Doug Casey on Japan: Something Wicked This Way Came

Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator 

L: Doug, a few weeks ago, you warned of more chaos and turmoil–not just in financial markets, but the fabric of society itself fraying around the edges, maybe even unraveling significantly. You couldn’t know the earthquake would hit Japan and exacerbate our world’s woes, but you did tell us that our world was already teetering close to the edge of an abyss – and now it’s just been given a violent shove in that direction. Many readers have written to ask what you make of the situation. Is the damage in Japan largely a Japanese problem? Or could this be the straw that breaks the global economic camel’s back?

Doug: I’m reluctant to say anything regarding what’s actually happening now over there, because as we sit here speaking in Salta, Argentina, we are literally on the opposite side of the world from Japan – about as far away as we can get. I’ve felt earthquakes here in the past, which are slightly disorienting and disturbing, but that doesn’t make me, or any of these other armchair quarterbacks, an expert. I’m not there, and I’m not a seismologist, and I don’t want to play the role of yet another talking head spouting uninformed opinions. It seems there’s very little reliable information that’s making it into the media. And what is, is reliably distorted.

L: I don’t think anyone expects you to be a fountain of local knowledge, but your take on things is so often different from what we hear anywhere else, I’m not surprised readers want to know your thoughts.

Doug: Well, okay, so this was a 9.0 quake, which makes it among the very worst in recorded history. The Richter scale is logarithmic, so a nine is ten times more powerful than an eight, which is already a big time event. This one’s epicenter was offshore. That created a tsunami, of course, and the world was fairly mesmerized by those images of an unstoppable wave swallowing up the Japanese countryside. That greatly compounded the damage caused by the quake itself. All of this was very bad, but now it seems that an inordinate amount of press ink is being spilled commenting on the nuclear reactors that were damaged.

L: Let’s talk about the earthquake coverage first, because I agree that this nuclear fearmongering seems to be an almost separate thing. I am deeply sympathetic to all the people in Japan who lost their lives – and the living who lost loved ones, the property owners, everyone. But the loss of life is tiny compared to the quake in Haiti last year, which claimed over 300,000 lives; or the tsunami in 2004 that killed 230,000 people in Indonesia; or even the Sichuan quake that hit China in 2008. Is it just me, or does it seem to you that worldwide press coverage is more intense this time?

Doug: It might have to do with economic impact. There were also big quakes in recent years in Iran and Pakistan –remote and poor places. This thing that hit Japan was First World and prime time. This resulted in more live footage and coverage. But Japan – like Chile – was much more able to weather their disaster than places like Haiti, Pakistan, or Iran simply because it’s rich. The solution to natural disasters is not more regulation and more NGOs – it’s more wealth.

The many YouTube videos of tsunami footage have gone viral. The tsunami was much more damaging than the earthquake.

Plus there’s the nuclear angle, which has been blown out of all proportion to the other two disasters, is generating its own hysteria, and is keeping the story atop the news. Or so it seems to me.

L: Okay, well then, let’s talk about that. You hear pretty scary things – the walls and roof of one of the plants affected were blown clear off, the radiation level around the plant has risen to dangerous levels, but the picture remains very unclear. There’s talk of another Chernobyl – could that actually be happening?

Doug: Well, I’m no more a nuclear physicist than I am a seismologist, but most of what I read strikes me as being hysteria. While not an expert – and the real experts in this area are few and far between – I am a technology aficionado… I say that even though I don’t have a cell phone…

L: [Laughs] That’s true, Doug – a bit of a contradiction.

Doug: [Laughs] It is true. I love technology, but don’t like to be bothered with nuisances. I don’t want to be belled, like a cow, and I don’t feel a need to keep up with an endless flow of distracting and trivial Twitter communications.

L: This is actually an aside worth highlighting: you can be a fan of technology without letting that technology dictate your life’s terms to you.

Doug: That’s exactly the way I see it. I am a technophile, but I still prefer to read a book over using a Kindle.

L: Me too. I like paper books, even the way they smell. But back to Japan – what about those explosions? Is it credible to you that the walls and roof of a nuclear power plant can be blown clean off and there be no major release of radiation? And since then, the trouble they’ve had cooling the fuel rods – could there still be a meltdown ahead?

Doug: Well, as I understand it, to begin with, nuclear power plants in Japan are built with earthquakes in mind. They know they live in a tectonically very active place, and plants built there have to be built on bedrock. They also have to be built on shock-absorbing foundations. These precautions seem to have worked quite well, actually, and the plants apparently received very little damage from the quake itself and its aftershocks. Also as designed, the affected reactors shut down automatically. The problems came later, when the primary (grid) power wasn’t there to keep the cooling systems working, and then the backup diesel-powered systems failed when hit by the tsunami, and then the third-tier battery backups ran out of power and things started overheating.

Now, as I understand it, when the reactors shut down, that means the fuel rods were pulled out or shielded. So, even if the reactor core or the cooling water overheats, there’s very little radioactive material in it. Now, I don’t know what caused those explosions – maybe there was some hydrogen being generated – but unless the Japanese and all the media operating in that country are blatantly lying, the shielded reactor core of the blown-up building was not affected. So, it’s unclear why there would be a meltdown. Certainly all this talk about how this is bigger than 100 Hiroshima bombs is silly. I’ve heard that the scare about the water in Tokyo is based on radiation levels that are lower than the safety guidelines in other places, such as the UK.

What happened in Japan was basically a worst-case scenario – Mother Nature threw the Japanese a double-dose of viciousness – and the technology actually worked. A major disaster has been prevented so far.

L: And yet, the press keeps reporting this as a nuclear disaster – the biggest one since Chernobyl.

Doug: That just goes to show you how ignorant and lazy most reporters are. There have only been two serious nuclear disasters in the 60-year history of nuclear energy, and both were Soviet accidents, one being back in the ‘40s, when no one knew what they were doing. People were handling fissile uranium with their hands – there was a lot people didn’t know or understand back then. The other accident was Chernobyl, of course. There, the plant was –like most Soviet plants –basically junk. It didn’t even have a containment barrier. As far as I can tell, what’s happened in Japan is very, very different from what happened in Chernobyl. Chernobyl was a result of bad design, pure and simple. In Japan, we have good design minimizing the impact of serious natural disaster.

But also remember that the reactors in Japan are close to 40 years old, and designed 50 years ago. That’s ridiculously antiquated – as if the car you were driving today was designed in the 1950s, or your computer was from that era. If the nuclear industry was not a ward of the state, it would have advanced far beyond where it is. But it’s stuck in time, because bureaucracy is always terrified of change. This is true everywhere the state plays a role. It’s why, for instance, the light aircraft industry is still flying Pipers and Cessnas that are basically 70 year-old designs. It’s actually criminal as well as comical. Regulation has made it uneconomic to improve them.

L: I know a Ukrainian engineer who says that the inadequate design elements at Chernobyl were compounded by political stupidity; Moscow ordered the plant managers to exceed designed plant capacity.

Doug: That wouldn’t surprise me in the least. In comparing what’s happening now to Chernobyl, people are just reacting hysterically – as they often do. It’s just like the fear-driven reactions to sodium cyanide, which is used in heap-leaching gold. I hate to see this thing being described as one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, when it was the earthquake and tsunami that were the disasters. It remains to be seen if the problems at the plant kill even a single person. Perhaps that will be the case. But thousands of people die every week, around the world, in industrial accidents. You have to keep this in proportion – something that political hacks, green activists, and the man-bites-dog media have no interest in.

L: What about Three Mile Island?

Doug:That wasn’t a nuclear disaster, it was a nuclear scare. More people got killed in Teddy Kennedy’s car. Nobody even got sick. What we have now, as far as I can tell, is more than a scare – but far from a disaster.

As I’ve often said, if you want everything to be safe you’d still be living in a cave– and likely dead by the time you were 20. Cars kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. When there’s an air disaster everyone goes wild. The only solution to the dangers of life on this little ball of dirt is vastly improved technology, and vastly increased wealth. You will arrive at those things most quickly through a completely free and unregulated society. Mankind’s destiny is – or should be – literally in the stars and on other planets. We’re not going to get there if fear and hysteria dominate on this insignificant little planet where we’re trapped right now.

I’m embarrassed to be surrounded by all these “Henny Penny”chickens, scared kitties, and wild chimpanzees. Of all the problems there are to worry about… Even if this turns more serious, this one is very far down the list. It’s probably even below anthropogenic global warming.