A Drop of Rain

I have collected a variety of links and don’t really have anything to do with them, so I’ll just post them and let you figure it out.

All of them are in some way or other related to the state of the pit now, no future fantasies are required to see the rapidly approaching future world.

• Nature stunner: Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean’s phytoplankton – ClimateProgress.org – 2010-07-29 — Scientists may have found the most devastating impact yet of human-caused global warming — a 40% decline in phytoplankton since 1950 linked to the rise in ocean sea surface temperatures. If confirmed, it may represent the single most important finding of the year in climate science.
• How we wrecked the oceans — Part II – declineoftheempire.com – 2010-08-01 — The latest issue of Nature contained a paper by Daniel G. Boyce, Marlon R. Lewis & Boris Worm called Global phytoplankton decline over the past century. This research describes a planetary catastrophe which, on a scale of 1 to 10, ranks about 8.5 on the disaster scale. This post should be viewed as a follow-up to How We Wrecked The Oceans (DOTE, May 17, 2010).
• Reactions to the phytoplankton crisis – declineoftheempire.com – 2010-08-05 — As I was preparing my post How We Wrecked The Oceans—Part II, I ran across several reactions from scientifically illiterate but politically savvy bloggers. I want to go through some of what they said. I am not here to praise them.

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Although I try to avoid verbatim repeats of people’s comment postings, this one is so clear and coherent that it really has to be preserved from the daily disappearing and endlessly scrolling comment threads appearing now daily at theOilDrum.

This is precisely the type of understanding the nuclear industry as a whole does not want people to have, and they try to keep these daily realities out of the media and public eye as much as possible in order to maintain the fiction of safe, clean power.

ransu on March 19, 2011 – 9:00am, TheOilDrum.com Drumbeat discussion

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this field. I work with metrology of physics standards.

If you ever walk into a nuclear power plant, you will see danger signs with either or both of these written on them:

DOSE RATE

CONTAMINATION

Basically there are two kinds of exposure to radioactivity: the direct exposure to radiation where an external source emits EM energy in the form of particles or energy which hit your body – let us call it external. For example walking alongside the waste pool now exposed and without its blanket of water between you and the rods, would mostly likely give you a lethal dose.

In a nuclear power plant areas marker with DANGER! DOSE RATE are areas where you are close enough or unshielded from the reactor core, waste pool or primary circuit. You need to wear a dosimeter and the time you spend there is monitored and limited. This part of radioactivity is what we can directly measure in units called Sievert with portable counters and indicators and the one currently quoted all over the media.

However it is contamination which is in many ways is a far greater danger. In order to have radiation you need something that radiates – a decaying radioisotope. Normally all these isotopes remain safely in the reactor core – and the extremely pure circulating primary water holds almost no radioactive isotopes (except for some very short lived temporarily created by the intense core radiation). However over time, and if you have abnormalities, especially accidents, core radiation can change the surrounding materials into radioactive isotopes – which is why you choose all materials and fluids very carefully and control their purity – and keep everything absolutely clean around there!

Areas of a nuclear power plant with DANGER CONTAMINATION include areas for fission material handling and areas indirectly exposed to intense radiation – where there is a possibility that some radioactive particles have either escaped or formed around surfaces where you might touch them, carry them with you, even inhale them. In these areas you need to wear a protective suit, and everything you carry with you outside, including yourself, needs to go through decontamination – meaning lots of scrubbing. You don’t want to get stuck with even one of these nasty particles because they can enter your body and literally give you “the dose of your life”.
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In general I tend to ignore surface noise as we scrabble around the floor of the pit we’re digging for ourselves, but now and then an event of such magnitude occurs that it’s just not possible to at least follow it as it unfolds.

Please note that some of these links will go offline as the world’s attention drifts towards other things, I’ll try to keep them fairly up to date.

Video Feeds

• NHK live stream on upstream.
• NHK live stream: direct link, no web page (offline as of March27, try nhk.or.jp/nhkworld instead)
• BBC live stream
• CNN live stream

News and Information Sources

• UCS Daily Press Briefing Has links to each day’s current press briefing
• english.kyodonews.jp Japan nuclear crisis – Live updates, also you can get live feed tsunami/earthquake news updates and nuclear disaster updates as well.
• www.jaif.or.jp/english/ Current pdf whitepapers on situation status
• Japan–Earthquake/Tsunami/Nuclear Energy Resources « INFOdocket. This page is full of handy links
• allthingsnuclear.org/tagged/Japan_nuclear Site is maintained by the Union of Concerned Scientists
• MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub
• Wikipedia: Fukushima I nuclear accidents It’s wikipedia, for better or worse, but that page should be useful over time.
• WSJ Japan Earthquake/Nuclear Disaster Page Frequent updates.

Live / Current News Blogs

The following news sites have live blogs where you can find minute by minute updates:

• Union of Concerned Scientists: All Things Nuclear Fukushima oriented blog, updated frequently. Probably one of the most reliable sources out there.
• Kyodo News
• BBC Online
• The Telegraph, UK
• The Guardian, UK
• Al Jazeera Links to each day’s Japan blogs down the page a little bit.
• Reuters

Reports and Serious Analysis

• Japan nuclear crisis is here to stay – Asia Times – Apr 7 This is more of an opinion piece, but it’s an interesting point.
• U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant – NYT – April 5
• “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” “George Monbiot’s nuclear conversion and an ecological visualisation of the elephant in the room that, it appears, no mainstream environmentalist, let alone the political class, dare talk about.” Read this one, forget all the pro-nuke garbage, this has the real energy utilization rates, CO2 data, etc. As usual, everything the nuclear industry says is a lie. That seems to be a solid framework to view these things from.
• We Are Looting the Past and Future to Feed the Present – Spiegel – March 23 “The entire affluence-based economic model of the postwar era, be it in Japan or here in Germany, is based on the idea that cheap energy and rising material consumption are supposed to make us happier and happier. This is why nuclear power plants are now being built in areas that are highly active geologically, and why we consume as much oil in one year as was created in 5.3 million years. We are looting both the past and the future to feed the excess of the present. It’s the dictatorship of the here and now.” Yes indeed, that just about sums it up I’d say.
• Status report: Reactor-by-reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant – CNN – March 25
• The Japanese Nuclear Power Crisis Deepens – Forbes – March 24 Despite progress in restoring electricity to some areas of FDI, a member of the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority commented yesterday, “We still judge the situation to be critical.”
• The Business Case Against Nuclear Power – WSJ – March 24(paywall, see excerpt here) “So how has anyone been able to afford to build any plants at all? In short, government support. The business model for nuclear power generation relies primarily on extracting huge amounts of taxpayer subsidies.”
• Atomic Cleanup Cost Goes to Japan’s Taxpayers, May Spur Liability Shift – Bloomberg – March 23 As usual, socialize risk, privatize profit. Too familiar in too many industries today.
• Kyodo News – Status of Fukushima nuclear power plants – March 22 Plant by plant status report
• Workers must cool 4,546 spent fuel rod bundles – Asahi.com – March 20 Good news report that explains the actual numbers of rods involved, and what needs to be done with them, as well as current status of reactors and cooling ponds.
• April 7 :: March 31 :: March 29 :: March 28 :: March 25 :: March 24 :: March 23 :: March 22 :: March 21 :: March 20 :: March 19 :: March 18 :: March 17 :: March 16 :: March 15 :: March 14 :: Union of Concerned Scientists Update on Japan’s Nuclear Power Crisis Daily (almost) Telepress Conferences (conferences main page)
• The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety in 2010 UCS Report
• Examining the Fiction of Safe, Clean Nuclear Power: Case Study This was originally posted as a comment in theoildrum but it’s too good to let fade in thoe long discussion threads, so I saved it here as well.
• www.debito.org The article starts by stating: Another trustworthy source connected with the industry believes, short of a miracle, Fukushima reactors won’t be cooled enough in time; there will be “fission product release” – We’ll see how these insider reports pan out in the real world, March 18
• JAIF: Reactor Status and Major Events Update 12 – NPPs in Fukushima as of 16:00 March 18, 2011 (PDF file)
• JAIF: Current Status of Units 1 to 4 at Fukushima Daiichi NPS as of noon, March 17, 2011 (PDF file)

Pro Industry News / Information Sources

• www.world-nuclear-news.org This is pro-nuclear by definition but they have official reports and knowledge
• www.tepco.co.jp This one is useful simply to see how slow and sanitized the official output is

Online Discussions and Analysis

As usual, theOilDrum.com is my go-to discussion and information source when it comes to energy related issues and problems.

• OilDrum Focused Topic Discussions/Analysis
  • Fukushima Dai-ichi status and prognosis – March 30
  • Fukushima Dai-ichi status and slow burning issues – March 25
  • Fukushima Dai-ichi status and potential outcomes – March 17
  • Safety of nuclear power and death of the nuclear renaissance – March 15
  • Stoneleigh – How Black Is the Japanese Nuclear Swan? – March 13
• OilDrum.com Fukushima Discussion Threads
  • April 8 :: April 6 :: April 4 :: April 2 :: April 1 :: March 30 :: March 29 :: March 27 :: March 20 :: March 19 :: March 18 :: March 17 :: March 16 :: March 15 :: March 14 :: March 13 Also see the drumbeat threads, as well as the focused analysis posts for ongoing information.
• Other Discussions of Interest
  • The Nuclear Nightmare Continues – Radio Ecoshock -Thursday, March 24, 2011 Part one of this episode has a major interview with world-famous anti-nuclear campaigner Dr. Helen Caldicott after the Fukushima Japan nuclear accident. Red hot. Covering nuclear power threats in Japan, the United States, Canada, France, and Europe generally (includes a full transcript).
  • Club Orlov, written by Dmitri Orlov: Nuclear Meltdowns 101 – March 18 :: Earth Shakes, Sea Surges, Nukes Blow – March 15
  • Cassandra’s legacy, written by Hugo Bardi: The Great Technological Wall – March 22 :: Fukushima: the nuclear martingale – March 17
  • Greg Palast, the great investigative reporter: Tokyo Electric to Build US Nuclear Plants – The no-BS info on Japan’s disastrous nuclear operators – March 14 Read it and weep. He knows all the main players, including TEPCO, from previous investigative reports he’s done. Yes, it’s worse than PR shills are trying to paint it. Don’t miss this one!

Online Tools

• www.weatheronline.co.uk animation displays a potential dispersion of the radioactive cloud (Caesium 137 Isotope) after a nuclear accident in reactor Fukushima I
• www.weatheronline.co.uk – Cloud Spread – Fukushima I power plant Latest radioactive emissions plume forecasts
• Japan Radiation by Prefecture (map)
• Very good tool to see difference before/after of earthquake zones Just slide the bar starting at the left to see how the impact of the tsunami results in basically a sweeping clean of all human constructions. (site is Norwegian but the tools are intuitive)
• Chernobyl radiation map 1996 This gives you a good feel for what the radiation levels were as that event unfolded over time, it’s an image map.

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Now and then I come across a posting made by someone that is so perfect in terms of how it explains a problem I have to post the entire thing, with little further commentary. In general I’m not going get as much into specifics like this in the future, unless the points are exceptionally well and clearly stated, as this one is. RockyMtnGuy is a petroleum engineer from Canada, by the way.

This one is from TheOilDrum.com Feb 8, 2011 Drumbeat

RockyMtnGuy on February 8, 2011 – 10:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Parent subthread | Comments top

“I’ve lived in a few countries, and in every single one of them, I paid tax in order to have health care on demand.” [quoted from a posting above this one]

In most countries, health care is considered an entitlement. If you live there, you are entitled to health care, although how it is paid for varies considerably.

It is like paying for the roads in the US. The US built a very impressive Interstate highway system. If you lived there, not paying for it was not an option. It came out of your taxes, or out of user fees such as gasoline taxes. Nobody had to sign up for the right to drive on an Interstate highway, nor did they have the right to opt out of the system on the grounds the didn’t want to use it. Everyone in the US can use the Interstate highways “for free” because not paying for them was not an option.

In other developed countries, the medical insurance programs are funded much like the US Interstate highway system. Not paying for them is not an option.

The difficulty the US has is that many people do not want to or cannot afford to pay for medical services – the 45 million people who do not have medical insurance. The real difficulty is that these people might well die due to lack of services, so there are systems such as “Medicaid” which pays for families with low incomes, and “Medicare” for people who are aged 65 and over, all funded by the taxpayer.

In the US, the insurance companies get to “cherry pick” the low-risk population and pay for about half of the total costs, and the government gets stuck with the other half of the costs incurred by the high-risk welfare and elderly population. In other countries, “cherry picking” is not allowed.

Cherry picking – the activity of pursuing the most lucrative, advantageous, or profitable among various options and leaving the less attractive ones for others.

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Whatever you do, don’t miss this recent long interview with Robert Hirsh. He is interviewed by Jim Puplava. You can listen to the stream or download the mp3.

Hirsh has just written a new book called, of course, The Impending World Energy Mess [amazon].

If you take the time to stop watching fantasy news, left or right, and read a few serious people, like Hirsh, you’ll soon find there is exactly zero room for optimism about our energy future. Once your realize this, you may start taking steps that actually correspond somewhat to the future that is coming. In other words, steps that lead away from an unsustainable present. What Hirsh presents are just boring objective facts, and solid, workman-like analysis.

Refreshing, of course, in the way someone talking about something that actually resembles reality when everyone else is trying to make up an alternate reality. This reality is now being admitted by among others, the US Military, the German Military, the British Government, and an ever expanding group of somewhat rational cities around the planet.

Hirsh was the main author of the US government sponsored ‘The Hirsh Report’, which about 5 years ago outlined what was coming.

He has just written a new book that analyzes where we are at now, which is tipping on the edge of the peak, which further means, we’re about to start on the downhill side.

He covers all the current fantasies, wind power, solar, etc, as well as the past oil production, current oil production, and anticipated future production, including the current plateau of production we’ve been on now for about 5 years. Exactly as Deffeyes predicted, and pretty close to what Hubbert predicted some decades ago.

I really like Hirsh because he’s so solid, so non-dramatic, and he’s basically just interested in reality, not making up fairytales about how everything will be just fine when the as of yet undiscovered new energy source saves the day.

And this doesn’t even talk about over-population.

Is he right, is he wrong? I’m guessing more right than wrong, sadly, since pretty much everything he’s saying in this interview is true.

The fake “recovery” was nice while it lasted, says famous apocalyptic forecaster Gerald Celente, founder of the Trends Research Institute. But now the fun’s over, and we’re headed for what Celente describes as the “Greatest Depression.” Specifically, the always startling Celente says the country is headed for rising unemployment, poverty, and violent class warfare as the government efforts to keep the economy going begin to fail.

The crux of the problem, Celente argues, is that the middle class has been wiped out. America used to be a land of opportunity for all, where hard-working people could build their own small businesses in their own communities and live prosperous and fulfilling lives.

But now a collusion of state and corporate interests that Celente describes as “fascism” have conspired to help only the biggest companies and the richest Americans. This has put a shocking amount of the country’s wealth in the hands of a privileged few and left the rest of the country to subsist on chicken-feed wages and low job satisfaction as Wal-Mart “associates” — or worse.

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There’s a lot of stuff going on right now in the economy, I’ll post some more soon, but for now let’s take a listen to one of the few coherent voices out there, William Black.

The Obama Administration says the recently signed Dodd-Frank Law, the biggest bank overhaul in decades, will ensure against another financial crisis.  William Black Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City couldn’t disagree more.

“They haven’t dealt with any of the fundamental perverse incentive structures that cause these recurrent, intensifying crises,” he tells Tech Ticker. In other words, the incentive to take excessive short-term risk in exchange for a multi-million dollar bonus is still very much intact. “Your pay should be based on long term performance instead of short term results which are easy to gimmick through accounting,” he says. 

Excessive pay on Wall Street, which Black says is the biggest culprit of the financial crisis, is just one reason we’re likely to witness another crisis in the not so distant future. Financial regulation reform also fails to deal with the “professional compensation” structure, says Black, a former federal regulator during the Savings & Loan Scandal. By that, he means the continued reliance on lawyers, appraisers, rating agencies and auditors ensures these professionals will remain the “most valuable allies to the frauds.”

We’re also no safer with the Dodd-Frank law than without it simply because, as a whole, the financial system doesn’t believe in regulation, Black observes. “It’s the ideology [which says] ‘you can never regulate effectively’, so why bother to try.” Finally, Black says, the law fails to end ‘Too Big to Fail’. As long as this policy exists we’re guaranteed to face more bailouts. “Why would we allow these systemically dangerous institutions to continue?,” he wonders.
Wall Street’s “Perverse Incentive Structures” Guarantee Another Crisis, Says Bill Black
by Peter Gorenstein – Yahoo

I’m just going to quote this in-depth. Even though the person being interviewed is promoting his own interests, nothing he is saying as far as i can tell is inaccurate, and I’ve read the same thing elsewhere, repeatedly.

See:

• URANIUM RESOURCES AND NUCLEAR ENERGY – Energy Watch Group 2006
• theoildrum.com Uranium Depletion and Nuclear Power: Are We at Peak Uranium? March 21, 2007

So without further ado, here’s part of an interview with Bill Powers (please note that this appears to be an automatically generated transcription, ie, it’s not very accurate):

Interviewer: A whole lot of newsletters cover oil and gas, but you picked uranium, which hardly anyone was covering until recently?

Bill Powers: I feel the uranium market right now could be the world’s most unbalanced commodity market. Inside a sense, the planet, by means of the nuclear power industry, consumes approximately 172 million pounds of uranium per year, as well as the planet only produces about 92 million pounds of uranium per year. The supply deficit is produced up through above-ground inventories, which are becoming worked down pretty quickly. Individuals numbers were supplied by Uranium Info Center. A great deal of my information arrives through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. For example, I discovered from them that the U.S. made, through the 1980s, about 43.seven million pounds of uranium. And by 2002, the U.S. only created about 2.34 million pounds of uranium.

Interviewer: Exactly where is uranium being created in the United States?

Bill Powers: Wyoming. There’s also a uranium facility in Nebraska. I think there are two in-situ leach plants in Wyoming and an additional 1 in Nebraska. There are a couple of phosphate farmers in Florida who generate uranium. I believe there can be a facility in Texas that also produces uranium. For that most part, the uranium business in New Mexico has just about been wiped out. The extremely low rates that we’ve seen, for about twenty years, have pretty a lot wiped out the entire U.S. uranium market. To go from over 43 million pounds to less than 2.five million pounds, it has truly only allowed the most productive, highest margin and most efficient mines in the nation to continue operating in that environment.
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If you follow energy matters, you might have heard about the new shale gas extraction methods.

Allegedly the near cornucopia of free energy, the new methods, asides from using extremely toxic liquid materials to fracture the rock formations to let the gas slip out to the well bore, for extraction, have been promoted by people like T. Boone Pickens as the source for future US energy needs in the transport sector. The latter by switching the truck/heavy equipment fleet to natural gas power.

This is supposed to be a good idea because it’s supposedly a 100 year’s supply. As usual, sadly, with such rosy predictions, the real numbers, when re-examined in the light of non-delusional, somewhat sane, thinking, simply do not hold up.

A current theoildrum.com posting highlights this issue.

Arthur Berman talks about Shale Gas

If you investigate the origin of this supposed 100-year supply of natural gas…where does this come from? If you go back to the Potential Gas Committee’s [PGC] report, which is where I believe it comes from, and if you look at the magnitude of the technically recoverable resource they describe and you divide it by annual US consumption, you come up with 90 years, not 100. Some would say that’s splitting hairs, yet 10% is 10%. But if you go on and you actually read the report, they say that the probable number-I think they call it the P-2 number-is closer to 450 Tcf as opposed to roughly 1800 Tcf. What they’re saying is that if you pin this thing down where there have actually been some wells drilled that have actually produced some gas, the technically recoverable resource is closer to 450. And if you divide that by three, which is the component that is shale gas, you get about 150 Tcf and that’s about 7 year’s worth of US supply from shale. I happen to think that that’s a pretty darn realistic estimate. And remember that that’s a resource number, not a reserve number; it has nothing to do with commercial extractability. So the gross resource from shale is probably about 7 years worth of supply.

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Recently I read a response to a fairly typical corporate type apologist in theoildrum.com comment thread. If you don’t follow theoildrum.com, it has a real problem, as do many US based forums/blogs that cater to any industry, with libertarian neo-conservative ant-government/deregulation notions among some, luckily not all, of its members.

This is about the most concise, accurate, rebuttal of the deregulation position I’ve ever seen.

syncro on July 13, 2010 – 8:53pm
Obeying regs is not going to provide a defense. But I am more interested in your point that

“BP’s response plan was filed and APPROVED by MMS as good enough. It wasn’t but that’s not BP’s fault…”

What catches my interest is that a lot of the conservative politicians argue that we should have less regulation. Some even say no regulation. Throw in the problem of the undue influence of corporate lobbyists and political cash. You wind up with a weak regulatory body that is instructed by the president to basically act as a force for promoting drilling. The new head cuts back funding for enforcement. Regs. are loosely enforced if at all. In other words, it is an ideal regulatory body from the point of view of the politicians who preach against regulation. And then when the corporate citizen causes a disaster through reckless conduct, you blame the hollowed-out regulatory body and let the corp. off the hook entirely.

It’s a bit hypocritical, no?

While the comment ends there, it’s worth looking at the question a bit more. The essence, as far as I can tell of all libertarian thinking is NOT, repeat, not, a true desire to achieve freedom for all. No, it’s rather the desire to achieve freedom to achieve wealth/power using whatever means necessary.
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