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Our Fukushima moment
Thomas Homer-Dixon, Globe & Mail
… Much of the hysteria surrounding Japan’s nuclear crisis probably isn’t justified. As Britain’s chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, noted in Tokyo on Tuesday, even in the worst case of a full meltdown of multiple reactors at the Daiichi site and combustion or explosion of the spent fuel in the plant’s storage pools, contamination is very unlikely to extend beyond 30 kilometres from the site. The Chernobyl reactor had a graphite core that caught fire. The ferocious heat propelled radioactive particles into the upper atmosphere, spreading fallout across Europe. Fukushima isn’t Chernobyl.
But it’s an unmitigated disaster, all the same. And it’s hard to see how the nuclear power industry can recover. In recent years, the capital costs of nuclear plants have skyrocketed, with estimates of the final price of plants under construction in Europe and North America coming in three to four times above initial projections. The Fukushima disaster will make this problem far worse, because governments and regulators will insist on yet more bells and whistles to guard against accident, ratcheting up the price even more.
Nuclear power is now officially on life support, except, as Globe columnist Margaret Wente has noted, in giant power-hungry countries such as India and China that believe they don’t have much choice – until they have their own meltdowns.
So using Fukushima as another verbal cudgel to batter nuclear power is simply overkill. The word, instead, should mark a turning point in human history. Twenty-five years from now, Fukushima should be the label we use for the moment when humankind finally grasped the staggering severity of its common energy problem – and started investing the real resources needed to solve it.
… We can’t get out of the box just by cutting back on our energy use. Yes, conservation is essential. But modern human societies are buzzing hives of technological and social complexity, and only huge inputs of high-quality energy can create and sustain this complexity. Most of us don’t want radically simpler lives, because they’d be poorer lives in countless ways. So we need energy, lots of it – and we need new carbon-free sources.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is the CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ont., and director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation.
(18 March 2011)
With Nuclear Power, “No Acts of God Can Be Permitted”
Amory Lovins, The Huffington Post
As heroic workers and soldiers strive to save stricken Japan from a new horror–radioactive fallout–some truths known for 40 years bear repeating.
An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an un-wise place for 54 reactors. The 1960s design of five Fukushima-I reactors has the smallest safety margin and probably can’t contain 90% of melt-downs. The U.S. has 6 identical and 17 very similar plants.
Every currently operating light-water reactor, if deprived of power and cooling water, can melt down. Fukushima had 8-hour battery reserves, but fuel has melted in three reactors. Most U.S. reactors get in trouble after 4 hours. Some have had shorter blackouts. Much longer ones could happen.
Overheated fuel risks hydrogen or steam explosions that damage equipment and contaminate the whole site–so clustering many reactors together (to save money) can make failure at one reactor cascade to the rest.
Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: as Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén said, “No acts of God can be permitted.”
… Nuclear power is the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away; the only one whose ingredients can help make and hide nuclear bombs; the only climate solution that substitutes proliferation, accident, and high-level radioactive waste dangers. Indeed, nuclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection.
Amory Lovins is founder and chief scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute.
(16 March 2011)
Paul Goodman on nuclear power
Roger Smith, “Paul Goodman Changed My Life” (blog)
… Starting with the earliest campaign to sell nuclear power, Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” scheme, a few dissidents have opposed this horrendous machinery, puncturing the industry’s lies and revealing the glaring destructiveness of its operation. The poet, philosopher and anarchist activist Paul Goodman was one of those early, committed anti-nukers. Goodman was an ardent champion of science, but fretted that the scientific virtues had been perverted by the structures of power—in academia as well as industry, government and the military. In his writings and dozens of speeches during the 1960s—of which you’ll hear excerpts in PAUL GOODMAN CHANGED MY LIFE—Goodman challenged scientists to take moral responsibility for how their work would be applied, and to oppose dangerous uses of their brain power.
Goodman wrote cogently and eloquently about establishing sensible, practical criteria for guiding the development of technologies. The machines we create and proliferate should be useful and efficient, of course, but also comprehensible to ordinary citizens and repairable by their users. Above all, he said, technologies should be prudent and modest, human in scale and humanistic in the mark they make on the world. Nuclear power flagrantly flunks all these tests, especially the modesty test. A technology that creates waste products so harmful and potent they must be sequestered for, literally, thousands of years—and that’s when it’s working properly!—and whose malfunction threatens to annihilate populations and render large areas permanently uninhabitable, is the very epitome of an arrogant technology.
It’s too simple to say that nuclear is the wrong choice for our century. What has to be said is that the whole development of nuclear power technology over the past 60 years has been a colossal, shameful mistake and a crime against humanity. It represents decades of time, mints of money, and generations of scientific effort misdirected, wasted. Imagine where we’d be if all those resources had been—or could be now—devoted to truly sustainable energy solutions.
(19 March 2011)
World energy crunch as nuclear and oil both go wrong
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph/UK
The existential crisis for the world’s nuclear industry could hardly have come at a worse moment. The epicentre of the world’s oil supply is disturbingly close to its own systemic crisis as the Gulf erupts in conflict.
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Libya’s civil war has cut global crude supply by 1.1m barrels per day (bpd), eroding Opec’s spare capacity to a wafer-thin margin of 2m bpd, if Goldman Sachs is correct.
Now events in the Gulf have turned dangerous after Saudi Arabia sent troops into Bahrain to help the Sunni monarchy crush largely Shi’ite dissent, risking a showdown with Iran.
… While there has been no loss of oil output in the Gulf so far, the violent crackdown in Manama on Wednesday left four people dead and risks inflaming the volatile geopolitics of the region. The rout of protesters encamped at the Pearl roundabout had echoes of China’s Tiananmen massacre.
The risk group Exclusive Analysis said such heavy-handed methods may provoke Iran to launch a proxy war by arming insurgents.
… Dr Euan Mearns at the Oil Drum said Fukushima has shattered democracies’ faith in the safety of nuclear power. If Japanese engineers had prevailed despite the worst that nature could muster, it would have vindicated the industry. “Alas, this is not the case. The future of the human global energy system has just changed course with potentially far
(16 March 2011)
