[lit-ideas] Fukushima
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 04:15:13 -0700 (PDT)
I wonder if anyone has been following Fukushima. It's off the media's radar
screens, but it's very alive and well. It's an extremely serious situation,
far more serious than Chernobyl. The worst part is that the technology for
dealing with the melted down cores is at least 10 to 15 years away. It has to
be why the media isn't reporting on the story.
Energy is the hugest problem. It's the reason Japan built so many reactors in
such a seismically active part of the world, because they fought a war
essentially over oil, lost, and had no alternatives. Still, the lure of
profits in the so called free market bewitched and bedazzled and TEPCO built to
a worst case seismic scenario of 8, which when it happened turned out to be a
9. They're American designed reactors by the way, designed by GE. Compounding
the irony is that there is no such thing as a free market, there never was,
there never will be, but that's another story.
For Lawrence, WWII was fought over oil, not freedom. Hitler wanted energy, in
the form of farmland in Poland and the USSR. Farms are energy because farms
are food, and food is energy for people the way oil is energy for machinery.
Try to live without either food or oil. (Napoleon said an army marches on its
stomach.) Russia had (and still has although their oil has peaked) huge
reserves of oil and gas. We were at the time of WWII the Saudi Arabia of oil,
we made huge amounts of money exporting oil, and of course all the government
stimulus money that went into fighting WWII. We peaked in oil in 1970 or so.
Oil imports are going down from 2/3 to apparently half our needs, but that's
because we're simply driving less and our manufacturing base went overseas,
most notably exported to China, but we still import at least half our oil, and
oil is a finite resource in any case. We have not moved away from being
absolutely incapable of
functioning without it. China is at this time running rings around us in
terms of renewable energy (wind, solar) because they too are now importing oil
and even coal (after being an exporter) and know they have to do something
about it. Still, their water is a disaster and they're running out of arable
soil, which so far they solve by importing water in the form of virtual water
in crops. They seem to be aware that they live on a small planet with finite
and dwindling resources, plus they don't have the burden of dealing with the
myth of the free market, so it's wait and see how they do.
Still looking for something cheerful. The irony though, if pessimists ran the
world, there would be plenty of cheerful things, because most problems wouldn't
happen. A pessimist would have built the reactors to a worst case of 12, would
regulate more, not less, would find better ways to run an economy than by
encouraging meaningless consumption, and on and on. Maybe people prefer
optimism because it's so, what's the word, exciting, leaving never a dull
moment...
Andy
Other related posts:
