Pressure built up in the primary containment, too, and it seems that the operators then released steam laced with hydrogen into the secondary containment structures—in other words, the building housing the reactor—first in unit one, then in unit three. In both cases, that release was followed by an explosion when something sparked the hydrogen. (It is also possible that the hydrogen did not come from the reactors at all; there are various uses for hydrogen in such plants and it may have been some of this which exploded.) The explosions were spectacular and unnerving, but were also, like the venting, better than the alternative. The secondary containment is meant to lose its roof if there is a blast within it, because otherwise such a blast will do more damage to the primary containment.
With the primary containment vessel of unit one still too full of steam, the radical decision was made to flood it with seawater. This greatly increased the amount of water available to soak up the heat, and should have made sure that the reactor was fully covered by water and thus not hot enough to damage itself any further. The seawater was also laced with boric acid, to soak up stray neutrons that the control rods missed. This treatment is, among other things, a death warrant for the reactors. Such flooding soils them to the point of rendering them useless.
The flooding has other disadvantages, too. Radioactive steam will still bubble up to the top of the water in the containment vessel, but will be harder to vent as the systems for doing so in an orderly manner are now underwater. And should the containment vessel spring a leak, then some of the water, containing radioactive debris, may flow out and contaminate other parts of the site. At unit three the plant managers decided to flood only the pressure vessel hanging in the neck of the containment vessel, not the whole of the primary containment.
At unit two, the decision was apparently made to put seawater only into the reactor vessel, but the intervention went awry. At some point, the entire reactor inside the pressure vessel was above the waterline: the kettle had boiled dry. After that, in the early morning of Tuesday 15th, there were reports of possible explosions within the building and damage to the doughnut at the base of the primary containment. It seems likely that this unit, unlike the other two, may have suffered significant damage to its primary containment. If this is the case, there may be widespread contamination at the site.
It could have been worse. If the zirconium melts, the fuel pellets embedded in it can melt, too, sinking to the bottom of the pressure vessel. If enough molten fuel gathers this way, a critical mass may be assembled, reigniting the fission reaction. The fuel could also burn through the vessel and start forcing radioactive steam continuously into the sky and spreading it around. (The fire within the reactor core at Chernobyl, which had only token containment, did this quite effectively.) This set of events is often referred to as a meltdown, though the word is not recognised as a term of art by the nuclear industry or its regulators.
So far, this most dramatic turn of events has not come to pass. The levels of radioactivity recorded around the site are high, but are unlikely to do great harm beyond it. Unlike Chernobyl, there is no obvious mechanism for spreading the damage at Fukushima Dai-ichi, though there could be further explosions if, on melting, the red-hot fuel hits a body of cold water and vaporises it explosively.
But though the reactors themselves cannot burn, other parts of the plant can and have—and that seems to have produced the most severe radiation hazard yet. On March 15th a fire started in the building housing reactor 4, possibly as a result of further hydrogen leaks. The reactor currently contains no fuel (like two more reactors at the plant, it was off line for maintenance when the quake struck) but there is spent fuel in storage tanks in the building. The fire is thought to have got to this fuel, which should have been entirely submerged, but may well not have been. Spent fuel tanks in the other buildings may also have been damaged by the hydrogen explosions. In response to this, when the fire was out the plant's owners, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, evacuated all personnel other than those involved in seawater pumping.
This decision seems to have been prompted by the fact that in the aftermath of the fire, the radiation levels outside the plant became truly dangerous for the first time, and within—where there had already been a number of casualties—things had got even worse. Background radiation delivers the average person a radiation dose of about 3 millisieverts (mSv) a year. In Europe and America, workers at nuclear plants are meant to receive at most 50mSv a year. People outside the plants should receive less than 1mSv a year on top of their background dose. On March 15th the plant reported a dose at the perimeter of 11.9mSv an hour (though this dropped back to 6mSv), meaning a worker’s maximum permitted dose for a year would be exceeded in a single shift. Inside the plant higher levels have been noted, with monitors between the buildings reporting cumulative doses of up to 400mSv.
The immediate vicinity of the plant, out to 20 kilometres, has been evacuated. People between 20 and 30 kilometres away are being urged to stay in their homes. Radiation has been detected further afield than this, but at low levels. In general, experiencing radiation levels a few times higher than background for a few hours is not considered harmful. That said, there is every likelihood of further releases—and it is impossible completely to rule out large ones if the situation at unit two worsens.
According to the International Atomic Energy Ageny, all three reactors have now been flooded with seawater. The pressure in the pressure vessels and containments of reactors one and two is reported to be stable. A release of pressure from the containment vessel of number 2 reactor  appears to be planned. The status of the various spent fuel stashes is not clear, which is disturbing. In the end they may contribute more contamination to the environment, especially that beyond the immediate vicinity, than the reactors themselves.
It is too early to say how Fukushima fared with the calamity, all things considered. Much of the damage seems to have been caused by the tsunami wrecking the diesel generators—a single failure that resulted in a series of others, and was, in turn, compounded by them. Surely, though, planning for such contingencies can reasonably be considered part and parcel of the technology writ large. And this failed on too many fronts. Switching rooms were flooded. Auxiliary power systems failed. And that is before the full extent of the damage suffered by the reactors is known for sure. True, in accordance with safety regulations, these were designed to withstand tremors of magnitude 8.2. That they survived relatively unscathed through a magnitude 9.0 earthquake—ie, one that, given the scale's logarithmic nature, was approximately 15 times more powerful—seems remarkable. But an expensive installation was ruined, lives were lost and hazardous levels of radiation leaked into the atmosphere. If no further harm is done, an amount of damage comparatively small when set against the many thousands of lives lost across all affected areas might be seen as a victory—but hardly one to celebrate.

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Libya: Government and rebels still battling for Brega


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Watch: Jon Leyne in Benghazi says the situation in Brega and Ajdabiya remains volatile
Continue reading the main story
Libya Revolt
Gaddafi's limited options
The case against a no-fly zone
Eyewitness: Tripoli in fear
Q&A: Stalled revolution
Heavy fighting has been continuing in Libya between government and rebel forces for the oil town of Brega.
The town has changed hands several times over recent days. Reports now suggest the rebels are losing control.
In the west, government forces appear to have retaken Zuwara and are shelling Misrata city.
After a meeting in France, the G8 group of nations urged action against Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi, but made no mention of a no-fly zone.
United Nations diplomats have meanwhile said they expect to circulate a draft resolution on Libya to UN Security Council members later on Tuesday.
Government planes have also been bombing the outskirts of Ajdabiya, the last town before the rebel base in Benghazi.
The sound of rocket fire has been getting louder in the town, while the frequency of ambulances and trucks bringing wounded to the main hospital has been increasing, AFP news agency reports.
Libyan state TV says the government has gained control of the town, but this has not been independently verified, and reports suggest that fighting is continuing.
'Convoy attacked'
In Brega, it seems rebel fighters have been hiding inside the oil installation in the daytime, in the belief that the government does not want to shell the facility, says the BBC's Jon Leyne in Benghazi.

Both sides have claimed control of the town of Brega
Opposition sources are also saying there are divisions within the government ranks, with some troops apparently reluctant to fire on civilians, our correspondent adds.
Meanwhile, a convoy of five civilian vehicles travelling to Brega is reported to have been attacked, killing a number of women and children.
A German writer and former member of parliament said he was driving near Brega when he was overtaken by the convoy. He later found the vehicles destroyed and everyone killed, and said he believed it was a ground attack using rocket-propelled grenades.
The German man said his own vehicle also came under fire and his driver was killed, while the rest of the passengers walked seven hours through the desert to safety.
Meanwhile, it appears that government troops have taken over Zuwara, the last rebel town in the west, near the Tunisian border.
A resident in Zuwara said security forces were trying to round up anyone suspected of links to the rebels.
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They have lists of names and are looking for the rebels. They also took a number of rebels as hostages”
Resident
Zuwara
"They have lists of names and are looking for the rebels," the resident told Reuters news agency. "They also took a number of rebels as hostages."
According to a report from Libyan state TV, an aircraft carrying people who it called "traitors" landed in an airport in Benghazi on Tuesday and stayed for about two hours.
"It is thought that it had carried a number of leading traitors and agents," the channel reported.
The G8 group of foreign ministers, who have been meeting in France, have called on the UN to increase pressure on the Gaddafi regime.
But despite recent talk of the imposition of a no-fly zone - an idea backed by France - the group made no mention of the prospect in its final communique.
G8 foreign ministers "agreed that the UN Security Council should increase the pressure, including through economic measures, for Muammar Gaddafi to leave", said the French minister, Alain Juppe.
The Arab League has been pushing for a no-fly zone that would ground Libyan aircraft to protect people from assault by forces loyal to Col Gaddafi.
'Outpaced by events'
The US, Russia and other EU countries had reacted cautiously to the no-fly zone proposal ahead of the Paris meeting.
Continue reading the main story

Libya in maps
Diplomatic options
Is a no-fly zone possible?
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - who attended the Paris meeting - has met a leader of the new opposition in Libya, Mahmoud Jibril, for 45 minutes at a Paris hotel and discussed ways the US could assist beyond humanitarian aid.
Divisions over the idea of military intervention also emerged in a UN Security Council meeting on Monday.
A UN diplomat has said the plan is to circulate a draft resolution on Libya to Security Council members on Tuesday afternoon.
The BBC's Barbara Plett says it is expected to be in two parts, according to the diplomat.
The first will lay out what the Arab League wants in a no-fly zone and be presented by Lebanon, while the second will present tougher measures wanted by the international community, such as tightening sanctions and action against mercenaries, the diplomat said.
In effect this places the onus for the no-fly zone on the Arabs, apparently as a way to overcome divisions on the issue in the council, our correspondent says.
"It's important that the no-fly zone is seen as coming from the region rather than as a silver bullet from the West," the diplomat said, adding that Arab states would be expected to participate in implementing it, not just support it.
But Mr Juppe suggested in a radio interview that events on the ground in Libya have already outpaced diplomatic efforts.
Mr Juppe also said that China, a veto-wielding member, is blocking UN Security Council action on Libya while the US has yet to define its position.
UN envoy Abdul Ilah Khatib travelled to Libya on Monday and met Foreign Minister Moussa Kusa in the capital, Tripoli.
In the meeting, Mr Khatib, a former J
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Suspension of disbelief
Known unknowns and unknown unknowns
Mar 10th 2011 | from the print edition

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. By Michio Kaku. Doubleday; 416 pages; $28.95. To be published in Britain by Allen Lane in May; £22. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

A MORE sober look at the future comes from Michio Kaku, who teaches theoretical physics at the City College of New York. Setting out to chart the direction technological progress will take in the 21st century, Mr Kaku is aware that history is replete with unfulfilled prophecies. To avoid his joining their ranks, he adopts a cautious three-pronged strategy.

First, he rejects any ideas that are at odds with what is currently understood about the fundamental laws of physics. No teleportation, wormholes or flitting between dimensions, then, at least until 2100, when Mr Kaku’s story ends.

Second, he dismisses innovations which, though possible in theory, go against the grain of human nature. Psychologically, man has changed precious little from the savannah-roaming brute of 100,000 years ago and is unlikely to do so in the next century. One example is humans’ preference for the palpable. This would explain why, say, the oft-prophesied paperless office never came to pass.

Third, Mr Kaku enlisted expert help from over 300 prominent boffins, including a dozen Nobel laureates. His interviews yielded an entertaining account of envelope-pushing research in fields as diverse as medicine, nanotechnology, energy and computing, and he makes a good fist of explaining the difficult concepts that fill the pages of top-notch scientific journals today.

What of the nine decades to come? Here, speculation begins. Telekinesis will be commonplace, with appliances controlled by brain scanners; microscopic sensors will continuously monitor cells for signs of danger, extending human life span; internet-enabled contact lenses will tag anything and anyone in sight, enabling omniscience on demand. In short, by the dawn of the 22nd century man shall, in the eyes of his early 21st-century forebears, wield godlike powers. Hyperbole aside, such claims are not that far-fetched. After all, technologies seen as humdrum today, like cars, aircraft, computers and mobile phones, might have inspired similarly divine awe a century or so ago.

Their 21st-century equivalents will also prove just as disruptive to economies, labour markets and societies. But perhaps not always in ways people fear. More robots need not, for instance, bode ill for all blue-collar workers, merely those with repetitive, assembly-line jobs. There will always, he argues, be a demand for certain types of manual labour.

However bold his view of the future, Mr Kaku may be treading too carefully. His problem is that technological prognostications sound credible only if underpinned by physics known today. Yet many technologies now taken for granted would have been impossible but for relativity and quantum mechanics, two theories that upended human understanding of the universe early in the 20th century. If history is any guide, thinking that no such revolution will be wrought again is complacent—and probably wrong. On the other hand, scientific theories cannot be predicted; they must be formulated and confirmed. Call it the futurologist’s paradox.
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The threat made real
Mar 15th 2011, 4:50 by H.T. and A.T. | TOKYO and HONG KONG

AT AN 11am news conference this morning in Tokyo, Naoto Kan, Japan’s prime minister, announced that elevated levels of nuclear radiation emanating from the Fukushima power plant pose a substantial risk to human life in the area. He urged people within 30 kilometres of the site to stay indoors.

Early Tuesday morning an explosion damaged the No. 2 reactor at the Daiichi plant in Fukushima; this is at least the fourth time that an explosion has affected some part of the multi-reactor plant since the a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami struck on Friday afternoon. This time part of the reactor itself seems to have been damaged. Crew that were tending to the facility and trying to make repairs were evacuated. They had already punched a hole into the vessel around the second reactor, so as to reduce the risk of further hydrogen explosions—at the cost of releasing a greater flow of radioactive particles into the surrounding atmosphere.

The No. 2 reactor is not the only source of concern. A fire broke out at Daiichi’s No. 4 reactor at about 6 o'clock this morning, about half an hour before the blast discussed by Mr Kan. The radiation level around that reactor too is high and rising. Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, says that the No. 4 reactor was not in operation when the fire started. That suggests that meltdown itself is not a possibility in that reactor, but there is nuclear fuel housed inside. Engineers suspect the explosion was a hydrogen-powered blast, like the ones that preceded it. If that is the case, the nuclear fuel should not be ignited. With the building's shielding ruptured however, some degree of radiation leakage was inevitable.

The radiation level around the No. 3 reactor meanwhile has risen to 400 millisieverts (mSv): much higher than it had been when last reported and positively damaging to human health. Exposure to anything higher than 500 mSv, for however short a period, is recognised as being harmful.

This nuclear accident is already the world's worst since the explosions and meltdown at Chernobyl, in Soviet Ukraine, in 1986. As it escalates rapidly, attention is swinging from the victims and survivors of the catastrophic tsunami damage along the coast to the horrifying possibility of yet greater dangers posed by the compromised reactors. Untold thousands of people in northern Japan have died since Friday. Today panicky e-mails about radiation cascade across East Asia, offering fear and bogus medical advice.

The French embassy put out a safety alert to its nationals living in Tokyo, noting that north-easterly winds from the area around Fukushima could bring low-level radioactive contamination to the capital, 250km away, within 10 hours. While the Japanese response has been by and large stoical, foreigners are clearly giving thought to flight. Air China has cancelled scheduled flights to Tokyo from Beijing and Shanghai.

Mr Kan and his colleagues are trying to reassure the public that the fight to contain the radiation is still on. Their approach has seemed marked by composure and candour. Mr Kan complained that he had not received information directly from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) for more than one hour after he watched this morning's explosion on live television. Tepco has requested help at Fukushima from the American army.

harlemagne
The divisiveness pact
Plans for closer economic integration in the euro zone could cause trouble
Mar 10th 2011 | from the print edition


“WHY are you trying to show divisions? Are we getting in your way? You are humiliating us.” Such were the bitter words that Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, hurled at the leaders of Germany and France in February when they set out their “competitiveness pact”, a plan for closer economic integration, complete with separate summits for the euro zone.

He had reason to worry, to judge by the humiliation in store at the meeting of European Union leaders in Brussels on March 11th. Over lunch at the Justus Lipsius building, the 27 EU heads of government were due to hold an emergency debate on north Africa. In the afternoon Mr Tusk, David Cameron of Britain, Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden and seven others were supposed to go home, leaving the 17 euro-zone leaders to discuss how best to salvage the single currency. Would the outsiders go quietly, satisfied by assurances that the competitiveness pact will be open to all—even if they were barred from the first night? Might some try to prolong the foreign-policy debate to sabotage the euro-zone summit? Indeed, might some just refuse to leave the room? One way or another, the sovereign-debt crisis is pushing euro-zone countries into deeper integration. Unless the process is handled with care, the day of separate summits may come to be seen as the moment when the euro zone uncoupled from the rest of the EU.

The surprise may perhaps be that this separation took so long. The deepest financial crisis in a century has exposed the fragility of a monetary union without a fiscal and economic union. Even now, the euro area as a whole has lower deficit and debt levels than America; in theory the fire in the bond markets could be doused by fiscal transfers and the mutualisation of debt. But Europe is not a state and any hint of a transfer union is anathema to Germany and others. In a union of sovereign states the most disciplined members do not want to pay for the most reckless. So the response has been limited, often too slow and sometimes contradictory. Resentment on all sides is surging and governments in both camps are being weakened, whether for granting bail-outs or for accepting austerity.

R
Euro-zone leaders have pursued two objectives: first, rescue those on the brink of collapse, such as Greece and Ireland, with temporary loans (not grants); and second, try to impose Germanic rigour to prevent future crises. None of this has convinced the markets. Moody’s this week downgraded Greek debt, and yields on Portuguese bonds are dangerously high. Caught between a clamour to do more to help the euro and her taxpayers’ refusal to give more, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is seeking a grand bargain: in exchange for boosting the euro’s defences, she wants tighter economic co-ordination of the euro zone along German lines.

Hence her competitiveness pact. In its original draft, the Franco-German proposal set out six objectives to be achieved within a year, among them abolishing wage indexation, raising pension ages, creating a common base for corporate tax and adopting constitutional “debt brakes”. All this was to be supervised by national governments, not the European Commission, the EU’s civil service. There would be yearly summits at 17 or 17-plus—the euro zone plus any others that choose to join.

After denunciation from all sides, the latest version, as revised by José Manuel Barroso, president of the commission (who is disliked by Mr Sarkozy and Mrs Merkel), and Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council (often seen as too close to France and Germany), is less abrasive and more coherent. Now renamed the “pact for the euro”, it places the commission at its heart. It removes the overlap with existing plans for closer scrutiny of members’ economic and budgetary policies. And it appoints the commission to supervise new commitments that are national prerogatives. It sets out broad areas of co-ordination—eg, keeping wages in line with productivity—but says the policy mix “remains the responsibility of each country”.

The wrong crisis?

Yet it is still fair to ask if the pact is aiming at the right problems. One cause of market turmoil is fear of contagion because of the fragility of Europe’s banks. But Germany is cagey about new stress tests and reluctant to recapitalise its institutions. This blocks any sensible debate about restructuring Greek and Irish debt in the near term even though, confusingly, Germany insists that bondholders must in future bear more of the burden.

If competitiveness is the aim, why not push for a more ambitious deepening of Europe’s single market, particularly in services? It is also a strange competitiveness pact that excludes some of the most open and competitive European economies, among them Britain, Poland, Sweden, Denmark and the Czech Republic. Perhaps the aim was never competitiveness, but rather the political appeal of a pact. Solemn yearly pledges from leaders are easier to sell than the commission’s bureaucratic process.

Yet to get this, Mrs Merkel has struck a Faustian bargain with France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. He does not care for her economic medicine, but wants a euro-zone “economic government” to restore lost French influence (one senior Eurocrat remarks that France needs Germany to disguise its weakness, and Germany needs France to disguise its strength). But as the pact is made more palatable to others, it may get less appealing to Mrs Merkel. And that may make her even more reluctant to open her purse.

The danger is that the pact may make the crisis worse. In the short term, a less-than-grand bargain could trigger a new bout of market nerves. In the longer term the pact may lead not to competitiveness but to divisiveness. What to do? Mr Tusk and others might end up joining the pact, if only to preserve the single market—Europe’s biggest competitive advantage.



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Corruption in India
A rotten state
Graft is becoming a bigger problem—and the government should tackle it
Mar 10th 2011 | from the print edition


INDIANS’ anger over rising corruption has reached feverish levels. What people are calling a “season of scams” includes the alleged theft of billions by officials behind last year’s Commonwealth games in Delhi; $40 billion in revenues lost from the crooked sale of 2G telecoms licences; and over $40 billion stolen in Uttar Pradesh alone from schemes subsidising food and fuel for the poor. Foreign businessmen, who have slashed investment over the past year, rank graft as their biggest headache behind appalling infrastructure. Now India’s anti-corruption chief has been forced out over, well, corruption (see article).

Graft is hardly new in India: the Bofors scandal brought down the government in 1989. But there seems to be more of it about than ever, if only because India is getting richer fast, and the faster the economy grows, the more chances arise for mind-boggling theft. The government says that in the next five-year plan period, which starts next year, $1 trillion will be spent on roads, railways, ports and so on, with billions more on re-equipping the armed forces and welfare. Add in an insatiable appetite for scarce land, water and minerals and a monsoon of bribes is forecast.

Some are inclined to shrug their shoulders. After all, corruption does not seem to be stopping India from growing. Yet imagine how much better the country would be doing without it. Corruption raises costs not just to Indians, but also to the foreigners whose capital India needs. Thanks in part to those scandals, India’s stockmarket was the worst-performing outside the Muslim world over the past year.

To its credit, the government has begun to take action against powerful individuals. Maharashtra state’s chief minister was forced out over a property scandal. Police have quizzed Suresh Kalmadi, the politician who ran the Commonwealth games. Most strikingly, Andimuthu Raja, the cabinet minister who oversaw the 2G telecom licences, was arrested.

A 2005 act giving the right to information is welcome, as are auctions for public goods, such as last year’s lucrative sale of the 3G telecom spectrum. Technology is helping. In some states, bids for state contracts are being run online, allowing anti-corruption bodies to monitor them. Gujarat does this for all contracts over 500,000 rupees ($11,000). It also puts land records and death certificates online, cutting down on one form of petty graft. Websites, led by ipaidabribe.com, reveal the cost of graft by publicising the sums demanded for everything from registering a baby to fixing a broken water supply.

The central government should now implement a plan for a universal, computerised ID scheme. It would allow welfare payments to be paid into individuals’ bank accounts, hindering theft by state workers.

The licence Raj lives on

Most of all, India must redouble its efforts to liberalise. The state could outsource official tasks, cut red tape and sell wasteful and corrupt state-owned firms (why does the government make watches?). For all that the “licence Raj” was supposedly scrapped two decades ago, it can still take nearly 200 days to get a construction permit and seven years to close a business. Regulations are not, by and large, deterrents to corruption, but a source of it.

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he crisis in Libya
Can the colonel be stopped?
Mar 14th 2011, 17:19 by X.S. | CAIRO

CALLS for a no-fly zone over Libya are becoming much stronger, now that the Arab League has "unanimously" backed the idea (though in reality Algeria, Sudan and Syria, all repressive and undemocratic regimes, were unhappy about it). At an earlier meeting last week, the six-country Gulf Co-operation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) was even keener to get rid of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, who has insulted a number of its rulers over the years.

Though the African Union elected Colonel Qaddafi its year-long chairman in 2009, it will probably blow with the wind.

Once these bodies have all thrown their weight behind the idea, enough "cover" should have been given to Western governments, in particular the United States, to let them persuade the 15-member UN Security Council to pass a resolution putting the idea rapidly into effect. The Americans were at first plainly warier than Britain and France, after their difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Brazil and India were initially hostile to the idea, but will probably follow the Arab League's example. China may abstain, but Russia is likely to take most persuading. The American vice-president, Joe Biden, has been in Moscow to discuss a "reset" in relations between the two cold-war adversaries. A bargain may be struck.

If the Security Council does pass a no-fly resolution, it will probably be for NATO to enforce the policy, using bases in southern Italy and the British sovereign base at Akrotiri in Cyprus. Aircraft-carriers would not be essential.

Among NATO governments, Turkey was initially hostile to a no-fly-zone proposal. If it sticks to this view, it would be difficult for NATO to participate as an organisation, in which case a coalition of the willing could be formed, provided the Arab countries were strongly on-side. At a public forum in Qatar on March 13th, the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davotoglu, studiously avoided specifically mentioning Libya. But Turkey might swing behind the idea if Arab countries in the region press it to do so.

It is debateable whether a no-fly zone would require a sustained campaign to bomb Colonel Qaddafi’s airfields and assets at the outset. It could be that his most dangerous defensive weapons, surface-to-air missiles, of which he is said to have a large and modern arsenal, would have to be knocked out by NATO (mainly American) missiles. Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, has sounded reluctant to authorise such operations. But other American generals have been more sanguine. Some say it would not be necessary to launch a bombing attack at all; the Libyan colonel would know it would be suicidal to send his aircraft into the air, once the UN resolution were passed.

Those who argue against the no-fly zone point out that so far the civil war has been entirely conducted on the ground and that the no-fly zone would make little difference. This is not quite true. The colonel has bombed assets such as oil refineries under the rebels' control. It is unclear whether his other key weapon, Russian helicopter gunships, would be forbidden to fly as well as his fixed-wing aircraft. There is no reason why this should not be made clear.

Moreover, the rebels would receive a big psychological fillip if they knew they and the buildings and assets under their control were safe from air attack.

The real key to the rebels' success would be the co-operation of the new Egyptian government, which is still tied closely to the Egyptian armed forces, which in turn may be understandably keen to conduct themselves modestly during the transition to democracy. But Amr Moussa, the Egyptian former foreign minister who heads the Arab League and has declared himself a candidate for the Egyptian presidency, is outspokenly keen to enforce a no-fly zone—and to topple the Libyan dictator.

Indeed, Colonel Qaddafi incurs hostility across the Arab world. He has few friends anywhere, except among some of the African dictators who have survived partly because of his largesse, sometimes in the guise of free oil. Hugo Chavez is also likely to stick up for him, and may even offer him a safe haven, should the colonel decide not to go down in flames at home.
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Lexington
Muslims and McCarthyism
A witch-hunt on one side, denial on the other, as the threat of home-grown terrorism rises
Mar 10th 2011 | from the print edition


IS A new Joe McCarthy strutting his stuff up on Capitol Hill? You might think so, to judge by the abuse that has thundered down on the head of Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, following his decision to start hearings on “The Extent of Radicalisation in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response”. Even before the first one took place this week, the very idea of the hearings came under withering fire from liberal America. They were “fuel for the bigots”, said Richard Cohen, a columnist at the Washington Post. “To focus an investigative spotlight on an entire religious or ethnic community is a violation of everything America is supposed to stand for,” echoed Bob Herbert in the New York Times. “Security hearings that focus exclusively on Muslim Americans serve only to amplify the rumblings of Islamophobia that seem to become louder and crazier by the day,” concurred Eugene Robinson, another of the Post’s columnists.

It is indeed hard to find much to like in Mr King. The representative for Long Island has approached this most sensitive of subjects with the delicacy of a steamroller, plus an overactive imagination and a generous dollop of prejudice. To be clear: he may not be prejudiced against America’s Muslims (the “overwhelming majority” are “outstanding Americans”, he says) but he long ago prejudged the question his own hearings are supposed to answer, being already firmly of the view that the country’s Muslims are doing too little to counter radicalisation within their ranks. He is the author of a novel, “Vale of Tears”, in which a heroic version of his thinly disguised self busts a home-grown al-Qaeda cell at a Long Island Islamic centre. His own attitude to terrorism, though, is conveniently elastic. In the 1980s this Irish-American Catholic sympathised strongly with the Irish Republican Army, going so far as to compare Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the terrorist group’s political wing, to George Washington.

Beyond these objections to his person, prejudices and past, most of the available evidence suggests that Mr King’s central thesis is overblown, if not flat wrong. Muslim co-operation with the authorities is not perfect, but by most accounts—including those of Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, and Eric Holder, the attorney-general—the community has in general worked hard to expose terrorist plots in its midst. In one prominent case last year, for instance, five men from northern Virginia who had travelled to Pakistan in search of jihad were convicted after their families tipped off the FBI. The Triangle Centre on Terrorism and Homeland Security, a research group affiliated with Duke University and the University of North Carolina, reported recently that 48 of the 120 Muslims suspected of plotting terror attacks in America since the felling of the twin towers in 2001 were turned in by fellow Muslims.

With the inflammatory Mr King planted on one side of the quarrel and pretty much all liberal opinion arrayed indignantly on the other, the hearings are expected to produce heat, not light. But it is worth noting that the liberal side has a defect of its own. Many say that Mr King’s exclusive focus on Islam is misplaced, since terrorism can arise from any group or grievance (Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 are suddenly much cited). But this is to let political correctness obscure a troubling development that America’s terrorism experts had started to worry about well before Mr King announced his hearings. It is true that not all terrorism takes an Islamist form, but Islamist terrorism is the clear and present danger—and al-Qaeda has lately shown an unexpected ability both to recruit American Muslims and to move its battle back to American soil.

The Americanisation of al-Qaeda

Two experts on al-Qaeda, Peter Bergen and Bruce Hoffman, pointed out in a study last year that Americans have occupied some senior positions in al-Qaeda. Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda leader in Yemen, grew up in New Mexico. Adnan Shukrijumah, probably al-Qaeda’s director of external operations, is a Saudi-American who grew up in Brooklyn and Florida. David Headley, from Chicago and now in custody, scouted targets for the attack on Mumbai in 2008 that killed more than 160 people.

America is producing followers as well as leaders. When a bunch of Somali-Americans from the Minneapolis-St Paul area started turning up in Somalia to wage jihad, the authorities hoped that this was a one-off. But the phenomenon turned out not to be confined either to Minnesota or to Somalis. In November 2009 Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Palestinian-American, killed 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas, and a few months later Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in New York. “The American melting pot”, Mr Bergen and Mr Hoffman concluded, “has not provided a firewall against the radicalisation and recruitment of American citizens and residents, though it has arguably lulled us into a sense of complacency that home-grown terrorism couldn’t happen in the United States.” The White House is worried too: Barack Obama’s National Security Strategy, published last May, promised to invest in efforts to counter radicalisation at home.

The subject, in short, is a real one. It merits frank discussion, not least in Congress. But Mr King’s clumsy approach to it risks feeding the sense of beleaguerment and outrage many American Muslims have come to feel in the face of the recent scaremongering over the so-called “ground zero” mosque in New York and the Republican Party’s paranoid fantasy about Islamic sharia law taking over America by stealth. As it happens, Mr King was in the forefront of the trumped-up objections to the Manhattan mosque. What folly to let such a man chair the Homeland Security Committee of the House of Representatives.
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Memories, Washed Away
By MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT
Published: March 14, 2011
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ON Aug. 9, 1945, my great-uncle was out fishing in the Pacific, far enough away from Nagasaki, Japan, that he missed the immediate impact of the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans that day. My great-aunt was in their new house outside Nagasaki; the entire family had only a few days earlier fled the city because my great-uncle feared a repeat of the bombing of Hiroshima.
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Adam McCauley
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Times Topic: Japan -- Earthquake and Tsunami (2011)
I heard this story many times during my childhood. Back then, it made me feel that my great-uncle was a clever man. As an adult, I realized he was also very lucky, because cleverness alone cannot keep you safe.

For 36 hours after the earthquake and tsunami that eviscerated the east coast of Japan on Friday, I was unable to get any word from my relatives who oversee and live in our family’s Buddhist temple in Iwaki City, south of Sendai, the biggest city near the epicenter. I wondered if they too were lucky and smart.

I wanted to know, and I did not want to know. I dipped into the world of the Internet, with its videos of water raging over the farmland and crushed ferries, and then quickly backed out. Not looking at the videos kept reality at bay, because the images of the coastline do not match the Japan that I know.

In the Japan that I know, I board the Joban Line train from Ueno station in Tokyo, and travel up the northeast coast to Iwaki City. If it’s spring, the bento stalls in the station sell cherry blossom-themed meals to eat on the train: pink cakes made of mochi rice paste are cut into flower shapes. The train will stop at Kairakuen, a park in Mito City that is famous for its plum blossoms. In the evening, the trees are illuminated from below, making neon pink froth against an indigo sky.

Not long after Kairakuen, the train curves and begins to hug the coast. Then I know that I have entered Tohoku, the northern region of Japan where the goddesses and demons of legend seem to be alive and seafood is sweet.

Often on this journey, I will switch to a local train to get off at Nakoso, a town famous for its inns and hot springs. My favorite spa, Sekinoyu, is just yards off the beach, a vegetation-thick cliff at its back. The waves of the North Pacific crash right outside the windows.

I do not see how the spa could have survived the tsunami. Its Web site is eerily still online, with numerous photos of ocean views though the windows of baths and dining rooms; no status update is posted on its main page.

The Joban train now does not run any further than Mito City; past this, the tsunami has battered train tracks and highways, making passage nearly impossible. A section of one train was found on its side just north of Iwaki City, the cars abandoned.

The beach where I used to play at Oarai, a town whose name means “big washing” and which sounded romantic in happier times, is covered with sludge. Sendai is home to the most famous and romantic of summer festivals, Tanabata, when the stars Vega and Altair, who are in love but separated by the Milky Way, are reunited for one night. Sendai, site of many happy pilgrimages for me, has also been pummeled.

All this has happened even though Japan is arguably better prepared than any other country when it comes to earthquakes and other natural disasters.

When I was a child growing up in California, my Japanese mother would ask me, “How do you know a tsunami is coming?”

“When the ocean starts to disappear,” I would say.

“And then what do you do?”

“Drop everything and run up a hill.”

The residents of Fukushima Prefecture would have been taught this as well, and yet most would have had only 15 minutes to understand they had just experienced an earthquake, to notice the sea was retreating, and escape.

After 36 hours, I get through to my family at the temple in Iwaki. My relatives are unharmed, but there are new fears of a catastrophic meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, just 30 miles away. One of the family cars is full of gas, and they assure me that they can escape at a moment’s notice. Fuel is in short supply, so in this, they are lucky.

I would like them to leave right away, but they refuse to flee. The job of the keepers of a Buddhist temple, after all, is to help shepherd souls into and through the afterlife. Since they were children, my cousins have held wakes, chanted sutras over dead bodies, and anticipated the needs of those in mourning. Nuclear fallout or no nuclear fallout, their neighbors will need them.

After 48 hours, the phone lines are not working again. I sit and wait.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of “Picking Bones From Ash.”

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MARCH 14, 2011, 5:21 PM
Japan’s Long Nuclear Disaster Film

By PETER WYNN KIRBY
Crisis Points gathers personal accounts of moments of turmoil around the world.

Tags:

Disasters and Emergencies, Japan, Movies, nuclear power

OXFORD, England — Peering at the post-tsunami devastation in Japan on miniature YouTube windows or video-streaming displays from Japanese news outlets provokes not only great empathy and concern, but an unmistakable feeling of déjà vu. As a scholar focusing on the place of nuclear energy in Japanese culture, I’ve seen more than my share of nuclear-themed monster movies from the ’50s onward, and the scenes of burning refineries, flattened cities, mobilized rescue teams and fleeing civilians recall some surreal highlights of the Japanese disaster film genre.

This B-movie fare is widely mocked, often for good reason. But the early “Godzilla” films were earnest and hard-hitting. They were stridently anti-nuclear: the monster emerged after an atomic explosion. They were also anti-war in a country coming to grips with the consequences of World War II. As the great saurian beast emerges from Tokyo Bay to lay waste to the capital in 1954’s “Gojira” (“Godzilla”), the resulting explosions, dead bodies and flood of refugees evoked dire scenes from the final days of the war, images still seared in the memories of Japanese viewers. Far from the heavily edited and jingoistic, shoot’em-up, stomp’em-down flick that moviegoers saw in the United States, Japanese audiences reportedly watched “Gojira” in somber silence, broken by periodic weeping.

Associated Press/Toho Co. Ltd.A scene from the original “Godzilla”, a film inspired by the testing of an American hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll.
Yet it is the film’s anti-nuclear message that seems most discordant in present-day Japan, where nearly a third of the nation’s electricity is generated by nuclear power. The film was inspired by events that were very real and very controversial. In March 1954, a massive thermonuclear weapon tested by the United States near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, codenamed “Bravo,” detonated with about 2.5 times greater force than anticipated. The unexpectedly vast fallout from the bomb enveloped a distant Japanese tuna trawler named the Lucky Dragon No. 5 in a blizzard of radioactive ash. Crewmembers returned to their home port of Yaizu bearing blackened and blistered skin, acute radiation sickness and a cargo of irradiated tuna. Newspapers reported on the radioactive traces left by the men’s bodies as they wandered the city, as well as “atomic tuna” found in fish markets in Osaka and later at Japan’s famed Tsukiji Market in Tokyo. The exalted Emperor Hirohito himself was said to have eliminated seafood from his diet.

In a nation fixated on purity, the revulsion against this second nuclear contamination of the homeland was visceral. In late September 1954, the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died. “Gojira” appeared in cinemas the following month, breaking the record for opening-day receipts in Tokyo and becoming one of the top-grossing films of the year. During the same month, there was an upsurge in anti-nuclear petitions in response to Kuboyama’s death, and the peace movement went national.

Audiences who flocked to “Gojira” were clearly watching more than just a monster movie. The film’s opening scenes evoked the nuclear explosion in the Pacific and the damaged Japanese bodies so poignant to domestic viewers. Godzilla — relentless, vengeful, sinister — looms as an overt symbol of science run amok. The creature’s every footstep and tail-swipe lay bare the shaky foundations on which Japan’s postwar prosperity stood. The great reptilian menace onscreen — actually a man in a 200-pound lizard suit stomping through miniaturized versions of Tokyo neighborhoods — illustrated both Japan’s aversion to nuclear radiation and its frustrating impotence in a tense cold war climate.

The bizarre and suggestive menagerie of creatures that followed Godzilla onto the silver screen ranged from the intriguing to the ridiculous. Two pterodactyl-like monsters, both named Rodan, wreak havoc on Japan after being disturbed underground by Japanese mining operations. Mothra, the giant, pied moth-god of Infant Island — a fictional nuclear testing ground in the South Pacific — unleashes devastation on Japan in one film and actually gets the better of Godzilla in an epic smackdown in another. Other monsters include Gamera, a giant turtle, and the absurd Varan the Unbelievable, a large reptile resembling a flying squirrel. In all the films, Japanese populations alternately mobilize against and cower from the threats that wash up, or lumber onto, Japan’s shores.


If there is any thread running through this sprawling bestiary of monster films, it is “the profound vulnerability of Japan,” as William Tsutsui writes in his acclaimed book “Godzilla on My Mind.” Japan, relatively powerless in the cold war arena in reality, is able in a fictional world to muster its heavily armed and impressively disciplined Self-Defense Forces to fight against, or occasionally delay or redirect, the colossal rampaging of outlandish threats.

But the films also clearly depict a human population that is, again and again, boxing above its weight class. Over time, Godzilla morphs into a defender of Japan, but dangers begin to materialize within the nation itself. For example, in addition to the lost moral compass of Japanese developers and other businessmen critiqued in several films, works like “Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster” (1971) gave voice to popular opposition against toxic pollution from Japanese industry and rapacious development that had notoriously poisoned Japanese bodies and defiled the nation’s once-famed “Green Archipelago” in a series of environmental debacles worthy of their own horror movie marathon.

If the monster-film genre is less ubiquitous than it once was, the themes it reflected are no less present today, particularly in the 24-hour blanket coverage of last week’s earthquakes and tsunami. It shows a Japan that remains visibly beset by large-scale threats that strike without warning. Japan’s emergency response teams rescue citizens stranded amid once-thriving cities I have visited in years past that are now little more than sludge and debris. Cars, trucks, trains and large ships lie swept into piles ashore or float in murky water like misshapen bath toys. Buildings implode and fires rage as if ignited by a burst of radioactive breath or a flick of a great creature’s tail.

But it also brings back into focus Japan’s awkward postwar nuclear predicament that was ambiguously illustrated by the Godzilla series. Japan now has 54 nuclear reactors, ranking third in terms of energy output behind the United States and France. Japan also has an unusually shoddy record for nuclear safety. The long string of occasionally fatal nuclear mismanagement lapses over the past few decades in a nation famed worldwide for manufacturing quality control and high-tech achievement is troubling and almost incomprehensible, to say the least. Part of this story is distinctly Japanese, as lack of transparency, insufficient inspection regimes and a sometimes paralyzing inability to make imperfect but practical decisions can leave an industry vulnerable to the sort of dangerous situations that confront the Fukushima reactors.

What is different this time, however, is that we don’t need a disaster film to bring out the nuclear contradictions of Japanese society. The tsunami was but one clear counterargument to the claim that nuclear power is a safe solution to climate change and dwindling oil supplies. As our thoughts remain focused on the plight of tens of thousands of people in harm’s way, Japan’s flawed nuclear record can help shed revealing light on nuclear power plans in other nations, including the United States, that have to succeed in the real world instead of in a far-fetched film plot.

Peter Wynn Kirby is a researcher with the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford and a research fellow at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. His latest book is “Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, Japan.“
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Any comment on the disaster in Japan must begin with the stunning scale of human loss. Thousands dead or missing from the devastating earthquake and tsunami surge. Hundreds of thousands homeless. Whole villages wiped out. And now there is the threat of further harm from badly damaged nuclear reactors. The worst-case accident would be enormous releases of radioactivity.
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Times Topic: Japan -- Earthquake and Tsunami (2011)
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The unfolding Japanese tragedy also should prompt Americans to closely study our own plans for coping with natural disasters and with potential nuclear plant accidents to make sure they are, indeed, strong enough. We’ve already seen how poor defenses left New Orleans vulnerable to Hurricane Katrina and how industrial folly and hubris led to a devastating blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is sobering that such calamities could so badly hurt Japan, a technologically advanced nation that puts great emphasis on disaster mitigation. Japan’s protective seawalls proved no match for the high waves that swept over them and knocked out the safety systems that were supposed to protect nearby nuclear reactors from overheating and melting down.

It is much too early to understand the magnitude of what has happened. But, as of now, this four-day crisis in Japan already amounts to the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

From early reports, it appears that the troubled reactors survived the earthquake. Control rods shut down the nuclear fission reactions that generate power. But even after shutdown, there is residual heat that needs to be drawn off by cooling water pumped through the reactor core, and that’s where the trouble came.

The nuclear plant lost its main source of electric power to drive the pumps, and the tsunami knocked out the backup diesel generators that were supposed to drive the pumps in an emergency. That left only short-term battery power that is able to provide cooling water on a small scale but can’t drive the large pumps required for full-scale cooling.

Early Tuesday morning, the frightening news came that Japan was facing the full meltdown of crippled reactors at a nuclear power station — with unknown and potentially catastrophic consequences. In a televised address to the nation at 11 a.m. local time, Prime Minister Naoto Kan pleaded for calm as he announced that radiation had spread from the reactors. He added that there was “a very high risk” of further leakages.

With the United States poised to expand nuclear power after decades of stagnation, it will be important to reassess safety standards. Some 30 American reactors have designs similar to the crippled reactors in Japan. Various reactors in this country are situated near geologic faults, in coastal areas reachable by tsunamis or in areas potentially vulnerable to flooding. Regulators will need to evaluate how well operators would cope if they lost both primary power and backup diesel generators for an extended period.

This page has endorsed nuclear power as one tool to head off global warming. We suspect that, when all the evidence is in from Japan, it will remain a valuable tool. But the public needs to know that it is a safe one.

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Mexican film
Bungled censorship on the silver screen
Mar 11th 2011, 13:45 by T.W. | MEXICO CITY

HAVING your film banned from cinemas might not be the start that most directors would want. But for a recent Mexican release it has turned out to be the best sort of publicity imaginable. “Presunto Culpable” (“Presumed Guilty”), a documentary about the conviction of a young man, Antonio Zúñiga, for a murder he did not commit, was released last month to modest success. Then a court ordered cinemas to stop showing it—and people swarmed to see it by the hundreds of thousands. It is now the highest-grossing documentary in Mexico’s history.

The judiciary’s flailing attempts to suppress the film have only added weight to its claims about Mexico’s creaking justice system. A Mexico City judge, Blanca Lobo, originally ordered the provisional suspension of the film on March 2nd, after one of the prosecution’s witnesses in Mr Zúñiga’s botched trial complained that his privacy had been invaded. Cinemas continued to show the film until being served with a formal demand, which arrived this week. On March 8th a different court ordered the ban lifted on public-interest grounds.

The bizarre coming and going of the ban is proving a great incentive for viewers to catch the film while they can. So far more than half a million have seen it in cinemas, and pirate DVD sellers are doing a roaring trade. YouTube and its ilk make a mockery of attempts to stop it from getting out.

Amongst those who have seen the film is Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico City’s mayor and a presidential hopeful. It is reported that Mr Ebrard, who has a keen eye for publicity, has announced that the film has convinced him to begin the video recording of some trials in the capital, a project to which he says he will commit 11m pesos ($920,000). It remains to be seen whether his initiative will move at the same leaden pace as judicial reform in the rest of the country. But with “Presunto Culpable” generating record audiences, politicians may not be able to ignore the issue forever.
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he Difference Engine: Send in the clones
Mar 11th 2011, 10:15 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES

SINCE the second iteration of Apple’s svelte iPad tablet computer was unveiled to the public a little over a week ago, the blogosphere has been abuzz with predictions about the demise of the PC. With more than 100 tablet devices from over 60 different manufacturers now scrambling for a piece of the market that the original iPad staked out a year ago, pundits have been writing epitaphs for makers of laptops and other personal computers.

No question that Apple—having sold an estimated 17m iPads over the past 12 months—has put a serious dent in laptop sales, its own as much as any other maker’s. Following the iPad 2’s announcement on March 2nd (it goes on sale today, March 11th), Gartner, a technology research company based in Stamford, Connecticut, promptly slashed its forecast for this year’s growth in worldwide laptop sales from 25% to less than 15%. Analysts expect some 50m tablet computers of various shapes and sizes will be shipped in 2011.

But your correspondent thinks talk of a “post-PC era” is rubbish. The phrase, uttered most famously by an ailing Steve Jobs during his brief appearance at the launch of the iPad 2, is typical of the caustic hyperbole computerdom has come to expect from Apple’s iconoclastic leader. The surge in tablet sales signifies not the end of an era, but the emergence of yet another form-factor for personal computing—as happens every decade or so.

First there were just desktop computers. Then luggable laptops were added, followed by slimmer notebooks and, more recently, lightweight netbooks joined the fray. Along the way, various attempts have been made to get users to embrace tablet and palmtop computers as well. Overall, however, the PC has continued to follow its evolutionary trajectory from a 50lb (23kg) lump that dominated the desktop to a 1.5lb device that can be cradled in one arm or curled up with in bed.

Why now, when all previous attempts to introduce tablet or palmtop computers have fallen flat on their touch-screen faces? Your correspondent has toted both at one time or another, and admits they were hobbled by their clunky touch-screens, flaky operating systems and inability to cram enough computational horsepower within their diminutive form-factors while maintaining a useful enough battery life. Since then, however, smartphones—the natural inheritors of the palmtop mantle—have licked all those problems and more.

Take the latest generation of low-power gigahertz processors based on designs licensed from ARM Holdings of Cambridge, Britain, and used in mobile phones everywhere—and now in iPads and over half of all the other tablet computers on the market or about to be launched. The ARM processor is an advanced “reduced instruction-set computer” (RISC) that can trace its origins back to the MOS 6502 chip used by Acorn, a British computer maker, back in the early 1980s. ARM (short for Advanced RISC Machines) was spun out of Acorn in 1990, to create RISC processors that consumed little power for Apple and other customers. To date, over 15 billion ARM-based processors have been shipped by the company’s 200 or so licensees.

ARM’s attraction is that it owes no allegiance whatsoever to Intel’s x86 architecture. As such, ARM processors incur no royalty fees to Intel. Nor do they need to be backwardly compatible with the x86 instruction set used by Intel processors and workalike chips from AMD and others. That is the key to the design’s low power consumption.

Because modern x86 processors use far more efficient instruction sets than their ancestors, Intel chips nowadays include additional circuitry to translate their new instructions so that they can interpret legacy software. This extra circuitry means more transistors generating yet more heat. Not only do the chips themselves gobble power as a result, but they also need special cooling fans to keep their temperatures within their operating range, consuming yet more energy in the process. The result is that portable devices using them either require bigger batteries or suffer from a shorter life between charges.

By comparison, ARM processors are smaller and run at temperatures low enough not to need forced cooling. That makes them ideal for the cramped innards of smartphones and other handheld gizmos. Devices that use them get longer battery life. The processor in the iPad 2 has a pair of ARM cores working in tandem that deliver 10 hours of continuous use between charges. According to management consultants PRTM, three out of five tablets about to hit the market will use similar ARM-based processors.

But processors are not the only thing tablet computers have borrowed freely from smartphones. Thanks to innovations made by suppliers, touch-screens capable of displaying high-definition video have come down in price dramatically. Nowadays, ten-inch displays (like those used in the iPad and Motorola’s Xoom) cost around $65 apiece; seven-inch versions can be had for less than $50.

In a similar vein, practically all tablet computers announced so far use operating systems developed originally for smartphones. The iPad's is based on iOS, the iPhone’s operating system. Meanwhile, more than half of the other tablets being rushed to market have adopted the latest version (Honeycomb) of Google’s free Android operating system. A quarter have licensed the Windows Phone 7 operating system from Microsoft. As for applications, the vast majority of tablet computers run software likewise written originally for smartphones. Apple's suppliers have already adapted some 60,000 programs (out of 350,000 iPhone programs offered by its App Store) for the iPad’s much larger screen. After a slow start, Android apps for tablet-sized screens are now multiplying fast.

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All this means thatHow will Japan pay for reconstruction?
Mar 14th 2011, 21:00 by R.A. | WASHINGTON

MANY people have linked to Robert Peston's nice piece on the potential obstacle to Japanese recovery posed by its high debt level. Japanese sovereign debt is in a league all its own. Its gross-debt-to-GDP ratio may reach 228% this year—more than twice the ratio in America. There is some concern that reduced expectations for growth associated with the immediate disaster may combine with expectations for increased spending associated with the reconstruction effort may shift debt worries in a definitive fashion. Maybe, it's suggested, markets will finally tire of holding Japanese debt and (another) crisis will strike.

Two factors lean against this argument. One is that Japanese households are voracious savers and hold much of Japan's outstanding debt. This structural feature of the Japanese economy makes a sudden flight from Japanese debt unlikely. OF course, someone has to keep buying the newly issued debt, of which there is plenty. Japan's savers might be willing, but amid crisis it's not clear that they'll be as able.

The Bank of Japan, on the other hand, may be. In addition to a massive release of liquidity to maintain financial market stability, the Bank has promised to double its asset-purchase plan, which will help absorb some of the additional debt. I suspect it is this action that led Japanese bond yields to fall in the immediate wake of the disaster. The question is: to what extent is the Bank of Japan willing to run with this activity? If bond yields were to rise, would the Bank of Japan take additional action?

I ask because deflation in Japan is a well-established fact of life, and Japan's demographics are likely to reinforce expectations of falling prices. Given this dynamic, the Bank of Japan could presumably increase its purchases to extraordinary levels without provoking inflation fears. No central bank on earth has earned more inflation-fighting credibility than the Bank of Japan. Now may well be the time to put that expectations capital to use.

Not least because the money-financed stimulus—the helicopter drop—is the most potent macroeconomic tool available to policymakers. Japan's problem has long been that its households are unwilling to spend. A major reconstruction effort financed by the Bank of Japan would provide the demand Japanese citizens haven't, potentially kicking the economy out of its doldrums once and for all.

In February, The Economist mused on the problem of Japanese saving:

Where Mr Shirakawa and Mr Motani most directly see eye to eye is on the need for companies to boost domestic demand by unleashing the latent spending power of the elderly, who sit on the vast majority of Japanese households’ ¥1,500 trillion ($18 trillion) of savings. Mr Shirakawa believes there will be growing demand for health care, nursing, tourism and leisure. He reckons that a 40% rise in the turnover of fitness clubs in Japan in the past decade is due to increasing health consciousness as people live longer. He says deregulation would increase supply in such fields.Mr Motani takes a more draconian view. He is fed up with the elderly hoarding their money. He says they do this because of a “King Lear” complex: they feel they will be deserted if they give too much away. And he favours tax reform to encourage them to bequeath their money to their grandchildren, rather than their children. One of the flipsides of longevity, he points out, is that the average age of those who inherit is a grand old 67.
Of course, one complication with stimulus spending in a rapidly ageing country is that long-term supply isn't the problem. Japan must obviously see to the rebuilding of critical infrastructure, but should be careful not to overbuild, as that would reinforce deflationary pressures. But there should be the monetary room to finance reconstruction without generating a near-term debt crisis. The debt issue won't go away, but at least Japan may be spared the need to worry about it just now.

Submit compared with laptops, the price of entry to the tablet market is extraordinary low. As a consequence, nimble newcomers could well gobble up the business before established brands can get their acts together. The new entrants are going to have a significant impact on how established brands like Asus, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung have traditionally marked up their digital goods—with retail prices typically set at three times the cost of manufacture. Needing next to no research and development, and with all the software free, back-street manufacturers around the globe will be able to enter the tablet business with only modest up-front costs. So, expect a bloodbath in pricing as dozens of low-cost Chinese assemblers crank out knockoffs galore for western retailers.

Your correspondent believes the tablet computer is on the verge of becoming the fastest product in the history of consumer electronics to be commoditised. It took little more than a year for e-readers to go from being premium products costing well over $300 to selling for $100 or less. Sharing many of the same components, but with vastly more suppliers bidding for a piece of the action, tablets will suffer even greater price attrition.

Despite its special charms and famously loyal customers, even Apple will feel the pinch. At least, the iPad maker has room to accommodate lower prices. A loaded iPad selling for $729 costs roughly $245 to produce, according to market researcher iSuppli. The same goes for Motorola's $799 Xoom, which is reckoned to cost the maker $278. But both contain high-end features that mainstream users will happily forgo in favour of rock-bottom pricing. As such, they are destined to become niche products for a minority willing to pay top dollar for bragging rights and other cravings.

Last weekend, your correspondent saw a harbinger of things to come—a perfectly competent Android tablet with a seven-inch screen selling at a local electronics chain for $139. He was almost tempted to buy one. The only thing preventing him from making an impulse purchase was the certainty that many more models would shortly be available at even lower prices. His silent prayer to the Chinese: send in the iPad clones!
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