Wednesday, October 01, 2003

American Power Plants play Nuclear Roulette Matt Bevens writes: In Russian roulette, the players--all resigned to the possibility of death--put a single bullet into one of the six chambers of a revolver, spin the cylinder and take turns putting the gun to their heads. It starts as a one-in-six chance of disaster. Those odds, however, are tame compared to those favored by our government's nuclear power regulators. They've recently been told by top scientists of a potential problem: floating paint chips and other debris can get past a poorly designed strainer and clog a key pump. If uncorrected, the scientists reported, this problem represents a one-in-three chance of disaster at an American nuclear power plant by 2007. The regulators' response? The problem ought to be fixed by, oh, say, 2008. That's the equivalent of chambering two bullets before spinning the cylinder and pulling the trigger. ... The original "one-in-three chance of doom" Los Alamos study actually went reactor by reactor nationwide and calculated the individual risk level for each. A chart in the study lines the reactors up from least at risk to most at risk. The study did not name the reactors, instead giving them coded numbers. Lochbaum says he was able to crack the code, and determine the two power plants Los Alamos considered most at risk. They were the Vogtle plant in Georgia, near the South Carolina border, and the Indian Point plant, which a coalition led by the environmental group Riverkeeper has been working to close on the grounds that, among other things, it's unacceptably close to New York City in a post-9/11 world. Davis-Besse, meanwhile, is way over at the least-at-risk end of the table. And that evaluation came before it made its recent improvements. This summer it installed a new pump that's twenty-five times larger than the original, installed new grates and made other improvements. And the NRC's stern position is that Davis-Besse cannot restart its reactor until the agency is convinced the new containment sump solves the problem. Lochbaum asks: If the containment sump problem is so serious it keeps shut Davis-Besse, a reactor at relatively low risk, how come reactors with a far higher risk are allowed to keep running? (10/01/03) Doing it Right: Reiji Murota, Master Farmer The New Farm -- In a tiny agricultural kingdom bounded by the sea, a Shumei master farmer has free reign to farm on the wild side. What he finds – and teaches – keeps pushing out the frontiers of Natural Agriculture. ... If Natural Agriculture has a single heart, this is it. And it’s even more like Fantasy Island than I thought. Shumei owns most of Kishima Island, making it a rather inimitable ideal. But it’s a place for the dream to grow, a place where Natural Agriculture can flourish unfettered by the mainland’s reality of drifting pesticides and financial pressure. Its lessons of perfection are taken by the farmers of Shumei, like those departing on dee plane at the end of the show, to put into practice in their imperfect world. A sort of dreamy research center. But the master of this island is no Ricardo Montalban; in fact, when he slides up to the lunch table just after we arrive, he appears more like a shy servant than the highly revered teacher he’s supposed to be. He’s small and his face is thin, with skin stretched over high, round cheekbones and caved into hollows below. His ears are the red-brown color of sausages, his leather hat so molded to his skull it could never fit another person. Rather than pull up a chair to our table, he stays seated at the one beside it and keeps his conversation cautious and deferent. When he does talk, his eyes blink. Out of the lunchroom and onto the land, Murota is like a fish returned to water. Standing in the soil his voice starts to flow, unfolding the concept of compost, layer by layer. We walk to the second of many micro-fields, up a thin and muddy path lined with short trees, and his voice becomes even stronger. The slight rise obscures our destination, the foliage erases the field we came from, and suddenly it is clear that he’s not powered by just the fields. This wildness is the thing that completes Murota—and his agriculture. (10/01/03) The Uncertainty of Human Knowing Jacob Bronowski speaking in 1976 his famous public television series the Ascent of Man said: One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the Twentieth Century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable. There is no absolute knowledge and those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. This is the human condition; and that is what Quantum Physics says. I mean that literally. Let us examine an object with the best tool we have today, the electron microscope, where the rays are so concentrated that we no longer know whether to call them waves or particles. Electrons are fired at an object, and they trace its outline like a knife-thrower at a fair. The smallest object that has ever been seen is a single atom of thorium. It is spectacular. And yet the soft image confirms that, like the knives that graze the girl at the fair, even the hardest electrons do not give a hard outline. The perfect image is still as remote as the distant stars. We are here face to face with the crucial paradox of knowledge. Year by year we devise more precise instruments with which to observe nature with more fineness and when we look at the observations, we are discomfited to see that they are still fuzzy, and we feel that we are as uncertain as ever. We seem to be running after a goal which lurches away from us to infinity every time we come within sight of it. ... Timothy Wilken, MD writes: In our present world, it is widely believed that mistakes are the result of badness. So when mistakes occur, we investigate, blame and punish. This belief has resulted in a world where violence, hate and judgment are common. Synergic science reveals that mistakes are in fact the result of ignorance. If we understand this, then when a mistake occurs, we would analyze, determine responsibility, and educate. This could soon lead to a world where public safety, love and compassion are common. ... Our human science has revealed that our knowing is incomplete and imperfect. This means that every human belief is an assumption. We can never know for sure. We can never know ALL. As you sit in your chair reading these words, you assumed the chair would hold you. You did not check under the chair to see if it had broken since its last use. When you ate lunch at your favorite restaurant last week, you assumed the waitress had washed her hands. You assumed the cook did not have hepatitis. If you had assumed otherwise, you would not have walked into that restaurant. You would not have eaten your lunch. We humans assume. Herein lies our uncertainty — that’s all we humans can do. There is nothing wrong in our assuming, we are simply obeying a fundamental ‘law’ of Nature.  (10/01/03) Calling the Kettle Black BBC Science -- The future of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change is largely in the hands of the world's biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. ... The US emits more, absolutely and per head, than any other country - although it also produces more wealth. When Kyoto was agreed, the US committed to reducing its emissions by 6%. But since then it has pulled out of the agreement and its carbon dioxide emissions have increased to 16% above 1990 levels. It has signed the protocol but repudiated it. For the agreement to become a legally binding treaty, countries responsible for a total of at least 55% of 1990 developed country emissions must ratify it. As the US accounted for 36.1% of 1990 emissions, this is much harder to achieve without its participation. President Bush said in March 2001 that the US would not ratify Kyoto, because he thought it could damage the US economy and because it did not yet require developing countries to cut their emissions. ... Developing countries like India are listed under Kyoto as Annex II countries, and they are not obliged to make any cuts in greenhouse emissions yet. But as they raise living standards their emissions will obviously increase - India's have risen by more than 52% since 1990. (10/01/03) 43.6 million Americans without Health Insurance New York Times -- Even before the Census Bureau announced the numbers, showing that the number of uninsured Americans had risen by 2.4 million last year, to 43.6 million, most of the major Democratic presidential candidates were campaigning hard on the problems in health care. Not since the 1992 election has the issue drawn so much attention, and the reasons are not hard to find. ... The jump in the number of Americans without health insurance is not just another bad economic statistic. Health care costs are soaring again, after several years of stability; average premiums rose nearly 14 percent this year, the third year of double-digit increases, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Employers are pushing more of the costs onto their workers, raising co-payments and deductibles. At the same time, many Americans saw their health benefits jeopardized by layoffs, which have continued despite the official end of the recession in November 2001. In such times, the plight of the uninsured becomes more of a middle-class issue, more of a symbol of real close-to-home insecurity and thus more politically potent, advocates and experts say. Until now, "it's mainly been an issue of altruism for a discrete and disadvantaged population," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal consumer group. "Now that the losses in health coverage are impacting more middle-class and working families," Mr. Pollack said, "this issue becomes one of self-interest for a very substantial part of the population." (10/01/03) 9:45:40 AM

© TrustMark 2003 Timothy Wilken. Last update: 11/3/2003; 6:43:10 AM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.