Image above: Proverbial flying pig. From (http://daniantart.deviantart.com/art/flying-pig-129988633?q=gallery).
First, any Greek bailout plan that will (may?!) be agreed on doesn't change anything about the country's financial reality. Greece is unable to pay down its debt. If an IMF/ECB/EU package deal is found, that debt will simply now be owed to the "Troika". And Greece will still not be able to pay it back.
You can find comments from those involved in the negotiations that suggest Athens will be "safe“ until 2014, or even for the next 5 years, but this is nonsense. The first aid package hasn't even been paid in full, and the desperate need for a second one has already led to the emergency talks we see now. The only thing that changes is that -much of- the debt is shifted from private investors to the public at large. An all too familiar pattern, and one that is really due for a change.
The situation at the talks, meanwhile, is becoming so opaque it's getting harder to beleive there's not at least to some intent intentional. If Germany and France think they can get away with more procrastination, why wouldn't they go that route? They need the euro to weaken vs the UD dollar. These are not good times to have a string currency. But again, they fail to see what the overall perception is in the marketplace. Which is that no matter what they do from here on in, their credibility is shot. For good.
On Friday, Angela Merkel was reported to have given in to French and ECB demands to not press for involuntary haircuts for private investors. Sometime over the weekend, this was denied, or half denied. Now, all of a sudden, Greece may only get half of the next tranche of Bailout 1.0, which it's supposed to receive in July. Moreover, any decision on the topic will be delayed until July as well. By then, we'll know if Papandreou will still be the Greek PM; he has a confidence vote coming up on Tuesday.
Papandreou's (caviar-) socialist party holds 155 of 300 seats. 5 defections and it's game over, both for him and for Bailout 2.0. To prevent this, he made his big party rival Venizelos Minister of Finance, to secure the support of the left wing of the party. If the confidence vote goes awry, Venizelos will probably step in, and Papandreou will gladly pass on the poisoned chalice. Venizelos will then not be able to pass the bailout deal on account of street protests, and thus be stuck with a huge mess. Elections follow, and the next blind power hungry doofus steps in.
Spanish bond rates are rising, as are Italian CDS prices after Moody's threatened a downgrade of Rome's government debt. Italian banks are getting hit hard. That is enough to weaken Greece even further. And that in turn is a major danger in Romania and Bulgaria, where Greek banks are among the main investors.
And if that is still not enough to weaken any- and everything that has to do with the Eurozone, its very head, Jean-Paul Juncker (who, admittedly, is a self-professed obsessive liar -when things get serious-) delivered the coup de grace. And it doesn't look like he meant to do it. I think he meant to strike fear in the hearts of the negotiators. Juncker became the first main voice to include Belgium in the group of endangered European animals. That gives us PIIGS +B. Can I buy a vowel?
Instead, Mr Juncker has now neatly lined up the row of Eurozone sitting ducks for the bond markets: Greece, Ireland and Portugal are obvious. Spain is getting there. Italy, and especially Belgium are the relatively new kids on the -chopping- block. Or the shooting range, if you prefer.
Now, if the EU wants to prevent its members from being picked off one by one, what can they do? Interestingly, I read two completely different approaches over the weekend. Unfortunately, neither makes much, if any, sense. In the Guardian, Larry Elliott writes: Greece must exit the eurozone, while the Telegraph's Edmund Conway argues: Why Germany must exit the euro.
The problems should be clear: if Greece were to leave the Eurozone, either voluntarily or forcibly, conditions would have to be defined to enable it to do that. Such conditions don't exist; there is nothing written on it in EU treaties. Once these conditions would be negotiated (something that can take months, if not years), countries like Ireland and Portugal would also either want to leave or be made to do so. Which would make all remaining parties involved look very closely at Spain and Italy. And Belgium.
If Germany were to leave, it couldn't go alone either. The Netherlands would not remain in the EU without it, and in all likelihood, neither would Finland. With the three arguably strongest economies gone, France would find itself between two rocks and three hard places. Paris might be tempted by the power games, but not by the peripheral debt; it would have to leave, or at least strongly consider doing so.
A Greek exit may seem the more obvious way to go right now, but if such a thing happens, the Eurozone, if not the entire EU, would cease to exist in its present form. A German exit simply won't happen.
For now, the Eurozone countries are stuck with one another. And there's really only one way left to go for them. That is, to deliver haircuts to private investors, as well as to the ECB, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan and perhaps China's central bank. Yes, a credit event. It will take them a while to realize this is the only path to take, the resistance will be formidable. But then, so will the resistance to ever more bank bailouts with public funds.
The Greek protests are an established phenomenon that will not easily be eradicated (even though there's plenty talk of tanks in the streets of Athens). That genie is out of the bottle. Spain's protests are for now more subdued, but a country with over 20% unemployment, and almost 50% of young people jobless, has a limited life expectancy. If the ratings agencies get serious about downgrading French banks, as they announced last week -and given their exposure to Greece it seems inevitable-, and if that raises rates in Paris and beyond, it will be game on. A flag in the Athens protests read: "The French are sleeping – they're dreaming of '68". True enough, but how much longer?
.
Sitting Ducks & Flying Pigs
SUBHEAD: Even though there's plenty talk of tanks in the streets of Athens the genie is out of the bottle.
By Ilargi on 20 June 2011 for Automatic Earth -
(http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/06/june-20-2011-sitting-ducks-and-flying.html)
Image above: Proverbial flying pig. From (http://daniantart.deviantart.com/art/flying-pig-129988633?q=gallery).
First, any Greek bailout plan that will (may?!) be agreed on doesn't change anything about the country's financial reality. Greece is unable to pay down its debt. If an IMF/ECB/EU package deal is found, that debt will simply now be owed to the "Troika". And Greece will still not be able to pay it back.
You can find comments from those involved in the negotiations that suggest Athens will be "safe“ until 2014, or even for the next 5 years, but this is nonsense. The first aid package hasn't even been paid in full, and the desperate need for a second one has already led to the emergency talks we see now. The only thing that changes is that -much of- the debt is shifted from private investors to the public at large. An all too familiar pattern, and one that is really due for a change.
The situation at the talks, meanwhile, is becoming so opaque it's getting harder to beleive there's not at least to some intent intentional. If Germany and France think they can get away with more procrastination, why wouldn't they go that route? They need the euro to weaken vs the UD dollar. These are not good times to have a string currency. But again, they fail to see what the overall perception is in the marketplace. Which is that no matter what they do from here on in, their credibility is shot. For good.
On Friday, Angela Merkel was reported to have given in to French and ECB demands to not press for involuntary haircuts for private investors. Sometime over the weekend, this was denied, or half denied. Now, all of a sudden, Greece may only get half of the next tranche of Bailout 1.0, which it's supposed to receive in July. Moreover, any decision on the topic will be delayed until July as well. By then, we'll know if Papandreou will still be the Greek PM; he has a confidence vote coming up on Tuesday.
Papandreou's (caviar-) socialist party holds 155 of 300 seats. 5 defections and it's game over, both for him and for Bailout 2.0. To prevent this, he made his big party rival Venizelos Minister of Finance, to secure the support of the left wing of the party. If the confidence vote goes awry, Venizelos will probably step in, and Papandreou will gladly pass on the poisoned chalice. Venizelos will then not be able to pass the bailout deal on account of street protests, and thus be stuck with a huge mess. Elections follow, and the next blind power hungry doofus steps in.
Spanish bond rates are rising, as are Italian CDS prices after Moody's threatened a downgrade of Rome's government debt. Italian banks are getting hit hard. That is enough to weaken Greece even further. And that in turn is a major danger in Romania and Bulgaria, where Greek banks are among the main investors.
And if that is still not enough to weaken any- and everything that has to do with the Eurozone, its very head, Jean-Paul Juncker (who, admittedly, is a self-professed obsessive liar -when things get serious-) delivered the coup de grace. And it doesn't look like he meant to do it. I think he meant to strike fear in the hearts of the negotiators. Juncker became the first main voice to include Belgium in the group of endangered European animals. That gives us PIIGS +B. Can I buy a vowel?
Instead, Mr Juncker has now neatly lined up the row of Eurozone sitting ducks for the bond markets: Greece, Ireland and Portugal are obvious. Spain is getting there. Italy, and especially Belgium are the relatively new kids on the -chopping- block. Or the shooting range, if you prefer.
Now, if the EU wants to prevent its members from being picked off one by one, what can they do? Interestingly, I read two completely different approaches over the weekend. Unfortunately, neither makes much, if any, sense. In the Guardian, Larry Elliott writes: Greece must exit the eurozone, while the Telegraph's Edmund Conway argues: Why Germany must exit the euro.
The problems should be clear: if Greece were to leave the Eurozone, either voluntarily or forcibly, conditions would have to be defined to enable it to do that. Such conditions don't exist; there is nothing written on it in EU treaties. Once these conditions would be negotiated (something that can take months, if not years), countries like Ireland and Portugal would also either want to leave or be made to do so. Which would make all remaining parties involved look very closely at Spain and Italy. And Belgium.
If Germany were to leave, it couldn't go alone either. The Netherlands would not remain in the EU without it, and in all likelihood, neither would Finland. With the three arguably strongest economies gone, France would find itself between two rocks and three hard places. Paris might be tempted by the power games, but not by the peripheral debt; it would have to leave, or at least strongly consider doing so.
A Greek exit may seem the more obvious way to go right now, but if such a thing happens, the Eurozone, if not the entire EU, would cease to exist in its present form. A German exit simply won't happen.
For now, the Eurozone countries are stuck with one another. And there's really only one way left to go for them. That is, to deliver haircuts to private investors, as well as to the ECB, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan and perhaps China's central bank. Yes, a credit event. It will take them a while to realize this is the only path to take, the resistance will be formidable. But then, so will the resistance to ever more bank bailouts with public funds.
The Greek protests are an established phenomenon that will not easily be eradicated (even though there's plenty talk of tanks in the streets of Athens). That genie is out of the bottle. Spain's protests are for now more subdued, but a country with over 20% unemployment, and almost 50% of young people jobless, has a limited life expectancy. If the ratings agencies get serious about downgrading French banks, as they announced last week -and given their exposure to Greece it seems inevitable-, and if that raises rates in Paris and beyond, it will be game on. A flag in the Athens protests read: "The French are sleeping – they're dreaming of '68". True enough, but how much longer?
.
Image above: Proverbial flying pig. From (http://daniantart.deviantart.com/art/flying-pig-129988633?q=gallery).
First, any Greek bailout plan that will (may?!) be agreed on doesn't change anything about the country's financial reality. Greece is unable to pay down its debt. If an IMF/ECB/EU package deal is found, that debt will simply now be owed to the "Troika". And Greece will still not be able to pay it back.
You can find comments from those involved in the negotiations that suggest Athens will be "safe“ until 2014, or even for the next 5 years, but this is nonsense. The first aid package hasn't even been paid in full, and the desperate need for a second one has already led to the emergency talks we see now. The only thing that changes is that -much of- the debt is shifted from private investors to the public at large. An all too familiar pattern, and one that is really due for a change.
The situation at the talks, meanwhile, is becoming so opaque it's getting harder to beleive there's not at least to some intent intentional. If Germany and France think they can get away with more procrastination, why wouldn't they go that route? They need the euro to weaken vs the UD dollar. These are not good times to have a string currency. But again, they fail to see what the overall perception is in the marketplace. Which is that no matter what they do from here on in, their credibility is shot. For good.
On Friday, Angela Merkel was reported to have given in to French and ECB demands to not press for involuntary haircuts for private investors. Sometime over the weekend, this was denied, or half denied. Now, all of a sudden, Greece may only get half of the next tranche of Bailout 1.0, which it's supposed to receive in July. Moreover, any decision on the topic will be delayed until July as well. By then, we'll know if Papandreou will still be the Greek PM; he has a confidence vote coming up on Tuesday.
Papandreou's (caviar-) socialist party holds 155 of 300 seats. 5 defections and it's game over, both for him and for Bailout 2.0. To prevent this, he made his big party rival Venizelos Minister of Finance, to secure the support of the left wing of the party. If the confidence vote goes awry, Venizelos will probably step in, and Papandreou will gladly pass on the poisoned chalice. Venizelos will then not be able to pass the bailout deal on account of street protests, and thus be stuck with a huge mess. Elections follow, and the next blind power hungry doofus steps in.
Spanish bond rates are rising, as are Italian CDS prices after Moody's threatened a downgrade of Rome's government debt. Italian banks are getting hit hard. That is enough to weaken Greece even further. And that in turn is a major danger in Romania and Bulgaria, where Greek banks are among the main investors.
And if that is still not enough to weaken any- and everything that has to do with the Eurozone, its very head, Jean-Paul Juncker (who, admittedly, is a self-professed obsessive liar -when things get serious-) delivered the coup de grace. And it doesn't look like he meant to do it. I think he meant to strike fear in the hearts of the negotiators. Juncker became the first main voice to include Belgium in the group of endangered European animals. That gives us PIIGS +B. Can I buy a vowel?
Instead, Mr Juncker has now neatly lined up the row of Eurozone sitting ducks for the bond markets: Greece, Ireland and Portugal are obvious. Spain is getting there. Italy, and especially Belgium are the relatively new kids on the -chopping- block. Or the shooting range, if you prefer.
Now, if the EU wants to prevent its members from being picked off one by one, what can they do? Interestingly, I read two completely different approaches over the weekend. Unfortunately, neither makes much, if any, sense. In the Guardian, Larry Elliott writes: Greece must exit the eurozone, while the Telegraph's Edmund Conway argues: Why Germany must exit the euro.
The problems should be clear: if Greece were to leave the Eurozone, either voluntarily or forcibly, conditions would have to be defined to enable it to do that. Such conditions don't exist; there is nothing written on it in EU treaties. Once these conditions would be negotiated (something that can take months, if not years), countries like Ireland and Portugal would also either want to leave or be made to do so. Which would make all remaining parties involved look very closely at Spain and Italy. And Belgium.
If Germany were to leave, it couldn't go alone either. The Netherlands would not remain in the EU without it, and in all likelihood, neither would Finland. With the three arguably strongest economies gone, France would find itself between two rocks and three hard places. Paris might be tempted by the power games, but not by the peripheral debt; it would have to leave, or at least strongly consider doing so.
A Greek exit may seem the more obvious way to go right now, but if such a thing happens, the Eurozone, if not the entire EU, would cease to exist in its present form. A German exit simply won't happen.
For now, the Eurozone countries are stuck with one another. And there's really only one way left to go for them. That is, to deliver haircuts to private investors, as well as to the ECB, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan and perhaps China's central bank. Yes, a credit event. It will take them a while to realize this is the only path to take, the resistance will be formidable. But then, so will the resistance to ever more bank bailouts with public funds.
The Greek protests are an established phenomenon that will not easily be eradicated (even though there's plenty talk of tanks in the streets of Athens). That genie is out of the bottle. Spain's protests are for now more subdued, but a country with over 20% unemployment, and almost 50% of young people jobless, has a limited life expectancy. If the ratings agencies get serious about downgrading French banks, as they announced last week -and given their exposure to Greece it seems inevitable-, and if that raises rates in Paris and beyond, it will be game on. A flag in the Athens protests read: "The French are sleeping – they're dreaming of '68". True enough, but how much longer?
.
Summer Solstice 2011
SUBHEAD: We are going to have to live on this planet without turning her inside out for a case of Mountain Dew.
By Juan Wilson on 21 June 2011 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/06/summer-solstice-2011.html)
Image above: Day Lilies and Queen Anne's Lace in ditch along road between East Gwillimbury and Uxbridge, Ontario. From (http://eastgwillimburywow.blogspot.com/2010/07/ditch-lilies-todays-flowers.html).
Image above: Day Lilies and Queen Anne's Lace in ditch along road between East Gwillimbury and Uxbridge, Ontario. From (http://eastgwillimburywow.blogspot.com/2010/07/ditch-lilies-todays-flowers.html).
White daisies stand in crowds along the damp ditch awaiting the dusty wind of your car to make them sway to the radio. by Juan Wilson - Summer Growth 1999 (http://www.islandbreath.org/TheGobbler/Articles%20Published/Seasonal%20SZ/03%20Growth/sz_03growth.html)Familiar but different, a new season turns the corner. Here comes summer. I am away from my home Kauai, Hawaii, and back in the land I came from, Chautauqua, New York. I've lived in other places, however this is the place in western New York is where I learned the feel of the land. To the Iroquois Nation this place was the Western Gate of their civilization. Since then it has had many masters, including Swedish dairymen and then Amish plowmen. Ever since the last Great Depression, regardless of their efforts to tame the forests, there has been a slow return of the wild. When I was a boy here in the 1950's there were a few shade trees around the house but beyond were buzzing fields of alfalfa, chewed pastures and low orchards. From the top of our hill you could see south across five ridges into Pennsylvania. Today you can see across the drive to a wall of woods made up of maple, beach, and thorn apples. The bears, bobcats, turkeys, and wolves are moving south from Canada to reclaim what they can. Those people that have stayed mostly live in what were farmhouses and have to drive far for work, food or fun. That is not to say that Nature is safe in these parts. The greatest threat by human activity in Chautauqua is likely to be a rush for the natural gas and oil that couldn't be reached when oil was first discovered in this "Quaker State" area in the 19th century. The car, the plane and imperial America would not have existed otherwise. Today energy company geologists are eager to tap what's under the old Quaker State oil - the great Marcellus Shale deposit. Deep and hard to get is a huge quantity of natural gas and oil. To get it economically means using the technique of "fracking" to get at it. Fracking means injecting millions of gallons of chemically poison fresh water, under great pressure, deep under the earth. The process breaks up bedrock that is saturated with methane, freeing it. The process also poisons the water table and requires the processing of lakes of contaminated waste water. After going for the natural gas they'll go for the shale oil recovery. So long nature. On Kauai we have the problem of "FERC You!" Here in Chautauqua it's "Frack You!". Fracking in Chautauqua is the step-sister to Appalachian mountaintop removal for coal in Virginia; and the cousin to shale oil removal from the Green River Basin in Wyoming. It's ugly, destructive, and short-sided. Anything for a fix! All is not lost. We have a short reprieve. Just two weeks ago the New York State Assembly passed a one year extension of a moratorium on permits for fracking gas - this in order to have time to resolve how to extract CO2 producing fuels without destroying the drinking water. A year delay may be enough make the issue moot if this summer ends as some are predicting - in doomsday. It could be economic or cosmic depending on who you listen to. Those betting on economic are looking to the Greek sovereign debt crisis getting out of control and infecting the world with another financial crisis to top that of 2008. On the cosmic scale, just a short time after the Autumn Equinox we are scheduled to have a near flyby of the comet Eleinin (named after it's Russian discoverer and scientifically labelled C/2010 X1). The less scientifically oriented have been calling it Planet X, Nibiru and other things. Elenin is the focus of several theories that include everything from a natural cosmic apocalypse to a planned alien invasion. Whether Elenin turns out to be a bang or a bust, it should grab increasing headlines as the summer wears on. Rather than planning on surviving an early entrance of the end of days we should be getting our houses in order. We are going to have to live on this planet without turning her inside out for a case of Mountain Dew. Should be an interesting summer. .
Savory Soylent Brown
SUBHEAD: Artificial meat made from poop - As if you didn't know this was a possibility.
By Sara Novak on 19 June 2011 for Tree Hugger.com -
(http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/06/artificial-meat-made-from-poop.php)
Image above: Burger Deluxe with lettuse and tomato with special sauce. From original article.
Image above: Burger Deluxe with lettuse and tomato with special sauce. From original article.
I'm sure your gag reflexes are in full effect right now and they should be. This is a weird one. A Japanese researcher has come up with an artificial meat that's made from human feces. According to Inhabitat, Japanese scientist Mitsuyuki Ikeda has come up with a burger made from soya, steak sauce essence, and protein extracted from human feces.
Researcher Ikeda is using sewage mud or human feces as one of the main ingredients in his artificial meat. According to Inhabitat,
"The lipids are then combined with a reaction enhancer, then whipped into 'meat' in an exploder. Ikeda then makes the poop more savory, by adding soya and steak sauce."Video above:Solution to the Global Food Crisis - Let them eat Turd Burgers!? From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1N6QfuIh0g).
Solar Storms
SOURCE: David Ward (ward.david7@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: The central intellectual challenge of our age - We live in complex systems, but we do not understand them.
By Curt Kobb on 19 June 2011 for Resource Insights -
(http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2011/06/solar-storms-emp-and-future-of-grid.html)
Image above: Detail of poster for movie "Knowing". From (http://sgenergycrisis.com/blog/all/space-scientists-warn-of-possible-disaster-in-three-years-time-2012-solar-storm).
In late August 1859 the most severe solar storm ever witnessed began and lasted through the first few days of September. It produced vivid auroras in the night sky as far south as Cuba and was so bright campers in the Rocky Mountains got up in the middle of the night thinking daylight had arrived. During the storm telegraph operators felt as if some alien force had overtaken their equipment. Even disconnecting power to the wires failed to quiet their telegraphs.
In some places the paper strip used to record the dots and dashes of Morse code caught fire because of the electrical surges coursing through the telegraph lines. Today, the world we live in might be thought of as one big telegraph system composed of computer chips, telephone lines, fiber optics, cellphone towers, satellites, undersea cables and an electrical grid that supplies energy to the terrestrial parts of that system.
An event as severe as the 1859 solar storm--called the Carrington Event after the respected British astronomer Richard Carrington who detected it as it developed--could cripple vast areas of the world, shutting down entire national grids not just for days, but possibly for months or years. The simple fact is that most electrical systems and equipment including computers are not shielded to protect against such an event.
One critical link, electrical transformers, would quickly be knocked out and would have to be replaced. Since few spare transformers are available, and it can take 12 months to build one, the world might have to wait years to fully recover--and that's assuming it would still be possible to produce new transformers which, after all, take electricity to manufacture. There is also the problem of what state modern civilization might be in if it faced months or years without electricity.
Critical systems that pump and purify water and treat sewage, for example, would no longer function. A fictional version of what all this might look like in our communities comes to us in a book by William Forstchen entitled One Second After. (For a brief nonfiction version of such an event, see this 2009 piece from New Scientist.)
One Second After is set in the not-so-fictional town of Black Mountain, North Carolina where the author not-so-coincidently lives. It turns out to be a good choice of settings since Forstchen can give us an intimate portrait of a town and region he knows well while treating us to detailed but unobtrusive illustrations coming from his meticulous research into the effects of a total and prolonged blackout.
To be clear, the cause of the blackout in the novel is the explosion of a nuclear weapon high above the Earth's surface over the continental United States, an explosion designed specifically to produce a crippling electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The effects of an EMP are in most ways similar to those that would result from another Carrington Event, and so the novel gives us a portrait of how such a disaster caused by either might unfold. Perhaps the first thing a sensitive urbanite residing in the northern part of the United States will notice about One Second After is the number of guns produced by the novel's characters.
But having lived in both the northern and southern parts of the United States, I can assure you that this would hardly raise an eyebrow south of the Mason-Dixon line where armory and home are very often one and the same. What is clear in the aftermath of the blackout is that order has broken down. Guns offer some protection and ultimately provide the force behind the small group of town leaders trying to guide Black Mountain through the worst disaster it will ever experience. The leaders succeed to a certain extent, but at a terrible cost as they are forced to put the mere survival of the community above all other values.
The story line of One Second After will probably not surprise you. The book is in the tradition of Alas Babylon, and as a reader, you will know right away where things in general are headed. So, the real questions are these: How will the main characters hold up under the strain? Will they retain their humanity? What kind of life will they be able to build for themselves? The surprises in the novel for me were technological.
As I followed the main character, John Matherson, through his traumatized community, I gradually discovered more and more things (beyond the obvious) that had been affected--things that I would never have imagined to be vulnerable or that I would never have even thought about. I will give you one example: commercial airliners. Surely, these would keep on flying since they run on liquid fuels, not electricity. Alas, the complex electronics in modern airliners freeze up after an EMP strike. And, that means that the thousands of them in the sky at the time would plummet to the ground or into the sea. There are no mechanical joysticks in such aircraft; everything is controlled by computers and electronics.
As the story continues, the list of vulnerable gadgets and systems just keeps growing, and it is an awesome and disturbing one. With all that is known about the potential for such a catastrophe, either through attack or through the normal, observable processes of the Sun, you would think that governments everywhere would be feverishly taking steps to harden critical systems. You would be wrong.
Even in America where we have casually spent trillions of dollars on fruitless foreign wars in the last decade, the Congress cannot see its way to have the country embark on a program that might cost a couple hundred billion to guard against the known dangers of the Sun or even the unpredictable action of unfriendly nations (think: North Korea) that might use EMP to maximize the effect of their meager nuclear arsenals. In fact, the writer of the afterword to One Second After tells us:
Rather, I think the greater danger is the Sun, a body which is totally indifferent to notions of deterrence, but whose fury could be addressed through the hardening of our many vulnerable systems. I do not think, however, that hardening the world's grid and electronic devices ought to be our top priority. We have the pressing problems of climate change, peak oil, soil depletion, water depletion, deforestation and myriad other critical problems to keep us busy.
But, I find the topic of solar storms and EMP interesting because these phenomena offer a window into the tightly networked complex systems which bind the globe, the failure of which could quickly plunge humanity into another dark age starting with a horrifying dieoff of a large part of the population. Tales of the grid breaking down in such a thoroughgoing way seem to be the one illustration of the vulnerability of our complex global systems that policymakers can at least understand. Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill that would have begun to address the U.S. grid's weaknesses. But, the Senate failed to act. The House was in part reacting to a 2008 National Academy of Sciences report.
The House bill has been reintroduced, but prospects for its passage are uncertain. The entire issue serves to illustrate what I believe to be the central intellectual challenge of our age: We live in complex systems, but we do not understand them. Just admitting this might help us find our way forward on so many problems that now plague us.
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Solar Calm Approaches? 6/14/11 .
SUBHEAD: The central intellectual challenge of our age - We live in complex systems, but we do not understand them.
By Curt Kobb on 19 June 2011 for Resource Insights -
(http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2011/06/solar-storms-emp-and-future-of-grid.html)
Image above: Detail of poster for movie "Knowing". From (http://sgenergycrisis.com/blog/all/space-scientists-warn-of-possible-disaster-in-three-years-time-2012-solar-storm).
In late August 1859 the most severe solar storm ever witnessed began and lasted through the first few days of September. It produced vivid auroras in the night sky as far south as Cuba and was so bright campers in the Rocky Mountains got up in the middle of the night thinking daylight had arrived. During the storm telegraph operators felt as if some alien force had overtaken their equipment. Even disconnecting power to the wires failed to quiet their telegraphs.
In some places the paper strip used to record the dots and dashes of Morse code caught fire because of the electrical surges coursing through the telegraph lines. Today, the world we live in might be thought of as one big telegraph system composed of computer chips, telephone lines, fiber optics, cellphone towers, satellites, undersea cables and an electrical grid that supplies energy to the terrestrial parts of that system.
An event as severe as the 1859 solar storm--called the Carrington Event after the respected British astronomer Richard Carrington who detected it as it developed--could cripple vast areas of the world, shutting down entire national grids not just for days, but possibly for months or years. The simple fact is that most electrical systems and equipment including computers are not shielded to protect against such an event.
One critical link, electrical transformers, would quickly be knocked out and would have to be replaced. Since few spare transformers are available, and it can take 12 months to build one, the world might have to wait years to fully recover--and that's assuming it would still be possible to produce new transformers which, after all, take electricity to manufacture. There is also the problem of what state modern civilization might be in if it faced months or years without electricity.
Critical systems that pump and purify water and treat sewage, for example, would no longer function. A fictional version of what all this might look like in our communities comes to us in a book by William Forstchen entitled One Second After. (For a brief nonfiction version of such an event, see this 2009 piece from New Scientist.)
One Second After is set in the not-so-fictional town of Black Mountain, North Carolina where the author not-so-coincidently lives. It turns out to be a good choice of settings since Forstchen can give us an intimate portrait of a town and region he knows well while treating us to detailed but unobtrusive illustrations coming from his meticulous research into the effects of a total and prolonged blackout.
To be clear, the cause of the blackout in the novel is the explosion of a nuclear weapon high above the Earth's surface over the continental United States, an explosion designed specifically to produce a crippling electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The effects of an EMP are in most ways similar to those that would result from another Carrington Event, and so the novel gives us a portrait of how such a disaster caused by either might unfold. Perhaps the first thing a sensitive urbanite residing in the northern part of the United States will notice about One Second After is the number of guns produced by the novel's characters.
But having lived in both the northern and southern parts of the United States, I can assure you that this would hardly raise an eyebrow south of the Mason-Dixon line where armory and home are very often one and the same. What is clear in the aftermath of the blackout is that order has broken down. Guns offer some protection and ultimately provide the force behind the small group of town leaders trying to guide Black Mountain through the worst disaster it will ever experience. The leaders succeed to a certain extent, but at a terrible cost as they are forced to put the mere survival of the community above all other values.
The story line of One Second After will probably not surprise you. The book is in the tradition of Alas Babylon, and as a reader, you will know right away where things in general are headed. So, the real questions are these: How will the main characters hold up under the strain? Will they retain their humanity? What kind of life will they be able to build for themselves? The surprises in the novel for me were technological.
As I followed the main character, John Matherson, through his traumatized community, I gradually discovered more and more things (beyond the obvious) that had been affected--things that I would never have imagined to be vulnerable or that I would never have even thought about. I will give you one example: commercial airliners. Surely, these would keep on flying since they run on liquid fuels, not electricity. Alas, the complex electronics in modern airliners freeze up after an EMP strike. And, that means that the thousands of them in the sky at the time would plummet to the ground or into the sea. There are no mechanical joysticks in such aircraft; everything is controlled by computers and electronics.
As the story continues, the list of vulnerable gadgets and systems just keeps growing, and it is an awesome and disturbing one. With all that is known about the potential for such a catastrophe, either through attack or through the normal, observable processes of the Sun, you would think that governments everywhere would be feverishly taking steps to harden critical systems. You would be wrong.
Even in America where we have casually spent trillions of dollars on fruitless foreign wars in the last decade, the Congress cannot see its way to have the country embark on a program that might cost a couple hundred billion to guard against the known dangers of the Sun or even the unpredictable action of unfriendly nations (think: North Korea) that might use EMP to maximize the effect of their meager nuclear arsenals. In fact, the writer of the afterword to One Second After tells us:
"A well-designed nuclear weapon detonated at a high altitude over Kansas could have damaging effects over virtually all of the continental United States."My own view is that such an attack is an extremely remote possibility since it must still come from a nation-state and would easily be detected. This would ensure that the perpetrating country would be nothing but a cinder by the next day.
Rather, I think the greater danger is the Sun, a body which is totally indifferent to notions of deterrence, but whose fury could be addressed through the hardening of our many vulnerable systems. I do not think, however, that hardening the world's grid and electronic devices ought to be our top priority. We have the pressing problems of climate change, peak oil, soil depletion, water depletion, deforestation and myriad other critical problems to keep us busy.
But, I find the topic of solar storms and EMP interesting because these phenomena offer a window into the tightly networked complex systems which bind the globe, the failure of which could quickly plunge humanity into another dark age starting with a horrifying dieoff of a large part of the population. Tales of the grid breaking down in such a thoroughgoing way seem to be the one illustration of the vulnerability of our complex global systems that policymakers can at least understand. Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill that would have begun to address the U.S. grid's weaknesses. But, the Senate failed to act. The House was in part reacting to a 2008 National Academy of Sciences report.
The House bill has been reintroduced, but prospects for its passage are uncertain. The entire issue serves to illustrate what I believe to be the central intellectual challenge of our age: We live in complex systems, but we do not understand them. Just admitting this might help us find our way forward on so many problems that now plague us.
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Solar Calm Approaches? 6/14/11 .
GMO's stranglehold on Hawaii
SOURCE: Ken Taylor (taylork021@hawaii.rr.com)
SUBHEAD: This year’s attempt to require labeling of GMO produce never made it out of his committee.
By Staff on 19 June 2011 for the Molokai Dispatch-
(http://themolokaidispatch.com/hawaii-s-one-sided-love-affair-gmos)
Image above: Cartoon by Matt Collins of scientists being over-ruled by GMO corn companies.From (http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research_1.jpg).
Clearly the GMO corn seed companies have cultivated a love affair with Hawaii’s legislators and governing agencies with a crop of alluring promises of tax and employment benefits. Instead, this love affair has birthed unrestricted and unregulated access to our scarce agriculture resources of water and land for Monsanto, Pioneer, Syngenta, Dow and BASF, with no oversight, no inspections and no protections against unintended – but sure to happen - consequences.
The GMO seed companies are the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone; with no consumer demand for the non- food product, the companies created an artificial demand called “crop improvement”, then manipulated genes to create new patented life-forms, then controlled all research, production, sales, distribution and ultimately replanting.
The global protest against GMOs challenges its science and seeks to abolish GMOs worldwide. Meanwhile, our `aina has become the laboratory test bed for both GMO seed production and also high risk, open-field, bio-pharmaceutical research with the unfortunate result that GMO corn seed – a non-food commodity - is now Hawaii’s highest valued agriculture crop. Shame on us!!
My problem with the global anti-GMO argument that my science is better than your science is that it is a battle of the extremes; it has no middle ground and no solutions, especially for Hawaii. It is a protest movement of anti-establishment activism that offers no alternatives. Better to advocate FOR common sense solutions than activism AGAINST status quo, for example:
Better to advocate FOR environmental responsibility: GMO science promises that there is absolutely NO environmental risk from their new genetic life-forms; that it will never happen. These promises have nothing to do with prudent and practical safeguards that answer the “what if” question and that legislate environmental clean up of any contamination from GMO research companies. Why does our environment need protection?? Just ask BP, our Bayou brothers; then
remember the coqui frog, the ever encroaching miconia and the parasitic varroa mites. Better to advocate FOR sustainable agriculture and food security: if “local food for local consumption” is a new vision for Hawaii’s agriculture, we must determine how GMOs fit into that vision.
Consider: GMO corn seed a non-food product; none of the bio-pharming research will result in local food; Pioneer buys and destroys existing mango orchards in Mokuleia; Monsanto buys Ag lands in Kunia; and none of these lands will ever return to local food production. Better to advocate FOR basic consumer rights: GMOs are the only product that is exempted from open competition in the marketplace. While the providence of consumer choice is already mandated by labeling for nutrition, RDAs, trans fats, calories and country of origin, none of our Federal or State legislators will permit consumers the right to choose whether their food is a GMO product or not.
This year’s attempt by Senator Gabbard to require the simple labeling of GMO produce never made it out of his committee on the environment. Even our own GMO papaya farmers have failed to convince Japan to import their papayas without the GMO label, leaving the papaya farmers standing with the proverbial self-inflicted gun shot wound. Better to advocate FOR equitable taxation: while our politicians balance budget shortfalls by cutting services AND raising taxes, these super-rich GMO agribusinesses operate on our lands virtually tax free and subsidized. Their products are classified as “research” and their seeds are never sold here, just shipped to their mainland headquarters. Thus, having no sales means no State excise taxes or income taxes and their employment taxes are also reduced for operating in “enterprise zones”.
There are many citizens, community groups, associations, activists and advocates engaged in GMO debate and awareness movements. It is time to minimize talk and maximize actions that will eliminate political entrenchment, remove tax subsidies, protect our environment, recognize consumer rights and insist on prudent, practical and ethical protections based on our common cultural heritage – Malama `Aina.
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Rally for Labelling GMO's 3/25/11
.
Image above: Cartoon by Matt Collins of scientists being over-ruled by GMO corn companies.From (http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/do-seed-companies-control-gm-crop-research_1.jpg).
Clearly the GMO corn seed companies have cultivated a love affair with Hawaii’s legislators and governing agencies with a crop of alluring promises of tax and employment benefits. Instead, this love affair has birthed unrestricted and unregulated access to our scarce agriculture resources of water and land for Monsanto, Pioneer, Syngenta, Dow and BASF, with no oversight, no inspections and no protections against unintended – but sure to happen - consequences.
The GMO seed companies are the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone; with no consumer demand for the non- food product, the companies created an artificial demand called “crop improvement”, then manipulated genes to create new patented life-forms, then controlled all research, production, sales, distribution and ultimately replanting.
The global protest against GMOs challenges its science and seeks to abolish GMOs worldwide. Meanwhile, our `aina has become the laboratory test bed for both GMO seed production and also high risk, open-field, bio-pharmaceutical research with the unfortunate result that GMO corn seed – a non-food commodity - is now Hawaii’s highest valued agriculture crop. Shame on us!!
My problem with the global anti-GMO argument that my science is better than your science is that it is a battle of the extremes; it has no middle ground and no solutions, especially for Hawaii. It is a protest movement of anti-establishment activism that offers no alternatives. Better to advocate FOR common sense solutions than activism AGAINST status quo, for example:
Better to advocate FOR environmental responsibility: GMO science promises that there is absolutely NO environmental risk from their new genetic life-forms; that it will never happen. These promises have nothing to do with prudent and practical safeguards that answer the “what if” question and that legislate environmental clean up of any contamination from GMO research companies. Why does our environment need protection?? Just ask BP, our Bayou brothers; then
remember the coqui frog, the ever encroaching miconia and the parasitic varroa mites. Better to advocate FOR sustainable agriculture and food security: if “local food for local consumption” is a new vision for Hawaii’s agriculture, we must determine how GMOs fit into that vision.
Consider: GMO corn seed a non-food product; none of the bio-pharming research will result in local food; Pioneer buys and destroys existing mango orchards in Mokuleia; Monsanto buys Ag lands in Kunia; and none of these lands will ever return to local food production. Better to advocate FOR basic consumer rights: GMOs are the only product that is exempted from open competition in the marketplace. While the providence of consumer choice is already mandated by labeling for nutrition, RDAs, trans fats, calories and country of origin, none of our Federal or State legislators will permit consumers the right to choose whether their food is a GMO product or not.
This year’s attempt by Senator Gabbard to require the simple labeling of GMO produce never made it out of his committee on the environment. Even our own GMO papaya farmers have failed to convince Japan to import their papayas without the GMO label, leaving the papaya farmers standing with the proverbial self-inflicted gun shot wound. Better to advocate FOR equitable taxation: while our politicians balance budget shortfalls by cutting services AND raising taxes, these super-rich GMO agribusinesses operate on our lands virtually tax free and subsidized. Their products are classified as “research” and their seeds are never sold here, just shipped to their mainland headquarters. Thus, having no sales means no State excise taxes or income taxes and their employment taxes are also reduced for operating in “enterprise zones”.
There are many citizens, community groups, associations, activists and advocates engaged in GMO debate and awareness movements. It is time to minimize talk and maximize actions that will eliminate political entrenchment, remove tax subsidies, protect our environment, recognize consumer rights and insist on prudent, practical and ethical protections based on our common cultural heritage – Malama `Aina.
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Rally for Labelling GMO's 3/25/11
.
KIUC's Smoke Filled Room
SOURCE: Ken Taylor (taylork021@hawaii.rr.com)
SUBHEAD: KIUC is not an investor-owned utility. As a co-op, we, the rate-paying members, are the owners. Educate yourself and vote responsibly! Deadline July 8th 2011.
By TGI Editor on 18 June 2011 for the Garden Island -
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_1130966a-9a46-11e0-adc4-001cc4c002e0.html)
Image above: Re-enactment of "smoke filled room" in Chicago where political fate was determined. From (http://thepublici.blogspot.com/2011/06/smoke-and-mirrors.html).
SUBHEAD: KIUC is not an investor-owned utility. As a co-op, we, the rate-paying members, are the owners. Educate yourself and vote responsibly! Deadline July 8th 2011.
By TGI Editor on 18 June 2011 for the Garden Island -
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_1130966a-9a46-11e0-adc4-001cc4c002e0.html)
Image above: Re-enactment of "smoke filled room" in Chicago where political fate was determined. From (http://thepublici.blogspot.com/2011/06/smoke-and-mirrors.html).
The leadership of our island’s electric co-op has overstepped its bounds with a broad campaign to influence how members vote on the reconsideration of a recent board action.
Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative has misrepresented the facts in its ongoing effort to sway the outcome of a vote on the Board of Directors’ May 9 decision approving a Development Services Agreement and an LLC Assignment Agreement that KIUC staff negotiated with Free Flow Power Corporation.
Despite the onslaught of radio spots, ads and propaganda online, members are not deciding the future of renewable energy for the island.
KIUC’s website incredulously states that a “yes” vote means, in part, “You believe KIUC should continue its careful, inclusive process of exploring new hydropower for Kaua‘i” and “You believe that after 80 years of failed attempts, your utility should not delay further in creating a responsible hydropower legacy for your children and grandchildren.”
In reality, a “yes” vote just means that the board’s action should stand, i.e. KIUC should proceed with Free Flow Power using the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission process. Nothing more, nothing less.
On the flip side, KIUC’s literature states that a “no” vote means, in part, “A likely end to member-owned hydro development on Kaua‘i” and $325,000 in contractual obligations will be due to FFP.
A “no” vote just cancels the arrangement as it exists today with FFP. It does not mean that KIUC can’t restructure its relationship with FFP and approach hydropower under a non-FERC process. A “yes” or “no” vote has no bearing on your belief about hydropower in general, as unfortunately implied by KIUC.
This petition-driven ballot question stems from members’ concerns about the co-op choosing to follow the FERC process in developing hydropower on Kaua‘i with FFP.
We’re still learning what the FERC process would really mean for Kaua‘i, and as such, we reserve making any judgment on it at this point.
But what we are sure about at this moment is KIUC’s poor decision to launch such a one-sided campaign instead of embracing a more democratic approach. We would have preferred, and expected, to see our co-op fairly and accurately present arguments for each side of this vote and let members decide for themselves.
We also would have accepted an honest letter from the CEO or the board, stating its position.
But what’s not OK is the full-court press we’ve seen to compel members to vote a certain way.
An unscientific survey reveals that most Kauaians, irrespective of their stance on FFP/FERC, support a responsible hydropower legacy for their children and grandchildren. They also are inclined to believe in a co-op operating as a democracy and being open and transparent with its owners before legally binding them to hundreds of thousands of dollars in contractual obligations.
KIUC is not an investor-owned utility. As a co-op, we, the rate-paying members, are the owners. As such, the dissenting concerns deserve a voice too, which should have been included in the Voters Guide instead of the obviously bias “con” position penned by KIUC.
Ballots are currently being disseminated to residents; July 8 is the deadline.
We urge members to wade through the propaganda, do their homework and cast a vote as an informed community member.
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Say No! to KIUC/FFP Deal 6/13/11
.
Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative has misrepresented the facts in its ongoing effort to sway the outcome of a vote on the Board of Directors’ May 9 decision approving a Development Services Agreement and an LLC Assignment Agreement that KIUC staff negotiated with Free Flow Power Corporation.
Despite the onslaught of radio spots, ads and propaganda online, members are not deciding the future of renewable energy for the island.
KIUC’s website incredulously states that a “yes” vote means, in part, “You believe KIUC should continue its careful, inclusive process of exploring new hydropower for Kaua‘i” and “You believe that after 80 years of failed attempts, your utility should not delay further in creating a responsible hydropower legacy for your children and grandchildren.”
In reality, a “yes” vote just means that the board’s action should stand, i.e. KIUC should proceed with Free Flow Power using the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission process. Nothing more, nothing less.
On the flip side, KIUC’s literature states that a “no” vote means, in part, “A likely end to member-owned hydro development on Kaua‘i” and $325,000 in contractual obligations will be due to FFP.
A “no” vote just cancels the arrangement as it exists today with FFP. It does not mean that KIUC can’t restructure its relationship with FFP and approach hydropower under a non-FERC process. A “yes” or “no” vote has no bearing on your belief about hydropower in general, as unfortunately implied by KIUC.
This petition-driven ballot question stems from members’ concerns about the co-op choosing to follow the FERC process in developing hydropower on Kaua‘i with FFP.
We’re still learning what the FERC process would really mean for Kaua‘i, and as such, we reserve making any judgment on it at this point.
But what we are sure about at this moment is KIUC’s poor decision to launch such a one-sided campaign instead of embracing a more democratic approach. We would have preferred, and expected, to see our co-op fairly and accurately present arguments for each side of this vote and let members decide for themselves.
We also would have accepted an honest letter from the CEO or the board, stating its position.
But what’s not OK is the full-court press we’ve seen to compel members to vote a certain way.
An unscientific survey reveals that most Kauaians, irrespective of their stance on FFP/FERC, support a responsible hydropower legacy for their children and grandchildren. They also are inclined to believe in a co-op operating as a democracy and being open and transparent with its owners before legally binding them to hundreds of thousands of dollars in contractual obligations.
KIUC is not an investor-owned utility. As a co-op, we, the rate-paying members, are the owners. As such, the dissenting concerns deserve a voice too, which should have been included in the Voters Guide instead of the obviously bias “con” position penned by KIUC.
Ballots are currently being disseminated to residents; July 8 is the deadline.
We urge members to wade through the propaganda, do their homework and cast a vote as an informed community member.
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Say No! to KIUC/FFP Deal 6/13/11
Monju Madness!
SOURCE: David Ward (ward.david7@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: $35 trillion and 15 years wasted are reasons to discontinue breeder reactor activity in Japan and elsewhere!
[Editor's note: Even though this is a long post it is a only a portion of a more detailed article. Click on link below for more.]
By Steve from Virginia on 19 June 2011 for Economic Undertow -
(http://www.economic-undertow.com/2011/06/19/monju-mania)
Image above: The Monju reactor, perched scenically at sea level, waiting for the next earthquake and tsunami. From the original article.
Those who think the end of the world is going to take place in 2012 may be onto something. It may be the end of the world for the nuclear power industry, which has been taking the international kicking. I am not the only one noticing!
Image above: The Monju reactor, perched scenically at sea level, waiting for the next earthquake and tsunami. From the original article.
Those who think the end of the world is going to take place in 2012 may be onto something. It may be the end of the world for the nuclear power industry, which has been taking the international kicking. I am not the only one noticing! Events — and the large numbers of plants — expose the industry to the law of averages. Despite the so-called ‘safety culture’ spin that has been promulgated in the United States and the West, nuclear plants appear to be no safer over the long term than other kinds of similarly scaled industrial ventures such as air travel or ocean liner cruising. The difference is the level of ‘process cost’ the nuke industry accepts to avoid the ‘nuisance deaths’ that accompany the better- rationalized coal electric generation- and auto industries.
A reactor will have more control rods — or redundant cooling pumps or a greater amount of concrete in the building or more pages/procedures in its operating manual — than a conventional thermal plant has equivalent safety or pollution control features. Both kinds of plants perform the same operation(s) more- or less the same way: the coal plant owns the adjacent fly- ash dump which is a leaky plastic lined pit.
The nuke is next door to its spent fuel dump – a leaky, water filled pit lined with concrete. The coal plant continuously vents its waste onto its neighbors by way of a smoke stack. The nuke saves is wastes and vomits them onto its neighbors intermittently. Very similar (highly toxic) wastes mean quite similar outcomes. The difference is the nuke industry successfully pushes its nuisance deaths into the future, the large numbers of (older, badly sited) plants means the future is now!
The Fukushima Daiichi debacle is nowhere near the happy conclusion that TEPCO endlessly promotes. It is likely to become much worse. TEPCO’s Fabulous Filtering System intended to pull radioactive particles out of the water collecting under the facility works too well, leaving the system buzzing with dangerously radioactive sludge. TEPCO is surprised: this is the same water radioactive enough to burn workers feet. It flows over and around ruined reactor cores, carrying whatever radioactive particles (waste) the cores emit. What is TEPCO (not) thinking?
Every day means more water pumped into reactors, more water carrying more radioactive materials outside the reactor containments with more isotopes accumulating in basements, ditches and in the aquifer under the plant. Soon enough, intensely radioactive water will overflow the basements into the ocean.
Several reactors in the US are threatened by flood waters resulting from abnormal snow pack in the Rocky Mountains along with heavy rains in the Upper Midwest. The Ft. Calhoun reactor in Nebraska is an island: it was shutdown before the flood and its core(s) are in spent fuel storage. Cooper Station is a GE boiling water reactor identical to those under siege @ Fukushima. It is also threatened by flooding, which effected the plant in 1993. There are spent fuel lagoons at ground level at the sites which are not mentioned in media reports. There are more reactors in Louisiana and Mississippi whose operators are carefully watching the water.
There are 250+ tons of spent fuel at Ft. Calhoun, 200+ tons at Brownsville.
Flooding here, drought there: operators of France’s 44 river- side reactors are vulnerable to decreased flows due to a severe drought that has a grip on the entire north of Europe. Low water in French rivers has in the past led to shutdowns. If flows decrease sufficiently France will have real problems. Reactors need water even when shut down.
Meanwhile, here is the (stupid) drama taking place right now at the benighted Monju Fast Breeder Reactor:
Japan Strains to Fix a Reactor Damaged Before QuakeHIROKO TABUCHI (New York Times)
TSURUGA, Japan — Three hundred miles southwest of Fukushima, at a nuclear reactor perched on the slopes of this rustic peninsula, engineers are engaged in another precarious struggle.
Monju is 60 miles from Kyoto, a city of 1.5 million people.
The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor — a long-troubled national project — has been in a precarious state of shutdown since a 3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel, cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core.
Engineers have tried repeatedly since the accident last August to recover the device, which appears to have gotten stuck. They will make another attempt as early as next week.
But critics warn that the recovery process is fraught with dangers because the plant uses large quantities of liquid sodium, a highly flammable substance, to cool the nuclear fuel.
The Monju reactor, which forms the cornerstone of a national project by resource-poor Japan to reuse and eventually produce nuclear fuel, shows the tensions between the scale of Japan’s nuclear ambitions and the risks.
The plant, a $12 billion project, has a history of safety lapses. It was shuttered for 14 years after a devastating fire in 1995, one of Japan’s most serious nuclear accidents before this year’s crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Prefecture and city officials found that the operator had tampered with video images of the fire to hide the scale of the disaster. A top manager at the plant recently committed suicide, on the day that Japan’s atomic energy agency announced that efforts to recover the device would cost almost $21.9 million. And, like several other reactors, Monju lies on an active fault.
The Monju plant is designed to ‘breed’ plutonium- reactor fuel by bombarding ordinary uranium 238 (depleted uranium) with fast neutrons from a core of medium- enriched uranium- 235 or plutonium. The heavy uranium absorbes a neutron or two and becomes plutonium- 239 or 240. This bombarded uranium can be sent to a facility where plutonium is separated and processed into MOX fuel. So far, breeder reactors have been used to create plutonium fuel for nuclear weapons: commercial use has been problematic. Handling the plutonium in the liquid sodium- cooled/moderated breeder reactor is difficult requiring complex automated machinery.
Here is what the fracas is all about:
1. Report submitted by the Japan Atomic Energy AgencyOn August 26, 2010, the in-vessel transfer machine (*) fell in the reactor vessel at the prototype fast breeder reactor Monju. On November 9, 2010, as a result of the remote visual inspection of the inside of the in-vessel transfer machine, it was found that the gap at the top of the inner guide tube, which is normally 5-7mm in size, was actually 14.5mm.
It was therefore concluded that the in-vessel transfer machine was deformed, was no longer able to handle nuclear fuel, and could not be removed from the reactor vessel using conventional methods.
(*) In-vessel transfer machine One of components that comprise the refueling machine to transfer the reactor core elements between the reactor core and the fuel handling system during a refueling operation.
2. Effects of this event on plant safety It was confirmed that this event did not affect plant safety when the in-vessel transfer machine fell on August 26, 2010 and the current status remains unchanged.
3. Actions of NISA
The report was received by NISA in accordance with article 43-14 of “the rule for the installation, operation, etc. of nuclear power reactors in the research and development stage.”
Because this event occurred on August 26, 2010, NISA instructed JAEA to report the causes of this event and countermeasures against possible recurrences on August 27, 2010.
In addition, local nuclear safety inspectors observed the visual inspection which was carried out on November 9, 2010 and confirmed the current status of the facilities.
In future, NISA will continue to rigorously check the investigation into the cause of and corresponding countermeasures against possible recurrence of the event, as carried out by JAEA.
(Reference) Chronology of the Event Date Event
- August 26, 2010 During the removal operation of the in-vessel transfer machine from the reactor vessel, in the machine fell inside of the reactor vessel.
- August 27, 2010 NISA instructed JAEA to report the details of the delayed report, causes of this event and countermeasures against possible recurrence.
- October 1, 2010 JAEA submitted the interim report to NISA.
- October 13, 2010 During the removal operation of the in-vessel transfer machine from the reactor vessel, when the load was lifted to approximately 2 meters, an overload was detected, and the removal operation was stopped.
It is possible the in- vessel transport was damaged before it was loaded into the reactor last summer, but the damage was not noticed.
Outside of the usual proliferation/plutonium/spent fuel/radiation issues the great problem with breeders is the coolant. Because it is opaque sodium, the in- vessel refueling machine cannot be seen, only ‘implied’. The liquid metal is an unforgiving material to work with. It is highly reactive, instantly forming oxides, burning in the presence of air, exploding when it comes into contact with water. Sodium melts @ 97.8 degrees Celsius. It must be isolated at all times within corrosion- resistant vessels or under an inert- gas atmosphere. The equipment used to service the Monju is remote- controlled within a pressurized argon environment. This makes maintenance difficult.
Sodium or some other combination of metals with a low melting point is used as a moderator in breeders because it is more ‘transparent’ to neutrons. That is, it does not slow the neutrons emitted from the U- 235 or plutonium fuel. A dense flux of high- energy ‘fast’ neutrons is necessary to efficiently convert U- 238 to plutonium. Both the fuel and the ‘target’ or blanket assemblies must also be placed physically close together, this requires greater heat- transfer capacity than what ordinary water provides.
The cause of the 1995 fire was the sodium- flow induced fatigue failure of a $50 part, a thermo-well sensor housing installed in a sodium cooling line.
Three tons of liquid sodium sprayed for over an hour through a hole the size of a dime and accumulated within a room next to the reactor core. Heat from the reaction and fire melted steel. Nobody bothered to shut off the air conditioning in the space which fed oxygen into the fire. The leak was in the secondary liquid sodium circuit so no radioactive materials entered the environment but the vulnerabilities of this plant — conceived as an ‘nth- generation’ breeder plant were exposed.
The official reaction to the leak and fire was identical to the response to the ongoing calamity at Fukushima. The operator delayed releasing information about the extent of the leak and the resulting damage, instructing employees of the plant to lie to investigators.
Sodium leaks have plagued the ex-Soviet Beyolarsk fast breeder reactor. Sodium leaks and fires have been a feature of fast reactors worldwide. The combination of sodium reactivity and the stress of neutron bombardment is ‘a bridge too far’ for reactor hardware, high- strength alloys, gasket material and lubricants.
After six month’s exposure to fast neutron flux the various reactor transport machines are engaged to swap the U- 238 blanket assembles and fuel cores for ‘fresh’ replacements. The assemblies — containing 5% plutonium — are ready to be shipped to a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility so as to be refined and milled into new MOX fuel. The Monju reactor is designed to produce 17kg of plutonium every six months. Because the plutonium can be refined to any level of enrichment, the entire process is designed to be audited/monitored by international observers including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The necessary fuel processing to chemically separate the plutonium from the uranium would be done at the Rokkasho Reprocessing facility. This plant is non- functional despite the staggering multi-year, multi- billion dollar investment on the part of its operator, Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited. Because of MOX/plutonium fuel hazards, completion of this plant wobbles between unlikely and uncertain. Without processing capability, the Monju plant and its output of plutonium/MOX fuel is superfluous.
Meanwhile, there are currently approximately 3,000 tons of spent fuel stored at Rokkasho. The left hand does not know or care what the right hand is doing.
Should a a fantasy world materialize out of the ruins of Fukushima where both plants are operational, large quantities of toxic plutonium fuel would be transported by sea or overland between distant parts of Japan. It’s a strange culture where putatively inexpensive baseload electricity is of greater value to ‘consumers’ than peace of mind and good health...
...The Three Stooges run a reactor: you cannot make this stuff up!......The breeding process is energy intensive: waste heat is directed by way of heat exchangers and a turbine set to a condenser. There are two sodium loops in series and a steam- generator where hot sodium boils water for the turbine. The electrical output is approximately 280 mw. The thermal output of the reactor is 840 mw.
A fundamental problem with this and other breeders is that the core is too small relative to its high thermal power output and neutron flux. To remove the excess heat, fast neutron reactors depend on complex and fragile heat exchangers that are vulnerable to corrosion, flow- induced fatigue and embrittlement. The secondary heat exchanger or evaporator brings sodium and water together so as to generate steam for the turbine. The reactor is designed to operate under high water pressure. The high sodium primary temperatures thermally stress reactor components which requires elaborate engineering.
Meanwhile, the reactors under certain conditions can ‘run away’ or become ‘prompt critical’. There is little integral safety margin with this reactor such as a negative void coefficient or thermal negative feedback loops. Reactivity depends almost entirely on control rod insertion. Operators have not said — and may not know — whether control rods have been effected by the fuel transfer machine ‘problem’...
...Removing the coolant to have at the transfer machine is impossible with fuel in the reactor core. The reactor cannot be shut down because of decay heat. The fuel cannot be removed and put into fuel storage with the transfer machine in the way. This is all of a piece with the ‘You can’t get there from here’ Fukushima Follies where nothing can be done because nothing can be done.
The Monju plan is to partially dismantle the reactor lid on the ‘hot’ reactor so that the fallen machine has a larger opening through which it can be retracted. Consequently, Monju will not have an effective containment.
“The device will definitely come out this time,” said Toshikazu Takeda, director at the University of Fukui Research Institute of Nuclear Engineering, and head of a government panel that approved the latest repair plans. He said that engineers had recreated removal procedures at a lab and perfected their handling of the crane that will lift the device from the reactor vessel.
Right … ! Either that, or the reactor will blow up and contaminate 100,000 people with plutonium. Worst- case scenario is an ‘accident’ requiring the abandonment of Kyoto along with a large part of south western Japan.
The reactor business has a long way to go before it catches up with the auto industry death machine but seems intent on doing so.
A reasonable plan is to accept the failure of throwing of good money after bad. It is time to abandon the ‘digging out of a hole’ strategy. $35 trillion wasted and fifteen years of failure is a reason to discontinue breeder reactor/fuel reprocessing activity in Japan and elsewhere! It’s time for the establishment to start cutting losses while it possesses the wherewithal to do so.
See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Time for a Cold Shutdown 6/17/11
.
Nebraska nuke plant in trouble
SUBHEAD: Obama censoring of this event for “political purposes” risks a serious blowback from the public.
By Staff on 17 June 2011 for the Nation.com -
(http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/17/us-flooding-nuclear-idUSTRE75G4Z120110617)
Image above: Ft Calhoun Nuclear Plant on Missouri River surrounded by flood water. From (http://endtimessigns.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/nebraska-nuclear-plant-crisis-worsens-with-midwest-flooding/).
A shocking report prepared by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a “total and complete” news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant located in Nebraska.
According to this report, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suffered a “catastrophic loss of cooling” to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools on 7 June after this plant was deluged with water caused by the historic flooding of the Missouri River which resulted in a fire causing the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to issue a “no-fly ban” over the area.
Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) who on their website denies their plant is at a “Level 4” emergency by stating: “This terminology is not accurate, and is not how emergencies at nuclear power plants are classified.”
Russian atomic scientists in this FAAE report, however, say that this OPPD statement is an “outright falsehood” as all nuclear plants in the world operate under the guidelines of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) which clearly states the “events” occurring at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant do, indeed, put it in the “Level 4” emergency category of an “accident with local consequences” thus making this one of the worst nuclear accidents in US history.
Though this report confirms independent readings in the United States of “negligible release of nuclear gasses” related to this accident it warns that by the Obama regimes censoring of this event for “political purposes” it risks a “serious blowback” from the American public should they gain knowledge of this being hidden from them.
Interesting to note about this event was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chief, Gregory B. Jaczko, blasting the Obama regime just days before the near meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant by declaring that “the policy of not enforcing most fire code violations at dozens of nuclear plants is “unacceptable” and has tied the hands of NRC inspectors.”
Video above: Nebraska's Ft Cahlhoun Nuclear Plant: Emergency Level 4 and getting worse on June 14, 2011. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mSvvmrB7qEg).
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Time for a Cold Shutdown 6/17/11
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Image above: Ft Calhoun Nuclear Plant on Missouri River surrounded by flood water. From (http://endtimessigns.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/nebraska-nuclear-plant-crisis-worsens-with-midwest-flooding/).
A shocking report prepared by Russia’s Federal Atomic Energy Agency (FAAE) on information provided to them by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) states that the Obama regime has ordered a “total and complete” news blackout relating to any information regarding the near catastrophic meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant located in Nebraska.
According to this report, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant suffered a “catastrophic loss of cooling” to one of its idle spent fuel rod pools on 7 June after this plant was deluged with water caused by the historic flooding of the Missouri River which resulted in a fire causing the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to issue a “no-fly ban” over the area.
Located about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, the largest city in Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant is owned by Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) who on their website denies their plant is at a “Level 4” emergency by stating: “This terminology is not accurate, and is not how emergencies at nuclear power plants are classified.”
Russian atomic scientists in this FAAE report, however, say that this OPPD statement is an “outright falsehood” as all nuclear plants in the world operate under the guidelines of the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) which clearly states the “events” occurring at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant do, indeed, put it in the “Level 4” emergency category of an “accident with local consequences” thus making this one of the worst nuclear accidents in US history.
Though this report confirms independent readings in the United States of “negligible release of nuclear gasses” related to this accident it warns that by the Obama regimes censoring of this event for “political purposes” it risks a “serious blowback” from the American public should they gain knowledge of this being hidden from them.
Interesting to note about this event was the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Chief, Gregory B. Jaczko, blasting the Obama regime just days before the near meltdown of the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant by declaring that “the policy of not enforcing most fire code violations at dozens of nuclear plants is “unacceptable” and has tied the hands of NRC inspectors.”
Video above: Nebraska's Ft Cahlhoun Nuclear Plant: Emergency Level 4 and getting worse on June 14, 2011. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mSvvmrB7qEg).
See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Time for a Cold Shutdown 6/17/11
.
Water Generating Star
SUBHEAD: Star shooting intense water jets into space spotted by Herschel telescope.
By Dean Praetorius on 17 June 2011 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/17/star-shooting-water-jets-herschel_n_879211.html)
Image above: NASA image of water spouting star from original article.
A star shooting water is almost an oxymoron.
Image above: NASA image of water spouting star from original article.
A star shooting water is almost an oxymoron. But a young sun-like star seems to have been spotted 750 light-years from Earth doing just that, as researchers have apparently discovered, according to PopSci. Their findings indicate that the proto-star is shooting water from its poles at about 124,000 miles per hour.
Essentially, it's creating water bullets that it shoots deep into interstellar space, according to National Geographic. This star is no more than 100,000 years old, and is located in the northern constellation Perseus.
The star was found by ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory, which was able to see through a dense layer of gas that surrounded it. According to PopSci, the telescope picked up the light signature of both hydrogen and oxygen which are coming together as liquid water before vaporizing near the massive jets of gas that spew from the the star's poles.
It's not until the water vapor is far from the star that it returns to a liquid state. At that point the water is moving at about 124,000 miles per hour, writes National Geographic. As Lars Kristensen, lead author of the study -- which has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics -- points out, that's "about 80 times faster than bullets flying out of a machine gun."
The really interesting part of this discovery however, is just how far the water is propelled and the possibility that this stage may be a part of the life of many more protostars. If this is the case, the prospect of stars like these distributing water throughout the universe is incredible, considering the implications for life that water brings.
.Systemic Collapse
SUBHEAD: Meanwhile, 300 million self-absorbed Americans watch TV to see which beer and automobile are being pimped.
By Guy McPherson on 17 June 2011 for Nature Bats Last -
(http://guymcpherson.com/2011/06/systemic-collapse/)
Image above: From (http://www.pitchengine.com/budweiser/budweiser-is-proud-to-serve-those-who-serve-with-special-armed-forces-paint-scheme/57916/).
Only willfully ignorant individuals are failing to perceive the ongoing systemic collapse of western civilization. Economic recession? Check, since 2000. Economic depression? Check, since 2008. Rampant “natural” disasters? Check, with increasing frequency. Climate chaos? Indeed, only a politician could miss it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is what systemic collapse looks like. We’re awash in tell-tale interactions between climate change, “natural” disasters, and the industrial economy. Fire and flood are both on the rise. We used to be able to exert a modicum of control over both phenomena, back when climate chaos wasn’t exploding and the industrial economy wasn’t imploding.
On the other hand, we used to contain nuclear power within nuclear power plants, too. Well, except the occasional Hiroshima and Chernobyl.
And we used to busy ourselves with the quaint concept of one war at a time. Now we’re committed to Iraq and Afghanistan for the duration of the industrial age. Tack on a few more oil-rich, Muslim countries — say, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen — and a reasonably intelligent person might conclude an increasingly desperate United States is beginning to lose its global hegemonic grip.
Phenomena that formerly captured our attention every few decades now appear weekly. The new normal is a mad scramble to steer clear of nature’s wrath while ratcheting up resource wars to stay one step ahead of complete socioeconomic collapse. Amidst the chaos, long-time political insiders warn of civil unrest.
Meanwhile, 300 million self-absorbed Americans watch the feel-good “news” to see which models of beer and automobile are being pimped by which of their favorite celebrities. It seems the personal game of “who’s screwing whom” is more important to the typical television-addicted American than the international, imperial game of “who’s screwing whom.” Oblivious to the carnage of industry and the lunacy of our lives, we keep praying the stock markets go up while bickering about who’s to blame for our economic misfortune.
There is another, better way to live. But we can’t be bothered. Please pass the guacamole, and don’t tell me how it got here. After all, extinction is for lesser species
.
Until it’s not.
A model for a better way of living is demonstrated by a pair of former teachers: Mike Sliwa and Karen Sliwa, who wrote an essay in this space late last year, have boldly walked away from empire. They’ve joined us for a few months at the mud hut, where they are learning new skills.
Among other things, in the first two weeks they’ve extended the water-delivery system (hence, learned some plumbing), added to the drip-irrigation system, expanded the orchard, done some carpentry and generally fix-er-up tasks, milked and walked the goats, and spent many an hour in the garden.
I encourage you to visit their blog as they pursue World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.
The Sliwas abandoned city life on moral grounds. Others will take a pragmatic approach to transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward climate chaos. In either case, my latest essay at Transition Voice provides a summary and charts a course. It’s been picked up and re-posted several other places. Perhaps it’s worth a look and a comment, on the original site or this one.
.
By Guy McPherson on 17 June 2011 for Nature Bats Last -
(http://guymcpherson.com/2011/06/systemic-collapse/)
Image above: From (http://www.pitchengine.com/budweiser/budweiser-is-proud-to-serve-those-who-serve-with-special-armed-forces-paint-scheme/57916/).
Only willfully ignorant individuals are failing to perceive the ongoing systemic collapse of western civilization. Economic recession? Check, since 2000. Economic depression? Check, since 2008. Rampant “natural” disasters? Check, with increasing frequency. Climate chaos? Indeed, only a politician could miss it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is what systemic collapse looks like. We’re awash in tell-tale interactions between climate change, “natural” disasters, and the industrial economy. Fire and flood are both on the rise. We used to be able to exert a modicum of control over both phenomena, back when climate chaos wasn’t exploding and the industrial economy wasn’t imploding.
On the other hand, we used to contain nuclear power within nuclear power plants, too. Well, except the occasional Hiroshima and Chernobyl.
And we used to busy ourselves with the quaint concept of one war at a time. Now we’re committed to Iraq and Afghanistan for the duration of the industrial age. Tack on a few more oil-rich, Muslim countries — say, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen — and a reasonably intelligent person might conclude an increasingly desperate United States is beginning to lose its global hegemonic grip.
Phenomena that formerly captured our attention every few decades now appear weekly. The new normal is a mad scramble to steer clear of nature’s wrath while ratcheting up resource wars to stay one step ahead of complete socioeconomic collapse. Amidst the chaos, long-time political insiders warn of civil unrest.
Meanwhile, 300 million self-absorbed Americans watch the feel-good “news” to see which models of beer and automobile are being pimped by which of their favorite celebrities. It seems the personal game of “who’s screwing whom” is more important to the typical television-addicted American than the international, imperial game of “who’s screwing whom.” Oblivious to the carnage of industry and the lunacy of our lives, we keep praying the stock markets go up while bickering about who’s to blame for our economic misfortune.
There is another, better way to live. But we can’t be bothered. Please pass the guacamole, and don’t tell me how it got here. After all, extinction is for lesser species
.
Until it’s not.
A model for a better way of living is demonstrated by a pair of former teachers: Mike Sliwa and Karen Sliwa, who wrote an essay in this space late last year, have boldly walked away from empire. They’ve joined us for a few months at the mud hut, where they are learning new skills.
Among other things, in the first two weeks they’ve extended the water-delivery system (hence, learned some plumbing), added to the drip-irrigation system, expanded the orchard, done some carpentry and generally fix-er-up tasks, milked and walked the goats, and spent many an hour in the garden.
I encourage you to visit their blog as they pursue World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.
The Sliwas abandoned city life on moral grounds. Others will take a pragmatic approach to transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward climate chaos. In either case, my latest essay at Transition Voice provides a summary and charts a course. It’s been picked up and re-posted several other places. Perhaps it’s worth a look and a comment, on the original site or this one.
.
Profligacies of Scale
SUBHEAD: Our power grid won't be operating on an economy of scale for long. Soon it will be unaffordable.
By John Michael Greer on 15 June 2011 for ArchDruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/06/profligacies-of-scale.html)
Image above: Chinese are making massive investment in centralized power grid. From (http://mychinaviews.com/2011/01/china-to-invest-500-bln-yuan-in-power-grids/).
The logic applied in last week’s post to photovoltaic solar power can be applied more generally to a fairly wide range of technologies that can, under the right circumstances, provide a modest supply of electricity to power those things for which electricity is really the most sensible power source. I want to talk about a couple of those in the weeks to come, partly for the sake of completeness, partly because the options I have in mind offer some distinct advantages, and partly because touching on a series of examples will make it easier to grasp certain common themes that aren’t often addressed on those rare occasions when discussions of the future of technology manage to make it out of the realm of popular mythology in the first place.
I don’t mean that last comment as a joke, by the way. If mythology can be defined as the set of stories that people in a given society use to make sense of the universe and themselves, contemporary beliefs about the future of technology in the cultural mainstream of the industrial world fill that role, doubled, tripled, and in spades. Those of my readers who have come to take the challenge of peak oil seriously, and tried to discuss it with family members, coworkers, and friends who haven’t yet grappled with the issues themselves, can testify just how forcefully most of these latter cling to the belief that some technological gimmick or other will bail us out.
Technology, for a great people nowadays, is their source of meaning and their hope of salvation. Most liberals, conservatives, atheists, and plenty of people who think they belong to some other religion all put their trust in the great god Progress and wait prayerfully for him to bring a future that, they insist, must be better than the present. However poorly founded that faith may be, it plays an immensely important role in today’s industrial cultures, and the death of Progress in our time thus bids fair to deal the same shattering blow to our present certainties that the death of God announced by Nietzche measured out to the equally comfortably certainties of the nineteenth century.
If anything, the approaching experience may be the harsher of the two. What Nietzche was saying, stripped of his ornate imagery, was that the people of Europe in his time no longer believed in the Christian myths and doctrines they claimed to accept, and needed to own up to the anthropocentric cult of power that had become their actual religion. That may have been true; still, it’s one thing to realize that you no longer believe things you were raised to think were good and right and true; it’s quite another, and far more devastating, to believe in something with all your heart and have it disproved right in front of your eyes.
The religion of progress claims to be justified by works, not faith; during the three centuries or so of technological expansion, the apparent confirmation of the myth gave it immense strength; as the age of progress ends and we enter on three centuries or more of technological regress, the resulting body blow to our culture’s fondest beliefs and hopes will dominate the cultural psychology of an age.
It’s the effort to avoid that profoundly unwelcome experience that drives current attempts to insist that we can maintain our contemporary lifestyles, and even provide them to the population of the world’s nonindustrialized (and never to be industrialized) countries, using renewable energy sources. That same effort drives plenty of other exercises in futility, to be sure, and many of them are a good deal more dysfunctional than the dream of a world of middle class comforts powered by wind turbines and solar panels.
Still, if we’re going to get beyond the mythology of a dying religion and talk about the future in more useful terms, it’s crucial to start by owning up to the fact that renewable sources are not going to allow anyone to maintain the kind of extravagant energy-wasting lifestyle that most people in the industrial world think of as normal.
What they can do instead is rather more valuable. There are certain technologies that are either dependent on electricity, or are easiest to provide using electricity, that contribute mightily to human welfare. (Long range radio communication is an example of the first kind; refrigeration for food storage is an example of the second.) If these technologies can get through the present crisis in a sustainable form, they will contribute to human welfare as far into the future as you care to look.
Renewable energy sources that provide a modest amount of electricity on a local scale can keep a good many of these technologies going, and if enough people here and now either learn how to build and maintain renewable systems on that scale, on the one hand, or learn how to build and maintain the technologies themselves on the same modest and local scale, on the other, our civilization may actually accomplish the surprisingly rare feat of adding something worthwhile to the long-term toolkit of our species.
The modest amount and the local scale are vital to any such project. Right now, anyone with a fairly good set of hand tools and a good general knowledge of electricity, carpentry, and metalworking can build a wind turbine for a few hundred dollars. I can say this with some confidence because I helped do exactly that, for a good deal less, while at college in the early 1980s.
The turbine itself was basically a two-blade propeller cut, shaped, and sanded from a block of fir; the conversion of rotary motion to electricity was done by an alternator salvaged from an old truck; the tail that kept it facing into the wind, the safety shutoff that swung it out of the path of the wind when the wind velocity got too high, and the tricky doodad that allowed it to turn freely while still getting electricity down to the batteries in the little shed at the base, were all fabricated out of scrap parts and sheet metal.
We used a disused power pole to put the turbine up where the wind blew freely, but if that hadn’t been there, an octet truss tower – one of Bucky Fuller’s better designs – could easily have been put together out of readily available hardware and bolted onto a hand-poured concrete foundation.
The design wasn’t original, not by a long shot; half a dozen old appropriate tech books from the Seventies have the same design or its kissing cousin, and it’s one of a half dozen or so standard designs that came out of the ferment of those years. The most important difference was between horizontal axis from vertical axis models. A horizontal axis wind turbine is the kind most people think of, with blades like a propeller facing into the wind and a tail or some other gimmick to pivot it around in the right direction.
A vertical axis wind turbine is less familiar these days, though you used to see examples all over the place back in the day; the business end looked either like one side of an eggbeater – the Darreius turbine – or an oil drum cut in half lengthwise, and the two sides staggered around the vertical shaft – the Savonius turbine. Some of the standard designs yielded high speed and low torque, which is what you want for generating electricity; some of them produced high torque and low speed, which is what you want for pumping water or most other uses of mechanical power.
All the information needed to design and build one or more of the standard models is easy to come by nowadays – literally dozens of books from the time cover the basic concepts, and it’s far from hard to find detailed plans for building your own. It’s also not too difficult for those who lack the basic technical skills to find small wind turbines of quite respectable quality for sale, though the price is going to be a good deal more than you’d shell out for an old truck alternator, a chunk of fir six feet by eight inches by four inches, and the rest of the hardware we used to cobble together our turbine. Either way, if you live in an area with average winds and your home isn’t surrounded by tall trees, steep hills, or skyscrapers, your odds of being able to run a respectable 12 volt system are pretty good.
Still, it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that very little of this wealth of practical information receives much in the way of attention nowadays. Instead, the concept of wind power has been monopolized by a recently minted industry devoted to building, servicing, and promoting giant wind turbines that provide electricity to the grid.
The giant turbines have their virtues, no question; compared to most other energy production technologies, certainly, they’re safe and clean, and their net energy yield is a respectable 8 or 9 to 1, which beats the stuffing out of most other alternative energy sources. Still, the idea that serried ranks of giant wind turbines will enable us all to keep on using energy at today’s extravagant rates runs headlong into at least two difficulties.
The first difficulty is intermittency. A wind turbine, obviously enough, produces power only when the wind is blowing, and it’s a safe bet that no matter where you put turbines, the wind won’t always be blowing. That wouldn’t be a problem at all if Americans were used to using electricity when it happens to be available, and doing something else with their time when it’s not, but that’s not the way Americans do things any more.
Just now, intermittency isn’t much of a problem, since modern gas-fired power plants can be cycled up and down promptly to respond to any shortage of power from the turbines, but if your plan is to replace the gas-fired plants (and the coal-fired ones, which can’t be cycled up and down so quickly) with wind turbines, you’ve got a problem. You have an even bigger problem if you want to rely on solar as well as wind, since then you’re dependent on two intermittent energy sources, and when they both go down at the same time – as, by Murphy’s law, they inevitably will – you’re left with no power going into the grid at all.
The second difficulty, as discussed in previous posts here, is complexity. Those giant turbines, it bears remembering, are not made out of spare truck alternators, blocks of fir, and other readily accessible and easily managed parts. They are triumphs of modern engineering, which means in practice that they depend on baroque supply chains, high-tech manufacturing processes, and massive investment, not to mention plenty of fossil fuels and, more generally, a society that has plenty of cheap energy to spare for projects on a gargantuan scale. Nor is a giant wind turbine sitting all by itself on a hilltop particularly useful to much of anyone; it gains its economic viability through connection to the electrical grid, which is itself an immense technostructure with its own even more sprawling supply, manufacturing, and investment requirements. If industrial society finds itself unable to maintain any one of the factors that make the grid and the giant turbines possible, then it doesn’t matter how useful they might be; they won’t be around.
Homescale windpower systems suffer from the intermittency issue, but then so does nearly every other option for providing electricity on that scale, and we’ve already discussed at some length the solution to it: get used to using electricity when it’s available, or to storing up modest amounts of it in inexpensive storage batteries and using that supply sparingly. The challenge of complexity, on the other hand, is not something a homescale windpower system has to deal with at all.
Even in the absence of salvageable alternators, and there are quite literally hundreds of millions of them lying unused in junkyards across the United States, a generator that will turn rotary motion into direct current is not a challenging project. I built a simple one in elementary school, for example, and although it wasn’t really suited to wind turbine use – most of the structural elements were made from paperclips, with a toy horseshoe magnet to provide the field, and the amount of current it produced was just about enough to get a decent glow out of a very small light bulb – the principle can readily be scaled up.
In the kind of future we can realistically expect, in other words, homescale windpower will almost certainly be a viable technology, while giant wind turbines of the modern sort almost certainly won’t. Now of course it’s a safe bet that the windpower industry as it now exists will keep on building, servicing, and promoting giant wind turbines as long as it’s possible to do so, so the small chance that the giant turbines might actually be viable is covered. What isn’t covered yet is the very large chance that small wind turbines of the sort that can be built and maintained in a basement workshop could provide a real benefit during the difficult decades ahead of us.
In order to respond to that range of possibilities, homescale windpower units need to find their way back into the conversation of our time and, more importantly, up above the rooftops of homes across the modern world. Professionally manufactured wind turbines of the right scale are a good start, and those green wizards in training who have the money and lack the fairly modest technical skills to build their own could do worse than to buy and install one. Still, there’s also a huge role here for the homebuilt turbine, and for those individuals whose willingness to get to work shaping turbine blades and bolting together octet truss towers might, as things unfold, lead to a future career.
Promoters of giant wind turbines, and for that matter of centralized power generation schemes of all kinds, tend to talk quite a bit about economies of scale. In an expanding economy with a stable or growing resource base, that sort of talk often makes sense, though the extent to which those economies of scale are a product of direct and indirect government subsidies to transportation, financing, and large businesses generally is not something economists like to talk about.
Still, in a world facing economic contraction, resource depletion, and a loss of complexity potentially capable of rendering a great deal of today’s infrastructure useless or worse, the balance swings the other way. In the face of a future where small, cheap, localized approaches that are sparing in their use of resources, relying on massive, expensive, centralized, resource-intensive power plants of any kind is not an economy but a profligacy of scale, and one that we very probably will not be able to afford for much longer.
.
Image above: Chinese are making massive investment in centralized power grid. From (http://mychinaviews.com/2011/01/china-to-invest-500-bln-yuan-in-power-grids/).
The logic applied in last week’s post to photovoltaic solar power can be applied more generally to a fairly wide range of technologies that can, under the right circumstances, provide a modest supply of electricity to power those things for which electricity is really the most sensible power source. I want to talk about a couple of those in the weeks to come, partly for the sake of completeness, partly because the options I have in mind offer some distinct advantages, and partly because touching on a series of examples will make it easier to grasp certain common themes that aren’t often addressed on those rare occasions when discussions of the future of technology manage to make it out of the realm of popular mythology in the first place.
I don’t mean that last comment as a joke, by the way. If mythology can be defined as the set of stories that people in a given society use to make sense of the universe and themselves, contemporary beliefs about the future of technology in the cultural mainstream of the industrial world fill that role, doubled, tripled, and in spades. Those of my readers who have come to take the challenge of peak oil seriously, and tried to discuss it with family members, coworkers, and friends who haven’t yet grappled with the issues themselves, can testify just how forcefully most of these latter cling to the belief that some technological gimmick or other will bail us out.
Technology, for a great people nowadays, is their source of meaning and their hope of salvation. Most liberals, conservatives, atheists, and plenty of people who think they belong to some other religion all put their trust in the great god Progress and wait prayerfully for him to bring a future that, they insist, must be better than the present. However poorly founded that faith may be, it plays an immensely important role in today’s industrial cultures, and the death of Progress in our time thus bids fair to deal the same shattering blow to our present certainties that the death of God announced by Nietzche measured out to the equally comfortably certainties of the nineteenth century.
If anything, the approaching experience may be the harsher of the two. What Nietzche was saying, stripped of his ornate imagery, was that the people of Europe in his time no longer believed in the Christian myths and doctrines they claimed to accept, and needed to own up to the anthropocentric cult of power that had become their actual religion. That may have been true; still, it’s one thing to realize that you no longer believe things you were raised to think were good and right and true; it’s quite another, and far more devastating, to believe in something with all your heart and have it disproved right in front of your eyes.
The religion of progress claims to be justified by works, not faith; during the three centuries or so of technological expansion, the apparent confirmation of the myth gave it immense strength; as the age of progress ends and we enter on three centuries or more of technological regress, the resulting body blow to our culture’s fondest beliefs and hopes will dominate the cultural psychology of an age.
It’s the effort to avoid that profoundly unwelcome experience that drives current attempts to insist that we can maintain our contemporary lifestyles, and even provide them to the population of the world’s nonindustrialized (and never to be industrialized) countries, using renewable energy sources. That same effort drives plenty of other exercises in futility, to be sure, and many of them are a good deal more dysfunctional than the dream of a world of middle class comforts powered by wind turbines and solar panels.
Still, if we’re going to get beyond the mythology of a dying religion and talk about the future in more useful terms, it’s crucial to start by owning up to the fact that renewable sources are not going to allow anyone to maintain the kind of extravagant energy-wasting lifestyle that most people in the industrial world think of as normal.
What they can do instead is rather more valuable. There are certain technologies that are either dependent on electricity, or are easiest to provide using electricity, that contribute mightily to human welfare. (Long range radio communication is an example of the first kind; refrigeration for food storage is an example of the second.) If these technologies can get through the present crisis in a sustainable form, they will contribute to human welfare as far into the future as you care to look.
Renewable energy sources that provide a modest amount of electricity on a local scale can keep a good many of these technologies going, and if enough people here and now either learn how to build and maintain renewable systems on that scale, on the one hand, or learn how to build and maintain the technologies themselves on the same modest and local scale, on the other, our civilization may actually accomplish the surprisingly rare feat of adding something worthwhile to the long-term toolkit of our species.
The modest amount and the local scale are vital to any such project. Right now, anyone with a fairly good set of hand tools and a good general knowledge of electricity, carpentry, and metalworking can build a wind turbine for a few hundred dollars. I can say this with some confidence because I helped do exactly that, for a good deal less, while at college in the early 1980s.
The turbine itself was basically a two-blade propeller cut, shaped, and sanded from a block of fir; the conversion of rotary motion to electricity was done by an alternator salvaged from an old truck; the tail that kept it facing into the wind, the safety shutoff that swung it out of the path of the wind when the wind velocity got too high, and the tricky doodad that allowed it to turn freely while still getting electricity down to the batteries in the little shed at the base, were all fabricated out of scrap parts and sheet metal.
We used a disused power pole to put the turbine up where the wind blew freely, but if that hadn’t been there, an octet truss tower – one of Bucky Fuller’s better designs – could easily have been put together out of readily available hardware and bolted onto a hand-poured concrete foundation.
The design wasn’t original, not by a long shot; half a dozen old appropriate tech books from the Seventies have the same design or its kissing cousin, and it’s one of a half dozen or so standard designs that came out of the ferment of those years. The most important difference was between horizontal axis from vertical axis models. A horizontal axis wind turbine is the kind most people think of, with blades like a propeller facing into the wind and a tail or some other gimmick to pivot it around in the right direction.
A vertical axis wind turbine is less familiar these days, though you used to see examples all over the place back in the day; the business end looked either like one side of an eggbeater – the Darreius turbine – or an oil drum cut in half lengthwise, and the two sides staggered around the vertical shaft – the Savonius turbine. Some of the standard designs yielded high speed and low torque, which is what you want for generating electricity; some of them produced high torque and low speed, which is what you want for pumping water or most other uses of mechanical power.
All the information needed to design and build one or more of the standard models is easy to come by nowadays – literally dozens of books from the time cover the basic concepts, and it’s far from hard to find detailed plans for building your own. It’s also not too difficult for those who lack the basic technical skills to find small wind turbines of quite respectable quality for sale, though the price is going to be a good deal more than you’d shell out for an old truck alternator, a chunk of fir six feet by eight inches by four inches, and the rest of the hardware we used to cobble together our turbine. Either way, if you live in an area with average winds and your home isn’t surrounded by tall trees, steep hills, or skyscrapers, your odds of being able to run a respectable 12 volt system are pretty good.
Still, it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that very little of this wealth of practical information receives much in the way of attention nowadays. Instead, the concept of wind power has been monopolized by a recently minted industry devoted to building, servicing, and promoting giant wind turbines that provide electricity to the grid.
The giant turbines have their virtues, no question; compared to most other energy production technologies, certainly, they’re safe and clean, and their net energy yield is a respectable 8 or 9 to 1, which beats the stuffing out of most other alternative energy sources. Still, the idea that serried ranks of giant wind turbines will enable us all to keep on using energy at today’s extravagant rates runs headlong into at least two difficulties.
The first difficulty is intermittency. A wind turbine, obviously enough, produces power only when the wind is blowing, and it’s a safe bet that no matter where you put turbines, the wind won’t always be blowing. That wouldn’t be a problem at all if Americans were used to using electricity when it happens to be available, and doing something else with their time when it’s not, but that’s not the way Americans do things any more.
Just now, intermittency isn’t much of a problem, since modern gas-fired power plants can be cycled up and down promptly to respond to any shortage of power from the turbines, but if your plan is to replace the gas-fired plants (and the coal-fired ones, which can’t be cycled up and down so quickly) with wind turbines, you’ve got a problem. You have an even bigger problem if you want to rely on solar as well as wind, since then you’re dependent on two intermittent energy sources, and when they both go down at the same time – as, by Murphy’s law, they inevitably will – you’re left with no power going into the grid at all.
The second difficulty, as discussed in previous posts here, is complexity. Those giant turbines, it bears remembering, are not made out of spare truck alternators, blocks of fir, and other readily accessible and easily managed parts. They are triumphs of modern engineering, which means in practice that they depend on baroque supply chains, high-tech manufacturing processes, and massive investment, not to mention plenty of fossil fuels and, more generally, a society that has plenty of cheap energy to spare for projects on a gargantuan scale. Nor is a giant wind turbine sitting all by itself on a hilltop particularly useful to much of anyone; it gains its economic viability through connection to the electrical grid, which is itself an immense technostructure with its own even more sprawling supply, manufacturing, and investment requirements. If industrial society finds itself unable to maintain any one of the factors that make the grid and the giant turbines possible, then it doesn’t matter how useful they might be; they won’t be around.
Homescale windpower systems suffer from the intermittency issue, but then so does nearly every other option for providing electricity on that scale, and we’ve already discussed at some length the solution to it: get used to using electricity when it’s available, or to storing up modest amounts of it in inexpensive storage batteries and using that supply sparingly. The challenge of complexity, on the other hand, is not something a homescale windpower system has to deal with at all.
Even in the absence of salvageable alternators, and there are quite literally hundreds of millions of them lying unused in junkyards across the United States, a generator that will turn rotary motion into direct current is not a challenging project. I built a simple one in elementary school, for example, and although it wasn’t really suited to wind turbine use – most of the structural elements were made from paperclips, with a toy horseshoe magnet to provide the field, and the amount of current it produced was just about enough to get a decent glow out of a very small light bulb – the principle can readily be scaled up.
In the kind of future we can realistically expect, in other words, homescale windpower will almost certainly be a viable technology, while giant wind turbines of the modern sort almost certainly won’t. Now of course it’s a safe bet that the windpower industry as it now exists will keep on building, servicing, and promoting giant wind turbines as long as it’s possible to do so, so the small chance that the giant turbines might actually be viable is covered. What isn’t covered yet is the very large chance that small wind turbines of the sort that can be built and maintained in a basement workshop could provide a real benefit during the difficult decades ahead of us.
In order to respond to that range of possibilities, homescale windpower units need to find their way back into the conversation of our time and, more importantly, up above the rooftops of homes across the modern world. Professionally manufactured wind turbines of the right scale are a good start, and those green wizards in training who have the money and lack the fairly modest technical skills to build their own could do worse than to buy and install one. Still, there’s also a huge role here for the homebuilt turbine, and for those individuals whose willingness to get to work shaping turbine blades and bolting together octet truss towers might, as things unfold, lead to a future career.
Promoters of giant wind turbines, and for that matter of centralized power generation schemes of all kinds, tend to talk quite a bit about economies of scale. In an expanding economy with a stable or growing resource base, that sort of talk often makes sense, though the extent to which those economies of scale are a product of direct and indirect government subsidies to transportation, financing, and large businesses generally is not something economists like to talk about.
Still, in a world facing economic contraction, resource depletion, and a loss of complexity potentially capable of rendering a great deal of today’s infrastructure useless or worse, the balance swings the other way. In the face of a future where small, cheap, localized approaches that are sparing in their use of resources, relying on massive, expensive, centralized, resource-intensive power plants of any kind is not an economy but a profligacy of scale, and one that we very probably will not be able to afford for much longer.
.
Time for a Cold Shutdown
SUBHEAD: Cut down use of power company energy. Invest in producing some energy of your own. Eventually it will be all you have.
By Juan Wilson on 17 June 2011 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/06/time-for-cold-shutdown.html)
Image above: Tokyo office workers witness 311 disaster. From (http://spreadia.com/Population/188791553/Population_soars_near_US_nuclear_reactors).
The terrorist attack September 11, 2001 (that we simply refer to as 911) was a wake-up call. Unfortunately, America took that event as an excuse to abrogate our traditional freedoms and enter an endless war in an effort to control Middle east oil.
We should take the Fukushima disaster as a wake up call. The reactions to a wake-up call are crucial. Some simply turn off the alarm and go back to sleep. Others jump into action by putting their pants on backwards and running off in a panic. Neither solves the reason for alarm. It is good to have a plan in place for action once you have been warned what the alarm will mean.
The disaster at Fukushima Dai Ichi will create an exclusion area of thousands of square miles that will be so damaged as to outlast everyone alive today. Fukushima has already fouled the ocean and the skies with radioactive plumes that will poison our young even if we are thousands of miles away.
The six reactor disaster at TEPCO's Fukushima Dai Ichi nuclear plant demonstrates the fragility of backup cooling systems when the power grid is compromised by a natural (or man-made) disaster. Even the most hardened nuclear plants have only days of back-up power and water to control nuclear reactions. All these plants assume that the grid will be back online in hours and that interstate, or other transportation systems, will be operational in order to relieve on site limitations in handling a disaster like Fukushima.
According to the European Nuclear Society (http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm) there are 442 nuclear reactors producing electricity in the world with a total production of 62,862 megawatts. As of January 2011 there were 65 more reactors to be built.
Nuclear plants require a high level of offsite support that we likely may not have available in another 50 years. That includes continuous:
Image above: Tokyo office workers witness 311 disaster. From (http://spreadia.com/Population/188791553/Population_soars_near_US_nuclear_reactors).
The terrorist attack September 11, 2001 (that we simply refer to as 911) was a wake-up call. Unfortunately, America took that event as an excuse to abrogate our traditional freedoms and enter an endless war in an effort to control Middle east oil.
We should take the Fukushima disaster as a wake up call. The reactions to a wake-up call are crucial. Some simply turn off the alarm and go back to sleep. Others jump into action by putting their pants on backwards and running off in a panic. Neither solves the reason for alarm. It is good to have a plan in place for action once you have been warned what the alarm will mean.
The disaster at Fukushima Dai Ichi will create an exclusion area of thousands of square miles that will be so damaged as to outlast everyone alive today. Fukushima has already fouled the ocean and the skies with radioactive plumes that will poison our young even if we are thousands of miles away.
The six reactor disaster at TEPCO's Fukushima Dai Ichi nuclear plant demonstrates the fragility of backup cooling systems when the power grid is compromised by a natural (or man-made) disaster. Even the most hardened nuclear plants have only days of back-up power and water to control nuclear reactions. All these plants assume that the grid will be back online in hours and that interstate, or other transportation systems, will be operational in order to relieve on site limitations in handling a disaster like Fukushima.
According to the European Nuclear Society (http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm) there are 442 nuclear reactors producing electricity in the world with a total production of 62,862 megawatts. As of January 2011 there were 65 more reactors to be built.
Nuclear plants require a high level of offsite support that we likely may not have available in another 50 years. That includes continuous:
- Connection to a 24/7/365 robust energy grid.
- Copious amounts of cooling water and ways to process it.
- On demand delivery from a heavy duty transportation system.
- An industrial base capable of replacing all crucial nuclear hardware.
- All planned new nuclear reactors should be abandoned.
- A reduction of 62,862 megawatts of energy consumption should be phased in.
- The cold shutdown of all nuclear power plants should follow that phasing.
- All the while we should be substituting alternative energy as fast as resources allow.
Cheap Full Spectrum Solar PV
SUBHEAD: Scientists develop solar panels that work with full spectrum light - almost in the dark.
By Jeffrey Davis on 27 January 2011 for GreenWala -
(http://www.greenwala.com/channels/green-technology/blog/13103-Scientists-Develop-Affordable-Solar-Panels-That-Work-In-The-Dark)
Image above: Solar panels in the dark, From original article [Photo: Norby/Flickr].
Image above: Solar panels in the dark, From original article [Photo: Norby/Flickr].
It's about damn time, don't you think?
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announced Wednesday that they have been able to confirm a new high-efficiency solar cell design that utilizes nearly the entire solar spectrum.
Translation: They figured out a way to make solar panels generate electricity in the dark.
In earlier trials, the researchers used different alloys that achieved full spectrum responses but involved very high production costs. The advantage of gallium arsenide nitride is that it is very similar to a conventional semiconductor, gallium arsenide, and it can be produced with a commonly used fabrication method involving chemical vapor deposition. The Lawrence Berkeley breakthrough represents just one path to increasing the efficiency and lowering the cost of solar cells. Over at Ohio State University, a full spectrum solar cell is also under development, and Stanford is pursuing a new technology that cuts around the problem of solar cell efficiency loss due to high temperature
In the meantime, you could just turn any metal surface into solar panels with photovoltaic spray paint.
.Regarding the KIUC debacle
SOURCE: Ken Taylor (taylork021@hawaii.rr.com)
SUBHEAD: Let’s see if our current leadership actually abandons all hydroelectric projects as Mr. Proudfoot warned.
By Vince Cosner on 16 June 2011 in The Garden Island -
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_23b26d16-97e1-11e0-a41f-001cc4c002e0.html)
Image above: Everard Proudfoot, a grumpy hobbit of the shire. From (http://www.theargonath.cc/characters/proudfoot/proudfoot.html).
The sleeping giant isn’t fully awake yet, but he’s starting to stir all right. Members from all over our island are voicing their concerns about the upcoming KIUC vote on hydroelectric power. If you feel your options were honestly and fairly presented beforehand, all you’ve got to do is vote your conscience.
But if you weren’t satisfied with how they conducted themselves recently or simply disagree with the direction they’re taking, please vote “No” upon receiving your ballot. If the “No’s” ultimately prevail, then let’s see if our current leadership actually abandons all hydroelectric projects in the future as Mr. Proudfoot, KIUC’s attorney, warned.
Actually, I’d be more worried if Mr. Proudfoot was in charge of KIUC, but he’s not. He was just honing his “bullish” style of character, but trust me; he’s just full of himself and trying his best to scare us into voting “Yes.” In reality, he’s a little short on substance but tall on yarn. Should hydro project abandonment actually occur, we could always put people on the Board that are more inclined to move it forward. Problem solved. We might want a new attorney while we’re at it.
Right now, I’m more concerned about how KIUC is going to count the blank or undecided ballots. I hope they count them as “No’s” as in other elections. I truly wish we could all step back, take a moment to actually discuss our game plan with more clarity and proceed to get hydroelectric power on this water rich island in the best way possible. If using the FERC is that “best way possible,” then KIUC should have considered pono methods of expressing themselves versus the methods they chose. But it’s too late now.
The ballots are on their way, and we have to remember some cold hard facts right now. The job of the KIUC Board of Directors is to chart the course of the company, then get out of the way. The CEO takes over and decides how to get there. So who’s really responsible for getting us in this predicament? It can’t be Mr. Asquith. He just wanted to discuss the game plan for making hydroelectricity on our grid a reality and you just can’t do that with only three minutes.
Anyone involved in a high school debate competition knows that. It can’t be their attorney, Mr. Proudfoot. He was just there to support their CEO and Board Of Directors because that’s what he does. So that leaves their CEO, Mr. Bissell, the Chairman of the Board, Mr. Tacbian, the directors themselves or all of the above. But aren’t they just doing their jobs? I think their first mistake was trying to emulate the Kaua‘i County Council style of taking testimony from its community members.
But there’s no back and forth permitted or even encouraged in that style of meeting. If and when an exchange does occur, the questions flow from someone on the committee to the one testifying, not the other way around. Is that what you expected at your KIUC membership meeting? It would have been more productive had a professional facilitator been used to organize and prioritize member concerns. To expect an outcome other than what we got that night would have been kidding ourselves.
I used to provide facilitator services for Kauai Electric while still employed there back in the 90s, but I don’t know what happened to that practice since it changed to KIUC years later. And why can’t one member surrender his/her time to another? What’s the big deal? What if you asked a question knowing the answer you received was flat out incorrect and you had the data to prove it. Could you get it done in your remaining 1.25 minutes? I doubt it.
We’ll have to organize a tag team style of questioning if they do it this way again. I think we were either intentionally set up to fail or the leadership talent over there is seriously questionable. I miss Randy Hee.
.
SUBHEAD: Let’s see if our current leadership actually abandons all hydroelectric projects as Mr. Proudfoot warned.
By Vince Cosner on 16 June 2011 in The Garden Island -
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/opinion/mailbag/article_23b26d16-97e1-11e0-a41f-001cc4c002e0.html)
Image above: Everard Proudfoot, a grumpy hobbit of the shire. From (http://www.theargonath.cc/characters/proudfoot/proudfoot.html).
The sleeping giant isn’t fully awake yet, but he’s starting to stir all right. Members from all over our island are voicing their concerns about the upcoming KIUC vote on hydroelectric power. If you feel your options were honestly and fairly presented beforehand, all you’ve got to do is vote your conscience.
But if you weren’t satisfied with how they conducted themselves recently or simply disagree with the direction they’re taking, please vote “No” upon receiving your ballot. If the “No’s” ultimately prevail, then let’s see if our current leadership actually abandons all hydroelectric projects in the future as Mr. Proudfoot, KIUC’s attorney, warned.
Actually, I’d be more worried if Mr. Proudfoot was in charge of KIUC, but he’s not. He was just honing his “bullish” style of character, but trust me; he’s just full of himself and trying his best to scare us into voting “Yes.” In reality, he’s a little short on substance but tall on yarn. Should hydro project abandonment actually occur, we could always put people on the Board that are more inclined to move it forward. Problem solved. We might want a new attorney while we’re at it.
Right now, I’m more concerned about how KIUC is going to count the blank or undecided ballots. I hope they count them as “No’s” as in other elections. I truly wish we could all step back, take a moment to actually discuss our game plan with more clarity and proceed to get hydroelectric power on this water rich island in the best way possible. If using the FERC is that “best way possible,” then KIUC should have considered pono methods of expressing themselves versus the methods they chose. But it’s too late now.
The ballots are on their way, and we have to remember some cold hard facts right now. The job of the KIUC Board of Directors is to chart the course of the company, then get out of the way. The CEO takes over and decides how to get there. So who’s really responsible for getting us in this predicament? It can’t be Mr. Asquith. He just wanted to discuss the game plan for making hydroelectricity on our grid a reality and you just can’t do that with only three minutes.
Anyone involved in a high school debate competition knows that. It can’t be their attorney, Mr. Proudfoot. He was just there to support their CEO and Board Of Directors because that’s what he does. So that leaves their CEO, Mr. Bissell, the Chairman of the Board, Mr. Tacbian, the directors themselves or all of the above. But aren’t they just doing their jobs? I think their first mistake was trying to emulate the Kaua‘i County Council style of taking testimony from its community members.
But there’s no back and forth permitted or even encouraged in that style of meeting. If and when an exchange does occur, the questions flow from someone on the committee to the one testifying, not the other way around. Is that what you expected at your KIUC membership meeting? It would have been more productive had a professional facilitator been used to organize and prioritize member concerns. To expect an outcome other than what we got that night would have been kidding ourselves.
I used to provide facilitator services for Kauai Electric while still employed there back in the 90s, but I don’t know what happened to that practice since it changed to KIUC years later. And why can’t one member surrender his/her time to another? What’s the big deal? What if you asked a question knowing the answer you received was flat out incorrect and you had the data to prove it. Could you get it done in your remaining 1.25 minutes? I doubt it.
We’ll have to organize a tag team style of questioning if they do it this way again. I think we were either intentionally set up to fail or the leadership talent over there is seriously questionable. I miss Randy Hee.
.
Tickling the Dragon's Tail
SOURCE: David Ward (ward.david7@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: We are all coming to realize is that the global economy is delicate, hungry, but there is no brain.
By PeakSurfer on 11 June 2011 for Peaksurfer Blog -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2011/06/tea-baggers-tickle-dragons-tail.html)
Image above: Luis Slotin tickling the dragon's tail in Los Alamos. From (http://tomsviewpoint.blogspot.com/2011/03/chernobylwikileaks-japan-and-reality.html).
Image above: Luis Slotin tickling the dragon's tail in Los Alamos. From (http://tomsviewpoint.blogspot.com/2011/03/chernobylwikileaks-japan-and-reality.html).
Outside the Fukushima plant and for some distance at night, can be seen the intermittently sparkling blue glow of re-criticality, as the melted fuel from four reactors, moderated by fresh water pumped from fire trucks, puts on a light show of ionized air over the coast of Japan. This is a requiem display, a salute of fireworks, because Japan, mortally wounded, is dying the same way the Soviet Union did, killed by the nuclear dragon it thought it had tamed.
This same light show was once observed in 1946, with fatal consequences, by physics students working in Los Alamos on advancements to the atomic bomb. Louis Slotin, their 35-year-old Canadian instructor, had been the criticality math whiz of the Manhattan Project and had personally assembled the core of the Trinity device. His method of establishing critical mass values was very bold, not to say reckless. Slotin would push fissile masses together slowly until they displayed early onset signs of criticality to clickity-clacking Geiger meters. On May 21, 1946, Sloton demonstrated his technique, which Richard Feynmann had by then coined “tickling the dragon’s tail,” to the six star-struck students in his lab.
Using his bare hands, Sloton slowly moved a screwdriver out from between two beryllium half-spheres lined with uranium reflecting neutrons back to a 3.5-inch-diameter (89 mm) plutonium core. At exactly 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell. The room flashed iridescent blue and Slotin, reacting heroically, used his other hand to knock the spheres apart. He died horribly, nine days later, from the exposure, but he saved the rest of the people in the room, not to mention everyone within a 5 mile radius of Los Alamos.
The idiotcracy that staged a palace coup in the US Congress last fall is now tickling the dragon’s tail of the full faith and credit of the United States. Refusing to give up tax breaks for the rich and powerful, the Exxons, BPs and Haliburtons, the tea-baggers and their millionaire Republican allies are demanding elimination of medicare, privatization of Social Security, and a blather of deep social welfare cuts that any impartial accountant (the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, or the Office of Management and Budget,for instance) recognize as not only ineffective (pushing the USA into far greater, and more expensive, problems down the road), but purely political gamesmanship.
The goal of that game, for millionaire Republicans, is to get as close to the brink as possible, elicit as many concessions for the wealthy as possible by beggaring the poor, and then to pass a new debt ceiling and repeat the process.
The goal of the Tea Baggers, for whom nuance and strategy are not strong suits, is to play to the cheers of the Colosseum as they give thumbs down to federalism and separation of powers and toss the Moorish President to the lions.
The US is now officially without a fiscal budget, living on holdover spending, mere wax and string that runs out on August 2nd. The millionaire Republicans want to strike a deal on August 1st and ham it up for the cameras until then. The Tea Baggers want to strike a deal on August 3rd, if then, to give both the Democrats and Republicans a taste of the lash. Neither have any idea of what kind of dragon the tail they are tickling belongs to.
The US Treasury is limited by Congress to borrowing up to a debt limit, originally established in 1939. Since Congress originates all federal activities requiring funding, such as insanely expensive foreign war adventures or sending rockets up into space, Congress has to annually increase the debt limit to keep up. The last increase was in February, 2010, to $14.294 trillion. George W. Bush increased it 8 times, moving it from 57% of GDP to 84% of GDP. Under Obama, it has risen to 97% of GDP.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1935 that Congress does not have the power to void a government bond, so if any loans come due, it is obligated to pay them or default. Here is what happens if the Tea Baggers’ screwdriver slips:
There would be widespread banking collapse, not just in the US, but everywhere dollars are traded as the currency of choice for oil and other commodities. If economic transactions are halted, then trade and supply-chains break. The longer goods are stalled in the pipeline the more consumables and perishables decay in transit and storage or are consumed by present holders or returned to sender. Pipelines and machines rust, factories close, unemployment and starvation turns to riot.
The longer the down time and the wider the scale, the harder the re-boot once the idiots see what they have done. The dollar ceases once and forever to be the world’s reserve currency. Suddenly, instead of getting everything in the global economy at a discount, the US pays top dollar to buy, say, Swiss Francs, so it can pay for its addictions.
FEASTA’s David Korowicz, writing last month on large-scale risk management, said, “The wonder of our globalized economy is that in all this globalized integration and complexity there is no one in control…. So, while national economies may have an individual character, they have no autonomous existence in anything like their present form outside the globalized economy, just as an arm, lung or heart cannot declare independence from the human body.” Korowicz was underscoring the point that we are all coming to realize: the global economic body is delicately interconnected, and hungry, but there is no brain.
In the US, a Zombie Congress is dragging itself through the angry streets in search of fresh blood. It may, in the end, have to settle for consuming its own. This dragon does not like to be tickled.
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