Thoughts on Fukushima

Whatever the outcome, I don’t think anyone should be surprised by the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant.  Like virtually all nuclear plants, they’ve been safe and quiet for decades.  But they’re not the kind of thing you can walk away from.  And sometimes, you need to walk away.  Volcanoes erupt.  The Earth trembles beneath your feet.  There are floods, and famines, epidemics and wars.  We do a good job of ignoring these things when they aren’t pressing concerns.  It makes life simpler and more enjoyable, especially since historically, we’ve had little power to do anything about infrequent, terrifying events.

I’m not categorically against nuclear power.  If we can do it in a responsible, scalable way, then great.   Making 10,000-100,000 year commitments is not responsible.  We can’t keep those promises.  Extracting only a couple of percent of the fuel’s energy isn’t scalable to tens of terawatts for centuries or millennia.  So any scalable, responsible nuclear power will involve breeding fissile fuel, and re-processing spent fuel to remove fission products that inhibit the chain reaction.  Additionally, to be responsible in my mind, a nuclear power station should be something you can walk away from at a moment’s notice, with no fear of catastrophe.  It should be something that an invading (or perhaps more likely, retreating) army cannot use as part of a scorched earth campaign without a major engineering effort that would take months of work.

But obviously, that’s not where we are today.

Continue reading Thoughts on Fukushima

Why I Won’t Be Turning Off Any Lights for Earth Hour

A GOOD (Magazine) summary of why Earth Hour is lame.  First, it’s symbolic — turning lights off for an hour has a negligible effect on your (and the globe’s) energy consumption.  Second, the symbolism (which is all it’s got) totally sucks!  Want to be environmentally sound?  Then sit shivering in the dark.  Great.  Widely publicizing an action which is both unnecessary and turns people off (ha!), isn’t gonna win any hearts or minds.  It just reinforces the needlessly “hair shirt” vision of “green” that most people have.

Links for the week of November 26th, 2010

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of November 26th, 2010

Links for the week of October 26th, 2010

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of October 26th, 2010

Links for the week of June 4th, 2010

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of June 4th, 2010

Links for the week of October 15th, 2009

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of October 15th, 2009

Links for the week of October 10th, 2009

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of October 10th, 2009

Links for the week of September 11th, 2009

If you want to follow my shared links in real time instead of as a weekly digest, head over to Delicious. You can search them there easily too.
Continue reading Links for the week of September 11th, 2009

Shared Links for Jun 26th – Jul 7th

You can also search or subscribe to my linkstream over at Delicious.

Shared Links for Apr 30th

  • Transparency means nothing without justice – Government transparency is necessary, but not sufficient. If police violence is recorded and publicized, and nobody cares, it doesn't matter. This is in come sense emblematic of the coup in western propaganda. You don't need to control the media as the Soviets did or the Chinese do, if your population is comfortable enough not to care what's happening out there to someone else, and if their voting patterns are firmly tied to other issues (especially social issues like abortion), the idea of a democratic revolt becomes fairly abstract. I think this where a lot of the government's fear of economic recessions comes from. When people are out of work, or even hungry, suddenly they become a lot more excitable. (tagged: transparency law police politics technology internet )
  • Condensing steam without water – Concentrating solar thermal power stations are ultimately designed to run a steam turbine, just like a gas-fired power plant. That means they need water (to turn into steam). Problematically, most such plants use water as a condensing coolant (70% of Caltech's water usage is as coolant for our 14MW worth of gas-fired power)… which is going to be hard to come by in the desert, where CSP will be built. Thankfully, there's a way to recondense steam without using a water coolant – but it does require a huge cooling tower. Not so great in Pasadena, but probably fine in the Mojave, next to acres and acres of mirrors. (tagged: solar energy technology sustainability green electricity water )
  • Rousing a Latent Defense Mechanism to Fight HIV – It turns out there is a gene in humans that produces a protein which inhibits infection by HIV, but it has a mutation – a premature stop codon – which prevents it from being effectively synthesized. This mutation doesn't exist in most Old World monkeys (and that's apparently why they can't get HIV). Undoing the mutation allows the protein to be synthesized, and grants HIV immunity to human cells. I imagine that undoing bad mutations like this, and our inability to synthesize vitamin C, might be the first place we see human germ-line engineering outside of disease avoidance (preventing e.g. cystic fibrosis). Really, these mutations are hard to distinguish from genetic diseases – they're just diseases that we, as a species, have learned to live with. (tagged: genetic engineering hiv aids biology science research plos medicine )
  • Anna in the Middle East – Anna Baltzer is a Jewish American who got a Fulbright fellowship to live in the West Bank in 2005, and document the experiences of Palestinians. She's been giving presentations about it ever since. Some parts of her presentation are available via YouTube too. From the 15 minutes I watched she seemed like a level headed critic. She's speaking in Boulder and Denver in May. (tagged: israel palestine politics fulbright peace war )
  • Twitter + Stimulus = Humans are Gullible – A wonderful demonstration of the power of the confirmatory bias. Twitter is the perfect platform for the injection of random falsehoods. Too short for citations. Instantaneous distribution. Make sure your followers are predisposed to agree with what you say, and you can get them to believe just about anything – within that constraint. Too bad the author seems to think this only applies to conservatives. (tagged: politics twitter statistics propaganda )