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.

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

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We Need a Gift Ecology

3 Apr

“Eternal abundance as the capitalist myth. Peel open a Puritan work ethicist and you’ll find a drifty opium head.”

So says eco-critic Tim Morton. More at his blog, including a TED talk. And the best things in life a free, fellowship, music, poems, paintings, and so forth.

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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 →

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Innocent Screams

1 Apr

By Komar, a graffiti artist working in northern New Jersey and who knows where else. This is under the 14th Street viaduct in Jersey City, where it supports thousands of cars a day from Manhattan, through the Holland Tunnel, to points West.

Innocent Screams - Komar

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Never Give Up, Never Surrender

1 Apr

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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?

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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”?

 

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The Case for a Transition Party USA

31 Mar

By Charlie Keil

A national Transition Party USA would protect the apolitical Transition movement from nearby nuclear disasters, the perpetual wars required by the military-industrial-twoparty-complex that will bleed America dry very soon.

From a local transition and resilience perspective, politics as usual, or politics as we have known it, can only be an interesting distraction at best, or a discouraging and entangling alliance with existing power structures at worst. After attending a day of “transition training,” getting just a taste of the humor, joy and personal passions that can be nurtured when you are following common sense and having a good time building community resilience, I wouldn’t want to pull a single person away from this local process and into national politics. The solutions to the shocks of global peak oil, the shocks of global storming, the shocks of global economic steady declines and sudden collapses, the shocks of desperate populations crossing borders for survival, are going to be almost entirely local.

On the other hand, there may be many people this year and next, who are so alienated by totalitarian big government Republicans and so fed up with the wimpy big government Democrats, that they will want a better choice than the one between the lesser of two evils or the evil of two lessers. In particular, there may be many “teapartiers” who really love the Constitution, truly want to return to traditions, family values, family farms, local autonomy, states’ rights, and 9th Amendment rights to privacy, clean conscience, clear consciousness who will find themselves with no one they can vote for enthusiastically as their Representative in the House or Senate. The Transition Party USA, with citizen candidates advocating for the 7 themes and the 7 principles, could be very persuasive and exciting for the millions of Americans, the vast majority of Americans in fact, who have given up on the so-called “two party system” as corrupt, bought and paid for, unresponsive, irresponsible, a game they no longer want to play.

How could elected Transition Party USA Representatives in the House change anything? They could vote for the very few but very important things that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich agree upon, i.e. bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan as the beginning of a non-interventionist, non-state-building, anti-empire foreign policy. They could vote against anything and everything that expands the role of the Federal government at the expense of state and local governments. They could lead common sense, rational, science-respecting Democrats and Republicans to close poisonous and dangerous nuclear power plants one by one using appropriate criteria: demographic (too close to major cities), ecological (biggest threat to water supplies), geological (worst earthquake probabilities), past maintenance weaknesses, age of plant, etc. Even a small group of Representatives following “transition to sustainability” values and principles, rather than lobbyist financial incentives, could make a momentous difference in the House of Representatives by voting as if people and the planet mattered!

* * * * *

I could stop right here. A case a for a “fourth party” (paleoconserving decentralist greens to balance the existing left-green “third party”) well made. But it is important to make two more points:

  1. There are at least ten federal income tax refusers on the right for every tax refuser on the left.
  2. When the economic collapse of 2008 happened I noticed an interesting alliance take shape that lost on key votes.

Continue reading →

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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.”

 

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It's Only Grass

30 Mar

IMGP4306rd Continue reading →

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