Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Perhaps the most important energy story on the planet right now is the precarious situation for fuel rods stored in a damaged building at the Fukushima nuclear power station. However, there is another story beyond the immediate danger that tells us something about how we think about risk.
If the experts at the U.S. Department of Energy are right, the startling “new” fuels of 2040 will be oil, coal, and natural gas — and we will find ourselves on a baking, painfully uncomfortable planet.
The highly radioactive water leaking from the wrecked Fukushima plant is part of a problem that Japan will take decades to resolve and which will blight many thousands of lives.
It has been almost 2½ years since the disaster at Fukushima No. 1 (Fukushima Daiichi) nuclear plant commenced, but the precarious condition of the nuclear plant remains a constant fixture in the news.
Wind has overtaken nuclear as an electricity source in China. In 2012, wind farms generated 2 percent more electricity than nuclear power plants did, a gap that will likely widen dramatically over the next few years as wind surges ahead. Since 2007, nuclear power generation has risen by 10 percent annually, compared with wind’s explosive growth of 80 percent per year.
It has been nearly two years since the world watched in horror as the Fukushima Daiichi reactor buildings exploded, one by one. Although the death and destruction that were caused by the tsunami were far worse, the nuclear crisis provided a harrowing global spectacle, with heroes like the 50 or so workers who stayed onsite, and villains like the increasingly beleaguered operating company, TEPCO. There were also victims like the 160,000 or so people who were forced to evacuate from the area and then, the wider population too as fears of radioactive contamination of food and water spread.
•Germany Has Built the Clean Energy Economy That U.S. Rejected 30 Years Ago •The German nuclear exit
There are times, and this is one of them, when I wonder if somewhere in the last few weeks we all somehow got teleported into an alternate universe where nothing works quite the same way as were used to.
This post describes Sandy as a catastrophic pulse in relation to the problems of dense urban living, complexity, and digitization.
