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.
• Russia’s oil peak and the German reunification – crudeoilpeak.com — Of interest to us now is how the peaking of Russian oil production impacted on the events in 1990, which was also the year of Saddam Hussein’s invasion in Kuwait (August 1990). We had a convergence of many events, just like today as the global peak is happening. It is important to learn the lessons of the past. It seems that current governments – who still do business as usual and allow new airports and freeways to be built – are still not aware of what consequences peak oil events can have and that they have to prepare for what is coming.
• Bolivia’s dissent strips the Cancun deal naked – climateandcapitalism.com – 2010-12-19 — Bolivia’s indefatigable negotiator, Pablo Solon, put it most cogently in the concluding plenary, when he said that the only way to assess whether the agreement had any ‘clothes’ was to see if it included firm commitments to reduce emissions and whether it was enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. The troubling reality, as he pointed out, is that the agreement merely confirms the completely inadequate voluntary pledges of reductions of 13-16% by 2020 made since Copenhagen’s talks.
• Measuring the meltdown – nature.com – 2010-11-10 — Cold, remote and threatened by global warming: the description applies not only to the North and South Poles, but also to a region of more than five million square kilometres, centred on the Tibetan plateau and the Himalayas, that researchers call the third pole
• History of Crises: The First Global Energy Crisis of 1973-1974 – profi-forex.us – 2010-11-17 — 1973 saw the first and severest energy crisis brought about by OPEC countries who reduced oil production. The economic crisis that started in the US in late 1973 significantly surpassed the global economic crisis of 1957-1958 in terms of the number of affected countries, duration, severity and devastation and, in certain aspects, was similar to that of 1929-1933. Besides, over 10 million people were shifted to part-time or laid off by companies. Real income of population fell everywhere. However, the 1973 Oil Crisis boosted oil exports to the West from the Soviet Union and heralded the independence of the USSR and, later, Russia from the oil pipeline and oil dollars.
• WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Wants To Spill Your Corporate Secrets – forbes.com – 2010-11-29 — In a rare interview, Assange tells Forbes that the release of Pentagon and State Department documents are just the beginning. His next target: big business. More at counterpunch.org. And a negative view of Wikileaks from Cryptome via theRegister.co.uk (why was I not surprised to see theRegister post this…?)
• Bank of England – Speeches – By Speaker — Here are the details of speeches made by Bank personnel which have been made available to the public sorted by speaker (including recent ones by Mervyn King, Governor).
• The United States of Inequality – slate.com – 2010-09-03 — Income inequality in the United States has not worsened steadily since 1915. It dropped a bit in the late teens, then started climbing again in the 1920s, reaching its peak just before the 1929 crash. The trend then reversed itself. Incomes started to become more equal in the 1930s and then became dramatically more equal in the 1940s. Income distribution remained roughly stable through the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. … It’s generally understood that we live in a time of growing income inequality, but “the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is,” Krugman told me. During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth—the “seven fat years” and the ” long boom.” Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.
• Why the US has really gone broke by Chalmers Johnson – Le Monde – 2008 — Global confidence in the US economy has reached zero, as was proved by last month’s stock market meltdown. But there is an enormous anomaly in the US economy above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis, the housing bubble and the prospect of recession: 60 years of misallocation of resources, and borrowings, to the establishment and maintenance of a military-industrial complex as the basis of the nation’s economic life
• How Many Cancers Did Chernobyl Really Cause?—Updated Version – allthingsnuclear.org – 2011-04-17 — There is a lot of confusion about how many excess cancer deaths will likely result from the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine. There are two main sources of confusion: information that is confusing—and in some cases misleading—put out by authoritative sources, and large inherent uncertainties in estimates of the effects of the accident. Because of these inherent uncertainties, it is perhaps most appropriate to only cite order-of-magnitude results: the numbers of excess cancers and cancer deaths worldwide will be in the tens of thousands.

  However, based on the data given below, 53,000 and 27,000 are reasonable estimates of the number of excess cancers and cancer deaths that will be attributable to the accident, excluding thyroid cancers. (The 95% confidence levels are 27,000 to 108,000 cancers and 12,000 to 57,000 deaths.) In addition, as of 2005, some 6,000 thyroid cancers and 15 thyroid cancer deaths have been attributed to Chernobyl. That number will grow with time.

• Economic Contraction – transitionus.org – 2011-04-06 — Just like peak oil and global warming, economic contraction is a “game changer.” As the economy we now know crumbles, the far-reaching repercussions will sculpt every aspect of our future. In my opinion, any long-term plan — Transition EDAPs included — must anticipate that it will unfold amidst a world of economic contraction. We have to plan for it, and put alternative financial tools in place to weather it, or it will undermine all of our other efforts. (Part of a serially formatted posting, this is part 1).

  “The scale of denial is breathtaking.” — Jerry Mander

• A Mad Scientist’s 50 Tools for Sustainable Communities – theatlantic.com – 2011-03-23 — In the middle of rural Missouri there is a physicist-turned-farmer looking to redefine the way we build the world. Marcin Jakubowski is the mastermind behind a group of DIY enthusiasts known as Open Source Ecology and their main project, the Global Village Construction Set. The network of engineers, tinkerers, and farmers is working to fabricate 50 different low-cost industrial machines. A complete set, they say, would be capable of supporting a sustainable manufacturing and farming community of about 200 people almost anywhere across the globe—a “small-scale civilization with modern comforts.”
• Can Nuclear Power Be Part of the Solution? – thesolutionsjournal.com – 2011-04-05 — As the unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan has shown, the costs of cleanup after a nuclear meltdown are borne in large part by national governments and taxpayers rather than the industry. Paying for cleanup is just one of many hidden costs of nuclear energy that make judging the value of nuclear power difficult.
• Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors – Associated Press – 2011-04-06 — Hundreds of such markers dot the coastline, some more than 600 years old. Collectively they form a crude warning system for Japan, whose long coasts along major fault lines have made it a repeated target of earthquakes and tsunamis over the centuries.
• ‘Indigenous thinking can solve climate crises,’ says Bolivia’s foreign minister – guardian.co.uk – 2011-04-13 — “Bolivia is not trying to wreck the climate talks. We are only trying to defend life, the future of new generations. We must guarantee that we are going to reduce the planet’s temperature by one degree centigrade, as the scientists have said. We didn’t know anything about this topic and it’s been scientists who said that [temperatures have increased] 0.8C, and we are already feeling the consequences. The Europeans have said we [must hold temperatures to] 2C but with the Cancún resolutions the same scientists are saying that the planet could have 4C temperature rise with disastrous consequences for us.

  “At these summits the Europeans have said that with 2C rise in temperature, planet Earth has a 50-50 chance of surviving. We said, if a person knows that a plane on take-off has only a 50-50 chance of landing at its destination, would that person let his son board that plane? He wouldn’t. That’s the risk.

• Radioactivity in the Ocean:
  Diluted, But Far from Harmless – yale.edu – 2011-04-07 — With contaminated water from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear complex continuing to pour into the Pacific, scientists are concerned about how that radioactivity might affect marine life. Although the ocean’s capacity to dilute radiation is huge, signs are that nuclear isotopes are already moving up the local food chain.
• Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth – guardian.co.uk – 2011-04-10 — Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.
• Japan nuclear crisis goes global – atimes.com – 2011-04-16 — Radiation is spreading around the world as a small nuclear wasteland grows near the heart of Japan. The desperate struggle to restart the crippled reactors’ own cooling systems in order to bring them under control is producing little to no results, and is shrouded in uncertainties.
• The planet strikes back – atimes.com – 2011-04-16 — In fact, on our punch-drunk planet, we’ve never seen anything like what’s underway at Fukushima – not one, but four adjacent nuclear reactors, three of which seem to have suffered partial meltdowns, and several containment pools for “spent” fuel (which, in terms of radioactivity, is anything but spent) in various states of distress.

  Meanwhile, talk about the weeks needed to bring the situation under control has faded into perilous months, years, decades, even a century of cleanup and recovery. There is speculation that some of the core of at least one reactor has already “leaked from its steel pressure vessel into the bottom of [its] containment structure” – and every action to bring the complex under some kind of control only seems to create, or threatens to create, other unexpected problems (like that “lightly radioactive” water).

• Mongolia Rail Eases China Rare Earth Grip: Freight Markets – bloomberg.com – 2011-04-21 — Mongolia’s aim of quadrupling its rail network will send coal, copper and rare earths to nations such as Japan and South Korea under a plan to reduce reliance on the Chinese market and boost economic development.
• Nature to Get Legal Rights in Bolivia – wired.com – 2011-04-18 — Bolivia’s Law of Mother Earth is set to pass. On Wednesday the United Nations will discuss a proposed treaty based on the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (.pdf), which was drafted by environmentalists last year. Both mandate legal recognition of ecosystems’ right to exist.

  It’s highly unlikely that the United Nations would pass any such treaty in the foreseeable future, and the discussion has been criticized as a time-wasting political maneuver. But the intellectual argument for nature’s rights isn’t necessarily a patchouli-soaked Gaia fantasy translated into legalese. Some say it’s a practical extension of ecological insight.

• The Truth About American Exceptionalism – onthecommons.org – 2011-04-18 — Indeed, to me there are two American exceptionalisms. One is the exceptionally favorable circumstances the United States found itself in at its founding and over its first 200 years. The second is the exceptional way in which we have squandered those advantages, in the process creating a value system singularly antagonistic to the changes needed when those advantages disappeared.

  Americans did not become rich because of our rugged individualism or entrepreneurial drive or technical inventiveness. We were born rich. Ann Richards’ famous description of George Bush Sr. as an individual is equally applicable to the United States as a whole, “He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”

• MUST READ: Jeremy Grantham On Ignoring Eisenhower And The Two Most Dangerous Industries In America – businessinsider.com – 2011-01-15 — The gist: Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex, and the dangers of misplaced power.

  Eisenhower was right, says Grantham, except it’s not the military industry that exerts too much power on Government. It’s the entire corporate apparatus.

• Making Room for China: – prudentbear.com – 2011-04-15 — When it comes to Bubble Analysis, the stunning expansion of Treasury debt and Federal Reserve Credit offers an easy target. Yet I’ve posited for two years now the emergence of something quite more expansive – a “Global Government Finance Bubble.” The key dynamics involve an extraordinary expansion of government borrowings and central bank balance sheets around the world – developed and “emerging.” I have argued that China is in the midst of the “terminal phase” of Credit Bubble excess, a circumstance that has created powerful financial and economic interplays with respective U.S. and global Bubbles.

  The current environment could not be more fascinating from the standpoint of analyzing Credit and Bubble dynamics. Most everyone is dismissive of the notion of some new Bubble, in the U.S. or elsewhere. Few are willing to see anything resembling huge excess or market distortions. Meanwhile, charts of Treasury debt, the Fed’s assets, and Chinese reserve holdings confirm that something unique in the history of finance is unfolding right before our eyes.

And that’s it for today’s report, check back now and then for updates on the state of the Pit.

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”.

So, if you mess up the core or waste containment, have explosions, fire – you are basically releasing much more then just ‘radiation’ – you are releasing contamination into the environment (Chernobyl radiation map 1996). Radioisotopes escaping outside the plant and blown along the winds as smoke and dust and eventually being deposited by rains. And you cannot really measure that danger until you collect soil samples and take them to a lab for a proper analysis.

For a nuclear emergency crew then, dealing with fallout, sampling a wide area for these particles begins to give a good idea of what kind of safety measures should be implemented: what areas to evacuate, what advice about outdoor activities to give, how foods derived from plants and animals from the area should be treated etc.

So far we have heard a lot of this advice being given – but the actual contamination figures they might have sampled – have been kept off the media – perhaps to avert further panic. It could also be that due to the extensive damage to the infrastructure of the whole area, and the priority of saving lives, there has been little chance to collect enough data.

Now we are starting to see the authorities take samples for iodine in milk for example. But to get a better picture of the isotopes released – and the long term ‘destiny’ of the surrounding area – even the whole country – will take some time. At a minimum there is a need establish a rough relative distribution of the different isotopes released – and to sample a fairly large area – then compare that to wind and precipitation patters over that area during the whole fallout period – to get a estimate of the total amount of contamination (measured in Curie) and its distribution. Further analysis with spectrometry will tell the types of isotopes so the biological effects can be factored into any response plan and eventual decontamination of the area.

The nuclear tragedy will depend on that: short term contamination of the food chain – and long term contamination of the soil.

Lots of such studies done since Chernobyl can be found from Google.

I love Japan and will always remember the cherry blossoms falling everywhere while attending my friends wedding in Miyajima island near Hiroshima. Visiting the museum of the bomb was a very moving experience and afterwards praying at the monastery overlooking the town gave me time to contemplate how truly strong spirited these people were for having rebuilt their city and moved on with their lives.

Dealing with the effects of the tsunami is one thing. But reawakening the horrors of the atomic age would be very upsetting for the Japanese I can imagine. And it is traditional to take off your shoes while going inside buildings, especially the home, which is considered holy ground: cleanliness is sacred. Upsetting the purity of the environment – with invisible and possibly deadly contamination – will have a very spiritual interpretation for the Japanese. A fallout contaminating their country, perhaps for years to come, rather than causing just fear, would cause deep sadness indeed.

Many thanks to this poster for such a clear and explicit explanation of the realities of being inside a running live nuclear power plant.

The more of this type of information is released and can enter the public’s collective understanding, the better.

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.

Related Japanese Energy Issues

It’s not just the nuclear power plants that are going to give Japan big problems during the coming years as it tries to adapt to the new reality created by the earthquake/tsunami. The following articles outline other issues to be faced by Japan’s energy sector.

• The cuckoo that won’t sing. Sustainability and Japanese culture – Cassandra’s Legacy – April 6 An examination of Japan’s sustainable past, in population and consumption. That’s pre-industry, of course. There cannot be sustainable industrial production, for what should be obvious reasons.
• WSJ – Some Coal-Fired Plants Brought Back Online – March 19 This one demonstrates pretty well a point I’ve been trying to drive home now: Japan is already the world’s biggest coal importer, and is building several new coal plants. In other words, nuclear is exactly as I said, an add on to existing coal, not removing a single pound of consumption. Here’s more on current Japanese coal deals.

Nuclear Waste and Other Related Issues

Many times the primary problems of the radioactive waste products generated by nuclear power, as well as the question of uranium mining tailings, themselves radioactive, are pushed to the side by the ongoing, and aggressive, pro-nuclear lobby, and those who have internalized this message.

• Russia: Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste – NTI.org Historically, the Soviet Union and Russia have disposed of radioactive waste in three ways: by dumping it into the Baltic and Arctic Seas as well as into the northern Pacific (primarily the Sea of Japan); by placing it in storage sites on the Kola Peninsula in the Russian North, and on the Shkotovo and Kamchatka Peninsulas in the Russian Far East; and by holding radioactive waste on storage ships servicing the Northern and Pacific fleets.
• Spent nuclear fuel throughout US stored by state – March 22 The Associated Press analyzed state-by-state data that nuclear power plants voluntarily report annually to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry and lobbying group. As I’ve noted, the waste is not being handled, and the costs are being pushed to the future. Until waste is processed and permanently stored as it’s generated, there’s nothing to talk about in terms of the acceptability of nuclear energy.
• The French fix – There are no good choices for dealing with nuclear waste; but some aren’t as bad – www.seattlepi.com – April 22, 1998 Got to start somewhere with the waste, so let’s see where the French are at now, since they generate the most nuclear energy of any country out there percentage wise of total electrical base load. This is an excellent, in-depth, and fairly objective article. Summary? All choices with nuclear waste are bad, but some are worse than others. But in no case does there exist an actually good choice.

General Energy Information

It’s important to have a grasp of some of the basics about global and regional energy use. That’s mostly so you can recognize nuclear industry shills when they lie about energy related matters, the top lie of course being that nuclear replaces coal.

• World energy resources and consumption – wikipedia This shows quite clearly how all energy sources are increasing, especially coal and oil. Well, oil has hit a plateau since this article was written since it’s hit its probably global production maximum per day. I’m sure there are better resources that show this information in a more up to date way, but this is ok for now. Coal use is up about 100% from 1990 to 2009.

Previous Known, Lesser Known, or Unknown, Nuclear Problems

• Outside Magazine – Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden Very long article about how a heavily irradiated, toxic, Chernobyl exclusion zone is doing today. Interesting stuff.
• Kyshtym disaster “According to Gyorgy, who invoked the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the relevant Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files, the CIA knew of the 1957 Mayak accident all along……but kept it secret to prevent adverse consequences for the fledgling American nuclear industry.” You will see a lot of this type of cover-ups by the way.
• Time Magazine report on Millstone reactor fuel handling / storage cover up Long, 14 page article that shows how failure to follow proper safety procedures is common and ignored. Same problem we saw, by the way, with Japan now, a history of corruption and other less than ethical actions designed to avoid expensive changes in materials handling and plant ioperations, like storing the massive amounts of spent fuel rods in the cooling ponds, only designed for a few months material initially.

NOTE: comment posters, please do not add discussion type comments to this thread, if you have new links that contain valuable resources, then post them, with a short explanation of what they are talking about in the link.

Feel free to post more general comments in any other currently active thread, however.

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.

You’ll note that not once did the American right admit to this truth. Nor did the American people as a whole perceive it, but that’s what happens when corporations control the media, and the only way to change that is by changing the laws. and the only way to change the laws is to ban lobbying in its present form, where there’s a rotating job circle, congress to lobbying groups/corporate employment.

How to fix it? How to restore some sanity and coherence to the discussion? Good question, and I don’t know the answer, all I know is that if you have brainwashed enough of the people enough of the time, and if you have a focused, profit driven agenda, the social body has a big problem.

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.

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.

I’ve seen some people reject this technically correct definition of fascism, Greer comes to mind especially, but that’s based on a misunderstanding of what corporatism actually is.

And here’s another interview, America Won the Cold War But Now Is Turning Into the USSR, Gerald Celente Says

There’s a lot of talk these days about America being an empire in decline. Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, goes a step further, arguing America is following a similar path as the former Soviet Union. “While the many glaring differences between the two political systems have been exhaustively publicized – especially in the U.S. – the glaring similarities [go] unnoticed,” Celente writes in The Trends Journal, which he publishes.

And here’s another, ‘Too Big to Fail’ Is Killing the Middle Class, Celente Says

Deregulation and bailouts favor the country’s largest corporations, at the expense of small business, Celente believes. “They’re squeezing out everybody else.” Policies like these have created the widest wealth gap in the industrialized world, he says; “10% of the nation controls 93% of the assets.” Former IMF Chief economist Simon Johnson makes a similar point in his book, 13 Bankers. In it, Johnson claims, six banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) control 60% of America’s gross national product.

The only way to turn the tide, says Celente, is to “put back what was in place that worked,” like the Glass-Steagall Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act, which exists in name only. “That’s what stopped the robber barons from raping the country.”

Celente is confident more regulation on the largest companies will help entrepreneurs, which in turn strengthening a fading middle class – the backbone of our society. “America becomes strong again when the middle builds big again,” he says. Unfortunately, Celente sees the trend going in the opposite direction. “The merger of state and corporate powers, let’s calls a spade a spade. It’s fascism.”

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

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.

Interviewer: So that makes the U.S. a net importer of uranium?

Bill Powers: Absolutely. According to the DOE, US imports have gone from 3.6 million pounds per year in 1980 to 52.7 million pounds per year in 2002. A lot of it comes from Canada, but a significant amount is coming through the Russians, through a program referred to as HEU (highly enriched uranium): the megatons to megawatts program. It is where the United States Enrichment Corporation, as nicely as its partner in Russia, took highly enriched uranium and broke it down into reduced grade uranium that could be marketed to nuclear power businesses throughout North America and around the planet. This has been a single of the reasons we’ve had reduced prices. All of this uranium has cluttered the marketplace the past handful of many years. As well as the US Enrichment Corporation has a lot to do with why we’ve seen low uranium costs here in the States. I had a conversation with them about the fact that because 1998, when they became a public business (right after becoming a company that was owned through the U.S. government), their long-term inventories of uranium had declined. When they became a private corporation, the U.S. government gave them seven,000 tons of enriched uranium and 50 tons of highly enriched uranium. They have been promoting about 6 million pounds of uranium into the marketplace each and every year because 1998. According to my conversation with them, they have about three to four much more many years of promoting. It is simply because the US Enrichment Corporation wants to get out of the uranium storage business, and they want being within the processing company.

For some reason, a certain type of person becomes increasingly delusional when it comes to energy production and nuclear power. Almost like fairy tales except using mystical sources of energy instead of dragons and emperors, or future scenarios that currently do not yet exist in production, ie, in the real world.

Note that these consumption levels include France, Sweden, and the USA, but do NOT include new plants coming online. In other words, the future isn’t looking so great re uranium supplies.

As for the mystical thorium, take a quick read of the Norwegian study on the viability of thorium as a nuclear fuel (PDF 2008 report). Read the executive summary chapter to get a good overview.

Here’s their final recommendations:

1. No technology should be idolized or demonized. All carbon-dioxide (CO2) emission-free energy production technologies should be considered. The potential contribution of nuclear energy to a sustainable energy future should be recognized.
2. An investigation into the resources in the Fen Complex and other sites in Norway should be performed. It is essential to assess whether thorium in Norwegian rocks can be defined as an economical asset for the benefit of future generations. Furthermore, the application of new technologies for the extraction of thorium from the available mineral sources should be studied.
3. Testing of thorium fuel in the Halden Reactor should be encouraged, taking benefit of the well recognized nuclear fuel competence in Halden.
4. Norway should strengthen its participation in international collaborations by joining the Euratom fission program and the GIF program on Generation IV reactors suitable for the use of thorium.
5. The development of an Accelerator Driven System (ADS) using thorium is not within the capability of Norway working alone. Joining the European effort in this field should be considered. Norwegian research groups should be encouraged to participate in relevant international projects, although these are currently focused on waste management.
6. Norway should bring its competence in waste management up to an international standard and collaboration with Sweden and Finland could be beneficial.
7. Norway should bring its competence with respect to dose assessment related to the thorium cycle up to an international standard.
8. Since the proliferation resistance of uranium-233 depends on the reactor and reprocessing technologies, this aspect will be of key concern should any thorium reactor be built in Norway.
9. Any new nuclear activities in Norway, e.g. thorium fuel cycles, would need strong international pooling of human resources, and in the case of thorium, a strong long-term commitment in university education and basic science. All these should be included in the country level strategy aiming to develop new sustainable energy sources. However, to meet the challenge related to the new nuclear era in Europe, Norway should secure its competence within nuclear sciences and nuclear engineering fields. This includes additional permanent staff at the universities and research institutes and appropriate funding for new research and development as well as a high quality research-based Master and PhD education.

nuclear engineering fields. This includes additional permanent staff at the universities and research institutes and appropriate funding for new research and development as well as a high quality research-based Master and PhD education.

And here’s a shorter summary.

A 2008 Norwegian study summarised the advantages and disadvantages of an ADS fuelled by thorium, relative to a conventional nuclear power reactor, as follows, and said that such a system was not likely to operate in the next 30 years:

Advantages	Disadvantages
Much smaller production of long-lived actinides Minimal probability of runaway reaction Efficient burning of minor actinides Low pressure system	More complex (with accelerator) Less reliable power production due to accelerator downtime Large production of volatile radioactive isotopes in the spallation target The beam tube may break containment barriers

No panacea, no magic pill, but a possible future mode of nuclear energy, using, again, another finite raw material, to burn up until it too is gone. But I’d guess it will be used, since mankind simply will not accept that less can be more, and quality could possibly just be more important than quantity.

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.

As with pretty much every other finite energy source, when you apply modern consumption levels plus the realities of extraction, the totals come out much lower than the energy optimists would have you believe.

Coal, and probably uranium, supplies reflect a very similar gulf between predictions from cornucopians and the actual numbers, including predicted consumption growth rates over time.

The group (Energy Watch Group uranium study – PDF)contends that worldwide rankings mean little, then, when one considers that only Canada has a significant amount of ore above 1 percent–up to about 20 percent of the country’s total reserves. In Australia, on the other hand, some 90 percent of uranium has a grade of less than 0.06 percent. Much of Kazakhstan’s ore is less than 0.1 percent.

The world uses 67,000 tons of mined uranium a year. At current usage, this is equal to about seventy years of supply.
Council on Foreign Relations – Global Uranium Supply and Demand – January 14, 2010

Pay very especial attention to the phrase ‘At current usage’. That is the essence of almost all cornucopian predictions. As oil / gas supplies begin their imminent decline globally, the world will reach to existing sources of energy, mainly coal and uranium, for its electrical production. Actually, forget the future tense, that’s happening now, all over. China, India, along with most of the rest of the world.

So make that 70 years drop down to less than 20 or 30. Really people should start to pay attention to the arithmetic of growth (transcript of the Professor Al Bartlett video talk on the problems of all growth based population/resource consumption patterns), it’s not very hard to understand.

And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the question of exactly how clean will an ongoing decline in global energy resources actually be, in terms of production and economic realities. Dmitri Orlov. has been pushing this point consistently, see for example his recent posting, Thinking in Straight Lines.

One particularly significant example of this thinking is the belief in Peak Oil, generally expressed as the idea that global oil production already has or will soon reach an all-time peak, and will then gradually decrease over a time span of several decades. Oil depletion is being modeled as a linear function of oil production: a few percent a year, holding more or less steady from one year to the next.

But that article isn’t good for little quote snippets, read the whole thing is my advice, what he’s saying is fairly serious, and isn’t being discussed nearly as much as it should be.

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.

There’s a reason almost all libertarian types love the third rate fiction author Ayn Rand, who writes what are essentially teenage fantasy novels about rising above all the other riff-raff. The fantasy presented is appealing to those who strive to either be master or to serve the master. In other words, it’s about as far away from actual freedom as you can get.

Libertarians want a return to basic feudalism, where power lies in the hands of kings, who allocate it dukes, earls, and so on. Serfs, aka feudal employees, and consumers, are the foundation of the wealth, not land. That’s the only real difference. Government regulations form the only real block to corporate type power, and so of course are blindly opposed, no matter how irrational that position appears to be from an outside perspective.

Alleged ‘intellectuals’, like Alan Greenspan, are simply small men (literally small in his case) who strive to become great by promoting the interests and agenda of such corporate structures. Kings of yore used the same tools to consolidate their power, only the names were different.

So in essence, my only real objection to the entire libertarian project is the intense intellectual dishonesty they engage in, pretending to be promoting personal freedom when what they really are promoting is the freedom to achieve maximum political power and wealth. But if this honesty appeared, then none of their power base, or almost none of it, would vote for them, so they can’t be honest. Plus I think they aren’t actually capable of thinking their position through in the first place.