the darkerside to rants

икониFollowing the online “discussions” with regard to the events happening at Fukushima it seems that society is split into two groups, roughly in the middle.

On the one side you have the people who perceive nuclear energy as inherently evil and in essence “we’re all going to die”. On the other hand you have “experts” (I put this in quotation because it is at times hard to assertion the credential of someone online) who perceive the risks as overblown, if I want to step down to their rhetoric I would call them the “reactor hugger group”. The general consensus on this side has changed from: “They are much better engineered than Chernobyl and the Japanese have it all under control.” to “Well, look at how well they were engineered, they survived the earthquake and the tsunami!” or if they wanted to be really fastidious: “If a dam breaks thousands will die too!”

I think both sides have it wrong, but out of different reasons.

Let’s first deal with the con argument here.

Most of the anti-nuclear crowds argument stem from two things:

1. Chernobyl
2. Mushroom Clouds

The Chernobyl comparison is somewhat apt, although only to a certain degree. Yes, a reactor did blow up and spew it’s fuel over a large area and contaminated vast stretches around the world with radiation, but it is also true that the design of the reactor was different. This doesn’t mean that a Chernobyl like event couldn’t happen in any other power plant, but the odds are lower. How much lower? That’s the big question here.

The mushroom cloud on the other hand is completely silly. Granted, it is the symbol for the nuclear age and it is a vivid image at that. But the reality is that there never will be a mushroom cloud over a nuclear reactor unless someone detonates a nuclear bomb at a reactor. The “worst case scenario” is the Chernobyl type disaster where the fissile material gets ejected from the core and spread over a wide area. This would be known as a dirty bomb. You know, the one the US is so afraid of someone could set off in the US.

So what about the proponents?

I think here we have to split them into two groups:

1. Politicians, Internet Commentators, Industry spokes people.
2. Engineers and Scientists.

The first group tends to be either misinformed as much as most of the opponents or has a vested financial interest in keeping the Status quo and downplaying any risk.

The second group though, the engineers, had me scratching my head for a bit as I couldn’t quite figure out why they were so adamant about downplaying the potential risks. It only occurred to me on Sunday that the reasons is rather simple: If you design a technology at one point or the other you have to be convinced that you have done a good job, as close to perfect as possible. Engineering always has worked on these principals, we design something with as many safety ideas in place as we can think off, and then when something goes wrong we go back to the drawing board, identify the point of failure and find a solution from this happening again.

In essence: Engineers need to believe they are Gods of their own creation and they can and will only admit they aren’t when proven otherwise.

This is an inherit human condition: We all live our lives that way, if we wouldn’t we couldn’t get out of bed in the morning out of fear that something bad could happen to us. We get into our cars or walk down the street ignoring the dangers we are in because we realize the odds are stacked in our favour, until they aren’t.

Out of this behaviour comes the rationalization right now in the pro nuclear camp why everything is not bad, but actually rather good: The reactors survived the initial earthquake and tsunami and only later failed.

This is an interesting way to look at the current problem. The reason why we now seem to have at least two melting cores is that the power that is needed to keep the cooling going until we can fully arrest the nuclear reaction has failed. This is a condition that could happen in other places as well, with or without and earthquake and a tsunami.

The engineers and scientists who write their fingers bloody right now with this line of argument on why all the other reactors are safe (no earthquake / no tsunami) fail to understand this though, or rather, they believe in the multiple backups that they have installed at all the other plants. Unfortunately Fukushima did have 300% redundancy as well. In the eternal words of Murphy: What can go wrong, will go wrong.

Yes, nuclear reactors have triple backup for these kinds of events, but cascading failures have happened before, there will always be a risk, we can lower it, but it will always exist and to deny this is doing us all a disservice.

Risk vs. Benefit

Which brings me to the real question that we have to answer when it comes to nuclear power: Are we, as a society and as a species, willing to take the risks with nuclear power? Are the benefits we gain from using it outweighing the risks?

Nuclear technology is still “brand new” in human technology terms. We have steam power for around 200 years, we have the petrol engine for a bit over a hundred and nuclear power is only slightly older than 50 years.

In these 50 years we had Windscale in Britain, Three Mile Island in the US and Chernobyl in the Soviet Union and now, it seems, Fukujima in Japan.

Add to this dozens if not hundreds of smaller accidents and incidents all over the world and you understand that the technology is far from fool proof. We’ve decided to run a marathon before we could really walk.

What’s worse on that count is that whereas with the rupture of a dam we can see the damage right away, in a nuclear disaster we may not know for generations the true cost of the accident.

On the benefit side: Japan could not have become what it is today without the use of nuclear power. China’s growth would be much lower as well. Other places like the US, Europe and Russia also benefited economically greatly from the use of nuclear energy. There is only so much fossil fuel, rivers and landmass that we can use to create electricity after all.

To Nuke or not to Nuke?

What is needed now, globally, is a debate over the use of nuclear for energy generation. This requires homework, by both sides.

The No side needs to educate itself over the real risks that are posed by nuclear power plants. The impression of the mushroom cloud over a power plant is neither realistic nor helpful.

At the same time the group also needs to come up with a list of things they, as a whole, are willing to give up if we remove the nuclear power input, at least until we can (if ever) replace it with an alternative energy source. Just turning them off and continuing as before is not an option.

On the pro nuclear side there needs to be an end to pretending that we have the technology fully under control. Eventually there will be a disaster. No human technology is infallible and honesty from the side of the pro-atom lobby would be more than refreshing.

We also, as a species, need to address what we want to do with all the spent fuel and old reactors. This is something we will have to deal with regardless if we continue using nuclear for energy generation or not. So where are we going to put all that highly radioactive garbage?

This is not a black & white scenario regardless of how either side wants to paint it. Both sides have valid points and both sides also have valid arguments in their support. The question really is: Are we willing to possibly risk future generations for our current prosperity?

I am sure the internet, as always, will be full with “this was 2010” or some such, not to mention the “traditional media”.

So why not?

On the global scale, things that I am aware of but that don’t necessarily directly affect me I would have to say the biggest news was Wikileaks. Not so much because of what they released (or are releasing) as in the way the media and politicians have reacted.

To put it mildly: It was and is a pretty shameful spectacle.

Like or don’t like Julian Assange, but at least the man seems to have principles and stick to them. He also gave Wikileaks a face and that seems to have galled some of the earlier Wikileaks supporters.

The good thing that may come out of it next year is another leak site, if they will be as principled as Wikileaks seems to be under Assange remains to be seen.

But I still wonder how much of an impact this will really on our day to day lives. It seems the internet is split between people who support Wikileaks and it’s mission and those who (mainly) see it as an attack on the United States. Again, I am sure, 2011 will give us more answers to that as media and internet loudmouths will jockey for a new position trying to either take Wikileaks down or support it.
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Darkness before the light?

For many years, Harris Decima pollster Allan Gregg has asked respondents whether they consider themselves conservatives, liberals or centrists, and he’s also asked them how they vote. In recent years, he told the Manning Centre conference, the number of self-identified conservatives has been growing. But what’s almost more interesting is that the political allegiance of self-identified centrists has shifted, too. In 1997, 41 per cent of centrists voted for the Chrétien Liberals. In 2008, 48 per cent voted for the Harper Conservatives. Two things have happened. As the population ages and is buffeted by polarizing events like the struggle against international terrorism, the centre has shifted rightward. And the Harper Conservatives have pushed the Liberals, sometimes with their hearty co-operation, off-centre.

Gregg found that 89 per cent of respondents, nearly everyone, agrees that “nothing is more important than family.” Sixty-seven per cent agree that “marriage is, by definition, between a man and a woman,” 60 per cent that “abortion is morally wrong.”

This is interesting to me for a few reasons.

It is a bit with sadness that I hear of the demise of CompuServe today… Back in 1989 (at the age of 15) I ended up getting an account on CompuServe, I spent an entire summer on there suffering severe jetlag, as the majority of people weren’t in Germany but in the US.

I also, fondly I might add, remember that I pissed some guy who showed up in a German forum with his Doctor Title proudly attached to his username. I dressed him down as it struck me as “show offish” and didn’t quite fit in the online world of CompuServe (and a little while later NewsGroups).

This, kids, was before the Internet Browser came along. It was an age where you were using command line tools to even navigate through CompuServe. Later on they came out with a Windows client that made things a bit easier, but I mostly used the command line edition as it was more flexible… Yeah, even back then, before I met Linux I was more interested in typing my way around the networks than clicking on buttons.

The end of CompuServe is somewhat bitter sweet to me. I left CompuServe after AOL bought them out, things changed, and not for the better. It ranks in there with the FIDO network for me, another thing I used heavily in the late 1980s early 1990s to “find my way around”. I guess most people who will end up reading this will have no idea what FIDO or even a BBS was, but back then, it was THE thing. You wanted warez? You got access through friends to a BBS, you wanted to send emails, you got something that was connected to FIDO.

My local FIDO note was part of the MausNet (Link in German) network in Germany, more precisely, Stuttgart II. I actually knew the SysOp who ran it literally out of his parents basement and we ended up playing Magic and a few other things. he also drove an old Mercedes with a Star Trek Sticker on it (“My other vehicle is a Starship”).

I just notice they still have a website up: maus.net.

It’s odd really, I haven’t used CompuServe or a BBS in a long long time, and yet, I look back at this and I just realize how much fun these were. We “abused” the German ISDN protocol, as we had figured out that via the data channel (the one that transmits the caller ID and other connection info) we were able to keep data flowing without having to pay for the connection. In Germany you had to pay by “unit”. Before they privatized the telephone business and turned it into the Telekom there was a “day rate” and an “evening rate”, but the data channel wasn’t part of that, so I was able to keep a connection (albeit at only 5K/s) open 24/7 without getting dinged… Good times I’d say

It was also before the masses started discovering the Internet, the tone was different…

In the mid nineties I switched over to a local ISP, back then the Internet in Germany was still mostly run by the Universities. The cool thing about this was that there were only a dozen or so peering points in the German Internet and I ended up knowing every single admin of these notes. If something didn’t route right I was able to talk to them and get the problem fixed. No crap of calling up a clueless tech support person, I was able to go straight to the source (literally).

I also knew the senior SysAdmin at the University Stuttgart who was also (at that time) the “owner” of the Stuttgart peering point, I was several times in the server room “touching” the Internet….

Yeah, I admit I miss the times. As fucked up as CompuServe became after the takeover by AOL (and AOLs invasion of NewsGroups, I remember that one too), the Internet was still mostly left to a few people….

Am I a snob for thinking back those times? Yeah, probably. There are many good things that a broader acceptance of the Internet has brought, the problem is, in my estimate, we don’t use it.

So yes, sorry to hear that CompuServe has gone the way of the Dodo, I had good times there, I had a good time on the internet back then in general, these days? Signal to Noise is clearly in favour of the noise…. Sad.

… The Economist puts a picture like this:

as it’s “teaser” for an article on the world economy.

But, welcome as it is, optimism contains two traps, one obvious, the other more subtle. The obvious trap is that confidence proves misplaced—that the glimmers of hope are misinterpreted as the beginnings of a strong recovery when all they really show is that the rate of decline is slowing. The subtler trap, particularly for politicians, is that confidence and better news create ruinous complacency. Optimism is one thing, but hubris that the world economy is returning to normal could hinder recovery and block policies to protect against a further plunge into the depths.

[...]

Add all this up and the case for optimism fades quickly. The worst is over only in the narrowest sense that the pace of global decline has peaked. Thanks to massive—and unsustainable—fiscal and monetary transfusions, output will eventually stabilise. But in many ways, darker days lie ahead. Despite the scale of the slump, no conventional recovery is in sight. Growth, when it comes, will be too feeble to stop unemployment rising and idle capacity swelling. And for years most of the world’s economies will depend on their governments.

This, after all is coming from “The Economist” a bastion of gung-ho economic news and a publication that not two years ago was harping on about the virtues of globalization, free capital flow etc. etc.

It is, somewhat amusing and scary at the same time to realize that the reality is starting to sink in with the “opinion makers” at places like The Economist. Will it change the outcome? No, I don’t think we have gotten even close to the truth in the media, as long as I hear people tell me that “If the media would just stop reporting the bad news all would be fine” we haven’t arrived…. And denial is still running strong and I can’t blame them really; if everything you’ve believed in so far is on the verge of going away / being wrong; then I’d cling to any little glimmer of hope as well, even if it means false hope.

After all, hope dies last.

There was a “neat” little story about the VPD intimidating a photographer for the Province to give up his camera. Didn’t take long for Jim Chu to try and… well, “explain” the situation.

My thoughts on this are …. well, rather direct:

I have to say I am a bit disappointed that the photographer caved. If the cop would have gone through with his threat and arrested him it wouldn’t have stuck and it would have made a much more powerful point about the abuse of policing powers.

But hey, let’s face it, if Jim Chu really would want to change the perception of the force I’d have a few ideas:

1. Take the cops out of their cars, when was the last time anyone here had a casual interaction with a cop? Most of the time they only approach you when you have done something wrong or you need them. Hardly ever do you see a normal relationship between the force and the people they are serving.

2. Get rid of these paramilitary type uniforms. The average “beat cop” looks like he’s part of a riot squat, only missing the helmet and club.

3. Stop trying to whitewash police transgression, get rid of the “cops investigating cops” theme that is going on. The VPD reports to the city. Cityhall should set up their own investigation group, even if they their findings won’t be binding (not sure about the law on this one).

4. Lastly: Educate yourself about your rights. The charter trumps whatever a cop may think they can do, and then STAND your ground and don’t just cave in and then whine.

It’s rather simple, I am actually partly waiting for the VPD to do a something like this on me. I am severely pissed at how the police in this Province has been behaving and Jim Chu and his fellow “top cops” don’t do anything to make me feel better. Either the people stand their ground now, or all is going to be lost.

THIS is a flash.

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) — More than any of its Nordic neighbors, Iceland under Prime Minister Geir Haarde imbibed the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — state-asset sales, light regulation and corporate growth abroad through debt.

Now that the hangover has arrived, many of Haarde’s countrymen want his Independence Party-led coalition to pay the price for turning one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita into a beggar state staving off depression.

“Many find that the government has mishandled the situation,” said Thorvaldur Gylfason, a professor of economics at the University of Iceland and a former International Monetary Fund economist. “A major political realignment will take place at the next election,” which must be held by May 2011.

Would you like to know more?

Now let’s see if the IMF attaches certain requirements to the bailout package they are preparing……

Bonus, a nationwide chain, has stock at its warehouse for about two weeks. After that, the shelves will start emptying unless it can get access to foreign currency, the 22-year-old manager said, standing in a walk-in fridge filled with meat products, among the few goods on sale produced locally.

[...]

Magnusson said last week that one of Iceland’s largest supermarket chains was unable to get any foreign currency to make purchases abroad and another retailer’s electronic payment didn’t go through. Iceland will begin to see shortages of “regular goods” by the end of the week if nothing changes, he said.

“We are struggling to make the economy survive from hour to hour,” Magnusson said. “There is an enormous amount of capital that wants to get out of the country.”

Sedlabanki told lenders on Oct. 10 that residents who want foreign currency should first prove they need the money for traveling by providing documentation for their trip.

Would you like to know more?