A year on from Fukushima

There's a moment in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles when Tess wonders which of the dates in her calendar will be the one on which she dies. There are tragedies that get added to all our personal calendars as we grow older, turning innocuous dates into painful memories. The latest is March 11th, when the magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit Japan. The death toll, a year later, stands at 15,800, with thousands more still missing.

Now, one of the things that we members of the press are wont to do when anniversaries like this roll around is ask ourselves what we could have done better. And unsurprisingly, the coverage of the Fukushima nuclear accident following the earthquake is prompting a lot of soul searching. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting last week, it was one of the big topics of discussion, and there's an excellent outline of the main points of concern on the Sense about Science website now.

One of their recommendations is "that governments and the nuclear industry relate their communications to the scientific evidence and are clear and open about the risks from nuclear energy." One of the major mistakes that some politicians have made in the past is to claim that nuclear power perfectly safe. When accidents happen, and they're proved wrong, the public instantly lose all faith in the technology. The truth is, no technology is foolproof, but even with the risk, nuclear power happens to have caused far fewer deaths than other means of energy production. The question is, is it a risk we're still willing to take?

The subject of nuclear risk is something I've explored for my latest feature in New Humanist magazine, now online. There also happen to be lots of brilliant pieces in this issue about freedom of speech. Check it out and also let me know your thoughts on nuclear safety.

How to make engineering more ethical

Making things may seem like an unquestionable good. But think again. Behind the products we use, the buildings we live in and every machine we have are sets of choices that can sometimes be ethical minefields. Take the Dow Chemical Company, for instance, which is still living with the ethical stain of the Bhopal tragedy in 1984, simply because it bought out Union Carbide. In 2010, eight former Union Carbide employees were convicted of death by negligence for the toxic gas leak that killed thousands. Now, campaigners have attacked the organisers of the Olympic Games in London for allowing Dow to sponsor the fabric wrap around the main stadium.

Which goes to show, ethics are a hugely important and sometimes sadly neglected aspect of engineering. Whether it's a choice of sustainable material, or whether to bribe a government official, engineers need to be more aware of the social repercussions of their work. The latest issue of the fabulous E&T Magazine explores this topic, including a piece by me on how engineers, ethicists and social scientists can learn to get along for the wider good of society - including views from the engineering giants, Shell and Arup. Check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Support the Little Atoms!

... They're small and helpless! In case you've been living in a box and have only just discovered the Internet, Little Atoms is a brilliant podcast that takes the form of a talk show, with guests drawn from the world of science, humanism and beyond. It promotes scepticism and rationalism, which is something we can surely all get behind. Little Atoms is self-funded and always in search of a buck, so the folks there have organised an eBay auction of ten signed books by authors who were on the show last year. Among them is one of my personal first copies of Geek Nation in hardback. The current bid is just £51, and I don't need to tell you what a steal this is. Get in quick.

On another note, I was on Midori House, a show on Monocle 24 (the 24-hour radio station of Monocle magazine) this evening, talking about Geek Nation (yeah, I really know how to celebrate Valentine's Day). If you missed it, then listen again here.

Sense and censorship

I'm always a bit bemused when people tell me we should censor the Internet. For one thing, it's technically tough, because the people who want information will usually find a way to get it. Secondly, the Internet is like much of the rest of the media: you may like only the New York Times, but to get it, you'll have to grudgingly accept The Daily Mail. Censoring one person online threatens the freedom of speech of everyone else. Thirdly, and most importantly, you can never be sure of the motives of the people who are calling for censorship and where they will stop. I wrote a comment piece for The Guardian today exploring this third point, following news that Google, Facebook and other giants of the Internet will be censoring some of their content in India, in line with a court order from the government. Check it out and please do let me know what you think about Internet censorship too.