Month: April 2005

Nuclear power

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What difference does it make if Yucca Mountain leaks waste in 1000 years, or even 100 years?

Seriously. Not that it’s at all likely to, but so what if it does?

There are two possible scenarios. Either we’ll continue advancing, and this planet’s entire population (much less the Yucca Mountain area) will be a minority of the human race in 3005, or we’ll stagnate, and then revert to savagery when our fuel runs out, in which case there won’t be very many people living in the desert and the human population as a whole will have much, much bigger problems than a bit of radioactive waste in an environment that most of them won’t be able to go anywhere near without dying of thirst.

Anything that maximizes the odds of the first scenario coming to pass, and minimizes the odds of the second, is worth doing at just about any cost. Including radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain, and even including leaking radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain.

After Peak Oil, nuclear power is our only hope of not reverting to the worst aspects of the 19th Century (you know, the horse-and-buggy level of energy and industry and technology that caused all the misery that the spectacularly successful laissez-faire economic policy keeps getting the blame for). With a sensible (i.e., much lower and stable, particularly with respect to plants already under construction!) level of regulation on the nuclear power industry, the risk associated with possible meltdown is still impressively low; our plants would have to be many, many orders of magnitude more shoddily built to duplicate the Chernobyl plant, and even with that sort of disaster happening occasionally, which it wouldn’t with any nuclear plants we’re ever going to build, we’re still bearing far less overall risk than we would be running out of oil with no large-scale replacement available.

Of course, any high-density terrestrial energy source is only a stopgap to get us to space so we can use the abundant energy found there. If we screw around until every form of stored energy here is used up, then we’ll be stuck forevermore using energy at a lower rate than it arrives from the sun, which as far as I can tell would leave us stranded on this damned rock until the Sun swallows it whole, or until someone manages to produce antimatter or a fusion generator using only the infrastructure that can be built and operated in such a low energy environment, which may amount to the same thing.

There is no such thing as perfectly safe. Every course we take has risks, and the one with the lowest overall risk involves nuclear power, and lots of it.

What about automotive fuel and fertilizer? How are we going to replace that with nuclear power?

Chemical synthesis, powered by nuclear reactors. There are several schemes for getting fuel from corn, organic waste, and so forth, that show little energy profit. Hook up a nuke plant, and even fuel processes that show a loss would, in effect, ship nuclear power to cars and cargo vehicles. Nuclear plants dedicated to this process can run at constant load as cheaply as physically possible, without dealing with continuously variable load. Given cheap enough energy and high enough demand, nuclear powered synthesis of everything we’re getting from oil should do the trick.

Rolling In It

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I was just reading this news item, which discusses the provisions that various emergency agencies have set up in order to take care of animals during disasters.

This is certainly nothing new, and it’s eminently practical since livestock are a major form of agricultural assets. Protecting farm animals against needless death is a way for the state governments to protect their tax base.

But people are taking steps beyond moving cows or horses out of harms way. Emergency shelters for people are now preparing to meet the needs of pets as well as their owners.

Megan McArdle says that it’s very difficult to declare yourself wealthy because the goalposts keep retreating as you move up the income ladder. That’s certainly true, but I think that I’ve found an indicator of the relative wealth of the nation as a whole.

Lisa Marr: Learning How to Fail

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Lisa Marr has been a recurring focus of praise from moi in this space, e.g. here and here and here. (Perhaps one of these days I will write a long-threatened post analyzing and explaining why she is one of the great musical voices of the age. But for now, take my word for it.)

The most recent major work we had from her, however, was not a collection of gem-like pop songs — my not so secret wish — but a neat little movie called Learning How to Fail. Miss Marr has begun devoting a lot of time and energy to film-making lately. She explains here how this film came about. She was finding that scaling the musical mountain was working less and less well for her. Things took a particularly ugly turn in 2003. She was finally going to get her band The Lisa Marr Experiment, on the road for a national tour, but the guy who was supposed to be booking the shows had botched it and lied about it, and the tour couldn’t happen.

But, rather than mope, the plucky Canadian songbird decided to make the most of it. As she tells it:

I had time off, I had recently acquired a beat-up ’63 Gibson acoustic and a mini-DV camera; I had a box of records, a bag of t-shirts, a trusty ’88 Toyota Corolla hatchback and a ferocious case of wanderlust. Why not just hit the road by myself, play music in random public places and interview the folks I encountered along the way about their notions of success and failure while I tried to sort out my own feelings on the topic. I’d call it the Learning How To Fail Tour. And that’s exactly what I did.

I had friends willing to put me up in Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Brooklyn, Detroit, Chicago and Denver so my route was a giant game of connect the dots. In between, I slept in my car. Every day I’d set out and stop whenever a place caught my fancy. I’d find a suitable location (a park, a shopping center, a laundromat, a street corner, a truck stop, a bowling alley, a tavern, a tourist trap….), set up the camera and start playing. I had a little sign on my guitar case explaining what I was doing. Folks would amble up… sometimes they’d throw me a little bit of money but mostly we’d get to talking… The question “What is the definition of success?” was a window into all kinds of really amazing discussions about happiness, money, work, divorce, ambition, love and heartache, cancer, suicide, politics, music, family, travel… you name it. People responded with a kindness and generosity I couldn’t have imagined. Everyone wished me well and helped me in whatever way they could. Not once did I feel threatened or afraid. The whole experience restored my faith in making art and reminded me of why I’d been driven to make music in the first place: not money, not fame, but simply to connect with people. Process not product. Hokey, but true.

The film is a document of this tour. We see but don’t hear Miss Marr playing. Instead we hear the voices of lots of people holding forth with some surprisingly touching responses to the question: What is the definition of success? Full disclosure: Some voices near and dear to me can be heard in the film. But, that aside, it is a nicely done piece of work. It is handsomely packaged, with a bonus cd of a live acoustic appearance on a radio station, which has pleasant if rough-hewn versions of several of her songs. You can go here for a short version of the film (scroll to the bottom). Go here to buy it directly from her.

I will confess that I pine for a brand new, full-blown, fully produced, fully instrumented album from Miss Marr. She updates the news page on her website pretty much every month, and these posts are amusing and informative. The sense you get is that she is enjoying herself with a lot of one-shot projects (like a Buck reunion show) and film-related stuff, and playing out mainly as “The Here and Now”, which has the minimalist format of her on accoustic guitar and a rather dashingly piratical looking bearded gentleman on drums. Which is all fine. The stars may all come ’round right and we may one day get an album from her in the same league as, say, “Pet Sounds” or “Mr. Tambourine Man” – which I actually think is possible. But if these Olympian heights are never reached, all is still well. We will nonetheless, I am sure, be blessed with a continual outpouring of worthy new musical projects from the irrepressible Miss Marr.

In the meantime, I can also strongly recommend The Spring Demo Collection, which you can buy here. It is Miss Marr and a guitar, no overdubs, no nothin’, just the songs, unvarnished. But her singing is very sincere and beautiful and all the songs are good and a few are brilliant. Also, check out the group of free songs here, to get some idea what I am going on and on about.

New Socialist Man, Chicago Style

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My wife and I were tooling around Bolingbrook, IL looking for a place for her new medical practice (to open shortly after a space is leased, more about that later) when we saw him. He was a government worker, pulling down christmas tree lights that had been put up on the corner of I-55 & IL-53 and with us stuck at a red light, he was our temporary entertainment.

Yank those lights! Rip that branch! One string that was serpentined across the front came down. A second string proved more challenging for our public servant as it was actually wrapped around the tree. After a brutal tug shook the entire tree, confirming that he would have to circle around the tree to take it off, he proved his membership in the vast collective of New Socialist Man. Rather than walk around the tree, he cut the wires.

My wife and I looked at each other in shared disgust. We didn’t have to say it. Our mutual look said it all. We talked about it anyway.

Any East European admiration for efficient US government is entirely misplaced. It really is true that there is zero difference among government workers across the world. They’re all New Socialist Men, at least on the job. Waste is their watchword, sloth is their middle name, and carelessness with other people’s money is their reality.

Berlin is Encircled, the Allies meet at Torgau: 60

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On April 25, 1945 “[t]he 1st Belarussian Front [Zhukov] … linked up with the 1st Ukrainian Front [Koniev] troops northwest of Potsdam, having completed the encirclement of Berlin.” The lid on the kessel was slammed closed. The same day, the desperate and hopeless relief attack by III Panzerkorps under Steiner, which Hitler was dreaming would save him, ground to a halt 50 miles from Berlin. The days of successful German offensives were long over.

The final offensive had begun on 16 April. “Zhukov’s 1st Byelorussian Front attacked at 05.00 on the 16th April and Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front at 06.15.” Stalin had set the two commanders in a race to Berlin. The Soviets had ten thousand cannon, one for every four meters of front, 6,300 tanks and 8,500 aircraft committed to the attack. Still, because the Soviets had failed to correctly identify the dug-in and camouflaged defensive line along the Seelowe heights, the Germans were able, for a time, to halt the juggernaut. The end was not in doubt, because the Soviets were willing to pay the blood-price to take Berlin street by street, house by house, room by room. The Soviets lost 300,000 men in the battle, roughly what the United States lost in the entire war. Upon winning, the Red Army troops subjected the conquered population to a reign of rape and brutality reminiscent of the Mongols — and similar to what the Germans had inflicted on the Soviet peoples when the boot was on the other foot.

Meanwhile, on the same day, April 25, 1945 American troops from Ninth Army and the Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front famously joined hands at Torgau on the Elbe, 100 miles Southwest of Berlin. Germany was being carved into pieces.

And on April 25 German U-boats sink 5 Allied supply ships in the English Channel.

The Germans did not give up when they were clearly beaten. They kept killing people long after there was any hope of victory. They did not do a rational cost-benefit analysis. They were good at fighting, it was what they knew how to do, and they believed their own racist lies about their supposed superiority. The only way they could be stopped was by battering them to the ground, so that anyone who was conscious would see it was over, so that they were so crushed that they were rendered physically incapable of killing anymore. That is what it took to achieve victory. No half-measures would have worked with these people. That is how it is sometimes.

As to the Soviets, we can and should recognize and respect the extraordinary achievement of the soldiers of the Red Army, without unduly glorifying them, without making excuses for their crimes, and with no illusions about the evil of the regime they served and saved. There is too little recognition of what they accomplished, in the face of a murderous, even psychotic enemy, ruled by a regime almost as bad. We in the West should be grateful that they did so much of the hard work to defeat the Third Reich, a fact the Cold War and a history seen through Western and German eyes did too much to obscure. Recent scholarship, especially that of David M. Glantz (e.g. here and books available on Amazon) and the appearance of memoirs (e.g. here, and this and this) are doing much to change this, to create a more balanced view, and to fill in the details of a vast and too little understood part of the Second World War.

(Sources: Here and here and here and here and here.)