Could a Fukushima happen in Pakistan?

On a quiet Friday afternoon in March 2011 something was stirring in the Earth deep under the waters of the North Pacific Ocean. Unknown to people preparing for their weekend on the North Eastern coast of the Japanese island of Hokkaido they were about to be hit by one of the largest earthquakes ever to be recorded in human history.

What is now known as the Tohoku undersea megathrust earthquake struck at 2.15pm Japanese time. It’s hypocenter was 70 km off shore and it registered a magnitude of 9.0 on the Richter scale. A few moments later a tsunami with wave heights reaching 100 feet washed ashore on the North Eastern coast of Hokkaido. The waters penetrated up to 10 km inland razing just about everything in their way. In a few minutes some 18,000 people had lost their lives.

But they were not the only casualties of that tragic day. At a nuclear power plant on the coast in Fukushima Prefecture the tsunami cut power to pumps supplying cooling water to the reactors and submerged backup emergency generators. With no cooling water the cores of 3 operating reactors overheated resulting in core meltdowns, explosions, and loss of radioactive containment. Radioactivity was released and continues to be released into the soil, air and water. A mandatory exclusion zone banning people from coming within 20 km of the plant remains in effect.

Three hundred tons of toxic highly radioactive water from the site continues to leak into the Pacific Ocean every day. The plant operator - Tokyo Electric Power Company - admitted recently that it has “lost control of Fukushima”. Radiation in the vicinity of the plant is so high that it would kill a human exposed to it in 4 hours.

The Fukushima incident is emblematic of the problem with nuclear power. A serious accident results in the release of radiation into the environment. And this is the good news. The real problem is that nuclear fuel and waste products generated in nuclear reactors remain radioactive from 10,000 to tens of millions of years. For example the half life - a measure of the rate of natural decay of radioactive materials - of the waste product Plutonium 239 is 24,000 years, and that of Neptunium 237 is two million years. When these waste products are released into the environment in an accident they are there to stay.

While the Fukushima accident was triggered by a natural disaster similar accidents have occurred at other nuclear plants as a result of human error or equipment failure. The most notable of these was the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 in the then Soviet Union. The reactor containment vessel exploded due to operator error. The environment was contaminated. Over the years 4000 people died of radiation induced cancer. The cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat were completely abandoned. A 30 km permanent exclusion zone remains in effect around the accident site. And it may well remain in effect for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Fukushima has had a chilling effect on the global nuclear power industry. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, a physicist by training, understood immediately. Within days of the accident 8 of Germany’s 17 reactors were shut down permanently. The remaining 9 are all due to be closed by 2022. The Italian parliament voted to cancel all contracts awarded in the past few years to build nuclear power plants. Switzerland with 5 operating reactors announced that the reactors will continue to operate but “will not be replaced at the end of their life span”. Even China, with ambitious plans to build nuclear capacity suspended approvals for all new plants as it sought to review safety issues.

Pakistan, despite a few palliative statements of concern, seems unmoved. We have three operating nuclear power plants. One near Karachi at Paradise Point on the coast of the Arabian sea. And two at Chashma on the banks of the Indus River in Punjab. Disturbingly, two more reactors are under construction at Chashma and a third is planned. By the time the Chashma site reaches its planned capacity in 2020 it will have five operating reactors on the banks of the Indus River.

Imagine the consequences of a nuclear accident at Chashma: Contaminated radioactive water starts to leak into the Indus River. It is carried downstream to hundreds of cities and villages. Irrigation canals then carry it to most arable areas of the land. Within a few weeks much of livable Pakistan is contaminated.

Building the plants at all was a bad idea. But building them upstream on the Indus verges on suicidal negligence. If Japan, one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world, is unable to cope with a nuclear accident, can we?

The plants at Chashma need to be shut down, and contracts for those being built cancelled. A disaster at Chashma will make our most intractable problem of today - terrorism - seem like a walk in the park.

Nadeem M. Qureshi is Chairman of Mustaqbil Pakistan

As Linux stalks Windows poor countries will benefit

What do the International Space Station, the Czech Post Office, the French Parliament and the Turkish Government have in common? All have switched from using a proprietary Operating System (OS) on their computers to an ‘open source’ or free OS; or putting it simply: They have switched from Windows to a free OS called Linux. And they are not alone. A growing number of businesses, educational and scientific institutions, schools and governments are doing likewise. Why are they doing it? And what has all this got to do with Pakistan?

First some definitions: An OS is the software that manages the computer and its resources such as processors, storage, drives and the like. It plays host to the many programs called applications that people need for computers to be useful. Popular programs used for typing and editing documents, preparing spreadsheets and office presentations, and surfing the web would be useless without an OS. The OS provides the ‘operating environment’ for these programs to function so that you - the user - can do what you want to.

The most popular OS by far is Microsoft’s Windows. More than 90% of the world’s PCs run Windows. About 7% run Apple’s OS X. And just under 2% run Linux. But this is changing rapidly as people are beginning to discover the advantages of Linux. First, Linux is absolutely free. No need for a license. No need for a pirated copy. Second, it is just as easy to use. Third, in contrast to proprietary systems whose innards are known only to the companies that sell them, Linux is literally an open book. Anyone can see its innards - the programming or ‘source’ code which makes it tick - the reason it’s called ‘open source’. This means that it can’t do anything behind your back like send information about you to its makers without your knowing it. Useful in these post-Snowden days. And fourth, it is practically immune to viruses so no need for expensive and intrusive antivirus software.

Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds a computer engineer from Finland some 22 years ago. Since then an army of software programmers has worked to improve it and make it available for general use. As a result today there are several versions - or distributions as they are called - of Linux which can be downloaded readily and installed on personal computers. They have colourful names such as Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu and many more.

The last of these - Ubuntu - is perhaps the most popular. In fact, I am writing this article on a PC running Ubuntu which I downloaded and installed myself. People with relatively little computer savvy can download a distribution such as Ubuntu and install and run it on their computer in an hour or so. What’s more, it comes preinstalled with open source versions of the most popular applications: Microsoft’s Office is replaced by Libre Office, and Internet Explorer by Firefox. So it is usable out of the box. It makes no sense anymore for anyone to pay for proprietary software when just as good, and arguably better free software is available.

Many countries and governments - rich and poor - have realized this and have already initiated serious programs to switch all their computers to Linux based systems. Here are just a few examples of many: The US Army is the single largest user of ‘Red Hat’. Malaysia in 2010 switched 703 of its 724 government agencies to Linux. The Chief Secretary of the Malaysian Government justified the switch as follows: “the general acceptance of its promise of better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility and lower cost”. The Turkish Government has created its own Linux distribution called ‘Pardus’, as has Cuba, whose distribution is named “Nova”. Iceland announced in 2012 that it will switch to open source software in public institutions. All schools in Iceland have already switched to Ubuntu from Windows. Brazil has 35 million students in over 50,000 schools using over half a million PC’s all running on Linux. Russia announced in 2007 that all its school computers will run on Linux. The list goes on, and on.

As a poor country Pakistan cannot afford proprietary software. In Linux we now have a powerful, globally accepted, and free alternative. We also have a large pool of talented young software engineers and programmers. Our government needs to put them to work in making Linux the preferred OS in every PC in every classroom and office in the country. The savings to Pakistan on licensing fees will be several hundred million dollars per year. Why should we, the poor, continue to enrich the Microsofts and Apples of the world when there is absolutely no need to do so?

Nadeem M Qureshi is Chairman of Mustaqbil Pakistan.