MITPressLog

Natural Disaster Preparation

In this excerpt, Erwann Michel-Kerjan, one of the authors of At War with the Weather, outlines lessons for the U.S. regarding extreme event preparation following the "Japanese Perfect Storm." Visit Wharton Magazine to read Erwann’s full post .

This massive earthquake in Japan is one more in a tragic series of recent devastating quakes beginning with Haiti in January 2010, Chile in February 2010 and New Zealand last month. While it is not clear how these events are interrelated, if at all, this certainly poses the question of whether other countries, or other communities, are prepared to handle quakes of similar magnitude.

Is California ready for a $100 billion earthquake this year? I doubt it. Research shows that only 10 percent of Californians have quake insurance (due in part to quake insurance being a costly product, coupled with individuals’ beliefs that a quake “won’t happen to them”). Given the current fiscal crisis in that state, if a quake does happen, who would pay for the damages to the uninsured 90 percent?

Is America ready? Unfortunately, we are not. After Hurricane Katrina, it seemed as though the question of how to better manage and finance large-scale catastrophes would be seriously considered by the highest level of decision makers. But then other crises occurred, and attention to natural disasters somewhat faded. This is the conclusion of our recent book, co-authored with my colleague Howard Kunreuther and several others, At War with the Weather.

We know what to do. What is lacking is the motivation to act, now. The Japanese Perfect Storm is just the latest reminder that we could be next on the extreme event list.

 

Earth Hour: A Voting Machine

David E. Nye, author of When the Lights Went Out, Consuming Power, and Electrifying America, on last weekend's Earth Hour. If you missed it, have no fear—it's also a great way to celebrate Earth Day (April 22).

 This year Earth Hour was on Saturday, March 26. Around the world millions of people joined this event and cut back their electrical consumption. This is a fundamentally new use of the technology of electricity, as people declare that excessive energy use threatens the environment.

Less than a century ago most of the world's houses, and most in the US as well, did not have electricity. A blackout was inconceivable, as most people controlled their own light, in the form of lamps, candles, hearth fires, and the like. Between 1911 and 2011 a tremendous change has taken place. Not only have billions of people wired their houses and apartments, but the electrical systems have been connected together into vast grids. These are in many ways admirable, ingenious engineering feats, designed to shunt power around to balance the load at each local utility.  

But the interconnections that make possible the grid also make possible cascading system failures, spreading blackouts from one city and state to another. The most spectacular examples in the United States occurred in 1965 and 2003, when blackouts spread at almost the speed of lightning and pushed millions of people from the power dependency of the electrical age back to an involuntary self-sufficiency. With each generation we are less able to fend for ourselves, as more and more parts of our lives are inextricably linked to the electrical system. When the power fails, there is no Internet, no television, no microwave, and no air conditioning. The ATM does not work, mobile phones are suddenly dead, and the kitchens dark and useless, unless one has a gas stove. Even so, all the food begins to thaw in the freezer.

Earth Hour reminds us how to live without the power, however briefly, but it is far more than that. It also is each person's chance to use the electrical system as a voting machine. Turn off the appliances, switch off the lights, and tell politicians and fellow citizens that you want to pollute less and be more efficient. Join Earth Hour as a declaration that the endless growth in electrical consumption has to stop somewhere.

Did you know that the average American family today uses as much energy every month as their grandparents did in an entire year? Did you know that electrical consumption for the US as a whole doubled roughly every decade for most of the twentieth century? That kind of growth is not sustainable, nor is it necessary to live a good life. Turn off the lights. Rediscover conversation. With luck, after an hour you might be telling stories. Shut off the TV, look up, and see the stars. 

 

 

Fukushima: Simulations Become Reality

Kenneth Bergeron, author of Tritium on Ice, on last week's events at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan.

 I don’t know how many thousands of nuclear reactor accident simulations I and my colleagues at Sandia National Laboratories ran in the two decades following the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, but I do know that a great many of them involved the Station Blackout scenario—the unlikely combination of loss of both off-site and emergency electric power. Commercial power reactors are such complex and massive machines that engineers have not found practical (or at least cost-effective) ways to make them “walk-away” safe after they’ve been shut down. It still takes a fair amount of electric power to cool the fuel rods, which continue to generate heat at a level of a few percent (at first) of the reactor’s operating power. Over the subsequent hours and days and weeks the residual heating gradually decreases, but to have no AC power at a nuclear power plant for sustained periods is bad news: core meltdown is in the offing. That is why so much attention has been paid to Station Blackout in computer simulations and probabilistic studies of reactor safety. 

So it was a kind of dreamlike experience for me to follow the progression of events last week at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station in northern Japan. From the moment I knew that on-site emergency AC power had failed (from the tsunami, we later learned) alarm bells went off in that dusty part of my mind that had been dedicated to the study of severe reactor accidents a decade and more ago. Within hours, Fukushima became the new focus of my life. There were conference calls and long conversations with good reporters confessing their poor grades in high school science and (I apparently can’t say no) answers to drive-time talk radio questions and interviews with bad reporters who projected their own fantasies onto my words. I learned how misquotes can propagate at the speed of the Web and cannot be retrieved. I did eleven television interviews in four days, and this from New Mexico, not New York! 

Amidst all this talking, there were moments of amazement for me, such as watching blurry web videos of the top blowing off unit 1’s reactor building, one day into the accident. After several rewinds I’m sure I see it: a shock wave signaled by a faint, almost spherical condensation front spiriting upward above the building. I think, hydrogen detonation! I studied hypothetical hydrogen combustion in reactor containments for years, but I never thought I would see this. It takes a lot more hydrogen to produce a detonation than the milder explosion called deflagration. Immediately, I knew how serious the overheating and core damage already was.

Another moment I will never forget was an interview with BBC radio’s World Service. Just before going on the air, the host, a most proper-speaking Englishman, informed me that at the London studio they were watching the Japanese dump water from Chinook helicopters onto the spent fuel storage pools.  With one hand holding the phone, I one-finger googled “NHK feed” and at the moment we went on the air I was watching the same thing they were.  We shared comments on the water bombardments—‘that first one looked good but the next one seemed off the mark, don’t you think?’ This was heard by BBC listeners all over the globe—it could be about a cricket match. A Londoner and a New Mexican 5,000 miles apart comparing the relative water bombing accuracy of some very scared Japanese pilots flying through a deadly radioactive cloud some 6,000 miles east from him and 6,000 miles west from me.  Amazing.