Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Bombing raids began on Libya this week as western powers combined to enforce the UN mandated no fly zone. The offensive has succeeded in its initial aim of slowing down Gaddafi’s forces, but the precise remit is unclear and a protracted conflict in the country is still highly likely.
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.
While riveted to Fukushima, we should remember that good old fashioned coal kills 4,000 times more people per kWh than nuclear power. As George Monbiot puts it, “While nuclear causes calamities when it goes wrong, coal causes calamities when it goes right, and coal goes right a lot more often than nuclear goes wrong. The only safe coal-fired plant is one which has broken down past the point of repair.”
– Science magazine: Peak Oil Production May Already Be Here
– Japan’s nuclear crisis has silver lining (NEW)
– Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: In this nuclear world, what is the meaning of ‘safe’?
– A global energy war looms
– International Crises Boost Russia’s Energy Posture
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…
While efficiency, substitution are key to our efforts to adapt to resource limits, they are incapable of removing those limits, and are themselves subject to the law of diminishing returns>
Seeing this list of handouts, one might think that Republican leaders would recoil at what might be termed nuclear socialism. One would think that the Tea Party activists would revolt at the sight of this massive government program to fund something that Wall Street would not touch even before the catastrophe in Japan.
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
One of the things I’ve been arguing for years is that most people in the developed world, given a perceived lack of alternatives and no narrative to explain change and sacrifice, will do almost anything to keep their present way of life. I point out that if they become cold enough most people would shovel live baby harp seals into their furnace to keep warm, while carefully justifying why this is reasonable and necessary and probably convincing themselves that baby harp seals like to be burned alive.
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.
– Thomas Homer-Dixon: Our Fukushima moment
– Amory Lovins: With Nuclear Power, “No Acts of God Can Be Permitted”
– Roger Smith: Paul Goodman on nuclear power
– Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: World energy crunch as nuclear and oil both go wrong
