The Three Mile Island line
Nuclear advocates have already developed their talking points. Don’t worry about a meltdown. Three Mile Island was a meltdown. No one was hurt at Three Mile Island.
Here’s a piece from Harvey Wasserman that tells a different story, from two years ago.
People died–and are still dying–at Three Mile Island.
As the thirtieth anniversary of America’s most infamous industrial accident approaches, we mourn the deaths that accompanied the biggest string of lies ever told in US industrial history.
As news of the accident poured into the global media, the public was assured there were no radiation releases.
That quickly proved to be false.
The public was then told the releases were controlled and done purposely to alleviate pressure on the core.
Both those assertions were false.
The public was told the releases were “insignificant.”
But stack monitors were saturated and unusable, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission later told Congress it did not know—and STILL does not know—how much radiation was released at Three Mile Island, or where it went.
Using unsubstantiated estimates of how much radiation was released, the government issued average doses allegedly received by people in the region, which it assured the public were safe. But the estimates…
Stan:
Fission stories
13 March 2011, 3:20 pmDeAnander:
German citizens — 60,000 of them — unite in a “protest chain” against nuclear power.
I salute their artistic sensibility, organising skill, and resolve.
I watch the unfolding disaster in Japan with a kind of dull horror, unable really to grasp the losses involved if the situation deteriorates further. Even the losses incurred thus far are staggering. Almost 200K people evacuated. To be evacuated — kicked out of your home on short notice, taking only what you can carry or cram into the car. Not knowing if — like Chernobyl residents — you will ever be allowed back. Leaving behind so much of the material substrate of your life, your memories — your *home*.
And since everyone is lying — the engineers, the government [why is it everyone involved with nuclear power seems to end up lying like the deluded wife of a violent alcoholic, always promising that he's really reformed this time and he'll be safe in future?] — not knowing how much radiation you and your family have already been exposed to?
How comforting is it to hear that your government will be passing out potassium iodide pills to reduce your risk of thyroid cancer?
And this is the future that the international fraternity of nuke engineers want replicated on a mass scale with a crash building programme — fast-tracked for even *more* secrecy and cover-up and slipshod engineering and cut corners? This is “our only hope” for surviving climate change and peak oil? Doesn’t look like hope to me, looks like desperation: as in the desperate, increasingly bizarre and violent risks taken by an addict in full-on withdrawal.
I wrote passionately several years ago at European Tribune that I felt Big Centralised Nuclear Power was the perfectly wrong solution to peak oil and climate change — that it
* was not even climate-neutral,
* was insanely costly (has any nuke plant ever turned a profit or failed to hit up the taxpayer for enormous cleanup costs after its short useful lifetime?),
* had a short resource future (uranium supplies are also limited, folks),
* encouraged the dangerous resurgence of the Security State, and
* represented the first or second prize in technomanagerial arrogance and hubristic risk-taking with public (indeed, biospheric) health.
I wrote that nuclear plants were not and *could not be* case-hardened enough to withstand the unusual rigours that a destabilised climate would subject them to — that declining snowpack would threaten the river levels needed to cool inland plants, that storms of unprecedented force would threaten the high-tech grids and support systems on which these fragile monsters utterly depend, even that diesel fuel for their backup generators might become difficult to obtain reliably in future. They are not a technology for hard times. They are a luxury toy for a civilisation rolling in wealth, with real estate to burn (literally), with an adolescent appetite for spectacular risk-taking and machismo. They are, in terms of human survival and resilience, a super-expensive frivolity, a Neronic ego-monument as crazy as the last moai or an obscenely overcompensated CEO’s third private jet.
How many of them have to fold up under even moderately severe climate/weather/geo events before we get it? This is Oz technology — terribly clever and impressive, but still just the work of a little cowering primate behind a curtain, pulling levers and praying that the damn thing keeps working ‘cos he has no idea how to fix the mess if it doesn’t.
[There is a terrible irony about our condition. Industrial civilisation has promoted the explosion of human populations (while also promoting an expanded scale of death and suffering along the way); and meanwhile industrial civilisation -- poisonous to the core in all its crude, violent, anti-biotic processes -- is busily undermining the ability of the biosphere to feed us, the hectarage of land we can inhabit, the friendliness and suitability of the planet for our own and other life forms. Each time we poison another few hundred square miles for several tens of thousands of years to come, we are like a family in a small and crowded house chopping yet another square foot or two out of the floor so there is less and less room to stand in. Japan is a small country with a high population density -- can they afford to write off thousands of acres of inhabitable space? Is that a fair price to pay for "cheap" electricity? If told that this would be the price, would the voters and consumers have said "Yes, fine, sign us up?" Are the people now being evacuated from their homes saying to themselves, "Well, it's all right really, I had a decade or two of cheap reliable power and my wide screen TV was really fun to watch, so losing everything and having to start over as a refugee is a fair deal." ???]
Words fail me. Birthright? Mess of pottage? Staten Island, beads? The price exacted for what industrialism “gives” us has been deferred (for some, only for some) but it is coming due with a vengeance. Was it worth it?
Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe they’ll cool F-1 down with sea water — their last best hope — and all those innocent people will be allowed to return to their homes, facing nothing worse than enormous, ever-escalating costs to replace the power they were obtaining from the old plant. Maybe “only” a few hundred cleanup workers will be irradiated enough to die untimely and unpleasant deaths from cancer. Maybe we will squeak by again, dodging the bullet, skating along until the next near-meltdown and the next coverup and the next evacuation [or failure to evacuate -- having seen what a bloody hash the US govt made of the NOLA storm and flood, do we like the idea of the same gang handling a Chernobyl-class event in the States?]. I hope so, I sincerely hope so. But I wish that “just squeaking by” wasn’t enough to lull everyone back into a happy childlike trust in the benevolent and wise nuclear authorities (and their endless welfare scam).
OK, I’m ranting. But honestly, how many fables and parables and contes have we generated over the centuries about genies out of bottles and false promises of absolute power — and we still don’t get the moral? When we accept the Genie’s offer — the GEnie in this case — we set ourselves on a path that seldom ends well.
I think I need to take a deep breath, get offline, and do something life-affirming
PS why “first or second prize”? because I’m still not sure whether GMO releases will prove to be even more stupidly undermining of civilisational longevity than nuclear power. the jury is out. so far, both technologies have only one guaranteed result: they leave our descendants an impoverished, diminished and shrunken world in which to realise their happiness and their possibilities. we should call them not High Technology, but Selfish Technology. to steal the future from our posterity has to be one of the meanest thefts of all.
13 March 2011, 11:18 pmTom:
Stan — thanks for the link and the info and forum you present to all of us.
De — An amazing “comment.” Well-written and easy-to-read. You sum up what has been an overwhelming information glut from the MSM, but as you state without a lot of truth MSM, not yours) in there. Please do not keep your thoughts to yourself.
14 March 2011, 6:34 amStan:
De, your rants are more lucid than 10,000 carefully measured statements from the Commentariat of Radical Technological Optimism.
Speaking of which,
FULL entitled “Japan’s Nuclear Nightmare: The Price of Technological Optimism”
14 March 2011, 12:25 pmDeAnander:
Perhaps we need a new book entitled “When Optimism is a Crime”…
actually this might not be a jest; a lot of criminally-minded folks I have known (and read about) seem to be career optimists, always sure that they can get away with anything and the rules somehow don’t apply to them. they get cocky, they overreach, and Whoops down they go — often taking others with them.
is unreasonable optimism — of the personal, selfish variety, not the kind of optimism that is just happy to be breathing in the sunlight on a fine Spring morning — an indicator or companion marker of sociopathy?
14 March 2011, 1:04 pmDeAnander:
– The Independent
This may be a moment to point out that massive disaster responses burn up even more of the petroleum that we don’t have that much of any more (there’s been a lot of flying around and moving heavy equipment long distances in a hurry): I think this is what Hornborg and others mean by catabolic collapse. As our civilisation overreaches into excessive complexity and fragility, the infrastructure and its servicing require more and more resources. Meanwhile our collective impact on planetary systems (climate destabilisation and so on) grows, creating more crises which our fragile infrastructure cannot survive without high-cost interventions, and so on. Until all our resources are consumed in desperately shoring up collapsing infrastructure and/or warring on our neighbours to get more resources to shore up… etc.
My point is not that we should not respond humanely to disasters with the best speed and effectiveness we can muster; it’s that we really can’t afford artificial, self-induced disasters on top of natural challenges. Another way of saying that disaster-prone technology is a bad investment, period.
Consider the fate of a wind farm in severe weather conditions: it could be damaged. A tower might fall. A rotor might spin off and bury itself in a field, even crush a house or two. Repair might be costly and take a while. But it will not poison the air, water, and land for miles around or force a mass evacuation. And if the wind farm is of moderate size and serves a local area only, the neighbouring areas (with their own local power generation) might remain fully served *and able to come to help*. Any technology that allows a huge area of dependency to be taken out by a single point failure is not only expensive to fix, but makes response that much harder because the radius of disability and disorder is that much larger.
Gigantism and resilience are opposing values.
Centralised control and resilience are opposing values.
Perhaps this is why empires always fall?
14 March 2011, 1:22 pm(Boer) Tom:
DISQUS (and maybe alternet) have repeatedly censored the following comment:
Example 2: Alpha emissions of one gram of Pu-240 in one day
Let someone’s body have bioaccumulated one gram of Plutonium isotope Pu-240, i.e. the biological processes in that person’s living body cannot remove the Plutonium to any significant extent, e.g. over a period of a month (or as another example, the lifetime of the person). Every alpha emission will be absorbed inside the body, as alpha particles are very massive relative to their energy, and therefor slow (and they cause ioniziation tracks, which also harm cells, unlike unabsorbed gamma particles). Calculate how many alpha particle emissions (and therefor absorptions) occur in one day in this person’s body due to Pu-240.
Answer:
To calculate the number of emissions per day, we need the number of atoms of Pu-240 in the body. To calculate how many atoms are in the body, we need to calculate how many moles (chemical quantity unit) of Pu-240 are in the body:
#mol of Pu-240 = 1 gram / (240 gram / mol) = 4.17 x 10^-3 mol
#atoms of Pu-240 = #mol of Pu-240 x N_A (Avogrado’s number)
= 4.17 x 10^-3 mol x 6.022 x 10^23 atoms/mol = 2.51 x 10^21 atoms
We can write the number of atoms of Pu-240 that remain after some time /t/ (i.e. remain despite radiative decay) as
#Pu-240 atoms left = 2.51 x 10^21 atoms x 2^(-a)
where a = t / (6563 years x 365 days/year) = 4.17 x 10^-7 (for t=1 day)
and 6563 years is the half-life of Pu-240.
The number of alpha particle emissions from Pu-240 is precisely the number of Pu-240 atoms lost. Thus, the number of emissions in a time /t/ after the start is
#emissions = 2.51 x 10^21 – (2.51 x 10^21 x 2^(-a))
As /a/ is very small, this calculation requires great accuracy. Fortunately, we can estimate it with less need for accuracy in the calculation, using a result from calculus:
#emissions ~= 2.51 x 10^21 x 0.693 x a
= 726 x 10^12 emissions (in one day)
= 726 trillion emissions (in one day)
Those with a calculus background may recognise the 0.693 as ln(2).
How many absorptions occur in one day with one gram of Pu-239? In one second with one gram of Pu-239?
14 March 2011, 4:17 pm(Answer: ~200 trillion, ~2 billion)
DeAnander:
Third Explosion at Fukushima
I wonder if ‘Fukushima’ is destined to become a well-known word like Chernobyl, Hiroshima, Love Canal… stay tuned and see, I guess.
I wonder whether/when Fort McMurray will join that list…
14 March 2011, 11:07 pm(Boer) Tom:
Why are they giving radiation levels (dose rates) in Sievert? Shouldn’t it be Sievert per hour (or per some other time unit)? Sievert is cumulative dose, not dose rate. I find it weird that no-one is commenting on it.
15 March 2011, 12:25 amSusan/catlady:
If you’re in the mood for some dark humor from Cold War days, here’s Tom Lehrer singing “We Will All Go Together When We Go”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frAEmhqdLFs
“when the air becomes uraneous, we will all go simultaneous…”
15 March 2011, 12:48 amStan:
I don’t believe anything they are saying. We will be breathing and eating radiation from this for years to come. The wind is supposed to change today and blow West across the island. Very bad news.
I had a nuke advocate tell me once that you can block alpha particles with a sheet of paper. I asked him if there little men in the alveoli of my lungs holding up sheets of paper.
Here is the IEER on spent fuel (not being discussed much). Arjun is an old friend from my anti-nuke organizing days.
FULL
15 March 2011, 6:41 amStan:
And here is a living example of stupidity from NPR and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peac. No mention by this “peace” advocate of the fact that nuclear power produces the material for nuclear weapons.
15 March 2011, 7:30 amm.c.:
Westinghouse(makes reactors) owns CBS.
15 March 2011, 11:41 amGE(makes reactors) owns NBC & MSNBC.
Disney(ABC) owns about 15-20% of global commerce according to a woman I met in an airport(George Bush Intercontinental-HOuSTON-) who worked for them.
Are PBS and NPR owned by the U.S. Dept. of Energy?
DeAnander:
Digital News
Is it just me, or is “nuclear safety” one of those risible oxymorons like “military intelligence”?
How smart is it to create “latent bombs” in the form of nuke waste storage pools which must be continually cooled (sucking up endless power for pumps, and requiring a reliable source of fresh water) in order not to burn and poison an entire bioregion? About as smart as basing your entire industrial infrastructure on a one-time bonanza of cheap fossil fuel, I guess.
If we were a dumb monkey we’d be OK. If we were a really smart monkey we’d be OK. Our problem seems to be that we’re a half-smart monkey, clever but not really intelligent.
15 March 2011, 11:52 amlatte lenya:
I was doing okay, limiting my intake of news to what I thought I could handle and keep functioning, and then today it somehow reached critical mass and I felt it, all the fear, it felt like a tiny particle of ice in every cell in my body. I was completely frozen. I thought, this is it, this is what it has felt like for the past 50 years growing up in the nuclear age, the fallout shelter signs in school, etc, that we had to numb out just to keep going.
15 March 2011, 12:45 pmWe’ve absorbed the fear just as assuredly as we’ve absorbed the radiation, and I hope it’s not too fatuous to say I’m not sure which is worse.
And then in the discussions of the viability of nuclear power, we’re exhorted by the experts not ‘not to be emotional.’
Well, I am emotional. I’m emotionally connected to the planet and also to the people who are suffering.
I’ve been crying uncontrollably all afternoon.
There is no thick line between thinking and feeling. Maybe, coming off of De’s last comment, thinking without feeling is clever but not really intelligent.
Thanks for listening.
DeAnander:
I hear you LL. There are days when I just wish — oh so much — that it was all a bad dream and we could wake up.
But this silly exhortation “not to be emotional” — it’s a major flaw in our thinking, from Descartes on, and it may prove fatal yet. Logsdon and others point out the snobbishness in the academy that reflexively invalidates the deep knowledge of e.g. farmers who *love* their land and understand it, nurture it, cherish it. This is dismissed as “sentiment” to be displaced by the more “advanced”, dispassionate, “objective” knowledge of academics remote from physical engagement with the realities they study (of course this is partly a mythic posture, as the best scientists do have precisely that fascinated, passionate love for what they study).
Certainly the exterminist/extractionist mind set requires a cauterising of empathy and love that amounts to induced psychosis. And this cauterising is part of the training of warrior males, and is valorised and mythologised and fetishised by warrior-patriarchy.
Thinking without feeling is definitely not intelligent.
Feeling without thinking (or mindfulness) can be unintelligent too.
As the old musician joke goes, “Cold hearted perfection has its appeal, and so does heartfelt ineptitude. But what we want is passionate virtuosity!”
What we want is a hunger for accurate information rather than wishful thinking, coupled with a passionate love and empathy for the living world: a passion to “do right by” the web of life and enhance rather than eroding its resilience, knowing (with the “smart” part of our brains) that this in turn enhances our own survival and health, a very rational goal.
15 March 2011, 1:31 pmChasm:
What frightens me much more than the disaster in Japan is the reaction to it among people who should know better. This should spell the death knell for the nuclear industry worldwide, but it won’t. They will fight on and on and on. The whole argument about “making it safe” is a sick joke. If something has the potential to irradiate major portions of the Earth, killing millions and making huge swaths of the planet uninhabitable, then *there is no way to make it “safe.”* Safety is not measured by the unlikelihood of an accident alone. The potential consequences of an accident must be factored in. And if the consequences are grave enough, then a sufficiently small likelihood cannot be achieved.
And this is doubly so when there are safer choices! The industry presents us with a false dichotomy: it’s nuclear power or ecocide via climate change. The possibility of simply *reducing demand* is off the table. The possibility of using alternative, renewable, and *decentralized* methods is off the table. And doing both? Are you insane?
It seems to me that people allow themselves to be bamboozled by these arguments because they want to maintain their resource-intensive lifestyles. They want their iPad2 and their iPhone4 and all their other gizmos. They are terrified that shutting down the nukes will cause the wonderful wheel of consumerism to grind to a halt. Will they let themselves be persuaded again?
I have nearly 1800 “friends” on my Facebook account (don’t ask). These friends are from all over the world — Europe, North and South America, Asia, and even a few in Africa. A couple of days ago a few bartender friends in Germany set up a FB page to encourage people to create a Red Cross cocktail in their bars and donate the proceeds to the Red Cross. Today there was a posting of a video in which some woman apparently argues that she caused the tsunami with her prayers. There has been a little discussion about flooding in Hawaii from some of my family who are vacationing there. Other than that, nothing.
By comparison, there has been quite a bit of commentary on Charlie Sheen. There was plenty said about the Super Bowl and, before that, the World Series and, good heavens, the World Cup! By comparison, this disaster has been a deafening silence.
These are not stupid people, nor are they uncaring. They are mostly average or above average intelligence, typically well educated, and as caring as most.
I view this as a very bad sign.
15 March 2011, 7:15 pmChasm:
Actually, the biggest subject for discussion in the past week on Facebook, as far as my “friends” are concerned, has been the iPad2 release. By far.
15 March 2011, 7:18 pmRobert Karaffa:
@Chasm. For the very first time in my life…standing outside in the 39 degrees drizzle of Ohio March. Peepers down toward the creek….Crows crying the last of the day.. sky cracking the moon out now and then….I am very scared.
15 March 2011, 7:48 pmChasm:
You and me both, Robert. You and me, both.
15 March 2011, 8:06 pmTeresa:
This is absolutely the scariest thing that is going on. Dr. Helen Caldicott has some excellent articles on this whole nuclear insanity. I can only consume so much of this news … we’ve literally been living in an insane asylum.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23663
15 March 2011, 11:14 pmSusan/catlady:
Some spine-tingling gems from today’s Talk of the Nation on Nashunal Propagander Raydio (my bolds):
(Caller): Hi, thanks for taking my call. Even though the accident happened, I’m totally for nuclear power. You know, our sun is a huge nuclear reactor. We wouldn’t be alive without it. So yeah, it’s dangerous, but you know, life is filled with risk.
CONAN: Life is filled with risk. So if they wanted to build one in Tampa, you’d be fine with that?
(Caller): I’d be fine with it, yes.
(me: um, doesn’t this guy pay attention to They Might Be Giants? The sun is a fusion reactor, and it’s 93 million miles away.)
REBECCA SMITH (Wall St Journal): I would say we can design around any threat. The problem with the power industry is these are privately owned power plants. That is, they’re owned by utilities. And they have to be able to pass a cost-benefit analysis. No one’s going to build a nuclear plant if they have to build it for a 9.0 or a 10.0 Richter earthquake. It simply would become astronomically expensive. So it may be economics that is the greatest threat right now, due to engineering, increased engineering standards, that is the threat to the industry.
ALEX (caller): Good. I’m in the U.S. Navy. I’ve worked on a submarine with these reactors, and I got to say if you look at the Navy’s history, we’ve never had an incident. I think the entire thing is about training and preparation for these things. Of course, the catastrophe of this magnitude maybe it wasn’t foreseen, maybe it wasn’t prevented – preventable, but in a normal environment, nuclear energy is one of the safest ways we can go, as well as the most affordable, if we look at it in the long run. I totally support it, and I would have a reactor in my backyard any day of the week.
(me: in the long run, we’ll all be dead, right?)
GWYNETH CRAVENS (Author, “Power To Save The World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy”)
[i]t’s important to know that the reactors function correctly. They were designed to withstand an earthquake, and they did. They automatically shut down, which all of our American reactors are programmed to do also. As soon as the first jolt appeared, they shut down. The control rods were inserted into the core and stopped the chain reaction….
The tsunami was the problem. The earthquake would not have caused the problems they’re dealing with now. But their backup systems of electricity failed, and so they couldn’t pump water into the reactor and so on. So it was a problem of the tsunami, not the design of the reactors.
(we couldn’t possibly predict a tsunami might hit a reactor in Japan…or California)
15 March 2011, 11:34 pmChasm:
Alex must have worked forward in the boat. If he’d worked in the engineering spaces as a nuke, he’d know that the Navy has had plenty of “incidents.” As I mentioned in a previous post, that’s how they are able to say with a straight face that they’ve never had an “accident” — they simply redefine accidents as incidents and presto! An accident-free record. Alex also doesn’t seem to recognize that Navy reactors are small, and are essentially cost-no-object. They are pressurized water reactors, which are generally safer, but more expensive to build. Of course, they make lots of radiation and radioactive waste and they have a pretty limited life due to neutron embrittlement…
16 March 2011, 12:09 amChasm:
Here’s one that really pisses me off:
http://blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbrook/2011/03/15/japans-real-disaster/
16 March 2011, 1:19 amMichael Anderson:
A friend on mine locally, who has some dough and a position here, told me the other day ‘the best minds in the world are working on this’.
Uh HUH—-Seems like they’ve been ‘working’ on this since 1939-45.
…and don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Are we with stupid, or what?
16 March 2011, 1:31 amDeAnander:
@chasm — Easterbrook, Brookings Institution… need we say more.
It’s interesting that nuclear-power fandom seems to go with rightwing tendencies. I can think of several reasons for this, not least the not-so-subtle connection with nuclear weapons and manly-warrior stuff like that. But it’s odd that the endless public bailouts to the nuclear industry don’t trigger the usual wingnut distress at taxing and spending. You’d think that the welfare-queen aspect of the nuke industry would be very distasteful to the rightward-inclined, no?
16 March 2011, 1:51 amDeAnander:
The Independent (Those 50 who remained behind to struggle with the fragile monster are imho genuine heroes. They face something far more frightening than immediate, dramatic fatality: slow, medicalised death by carcinoma.)
BTW, iirc the “safe” levels of radiation exposure for humans are based on US Govt tests using young, fit, male soldiers as Standard Test Bunnies. I have heard them challenged (as over-optimistic) when children and pregnant women, or people of lower body weight or impaired general health are concerned.
“According to published information, the reported dose of radiation to result in an increased incidence of birth defects or miscarriage is above 20 rad or 200 mSv. ” footnote
Speaking of denial and bogus promises of “harmlessness” and “safety” –
The US has never openly addressed allegations/accusations that its use of DU munitions in Iraq may be the cause of an observed increase in birth defects; nor has there been much discussion of the use of DU munitions in the Balkans and alleged effects on civilians as well as soldiers of both (all?) sides. But then, the US officially denied any harmful effects from Agent Orange for decades after its use in Viet Nam. The discussion of DU munitions as a war crime is currently restricted to partisan Iraqi web sites and “conspiracy theory” boards and sites in the rest of the world; but those who insisted Agent Orange had poisoned US soldiers as well as Vietnamese civilians were marginalised as conspiracy theorists not so long ago.
Stepping back to a larger POV, we see a pattern of fascination (amongst those in power) with deeply anti-biotic, toxic, lethal technologies: a fascination with slow and fast poisons. Such a fascination (and propensity to deploy) would be considered criminal and/or insane in an ordinary citizen. It should be found criminal and insane in governments, bureaucracies, corporations etc. — if the World Court had any teeth, that is.
16 March 2011, 2:10 amStan:
The echo chamber is more in lockstep than I have seen it in a long, long time. Every news channel, every newspaper, every well-publicized talking head, is minimizing, minimizing, minimizing. Their statements on the meltdowns are measured and couched in language that treats it as a local problem… only. Every report or comment now talks about NATURAL background radiation, getting us used to the idea that a little more doesn’t hurt. There are far more claims about what the radiation is NOT likely to do, than what it is likely to do. It is NOT likely to affect the US, eg. A lie. A damnable lie. A lie that can be gotten away with in the short term, because the effects won’t be visible until out children begin to develop immune disorders and cancers several years from now; and then they can come up with some other hocus-pocus to equivocate and evade and misdirect.
This is so utterly evil, that the power of an industry can take this kind of precedence over us all. That their profit-taking can be done at the expense of every living thing, and that they can continue to rape this little planet. There are so many of them to call out, and it doesn’t divide along the traditional lines, so people are hearing The Line from representatives of nearly all points in the political spectrum. Conrad said it,
“The horror, the horror.”
*
A couple doses of antidote to share, share, share.
FULL
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16 March 2011, 6:56 amDeAnander:
I am wondering whether the love of money is the root of all evil, or the love of evil is the root of all money…
It seems to me that in the love of nuclear power there is something, for lack of better word, diabolical — a worship of destructive power and toxicity for its own sake, a romantic swooning over sheer lethality. But I’m not at my most lucid in the morning…
16 March 2011, 11:00 amDeAnander:
The Legacy of TMI
Lies, lies, lies and coverups, more lies and coverups.
It’s common knowledge among the working stiffs here in Canuckistan that native communities downstream of the Alberta Tar Pit are suffering skyrocketing levels of cancer and other illnesses, presumably due to water contamination. But no one’s talking about it in the corporate-owned media. As R.D. Laing memorably said,
Rule #1: We don’t talk about it.
Rule #2: There is no Rule #1.
We are starting to experience what it means to live in a neo-feudal society, or under a Soviet-style totalitarian regime. Only officially sanctioned stories appear on the news. Public debate is a surreal Punch-n-Judy show, a meaningless exchange of platitudes between the right-hand and left-hand sock puppets of one puppeteer. Talking heads natter on at us, making soothing noises or stirring up hate or exhorting us to “sacrifice” — increasingly, I hope, we ignore and/or mock them.
16 March 2011, 12:35 pmChasm:
I have wondered, too, for quite some time about the strange obsession with nuclear power among many. I suspect that there is a relationship to masculinity (as currently practiced). Most of the nuclear apologists I’ve known have been men. Oddly, although there is a clear right-wing tilt, many of my more liberal friends have embraced the technology as well.
Having personally experienced having a hand on the controls of a reactor and bringing it critical, I will say that it can be a bit intoxicating. There is an immense sense of power barely controlled. Most of the time it was a terribly boring job — essentially a glorified meter reader. We spent a lot of our time cleaning the engineering spaces and jokingly referring to ourselves as “nuclear janitors.” But one of the best descriptions I ever heard of operating nuclear reactors was, “The world’s most boring job that becomes much too exciting much too quickly.”
“Nukes” were widely derided when I was in the Navy (and by nukes, I mean the sailors who worked with the nuclear power plants), but the truth is that it was probably the highest-status enlisted rate (with the possible exception of SEALs), and among the three ratings — mechanical, electrical, and reactor — within the nuclear field, the reactor operators were clearly the top. Twenty-five years later, I still get treated with deference when I tell people that I was a Navy Nuke.
Is it some sort of Thanatos? Is it a macho thing or a status thing? Is it because nuclear power is seen as some sort of super-advanced technology? (That one just makes me laugh. When I was in the field, we were still using 1950′s mag amps — in the 1980s.) Is it an unwillingness to give up our wasteful ways? Some combination? None of the above?
16 March 2011, 1:04 pmMichael Anderson:
@ DE:
War fosters the same love of sheer lethality, I think. Chris Hedges spoke of it in “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning”.
16 March 2011, 1:49 pmDeAnander:
Michelle Chen on the connections between US and Japan:
She refers to nuclear plants as “managed destruction” and I think this is a very powerful phrase, encapsulating the thrill-seeking we were referring to above, the buzz of being (barely) in control of a vast and dangerous force. A healthy version of this thrill might be riding a spirited horse, or sailing a weatherly boat in brisk conditions, the sense of “riding the wind”, of harnessing energies much greater than our own and dancing with them in a kind of harmony and balance, the exhilaration of risk and skill. But this is an extreme, perverse version: the risk and lethal power are grotesque.
Somehow I have to connect this to the extreme varieties of sexual titillation/stimulation that spin off into the grotesque and brutal (even lethal). The rush of erotic intimacy (a kind of risk and dancing with great cosmic powers) perverted into an obsession with control and destruction. It’s as if our naturally erotic (in the broad spiritual sense), thrilling relationship with the physical world — our joy in risk and skill and engagement — has been perverted on all levels to an intensifying addiction-spiral of More, Faster, Bigger, Meaner — a desperate chase by jaded senses for bigger thrills. I am groping for a thread here that connects so much of the mental illness of our culture, the insatiability and the taste for grotesque extrema: the same madness that spawns mutilations and other atrocities in combat, the party atmosphere at a lynching (I count gang rape as a kind of lynching)… a tendency to go OTT and seek intensities of experience (thrill, that is) beyond the reasonable, permissible or even survivable.
Our warrior/patriarch/accumulator culture seems programmed to play Russian Roulette, on every front. Ever-elevating risks giving ever-bigger thrills to ever-crazier dweebs who fantasise that they’re in perfect control, yet get off on the magnitude of the risks involved. “I am become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds,” said Oppenheimer. I think he was gloating, not reflecting in horror. Power not only corrupts, it renders us insane.
16 March 2011, 3:26 pmStan:
FULL
16 March 2011, 6:23 pmStan:
Why what’s happened in Japan should be an ENDORSEMENT of nuclear power
*
-from Orwell’s 1984
17 March 2011, 12:04 pmDeAnander:
I notice that the stream of news from Fukushima has reduced considerably today.
I wonder if this means (a) no change therefore not much “exciting” to report, or (b) they are getting control of the situation (whatever that means) so the alarm level is starting to fall, or (c) official silence because it’s getting worse and they want to keep a lid on it to avoid mass panic.
No news doesn’t seem like necessarily good news. Anyone got any fresh gossip, rumour, or better yet, reliable reportage?
17 March 2011, 1:44 pmCurt:
That article said that the tsunami created devistaion on a biblical scale. hahahahahaha. I guess that since I find 10,000 to 20,ooo deaths hardly impressive compared to the Tsunami that killed 240.000 just a few years ago I must be a hardened criminal now. Ten to 20 thousand people dieing in an earthquake happens every couple years.
17 March 2011, 2:00 pmThe survival stories from the tsumani are quite gripping but so is the heroism of those working on the front lines of the nuclear disaster. It is too bad that the CEOs are not right there beside them.
But of those nuclear power workers who are risking their lives on the front lines I wonder if it has occurred to any of them to think that, “Hey I thought nuclear power was a good idea up until now. Do I carry a small amount of resposiblity for this disaster?” Maybe some of those dieing in the containment effort still think that nuclear power is a good idea. Then again maybe some of them only worked there because they could not find a job anywhere else and they hated nuclear power and their job.
Anyways, Oh well, never mind. You did not hear that.
DeAnander:
footnote: Alternet news roundup. Alas, sloppy editing means the Updates are not timestamped!
17 March 2011, 2:01 pmTom:
De — I wish someone would invent a sarcasm font, because I would be using it in my last paragraph below.
On another site (sports-related), some guy, and he has several supporters, keeps saying the only way to get the true story on this catastrophe is to go to the NEI site. According to him, they provide the truth. I informed him that NEI is probably the biggest lobby entity for the nuclear power industry. But, he and his minions will have none of that.
So, in response to your original query, I’ll just say, go check out NEI. Then, you’ll know what’s really going on.
17 March 2011, 2:06 pmPlease reread my first sentence.
DeAnander:
@Curt I wonder just the same things. Are those dutiful, heroic workers still in love with the technology? were they ever in love with it? are they feeling bitter and betrayed at this juncture, or do they think this was just “bad luck” and the technology is still sound? Were they working there with enthusiasm as true believers in nuke power, or just because it was the only good job in town?
How similar or dissimilar is their position to that of career soldiers realising that the war they are fighting is futile and/or immoral and/or unnecessary and/or criminal? Do they “soldier on” believing in the Cause, dying in good faith that their sacrifice was redemptive? or do they soldier on because it would be wrong to abandon comrades, knowing all the while that the whole thing is a tragedy/farce that should never have happened in the first place?
I cannot imagine their state of mind. the emergency has gone on long enough now that the original, thoughtless heroic impulse (that is in most of us, to rescue someone drowning, to turn back and help someone faltering) has worn off. they’ve had weary days and nights to experience every kind of doubt, every nightmare of the consequences of failure, and every sincere longing that they had never been trapped in this situation at all.
I hope they live long enough to do oral histories, at least to tell us what it was like, to warn us (if we would only listen) about the cost of “cheap” power.
17 March 2011, 2:06 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.radiationnetwork.com/
3 sensors operating on the West Coast (where I’m at).
Iodine pills on order, we are taking kelp to start, with Betadine 10% liquid as the fun and messy solution—1.6 ml at a time on a gauze pad.
The plume evidently will make landfall in the San Francisco area tomorrow, according to UN scenario, so I’m looking at the SF sensor as the bell-weather. Then we’ll know just how bad it is.
Just remember—’the best minds in the world are working on this’—-I can’t get that out of my head.
17 March 2011, 2:12 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/16/science/plume-graphic.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1\
Here’s the plume map, courtesy NYT.
17 March 2011, 2:17 pmDeAnander:
@Tom your NEI booster may possibly be a paid troll or even a bot.
Corporate-funded astroturf — commercial psy-ops — is a growing trend
on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog
and so it’s easy to do “viral marketing” of ideas by inserting phony avatars into fora and chat rooms to promote everything from new products to old talking points. it’s hard to tell the difference between a live person who just happens to believe the old talking points, or a clever software construct programmed to repeat them with just the same dogged determination.
how do we know what info to trust, with a firehose of info spouting 24x7x365 right on our desktop (or worse, our networked phone)??
in general I rate information according to a complex grid of factors including source, timing, prose style, footnotes, and “cherchez l’argent” — this last being the biggie. if the POV being peddled defends or promotes some enormously profitable activity then my suspectometer starts ticking faster. if it challenges some powerful profiteering operation then I’m more easily convinced. basically in my private physics, Money=Lies– so the more money, the more lies. it’s a truism that “all men lie about sex, all the time” (I think this is a quote from Dead Like Me but not sure) but it’s even more true that rich people lie to get money, lie about where it came from, lie about what they’re doing with it, and lie about the bodies they walked over to get to it. *always*.
industry front pages therefore rate a zero or even negative on my trust scale.
somewhere on the opposite extreme of the trust scale is the lunatic fringe, the tinfoil hatters trying to connect every dot in the political universe into one gloriously gothic tale of conspiracy involving the Houses of Windsor and Rothschild, the Masons, World Bank, Illuminati, Atlantis, fake moon landings, radio mind control, and whatever else. it’s not the unpopularity of the views that makes me distrustful, nor the perfidy ascribed to the powerful — it’s the neat tying together in a decorative literary knot, obeying the conventions of fiction rather than the messy chaos of real life. no vast conspiracy is needed to make robber barons lie and pillage, or cover up for each other after doing so — it’s just the good ol’ invisible hand doing what it does best: collusion and deceit. the only conspiracy we need to explain much of the lying and bullshitting in the world is greed, attachment to wealth and power. that’s enough to make people lie to themselves, God, and everybody.
the nuke industry is vastly profitable and vastly harmful. therefore there’s a lot to lie about (the harm) and a big reason to do so (the profit). therefore my trust rating for nuke industry information — just like Monsanto propaganda — is zero or negative.
it’s a simpleminded system I suppose, compared to peer review and exhaustive research; but I find it’s guided me fairly well when evaluated over what is now becoming a longish lifetime.
17 March 2011, 2:20 pmSusan/catlady:
Bernhard at Moon of Alabama has been posting updates with his usual level of analysis and caution.
17 March 2011, 2:58 pmStan:
Not just corporate…
FULL
17 March 2011, 3:03 pmStan:
The State Department now has charter airplanes carrying DOS personnel to Taipei.
Actions speak louder than words.
17 March 2011, 3:10 pmStan:
on “safe” doses of ionizing radiation…
FULL
17 March 2011, 3:18 pmStan:
FULL
There very well may be a permanent no-go zone in Japan. First they wrecked the Gulf of Mexico, now this. No one is talking about energy conservation. As in, we ought to use a LOT less energy.
A video
17 March 2011, 3:24 pmChasm:
@Michael Anderson, I recommend that you simply remove yourself from the West Coast rather than waiting for the cloud to arrive. Potassium Iodide pills are largely a placebo. Radioactive Iodine is only one of the radioactive nuclides, and not even the worst. If you’ve been given fatal doses of hemlock, arsenic, and cyanide, what point in providing the antidote (maybe) for only one of the three?
@Curt and @DeAnander, having worked in nuclear power (and in the military), I can tell you that the views of my coworkers spanned pretty much the entire gamut. I was probably further to the left than anyone else I knew, but a surprising number of my colleagues did not want to work for civilian nuclear power plants, and many of them weren’t too happy with Reagan’s belligerence, either. Many refused to re-up. And many of my friends who did go on to civilian plants did so because that’s the skill they had to sell. They would come back and tell horror stories with that fatalistic sense of humor so common in the military. I don’t think the distribution of views was really much different from that in the population as a whole. Check the comments on any website (or Facebook) to see just how out of touch with reality many of us are.
Also, you missed the Creature from Jekyll Island, the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, the “liberal” media, al Qaeda, and, what the hell, we might as well throw in ZOG, too.
@Stan, I agree completely. Disregard what they say; pay close attention to what they do. When an aircraft carrier runs away, when U.S. diplomatic personnel are running like cockroaches when the lights come on, when the State Department is suggesting that U.S. citizens leave and not come back, then there is something very bad happening. These people don’t understand the meaning of the word “cautious.” If they’re doing these things, it is most likely a bit after the fact.
17 March 2011, 4:16 pmDeAnander:
Alternet updates
I have been thinking about this myself — the diversion of resources, attention span, sympathy and all the rest away from the displaced, homeless, cold, hungry population and focussed intensely on “defusing the bomb.” If the bomb were not there in the first place there might be more organisational and material support for the displaced persons… maybe not a whole lot more, as the “UXB” team working on the nuke disaster is kinda specialised, but still…. the nuke demands our whole and immediate attention (the fragile monster problem) and distracts our eyeballs and hearts from half a million or so people in deep trouble.
17 March 2011, 4:29 pmStan:
Here is a report from Democracy Now today (Mar 17)
17 March 2011, 4:35 pmDeAnander:
Synergy of Natural Disasters and Civilisational Hubris [my title]
[link-rich article, definitely worth visiting]
17 March 2011, 4:58 pmRobert Karaffa:
Why can’t anyone on this planet pull away from “growth” and just admit that the only thing sustainable is reduction? Greed, the “future,” my stuff, it will all be better in “the future” when I get all my stuff….you know for my kids…and stuff…every church, every town, every country, every ideology with influence runs on this complete insanity…and I am guilty..
17 March 2011, 9:04 pmDeAnander:
Late night extra (courtesy of The Guardian, UK):
As I understand it that is rather a lot.
Four years’ worth of exposure in one hour sounds bad. And of course, with toxins and radiation and similar insults to the body, it’s not quite as simple as “just stay away from radiation for 4 years and it will all even out –” just like you can’t get really severe sunburn and expect to average out the skin cancer risk by staying out of the sun for a few weeks afterward. Damage is damage, and a lethal dose is a lethal dose.
[So hmmm. The aftermath of damage to a nuke plant is *worse* than the aftermath of a nuclear bombing? Run that by me again?]
There seems to be a general feeling slowly building that the workers still strugging to contain the disaster — working in 4 rotating shifts of 50, 200 people in all — are on a suicide mission. Doubtless there will be a monument of some kind to their sacrifice, and so there should be. But the best possible monument would be a marker over the grave of this technology, engraved with the simple words “Never Again.”
Yeah. Us too.
In recent years I’ve noticed that the role of sober, credentialled scientists and experts — whether climatologists, nucleomedical experts, toxicologists, biologists, petrogeologists or what have you — is to tell us that things are, actually, far more dire even than they thought… and not even on the same planet with the corporate happytalk that saturates our mental environment.
Stay tuned tomorrow for more water bombing, more spraying, and maybe TEPCO finally getting electric service back to the cooling pumps; what this really means, I guess, is that TEPCO runs a cable to the site and the heroic suicide squad struggles (in their radiation suits, in the snow, while being waterbombed by Chinooks) to hook up high voltage cables, throw breakers, and see if the pumps will start. Probably some of this is going on right now. It’s hard to be a helpless bystander…
18 March 2011, 2:31 amStan:
FULL
18 March 2011, 7:45 amStan:
For a break… the art of the possible
18 March 2011, 8:02 amMichael Anderson:
@ Chasm—
If it were possible to ‘bug out’ to another state, perhaps we would. But, like a lot of people, we are tied here by personal AND economic bonds. Where are you at? So, we do what we can, in the here and now. Here’s a link from a site, for lurkers and others, on foods and supplements to eat:
http://www.care2.com/greenliving/natural-remedies-for-radiation-and-toxic-overload.html
Funny, most of these foods are the ones that are universally acknowledged as ones you SHOULD eat to stay healthy anyway! (Who’da thunk it?) The paragraph on Nagasaki is interesting. I suspect that any detox rituals (pick your personal one) will help.
I keep wondering how much radiation we were all unknowingly exposed to during the period 1945-62, when there were over 400 above-ground tests worldwide. Talk about mass hypnosis…a 17-year nuclear war.
18 March 2011, 1:41 pmTom:
Michael — thanks for the link and the comment about the nuclear testing (17-year nuclear war, indeed). On another site, I mentioned this period as POSSIBLY contributing to the rise in ADD, ADHD, autism, etc. in the 70s and 80s. They came at me like I had the ultimate tin-foil hat on.
18 March 2011, 2:04 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Tom…
Interesting…I wonder who ‘they’ were, since we’ve been talking on another topic about military/intelligence (sic) plants on social sites. (evil grin)
18 March 2011, 3:39 pmDeAnander:
From today’s Wingnut Follies Review…
Rightwing media response to Fukushima: trash-talk renewable energy technology!
Plus: Don’t Worry, Radiation is Good For You — I mean, Ann Coulter says so, and we know we can trust her.
I wish these people had even a half a clue how funny they are. I wish that the comedy did not take place against such a background of tragedy and waste; I could enjoy it more.
18 March 2011, 9:28 pmMichael Anderson:
In Oregon last year, we had a Tea Party candidate, a scientist (sic) who obviously can take directions from Corporate (and who lost by a considerable margin, thank God) who gave the same line—radiation is good for you….helps your immune system. They ought to park his sorry ass at Fukushima for a day or two until he gets well.
18 March 2011, 11:44 pmDeAnander:
It occurred to me this morning to wonder…
They’re spraying and dumping mio of gallons of water on the smouldering reactors and spent fuel dumps at Fukushima, trying to ward off “core on the floor” meltdown.
Where is all that water — loaded with radioactive particulates — going? Back out to sea? After rolling over how much ground and soaking into how much soil?
Inquiring minds are afraid to ask.
19 March 2011, 11:43 amTom:
De — a legitimate question and concern. But, if anyone broaches this during an official press conference, you’ll hear the crickets chirping. For some reason, during this entire event, I can’t get that Monty Python sketch out of my mind: “Move along. Nothing to see here. Move along.”
19 March 2011, 2:19 pmSusan/catlady:
De and Tom, I wondered about all that radioactive water, too.
Here’s the Nuclear Energy Institute’s version of “move along. nothing to see here. move along,” including a lovely little FAUX News public opinion poll indicating that many Americans have no clue what’s going on.
NEI take on Unit 4: “TEPCO also is stepping up efforts today to add water to the used fuel pool at reactor 4.”
b’s take on Unit 4 at Moon of Alabama:
19 March 2011, 3:03 pmMichael Anderson:
So far, the independent monitors on radiationnetwork.com are reading normal….agreeing with the MSM THIS time. We’ll see what happens if those other reactors go down…or up, as the case may be. Be nice to get data from somewhere on fish kills in the East Pacific soon.
19 March 2011, 5:26 pm(Boer) Tom:
On reactors being worse than bombs when they go bad, it makes good sense – you’ve got a few orders of magnitude more of the uranium or plutonium.
19 March 2011, 8:44 pmRobert Karaffa:
If you can find a way..watch the jetstream. Like GMO pollen this stuff goes….everywhere.
19 March 2011, 9:25 pmChasm:
@Michael: I am in the Lakes Region of Chile, but am heading back to Buenos Aires for a while tomorrow. The possibility of bugging out is directly proportional to the scale of the disaster. If it gets bad enough, lots of new possibilities emerge. I left the U.S. more than a year ago for a variety of reasons, particularly health reasons — both physical and psychological. It was not easy and it remains a struggle, but as I said, when the balance tips, you’d be surprised what you can do.
20 March 2011, 1:57 pmDeAnander:
Tom Engelhardt, always worth a read, on our curious inability to face up to the worst-case possibilities in a nuclear meltdown:
Public fear is politically shaped and wielded. We are instructed what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of, not according to sober assessments of risk, but according to what programmes (and what profits) are being promoted by those who own or influence the media outlets.
I was saying something similar to my partner t’other day, that it seems ludicrous to see old nuke plants relicensing (and being granted exemptions from safety regs so they can operate at up to 120 pct of rated power) in a country where in many states you cannot legally ride your bicycle to the corner store w/o wearing a helmet
there are very warped perceptions of risk and culpability at work, and underneath them is the underlying theme that vulnerability is culpable, while power has diplomatic immunity (this is just one more way of spelling “victim blaming”).
Anyway Tom E’s essay strikes very resonant chords for me. People of my age — 50-ish — often seem to say to each other that the world around us feels weirdly like some dystopian fiction that we would have read in our youth. In other words, the prophets of our youth were right: the world really was going in some very wrong directions and despite our efforts we did not manage a course correction… yet. Of course, as my oldest bestest friend always says, if all those people of good will had not tried so hard, things might be even worse than they are!
22 March 2011, 11:45 amRichard:
Astonishingly, Monbiot concludes from this that nuclear power is a good thing:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima
“As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.
A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.”
later: “energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn’t work”
22 March 2011, 11:55 amMichael Anderson:
@ Chasm:
I just got an e-mail with the following information:
This is a reading change not confirmed by any governmental agency. For information only no implied cause for concern.
For the first time since the incident, background radiation levels are very slightly elevated on the Southern Oregon Coast. Airborne and soil readings measured 0.03 – 0.12 mr/hr at 0900 hours at a location near Coos Bay.”
Since you are knowledgeable on these matters, what sort of levels are we looking at?
22 March 2011, 2:22 pmSusan/catlady:
@Richard–
Seems to me that the kicker phrase is “no-one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.” They are now reporting elevated levels of radioactive iodine and cesium in the ocean near the plants–run off from the pool-filling, I guess. It’s the lethal doses down the line that Monbiot seems to be ignoring.
22 March 2011, 2:36 pmWinston Warfield:
Here is a link to an interview with the sole remaining “cleaner” of the Chernobyl disaster. Her advice to the Japanese in the vicinity of the Fukushima reactors: “Run”. She says don’t believe anything the government or industry is telling them, that it’ll be mostly lies to protect themselves. She asserts the Fukushima region residents are in mortal danger. Her story:
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/22/chernobyl-cleanup-survivors-message-for-japan-run-away-as-qui/
22 March 2011, 2:38 pmStan:
The thing that amazes me – the thing that is ignored that it amazes me – is that no one asks what will get done with the stuff this process produces. When something has a half-life of 24,000 years, I mean, do the math backwards… the Upper Paleolithic period, when humans were just starting to use symbolic thought with any regularity.
22 March 2011, 7:19 pmDeAnander:
Yes me too Stan. It’s the exceptionalism of the industrial/engineering era, I think. We keep solving problems, right? Tomorrow’s technology could never have been imagined yesterday. Our grandparents would have thought a cell phone was pure magic (hell, as late as the original Star Trek the “pocket communicator” was sci-fi). Therefore — and here’s where a vast error of logic is committed — the technology of tomorrow will also seem like magic to us, and problems that can only be solved by magical thinking will — magically — be solved.
The only problem of course is that civilisations over-complexify and crash, and technologies hit their “glass ceiling” and produce diminishing returns (or their “externalised” effects catch up with them). At many moments in world history, tomorrow’s technology has been a step back towards the Neolithic, and yesterday’s technology (even its ruins) looks like the work of magicians to the survivors.
22 March 2011, 8:43 pmStan:
Or de-complexify, depending on where you stand. The lack of resiliency in generalizing systems is directly related to reducing the complexity of the biosphere and thereby all its superstructures. It’s that tehcnomass vs biomass thing again, but more complex (:
Sorry…
Watch the ripples from Japan. Already, there are incipient crises in car manufacturing here, because some thingy that is only made there is jamming up the whole process worldwide.
Glass ceilings, or Illich’s watersheds… when the process goes iatrogenic.
23 March 2011, 7:20 amMichael Anderson:
@ Chasm again—-never mind—engage brain before opening mouth:
http://www.nirs.org/radiation/radtech/nosafedose072005.pdf
23 March 2011, 9:35 amStan:
FULL
23 March 2011, 1:18 pmMichael Anderson:
Cutting corners—if you’re a Corpo (‘Corpso’??), it doesn’t matter what country. This story reminds me of the ‘Titanic’—-bad steel rivets and plates, no tops on watertight compartments:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-23/fukushima-engineer-says-he-covered-up-flaw-at-shut-reactor.html
Fukushima Engineer Says He Helped Cover Up Flaw at Dai-Ichi Reactor No. 4
One of the reactors in the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant may have been relying on flawed steel to hold the radiation in its core, according to an engineer who helped build its containment vessel four decades ago.
24 March 2011, 1:29 pmDeAnander:
What it’s like living in a nuclear sacrifice zone
A “low-use segment of the population”?
A new technomanagerial euphemism for “expendable”?
24 March 2011, 10:15 pmDeAnander:
Chip Ward presents the case against nuke plants — the basic democratic-minded rejection of authoritarian technology and imposed risk. Good facts and figures on taxpayer subsidies to the nuke industry.
24 March 2011, 11:41 pmChasm:
Humans are not very bright animals, but we’re pretty good at wishful thinking.
This nonsense about “no one has died yet” is exactly that: nonsense. Lots of people have died. They just don’t know it yet.
Every increase of radiation will increase the number of cancers, birth defects, and other problems, and at least some of them will be fatal. There seems to be this idea that if the workers at the plant didn’t get a “fatal” dose, then they’ll “recover” and be right as rain in no time. In fact, that’s nonsense. Those that do not die in the near future from the results of their radiation exposure will almost certainly experience negative health effects that will get progressively worse as they get older. And if something else doesn’t kill them first, the radiation exposure almost certainly will.
So what constitutes a “fatal” dose? Doesn’t that depend on your time frame? It takes a lot of radiation to kill you instantly. Is that our definition of fatal? What if it takes three days? A week? Two weeks? Ten years? At what point does a dose become “fatal”?
Another important factor I’d forgotten about but was reminded of recently is that exposure is determined by the inverse square law. So given a point source for radiation that provides X dose rate at 1 meter, the dose rate at 2 meters will be X/4, at 4 meters will be X/16, and at 8 meters will be X/64. It goes down pretty quickly as you get farther away. But what no one points out is that what this also means is that at 1/2 meter the dose rate will be 4X, at 1/4 meter it will be 16X, and at 1/8 meter it will be 64x. So how close is the radiation source if you inhale a particle, or eat it with your food?
I can help but keep thinking about @DeAnander’s point: what has happened to all the water they’ve poured onto these reactors? Some of it has run off, obviously, and the rest has turned to steam. And then where did it go?
We humans will be dealing with the consequences of this nuclear failure essentially forever.
25 March 2011, 1:22 amStan:
FULL
25 March 2011, 1:41 pmMichael Anderson:
http://www.ecoshock.info/2011/03/nuclear-nightmare-continues.html
A piece of the transcript:
HC: Well, it’s the same way they built nuclear weapons. You know I called one of my first books ‘Missile Envy’ a la Freud. And that’s what it is.
I think the etiology or the cause of this nuclear illness is the reptilian mid-brain of some men’s minds. And it’s very interesting to read about the latest physiology of the brain. The limbic system which produces a hormone which is rather like morphia – the two instincts which generate that wonderful hormone that makes you feel terrific in men, are sex and violence. Intrinsic in nuclear weapons, and nuclear power which is an off-shoot of nuclear weapons, it’s the same technology – is violence.
AS: And this is probably resulting from a brain problem.
HC: It’s not a brain problem, it’s just a normal physiological problem that we evolved with since we lived in caves, I think.
—————————————————————–
The whole interview is good—history, process, facts and figures, but this passage caught my attention.
@ Stan—-this may be a bit off-topic, but—does this have anything to do with the concept of ‘original sin’?
25 March 2011, 3:13 pmDeAnander:
I wonder what the workers have been hospitalised for. Did the soles of their feet burn off inside their boots?
I was wondering where all the water went…
Ya know, when you have a fire in certain kinds of machinery rooms and factory floors you’re not supposed to use water because of the toxins that the water picks up. You’re supposed to use inert foams or halon gas, etc. At Fukushima they didn’t have this option. In other words, we don’t have any technology or plans in place to deal “safely” with this kind of toxicity: highly lethal, highly mobile, invisible, odourless. We don’t know how to put out a reactor or pool fire “safely”. We don’t have a Plan B.
And even if we did, the weather still goes on. It rains. The wind blows.
Nuclear power is another instance of the containment fantasy, that we can build impermeable containers for things that must not escape, and that somehow this will work and we will control (emphasis on *control*) things that by their nature are not controllable. Other instances are penned fish farming; CAFOs; the Academie Francaise and its “approved French”; the insane “leafy greens agreement”; national borders; gender and race taxonomies… and the list goes on. All borders are porous, all edges are fractal, no barriers are impermeable, but we insist on rigid delimiters and this fantasy of containment and hermetic seals.
And I’m still thinking with increasing bogglement about the fundamental toxicity of our culture and how we just accept that. Even Monbiot seems to have taken the pill — which one was it now, red or blue? — that keeps us suspended in the collective fantasy:
I am a longtime fan of George M but I shudder at this complacent acceptance that “every energy technology carries a cost,” with its implicit endorsement of human sacrifice. Are we no better than the Aztecs? It will take years to determine the actual impact on “people and planet” of the Fukushima incident, always supposing that it *can* be determined accurately (i.e. that there is any political will to do so, and that our data-gathering and -processing resources are adequate to the task). Estimate of the impact of Chernobyl are still hotly [so to speak] contested, and post-disaster investigation of TMI was about as funny a joke as federal aid post-Katrina. It’s easy to claim no significant impact when no one wants to, or bothers to, measure it.
But stepping back from the apocalyptic and towards a “mere” death toll of a few hundred or thousand cancer cases and premature deaths, a few hundred or thousand genetically defective births, etc… if we are to accept this ruthless logic — that bulk centralised energy is so necessary that we should endorse human sacrifice if need be to keep providing it — then I propose that all nations with nuclear power facilities immediately pass a law that the “richest” neighbourhoods, those inhabited by politicians, CEOs, technomanagers and the like, should be located in concentric rings around the nuke plants, with the most powerful and privileged closest to the plant. If we are to run a nuclear lottery then those who profit the most and have the most decision-making power should hold the most tickets. If they are so damn confident in the technology, let them live in its back yard.
But no… as we saw above, nuke plants are mostly located in places inhabited by “expendable” persons. Which tells you all you need to know about the technology and about the above reasoning. We are prepared to endorse human sacrifice so long as it’s the “little people” who get sacrified. I feel quite disappointed in Monbiot. It seems a poverty of imagination has gripped even our radical environmental thinkers (Lovelock springs to mind): their addiction to the industrial system and its technologies has blunted their analytical and creative facilities. They no longer believe another world is possible; and when persuasive and passionate people lose that creative sense, it is a great loss to us all. They become prophets of the status quo instead of visionaries.
Meanwhile the very rich, who live in lovely neighbourhoods, suburbs, and estates very far from coal and nuclear plants, form associations to prevent the building of wind farms anywhere where they might have to look at them.
Sometimes words fail me.
25 March 2011, 3:19 pmMichael Anderson:
Here’s a look at a post-nuclear future:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~dmcmill/index.html
Pripyat And The 30k Zone
25 March 2011, 4:50 pmStan:
The headline uses the word “contain”:
“Lengthy struggle ahead to contain Japan nuclear crisis”
FULL
Here is the BBC with video, on a plant built directly on top of one of the faults.
25 March 2011, 7:59 pmDeAnander:
It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over (Alternet comments on NYT reportage):
Plutonium is very bad news. It’s hard to convey just how bad-news it is, right up there with dimethyl mercury among Scary Substances. Minute quantities carry a large cancer risk.
New Scientist reports in 2004:
First, this underscores the risk of all low-level exposure, contradicting the antiquated and optimistic dosimetry constantly recycled by nuclear advocates and government officials complicit in coverups. Second, it means that Pu is even scarier than we thought it was.
Millennia… 24,000 years ago, we hadn’t figure out most of what we now think defines us as human. We didn’t even start building cities — becoming “civilised” — until about 5,000 years ago. And we are merrily refining and dispersing into the world at large, a lethal substance with a toxic lifetime of almost 5 times our recorded “civilised” history.
This among other things is what makes me shake my head when I hear these soothing bromides about “small impact” from the Fukushima incident. Exposure that damages our DNA in an inheritable way is not a small impact.
A diminishing of the overall cognitive ability of a substantial chunk of an entire generation of children is not a small impact.
The really tragic thing is that hundreds — thousands? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? — of people have already breathed or ingested the contaminated particulates from Fukushima. They will never know whether their exposure will lead to cancer; they will never know, if they are diagnosed with cancer, whether it resulted from this exposure. The damage may take years to manifest. This is slow violence: the effects are “3D” (diffuse, delayed and deniable); the epidemiology required to make an airtight case in any one particular death is “not cost effective”, but we can guarantee statistically that some number of persons, and not a small number, will develop cancer or other radiation-related illnesses from this exposure (from eating cesium-contaminated vegetables or milk, breathing radioactive smoke or dust, drinking “hot” water, etc).
If there is indeed “core on the floor” at Unit 3 then sarcophagisation looks like the next step. The gift that goes on giving, eh? What an expense, a drain, a leech on the resources and energies of a nation already reeling from natural disaster.
25 March 2011, 9:49 pmDeAnander:
This is rather OT, but continuing the Containment Fantasy theme:
Bees? *trespassing*?
This is the reasoning of an insane person, or an insane culture, which now believes more strongly in artificial, imaginary, unenforceable borders than it does in the most basic biotic processes.
26 March 2011, 2:20 amStan:
De, your riffs on this have a certain coherence; and I’m wondering if you have the time and inclination to perhaps turn them into a single essay. The depth of your clarity on this disaster and your unique and lively writing on it demand a wider audience than the handful of us who run into this room when we have to holler.
You are saying what a lot of people sense and don’t have the gift you do for putting it into words. I doubt I’m alone in this conviction. A lot more people need to be empowered with your articulation. This horror in Japan and the recent destruction of the Gulf of Mexico are warnings that confirm everything we’ve been saying for years; and now with these two terrible wounds, the urgency is combined with the evidence, and former denials are drifting out to sea with the Corexit and the Cesium.
There are too many cautious voices out there, even among the critics of nuclear power and hydrocarbon capitalism, while our children and grandchildren are having the fragile shell of life we inhabit vandalized and poisoned before they can even grow up.
What you’ve been saying and how you’ve been saying it deserves to be heard by many, many more people, and will be appreciated because it will give them a voice for their own anger and anxiety.
26 March 2011, 4:18 amTom:
De and Stan: I second what Stan stated in his last post. To paraphrase Steve Martin” “Some people have a way with words, some people no have a way.” You have a way.
26 March 2011, 7:31 am(Boer) Tom:
@DeAnander
FYI, Argonne laboratory published an extremely dubious Plutonium safety sheet, which calculates plutonium cancer risks using the specific activity of Plutonium-244 (an extremely rare isotope, and the only naturally occurring one, with such a huge half-life that its activity is expected to be low). Repeating their calculation, using the far more abundant (due to human activity) Pu-239 gives a cancer risk that is to first order 35 times the US background (to first order, because the lifetime expectancy of getting cancer is one in three, so properly, the linearizing assumption fails, and the probability presumably becomes 1-(1/3)^35, assuming no further fraudulent assumptions on their part, and ignoring the healthy probability of death from radiation before cancer can develop/be detected…).
Another nasty stunt you might come across is discussions of Plutonium’s chemical toxicity – it is chemically (i.e. only relevant to Pu-244) about as toxic as caffeine (probably much worse, but this is your tax dollars speaking), which as you stated before, is a comparison with something that sounds safe, except that it is chemically toxic by this standard at about 5g, and has a biological half-life of 200 years, unlike caffeine which goes at about 5-10 hours.
Of course, at a biological half-life of 200 years, that 5g of Plutonium, is bioaccumulated. 200 years bhl means it isn’t leaving your system – about 15% of what enters the lungs gets into the bloodstream (there is a contradiction in the relevant paragraph – 1% or 15%? the 15% statement is definitive, and the 1% statement suggests dubious editing to allow a dishonest reinterpretation of one step in a process), and stays – according to the US government. Given that it is primarily Pu-239, i.e. 5.24MeV/alpha, will be delivering into a 100kg body,
5.24 x 10^6 eV x 1.6 x 10^-19J/eV x 200 x 10^12/day / 100kg = 1.7Gray/day – but this is alpha emission. Let’s use the Q value of 20 (some controversy – should be 1000?) and N of 0.1 (minimum), we are looking at about 3.2Sv per day – an acute dose – which is why they then use chelation. So much for ‘as toxic as caffeine’. (At 1/100th of that mass, you get 32mSv/day, to take the coffee analogy further – one cup of coffee, as LD-50 is 100 cups – the analogy fails, because this ‘caffeine’ isn’t leaving the system – 1.5 times the yearly dose for nuclear workers per day – I need coffee.)
26 March 2011, 8:49 am(Boer) Tom:
And the stuff accumulates on bone surface and in the liver – guess which organs get the dose? Suddenly, that mass (100kg for the person) is unrepresentative. And the stuff accumulates in sea life:
fish around Gdansk contaminated by Chernobyl’ – tiny mass per fish – 500 femtogram, but certain organs get the brunt, and most of the sea water at Fukushima used to cool the reactors went back into the sea via the ground, while most of the fallout from Chernobyl was over Belorus…
Stated another way, if Plutonium was half as ‘harmless’ as they pretend, why do people with minor cuts undergo chelation?
26 March 2011, 10:51 amSusan/catlady:
Radioactive seawater, and more platitudes:
Some interesting comments, too, noticing the lack of response in the global markets to a catastrophe this size. Which makes sense to me, since capitalism doesn’t distinguish between wealth and illth, but only measures the transfer of money.
26 March 2011, 1:31 pmBruce F:
Not directly related to the ongoing nuclear catastrophe, but fits in with De has been saying.
From.
26 March 2011, 2:13 pmKim Sky:
Ground Zero – point of atomic explosion
I never stopped to think about this name before, from Tom Engelhardt
“Consider one irony: from almost the moment they happened, the 9/11 attacks in New York City were treated as if a nuclear strike had occurred. (Hence, the instantaneous name for the site where the World Trade Towers once stood, Ground Zero, a term previously reserved for the place where an atomic explosion took place.) Ever since then, this nation has been convulsed by, and has discussed ad nauseum, various worst-case possibilities and potentially apocalyptic dangers from terrorism, which remains a relatively minor threat on our planet and has, since 9/11, posed few real dangers for Americans.” Url: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175370/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_worst_that_could_happen/#more
This particular article examines various apocalyptic themes that have contributed to our subjective subconscious. Nuclear Apocalypse is one of them!
Analyzing this simplistically. We evoke the Nuclear-Fear-Button to assist us in our interpretation of 9/11 — i.e. catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions. Now faced with a real nuclear sisaster, the erasure of that fear, realistic and unrealistic as they might be, is not so easy undone — I hope!
26 March 2011, 5:00 pmDeAnander:
I am thinking that George Monbiot may well live to regret writing that Strangeloveian essay. The impact — on people and planet, as though those were really two separate things — of this disaster has not yet begun to be measured or understood.
BradBlog asks (my translation): Can we spell “Chernobyl” yet?
The status of Unit 3 remains mostly a matter of conjecture, though there’s some evidence that it really wasn’t such a good idea pumping raw saltwater onto metallic surfaces already under thermal and radiative stress. As Hirose Takashi said earlier this week:
Per BradBlog (above):
27 March 2011, 12:51 amDeAnander:
Old friend and virtual colleague Bernhard is back on the air at Moon of Alabama with a whole series of very detailed updates on the Fukushima situation. Much technical detail.
27 March 2011, 1:22 amStan:
@Bruce.
Hornborg’s theses on money are well worth a look. He points out that the more generalized it becomes (a function mostly of the state), the more pernicious is its effect. As a tool, general purpose money achieves its second watershed (Illich) early on.
27 March 2011, 7:13 amDeAnander:
On the perniciousness of money and power: how Entergy (nuclear plant operator) does biz in the US. Dirty tricks and dirty power.
27 March 2011, 10:18 amStan:
Seems appropriate that when I brought up the page, the rotating quotes gave me this:
27 March 2011, 12:52 pm(Boer) Tom:
Hirose Takashi’s interview on youtube – the counterpunch article doesn’t link the interview.
27 March 2011, 1:33 pmDeAnander:
More on the Culture of Poison: Charles Kettering, mass poisoner and innovator of much that turned out to be a really bad idea?
27 March 2011, 2:58 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Chasm
27 March 2011, 11:30 pmNot to promote nuclear technology or anything, but doesn’t the inverse square law break down when the radiation source is in your body? Does it (inverse square law) not arise because of the solid angle that a silhouette subtends at a given distance? It strikes me that one can simply take all the decays and count them to calculate the dose, taking into account only the mass that the radiation strikes (i.e. the mass of tissue around the bioaccumulated emitters) – the smallness of that mass being what multiplies the effects, e.g. bone surface and affected liver mass for plutonium.
Stan:
This has already passed over many of us, who are undoubtedly drinking this stuff.
FULL
But don’t worry. Public officials say there is not danger.
28 March 2011, 12:57 pm(Boer) Tom:
Courtesy of Chris Busby at counterpunch, my estimates above (re plutonium) may be wrong by two orders of magnitude (courtesy of ICRP) – divide the masses I give by 100 – plutonium’s radiotoxicity goes up by two orders of magnitude – maybe the older folks were onto something.
28 March 2011, 1:54 pmTeresa:
Buffy Sainte Marie, No No Keshagesh (Greedy Guts in Cree)
“I never saw so many business suits.
Never knew a dollar sign could look so cute.
Never knew a junkie with a money Jones:
He’s singing, “Who’s selling Park Place. Who’s buying Boardwalk”?
These old men they make their dirty deals.
Go in the back room and see what they can steal.
Talk about your beautiful fore spacious skies.
It’s about uranium; it’s about the water rights.
Put Mother Nature on a luncheon plate.
They carve her up and call it real estate.
Want all the resources and all of the land.
They make a war over it: Blow things up for it.
The reservation out at poverty row.
There’s something cooking and the lights are low.
Somebody’s trying to save our mother earth.
I’m gonna help them to save it,
To sing it and pray it
Singing: No no Keshagesh:
You can’t do that no more, (no more, no more no more)
No, no, no, no Keshagesh
You can’t do that no more, (no more, no more no more)
No, no, no, no Keshagesh
You can’t do that no more, (no more, no more no more)
No, no, no, no Keshagesh
You can’t do that no more, (no more, no more no more)
Ole Columbus he was looking good,
When he got lost in our neighborhood.
Garden of Eden right before his eyes.
Now it’s all spy ware: now it’s all income tax.
Ole’ brother Midas looking hungry today.
What he can’t buy he’ll get some other way.
Send in the troopers if the natives resist.
Old, old story boys, that’s how you do it boys.
Look at these people; ah they’re on a roll.
Gonna have it all, gonna have complete control.
Want all the resources and all of the land.
They’ll break the law for it: Blow things up for it.
When all our champions are off in the war,
Their final rip off here at home is on.
Mr. greed I think your time has come.
We’re gonna sing it and pray it and live it then say it.
Singing: No no Keshagesh:
You can’t do that no more, (no more, no more no more)
No, no, no, no Keshagesh
You can’t do that no more, (no more, no more no more)
No, no, no, no Keshagesh
You can’t do that no more, (no more, no more no more)
No, no, no, no Keshagesh
You can’t do that no more, (no more, no more no more)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmAb1gNN74
28 March 2011, 2:00 pmMichael Anderson:
It’s like having a ‘designated-peeing’ area in the swimming pool…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42291675/ns/world_news-asia-pacific/from/toolbar
28 March 2011, 2:19 pm(Boer) Tom:
Even better – I just finished watching the film – that Uranium (I’d like to see the affinity of Plutonium Dioxide to DNA – Plutonium will have an even further enhanced photoelectric effect) practically destroys DNA. Just beautiful.
28 March 2011, 2:33 pmMichael Anderson:
Hanford…
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,752944,00.html
28 March 2011, 2:54 pmMichael Anderson:
Looks like, according to Eurad, that the plume is starting to circulate into the southern hemisphere—traces over Indonesia @ 5000 meters (16,000 feet).
28 March 2011, 2:58 pmStan:
FULL
FULL
28 March 2011, 4:06 pm(Boer) Tom:
The really disgusting thing that I’ve realised about the ICRP is that universities and other institutions always realised what was going on, about internal radiation. When I did undergrad, we were always told just prior to experiments involving alpha radiation, that we were not to eat, drink, smoke or scratch ourselves during the experiments, and had to wash our hands thoroughly after the experiments – they simply didn’t buy the whole body dose shtick – I just never realised that the main international body on radiation protection pushed such rubbish. The universities held their counsel. Multiply those Sievert doses by a factor of a hundred, without even considering the enhanced photoelectric effect, to get realistic impressions of internal doses.
28 March 2011, 5:01 pm(Boer) Tom:
Here are Busby’s slides, in an older form.
28 March 2011, 5:12 pmDeAnander:
@Tom: remember the signs on all the rad lab doors? “Absolutely NO food or drink inside.” At least that’s how it was at my institution of “higher” learning.
28 March 2011, 6:40 pm(Boer) Tom:
@DeAnander
28 March 2011, 9:23 pmExactly. We didn’t have it on the doors, but if you didn’t have a reason to be there, good luck getting in, and if you had a reason to be there, long lectures about what not to do (food, drink, smoking etc), as well as in the guide to the lab work – I work with radiation on occasion, and they don’t even allow us to have coffee in the lab.
DeAnander:
Basically, the nuke industry is working overtime trying to sell Edsels, when the new Smart Car is already on the streets — if you’ll forgive an automotive metaphor. Not that solar panels are gonna “save us” from our interlocking crises overnight, but clearly the Chinese planners and economists are smarter than the American ones. They can see the future when it comes knocking on the front door
American politicians and bizpeeps are still frantically chasing the market of yesterday, like those anecdotal generals who are always fighting the last war.
Wind, solar, tidal power generation are likely to be huge expanding markets in the future (always supposing industrial civilisation doesn’t just shoot itself in both feet). So is heavy and light rail. The US has positioned itself to be way at the back of the pack in all these areas — from “technological leader of the world” circa 1965 to “corrupt has-been backwater of ignorance and nepotism” circa 2010.
As the kids would say, nuclear power is “just so yesterday.”
28 March 2011, 11:48 pm(Boer) Tom:
@DeAnander
28 March 2011, 11:55 pmJust a comment about solar – I don’t see any evidence that Silicon based cells get EROEI above one – I have heard that CdTe cells do get above one (even forty!), but Cadmium is a nasty toxin, Tellurium is a nasty teratogen, and the chemical combination has its own detrimental effects… Silicon cells might have higher operational efficiency, but to my knowledge, their manufacturing costs make their lifetime efficiencies much lower.
DeAnander:
@Tom I share your skepticism; though I have some 10-y-o solar panels that still charge batteries quite well I suspect that they will never generate as much power as it took to manufacture them. I personally much prefer solar stirling to photovoltaics.
Also suspect far more could be done with large Fresnel lenses…
but the basic point was that — whether futile or not — there will be a big demand for PV arrays, wind turbines, tidal turbines, biogas digesters, etc… an increasing reliance on these more modest methods of generation. and the US has wilfully removed itself from that R&D effort.
BTW, there’s the toxicity theme again — why should it be that the CdTe — highly toxic technology — should be so much more efficient than the silicon arrays? Why this association between energy density and toxicity?
29 March 2011, 1:54 am(Boer) Tom:
I think it might be that because it is a III-V semiconductor (two compound) – one can probably get away with more impurities and crystal defects than with Silicon and still get good semiconductor properties, thus less purification (slowly sending an RF heater from one end of the crystal ingot to the other, repeatedly, to concentrate the impurities on one end). Perhaps, if biosemiconductors get somewhere, we might be able to get really low manufacturing costs… I’m not sure that CdTe has higher operational efficiency – I think it is just that it can more than break even over manufacturing (by a claimed factor of 40 – although some dubious analogues were used in the calculation that I saw).
29 March 2011, 12:30 pmMorocco Bama:
Michael, you have to love the juxtaposition of the Mini-Wheats commercial prior to the discussion of the unfolding nuclear meltdown disaster in Japan. This latest disaster alert brought to you by the makers Life cereal and wholesome Milk produced from cows pumped full of healthy bovine growth hormones. Just think what a bowl of that, combined with your involuntary dose of radiation, will do for your day….and your future. Disaster Capitalism, you have to love it.
29 March 2011, 12:49 pm(Boer) Tom:
I should add – the reason for breaking even would be that the device lasts longer when it has lower operational efficiency (less fine structures to boost operational efficiency and be broken down by UV etc).
29 March 2011, 1:25 pmDeAnander:
I’m reaching for a larger generalisation: why toxicity should be associated with industry and specifically with energy density. perhaps “density” is the key: that toxicity is associated with density and dosage — i.e. salt is toxic if you ingest enough of it, but no animal normally would choose to do so. industry is largely about “refinement”, that is, concentration. so industry’s byproducts are unnaturally concentrated doses of compounds that would normally be encountered only in diffuse form (or not encountered because they normally occur below ground, as in mining that brings toxic compounds and gases to the surface).
energy density is about concentration also: fossil fuels are “refined” first from biomass over hundreds of thousands of years, then further refined by human intervention using more energy to refine ‘em. thus whatever toxins they contain are also concentrated and become harmful by concentration?
when we burn wood we release a certain amount of potential toxicity. when we burn coal or oil we release more. when we burn certain plastics made from oil we release seriously, immediately toxic compounds some of which are lethal on inhalation. when we “burn” uranium… well…
I’m trying to figure out how we got from a culture where almost no byproduct of our existence and industry was poisonous, to one in which almost all the byproducts of our industry are poisonous *and we just accept that as inevitable*. I’ve never stepped back to look at it from this perspective and am boggled by the largeness and the pertinence of the question. if we accept this assumption — that “progress = energy consumption” and that energy density = value, then if energy density inevitably comes with toxicity we will have accepted (as Monbiot evidently has) that toxin emission, i.e. human sacrifice and environmental vandalism, is the “price of progress” and that we just have to resign ourselves to killing areas of the biosphere and members of our human community (as if by lottery, as in the Shirley Jackson story) in order to maintain our civilisation.
the malignity of industry — its literal poisonousness — seems to be one of our fundamental assumptions. we are just supposed to accept it. I’m wondering how we got to this point, where living in a toxin-saturated world seems normal and necessary. recently local gov’t passed a pesticide ban in my area of BC. many people are outraged by this — they feel they have a *right* to spray powerful neurotoxins on their yards, lawns, gardens, flowers and food crops — a right to kill honeybees (who are, after all “trespassing”!) — a right to expose their neighbours (kids, adults, dogs and cats) via wind drift, etc. it is *normal* for every household to keep an arsenal of highly toxic products and use them liberally — overuse them, even — and “weird” or “paranoid” to try to keep one’s home free of serious chemical toxins.
this is the thing I’m trying to wrap my head around. like “factory food” and a number of other rather grotesque peculiarities of our times, how did this get to be normal?
29 March 2011, 1:56 pm(Boer) Tom:
Let’s see – all the stuff I’ve read here and elsewhere…
Perhaps controllable consumption of available energy brings military power (Stan did promote John Boyd’s writings at some point) – self-organized violence that isn’t nearly as constrained by DNA’s limitations and rates of evolution as a predator might be. Within the metropolis, the violence (and access to violence) is largely negotiated through money accumulation (and outside, as long as the system’s frauds are abided by, money negotiates the transfer of wealth from the host to the parasite – if the frauds are not abided by, the system attempts violence). One means to accumulate money is to make certain products status items, and in a culture where thinking about certain parameters is an invitation to ridicule (and thought is redirected, again through status-having activities, to inane matters, e.g. sport, or worse, American Idol/Reality TV), it is probably terrifying (or just weird as you said – maybe they perceive us to the extent that they are aware of us, as weird and incomprehensible) to even consider these matters – experimentation (again to borrow from Stan) is largely within premanufactured identities – to be incomprehensible (not of the premanufactured identity, therefor not comprehensible) is worse than to be loathed.
Then there is the influence of a vaguely utilitarian mindset – I have dandelions, they are a nuisance (the landlord or housing body gives me heck, and I don’t know their nutritional value, or if I do, I probably also know that people are spraying neurotoxins in the vicinity – these kinds of knowledge are probably correlated, and some neighbours are so kind as to spray yours for you), so I take the easy and effective route, and buy some product that does the job. Add an ideology that the government should take care of it (even if the government is resented in this role – much of US definition libertarian sentiment), then it isn’t that surprising – much like naive children thinking that milk comes from a shop.
Another thing also plays a roll – people are caught between the devil (e.g. landlord) and the deep blue sea (e.g. poisons), and they realise on some level that they cannot do anything about it. To remind them of their situation (e.g. by telling them what the risks are without giving a meaningful (to their situation) alternative is to stir their resentment – they don’t want to think about it. Another example – uranium mining in Uranium City (northern Saskatchewan) – the dust blows quite quickly over Winnipeg – do you think people in Winnipeg even want to have that burden on their minds? Winnipeg is a post-apocalyptic dump – if you’ve ever been down town (a block or three away from the business district/high rises) you’ll know what I mean. Perhaps a campaign there might work, but people will be more resentful toward activists generally…
29 March 2011, 7:48 pmDeAnander:
Core on the Floor at Fukushima Unit 2?
I notice interesting locutions in the article. The headline reads “Japan May Have Lost Race To Save Nuclear Reactor.” I don’t think this race is about saving the reactor; surely it’s about saving the millions — tens of millions? — of people living within plume-distance of the reactor (plume distance being at least 1000 miles downwind, maybe more).
Later in the article the quoted expert says on-record, “It’s not going to be anything like Chernobyl, where it went up with a big fire and steam explosion, but it’s not going to be good news for the environment.” Again the locution is weirdly distancing. It’s not going to be good news for anyone anywhere near it, or for lots of people far away from it. Yes, it won’t be good for “the environment” (our shorthand for “everything that is not us”), but it also will be very bad for us. For humans. Not just for Japanese humans either.
Meanwhile the president of Tepco has gone missing… I would quite understand if he has chosen seppukku, but surely it should have been done semi-publicly, at least with witnesses. I have a feeling however that he is hiding in “an undisclosed location,” like many another coward when the chickens come home to roost.
Business Insider, our source for the Missing CEO story, complains not that he has disappeared just as his company and its obscene technology have put the lives of tens of millions at risk — no, he has disappeared just as “His company is in the midst of an existential crisis that may see it go bankrupt or nationalized.”
The writer further notes that “TEPCO shares have crashed hard for the second straight day as the odds grow that a nationalization will wipe out all the equity.”
Apparently this is the only type of meltdown that concerns the Business Insider readership. No mention of Unit 2, core on floor, or any other real-world consequences of Tepco’s profitable activities.
29 March 2011, 10:17 pmSusan/catlady:
De, thanks for nailing the disconnect in these articles, written from the corporate point of view.
Over the past several years, I’ve come to think of corporations of the monsters and dragons of our times. Clive Barker came up with a haunting living metaphor for corporate horror in his short story In the Hills The Cities. From Books of Blood.
30 March 2011, 12:52 amSusan/catlady:
The center cannot hold.
Glitches in the global supply chain, bits and pieces from Japan missing.
30 March 2011, 4:08 pmWinston Warfield:
Thinking about “grotesque peculiarities of our times”, as De so aptly puts in above, brings to mind one of the “solutions” which has been found to dispose of depleted reactor fuel. It is the source material for depleted uranium (DU) munitons in wide use now by NATO. Depleted uranium makes, it turns out, very effective armor-piercing projectiles, which render armoured columns completely vulnerable to attack by NATO aircraft. These projectiles are very dense and hard, which is why the military loves them, and are pyrophoric, i.e. they burn and vaporize when passing through a target. Lots of radioactive dust is released into the desert environment, to settle into unsuspecting bronchial systems where they can emit alpha particles until the inevitable cell nucleus finally has had enough and its DNA mutates. Like Fukushima, it would seem the military-industrial ideology assumes, at least by these stauchly-defended practices, that whole populations are to be exposed to the most lethal airborne agents and sacrificed, including occupation soldiers in the case of DU, all of whom are breathing the same air.
30 March 2011, 5:00 pmStan:
FULL
FULL
30 March 2011, 5:14 pmDeAnander:
Is there one that isn’t?
30 March 2011, 6:37 pmDeAnander:
From Catlady’s link above…
Define “fragile”. Now define “robust”.
Which one best describes late global capitalism?
30 March 2011, 6:47 pmStan:
FULL
In other words, this reactor will cointinue to contaminate us for years.
30 March 2011, 9:11 pmDeAnander:
From Green Action Japan:
This is what the inhabitants of the affected area around Fukushima are facing: a combination of genuine ignorance, wilful ignorance, stonewalling and wishful thinking.
Looks like the government wants a Potemkin Village show, and they’re willing to draw children (especially vulnerable to radioactive contamination) back into the hot zone to participate in a pretence of normality.
30 March 2011, 11:15 pm(Boer) Tom:
Actually, the fascination with “dirty bombs” also shows that most people don’t buy the ‘radiation is safe’ line. Perhaps a meme with which to undermine nuclear proponents’ arguments, along with documentation?
31 March 2011, 10:32 amMichael Anderson:
@(Boer) Tom:
Great tactic! The same kind of thing you would say to a child (sic) who was trying to weasel out of something….
…children with nukes…
31 March 2011, 12:09 pmHenry:
Fukushima Dai-ichi status and slow burning issues
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7706
See this node especially:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7661#comment-777260
———————————
“The comment[#comment-77726] goes on to explain in detail why zirconium alloys are used in nuclear reactors, and the risks. It explains exactly what happens if the fuel rods get too hot, and discusses the current situation. It is a fascinating demonstration of the detailed knowledge our commenters bring to bear on complicated issues. It is also a reminder that the schematic drawings that we put up to describe nuclear reactors are highly simplified, giving only the rough outlines of an enormously complicated system. Very few people, if any, have the entire system in their minds, so when a disaster occurs, and they have little idea of what broke, figuring out solutions is very difficult, if not impossible.
We live in a very complicated society, so complicated that no one person has even a vague idea of how complicated it is. So, here’s a story. In the summer of 1967, I went to Montreal with a bunch of my buddies to see Expo 67. The US exhibit was housed in an enormous geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. As I recall, it featured what was then the world’s largest freestanding escalator, rising 150 feet inside the 20-story dome. I crushed the handrails with a death grip while riding to the top.
There was a rat experiment in one room, a maze in the shape of a right triangle. There was a passageway four inches wide down each of the legs of the triangle, so if a rat were put in at one of the 45 degree angles, it could run five or six feet to the 90 degree angle, turn right, and run to the other corner, where there was a tasty pellet. Between the passageways and the hypotenuse, there was a very complicated maze. The solution was hard to find looking at it from above. It was possible for the rat go through the maze to get to the food.
If you starve the rat for a while and then put it into the maze, it eventually figures out to move down the passageway to the food. The experimenter immediately repeats that process as soon as the rat finishes eating. The rat runs down the passageway more quickly and eats. Eventually the rat isn’t hungry, and it goes into the tricky maze. When it gets hungry, it leaves the maze and goes out to get food. Again, when it is satisfied, it moves back to the tricky maze. Eventually it solves the complicated maze. After that, if it is hungry, it runs down the simple solution, but if it is less hungry, it uses the difficult one.
This parable has lots of interesting implications. One is that most of people are attracted to complexity once they aren’t hungry. There are all kinds of complexity, some easier to manage than others. Keeping track of sports or the doings of a bunch of celebrities is complicated. Working on your house, growing a garden, tying flies, playing video games, these are complex. Most people are indifferent to the abstract complexities of zirconium. Unfortunately, most people are indifferent to many of the issues that come into play through politics. It’s as if when confronted with questions of taxes and bombing people and civil rights, people run down the passageways to get their pellet and ignore anything more complicated. A lot of political noise is designed to get that result.
The Tea-GOP and its fabulously rich supporters reject complexity, and insist that there are simple solutions to every problem, the same solutions they have been flogging for over 40 years. That stupid idea, that things are simple, is causing the destruction of complexity in society, reducing to rubble the accumulation of possibilities for fascinating lives that we have developed over the last century. The rich will be fine behind their stone walls in feudal but stupid splendor. The rest of us will suffer the fate of the American Bison.”
http://firedoglake.com/2011/03/27/complex-society-simple-ideas-bad-mixture/#comment-2338961
31 March 2011, 3:46 pmStan:
It’s okay. Your kids can drink this milk.
31 March 2011, 4:36 pmStan:
FULL
FULL
And the kicker…
FULL
31 March 2011, 4:52 pmStan:
How do you spell impunity? GE.
FULL
It occurs to me that there are two unlikely bedfellows in opposing nuclear power at this point… libertarians and environmentalists. The libertarian Cato Institute has written against the Price-Anderson Act – the law that caps nuclear power operators’ liability in the case of an accident, without which nuclear operators could not get insurance – a subsidy, in other words, that we will bear when we pay the price of post-disaster clean-ups.
1 April 2011, 7:46 amMorocco Bama:
Henry, this has been my line of thought, as well. We have not evolved socially to keep up with the evolution of technology. I wrote this at another forum, but it’s appropriate to what you have posted here. From your posting:
“”We live in a very complicated society, so complicated that no one person has even a vague idea of how complicated it is.”"
I said this at another forum:
“” As the Singularity is upon us, meaning the complexity of interconnections has become so great that the implications of such happen so quickly, and so anomalously, we no longer have the theoretical framework, or perceptual framework, with which to gauge our new reality. We apply our now archaic and irrelevant theoretical and perceptive models in vain, hoping upon hope that hitting the enter button will render the sought after result…but alas, it will not. It’s our Brave New World, the one we’ve been incubating all these years and now it’s climbed out of its shell and is making its way towards Bethlehem. Yes, something Wicked This Way Comes…in fact, it is here, it is us, and we are it. Our lives from here on out will be spent in a state of Constant Fear. Here’s some music to celebrate that success.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2zkN74s72M&feature=related “”
1 April 2011, 9:28 amDeAnander:
Giambrone deconstruction of Monbiot’s conversion — no time to do more than object to his use of “bitch-slap” (sheesh) — it’s worth a read as it exposes the paucity of data behind the official IAEA apologist line and the wealth of post-Chernobyl studies controverting the official story.
(update) Here’s John Vidal also of the Guardian — I feel that the nuclear issue is going to become a splitter (so to speak). There really isn’t a neutral position on this one: those who tout the technology claim it’s “our only hope” (of deliverance from the various hells of a coal-fired future and complete climate chaos), and those who decry it (such as myself) believe it is irredeemable: inherently lethal, secretive, authoritarian and corrupt.
I’m getting really fed up with the “well it’s better than coal” line. That’s a protection-racket line, and we should be wise to it by now. There are other alternatives.
1 April 2011, 12:53 pmKim Sky:
Five things that are Blowing my Mind!
1. WORLD’S LARGEST CONCRETE PUMPS
Two of world’s largest concrete pumps are being moved to Japan. The Fukushima nuclear power plant has purchased two truck-mounted concrete pumps from U.S. construction firms and are being modified to pump water to cool the damaged reactors — and will later be used to move concrete.
The arrival date is estimated to be as early as April 11th. The pumps will not be returned because they will become too contaminated.
The Putzmeister 70Z pumps are the largest in the world, and there are only three in existence. They have a 230-foot articulating boon that can be controlled remotely from more than a mile away. They weigh 95 tons and have a list price of over $1.5 million.
2. WORLD’S LARGEST JET PLANE
To get the pumps to Japan, they will be loaded onto the world’s largest jet plane, the Antonov An-225, of which there are only two in existence. Produced in Russia some 20 years ago, the planes have six engines each and a 290-foot wingspan — nearly the length of a football field — and can carry up to 200 tons, according to company that built the monster plane.
The pump’s are being taken from the Savannah River Site and a construction site in Sacramento California.
3. MOX FUEL PLANT IN GEORGIA
The Savannah River Site is a U.S. government Mixed Oxide Fuel Plant (MOX fuel), estimated value $4.86 billion.
The MOX Plant is being built for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration by Shaw AREVA MOX Services, LLC. which is a joint venture between Shaw’s Environmental & Infrastructure Group (70 percent) and AREVA (30 percent).
Savannah River Site [DOE facility located near Aiken, South Carolina] http://www.srs.gov/
MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility – The MOX Project: http://www.moxproject.com/
The MOX Plant sounds like a scary place! Nuclear Reactors are scary, and then there are all of the other wacky things!
One attraction of MOX fuel is that it is a way of utilizing surplus weapons-grade plutonium, which would otherwise be stored as nuclear waste and might be stolen to make nuclear weapons. Apparently MOX fuel is used in Thermal reactors? Getting beyond me!
4. 1000 BODIES IRRADIATED BODIES
They are unable to collect up to 1000 dead bodies lying within 20-kilometers of the Fukushima nuclear plant because of fears the corpses are too contaminated with radiation.
5. RADIATION FOUND IN WEST COAST MILK
Traces of radioactive Iodine-131 were found in milk in California and Washington state, according to federal and state authorities who are monitoring for contamination as the nuclear crisis unfolds in Japan.
Above info includes quotes from:
1 April 2011, 3:27 pmJapan buys giant pumps for Fukushima
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/japan-buys-giant-concrete-pumps-for-fukushima-2011-04-01?reflink=MW_news_stmp
SRS pump will head to Japan
Url: http://chronicle.augusta.com/latest-news/2011-03-31/srs-concrete-pump-heading-japan-nuclear-site
Radiation Fears Leave 1,000 Bodies Unclaimed Near Japan Plant
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/asia/Radiation-Fears-Leave-1000-Bodies-Unclaimed-Near-Japan-Plant-118988374.html
MOX Fuel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel
Low levels of radiation found in West Coast milk
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2014648129_apusjapanearthquakeusmilk2ndldwritethru.html
Stan:
A tale about nuclear power?
1 April 2011, 3:52 pm(Boer) Tom:
Nobody believes that internal radiation can be normalized to the entire mass of the body – not even the propagandists of Sieverts who pretend as much: had they, they would not promote potassium iodine for victims of radio-iodine exposure. If they believed their own lies, they would oppose distribution of potassium iodine as quackery.
2 April 2011, 2:13 pmCurt:
One thing that has not been touched upon is breeder reactors. I seem to recall that France was placing great hopes in this idea. How do these reactors differ if at all from a normal reactor? Would they produce toxic waste? I do not know anything about these breeder reactors becasue I have never really gotten in to the nuclear energy question. I just accepted what the proclaimed nuclear energy experts said on the MSM. I should have known better but when a person knows less than nothing about a subject they can not even begin to question the official line.
2 April 2011, 4:10 pmI should have told myself at some point. Hey this is the official line official lines are almost always screwed up so this should not be an exception.
(Boer) Tom:
Breeder reactors convert non-fissionable U-238 into Pu-239, or Th-222 into U-233 (I think) – you’ll see many people promote breeder reactors (especially the latter, which they claim cannot make usable bomb fuel – rubbish – U-233 is as good a bomb fuel as Pu-239, i.e. about 6kg should do it, and if the proponents come with stories about how the radiation destroys the electronics, suggest encasing the U-233 – inner sphere of bomb – with U-238, to protect the electronics – twice as dense as lead, therefor good radiation shield), but their safety record is garbage. Japan had a fire at a breeder reactor in 1995 – they usually cool them with liquid sodium (think gigantic fire hazard).
You might also see glowing reviews of liquid fuel reactors and tall stories about how they don’t have the equivalent of a melt-down because their fuel is melted in operation – one such bs-er was telling me that they were air-cooled (funny, but not so funny, when one does the thermodynamic analysis of the electrical output – are they trying to superheat the air above, or just telling ordinary lies?). To the extent that they ‘burn up’ the fuel, one is left with fission products – think Cesium and comparable evils. All these (and more) get released when the system does fail (they say it was run for 20k hours without problems – 2 years and three months, spread over five years). India tried and failed to commercialize the technology, so the rosy stories are fraud.
Oh, and they’ll come up with how the super-heavy radiation of the U-232/U-233 prevents ‘normal’ fuel refinement – more misdirection – make Uranium hexaflouride (or some other uranium gas – hex is a gas above about 60C), pump it repeatedly around corners (and take the outside gas after each corner for pumping around the next corner) to get usably pure U-233, then vacuum deposit onto inside of a hollowed U-238 shell. The Cesium makes a great ‘dirty bomb’ (more proof that the gov’t doesn’t believe the nonsense about normalizing internal radiation to body mass), I’m told.
2 April 2011, 8:00 pm(Boer) Tom:
Another comment, about the Argonne pamphlet that I posted above – notice that their mass is in femtogram to picogram, even for mere Pu-244 – they don’t believe at all that it is safe, whatever sentences they write – their calculation shows their own beliefs very strongly.
2 April 2011, 10:22 pm(Boer) Tom:
Correction on the above re Argonne – they did in fact do the calculation on Pu-239 – I rechecked the math. My apologies for the confusion. The mass they specify is about 1 microgram of Plutonium into the blood stream, or 6 microgram into the lungs.
It is interesting – if the nuclear proponents actually believe the calculation, they should be quite willing to inject three micrograms – 390 microSv/year – with a few x-rays per year, that should put a quick end to the debate.
3 April 2011, 12:52 amCurt:
Thank you Tom.
3 April 2011, 7:27 amtochigi:
@DeAnander:
re your coment above, i think there was a two-step process. the first one occurring about 10,000 years ago when groups of humans took up agriculture in place of hunting and gathering. and then they went on to dominate and disseminate this new strategy largely through territorial conquest. the second step in the process i think occurred over most of the 19th century, mainly between 1815 and 1885 or so. the industrial revolution removed vast numbers of people from their existing subsitence or artisan culture. the seeds of almost total alienation from the rest of the biosphere began here, imho. i also think a certain amount of what you are trying to explain was summed up very well by Richard Manning in his book Against the Grain.
meanwhile, i am sitting here every day in Tokyo wondering how much i and my loved ones have breathed and ingested of this lethal gift of modern civilization. many thanks to you, Stan and all the other commenters for some excellent info and insights.
3 April 2011, 10:56 am(Boer) Tom:
Also, the mass in the Argonne (I rechecked that too now) is about 6 microgram (I made a huge mistake in anger originally – must have miss-entered a digit somewhere and not checked – the person introducing it got me riled up), or 1 microgram in the blood (15% absorption). For that confusion, also, my apologies. As such, nuclear proponents should be entirely comfortable to take 3 microgram Pu-239 in the blood – 390 microSv/year. Again, my apologies for my sloppiness.
3 April 2011, 8:43 pmDeAnander:
@tochigi: I’m a big fan of Manning, all his books are worth reading despite his occasional forays into testosteronostalgia (a word I made up to describe a wistful worship of the theoretical ideal of the Rugged Manly Man).
Back to the disinformation spewed by the nuclear shills. This is one of the neatest deconstructions I have come across yet, very clear and vivid.
[From Low Level Radiation Project, an annoyingly designed website whose nav bar structure hides its URLs. Hence this link (pasted from my browser) does not lead directly to this article... But (remember this trick, folks) if you Google a signature phrase from the article, like "english king edward offers analogy" (unlikely to appear in other docs), you get result text including the revealed link for just a minute or so of additional nuisance. The Google clickthrough is to the revealed link w/o sidebar. I wish people wouldn't adopt these sidebar-nav schemes that conceal real urls...]
This mythology of dosimetry really needs to be deconstructed and discredited, asap. Just another example of the linear Cartesian thinking that is crippling our science (and hence our politics). But it is a thinking very conducive to the simplification that’s the heart and art of industrial commodification, a “mining mindset” if you like, so it has powerful proponents and a huge meme-factory at work all the time. Tough to oppose but needs doing anyway…
4 April 2011, 11:35 am(Boer) Tom:
@DeAnander
That is precisely the Sievert unit dosimetry’s fraud – normalizing to the total mass of the body. By that reasoning, one can safely inject 3 microgram of Plutonium 239 (total body dose = 390micro Sv per year, assuming 100kg body) – just like internal potassium decays, and as noted, that mass the Argonne pamphlet suggests would yield 3% extra cancer risk over a lifetime (likely to be much much more – probably dead of combination of immunosuppression, liver failure and cancers within three years – will the nuclear proponents offer themselves as test subjects?), but WHO ain’t touching it, etc. Thus Busby, et al.
So the thing in my mind to ask the nuclear proponents (and people who suggest that nuclear is safe, based on Sv doses) is whether they are willing to inject 3 microgram Pu-239 into their veins. If they believe their own claims, they should do that without hesitation (except to verify the dose rate), they should demand that potassium iodine not be distributed (normalize to the entire body, not the thyroid!), and they should demand that universities stop their efforts to prevent internal radiation, and allow eating, drinking and smoking when working with alpha and beta emitters.
4 April 2011, 2:35 pm(Boer) Tom:
@DeAnander
4 April 2011, 2:42 pmTry opening the nav links by right clicking and opening in a new tab or window, or if you have a scroll mouse or three button mouse, click with the scroll/middle button, and it should open up without the frames.
(Boer) Tom:
@DeAnander
4 April 2011, 4:48 pmSorry for dominating the thread.
On the matter of Cartesian duality, why not make a Cartesian/etc. critique of the methodology? Then the ‘they just want to destroy science’ meme falls flat. Surely the test of a dose calculation methodology is how well the dose method can predict consequences. With cancer, one can do a trivial study – put ten nanograms, twenty nanograms, or thirty nanograms of plutonium into a rat’s brain – have one hundred rats with ten, hundred with twenty, hundred with thirty, and one hundred rats with no plutonium. Does the ICRP dose calculation predict the consequences? It doesn’t take much mathematical imagination to predict what will happen. Likewise, irradiate a rat’s paw with a very high dose, but that is low on the ICRP basis – when one does an external analog of the internal radiation, the argument becomes hollow: why not subject one’s thumb to 0.2 Gy (as normalized to total body mass, and calculated as absorbed photons), and see if cancer develops – the ICRP model implies that the primary cancer should develop with equal probability in the brain or stomache! Why else would the total body mass matter?
Stan:
FULL
4 April 2011, 7:49 pm(Boer) Tom:
Monbiot’s pathological dishonesty:
The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease(16).
and
16. The authors announce that they reject this method in the introduction to the book. Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko and Alexey V. Nesterenko, as above, page 2.
Here’s the original (see page 23 in the pdf, which is page 2 of the book):
5 April 2011, 12:34 amThere are several reasons, including that some experts believe that any conclusions about radiation-based disease requires a correlation between an illness and the received dose of radioactivity. We believe this is an impossibility because no measurements were taken in the first few days. Initial levels could have been a thousand times higher than the ones ultimately measured several weeks and months later. It is also impossible to calculate variable and “hot spot” deposition of nuclides or to measure the contribution of all of the isotopes, such as Cs, I, Sr, Pu, and others, or to measure the kinds and total amount of radionuclides that a particular individual ingested from food and water.
(Boer) Tom:
One final thing – with the rats, include same size groups with same dose (Sv), but applied externally – if the cancers in the internal dose groups are higher, then Sieverts don’t have physical correlates, and are not ‘objective measures’ (more properly, they don’t have physical correlates – to then compare internal and external doses for effects is equivalent to including the day of the week into the definition).
5 April 2011, 12:57 amMorocco Bama:
I’m afraid if our species survives this century, which is highly doubtful, we will evolve, but not in a positive way. Read the article below and weep. The cabbage farmer’s option may one day be our own. We face a certain future of evolving into grotesquely genetically mutated creatures….no longer human…but rather some nightmarish permutation.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/04/most-americans-say-u-s-nuclear-plants-safe-poll/
“”"Most Americans say U.S. nuclear plants safe: poll
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Fifty-eight percent of Americans think U.S. nuclear power plants are safe, while the public remains split over the need for more plants followingJapan’s nuclear crisis, a Gallup poll showed on Monday.
The March 25-27 survey of 1,027 U.S. adults found public confidence in nuclear safety relatively unchanged since 2009, when a Gallup poll said 56 percent of Americans believed U.S. plants were safe.
In the new poll, 58 percent said U.S. nuclear power plants are safe, 36 percent said not safe and 6 percent had no opinion.”"”
Of course, I take polls with a grain of salt, and 58% does not equal “most” Americans by my definition, but this is couched this way purposely in order to manufacture consent for more Nuclear, so long as safety is mentioned and given proper lip service. What it means is, the Establishment’s intent is to not abort Nuclear. Our fate is sealed….in so many ways, we can’t list them all.
5 April 2011, 8:17 amMorocco Bama:
Don’t worry, it’s a big ocean, it will dilute in time….right? Maybe we can get photo of Obama and Jeffrey PattyMelt swimming in the glowing waters at Fukushima to assure us that everything’s A-Okay….like they did with the GOM Disaster. I guess the question is, what will the next Environmental Disaster be. They are coming now with greater rapidity and intensity.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-japan-nuclear-20110406,0,2697428.story
“”"Japan’s ocean radiation hits 7.5 million times legal limit
High readings in fish prompt the government to establish a maximum level for safe consumption.
The operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.
The reading of iodine-131 was recorded Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. Another sample taken Monday found the level to be 5 million times the legal limit. The Monday samples also were found to contain radioactive cesium at 1.1 million times the legal limit.
The exact source of the radiation was not immediately clear, though Tepco has said that highly contaminated water has been leaking from a pit near the No. 2 reactor. The utility initially believed that the leak was coming from a crack, but several attempts to seal the crack failed.
On Tuesday the company said the leak instead might be coming from a faulty joint where the pit meets a duct, allowing radioactive water to seep into a layer of gravel underneath. The utility said it would inject “liquid glass” into gravel in an effort to stop further leakage.”"”
You have to love the part where it says the “Government to establish a safe level.” Why not just come out and say radiation at any level, regardless of internal or external transmission, is safe. If you’re going to lie, lie big….isn’t that what Goering said? Or was it Hitler?
5 April 2011, 8:45 amMorocco Bama:
Look closely at this video and tell me that this TEPCO official isn’t crying. He’s crying as he announces the dumping of the radioactive water into the ocean. He knows the implications and is wounded by his complicity in it….meanwhile, Government Officials around the world, and compromised scientists, tell us all is well, it will dilute, without blinking an eye.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W7uGvW8xvY&feature=player_embedded
Damn Them All To Hell!!!
6 April 2011, 11:40 amMichael Anderson:
Next—#1 ready to blow up now…
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/Japanese-Plug-Nuclear-Plant-Leak-Now-Face-Hydrogen-Build-up-119311074.html
Crisis at Japan Nuclear Plant Shifts to New Blast Risk
Workers are pumping nitrogen into one of the reactors at Japan’s damaged nuclear plant in an attempt to prevent an explosion caused by dangerously overheated fuel rods.
6 April 2011, 12:40 pmMichael Anderson:
@ Morocco Bama:
I wonder if that TEPCO official will commit suicide like the farmer De mentioned.
6 April 2011, 12:44 pmMorocco Bama:
According to Japanese Tradition, he should, but I believe Tradition went out the window many moons, or rising suns, ago. Instead, he will seek counseling and be put on Abilify. That way, he can watch the world mutate and melt with all the morbid curiosity of an Eggplant. Don’t get me wrong, I like Eggplant, but not because Eggplants are curious (although they are curious looking, but so too is this guy http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2009/08/custom_1250050680932_michael_chertoff_660x.jpg Rather, because they are delicious, especially when skoked and pureed into a dip of Baba ghanoush.
6 April 2011, 1:05 pmStan:
Posted De’s link on fragility to FB, where it has drawn a bizarre response from Stan Moore, once a frequent denizen here. I’ve had my say there, to which he replies:
It must the Monbiot syndrome. I don’t know how to respond to this without getting into a spiraling nosedive of this kind of reply and arcana. This was in response to my sending back some of the comments from here. This concerns me more than the general ignorance, kinda like CP’s A Cockburn and his climate-change denials. Very strange.
6 April 2011, 2:42 pmPete:
Either he’s too scared to be rational or “follow the money.”
6 April 2011, 4:31 pmDeAnander:
“Manageable” is a very curious word to use for something that appears to be utterly un-manageable, un-containable, etc.
“Relative to everyday threats” is also an interesting meme to bring in. In a way it’s valid — for example, almost as many people die in N Am *every year* from side effects of tobacco smoking than some of the current “doomist” predictions of Fukushima fatalities (over 400K people for smoking, 500K for Fukushima). We can play that numbers game. But there are enormous differences. It is possible to protect oneself from the side effects of smoking by … not smoking! There is nothing people can do to protect themselves from inhaling a stray cesium particle from halfway around the world (or from the neighbouring prefecture), other than wear a dust mask for the rest of their lives. So there is a big difference between inflicted risk experienced with no agency for self-protection, and (somewhat) assumed risk with (even limited) agency.
I find it kind of interesting that the new pro-nuke posture is to compare anti-nuclear arguments to McCarthyism
of course, the current pro-fossil posture is to compare investigative reportage like the new “Gasland” film to “Nazi propaganda”. In other words, we compare something we don’t like to something else we don’t like, which is ordinary partisan rhetoric (reflecting perhaps our brain’s fondness for symmetry, likeness, and generalisation). Easy, natural, but not very content-rich.
To be more effective debaters, we also try to compare things our opposition is saying to things that we *both* don’t like (invocation of shared values), to try to “shame them into coming to their senses,” in the same way that one kid says to another, “Christ, you sound like Mom!” In this case I think Stan’s correspondent knows that Stan doesn’t like McCarthyism, so he compares antinuclear “alarmism” to McCarthyism, in the hope of shaming Stan into silence (“See what you sound like? You sound like a crazy person that we both dislike!”)
Regardless of metaphor and simile, however, the fundamental questions not resolved between pro-nuke and anti-nuke advocates are this: is the technology really “manageable”? is its EROEI good enough to make it worth developing further? are its costs (social, environmental, financial, energy) sufficiently accountable to enable honesty or transparency in auditing? is it really any more “green” than fossil power? is it really “the only alternative to coal”? and are its risks really “inconsequential” compared to other risks undertaken in the name of civilisation? These questions are not resolved by catchy cultural references to McCarthy, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot or other cartoon historical badguys — by either side.
It would take the debate to a deeper level to question whether these other “everyday threats” (such as, perhaps, mortality from automobile overuse, from “externalised costs” of industrial ag, from air pollution, from exposure to byproducts of the chemo-plastic-fossil industrial nexus, from wars to control fossil resources, etc) are themselves acceptable. If they are not acceptable, then they are not an acceptable baseline against which to measure other risks. In other words, if your neighbourhood is very violent and your likelihood of being mugged if you walk to the corner store is 50%, it is still not acceptable for your husband to beat you 50% of the time, excusing himself by saying that he represents no more risk than a walk to the corner store. It’s not acceptable for your neighbourhood to be that violent, *and* it’s not acceptable for your husband to be that violent.
If other sectors of our industrial/financial culture are toxic, callous, profiteering, unsustainable, dangerous, poorly managed, riddled with corruption, highly secretive, posing significant risk to human health and happiness… surely that does not make it OK to develop yet another sector which manifests all the same flaws with the potential for far greater harms — or even for equal harms. More bads don’t equal goods.
So in order to interpret the argument vis a vis everyday risks, we would need to know what risks are being invoked and whether we consider them acceptable or inevitable. If we don’t, then there is no point in comparing nuclear risk to them. Opposing nuclear power does not mean (sheesh, how many times do we have to say this) that we are big fans of the fossil nexus. Nor does it mean that we disregard or gloss over the human (and generally the biotic) toll of the fossil sector (which is absolutely required by the nuke sector, of course, since all its mining and plant construction and transport and so forth are fossil-powered). It means that we (well I, anyway) regard nuclear power as a further refinement or development of a madness that has already destroyed too much life, laid waste to too much territory, brought us too close to overshoot and bankruptcy.
It is not hysteria (note the implicit misogynist slur) to look around us and observe the signs of biotic bankruptcy. Alarm is a very reasonable response from any creature whose foodbase is threatened. Alarm is a very reasonable response from people who can confidently expect their children to be poorer and less free than themselves. Alarm is a very reasonable response from people who believe they see the signs of overcomplexity, resource overdraft and terminal hubris documented repeatedly by historians who study the collapse of “high” cultures. In this context (a broader context than mere insurance-wonk actuarial calculation) the risks of nuclear power are not to be *contrasted with* other risks and dysfunctions of a “third watershed” culture; they are to be *added to* them and possibly to react synergistically with them (for example, consider the number of hot ponds in the US whose cooling would fail if there were any extended interruption of electricity or fossil fuel delivery, or of human time and attention for routine maintenance).
Anyway, comparing one’s opponents to Joe McCarthy is amusing sport, but imho doesn’t really address the issues.
6 April 2011, 4:37 pmMorocco Bama:
I see many in the Climate Camp espousing the same nonsense, and it’s precisely why I state it should be about the Environment, the Ecology in its entirety, and not just the Climate. If we adhere to a simple pledge, to replace the pledge of allegiance to the flag, and use it as our benchmark in every thing we do, Nuclear is a no go, just as Fossil Fuels are a no go, just as exponential growth of a materialistic lifestyle is a no go.
Here’s the pledge for the hysterical amongst…..including me.
I pledge allegiance to the earth and all the life which it supports. One planet in our care, irreplaceable, with sustenance and respect for all.
6 April 2011, 4:59 pmMorocco Bama:
And De, that was an excellent analysis, comprehensive, yet concise, precise and presented in way that didn’t stoop to the negative tactics of the opposite of the argument.
In all fairness, I don’t have the energy to perpetually argue with those who don’t want to go there. That’s why it was such a relief when I stumbled upon this site and realized I wasn’t alone in my thoughts and feelings. Well, this site and few others, but they are few and far between.
6 April 2011, 5:03 pmDeAnander:
108 million Americans live w/in 50 miles of a nuclear power plant.
Think our “best minds” have a plan for this? Think it might be the Katrina plan, i.e. YOYO? not a pretty picture.
6 April 2011, 6:55 pmMorocco Bama:
I wonder how the Hanford Clean-Up is coming along? Last I checked, it was leaking into the groundwater, and making its way to the Columbia River. Think twice about that Salmon you were craving…it may be contaminated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pjidsOytZ8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwZA3slX3uY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L_z28xZcjc&feature=related
6 April 2011, 8:05 pmDeAnander:
Cross post from the ever-informative Oil Drum, by adamx:
Well put and I wish I’d thought of it first
Of course he meant Three Mile Island, but that’s a minor typo.
6 April 2011, 11:15 pmMorocco Bama:
Paper or Plastic. Shit on a Stick or a Shit Sandwich.
What wonderful choices we are offered. They’re like no choices at all.
7 April 2011, 7:42 amMorocco Bama:
De, Nuclear is not safe at any level, and once again another makes the plea to Climate, rather than the Environment. If we make the Environment the center of the discussion, as I have said, both Fossil Fuels and Nuclear are an absolute no go, and should not be perpetuated. What you posted implies that Nuclear can be managed at non-scalable levels, and I don’t want to settle for that, at least not in principle. In reality, my opinion is meaningless. The Powers That Be are going to do what they want to do, and I don’t see any indication that Nuclear is off the table. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
7 April 2011, 10:22 amMichael Anderson:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/world/asia/09japan.html
“Two other nuclear facilities — a fuel reprocessing plant at Rokkasho and a power plant at Higashidori, both in northern Aomori Prefecture — ran temporarily on emergency diesel generators after their external power was knocked out. Grid power was restored at both plants on Friday morning, according to Japan’s nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.
The single reactor at Higashidori is shut down for maintenance, and all nuclear fuel had been transferred to the facility’s spent fuel pool, which are being cooled by back-up diesel power, according to the operator, Tohoku Electric.
A third site, the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station in Miyagi Prefecture, lost two of its three external power systems, and cooling stopped temporarily at a spent fuel pool there, Tohoku Electric said. All three plants have been shut down since the March 11 quake, but power is needed to cool the nuclear fuel.”
Guess I’ll be quitting Salmon and Tuna…and Halibut, and Whitefish, and…..
8 April 2011, 12:45 amMichael Anderson:
…and maybe Japanese guitars. Cars? Stereos? Teriyaki Sauce?
8 April 2011, 12:50 amMorocco Bama:
Yeah, my two Hondas, both made in Japan, will become collector’s items. Woo Hoo!! That’s black satire, by the way.
8 April 2011, 9:17 amm.c.:
Those ceramic cats that wave one of their paw/simulating washing their ears are made in Japan?
I’m gonna miss Sapporo & Asahi
8 April 2011, 1:16 pmMichael Anderson:
Didn’t know whether to post this link under ‘unmanageability’ or ‘the 3 mile island line’ (insane tittering)! So:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/09_30.html
Some frickin’ seawall, huh?
9 April 2011, 5:10 pmHenry:
Free book downloads:
“Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy”
by Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D.
A Joint Project of the
Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
http://www.ieer.org/carbonfree/CarbonFreeNuclearFree.pdf
“Cover-up: What you are not supposed to know about Nuclear Power”
by Karl Grossman
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B2XzM53vkrU
PZWZkODNlMTktNTg0MC00ZDUyLTk1ODgtMTI5OGMwMjhmY2Zk&hl=en&authkey=CM7ticUJ
[click on "file" to get the dropdown menu for the pdf download]
ieer.org has a lot of good info on alternative energy prospects for the world.
10 April 2011, 1:41 amHenry:
Looks like the “Cover-up” URL didn’t register completely.
Let’s try again:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B2XzM53vkrUPZWZkODNlMTktNTg0MC00ZDUyLTk1ODgtMTI5OGMwMjhmY2Zk&hl=en&authkey=CM7ticUJ
10 April 2011, 1:43 amStan:
FULL
FULL
11 April 2011, 4:46 pmMichael Anderson:
It’s not Chernobyl! Er, wait, maybe it is:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/japans-fukushima-fallout-is-serious-but-its-not-chernobyl/article1981816/
But yesterday:
http://blogs.forbes.com/oshadavidson/2011/04/11/japan-nuclear-update-evacuation-zone-expands-new-photos-of-tsunami-hitting-plant/
http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/japan-may-raise-nuclear-accident-severity-level-to-highest-7-from-5
Herds of cattle and dogs????? Wonder if they’ll pass this beef off as ‘food’. Venture into the exclusion zone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp9iJ3pPuL8
Lies, lies, and more lies….
12 April 2011, 1:30 pmPete:
I don’t think Monbiot met Jesus, I think he met dollars.
12 April 2011, 7:56 pmaskod:
Stans comment uptread got me thinking:
Feral Scholar » Blog Archive » The Three Mile Island line
I do not think Monbiot is bribed, I think he and many more are stuck in cornucopia mode. If God, Marx and history has handled humanity the right to enter the paradise of lots of stuff, and at the same time oil, coal and gas must go to save the climate, then Something ™ has to replace it. And that role is in general given to nuclear, despite wind almost always being better from all aspect.
13 April 2011, 7:27 amDeAnander:
Yes the narrative is always “finding something cleaner than coal/oil to do the same job,” without ever questioning whether “the same job” is (a) necessary or (b) desirable (or even (c) doable at all).
13 April 2011, 11:25 amStan:
FULL
13 April 2011, 12:27 pmWinston Warfield:
It is getting harder every day to find out what is going on at Fukushima. Partly it’s the nature of the news business, i.e. if it’s not “new”, it’s not “news”. But there is another reason, I believe: the disaster is so colossal in its LONG-TERM ramifications, essentially the real story, that the “invisible hand” of corporate censorship is now in control. A secret consensus probably already has been reached, that Japan’s northeast region is to be written off and disappeared from the public eye, as the relentless poisoning is spreading and threatening the entire nation economically. As it will take years to even bury this monster, far better to pretend it’s not there and avoid further panic. Government agencies will raise official levels of acceptability of various lethal isotopes in the environment, the cancer epidemic will spike upwards but be generally blurred into the background of overall cancer mortality. It will become the bailiwick of marginalized public health activists trying to get the attention of bewildered victims, unable to see themselves as other than unlucky recipients of the fickle finger of fate, to maybe cobble together a class action suit years later that will drag on in courts for years while $1,000/hour corporate legal vipers make careers and send their kids to Harvard. It was that way with us Vietnam veterans’ legal struggle against DOW, et al, over Agent Orange, and the pattern tragically repeats. I can recall refusing to shake the extended hand of one of DOW’s silver-haired legal cobras in federal court years ago, as he pretended that we were all friends and in the same boat.
16 April 2011, 4:53 pmCharles:
I’m afraid if our species survives this century, which is highly doubtful, we will evolve, but not in a positive way. Read the article below and weep. The cabbage farmer’s option may one day be our own. We face a certain future of evolving into grotesquely genetically mutated creatures….no longer human…but rather some nightmarish permutation.
^^^^^^^^^
29 April 2011, 1:54 pmDon’t we have some significantly nightmarish characteristics pre-mutation ? ( See this blog)
Michael Anderson:
http://open.salon.com/blog/stuarthsmith/2011/04/29/chernobyl_in_the_gulf_of_mexico_8
“Radioactive elements such as radium, thorium and uranium are known byproducts of the oil production process. These toxic elements are extracted from the ground along with the oil and gas, and are separated from the fossil fuels as part of the production process. Once the NORM is extracted, it is flushed directly back into the ocean in the waste-stream byproduct known as produced water. Their discharge into the Gulf of Mexico has been a daily reality since the 1950s – but the amount that was released into the water from the runaway Macondo Well is unprecedented.”
30 April 2011, 8:05 pmMorocco Bama:
Michael, thanks for posting that. I read something similar during the Press coverage of the GOM Oil Spill last year. Of course, the Press has all but forgotten that this is still an ongoing catastrophe, just as they are quickly leaving behind Fukushima for the next latest and greatest catastrophe. Pretty soon there will be one a day, or more.
The GOM is a cesspool, to include radioactive poisoning. And to think, I’ve been vacationing there for years now, and eating seafood from its poisoned waters. No longer, of course, but maybe I made that decision a little too late. Time will tell. It’s a game of Russian Roulette, if you think about it. Every day is a gamble…..and we may have already stepped on that landmine and it’s blowing up inside of us in slow motion until one day we’re bleeding out of our orifices, and at that point we’re as good as dead.
1 May 2011, 10:19 amMichael Anderson:
After looking at the gifs from here…we may well be on the road to extinction:
http://zardoz.nilu.no/~flexpart/fpinteractive/plots/
What’s with the “Zardoz” name, anyway? A little cultural crit—an apocalyptic movie from ’74 about a post-nuclear future.
13 May 2011, 1:27 pmStan:
Infant death spike since reactor meltdowns
10 June 2011, 6:43 pmStan:
FULL
16 June 2011, 10:46 amStan:
FULL
FULL
16 June 2011, 11:01 amDeAnander:
Conspiracy theory of the week: the PTB have studied peak oil and climate weirding. They have decided that there are in fact limits to growth and that the global population must be culled. They have concluded that generalised radioactive contamination is the most fair (everyone is eventually effected, but “developed” nations of overconsumers are affected most), anonymous and deniable method of reducing the population. So they are pushing nuke power: it reduces human live-birth rates w/o running afoul of religious sentiments against abortion and contraception.
I will now remove my heavy Harvard Lampoon juvenile sarcasm hat and say that I am more scared and grief-stricken by the ongoing Fukushima story than words can really express. Not tears, not even sarcasm cannot relieve the ache. Just recently, a whole community of tea farmers almost 200 mi from Fuku were required to destroy their tea crop because of radiocontamination. They are heartbroken. To break the hearts of peasants is an old habit among the aristocracy but this is new, this is different. This is destroying the biotic capacity of the land itself to feed us.
This is sin.
16 June 2011, 12:33 pmSusan/catlady:
Ft. Calhoun Nuclear plant on the flooding Missouri river, just north of Omaha. Plant at Level 4 emergency–electrical fire has damaged cooling to spent fuel pool. Prayers that none of the dams fail above the plant–reservoirs already filled to capacity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSvvmrB7qEg
16 June 2011, 12:47 pmSusan/catlady:
Gunderson on Calhoun story: “sandbags and nuclear power plants really don’t belong in the same sentence”
16 June 2011, 12:53 pmStan:
This one goes in the holy shit category. Omaha! Floods. Nukes.
16 June 2011, 2:52 pmSusan/catlady:
I was born in Omaha. My parents are in Lincoln (70 miles to the SW) and I have relatives in Falls City (downstream of both Calhoun and Cooper nukes).
16 June 2011, 3:10 pmm.c.:
Obama as an Illinois politician, has received large amounts of money from Exelon Corp. According to Wikipedia, Rahm Emanuel & Goldman Sachs were key players in the creation of the Company in 1999. David Axelrod has also worked as a consultant for Exelon, and I bet a dollar that Bill Daley has done work for or on behalf of Exelon or one or more of its subsidiaries/divisions.
16 June 2011, 5:45 pmStan:
Oh my.
FULL
FULL
18 June 2011, 11:53 amDeAnander:
Another instance of dogwaggery. It doesn’t matter whether nuke power “works” or not so long as the enormous subsidies keep flowing and the contractors get paid. A very large scale and much more dangerous version of keeping idle soldiers busy by painting heaps of rocks black, then painting them white again… makework. Sinecure. A CCC programme for the wealthy.
Similarly with all these last-gasp oil extraction projects. It doesn’t matter if the wells really produce. It doesn’t matter if the EROEI makes no sense. All that matters is that somebody’s cousin gets the contract.
We see this all the time with speculative construction and these criminal “private/public” deals to build sports arenas, conference centres, hotels etc. It doesn’t matter if the whole thing is a boondoggle (porkdoggles and boonbarrels, I say!) — the conctractors and suppliers get paid and walk away w/o liability. All same with foreign wars: winning or losing isn’t the point, it’s the transfer of public wealth to private contractors, suppliers, etc.
If you look around with a skeptical eye, much of the “productive” activity going on so frenetically in every direction is really just counterproductive makework to guarantee BAU for favoured industrial sectors. Some of this generates benefits for the average citizen and some of it generates ills or disadvantages, but that isn’t the point. The point is the accumulation of abstract money in bank accounts and the continued production and consumption of luxury/status goods for those who own the industrial plant. Actually “getting anything done” in a real, practical, extend-the-runtime-of-your-civilisation way is a secondary consideration… which is why the brick wall looks so close.
That poor pooch is being wagged so hard it’s getting whiplash.
imho.
18 June 2011, 1:10 pmStan:
FULL
and this
FULL
21 June 2011, 2:47 pmDeAnander:
It occurred to me this morning, one of those crack-of-dawn sinking feelings… we worry a lot about the effect of radiation on *us*, on damage to our chromosomes and possible carcinogenicity and so forth. But I wonder if we should be worrying about the effect of elevated radiation levels on bacteria and fungi and “small stuff” like that. Rapid mutation makes bacteria more intractable to our medical technologies (take f’rexample the development of “super” E Coli strains in CAFO environments). If we are depositing radioactive plumes here and there at random, surely we’re causing rapid mutation in all kinds of bacteria, some of which may be inimical to mammals or our favourite food plants? Maybe one thing we should be worrying about is accidental genetic engineering of new and interesting bacterial strains.
I didn’t really need something new to worry about. But now that the thought has occurred…
22 June 2011, 9:19 amStan:
The acceleration of unintended consequences at the molecular level. It ain’t just science fiction any more.
22 June 2011, 10:10 amSusan/catlady:
“Think of it as evolution in action.”
22 June 2011, 10:22 amStan:
FULL
25 June 2011, 6:25 amDeAnander:
Holy cow, it’s like something/one is trying to make a point. Fort Calhoun nuke plant threatened by flood water, and now Los Alamos (an epicenter of cold evil) surrounded by fire.
28 June 2011, 12:58 amStan:
:OD
Running hard next coupla days. Might be a hit and run moderator. Looks like I might run up on a real job. Got my back, De?
hugs
28 June 2011, 8:32 amDeAnander:
Hi Stan, I’m nearly outta here for 2 months at least so it looks like the store may be somewhat unminded for a while. I’m departing Thu afternoon so can mod intermittently until then…
28 June 2011, 10:47 amStan:
Thursday’s good. I’ll be off the train by then. Cheers.
28 June 2011, 10:59 amStan:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/world/asia/01radiation.html?_r=1&hp
Japanese testing on their own.
1 August 2011, 2:52 pmCurt:
Wee I just have to report this. I find it really interesting. It is a poll published in todays issue of Frankfurter Rundsachau. The article says that the original source of the poll is BBC. The question in the poll is, do you think that nuclear power is safe. This question was asked in the US, UK´, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, India, Indonesia, and Mexico in 2005 and then again in 2011. In Japan, Germany, and Russia the faith in the safety of nuclear power droped drastically. In France, India, Indonesia, and Mexico it deopped significantly. In the US it barely dropped. In the UK it actually went up. Does anyone see a pattern there?
10 December 2011, 5:46 pmWow the colors! The patterns remind of those little tubes filled with colored sand that I used to love to look in to when I was little boy of 17 18 and 19 in which the patterns would change as you twisted the tube.
Curt:
I think that such a result can most likely be explained by the way the MSM in the different countries report on the developments. With such power in the hands of a few to shape the opinions of the many is democracy possible?
One another subject altogther just think of how much packaging yoú save when you grow your own food. I like farmers. My grandparents on both sides of my family were small farmers. I want farmers to get a fair deal. I do not know how it will happen if lots of people are growing lots of their own food but I bet that something reasonable can be worked out.
11 December 2011, 4:54 pmStan:
FULL
8 February 2012, 3:52 pm