So when you point out to them that the TMI meltdown had zero casualties, that the Fukushima triple meltdown and explosion/fire in a fuel pool is presently holding the zero and that the prognosis is slowly starting to look hopeful, and that the current death toll from Chernobyl correspond to the number of people killed in US motor vehicle accidents in one day, people tend to take great offense at you questioning the supposed "truth" about nuclear power. I have been called quite a few unflattering things for this heinous crime of not being upset about nuclear accidents and - even more blasphemous - trying to calm other people about them as well.

Therefore it was with a great sense of recognition I read Lewis Page's piece "Mummy, mummy, there's a nuclear monster!" in "The Register today. I won't steal his glory but I will point out two core pieces and quote them:

This is the problem that everyone faces, who describes nuclear incidents as they really are – that is: insignificant. You are accused of being heartless, of failing to care about or empathise with people who are terribly frightened. You have committed the same sin as bracingly telling a toddler that there is no monster under his bed and that he should go back to sleep.

Part of the problem here is that in the case of nuclear dangers it is rather as though the toddler had a mentally troubled aunt or uncle who, in addition to telling the kid fairytales at story time, insists that the monsters in the stories are real.

The people in charge of story time here are the media, and like many of us finding ourselves troubled by bizarro in-laws, the media fails – seldom really even tries, often enough – to prevent the mad aunt telling the kids rubbish.

[....]

Some of us at least are getting a bit sick of the idea that you simply aren't allowed to tell frightened people quite bluntly to act their age – and we're getting more than just a bit sick of irrational or unscrupulous fairytale-spinners making them frightened in the first place.

That is pretty much it: you are considered a villain for telling people "Oh stop whining you baby, it's just a nuclear accident!". You're being painted as an arsehole for not playing along with paranoia and prejudice. They are calling you foul names and questioning your moral character for trying to make people less scared.

It's one of those things that makes me want to bang my head against the desk and tell people to go overdose on their stress- and angst-hormones if they are so much in love with them. It feels like getting yelled at by a drunk relative for taking his/her bottle away. Why would I bother?

Well... I must, because it's the right thing to do. If I didn't, then I'd be an arsehole for real, wouldn't I? If I firmly believe that someone is wrong in their actions and beliefs, and that they are hurting because of these beliefs, would you suggest I play along? Or should do as I would to the same human being if they had been 25-75 years years younger, by telling them that there is no monster waiting to eat their toes?

The worst part is - of course - that some people have a very strong self-interest in keeping others scared of the nuclear monster under the bed. Let me show you another example...

With "information" like that, is it any wonder that people are frightened? Those who made that video are the ones that should be called heartless, for using and abusing people's fears simply to advance their position and get more influence.

But good news are no news. It's easier to sell a story of Doom & Destruction than telling people that things are actually not very bad at all. You're considered the weird one for not being a paranoid alarmist professing the impending end of life as we know it.

What can we do to break the trend? How can we make people stop being scared of things that are not scary, and focus on the real dangers out there, such as fossil fuels that are killing literary millions of people every year?

Facts... keep speaking the facts... that's how you eradicate fear, prejudice and misconceptions. I have so far not met a single person who have learned the facts about nuclear power and who has since remained genuinely scared of it! Keep pushing the facts...

Let me close up this post with a video of a fellow swede that has opened up many people's eyes and minds by showing the cold hard facts in a very funny and interesting manner: Hans Rosling. Enjoy... I did.

EDIT: as commented below... there is more on www.gapminder.org.

NISA has released their update, link 1, link 2, link 3. I have also reattached the earlier JAIF figures at the bottom of the last update to see if it will fix the bug that gives an error when one clicks on the pictures.

As usual the NISA figures are between (). The NISA data is 3 hours older than the JAIF data.

Reactor 1:
Water level in the core: 1.65(1.65)  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Flow rate of injected water: 7.2 cubic meters per hour
Core pressure: 476 (477) kPa
Containment pressure: 270 (270) kPa *note, in the last update I misstakenly wrote 370 kPa as containment pressure.
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): 195.3 Celsius
Core temperature(bottom head) 146.3 Celsius
Dose rate within containment: 35.1 Sv/hour

Reactor 2:
Water level in the core: 1.1 (1.1)  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Flow rate of injected water: 18.6 cubic meters per hour
Core pressure: unknown
Containment pressure: 116 (115) kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): 107 Celcius
Core temperature(bottom head): 100 Celsius
Dose rate within containment:  43.4 Sv/hour
Spent fuel pool temperature:  57 Celsius

Reactor 3:
Water level in the core: 2.3  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Flow rate of injected water: 14.5 cubic meters per hour
Core pressure: 139 (139) kPa *note, I wrote the wrong pressure in the last update
Containment pressure: 106.6 (106.6) kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): 37.6 Celsius (sounds like an error on equipment)
Core temperature(bottom head): 106.1 Celsius
Dose rate within containment:  36.1 Sv/hour

Due to my error with containment pressure in the last update I withdraw my speculation that its hard to control the pressure in number 1. Rather it seems like the situation is fairly stable. Otherwise not much new information.

The US Department of Energy has done some arial surveys around Fukushima Daiichi and released the data. I have one pictures from it below(hats of to http://neutroneconomy.blogspot.com/ where I found the pictures). The dose rate unit used on the picture is millirad. 1 millirad=10 microgray =* 10 microsievert
*that equality between gray and sievert is only valid for gamma radiation. Gray measures the energy deposited while sievert is weighted in such a way that it expresses a cancer risk.  For gamma the weighting factor is 1.

Update 12:00(UTC)/13:00(CET)/21:00(JST)

No NISA updates have been released yet today, JAIF has released their update as usual(one hour old as of writing this).

Reactor 1:
Water level in the core: 1.65  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure: 476 kPa
Containment pressure: 370 kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): no new data
Core temperature(bottom head) no new data
Dose rate within containment:  no new data

Reactor 2:
Water level in the core: 1.1  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure: unknown
Containment pressure: 116 kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): no new data
Core temperature(bottom head) no new data
Dose rate within containment:  no new data

Reactor 3:
Water level in the core: 2.3  meters below the top of fuel assemblies
Core pressure: 202 kPa
Containment pressure: 106.6 kPa
Core temperature(feedwater nozzle): no new data
Core temperature(bottom head) no new data
Dose rate within containment:  no new data

All 3 reactors are now cooled with freshwater instead of sea water. It seems hard for them to get the pressure in the number one reactor under complete control. In JAIF's written update they say lights are on in all control rooms now. Levels of radioactive materials in the seawater around the plant is climbing. TEPCO is releasing updates on activity in both sea and air, I have attached levels as pictures in the bottom of this update.

The ground deposits of I-131 the prefectures around Fukushima ranges from less than 1 to 16 kBq per square meter. The cesium ground deposits ranges from less than 0.1 to 1.9 kBq per square meter(here are the last 3 MEXT updates on ground deposts link 1, link 2, link 3). The data form the worst effected prefectures are however omitted, we hope MEXT will make those figures available asap! As a comparison the ground deposits of cesium due to Chernobyl ranged from a couple of hundreds to a couple of thousand kBq per square meter.

Update, March 26, 12:00 (UTC) / 13:00 (CET) / 21:00 (JST)

Not much to add today. The radiation levels in the sea outside Fukushima I are sky-high. The long term effects are hard to predict now since a sea contamination is entirly different from a land contamination, where land is basicly a 2D area, which leads to a thin and high concentration on the surface, and where rains soon concentrate the contamination to "hotspots".  The sea on the other hand is a 3D volume where currents quickly dilute any contaminant by dispersing them over very wide areas.

The JAIF updates from 10:00, 16:00 and 21:00 (JST) for March 26 are pretty much uniform. The big news is that freshwater injection to the cores of 1, 2 and 3 has started as opposed to using salty sea water. Apart from that nothing new. The radiation readings at the main gate (1 km out) has stayed at 170 μSv/h all day. The west gate read 147 μSv/h at 13:30.

NISA has not said anything new since last night.

Links(english):
BBC We should stop running away from radiation
Hufftington post US brings fresh water to japan nuclear plant
NY Times Japan presses nuclear plant repair as more damage is found
Rod Adams Shaken, flooded, stressed by power outages, Fukushima Daiichi moves into second place
The Independent Fear and devastation on the road to Japan's nuclear disaster zone

Links(swedish):
Röda berget
Dr Angels blog
DN Radioaktivt jod tusen gånger tillåten nivå i havet
Aftonbladet Strålningen ökar runt Fukushima
SvD Radioaktivt vatten i reaktorer
Tänkvärt? Eller inte!
Grön horizont

When pressed about a specific issue where Greenpeace appeared to have exaggerated their claims, Leipold admitted they are "emotionalizing issues", and that they do it willfully and consciously. He went on to defend this practice saying that they do not feel they gain enough sympathy for their statements if they do not "emotionalize" their messages.

We, as a pressure group, have to emotionalize issues, and we are not ashamed of emotionalizing issues.

Gerd Leipold - Executive Director of Greenpeace International, 2009

He may call it "emotionalizing", but  that is merely a euphemism for scare-tactics, FUD and propaganda. When he calls it "emotionalizing" he is in effect green-washing the act of lying.

Greenpeace was not late to react to this and the signature "Brian" posted a blog entry lambasting BBC, saying they got it wrong about the factoid that triggered the confession. But while that blog post may be technically correct, it is insignificant because Leipold still admitted that "emotionalizing" is indeed a Greenpeace tactic.

If Greenpeace cannot argue their cases without "emotionalizing", they are not only justifying skepticism, but rather necessitating it. This confession shows that scrutiny is long overdue. It proves it's time we started looking at if they know what the heck they are talking about or just bilking sympathizers for money with whatever fairy stories they can come up with.

After all... we don't exactly lack examples of  "emotionalizing" in the nuclear issue from Greenpeace...

Before we get to them, take a look at others who have discovered some of the practical buttons that comes with being a blog administrator.

Monica Antonsson, of the blog "Änglagård, Tjernobyl och Jag", recently turned off the ability to post comments on her blog. She claims that this was because "[She] was terrorized by a rabid nuclear power lover". What happened was that practically every blog post she made was quoting some other nuclear opponent. She admitted herself that she did not even fact check these quotes, only that she found them "interesting". Most of these quotes had errors of fact, grossly exaggerated the state of matters or were in some other way worthy of criticism. When members of Nuclear Power Yes Please pointed that out to her, she claims we "spit on the information".

Monica claims that she is not opposed to nuclear power, that she is "only collecting information". But the links on her blog, not to mention her behaviour in general in the matter, tells a very different story. You don't have a link with the headline "No to more nuclear power. You can sign (the petition) here!" when you are  "just collecting information".

The thing that finally made her snap and turn off comments was when I relayed to her the fact that every nuclear reactor that replaces the equivalent amount of coal power saves up to 15 000 lives. Her immediate reaction was to lash out and call me a liar, without checking the fact. I relayed to her the data behind the statements, and she immediately dismissed them as conspiracies by the EU and the UN, and shortly thereafter turned off the ability to further criticise what she posed.

This is what she calls "being terrorized". Well, I guess someone coming up to you telling you "You're so very wrong" and showing he has good cause for it(!) is quite terrifying.

Peter Swedenmark is a former editor in chief, and chief of the opinions & debate desk of a Swedish newspaper. After only two posts he made opposed to nuclear power under which I had discussions with other people on his blog, he quickly shut me out because "[he] didn't want this to become a playground for nuclear proponents". I guess having had the say-so of who gets to voice their opinion in the paper and who doesn't was stuck as an old habit.

Anders Grönwall, press secretary of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation(SNF) did not appreciate when I criticised their hate-campaign against nuclear power where they among other things constantly and next to obsessively call it "expensive and dangerous". I wrote a comment on that saying that this had a certain likeness in method to another well known hate-campaign we all know about. The exact comment was:

Nobody except ardent opponents of nuclear power believes the scare-mongering where you are saying "Beware of the Jew...", sorry, "Beware of Radiation, it will come and get you!

Anders Grönvall mailed me and said "It feels as if you are trying to say that nuclear opponents are like nazis". I mailed him back and told him that this was of course not the case since trying to conserve nature and nazism were of course(!) completely unrelated. Such a connection would be completely invalid and silly. I also told him that I did not intend to not remove the comparison of the method since scare-mongering was the key issue I was criticising. He ignored all of those arguments and just repeated he wanted that wording removed. When I again wrote him a lengthy email explaining that if SNF did not agree, all they needed to do was defend themselves and argue the case. This mail he just ignored completely, never answered and withheld the comment.

And now, the latest one,  Thilo Kunzemannof Allianz SE. As you know we posted a critical blog entry about how WWF and Allianz wantonly manipulated emissions data on the climate scorecards. A bit later I found the Allianz web page about the scorecards for 2009. A conversation had already started and Thilo had posted a sour comment where he tried to defend Allianz saying they had not lied because they had in some places told people that they had changed and misepresented the data. I posted a comment saying that a lie does not become diminished just because you admit to it.

A strange turn of events then followed. Thilo mailed me and said he wasn't going to approve the comment, claiming it was insulting to call them liars just because they admitted to lying.  When I checked the page though, the comment was there, despite him saying he wouldn't approve it. 24 hours later still, I got a email saying that the comment had been removed, and indeed it had. Luckily I saved a screenshot of it; you can grab it here.

All in all, we are seeing a pattern where nuclear opponents are getting increasingly desperate when their claims are getting challenged. Having had the stage practically to themselves for over 30 years, they are finding themselves stumped when someone else gets up there with them and starts criticising their arguments. 

Well they better get used to it. Trying to shut us out will not make us go silent. Oh no, quite the contrary.

P.S: Greenpeace didn't approve my comment critical of their Hiroshima Day article either. But I might write that one off since they don't seem to be accepting any comments at all on those pages.

Steel was used to kill, maim and terrorize countless millions of people from 1914 to 1919 and 1939 to 1945. It was used in rifles, in tanks, in artillery shells and hand grenades. All of it culminating with the steel birds Enola Gay and Bockscar dropping atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Steel and war are forever linked because you simply cannot wage war without steel.

The connection between war and wind power is steel. Practically every wind turbine in the world uses steel. Steel is everywhere in them: in the tower that holds up the turbine; in the gearbox; in the bolts that hold it together, just to mention a few examples. This of course means that wind power always connected with the use of weaponry and war.

Wind power is an insulting tribute to the memory of those who died in the world wars. Turning away from wind power and, in turn, weapons and war should be a true lasting legacy and memorial of those victims.

What?! Wait...

No folks, we haven't gone completely off our rockers just yet. The arguments above are (of course) pure nonsense. Using steel for killing and using steel for producing electricity are completely unrelated. The start of this article is just to show you through irony how utterly stupid such an argument is.

Still, this is exactly the kind of argument Greenpeace calls upon in their effort to try to abolish nuclear power. The boldface sentence above is copied nearly verbatim from a Greenpeace blog article posted on August 6, 2009, the 64'th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. You can read the post here.

We could count endless examples like this:

We could go on and eventually dismantle our entire way of living because of the atrocities mankind has committed in the past. But everyone knows it is absolutely silly to argue like this. It is not the origin or some vague, irrelevant common denominators that decide whether something is intolerable. It is the present intent and use that decides. So how does Greenpeace make the connection between the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, and nuclear power in the year 2009 and onwards?

The entire Greenpeace article hinges on the following sentence: "Nuclear power and nuclear weapons go hand in hand - always have, always will." The critical thinker asks: "Do they now? Why? What would nuclear power and atomic bombs have in common?".

The answers are, in order: "no", "no reason at all", "nothing". The peaceful use of nuclear fission to generate electricity for millions of people has nothing in common with using fission for war and mass destruction. Nuclear power is about as similar to nuclear weapons as is cutting bread with a knife compared to stabbing someone else in the heart with the very same blade. The connection just isn't there.

Looking at the bottom of the Greenpeace blog entry there are three links. All three of them relate to the bombing of Hiroshima or the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. None of them even mention nuclear power. So where is the link that Greepeace say is "always" there?

It's not. It's missing. There is no link. This is guilt by association. The Greenpeace blog entry associating nuclear power with the atomic bombings is trying to exploit the deaths and suffering of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to try to gain points for a completely unrelated issue of opinion. Did Greenpeace take time to ask the over 200 000 still living hibakusha, "explosion-affected people" if it was alright to abuse their plight for a completely unrelated cause? We dare claim that Greenpeace didn't do that. They just chose to shamelessly exploit these victims despite having neither permission, nor cause for it. As if getting two atomic bombs dropped on them wasn't enough already, not only are the hibakusha, their relatives and children being discriminated against; now they also have to suffer Greenpeace swinging them around by the ankles as a bat in the debate on nuclear power.

And in the midst of this, Greenpeace speaks of "insulting" them. The irony is just staggering.

If Greenpeace cannot argue their standpoint against nuclear power without resorting to this kind of nonsense, it's time to look close at their other arguments as well. Something tells me we'll find a lot more holes in their reasoning...