Nuclear Power, Return Of

Just a quick commentary on something I said previously several time, e.g. in this post on Global Warming. If extracting energy from natural gas and oil resources becomes increasing difficult, countries will look for alternative solutions. The most convenient thing is to fall back to already existing technologies. Power from nuclear fission stands on top of the list. It is except for a little waste problem environmentally fairly clean, and has a reasonable energy-return-on-investment (EROI), somewhere around 10:1 - at least considerably better than biofuel. Though people disagree on the details. This site (which is a quite good resource) offers a plot of the EROI estimates for Nuclear Power plants vs. year of analysis. (The estimates are not all for the same technologies, which explains part of the deviations. Either way, one would wish for some clarification on the issue.)

It's not that I am advocating nuclear power, I just want to mention this is likely where things are going. There hasn't been a major accident for a while and those who've demonstrated against nuclear power plants some decades ago are now worrying about hemorrhoids and their children's tuition fees. What I am waiting for is some 'educational' advertising campaign for how great nuclear power is to overcome the NIMBY problem, or possibly BANANAs. Nuclear power plants are cost intensive, so to get things started governmental backup is helpful. Here as in many other areas however, the question is eventually not whether it is cost intensive, but how much more cost-intensive other alternatives would be.

Over the last years you could collect more evidence for this trend. Since 2002 the Department of Energy is running a program called Nuclear Power 2010:

"New baseload nuclear generating capacity is required to enhance U.S. energy supply diversity and energy security, a key National Energy Policy (NEP) objective. The Nuclear Power 2010 program, unveiled by the Secretary on February 14, 2002, is a joint government/industry cost-shared effort to identify sites for new nuclear power plants, develop and bring to market advanced nuclear plant technologies, evaluate the business case for building new nuclear power plants, and demonstrate untested regulatory processes[...]

The NP-2010 program is focused on reducing the technical, regulatory and institutional barriers to deployment of new nuclear power plants based on expert recommendations [...]"

And President Bush can be heard saying (Washington Post, May 22nd 2008):

"Our problem in America gets solved if we expand our refining capacity, promote nuclear energy and continue our strategy for the advancement of alternative energies, as well as conservation."

Every once in a while there appears some article like e.g. this one in Scientific American from September 2007

Nuclear Power Reborn
New Jersey-based NRG Energy applies to build the first new nuclear power plant in the U.S. in more than 30 years

"It is a new day for energy in America," David Crane, NRG president and chief executive officer, said after making the application. "Advanced nuclear technology is the only currently viable large-scale alternative to traditional coal-fueled generation to produce none of the traditional air emissions," including the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.

Armed with the backing of the White House and congressional leaders—and subsidies, such as $500 million in risk insurance from the U.S. Department of Energy— the nuclear industry is experiencing a revival in the U.S. As many as 29 new reactors may be added to the current U.S. fleet of 104, according to Bill Borchardt, director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) office of new reactors. "It is going to be significantly different than it was in the 1970s," he says.

This is not an US-only trend. In Physics Today, February 2006 it is summarized

Stronger Future for Nuclear Power
Nuclear reactor builders are jostling for business as energy utilities take another look at nuclear power.
Some two dozen power plants are scheduled to be built or refurbished during the next five years in Canada, China, several European Union countries, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and South Africa. In the US and the UK, governmental preparations are under way that may lead to 15 new reactor orders by 2007.

CBS reports (April 2007)

"France: Vive Les Nukes

With power demands rising and concerns over global warming increasing, what the world needs now is an efficient means of producing large amounts of carbon free energy. One of the few available options is nuclear, a technology whose time seemed to come and go and may now be coming again.

For the first time in decades, new nuclear plants are being built, and not just in Iran and North Korea. With zero green house gas emissions, the U.S. government, public utilities and even some environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power."

Reuters discusses the waste problem (Jan 2008). USA today comments on the "nuclear rebirth" 131 days ago (can somebody find a date on this site?):

With nuclear rebirth come new worries
Global warming and rocketing oil prices are making nuclear power fashionable, drawing a once demonized industry out of the shadows of the Chernobyl disaster as a potential shining knight of clean energy. [...]

Of the more than 100 nuclear reactors now being built, planned or on order, about half are in China, India and other developing nations. Argentina, Brazil and South Africa plan to expand existing programs; and Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt and Turkey are among the countries considering building their first reactors.

And today the New York Times reports that Italy Plans to Resume Building Atomic Plants.

The only thing that surprises me is that there hasn't yet been a more furious outcry.

Finally, here is a special bonus for the Germans from today's Spiegel Online

With the new Italian government saying it wants to pave the way to construct new nuclear power plants, Germany's chancellor says its time for Berlin to rethink its energy policies. It "doesn't make sense," Merkel argues, to take Germany's nuclear plants offline.

Book Review: The Upside of Down

The Upside of Down
Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization

By Thomas Homer-Dixon

Published by: Knopf Canada (Oct 31 2006) , Island Press (Nov 1, 2006)

The Downside

"So far, so good" said then men who fell off the roof when he passed the 3rd floor. Threshold effects are quite common in everyday life. They are characterized by a sudden change in a system's properties, like e.g. the ability of a medium to emit laser light, our your brain hitting concrete. In real life, the existence of a threshold is often obvious, but our inability to predict exactly when and how it will be reached fools us into pleasant ignorance, and permanent postponement. After all, tomorrow is another day.

In reality, there is nothing truly infinite, and nothing lasts forever. You won't survive an arbitrary blood alcohol level, no matter how cool you are. Your cat won't live forever, and your boss is not infinitely patient. Warnings to mind these constraints of reality are common knowledge, it's the drop that makes a vase overflow, and the last straw that breaks the camel's back [1].

Yet we are living in a society that disregards its limits. There is no doubt growth can't proceed forever, energy resources are not infinite, and more is not always better. Sure, one can debate exactly when and how a change will set in, but there is no way disregarding the fact that we have to address these problems, and we should do so rather sooner than later.

In his latest book "The Upside of Down" Thomas Homer-Dixon addresses the question of how crucial energy resources are for our societies to maintain their complexity. In a nutshell the argument is that it takes energy to keep our systems running at high performance. We are not prepared to cope with less energy, and our societies' networks lack resilience. Should energy supply dwindle, and one or two unfortunate events hit at the wrong time, the effect can be disastrous. The book is a warning, a call for caution and for action.

Just consider how much you have come to rely on the omnipresent availability of electricity and the internet in your daily life. Now knock out some of the DNS servers, Google, and a couple of telecommunication switches [2]. You think you can cope with that? Sure, but how much of your grocery store's shipment and organization will be affected, your airport's flight schedules, public transportation, traffic reports, online banking, library access, the stock market, how much does your local government rely on email, BlackBerries, WLAN, cellphones? How much of that could suddenly become dysfunctional?

How much can a system take before it breaks down?

"The Upside of Down" is a very clearly written book that lays down all the arguments in a well structured, and accessible manner. One fourth of the book is an extensive list of references and footnotes where the interested reader can check on the details. It is a summary of a large number of works that have been made during the last decades. Homer-Dixon addresses all the obvious objections that people would raise, like e.g. the common optimist objection: things will work out because they have always worked out, people must have believed their situation equally unstable all along. This objection fails to acknowledge that the recent technological developments occur so rapidly that we reach the limits of how we can fix problems in a timely manner:

"Some skeptics might respond that people have always perceived they lived on the cusp of chaos, but in the end they’ve usually managed well by marshaling their ingenuity and courage. But today’s world is fundamentally different from the past. The complexity and speed of our social and technological systems are unlike anything we’ve seen before, and these factors are now pushing against the upper limits of the human brain’s abilities. Ecologically, for the first time in history, we are moving materials, producing energy, and generating waste on a scale that rivals nature itself."
[Thomas Homer-Dixon, 'A world that turns too fast', Financial Times, London, Jan 2001]

Of Up

There are various minor points in which I disagree with the author's conclusions, but overall seen the book expresses my unqualified opinion on these issues much clearer and better founded than I could ever have done. Like my feeling that the present organization of our so-called civilized society is an accident waiting to happen. Fortunately, Homer-Dixon doesn't make excessive use of complicated words which often leads me to throw away books about political and social theories. In fact, he uses a lot of explanations from natural sciences that - for obvious reasons - immediately appeal to me. He writes nicely, though the literary style is not exactly terribly good or original. Some of the explanations are rather lengthy, like endless pages on how the Romans build aqueducts or whatever. (Sorry, I've never been a huge fan of the Roman history.)

In the last some chapters he turns towards the question how the laid-out problems can be addressed, and he argues that we need more awareness for the instability of our present systems:

"So somehow we have to find the middle ground between dangerous rigidity and catastrophic collapse. In our organizations, social and political systems, and individual lives, we need to create the possibility for what computer programmers and disaster planers call 'graceful' failure. When a system fails gracefully, damage is limited, and options for recovery are preserved." [p. 291]

And he mentions the obvious questions that have to be answered:

"In countries that are already very rich, we especially need to figure out if there are feasible alternatives to our hidebound commitment to economic growth, because it's becoming increasingly clear that endless material growth is incompatible with the long-term viability of Earth's environment. What might a 'steady-state' economy - an economy that maintains a roughly constant output of goods and services - look like? What economic and ethical values might it be based on? Could it incorporate some (albeit radically transformed version) of market-based capitalism, and would it be compatibility with political and personal liberty? And how would we deal with the political and social conflicts that would inevitably arise if there were no growth?"[p. 293]

And points out that we need to look for alternatives how to organize our societies, possibly with the help of new technologies

"Alternative values might also promote a broader, fairer, and more vigorous democracy, maybe using some kind of open-source approach. New forms of democracy are essential, because we need as many heads as possible working together to solve our common problems, and because the larger the number of people involved in making crucial decisions that affect everyone, the less likely that narrow elite interest will dominate." [p. 306]

(I disagree on the last point about the large number of people, just so you know.) However, I have to say that all this is well and good, but it doesn't strike me as very practical. I mean, telling people to think usually isn't sufficient.

I am not an expert in this field, so it is not clear to me how much of what he says is actually new, or result of his own research. But nevertheless, it is one of these books where upon reading I can only ask myself: what does it say about our society that all these problems are known, have been known since decades, have been well researched, published, pointed out, again and again. But nobody listens. After all, tomorrow is another day. Three more floors to go. So far, so good.

Overall, the book is very recommendable. If this was an amazon review I'd give five stars.

Related: See also my opinion on Global Warming

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About the author: Thomas Homer-Dixon was born in Victoria, British Columbia and received his B.A. in political science from Carleton University in 1980 and his Ph.D. from MIT in international relations and defense and arms control policy in 1989. He then moved to the University of Toronto to lead several research projects studying the links between environmental stress and violence in developing countries. Recently, his research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change. Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at University College, University of Toronto. [Info from this website].

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[1] The respective German sayings are: Der Tropfen, der das Faß zum Überlaufen bringt, und der Krug der so lange zum Brunnen geht, bis er bricht.
[2] Looking forward to the next major earthquake in San Francisco.

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TAGS: BOOKS, POLITICS, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Global Warming

Blogging, so I've learned, comes with tags. The best is you make yourself and your blog easily classifiable. You see, people want to know what they have to expect. I would recommend you state in your side bar something like 'I am an atheistic, non-smoking, anti-alcoholic, pro-abortion, anti-war, pro-string, anti-drug, pro-evolution, anti-matter, pro-blematic, unemployed neo-liberalist '. Or the like. Ah, and don't forget to clarify sexual preferences, we don't want to confuse anybody.

The advantage is, visitors don't even have to read what you write to disagree with you.

Anyway. I recently feel like subject to peer pressure, and I am afraid I will have to proclaim an opinion about global warming. I recently stumbled across these lists of

50 things you can do to reduce Global Warming

and I just found out via Lubos that the TIME magazine had a similar list in last week's issue: 51 Things you can do to save the environment.

The present global warming debate is in my eyes very ironic. Initially, I was happy to see how fast the environmental consciousness has increased in the last some years, not only in the USA. See, all these points you find on the list like: cover your pots while cooking, take a shower instead of a bath, reuse your shopping bag, recycle your waste - this is what we were taught in Kindergarten¹. When I moved to the USA I was shocked, honestly, to see how little people cared about their environment. Okay, Tuscon AZ might have been an extreme case. But folks, when you go shopping then shut off the engine of your car. And yes, better insulation in housing would significantly reduce AC and heating cost, paper can be recycled, etc, etc. Now what's new about these insights?

To come back to global warming, from a scientific point of view it puzzles me how this debate is lead. The essence has become to scare people with the potential catastrophes that global warming can have. Then tell them it's their fault because of the carbon dioxide increase they cause with every fart. The problem is this entangles several points that were better treated separately.

So, let me first state an obvious fact. The world's natural oil and gas resources are not infinite. Experts may disagree whether we will run out of oil in 30 or 100 years, but that is not the point. If our present high-tech civilizations experience energy shortening, very many things will change very suddenly. This is a huge threat for the organization of the society you live in. Since there are so far insufficient preparations in case this happens, the thing to do is: save energy. These 50 points have a priori actually nothing to do with global warming, but are about energy saving. Whether or not you think global warming is real, you should save energy.

Why? You are convinced that bio fuel is the thing to do, or hydrogen, or nuclear fusion, or you are just an optimist who hopes somebody will come up with something at some point? Gee, there is a line where optimism turns into ignorance. The important thing is called Energy Return on Investment Ratio (EROIR), that is essentially the ratio between energy surplus you get and energy you have to invest E_in. The surplus is the difference between the total energy extracted E_out and the energy that you use, that is

EROEI = ΔE / E_in = (E_out - E_in) / E_in

(In many cases, instead of the EROEI the energy return ratio is used, which is just E_out/E_in).

If we want to access new energy sources, its not sufficient to ask how much can we get out. We have to ask what is the price to pay. I am not an expert on bio fuel and hydrogen powered cars and the like, but none of these technologies is presently sufficiently advanced to replace natural oil and gas, the EROEI is significantly lower.

I am not saying this is not possible. I am saying our civilization is presently not prepared to cope with a significant energy shortage. The reason why this concerns me is that you don't have to be a seer to predict what is going to happen if energy shortage hits us unprepared. Nuclear energy (fission) is a well known, easily accessible technique with a large energy return on investment. Current nuclear reactors return around 40-60 times the invested energy [source].

And then multiply that with the fact that the generation in charge when oil runs out will not be the generation that remembers Czernobyl from first hand.

To come back to the global warming. There is high confidence that average temperature on the earth's surface has been raising by about 0.8 degrees since mid of the 19th century. There are many other indicators of a climate change: differences in temperature between summer and winter, day and night, thickness of the Arctic ice, melting of mountain glaciers, frequency of extreme weather events (floods, storms), shifts in the average days of first frost in winter, first bloom of plants, the end of animal hibernation, onset of bird migrations in spring, decline in maple syrup productivity, and so on and so forth. You can discuss any one of these points if you like (I have my doubts about the maple syrup factor), but the evidence that the climate is changing is overwhelming.

Studies also show that the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere hasn't been as high as today in the last 650,000 years. The question is of course whether the one is causally connected to the other, and I am not the one to tell you that. But even if you shrug shoulders and say: we don't know, the smart thing to do is not to mess with nature if you don't know what is going to happen.

Why? Darwin has told us the fittest survive. There is a huge number of humans on that planet that fit very good into the present environment. We adapt to changes, but evolution works slowly. If we manage to change our environment faster than we can adapt to it, well, congratulations. The whole human race will get the Darwin award for removing itself from the earth's surface by natural selection. We have the power to cause significant effects on the equilibrium of our environment, and we should be very careful with what we do, or we risk consequences that might be irreversible (we can of course debate whether or not it would be a great loss if the human race vanishes from earth's surface).

Besides this, the most pressing problem today is coping with the present changes, whether you know where they come from or not. One problem that will most likely be worsened by climate change, energy shortage and growing population is illegal immigration. Poorer countries have more problems coping with these challenges; if the situation becomes a threat to survival, people take high risk to get into richer countries - can you blame them? Whether you are in North America or Europe, look at your south borders and imagine what the situation will be like in ten years. Twenty years. Thirty years.

I am afraid covering you pot while cooking is not going to significantly change this. Scaring people with scientifically shaky statements might be effective on the short run, but isn't going to help on the long run. What scares me is how imbalanced this discussion is. I wonder if it is the connectivity and information overflow of our modern world that amplifies our concerns, polarizes opinions, and grossly oversimplifies matters. It is tempting and easy to condense the causes of problems and come up with a 50 point list. Others might argue 10 commandments are sufficient.

My mum always said they missed the most important commandment: You shall not be stupid. In fact I think this is the only one we need. The rest are details.

To summarize:

Save Energy. And support development of alternative energy sources. Whether or not you believe global warming is caused by humans.

Don't mess with nature. As long as you don't know exactly what your actions will cause, don't disturb our environment unnecessarily, and be as little invasive as possible. Whether or not you believe global warming is caused by humans.

Don't deny. Climate changes are a fact and have consequences. We have to deal with these changes. Now. Whether or not you believe global warming is caused by humans.

So, if you want to classify me: I'm a tree hugger. I'm a pro-environment, anti-energy-waste currently sick plastic-bag-reuser who worries about the next generation. I could use a little bit of global warming though. We still have snow up here.

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1: I just say "Jute statt Plastik"

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TAGS: GLOBAL WARMING, TREEHUGGING, ENERGY

Braindead Decisions

In most parts of the world, even in Canada, the day has only 24 hours. And there is so much to do in this world, so many books to read, so many stories to tell, so many photos to take, so many papers to write. And so little time in this one life. Every day, we have to set priorities, and make decisions.

My friends know me as a very impatient person. Basically, I don't like to waste time. Especially if the outside temperature is minus twenty-something. If someone can't make up their mind, I'm usually the one who points into one direction, thinking, any decision is better than no decision.

Last weekend, I was pretty braindead. I was so braindead I looked up the smiley for 'braindead'. Here it is:

%-6 (braindead)

Then I made the Jung Typology test, recalling that a seat neighbor on a long distance flight urged me to, after he realized I wouldn't entertain him. I shouldn't have taken the test. The outcome was:

Your Type is INTJ
Strength of the preferences in %:

Introverted 100, Intuitive 75, Thinking 12, Judging 44.

The only reason why I'm writing this in my stupid BLOG is to show that I'm working on the 'Introverted' score *gnurg*.

Here is the INTJ profile. In case you belong to my ex-boyfriends you'll find yourself nodding and grinning. 'INTJs know what they know, and perhaps still more importantly, they know what they don't know.' A-ha. So-so. Well, currently I don't know what I meant to say. Oh yes, I meant to write something about decision making.

Today, I read at the SciAm blog Big Decision: Head or Gut? Hmm ... by Alex Haslam about the Science article

On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect
Ap Dijksterhuis, Maarten W. Bos, Loran F. Nordgren, Rick B. van Baaren
Science 17 February 2006, Vol. 311. no. 5763, pp. 1005 - 1007

In this article, the researchers examined the decisions of participants to pick purchasable items (cars, furniture) after being confronted with information of varying complexity. They made a distinction between conscious and unconscious thinkers, the latter simulated by distracting the participants and then asking them to make up their mind. They found (guess what) that more complex information makes decisions more complicated.

But more importantly, they also found that when the situation got more complex, the unconscious thinkers did better in choosing the best car. Reading the paper, it remains unclear to me in how far it was common sensus what they actually meant with 'best car'.

In further studies they rated the choice by 'postchoice satisfaction' with unspecified 'products'. What they found was that in not very complex situations, conscious thought works best, but 'the more people thought consciously about complex products, the less satisfied they were with their purchase'. Folks, I wonder if they asked the people again after their Walmart shelf fell apart. If you ask me, the only thing their research shows it that longer thinking raises your expectations, and you are more likely to be critical about your own choice, which in turn lowers 'postchoice satisfaction'.

Already the abstract of the Science article says, maybe deliberately provocative: 'choices in complex matters [...] should be left to unconscious thought', and they end with stating

'There is no reason to assume that the deliberation-without-attention effect does not generalize to other types of choices -- political, managerial, or otherwise. In such cases, it should benefit the individual to think consciously about simple matters and to delegate thinking about more complex matters to the unconscious.'

I totally agree with Alex Haslam that contrary to what the researchers write, this conclusion can not be applied to situations where the notion of a 'satisfactory outcome' or 'best choice' is not as immediately apparent as in choosing a color for your car. As the worst of all possible consequences, he has this scary quotation by a well known world leader, from June 1, 2003, after having invaded Iraq:

G.W.Bush: "I'm not very analytical. You know, I don't think a lot about why I do things."

Well. He definitely didn't think about whether this was a smart thing to say. Here's politics for beginners: The whole idea of representative democracy is the election of politicians that make the complex decisions based on their expertise. In a time where matters are as involved as today, we citizens just can't take care of every political decisions on our own, but we rely on those who we elect to do their best. That's what politicians get paid for. If I want 'to delegate thinking about more complex matters' - say, like social security, research funding, or invading foreign countries - 'to the unconscious' I can do that myself. Trust me, I'm INTJ, I possess the unusual trait combination of imagination and reliability, and I can reliably imagine things getting even worse if Science articles encourage stupidity.

It seems to me though in their final statement the researches might not have referred to the politicians themselves, but to those who make their X on election day. I seriously hope for the future of your country - whichever it is - that you don't leave your precious civil right to your easy to manipulate unconsciousness. What if the candidate's photo reminds you of your 8th grade teacher who once sneezed a giant booger on your notebook?

In this regard, it is especially interesting that it has been shown (see e.g. Fatal Attraction. The Effects of Mortality Salience on Evaluations of Charismatic, Task-Oriented, and Relationship-Oriented Leaders, Cohen et al, Psychological Science, Vol. 15 Issue 12 Page p. 846–851, 2004) that 'psychological terror', that is, thoughts about death and our own mortality, strongly influence our political opinions. Overall, thoughts of death let us tend to the politically conservative side.

The recent issue of Psychology Today has an article on that matter (The Ideological Animal, by Jay Dixit) which features one of the authors of the above findings, Sheldon Salomon. In this article they don't explicitly talk about conscious and unconscious decisions, but I guess you can easily see the connections:

[...] is there any way we can overcome our easily manipulated fears and become the informed and rational thinkers democracy demands?

To test this, Solomon and his colleagues prompted two groups to think about death and then give opinions about a pro-American author and an anti-American one. As expected, the group that thought about death was more pro-American than the other. But the second time, one group was asked to make gut-level decisions about the two authors, while the other group was asked to consider carefully and be as rational as possible. The results were astonishing. In the rational group, the effects of mortality salience were entirely eliminated. Asking people to be rational was enough to neutralize the effects of reminders of death [...].

"People have two modes of thought," concludes Solomon. "There's the intuitive gut-level mode, which is what most of us are in most of the time. And then there's a rational analytic mode, which takes effort and attention."

The solution, then, is remarkably simple. The effects of psychological terror on political decision making can be eliminated just by asking people to think rationally. Simply reminding us to use our heads, it turns out, can be enough to make us do it.

So, I ask you kindly, if it comes to politics, think rationally.

To summarize: unconscious politics is just plain Bu**sh**.

Now I'm going to work on the 'Thinking' score.

Money Talks

The Federation of American Scientist reports in a summary about Technology Collection Trends in the U.S. Defense Industry that spies have been embedding tiny transmitters in Canadian coins:

'On at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006, cleared defense contractors’ employees traveling through Canada have discovered radio frequency transmitters embedded in Canadian coins placed on their persons.' (p. 32)

See, that's what technological progress is good for.

More Info

• Washington Times:
  Foreign spy activity surges to fill technology gap


• Globe and Mail:
  If you're a spy, Canadian money talks


• Canada.com:
  Spies embedding tiny transmitters in Canadian coins, U.S. report says

Thanks to Kerstin for the interesting info.