Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In a war zone, you have your vanguard. Then you have your tanks, your main body of troops, and your artillery. If all that fails, and you are being overrun, there is your rear guard. If they fail, and you cannot retreat, all is lost.
Fukushima is like a cancer eating away at the habitat of the East coast of Japan. Whilst the situation appears to be stable, a number of slow burning processes must inevitably be eating away at the heart of these reactors…It seems possible that the current meta stable condition may persist for many more weeks, and all the while the release and accumulation of radioactive isotopes in the environment will continue. And there is still risk of a catastrophic failure due to heat or corrosion that would result in the status degrading rapidly. It is too early to call this crisis over.
Last week’s post here commented on the ways that proponents of nuclear power have tried to put their spin onto a situation that seems to be taking a perverse pleasure in frustrating them. One of their tactics seems to have shifted into overdrive over the last week: the insistence that even though all past and nuclear technologies have turned out to be far less safe and spectacularly more expensive than their promoters claimed at the time, future nuclear technologies not yet off the drawing boards will surely be safe, clean, cheap, and reliable sources of energy. Those of my readers who know their way around the software industry have heard this kind of song and dance before, often enough so that there’s a useful term for it among computer geeks: vaporware.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
-Falklands
On the surface, the nuclear crisis in Japan and the political crisis in Libya (along with at least five other countries in the region) might seem unrelated. But when it comes to our self interest here in the United States, there’s one thing that binds them together: our unquenchable need for energy and the price we pay for that addiction. And there are a few lessons I think would behoove us to learn from this month in hell…
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Conflict in the Middle East
-The global oil balance
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
Even now, 10 days after the crisis began, the situation at Fukushima is still not under control. The disaster is clearly worse than the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, yet not as grave as the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which spread radioactive material over large portions of Europe. A chronology of how the Fukushima crisis has unfolded demonstrates that even a country as advanced as Japan — and as practiced in dealing with natural disasters — was unprepared for an earthquake of this magnitude, the largest in Japan in 1,200 years.
As nuclear Japan melts down, America has the same reactors, the same government policy of withholding vital information (“to prevent terrorism”) about nuclear risk. Radio Ecoshock finds the key audio clips from nuclear critics long banished to the media wilderness – plus interviews with Nicole Foss from “The Automatic Earth” (who is a trained and published nuclear expert!) and Shawn Patrick from Greenpeace. These are American reactors from GE, all promoted as “fail-safe” answers to future energy. Now we see (again) what happens when reactors go wrong. Will the Japanese people now demand renewables? Could this tragedy lead to a burst of clean energy innovation?
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
Once hailed for enabling the post-war renaissance, construction — including construction of nuclear power plants — has become a juggernaut. Astonishingly, tiny Japan, smaller than California, recently boasted the largest construction industry in the world. (It now rates third, behind China and the U.S.) To maintain its hegemony, its lobby has run advertising campaigns identifying nature as “the enemy,” tapping into fears of earthquakes, tsunamis, and typhoons.
-German green industries say can fill nuclear gaps
-China suspends all new nuclear plants, orders safety review; U.S. plans unchanged
-Japan crisis reignites nuclear debate
-EU to carry out stress tests on nuclear plants
Yesterday I believe will go down in history as one of the most significant for mankind. Whilst most citizens of the developed and developing world’s do not realise this yet, the future course of the human global energy system has just changed course with potentially far reaching consequences for human civilisation.
