Last night I went to a presentation by the Renewables Yes technical and financial modeling team. They’ve put up a bunch of information about their modeling efforts on the web site. I’ve organized nine short videos of a previous iteration of the presentation into a single 90 minute playlist here if you want to see it yourself. It’s definitely worth watching if you use electricity in Boulder! This post is my attempt to digest and rephrase their conclusions.
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.
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.
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And what will cities look like once everyone has arrived? If we actually reach that day, when the countryside is emptied, and the flow staunched, then how will cities develop going forward? What will their margins look like? Will the slums filled with newcomers vanish? What will they be replaced with? (tagged: technologie urban design economics history technology poverty )