...My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek...
- Sylvia Plath - The Elm (1962)
(Immediate disclaimer: Nothing in the world has quite so frightened me as the now famous or infamous "nuclear" earthquake in Japan.)
I haven't had as much time as I would like to participate in public discourse on the topic of my favorite environmental issue, nuclear energy. As much as I feel a moral need to comment on this topic which is, in my view, the single most important topic of our times, I do have other responsibilities beyond the responsibility I attempt to fulfill by writing here.
I have my own problems.
I was working on a diary before the earthquake this week and it had very little to do with nuclear energy per se. It was called "Diamond's Collapse: Interesting Variables In the Total Extinction of Easter Island Forests."
It was a diary about the book I'm reading, which is, I think, best environmental book I have ever read anywhere. It was a leisurely diary, the diary that I was writing. Probably it mostly would have been ignored, like the time I wrote a diary about how I got a robocall from Joe Piscopo. The reason my diary about the best book on the environment I have ever read would have been ignored was that, in writing it, I was stepping out of what has come to be seen, by some, as a gadfly role and by others as a rational role. These are the roles I play whenever I say the word "nuclear."
Now it seems I will never get to publish the diary called "Diamond's 'Collapse': Interesting Variables In the Total Extinction of Easter Island Forests." Instead over the last few days, in bits and pieces and fits and starts, I have been writing this diary. It's called "Japanese Nuclear Reactor Earthquake Story Changes. Everyone in Japan Will Die."
Sigh...
Let me say the word now.
NUCLEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There. I've said it. As usual, I am about to be called all sorts of names for saying "nuclear," in the way I say it. I suspect my motives and intentions are going to be questioned, and all sorts of irrelevant points about conspiracies among members of my readership will be evoked. I'm going to predict that some of my responses to comments that I will receive will be rude.
For the record, a few days ago, when I first heard about the earthquake that damaged the reactor in Japan, I called up someone who has excellent contacts throughout the nuclear industry, far better than my contacts - although I am trying to expand my contacts in the nuclear industry. I wanted to find out more about the events at Kashiwazaki Kariwa, because as it happens, two of the reactors there, units number 6 and 7 are two of my favorite reactors in the world. Why are they my favorite reactors? Both were built in the 1990's, that's why. Unit number 6, which was built in the mid 1990's is the reactor from which the now internationally famous release of radioactivity occurred. Reactor number 6 was built in 39 months from the pouring of concrete to connection to the grid.
Now famously, reactor number 6 is not connected to the grid. In fact it wasn't connected to the grid when the earthquake struck but there is some question now about when it will be reconnected to the grid again. I hope that the people who run the reactor will be able to demonstrate that the reactor can be reconnected soon. This, of course, will depend on how much damage was done to the reactor. I have no direct information about the answer to this question, but I am hoping that the answer to it will be "not much." Of course it will take time to inspect everything that needs to be inspected, so I may not have my answer as quickly as I would like.
On the other hand, I have the distinct impression that there are lots of people who would like to hear that the answer to the question will be "lots of damage." I could be wrong about that but there may be people who hope the damage was severe. You tell me.
I'm sure I have written about reactor number 6 in this space because I admire the ideas behind the reactor. I think a lot about that reactor, since I regard it has an element of hope in the world. It's a reactor that is often on my mind.
Anyway. I called my industry contact. Just so there's no mystery about the subject of what I discussed with my contact to the nuclear industry, I would like to paraphrase now what we said to each other:
"Sigh..."
That's what we said more or less, although we spent maybe 15 minutes or so talking and used lots of other words. I can't produce a transcript because I wasn't writing everything down. Like I said, I'm paraphrasing.
He promised to send me the latest information he had on the accident, and I received it. I wrote back and asked if it was OK with him if I move up the information chain and ask some questions of his source. I may or may not get it, since his source is probably very busy right now.
Sigh...
I really wanted to write a diary about the best environmental book I have ever read. The subtitle of that book is "How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed."
How. Societies. Choose.
Societies Choose.
Choose.
There are lots of reviews of Diamond's Collapse on the internet. Interestingly enough, the review I more or less randomly selected for my link comes from a reviewer at the Naval War College. He is Col. (Ret) Thomas E. Seal.
I have a friend - a new friend - who is an officer in the United States Navy. He knows all about nuclear reactors, having operated several of them. That's why we're friends, in fact, because he knows all about nuclear reactors. I wrote to him because I am always trying to find out more about reactors. I said, "Let me introduce myself. I like nuclear reactors." After a while he wrote me back. After corresponding we talked on the phone. Then we decided to meet and become friends. My friend, from all I know of him, is a very fine man. I like him a lot. He's come here a few times to comment. He's generally more gracious than I am. So far as I am aware he has only commented here on nuclear energy, nothing else.
To tell you the truth, I don't know many naval officers. In fact, I only know one, although I am told - and this should hardly be surprising given the number of nuclear reactors that the US Navy operates - that a large percentage of the people who work in the nuclear industry, at least in the United States, are former naval officers.
That could be.
Dwight Eisenhower, who once held the highest military rank there is, albeit not in the Navy, once said something along the lines of "the business of every military officer should be to put himself out of work." General/President Eisenhower made other pacifist statements like this one:
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war – as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years – I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.
I have no idea if this kind of thinking is common among military officers though. Although my friend is a gracious man around whom I feel no discomfort, if you'd asked me to predict how I might feel around naval officers before I met him, one word I might have chosen would have been "sheepish." That's because I'm not generally supportive of military things. Over the years, I can think of zero times that I have called for the expansion of the military budget in any country. Everywhere I look in the world, I want military budgets cut. So I can't imagine that I would be universally popular among military officers. I couldn't imagine it being pleasant to say to meet someone whose profession is one that I have publicly called for defunding.
In fact, I am one of those wimpy, whiny pacifist types who are always calling for cuts in military budgets and not necessarily in the way Dwight Eisenhower called for cuts in military budgets. Eisenhower was, after all, a Republican. However pacifist General Eisenhower may have been in his farewell address, one of his last acts was to advise his successor to resume open air nuclear testing to upset an existing moratorium. Eisenhower's successor did just that, resumed open air nuclear testing, and almost blundered into the very nuclear war that Eisenhower said could destroy "this civilization."
And that's what the best environmental book I have ever read is about, collapsed civilizations.
How. Societies. Choose.
Societies Choose.
Choose.
Although almost all of my diaries are about nuclear energy, once in a while I write a diary about my damn pacifist attitudes, like one that I called The Best Thing I Have Ever Written. This is relevant to choosing, I claim, because Jared Diamond claims in Collapse that while the environment is a very, very important factor in why societies collapse there are also other factors, like war for instance. The diary I wrote about my distaste for war, though, certainly set no records for comments as NNadir diaries go, but it got a lot of tips for a NNadir diary, 34.
Wow.
I'm pretty good a predicting that renewable energy will never come close to preventing the continuous release of dangerous fossil fuel waste in a continuous uninterrupted stream. I've been doing it for about 20 years now, counting exajoules all the time. Since I'm pretty good at making predictions, having never been proved wrong on my prediction that renewable energy will not lead to banning dangerous fossil fuels, not once, I predict that there will never be a NNadir diary that makes it to the front page here. I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that the best way to be popular is to tell people what they want to hear. If you don't believe me, you ought to look at Presidential campaigns. If you never tell people what they want to hear, you will not be popular.
Here, by way of contrast, is a diary that is collecting tips and recommends like wildfire and of course, it is NOT an NNadir diary: Situation Grave at Nuclear Power Plant. This is a diary that is so contorted, it could have been written by Judith Miller, but it's not written by Judith Miller or even by anyone the New York Times.
Situation Grave!. This is, by the way an accurate description. There are very few major earthquakes in populated regions that do not inspire a sense of gravity.
Wow.
Grave.
Speaking of graves, how many graves are there, exactly as a result of this earthquake?
In fact the "Situation Grave" diary is the usual stuff. Three Mile Island. Cover ups. Conspiracy. So on and so on.
It includes precious little tidbits like this:
Japanese authorities seemed surprised at the extent of the damage. The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant supposedly was designed to withstand an earthquake. If, however, there was more than one epicenter, the effect of seismic waves approaching from different angles would be far more devastating than a single quake, or even multiple tremors from the same epicenter.
Bloomberg reports two other recent quakes, of similar magnitude: one in October 2004 and one in March of this year. Possibly, the earlier quakes strained plant structures, leaving them vulnerable to Monday's quake.
The bold is mine.
Reading it, this set of phrases, one is almost inclined to think that the reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa broke up into little pieces, all of which have been eaten by the citizens of Japan. I don't think this is the case, but I don't know. There could be a cover up.
Almost every antinuclear piece of work is chock full of conditional statements designed to induce fear, just like Kashiwazaki-Kariwa was designed to withstand an earthquake. The information about how well the reactors withstood the earthquake is still incomplete, of course - and there may be good reasons or bad reasons or both kinds of reasons for this. The question of whether or not the conditional statements have generated fear is more directly observable.
This reminds of the conditional statement, also designed to produce fear that says, if Saddam Hussein gets nuclear weapons.... The fear was so great that a prominent North American nation was inspired to go off on an extremely violent adventure on the other side of the planet.
Fear. The usual stuff.
Sigh...
This is why I'm not writing a diary, once again to repeat myself, the palimpsest diary called "Diamond's "Collapse": Interesting Variables In the Total Extinction of Easter Island Forests." I am writing a diary called "Japanese Nuclear Reactor Earthquake Story Changes. Everyone in Japan Will Die."
The two declarative statements that make up the title of the diary that you are now reading are true and irrefutable. They may have nothing to do with one another, but they are true. True statements bearing a similar relationship might include "Bananas are served with ice cream and many countries," and "Bristlecone pines are the oldest continuously living individual trees on earth." These statements are both true. There may be some relationship between bananas and bristlecone pines and ice cream - since one has to change the atmosphere's composition to ship bananas from, say, Indonesia to Japan and, at the same time Bristlecone pines survival rate is tied up with the composition of the atmosphere - but the relationship is actually quite tenuous if it can be said to exist at all.
I once wrote a diary with a similar title to this one on Democratic Underground. It was called, if I remember well, "1000 Gallons of Radioactive Water Dumped in German River. Everybody In Germany Will Die!" or something like that.
It actually generated some laughter, that title, at least to the extent one can detect laughter on the internet. However there are many people on Democratic Underground - and undoubtedly here as well - who think I have no sense of humor.
A German reactor really did release a large amount - I think 1000 gallons - of radioactive water into a river once a few years ago. That happened. It was international news. Note that the statement is lacking quantitative information however, since there is no information on how radioactive the water was. It could have been in concentration terms, about as as radioactive as a banana. It could have been as radioactive as a cancer therapy machine containing cesium-137like the machine that killed the little six year old girl Leide das Neves Ferreira. The water could have contained more radioactivity than the machine. There simply was no information. We can be pretty sure that it was not as radioactive as the radioactivity that escaped from the failed nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, since Chernobyl set off radiation detectors around the world. That is, in fact, how the world found out about Chernobyl. It certainly wasn't from a news release from the official Soviet news agency Tass. The Soviets tried to cover up the accident but they couldn't cover up the accident because major releases of radioactivity are detectable everywhere on the planet.
I thought everybody knew that.
I don't think radiation detectors around the world are going off today because of the Japanese earthquake last week. I don't know though. I have no information and I don't happen to own a radiation detector.
One of the things often missed by people who are scientifically illiterate is that science involves not only description but also measurement. In turn, measurement involves units. There are many different kinds of units for measuring radioactivity and exposure to radioactivity. The latter kinds of units are somewhat fuzzier than the former, because it makes a difference if you are exposed to a radioactive substance if it is plutonium or tritium or technetium. (I note that all three of these substances have been deliberately been included in human flesh as part of approved medical diagnostics, devices or treatment.)
There are plenty of places where one can see scientific illiteracy translated into innuendo, sadly, many hundreds of thousands of web pages of innuendo. Take this scientifically illiterate web page for instance. Note that of the thirty incidents listed there is only one that includes a scientific unit. Here is what that singular report says:
1992 Tube leak causes a radioactive release of 12 curies of radioactivity from Tarapur nuclear power station (India).
Everyone in India will die.
Note that there is no effort to report whether the "12 curies" was tritium, in which case it weighed less than a milligram (as pure tritium) and probably was too diffuse (and weak as a radioactive source) to have harmed anyone, or whether it was uranium and weighed 35 metric tons in which case the chemical risks would clearly outweigh the radiological risks.
Finally there is no effort to identify a single person who was injured or maimed or killed in even one of these incidents.
Four other "incidents" on this website casually mention physical units
of volume and mass while wholly ignoring units of radioactivity. The units of volume 8 cubic meters of water released in 1965, and 30 liters of water in 1990, 5 cubic meters also in 1990, and 38 tons (in Alabama) of water in 1981. Again, not one of these references bothers to assess how much radioactivity was released. For instance the "38 tons" of water is not evaluated to see if it is more radioactive than 38 tons of Brazil nuts, even though brazil nuts are pretty radioactive. I could produce a headline that reads "Brazil Shipped 104,487 Tons of Radioactive, Irradiated Nuts in 1980!!!!!!!!!!" and I would not be lying,although I would be, misrepresenting the existence of any quantifiable risk.
Since this is a diary that is called, in part, "Everyone in Japan will die," I should say something about Japan. Since another part of the title of this diary says the word "nuclear," I should also say some more stuff about nuclear things in this diary. As it happens, stuff about Japan and nuclear stuff is in the news. Maybe you have heard about it. I have. Very few reports in the news even try to answer the question "how much radioactivity?" I have seen one report, however, that makes a stab at scientific units and even - and this is surprising, believe me - tries to offer perspective on what the units mean:
An Actual News Report with Scientific Units Included.
Until yesterday, about 402 million Becquerel of radioactivity were released, Hisanori Nei, director of the trade ministry's Nuclear Power Inspection department told reporters. That's about a 10 millionth of Japan's legal limit, the ministry said in the statement...
...A Becquerel, the standard international measure of radioactivity, is one atomic decay per second, according to the World Nuclear Association. The radioactivity of an adult human body is 7,000 Becquerel, while 1 kilogram of uranium has 25 million Becquerel, the association said on its Web site.
That's not bad for a popular news account. It's really not bad. It's not the kind of thing you'd see on CBS News or NBC, I assure you.
The report is still open to spectacular misapprehension though. I will discuss these units and what they may mean below.
However, I would like to point up a point made in this article that shows that this affair will absolutely result in fatalities:
Tokyo Electric is studying starting up as many as six gas, oil and heavy fuel oil-fired power plants, with total capacity of about 2 million kilowatts, that had been mothballed, Takeyama said.
Every time a nuclear power plant is shut, it is replaced by the use of dangerous fossil fuel burning. Dangerous fossil fuel plants are known to cause fatalities because they release dangerous fossil fuel waste in normal operations.
Anyway.
Apparently you are still this diary that has a title called "Everybody in Japan Will Die." I should at some point get around to discussing even more about the situation in Japan, although I am talking about everything else, as usual. That's OK. My critics often change the subject too. So do some of my supporters.
Anyway.
Everybody in Japan will die. Everybody in Germany will die. Everybody in France will die. Everybody in the United States will die. I will die. You will die.
Everybody in Bangladesh will die, too, not necessarily at the same average age as everyone in Germany, but they will all die nonetheless.
If there were lots more room for titles, I could have included the following statements in the title of this diary, all of which are as true of the statements I did include:
"First News Reports Fail to Cover Full Extent of Releases of Radioactivity!"
"Radioactive substances Leak Into Japanese Seas!"
"Repeat of Event Deemed Possible!"
"World Attention Focused on Releases of Radioactive Water!"
World Attention!!!!!!!!!!!!
World Attention!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
World Attention!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am always amazed by what gets "World Attention."
I am old enough, sad enough, cynical enough, scientifically literate enough, passionate enough, realistic enough, horrified enough, to understand that one of the most toxic things on this planet is "World Attention," and I'm not necessarily talking about the world attention paid to Britney Spears failure to wear underwear during one of her public forays.
Photographs of this world shaking event - the one with the underwear - were circulated around the entire planet. Of course, it is true that Britney Spears actually did go out without underwear. Unlike the underwear case, some of the things that garnered "World Attention" have been notable for having little connection with reality.
For example for many years in the recent past, there was all sorts of news around about something called a "War on Terror." One doesn't hear much about this war these days, but I assure you that it was the subject of nightly news reports - and daily news reports too - and they were very, very serious and they lasted a long, long time.
Think long and hard. Maybe you remember this. I know I do.
There were hours and hours and hours and days and days and days of reports all about the "War on Terror." There was only one tiny little problem with all this reporting. That is that one cannot have a "War on Terror," since "terror" is an abstraction. One cannot have a "War on Conceit" or a "War on Abrasiveness" or a "War on Animal Loving" or a "War on Nuclear Shilling." You cannot shoot "conceit" in the head or bomb the cities where "abrasiveness" is has weapons factories, nor outflank "Animal Loving" nor surround "nuclear shilling" and force it to surrender and sign a peace treaty.
If people all decided somehow to stop being afraid of things, maybe terror would go away, but I'm quite sure that even if this happened it would have nothing to do with acts of war, especially because war mostly is terror.
In fact, the media wasn't quite sure what "terror" was exactly and so all sorts of things became the "terror" on which we were alleged to be having a war. Sometimes "terror" was the people who lived in Iraq. At other times "terror" was telephone conversations that the government couldn't monitor. At other time "terror" was people who hadn't been thoroughly tortured. Sometimes "terror" was the inhabitants of Guantanamo. That's the problem with the idea of wars on abstractions. The abstractions themselves can be anything you say they are.
So there are times that the media, collectively with little dissent, just makes stuff up.
There is an intermediate case of course, which is somewhat more common. This is the case of spin.
Let me speak in a language that Kossacks should understand:
In the year 2000 many of the problems that have gotten much worse over the last seven years already existed. There was terrorism for instance. A fellow named Timothy McVeigh blew up a building with a dangerous fossil fuel bomb. Also, people were talking about restricting the unlimited release of dangerous fossil fuel waste, Al Gore and George W. Bush included, and dangerous fossil fuel waste was a vast problem under international discussion. There were also discussion of international trade policy and public debt and nuclear weapons and all sorts of things like that. People also worried about shortages of dangerous fossil fuels, even though they are dangerous.
So what was represented as the most important campaign issue of 2000? Believe it or not, one of the most important issues of that time was whether or not you or not you would like to sit down and have a beer with George W. Bush or with Al Gore. Now, one may question the consensus of the media as it answered the question it itself posed, the answer being that you would rather have a beer with George W. Bush than with Al Gore. This incredible outcome was determined in spite of the fact that one should never have a beer with someone who has had or does have a drinking problem and that if you ignore such advice you are very unlikely to have a good time.
Another important issue was raised by the media was whether Al Gore was "stiff," something that implies, I guess, that George W. Bush was "flexible."
Thus, news can be "spun" by taking it out of context and choosing criteria by which to evaluate things by focusing attention arbitrarily. At the same time, it must be said that the whole blame does not lie with the media that chose to promote the issue of "stiff" vs. "flexible." Some of the blame lies with people who chose to accept the criteria being offered. It must be said that some of the people who did choose to accept the criteria being offered chose it specifically because it was what the wanted to hear.
How. Societies. Choose.
Societies Choose.
Choose.
If this society had chosen to seat the man who had the most votes in the 2000 election in the White House, would Al Gore have been a successful President? Would we be well along to solving what he has correctly (in my opinion) identified as one of the most serious issue to face humanity in post literate times? I don't know and you don't know. Almost certainly the outcome would have depended on Al Gore's choices about things like nuclear energy and the degree of support and opposition that the choices encountered in the society he would have represented.
Al Gore has identified and publicized the problem - making a vast contribution in my opinion -but it does not follow that he can solve the problem any more than an oncologist who has diagnosed a cancer can cure the cancer.
Anyway.
I was going to say something about Japan and the nuclear earthquake that has produced an international orgy of concern. I have very little direct information as yet, some, but not that much. My friends in the nuclear industry have not given me an especially broad set of details yet. Maybe they will. Maybe they won't. We'll see. I can call them again and they will take my phone call, I assure you. We are on a first name basis.
According to one report, not one I've been given privately but the one that you and I can both read because I have linked it, the amount of radioactivity released was 408 million Becquerel. There is another unit of radioactivity that is commonly used. It is called the "Curie." A "Curie" is defined as 37 billion Becquerel, and it is approximately the number of radioactive decays that take place in one gram of the radium isotope 226 in one second. Thus the release of radioactive material as reported was about 0.011 curies. From the data I gave earlier, this is the radioactivity associated with about 3100 tons of bananas. That's a lot of bananas.
Of course, there could be a cover-up and the situation could be a million times worse. There certainly are people who would like you to believe that. In this case the amount of radioactivity would be the equivalent of 3 billion tons of bananas. According to this (coincidentally Japanese) abstract, this is about three times the amount of banana waste produced per year.
I also have written here about bananas. It got 27 tips. That's pretty good for a NNadir diary. I guess people want to hear about bananas.
There is an important point about this (potentially - if there's a cover up on the scale of a factor of one million) 3.1 billion tons of bananas worth of radioactivity: We don't know what kind of radioactivity it is, specifically we don't know what isotopes were involved. I don't know. You don't know either. I would guess, without being told anything, that the isotope in question is tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that is found in all commercial nuclear reactors.
I have, predictably, written about tritium in this space.
In that diary, one can find the cancer risk associated with tritium, which is to raise one's cancer risk 4.4 one hundred trillionths for each picocurie if one drinks the tritium.. Thus, if the accident is one million times worse than Bloomberg reports, and all of the Japanese in the area rush down to the site to drink all of the released radioactivity and the radioactivity is associated with tritium, we might expect that there will be 0.0005 additional cancers in Japan.
Conditional statements, you gotta love 'em!
It might not be tritium. It could be plutonium though, or a mixture of radioisotopes. I don't know. Neither do you. We'll have to wait and see. Maybe they'll be five cancers. Maybe 500. I don't know and you don't know.
There will not be, I assure you though, as many cancers from the radiation as there will be from the particulates and other dangerous fossil fuel wastes that the fossil fuel facilities replace the nuclear reactors, I am reasonably confident of that. And this is only if the dangerous fossil fuel plants behave normally.
I don't believe, by the way, that there is a secret conspiracy to cover anything up. I believe that it takes time to find things out and one releases stuff as one finds out what has happened.
During one of my (failed) revolts against the internal combustion engine I once unexpectedly and unintentionally killed an automobile - thankfully leaving the driver uninjured - using my flesh and fragments of my instantly mangled bicycle. I was in a coma for several days after being checked to see if I was brain dead and my organs could be harvested. (Feel free to insert a joke here.) My mother and father - both were alive then - rushed to my bedside and, according to the accounts they gave me, asked the doctor if I would be all right. The doctor said, "I don't know." He didn't know. So he investigated the situation. Even though my flesh was involved, I don't know what he did, except in general terms. I know he re-inflated my collapsed lung. I know he stitched up the huge gash my head. I assume he gave me an EEG. I know he checked my hemoglobin and decided to transfuse blood. Of course, all of these things took time, and I also assume, but do not know, that my parents asked him lots of times for news. Probably he told them what he did know and listed the things that he didn't know.
It may be that some of the information he gave my parents proved to be wrong but the fact that it was wrong doesn't imply in any sense that the doctor was conspiring with the bicycle industry to cover up the extent of my injuries.
Something else was going on a the same time as the great nuclear "disaster" in Japan, another technological tragedy involving energy was taking place in a far away part o fthe world. In Brazil - and this has nothing at all to do with Brazil nuts - there was a terrible aircraft accident that killed 187 people. What happened is this: An aircraft powered by dangerous fossil fuels crashed into a structure where dangerous fossil fuels - or given that this is Brazil, a mixture of dangerous biofuels and dangerous fossil fuels - were available for sale. A facility that sells dangerous fossil fuels of this type is called a "gas station."
It was initially reported that the accident was caused by the runway.
Today (as I write) we hear another story.
The truth? I don't know it. You don't know it.
There is talk of closing Brazil's largest airport. I have no idea whether anti-aviation people around the world are almost at the edge of gloating over this accident, but I can tell you that as an anti-dangerous fossil fuel activist, I take no satisfaction whatsoever in the fact that a dangerous fossil fuel facility was involved. Frankly, the incidents where dangerous fossil fuel stations are hit by airplanes are vanishingly small in the grand scheme of things. I am not concerned so much with dangerous fossil fuel accidents so much as I am with normal dangerous fossil fuel operations.
Shortly after that disaster, in New York, a transformer that is partially powered by dangerous fossil fuels and partially by nuclear power blew up on the streets of Manhattan when a steam pipe that was energized 100% using dangerous fossil fuels blew out. One person was killed and the situation is grave at the explosion site. Ironically enough, the incident involved a transformer, just like the fire on the grounds of the nuclear facility in Japan. Of course, pictures of the transformer fires in Japan and New York were broadcast around the world, just like pictures of the terrible situation with Britney Spears forgetting to wear her underwear. Still the world reactions were different. People all around the world got into a tizzy, because, in the case of Japan, the transformer fire was made to sound like a nuclear accident, if, indeed an earthquake can be thought of as an an accident. As it happens the transformers in both incidents - the one in New York and the one in Japan - were both connected to nuclear power plants by the same kind of device - a wire. In this way, the accidents are very much alike. But nobody hearing of the New York disaster said anything like "the accident raises questions about district heating around the world," or "the accident raises questions about the use of electricity and electrical transformers."
In the epigraph of this diary, I quoted my favorite poem by my favorite poet, Sylvia Plath. Over the years, in my private unpublished writings, I have chopped this poem to pieces many times, ripping it apart and quoting it out of context in search of epigraphs.
That poem, The Elm begins like this:
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
"...I do not fear it: I have been there..."
"...the voice of nothing, that was your madness?"
Context.
"The voice of nothing..."
It cannot be said that nothing happened in the Japanese city of Kashiwazaki this week. A lot happened. Buildings fell. People died. A nuclear facility that was saving lives every second it operated was shut down on the chance, not the certainty, that it might instead of saving lives, cost lives. In the final event, everyone in Japan will die, but none of the people who died in Kashiwazaki are likely to die because of the nuclear facility's operations or even the effects of the reactor leaks. Nevertheless people will die because of the energy implications of this accident. People will die because the nuclear operations will be replaced for some amount of time with the output of plants that use dangerous fossil fuels to operate. Dangerous fossil fuels kill, 100% of the time, in normal operations.
If the leak killed 5000 Japanese, it would still not make nuclear energy as dangerous as dangerous fossil fuel energy. At 5,000 deaths, 10,000 deaths, 50,000 deaths, it still wouldn't even be close.
But there are not 5,000 deaths. I don't know if there will be five deaths. I don't know if there will be any deaths. Neither do you.
I wrote in the disclaimer beginning this long diary with a disclaimer saying that nothing frightened me so much as the "nuclear" earthquake. Actually it was not the earthquake itself so much that frightened me, so I much as how society would choose to interpret what happened. My worst fears have been borne out but my guess is that as time passes, rationality will prevail.
At least one hopes so...
I am a vocal and loud and fierce supporter of nuclear energy and still, still, I knew, that some day, some where, nuclear energy would fail to be perfect and that a chorus of people who demand perfection of nothing save nuclear energy would sing old chants about some putative utopia where nothing fails and nothing falls except nuclear systems.
Speaking of the Norse Greenlanders, who went extinct, Diamond writes in Collapse of how the starving Norse chose not to eat the readily available salmon and other fish around them, probably because they feared that eating fish would make them sick. Appealing to the archeology of Norse Greenland sites and the complete dearth of fish bones in the garbage dumps there, Diamond speculates that the decision was cultural. There are plenty of fish bones in the Inuit sites that were the contemporaries of the Greenland Norse. The Norse chose to starve to death rather than face the assumed danger of eating Salmon.
How. Societies. Choose.
Diamond suggests that maybe some Norse had eaten some bad fish and so determined that all fish in Greenland were bad fish. Fish of course, can go bad. There is no such thing as risk free fish.
There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy. So I say.
We have heard and we are hearing and we will hear a lot about faults and about nuclear energy, but all the faults in the world have no bearing on the accumulation of carbon dioxide - not a probability but a certainty - in the acidifying seas and the collapsing atmosphere. All of the discussions of faults and nuclear energy in the world will not revivify a single human being killed by dangerous fossil fuels.
And I will bet you that there will be few in this conversation about faults who, recognizing that the reactors still stand and that they have not fallen and they more than likely will once again be operable, who will say:
"I do not fear it. I have been there."
Shortly after writing "The Elm," - ostensibly a poem about the environmental disaster represented by Dutch Elm disease, by the way - Sylvia Plath killed herself. She stuck her head in an oven filled with dangerous fossil fuel and she asphyxiated herself. She knew the bottom. She collapsed. Even though her death was deliberate, she will not be the last person to die from dangerous fossil fuels, but few of those deaths from dangerous fossil fuels will seem quite so deliberate as Plath's death was.
Thus in some sense then, "The Elm" constitutes a fragment of Plath's last words. The poem was, in fact, a suicide note. In turn, the last words of "The Elm" itself are these:
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?--
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
Suicide. Collapse.
The essence of poetry is ambiguity. To see the world of poetry, and maybe other kinds of worlds, is to see places where things that would seem to have one meaning actually mean something quite different than that which is assumed. As such, reading into worlds so structured, we may ask, we should ask, we must ask:
"What are the faults that kill, that kill, that kill?"