A Sense of Scale

The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan is shocking beyond its numbers. There are thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. The economic damage is immense. Well beyond that is its impact on our sense of scale, our sense of the human place in the world. Here is a video clip that had me transfixed in horror:

One could look at that scene and conclude that nature is cruel. That would be wrong. It's worse than that; nature just is. Cruelty is a human trait and has a human scale. We can negotiate with cruelty. We can fight it. We can arrest it, try it, convict and imprison it. We can reeducate it, or wait it out. Nature is there forever, and it is unconscious and without intent.

I'm sharing this video clip with you not to shock you, but to remind you of our scale. It's not a kind thing to do, and I apologize. A friend of mine once said that a certain amount of delusion was necessary to stay sane, and I suppose I'm threatening that. However, a regular reminder of our place in the world is a mental tonic; not good tasting, but it clears the mind.

There is an area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that will be off limits for human habitation for, what, decades? Centuries? With luck, the area around the Fukushima nuclear plant won’t be contaminated and people will be able to move back – if they actually want to. With a little less luck Japan could lose some land area essentially forever. Is this a level of risk we should be taking, especially given that there are alternatives? I say no. Don’t juggle hand grenades if tennis balls are available.

The Fukushima disaster hits close because here in Vermont we have a nuclear power plant that is the same age and design as the Fukishima reactors. It is the outdated and unsafe GE Mark 1 design, and it is coming up on its 40^th birthday. It has been leaking tritium and perhaps other things for some months. Its owner, Entergy, has been lying to state regulators and coping with drunken employees. 75 miles east-southeast lies the greater Boston metropolitan area, with a population of 4.5 million. It’s the unimaginable waiting to happen. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in a move that surprised nobody, just re-upped its operating license for another 20 years.

As Japanese workers valiantly attempt to cool down those leaking reactors that were wrecked by the earthquake and tsunami, we should rethink risk and our ability to manage risk. We are, as a species, a glass cannon. That is an expression from the world of fiction meaning a character that can inflict terrible damage but can’t take a punch. We can be incredibly destructive en masse, but as individuals and as communities we are vulnerable to what nature can dish out. Likewise our complex structures, both social and technological.

Engineers regularly design mechanical systems to endure natural disasters. The point is to predict the worst things that could happen and build in enough redundancy so that in the worst case scenario the system still has one level of safety left. As we have seen, nature can defy our predictions and wipe away that last level of protection. Taking it as a given that our systems will sometimes be overwhelmed by events, we have to start thinking about the consequences of absolute failure.

If a wind turbine has an absolute failure and falls over, I suppose it could land on someone. The same goes for a rack of solar panels. However, the fall zone would not be rendered uninhabitable for centuries. Cancer deaths would not spike downwind. An entire wind farm could go over all at once and the nearest city would not have to be evacuated.

We seem to have reached a scavenging age in the pursuit of non-renewable energy. We have decades-old power plants and decades-old oil fields starting to fail. We are exploring for oil at extreme ocean depths with the associated extreme risks. We are strip mining and processing tar sands that nobody in the business would have bothered with a few decades ago. We are blasting the tops off of mountains for coal and engaging in the dangerous re-mining of old deposits. As we start to scramble, the risks per ton, per barrel, per gallon, per kilowatt-hour are going up.

We can’t keep reassuring ourselves that we’ve got it all under control and that the worst will never happen. It’s time to look with an unflinching gaze at worst case scenarios and ask ourselves, “Are we willing to accept this level of destruction as the cost of temporarily keeping the status quo?” The answer, in many cases, will be no. We’ll have to face up to fundamental changes in the way we live. We’ll have to balance present convenience against future consequences. There are no easy answers, but pretending that everything will be ok is no answer either.

Japanese Nuclear Problems

Here’s an overview of the nuclear power crisis in Japan. History will probably overtake this post within a day, but I thought people might like a general picture of the problems.

The worst hit plant is Fukushima Dai-ichi, located about 180 miles north of Tokyo on the east coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu. It is a set of six boiling water reactors, meaning that the water heated by the nuclear reaction is not pressurized, so it boils. This is an important point, which I will get to later.

Three of the six reactors were operating at the time the earthquake hit. They all immediately shut down. That means that a number of rods were dropped into each reactor core, these rods absorbing radiation and stopping the reaction. The problem is that the cores of these reactors don’t immediately cool down, so the cooling water needs to circulate through them for another week. During a normal shutdown the cooling water pumps run on electricity from the utility grid. This being absent, the pumps are powered by diesel generators on site. In this case, the generators were swamped by the tsunami, so the pumps fell back on batteries, the problem being that the batteries can only power the pumps for 8 hours.

Adding to the problem, each reactor has a pool of water holding used fuel rods. These pools need to have water circulated through them to keep the spent rods cool, although to a lesser extent than the reactor cores. Some of these pools lack circulating water due to the multiple failures and are starting to boil off their water. The danger is that if the spent rods are exposed they could catch fire and spew radioactive particles into the air.

Already there have been releases of radiation. Units 1, 2, and 3 are all at risk, with the cores of all three having been exposed several times and partially melted. The pool on Unit #4 is at risk of exposure. Local residents have been evacuated, and even outside the evacuation zone people have been ordered to stay indoors.

Those explosions you may have seen on television were from hydrogen produced when steam reacted with the superheated casings of the nuclear fuel rods. The hydrogen vented out of the steel and concrete containment vessel and into the building around it. Usually any gas that gets vented into this building gets run through filters to remove radioactive particles and is then blown off, but the venting system was overwhelmed and the hydrogen built up and detonated. Now any radioactive gas that gets vented from those primary containment vessels goes directly into the atmosphere.

Japanese utility workers have been flooding the cores of reactors 1-3 with seawater in an attempt to keep the cores cool. Apparently they have also been mixing some boron containing compound into the water as well. Boron absorbs the neutrons that maintain a nuclear reaction, so this gives double duty, cooling and slowing the reaction at the same time.

There is presently a problem in the #2 reactor, in that the operators can't open the pressure relief valves. The pressure has built up to the point where they are unable to pump water into the core. Unless the valves open on their own, this can't end well.

Key concept: Flooding a boiling water reactor with seawater and boron is a permanent shut down. The Japanese authorities decided that the situation was bad enough to write off these reactors forever.

Second key concept: A small percentage of the fuel rods in reactor #3 are mixed oxide, or MOX, meaning that they contain plutonium as well as the usual uranium. This raises the probability of containment failure, because the plutonium helps to keep the reaction going and because it tends to create more gas when the core gets uncovered. It also poses a higher cancer risk than pure uranium.

Third key concept: These reactors are 40 years old, of a type called the General Electric Mark 1. There have always been questions about the probability of catastrophic failure with this design. This is, by the way, the same age and design as our own Entergy/Vermont Yankee plant in Vernon, as well as 22 other plants in the U.S.

A good site for ongoing information about the Fukushima plant, with excellent explanations of the technology, is at the Union of Concerned Scientists website.

On Being a Suit

A while back I wrote a piece about buying a formal business suit and the language of suits. I may have just experienced the consequences of that language barrier.

Periodically I have lunch with my friend the Broker. He is always dressed well, in the uniform of a financial advisor; a conservatively cut grey suit, white shirt and tie. (I should note that the only conservative thing about him is his suit.) I am dressed for whatever I happen to be doing that day. This often means jeans, a flannel shirt, a Johnson Wool work jacket, and work boots.

We often go to a good Chinese restaurant in Burlington, where the food is miles above your usual American/Chinese industrial fare. I never really consciously registered it before this, but the waitstaff have always been friendly and personable. I have worked in a restaurant kitchen myself, so I do my best to treat restaurant staff with respect and friendliness, and it comes back to me.

The other day I decided to dress the part for our lunch, since we would actually be discussing financial issues. I donned a Brooks Brothers suit (charcoal pinstripe), shined my formal black shoes, and put a neat knot in my tie. The Broker and I strode into the restaurant looking like serious financiers. The hostess approached us and – how to put it – ice crystals formed in the air in front of her. She was unfailingly polite, but it was as if we were wearing Klan robes. She never hinted at a smile in any of our interactions. Our waiter was solemn and deferential, and seemed nervous, as if we were about to attack him. The Broker and I were our usual cheerful selves, but all the good will hit a glass wall and slid to the floor. I had never experienced this kind of reaction at this restaurant, or any restaurant, for that matter.

I mentioned my impressions to the Broker later in an email and got this response:

Yeah, I felt the cold glare from that hostess. The Russian waiter seemed more like he was miscast in the wrong movie. After years of people sure they've got my number because of the suit, I get a certain sort of secret pleasure in brandishing it. I've found, ironically, that it can get the most negative reaction from those who most vehemently profess their liberal open-mindedness. Try it sometime, now that you are an initiate.

I guess we did look like bankers at a lunch meeting, cheerfully engineering the next financial collapse and how to extract our outrageous bonuses from it. Usually we look like a successful businessman and his not-so well off brother-in-law.

I related the story to a friend who is a manager at a non-profit. He told me about a workshop he had just attended which was about giving good presentations. The instructor noted that researchers had found that 60% of an audience’s impression of the speaker came from clothing and general appearance. Maybe 15% came from the actual content of the presentation. Bloviate how you will, but wear the right costume for the crowd.

Of course, this makes me wonder how many snap judgments I have inflicted on people based on clothing. Perhaps fewer than most people, given my own performance as a clothing chameleon. But still, most of our judgments happen before we have a chance to consciously register them. People who research these things find that we make emotional snap judgments and then quickly construct intellectual justifications for them post hoc.

I also wonder whether the clothes really did make the man. That is, did I subtly change my behavior because of the clothes I was wearing? Did I come across as arrogant or distant because I was unconsciously “brandishing” my suit?

Get dressed at your own risk.

Letting it Hang Out

I have just witnessed a few things that have struck me as hubris. In this case, it’s the hubris of the moneyed class that enjoys a parasitic relationship with the corporate species.

Here’s an article (There Goes the Fig Leaf) by Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, noting that the VP of the American Petroleum Institute has announced a new initiative of direct campaign donations to candidates. The key line: "At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate." The fig leaf in question was the near-transparent fiction that campaign contributions were designed to influence voters, not the decisions of members of congress. It was supposed to be about promoting a particular candidate, not particular results. So much for that. The executives of API are now willing to advertise that they are engaged in deliberate, continual, strategic bribery.

The attack on unions in Wisconsin is another lost fig leaf. Governor Walker has been justifying his anti-union bill on the grounds that there is a 130 million dollar state budget deficit. This, directly after promoting and passing legislation giving corporations various tax breaks totaling 140 million dollars. Wisconsin municipalities also lose $700 million a year in special-interest property tax exemptions, money that has to be made up out of state funds. You do the math. Done?

Add to that the not-quite-secret surprise in the bill: A provision would allow the state to sell off its heating plants to private companies without competitive bidding or any of the usual oversight. The probable beneficiaries would be the Koch brothers, billionaire supporters of far-right causes and major donors to Governor Walker’s reelection campaign. Did Walker and his crew think that nobody would read through the bill? Or was it just that they didn’t care if somebody read that part?

Look back at my last post, which was a brief about ditching that 100 billion dollar spending cut in favor of actually enforcing tax laws on millionaires. Enforcing the law to get $100 billion, as opposed to cutting heating assistance and the like, is a no-brainer. The problem is that it would force those big campaign donors to obey the law.

The final straw is a petulant little act by House Republicans – the return of plastic tableware in the House cafeteria. When the Democrats were in control of the House they switched the disposable cups, plates, and other utensils to biodegradeable materials. Not a huge deal, but a nice gesture. The GOP, under Boehner, has changed the rules and gone back to Styrofoam and other plastics. Really? It is a miniature version of Reagan stripping a perfectly functional solar hot water system off the White House back in 1980 – a petty mix of spite and symbolism.

The key to success for the corporate conservatives is to distract the voting public from the structural changes they are making while selling them a bucketful of irrelevant emotional narrative. They also get a lot of mileage out of personal attacks. It works because humans are naturally focused on personalities, tribal membership, and emotional stories.

Now imagine a magician so contemptuous of his audience and so convinced of his own powers that he stops trying to distract them from his semi-hidden moves. Imagine that he goes so far as to narrate the truth of his tricks: “Now I’ll slide the coin down my sleeve, and presto, it seems as if it appeared out of nowhere. Now you applaud.” That is roughly where we are right now. The corporate conservatives are walking around with the fronts of their trousers open, saying “What are ya gonna do about it?”

My hope is that, as in ancient Greek drama, hubris is followed by nemesis. I have some small amount of hope, because deception is the conservative movement’s only real armor. Back in the time of the old Soviet Union, Soviet citizens all knew that the official line was a lie, but they kept quiet to avoid a train ride to Siberia. Our present system is much more sophisticated. We are allowed to debate vigorously in public – within corporate-defined boundaries, or else on subjects that don’t concern the economic powers. We have all the window dressing and symbolism appropriate to a functional democracy. However, if the general public gets corporate naughty bits waved in their faces too often they might actually notice that they’ve been distracted. Witness the uprising in Wisconsin. And hope that it spreads. And help it spread. 

$100 billion, found

This one is going to be short.

The GOP controlled house just passed a budget (soon to be voted down by the Senate, if not vetoed by the White House) that cuts $60 billion in spending. The cuts include programs such as heating assistance for the poor. These cuts are down from the intended $100 billion.

Here's the alternative: Give the IRS the funding and the special mandate to go after millionaires who are hiding their assets in secret foreign accounts. These millionaire tax cheats are costing us - you guessed it - roughly $100 billion a year in lost tax revenue. That's billion with a b.

It won't be a tax hike, just the prosecution of criminals and collection of taxes due under present law.

You're welcome. Glad to be of service, Mr. Boehner.