The dimensions here will be for the Terra Nova Laser Competition tent, but just change to suite your needs for any other stuff sack, there’s nothing specific at all about this to that tent except the dimensions.

Making a New Stuff Sack for your Laser Competition

So you’ve got your new Laser Competition tent. Now it’s time to change a few things. First, let’s get rid of that big stuff sack, which is much bigger and heavier than it needs to be (about 22 grams, compared to the 10 to 12 grams this stuff sack will weigh. The gray stuff sack, which is a little bit too small for the tent with its new pole sleeve attached, weighs only 8.5 grams, mainly because it uses a lighter silnylon). Since Terra Nova supplies a tent pole bag and stake bag, I put the stake, or nail, bag, into the pole bag, then stick both into a side backpack pocket. Then we’ll create a small stuff sack that fits the tent, a light ground cover, plus the attached cuben fiber pole sleeve cover I showed you how to make, and which takes a lot less room in your pack, and weighs less as well. The final dimensions of this bag will be about 5.5″ X 10.5″. If you want it a bit roomier, just add one inch to the height of the bag.

Important: Remember to either remove or fold in half the two carbon fiber end poles when using a smaller stuff sack!! They are easy to reinsert, and if you just fold them in half, and leave them in, that’s even easier. But do it however you like, just don’t try to fold the tent up to stick in this stuff sack with them at standard length.

I’ve also sewn pole and stake/peg/nail sacks, which weigh either less or the same as the Terra Nova supplied ones, except they have drawcords, like this bag. The only differences between those and this one, aside from the dimensions, are that they have a single side seam, and no squared off bottom, ie., they are a simple envelope shape, but the rest of the sewing process is exactly the same as given here.

Basics of Stuff Sack Construction

This style is the basic method, and doesn’t use a sewn in rounded bottom, so you have to add in the folds you’ll sew in on the bottom of the bag to square it off when figuring out your dimensions.

Remember: circumference is equal to diameter desired X 3.14 (pi), plus 1 1/8″ for the seam allowance.

Height is about the desired height of the final bag, plus 1/2 the diameter for the bottom, and about 1/2 the diameter for the top. Remember that the channel requires about 1.5″ inches extra material on the top.

Sewing is in several stages: 1. top right and left corner diagonals created to form channel reinforcement and entry points. 2. Channel itself is sewn, with tucked under 1/4″ to create a clean edge and avoid loose edges that can fray. 3. First seam, that creates the tube, done with bag turned inside out. 4. Second seam, which is pinned with bag turned back to normal, as a flat felled seam, then the bag is reversed, inside out again, so you can sew it from the inside. 5. Stitch along bottom edge. 6. Fold over this edge, and sew through it again to reinforce it. 7. Sew two corners, with bag inside out, to form a sort of square on the bottom when it’s full.

The last step is to thread cord into channel, and then add cord lock.

Materials

• Quest Outfitters – Silnylon Seconds 1.1 oz / yd silnylon. Note, that they don’t include the silicone weight, so the real weight is around 1.4 oz/yd. The quality of the silnylon doesn’t matter a lot here, and the cheaper stuff actually tends to be a bit lighter. Seconds are also fine for such projects, and they are cheaper.

  For this project, we’ll use a piece 14.5″ X 18.25″

• ZPacks 80 pound polyester cord I like the 80 pound cord, it’s totally adequate for most stuff sacks, and is really light. By the way, get a lot of this, I always order too little, and am always running out, 5 or 10 yards should keep all your stuff sacks happy.
• Zpacks Tiny Cord Locks Same for the Tiny Cord Locks, they work great with these narrow cords, and don’t weigh anything. Tiny is a size, smaller than the Mini, which is way too big for very thin cord. Order a bunch of these, you’ll probably want to replace most of your drawcords with this and the 80 pound cord once you see how light it is.

I use Gutterman thread, which is easy to find, but any quality polyester thread should be fine. But Gutterman is well regarded and reliable, the thin kind for this project, and most silnylon and light fabric projects.

When sewing silnylon, use the smallest needle you can manage, I used a #10 (70) needle. And sew slowly, otherwise the material tends to slip out of control, resulting in either really tiny stitches, or simply losing control of the seam altogether.

You should also have very sharp scissors. A good piece of advice I got was to use one pair only for fabric, not paper or other stuff, ie, have a dedicated, very sharp pair of scissors for your sewing. You can sharpen real steel scissors if you are careful using a honing rod if you have one, for knife sharpening, just make sure you are at the right angle to the actual cutting edge, which is quite steep, not like a knife.

Sewing the Stuff Sack

Ok, we’re ready to go now.

To get the right size, I’ll measure then cut a rectangle of silnylon, 14 1/2″ by 18 1/4″.

There is the rectangle, cut out and ready to be sewn.

To get nice entry points to the cord channel, and to reinforce the entry points, we’ll sew a triangle about 1 1/2″ high, from the corners. Just fold over and over the material until it hits 1.5″ down from the top, then sew the folded part, like this.

There’s the two corners sewn, now we’re ready to sew the cord channel.

First, mark a few points 1.5″ down from the top edge. These will be the guides as we pin the top channel to get it ready to sew.

To sew this, we’ll add a few pins to the silnylon, which tends to be very slippery, to put it mildly. Fold under about 1/4″, to hide and protect the edge of the top of the rectangle, which will be the top drawcord channel, then fold over to reach the 1.5″ markings, and pin a few times along the top, 4 should be fine for this size. So the pins go through the top layer, then the 1/4″ folded under it, and then the main fabric under it.

Then start to sew. You’ll notice that the diagonals you made now meet, and form an entry to the cord channel. Start the stitching a little ahead of where the top material meets the bottom, that way you get the edge of that sewn nice and tight. Remember to reverse to lock the stitches, a few stitches is fine, then go back and sew it. Hint: remember, put the pins in with the head pointing AWAY from the direction you start the seam, that way you can pull them out easily as you sew.

And there’s the top cord channel, all done.

Now we’ll connect the sides, forming a tube. Use a few pins to hold the material, it’s slippery. Important: we want to do this so it’s inside out, with the channel on the inside of this tube. Pin the edges so that the bottom one is about 3/8″ inch past the top one, this will form the flat felled seam later. Sew about 3/8″ in from the edge of the top piece of material. Start sewing on the top channel edge, the seam should start basically where the seams that form the channel are, perpendicular to it.

Now turn the bag tube right side out again, and fold the long edge over and around the short edge, then pin it. This will be sewn into a flat felled seam.

It’s all pinned, remember, start the seam along the same line as formed by the top cord channel seam.

Now turn the bag, with the pins inside, inside out again, we’ll start stitching at the top, and work our way down inside the bag. It’s very important at this point to avoid stitching the top of the bag or the sides under the seam, it’s easy to do that, so make sure to stop once in a while and pull the side or top fabric to make sure it’s not gathering under the seam.

I like to start the seam by going from one end of the channel seam to the other, and then to do a small bartack when I connect the two edges, to reinforce it. Then reverse until you get to where the edge of the flat felled seam you will be sewing is, and turn the bag so you can sew down into the tube.

See? Ready to turn it around after reversing.

Now start sewing, as close to the folded over edge as you can manage. It helps to sew very slowly when you do this, it’s much easier to control the material. Remember, you’ll be sewing inside the tube here, so don’t sew the other parts by accident.

Hold the top to make sure you know where it is, then start sewing the second seam on the flat felled seam.

That’s the end of the seam, at the bottom, see how my hand is holding the top to keep it from getting accidentally sewn into the seam? Believe me, it’s easy to do that, I’ve done it several times. As always, remember to reverse the stitch a few stitches to lock it in, and pull the threads very tight to pull out any loose loops that might be present on the other side.

Turn the tunnel right-side out again. And there’s the top channel, and the flat felled seam. It’s a bit hard to see it because of the materials I used, blue silnylon and black thread.

Now run one stitch to close the bottom, then after you’re done, fold over the bottom edge, pin it, and sew over that 4 layer fold, to reinforce it.

And there’s the bottom edge completed.

Now, after checking all the seams, turn the bag inside out again, and we’ll make the bottom corners, which will give the bag a sort of roundish form, instead of it just looking like a flat envelope.

To help make the bag a bit more square, instead of a flat edge on the bottom, you can sew in the corners, make sure to start on the side that has the seam, and line up the side seam and the bottom seam exactly, if you get it right, it looks nice, if you don’t, it doesn’t really matter but doesn’t look as nice. The triangle you’ll sew should be a bit less than 1/2 the diameter of the bag when done. Just sew straight across what would be the base of that triangle.

Now we’re done, turn the bag back right side out, and we’ll thread the cord into the cord channel. Here you see the side flat felled seam, and the bottom square you sewed in, forming a sort of pseudo-bottom to the stuff sack.

I like to use a small bit of aluminum (any wire will do that’s stiff) wire twisted to have a small loop in the top, sort of like a big needle.

This end goes in first, and you stick the cord through it a few inches, it tends to hold fine while threading it through the channel.

Stick the looped end into one channel hole, then, holding the top of the wire loop, push the fabric along the bottom.

That’s about half way, see how I bunch the fabric up to the end of the wire loop, which I’m holding fast with my hands? Then you just pull the cord forward while pushing that bunched up fabric back. It’s easy once you do it.

And there we’re through, ready to add the cord lock.

There’s a somewhat loose Terra Nova Laser Competition tent, with a Gossamer Gear polypro ground cover, those will fit fine into this sized stuff sack.

See? All done, works.

Weight of this one, because I was using a slightly heavier grade of silnylon I got from DIY Gear Supply, is 12.1 grams, but if you use standard silnylon, it should weigh around 10 grams, give or take a bit.

The black thing is the pole sleeve cover, designed for several purposes: 1. To make it possible to sell a silnylon tent without seam sealer requirements. 2. To strengthen and reinforce the tie-outs that go from pole to ground. 3. To cover the zipper on the fly, and thus avoid having to create a waterproofed zipper or zipper covering.

However, unlike the rest of the Laser Competition, for some inexplicable reason, the pole sleeve cover is not ultralight. In fact, it’s not light at all. The only light part is is the tie out cord and cord lock. The rest is regular coated nylon and 3/16″ nylon cord. All that together weighs in at a fairly hefty 2.7 ounces, give or take.

Since I was looking to do a Cuben Fiber project to get the feel for that new high tech material, I decided that replacing the nylon black pole sleeve cover would be a great first project. Not too hard, but will result in a savings in the end of 1.45 ounces. For a cost of about $12 US for the cuben. I had the other materials lying around, but if you order them, you’ll have to spend a bit more of course, but everything else is really worth having in your toolkit in my opinion anyway.

Why Cuben Fiber?

Besides my wanting to try sewing it? – by the way, most people who deal with cuben recommend using special double sided cuben tape to tape the seams, then sew them, but I decided that wasn’t necessary for this project. First, Cuben Fiber does not stretch or shrink. This makes it a much better choice than Silnylon. Second, it’s totally waterproof, until the mylar sheeting breaks down over time, of course. This also makes it a better choice than silnylon. Third, for the same weight as silnylon, it’s radically stronger, and far more tear resistent. That’s because of the embedded dyneema fibers sandwiched between the mylar like sheets of clear plastic. This weight (1.5oz/yd) of Cuben Fiber is the same weight as 1.4 oz silnylon, but far stronger, and thus makes a good choice for a reinforcing sleeve cover/tie out support.

Materials List

Here is a list of the materials I used for this project, and links to where I got them. All of the sources were from cottage industry suppliers, so these links may not work in the future.

• lawsonequipment.com – Cuben Fiber CT5K.18 1.50oz – Lawson, aka mountainfitter, had a sale on 1.5 oz per yard cuben fiber ($10 US a linear foot), sold by the foot. I got one foot. The rolls, after trimming off the ends without the fiber, are about 54″ long. So that means I got a piece of usable cuben 54″ x 12″. This is enough for the project, and leaves some over for tarp tie-out reinforcement patches. You could also try this with his 0.74 oz / yd cuben, but I don’t recommend it for high stress tasks like this.

  If Lawson is out of this cuben fiber, you can email Joe at z-packs and ask him if he will sell you a foot of his 1.5 oz cuben. He has a wider range of cuben fiber, so you could also use the 1.0 oz I think for this project.

• lawsonequipment.com – Reflective Glowire 2mm dyneema core, dacron covered cord. Works with LineLoc 3 Line Adjusters. 1 yard or less should be enough, unless you want to use this for the entire project.
• zpacks.com – 1.25mm and 1.5mm spectra cord To make this is as light as I could, I used 1.25 mm z-line spectra cord for the tie-out cord, 1.5mm spectra for the main length in the pole sleeve cover, then tied about 12″ of the Lawson Glowire cord to the ends to use with the LineLoc 3 Line Adjusters.
• zpacks.com – LineLoc 3 Line Adjusters, Micro Line Loc Guy Line Adjusters Get a lot of these, they don’t cost much each, and you can always use these for other things. I’ll add a Terra Nova mod page in the future, but I recommend picking up at least an 8 pack. You can get these with 1/2 grosgrain loops attached, but you won’t need that for this project. The micro line lock adjustors work for cords that are less than 2mm thick, like the 1.25mm and 1.5mm cords you got.
• zpacks.com – 1/2 inch Grosgrain ribbon Get a few yards of this, you’ll end up using it for other things, and then you’ll have some to spare.

Note: if you want, you can substitute the Micro Line Adjusters for the LineLoc 3 adjustors, and just buy one 50 foot length of zpack cord. It’s not as elegant and easy to adjust that way though. You can also use any other cord that is 2mm or bigger, or use smaller cord and tie them together, as you will see below.

Obviously, you can use materials from anywhere, and in Europe, it might be easier to use a European based supplier for these materials. But I have used and can recommend both z-packs and Lawson outdoor equipment, nice people who do a good job.

Now we’re ready to go.

Equipment Needed to Make the Pole Sleeve

Cuben is quite easy to work with, here’s what you will need.

• Razor blade, sharp. Do not try to cut Cuben with scissors, it’s too tough, and too expensive to ruin that way.
• Wood surface to cut on
• Ruler, ideally steel, to cut against
• Lighter or flame, to seal the cord and grosgrain ends from fraying
• Sewing machine in good working order, capable of sewing between 6 and 8 stitches to the inch, and of sewing slowly.
• Number 10 (70) sewing needles. If you have 9 (65), use those if you can get them threaded. The smaller the better with cuben.
• Good thread, like Gutterman. I found the medium gray blended very nicely with the Cuben semi-clear color.
• Patience

Building the Cuben Fiber Terra Nova Laser Competition Pole Sleeve Cover

Key Points: I folded over the cuben to form the channels, and sewed on the patches, to the side of the cover that will face DOWN. The 3 cord grosgrain attachments are sewn on this down facing side, and the 2 grosgrain tie out loops are sewn facing up. This leaves as little surface as possible to get wet or leak as you can get. I don’t believe it’s important to seam seal this, but you can seal the patch and grosgrain seams if you want. The two V-shaped tie-outs point to the ends of the sleeve cover, ie, the V points to the end of the tent pole.

To make this easier to follow, I took pictures of the process. The descriptions will be under each picture.

Cut the 1 foot piece of Cuben, after trimming off the clear plastic end pieces, into one piece 12″ x 41″. This will leave you about a 12″x12″ piece to make reinforcements out of for this and future cuben projects. Cut that 12″x41″ piece into two 6″ strips, each 41″ long.

Cuben has a wonderful property which you will really appreciate if you have sewn Silnylon: it keeps its bend when you fold it. This makes this project, which will involve sewing a very long single seam all the way around the borders, much easier than it would otherwise have been.

So, first, we need to join the two pieces to make one continuous piece. Fold each end of one over about 1/2″, and crease sharply, then fit together to make sure you got them to join straight. Fix and redo if you didn’t, if you did, we are ready to sew.

Make sure the two folds are inserted into each other, then pull back on them, and start to sew. We’ll be sewing a box around the edges of the joint, in a single seam.

Run up down one side, then go over, and sew up the other side, and finish the box you’re sewing.

And there it is, almost finished that part.

Now the two sides are connected nice and firmly, in a flat felled seam. This should hold up well.

Now, remove the material from the sewing machine, and fold the actual channels the cords will run through, and the top and bottom. Notice that I folded in each corner (1 3/16″) so that I would avoid getting a sharp single corner that might poke a hole in the silnylon of the tent, plus it reinforces the entry points for the cord. Once all four corners are folded over, fold over about 1/2″ each end, the 6″ width part, then create a fold first 1/8″ or a little more that will be doubled under the main channel fold, to keep the edges of that channel nice and clean.

I used a 5/8″ total, or a little more, and measured down the length of each side with a light colored marker so I would make the channel a consistant width the whole way down. So the channel fold is 1/2″, and 1/8″ is folded under that, for a total of 5/8″ inch. This gives just enough channel to get the cord through later, but if you want to make it wider, you can, 3/4″ or 7/8″ should be fine, and will leave you with a width of 6″ – 3/4″ – 3/4″ = 4.5″. I wanted mine as wide as I could get it, but I don’t think it has to be that wide.

All done folding all the way around. Be patient, and remember, if you misfold, you can redo it, Cuben holds the folds really well, and is quite flexible.

Now cut the reinforcing squares, I found that a square of 3″ on a side is just about right for the channel width I used, I trimmed off about 1/4″ from each corner to get rid of any potential sharp corners, and to get the material out of the actual channel. It should fit right under the 1/8″ folded part, so the stitching will reinforce the reinforcement patches. This is probably not necessary, especially not using the heavier grade 1.5 oz yd Cuben like I used, but if you use really light stuff, like 1.0 oz or .74 oz yd, you might want to do that to make sure.

The squares will go right under the channel edges, like so, and we’ll sew them in first to make sure we get it right. The center of the patch is 24″ from the center of the main strip, in other words, each patch will be centered 24″ from the center of the pole sleeve cover. Make sure to measure and mark to avoid error here.

Sewed around the edges of the square, under the channel edges, in a single seam. Remember to lock the stitches by sewing back a few stitches with the reverse button of the sewing machine, and remember to always pull the threads tight before you cut them to get rid of any slack or loops on the other side.

Here’s what it looks like when the stitching is all done all the way around the edges. I sewed starting at the beginning of the end piece that’s folded over, turned the corner, then sewed along the edge of the channel, so that the thread goes through the top piece, the 1/8″ folded under piece, and the main piece under it, leaving the 1/2″ channel open as much as I could. In other words, I sewed as close to the edge of the fold on the channel on the inner side as I could manage. Sew slowly and you will find it fairly easy to do.

There’s a shot of the edges and how the stitching works.

And there’s a shot of the completed reinforcement patch. Notice how it goes under the channel edge.

Now cut 3 pieces of about 2″ x 1/2″ grosgrain. Remember to singe the edges to keep it from fraying in the future. We’ll be sewing these to form a small channel for the 3 connector cords that will tie onto the loops of the pole sleeve itself. The center one goes on the center connection, and the two other ones go 24″ down from the center on each side, right in the center of the reinforcement patches. I used a short zig zag stitch because you’re not supposed to bar tack or stitch too tightly on cuben, so the stitches are sort of ugly, if I’d used black thread it would have looked better, so do that if you want a clean look. Notice that I sewed a box using a loose zig zag pattern, leaving about 3/8″ in the center clear for the cord to go under.

That’s how it looks with gray thread, I recommend using black for the grosgrain parts. But lighter thread really lets you see what you are doing, so that’s an advantage. Notice how the grosgrain is stitched on with two loose boxes, with an empty space in the center for the cord to go under.

And that’s what it looks like on the other side.

Next, turn over the sleeve cover, so its actual top side faces up, and sew on the two tie-out loops. Those will go inside the stitching that holds on the reinforcement patch cover, by about 3/8″ of an inch or so. I stitched it pretty close on the ends, but I’d recommend leaving it a little bit more open to make inserting the tieout cord easier. I stitched first across the grosgrain on top, by the fold (see below for picture when done), then reinforced it with a box and x on both ends, then 3 rows of stitching on the part closest to where the cord will go. Usually you’d use a bartack, but since this is cuben, that’s not a good idea. You can do this all in one stitch, just go across the top, then down one side, make the box, then make the x inside, then go across another line, and do the other side, then do one last line across, and that’s it.

Remember to make the Vs of these tie outs point to the ends of the sleeve cover, with the open ends pointed towards the center of the sleeve cover.

Now we’re ready to thread the 2 channels. About 100″ is good if you are using thin cord plus thick cord, and about 120″ or so (measure from your existing sleeve pole cords) if you are using just one cord, the 2mm or greater one.

To thread the channels, take a piece of wire, about 6″ to 8″ long, I used aluminum, but any stiff wire will do, and bend the front of it, to get rid of the pointy part that can poke the channel when you push it through, and then bend the back part, and put the cord end in there, then clamp down on it with pliers to lock the cord in. Make sure that the back part, with the cord locked in, has its wire ending bend to point back as well, otherwise it will catch in the channel as you push it through.

To push it through, poke the end without the cord attached into the channel. Hold the end, then pull the channel material up to the front while holding onto the wire end. Then smooth out the channel behind it, pulling in the cord. Be patient, this takes a while, just do a few inches or so at a time, always smooth out behind you as you go along or the channel material bunches up too much.

Here’s how you clamp down on the bend over the cord with pliers.

Done with one side, ready to insert the wire into the second channel.

Just pull the channel material while holding the front of the wire guide, you can also use this technique to thread stuff sack cord channels by the way, but using a shorter wire guide. Here you can see the wire guide almost at the end of the second channel.

And there we are. This is the end I will be connecting the two extension 2mm cords, the yellow channel cord is z-packs 1.5 mm spectra cord, lighter than the 2mm dyneema from Lawson, but that is too thin for LineLoc3 adjusters.

3 pieces of Glowire from Lawson, about 4 or 5 inches long each. These will be put through the 3 channels we made with grosgrain to connect the cover to the tent sleeve.

I made mine a little tight, so I had to poke these through with some wire, but on the good side, the cords don’t slip out now, they are held in nice and snug.

This is the connector for the zipper side of the tent, this will go through the bottom loop where you would have tied on the cords from the sleeve before. Notice a few things here: I took one piece of 1/2″ grosgrain, about 4″ long, and then sewed on the two LineLoc3 adjusters. However, because the ribbon will turn half way, you want to make sure that the two LineLocs are sewn in so each faces the opposite direction of the other.

See what I mean? I did a simple bartack here. My machine has been having some problems with tight bartacks, so I made this one loose, but I suggest you do it tightly to make it stronger. Notice how the two LineLoc3s are facing opposite direction?

Now we’re ready to put it on the tent. Take the long ends of the sleeve cords ( the part that goes opposite the door that is), and tie them onto the grosgrain loop by the pole attachment. Any loop is fine, as long as it holds. The thinner cords don’t hold knots as well as thicker cords, so keep that in mind.

That’s how the static side should look when you’re done. There’s no need to add LineLocs on this side, the cord and cuben is pretty slick, and it tightens well with them just on the zippered door side.

Tie the first knots to get ready to add the thicker cord extenders, that will actually be used to tighten via the LineLoc3s.

Then connect the thicker cords.

These two pictures show how to make the thinner, lighter cord connect to the thicker, 2mm or greater, cord, that will go into the LineLoc 3 adjuster. If you are using a single heavier cord for the entire length, ignore this.

Pass the LineLoc3/Grossgrain assembly you made above through the zipper side grosgrain loop by the pole grommet.

Then pull the thicker cord through the LineLocs, they are ready to adjust your tension now once you get them both done.

Then take some thin cord, or you can just reuse the cord attached to the original black sleeve cover, with their line adjusters, and tie a loop in one end, about 2 inches long or so. The length of the total should be at least 48″ to start.

Attach the line adjusters to the other end.

Pass the loop in the cord through the tie-out loop, then pull the cord through the loop. This makes it easy to remove it if you want to not have tieouts, or to use it for something else. If you want to always have it attached, then just tie it onto the tieout grosgrain.

Passing the cord loop through itself to lock it down.

Locked down, ready to hold your tent through gales and storms.

Note on Use of Pole Sleeve

I read some comments online that I don’t think are particularly useful in terms of this pole sleeve. First, you don’t need adjusters on both sides with this system, just the zipper/door side is fine. Second, there’s no need to take this off, just leave it connected, it only weighs an ounce or so, less if you use 1 oz / yd Cuben. It’s also not very hard getting the pole in and out with the sleeve on, just be careful when you get to where the knots attach the sleeve cover to the pole sleeve, and make sure they don’t get mixed up with the pole as it pushes through. Also make sure you stick the pole between the two cords on each end of the sleeve cover to avoid tangling it up. That’s also not very hard to get used to.

Once you get the hang of it you’ll see what I mean. The pole sleeve was not a great idea on Terra Nova’s part, but the tent itself is a really good tent aside from this oddity, mine weighs, with everything, including ground cover, about 3oz less than a seam sealed TarpTent Rainbow, and it’s a true double walled tent. Not bad. I like both tents, but in winter, I like double walled tents more. Once I change the end pegging/stake system to be a cleaner 3 stake per end method, with adjustable fly tensioners, the Terra Nova Laser Competition will be good to go.

And That’s That

I’ll put up some pictures of the tent with the sleeve later so you can see what it looks like, but I wasn’t able to pitch it properly during the day I made this tutorial.

This saves you about 1.5 oz give or take, and provides a super strong cuben fiber replacement, with high strength spectra/dyneema cords, fully adjustable. Lighter and stronger and more adjustable, what’s not to like? Plus you got to play with Cuben Fiber.

So, assuming you had most of these pieces of material lying around already, except the cuben, this project cost you around $12 or so, more if you had to order cord and the other pieces, but the cord and the other pieces are really useful to have in general if you’re going to be sewing, so I’d just consider that as building up your parts selection for future projects.

Next up, I’ll show you how to sew in some LineLoc3 adjusters to the main tent tie outs, and how to use only 6 stakes total to pitch the tent (plus two for the sleeve tie-outs if needed). You’ll need some more LineLoc3s, mini line adjusters, a few pieces of 1/2″ grosgrain, and some 2mm or greater cord, and some lighter cord if you want, so I’d just order more than enough when you get the stuff for the above project, then you won’t need to order again. We’ll also replace the tent body elastic tent stake cords and a few other things, which should result in about the same weight on the tent, but with more adjustability, and less weight for stakes.

Now that you have the pole sleeve cover done, let’s make a custom silnylon stuff sack that fits the tent body, pole sleeve, and ground cover, and which weighs about half what the Terra Nova supplied one does (10-12 grams vs 22 grams).

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.

These types of falsehoods and misrepresentations of what is actually going on form the essence of all modern public relations, especially for heavy industrial consumers of non-renewables of all types, constitute a steady chipping away at a very accurate human response towards radiation, one that I would suggest is in fact highly rational. It is especially discouraging to find such things repeated by those who might otherwise pride themselves on being somewhat critical in their view of modern society.

What I find totally and utterly irrational is that when faced with the total inability to handle a process that was never meant to exist on earth, people continue to pretend that it’s a rational decision to create it. This is simply false. It was a refusal to start winding down power consumption, coupled with a military requirement to obtain nuclear materials for nuclear weapons, that was directly responsible for humanity entering this lunatic course of action in the first place.

The entire nuclear project has always been totally irrational, on so many levels it’s really hard to pick just a few, but here’s some: assumption, despite ALL history as positive proof against this faith, that societies will. continue to be able to handle these toxic systems as they change in fundamental ways. Poster child for this? Ukraine, today, requiring about 2 billion euros to create a new sarcophagus for Chernobyl.

Assumption that current, present, financial situation, will enable states all around the planet to keep funding such toxins, and to then have the capital and resources required to do so into the future. This is almost beyond absurd, and seems to involve a willful decision to ignore the economic chaos that those who have followed the unwinding socially, economically, and politically, have been noting for years as an almost inevitable outcome of global production maximums being reached in key raw materials, especially oil. In other words, current US debt levels are about 65 trillion, probably more now. Assuming this economic system will remain viable and able to cope with large scale and long lasting radiation releases from failed plants or improperly disposed of, or, as we have learned, not at all disposed of, radioactive materials, of all types, is totally irrational.

Next: the assumption, again despite all empirical evidence to the contrary, that financial / political corruption will not work steadfastly and consistently to minimize disaster preparedness and to lower expected danger levels to fit required finance and cost compromises that constitute the essence of especially private industry, but also corrupt government/private connections like we find in China and France. Case studies: Bush group dismantles ability of FEMA to properly function, then Katrina exposes the non-existent privatized fraud that created almost no required response means. Case 2: Diablo Canyon (yes, diablo means devil in Spanish…) reactors in California, sue, successfully, to avoid proper disaster preparedness. That’s in the San Andreas fault zone. Case study: Chinese freeway collapses due to contractors cheating; Chinese high rises collapse due to contractors cheating.

Again, a clear and explicit case of irrationality and magical thinking ignoring reality on the parts of apologists. See the political/tepco ties in Japan that created lax regulations and enforcements as real-world examples of this.

There are so many others, for example: in case engineers and other such alleged ‘experts’ we are supposed to have some faith in re nuclear energy were asleep in their required liberal arts classes, history in particular, several major regions of the globe were bombed heavily from 1938 to 1945, these regions today contain hundreds of reactors. They include China, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, etc. This war was not an aberration, these regions have been engaged in a near constant state of warfare since nation states came into existence. Thus, it is massively irrational to assume a precarious peace will last. Case studies, that are more recent than WWII: the former Yugoslavia blows up into violent warfare, that lasts for years, and features brutal and totally ruthless attacks on whatever was there to attack. Georgia, invaded by Russian backed troops, if I remember right.

Other regions subjected to basically indiscriminate bombing campaigns post WWII: Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Honduras, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia/Croatia.

It is irrational to believe that what has always happened among a set of people will not happen because that makes the ideology that one is attempting to justify impossible to justify rationally. We have not entered into a magic golden age of peace and tranquility. The USA is currently involved in two occupying wars, a situation that makes the people who are occupied very grouchy. Pakistan is highly unstable. It is irrational to assume that when these states fail or collapse further that the world can fix the reactors as they begin to fail there.

Key and absolutely core: the ongoing failure to engage in proper long term storage of nuclear core wastes as they are created. This is ongoing. Ignoring this fact nullifies all other positives. Pretending this stuff is going to go away when it has not gone away is profoundly irrational, since it ignores a reality that is clear and present for more than 40 years now. A corollary of this irrationality is saying certain wastes with half lives of say, 10,000 years will be safe in 10,000 years. This is of course beyond absurd, Fukushima has I believe 200 tons of this material. This means that in 40,000 years, the storage, should it even happen, will still contain 12 tons of highly radioactive materials. Ignoring this simple arithmetic is another example of the fundamentally irrational quality of the pro nuclear position. France, with their systems, cut this amount to 1/20th, but they do not eliminate it. I don’t know the negatives of their methods, but I assume they are significant, since I now assume all propositions put forth by apologists are based on lies and deception.

I could go on, but I believe it is totally pointless, because the level of irrationality and near willful self-delusion among proponents of this horrifying technology, which resembles in my opinion more than anything else an attempt to make material the notion of ‘hell’ that has always plagued Christian Western man (not anyone else, by the way, Hell is a fairly unique notion, not found really in the form we see it in Christian dogmas in other non-semitic religions.). One is tempted to note, following Soros, that nuclear bombs / reactors, are nothing more than a reflexive effort to make real the core Christian bias of a thing so evil that it defies all human attempts to control it. Sort of like a nuclear reaction, that is. I think people understand this at some core level, and it is this that makes them have the utterly rational reaction of abhorrence that apologists strive to minimize.

But I also do not believe that such decisions were ever made rationally, nor do I believe that proponents of these long lasting toxin generators are proponents for rational reasons. This has grown very obvious to me reading these threads. I am heartened however by the fact that normal people continue to have a rational reaction, which PR and spin and self-interested deception and misdirection, internalized by some, propagated by others, constantly is trying to fight and suppress.

Now, to get back to the overall rational reasons to abhore radiation, let’s look at a few places: long term genetic damage caused by radiation releases. See Chernobyl and Hiroshima and Nagasaki for examples of this, always whitewashed by pro-nuclear apologists to minimize this fact. Normal strategy used: point only to direct deaths, filtering out every possible indirect or long term death, illness, mutant babies, or whatever. Increased cancer rates.

Note the restricted zone around Chernobyl, note the 15 to 30 years required to shut down and in a nuclear power plant. Note the types of injuries being experienced by Chernobyl and Fukushima plant workers, who are basically sacrificing themselves to save the greater social body.

Note the fact of how little plutonium is required to generate cancers. Note the fact that plutonium is a totally 100% unnatural element. Note that each major failure basically removes between 500 and 2500, or more, in a future worst case scenario, possibly coming to a Fukushima reactor near you if today’s news reports about massive radiation spikes prove to be correct.

I find, in fact, when we note all the realities around this perverse, and I would suggest, fundamentally evil technology of nuclear power and weaponry, that the reaction of rational abhorrence is about the most rational possible reaction anyone could possibly have.

I see as a given that our current system is going to change, and change fundamentally, as resource depletion continues to alter the ease with which we extract, and waste, non-renewable, or not quickly enough renewable, raw materials. I find myself tending to agree with John Michael Greer (aka: the ‘Arch Druid’) re the time frames over which the ensuing changes will occur, mainly because Greer’s views tend to match reality as we find it documented in our histories.

Greer also makes an effort to study actual history and related areas that touch on these questions, unlike most of the other commentators out there, and he also is pushing out information that tries to help deal with the issues, which you’ll see at the end of this essay, is really the core difference between those prophets of doom and those who will actually find the way forward as our present grows into the future.

However, I also believe that significant portion of people who think we will see a sharp steep global collapse are simply confusing a drop in available consumption levels with the end of all life (aka: The End of Life as We Know It).

A Realistic View of Real-World Change

The way this so called collapse (better called: change, adjustment, alteration in prevalent mythologies and deeply held cultural biases) develops will be regional, not global. I’ve thought that for a while now. This is, by the way, another reason I don’t consider myself a ‘doomer’. Regional alterations do not make for a unitary moment of doom, they are something we have seen throughout history. Remember, Italy in its center was largely empty after the Roman Empire moved its center to the east, and the Barbarians had invaded one too many times. Then time moved on, and Italy wasn’t empty any more. Norway’s northern regions were emptied of Norwegians after the black plague, but NOT of human habitation, the Saamies (Lapps) were happy to move back in and occupy the land with their nomadic reindeer herding way of life until very close to the modern era. There is, I think you have to agree, a certain ethno-centrism involved in the belief that the failure of a single means of human social organization is somehow ‘doom’, when for others, it might be the ticket to the possibility of living a real life again, freed from the bonds of industrial non-sustainable production. It all depends on your point of view.

The notion, presented by Greer, among others, that changes will occur in staircase form I think doesn’t require much of a leap, since changes are coming in staircase form already. Just as an example: Colin Campbell (retired petroleum geologist, and prominent peak oil observer and analyst) points to the technical peak of global oil extraction as being marked by extreme social, economic, and political volatility. I look around myself in 2010 and find just that. Resource wars ongoing, political instabilities, ongoing. So that part seems pretty much right on.

The Real Turning Point

I don’t like getting into more sci-fi speculations, but to me, it’s fairly obvious that the reason 1970 was the real turning point for the global human culture based on non-sustainable resource exploitation is that is when the global population went into serious overshoot, beyond carrying capacity. The real warning flag back then was the requirement of instituting industrial, non-sustainable farming techniques, called, in Orwellian style, the ‘green revolution’ in order to avoid famine and provide enough food stuffs to feed the now clearly non-sustainable population numbers created by ceaseless population growth.

This topic used to be something people were aware of, but now industrial non-sustainable farming, perversely named ‘green’, is considered as ‘normal’.

The Myth of Perpetual Consumption and ‘Growth’

The real problem, and this is what Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (a Columbian author/intellectual/historian) also notes, is the notion that we can continue growth based economic systems based on relentless and brutalizing extraction of all available materials, when the quantity and qualities of those materials grows less, ie., when they peak in qualities and quantities. I would say most of our primary raw materials are now in this state, but we ignore it, pretending that brown lignite is somehow equal to anthracite, or tar sands equal to sweet light crude, or leaching gold out of rock with acids equal to finding raw gold ore, or silver, etc.

It’s also important to review the term ‘growth’, which really doesn’t mean growth in any normal sense, it means consumption of finite raw materials. Growth is what you see plants and animals do through their lifespans. What we call ‘growth’ is actually much more accurately understood by a term like speed of destruction. Or, as I outlined in some earlier postings, the rate of excavation in the process of digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the pit we are creating for ourselves. The more ‘growth’, that is, the further down we have gotten.

But growth itself, and capitalism, isn’t monolithic, that is, even though overall system growth may halt, the individual components of that system will keep on searching for new avenues to grow in, like ‘green’ things that aren’t green, but the overall system will not be sustainable within its current model or core biases because that growth is currently only possible by consumption of raw materials in a non-sustainable manner.

What I’m learning however from George Soros’s book, The Alchemy of Finance, is that it’s a serious mistake to believe that a current core set of core underlying socially generated biases are going to last. Since we cannot see beyond these biases in general, and since they shape what we do, our actions, and create the results, the core notion of the so-called doomer position really is just noting that our current core biased world view is not going to last. Which it can’t, since it’s based on resource extractions done in a way that guarantee failure long term, and now, increasingly, in the short term as well, as we hit extraction limits of more and more key resources, particularly those that fuel the system, oil and coal.

But there’s nothing new in this situation, this is how capitalism works, and how it has worked ever since it appeared. Ruin, strip out, profit short term while handing long term costs to the social body, who have to take care of those costs for all time, basically.

It is, however, important to keep one thing in mind: We live, here, today, in a tiny blip of history where production and extraction occur globally. So we are all tied in to some degree to the heavily flawed (non) logic of this way of organizing social life and resources.

Just as you really can’t fully choose to not participate in this current system, so too will we not have a real choice of how we interact with the systems that bumpily arise to replace them, in whatever manner that happens.

Population Overshoot

There’s been a fair amount of population overshoot on the planet, however, this is really not a very big question in my opinion, really it’s just this overblown western self, the ego, that views itself, and all other overblown selves like it, as the essence of existence. A few plagues and famines, a drought here and there, a crack in heavily non-sustainable food production methods, loss of natural gas based fertilizers, the bank reclaiming one too many farms, and the numbers drop. This too will happen regionally. The formula here is very simple: any country that today, here, now, depends on food imports to sustain its bloated population numbers is going to experience population reduction. There is no point in pointing to how the stuff is distributed, that is how it is distributed, each region views human rights and the laws governing socially acceptable distribution of the social generated materials differently.

Given the clear tautology that non-sustainable means cannot be sustained, not, can be sustained if we want since we don’t want to live sustainably, how these population adjustment events occur will be seen as they occur, I’m not worried about that part to be honest, I’m more worried about the damage we are doing long term to our ecosystem, the long term waste products we are leaving behind, etc.

Our Real Legacy to Future Generations

Even global heating doesn’t worry me that much, since it’s basically just going to shrink the land mass area that humans can live on sustainably, although of course, the cost will be far higher long term than mere problems for humans in the future. We are also wiping out species after species, and sometimes now even entire ecosystems.

In terms of history, the 1000 years it will take to recover CO2 levels, and so restore more or less normal temperatures to the ecosystem, is not that big a deal. However, the multiple tens of thousands of years the nuclear wastes require is another story, that is the most grotesquely selfish and irresponsible thing that human beings have ever done, period, bar nothing. Even numbers like: 10,000 year half life are so deceptive, since that’s only half of the material gone or degraded, the true number is closer to 100k years before the stuff is degraded enough and in enough quantity. This is simply inexcusable, to create this type of waste to feed our greedy desire for cheap and easy energy for a mere 50 or so years.

But it’s not just the 1000 years of global heating that is the legacy we leave behind. The massive species extermination we are now directly responsible for, and which can only advance as global heating increases and bloated human populations gut more and more of our ecosystems by means of the tools industrial techniques create, that too has to be considered as one of the worst things ever done, but that’s going to happen no matter what, we are not going to stop ourselves until it’s too late. We can, however, today, choose to stop the nuclear error, thus removing at least one of the evil deeds we leave as an unwelcome legacy to our future generations.

A Closer Look at the Doomer Position

When we take a closer raw doomerism, it’s useful to note that we have a roughly 2000 year history of apocalyptic cults. These cults are generally connected to Christianity here in the European West (West as opposed the East, Asia and the Americas, in this context). For example, in the years leading up to the year 1000, there was virtual certainty among those in the know that 1000 would be the end of days.

To me, all that doomerism is, is the humanist form of this same cult, and is, in my opinion, largely motivated by an excessive attachment to a non-sustainable way of life. Freud, who I generally dislike intensely, had noted something he observed in hist patients that he named the death instinct. While I reject this as an instinct, I have started to suspect that he may have found something in our own culture’s underlying biases that in fact looks very much like just such an intinct.

I believe a look into the history of such apocalyptic cults would be quite interesting, as well as revealing. Could it be that some of us have had a sense of the impossibility of our project for millenia now? This would not surprise me, after all, humans evolved not in large scale centralized cultures, but in smaller ones, living in direct contact with the ecosystem, and its natural cycles, large and small, local and regional (the seasons, for example, would always be central to any worldview that lives with its ecosystem, rather than off it). Given such an evolution, a sort of built in sense of what actually works at some level would not at all be surprising, and so living in violation of what works could very well trigger responses that even someone as clueless in any larger sense as Freud could pick up on.

Here’s a very good comment re this problem from Guardiola-Rivera:

The former (the view of the native people’s) is based on a forward looking ethic that involves reading history as a cycle of destruction and creation, in which the creation of future environments remains our collective responsibility. The latter (Euro style ‘progress’ and exploitation) is backward looking and contains its own delusion, and idea of regeneration in violence and accumulation, a self-reproducing drive to live the myth of El Dorado in a frozen present of permanent abundance and near useless renovation. And if the future is simply more of the same, then nothing we can do would make the slightest difference. The result is irresponsibility and the spoiling of Nature, as well as a sense of social paralysis (my emphasis)
What if Latin America Ruled the World, pp. 184

As you can see, there is nothing new in the doomer view, it’s always been with us here in the West, that’s why Christianity puts heaven into the future instead of here, in the present, as all other serious religions do, it’s why our science comes up with its big bang instead of seeing a constant stream of expansions and contractions, occurring well beyond our tiny, restricted, limits to perceive, since the time frames are just too big. So that forms how we think too, deeply, we here in the self-styled ‘modern’ age, actually believe that things start and finish, instead of cyclical change, which is what all sustainable societies have to see in order to be sustainable. It’s amusing to see a people and culture that views itself as so sophisticated and smart take on such a childish core conception of reality. Doomerism is simply mistaking a change for the end times, the inflection from expanding raw material extractions to diminishing raw material extractions. That view is almost built in to us, so it’s an easy mistake to make.

You’ll observe, however, that nobody who is engaging in real world activities that strive to avoid the issues Guardiola-Rivera warns us about in his statement ‘irresponsibility and the spoiling of Nature, as well as a sense of social paralysis’ have a doomer view. Turn off the TV folks, the real world is out here, and always has been. Hats off to the new generation of young organic farmers, to the farmers’ markets that are growing incredibly quickly in popularity, and in number, and to the localizers, to the permaculturalists, to everyone, that is, who is working to shape a sustainable tomorrow today rather than pine about the doom that is coming tomorrow.

There might be concern, worry, a pressing sense of urgency, but what there is not is the self-indulgent social paralysis that can be the only logical outcome of adopting the doomer’s perspective. The question is simply, are we willing to begin creating tomorrow today? Or will we insist on attempting the foolhardy project of perpetuating that which cannot be perpetuated?

I like to keep up on the latest major books written on crude oil in order to get a sense of how the industry actually is evolving over time as we surf the bumpy plateau that was promised by so called peak oil theorists like Colin Campbell (official ASPO website). One noteworthy thing about guys like Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes is that they are being proved disturbingly right in their longer term predictions, as is, sadly, M. King Hubbert.

The first really significant book released, right on the dawn of the current production plateau first reached in about 2005 was Matt Simmon’s Twilight in the Desert, which was essentially the first real shot across the bows of prevailing cornucopian (the belief that finite raw materials are in fact infinite) views held by both insiders and outsiders of the oil industry. While Simmons appeared to suffer a decline in the last year of his life, don’t be fooled, Twilight was a very well researched book on Saudi oil production, probably one of the best ever written, if not the best.

However, it’s also good to read some of the major works dealing with oil that don’t come from exactly the slightly outsider, critical, peak oil perspective, but which also contain a wealth of information about various aspects of the oil industry that might generally go less considered, such as speculation, refinery utilization and tuning for different oil types, and the role of public relations, as well as general styles of corporate governance among the Western majors.

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century (OMPP) goes a long way towards explaining some of the more technical intracies of how and why oil speculation can work, how big Western oil companies work from the inside, how PR is handled, and a wealth of specifics on topics such as refinery tunings towards various oil grades and sources. These specifics can help us understand how intertwined the entire process of modern oil, extraction, finance, governments, and corporate power, truly are.

For example, we learn that it is not simply how much raw oil in barrels there is on the market any given day, but how much per refinery per type of oil there is (heavy/light, sweet/sour, and a variety of combinations of these different grades). This is why, for example, you might hear Saudi Arabia claim it is producing extra, but then also complain that there are no buyers.

Since Saudi Arabia’s new production is now almost all what is called sour crude, that’s sometimes why more per day is not purchased even when it’s been extracted and is ready for shipment, it can’t be used, since there are no contracted refineries for that specific type of crude oil. I didn’t realize the requirements of matching refinery tuning to crude type was so specific. This book made me stop thinking of oil as one thing, just what they call petroleum liquids, like butane, propane, etc are also not properly assigned to that one thing, oil (plus liquids).

While the information the author got from his various sources is sometimes very eye-opening, I have to also warn any potential readers of a drawback: the author clearly used Western Oil company insiders as a primary source, so the general peak oil issue is of course slanted towards the words they used, and the message they internalize as officers of such corporations. In other words, the official view that given the right price and technology, production will be met.

As an aside, a growing number of oil company CEOs are beginning to admit that they will not in fact be able to meet supply by 2020. The US Army funded a study that puts the date close to 2015. So that view is generally now only promoted in order to continue to maximize shareholder value. Oil companies value depends on their reserves, and on the belief/bias of the market in terms of what they believe the company can achieve in terms of new reserves and production in the future. Because of this, the executives when interviewed almost always state an overly optimistic scenario, which reality proves wrong time and time again.

One such correction is very well covered by this book, the Shell oil reserve correction, which resulted in a huge downward revision of their total global reserve estimates. OMPP gives an excellent view of how that came about, from the insider’s perspective.

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century also covers quite in depth the John Browne years at BP, how Oil PR works, and what they have targeted. Any doubts you might have entertained about BP’s entrenched corporate cultural culpability re the BP gulf oil spill will probably be removed after you read those chapters on Browne’s aggressive share boost via expense cuts, safety, which is an expensive component of any oil drilling and extractio operation, yet one that only pays when the system fails, was first to be downgraded in priority, of course. The author goes into this story quite decently, and you’ll have a much better understanding of why some corporations really are in fact bad, and some are less bad.

I found one of the bigger flaws of the book the fact that the author appears to have had virtually no ins to NOCs (National Oil Companies), and that he depends too much on Western oil company sources that are biased. Another subtle bias is a tendency among Western oil majors to believe they could get more oil out than NOCs, which tends to simply not be true. In some cases, like Mexico’s Pemex, it’s probably accurate, but in cases like Norway’s Statoil, Brazil’s Petrobras, or Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, these companies are already absolutely top level oil extraction firms, second to none in terms of skill and technical ability.

I think many of you will find the refinery/speculation parts of OMPP especially educational, since they show ways that in fact prices really can be manipulated, and why one barrel in fact is not the same as another. In other words, despite popular beliefs to the contrary, oil is not fungible to the degree people like to think. Fungible basically means any one barrel can be replaced by any other barrel, no matter where it comes from or what type of crude oil it is.

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century is well worth the read, despite its varied flaws. You should be able to find it at better bookstores and libraries in your area today.

Other Material by Tom Bower

Tom Bower is a prolific investigative reporter and journalist, here are a few samples of his work:

• Drilling Down: A Troubled Legacy in Oil – WSJ – May 1, 2010 The spill in the Gulf of Mexico is the latest disaster for BP, which has been haunted by a history of cost-cutting
• Tom Bower in The Guardian Wide range of articles, many on the oil business, such as How the Sun King sank BP (the rise and fall of BP’s John Browne), Held over a barrel (oil producers, traders), Crude World by Peter Maass and The Squeeze (Paul Mason on two assessments of the oil business)

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.

It’s very important to look at such views and see what’s actually driving them, because to do so gives us a way to learn how to see our real world environment.

“if the Worst Possible Scenario happened at all the world’s gas/coal power generation stations simultaneously” – well it happened, in part, there, we call it global warming these days. Not as spectacular as exploding reactor roofs, not as fast as a cloud of radioactive debris, but the effect is here with all of us, it is enormous and irreversible. But it’s out of interest when people make their judgements.

If all four units in Chernobyl would have burned as #4 obviously it would have been much worse, yes, it would have contaminated Europe badly, but far from inhabitable. And that reactor design was a goddamn pit of hell compared even these 40yr old BWRs. Now Fukushima looks like crap, it will do some harm, it will hurt people, but not to the extent you believe.

Of course nuclear waste from all plants must be taken care of, there is research, I believe there are already finished plans for reactors that besides producing power, burn this “spent” fuel to shorten it’s dangerous effects to about ~2 centuries, which, while I agree is a lot of time, still looks somewhat shorter than it would take to remove all those greenhouse gases your gas/coal plants gushed into the atmosphere.

60 years of nukes vs. 120 years of ff power generation, yet the negative effects are hard to compare.
(src: theOilDrum 2011-03-16)

No known human non-sustainable, large scale, centralized, culture has been able to correctly predict the condition of that human culture 2 centuries in its future.

Just 65-70 years ago bombs were being dropped on all key facilities in Europe, Russia/USSR, China was being bombed, Japan was bombed. That’s only 70 years, not even remotely close to 2 centuries. And that’s only one way things can and do go bad.

Yes 2 centuries looks shorter than multiple thousands of years, but there is no way this heavily industrialized system is going to exist in 2 centuries, sorry. It’s a blip in history, a dip at the bottom of the pit. Also, what we have to look at is our present, not some uncreated future.

If we want to understand the real world, we must divert our gaze from a hypothetical final outcome and concentrate our attention on the process of change we can observe all around us.
George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance pp. 31

Such an observation shows us that the comparison of the dangers of nuclear power danger to the danger presented by the CO2 released by coal burning is false, both are being extracted and consumed as quickly as possible, and coal consumption is not slowing down, it’s speeding up.

I think the thing that is hard to grasp here is that when we started using nuclear energy, this was basically a tacit admission that we had reached the maximum levels of energy extraction, at least when looking at matters from a relatively sane one or two century perspective (the 7 generation model of decision making). All nuclear energy did was let us dig ourselves a bit deeper, with slightly longer lasting toxic waste as the outcome.

Coal alone is being produced and consumed at maximum levels, barring the global heating induced flooding of Australian coal mines, of course. I realize we have been brainwashed for decades about nuclear power being a replacement, that was the dream promoted in the 50s, but reality soon showed that the old too cheap to meter dream would never happen. And it never has happened.

In a way nukes are the ultimate toy/gadget, only it’s corporations that profit from making these, and so they are understandably reluctant to release the tax payer funded teat. In my view, the actual maximum of overall real energy production happened some time in the 70s, only we are only now starting to see that fact. Nuclear was introduced in order to mask that fact from ourselves, rather successfully I might add, since up to this week it was still being considered as our way out from the pit we are digging ourselves with coal and other fossil fuel generated CO2 gases.

I will repeat this point because it’s important to drive it home: not one pound of coal has not been burned, in the long term, from nuclear power plants being online, but a massive amount of conservation has NOT happened in the first world because of them. These nuclear power plants are just enabling devices, not positive future paths, or solutions to any problems. The developing world is developing on coal, and is adding nukes as well. Besides, uranium is depleting as a resource, and will deplete even more quickly as global demand rises.

I keep seeing this fallacy appearing in even the best of intentioned people, but the facts do not cooperate. The USA has something like 50% of its energy being generated in coal powered plants today. They are adding more I believe, so is China, India, etc. I think even Saudi Arabia is looking to add coal power, because oil is too valuable to burn. If you draw a baseline of generation levels, I will bet that expansion in consumption since the 70s largely matches the expansion of nuclear. Nuclear energy is digging us deeper, it’s not helping us get out of the problem.

Looking globally, coal is now being extracted at the maximum levels the mining industry can manage. It is also rising in price, so clearly demand is outpacing supply, thus no coal burning is being stopped at all, and thus, no CO2 is being stopped from being added to our atmosphere. We are burning coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium, at full speed. There is no surplus coal being produced, no surplus oil, and I believe, no surplus uranium. There is a small uptick in gas extraction rates because the US market is flooded with that quick depleting fracked natural gas, so that’s probably what we should be using as we try to reach a lower level of consumption, before it’s too late, that is. This logic isn’t complicated so I think it’s just mental habits and repeating what we’ve been told rather than any malicious attempt to deceive that keeps most people from seeing these simple facts.

In other words, it appears that we are now on the inflexion point of major change. This inflection point can be determined when the key resources are no longer able to keep up with demand, that is demonstrated by the price the market demands to supply them. The only question now is how long the current levels of consumption can be maintained. Once those cannot be maintained, you will see wars, increasing system instability, and it is this that forms the ultimate reason to stop all nuclear development now. We will not have the resources to correct the failures in the future. Coal is merely the silent killer that creeps up on us, but is even worse, but adding bad to worse in no case results in better. Dealing with nuclear failures requires a huge amount of socially mobilized resources, and a definite level of social cohesion, which can only be found in a functioning and fairly stable society.

These wars and system instability, by the way, are not hypothetical, they are happening now. Iraq is one such, a miserable failure, of course, but still that’s what it is. The Mideast convulsions are one way you can see how systems destabilize, often in highly unpredictable, chaotic ways. Those are the weak links, the way the stronger links manifest these instabilities is not yet known, but one thing you can be certain of, there is no safe predictable future for a nuclear power plant in any nation in the world over the next 100 years. Some may do ok, but that cannot be predicted in any meaningful way.

Both Coal and Uranium are non-sustainable, highly toxic materials, neither of which has any place in any sustainable energy mix, but sadly, both are promoted by entrenched corporate interests who do everything they can to keep these profit generators running. Profit for them, not for us, we pay the price, so does the planet.

And that’s the latest view from the Pit, a view growing more and more unstable and unpredictable by the week I might add. But that’s how it is down in the pit, we’ve left stability far behind, we’re so deep now we can barely even remember what it looks like.

You have fewer pieces than she does, and have now entered into a phase of the game where, while you are a skilled and talented player, you are also clearly able to recognize that checkmate is inevitable. She’s also got some options in the game which you don’t have, although you were given the option to inspect them before the game started, but chose to ignore that in favor of making up your own version of the rules, which isn’t actually permitted in this game. In other words, the real rules are absolute and determined by Y, the rules we generate will fail but we believe they won’t.

Building a nuclear power plant at the edge of the ocean facing a massive and extremely active earthquake fault is an example of making up these rules and ignoring the more fundamental ground rules of the game. In that case, the rules they made up were: we will build a x meter high (6, I believe) tsunami defense wall. In other words, the rule is that the tsunami that hits in potential will be less than x meters high. Mother nature doesn’t care about these made up rules, so the tsunami was as big as it was going to be, ie, larger than the rule said it would be, x+y, the quake was stronger than they designed for, so that piece of the ecosystem is now compromised and heavily damaged, and thus, the position occupied by X is now weaker than it was 5 days ago.

Making up rules like this is extremely common in I believe all large scale cultures that practice excessive non-sustainable resource extraction. Out of sight out of mind is another form of this rule invention, which is the rule we apply to most of our generated waste products.

Your pieces are parts of your ecosystem. You can use them all up before being checkmated, or you can gracefully tip the king over and admit the inevitable defeat, thus preserving the lives and future viability of your various pieces.

While some might point to the so-called marginal economic benefit of using nuclear energy as opposed to coal fired power plant energy, I am unable to actually derive any meaning from the term ‘marginal economic benefit’ since from what I understand all nuclear power is not economically viable in the first place. That is is, if all mining, construction, de-activation, and most important, permanent long term waste disposal costs are taken into account, the plant is a zero gain enterprise.

If we forget the entire ‘economic’ modeling, which I think is a good place to start, and look merely at extraction rates and long term viability of the various options, it’s clear that none of the current options have any future.

If we shut down our nuclear plants, as some suggest when trying to demonstrate a lesser of evils type argument, we would probably increase our coal extraction / burning rates in the short term, with a net gain/change in the chess game of exactly zero, since the coal will get burned up anyway somewhere in the world in all cases, only maybe not as quickly in the case where nuclear plants are not closed down or built. So while that might appear to present a reason to build nuclear power, it’s a false premise, since in fact what would happen is we’d just burn the coal anyway. So the reality is we are burning the coal, creating CO2, and show no signs of stopping, and generating long term highly toxic wastes, which threaten to poison our environment long term. That’s lose lose, instead of lose alone.

Keep in mind they are currently majorly revising actual economically viable coal extraction re reserves, with massive downgrades in future reserves. No more 200, 300 year future talk, it’s now approaching 20 to 40 years to reach global maximum production levels (although I am suspecting, based on rapidly increasing coal prices globally, that these levels have possibly already been reached due to unexpected massive increases in global demand based on Chinese and Indian coal use), which is about the same timeframes re time to oil production maximums being achieved (aka: peak oil) that were being discussed when I started following the so called ‘peak oil’ issue in the late 90s.

I see this only in terms of a realworld chess game where we already have lost too many key pieces to nature to ever win, or even reach stalemate.

Future generations will curse us, believe me, they will curse the heated global ecosystem from CO2 emissions they are going to inherit from us, which will take about 1000 years to return to a more normal level, and they will curse our mountains of toxic wastes (including but not limited to nuclear) we leave behind, which can take tens of thousands of years to finally become reasonably non-toxic, if they ever do. Discussions of ‘economic benefit’ when the outcome is only destroying more of our ecosystem long term in all cases is just not something I can find any heart to really get into.

I don’t know or understand why so many modern humans cannot respect mother nature, and why or where their profound contempt for her rules and limits came from, but I am unable to participate in that contempt or self-centered focus on personal greed, consumption, and fulfillment of desires that were not even an idea in someone’s brain 80 years ago.

I see now that the requirement for all decisions to be taken in long term was not some side thing for those who managed to live more sustainably than we do, it was the only thing. Despite this I see ground for hope, but not in any way a hope that will satisfy artificial notions of economic development. But that’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing.

I have been reading, with great interest, Soros’s book The Alchemy of Finance, which strives to not be a work on finance, but on human behavior and social systems. It succeeds in my opinion. One of the key concepts therein is that the way we as thinking entities perceive reality is always filtered through our thinking, and this is not something you can get around. The requirement, so called, for x or y levels of energy consumption in my opinion fits in perfectly with this model. It’s a feedback loop, we believe we require x or y level, then we generate x or y level, then we believe we need x or y + 1, so we generate that. Once generated, that forms a new floor for what we believe is necessary for human existence, even though it’s totally obvious that it isn’t, nor has it ever been.

To be clear, what Soros is noting here is the inevitable failures of social ‘sciences’ to achieve the status of certainty that physical science is able to reach. In other words, there can be no social science because the agent who is investigating is the agent being investigated, and that agent contains biases that are not possible to work around. So what’s he’s talking about is understanding social systems. Personally I would go further, because I do not believe science itself actually is doing what it pretends to be doing, but that is going way too far afield, and would lead to pointless discussions that would do little good.

This recent Japan nuclear problem to me is a perfect test for the core premises of several books I’ve recently started digesting (Soros’s work here discussed, Taleb’s derivative and weaker, but still useful, Fooled by Randomness, as well as the excellent When the Lights Went Out – A History of Blackouts in America, by David E. Nye), and their premises are being proved not just slightly correct, but absolutely so.

The corollary of this point is that it’s not a one way process, ie, just as we adjust our world views to the x=x+1 process, so too when we hit the limit of that, determined by underlying tendencies and fundamentals, we are forced by material circumstances to adjust mentally to a model which now is x=x-1, until a new relative steady state is reached (itself an illusion, since only once actual sustainable living is reached can we discuss relatively steady states, but it’s an adequate working model).

So all the frantic statements and comments from people who insist that the x=x+1 condition are the only possible outcome and future for us are simply demonstrating Soros’s notion of reflexivity in an explicitly clear manner.

When x=x-1 becomes the prevalent bias, these people will vaporize, or rather, the bias will vaporize, and will be replaced by those who maintain equally adamantly that an ongoing x=x-1 is the natural condition, and it’s absurd to suggest otherwise. At some point in the distant future we will bounce off and on from x=x, each time being corrected, again, as we try to use x=x+1 model, and returned to the x=x model. This won’t be a choice, but it’s so far in our future it’s also pointless to even really discuss that future.

The core concept here is that there is no way for human beings to actually avoid the underlying bias and trendlines, which are mutually self-reinforcing, ie, there is no point of view outside of them that is solid, but we can note that this process exists, and then try to mold our thinking to fit this model, which in my opinion is a significantly superior model for understanding human actions and social thought.

To be clear: the bias we now internalize about yearly growth in consumption of electricity leads directly to yearly growth in consumption of electricity, it is a feedback loop. When our bias alters due to our views coming too far out of step with what the fundamentals can provide, the bias will swing to the negative side of the slope, which will involve declining, decreasing levels of electrical power consumption. How our biases achieve explanations to ourselves at that point remains to be seen, but one thing is certain, they will. I am glad to see such a fantastic real world test case here and now for these ideas, it’s rare real concepts can be so readily tested, Soros used the market to test these, but he knew the ideas were much larger than the market.

This is how Soros explains all bubbles and boom/bust cycles, and I would without hesitation include the growth/decline model as fitting this perfectly, only more slowly, and over a longer and more complicated period of time.

In other words, we view our normal as normal, but that normal itself is not fixed, it’s fluid, it changes. People don’t like change, but when it comes, it comes, one can either resist (as in rightwing climate heating denialism), or one can move with it, ideally a bit ahead of it to give you an edge. Not impossible at all. Difficult, sure. It’s worth noting that deliberately placing oneself behind the curve, as most climate heating denialists do, places you in a position where you may experience short term gain, but you are almost certain to have long term total failure, both as a country and as an individual. While it’s a possible course, it is neither wise nor offering long term advantage.

And that’s it for the latest view from the pit, we’ll see how things pan out as they panic and try to negotiate their way out of finite and absolute limits, in other words, call in more digging tools, we’ll bury the nuclear plants in cement and sand sarcophagi, then build more new ones, we need to power the excavation equipment at all costs, full speed ahead!

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.