Fukushima Open Discussion Thread

DV82XL,

I really appreciated your post. Very important to say it how it is – the future is very hard to see through.

As to your finale, I’ve seen a number of arguments from people who are neither pro or anti nuclear but who are convinced that we are living in a relatively wonderful era of economic and political stability, but this era won’t last.

The guts of the argument goes: Nuclear energy would provide ample base load energy but a massively enlarged nuclear industry in the future will have to operate in an environment when the world’s economic and political systems have largely broken down. It’s an industry that can conceivable be kept reasonably safe and separated from arms proliferation, but (this is the rub) the regulations to ensure such safety can only happen in a fairly stable economic and political environment.

The regulatory environment has to be top class and there needs to be enough fiscal liquidity to afford to upkeep safety standards.

In other words, if we look at the future and have great confidence that the world is not going to be precipitated into an era of relative chaos, then nuclear energy sounds very viable and sensible.

On the other hand, if our world view is that we have reached a critical point that will bring on an era of global financial chaos and a breakdown of many political regimes then the prospect of building another 10,000 nuclear facilities to counter climate change is a rather scary thought.

I have to admit that I am not confident about humanity being able to guarantee a stable future, so I worry about a future predicated on a huge growth in nuclear reactors all over the world. But I’m also aware that the romantic dream of powering our consumer society from renewables is just that.

Let’s face it, there ain’t an easy way out of our pickle.

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# DV82XL,

Oh well, that’s where we must part ways. I deal with too many people (all blokes) who think there is an easy technical fix. Latter day alchemists.

One doesn’t have to be a doomsday merchant to accept that the world’s economy is in a precarious state and we are in for a major ‘correction’. Many are forecasting much chaos to emerge from that, at worst a global economic meltdown. Even if half the predictions come true then we are in for very interesting times.

I don’t have a crystal ball, just observe the pulse, so let’s compare notes down the track a bit.

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@MattB I understand a Mwh of PV counts towards not one but five Renewable Energy Certificates. It gets added to pseudo-solar such as heat pump water heaters (that may never see a ray of sunlight) based on presumed savings w.r.t. resistive water heaters. When I got PV in 2005 I got a simple rebate cheque no other options were available. They say a camel is a horse designed by a committee well the same people must have designed the RET.

That’s why I fear the carbon tax will also be an inconsistent muddle. With the boom in new coal mines I’m convinced the tax should apply to export coal and LNG. Importing countries should write a nice letter to Australia arguing why they should get the money back.

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Thanks again DV82XL,

Perhaps I should not have highlighted the proliferation issue in my earlier post, it’s a latent issue, but not the core of my concern. Efficient regulation is.

In fact, if I were to lay bets I believe this almighty (sometimes ugly) tug-of-war between the renewables and nuclear camps will be won by the nuclear power lobby – hands down.

(Not so much in Australia, because the coal lobby is so powerful here, but Australia’s rather huge uranium reserves will, in any case, all be sold off to feed the industry elsewhere.)

But I believe both sides of the tug-of-war are avoiding the main issue, the fragile state of the world economy. Long before even the foundations for all those 10,000 odd new nuclear facilities can be built oil depletion and the global financial bubble are likely to change the finance world as we know it.

For this discussion to be complete this elephant-in-the-room issue has to be brought into the equation seriously. I’m bringing in the views of economists here, and there are various ones, but a solid body of opinion is emerging that our energy future will be made vastly more difficult in the next two decades as a result of a looming global recession.

There is an instinct in the warring energy camps to come out fighting and bat for their chosen technology come what may. So anything that is said, no matter how constructive, is immediately swatted. Assuring you here that I am not being an adversary, just pointing to a need to include the main ingredient in the pudding. If you don’t the pudding won’t come out as you may be expecting.

That applies to both sides of the war.

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@ Chris Harries, on 26 March 2011 at 9:30 AM:
It is fair enough to take a pessimistic view of the future; or at least to consider pessimistic scenarios when planning major industries, including (for example) nuclear power plants or land transport modes. ”

What if” scenarios for all reasonably conceivable outcomes should be examined.

You have based your opinion that nuclear power is not worth the risk on what I consider to be a pessimistic view of the future – ungoverned, ungovernable, warlike and unable to be trusted with nuclear weapons or the tools for making them.

I suggest another future: Still ungoverned and ungovernable and warlike, but with NPP’s providing more than half of the electricity and a similar proportion of process and amenity steam. Withour the process and amentity steam, the NPP’s are about 35% thermally efficient. If spent and bled steam enter the mix, overall efficiency can climb by as much as another 10%. If prawn farming, hothouses, etc, are included in the mix, who knows how much heat will be wasted?

My point in mentioning secondary thermal values is that this is possible with nuclear and coal fired plant only – assuming that oil and gas will, in a future world, be too expensive to waste for simply boiling water.

So, what about nuclear proliferation? Fast breeder technologies are the only currently available means for consuming weapons grade nuclear materials, apart from actual explosions. If the world turns upside down in the future but first decommissions and consumes most or all of the warheads, that will be an enormous improvement over your “no nuclear” option, and this outcome is entirely achievable.

Next scenario: We have, for some mad reason or other, not bothered with fast breeder NPP’s but have heaps of current technology plant. Apart from those which are specifically designed to produce weapons grade materials, there will still be no more weapons grade materials available than at present.

This scenario thus envisages using that 0.7%, or whatever, of the natural uranium which, through enrichment, can be converted to energy in currently available commercial reactors. The remaining 99% of the uranium ends up as a problem, for ever, in highly dangerous stockpiles of spent fuel, right?

Wrong! The depleted uranium which is separated during the manufacture of fuel rods is not a significant radiator. It sits quietly, even more quietly than it did as a native ore. It can simply be stockpiled, out of the way, pending use as a fuel in fast breeder reactors, or not at all. It does not pose a risk to the planet, regardless of the fact that its name is Uranium.

What about the spent fuel rods? Fair question. They remain radioactive for several centuries, at first dangerously so. Hence, they are stored and cooled under water. After a period of years, they no longer require significant cooling, so they can be stored in dry storage drums, locked away from the local environment. After a couple of hundred years (NOTE: NOT thousands or tens of thousands of years), they become essentially inert and inactive. However, they are excellent fuel for fast breeder reactors, so they should not be thrown away. They are valuable resources and are no more dangerous than many common chemicals, pesticides and so forth, which also require careful management and storage.

But surely the nuclear fuel cycle poses a nuclear weapons threat, you might say. No, it does not. The above is all there is to worry about.

Nuclear weapons grade materials which are the stuff of The Bomb are not derived from NPP’s, but from specially designed reactors, the output from which includes the weapons grade materials and, as a by-product, heat. This heat may be used to generate steam and drive a turbine, but it is not the primary purpose of an operation which makes weapons, it is a by-product.

So, to reduce the availability of nuclear weapons in a deteriorating world, two things should happen:
FIRST, ensure that plant capable of manufacturing weapons grade nuclear materials is removed from service as soon as possible and dismantled.
SECOND, destroy as many weapons as possible and remove their payloads from the planet for ever. The best and only feasible way of achieving this at present is to use the warheads as fuel in FBR’s, so even arch pessimists should get right behind this technology, right now.

Perhaps DV82XL or someone with better knowledge of nuclear plant designs and capabilities than I have can review what I have just written, but that now forms at least one strong strand of the core of my belief system when it comes to future energy options.

Essentially, where I am now at is:
1. Transition from fossil fuels to nuclear asap, for the sake of the climate.
2. Close down and dismantle all facilities, anywhere in the world, that are capable of producing weapons grade fissile materials.
3. Use renewables as and when possible, but accept that there is no realistic scenario based on renewables alone that provides for sufficient energy, especially electrical energy, for a stable future world.
4. Transition from conventional nuclear to FBR’s or other technologies that can/will consume warheads and spent fuel stockpiles as soon as these can be commercialised.
5. Destroy for ever all nuclear warheads by using their fissile material in FBR’s as fuel.
6. Cease mining of both thermal coal and uranium for the next 10,000 years or more, because it will take that long to complete steps 1 – 5 above.

So, Chris, I suggest that you take a little time to work through the above and a little less time worrying about the gender of your fellow contributors and whether gender is relevant to or a determinant of technological knowledge.

I am a bloke, a word which you have used as an accusation. I am also an engineer, so perhaps that is a second strike against me. However, I do not posit that there is an “easy technical fix”, because the path I suggest that should be followed has many obstacles. Let’s hope that gender does not become a major obstacle as we all try to achieve a better future.

There is much work to be done by those who do not wish to immerse themselves in technology. This includes by informing the debates; helping to achieve change; developing and guiding political will to demolish the true nuclear threats – warheads and means for manufacture of warheads; supporting critical analysis of all options; demanding that long range views should be considered before short term goals are set; and so on.

The energy future of our planet is not and cannot be determined by narrow technical issues alone, but all of the above and much more, but it must have a technologically firm foundation.

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# DV82XL – so there you are, in your definition: renewable advocates are ‘fanatics’ and nuclear advocates are merely ‘supporters’.

Does the debate have to be quite so polarised, one sided and combative? Insults, outright hostility and lack of tolerance seems to come equally from both sides from what I can see. I do realize that both sides experience a lot of frustration – believing that their technologies aren’t appreciated enough.

# John Bennetts: “I am a bloke, a word which you have used as an accusation”.

Well, John, if so then I would be accusing my own gender. But having been involved intensively in energy forums from some four decades I can’t help noticing that we blokes have a rather big stake in technical solutions and a rather big blind spot when it comes to other things that really matter.

100 percent of people who come to me with their golden solutions for the future – whether they be fuel cells or hot rocks or solar cells or nuclear fusion or IFR reactors are blokes. Not 98 percent even, 100 percent.

Maybe it’s just that we blokes are good at that sort of thing, but if I am to look at this experience rationally then I can’t ignore the gender distortion on technology altogether. It makes me think, is that all there is to it? Could it be that we are missing something? Maybe Einstein thought this one out when he said ‘you can’t fix a problem using the same type of thinking that created it in the first place’? Is that what we are doing, in fact?

These are all just questions. I have a very open mind on the energy mix that will eventuate in time, but most of the current debate I believe will prove to be rather irrelevant. If I listen to economists and political science folk as well as energy technicians then their prognoses don’t match up very well.

As we power on into this century, governance (or its absence) seems likely to become the dominant issue, overwhelming all others – including high-tech energy solutions.

MODERATOR
Sorry if I have missed some previous ad homs etc. The rule regarding incivility/rudeness etc still applies on the Open Threads.
Please advise me of any such occurrences I may have missed. See up comment for my reminder to all blog users on Open Thread

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@ Joshua – I covered the HUE issue in detail here on this site some time ago see:

Analysis of the 2010 Nuclear Summit and the obsession with highly enriched uranium

both in the body of the lead article and in subsequent comments.

The short answer is that HEU from small reactors is not a threat. You have to understand that obtaining fissile material for a bomb is one of the more trivial parts of the process. There are many steps, that require that a constructor have very specialized skills and equipment before even a ‘crude’ HEU device could be built.

Not only that but a device is not a weapon. A weapon must be deployable, deliverable, and reliable, and you must have enough of them to project any sort of threat. This simplistic view that somehow these are a kind of a pipe-bomb that anyone could lash-up if they just had the fuel is is just plain naïve.

Understanding this issue is not difficult, but it does require that you look into the matter in a bit more detail than simply swallowing what is in the popular media. The funny thing is, it’s not that hard to find, it’s not buried, its right there.

@Chris Harries – Yes they are fanatics, because they cannot see that they are backing a dead horse. They cannot see it because the cannot or will not learn enough about the technical issues to see the deep flaws in their ideas.

I understand that most people are attracted to some intuitive (and wrong) notion of epistemic fairness: you are making one claim, the other guy is making another claim, the two of you are therefore on equal footing. But this is an issue of hard numbers, and hard science – like it or not there is a right judgment, and wrong judgments here, that are independent of ideology, and are non-negotiable.

I suspect that many will find this unpalatable, but unfortunately it is true.

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re post by: Joshua, on 26 March 2011 at 11:57 AM said:

Reply to American re Insurance rate as indicator of NPS safety

American, Joshua and others here have summed it up fairly well. Initially you seemed to be aruging that insurer’s wouldn’t insure nuclear because it was too inherently risky from a technical standpoint.

Then I pointed out that part of what insurer’s consider in liability insurance is the risk of lawsuit, and that the inordinate fear and lack of understanding leads to huge risks of frivolous lawsuits should anything untoward occur at a nuclear stations. You seemed to incorporate that into your argument – which led to the tautological dilemma w/ circular reasoning.

Others pointed out that in fact, nuclear plants do get insurance, significant amounts of it in fact. That didn’t seem to be enough however, and the argument again shifted, this time with the idea that if they are unable to get full insurance, it still somehow shows that they are inherently too risky.

Others pointed out that part of the problem is that nuclear has been so safe historically, there is little experience for insurer’s to even be able to calculate risks should a major accident occur. Almost certainly true, and rather ironic on the face of it.

Then it’s pointed out that the US Gov also insures and indemnifies some other things, such as flood coverage – and the goalposts shift a little yet again, because, hey, why should we allow and cover something so risky as building in flood areas with tax dollars? While I admit to harboring those same feelings to some extent (residential, retirement, espec in areas that flood time and again in short periods), I also recognize that some of the most productive and necessary areas fall into those very categories – that’s where harbors, ports, and associated facilities pretty much have to go, along with all of the related infrastructure and interrelated businesses… and people want to live somewhat reasonably close to where they work too, and so on.

Well, the fact is that people also demand cheap reliable energy – and it is crucial to our well being and standard of living. That isn’t just in terms of our own homes which is what we tend to think of, but all of the industry and services that we don’t think about but which create the standard of living that we have managed to develop. Nuclear power is an integral part of that, having provided roughly 20% of our nation’s electricity for decades now. All with less death and injury than any other method of electrical production, and at a competitive rate too.

So, if the government provides indemnification over and above a certain level, and so far it hasn’t ever been needed and therefore hasn’t cost the tax payer a cent… sure, it does leave that door open, there is the possibility. It certainly seems to be a very low level of risk for the taxpayer, however, with a very clear and evident gain for everyone that has accrued now for 50 years. Plus, as time has gone on, the risk to the taxpayer has notably decreased, not increased – and with advanced designs, will become even less and less as time goes on.

So, to me, to use the argument of “they can’t get insurance” or anything along those lines as a reason for nuclear power somehow not being viable – well, that dog just don’t hunt for me. That dog ain’t even tryin’ to hunt, he’s off happily snoozing on the porch.

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DV82XL wrote:

“American – I’m not so sure that risk (as an insurance company defines such) has been well calculated for nuclear plants. Mostly this is due to the fact that there haven’t been enough events, and loss, in the event of one, has yet to be properly defined….”

You know, DV, when I first read this, and then the similar comments at the end of JOSHUA’s subsequent post, I thought you guys’ coming up with this was brilliant.

Not to take anything away from you and Josh however, I now think it was just very very smart of you two, but … still insufficient to explain why (U.S.) nuke plants can’t get fully privately insured.

That is, yeah, you and Josh are right; there *have* been damn few accidents and claims, haven’t there? And thus off-the-cuff the instinct is to say “well of course one can’t insure something long into to the future when there’s such a long void of a history behind.”

But … think about it: Insurance policies aren’t ordinarily—and certainly aren’t necessarily—written for the long future. Instead they tend to be written for short terms, don’t they? Why? Because if they were the companies would not be able to adjust their decisions to insure or their premiums to account for new risk analyses which take into account new events. Thus for instance you probably *can’t* get anything like 5-year car insurance, because your insurer wants to be able to re-evaluate you, and perhaps changes in the law, and other drivers, and indeed everything relevant more frequently than that, right?

Accordingly, insurance policies are written—and certainly can be written—for relatively short defined *terms* … and it is then only the risks arising *within those short terms of time* that the insurer has to worry about.

So, given then that nuke power has been around for something like 50 years now, I have to believe the fact that there have been so few accidents and claims in that time can only be *attractive* (if not wildly so) in terms of getting insurers to make offers to insure them for just another year or two or even five. Hell it’s a no-brainer even if that were really the stickler: “Very safe operations over fifty years; very few claims … of *course* we’ll insure you for the next measly year.” (Or maybe five even.)

Consequently, after giving this some thought, I can only conclude that something else must be at work making nuke plants privately uninsurable. (In the U.S. at least.)

JOSHUA then wrote:

“The magnitude of an insurance loss is increased by fear and uncertainty, making it a bad bet for the [insurance companies]”.

Yeah but so what, Josh? The same is true, say, for many pharmaceuticals: Lots of fear that they may cause some terrible damage. Lots based on the fact that many have. But hasn’t seemed to prevent the drug manufacturers from getting insurance … because that can be factored in to the premiums.

JOSHUA also wrote:

“… Act of God, category which [insurance companies] have traditionally not wanted to get involved in.”

Ah, brilliant! as the Brits might say. You are exactly right, Josh, property and other insurance policies routinely even exclude coverage for losses caused by Acts of God.

So … how come they won’t just do the same in policies covering nuke plants and still then cover them for non-Acts of God liability?

Once again, I think one has to conclude, the risks of non-Acts of God liability from nuke power are just simply … too much for anyone private to *voluntarily* issue insurance against. And one can argue until the cows come home that no, the risks are small, but the reality is that not enough other people agree with same so as to take that bet, despite even the lure of making zillions in premium money doing so, period.

As I’ve said before, I don’t think this necessarily means that gov’t should not indemnify or insure nuke plants (as indeed I think they should). But it does mean facing up to the fact that those who say that the risks of nuke power are just negligible (with “risk” being defined as including not just chance but the full consequences of harm too), simply do not have very many people agreeing with them.

Or at least “not enough to capitilize an insurance company to issue a full-coverage policy to a nuke plant” that is….

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@American

But hasn’t seemed to prevent the drug manufacturers from getting insurance … because that can be factored in to the premiums.

American, do you KNOW that pharm manuf. get insurance? Most (all?) are so large I would suspect they self insure.

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Insurance against what event?

Pharma companies possibly find it much easier to insure against the harm done to trial participants, or the general public, than, for example, the risk of negligent release of untested product. There are hundreds of possible risks, some of which are insurable, some of which may not be and some of which may be trivial or within the capacity of the pharma company to shoulder alone, as self-insurer.

Certainly, pharmaceutical companies suffer enormous business losses when things go wrong and that at least some end up on the balance sheet.

I am quite content with a similar system within the power industry:
Self insurance for smaller and manageable risks.
Private insurance for those risks which are too big to cover internally.
Government guarantees for political purposes and to set the public’s minds at rest, where insurance is not commercially available, even if there is zero claims history across the industry after 50 years.

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@ American – The U.S. NRC, on the page titled: Fact Sheet on Nuclear Insurance and Disaster Relief Funds at

http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/funds-fs.html

states that indeed that under existing policy, owners of nuclear power plants pay a premium each year for $375 million in private insurance for offsite liability coverage for each reactor unit.

It goes on to say that American Nuclear Insurers, the pool writing nuclear insurance, is comprised of investor-owned stock insurance companies. About half the pool’s total liability capacity comes from foreign sources. The average annual premium for a single-unit reactor site is $400,000. The premium for a second or third reactor at the same site is discounted to reflect a sharing of limits.

I’m not an American, but that looks like private insurance to me.

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If insurance problems represent a major reason in raising nuclear costs, they are problems confined to states with democracies and liberalised energy markets. There are other states with no such problems. If the democracies remain hamstrung by the dictates of free market capitalism, they will lose out big time in the global economic rat race.

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@ Joshua:
You wrote: “As part of the threat definition let us assume that they have a sufficient amount of either HEU or Pu.”

Right up front, there is this massive assumption.

From there onwards, you seem to assume that highly enriched uranium (HEU) and/or Plutonium are available in power stations.

Mate, you are looking in all the wrong places. I am pretty sure that this essential first assumption is so wrong as to blow your hypothesis out of the water in practical terms.

HEU is not a common reactor fuel. My impression is that it is used for explosives, in military reactors, eg subs, and for research purposes. It is not necessary to go to the trouble and expense of refining the uranium to weapons grade 80%+ purity of Pu 235, or even beyond the lower limit for HEU, of 20% Pu235 for power reactors.

So, given that HEU is uncommon as a reactor fuel and that PU is perhaps even more uncommon, chances are that your hypothetical terrorists will need to be very selective indeed as to which reactor they raid for supplies.

Is somebody out there prepared to offer a guess as to the percentage of civilian reactors which have HEU and/or Pu as fuel?

Simply assembling a team of physicists and metal machinists appears to me to be the easy bit.

Obtaining raw materials and devising a delivery system are potentially much more challenging, assuming, of course, that the terrorists have managed to NOT kill themselves somewhere along the way due to overexposure to radiation.

Not saying it can’t be done, of course – only that construction of nuclear weapons by civilians is likely to be an extremely challenging task, both in 2011 and for some time to come.

Lastly, I fail to see how construction of a new generation of civilian reactors will result in increased availability of fissionable materials for our hypothetical terrorists.

For these reasons, I don’t believe that the risk of terrorists producing a nuclear bomb will be increased by construction of more civilian reactors. Those who spread these notions are, in reality, using the principles of fear and uncertainty to oppose the only energy technology that provide the electricity supplies that are absolutely necessary for protection of our climate and to ensure the future of this world’s civilisations.

Let’s worry more about ensuring power supplies for the future and less about manufactured debates based on fear and uncertainty.

One reference from a huge range: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_Enriched_Uranium
or, just use Google and HEU.

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DrD:

You ask about operating reactors in Kansas.

This link may not be to Kansas, but it certainly indicates how risk averse we have all become.

Nuclear madness in Idaho

Folks, the link is well worth a look. I found it very enlightening.

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@John Bennetts 10:37

Read your reference

Nuclear madness in Idaho

Thanks for adding one more to my long list of paranoias.
I find a generic engineering response to disaster to be “Well, we won’t make THAT mistake again!” to which my response is, “No, you will find a new mistake to make.”
The original reactor designers weren’t stupid for missing some critical (and eventually catastrophic) aspects of design. But it is hubris to think that we’ve got it all covered. They thought they did.
That said, I agree that fission nuclear plants are a necessary but stopgap solution to energy demand.

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@John Bennetts 10:51

I’m not concerned about protecting Kansas reactors from tsunami. I’m concerned about protecting them from their operators who could presumably be expecting to be raptured at any moment.

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Been following this debate since Tsunami. Thank you all. Any comments on this from Reuters?
edition.cnn.com/2011/US/03/26/nuclear.energy/

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I find this blog very interesting.

@Shelby: while I do not agree with much of what you say, I do profoundly agree with your statement that:
“It’s mismanagement that drives fears in the public. It’s not the fear of nuclear energy itself, it’s the fear of the the people in charge of managing its use. No private corporation should police itself at all in any situation when such dangerous technology is used. It is my opinion that the official mismanagement of the Fukushima plant before during and after the crisis will be greatly scrutinized and provide the most useful lessons for the nuclear world.”

I recall similar sentiments being expressed post-TMI and post-Chernobyl. We can add to that a distrust of the gov’t regulatory agencies. (e.g. the regulatory corruption that contributed to the BP Gulf Oil Spill) Neither group can be trusted as the external pressures (financial and political) are too great. This is not to disparage the employees, it is just a reality of life in this complex world.

I believe this can be easily resolved simply through requiring open disclosure of the test, maintenance and operations records both by the corporations involved and the regulatory agencies. No need to wait for wikileaks or other leaks – just enforce open disclosure throughout the life of the plant. Those being ‘disclosed’ will scream and rant. Fine. Open it up or shut them down.
Just a thought …
Note: I raise this point in this context as accountability and transparency are key themes which are being pushed hard by Engineers Without Borders. No reason it can’t be applied here as well.

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Rational

“nuclear plants do get insurance, significant amounts of it in fact”

This is a dangerous argument – a bit like ‘sufficient safety’.

However any 1GW reactor, produces up to 8765 GWhr a year, so can afford $100 million per year in secondary insurance premium.

This is only $11.51 per MWhr [ 1 cent per KWhr]

But having big numbers of affordable insurance does not mean that there is the physical means to fix the problem, and areas of real estate may be entombed or depopulated for decades.

You cannot insure against such loss in amenity, nor compensate losers.

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@Mike:
Can’t have it both ways, my firend.

If the discussion is about insurance, I take it that you are convinced that affordable and appropriate insurance is available.

If the discussion is about systems safety, then the runs are on the board and getting better all the while. Nuclear power is far safer than most (all?) of the alternatives and the gap is not closing. There are a couple of threads on this topic on this site which have covered comparative safety in depth. There’s no reason to justify re-opening these discussions now, unless new material is presented; real data, not unsubstantiated opinion.

So, what exactly was your point?

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Finrod

This is an argument put by others – not me.

I do not have the slightest idea what “sufficiently safe” is?

It is a vague vague concept?

Why do you ask?

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This is an argument put by others – not me.

I do not have the slightest idea what “sufficiently safe” is?

It is a vague vague concept?

Mike, you were the one who bought it up claiming it was ‘a dangerous argument’. Please outline why you think this.

To my mind, nuclear power is ‘sufficiently safe’ if the known and reasonably anticipated risks of using it are substantially less than the known consequences of not doing so. By such a definition, nuclear power is indeed ‘sufficiently safe’.

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Finrod, on 27 March 2011 at 11:50 AM said:

“sufficiently safe if ……”

Adding in an “if” may make matters worse.

I only say insurance is “sufficiently affordable” and I am willing to substantiate this. Whether ‘affordabilty’ is the end of the matter, needs further consideration.

It is others who are trying to pile-in extra views.

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Related to ‘safe enough’ is the following quite fascinating link:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

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http://www.radiationanswers.org/radiation-introduction.html
Really good, easily understandable to the general public blog/book on radiation and what it is and how it affects you.

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Geez it’s hard to conduct a discussion on one issue in a thread devoted to many. Not complaining! But I’ve gotten a little lost. (No doubt much due to my own inarticulateness in what I wrote before I’ll readily admit.)

Okay, anyway, re this insurance issue; this a.m. I tried to post a response to some of the very smart responses I got to one of mine on same and I don’t see it, but then see others then talk further about insurance so I don’t know if mine got zipped by a moderator or the internet ate my pearls of wisdom. In any event I’ll try again.

The issue though has gotten so tangled that maybe I should just start at the beginning again. I hesitate to do so though because in the first place this “insurance argument against nuke power” (in the U.S. at least) isn’t really mine, with me bringing same up because I at least can’t help feeling it does have a significant amount of validity. Not enough to make me anti-nuke power, but, still, trying to be intellectually honest….

Plus I don’t want to be seen on any soapbox here.

But it is interesting to me, so, anyway, in case anyone else finds it so here again is the background to the argument as I understand it:

Per Wikipedia pages on nuke plant economics and insurance it seems to be said that to get plants built and run back in the ’50’s in the U.S. Congress had to indemnify owner/operators for the losses/liabilities they might suffer *above and beyond* what self-insurance they could get afford or what private third-party insurance they could get.

So the U.S. Congress did via an “Indemnity Act.”

Originally it was thought to be needed for only a decade or so until nuke power proved its safety and could thus afford/attract enough insurance on its own to ensure owners/builders/operators to go forward with their nuke plants. But, it is further said, this didn’t turn out to be so. The Act was then extended for awhile, and then extended again, and only recently in fact was extended again to 2017 I think it said.

Alright, so here then is the anti-nuke argument from this as I further gather:

Given that there’s no rock on which God has written how much risk from various ventures societies should allow, the way we essentially—and effectively— decide the issue for most if not all other things is ask that they be safe enough to either be self-insurable or insurable via private third-parties. If they can’t, then, the argument goes, that says something very very strong about the risk. Such “not safe enough” ventures don’t go forward, or they collapse from their uncovered liabilities when their lack of enough safety is proven.

I.e., that while *some* people might say that a venture is very very safe or “safe enough” or whatever, *enough* people don’t. Despite an enormous profit potential. If, that is, something is really truly “safe enough,” well then to self-insure would be affordable and the venture would be undertaken. Or third-party insurance would be offered because there are lots of premiums to be earned.

(And if something goes forward without enough insurance, it eventually goes belly-up because of liabilities it hasn’t been able to afford to insure against sufficiently.)

In the nuke power business then, it is observed, owner/operators will not go forward on their own with self-insurance or with the insurance they can get from third-parties. It isn’t enough insurance for them to go forward. They need that gov’t indemnification for the potential liability that *they themselves* perceive might exist out there.

(*Real* potential liability, which is imposed by law in the term of time insurance is issued for. So that, as I see it, this means that hysterical fears by however many people about a venture don’t matter. Insurance only pays out for *actual* liability, not for mere fears. And it only pays out for liabilities the law imposes during the period of time the insurance is good for, with that law being understood or at least taken into account in making insurance decisions beforehand. So, once again to emphasize, this is the owner/operators *themselves* saying apropos of self-insurance that they don’t want to risk what potential liability they see, and third-party insurers not wanting that risk either.)

What more then, the argument goes, is needed to be proven against nuke power? It’s own actual and potential owner/operators don’t feel it’s profitable enough to self-insure and say they also can’t get enough private insurance otherwise. Apparently no matter how much they pay for premiums with what they can afford. (And we’re talking companies like GE here who can afford a lot.)

Thus, unlike the vast majority of other ventures, the argument goes, nuke power says “oh Gov’t, come and subsidize us,” and why should we, it is said? Isn’t the fact that gov’t is needed just a testament to the inability of the owner/operators to prove the *real* safety of what they want to do? (As well perhaps as a testament to the inefficiency of nuke power in the broad sense: After all, it is argued, if it were *that* cheap, then the profits generated would be enough to self-insure or pay high third-party premiums.)

Again, I myself don’t accept this as the final word on nuke power and support the gov’t indemnification of same, but there’s some force to the argument I have to concede.

Now I know that there have been some smart arguments above saying no, there is no force to it for various reasons. But my understanding of those arguments has gotten so tangled that I don’t want to do them a disservice by trying to address them here. So if anyone wants to continue from the above hey, I’m all ears. As I say, it’s interesting to me.

If not though I understand. It was tiresome enough for me writing this! (Which is probably no model of clarity for sure even then.)

In any event, sure appreciate you guys and all your smarts and comments and civility, so thank you….

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re post by: Shelby, on 26 March 2011 at 11:31 PM said:

It’s mismanagement that drives fears in the public. It’s not the fear of nuclear energy itself, it’s the fear of the the people in charge of managing its use.

Shelby, I’m sorry but it is abundantly clear that you don’t understand what people are or aren’t afraid of when it comes to all things nuclear. I cannot tell you how many people I have encountered who seriously believe that a single drop of radioactivity – ANY radioactivity – that touches a floor, for example, makes that floor and a large area around it (anywhere from the whole room to literally a mile or more) deadly for thousands of years. Unusable, uninhabitable, and impossible to ‘clean up.’

I have heard this from people who have lived much of their lives within 10 miles of a nuclear plant. That isn’t fear of bad management, that is a complete lack of understanding about the very nature of radioactivity and nuclear power.

No private corporation should police itself at all in any situation when such dangerous technology is used.

This is a huge & blatant strawman. The very article you link to talks about the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. No private corp. in the US that handles radiation polices itself. Nor is that the case in Japan, and I don’t believe it is in any nation.

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Finrod said:

“The consequences of humanity forsaking civilian nuclear power would eventually be the fall of industrial civilisation. ”

This is extremism. There is no point trying to bring pro-nuclear extremists to rational discussion.

I could make points about a preferable path for industrial civilisation, but not in the terms Finrod is operating in.

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What would happen if we discontinued nuclear electricity? This was recently summarised dispassionately by Gail Tverberg on her American blog site: http://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/03/14/what-would-happen-if-we-discontinued-nuclear-electricity/

Tverberg has a fatalistic view of the immediate future, but is a solid academic and gives quite an impartial view on such a prospect.

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Hi folks,

A discussion got started over on the newest plant status thread that was more appropriately carried out here. My post below is a reply to someone over there, shifted from that thread to here.

@bks, El, and of course anyone else interested – let me give an example of the dilution and decay vs. Japanese government ‘limits.’

Let’s take iodine-131 in water as the example. First you have to recognize that the government limits assume that that ALL of the water you ingest comes from a source that contains I-131 at the level detected – for an entire year.

As you all know, I-131 has a relatively short half life of about 8 days. So after 8 days, only half of the initial activity is still there – in other words, the dose you’d get from that same water after 8 days is only half the amount that was announced originally. After another 8 days, only a quarter of the activity remains. So you can see that the dose you could possibly get from water at the initial dose rate reported drops extremely rapidly. By roughly 60 to 80 days, essentially none is left.

The ONLY way that you could reach an unsafe level based on the Japanese government limits, then, is if the amount of I-131 is constantly being added to the water, new I-131, at sufficient levels to make up for that decay rate. That or the original levels have to be SO high, that in the few days you are drinking it, you get enough to give you the same total dose as a year at the limit itself would if you drank it every day for a year.

So, take the I-131 level that was detected in Tokyo, and reported as being twice the ‘safe’ limit for infants. It was detected at that level for only ONE day. The days after that it was back below the limit. To be unsafe, an infant would have to have had all of it’s water coming from that contaminated source, at that same level, for over 183 days before it might (not would) very slightly, theoretically, increase the child’s risk of thyroid cancer. That means the entire 183 days NEW I-131 would have to be added to the water, enough to make up for the rapid decay to keep the level at 2x’s the limit – and the entire 183 days the infant would have to get all of it’s water from that source, no bottled water or juices, no breast milk, etc.

But what really happened? The level was 2x the limit for a single day, iirc, a single measurement that day (e.g., it may not have even been that high for an entire day). After that, it was back below safe limits.

From a Wall Street Journal article written on the day that high level was found (and by the way, they made an understandable error even, as the limit for INFANTS, e.g., under 1 yr, was exceeded, not the limit for children – the I-131 level even that single day wasn’t high enough to be exceeded for children) states (I added the bold):

Radiation Risks in Tokyo’s Water Supply Are Slight, Safety Experts Say

At the highest levels of radiation detected in Tokyo’s water, a normal adult would have to drink about 52 gallons of contaminated water to reach the annual U.S. limit for radiation exposure, according to Peter Caracappa, a clinical professor of nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

Depending on the other factors that affect any individual’s risk of cancer, the current level of exposure measured in Tokyo’s water might raise the risk of thyroid cancer by four one-thousandth of a percent, Dr. Caracappa said. “If I needed to drink water, at the current levels, I would drink it,” he said. “It is human nature to have an abundance of caution when it comes to children.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703362904576219113172950714.html

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Shelby, Jess, DV82XL, and anyone else here carrying on about ‘open disclosure’ and so on, such as the following comment:

I believe this can be easily resolved simply through requiring open disclosure of the test, maintenance and operations records both by the corporations involved and the regulatory agencies. No need to wait for wikileaks or other leaks – just enforce open disclosure throughout the life of the plant. Those being ‘disclosed’ will scream and rant. Fine. Open it up or shut them down.
Just a thought …
Note: I raise this point in this context as accountability and transparency are key themes which are being pushed hard by Engineers Without Borders. No reason it can’t be applied here as well.

Have any of you so much as bothered to even find out what is already required in this regard, let alone seeing how much ‘screaming’ is or isn’t being done by Nuclear Power Plant operators?

For heaven’s sake, go to NRC.gov, and look around. At least in the USA, absoutely reams of information is, and has been, regularly reported for as long as I can remember. Daily status reports, activity reports, maintenance reports…. just one example, since at least the early 90’s and probably longer than that, every single plant puts together an annual environmental report covering every single aquatic and atmospheric release pathway, biota samples, well samples, and so on, that not only contains the actual data from every pathway, every isotope, but in depth calculations of the hypothetical maximum exposed member of the public and so on.

For heaven’s sake, the reporting requirements that every nuclear plant in the USA meets is absolutely massive. So it just really floors me, and, I’ve got to say, chafes too because the claims are so outrageous compared to reality, when people start carrying on like this.

Just to get you started:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/pdr.html

and from http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/ you can find things like:
*daily power reactor status reports
*event notification reports
*daily morning reports
*part 21 reports
*preliminary notification reports

Every plant’s performance in major emergency planning drills and exercises can be accessed: http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/index.html.

and on and on and on. Every power station has on site NRC inspectors and gets offsite inspectors in regularly for all sorts of various inspections – in addition of course to all the self-inspections that they do themselves, to not only ensure that the plant is functioning problems, but to avoid any problems or fines from the NRC.

I mean for heaven’s sake – if a plant has a fire in a trash can in certain areas, even when it is totally isolated and can’t hurt anything, if it isn’t put out within 10 minutes, the plant reports it as a ‘notification of unusual event’ to the NRC, which is the lowest level (1 out of 4 levels) of emergency at a power station. ALL of that information is public. No one is screaming about it.

The reporting requirements, the maintenance requirements, the inspection requirements are all probably far more stringent, and far more public than virtually anything else out there.

Just how much do you want? Especially when it is apparent that reams already readily available isn’t generally being paid any attention to? Worse, when it is noticed, few bother to find out what it really means – all too often it is assumed that if the lowest ’emergency’ reporting level is ‘notification of unusual event’ then, gee, any of those must be really bad!! WRONG. Obviously you don’t want things to occur, but when limits are set so low and so tight, then all too often really minor things get blown vastly out of proportion.

Claims that ‘requiring open disclosure can fix everything’ ring really hollow, seem really absurd, when it is clear that the existing open disclosure isn’t even recognized. Please, folks, how about taking the time to learn a little about these things before trashing the industry?

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Finrod

Almost everyone would consider that:

“I want the whole of humanity to enjoy the benefits of industrial technology with plentiful food, transport, communications, opportunities for trade and travel and the continued improvement of life, along with sufficient reserve capability to manage the environment in a sustainable manner into the indefinate future.”

But why should you tag this as “extremism”. It is not.

Extremism is saying “if the world does not go nuclear, industrial civilisation will collapse” without any substantiation.

Industrial civilisation will collapse if:

– a large meteor strikes
– greenhouse gases increase exponentially
– nuclear weapons cause nuclear winter

but all these have rigorous science behind them.

Wise people do not say that industrial civilisation will collapse if the world does not use renewables, so why do nuclear proponents?? This shows a loss of perspective.

With further developments and public committment – renewables can produce a suitably liveable world where a similar standard of living can be shared by all and the interests of future generations not jeopardised by unwanted waste dumps.

This is what the public needs.

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sory Mike, but you have to add to

Industrial civilisation will collapse if:
– a large meteor strikes
– greenhouse gases increase exponentially
– nuclear weapons cause nuclear winter

– we run out of fuel

or, if you prefer, take off “industrial” before the three events you listed: those will put an end to any kind of civilization, because they would alter substantially many or all the conditions that permit the very life on this planet.

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BerGonella, on 27 March 2011 at 7:55 PM said:

“…you have to add

– we run out of fuel”

I agree, but only renewables do not have this problem.

In any case its more a problem of associating two variables – population and industry growth, to fuel supply, costs and risks.

Taking a long-term view will produce a different conclusion than taking a short-term view.

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Here’s a fascinating little page …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disasters_by_death_toll

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But to make renewables viable, democracy may need to deliberately close down nuclear for the good of future generations.

sory, cannot see the logic behind it: that a democracy (?) could deliberately close down a reliable source of energy and at the same time push the research on other sources to the maximum possible results looks to me pretty difficult.
I mean, one has to eat, wash, move and be warm and dressed too, during the process….

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Rational Debate, on 27 March 2011 at 9:47 PM said:

I agree, if you need R&D to make something viable, then obviously it is not viable now.

But then, given the progress being made, this is not wishful thinking.

All development and discovery starts like this, and follows an incremental path.

Society has to make this choice based on all the pros and cons.

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Rational Debate, on 27 March 2011 at 3:29 PM said:

re post by: Shelby, on 26 March 2011 at 11:31 PM said:

“It’s mismanagement that drives fears in the public. It’s not the fear of nuclear energy itself, it’s the fear of the the people in charge of managing its use.”

Shelby, I’m sorry but it is abundantly clear that you don’t understand what people are or aren’t afraid of when it comes to all things nuclear. I cannot tell you how many people I have encountered who seriously believe that a single drop of radioactivity – ANY radioactivity – that touches a floor, for example, makes that floor and a large area around it (anywhere from the whole room to literally a mile or more) deadly for thousands of years. Unusable, uninhabitable, and impossible to ‘clean up.’

I have heard this from people who have lived much of their lives within 10 miles of a nuclear plant. That isn’t fear of bad management, that is a complete lack of understanding about the very nature of radioactivity and nuclear power.

No private corporation should police itself at all in any situation when such dangerous technology is used.”

This is a huge & blatant strawman. The very article you link to talks about the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. No private corp. in the US that handles radiation polices itself. Nor is that the case in Japan, and I don’t believe it is in any nation.

—–

RD,

I’m the social scientist, I feel confident that I have a good perspective of what the people think or feel, despite what the physical scientists claim. What all people most fear is the corruption and misconduct and conspiracies of those in power. Despite what you may think, the average person has very keen common sense, it is part of human nature, which includes a general distrust of the authority figures, because of human greed and lust for power, which is something you can’t measure with mathematical / statistical calculations. I maintain people are more afraid of the human mismanagement of nuclear power rather than the nuclear power itself.

As for your “blatant strawman” comment, it is the pro nuclear side that has called for less regulation. I’m merely stating in my opinion there can never be too much regulation, as long as nuclear power plants are the property and responsibility of a for profit corporation. By law, the prime directive of any US corporation is to provide profit for its shareholders. There is NO stipulation of anything else in their corporate charter. Every step from cradle to grave of nuclear power and waste must be regulated in real time as it is happening. Not just after the fact, when they see fit to make a report.

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To those who insist the future is “doomed” to one outcome or another (especially those who claim its nuclear power or certain doom, but also economic growth or doom, ) I offer this interesting new book. Turns out predicting the future is harder than you think, and the so called “experts” of one field or another are in fact less accurate at predicting the future than those who possess a little knowledge about a lot of things and adjust their opinions and predictions as more information is learned. Also known as “common sense” thinkers.

—–

This is the problem Dan Gardner tackles in “Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better.” Gardner, a Canadian journalist and author of “The Science of Fear,” takes as his starting point the work of Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in the 1980s, Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps.

The most generous conclusion Tetlock could draw was that some experts were less awful than others. Isaiah Berlin once quoted the Greek poet Archilochus to distinguish between two types of thinkers: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin admired both ways of thinking, but Tetlock borrowed the metaphor to account for why some experts fared better. The least accurate forecasters, he found, were hedgehogs: “thinkers who ‘know one big thing,’ aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains” and “display bristly impatience with those who ‘do not get it,’ ” he wrote. Better experts “look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things,” “are skeptical of grand schemes” and are “diffident about their own forecasting prowess.”

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To sum up what I’m getting at;

On one hand you have those who believe in more GDP, more consumption, more productivity (aka more product for less wages), and more energy needs to power the whole machine including fossil and nuclear power.

Vs

those “tree huggers” in society that believe less consuming, less GDP, less pollution, less waste, resulting in lessor energy demands, produced by a larger percentage of renewable energy sources.

We don’t know at this time which side society will trend toward. What we do know is one or the other will (eventually) make more sense to the common man. The consumption peddlers have the upper hand because we live in a world built around their industrialized world view. But in the grand history of great civilizations, that’s a mere 200 year blip on the screen. It could change,

I believe slowing everything down, less is more, will eventually make more sense to the common man. Most of us just want to live small lives, with average comforts, in exchange for reasonable amounts of labor. We share very little in the grand profits of the industrialist / capitalists. There is many signs in our society that the average person grows weary and wary of the so called growth model. To them it just means being on an endless treadmill of working and consuming debt that never really pans out for them. At some point they will no longer believe the carrot and stick that has been used to scare and motivate them.

The motto of this revolution, “Workers of the world, Relax!”

At that point we will have a global reform that will reshape the world in a more social conscious way. But not before the industrialists and so called free market capitalists go down kicking and screaming. They have the most to lose if the world becomes a “less is more” society of lowering GDP in order to raise the general health, wealth, and happiness of the common man.

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# Shelby, on 28 March questioned the veracity of negative or doomsday predictions for the future.

I don’t think he /she was claiming to be a climate change sceptic. When predictions for the future are based on hard science or hard economics, backed by ample data, then it is prudent to take note, and adopt sensible measures to avoid or mitigate what can happen.

This applies to climate change science, oil depletion scenarios and the globe’s fragile financial system, all three of which have been studied in depth by many hundreds of professional people who are experts in those fields. In each case it is prudent to take note and at least adopt the precautionary principle, and also know how they may interplay. Our civilisation is complex and dynamic.

That said, I suspect it is true that the majority of negative predictions through history have been based more on fear than fact, often propelled by those having a religious Armageddon headspace. But knowing that should not turn us all into universal sceptics. Bad things can happen.

Even when we may become convinced about a particular futuristic theory, such as human induced climate change, it is a good thing to hold a reserve of radical doubt in our heads to avoid becoming preachy dogmatists.

When we don’t have expertise in any one area (as is the case with the majority of people walking the streets) they best they can do is listen intensively to what is being said and try to make a judgement based on the most credible evidence available. This can be a very difficult thing, we only know too well the extent to which climate science has been tossed around by the media, and we are all aware that there are commercial vested interests out there who at times poke their oar into the fray too.

How many people a few years ago would have predicted that the rising price of food would precipitate the rapid political changes we are now witnessing in North Africa and the Middle East? Not many, but such a scenario had been predicted by experts in that field. I suspect that food politics will dominate in the next few decades, and will be the cause of much global insurrection.

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