I continue to be transfixed by the situation in Japan, where technology has shown its best and worst face in the past few days. “Best,” I say, because the terrible human losses would have been greater yet, had builders not prepared for violent earthquakes. There were certainly gaps in planning for the tsunami, in particular, but overall Japan’s construction technology saved untold lives – tens of thousands.
The nuclear plants partly had bad luck, but then again, the chain of power failures that’s now leading to overheated radioactive fuel rods was fairly predictable. I don’t know enough about the technology to give an explainer. Rachel Maddow continues to have good coverage. But essentially, you don’t have to be a nuclear engineer to know that highly radioactive spent fuel presents a problem for decades at a minimum, even under controlled circumstances. How many civilizations have survived for tens of thousands of years - long enough to keep ploutonium contained? And yes, some of the fuel rods (about 6%) at the Daiichi plant contain some plutonium.
Then again, with some technologies you really don’t need to be an expert in order to say: this is stupid. A case in point is the use of hormones to stunt girls’ growth lest they grow too tall to catch a husband. I knew that this was a fairly common practice in the 1950s. A recent study reports that the estrogen used to stop growth also mucked with these girls’ fertility, and as adults they have had trouble conceiving. Not all that surprising. What did shock me? The fact that this practice continues today.
This use for estrogen gained popularity about 50 years ago after researchers found it might limit the growth of girls who were much taller than their peers in adolescence. According to one estimate, up to 5,000 girls in the U.S. were treated with estrogen, and many more in Europe.
At that time, “women were basically supposed to get married and have children, and that would be harder if you were a very tall woman, everybody believed,” Christine Cosgrove, co-author of Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry’s Quest to Manipulate Height, told Reuters Health.
“There were so many parents, mostly mothers probably, who just feared that their daughters’ lives would be ruined if they ended up being six feet tall, because they’d never have a husband and a family,” she said.
Some tall girls are still treated with estrogen today — more in Europe than in the United States — and estrogen is currently given to these girls in about the same dose that is in a birth control pill, Cosgrove said. In the past, it might have been given at 100 times that dose before doctors realized the potential dangers, she said.
[Cosgrove is co-author of Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height, speaking here to Reuters.]
Two very different scenarios – one a matter of life-and-death, the other “merely” a matter of life foregone through infertility. Yet both reflect the foolhardiness of humans when it comes to technology. I’m no Luddite (my laptop is a cyborg extension of my brain), but could we just cut it out with the human experimentation? Because that’s what nuclear plants are, at bottom, too – an uncontrolled experiment with far too many uncontrollable variables. Also, perhaps friend-of-the-blog Hydraargyrum will chime in on this: humanity will never win against CORROSION, which is basically what I understand to be happening at lightning speed in those uncooled fuel rods.
Can’t we humans please learn for once, and put an end to the techno-hubris?
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
So, and what do you propose we use instead of nuclear power ? Burn more oil/coal ?
There’s no simple answer. We should have started putting some of the money spent on “national security” (i.e., wars and the arms race) into an aggressive program of clean-energy development, and that should have started back in 1973. We haven’t even really begun to do that now, here in the U.S. And we’ve thus painted ourselves into a corner.
I do recognize that climate change threatens human life as we know it, and that so-called “clean” coal is nowhere as feasible nor as clean as its proponents claim. Here, too, the U.S. didn’t see a need to act. Instead we raised the emission limits to allow everyone to drive an SUV.
But if we’re stuck with nuclear energy over the short-to-medium run, then for god’s sake let’s not let knuckleheads build plants to withstand a mere 7.0 temblor (in Japan!!) or construct cooling pools on top of reactors with no meaningful protection.
Also: keep in mind that in the long run, corrosion always wins.
Also: keep in mind that in the long run, corrosion always wins.
I love this line.
But seriously, Sungold, you’re right, we did paint ourselves into a corner.
As far as I’m concerned, there’s no excuse for their not being a solar-electric panel on every building in the US – it’s a matter of what our priorities are, and if we as a country decide that energy independence and clean energy is a matter of national survival, then we can spend the money currently being spent on wars of occupation and bail-outs of big finance on this goal. And we can freakin’ wean ourselves off of cars and build a national railroad system and local and regional mass transit that is truly viable (including for PWD). If France can build high-speed rail, so can we if we value it enough.
We can likely cut our energy usage by 50%, which will greatly reduce the pressure to build more nukes and cut the bottom out of highly destructive fossil fuels, including tar sands and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) of natural gas.
While we’re at it, maybe environmental orgs can get a clue and realize that when you oppose nukes and coal (not disagreeing with them there) and *then* oppose wind energy because oh boo hoo it’ll spoil the view (and they wonder why their membership is almost exclusively upper-class whites? Most of the people who live in Philadelphia can’t even afford to visit any place that might be “spoiled” by windmills), they are contributing to the problem.
Regarding estrogen: SMH. [snark] We wouldn’t want any women to think that she has a chance at defending themselves against men, now, would we? Gotta keep ‘em petite and scared… [/snark]
Sungold, very scary stuff about estrogen ingestion — had no idea this was still going on.
As for nuclear power, I have no idea. Scares the shit out of me. Enlightening (as ever) discussion going on over at Ian Welsh’s place. Don’t know if you know his stuff; he’s pretty solidly left of left, but he’s no pie-in-the-sky dreamer. He’s a realist. And in this post he comes out in favor of more nuclear power, not less. Lots of debate in the comments. Scientists, economists, enviros chiming in, ever thoughtful. That’s why I read him:
http://www.ianwelsh.net/no-free-lunch/
Good discussion there. A while back ballgame alerted me to Ian Welsh’s blog. I don’t read it very regularly, but maybe I should.
I am maybe a little more nervous about nuclear power than the average bear because my husband lived through Chernobyl in Germany. Obviously Germany didn’t suffer in the same way Ukraine did, but it still got a fair amount of fallout, which then worked its way into the food supply. Spinach farmers merely plowed their crops under, ensuring the radioactivity would stick around for a good long time.
Uh-oh. Here’s something else to give one pause. By Greg Palast:
http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/
I’m not at all surprised by the level of lying that Palast reports. TEPCO has hardly been forthcoming from the very beginning of this.
Also, the Pentagon – hardly a den of scaredy-cats – is preparing for a worst-case scenario, according to Stars and Stripes.
Japan warned over nuke plants/earthquakes in 2008, WikiLeaks cables show
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2011/03/japan-warned-over-nuke-plantsearthquakes-in-2008-wikileaks-cables-show/
Yet again — the value of WikiLeaks.
Knowing that spent fuel rods are kept on site, my first thought after the earthquake was in fact the cooling ponds and not the reactors. I visited a nuclear power plant 20 years or so ago and remember asking about the fuel rods, even got to see the glow. I wondered about what was done to treat the water on-site to remove soluble radionuclides, as well as the radiological characteristics of the rods themselves. So when I saw these hydrogen explosions my first thought was that the cooling ponds had been damaged and a major radiological event had occurred.
We have seriously backed ourselves into a corner when it comes to energy. Renewables and biofuels are just not big players, although there are exceptions such as geothermal in Iceland. I have despaired about nimbyism with both geothermal and wind, but that is a whole other topic.
Yes, corrosion always wins eventually. But we are constantly battling thermodynamics, too.
I figured that the reactors would automatically trip and coolant would continue to circulate to dissipate heat, using back-up systems as necessary. containment would
Didn’t finish my last post, here is my last couple of lines:
I figured that the reactors would automatically trip and coolant would continue to circulate to dissipate heat, using back-up systems as necessary. Reactor containment was there, unlike Chernobyl. But the designs were badly flawed, with terrible consequences. I wonder if they ever did a proper risk assessment.
I think Ian Welsh is often brilliant in his political/economic analyses, but I think he’s dead wrong about nuclear power, which is an irreducibly and inexcusably immoral approach to producing energy … even if you could avoid Fukushimas and Chernobyls and TMI’s. As you point out, Sungold, the latter just make it an ineluctably stupid option to boot.
ballgame,
I think he’s wrong on this score, too. I don’t think nuclear power is the way to go. The risks are too profound, the nuclear waste impossible to justify. I do, however, find the discussions that he starts quite worthwhile. I always learn something by reading his blog and the comments that ensue.
I think we’re all thinking about this disaster, Sungold. Glad for your words, as usual.
About the hormone growth-stunting — that’s so nauseatingly wrong I can’t even comment (talk about delaying puberty for trans-kids, then maybe we could have a discussion).
About the nukes, here’s my deal. Sungold, I think you’ve been to my basement. You know I like equipment. Certain kinds of technology. Thing is, I would not own a piece of equipment I cannot shut down and walk away from. I repeat: I do not want to own a piece of equipment I cannot shut down and walk away from. As a taxpayer and citizen as well, I do not want to own a piece of equipment that cannot be shut down and walked away from if the need arises.
If we’ve learned anything about nukes from this fiasco it’s that there is no “off”. You can only switch from high to low, and low is still pretty damn hot. And astoundingly dangerous. There is no level of redundancy that can substitute for a switch that says “off”, and nukes don’t and can’t have that. Even Grand Coulee Dam, biggest hydro ever and dwarfs the largest nuclear plant, you just close the penstocks, open the spill gates, and walk. Everything will be as you left it whether you return in a day or ten years.
Got interested in pebble-bed reactors a while back. You should look it up, they had one running in Germany for a few years. At first you read about it and it seems like “oh, this is the right way to do nuclear”. Very simple, self-regulating, no need for a constant water supply. But then you look at the details, especially how it worked out when they actually built one, and there are all sorts of doomsday scenarios. The one in Germany was a complete cluster, including radiation release and the usual lying and scandal. Now huge costs to clean things up.
Nuclear radiation is so contrary to living things, seems like it’s Sisyphean to try and attain “safe enough” — The hippies were right all along on that count. So my preferred solution would be to decommission the nukes we have starting noon tomorrow and just deal with the inconvenience for a few years — consign that technology to the dustbin of history and never look back.
Oh No! I’ve killed Kittywampus with my angry rant! Please, Sungold, Oh Please come back! I’ll never post after midnight again! Nothing but kittens and pink, puffy unicorns from now on…