A friend once said "White man make big fire, sit far away, Indian make small fire, sit close."
This phrase offers a wise observation from a culture that lived at least 10,000 years here in North America without devastating the ecology. A people who didn't talk about sustainability, but who were all about it.
Some supposedly "advanced" folks liked to talk down about "savages", but it now appears that they were advanced in some important ways. Some would argue that they didn't have the capacity to alter the planet, others observe that they thrived and lived in a sort of harmony with nature.
Our civilization may alter the climate in such a way that we loose a third or half of the species on the planet. If so it would be one of the worst mass extinction event in the future history of the planet. I've wondered what it would look like if we were 10,000 years in the future? With an asteroid, we can find an impact crater perhaps if it caused a geophysical event, but with CO2 driven climate change, it's a more subtle signal if viewed from a distant planet. A sad change, and one that we can yet mitigate.
Hopefully we will learn from the ways of the native Americans, from our farmers, foresters and ecologists, scientists and our best minds. Can we learn to live with our nature as the treasure that it is? Can our society learn to respect, protect, and conserve the wild spaces,? It is the diversity of life and the large habitat areas that are the most precious legacy we could give to future generations.
Sometimes it is so easy to help a species through the narrow point as they face extinction, and yet so difficult to get folks to support these efforts. Extinction is different from individual death of course, and it's so unnecessary to allow entire lines of evolution to stop just because some greedy fool wants a blip of profit, just because the values don't yet account for the environment, and our economic system hasn't figured out how to work effectively in the new ways that are necessary to adapt our society to the realities becoming apparent in global climate change.
With Perigrine Falcons, a small amount of money, some dedicated scientists and caring people, good luck, and they are now populating California again in sustainable numbers. This small triumph shows how we can make a difference, yet it is a fragile triumph as the species will need continued stewardship as the climate shifts and habitat is threatened.
I suspect that as the climate heating raises the ocean levels and unloads the glacier weight, the crust of the earth and the tectonic plates may flex a tiny bit, but make big news in the process. It seems to me that the distribution of weight on the plate boundaries (margins in some cases) may allow some things like large earthquakes and increased volcanic activity.
On the good side, volcanic activity can cool things, unfortunately we may be fooling with a system prone to catastrophic transitions to other parts of the dynamic map. Some "tipping points" appear within the horizon, a wake up call, an opportunity to conserve the heritage that we enjoy for future generations.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Climate Change and Nuclear Waste: Solve both with one stroke!
A new perspective on nuclear power is long overdue in the environmental movement and James Hansen's recent talk at U.C. Berkeley points the way ( see video of his presentation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ctTxZHosI). The urgency of developing a new energy infrastructure to replace the coal and oil based technology is understood, how to do it is the open question.
What most folks don't know today is that the current generation of nuclear power generation plants don't efficiently burn the nuclear fuel, and they depend on a continuous supply of new Uranium. The main reason that they only extract a tiny fraction of the available energy from the fuel is concerns over proliferation and technical limits that are intrinsic to the first three generations of nuclear plants. Current plants generate what is labeled as "waste" but it's really a resource that can power the planet for the next 1000 years, enough to heal the earth from the blast of heat we are just beginning to experience from the burning of fossil fuel.
With the current nuclear power systems, we must store the waste for 24000 years or more and are committed to something that just isn't realistic. The current systems produce waste that has long decay times and it's been known for a long time though not discussed in public very much that the storage of nuclear waste for the long term isn't likely to be a viable solution. The more practical solution is to transmute the waste into a less harmful and shorter lived form, extracting the energy locked up in the process. We have enough waste now to provide power for our civilization for 1000 years-long enough for the excess CO2 to come out of the atmosphere.
The key to extracting the energy from what we now call nuclear waste is the development of subcritical fast neutron reactors such as the systems proposed by the Nobel laureate Carlos Rubbia ( see for example: http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2008/07/nobelists_talk_energy.html or a more technical talk : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8) or the more recent Lawrence Livermore proposal with the market ready acronym of "LIFE" : https://lasers.llnl.gov/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/how_life_works.php)
We will need to invest in the Research and Development that will make practical the recycling of our present harvest of nuclear "waste" and the recent impasse on the construction of a nuclear waste respository gives us an opening to rationalize our policy, and to solve one of humanities biggest challenges.
The use of the new generation of fast neutron sources growing out of the laser fusion and the z-pinch fusion programs makes it possible to both extract useful energy from the waste that we now store at each nuclear power station, and to reduce the volume of the waste that will need long term storage and to do so in a proliferation resistent way.
Our current generation of environmental activists are repeating slogans, and not grappling with the scientific realities, stuck in an old paridigm that obscures the real potential of this avenue to restore the viability of human civilization without giving up the precious aspects of our society and to get back to living in harmony with the natural world.
We can develop energy sources that reduce the potential for toxic pollution now present in every nuclear station through reprocessing of the waste, and it's important to do so before the thousands of tons of waste now stored deteriorates and poisons the environment and the possiblity of making use of this precious energy source.
The US and the world scientific community should immediately launch a project to develop the family of reactors that we know are possible. Several tracks are necessary including laser and z pinch fusion neutron sources, Thorium energy amplifiers, liquid flouride fast reactors, and the engineering studies and test facilities that can bring this technology to the point where we can build thousands of modular power stations within the next 30 years.
I think that with leadership from the Obama administration, and a clear vision from the scientific community combined with public education we can do this!
A new perspective on nuclear power is long overdue in the environmental movement and James Hansen's recent talk at U.C. Berkeley points the way ( see video of his presentation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ctTxZHosI). The urgency of developing a new energy infrastructure to replace the coal and oil based technology is understood, how to do it is the open question.
What most folks don't know today is that the current generation of nuclear power generation plants don't efficiently burn the nuclear fuel, and they depend on a continuous supply of new Uranium. The main reason that they only extract a tiny fraction of the available energy from the fuel is concerns over proliferation and technical limits that are intrinsic to the first three generations of nuclear plants. Current plants generate what is labeled as "waste" but it's really a resource that can power the planet for the next 1000 years, enough to heal the earth from the blast of heat we are just beginning to experience from the burning of fossil fuel.
With the current nuclear power systems, we must store the waste for 24000 years or more and are committed to something that just isn't realistic. The current systems produce waste that has long decay times and it's been known for a long time though not discussed in public very much that the storage of nuclear waste for the long term isn't likely to be a viable solution. The more practical solution is to transmute the waste into a less harmful and shorter lived form, extracting the energy locked up in the process. We have enough waste now to provide power for our civilization for 1000 years-long enough for the excess CO2 to come out of the atmosphere.
The key to extracting the energy from what we now call nuclear waste is the development of subcritical fast neutron reactors such as the systems proposed by the Nobel laureate Carlos Rubbia ( see for example: http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2008/07/nobelists_talk_energy.html or a more technical talk : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8) or the more recent Lawrence Livermore proposal with the market ready acronym of "LIFE" : https://lasers.llnl.gov/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/how_life_works.php)
We will need to invest in the Research and Development that will make practical the recycling of our present harvest of nuclear "waste" and the recent impasse on the construction of a nuclear waste respository gives us an opening to rationalize our policy, and to solve one of humanities biggest challenges.
The use of the new generation of fast neutron sources growing out of the laser fusion and the z-pinch fusion programs makes it possible to both extract useful energy from the waste that we now store at each nuclear power station, and to reduce the volume of the waste that will need long term storage and to do so in a proliferation resistent way.
Our current generation of environmental activists are repeating slogans, and not grappling with the scientific realities, stuck in an old paridigm that obscures the real potential of this avenue to restore the viability of human civilization without giving up the precious aspects of our society and to get back to living in harmony with the natural world.
We can develop energy sources that reduce the potential for toxic pollution now present in every nuclear station through reprocessing of the waste, and it's important to do so before the thousands of tons of waste now stored deteriorates and poisons the environment and the possiblity of making use of this precious energy source.
The US and the world scientific community should immediately launch a project to develop the family of reactors that we know are possible. Several tracks are necessary including laser and z pinch fusion neutron sources, Thorium energy amplifiers, liquid flouride fast reactors, and the engineering studies and test facilities that can bring this technology to the point where we can build thousands of modular power stations within the next 30 years.
I think that with leadership from the Obama administration, and a clear vision from the scientific community combined with public education we can do this!
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