This handout picture released by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) on March 26, 2011 and distributed by Jiji Press shows the control room of the second reactor of TEPCO's Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant at Okuma town in Fukushima prefecture. Radiation levels have surged in seawater near a tsunami-stricken nuclear power station in Japan as engineers battled to stabilise the plant in hazardous conditions.-
When parts of Japan's Fukushima nuclear power facility melted down in March, the disaster slammed financial markets in Japan and beyond. Months later, economic aftershocks continue to reverberate. Among the most far-reaching are the impacts on international container shipping. In March, China turned away a container ship from Japan, citing irregular radiation readings. Shippers from just about every country have been rerouting cargo away from Japan to avoid even the tiniest chance of contamination.
One lesson from the Fukushima disaster is that the huge benefits of efficient global networks are, unfortunately, accompanied by potentially massive and immediate risks. Metcalfe's Law, named after U.S. engineer Robert Metcalfe, who co-invented Ethernet computer networking technology, states that the value of a network rises in proportion to the square of the number of possible connections within it. The more places an airline flies, the higher its passengers tend to value it. The more people who use cellphones or have Facebook accounts, the greater the perceived value in joining those networks. Likewise for global container shipping. The exponential increase makes intuitive sense-there's one possible direct link between two phones in a network, but 10 possible connections between five, 45 between 10, and so on.
The risk of network contamination, however, also increases exponentially. The higher the Metcalfe value, the more exposed each user is to any contaminant. Viewed in this context, anxiety about radiation in the container network is quite like the panic over SARS in 2005, or worries about Facebook viruses: Even a local outbreak can have almost immediate worldwide consequences.
In shipping, of course, irradiated containers would be more than just a hassle. A radiation-contaminated container box-or 10, or 100-could end up in almost any port in the world within weeks. That's why terminals in North America have been responding aggressively to Fukushima, even though there's been no evidence up to this point of a health threat from radiation on this side of the Pacific. In Vancouver, every imported container is now being passed through a radiation detection portal.
Inspecting every container is time-consuming and expensive, however, and it can't protect shippers or insurers from the direct costs of a cleanup. Consider the ship MCP Altona, owned by Saskatchewan-based uranium producer Cameco Inc. In January, on a voyage to China, two drums of uranium concentrate opened up during a storm off Hawaii. The company brought the ship back to Vancouver for complete decontamination. The spill was minor, and had nothing to do with Fukushima, but the cost of scrubbing down the vessel and mooring it for several months will be over $15 million-more than the ship was originally worth.
Is all the worry over radiation since the Fukushima disaster an overreaction? Maybe so. Levels of so-called background radiation in the atmosphere, as reported by Health Canada, have remained minuscule. But even if there's more anxiety than radioactive particles in the air at the moment, Metcalfe Anxiety is very real, and very costly.
Timothy Taylor is a Vancouver-based author.