BANGLADESH VIEWPOINT
Radioactivity, environmental
standpoint & energy demand
Although nuclear energy is very efficient, it is relatively costly compared to other energy sources, e.g., hydroelectric power, solar power, wind power, tidal power, etc. Cost, in fact, is negligible, if industrialisation is vital. Therefore, initially it is necessary to develop a policy on the energy sector. Using solar and nuclear reactors is of prime importance for Bangladesh,
writes AM Sarwaruddin Chowdhury
It is pretty important to know how transportation of radioactivity occurs from environment (radioactive materials) to human beings. Naturally occurring radioactive materials are also present in our environment and in the human body. People are, therefore, continuously exposed to radiation from radioactive atoms (radionuclides). Radionuclides released to the environment as a result of human activities (nuclear reactors) can add to that exposure. Radiation is energy emitted when a radionuclide decays. It can damage living tissue only when the energy is absorbed in that tissue. Radionuclides can be hazardous to living tissue when they are inside an organism where radiation released can be immediately absorbed. They may also be hazardous when they are outside of the organism but close enough for some radiation to be absorbed by the tissue. It is important to know how radionuclides move through the environment and into the human body. When the transportation routes the radionuclides follow are known, it is possible to take actions to block or avoid those pathways. This can minimize peoples' exposure to additional radiation resulting from human activities. Radionuclides travel through the environment along the same pathways as other materials. They travel through the air, in water (both groundwater and surface water), and through the food chain.
Radionuclides may enter the human body by ingestion (eating or drinking), by inhalation, or through the skin. This briefing portrays the routes radioactive materials follow through the environment and into the human body either by atmospheric or water and soil. (a) Air: Radionuclides can be released into the atmospheric air by human activities. They can also be created in the atmosphere by natural processes such as the interaction of cosmic radiation with nitrogen to produce radioactive Carbon-14. Radionuclides can be removed from the air in several ways. Particles settle out of the atmosphere if air currents cannot keep them suspended. Rain or snow can also remove them. When these particles are removed from the atmosphere, they may land in water, on soil, or on the surfaces of living and non-living things. The particles may return to the atmosphere by re-suspension. Re-suspension occurs when wind or some other natural or human activity generates clouds of dust containing radionuclides. (b) Water: Radionuclides can come into contact with water in several ways. They may be deposited from the air (as described in the previous section). They may also be released to the water from the ground through erosion, seepage, or human activities such as mining. (c) Soil: Some radionuclides that reach either groundwater or surface water will move with the water. Others will be deposited on the surrounding soil or rocks. One important factor affecting their movement is how thoroughly they dissolve in water (solubility). Another factor affecting movement is the radionuclide's ability to adhere to the surfaces of rocks or soil through which the water flows.
Let us come to see how radioactive materials enter human beings. Radionuclides in water or air may enter the food chain. For example, plants are capable of absorbing radionuclides from water in the same way as other minerals are absorbed. When animals drink water some of the radionuclides in the water will remain in their bodies. Radionuclides from the air may settle on the surface of plants. When animals eat the plants, they ingest the radionuclides that have settled from the air or have been absorbed from the water. Plants and animals that will eventually become food for people thus provide a pathway for radionuclides to move through the environment to people (i) Ingestion (Eating or drinking): Anything that people eat can contain radionuclides. The water that people drink may also contain radionuclides. Some radionuclides are intentionally ingested as part of a medical therapy or diagnostic procedure. Some of the radionuclides people ingest can remain in the body for long periods of time while others are quickly eliminated. (ii) Inhalation: Radionuclides suspended in the atmosphere can enter human lungs. Some radioactive particles are exhaled, and some remain in the lungs where the radiation they release immediately strikes the lung tissue. (iii) Skin: Radionuclides may be absorbed through the skin's surface, or may enter the body through a break in the skin. Another pathway is through the injection of radionuclides as part of medical therapy.
Bangladesh viewpoint, necessity of energy: To meet the highly growing demand of electricity in the domestic and industrial sectors, Bangladesh will have to come up with a plan for massive production of power. But how can power production be ensured? Because of low terrain and high population density, the prospect of developing hydroelectric power is not environmentally feasible. The oil and gas reserve of the world will eventually diminish (maybe within the next two or three decades). Other means of alternative energy sources include solar power, wind power, tidal power, and nuclear power. Solar energy is plentiful in Bangladesh. Generation of electricity using solar power is environmentally feasible. Development of solar power should be one priority for Bangladesh in the 21st century. To meet the rapid increasing demand of energy, Bangladesh should also consider developing nuclear power as a source of future energy. Well-constructed nuclear power plants have an important advantage when it comes to electrical power generation -- they are extremely clean.
Compared with a coal-fired power plant, nuclear power plants are a dream come true from an environmental standpoint. A coal-fired power plant actually releases more radioactivity into the atmosphere than a properly functioning nuclear power plant. Coal-fired plants also release tons of carbon, sulfur and other elements into the atmosphere. Except for the Chernobyl disaster, which was caused by a faulty and outdated technology in the former Soviet Union, and 6/7 minor incidents in the USA, there has not been any significant accident associated with nuclear power generation. Any other sectors have risk associated with accidents. For example, the Bhopal disaster (1984), etc. Although, the problem of radioactive waste materials disposal could remain as an unsettled issue in a developing country like Bangladesh, it is important to know the current trend of globalization. With the current trend of globalization of trade and technology transfer it will be easier to adopt a policy on energy using solar and nuclear reactors to ensure efficient and environmentally viable energy for Bangladesh.
Transportation of radioactivity from environment (radioactive materials) to human beings is to be taken care of. To meet the world's energy demand in the future, research and development in the nuclear power/ energy sector, I think, will continue throughout the whole world although the UN thoughtfully discourages the setting up of further nuclear reactors. Many countries in Europe these days heavily rely on nuclear energy. For example, France uses up to 75% of nuclear energy to meet the national demand. Germany, the UK and USA, Japan and mostly G8 countries also use a tremendous amount of energy generated by nuclear reactors. Although nuclear energy is very efficient, it is relatively costly compared to other energy sources, e.g., hydroelectric power, solar power, wind power, tidal power, etc. Cost, in fact, is negligible, if industrialization is vital. Therefore, initially it is necessary to develop a policy on the energy sector. Using solar and nuclear reactors is of prime importance for Bangladesh.
The writer is visiting guest professor/researcher, Section of Earth System Science, School of Environmental Earth Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
A widening chasm
As the American problems in Iraq increased and as the original reason for moving into the country was shown to be built on a series of false premises, the Bush administration began to search for new explanations for the conquest of Iraq. In his speech at the time of his second inauguration as president, George W. Bush chose to use the spread of democracy as the main reason for toppling Saddam Hussein. Is he succeeding in achieving that goal? Most evidence seemed to point the other way,
writes Shahid Javed Burki
AMERICANS, more than most people, treat the passing of one year and the dawn of another as a moment of deep reflection. Many questions get asked. Among them the most frequent ones raised this year are those related to the way the country has performed in the year that has closed and how it will be shaped in 2006.
As 2005 came to an end and 2006 was ushered in, the question upper most in the American mind was Iraq. What has America achieved and what has it lost since it invaded Iraq almost three years ago? When President George W. Bush ordered his troops to move into Iraq, he did so with great confidence. He and his associates anticipated a quick victory; they did not think that the great American military machine would face any real obstacle in moving quickly through the Iraqi desert and taking over Baghdad. In Baghdad they expected to be received by hordes of Iraqis grateful for having been relieved from the tyranny of a brutal dictator, supported by a killing machine that operated in the guise of a political party.
Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party were likely to offer some resistance but in the end American troops would be cheered by a welcoming Iraqi population. Why would they mourn the passing of a despot and why would they not look to the future with unbounded joy which allowed them to pursue their lives according to their own wishes and desires? Unfortunately, for America it didnt happen that way.
Even those who had opposed President Bush’s decision to march his troops into Iraq did not seriously question that the Iraqi drama would be played more or less according to the above script. They opposed the Iraq project — or were uncomfortable with its execution — not on the ground that the American military would not triumph. Iraq, after all, was a Third World country whose economy and military had been weakened by a dozen years of sanctions imposed by the United Nations. The opposition to the war in Iraq was for other reasons.
Some questioned the premise on which the Bush White House had built its case against the regime of Saddam Hussein. They felt that a ‘slam dunk’ case had not been made for Baghdad’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, or for its support of Al Qaeda, or for its ambitions to strike against America and American interests. Some others argued that even if the Iraqi leader was guilty as charged by Washington, America had no legal right to launch an attack unless it had the sanction of the United Nations. After all, America was one of the more important builders of the post-Second World War political order which was based on the sanctity of national borders. These borders could not be violated unless such an action was validated by the UN Security Council.
Some other felt that Washington should not get diverted by Iraq — a war against that country would only distract from the main objective at hand. There was a great deal of unfinished business that had to be completed. Osama bin Laden was still at large, hiding somewhere in the rugged mountains along the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan itself remained unsettled. Hamid Karzai, the handpicked Afghan president, had a lot of work to do in order to consolidate his hold over his fractious nation.
Across the border in Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, another ally of America, had not won many friends among his own people by giving total support to what the American administration called the ‘war against terror.’ The newly emerging countries in Central Asia were still in the process of finding their identities. Most of them were governed by despots who were hold overs from the communist rule of the Soviet Union. In some of them radical Islamic groups were vying for political power.
Still others argued that by attacking Iraq, America would be jumping into an exceptionally difficult and unsettled part of the world. Arab countries were still in the process of adjusting to the post-colonial period. The Arab people had been poorly treated by the former colonial powers — by Britain, France and Italy. Until the end of the Second World War, America had been looked upon as a benign western power, less rapacious than many of the European colonialists of the 19th and 20th centuries that had operated in the Middle East. It had enhanced its stature as a fair arbiter in the 1956 Suez War in which both Britain and France had tried to reinsert themselves in the region.
Some of this evenhandedness was lost because of both the overt and covert support America had provided since then to Israel. Even then Washington had not used its military power as the Europeans had done in the past to conquer Arab land. The invasion of Iraq, many opponents of the war felt, would change all that.
In other words, America needed to concentrated its attention and spend its enormous energy on the piece of geography that included Afghanistan, the Central Asian states and Pakistan. It was appropriate for it to focus on the non-Arab part of the Muslim world while improving its standing with the Arab people. But oil and Israel pulled it towards the Middle East.
As I read what was written in the spring of 2003 when America launched a military operation against Iraq, there was almost nobody who predicted that events would unfold as they did. There are many wiser heads now and many theories on why the American involvement in Iraq did not produce any of the results foreseen by Washington. Even the over confident President Bush has been chastened by the scope of the insurgency unleashed by his country’s occupation of Iraq and by the inability of his mighty military to secure the land it had conquered.
In his December 18, 2005, address to the American nation from the Oval Office — only the second time he chose that locale to talk to his people, the first time being the eve of the US attack on Baghdad — he admitted that ‘the work in Iraq has been especially difficult, more difficult than we expected. Reconstruction efforts and training of Iraqi security forces started more slowly than we hoped. We continue to see violence and suffering caused by an enemy that is determined and brutal — unconstrained by conscience or the rules of war.’ The reference to the rules of war was ironic since the Bush administration had explicitly or implicitly rejected all of those that pertained to dealing with the prisoners taken during the country’s many operations since the attacks of September 11, 2001. I will return to this subject in a later article.
Even the admission of these difficulties in Iraq was unusual for a politician who had never accepted that he ever made mistakes. Having acknowledged that Iraq turned out to be less than a ‘cake walk,’ President Bush showed that his experience had done nothing to weaken his resolve. Should America withdraw from Iraq, as some influential Americans had begun to suggest?
‘That is an important question, and the answer depends on your view of the war on terror,’ said President Bush. ‘If you think the terrorists would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them, then it might make sense to leave them alone. This is not the threat I see. I see a global terrorist movement that exploits Islam in the service of radical political aims... These terrorists view the world as a giant battlefield — and they seek to attack us wherever they can. This has attracted Al Qaeda to Iraq, where they are attempting to frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat.’
But for Mr Bush, retreat was out of the question. ‘My conviction comes down to this: We do not create terrorism by fighting the terrorists. We invite terrorism by ignoring them. And we will defeat the terrorists by capturing and killing them abroad, removing their safe havens, and strengthening new allies like Iraq and Afghanistan in the fight we share.’
The use of military might, in other words, was still the preferred option. This choice only suggested that little had been learned since March 2003 and that all the ink that had been used by hundreds of analysts to understand the wider implications of the war in Iraq had gone to waste. Largely as a result of the Iraq war there is now a widening chasm between the West and the world of Islam.
The conflict was not just between Washington and Al Qaeda and its many off-shoots. As the train bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2004, the attacks on London’s transport system on July 7, 2005, and the riots in the Muslim suburbs of Paris later in the summer showed, this clash had spread over a much larger area. There was plenty of dry wood lying around in the banlieus (low income suburbs of French cities), in the unintegrated town centres in Britain’s urban areas, and in the areas inhabited by the Muslim migrants to West Europe for a fire to be lit. The Iraq war provided the fuel.
As the American problems in Iraq increased and as the original reason for moving into the country was shown to be built on a series of false premises, the Bush administration began to search for new explanations for the conquest of Iraq. In his speech at the time of his second inauguration as president, George W. Bush chose to use the spread of democracy as the main reason for toppling Saddam Hussein. Is he succeeding in achieving that goal? Most evidence seemed to point the other way. A recent survey by Brookings Institution scholar Shibley Telhami found that 58 per cent of Arabs outside Iraq said the war had produced less rather than more democracy. A poll released by Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, a non-partisan think tank operating out of Washington, in November 2005 showed that only 34 per cent Americans believed Middle East democratization would happen.
Even with this evidence some believers were not prepared to lose heart. In one of the year-end opinion columns, Jackson Diehl of The Washington Post wrote: ‘That’s one of the perverse effects of the war: Amid all the noise of suicide bombings, talk of a quagmire for US troops and a sectarian conflict that could lead to Iraq’s disintegration, most people hadn’t noticed that in the rest of the Arab Middle East, the political momentum of the past year has been distinctly democratic.’ But did causality really run that way? Is the seeming, albeit, glacial transformation of the Muslim world, the result of President Bush’s war on Iraq and on terrorism? I will attempt an answer to this question next week.
This article has been published by arrangement with Dawn
BTRC directive on free mobile calls
by Issam Mosaddeq
Who says consumers (or at least their parents!) in Bangladesh do not have a strong voice and they are at the mercy of businesses? According to a report published in New Age on 14 January, the Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has asked the mobile phone operators in the country to stop their offers of free phone calls at night, following complaints from parents of young mobile users. The parents complain that such nighttime free calls are harming their children by hampering their studies, changing their lifestyles and, I guess, in the overall sense leading their children down the ‘wrong-path’ as they talk on the phone all night.
Firstly, it is ludicrous that some parents, who are not able to control their own children, are asking the government for help so that they can make their children study and go to bed at sane hours. Secondly, it is bizarre as well as worrying that the same inept telecom regulator, incapable of taking firm decisions, actually paid heed to these requests and asked the mobile companies to refrain from legitimate business practices. These offers are a result of long sought-after competition in the mobile industry beneficial to consumers at large.
Going back to the first point, it has long been a mentality of certain groups of parents in Bangladesh to blame everything but themselves for their lack of parenting skills. Why should mobile phone operators bear the responsibility for their inability to exert control on their children? Why then should only mobile operators be ‘blamed’, when a similar (and equally ridiculous) argument can be made ‘against’ broadband internet providers? With broadband internet, young people can chat with their ‘romantic partners’ all night and using a cheap microphone talk to them for free, using software like Skype or MSN. So should broadband internet be banned as well to compensate for some people’s bad parenting?
To me, this sort of mentality points to a bigger sociological problem of a rise in our society of a section of people who have come to acquire wealth rapidly without a corresponding rise in education and enlightenment. This same section of society seems to be unable to handle their children. They shower their adolescent offspring with money and then lose all influence over their ‘unruly ways’ and then start blaming everyone and everything but themselves. To make matters worse these 21st century young men and women can easily bluff their way around their unsophisticated 20th century parents. Surely, in this particular case, it would have been far simpler for the parents to take away the mobile phones from their children or at least give warning of the consequences of not being obedient than to complain about the mobile tariff structure to the BTRC.
As for the BTRC, they failed miserably for quite a long time to ensure a competitive environment in the mobile phone industry. This failure is also due to the lack of a proper policy on industrial organization in our country. We have had two mobile phone monopolies in Bangladesh at different points of time (CityCell to start with and then Grameen Phone) before the industry slowly started to take the shape of what resembles a competitive oligopoly. The BTRC, after being formed, paid little attention to the monopolized market structure in the industry even as consumer screamed themselves hoarse complaining about the expensive tariffs, poor service and lack of competition. So it is very strange that now, after the market finally starts to become competitive, the BTRC wants to interfere with the conduct of firms that is neither illegal nor against the best interests of their consumers at large. And they have apparently only interfered at the request of an unspecified number of irresponsible parents. Another question worth asking is who has given the telecom regulator the right to play the part of moral police and decide whether free phone calls conform to social and cultural values?
Another part of the report is also worrying. Why are intelligence agencies asking for the free call offers to be stopped. It is legitimate for them to ask for subscriber registration but what right do they have in interfering with business conduct? And why would they want to? Will terrorists stop killing people if they have to pay by the minute for their calls or are late night romances a new security threat for the country?
It is high time for Bangladesh to have a well-defined policy on industrial organization outlining rules on industry structure and behavior of firms. It is very important to have such a policy if businesses are to expand and the economy is to attract foreign companies. It would go a long way in ensuring consumer rights. Firms and consumers should not have to be victim to the sudden follies of the government or its capricious (and seemingly parochial) officials or have to bear the strange consequences of teenage romance.
And would someone please tell some of these parents to stop whining and teach them a thing or two on how to handle adolescents?
Issam Mosaddeq writes from London
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