What if Jean-Paul Sartre Had Written ‘Star Wars’?
[French dialogue with English subtitles]
Lack of Enforcement is the Real Problem With Nuclear Power
Most of the world’s most controversial subjects tend to polarize people’s opinions: people not only disagree about the subject, but do so by being either completely for or against the subject. Generating electricity from nuclear power is one of these subjects.
Too bad, because it’s people’s polarization itself that prevents a solution. Yes, nuclear power is environmentally clean and therefore nuclear power should be used. Yes, nuclear accidents will happen and therefore nuclear power shouldn’t be used. However, the reality of the subject isn’t at all that polar.
Among the people who know that is the board of editors of Scientific American magazine. They include people who not only understand both sides of the issues, but realize that the ultimate problem about nuclear power generation isn’t nuclear power but the cases of duplicity, corruption, and incompetence about it. Here is their editorial about it, which appeared in the June issue of their magazine. I applauded the editorial when I first read it earlier this summer:
“…If we gave it up, what would replace it? Pollution from fossil-fueled power plants shortens the life span of as many as 30,000 Americans a year. Coal companies lop off mountaintops, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas threatens water supplies, and oil dependence undermines the nation’s energy security. Then there is the small matter of greenhouse gas emissions. Clean renewable technologies will take years to reach the scale needed to replace the power we get from splitting atoms….
“…The industry and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) claim that nuclear power is safe, but their lack of transparency does not inspire confidence. For example, an Associated Press investigation in March revealed 24 cases from December 2009 to September 2010 in which plant operators did not report equipment defects to the NRC….
“…The trouble is that regulations are not being enforced rigorously. The NRC has to mete out stiff penalties for violations and make every action transparent to us all….
“…If exercises showed that residents around a plant could not leave quickly enough, the NRC should consider shutting it down. A good test case is the Indian Point plant 38 miles north of New York City. Evacuating the 20 million people who live within 50 miles staggers belief….
“…If an operator proposes a site that is too close to an earthquake fault, or too close to oceanfront that is vulnerable to a tsunami or hurricane storm surge, or downriver from a huge dam that could burst, then the NRC should reject the bid. Similarly, if the utility could not protect spent fuel pools or casks from being breached during a severe accident, which happened in Japan, the NRC should not license it. Saying no to a suspect plant would do more than anything else to restore public confidence….
“…The 22 new reactors proposed in the U.S. use so-called Gen III+ designs that are safer than today’s reactors, which date to the 1970s or earlier…. Manufacturers should pursue even safer, meltdown-proof designs that they have experimented with but shelved, such as liquid fluoride thorium reactors and pebble bed reactors. China is developing both….
“…Reactors across the country have accumulated 72,000 tons of spent fuel. Some utilities have packed four times as many spent fuel rods into temporary holding pools than the structures were designed to contain. The government poured $9 billion and decades of effort into the planned permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, with little to show for it. Then President Barack Obama scuttled the project. The waste continues to pile up. At some point, officials will have to face down the citizen refrain of “not in my backyard.”
Nuclear power has a good safety record, but when it fails it can fail catastrophically. Now is the time to make tough, transparent decisions that could regain public trust. Otherwise, the public might make the ultimate call: “no more nukes.”
Emma, Vin, and Katie in Colorado
A short, family video to my mother.
Three Elk at Dusk
Fighter Plane Mows the Lawn
Think that the airliner you’ve been on flew a bit to low when coming in for a landing? You don’t know what flying low is. Watch the first of these two Argentinian fighter jets fly low enough to get grass stains on its fuselage.
How Not to Joke (Worse Attempt of 2011)
Karl Stefanovic, co-host of the Today show in the Australia tries to tell a joke to the quite attentive Dalai Lama. Maybe it will work in Stefanovic’s next incarnation.
Barcelona: Adri Brothers’ Open Cocktail Tapas Bar
For much of the past decade, El Bulli in Catalonia has been considered the best restaurant in the world. Restaurant Magazine ranked it Number One on its Top 50 list of the world’s best restaurants for a record five times — in 2002, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009, and #2 in 2010. Now, El Bulli’s owners, Ferran and Albert Adrià, have opened a cocktail bar in Barcelona, our favorite city. The seven-minute video above from The Guardian will give you an idea.
When Emma and I think about our eventual retirements, we think of Barcelona. That shouldn’t be surprising about her, a Spaniard (although our Catalan friends maintain that the autonomous community of Catalonia isn’t really part of Spain). My own experiences in Barcelona started late for me, beginning in the late 1990s: primarilyspeaking the NetMedia conferences held there, at Pompeu Fabra University, and at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Vilanova y la Geltrú 50 kilometers south, plus friends at La Vanguardia.
I remember waking one morning after arriving, and hearing the sounds of roaring motorcycles outside. I saw hundreds of leather- or denim-clad riders astride Harley-Davidsons passing by my hotel. Badly jet-lagged, I wondered if I was still in the States. Hundreds and hundreds of Harleys. But they were speaking French, Hungarian, Finnish, or Greek, etc. I’d arrived in Barcelona when it was hosting the continent’s annual Harley-Davidson riders’ conference. The next day, once I’d gotten used to the all that, I was walking across a crosswalk on a street near Pompeu Fabra when Jay Leno, at the wheel of a Smart Car, pulled up at the stoplight (turns out he was in Barcelona on vacation for Harley conference). That’s Barcelona−surreal, delicious, and always unexpected. Just like the Adriàs’ new cocktail bar.
Osama bin Lauden Lost Islamic Support Before He Lost Life
The Economist today reports that polling by the Pew Research Center showed that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Lauden had lost popular support in Islamic countries years before a US Navy counter-terrorism team took his life. “This may reflect a genuine change in attitudes after al-Qaeda’s high-profile attacks in places such as Bali and Jordan, as well as its violence in Iraq. But it could also reflect Mr bin Laden’s lower profile in recent years.”
A Prospectus for Tea Party Land
I’m thinking of raising capital for a new venture—Tea Party Land.
This amusement park located in Middle America will have little or no government, ban admission to immigrants, and comprise Hannity Town, Old Testament Ingrahamstan , Beck Fantasyland, Coultershire, and O’Reillytopia. All its streets will lead to Fox Castle where every hour on the hour Princess Palin appears from a balcony.
Tea Party Land will be the first family amusement park to feature rides engineered according to Creation Science and Supply-Side Economics: such as the Holy Rollercoaster down the mighty Limbaughorn, the Trickledown Waterslide (is your mortgage underwater?), and It’s A Cool Cool Cooling World.
What other rides, cuisines, and features should we include?
(Photograph, Tea Cup Ride on High Street, Solihull, courtesy of Ell Brown on Flickr.)
Charming Mashup
Charming mashup of Oliver Laurel & Stan Hardy’s 1937 Way Out West dance scene with Cachao’s Oye Como Va played by Santana.
Screw Company Stockholders
The editor in 1958 was a Quaker who ‘didn’t get out much’ and who the pressmen hated because he’d frequently order last-minute changes to the front page (loads of work with melted lead type). So when he ordered this last-minute headline about Textron offering to purchase a local company that manufactured fasteners, they decided that their role wasn’t to question but to obey. The next day, Textron’s legal department ordered 50 copies. And my parents, the newspaper’s publishers, spent the next week explaining to Textron that no harm was meant.
