Saturday, March 19, 2011

Hidden history of Nigeria’s brain drain: a Physician’s story

Africa Works

Kehinde Ayeni is a Nigerian physician working in the U.S. A published novelist, Dr. Ayeni is also a keen observer of African affairs, and especially those involving Nigeria and Nigerians. We got to talking recently about the problem of talented people leaving Africa, and not returning to work. This exodus, the subject of so much anxiety from so many perspectives, has complex roots in recent history. Here are Dr. Ayeni's fascinating, and surprising, observations:

"For political reasons and as it crazy as it sounds, I know for a fact that Nigeria doesn't like to retain doctors trained in Nigeria and they prefer to export them.  And I think that it is a throw back to some un-mourned aspect of slavery, I will not say this to anyone else, if I did, they will think I have lost it but I strongly believe it.

Most of the people I grew up with and went to school with are in the US or England and the rest are all over the world.  I know someone I grew up with in almost every country of the world!  Young people graduate from college in Nigeria and hightail it out of there as if the devil is chasing them.  And the parents like it!  The few times I would go back home to visit my parents and other relatives, I used to be met with "Kehinde, what have you come back home for, why are you here?" It used to make me so angry and I would say, 'But this is my home, are you saying I cant just come home on a visit?" and once my father said to me, "Wouldn't it be better if you stayed in America and you just send us money, instead of wasting money on air plane tickets to come visit us, the money would be better spent if you sent it to us."  So Africans continue to sell their children.  So the brain drain and migration of young people out of Africa now is just humane slavery, one where they pay you very well.

This is the reason that I made that statement, at the time that the brain drain phenomenon first began in the 1980s and a lot of our doctors who were originally trained in England in the late 50s and early 60s and following our independence from the British (the majority of our professionals went to England for college education and most of them returned to establish hospitals, universities and take over from the English staff who were in place).

But then in the 1980s, when the economic situation started to deteriorate to the extent that doctors and college professors were not even able to feed their families, a lot of them just dusted their diplomas and applied for jobs in the Arab world and their was a massive migration of doctors, who were our teachers in medical school, out of the country at the time. And they were being paid the equivalent of the salary they would have earned in Nigeria in two years in just one month.

And the rest of us realized that we needed a foreign diploma along with the Nigerian one to really be respected as doctors anywhere in the world; and so those of us in medical school at the time started to apply for and take the American and the British medical board exams.

Prior to the 80s, Nigerians were hardly migrating, people would go abroad for one thing or the other but always returned home and the national spirit was that we had to make our country great.

But then with the recurrent pillaging by the military, it became such that uneducated people with good connections, and the military were the highly rewarded ones in the country and the more education that you had, the more at a disadvantage that you were.

Another reason was that the Nigerian government did set up a commission at the time to look into brain drain and see what they could do to curb it, but they returned after a year of traveling all over the world to investigate what was attracting young Nigerians out of the country and concluded that it was good for the country.  They never did go into details at to why it was good for the country, and so the government didn't put anything in place to attract young people to stay in the country but rather things got worse and a lot of us started to leave.

Those of us who came to the US for our residency training did come on Exchange Visitor's visa – a J1 or J2. And the condition of that visa is that on completion of our training, we must return to Nigeria for a minimum of two years before we could apply to re-enter the US.  This was an agreement arrived at by the WHO/UN to ensure that poorer countries do not lose their physicians to rich countries.  But then if you don't want to return to your country, you could get a letter from your home Ministry of Health stating that they don't need you and that if you returned there would be no job for you, and with that letter, you can then apply for a waiver job in the US and then the US will send you to an underserved part of the country to work.

The Nigerian Ministry of Health was issuing these letters to us in droves, they didn't want us to return to Nigeria to work for Nigeria.  And this is doubly sad because we all went to college free of charge, we didn't pay any tuition.

So that is how we were able to stay in the US.

Most of us did have tried to return to Nigeria to work, for say a month a year or so. I have applied to many of the medical schools to teach free of charge, but you know, the reception is always hostile.  There was a time that I had an agreement with my medical school and did go there to try to establish a program….  The residents were very excited, but the faculty was very hostile to me, and they didn't make the residents and students available, they would tell me they were busy with this or that but the residents later told me they were not.

And this is the experience of a lot of my friends."

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Six Ways Fukushima is Not Chernobyl

ProPublica: Articles and Investigations

by Lois Beckett, Special to ProPublica

The crisis at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi has already been dubbed the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, and the situation there continues to worsen.

But along with references to the "ch-word," as one nonproliferation expert put it, experts have been quick to provide reasons why the Daiichi crisis will not be "the next Chernobyl."

Experts have noted several key differences in the design of the reactors in question, as well as in the government's reaction to the crisis:

1. Chernobyl's reactor had no containment structure.

The RBMK reactor at Chernobyl "was regarded as the workhorse of Soviet atomic energy, thrifty and reliable -- and safe enough to be built without an expensive containment building that would prevent the release of radiation in the event of a serious accident," The Guardian's Adam Higginbotham noted.

As a result, when a reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, the radioactive material inside went straight into the atmosphere.

Fukushima's reactors are surrounded by steel-and-concrete containment structures. However, as the New York Times reported Tuesday, the General Electric Mark 1 reactors at Fukushima have "a comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure" that has drawn criticism from American regulators. In a 1972 memo, a safety official suggested that the design presented serious risks and should be discontinued. One primary concern, the Times reported, was that in an incident of cooling failure -- the kind Fukushima's reactors are now undergoing -- the containment structures might burst, releasing the radioactive material they are supposed to keep in check.

At least one of Fukushima's reactors -- No. 2 -- seems to have cracked, and has been releasing radioactive steam. The seriousness of this breach is still unclear, with a Japanese government official maintaining on Wednesday that the damage to the containment structure may not be severe.

2. Chernobyl's reactors had several design flaws that made the crisis harder to control. Most crucially, their cooling system had a "positive void coefficient," which means that as coolant water is lost or turns into steam, the reaction speeds up and becomes more intense, creating a vicious feedback loop.

Shan Nair, a nuclear safety expert who spent 20 years analyzing the consequences of Loss of Coolant Accidents like the one at Fukushima, discussed this factor on TIME's Econcentric blog. Nair was a member of a panel that advised the European Commission on how to respond to Chernobyl. As he explained:

[Fukushima] can't be Chernobyl because the Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) at Fukushima are designed differently than the High Power Channel-type Reactor (RBMK) reactor at Chernobyl. The RBMK was designed so that the hotter the core gets the greater the reactivity -- so you have a situation where you are in a vicious cycle and a race to an explosion. [Fukushima's] BWRs are designed in such a way that the hotter it gets the less radioactive the core gets so there is a self-shutdown type of mechanism. But the problem is that before you can get to a safe level you might have a complete meltdown. I believe that's what they are battling against now in Japan.

3. The carbon in Chernobyl's reactor fueled a fire that spewed radioactive material further into the atmosphere. Fukushima's reactors do not contain carbon, which means that the contamination from an explosion would remain more localized.

Dr. Colin Brown, director of engineering for the UK-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers, described another of the Chernobyl reaction's design flaws in a post on the Institution's website explaining why it was "unlikely" that Fukushima "will turn into the next great Chernobyl with radiation spread over a big area." He wrote:

The reason why radiation was disseminated so widely from Chernobyl with such devastating effects was a carbon [graphite] fire. Some 1,200 tonnes of carbon were in the reactor at Chernobyl and this caused the fire which projected radioactive material up into the upper atmosphere causing it to be carried across most of Europe. There is no carbon in the reactors at Fukushima, and this means that even if a large amount of radioactive material were to leak from the plant, it would only affect the local area.

Britain's Chief Scientific Officer, Sir John Beddington, made a similar point about the localized nature of an explosion in a speech about Fukushima on Tuesday:

In this reasonable worst case you get an explosion. You get some radioactive material going up to about 500 metres up into the air. Now, that's really serious, but it's serious again for the local area. It's not serious for elsewhere even if you get a combination of that explosion it would only have nuclear material going in to the air up to about 500 metres...And to give you a flavour for that, when Chernobyl had a massive fire at the graphite core, material was going up not just 500 metres but to 30,000 feet [about 9144 metres]. It was lasting not for the odd hour or so but lasted months, and that was putting nuclear radioactive material up into the upper atmosphere for a very long period of time. But even in the case of Chernobyl, the exclusion zone that they had was about 30 kilometres. And in that exclusion zone, outside that, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate people had problems from the radiation.

One of the most pressing worries about Fukushima is that radiation might be spewed into the atmosphere not from reactors themselves, but from spent fuel rods exposed to the air once the pool of water protecting them boils away. According to the Los Angeles Times, U.S. officials believe one of the spent fuel pools has been breached, potentially exposing 130 tons of uranium.

4. Unlike Chernobyl, however, a meltdown at Daiichi could end up contaminating the water table.

One troubling possibility that has received little attention is that a reactor meltdown could send radioactive material downwards until it reaches the water table, which could contaminate both water supply and crops. Discussing Daiichi on TIME's Ecocentric blog, Nair, the nuclear safety expert, noted:

If the entire fuel has melted the odds are it will go straight through the pressure vessel and therefore through the ground until it gets to the water table. Then it will cool down, but the problem is that the water table will start leaching actinides and fission products from the melted glob of fuel into the environment. So you will end up with some radioactive contamination of water supplies and ultimately crops and other products. That's a major problem because radioactive particles are much more dangerous when digested -- they cause internal irradiation of organs with resulting increased cancer risks...The severity of the water table risk depends on the local topography -- it depends on the depth of the water table, which itself moves up and down. I would imagine the water table is quite close to the surface right now because of all the flooding, which is not good.

At Chernobyl, fears that the radioactive material from the exploded reactor would reach the water table prompted a massive two-part project: first, to use liquid nitrogen to freeze the ground beneath the exploded reactor, and secondly, to build a shielding structure beneath the reactor. Although the effort exposed many miners to intense radiation, it was ultimately unnecessary.

5. Much of the public health impact of Chernobyl was the result of the Soviet government's attempt to cover up the crisis, rather than moving quickly to inform and protect the public.

In Japan, the government evacuated the 20 kilometers, or 12 miles, surrounding the Fukushima plant fairly quickly, and have continued to upgrade the warnings to citizens in the vicinity (although, according to the United States government, not quickly enough).

That didn't happen at Chernobyl. In the sunny April morning after the explosion, the residents of the nearby town of Pripyat were left to go about their business. As the Guardian has noted, children went to school, an outdoor wedding was celebrated, and sunbathers went out to enjoy the good weather, as the plume from the exploded reactor continued to fill the air with radioactive particles.

One of the plant's employees, who had been away on business, returned home to find his wife outside in the garden, where she was paying no attention to the small pieces of graphite that had landed "on the petals of her wild strawberry plants." Before long, the sunbathers began to experience strange cases of nausea and vomiting. The town would not be evacuated until the next day. And it was only after heightened levels of radioactivity set off alarms at a nuclear plant in Sweden that the Soviet government finally admitted publicly that something had gone wrong.

The delay and denial had serious implications, including an epidemic of thyroid cancer among about 6,000 people exposed to radiation as children.

As the New York Times noted, this epidemic "would probably not have happened if people had been told to stop drinking locally produced milk, which was by far the most important source of radiation."

(Russia distributed iodine tablets, as has Japan. But as we reported on Monday, these offer little protection against ingesting contaminating food or milk.)

6. Emergency workers at Chernobyl took few precautions, and may not have been fully informed about the risks they were taking.

The "Fukushima 50" who stayed at the plant on Tuesday and Wednesday to keep containment efforts underway have been facing serious risks. But they have been taking precautions, the Times reported, including breathing through respirators, wearing full-body jumpsuits, and limiting their exposure time.

At Chernobyl, the Guardian wrote:

[The firefighters] had had no protective clothing, or dosimetric equipment to measure radiation levels; the blazing radioactive debris fused with the molten bitumen, and when they had put the fires out with water from their hoses, they picked up chunks of it in their hands and kicked it away with their feet.... This heroic but utterly futile action took them closer to a lethal source of radiation than even the victims of Hiroshima...When they died two weeks later in Hospital No 6, Zakharov heard that the radiation had been so intense the colour of Vladimir Pravik's eyes had turned from brown to blue; Nikolai Titenok sustained such severe internal radiation burns there were blisters on his heart. Their bodies were so radioactive they were buried in coffins made of lead, the lids welded shut.

The Times noted that 28 of Chernobyl's emergency workers died from radiation exposure within three months, and more than 100 developed radiation sickness.

Chernobyl's final toll of deaths and injuries is still a subject of fierce debate. A 2005 Chernobyl Forum report, jointly produced by eight UN agencies and the governments of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Berlarus, concluded that up to "4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure" from Chernobyl, including 50 emergency workers who died of acute radiation syndrome, 15 children (as of 2005) who had died of thyroid cancer, and a projected total of "3940 deaths from radiation-induced cancer and leukemia" among emergency workers, evacuees, and residents of the most contaminated areas around Chernobyl. (The report noted that it's impossible to tell which cancer deaths in the region were specifically caused by Chernobyl radiation, only that there is an expected 3 percent increase.)

Lois Beckett writes for the Nieman Journalism Lab, the SF Weekly, and the East Bay Express.

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Even In Worst Case, Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Will Have Limited Reach

ProPublica: Articles and Investigations

by Abrahm Lustgarten

For more than a week the world has watched the escalating crisis at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant slide from one catastrophic episode to a seemingly graver one, often upending assurances from the Japanese and adding to the fear and confusion about how it all might end.

Are we on a slow-motion path to a six-reactor meltdown? Or will Fukushima stop short of being the worst nuclear power disaster ever, and squeeze somewhere behind Chernobyl and alongside Three Mile Island in infamy?

While there can be no definitive answers amid a still-unfolding disaster, ProPublica spoke with seven top nuclear engineers and scientists to at least establish some boundaries for the disaster's potential health and environmental impacts.

The rough consensus: The long-term and most severe effects from radiation at the plant, where four of six reactors are in crisis and hundreds of tons of spent fuel is a risk, will be largely contained to the area around the plant, affect a relatively limited population and will likely not spread outside Japan.

Even in the worst case, the crisis should not lead to the level of health and environmental destruction that followed the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the experts say. Unlike Chernobyl, the potential for an explosion large enough to carry contaminants high into the atmosphere and to far away areas appears remote.

A complete loss of control of the Fukushima plant, followed by total meltdowns at multiple reactors and fires in the spent fuel stocks, would be an extraordinary development leading to very high radioactive emissions and contamination of the surrounding landscape that could last for decades.

Such a scenario is now less probable, in part because the fuel rods in the reactors are expected to continue to cool each day. Even a sustained fire in the spent fuel that sits on the top level of the reactors is unlikely to result in "criticality," or a new nuclear chain reaction and reheating of that spent fuel.

The New York Times reported that Japanese officials remain concerned that criticality is possible in some of the troubled reactors or spent fuel. But even if it were to happen, the process can eventually be interrupted.

Experts interviewed by ProPublica said that even if a meltdown scenario unfolded unabated, the contamination would likely remain localized and would not affect a large population because evacuations have already been ordered. There remains uncertainty about whether worst-case contamination could reach as far as Tokyo, about 150 miles from the Fukushima plant, but few believe there is any chance of dangerous levels of contamination spreading offshore.

"The events that have happened, and the speculation for what could happen is not on the same scale as the release from Chernobyl," said Peter Caracappa, a nuclear engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y. "Based on all the available information, the risk to any of the places far from the plant … would be too small to calculate with any confidence. We're not talking intercontinental effects."

Odds of Total Meltdown Diminish

There are two aspects to the ongoing risk at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan: the fate of the reactors themselves, and the condition of the millions of pounds of spent fuel rods stored in open pools atop the reactor structures.

A total meltdown would occur if the fuel rods inside a reactor continue to overheat and break down, spilling the uranium or uranium-plutonium pellets inside them into a heap on the reactor floor. The core of the reactor containing the fuel rods is encased in a steel vessel that is then surrounded by a huge reinforced concrete containment structure.

As the fuel consolidates, there is less space for cooling water to circulate among the pellets, which can heat into a molten substance. The hotter that molten slurry gets, the greater the possibility that it can burn through the fortified steel containment vessel meant to isolate whatever happens inside the reactor.

A breach of the reactor vessel would normally be the most critical danger. If a meltdown did happen, experts say the fuel could leak out and spread through cracks in the concrete containment, sear through a second metal liner, and then flow out in the open air towards the perimeter of the plant.

"That's the event that changes this situation from a horrible situation to a nightmare of unprecedented proportion," said Kenneth Bergeron, a physicist who worked on nuclear reactor accident simulations at Sandia National Laboratories.

Officials have said they believe there has been a partial meltdown at least two of the four troubled reactors. But it has now been seven days since the reactors were shut down following a 9.0 earthquake that rocked the islands of Japan and triggered the devastating tsunami that swamped the power plant.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the plant, continues to work to control the temperature inside the reactors and has been injecting sea water laced with boron, which short-circuits the nuclear reaction, into the reactors to maintain cooling. Experts believe that by now, the reactors should have cooled substantially. And with each day that passes, they say, the temperature drops further and the possibility of a full meltdown diminishes.

"That doesn't seem very likely now," said Louis Lanese, a nuclear engineer who worked on the Three Mile Island crisis in 1979 and now is a partner with Panlyon Technologies, a nuclear energy services firm in Flanders, N.J. "It's cooled down. They have water over the core. Every day makes the consequences a little bit better."

For those cores to melt now, Lanese said, there would have to be a complete loss of water and fuel rods would have to sit for some time – days or even weeks. Even then, he said, "I don't know if there is enough energy in that fuel to even get out of the reactor vessel."

Spent Fuel Is Less Potent

The greater risk may now lie with the spent fuel sitting in storage pools on top of the reactors. Those pools contain very large quantities of old fuel, at least some of which still contains significant amounts of uranium, and they are not in containment like the reactor cores.

The spent fuel rods generate residual heat and must to be cooled by water, but water levels have been precariously low in at least one pool – Unit 3 – and may have dried up altogether in the pool at Unit 4. The danger is that the zirconium cladding that contains the fuel pellets, when exposed to the air, can catch fire and burn intensely and leave the fuel pellets exposed.

Twice, reports have emerged of smoke and a possible fire in the pool atop Unit 4, but it has been difficult to confirm exactly what is taking place. Those reports have also stoked concerns that spent fuel could also melt down, and because it is not contained, release large amounts of radioactivity.

But much of the most dangerous material has already been spent, or has begun to degrade. Lanese said that if the cooling water has already evaporated from the pool in Unit 4 without a significant fire erupting, it is a sign that convection cooling from exposure to the air is enough to keep the rods stable.

Explosions remain a risk at the site. When nuclear fuel is hot enough, it can split the water molecules, releasing hydrogen, a flammable gas. Should spent fuel become molten, it could melt through the floor of the pool. When doused again with water, it could create hydrogen and an explosion that released radioactive contaminants. If reactor fuel were to melt down, it could fall into an area that contains water.

There have already been three hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi plant – a gas buildup in the reactor buildings of Units 1, 2 and 3 destroyed the exterior walls. But unlike Chernobyl, the worst explosion believed possible at the Japanese plant would not push tens of thousands of feet into the atmosphere and would be a momentary event.

That explosive power is the key difference.

In Chernobyl, the reactor burst in a fiery ball while running at full capacity. The Chernobyl plant was also an entirely different design. It did not have a containment vessel to hold the fuel inside, and the core of the reactor contained graphite. The graphite burned like coal and sustained a roaring fire for two weeks, pushing radioactive particles miles into the atmosphere. That is how some of Chernobyl's radioactive fallout ended up in Northern Europe.

Radiation risk mostly local

If there is open-air exposure of molten fuel at Fukushima Daiichi, there does not appear to be a mechanism for carrying large quantities of radioactive byproducts over wide areas or great distances. A fire or hydrogen blast could carry contaminants into the lower atmosphere, but only for a relatively short way, scientists say.

The exposed fuel rods or molten slurry emit large amounts of radiation and present a serious health risk to workers inside the plant. But the radiation itself doesn't extend very far. To affect people outside the Fukushima facility, radioactive material has to be spread around.

Long-term radiation risks result from people swallowing or breathing in tiny particles that continue to be radioactive inside the human body, and continue to emit radiation as they break down over time. The radionuclides of most concern include cesium 137 – which has been detected around the Fukushima Daiichi plant – as well as strontium 90 and plutonium 239.

"A fuel melt doesn't necessarily lead to a big disaster, any more than what we have," said Gilbert Brown, a professor in the nuclear engineering program at the University of Massachussetts in Lowell. "Even if it's a fuel melt, you have to have a mechanism to get all that radiation to people, to get hurt by it."

Bergeron estimates that even after the worst kind of explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, contamination might be detectable 200 miles away, with the most serious contamination within a 100 mile radius.

"That, although striking and horrible, is something described as manageable," Bergeron said.

An evacuation has cleared out part of the area around the plant. Experts say the largest environmental impact, outside the facility, is potential contamination of the surrounding landscape. Fallout could affect groundwater and surface water supplies, as well as render much of the nearby farmland too dangerous for use.

Some of that environmental contamination can be cleaned up, but agriculture and food supplies could be affected for decades. Human health exposure can be limited by both evacuations and other precautions.

"I don't think we are going to kill a lot of people," said Victor Gilinsky, a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a former head of the physical sciences department at the Rand Corporation. "But you could have a tremendous amount of land contamination. Depending on the half life, it could be many time more than 30 years before you could go there."

Much uncertainty remains about what will happen next at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Experts caution that if there has been any lesson thus far, it is that assumptions can be easily proved wrong. But with every day that Japanese responders hold wholesale deterioration at bay – however tenuously – the health and environmental impacts should be less severe.

"I've worked almost 40 years in this business to keep anything even remotely like this from happening," said Lanese. "But strange as it is, these situations tell me that these plants have even more resilience than I had expected.

"This is what an 9.0 earthquake and an eight-foot Tsunami does?" he asked. "It's unprecedented. And those nuclear reactors are still there and still hanging in there."

Michael Grabell and Nick Kusnetz of ProPublica contributed to this report.

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Thursday, March 17, 2011

Don’t give money to Japan

Chris Blattman

So pleads Felix Salmon:

We went through this after the Haiti earthquake, and all of the arguments which applied there apply to Japan as well. Earmarking funds is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places. And as Matthew Bishop and Michael Green said last year, we are all better at responding to human suffering caused by dramatic, telegenic emergencies than to the much greater loss of life from ongoing hunger, disease and conflict. That often results in a mess of uncoordinated NGOs parachuting in to emergency areas with lots of good intentions, where a strategic official sector response would be much more effective. Meanwhile, the smaller and less visible emergencies where NGOs can do the most good are left unfunded.

In the specific case of Japan, there's all the more reason not to donate money. Japan is a wealthy country which is responding to the disaster, among other things, by printing hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of new money. Money is not the bottleneck here: if money is needed, Japan can raise it. On top of that, it's still extremely unclear how or where organizations like globalgiving intend on spending the money that they're currently raising for Japan — so far we're just told that the money "will help survivors and victims get necessary services," which is basically code for "we have no idea what we're going to do with the money, but we'll probably think of something."

Reader thoughts?

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SCIENCE: The Dirt on Nuclear Power

Project Syndicate - A World of Ideas - the highest quality opinion ...
SCIENCE: The Dirt on Nuclear Power Japan's nuclear crisis is a nightmare, but it is not an anomaly. In fact, it is only the latest in a long line of nuclear accidents involving meltdowns, explosions, fires, and loss of coolant – accidents that have occurred during both normal operation and emergency conditions, such as droughts and earthquakes.
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Our Reading List for Following Nuclear News From Japan

ProPublica: Articles and Investigations

by Marian Wang

If you're trying to follow the news from Japan, you may be finding that the news is coming out faster than you can actually read it.

We've compiled a few resources that we've found helpful as we track this developing story. With the news itself overwhelming enough as it is, we're trying to keep it short so as not to overwhelm with quantity, but feel free to put your suggestions in the comments below.

Resources for news in real time:

The Guardian has kept a helpful live blog going, keeping it up to date but not too cluttered. The New York Times and NPR have also been updating.

As for Twitter, The Globe and Mail's East Asia correspondent @markmackinnon has a good Japan twitter list to follow. The UK's Daily Telegraph (@TelegraphWorld) has another. Energy writer @JesseJenkins has a list specifically on the nuclear crisis. The Japanese government's press secretary Noriyuki Shikata is also tweeting at @norishikata

How nuclear plants work and what's at risk of happening:

The Wall Street Journal has good backgrounder on how nuclear reactors work and what went wrong in Japan. It covers the basics, including the difference between a partial meltdown (what's happened so far) and a full meltdown (the situation that Japan is fighting to avert).

The New York Times also has a helpful interactive for understanding some of the technicalities about nuclear reactors. The Washington Post has a map of nuclear plants in Japan that shows the reach of the evacuation zones overlaid with population density (tab 7).

We've also reported on why the storage of "spent" nuclear fuel is a growing safety concern for Japan—a concern related to but separate from fears of a full meltdown.

The public health angle:

The World Health Organization has an FAQ on the health risks of radiation exposure in Japan. About 140,000 people have been ordered to stay home to avoid exposure.

NPR has a short explainer on the iodine tablets being distributed at evacuation centers. We noted that those pills were deemed by U.S. officials in recent years to offer limited protection from the effects of radiation exposure.

About the wider crisis: 

The New York Times has a quick look at the current state of things on the ground right now in Japan: More than 2,700 confirmed dead, thousands still missing, and about 400,000 living in makeshift shelters and evacuation centers.

The Times also has before-and-after interactive satellite images showing the devastation to key locales. And the Big Picture blog, as always, has compiled several sets of incredibly heartwrenching photos.

Nuclear safety concerns outside of Japan:

The Post interactive includes a map of nuclear plants in seismic zones around the world (tab 9). It shows that in the United States, two plants in California are located in areas of "very high" degree of seismic hazard.

We've also published a piece on the capacity of U.S. nuclear plants to handle a major natural disaster like Japan's. And given the New York Times piece today on the design weaknesses of the reactors used in Japan, McClatchy Newspapers has a piece on the 23 nuclear plants in the U.S. that use the same reactors. General Electric, which designed the reactors, has defended them as safe and reliable

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Slacktivism, the Gateway to Change?

SSIR Opinion & Analysis

I've been thinking about slacktivism a lot lately. I recently did a guest lecture at The New School on the topic, I've had countless conversations with colleagues and friends, and I've been capturing ideas and questions to myself on scraps of paper everywhere. Slacktivism, to me, comes down to two crucial points: 1) organizations play an important role in creating and endorsing the level to which people take action, and 2) "slacker activism" is really a gateway to more lasting change. My guest lecture notes cover the first point, and today I want to share a few ideas about slacktivism as a gateway to change.

Call and Response

Some consider Facebook likes and retweets as examples of slacktivism, but we can also view those actions as people raising their hands or signing on with the message that they are here, they are listening, and they are ready to respond. Organizations are putting out calls, and the community is responding. It's just a matter of shaping your call to action well. Katya Andresen has a great post about some of the "essential elements to a strong call to action." But I want to add a few more elements that can help change organizations' calls for response into actual calls to action:

  • Create opportunities that people can personalize. There's no engagement quite the same as having responses include personal messages, pictures, videos, or even re-worded messages.
  • Create opportunities with multiple levels of action. There's nothing wrong with asking people to simply share a message, so long as you're also providing opportunities for others in the network who are willing to do more.
  • Create opportunities for taking action that bridge online and offline, and start moving people on both sides of the computer.

Getting Offline

I've had many people tell me that the Internet is ruining society, community, family, and everything else. I personally don't believe that. I've worked with communities to build online spaces where people of all ages, accessibility, and interests can come together to share, learn, and more directly build a community that they can take offline. I've also worked with an organization that has created an online portal that helps connect teachers to content about global issues they can use in their class, and that gives students opportunities to take action and to connect with other students around the world.

Those who have worked on organizing and engaging communities will know firsthand that you can't get people to take action until they feel that they understand the issue, have access to key information, and trust that their action will make a difference. Online connections with organizations and causes can help expose people to information about issues in a much richer, more dynamic, and more accessible (not to mention more scalable) way. That said, we need to make sure we remember that online connections are about more than just getting information.

A recent study from University of California's Humanities Research Institute, backed by MacArthur Foundation, involved more than 2,500 high school students (the study followed some students for up to 3.5 years!) and "found that younger Internet users become more socially engaged in the real world, not just online."

Youth engagement in interest-driven online communities was associated with increased volunteer and charity work, and in increased work with others on community issues. The Internet can serve as a gateway to online and offline civic and political engagement, including volunteerism, community problem-solving, and protest activity.

And, as Matthew Ingram posted recently, "A study from the Pew Research Center earlier this year found that being active in social networks and other community-related activities online makes it more likely you will be involved with similar groups and activities in the offline world as well."

So, what are you doing to connect your online community with offline actions? How are you building information and action into your communications and online engagement? What have you tried that didn't work or what do you want to try but haven't yet?

(As I continue to put my thoughts together about slacktivism in the nonprofit and social impact space, I'm looking next at the impact of location and hyperlocal content on slacktivism and engagement.)

Can't wait to hear your thoughts!


image Amy Sample Ward is a blogger, facilitator, and trainer who focuses on leveraging social technologies for social change. In 2009, she co-authored Social by Social, a handbook for using social technologies for social impact, and she has contributed to various other publications about social media. She is a conversation-starter and thought-leader, and writes about strategic uses of new technologies for communities and organizations here and on her blog. She is also the membership director at NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network.

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Monday, March 14, 2011

The Wealth of African Nations

Africa Can... - End Poverty

This is a story of three Africas.

One is all too familiar – the declining fortunes of fragile states. Another is less well-known: the growing importance of mineral and energy resources in many African economies. The big story is that, from 1995-2005, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa grew their total wealth faster than the world average– a major African success story.

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The Myth of “Wild Africa”: a critical appreciation

Africa Works

I'm teaching a class on technology, development and sub-Saharan Africa this term at Arizona State University, and one of my students, Dustin Short, has written a penetrating appreciation of one of the classic texts on conservation and environmental protection in the region, The Myth of Wild Africa. The challenge of balancing "man and nature" in Africa is made considerably harder by a legacy of international interventions that both pathologically romanticize Africa's environment while at the same time relentlessly diminishing the capacity for Africans to strike a satisfactory balance on their own accord. International environmental groups continue to advance arguments that confuse as much as clarify how, when and where to control and coordinate the interplay between humans and animals and the lands they co-inhabit. Short writes eloquently and with necessary detail about one of the great and neglected subjects of African affairs:

Jonathan Adams and Thomas McShane, in The Myth of Wild Africa, argue that the idea of an Africa unspoiled by human activity was a fabrication of early white explorers. This perception of "Africa as uninhabited wilderness" [35] has persisted through colonialism into the modern era of African conservation. According to the authors "the myth of Africa as a pristine wilderness, problematic from the outset, was an utter fallacy firmly in place by the mid-nineteenth century" [17] is the greatest hindrance to conservation in Africa today. Instead of the West dictating a strict conservation policy of preservation that stems from an emotional response created by advocacy groups, Myth posits that "simple justice demands that we recognize the primacy of Africans in conserving their natural heritage." [251]

The legacy of colonialism has created a mentality within the Western conservation community of "primitive Africans" who are presented for European consumption as not far removed from the animals that inhabit the wilderness. "Science and technology are the most powerful tools that the West has at its disposal. The inhabitants of the primeval African wilderness cannot protect it, many people outside of Africa believe, so it follows that the West must take on this task, and must send in its finest troops, the scientific foot soldiers." [90] While not explicitly stated, Myth subtly intimates that the West must avoid considering "Africans just another species" [28] "incapable of protecting their wildlife." [60] Even the rhetoric used by some members of animal rights movement claim that "it is only a matter of time before African culture 'evolves' to the point where Africans will accept the value of strict preservationism" [167] indicates that some conservationists still view Africans living closer to the wild animals than the civilized West. Myth counters this regressive mindset with the concept that African conservation "will most certainly fail if Africans are not included in every level." [108]

Adams and McShane provide a wealth of examples to dispel this illusion of uncaring and incapable Africans. In contrast, the inclusion of rural Africans has produced some surprising results where exclusionary methods of conservation experience little success if not outright failure. As the Owens experienced in Botswana "If you cannot operate within the bounds of government, whom you are a guest of in this country, to work these issues out, then work elsewhere." [146]

Africans from the governmental to local level have little incentive to conserve their resources beyond a sense of economic gain or national pride. If efforts are not taken to appeal to these aspects of African life, the authors argue that very little traction will be gained in conserving the wildlife of Africa. Where rural communities have been involved great strides have been made. In the pilot program that led to the creation of ADMADE, Lupande saw poaching rates decrease at least ten fold as the villagers gained skills from the training program [165]. Much of this was due to the program receiving part of the revenue generated by commercial safari organizations. The villagers saw a direct monetary benefit to protecting their wildlife and developed a protectiveness of the animals. In Botswana, the democratic environment created by "kgotla" (public meeting, community council or traditional court of a Botswana village) allows the rural populace to use their voice when provided the opportunity. In 1991 seven hundred residents of the Okavango Delta spoke out against a proposed dredging program, citing fears of draining the delta dry [152]. Clearly the rural Africans, given the chance, are willing to protect the very land that has sustained them and their families for generations, if not much longer. It is these cases, where the rural communities are directly involved, and given custodianship that provide the most hope for conservation in Africa.

Most promising, rural Tanzanians complained to the state government that "the Wildlife Department had not created any game reserves" in their region, the first occurrence of Tanzanians volunteering their land for a game reserve [158]. The afterword explains it best: "Conservation in Africa, once the exclusive province of Europeans and Americans, increasingly carries an indelibly African stamp." [251]

Unfortunately The Myth of Wild Africa has begun to show its age. Written nearly twenty years ago many recent developments in conservation have addressed the issues discussed. While the afterword, written in 1996, does a commendable job of acknowledging the changes that Africa has seen from political to environmental, that was still fifteen years ago and even more has changed. Many conservation programs have begun to incorporate rural communities into their scope.

One such program seeks to protect the wild African dog, which is the most endangered species of canid, and is threatened by rabies contracted from domestic dogs. The wild dogs are elusive however and vaccinating them was not feasible. So a program was designed to vaccinate domestic dogs kept by the Maasai. The Maasai were enthusiastic at the prospect of protecting their pets from a grisly death as well as villagers bit by infected dogs and in the process a rabies free quarantine zone was established around Tanzania's wild dog populations. This is a clear example of conservation efforts providing tangible benefits to rural Africans while simultaneously protecting threatened wildlife.

Adams and McShane consistently portray American conservation policy as synonymous with American and European conservation advocacy groups. The authors mention that "a fenced park plays on a Western Ideal of wild Africa by making the mistaken claim that a fence is a barrier against both man and nature, creating in effect a time capsule; the land inside the fence shall endure, untainted by man, regardless of what happens beyond." [56] However look at the National Parks of the United States where few, if any, parks have a fence surrounding them. Some have border fences to counter illegal immigration, like Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, but those are roundly criticized by conservationists as preventing animal migrations. This is exactly the same criticism that African parks face. Adams and McShane frequently mention safari hunting as a source of revenue to fund conservation efforts but the position is unpopular with advocacy groups [169]. While many advocacy groups do not support this route, the sale of hunting licenses in the United States is a major source of conservation funds. In a similar vein, the authors frequently make a distinction between conservation tactics of the West and methods that will work for Africa. This implies that the West operates differently from Africa as far as conservation. However when recently reintroduced California Condors were dying of lead poisoning, hunters were educated about the problem and many subsequently switched to using non-lead ammunition to preserve the species.

While the "march of civilization destroyed has destroyed or tamed the wilderness of North America and Europe." [xii] The West still faces the same conservation challenges as Africa. Both must balance short term economic needs with long term environmental considerations. If Africa can find ways to develop economically without destroying the charismatic megafauna that charms the international community, maybe there is hope that one day America can find ways to coexist with bison, grizzlies and wolves throughout the American West.

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An Interview with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee

Financial Access Initiative Blog

MIT Economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee have a new book called Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. We'll be reviewing the book here on our blog in the near future. In the meantime we thought a look back at an interview Duflo and Banerjee conducted in 2008 with our friends Tim Ogden and Laura Starita at Philanthropy Action on their ideas of what poverty interventions they view as effective and where donors can make a true impact.

And for those eager to dig deeper into the nitty gritty of using rigorous evaluation to assess poverty interventions, here is a link to Duflo and Banerjee's original groundbreaking study, The Miracle of Microfinance?. Written with Rachel Glennerster and Cynthia Kinnan, the paper examines the promise of microfinance to alleviate poverty and continues to be a touchstone for practitioners, donors, and regulators today.

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Is microfinance a neoliberal fairytale?| Madeleine Bunting

Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk

Critics of microcredit make some convincing arguments that need urgent rebuttal from the organisations that have ploughed huge sums into it

The complicated twists and turns in Bangladesh over the position of Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel prize winner, continue. Last week government officials were quoted saying that he had been ousted from his position as managing director of Grameen Bank, and there is clearly a nasty dogfight going on in Bangladesh over the reputation of its most famous citizen. Blame is now flying around in every direction – including the Norwegians for giving him a Nobel prize in the first place.

In the meantime, the film that has played a powerful role in challenging Yunus's global reputation as a pioneer of microfinance will finally be shown in London on Friday( I wrote about the film on this blog a month ago). After the film, the Danish film-maker Tom Heinemann will be in conversation with Alex Counts of the Grameen Foundation. Given how fiercely contested the whole subject of microfinance and the role of the Grameen Bank in particular has become, Counts deserves credit for taking on the debate publicly.

Inevitably, much of the media coverage has focused on Yunus himself, rather than the much broader questions Heinemann is asking about microfinance as an effective strategy for poverty reduction. After I last blogged on this, I had some very interesting responses, including one from the Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, who directed me to a paper he had written (pdf) with Milford Bateman – one of microfinance's most vociferous critics and an interviewee in Heinemann film. Their critique of microfinance makes some very convincing arguments that urgently need rebuttal from the many development agencies and foundations around the world that have ploughed huge sums into the expansion of microfinance in the last decade.

Here are some of Chang and Bateman's top findings:

1 Microfinance is based on an attractive but false premise that poor people can make themselves richer providing they have access to credit. But wealth creation, outside of fairytales, is very rarely the result of individual effort. Rather it is a collective endeavour – requiring skills and knowledge – in institutions such as companies, co-operatives. Microfinance has erroneously put the individual centre stage, reflecting a neoliberal world view.

2 Microfinance has always maintained that it is self financing apart from the initial start-up costs. But what the last few months have revealed is that unless there is a big injection of government or aid funds, microfinance institutions have to charge very high interest rates. Without subsidy, interest rates soar to 50% and even higher. That really cuts into any possibility of small businesses being able to reinvest their profits.

3 Most loans are not used to create small businesses at all; they are used for "consumption smoothing" as the economists describe it, in other words, those items of extraordinary expenditure such as weddings, funerals or education and health fees. That is the kind of scenario which leads to indebtedness.

4 Finally, microfinance is not very successful at creating prosperous small businesses in the long run. Much was made of the "telephone ladies" in the 1990s who took out microloans to buy mobiles and rent them out. Initially they made handsome profits, but as Chang points out their income has dropped dramatically. If a business idea works and is accessible to poor people, everyone will pile in; it's why you see rows of women sitting patiently selling a few tomatoes in African marketplaces. Overcrowding is a result of very limited options in terms of technology, skills and financial resources: microfinance doesn't solve any of those problems.

Chang and Bateman cite academics arguing that the claims of microfinance are "in many respects a world of make-believe." These points all seem damaging enough but Chang and Bateman go even further, arguing that microfinance could actually inhibit poverty reduction by diverting attention and resources from the much more important state co-ordinated policy interventions, financial institutions and investment strategies that have been crucial to the success of fast-growing economies such as Vietnam, China and South Korea.

The gist of the argument is that the enthusiasm for microfinance has been rooted in the myth of the heroic individual entrepreneur, the rags to riches fairytales, Dick Whittington style.


guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Post-earthquake imagery of Japan

The Official Google Blog
(Cross-posted from the LatLong Blog)

In response to the devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan, we've worked with our satellite imagery providers to get the latest available data of the areas affected most.

To view this high-resolution imagery, courtesy of our partners at GeoEye, download this KML file and explore it in Google Earth. You can also explore the imagery with Google Maps, or have a look at this Picasa album of before-and-after shots. Here's a sample:

Before and after the earthquake and tsunami. Above is Yuriage in Natori, below is Yagawahama; both are in Miyagi prefecture. High-resolution version of this photo.

We're working to provide this data directly to response organizations on the ground to aid their efforts. We hope this new updated satellite imagery is valuable for them as well as everyone else following this situation to help illustrate the extent of the damage.

You can find more information regarding the disaster and resources for those in need at our Crisis Response page in English and Japanese. You can also follow @earthoutreach on Twitter to stay up to date with our mapping and imagery efforts.

Posted by Ryan Falor, Google Crisis Response team
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