Nuclear Power – A Really Bad Idea
In December 2003, when I was working as a security analyst for a nuclear power watchdog group in North Carolina, I sent an overview analysis to Counterpunch entitled Bush, Security, Energy and Money.” The piece explained how nuclear power plants are prime targets for anyone wanting to attack infrastructure to create maximum damage; and it explained how the interlocking directorate of government and the business class conspires to underplay the dangers of nuclear power.
Today (March 11, 2011), we are seeing the reports of the Richter 8.9 quake that hit Japan, and as I write this there are concerns about Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which has been hit with the tsunami generated by the earthquake. The concern is that without an external power source, the cooling pools for the waste fuel will quit circulating, causing the spent fuel rods to spontaneously ignite, which would release Cesium-137 and other highly radioactive isotopes into the air. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years. Use your imagination or meteorological wind data to figure out what this could mean.
What we have already seen on a limited scale is another type of nuclear accident, a “core-melt.” This is when the cooling system fails in the nuclear reactor core, and the active fuel ignites. Partial core-melts are what happened in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and the Fermi plant in Detroit. What Chernobyl taught us is that rupture of the core containment structure is a disaster that renders surrounding areas dangerously radioactive for many years - turning them into policed and administered exclusion zones.
The point is, and it’s a simple point, in addition to the danger of attack, nuclear plants are vulnerable to earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, even ice storms that massively disrupt external power sources.
The follow-on point is that each plant constitutes a custodial responsibility that is longer than the longest lifespan of any known civilization. We are intentionally creating facilities based on the highly doubtful assumption that the custodial societies will be stable and continuous longer than any in history.
We watched one Gulf Coast offshore oil rig out of 3,500 – 79 of them deep water rigs like the Deepwater Horizon – destroy a substantial section of the Gulf of Mexico.
In the United States there are 170 major chemical companies, with all their plants, with 1,700 foreign affiliates; and thousands more chemical fabrication facilities worldwide.
The hubris of this civilization is not only its assumption of stability, which we are seeing break down with war creeping into the midst of a nuclear standoff (in Pakistan-India), and instability in several places operating nuclear power plants, but the assumption that this non-existent stability will continue for thousands of years.
I’ll revisit something called the precautionary principle, then leave my point there.
The precautionary principle or precautionary approach states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action.
DeAnander:
I always have a hard time not guffawing — or crying, I am not sure which — over the fact that nuke plants, those great big generators of “cheap” power, cannot provide their own electricity, cannot function without a larger centralised power grid, cannot be powered down safely without generator backups, etc. when the grid goes down, the generators are damaged or you can’t get diesel to run them — in other words, when there are hard times — these great big pampered contraptions threaten to have lethal tantrums with multi-decade, maybe multi-century consequences. as we have just seen.
it’s the very opposite of “robust” technology. it’s ultra-fragile *and* lethal. bad, bad, bad combo.
11 March 2011, 6:46 pmStan:
Here goes:
Govt. orders ‘unprecedented’ release at Japan nuke plant; radiation 1K times normal
The Japanese government declared has issued a state of emergency at a second nuclear power plant following cooling-systems failures.
Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe Escalates in Japan – ‘Worse than Chernobyl’
U.S. Military Scrambles to Avoid Nuclear Meltdown in Japan
11 March 2011, 7:04 pmStan:
Had the violent 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States.
The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.
and this
The devastating Japanese quake and its outcome could generate a political tsunami here in the United States.
and more
What Japan is now trying to avoid is a complete loss of power to the cooling systems at its Fukushima nuclear power plant. This would lead to a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident — a disaster which could have catastrophic impacts on Japan and much of the world.
and still more
We shouldn’t need yet another major nuclear power accident to wake up the public and decision-makers to the fact that there are better, much safer ways to make electricity.
In the aftermath of the largest earthquake to occur in Japan in recorded history, 5,800 residents living within five miles of six reactors at the Fukushima nuclear station have been advised to evacuate and people living within 15 miles of the plant are advised to remain indoors.
Plant operators have not been able to cool down the core of one reactor containing enormous amounts of radioactivity because of failed back-up diesel generators required for the emergency cooling. In a race against time, the power company and the Japanese military are flying in nine emergency generators. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton announced today that the U.S. Air Force has provided cooling water for the troubled reactor. Complicating matters, Japan’s Meteorological Agency has declared the area to be at high risk of being hit by a tsunami.
11 March 2011, 7:19 pmChasm:
In the early 1980s I was a reactor operator and instructor for the U.S. Navy at the Kesselring site in upstate New York (I worked on the world’s only female reactor). I was very impressed by the professionalism of the Navy’s “nukes” and the very strict policies and procedures that Admiral Rickover had insisted on. We were a pretty dedicated bunch, compared to anywhere else I’ve worked in life. Despite this, problems were not uncommon.
The Navy claimed an accident-free record, but this was accomplished by sleight of hand. They simply redefined the word “accident” to cover only major accidents — something like a Chernobyl or a Three Mile Island. Anything less was termed an “incident.” “Incidents” happened all the time. If a ship discharged radioactive fluids at sea, it wasn’t even an incident (it was often deliberate) if it was far enough away from a coastline.
These power plants were essentially cost-no-object, and they did not need to make a profit. The Navy could afford to do things “right” — well, as rightly as one can do anything involving something as unforgiving as nuclear power. Still, cheating was common. We called it “Xeroxing.” If you missed a set of readings in your logs, you simply interpolated between the previous set and the current readings (hopefully remembering if there were any unusual evolutions around that time).
Then Reagan started the sabre-rattling and eventually invaded Grenada. When he was reëlected in 1984, I’d had enough. I fought for and won an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector — not an easy task for someone who’d volunteered (and reënlisted). Of course, after I got out — owing the government a large amount of money — the only real marketable skill I had involved nuclear reactors. But many of my shipmates had gone on to work in civilian facilities and the horror stories I’d heard were frightening. Besides, I’d already concluded that nuclear power was a very bad idea, even when cost was no object. To try to make a profit off it? Insane. I was having none of it.
One of the things that not many people know is that the Navy’s reactors are designed in a fail-safe (sort of) manner such that if the coolant temperature rises, the rate of fission decreases. This provides a negative feedback that helps to maintain temperatures and power levels. It’s self-regulating. Civilian power plants, which are much, much larger than the Navy’s small reactors, are designed such that higher coolant temperatures mean higher rates of fission, which heats the coolant further, creating a feed-forward loop with a tendency to run away. How stupid can you get? I mean, really… how utterly imbecilic can you get?
I have long maintained that nuclear power is the stupidest idea humans have ever had. Frankly, it’s not even arguable, and anyone who says otherwise is either selling something, or a seriously-deluded “true believer.” I think the real function of nuclear “power” is to allow nuclear *weapons* lovers to pretend that there are “peaceful” benefits to splitting the atom.
I think we can expect plenty of lying and deception wrt the Fukishima plant and others. Get your BS detectors warmed up.
11 March 2011, 9:18 pmStan:
FULL
Check out the photos.
Here is a news report with video.
This s a warning to industrial civilization. Wonder if we’ll heed it.
12 March 2011, 7:01 amDeAnander:
We haven’t heeded any of the others so far, have we…
The pattern of a self-destructive addict seems pretty familiar. Warnings ignored, disasters skated through (barely), hubris intact until…
This event illustrates the terrifying fragility of our industrial/chemical/nuclear culture.
12 March 2011, 12:18 pmStan:
News just getting worse. No mention yet, except in one Stanford blog that cited David Lochbaum (a smart fella), of spent fuel. Spent fuel is stored two basic ways. Hardened casks, or in spent fuel pools. The latter are like the core, requiring circulating water to prevent auto-ignition. Spent fuel is cesium and plutonium rich. That is a Not Good thing. Apparently at least some of Japan’s reactors use pools. Not Not Good. And I’m seeing talk of a Tokyo reactor that may have also been damaged.
MSNBC (partly owned by GE) had a nuclear industry apologist on this AM saying that (1) the Japanese have the situation well in hand and (2) a little extra radiation is actually good for you. No shit. I feel better now.
I sent a letter to the editor of my local paper today, stating the reasons in less than 400 words why the US should decommission all 103 plants. Others are encouraged to do the same, because the bullshit is about to get deep and well-funded by the nuke advocates.
Reason 1: Don’t make dangerous material that has a half-life of 24,000 years. The oldest civilization on the planet, China, has lasted only 4,000 years…. figure it out.
Reason 2: Humans – with problems and issues and bad days – run these things.
Reason 3: They can be turned into weapons by the right lunatics.
Reason 4: Under the Price-Anderson Act, we subsidize nuclear energy’s insurance. Their damages for ‘accidents’ are capped at $12.7 billion iirc, a tiny fraction of the actual cost for a bad one, and we get to pay for the rest, if our cancers and immune disorders don’t wipe us out first. Nukes could not afford their premiums without this law – a point for the libertarians, who say they hate government interference in the Holy Market.
Reason 5: People can neither predict nor control the future. (This one is a tough sell for some, but point it out anyway. We have evidence.)
12 March 2011, 3:31 pmStan:
Union of Concerned Scientists on Nuke Subsidies
12 March 2011, 3:53 pmMichael Anderson:
We got a HOT ONE….
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110312-japanese-government-confirms-meltdown?utm_source=redalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=110312%286%29&utm_content=readmore&elq=0b95ca967e7b4619b4036d208ab1d768
Japanese Government Confirms Meltdown
March 12, 2011 | 2148 GMT
Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said March 12 that the explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 nuclear plant could only have been caused by a meltdown of the reactor core, Japanese daily Nikkei reported. This statement seemed somewhat at odds with Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano’s comments earlier March 12, in which he said “the walls of the building containing the reactor were destroyed, meaning that the metal container encasing the reactor did not explode.”
NISA’s statement is significant because it is the government agency that reports to the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy within the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. NISA works in conjunction with the Atomic Energy Commission. Its role is to provide oversight to the industry and is responsible for signing off construction of new plants, among other things. It has been criticized for approving nuclear plants on geological fault lines and for an alleged conflict of interest in regulating the nuclear sector. It was NISA that issued the order for the opening of the valve to release pressure — and thus allegedly some radiation — from the Fukushima power plant.
NISA has also overseen the entire government response to the nuclear reactor problems following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. It is difficult to determine at this point whether the NISA statement is accurate, as the Nikkei report has not been corroborated by others. It is also not clear from the context whether NISA is stating the conclusions of an official assessment or simply making a statement. However, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima nuclear plant, also said that although it had relieved pressure, nevertheless some nuclear fuel had melted and further action was necessary to contain the pressure.
If this report is accurate, it would not be the first time statements by NISA and Edano have diverged. When Edano earlier claimed that radiation levels had fallen at the site after the depressurization efforts, NISA claimed they had risen due to the release of radioactive vapors.
12 March 2011, 6:03 pmMichael Anderson:
The good times just keep on keepin’ on…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/12/us-japan-quake-tepco-radiation-idUSTRE72B3PJ20110312
12 March 2011, 6:23 pmStan:
Here’s one for the books (emphases added):
FULL
NOTE – Several years back the Nuclear Regulatory Agency did one of its pro forma inspections at the Shearon Harris plant in NC. Word leaked that during the inspection, it was found the none of the four diesel backup generators would start. The NRC routinely covers up and cooks books, because it is not a regulatory agency, but an industry advocate agency.
12 March 2011, 8:26 pmm.c.:
Some gentle souls thought Mario Cuomo was crazy when he approved the construction stoppage of Shoreham in the late 80′s. Hmmm., large population centers in proximity to power stations with poor evacuation possibilities.
13 March 2011, 3:44 pmJack:
We lost the fights over Seabrook, Maine and Vermont Yankee. Now, it’s barely reported news when nuclear damned material just sort of “goes missing” from VY.
*
Remember during the last great black out. Ever read or hear about how close Ohio came to being a nuclear dead zone?
Most of us didn’t…
13 March 2011, 7:17 pmm.c.:
Rickover put reactors on submarines because they don’t suck up air/oxygen underwater like diesel engines(which need to be turned off underwater, switching to battery power but only for the life of the batteries, several hours to maybe a day or two/three at most) & don’t need refueling for long periods of time. This made submarines a potent tool of war against the soviet union. This is a public policy argument that at least can be rationally(?) made? Rickover made it successfully, and the soviet navy copied his example.
But to use nuclear energy for any other use to boil steam to turn an electric generator is insane. Maybe French nuclear officials will disagree but I wish The priciple of Darwinian survival was a little stronger.
15 March 2011, 12:48 pmDeAnander:
OK, I’m gonna relink
The Nuclear Skeptic, Part 1
The Nuclear Skeptic, Part 2
Risk, Perception, and Ethics
Thinking Too Big? Or Too Small? (“Hearts and Minds”)
This is an egotistical xpost as I wrote these articles myself, but it beats writing them all over again
15 March 2011, 1:22 pmStan:
Thanks De. Nothing egotistical at all, in my mind. The good thing about writing stuff down, is that you don’t have to rewrite it every time it becomes relevant.
And you write extremely well.
15 March 2011, 7:14 pmBruce F:
To DeAnander and Stan,
Thank you for continuing to post on this subject, as horrific as it is.
I came across this, from a physicist who currently works for the DOE, at A Tiny Revolution. Among other things, he talks about the ways that scientific language is used to minimize the risk.
He finishes his observations with this –
16 March 2011, 11:16 amDeAnander:
@Bruce, great link thanks.
One phrase immediately leapt out at me as probably the epitaph for our entire technological enterprise — agricultural, electrical, transportational, medical, etc — “The existing research is based on ludicrous simplifying assumptions.”
All of our science is based on ludicrous simplifying assumptions about biotic processes. That’s how we are wrecking the world, ourselves included. Kirschenmann calls it “16th century thinking” — I have called it “19th Century mechanistic thinking” — whatever you wanna call it, it consists of reducing the enormous nonlinear fractal complexity of living systems into a static machine with finite, predictable responses to measurable inputs.
It’s simply wrong and stupid, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy or flat-earth cartography. And it’s literally killing us. Our intolerance for complexity is killing us.
I guess we face the classic predicament of all life on Earth: evolve or die out.
16 March 2011, 12:14 pmDeAnander:
“Nuclear engineering experts can’t effectively process the information that nuclear power technology is harming tens of thousands of people for the same reason that laid-off millworkers become depressed and suicidal. Attacks on the technology or on the industry are attacks on their identity.”
Another great quote from Aaron at ATR and a home truth.
16 March 2011, 12:23 pmm.c.:
What worries me is that Japan isn’t a 3rd-world country. I bet a lot of their engineers & scientists were educated at MIT, Cal Tech, Georgia Tech, Purdue, Imperial College London, etc… The probability is another accident will happen in the world in the next 20-30 years, if not sooner.
16 March 2011, 2:06 pmm.c.:
Earthquakes & the Tsunamis that go with them are more common in the Pacific U.S. than the Atlantic but Simon Day of University College London & UC Santa Cruz claims that La Palma, the most volcanically active of the Canary Islands has a geological structure where an eruption could trigger an enormous landslide on the west coast of the island. If this happens, the mass of rock is large enough to generate a huge tsunami which could reach North America and the Caribbean. Cumbre Vieja is the name of the north-south volcanic ridge. It has erupted in 1470, 1585, 1646, 1677, 1712, 1949, 1971.
17 March 2011, 11:57 amDavid Hovgaard:
Haven’t seen any rad counts at the plants or in the surrounding area. Is this because the corporate media still wants to sell us Nuclear power? I suspect that if they told us no human in their right mind would vote to build these enormous boondoggles. But Nuclear power in general is pretty much insane especially when there are so many better cheaper and safer ways to make power they just don’t lend themselves to the hydrolic despotism model pioneered by the oil companies. We got it and you are going to pay through the nose for it because we will never allow there to be an alternative. Down with stupidity and artificially created shortages. “We have everything we need to solve our problems just not the political will to use them. union of concerned scientist.”
18 March 2011, 10:17 pmStan:
FULL
Here is what they’ve avoided as long as they can. This is why the whole “acceptable levels of radiation” along with “background radiation” doesn’t wash. These are particles, and they enter the food chain. Anyone remember Strontium-90 in US milk?
19 March 2011, 8:26 amStan:
US Headlines seldom tell us much about how the world works, because they report what is spectacular (a bifurcation that has already happened), then they spin it (treat is ahistorically to conceal its origins). Let’s look at a couple of stories about neighbors that provide a little perspective… one that is under attack with the collusion of its own government.
FULL
FULL
Now let’s throw another perspective in:
FULL
19 March 2011, 9:17 amDeAnander:
Amory is a bit of a rose-coloured futurologist (I never could get excited about the whole Hypercar thing, which seemed like a surface greening of an insane transit paradigm). However the points he makes here are imho solid. The nuke industry is on the ropes. They have spent 60 years developing a hammer that is too heavy, too expensive, too dangerous, and wrong for the job. The competition (conservation and renewable energy sources) is catching up. They are desperate to sell the Edsel to some sucker, somewhere, quick, before people catch on. Or so it seems to me.
19 March 2011, 11:35 amCurt:
De,
19 March 2011, 12:10 pmThe arguement that nuke power does nothing to help prevent global warming is really the best argument against building new ones.
Furthermore, and forgive me for needing to repeat myself which I have been doing a lot of for the past few years, I say for the sake of new readers, so that You or Stan do not have to say it, so that you can have a few extra minutes to get your New Years meal planning done, if the leaders Russia or the US had any sense what so ever they would give the Iranian military a dozen extended range Pershing missles with nuclear warheads in the 200kt range. The Iranian military could then choose to conduct an underground nuclear test with one or even 10 or the warheads to make sure that they were not sabotaged and test fire one to ten of the missles to make sure that they were not sabotaged.
That way the US military could forget about ever again launching an overt attack against Iran and the members of the US military can do what they really do best which is visit the tourist attractions of Venice and Munich and Kyoto.
Curt:
Oh dim whitted me I forgot the real main point of why we need to give Iran those Pershing missles.
19 March 2011, 12:21 pmEarthquakes……..Iran has a lot of them.
We know that earthquakes and nuclear power plants are not a good combination. But the Iranian Government must be feeling quite desperate to continue with their nuclear program. So if they have the nuclear strike capability then they can come out and say, OK based on recent history we have decided that nuclear power is not such a good idea. And they can shut down their reactor. If they want to.
Maybe we have missed something. I just heard minutes ago that the government of Turkey which is also in earthquake alley wants to build nuclear power plants too. So if the Iranian government really does just want to produce expensive electricity maybe they will not shut thier reactor down. They may say, The French can not be that stupid it must be a good idea or the French would not have it.
Perhaps the Iranians do not know though what the Germans say about the French bread. WE do it better. I think that the Germans will get out of the nuclear energy business as they had decided a whle back.
Stan:
FULL
Just an add-on to my earlier. The point among other things being… nuclear proliferation and its dangers in conjunction with Obama’s completely insane destabilization of Pakistan.
19 March 2011, 6:09 pmStan:
FULL
21 March 2011, 2:04 pmStan:
FULL
21 March 2011, 2:15 pmStan:
And on the proliferation front… (nuclear power contributes to nuclear weapon proliferation)
FULL
*
FULL
21 March 2011, 7:51 pmDeAnander:
I notice that official and techno-fanboy responses dwell exclusively on exposure to ambient radiation — which of course falls off very rapidly with distance from the source. They tend to shy away — for good reason — from the far greater risk of inhalation and ingestion. For example
Physical Insights — a well-informed discussion of dosimetry, but unless I have read it very carelessly (and I might ‘cos I was in a hurry), it does not address hot particles inhaled or ingested. Which is kind of like discussing risks from e.g. pesticide residues or phthalates in plastics exclusively in terms of “what can rub off on your hands.”
I suspect that this avoidance is partly disingenuous and partly the natural tendency of a Cartesian worldview that doesn’t like Really Messy Problems that are nearly impossible to quantify or meter.
21 March 2011, 8:07 pmHenry:
The former publication, Sanders Research, did a great series on nuclear power. Check the Wayback Machine and also google John Busby + nuclear power.
21 March 2011, 9:04 pmHenry:
Nuclear Energy links
http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/nuclear/links.html
21 March 2011, 9:22 pmm.c.:
The old-time Greeks & Romans didn’t know everything. Like the dangers of lead plumbing and the Arabic Number System. In retrospect, Pontius Pilate should have put Jesus on the payroll and told Herod and the Boys to stuff it. Tiberius in Rome could have used a reasonable and knowledgeable Middle East Expert. They make us in the nuclear age clueless Barbarians in comparison whose worst blind spot is we don’t realize how incredibley stupid we are.
22 March 2011, 12:37 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Henry – thanks, I knew that they dumped off the coast of Somalia, but I didn’t know that they were dumping inside Russia – good to be informed, I guess.
22 March 2011, 1:04 pmHenry:
What They’re Covering Up at Fukushima
http://counterpunch.org/takashi03222011.html
Hirose Takashi has written a whole shelf full of books, mostly on the nuclear power industry and the military-industrial complex…now that the disaster has begun he would just as soon remain silent, but the lies they are telling on the radio and TV are so gross that he cannot remain silent.
22 March 2011, 4:20 pmHenry:
Animated maps:
Rhenish Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Cologne
Potential dispersion of the radioactive cloud after a nuclear accident in Fukushima
http://www.eurad.uni-koeln.de/index_e.html
22 March 2011, 4:23 pmStan:
…which is transmitted instead through the breast milk of mothers for whom the water is still presumably “safe?”
Radiation levels 1,600 times the ‘acceptable’ levels. Video.
23 March 2011, 12:56 pmm.c.:
I was flipping through the basic cable MSM last night. One talking head suggested dumping tons on concrete on top the the 4 damaged reactors. 1) Like that will stop the leakage to the ocean and underground. 2) If the fuel rods are still unstable, they could melt and become Critical again. There is many tons of fuel there. 3) This is why is is important to cool the fuel with water mixed(I believe with Boric Acid which slows the fission rate.) 4) The Pumps, Electrical systems, Piping are probably badly damaged, not to mention the salt encrustation from the evaporating sea water previously used. 5) Damaged fuel rods in contact with air produces Hydrogen Gas, which in confined space makes turning on the lights creating a spark very dangerous. 6) I heard it could take 3-5 years just to get the fuel to a point of Stability.
1 April 2011, 1:26 pmHenry:
Tell Me About the Future
Tell Me About the Future
Nuclear power isn’t safe. Oil and gas will run out — sooner, rather than later. Coal is, well, no solution either. Carbon, let’s face it, is killing the planet. Realistically, we don’t have much choice other than to move to renewable energy, but that move must be facilitated by government. If the federal government can’t or won’t act then state governments must intelligently develop practical innovations. Which, it turns out, it’s politically possible for them to do. To talk about the future of energy policy I turned once again to Terry Tamminen, an environmental visionary who’s doing a magnificent job of leading us out of the wilderness. Total runtime forty four minutes. Memores acti prudentes futuri.
http://www.electricpolitics.com/media/mp3/EP2011.04.01.mp3
1 April 2011, 10:50 pmHenry:
Comments [from a listener of the above interview]
Re: Gujarat is one of the strongholds of neo liberalism in India. Its chief minister, Modi, is probably the most egregious politicians on the sub continent — and that’s a tight race.
Kerala is probably what you were thinking of, communist led government, no child labour, women’s rights and you can get a drink there.
An interview with P Sainath on neo liberalism in India would be great.
[I stand corrected — Thanks! g.]
1 April 2011, 11:05 pmMichael Anderson:
Nothin’ to see here, folks, just move along now:
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/daiichi-photos.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M22Gt4sswEA
1 April 2011, 11:31 pmKim Sky:
The EPA wants to raise “Protective Action Guides” (PAG’s) to levels vastly higher than those at which they are currently set allowing for more radioactive contamination of the environment and the general public.
“According to PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the new standards would drastically raise the levels of radiation allowed in food, water, air, and the general environment. PEER, a national organization of local, state, and federal employees who had access to internal EPA emails, claims that the new standards will result in a “nearly 1000-fold increase for exposure to strontium-90, a 3000 to 100,000-fold hike for exposure to iodine-131; and an almost 25,000 rise for exposure to radioactive nickel-63? in drinking water. This information, as well as the emails themselves were published by Collapsenet on March 24.
Above from: Department of Nuclear Engineering at UCI Berkeley Forum http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/node/2162
Mike Rupert’s Collapsenet
3 April 2011, 3:27 pmhttp://www.collapsenet.com/free-resources/collapsenet-public-access/item/723-fallout
Stan:
Problem solved. The levels are no longer dangerous.
Dog-waggery on steroids.
3 April 2011, 8:22 pmDeAnander:
Antifragility: beyond ‘robustness’. Nassim Taleb (he of the Black Swan meme) suggests another way of looking at complexity and fragility.
Taleb’s actual monograph is worth a read. I am not sure I grasp every detail of his presentation but am willing to read it again a couple of times, as it seems… important. He concludes
He’s using “convexity” and “concavity” in a rather innovative way but I think I get the gist. His point seems to be that highly complex, fragile systems/artifacts do not well tolerate unexpected events, and that we can guarantee that unexpected events will happen. Highly optimised (for “efficiency”) systems become fragile. Highly centralised systems become fragile. “So about everything behind the mathematical economics revolution can be shown to fragilize.” (which I think is delightfully quotable)
Taleb suggests that the decentralised city-state is the most antifragile (likely not only to endure surprises and uncertainties but to thrive on them) of political systems. I’ve been gradually leaning towards this view for a while, not least because of the trend for urban regions to be years ahead of even State govts (let alone the Fed) in carbon reduction, clean-air, and other “common good” legislation.
Anyway, we might want to start a thread on antifragility sometime. The Fukushima incident is a horrendous but instructive example of extreme fragility in the face of a Black Swan event. It’s hard to imagine an “antifragile” system that would actually benefit from a tsunami and earthquake, but easy to imagine technologies that would recover more quickly and not exacerbate the existing disaster so gravely…
5 April 2011, 1:24 amDeAnander:
Dmitry Orlov is, as always, focussed on the essentials.
5 April 2011, 1:39 amStan:
Taleb is a very interesting fella; someone who ‘gets’ complexity/chaos in the macro, and makes it accessible. Resilience is the opposite of fragility; and diversity is the basis of resilience. It is in nature, at any rate.
Reminded of an old kid’s experiment, where you get a big canning jar, and scoop in a handful of mud from a wet field, a handful of mud from the edge of a pond, and a handful of mud from alongside a riverbank. Add a bit of water. Seal the jar, and set the jar in a sunny window. It then eventually grows out a series of self-displacing ecosystems until it gets stable. Then you can take the jar and shake the hell out of it, a mini-catastrophe. Put it back in the window. It starts over, and eventually stabilizes.
5 April 2011, 7:08 amMichael Anderson:
This reminds me of the ‘zeroeth’ law of Thermodynamics, which The zeroth law states that if two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroth_law_of_thermodynamics
Mud.
Nukes.
Humans.
Oh, boy. What will we look like if we survive? Quadruped Bullheads? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sculpins
The 4 laws of Thermodynamics are the closest real-world manifestation I’ve seen of what you could call God.
5 April 2011, 8:46 amMichael Anderson:
Zeroth law translated:
You cannot GET OUT of the game.
5 April 2011, 8:58 amMichael Anderson:
Excuse me! Too early!
You must PLAY the game…
5 April 2011, 9:00 amKim Sky:
Along the Black Swan/Fragility/Diversity
My father always told me that the people who did the best during the Great Depression were the folk who lived in the countryside, farmers etc. This concept goes against the idea of the dust-bowl folk. He claims that in the countryside people always live at a depressed level, and events had little affect on them, they had their food, minimal possessions and life went on. My father was raised by a single mother, they struggled, but in his mind they had it pretty good, his mother was a gifted piano player and supported them working at speakeasys.
Quoting Orlov:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
“Poor” just means “poor,” and “in spirit” means “on purpose, not as a result of, say, injustice, misfortune, or being lazy, stupid or a gambler.” Oh, and “blessed” means “not damned.”
It is rather difficult to embrace such basic tenets while remaining within a culture that has elevated avariciousness and rapaciousness to the status of virtues. But here is a key insight: being poor on purpose is much easier than being poor as a result of suddenly having less than you are accustomed to having. Voluntary poverty is a hell of a lot easier than involuntary poverty.
5 April 2011, 12:34 pmMorocco Bama:
The problem I have with the Black Swan Theory is that Taleb asserts the outcomes are unexpected, and I don’t agree with that. It was known since the inception and implementation of Nuclear Power that these reactors stood a certain chance of melting down when certain conditions manifested….especially in the case of Fukushima where they were building on the Coast in an area prone to seismic activity. What happened at Fukushima was expected. It was not a Black Swan.
Taleb applies the Black Swan to what has occurred, or is occurring in the economic system today, but I would argue that the Mortgage Melt Down Crisis was also expected. It was not a Black Swan either.
5 April 2011, 12:42 pmStan:
FULL
He doesn’t say events are universally unexpected or unpredictable. He says the sequelae are unpredictable… and that Black Swan events have hugely significant ramifications.
5 April 2011, 2:04 pmMorocco Bama:
Thanks for providing clarification, Stan, but I still have issues with the concept. I’m not saying it doesn’t have merit, and I’m not saying it’s not food for thought, but its value is limited, in my opinion, and it’s not flawless.
It allows for plausible denial when things go wrong, or so it appears. Take, for example, his claim that 911 was a Black Swan Event. Applying his three criteria above, I would say I disagree that it was a Black Swan Event. Same goes for the creation of the Internet. Maybe it’s just a matter of exactitude and detail, and also who is doing the modeling. It’s no secret that there were many indications of a substantial terrorist attack prior to 911. Sure, time, date and place would have been difficult, if not impossible to predict, but a substantial terrorist attack was imminent and many inside the beltway expected it. And, they took his advice and capitalized on it, even though it wasn’t a Black Swan. They had plans to “Roll” as soon as it went down. Science Fiction, and even cartoons prefaced the Internet. I have a theory of my own, in that regard. I call it the Build It And They Will Come theory from that awful Kevin Costner movie. Science Fiction imagines it, and decades later it comes to fruition. As PK Dick said, though, all he was doing was extrapolating the curve to the future. If only we could use some of that quantum mechanical thinking in more positive ways as a species, we could not only move mountains, but create them…along with entirely new worlds and realities we are not yet capable of comprehending.
5 April 2011, 4:59 pmDeAnander:
As I understand it (which is not very confidently so far)… One of the Black Swan issues with met and geo events (storms and quakes) is that our quant-era human knowledge is shallow compared to climatic and geological (even to human) time. The industrial era is a tiny historical blip. We have only a very small sample of conditions on which we base our notions of what is expected or normal… so our predictive power is even slighter than the nature of reality would permit in any case.
Engineering wants to create and assume stability and sameness. But natural systems are fractal, chaotic, nonlinear and emergent — all tedious buzzwords by now, I know, sorry, but they do have meaning and are descriptive of aspects of reality that engineering wants to (a) ignore or (b) overcome. Ignoring these aspects is dangerous and the effort to overcome them is a diminishing-returns game. And that kind of sums it up.
This I think is where Taleb is venturing: what would it take to create human systems that thrive on an unpredictable environment (as some other living organisms do) rather than falling apart and having to reorganise from squat every time something “unexpected” (to the attention span of a mayfly) occurs?
Taleb concludes that bricolage and artisanal lifeways are more antifragile than highly organised/centralised/standardised ones. This certainly mirrors our experience with monocrop ag (ludicrously fragile and expensive). I think we’re about to learn that it mirrors our experience with centralised authoritarian power generation (double entendre intentional).
Up in the inlets to the North of me there are a few Pelton wheels abandoned by homesteaders or loggers, still turning, still producing electricity from 30 to 50 years after all the people left. One or two have been adopted by squatters.
30 years is the normal operating lifetime of a nuke plant — yes, they’re asking for licenses to extend operating lifetimes but that is just one of the many desperation moves our industrial civ is making as it sees the energy endgame approaching. At the end of that lifetime the risks go up, the cleanup costs loom ahead. The Pelton wheels, decentralised and small and inoffensive, have gone on turning all those years. When the bearings finally seize, they may be repairable or they may become a big hunk of metal to use for a mooring. But one thing they will not do is poison the neighbourhood. Sometimes in the summer the creek or river runs low and the wheel stops turning, but you need less electricity in the summer anyway because the days are 18 hours long, you can read by daylight until 10pm.
If we all got to vote for the future we wanted, I’d vote for the Pelton wheel. wind generator, tidal generator, solar future (I’m not so hot on solar panels any more but will wave a flag for solar Stirling with moderate enthusiasm). Less electricity each, but I’m already living with that and finding it quite acceptable. Less electricity for less lethality, less squandering of our limited wealth, less of those pending, snowballing escape costs. Seems like a deal.
Another Bite Out Of Life is what Brian Czech calls the Fukushima and Deepwater events. Another nibble out of the living biosphere. Death by a thousand cuts. Another reduction of the biosphere’s capacity for self-renewal. A kind of planet-wide apoptosis. If we were sane, there would be no greater crime in our lawbooks than this reckless destruction of the creative/productive capacity of the earth. It’s one thing to alter the biosphere, to coax it into a symbiotic relationship with us (recall that in some MesoAmerican areas where traditional permaculture was practised there were as many as 2 or 3 times *more* bird species than in “wilderness” areas without human activity). It’s another thing entirely to lay waste to it, to create a desert and call it cleverness.
T’other day I was strolling along the waterfront where some enterprising souls had built some pretty tall inukshuks (statue-like cairns of piled stones) standing knee-deep at mid tide. A young family was idling away a happy hour in the rare sunlight. Two little boys (in the 7 to 9 y/o age bracket) in bright-coloured winter jackets and gumboots were — you guessed it? — hurling rocks at the inukshuks, trying to topple them. Laughing and crowing. Parents chiding them, but not very seriously.
I pondered this delight that young male primates seem to take in destroying something — anything — in smashing oyster shells, kicking over sand castles, breaking branches off trees…. and a cold sinking feeling came over me as I wondered whether this is the real appeal of nuclear technology, of the weapons of war, the violence of mining, the poisons of industrial civilisation: could it be the grownup realisation of that infantile glee in kicking over the ants’ nest, throwing a rock at the cat, breaking down the young cherry tree? Are our “best minds” really just highly educated boychildren in bright slickers, hurling rocks at the real world in a frenzy of overexcitement and competitiveness? Are they, despite all their big talk about “safety” and “failsafes” and so on, secretly in love with destruction and courting it with a great big thrill deep in the heart? Is there a thread in “human nature”, way down in the onion-layers of our brains, that really does love to destroy, smash and burn?
If so, we can no longer afford it. If unchecked it will be the death of all of us. We don’t have enough spare wealth to go about destroying it for fun. We are all living in glass houses now, and throwing rocks is … well, a Really Bad Idea.
5 April 2011, 5:17 pmRobert Karaffa:
@De. I think you are correct..I’m standing outside my chicken pen…(with no cat on my head and no dark glasses) looking at the poo…and picking up my grand daughter so she doesn’t walk in that…or pick it up in totally innocent curiosity.. and I’m always trying to catch those rocks being thrown at us by those “above” ..Some of those “above” being Frat Boys that were self proclaimed owners to be of the system….. But the granddaughter is ready to throw those rocks too…She wants to see stuff move at her command. She wants to see those birds/cats/dogs/friends/Family members cower. Or at least respond. She wants control. Of something. It actually makes laughter when it happens. There is something in us that wants to smash and burn..its not just male primates..its primates..and this is as close to gender as I will ever go here..Surely there are tendencies going certain directions far stronger in one gender or the other. But we need to think more concentratively about what we are..(smart monkey? Abberation?) This kid is gonna do that..until she becomes closer to us (developmentally hopefully)and thinks about ramifications..if she can..Can I? Though I think I know what kindness means, do I control myself in regards to throwing rocks? All I do is throw rocks..maybe..everything is calculated for a response. Throwing rocks is the glee of destruction and control. Defiance. A dare. Taunt..Ego. If I lie to myself I say I’m just trying to show justice to everyone with the rocks I throw. But am I actually just spending all my energy to get people to think about me and treat me the way I want to be treated and to win in the end by getting my way? Without being merely destructive for taunts and giggles? Guess I’m a hair lost in this…oh well…punch me..but please only once..
5 April 2011, 11:36 pmMorocco Bama:
“”"”"There is something in us that wants to smash and burn..its not just male primates..its primates..and this is as close to gender as I will ever go here..Surely there are tendencies going certain directions far stronger in one gender or the other. But we need to think more concentratively about what we are”"”"”
We can infer so many different things from this, could we not? And, what each of us infers from these observations is itself highly influenced by our past experiences and observations that have formed our internal biases.
I had a propensity to destroy when I was young, but I also had a propensity to create, as well. I believe I was testing the limits of both ends of that infinite spectrum, but if you get right down to it, in a world of finite resources, or even infinite resources, you must destroy to create…one is betrothed to the other.
Also, I’ve been toying with the notion that senseless destruction for the sake of destruction may be a Jungian Unconscious impulse to reject the material world that is so at odds with our primal nature. We are a conflicted species…at once being mammalian primates, and concomitantly being highly sentient beings capable of self-realization and reflection, able to ponder our existence. Those two spheres of existence must occupy the same shelter and vie for position….the ladder having the upper hand early on in development, but always subtly manipulating behind the scenes thereafter allowing the ethereal self to think it’s in charge.
6 April 2011, 9:04 amJames M:
De, it’s interesting to me that you observed two boys engaged in destructive play–would one boy alone have been as likely to cast stones? The speculations in your comment immediately referred me to a Wikipedia-refresher on Freud’s “todestrieb” (death drive), where I hit upon this sentence:
Freud made a further connection between group life and innate aggression, where the former comes together more closely by directing aggression to other groups, an idea later picked up by group analysts like Wilfred Bion.
That rock structure was created by another group … and the inukshuks I googled looked like a statuary representation of a human form, so basically the symbolic / totem version (in these boys’ minds) of that group … just positing that their glee may not have been in destruction for its own sake, but in the us vs. them bonding — the definition, affirmation, and strengthening of their communal idea of self that (sadly) often comes through violence against outsiders.
6 April 2011, 12:39 pmJames M:
Since we’re getting into primate (including human) psychology and propensity for violence, I’d like to expand on my last comment with some more about what I think’s been largely missing in this discussion so far: the sociocultural factors.
What often makes me uncomfortable about this type of project (comparing people to chimps to tease out the roots of aggression) is that it can tend to end up in a kind of incomplete analysis that acts to essentialize, or make native, aggression within us and within them. The logic being: chimps are our nearest antecedents –> chimps are aggressive in their “natural” state –> therefore our aggression has some natural / biological origin. Which is not necessarily bad in and of itself, but what’s sometimes forgotten, I think, is that chimps live within cultures and these cultures feed back into the behavior of individual chimps.
I was recently told by a guy who rescues and shelters chimpanzees that a) they’re highly social and b) highly intelligent, but even more than we tend to give them credit for — a mature chimp is about as smart as a fifth grader, only minus language ability. My point being, they have the cognitive capacity for pretty highly developed culture, along with the inter-relational perceptivity that allows them to pick up and transmit social cues to each other.
Here’s where I want to go in reverse, and speculate about chimps based on my observations of human group dynamics: what if we were to say that, instead of an “aggression gene” (that promotes destructiveness for its own sake, beyond that needed to survive), we and our chimp ancestors instead have a set of genes (and / or acculturated cognitive schemas) that promote anxiety about our status within the group / pack (and therefore anxiety about our long-term survivability), and this anxiety prompts some (with greater aggressive capacity) to behave belligerently (i.e. create survival-anxiety within the other members of the group) so as to establish themselves at a higher rung on the intraspecies social ladder — as well as in relation to other species?
What I’m getting at is that human aggression / destructiveness very often seems to occur as a way of promoting oneself within a group, and of bonding with and promoting one’s group at the expense of others — all as a project to attain mastery-over-environment, and thus the quelling of an innate fear (survival anxiety). What do we call someone who kills and / or tortures other people and / or species as a solo project? Psycho- or sociopath, an aberration. What do we call someone who excels at killing / torturing others as part of a group project? Hero, or big-shot (at least within the perimeter of that group).
When I was a kid, there seemed to be a certain rite that happened for every boy at around the same age, which amounted to an initiation into the “junior league” of the male martial culture: the awarding of a BB gun from father to son, along with the (completely insane) assumption, apparently, that we would use them “responsibly” (whatever that means). When we would roam in packs with our guns together (as our mothers doubtless fretted over the possibility of our losing an eye), someone would invariably suggest senselessly shooting some poor defenseless bird out of the sky. (I never, I’m happy to say, participated in that.) The idea in doing so, I believe, was to demonstrate martial prowess to the other boys, thereby establishing rank. Nobody, I’m sure, was possessed by the idea of shooting sparrows for the fun of it on their own — I certainly wasn’t — except maybe as practice for a future demonstration in the presence of the others.
The tendency to collect trophies of vanquished enemies has been remarked on here (somewhere, I forget) as both a human and monkey behavior — but I suspect it’s not so much done as some individual, perverse fetish, but as a time-binding display of one’s superior martial ability. Where do hunters keep their prized bucks’ heads? Usually in their living room / den – the social area of the house, where others can be made aware of their Big Shot status.
So, in case I haven’t flogged it enough by now, my point is that Freudian death-drives, or the notion of some intrinsic glee related to wanton destructiveness, don’t necessarily explain, by themselves, the phenomena we’re exploring. Pack status has to be a big part of it. The overgrown boys who enjoy wielding power — e.g. nuclear power, for military or “peaceful” purposes — and shrugging off the potential (and actual) consequences, are probably doing it not just for the mischievous infantile fun of blowing stuff up and making messes, but as a way of promoting their felt sense of social rank (at a usually unconscious level) via their ability to destroy things on a massive scale.
(Nuclear power, btw, is inherently destructive, fission being a destructive assault-upon-atoms, even without considering its assault on the larger environment. Combustion, too, is inherently destructive. Interesting to note that the more sustainable and sane forms of energy generation — wind, solar — happen not as the product of destroying something, but as a form of cooperation with natural processes.)
6 April 2011, 2:38 pmDeAnander:
Good call James, ties in very closely with my previous writings on “trophy pictures”.
And it ties in very closely with “hungry ghost” consumer culture, which in essence is seeking a complete cocooning from all the risks of “natural” life. No exposure to climate vagaries (air conditioning, heating, filtration). No exposure to seasonal food variations (same handful of monocrop species imported year round, preserved variously, unvarying, reliable). (Ideally) no exposure to personal injury, accidental premature death (advanced medical care, antibiotics, etc). Some even dream of immortality, of “anti-aging” medicines. You could say that consumer culture is survival insecurity taken to the ultimate bleeding edge: an attempt to divorce ourselves utterly from the idea of life as resource-based, finite, and precarious.
I suspect that the dogged attachment to “magical” power sources that will enable the continuation of the consumerist lifestyle is in itself a status/survival reflex of some kind, which might explain the quasi-religious fervour it inspires. We prove our superiority to other neighbours by the amount of energy we consume; we prove our superiority to other nations by the amount of energy we collectively consume and flaunt; and we prove our superiority to all other species by the way we use energy to dominate and destroy them. To accept limits to any of the above requires “stepping back” (as in a confrontation between testosterone-addled boys) in a way that some egos will find intolerable, intolerably threatening to deep-seated insecurities about survival and ranking.
Interestingly there’s an essay at Energy Bulletin about the challenges of telling a “downstory” instead of an “upstory”. We are tweaked for upstories, we like to hear about people *gaining* status and power, about material rewards falling to the deserving, about winning, about achieving security and “living happily [idly] ever after.” This we have made the story of our civilisation: that through ingenuity [we don't mention the various kinds of theft, extortion and mass murder that were also involved] and hard work, we have earned our luxurious insulation from biotic realities. We don’t know how to tell the downstory without making it a tragedy, a defeat, a “loser” experience…
I don’t know where I’m going next with this (and I have real-world things to do) but these threads tie together somehow. Knowing that may not help (is it really helpful to understand precisely the cultural/neurological traits that doom us to collapse?) but somehow I find I have to keep picking away at it…
6 April 2011, 4:50 pmm.c.:
3-Mile Island — 1979
St. Laurent, France — 1980
Chernobyl — 1986
Japan — 2011
Next ???
Even if Nuclear Energy was 100% safe, it would be Stupid just on the topic of Waste Storage alone.
6 April 2011, 5:30 pmm.c.:
Damaged fuel rods in contact with air doesn’t produce Hydrogen Gas; fuel rods in contact with steam(gaseous H2O) created oxidation, like rusting on the rods which captures the Oxygen molecules leaving H2. The Hydrogen gas isn’t radioactive, but like the Hindenberg is highly explosive.
Some of the early scientists changed their minds and became very sceptical/critical of Fission for energy and/or weaponry. Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer are perhaps the most famous. But the true believers like Lewis Strauss(who destroyed Oppenheimer’s official career), Edward Teller, Hyman Rickover(Nixon himself was too scared of him to ask him to retire. Rickover a 4 star admiral used to walk around the pentagon wearing a suit not his dress blues.) Herman Kahn, and Albert Wohlstetter are some of real cast of characters.
7 April 2011, 11:49 amm.c.:
The Natural World, not often but every once in a while can be dangerous. Vesuvius, Krakatoa, large Hurricanes/Typhoons etc. But when Homo Sapiens contribute to the damage, especially to the point of permanently damaging the food supply, this is what I call major Idiocy.
11 April 2011, 6:56 pmStan:
FULL
17 April 2011, 3:11 pmm.c.:
I read Russell Hoffman’s article in yesterday’s Counterpunch and had a hard time sleeping last night. Tons of radioactive water being dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Previously I worried about the fish, birds, and mammals in the food chain. If there was a world-wide drought would the Pacific be off limits for desalinization? It’s costly but one way to get fresh water.
19 April 2011, 11:46 amCurt:
Just heard this on German TV I was not paying close attention at first so I did not hear the beginning of the report. What I did hear was that the cover over Chernobyl is in danger of collapsing. The Ukrianian government is disscussing a plan to place a new cover of the destroyed facility but it is unkown if the new project will be finished before the ad hoc cover collapses.
19 April 2011, 1:28 pmConsidereing how wide ranging this problem could be one would think that the EU and Russia and Turkey and Iran should all have at least observers in Ukraine to make sure that they get all the support that they NEED to make sure this potential problem does not end up causing us really big problems.
I hope that my report did not sound to hysterical.
Stan:
FULL
19 April 2011, 4:43 pmaskod:
Curt,
as far as I know, this is in the news now (except for the Kagoshima relevance) because there is an international conference in Ukraine right now on how to replace/strengthen/add to the sarcophagus. So I think it is being handled, to the extent that it can be handled.
Of course, what one should really take home is that the Chernobyl disaster is far from over.
20 April 2011, 6:21 amjohn steppling:
let me throw this one in as well:
http://youtu.be/TMXvpWoHzeE
20 April 2011, 10:34 amm.c.:
The Ukraine is the best/one of the best breadbaskets in the world. I think they are one of the top two or three wheat producers as well as other valuable crops. Why do they build these sh–piles where the food is grown?
Don’t Sh– Where you Eat?
21 April 2011, 11:58 amDeAnander:
Actually mc that is a very good illustration of industrial insanity. They locate the nuke plants in rural areas because those areas are considered more expendable than densely populated urban areas; because rural people are considered ignorant and easy to push around; because the sparser population is less easily organised; because there’s a kneejerk contempt for “peasants” and the countryside among technocrats… because food and soil are “low”, dirty, female/peasant business and not to be taken seriously by Big Men. So they situate the most dangerous toxicity-bombs amid the most essential resource any country has: its food-growing acreage.
But of course this does not worry the technocrats and priests of finance, because if they make enough “wealth” (arbitrary money units) they can always import food from overseas. They can utterly wreck their own nation’s biotic resources (so they think) and still get food by purchase, extortion, or outright theft from other places.
They don’t seem to consider the larger picture: populations congregate where agriculture is most feasible; big cities are near breadbaskets of various kinds; other nations also experiment with toxic industrial technology; therefore all breadbaskets are being poisoned all over the world.
Let them eat [yellow]cake eh?
21 April 2011, 12:44 pmm.c.:
2009 Figures from the UN Food & Agriculture Org. puts Ukraine #10 in wheat output(Russia is #3, combined like they used to be before the dissolution of the USSR they’re 2nd behind China and ahead of India); and Ukraine #10 in corn output(ahead of Canada.)
21 April 2011, 3:36 pmMichael Anderson:
Here’s an interesting link—-this blog discusses sexism quite a bit, and it looks like nuclear radiation has an effect on Male-Female birth ratios. A suicidal guy-thing? Are we that Greek? Sure looks like it:
http://www.dailytech.com/Study+Nuclear+Radiation+May+Affect+Gender+of+Babies/article21750.htm
Researchers found that long-term nuclear radiation exposure led to either increased male births or decreased female births
29 May 2011, 5:21 pmCurt:
Is it just me. Am I the only one to find the way the word OR is used in the dailytech link which describes a link in radiation exposure and an increase in the percentage of male births? Wierd. Small but wierd. What were people once called who were called upon to proof read reports? Editors, or perhaps mere proof readers.
30 May 2011, 6:27 amm.c.:
Good News! Germany has decided to get completely off nuclear energy by 2022. They have 17 reactors. Global stock prices of Solar Energy Companies soared yesterday as a result of this news!
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a strong Green Party all over the world.
1 June 2011, 2:11 pmm.c.:
Japan isn’t out of the woods. Another major wave or earthquake is problematic. Also if 3 or 4 reactors had faced total meltdowns it would have been 3 or 4 times as bad as Chernobyl. Thank goodness for the seawater. Seawater btw is not in the fix-it manuels. Northern Japan might have been byebye. Nuclear Fission for energy is just not worth it. I have no empathy for it. Read the article in the new Harpers about Chernobyl. They are still trying to figure out how bad it is/will be. I forget the author’s name. I want to remember he lives in upstate NY.
1 June 2011, 3:16 pmm.c.:
I should clarify. In many reactors, seawater is used to cool the reactor through a heat exchange mechanism, but seawater is never supposed to be pumped in via firehose into the reactor vesselfor cooling. Doing that is a last resort action which results in massive amounts of radioactive water everywhere.
3 June 2011, 12:10 pmm.c.:
More Good News! The Swiss government is considering a proposal which would close/deactivate all nuclear reactors(5) by 2034.
8 June 2011, 3:41 pmMichael Anderson:
From the establishment:
http://www.businessinsider.com/faa-closes-airspace-over-flooded-nebraska-nuclear-power-plant-2011-6
“A fire in Nebraska’s Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant briefly knocked out the cooling process for spent nuclear fuel rods, ProPublica reports.
The fire occurred on June 7th, and knocked out cooling for approximately 90 minutes. After 88 hours, the cooling pool would boil dry and highly radioactive materials would be exposed.
On June 6th, the Federal Administration Aviation (FAA) issued a directive banning aircraft from entering the airspace within a two-mile radius of the plant.
“No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM,” referring to the “notice to airmen,” effective immediately.
Since last week, the plant has been under a “notification of unusual event” classification, becausing of the rising Missouri River. That is the lowest level of emergency alert.
The OPPD claims the FAA closed airspace over the plant because of the Missouri River flooding. But the FAA ban specifically lists the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant as the location for the flight ban.
The plant is adjacent to the now-flooding river, about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, and has been closed since April for refueling.
WOWT, the local NBC affiliate, reports on its website:
“The Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Facility is an island right now but it is one that authorities say is going to stay dry. They say they have a number of redundant features to protect the facility from flood waters that include the aqua dam, earthen berms and sandbags.”
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/faa-closes-airspace-over-flooded-nebraska-nuclear-power-plant-2011-6#ixzz1PklhmgrC
19 June 2011, 2:51 pmStan:
FULL
22 June 2011, 4:57 pmHay Jude:
There was a discussion here recently about how much energy it would be possible to save without threatening our well being. Sadly I could not find it. So I figure that this is a good a place as any to post a comment or two on the subject.
24 July 2011, 7:18 amI wonder how much energy would be saved if there were no hot water tanks, even well insulated ones,
maintaining a supply of water at 45 or 50 degress centigrade and the water was heated as it was used like in many, but not all, european households. I wonder how much energy would be saved if on hot days people slept in the basement rather than used an airconditioner. I wonder does spending time on the internet use more or less energy than spending time on the TV. I wonder does reading a e book use on the average more or less energy than reading a real book. I wonder if more street lights were turned out at night how much crime and accidents would go up.
I was slowly thinking, turning it over and over on my electric grill, that if oil, gas, and coal, use in the industrialized world in general and the US especially, was reduced to a level 40% of what it is now and some of that saved energy was used to improve the lives of those in undeveloped areas but in a manner that avoids the mistakes that the industrialized world made we could push back the comming petrochemical shortage by a number of decades.
The less we waste on stupid activities the more time we gain. Yet the current system does nothing to achieve this goal becasue as has already been pointed out under the current system if well meaning people cut back that lowers the price which just encourages some people to waste more.
I will also repeat what some one else said some time ago. When well meaning people save energy they will save money. One way or another that money will be used in other economic activity.
Either the well meaning people will suddenly see that their checking account suddenly has enough money for a vacation or the saved money will be used for investiment purposes which will also lead to expaned economic activity and therfore increased energy use.
Most policemen probably do not want to admit this but it looks to me like they are riding a dinasour. Will they ride the dinasour to the ground or will they start designing and building a camel. Is there anyone that they can turn to for advice on how to construct a robust camel?
Are policemen smart enough to know who they can trust? Will they trust Gilligan and the Professor or will they trust Thirston Howell the Third? They write what might be the final chapter or what might only be the end of the first act.
m.c.:
I forgot where I left my thread on the June 2011 Harpers article by Steve Featherstone about Chernobyl, Ralph Nader has a LTE in the new just out August 2011 Harpers saying a Russian biologist has estimated the death toll at 1 million due to radiation in the quarter century since. Petra Bartosiewicz has an interesting article as well on a different subject.
25 July 2011, 6:38 pmm.c.:
I’m not necessarily opposed to orthodox even somewhat conservative politics but when Governments & other powerful institutions(Banks, Media Conglomerates, etc.) continually Lie to their Citizens it makes the spectrum of Left-Moderate-Right a Big Joke with No meaning.
Take the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932. It separated Investment Banks, Commercial Banks(the British term is High Street Bank), and Insurance Companies. Investment Banks are encouraged to take greater risks than Commercial Banks for their very existance to make big investments happen, but you don’t want grandma’s life savings in your local bank lost in some foolish deal. Insurance Companies were supposed to be separate from both types of Banking above because it would be a conflict of interest for an insurance company to cover itself or one of its subsidiaries in a financial or business transaction, or God Forbid to bet against itself. When Franklin Roosevelt made his fireside chats in the 1930′s what I just mentioned above could be understood by a sharp 10 year old and considered Common Sense by just about averyone, including the Village Idiot. Why Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Bob Rubin, Newt Gingrich, and Bill Clinton reading their Ayn Rand thought that they knew so much better that plain-old Common Sense is Mind Boggling to me.
28 July 2011, 12:24 pmm.c.:
Glass-Steagall was enacted in the summer of 1933. Wikipedia has an audio link to Roosevelt’s first fireside chat about the Financial Crisis then. It’s about halfway down the Glass-Steagall page on the right hand side.
29 July 2011, 11:59 amm.c.:
Wrong thread but I’m tacking this on Glass-Steagall. In 2000(his last year in the WH) Bill Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act(CFMA) which deregulated financial products known as Over-the-Counter Derivatives. Basically it overturned a 1936 law known as the Commodity Exchange Act. See a pattern? Some of the Pols who lives through the Great Depression knew a little about Capitalism & Human Nature enough to put some restrictions on the Circus/Madhouse known as Wall St. I’m on the thought that from now on to graduate from a top notch law school or mba program, students need to internship on a farm or construction site, lumber yard, coffee shop, etc. for a few months so they have an appreciation for real work.
10 August 2011, 6:16 pmCurt:
Here is a good libertarian idea. Eliminate street lighting. It is probably only one percent of our electical energy use but it is a totally unnecessary one percent. It is also a sicnificant factor of most municiple budgets. I know that libertarians like to save the government money.
19 March 2012, 4:09 amStreet lighting may heip reduce crime it may prevent some traffic fatalities. But if humans do not get a handle on global warming those benifits will be dwarfed by the costs of a climate out of control. Only one percent. But an easy one percent. If we can not take this easy step then the powers that be are clearly not serious about doing anything. People who are our at night are often driving. Drivers have headlights. Other people are moving slowly starlight is suffecient to navigate at night. Furthermore there are societies in the world where people do not fear their neighbors or even their countrymen. If the US were such a society street lights would not prevent crime anyways as there would be very little crime to prevent.
Also the nighttime lighting of monuments should stop too. It may only be a symbolic savings but how can we highlight our greatness when we are not great. When our electical needs are met by 100 percent renewable sources then we are doing something right. It might then make sense to light up the Eifel Tower or the Washington Monument at night time.
Sometime back in a moment of despair I said that reducing the demand for oil and coal just lowers the price so that rich people can waste more of it. Yet I forgot to understand that it also makes it more affordable for poor people as well. In the short run it seems to me that there will be no advantage gained in the race to reduce carbon emmisions.
askod:
To reduce carbon emmissions, I think we need to stop it at the source. Ban fracking, drilling, coal mining etc. If it is drilled or digged it will be used.
19 March 2012, 12:36 pmMichael Anderson:
Things must be REALLY, REALLY, REALLY messed up at San Onofre for the NRC to shut ‘em down. Turnabout is fair play—these reactors are manufactured by Mitsubishi!
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0328-san-onofre-20120328,0,1692312.story
28 March 2012, 1:38 am