Nuclear futures
At a crucial stage in the still open-ended nuclear developments in Japan, you assigned four pages to exploring how nuclear power might be “rescued” (26 March, p 8), and only a short piece on the consequences in Japan (26 March, p 6). You question the judgement that building new nuclear plants might not be a favourable low-carbon strategy. You also assert, twice, that nuclear power is an “essential option”.
In fact, many studies have documented that with the requisite political will and investment it is technically feasible and economically viable to achieve a secure zero carbon future without new nuclear build (for example, see ). Support for nuclear is entirely legitimate, but it is just one option. To insist as a matter of science that it is indispensable undermines both scientific independence and healthy democratic debate.
From Quentin Macilray Paul Marks tells us that Japan’s Fukushima reactors are a 40-year-old design, as if this is an excuse for the failure of their safety systems (26 March, p 11). This misses the point: when they were built, the reactors were state-of-the-art and supposedly resilient to anything except an unimaginable catastrophe, which duly happened. Today’s state-of-the-art designs will also one day be 40-year-old decrepits, and the catastrophe, when it comes, will be unimaginable. Alexis Marincic of reactor-maker Areva claims in the article that most of the failures that led to Fukushima’s radiation leaks would “probably not have happened with the latest designs”. So that’s all right then.
Limassol, Cyprus
From Andrew Taubman
The continual parade of possible technological solutions to anthropogenic climate change 鈥� thorium reactors, pebble bed reactors, European pressurised reactors, nuclear fusion, giant solar shades 鈥� only serves to muddy the waters and convince ordinary people that they don’t have to do anything yet, and possibly ever, to combat this threat. The only strategies that can have any useful long-term effect are compulsory energy conservation measures, restrictions on power-hungry technologies, and the swift implementation of solar-thermal power generation.
Solar-thermal generators are still not as efficient as they could be, but we don’t have the luxury of waiting for improvements. They exist, they work, they harness free plentiful energy, and they are affordable compared with the alternatives. Low efficiency can be overcome simply by having more of them. We need to start encouraging use of this technology now.
Queens Park, New South Wales, Australia
From Gila Shoshany
The “safer” nuclear technology you write about is, by your own admission, some way off. This suggests that increasing our reliance on nuclear power today means saddling ourselves with a dangerous technology that is already understood to be outdated.
The Fukushima crisis was triggered when the tsunami deprived its backup systems of power. This essential weakness lies at the heart of all current industrial nuclear technologies. Without access to water and power, any nuclear plant is a Fukushima waiting to happen. Installing additional backup systems is not a solution: what’s to say an unforeseeable event wouldn’t render them all inoperable?
Madison, Wisconsin, US
Perceiving risk
You ask why people tend to fixate on the risks of nuclear power when statistics show that fossil fuels kill more people (26 March, p 10). I suggest the reason is not so much the deadliness of nuclear power as its ability to inflict economic damage, in particular the fear that your house, your place of work, the places you visit 鈥� really your whole living space 鈥� could be rendered uninhabitable. Since there are still large tracts of land in Ukraine and Belarus rendered uninhabitable by the Chernobyl accident, this fear is not unreasonable.
From Roger Hill
In suggesting that nuclear power is safer than coal because it kills fewer people, you ignore the distribution of deaths from these technologies and falsely assume that the social cost is directly proportional to the number of deaths and scale of destruction. This is simply not observed in our society.
For example, road transport is considered relatively safe because each time there is an accident relatively few people are killed and little property lost. In contrast, rail and airline companies spend large sums on safety because a single event can kill hundreds and cost dearly in economic terms, which dissuades people from using that form of transport. It is reasonable to prefer options where the standard deviation of death and destruction is low even though the mean is higher.
Manchester, UK
Aviation uncertainty
The certainty of your headline “Contrails heat more than aircraft fuel” (2 April, p 16) belies the real nature of the research on which it is based. 杏吧原创s are still a long way from agreeing on the climate impact of contrails and related cirrus cloud, or even clouds in general. The aviation industry is happy to see more research being done on the issue, but until the scientific community is convinced of the impact, it would be unwise to introduce technology or operational measures that could eliminate contrail formation, particularly as doing so would increase carbon dioxide emissions.
Cities of the future
In your article about how to rebuild civilisation from scratch (26 March, p 40), the diagram of the “ideal city” looks eerily similar to Ebenezer Howard’s design for a “Group of Slumless, Smokeless Cities” from his 1898 book Tomorrow: A peaceful path to real reform, although the scales are a little different. Likewise, the ideas for community ownership of the new towns can be traced directly back to that book. My point is that more sustainable city forms have long been known about. The question is not so much what to do, as how to do it.
Civilisation of teeth
Your article on “Homo civicus” referred to recent evolutionary changes in Homo sapiens that suggest the continual refinement of our bodies (19 March, p 36). One additional line of evidence that wasn’t mentioned is the reduction in human tooth size over the past 10,000 years, which, unlike bone thickness, cannot be a direct response to reduced physical activity. Samples collected by Ron Pinhasi in the Levant () show that the buccolingual thickness of 13 different human teeth (most clearly molars) declined linearly at around 0.1 millimetre per thousand years from the end of the last ice age.
As a dental student in the 1950s, my father was taught that Stone Age people had much bigger teeth than nowadays, making this an example of once commonplace knowledge being forgotten.
Perfect relative pitch
Ed Douglas’s article on why some people have perfect pitch (26 February, p 46) makes a number of credible proposals but does not mention mirror neurons. When a musician with perfect pitch hears a note played by someone else, they might go through the motions in their mind of attempting to emit the same sound. If this involves muscular movements, such as tightening vocal cords, they would surely have a very real and straightforward feel for the note.
La Tour d’Aigues, Vaucluse, France
From Graham Saxby
The suggestion that perfect pitch may have something to do with the memory of pitches heard in childhood does not tally with my experience. When I began to learn the piano at the age of 6, it was tuned to the old military band high pitch of A=459 hertz. I became able to name any piano note within two octaves of middle C at this pitch. When I began more formal lessons on a piano tuned to A=440 Hz I was confused for a few weeks, but eventually became accustomed to the new pitch and as well as identifying notes could sing any named note accurately.
At the age of 60 I began to lose this ability. I found this loss bewildering, much as I imagine becoming slowly colour-blind would feel. I ascribed this to a gradual hearing loss at high frequencies, a view confirmed when I was fitted with correctly matched hearing aids: the old ability returned, albeit briefly.
Perfect pitch is a mixed blessing. Some early LP records were made at 33 rpm instead of 33 1/3, and listening to them played at 33 1/3, nearly a quarter of a tone sharper, could be a disturbing experience. On the other hand, in a performance of Havergal Brian’s Symphony No. 1, or The Gothic Symphony, in London’s Royal Albert Hall, a choir that had gone horribly flat in an a cappella section was rescued during the following stretch of solo soprano in which the singer, Jane Manning, gradually shifted the pitch back up, so that when a trumpet call took over the pitch was bang on. I have a tape of this, and still marvel at it.
Wolverhampton, West Midlands, UK
Split brain
In his article on the nature of self, Julian Baggini says that “in the 1960s Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga famously severed the corpus callosum in several people with epilepsy” (12 March, p 34). In fact Philip Vogel and Joseph Bogen were the neurosurgeons who carried out what became known as the “split brain” operation to treat epilepsy in this group of patients. Sperry and Gazzaniga subsequently studied the patients’ cognitive function.
Barely literate
Has anyone pointed out the delightful Freudian nature of your error in the passage: “there is a depiction of a horned bison hovering over the lower body of a naked woman that bares an uncanny resemblance to Picasso’s etching” (12 March, p 54)?
Down to moon
I enjoyed the article by Greg Klerkx about private ventures sending rovers to land on the moon in competition for the Google Lunar X Prize (5 March, p 46). But I was perplexed by the parachutes bringing rovers onto the moon’s surface pictured in the image on the opening spread. They would, I imagine, suffer some serious technical issues.
For the record
鈥� Marlene Zuk is at the University of California, Riverside, not San Diego (2 April, p 32).