The myth that Fukushima radiation levels were too low to harm humans persists, a year after the meltdown.  A March 2, 2012 New York Times article quoted Vanderbilt University professor John Boice: “there’s no opportunity for conducting epidemiological studies that have any chance for success – the doses are just too low.”  Wolfgang Weiss of the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation also recently said doses observed...

-The Economist   Nuclear power will not go away, but its role may never be more than marginal, says Oliver Morton THE LIGHTS ARE not going off all over Japan, but the nuclear power plants are. Of the 54 reactors in those plants, with a combined capacity of 47.5 gigawatts (GW, a thousand megawatts), only two are operating today. A good dozen are unlikely ever to reopen: six at Fukushima Dai-ichi, which suffered...

The water used to cool the Rawatbhata reactor was pumped back into Chambal river. Before and during my pregnancy, I drank the tap water supplied to us from the same river. I didn't go even so far as to boil this water. Nothing went wrong. Kudankulam has been in the news and how! Little did I imagine in 2002 that this remote area of southern Tamil Nadu where there are more...

Warnings have, by and large, been discarded perhaps ever since the forbidden apple was eaten. So is the fate of the warning from the Fukushima nuclear meltdown almost on the ides of March last year, on March 11, 2011 to be precise. Nuclear apologists who earlier professed that lessons had been learnt from Chernobyl and that design modifications had been made in reactors to avert another accident are now brushing...

Renewable energy sources are attractive but in a sense, powerless. Maybe, someday we'll all live in houses with photovoltaic roof tiles but in the real world, a 1GW of solar plant will require 60 square miles of solar panels. When the demand increases, you can fire up more coal, but how will you cause the wind to blow and the sun to shine 24x7? The earth is already so disabled...