I don’t generally cross-post, but Maggie Gunderson over at Green Mountain Daily (a fine site, by the way) came up with a good story from the files of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
To quote from the piece:
“FITNESS FOR DUTY - SUPERVISOR TESTED POSITIVE FOR ALCOHOL was today's posting on the NRC Website for current event notifications.
A non-licensed employee supervisor had a confirmed positive for alcohol during a random fitness-for-duty test. The employee's unescorted access to the plant has been revoked. Contact the Headquarters Operations Officer for additional details.
What is a non-licensed employee supervisor? Well, that means he was not one of the plant operators, but is a supervisor of another group, like engineering, maintenance, purchasing, or even health physics meaning dose measurement.”
As it turns out, it was a maintenance supervisor. You know, one of the people responsible for keeping the place bolted together so the radioactivity stays on the inside. The guy blew into the Breathalyzer sometime before 9:44 AM on September 1st and copped something over .04% blood alcohol concentration (BAC), which is the legal limit for operating a nuclear plant on the power superhighway.
I should note that we are one up on the Byron nuclear plant in Illinois. Just a minute later on the same morning one of their actual plant operators tooted the booze whistle and got nailed.
Susan Smallheer wrote it up for the Rutland Herald, reporting thus: “The employee must also go through a mandated employee-assistance program and, depending on the results of that program, the employee could be back on the job in two weeks, Smith said.”
This raises a number of concerns for me. First, am I just a worrier, or does a .04% plus BAC in the forenoon indicate an alcohol problem that won’t go away with two weeks of “employee assistance”? Second, given the random nature of testing, how long had this employee been dousing his Wheaties with beer before he got caught?
Third, as Smallheer reports, this is the third banned substance incident at Vermont Yankee in the past two years. This included a stoned control room operator and the actual administrative assistant tasked with giving the Breathalyzer tests getting busted for being north of .04. There is a basic principle of both Human Resources Management and being a bar bouncer. Your success is not measured by how many bozos you throw out. It is measured by how many you prevent from coming in. With the high turnover rate at Vermont Yankee they seem to be coming up short on that.
Fourth, .04 BAC? Really? I could blow a .039 and legally stroll into the plant for a little Homer Simpson wrench twisting?
And how many drinks get someone to .04 BAC? Defining a drink as ½ ounce of ethyl alcohol, or a 12 ounce beer, a 4 ounce glass of wine, or a 1.25 ounce shot of liquor, a 180 pound man would have to consume three drinks in an hour or four drinks over two hours.
Considering that the test occurred at 9:44 AM, I’d assume that the guy in question had been either at work or commuting for at least the past hour. That tells me that he hadn’t just snapped back a quick Irish coffee to beat a hangover. And .04 BAC is the minimum we can assume. The evidence points to a bottle-heavy breakfast for our hero. Yes, a couple of weeks of counseling and a “cross my heart, hope to die” promise and he’ll be ready once again to supervise the maintenance of our aging nuclear plant. With luck he will be able to prevent more incidents like this:
And this:
The State of Vermont needs to crack down on Vermont Yankee and then shut down Vermont Yankee. This is not a situation where I want to be able to say “I told you so.”
There is a school of thought in the computer world that is advancing the concept of what they call a technological singularity. The proponents of this concept point to the accelerating pace of computer speed and capabilities and state that there will be a point in the near future where computers gain a kind of consciousness and start to improve themselves. They call this point a singularity in reference to the gravitational singularity of a black hole. A black hole is a collapsed star so massive that gravity doesn’t allow even light to escape and common physical principles don’t apply. This departure from predictability is the essence of the appropriation. Once computers start advancing their own development the speed and direction of that development would be unpredictable. Some proponents of the theory claim that we will reach this singularity within the next 25 years.
There are doubters, of course. Some point to the recent slowing of the rate of increase in computer speed. Some question the basic principles of the argument and accuse the proponents of misleading themselves about the limits of electronic computation. I have a diametrically opposite opinion on the long-term future of computation in our society.
There is another limit on the evolution of computing power and on the widespread use of digital electronic technology in general. That limit is discretionary energy. The development of computer technology has occurred in an economic environment rich in discretionary energy. From the Second World War onward the worldwide production of coal, oil, and natural gas has been increasing and the supply has been far more than sufficient for the basics of human life. For decades we have been using these resources with absurd inefficiency, spending them on recreational mobility, and engaging in non-essential activities such as space exploration. In such a glut there is plenty left over for processor chip manufacturing and facilities full of servers and routers.
Our access to complex electronics and computing power is striking. Many children have cell phones, each device containing more computing power and memory than the mainframe computers of 30 years ago. The devices are affordable even to the relatively poor. Personal computers are common, if not universal. Even more significant are the electronic devices we no longer really notice: the automatic door opener and scanner at the supermarket, the programmable timer on the coffee maker, the smoke alarm, and the cordless phone. Even less visible and more important are the electronics that control our power grid, coordinate our transportation system, and speed our industrial production.
All this electronic intelligence relies on set of interlocking conditions. It is hard to know where to start, given the complexity of the connections. There were the initial scientific discoveries that were, in turn, augmented and speeded by the technological developments they enabled. There was the demand of early adopters, including the space program and the military that jump-started the consumer market, which then had its own early adopters. There was the ramp up into mass production. Then there was the export of high-tech manufacturing to countries with despotic governments and the resulting low standards for workers and the environment. This interaction of technological development, mass demand, and cheap mass production brought the price of electronic computing into a range that the ordinary consumer could afford. It also enabled product designers to include intelligent features in what were previously manual devices.
Underlying this all is discretionary energy. It is this energy that offers masses of people in the industrialized world the prosperity to be a mass market for electronic consumer goods. It is this energy that allows the mass international shipment of these electronic goods. It is this energy that allows industrialized agriculture to displace peasants into the cities of the third world, where they are available to cheaply produce electronic devices and the discrete elements that make up these devices. It is this energy that is available for the mining, transportation, and processing of the materials that go into these devices. Even the cheap plastic casings for all this electronic bounty are made from petroleum products.
The earth is no longer making fossil fuels, and therefore the supply is declining as we consume it. It is a geological fact that the annual production of oil fields, natural gas fields, and coal mines slows as they age. Many observers, myself included, conclude that the world is presently on the long bumpy plateau of peak production that precedes irreversible decline. So what happens when the supply of fossil fuels no longer meets all our superfluous needs? What happens when it no longer meets even our most basic needs for food production, heating, medical care, and the manufacturing of the basic necessities of life? What happens when the supply of diesel fuel and natural gas based fertilizer declines and the sons and daughters of third world factory workers make a desperate return to the land?
Part of Norse legend, as envisioned by Richard Wagner in his Ring Cycle operas, was the idea of Gotterdammerrung, literally the twilight of the gods. The balance of the world is lost, the rope of the Fates is broken, and the gods themselves go up in flames. I can foresee an Elektronikdammerrung, a twilight of electronics, when humanity no longer has the necessary supply of energy and materials to make them or the prosperity to drive demand. The huge chip and transistor factories in Southeast Asia will go to ruins. Like history running backwards, electronics will devolve from mass consumer goods to luxury consumer goods, and then to the vaults of universities, military bases, and government agencies. Computers will be lovingly tended by teams of specialists. More prosaically, people will open store doors by hand and time their coffee with windup devices, communicating the everyday events of their lives with letters and the landline telephone.
Eventually, without our present widespread use and facing the time and energy demands of post-petroleum agrarian life, our descendants will be faced with the decision between parts for the mainframe computer and the wheat harvest. Given the complexity of manufacturing processors, perhaps the industry won’t sustain itself below a certain level of mass demand. A period of electronic cannibalism will ensue and run its course. One by one, the last lights of the computer age will wink out.
I’m not a modern Luddite. Let’s face it, this piece was written on a computer and you are reading this on my website. I like my electronics and rely on them for business, personal communication, and recreation. However, I do not make the historical mistake of thinking that the way we live today is the way we will live forever. Nor do I make the similar mistake of thinking that the path of our society is onward and upward forever. The graph of human history is a series of rising and falling lines, with civilizations increasing in complexity and demand on their environments until they collapse. It would be arrogant to assume that we are exempt from the laws of physics, biology, and geology. I used to enjoy a vision of our future as a secular version of the Amish, augmented by a veneer of electronics, as a best case scenario for a post-energy-glut world. I now have a rougher, sparer vision, formed by what I know about the limitations of our resources and our species itself. If we are careful our descendants will still have the knowledge we have gained in our period of technological bounty. Perhaps they will be able to use much of it with only (I shouldn’t say “only”) their minds and their hands.
President Obama held yet another one of those pointless town hall meetings in Montana recently. It did allow him to respond to some of the absolute mythology that the health insurance industry has been promoting, but the format itself is the folksy equivalent of a show trial. There is only the illusion of discussion and thought. Television viewers get the vicarious satisfaction of seeing their views expressed, pro or con, and the president gets to make his case to the .02% of the population as yet undecided.
Here’s one exchange:
Q My name is Mark Montgomery. I'm from Helena, Montana.
THE PRESIDENT: Great to see you, Mark.
Q I appreciate you coming here. It's great to be able to do this.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.
Q Mr. President, I make a living selling individual health insurance. (Laughter.) Obviously I've paid very close attention to this insurance debate. As you know, the health insurance companies are in favor of health care reform and have a number of very good proposals before Congress to work with government to provide insurance for the uninsured and cover individuals with preexisting conditions. Why is it that you've changed your strategy from talking about health care reform to health insurance reform and decided to vilify the insurance companies? (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, that's a fair question, that's a fair question. First of all, you are absolutely right that the insurance companies, in some cases, have been constructive. So I'll give you a particular example. Aetna has been trying to work with us in dealing with some of this preexisting conditions stuff. And that's absolutely true. And there are other companies who have done the same.
Now, I want to just be honest with you, and I think Max will testify, that in some cases what we've seen is also funding in opposition by some other insurance companies to any kind of reform proposals. So my intent is not to vilify insurance companies. If I was vilifying them, what we would be doing would be to say that private insurance has no place in the health care market, and some people believe that.
I don't believe that. (Applause.) What I've said is let's work with the existing system. We've got private insurers out there. But what we do have to make sure of is that certain practices that are very tough on people, that those practices change.
Now, one point I want to make about insurance: Some of the reforms that we want for the insurance market are very hard to achieve, unless we've got everybody covered. This is the reason the insurance companies are willing to support reform, because their attitude is if we can't exclude people for preexisting conditions, for example, if we can't cherry pick the healthy folks from the not-so-healthy folks, well, that means that we're taking on more people with more expensive care. What's in it for us? The answer is if they've got more customers, then they're willing to make sure that they are eliminating some of these practices. If they've got fewer customers, they're less willing to do it.
So it's important for people -- when people ask me sometimes, why don't you just do the insurance reform stuff and not expand coverage for more people, my answer is I can't do the insurance reform stuff by itself. The only way that we can change some of the insurance practices that are hurting people now is to make sure that everybody is covered and everybody has got a stake in it, and then the insurance companies are able and willing to make some of these changes that will help people who have insurance right now. But thank you for the question. I appreciate it. (Applause.)
Sorry, Mr. President, but that was anemic. Here’s a preferable response.
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, that's a fair question, that's a fair question. First of all, I am vilifying insurance companies because they richly deserve vilifying. In fact, when you look at their behavior over the past few decades, you’ll see that they deserve prosecution for fraud. In some cases they probably deserve prosecution for murder, when denial of coverage could easily have been predicted to cause the death of the insured person. Where’s the Tarpeian rock when you need it? Whoops, any classics scholars out there? (Laughter) In ancient Rome they pitched murderers off a rocky cliff, and at least figuratively that’s what we need to do to the health insurance industry. (Applause)
They are playing at cooperation with reform efforts right now. I guess that with the Blue Dog Democrats in their pockets they expect to write in some more subsidies for themselves. They certainly aren’t acting out of the goodness of their hearts, because, well, there’s no goodness in there. Just raw profit motive.
There is ample evidence that they have groups of employees whose sole purpose is to exploit any tiny loophole in their complex contracts to deny people the coverage they paid for and that they deserve. The whole industry is based on suckering people into signing flawed contracts and then breaking those contracts when they think they can get away with it. That’s fraud. It’s also downright immoral. The executives and upper management should consider themselves lucky if they don’t end up behind bars. Once they are in prison I’d make them pay out of pocket for their medical care. (Laughter, Applause)
So, Mr. Montgomery, I consider you the equivalent of a minor errand runner for an organized crime family. Perhaps you do your job with the best of intentions, but thousands of Americans die every year thanks to the efforts of your employers, and millions more suffer pain and hardship. Tens of thousands go bankrupt. If I have my way you will be looking for a new job soon, one that doesn’t involve contractual fraud and sucking the lifeblood from the American people. I hope you enjoy your new anus. I enjoyed tearing it for you. Okay, time for one more question – back there…
In my dreams. Now it seems that the White House is backing off from the public health insurance option. The insurance companies will continue their dominance in the sole industrialized nation without a public health care program. We’ll keep forking over the money and fighting for our benefits. It’s the money, folks, the campaign money.
Perhaps you have read (those of you who live in Vermont) about the wind power project proposed for Ira, West Rutland, and surrounding towns. A company called Community Wind, headed by a man named Per White-Hansen, wants to develop a wind farm approaching 80 megawatts in capacity on the ridgelines in the area. It has generated intense controversy. Here is a clip from one of the public meetings attended by Mr. White Hansen and his public relations man Jeff Wennberg, former Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. A local resident asks about a device he found on his land:
I know some folks from that area who have attended a number of these meetings. The developers have done just about everything wrong. One could catalog their process into a book: "How to Alienate Local Communities and Botch a Wind Development Project." They started with secret lease agreements with gag orders attached. Then, as noted in the video clip, they (or their consultants) trespassed on people's land and put up monitoring devices without the landowner's permission. They changed their story depending on their audience. And so on.
I relayed this info to a friend of mine who is involved with Renewable Energy Vermont, our state's renewable energy organization. He said that he had already gotten a dozen calls about it from within the organization. The consensus was "These idiots are making us all look bad." Of course, hiring Jeff Wennberg, Governor Douglas’s slap in the face to the Vermont environmental community, was not a brilliant strategic move either. Mr. White-Hansen recently announced that he was scaling back his plans, eliminating turbines around Suzie’s Peak in Tinmouth. He explained it as an enlightened response to public opinion, but the word on the dirt roads is that he couldn’t get key landowners to sign necessary leases.
So these particular developers are making a bollocks of the job. What about the subject in general?
Non-renewable energy is non-renewable, so we are going to be running on renewable at some point. That is a definite end state. Fewer, larger energy systems are more cost effective than many small ones, in general. If we want relatively low cost energy we are going to have to install fewer, larger generators, which will have concentrated impact on particular communities. In the case of wind, these will be communities with specific topography such as the high ridgelines in Ira, Middletown Springs, Tinmouth, and Danby.
It raises questions of local vs. state balance. We could say "Fine, citizens of Ira (or any other town with a good wind site), you want a few small wind turbines for yourselves, so you and the rest of Vermont will endure dramatically higher electricity prices in the future." We could, with appropriate attention to local concerns and reasonable mitigation of effects, ask them to host a megawatt-scale wind farm. The locals would experience a mix of benefits and problems.
We experience this question of balance and localized impact with our power system as it is today. Some people live near large, ugly, dirty conventional power plants. Some people live near large, ugly transmission lines and substations. Not everybody who lives near a power plant or transmission line benefits from it in what they would consider a fair proportion to what they sacrifice. Many of us live nowhere near a power plant or high voltage transmission line but enjoy the benefits thereof.
People sometimes ask me, "Why not just solar? Why do we have to have these huge wind turbines?" I ask them if they are willing to pay five times as much for electricity in the winter, when sun-hours are scarce and wind is plentiful. That's the decision we have to make. We are used to an unending and cheap supply of electricity from far off power plants brought in over huge power lines. We can’t assume that this will be the pattern in the future. In fact, we can safely assume that the paradigm will be exactly the opposite – smaller, decentralized power systems with distributed generation sources, making electricity for sub-regional markets.
That said, we do have to put in place some kind of rational guidelines for wind development so that developers like those presented above don't bulldoze in and screw people around. Conversely, so that one occasional summer resident can't throw a wrench in the works and deny us renewable electricity.
I don’t buy the aesthetics argument against wind power. What is beautiful in a landscape is entirely subjective and changes with time. I happen to dislike the appearance of farm silos. Nevertheless, they appear repeatedly in picturesque photos of Vermont in our premiere tourism magazine, Vermont Life. Why are multi-story unadorned concrete cylinders capped with galvanized steel domes considered picturesque? I like the dark blue Harvestore silos a bit better, but they were considered an aesthetic abomination when they were first introduced. Now they show up in those Vermont Life photos as well. I also dislike the appearance of gas stations, fast food outlets, big box stores, and pseudo-colonial McMansions, but each has its advocates touting economic utility, property rights, and consumer choice. We put up with a huge number of blights on our landscape that don’t actually need to be ugly or imposing simply because some real estate developers or corporate-backed franchisees had their way with us.
The key difference is that a fast food franchise does not technically have to be ugly but a wind turbine has to be tall. The farther the turbine blades get from the ground the faster and smoother the airflow they encounter. Faster and smoother wind means more power and longer turbine life, which means cheaper power. The power available in wind increases by the cube of the wind speed. Double the speed means eight times the power. Even the small increment of speed and smoothness offered by another ten feet of tower makes a noticeable difference. That also means that a wind turbine has to be located where there is decent wind. In Vermont that is a ridgeline between 1600 and 2400 feet high. At greater altitudes than 2400 feet the turbine blades tend to ice up in the winter. Tall and high up means visible, and there’s the rub.
Another constraint is transmission. Put some tens of megawatts of generation somewhere and you need sufficiently large power lines to get that electricity to market. There happens to be a high voltage line going west from Rutland along the Route 4 corridor, right at the northern end of the Ira/West Rutland ridgelines. Not every ridgeline in Vermont has a high voltage line running nearby, so that cuts down the possible locations dramatically.
There is an intellectual dishonesty to saying reflexively “Yes, wind power is important, just don’t put it here.” Not every location where wind is technically and economically possible is also environmentally and socially appropriate. Each citizen has the right and duty to question a developer and hold a wind development company to appropriate standards. But if everyone says, “Not here,” then are we all willing to accept the consequences?
Coal, natural gas, and uranium are getting scarcer by the hour. Someday we will have far less power available to us at a far greater price. In order to have a stable utility grid we will have to base our generation portfolio on the most stable renewable source, hydroelectric power. Wind, solar, wave power (on the coasts), and to a lesser extent, biomass, will make up the rest. In a best case scenario I can see us generating about a quarter of the electrical energy we now enjoy. We will need every kind of renewable energy source available to us. We can’t wait for the economics of scarcity to drive renewable energy development unless we want to endure a desperate interregnum, an electrical Dark Age, while we scramble to develop renewable generation.
That means that we need to start making hard decisions about the location of wind generation right now. The residents of towns with ridgelines and nearby transmission capacity need to realize that their little patch of Vermont was chosen by geologic and human history as one of a handful of viable sites for something we all need. I don’t expect or desire the residents of these towns to roll over and say “Do what you want.” I do expect them to formulate a positive, proactive vision of how they would like to see wind developed. I expect them to pressure the state government to create realistic and workable guidelines for wind development. Otherwise the eventual answer to the question “Got any electricity?” will be “Not here.”
I just read a post at the always-interesting site Registan about corruption in the Afghan National Police. It is sordid and depressing. It would be shocking if I hadn’t long ago ceased being surprised by what people do with guns and without supervision. I’ll quote the original article from Al-Aribiyah about what British troops found when they fought their way into Helmand Province.
As the troops advance, they are learning uncomfortable facts about their local allies: villagers say the government's police force was so brutal and corrupt that they welcomed the Taliban as liberators.
"The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter.
He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of "bachabazi," or sex with pre-pubescent boys.
"If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and rape them," he said. "You can go to any police base and you will see these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then let the child go."
The Interior Ministry in Kabul said it would contact police commanders in the area before responding in detail.
When the Taliban arrived in the village 10 months ago and drove the police out, local people rejoiced, said Mohammad Rasul, a toothless elderly farmer who keeps a few cows and chickens in a neatly tended orchard of pomegranate trees, figs and grape vines.
Although his own son was killed by a Taliban roadside bomb five years ago, Rasul said the Taliban earned their welcome in the village by treating people with respect.
So, we have the ANP shaking people down like the local branch of the Mafia, and then engaging in brutal sexual abuse. Note that the farmer lost his son to the Taliban and yet prefers them to the ANP.
This is history repeating itself. Why, one might ask, were the Taliban able to take over and hold Afghanistan against all the other warlords? Were they better fighters? Were they better equipped? Better generaled? Nope.
They were honest. Damn them for a bunch of medieval, superstitious, woman-hating sadists, but they were, and are, a very legalistic bunch. Sharia law is a throwback to centuries ago, but it is law, and they rule by it.
After the Soviets were driven out Afghanistan had a not-very-charming civil war among the various warlord factions. From that time until the Taliban took over in 1996, a regular Afghan civilian could expect to be stopped on the road and robbed at gunpoint every few miles by the local militiamen. Businesses paid protection money. It was essentially a country ruled by organized crime, only less organized than Chicago in the 1920’s.
The Taliban, backed by factions within the Pakistani government, made headway in their successful fight for power by simply leaving people alone. If you grew your beard, kept your radio quiet and your women under wraps, you could go about your business in relative safety. Anybody who stole lost a hand, and unlike the previous non-administration, bribes and connections didn’t do the crook any good. Overall the Taliban were bureaucratic sticklers for procedure. It says something about the abysmal level that things had gotten to that Afghans preferred living in the legal equivalent of Europe in the year 1214. It says something about the failure of our efforts today that many still prefer it.
Corruption in Afghanistan is endemic partly because of the general chaos, partly because of our influence (more on that later) and partly because the country is tribal. Tribal societies work on the basis of familial and personal relationships, patronage, and nepotism. Afghanistan seems to have the worst of all worlds – the tradition of favoring relatives and rewarding followers without the original firm social structure that made it work. Endless war, the imposition of alien political structures, and huge flows of foreign cash have broken down the traditional safeguards. I’m not saying that Afghanistan ever had a golden age of lawfulness, just a set of traditions that were coherent enough to organize a society. The key to power in Afghanistan is eliminating corruption, or at least minimizing and regulating it.
How do we eliminate corruption in a country where loyalty is rented?
We could start by not underestimating the Afghans. The primary Afghan values are hospitality and practicality. They may not have progressive values about the role of women but they know how to adapt and survive. I have read accounts of local Afghan judges setting up mock “fair trials” for visiting UN representatives to show how well the reform efforts are going. Then, with the foreigners out of the way, the Potemkin courts get shut down and it is back to bribery and favoritism. They will get away with whatever we let them.
We could also start by cleaning up our own act. Our whole semi-privatized effort over there is riddled with corruption. Contractors are doling out bribes and protection money, which sustains and reinforces the present way of doing things.
Ultimately, we have to be willing to step away from our allies. Afghanistan has held greater importance in the minds of western governments than it really deserves. Great Britain and Russia played “The Great Game” of influence and espionage for decades in Central Asia, to no real advantage for either. We went in, ostensibly after Osama bin Laden, when with a bit more pressure we could have had him for a few diplomatic concessions. Now he is almost certainly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, so there goes that reasoning. Some see our interest in Afghanistan as relating to a non-Russian pipeline route for oil and gas out of the ‘stans. That is one pipeline that won’t get built for a while. The whole deal is such a loser that we could safely threaten Hamid Karzai and the whole wretched crew with abandonment if they don’t clean up their acts. That includes prosecuting the rapist policemen.
The two valuable things that we could offer the people of Afghanistan would be personal security and some kind of consistent justice. Until they see western presence as a source for these things they will find it in the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.
Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 8:51PM ;)
;)