Archive | Good Information, Good Decisions RSS feed for this section

Predicting the Future, NOT

5 Apr

Back in the mid-1960s, Dan Gardner reports, Olaf Helmer directed a group of RAND Corporation experts in forecasting the state of this that and the other in the year 2000, which is now well behind us. The following were deemed “very probable”:

Controlled thermonuclear power [fusion power] will be economically competitive with other sources of power.

It will be possible to control the weather regionally to a large extent.

Ocean mining on a large scale will be in progress.

Artificial life will have been created in a test tube.

Immunization against all bacterial and viral diseases will be available.

Highly intelligent machines will exist that will act as effective collaborators of scientists and engineers.

I don’t know about life in a test tube, but, by my lights, none of the others have come to pass. What’s the chance that we can predict the effects of producing more nuclear power plants, more waste, etc.?

 

 

Tags: ,

Open Source Ventures, Alternative Currencies

4 Apr

Some interesting posts over at John Robb’s Global Guerillas.

Open Source Venture:

We’ve been working on it for a couple of months now, and have learned some valuable lessons.  The most important lesson is that starting an open source venture is just like starting an open source insurgency.  You need a foco and an example (that provides a plausible promise).

Foco: “…small team, a vanguard if you will, that initiates the effort.” And an example “ignites the imagination.”

Is TPUSA an open source venture?

Alternative Currencies:

  1. Serve as a store of value.
  2. Enable a loyalty program.
  3. Jumpstart a local/virtual economy.

Tags: , ,

Radioactivity may leak for months in Fukushima

4 Apr

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says that if the current situation continues for a long time, with accumulation of more radioactive substances, there will be “a huge impact on the ocean.”

From a summary of the current state of the disaster in The New York Times, 04/04/2011. A special issue of Nature is devoted to the disaster.

Tags: , ,

Ten reasons why new nuclear was a mistake

3 Apr

Plus One (1) makes Eleven (11)! Count ’em!

Alexis Rowell tell us why in this post at Transition Culture. Here’s the list:

  1. Nuclear power is too expensive
  2. New nuclear power stations won’t be ready in time
  3. Nuclear does not and will not safeguard our energy security
  4. Nuclear power is not green
  5. Nuclear power will do little to reduce our carbon emissions
  6. Nuclear power stations are inefficient
  7. Plane crashes are a risk to nuclear power stations
  8. Nuclear power kills
  9. It’s a myth that renewables cannot provide baseload
  10. Global expansion could lead to new nuclear security risks
  11. And we still have no idea what to do with nuclear waste

Here’s what we need to do:

  1. Energy efficiency
  2. Renewables (and possibly Combined Heat & Power in urban areas if we can find enough non-fossil fuels to run it)
  3. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs)

Read the full post to find out more.

IMGP7420rd

Thanks for your attention, your most precious resource . . . and ours.

Tags: ,

My Father Cleaned Coal for a Living

1 Apr

A Systems Story

by Bill Benzon

My father was trained as a chemical engineer. He spent his entire career with Bethlehem Mines, the mining division of the Bethlehem Steel Company. He designed coal-cleaning plants, at least the system for actually cleaning the coal.

This is a story about the last plant that he designed, one designed to keep the air clean while at the same time reducing the cost of running and maintaining the plant. It was a beautiful and elegant solution to a nasty engineering problem. I offer it as a study in systems thinking – though my father probably never used that phrase.

Cleaning Coal

Before coal can be turned into coke (for subsequent use as a fuel in steel-making) it must be cleaned of impurities, mostly sulfur. Most cleaning techniques take advantage of the fact that the rocks containing the impurities are denser than coal. So, you crush the raw coal until all the particles are less than, say, an eighth of an inch. Then you float the crushed coal in some medium – generally, but not always, water – and take advantage of the fact that the rock sinks faster than the coal. There are several things you can do, as I recall, but whichever technique you use, you end up with wet coal when you’re done.

Wet coal is considerably heavier than dry coal. As railroads charge by the pound, it costs more to ship wet coal than dry. And, in the winter, a hopper car filled with wet coal at the mine – coal is generally cleaned at the mine, not at the steel plant – is likely to be filled with frozen coal when you get to the plant. How do you empty that mess from the cars?

So, you need to dry the coal.

The old drying techniques – drying ovens – leaves you with a lot of coal dust in the air. A lot. And coal dust is nasty stuff. You don’t want it spewing out of chimneys anywhere in your neighborhood. Or near your farm.

Continue reading →

Tags:

Megawatt Coal Plants Don't Bring Jobs Home

31 Mar

Utilities sell coal plants by promising jobs in compensation for the environmental hit. A study of “the six largest new coal-fired power plants to come online between 2005 and 2009” indicates that more jobs were promised than were delivered. Writing in The New York Times, Tom Zeller, Jr. reports that “only a little over half, or 56 percent of every 1,000 jobs projected, appeared to be actually created as a result of the coal plants’ coming online. And in four of the six counties, the projects delivered on just over a quarter of the jobs projected.”

How’s the song go? “Sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” And now you don’t even get a job burning the 16 tons. Have we sold our soul to the company store forever?

Tags: ,

Corporatized Education a Fraud?

31 Mar

Michelle Rhee has been advocating education reform based on rewarding teachers whose students score well on standardized tests and firing the others. It now appears that her apparent success in D.C. schools masks possible test fraud on her watch. Writing in the Daily Beast, Diane Ravitch reports results of an investigation into tests at “the Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, which saw spectacular score gains during Rhee’s tenure. Rhee held up the school as a model because the percentage of students who reached proficient on D.C. tests soared from 10 percent to 58 percent in a two-year period.”  An analysis of patterns of erasures on answer sheets

found a dramatic pattern of changing answers from wrong to right at Noyes. In one seventh grade classroom, students averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures on the reading test, as compared to a district-wide average of less than 1. When parents complained that their children’s high scores didn’t make sense, since they were still struggling to do basic math, they were ignored.

Looks like the program motivated someone to game the system, not teach the students. Game-the-system, isn’t that WallStreetspeak for “business as usual”?

 

Tags:

Safety and Sustainability Lacked a Voice at Fukushima

30 Mar

That’s the title of an article Francesca Rheannon has published in Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire. Some of the workers have been hired by subcontractors and have been poorly paid, poorly trained, and poorly outfitted. And some of them have been, in consequence, badly injured. In some cases radiation levels were not being monitored in areas where workers were operating.

What’s the link between injured workers battling to contain the worsening nuclear disaster in Japan and the hundreds of thousands of Japanese residents as far away as Tokyo who are worrying about the radiation spreading invisibly into their air, water and soil? It’s not that the former are trying to protect the latter, although that is true. It’s that a company that takes worker health and safety as cavalierly as TEPCO does is one that takes the health and safety of the environment just as cavalierly.

Rheannon goes on to note: “In the case of Fukushima-Daiichi, the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster a year ago and upper Big Branch Mine disaster before that (just to mention the most famous accidents in recent history), all the companies involved had been cited for poor worker health and safety records before the disasters.”

“Safeguarding worker health and safety isn’t just good for workers and the environment. It’s also good for companies.”

 

Tags:

Hoboken takes aim at private cars

29 Mar

In various ways, cars are at the center of our oil dependence. Long term, well, many things are needed – more public transportation, new kinds of propulsion, reorganized cities, towns, and suburbs. Short term, anything that moves in that general direction.

Hoboken, NJ, is a small city across the Hudson River from mid-town Manhattan. Once a port and small-industrial city, now it’s a bedroom community for people working in New York City. Lots of them. And cars infest the streets. In the past couple of years the city has done two things to free its residents of cars: 1) they’ve partnered with Hertz to create a city-wide car-sharing program. According to the City “the first phase of this program is anticipated to remove more than 750 vehicles from Hoboken’s crowded streets.” 2) They’ve established a shuttle service that circumnavigates the city and is no more than a 5-minute walk from any resident. The shuttles are tracked by GPS, which can be followed on the web or through cell phone. Ridership has increased by 50% in the first 6 months of use.

Tags:

German Solar Outshines Fukushima's Nukes

29 Mar

Reporting in Grist, Christopher Mims notes, with appropriate qualifications, that “total power output of Germany’s installed solar PV panels hit 12.1 GW — greater than the total power output (10 GW) of Japan’s entire 6-reactor nuclear power plant.” The kicker:

Japan’s facing rolling blackouts until next Winter, and it’s undeniable that if the country had more distributed power generation like Germany’s roof-based solar PV system, the entire country would be much more resilient in the face of catastrophe.

Tags:

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →