John Large has given a preliminary assessment on the possibility of presunami seismic damage at Fukushima Diaiichi.

http://www.largeassociates.com...0GP%20de/R3202-A1.pdf

Arnie Gunderson continues his investigations into evidence of partial and periodic criticalities occuring during the Fukushima disaster.

http://fairewinds.com/updates

The Office for Nuclear Regulation's sole contribution is the now out of date interim report.

http://www.hse.gov.uk/nuclear/...ma/interim-report.pdf

Office for Nuclear Regulation's submission of further information page up, but no submissions posted as of 24/08/2011.

http://www.hse.gov.uk/nuclear/...submissions/index.htm

-----

Having also studied at Manchester University I have been invited to a The Global Energy Crisis Discussion event where Professor Andrew Sperry one of the speakers (20th October)

In the immediate aftermath of the crisis Professor Sperry and a few other senior British nuclear academics tried to assure us that the Japanese had the disaster under control and that there was little danger of core meltdowns etc; it will be interesting to see if he has changed his tune now.

Personally I would like to see some mea culpa from certain nuclear academics including Andrew Sperry, concerning their quasi-definitive and wildly over optimistic media utterences during the unfolding of the disaster.

James Arathoon MIET

Following up on thoughts of lateral thinking :-

I went to an IET talk at Cambridge University Engineering department called "The future of nuclear power" earlier this year before the Fukushima disaster.

Unfortunately it was scheduled very early this year when cambidge students were still on holiday
- what's the point of having the future of something talk at Cambridge University, I complained bitterly in feedback to the IET, without the students being there.

Anyway baring this lapse in lateral thinking at Cambridge, thorium is being thought about and was briefly discussed - unfortunately the plans being drawn up by academics at Cambridge and elsewhere require a research facility that will cost many hundreds of millions of pounds to build, perhaps exceeding a billion pounds when the final bill comes in. Exploratory research projects don't come much more expensive than this.

Lets be realistic about Nuclear Energy post Fukushima.

It is now unlikely that a new build nuclear plant will be operational in the uk before 2030. This is because there is very little chance of a project start in this parliament partly due to differences in the coalition or even in the next for obvious electoral reasons post-fukushima. Also as we now know from Finland it takes at least 10 years to build and commission a nuclear third generation plant.

I also doubt whether commercial thorium energy generation can be developed sucessfully in this 20 year period, even if we started now.

Given all this, why should the cleverest young engineers currently coming out of our universities enter an industry where nothing will be delivered (to help us out of our energy crisis) for the first twenty years of their careers?

James Arathoon MIET

On the Nuclear Industry Association website they point to a recent global poll on nuclear power

http://www.niauk.org/News-Stor...on-nuclear-power.html

The results are online at

www.ipsos-mori.com/Assets/Docs/Polls/ipsos-global-advisor-nuclear-power-june-2011.pdf

On the question:
Overall, do you think that electricity produced from nuclear energy will be a viable long term option for countries who need to produce it in that way or do you think it is only a limited and soon obsolete form of producing energy for the future?

In Britain only 20% of people think that Nuclear is viable long term and 80% Limited and Soon Obsolete

Almost exactly opposite to the voting results being obtained in our debate.

James Arathoon MIET

The problem is that the British public (and that of many other countries I am sure) don't understand nuclear energy. Unfortunately in the UK it is worse than that in my opinion. The bits that the public think they know are the bits that journalists think will sell their papers. Unfortunately, this information is rarely positive, and often not factually correct.


Regards,

Alan.

The sheer cost of nuclear new build may be a problem. Will the city/investors be prepared to wait 10 years or more to see a return on their money?
In 2008 edf shares were trading at about 84 euros.Today they are about 23 euros.

I apologise for spelling Professor Andrew Sherry's name incorrectly in the posts above (Sherry not Sperry).

If you look in the Office of Nuclear Regulation Corporate Plan 2011-2015, the department overseeing nuclear new build has a budget of roughly £16 million pounds a year for the next five years.

I have no idea what has already been spent, but if my prediction of no new nuclear stations up and running for another 20 years is correct, £320 million more might have been spent on Generic Design Assessments etc. by the government before the first election of nuclear new build electricity flows.

I have now signed up to the 'The IET Seminar on Nuclear Energy 2011' (at my own expense) to learn more about what is going on and get my chance to talk to the experts.

James Arathoon MIET

Correction

'before the first electron of nuclear new build electricity flows'

As Arnie Gundersen points out in his latest video, high resolution pictures of the Fukushima Daiichi site are available

http://cryptome.org/eyeball/da...pp/daiichi-photos.htm

Having looked at these I now don't believe that the unit 3 explosion was a hydrogen explosion. I think it was some sort of steam explosion, where molten and semi-molten metal is suddenly quenched in a water reservoir, most likely the partially empty unit 3 fuel pool. (A bit like the recent icelandic volcano erupting through a glacier.) If I am right the dust from the explosion will have a microscopic signature that can experimentally used to determine the exact nature of the steam explosion.

If you look at the damage to unit 2 from the unit 1 hydrogen explosion, you can see that the top framework of the building is unbuckled. Now look at the side of unit 4 building, the top side wall of the building has been melted and buckled away from Unit 3 by the force of the unit 3 explosion.

The ONR says that both these explosions were hydrongen explosions in their interim report; Now we can all view the pictures I think this needs to be reevaluated by a wider array of experts - and the evidence for and against presented using all the available evidence.

Given this, I would now like the UK Office of Nuclear Regulation to abandon the politically determined 6 month timescale of their full fukushima report - issue another updated preliminary report instead - then start funding some serious research into what exactly did happen at Fukushima - then publish their full report when the results are in.

James Arathoon MIET

To James Arathoon,
I don't fully understand your viewpoint here. You state:
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"I am not a green activist or an anti-nuclear activist, I am an engineer trying to view the industry from an economic and engineering perspective."
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Then you make statements like this:
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"The trouble is radioactive emissions from Nuclear plants don't ever produce a nice even distribution of radioactivity that could simply qualify as a new background. They produce a very uneven background of very hot highly radioactive particles and collections of particles, they produce highly radioactive hot particles that can fly on the wind and we can ingest if extremely unlucky"
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When I ask for a little more detail to clarify this

'Do you mean in normal operation or in case of accidents? Do you have any further details of quantities or health effects? The CERRIE study generally concluded that the effect of internal emitters and external radiation were similar.'
You responded:
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"I don't know enough to answer your question and I have never met anyone who does know."
"The report you quote cannot be entirely comprehensive because it doesn't mention long lived Cesium isotopes of fission which are prevalent in the Fukushima disaster and doesn't seem to have much to say on alpha emitters"
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If you actually look at the CERRIE report Cs 137 (half life 30 years) is referred to in many sections, for example pages 26-28, section 3.10 on page 52 and section 4.4.2 on page 70 although more reference is given to Sr 90 (half life 28 years) as this tends to bind to bone and may be more biologically significant. Alpha emitters such as the Plutonium isotopes and Po210 are mentioned throughout the report and there is a complete section, Annex 2D Alpha Emitter Doses and Risks starting on page 42.

It appears that you are quoting from various anti nuclear groups without applying a little engineering curiosity and research or looking for the source material.

If you are an engineer trying to view the industry from an economic and engineering perspective you need to do some more research. The economics of nuclear power are closely tied to the acceptable levels of radiation. It is the same for any industry, if the coal or oil industries were forced to reduce their emission's the costs would go up.

The mention of radiation always brings emotion and sensationalism. This has not been helped by the SI unit for radioactivity, the Becquerel (one disintegration per second) which is a very small unit so there are some very big numbers mentioned. The current emission from Fukushima is around 200 million Bq per hour, sounds like a big number!
Your body contains around 4000Bq of Potassium 40 and 3000 Bq of Carbon 14

http://rerowland.com/BodyActivity.htm

so Fukushima is emitting around 30 000 persons worth of radioactivity per hour, about the commuter flow for a moderate size city.

The following quote is taken from the Radsafe website.

http://health.phys.iit.edu/arc...11-August/033737.html
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Hello all,
I read an article recently: "Fewer Contaminants Seen Escaping From Japan
Nuclear Plant", Aug. 18, Global Security Newswire. See:
http://www.globalsecuritynewsw.../nw_20110818_8989.php

This recent article mentioned that the Fukushima complex was now
releasing 200 million Bq per hour. Most members of the media and public don't know a Becquerel from a Pickerel, but 200 million of anything must be a very huge amount that poses a major risk. Right?? How do you make people understand that 200E6 Bq per se is not the end of the world? Of course the isotopes and exposure pathways are vital in assessing significance of any activity released, but let's not go there.
200E6 Bq got me thinking about natural background radiation, and what is released from soil to air. Let me know how the following strikes you as a point of comparison.

An average value for Rn-222 gas flux from the earth's surface [due to the average concentration of U-238 in soil leading to Rn-222 gas release] is roughly 30 milliBq/m^2/sec. Do the math and you'll see that give or take, any random 2 km^2 of the earth's surface will release 200 million Bq per hour of Rn-222, equal to the total amount of radioactivity being emitted recently by the nuclear reactors 1, 2, and 3 at Fukushima as it is brought to a cold shutdown.
As the Global Security Newswire article noted the reactors were "previously hemorrhaging five times that amount" . As we all know radiation is not released from a facility -- it is either "spewed" or "hemorrhaged".
Five times more than 200 million Bq would be equal to the routine Rn-222 release by nature from about 10 km^2 - an area 3 km x 3 km - which will continue due to natural radioactivity for billions of years given the half life of U-238.
Further, based on average wind farm capacity density [ about 6.5 MWe per km^2 ], the 2 km^2 of land currently "spewing" 200 million Bq/hr will support the wind generation of only about 13 MW of electricity.
An area of land necessary to site and generate 2,000 MW[e] of wind power [an area of 285 km^2 or 11 miles by 11 miles ] would be needed to equal the pre-accident combined output of Fukushima 1, 2, and 3. This 285 km^2 of land to site 2,000 MW[e] of wind generation will release about 32 billion Bq of Rn-222 per hour. 32 billion Bq of Rn-222 per hour from nature being "spewed" from a windfarm generating 2,000 MWe vs. only about 200 million Bq from Fukushima 1, 2, 3. Do we need to evacuate the area around any large windfarm?

Thoughts on the above comparisons?

Stewart Farber, MS Public Health
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Maybe the radiation isn't such a problem after all? Perhaps the investment in new fuel cycles such as Thorium, pebble bed or traveling wave (apparently supported by Bill Gates) will produce a viable solution.

http://www.terrapower.com/home.aspx

Do some more investigation, don't just follow Arnie Gundersen, look at all the options.

Best regards
Roger

Honestly, it is nothing to do with Nuclear or wind, it is all to do with inexperienced indoctrinated and controlled individuals in Westminster. See how many shopping centres/malls that have arisen in the UK with same typical circle of shops VUE/Bella Italia/Nando's/Millies Cookies in the same shopping complex, and now ask your self the question, how many cities in the UK now have these typical Americanised centres? See how like-for-like UK has become to the US system! So if US economy crashes, so will UK. So if the US had bad nuclear GE installations and consultancies in Japan, Germany did the right thing, by going offline with their old ones. Germany didn't lose the second world war as such, they were funded by the US banks, and have the closest relationship to US then any other country in the EU, so follow Germany and I think we will all survive! ;-)

To Roger Bryant,

Some of my personal educational history to start the post:-

Even though I changed courses and later got my degree in Geophysics, I started out doing the Mechanical Engineering degree course at Manchester University (Simon Engineering Laboratories at that time); the sister course was the nuclear engineering course - perhaps the premier nuclear engineering course at the time 1985/86.

My first year at manchester was the year of the Chernobyl disaster and I remember joking with the Nuclear engineering students that they were now out of a job.

As it turns out we have not built a new Nuclear Power Station since that time, and that must be born in mind in the context of the current debate.

-------

I will now try and explain my thoughts more clearly, without initially being diverted into areas, such as human health, that I know little about.

For me one of the key concepts central to the engineering profession is the concept of "control". How do we design and build processes and systems that stay within the bounds of engineering control at all times?

[My first tutor at Manchester Dr. W.J.D. Annand (now deceased sadly), gave a good succinct description of the problem of control in his book 'The Mechanics of Machines'

His words - 'The problems of control are essentially the same for all forms; they concern accuracy, delay, and stability.']

You say
'The economics of nuclear power are closely tied to the acceptable levels of radiation.'

I say:
The economics of nuclear power are closely tied and perhaps unnecessarily tied to the difficukty in building large stable Nuclear Power Plants.

I ask:
Why did we design and build nuclear power stations and nuclear fuel storage systems that fail so catastrophically when power to the cooling systems fails? Why did we do that?

Why are many Nuclear Power Stations designs so fragile, so intrinsically unstable?

Answering these question has nothing to do with the amount of radiation they contain, but has everything to do with economics and the economic constraints imposed on engineering decision making.

What then of the relationship between the intrinsic stability of a control regime and nuclear safety?

Dame Sue Ion says that the new third generation power stations will be safer than the older generation power stations. So given this she must believe Pressurized Water Reactors of any form are safer than the older Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors?

In order to prove this sort of statement you have to make detailed calculations of the risk of random failures as well as the suseptability of the design to systematic failure. However systematic design failures are much more hard to identify and quantify than random failures.
To answer questions regarding systematic failure we have to begin to understand the relationship between safety and stability more thoroughly.

I wonder how Dame Sue Ion knows the answer or Professor Andrew Sherry or other high profile Nuclear commentators - when most of them are not even trained Nuclear Engineers of the type I once knew - they may be chemists or materials scientists or physicists or whatever, but not engineers. Their level of certainty, given their qualifications and research interests, annoys me somewhat.

Health Effects?
What I meant in my previous posts is that I am not knowledgeable as to the health effects of long term exposure to radioactive Cesium and other long lived products of nuclear fission. I am sorry I didn't express myself very well, but the effects of radiation on health is simply irrelevant to the engineering and economic issues I am trying to think about and discuss.

I should have completely avoided questions of public health, because like many others I am unfortunately subject to unavoidable emotional bias on the subject:
The best example for my emotional bias perhaps is the following:

I strongly believe radioactive iodine can kill on an individual basis because my mother died of a rather aggressive form of thyroid cancer after taking three treatments of radioactive iodine. Her death certificate doesn't say anything about the medical radiation treatment she received prior to her death, because there was no conclusive proof of causation from the medical practitioners point of view. Am I irrational for believing what I do, when the medical practitioners say there is no certain and conclusive proof?

I am sorry, but given the choice, and I think we still do have the choice, I would rather we didn't have any more radioactive contamination covering our country thank you very much - whatever the medical experts currently say about its dangers. This is a matter of principle for me (bias perhaps)not cost.

One last point - I welcome all your criticisms of my posts apart from one - the question over my curiosity:

I am a very curious person Mr Bryant, extremely curious. I am especially curious to know where all the curious nuclear and mechanical engineers have gone, the type of people I studied with briefly at Manchester University.

I have found two engineers publically willing to share their curiosity, knowledge and theories with the public concerning the Fukushima Disaster - Arnie Gundersen and John Large - Even if some of their theories and ideas later get proved to be wrong, I still strongly support what they are trying to do; fostering creative and collective problem solving.

I just don't see their level of engineering curiosity at the Office of Nuclear Regulation yet - I hope I begin to see that soon.

James Arathoon MIET

To Roger Bryant,

I think a correction to part of your argument is required.

You say
'The current emission from Fukushima is around 200 million Bq per hour'

Of course its approx 100-200 million Bq per hour per litre of water in the fuel pools and that's just cesium disintergrations we are talking about.

A litre of water is one kilogram. Say a person is on average 80 kg, thats 16 billion Bq per hour in total per 80 litres (per human equivalent).

I don't know what the total release from the disaster is, but it may be plenty of Terra Bq - most of it dumped into the ocean of course.

From the hires pictures of the Fukushina site, there seem to bits of fuel rod littered all around the Unit 3 explosion, so how much of the fuel is left in the fuel pools is still an open question.

Professor Geraldine (Gerry) Thomas from Imperial College says in one of her videos on the health effects of the Chernobyl disaster that the area immediately surrounding the Chernobyl site is now a willd life paradise, because there are few humans who live there.

Anyway even if all this radioactive emission is not a great hazard to human physical health as Professor Gerry Thomas and other high profile medical researchers state authoritatively, for the engineers and economists there is still the problem that billions of pounds of electricity generation hardware has been laid to unservicable waste - even before considering the clean up cost as a consequence of the site losing power.

Apparently according to the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2010-2011 I quoted in an earlier post, the wind turbines survived the earthquake and tsunami more or less unscathed.

James Arathoon MIET

Professor (Gerry) Thomas is a cancer specialist, not an epidemiologist, and certainly is no expert in the wildlife of Chernobyl. None of her "publications" on radiation etc. are available to any but those with subscriptions to specialist journals, so I cannot judge what she is actually claiming.

A pretty superficial google search finds much that suggests that the wildlife of Chernobyl is having a hard time, and, of course, we cannot know whether they are suffering. A few argue that there is no evidence of harm, but this looks to me like armchair science. Undoubtedly, the absence of people is a major enricher of wildlife. We really cannot find out how great this impact is, as it would not really be sensible to find another uncontaminated area, currently occupied by some 300,000 people, ship them all out, and see what happens. So for serious analysis we do have to rely on models, and test them with empirical data, and for this the models and the data need to be open to "objective" scrutiny and argument. What I see is very polarised position taking, often without evidence.

Animals, like us, are generally unaware when they are being irradiated, so the harm it does to them is not evident until later. A loss of animal life expectancy, even a substantial one, would not necessarily be evident without expensive (and dangerous) data collection.

For individual people, the effects of radiation can be very long lasting, and multi-generational. When used explicitly and with appropriate technology for some medical purposes, (like radio therapy), it may prolong individual lives. It seems self-evident that a sensible (and precautionary) approach is to assume that general exposure to radiation always does harm to life, never good.

The extent to which the harm is tolerable is not an engineering matter. It is a social and ethical one, in which all the harms to all the people (and other life) who suffer them have to be balanced against all the benefits to all the people (and other life) who gain them. Both those who suffer and those who gain deserve a voice in this matter. I see little evidence of any analysis of this sort, nor political debate about it.

If a (political) decision is reached that a defined level of harm to people (and life) today and to people (and life) in the future is acceptable, then it is an engineering matter to demand and then achieve this "safety" specification. So far, I do not believe we understand how to keep the levels of harm to acceptable levels in the face of the huge scope for harm from the vast quantities of long lasting radioactivity that we have created inside reactors, and now have to live with.

We do have a choice as to whether or not to create more. Let us make that choice knowingly.

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David Hirst

Will deaths from the effects of nuclear power generation, including all serious accidents, ever reach these proportions?

"The World Health Organization and other sources attribute about 1 million deaths/year to coal air pollution."

Taken from here;

Deaths per twh by energy source

and here (this states 2 million per year);

World Health Organisation

Distributed around the planet, perhaps with a number of 'hot spots' it's not as newsworthy as a damaged nuclear power plant.

Also, if we want to consider the economic costs then we should avoid the use of hydroelectricity, because the Banqiao Dam and other dam failures are significantly more devastating than Chernobyl and Fukushima put together.

Banqiao Dam

"It also caused the sudden loss of 18 GW of power, the equivalent of roughly 9 very large modern coal fired power stations or about 20 nuclear reactors, equalling about 1/3 the peak demand on the UK National Grid."

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Andy Taylor CEng MIET

The choice is not between unsafe nuclear; dirty coal; and polluting oil and gas. All of these run out, some sooner than others. All leave a lasting legacy of harm.

Wind, solar and marine generation are clean and inexhaustible.

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David Hirst

I'm quite in favor of renewable energy, it certainly has a very significant role to play, but while there is discussion of the environmental issues of nuclear generation then I think it's fair to point out that all other forms of energy generation have significant environmental impact. By the way, I consider pollution as 'unsafe', since it leads to early deaths.

"Wind, solar and marine generation are clean and inexhaustible."

Only if the machinery occurs naturally and never needs replacing (you are of course referring to the basic energy source).

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Andy Taylor CEng MIET

To Andy Taylor,

Re failures in engineering projects, systems and products and how they can be compared.

I think all the engineer can do is say to his regulatory and consumer audience 'look I investigated the dam disaster carefully and X, Y and Z went wrong. I have the confidence that I can build a new one that will not fail in future because we will do this and that to prevent the disaster reoccurring'

If the dam is then built well it may reduce future deaths due to flooding (rather than increase them) as well as generating electricity; people may still want these benefits inspite of all the previous dam related deaths.

In proposing the new dam engineers will have to convince everyone involved that they are both competent and truthful in what they say thay can deliver.

Now if people have to decide between a new nuclear power station or new dam, they then have to decide in part which engineering team they are now willing to trust for the future - whatever the scale of past disasters.

In the case of the nuclear industry, trust has become a significant issue, because of the secrecy, lies and misinformation surrounding the extent and impact of previous nuclear disasters. Any engineering case a nuclear engineer now tries to make is constrained by this public mistrust.

I also wish to mention that the nuclear engineers are also handicaped by the length of time it takes to both fully investigate previous disasters and then produce new engineering solutions acceptable both to the public and the regulator. Other technologies might win out in the end just because of the very slow rate of technological improvement and together with the ever increasing costs of nuclear electricity.

James Arathoon MIET

1. Quite right. There are many reasons for the lack of trust in nuclear energy, perhaps a large part of this mistrust relates to weapons production, had there never been any nuclear weapons I suspect we would not be having this discussion now. I think there's less opportunity than in many other industries, at least in this country, for the wool to be pulled over the eyes of interested parties, if it was easy to hide the effects of serious nuclear incidents then they would not be classed as incidents. But I also think that there is a significant lack of perspective with nuclear power, as if an early death bought about by exposure to radiation is somehow much worse than an early death bought about by other pollutions e.g. from a coal fired power station, or the instant death from a dam burst. There's a fear of radiation that seems a little unbalanced to me.

2. I spent several years working in nuclear re-processing and power generation, and the only significant handicaps that I came across were in relation to ever more stringent standards and requirements being applied. Had those kind of standards been applied and implemented in say the construction of the Banquio Dam, or the Bhopal Union Carbide plant, or the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, then over 180,000 people might have lived, 600,000 people would not have been injured, and 11,000,000 people would not have lost their homes.

Put people in a car behind a lorry carrying a flask of spent nuclear fuel and they may well develop a cold-sweat of fear, put them in a car behind a tanker carrying Methyl Isocyanate and they will most likely think nothing of it, who is at greater risk? Methyl Isocyanate ranks about 50th in the list of 100 dangerous chemicals at risk of abuse by terrorist, and Bhopal is a chilling reminder of what it can do.

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Andy Taylor CEng MIET

Pollution risks are normally readily detectable by smell, and quite visible. We, as people, are quite unable to sense the harm of radiation. We have no sensory input to warn us of danger. So we do have to trust to indirect sources. There seem to be a very wide range of ways in which radioactivity of various sorts can do us harm, and many of the available sources are seem untrustworthy, and have been proved wrong or overoptimistic in the past. In addition, they often have vested interests, and so we would be wise to be suspicious of them.

Nuclear weapons do give grounds for enhancing the suspicion. They encourage lies and deceit (for rational security reasons), and have been inextricably implicated in all nuclear power generation. Magnox would not have happened if it had not been for the perceived military need for plutonium. Do they now want power stations to help them get rid of it? Or to share the huge costs of a nuclear infrastructure?

Incidentally, my mother claimed that I would not exist if it not been for the atomic bomb. She perceived my father as being unlikely to have survived a conventional invasion of Japan.

-------------------------
David Hirst

Are you really sure about this? You may be able to tell the difference between city and country air for example, but the pollution in cities and industrial areas where people work isn't really as visible and certainly not as avoidable as you seem to suggest.



Overoptimistic in what way?

-------------------------
Andy Taylor CEng MIET