Nuclear Power, Folks

I've been meaning to post this for months but I keep forgetting to. It's a series of blog posts by an environmentalist who is not exactly supporting nuclear power, but has changed his position from knee-jerk anti, to cautious acceptance. Even in the face of the Fukushima nuclear disaster following the Japanese tsunami, George Monbiot pits nuclear against one of the only realistic alternatives, coal; and finds coal to be quite a bit crappier:

Coal, the most carbon-dense of fossil fuels, is the primary driver of human-caused climate change. If its combustion is not curtailed, it could kill millions of times more people than nuclear power plants have done so far. Yes, I really do mean millions. The Chernobyl meltdown was hideous and traumatic. The official death toll so far appears to be 43 – 28 workers in the initial few months then a further 15 civilians by 2005. Totally unacceptable, of course; but a tiny fraction of the deaths for which climate change is likely to be responsible, through its damage to the food supply, its contribution to the spread of infectious diseases and its degradation of the quality of life for many of the world's poorest people.

Monbiot still feels that low-carbon, alternative solutions would be superior to both coal and nuclear, but the question is, how much time do we have to develop these solutions? According to Fugu's dad (a geologist of some prominence), not much time at all.

Nuclear Power scares a lot of people, but you have to wonder: If the Earth can throw an 8.9 earthquake and a tsunami at an aging nuclear power plant, and this is all that happens; then maybe our stupid fears are little misplaced, especially given the dangers of extracting and using fossil fuels.

Here's the post.

Free energy harvesting

I've mentioned Vernor Vinge before, and I'm going to do it again (seriously, if you want to read one of the best authors of speculative fiction and technological forecasting, this is the dude). Anyway. In his book, A Deepness in the Sky, he writes about machines that resonate at the right frequencies of background radiation (sort of) to harvest free energy.

At the CES this year, it appears that RCA of all companies may get there first:

Steven Chu to be energy secretary. Just kidding: Bush to be president for 4 more years!

It's completely unreal. We're witnessing changes so monumentally different than the status quo and so exponentially closer to the direction we should be going that it's like we're living in some kind of Aaron Sorkin film. Either that, or it's all fake...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President-elect Barack Obama intends to round out his environmental and natural resources team with a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and three former Environmental Protection Agency officials from the Clinton administration.

The Nobel Laureate is Steven Chu, who received the Nobel Prize in 1997 for atomic physics, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (which, under Chu, has been working to develop alternative energy sources), and is a professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology. This feels unprecedented. We're going to have people up there who like science.