What Lies Beneath Pacific Rim

So: Pacific Rim. If you haven't seen it--see it. It is a movie that promises giant robots punching giant monsters, and by God it delivers giant robots punching giant monsters. I can't remember the last time I walked into a film that was so cathartic, so full of in-your-face spectacle. It makes me pine, in fact, for a world in which our most pressing problems can be solved by punching things. Well, I suppose we do live in such a world, but there is always the problem of being charged with assault immediately thereafter. So it's not a particularly practicable method of problem solving.

For a summer movie built around giant robots punching things, though, Pacific Rim has surprising thematic depth. The main themes running through the film are family, unity, and coming together--witness the nature of the jaeger pilot teams, the manner in which the jaegers' mission is fulfilled, and the things that are necessary in order to do that. Behind those, though, there's a pretty strong environmental message--really, the kaiju are a pretty blunt metaphor for climate change.

Consider it: powerful forces erupt from out of sight, emerge onto land and devastate cities. The countries of the world cooperate at first and take active measures--the jaegers--to beat back the threat, but as the tide begins to turn, the sense of unified resolve splinters and the leaders choose instead to build giant walls to protect the land from the threat of the ocean; walls that may or may not be finished in time, and which may or may not actually protect the millions of ordinary people on the coasts immediately behind them, while the rich and powerful flee to "safe zones" inland. Remind you of any projections? The kaiju themselves are almost as forces of nature within the movie itself; consider that a powerful kaiju is a Category 4, the same way we categorize a devastating hurricane, and the opening narration explicitly draws that comparison ("in a jaeger, you can fight the hurricane").

That's why I have such a problem with part of the film's climax. If you've seen it, you may already know what I mean. If you haven't, wait until you've seen it to read the rest of this, unless you don't care about knowing what's to come.

Here's a good spoiler break--created by the Jaeger Designer.

So, it's the end of the movie, and Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka are marching across the bottom of the ocean to deliver a nuclear weapon to the Breach, the dimensional portal through which the kaiju are invading Earth, and thereby seal it. Things go wrong, because of course they do, this is a movie for hell's sake. The weapon is unusable, and the hero pilot of Gipsy Danger must seal the Breach by self-destructing the jaeger's own nuclear reactor.

Oyyy. To put it simply: NUCLEAR REACTORS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. You can't turn a nuclear reactor into a nuclear bomb any more than you can turn a 1989 Geo Metro into a fuel-air explosive.

This is a regrettably widespread misapprehension, because some goddamn writers don't make an effort to actually understand how things work--but, hey, I get you. You might be saying, "in a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters, you're getting angry over something like this?" Yes, I am. Things like kaiju and jaegers are impossible; you're not going to have 300-foot monsters in reality, and the idea of building 300-foot battle robots with modern technology is purely ridiculous. I can, however, suspend my disbelief on that point--jaegers and kaiju are the very core of the movie. Since they do not, and cannot, really exist I can forgive a lot of spectacle about their capabilities.

Nuclear reactors, however, do exist, and it is not very hard to treat them accurately. Pacific Rim is already asking a hell of a lot from me to suspend disbelief over jaegers, kaiju, a giant wall built around the entire Pacific Ocean... asking enough, really. It does not get a free pass on mischaracterizing something that actually exists.

There's more to it than that, though--a rather pernicious "more," the way I see it. It's the illusion-of-truth effect; people are more willing to believe something they've encountered before. Now, Pacific Rim isn't making any kind of statement here--the reason the whole "nuclear meltdown self-destruct" thing was used was because it's a simple kludge for the writer and it's direct. The problem, however, is that it generates another little data point fluttering around and waiting to attach to something. It's another piece of "something that I heard somewhere" that nuclear reactors explode.

The kicker is that the way I see it, this runs at cross-purposes with Pacific Rim's environmental themes. What was true in the 1970s is true in the 2010s; when it comes to electrical generation, for most of the world there are only three choices: nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Not everyone has geothermal vents of dammable waterfalls, after all, and while renewables are admirable targets to shoot for, they're still far away from being able to support the brunt of demand themselves. While natural gas has a comparatively low CO2 emission rate, the fracking necessary to get it is causing earthquakes hither and yon, and the pollution from coal-burning plants kills hundreds of thousands worldwide every year when everything is working normally.

But you don't see Greenpeace standing in front of the bulldozers that the Germans are using to build those dozen new coal plants that are replacing all of its nuclear plants, because it doesn't fit with the common environmental ideology that nuclear is the worst of all things. No, you just see well-meaning movies that unintentionally shore up the foundation that makes that kind of ideology possible.

Nevertheless: Pacific Rim is fucking awesome. Go see it.

It's Not Easy Being A Pro-Nuclear Environmentalist

The manner in which you, the reader, reacted to the idea of a "pro-nuclear environmentalist" may well illustrate just why I say that. If you're looking for a position that leads you to believe the rest of the world has gone somewhat askew, that enemies have made common cause to frustrate you, then I suggest you give it a try. You'd certainly have a greater understanding of things, at any rate, and understanding is one of the most vital things in the world. The lack of it is a problem--since I'm sure that if I was writing in a newspaper with any sort of circulation, the preceding paragraph would have been more than enough to spark angry comments about how I'm obviously a nuclear industry shill and "no nukes is good nukes."

Like I've said before at other times, there's something about nuclear power that twists plenty of people. I get the impression that a lot of folks think of it the way our ancestors thought of witchery and black magic, almost as if the reactor cores are really portals to Hell and everything that comes out of them is inherently evil and bad. Those attitudes show through fairly easily, particularly when I see newspapers oh-so-innocently drop references to atomic power. It's like they're saying "we're just presenting the facts, and by the way, you do remember what else was atomic, right?"

Sometimes I don't even have to look particularly hard to find it. Like, say, the cover of the Georgia Straight that's on the streets of Metro Vancouver right now, a very obviously unbiased design involving "fresh fish" that happen to have three eyes, are lying in flourescent slime, and are setting off a Geiger counter... because the average levels of radioactive cesium in Japanese fish were thirty-six becquerels per kilogram in June, below Japan's own ceiling of 100 Bq/kg and well below the Canadian ceiling of 1,000 Bq/kg. Less than ten percent of catches in June exceeded the ceiling--but hey! Nuclear. Not that anything is entirely free of radiation, of course--thanks to the decay of potassium-40, your body probably registers somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand becquerels.

Still--the environmental movement and the anti-nuclear movement have gone hand-in-hand for quite a long time. I could understand the rise of an anti-nuclear movement after Chernobyl and Fukushima. After all, these were significant events with lasting legacies, and there's nothing unusual about things like that giving people pause. It's only natural to react like that, right?

That's not how it happened, though. Instead, the modern anti-nuclear movement grew out of the understandable and sensible opposition to nuclear weapons during the height of the Cold War... afterward, of course, it transformed into what we know today. The first protests against nuclear power emerged in the 1960s and started gaining steam in the mid-1970s, well before Three Mile Island. Chernobyl and Fukushima only energized the opponents, but really, it's not as if tens of thousands of people protesting against nuclear power is something that's started just in the last year. It's been going on for longer than I've been alive.

The movement even has a logo: the Smugging Sun... no, wait, the Smiling Smug... sorry, I meant the Smiling Sun, accompanied in English by "Nuclear Power? No Thanks." This was designed in 1975, a full eleven years before the first accident that I feel could have prompted rational opposition. The fact that the Sun is, itself, a gigantic nuclear reactor is conveniently ignored.

It's been going on for decades, and today I feel like I was betrayed by people who should have been looking out for me before I was even born.

NO NUKES! NO--wait, you're saying that's a COAL power plant? No uranium? Not even with the cooling towers? Whoops, terribly sorry for the mistake, just keep on doing as you're doing. We thought this was Three Mile Island.

Let me ask you something: when's the last time you remember hearing about tens of thousands of people protesting the construction of a new coal-fired power plant? How often do you hear of Greens in government using what clout they have to engineer fossil fuel phaseouts? When was the last time you heard about a coal power plant being closed well before its intended lifespan ran out because of environmental concerns? For me, the answers to all three are "never." The closest thing to a coal protest I can remember is the event a couple of months ago, when people blocked a coal train near the border. Among all the jurisdictions in the world, Ontario is the only one I know of that has actively legislated an exit from coal power.

I could be wrong--I could just not be hearing about these things... but that's part of the problem. I take an active interest in informing myself. I go out of my way to look things up and expose myself to information. I read newspapers from across the world, and yet I'm not hearing about any of this stuff. Simply put, then, if I'm unaware of this sort of thing, how aware would the average person who only reads the sports and comics sections be? Events like nuclear protests are transcendent, in their way--they gather attention. They're things people talk about. It gets its own inertia.

Meanwhile, the real problem chugs on. Meanwhile, coal power stations continue to belch their waste into the atmosphere. Even ignoring the issue of carbon dioxide emissions, the fact remains is that coal is the dirtiest source of power in existence. Coal plants emit sulfur dioxide, the main agent of acid rain. They emit hydrochloric acid. They emit fine particulates that can be inhaled and cause lung disease. They emit mercury. Some of these things, they emit tens of thousands of tonnes of it every year. when everything is working exactly as it's supposed to. They emit, and if they could I'm sure they would laugh as environmentalists furiously unload their chambers against nuclear, keeping their back to a force that's been steadily polluting the world for more than a century.

I would be disturbed, but I would not be particularly surprised, to find that environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club and so on have been financed in part by coal companies--because over the past forty years they've sure done a hell of a job to ensure that nobody cares about pollution from coal.

So it feels lonesome, like I'm one of the only ones who recognizes that even if a tool can be dangerous when it's not treated with the respect it deserves, it's still better to use it than try to get along without it. I wouldn't even have a problem with a world that managed to move beyond nuclear fission... so long as it had already moved beyond coal, oil, and natural gas. Sure, there is Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy, but it's a fringe thing--its website literally looks like something you would have found on Geocities in 1998, from the animated flag gifs to the frames.

Don't expect new technology to come without a fight, either. Sure, the Sun is actually a nucelar fusion reactor... but remember, nuclear fusion is still nuclear! When it comes to fusion and organized environmentalism, it seems, don't hold your breath on any kind of accord - back in 2005, the French group Sortir du nucléaire criticized ITER as dangerous because scientists didn't yet fully understand how to control the fusion process... you know, exactly the sort of thing that you would build a research reactor to discover! Greenpeace got in on the dogpile as well, criticizing the investment of time and money into ITER because if ITER ends up being successful, it won't be until midcentury... so I guess the implicit position there is "cross your fingers that the world can be powered by wind, solar, and hydroelectricity, because we're certainly not going to support any potential way out if it can't."

I'm of the opinion that actions speak louder than words... and in that respect, it's clear to me that the anti-nuclear movement backs fossil fuel energy 100 percent.

In the Long Shadow of Fossils

It's easy to not follow an idea to its logical conclusion; after all, inaction always takes less energy than action, and this is particularly true when it comes to the question of energy generation. Many people, upon being presented with information "A," will jump to point "B" and make a vociferous stand, but will act as if they're entirely unaware that the existence of point "B" implies the existence of points "C" and "D" and so on.

This sort of thing comes up most frequently in connection with nuclear power. Nuclear power is practically synonymous with protests these days. While Japan's post-Fukushima nuclear stall officially ended yesterday with the achievement of a critical reaction at the Oi Nuclear Power Plant, tens of thousands protested in Tokyo. Closer to home, Ontario Power Generation has recently been inviting comments on its planned Deep Geologic Repository at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. This will be a facility buried six hundred and eighty meters underground and a kilometer away from the Lake Huron shoreline, used a storage facility for low- and intermediate-level waste. Just what is this waste? Intermediate waste is primarily used reactor and water filter parts, stored in steel-lined receptacles, and low-level waste takes the form of "mop heads, rags, paper towels, floor sweepings, and protective clothing used in the nuclear stations during routine operation and maintenance."

It says a lot about the Ontario nuclear industry that it goes to this sort of trouble to dispose of items that are only minimally radioactive. Unfortunately, the big problem here is not only that the average person doesn't have much idea of what nuclear waste is, but that the vague ideas they do have are probably informed greatly by The Simpsons - that is, rusty containers of fluorescent green ooze. Given that, it's no surprise that the public review process for the Deep Geologic Repository has attracted detractors.

Last week, the Toronto Star reported on the nature of many of the comments that have been received. Some are calm and reasonable, like the Bruce Peninsula Environment Group's request for further investigation into temperature increases in underground works. Some are less so - many are Americans calling for the cancellation of the repository because of its proximity to Lake Huron, with messages that give me the impression that they jumped straight to point "B" and looked no further than "Lake Huron" and "nuclear waste disposal." There's one, however, that after reading it left me infurated for hours. It's from Rich Moser in Santa Barbara, California, and funnily enough, the original email the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency was flagged as SPAM by its email system.

"It's time Canada leads the way and does what Japan finally found out is the best thing for the Earth: quit nuclear altogether," Moser wrote. "If canada leads, maybe the stupid USA (my country) will follow."

I can understand people who think nuclear power is dangerous. I can understand people who don't want nuclear reactors near their homes. I can even understand the protests in Japan, as much as I think they're counterproductive. To claim that a nuclear phaseout is "the best thing for the Earth," however--that's going way beyond ideology. It's planting your flag on the summit of Mount Look How Goddamn Ignorant I Am, and what that flag says is that you don't actually know anything about nuclear power that's more advanced than "ATOMZ = BAD."

I mean, look at all that steam! Isn't that just so sinister?

Hell, though, I'm game--let's go through this hypothetical. Nuclear power currently accounts for around 13% of the world's electrical generation capacity, with most of this found in France, Japan, and the United States. Now, a knee-jerk anti-nuclear person who makes claims like the above would probably say that all that nuclear power would be replaced by clean, green, renewable power like solar and wind. That's what's happening in Germany, right? Think again. Last year, Germany embarked on a plan to use a clean energy fund to finance the construction of--wind turbines? Solar farms? No! Coal and gas power plants! Because, you see, they have to make up for the thirteen gigawatts of generation that will disappear when its nuclear plants are taken offline over the next decade, because oh my god! A nuclear plant built next to a seismic zone on the other side of the planet and operated by a criminally negligent company got swamped by a thousand-year tsunami and experienced a meltdown!

Let's take this back to Ontario, though. Let's say that for whatever crazy reason, the Ontario government agrees with Mr. Moser and phases out its nuclear capacity. Is it going to be replaced with renewables? Don't make me laugh, man. Ontario's renewable energy infrastructure is essentially limited to two wind turbines, one of which is already on the grounds of a nuclear plant. New hydroelectric plants are not particularly likely; as early as 1955, almost all of Ontario's hydro-potential rivers had already been dammed. They didn't go up to survey the Little Abitibi for their health, you know. Not with all those blackflies. No, especially given the current economic climate, what the Ontario government would most likely do would be tear up its phaseout pledges and build new coal power plants.

Coal power plants like the Nanticoke Generating Station, the last coal plant left in Ontario, the largest of its kind in North America, and Canada's largest single producer of greenhouse gases. People have been agitating for its shutdown as far back as 2004, and though the original shutdown timeline of 2007 was missed, Ontario seems on-track to step away from this most primitive of generating technologies in 2014. As for its emissions? Well, that's a thing.

In 2002, according to PollutionWatch, Nanticoke's pollution output included 5,514 tonnes of toxic particulate material with a diameter less than ten microns, small enough to penetrate the lungs and be absorbed into the bloodstream. In 2006, when unit shutdowns were already underway, it produced 1,640 tonnes of hydrochloric acid, 5,500 tonnes of carbon monoxide, and nearly sixty-two thousand tonnes of sulfur dioxide, one of the building blocks of acid rain. These pollutants were spewed in a shadow that stretches as far as Montreal, a shadow that I lived my entire life in until I moved out west.

For comparison, here's how much hydrochloric acid, carbon monoxide, and sulfur dioxide a nuclear plant emits into the atmosphere: zero tonnes. Oh, and there's also the issue of greenhouse gases--each 676-megawatt CANDU-6 reactor, the kind used at Gentilly in Quebec and Point Lepreau in New Brunswick and Qinshan in China, prevents the annual emission of 1.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide that would happen if that electricity was instead produced by coal.

I found that out back in 2003, when I was doing research into the history of Ontario Hydro for a university essay. That was one of the big things that convinced me that nuclear power was the best way forward, and that nuclear power was the best for Earth.

saisho ni sekitan ga kesu

The lights are still on in Japan, but a year after Fukushima the question on everyone's mind is how best to keep them on. After experiencing such a massive shock to the system, the whole idea of nuclear power is being approached very skeptically in Japan; it's a vast change from before the tsunami, when government plans were for Japan to continue increasing the nuclear foundation of its generation capacity. Considering the incompetence with which Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner and operator of the Fukushima reactors, approached not only the disaster but disaster planning - ignoring or dismissing multiple opportunities in past years which, if implemented, could have prevented the meltdown - along with the dream of "absolute nuclear safety" being shattered in such a dramatic way, it's absolutely reasonable for people to have second thoughts. Of all the nuclear reactors in Japan, by the end of this month only the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido will still be generating power, with the remainder suspended for checkups and stress-testing.

Utilities across Japan are, therefore, confronting hard choices: not only what to do to keep the lights on for the immediate future, but how to approach power generation in the years and decades to come. Earlier this week the Japan Times reported that the Kansai Electric Power Company, which supplies electricity to Japan's populous Kansai region partially from eleven nuclear reactors, is potentially facing demands from some of its shareholders - namely the cities of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka - to phase out its nuclear generation capacity, accounting for nearly half of its total supply, and replace it with renewables.

When taken in isolation, this is a laudable goal; however, laudable goals don't easily translate into reality, and it's possible that the highly understandable reaction to the Fukushima disaster may end up worsening things in its own way.

The Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido. Photo by Mugu-shisai, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The nuclear power plants that supply the Kansai region are situated in Fukui Prefecture, on the coast of the Sea of Japan and about seventy kilometers as the crow flies from Kyoto. What's significantly closer is the northern coast of Lake Biwa, the largest lake in Japan and a reservoir used by fifteen million people. A sufficiently bad nuclear accident could contaminate the lake - which, to me, is just another reason for safety measures at the existing plants to be beefed up. It's not as if the plants are going to be decomissioned tomorrow; hell, by the original schedules, Fukushima Daiichi was to have already begun the decomissioning process on the day the tsunami struck.

Japan is in a difficult place when it comes to nuclear power for the very reasons that led it to install nuclear power in the first place; it's a geographically small, relatively resource-poor country. Germany may be trumpeting the fact that it's shutting down all its reactors and increasing the presence of renewable power sources in its mix, but what tends not to be mentioned is how Germany is bringing more and more coal-burning power plants on line to fill the gap - which, if you care about air pollution and the increased deaths it absolutely causes or atmospheric emission of carbon dioxide, is a significant problem. It's hardly the "environmental" choice.

Fortunately, the mayors aren't pulling for coal - however, in addition to their drive for renewables, they want KEPCO to replace its nuclear reactors with liquefied natural gas power plants; granted, they're not as polluting as coal-burning plants, but they still pollute and still emit carbon dioxide.

My own view of this is simple - if KEPCO is to replace its reactors, it should first demonstrate that it's capable of replacing a substantial mix of its generating capacity... how fortunate for my argument that its mix also includes twenty thosuand megawatts worth of "thermal" generating sources. It's unclear which of these are coal-burning plants, since that lovely word "thermal" hides so much, but with more than a quarter of Japan's electricity coming from burning coal I don't think it's a much of a leap to suggest that at least some are.

So - let KEPCO first mothball its existing coal power plants, replacing them with renewables and - if necessary - LNG. If there aren't any problems with that kind of switchover, then the drive toward a local phase-out of nuclear would at least have the precedent of a functional solution. The real enemy here is coal; personally, I would much rather live next door to a nuclear power plant than even within sight of a coal-burner's smokestacks.

Waiter, Waiter, There's An Atom in My Water

One of the most precious things in the world a person can have is a sense of perspective - the capability to understand the degree to which something is important in the grand scheme of things. It's precious specifically because the vast majority of people either don't have such a sense, or sorely need to calibrate it. It's easy to make a mountain out of an anthill when you don't really understand mountains, and it's very easy to freak out about nuclear power when you only have a limited grasp of how nuclear power actually works.

In his editorial for the January/February 2012 issue of Analog, Stan Schmidt called for perspective and understanding in the wake of the Fukushima disaster - covering, incidentally, similar ground as I did at the same time - but one thing he wrote struck me in particular. "I live near a nuclear power plant," he wrote, "and I often marvel that a routine plumbing repair there is front-page news; I can't think of any other industry in which such treatment would even be considered."

It only took a couple of days for the Canadian media to prove the accuracy of that. On Wednesday, it was reported in the Globe and Mail - not on the front page, thankfully, but high up in the science/environment section - that the presently inactive Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station, New Brunswick's only nuclear power station, experienced a spill of four to six liters of radioactive heavy water while the plant's moderator was being filled. Note that this was specifically in the reactor building, and it was cleaned up by staff and it's no longer an issue.

Still, for some people, uttering the word "radioactive" in the context of a nuclear plant is like Pavlov ringing one of his little bells. Also on Wednesday, the Globe ran a follow-up article - about the spill of four to six liters of radioactive water inside a nuclear power plant, just so we're clear - about how the Conservation Council of New Brunswick is seeking more information about what happened, because "there are too many unanswered questions."

I've got an unanswered question, right here - do you have any idea how nuclear power generation really works, really?

Presented for your consideration, six liters' worth of containers. I didn't want to waste any water, so just pretend that they're full.

The website of the CCNB describes nuclear power as "not green, not cheap, and not needed" - which, when you consider that "Cutting Greenhouse Gases in NB" is in the same section of the website, tells you the degree to which this organization seems to be rooted in the real world, just like how it claims that Canada reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% below 1990 levels in 2020 is achievable... I suppose technically that's true, in the sense that it doesn't really violate any physical laws, like how I could just lie down in front of the SkyTrain when I go to work. Just because it isn't impossible it doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Too, there's the separate Nuclear Free NB website, which is exactly what you'd expect - the main logo is all red clouds, and the second post is selling bumper stickers carrying the message "FUKUSHIMA: Don't Let It Happen Here!" Because, you know, Fukushima Daiichi didn't experience catastrophe because it was hit by one of the most powerful earthquakes in the last ten thousand years and one of the most powerful tsunamis in the last thousand, and because it had been incompetently managed. People seriously advocating this should first be able to explain a mechanism for how a nuclear plant situated near the coast of the Bay of Fundy, shielded by Nova Scotia from the open Atlantic, far from any active fault lines, could "happen" the way Fukushima did.

Here, they're making perfect the enemy of good. Personally, I consider anti-nuclear organizations like this to be unwitting stooges of the true enemy, the big fossil fuel lobbies. If Point Lepreau was to be decomissioned, what do you think would make up the generating gap? Would it be renewables, or would New Brunswick just follow Germany's sterling example and replace its non-polluting, zero-carbon nuclear infrastructure with dirty, polluting, carbon-heavy coal? Coal's no stranger to New Brunswick - my great-grandfather was a New Brunswick coal miner.

But in the end, these things get traction because too many people have no understanding of how nuclear power plants work. It's not like in Blowups Happen, where constant monitoring and intervention was necessary to keep the plant from going up. Nuclear power is, on the whole, the safest form of power generation we have. Keep in mind that, even almost a year later, no one is known to have died as a result of the Fukushima disaster. Estimates range wildly for the toll of Chernobyl, from 30,000 to 985,000 premature cancer deaths... but compare this to the main alternative, coal power. Earlier this year, a report by the American Lung Association estimated that in the United States alone, thirteen thousand people are killed every year by power plant pollution. At this point, even by Greenpeace's estimate of 200,000 early cancer deaths, American coal plants have killed far more people than did Chernobyl.

We face grave challenges in the years to come, and if we want to have a hope of coming out the other end with any kind of strength, we cannot afford to discard zero-pollution, zero-carbon power generation because it gives some people the willies. The answer to that is education and proper oversight. It would be a dark future indeed that didn't have nuclear power in it.

British Columbia's Fusion Future

Fusion power has always been the future. Usually framed as advanced, clean, and inexhaustible, it's one of those holy grails of accomplishment that scientists and engineers have been reaching for since the 1940s, and it's always twenty-five years away. It's part of the lives of every living thing on Earth - after all, the sun is essentially just a natural fusion reactor. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a common thing for projections of the future to include the perfection of fusion power in the early twenty-first century: in our actual twenty-first century research is still ongoing, with the most high-profile project being ITER over in Cadarache, France.

Yet ITER is not the only attempt to achieve economical fusion power, and as the theory goes there may be more than one road to realizing it. One such effort is underway right here in the Lower Mainland, with Burnaby-based General Fusion working towards the demonstration of a magnetized target fusion generator by 2013. If they were to be successful, it would be revolutionary - the nature of fusion power is such that it is not vulnerable to the sort of runaway chain reactions or significant releases of radioactivity that can happen when nuclear fission reactors go awry. To put it simply, if you want civilization to dramatically cut down its environmental footprint without cutting its power production and expenditure equally dramatically, fusion power is it - though, of course, Greenpeace has already come out against it.

Until very recently, General Fusion was working under the radar. That changed on Monday, when CBC News posted a story built around comments by Erich Vogt, a UBC nuclear physicist who stated that "there's a hazard, an explosive hazard" associated with General Fusion's experimental reactor - I'm not sure to what degree he believes this is possible. But it's got people more aware about the future-focused experimentation going on in Metro Vancouver, and what's going to be done about it. I just think it's great that the media is seeding fear, uncertainty, and doubt about fusion power - after all, that's totally not the sort of thing that will backfire on us down the road.

Fusion power is perfect for British Columbia! I mean, there's a fusion reactor on the flag already!

Yesterday, the CBC followed up with another story looking at the official response - Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan has stated that local officials will be monitoring future tests of the plasma injector that's at the heart of this project, and that the city's current view is that General Fusion's operations pose no risk to the surrounding areas - not just that, but the reactor is not even going to be tested in Burnaby. Taking that into consideration, though... just what is city supervision of the project going to accomplish? How many people does the City of Burnaby have on its payroll who are sufficiently familiar with the science behind magnetized target fusion to meaningfully monitor it?

My own opinion is that some people are taking this more seriously than it needs to be because it's nuclear fusion. The fact is that a fusion reactor would not act like a fission reactor because they work along different lines - otherwise, why would it have taken sixty years to get even to this level of development? Still, I'm glad to see that people don't seem to be freaking out about this. Just think what it could do for the international reputation of British Columbia if - though it's a big if - the world's first workable fusion reactor was built here.

That, of course, depends on the laws - all of which seem to have written with "nuclear power" and "nuclear fission power" being considered synonymous. The first CBC article refers to a ban on nuclear energy in British Columbia - I'm not sure where this is coming from. Having searched BC Laws, the closest candidate I can find is the province's current Clean Energy Act, which simply states that one of BC's energy objectives is "to achieve British Columbia's energy objectives without the use of nuclear power."

I wonder if that would mean solar is out of the question, too - after all, solar power wouldn't be worth anything if not for the nuclear reactions constantly happening inside of the sun.

Radiating Ignorance in the Legislature

As a failed candidate for political office, I know that the only thing that's really needed to get a job in politics is the conviction of the voting public that you're the right one for the office - though just as God fights on the side with the strongest artillery, that conviction tends to correlate closely with the weight of dollars tossed onto the campaign bus. This is one reason why advisors and lobbyists are so common in political circumstances; frequently enough, politicians simply lack understanding of the underlying facts, and so rely on other people to interpret it for them. This can be seen, for example, in the conduct thus far of hizzoner Rob Ford in Toronto, particularly with regard to surface-running light rail and the relative merit of subways - but that is neither here nor there.

Again, it's coming back to nuclear power: the inscrutable black magic of the modern age, brought to the public eye again by the continuing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan. I think it's a fair thing to say that the average politician probably doesn't understand nuclear power all that well, because the average person doesn't understand it all that well either, and familiarity with nuclear power generation is not a prerequisite for political office in this or, to my knowledge, any other country.

Nevertheless, I think I like political systems more when its participants don't make such a show about how much they don't know. Case in point: Ontario, where Premier Dalton McGuinty - who, incidentally, is facing an election this October, and I'm sure that little fact has nothing to do with this whatsoever - has come under attack from the opposition New Democratic Party over "failing to tell the public about elevated levels of radiation detected" as a result of the events in Japan.

Because, you know, radiation is some unfathomable curse that has settled over the land, and things like half-lives don't exist.

Amazingly enough, not glowing green!

"This government totally dropped the ball," said NDP leader Andrea Horwath, as quoted in the Globe and Mail on Wednesday. To what I say - what the fuck? Look, I know that the security of the public is the central responsibility of a government, but this is ridiculous. That slightly elevated radiation levels are detectable in Ontario as a result of Fukushima speaks to the quality of Ontario's radiation detectors, not the severity of the threat. Because there isn't one. Not in North America. Remember, iodine-131 has an eight-day half-life; air takes time to cross the Pacific, and even longer to cross the continent.

Let me break this down here. Health Canada's observations indicate that on April 12, the date this story broke, the average dose of radiation per day in Toronto was 0.28 microsieverts. Put another way - the average dose of radiation was almost as much as a person would get from eating three bananas, which are slightly radioactive due to their potassium content - and even though their radiation doesn't linger in the body, it's still a worthwhile benchmark.

Meanwhile, on the same day, Vancouver's average radiation dose was - are you ready for this - 0.44 microsieverts! Twice as much! But do you see people dying of radiation poisoning on Granville Street? No! Do you see the British Columbia opposition making noise about this? No! Why? Perhaps because they're overwhelmingly concerned with the political hay they can make out of the HST, but also perhaps because they're not morons.

Going over the situation, I can arrive at only two circumstances. Either:

• Andrea Horwath and those Ontario NDP members in the legislature who are pursuing this have seized upon this as an opportunity to attack McGuinty and don't care that they're spreading further cause for atomic fear among the population of Ontario, in which case they are opportunistic bastards; or
  
• They honestly think this is a real problem, in which case they're monumental dumbasses.

Either way, it doesn't augur well. It's been sixteen years since the New Democratic Party was turfed out of power in Ontario - if this is representative of their knowledge and capabilities, better to keep them in opposition, where they can only yammer.

An Atom of Reaction

As I write, they're still fighting to bring the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi back under control. I understand that reactors 5 and 6 have been cooled to safe levels, and even though they were the ones least affected by the earthquake and tsunami, any victory here is a good one. We need all the victories we can get at Fukushima; the entire concept of nuclear has already taken a hell of a beating from it. A recent poll found that eighty-seven percent of Switzerland's population wants to terminate the Swiss nuclear power infrastructure, and the Vancouver Observer carried an article from the head of Greenpeace's nuclear campaign about how Fukushima should be an example to us all about why we should dismantle our nuclear plants and dedicate ourselves to renewable power.

Personally, at this point, I think it would be folly to go nuclear-free; it wouldn't result in a pure renewable-power utopia, but an even wider reliance on coal, oil, and natural gas power to replace the massive baseload generating capacity that nuclear generating statiosn are built for. I'm glad that Ontario is continuing to go ahead on its nuclear replacement project; hell, while I lived there, I was thankful that so much of Ontario's electricity was nuclear-generated, so that I could be assured that my lifestyle wasn't built upon a foundation of burning coal.

In the end, it's all about psychology. It's the same reason, I think, that a lot of people don't accept the idea of climate change: it's too slow to be seen, and it's practically impossible to specifically connect any one event to it. Nuclear accidents are something else entirely. They dovetail perfectly with the way humans have developed to perceive threat; it's something immediate, demonstrable, and obvious. Except, of course, that it isn't obvious - we can't see radiation, and as I wrote about the other day, I believe this is a significant factor in why some people are especially skeptical or fearful about nuclear power. The Swiss nuclear reactors are exactly as dangerous today as they were a month ago, but people are keyed up and seeing patterns everywhere.

And I think it's a bit unfair, anyway. It goes back to that whole "black magic" aspect that I believe a lot of people have regarding nuclear power. Would we be reacting this way over something like a hydroelectric dam collapse?

An aerial photograph of the Revelstoke Dam in the interior of British Columbia. This photo was originally taken by Wikipedia user Kelownian Pilot, and is used here in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license under which it was released.

The Revelstoke Dam on the Columbia River is one of the linchpins of British Columbia's electrical generation system; it was dams like these that allowed this province to keep the lights on without burning coal. It holds back enough of the Columbia that it's created Lake Revelstoke, five kilometers north of the town of Revelstoke. I've checked terrain maps for this area on Google; the Columbia winds through a rather narrow and deep valley here, and it's in this valley that you'll find Revelstoke and its 7,500 people.

What do you think would happen if the Revelstoke Dam were to be compromised? For now, let's not concern ourselves over the how - maybe it was an earthquake, maybe it was an asteroid, maybe the dam just didn't want to be a dam anymore. The result of the failure is stark: Lake Revelstoke empties itself back into the Columbia River in the form of an exceedingly large and exceedingly fast wave. A lot, in fact, like a tsunami! With only a five-kilometer separation between the dam and the town, there's a very limited window of opportunity for people to get out. People would die; it's probable that thousands of people would die. It would be a terrible, horrible disaster.

But do you think that, in the days afterward, you would have environmental organizations agitating to bring down the world's hydroelectric dams, or the people of Ontario polling in favor of turning off the turbines at Niagara Falls? Would we take a collective step back from hydroelectric power? Would we remember, in the same breath, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Revelstoke?

Somehow, I doubt it.

It all goes back to psychology in the end, I think. A wall of water's something we can see with our own eyes; a wall of water is something we can try to get away from, even though once it's got to the "wall" stage you'd have to be damn lucky to make it to safety. But radiation is black magic; it kills invisibly, and we can't even agree on how many. I've seen estimates of Chernobyl-attributable casualties range from four thousand to one million.

I just don't know where we can go from here.

Knowledge is Power... Nuclear Power

It's not going to be another Chernobyl, but that doesn't seem to make much difference anymore. Even though the struggle to cool down the reactors at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station continues, the mere fact of the crisis has pushed nuclear energy back into the spotlight, out in front of a public that after seventy years still has deep reservations about the whole thing. The public's vague unease, and general unfamiliarity with, the basics of nuclear power is itself fueling a critical reaction in the Western memescape.

Personally, I think that a big part of it is that a lot of people still think of nuclear power, in deep in their hearts of hearts, as some kind of black magic. Like something out of myth, some shadowy evil thing that can kill silently, invisibly, and poison the land. Make no mistake, radiation is dangerous - but I have to wonder how many people subconsciously assign agency to radiation, who deep down think of it not as a force of nature, but some ghostly, stalking predator.

The news media hasn't been much help. The news media is never much help in this regard. Hell, yesterday CBC News ran an article dealing with concerns raised about Columbia Nuclear Generating Station in south-central Washington state, the Pacific Northwest's last active nuclear plant and the only source of nuclear power within 1500 kilometers of Metro Vancouver. We should be concerned because Columbia "uses the same kind of radioactive fuel rods as the Fukushima reactors."

Not that it's not built to withstand a magnitude 9 megathrust earthquake, hundreds of kilometers away from the fault line where this quake is most likely to occur. Not that its emergency diesel generators are vulnerable to ten-meter tsunamis of the sort that are the actual cause of the Fukushima crisis, which we all know are totally common on the Columbia River. That it uses the same "radioactive fuel rods." You know what? I guess that makes it - gasp - a nuclear reactor! I'm no nuclear engineer, but isn't it safe to say that the problem with Fukushima Daiichi was not that it uses radioactive fuel rods, but that it was designed in such a way that mechanical pumps were necessary to get coolant to the reactors, and not in such a way that gravity would do the pumps' work?

None of that matters to the media, it seems. Right now, people are keyed up and scared shitless about atoms and radiation. The other day I saw a news ticker about how people in British Columbia were stocking up on "iodine" pills - putting aside the question of whether this was a typo or people were actually stocking up on iodine instead of potassium iodide, which is what you want when you want to protect yourself from thyroid cancer - because of fears of a radioactive cloud blowing across the Pacific.

Keep in mind that the Pacific is big. It is, in fact, more than seven thousand kilometers from Tokyo to Vancouver. If radiation is such that iodide would become a good investment here, I very much doubt that any human would be able to survive on Honshu without glowing. But many people only have a surface understanding of it - for many people, it's a case of radiation coming, and radiation is bad.

The Pacific Ocean, viewed from the west coast of North America. Not pictured: Japan.

Here, I think, psychology plays a role again. The ocean is big and wide, without any barriers - but that bigness is in itself a barrier to something like radiation. According to an article in the Deseret News, which demonstrates that even people in Utah are worried about transpacific radiation, the main health risk comes from iodine-131, which has an eight-day half-life. If you're only familiar with the term in context of Gordon Freedman, half-life refers to the amount of time required for half of whatever stuff you're talking about to decay. So if you have one hundred units of iodine-131, after eight days only fifty of them will still be radioactive. And it's not as if they'll stay in a big lump during the time it takes the winds to blow them across the ocean.

I mean, really - it's not even 3700 kilometers from New Westminster to Pickering. If there was a radioactive crisis at Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, while I would be deeply concerned for my friends and loved ones and the millions of people who live within a hundred kilometers of its reactors... would people on the Pacific coast still be stocking up on potassium iodide?

As a culture, we've needed to deal maturely with the pitfalls and possibilities of nuclear power for decades now. It's unfortunate that in this time of crisis, the media seems dedicated to the idea of the worst-case scenario.

god damn when I started writing this it was going to be about dams

An Unrequested Fission Surplus

I really hate the term "meltdown." Sure, it is technically accurate - for nuclear engineers, who know what they are talking about. If you are not a nuclear engineer, a meltdown means that the nuclear fuel has overheated and melted, causing damage to the reactor core. I would be willing to bet that the average person on the street, for whom The Simpsons is likely their only source of information about nuclear power, thinks that "meltdown" means something along the lines of "the entire nuclear plant melts down into the center of the earth and leaves a big, sizzling, glowing green hole behind it."

With the crisis still underway at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan - a plant which is, mind you, still intact after being hit by the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history as well as a tsunami - the word "meltdown" or its non-English equivalent probably appears on the front page of every significant newspaper in the Western world. This is not going to be another Chernobyl, but no matter what happens, nuclear power is going to take yet another bruise.

You'd think the media could use this opportunity to educate the public - to expand awareness of how nuclear power actually works, the pitfalls and the possibilities, rather than just go to ridiculous extremes like articles about fallout being carried across the Pacific to the West Coast. But no. The atoms are going to kill us - they're going to melt us, then kill us.

The Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Pickering, Ontario

This post's title comes from the early Simpsons episode "Homer Defined," which dealt with Homer averting a meltdown at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant - and I can't help but think that that episode, and things like it, have been incredibly influential in shaping the nuclear memescape. Simply put, these nuclear plants are not going to explode like nuclear weapons - that is entirely impossible. People only think so because unless you make the effort to educate yourself, nuclear reactor design and nuclear weapon design are equally black-box. It's not as if they taught me about gun-trigger vs. implosion nukes back in high school.

It's almost as if the debate has been consciously engineered over the decades to be as scary as possible for the average person. I mean, just look at that word "meltdown." Melting means really super hot, which means get away! Go! It pushes primal buttons. It doesn't matter that, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, seawater injections are underway at Fukushima Daiichi to cool the reactors. The media has already pushed out its narrative, and that's "this is terrifying and you should be terrified."

Words matter. We should choose them carefully.

After Nuclear Twilight, Germany's New Day

I've heard it described as one of the most boring and bland elections of the twenty-first century. Yesterday, Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel won a second term and fresh mandate from the German people, and in cooperation with the Free Democratic Party will form a majority government. Previously, Merkel's Christian Democratic Union ruled with the support of the Social Democratic Party, but with the SPD down seventy-six seats, things have changed. In particular, now that the SPD is out of the equation, it appears that the German government will re-evaluate the controversial plan to decommission Germany's nuclear generating capacity.

At its height, nineteen nuclear power plants operated in Germany, although like much of the rest of the world the majority of its power is derived from coal-burning power plants, and nuclear's share of the electrical pie has been roughly stable since the mid-1980s. In 2000, despite a 1997 opinion poll which indicated 81% of the German population supported nuclear power, a coalition government of the SPD and the Greens announced that all nuclear power in Germany would be phased out by 2020.

I thought it was ridiculous then, and I still think it's ridiculous. Personally, I'd go so far to say that in the current climate, with the looming threat of climate change never so well known, holding on to a policy like this is evil. It wouldn't be the first time an evil act was committed by people who honestly believed they were doing a good thing.

Of Germany's nineteen nuclear plants in 2000, two have already been shut down. Controversy arose after the closure of the 672-megawatt Stade Nuclear Power Plant in 2003, with the German news site Tageblatt Online reporting on environmentalists opposing the construction of an 800-megawatt coal power plant to replace it. The BUND Kreisgruppe, an environmental organization active in Germany, called for the construction of what appear to be natural gas power plants - Google's translation is not exact - which would generate only half the emissions of a coal-fired power plant.

This is, obviously, far superior environmentally when compared to a nuclear power plant which produces exactly zero emissions.

The problem with modern environmentalism is that its wagon has been hitched to the anti-nuclear movement for quite a few decades, and as such it's at war with itself and with reality. Environmentalist campaigners talk about the need to introduce further renewables into the generation infrastructure, but a modern civilization cannot be fueled by solar and wind alone. There has to be a source of baseload power generation, and unless you're lucky enough to be near a good set of waterfalls or a geothermal zone, only coal and nuclear can effectively provide that. I couldn't consider myself an environmentalist living somewhere other than Ontario; fifty percent of this province's power is nuclear-generated, and much of the rest comes from hydroelectricity, clean and carbon dioxide-free.

It seems to me that a lot of these dedicated environmentalists have not caught up with today's reality. They're still fighting the crusades of the 1970s, still seeing nuclear power in the same jaundiced light cast by the threat of the Cold War. It's well past time for us to leave behind China Syndrome scaremongering, for us to look at nuclear power with eyes unclouded by Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. How many people do you think die every year in coal mine accidents, or from the pollutants spewed into the atmosphere by coal power plants all over the world?

Coal burning is representative of modern industrial barbarism. We owe it to ourselves and to the future to move away from it as soon as possible. Bravo to the new German government for readying itself to go down that road again.

Pickering Nuclear Generating Station - may it bring the light for decades to come

Keeping Iqaluit's Lights On

There are probably a few people in Nunavut who would rather it hadn't happened. Prime Minister Harper's recent tour of the Canadian Arctic, an overdue demonstration of governmental interest in the country's vast northern hinterland, was jolted on Wednesday morning by a widespread power outage in Iqaluit, the territorial capital. Until Wednesday, it's a fair bet that most southern Canadians probably didn't know if Iqaluit even had electricity.

The problem is that, until recent Russian and Danish noises and activities around the North Pole and Greenland alerted Ottawa to the fact that sovereignty can't be propped up with words alone, the federal government didn't really care about the north. The territory of Nunavut is slightly more than thirty thousand people spread across more than two million square kilometers of ground, and there are few people in the government who speak for them. Iqaluit's electrical generation capacity is, according to the Globe and Mail, a fifty-year-old plant housing four diesel generators. A recent Qulliq Power job posting for a Journeyman Diesel Mechanic in Iqaluit suggests that they're rather small, with generating capacities between one and six megawatts.

It's understandable why Iqaluit's electrical generation infrastructure is based on diesel generators - it's easy to use them, and that would especially have been the case fifty years ago. The twenty-first century poses new challenges, however, and if we're to credibly build up the Arctic to a new standard, finding reliable and effective sources of electricity for its cities will be key above all.

The thing with diesel generators is that they tend to drink their fuel fairly fast when you're powering a city with them. I wasn't able to find an exact breakdown of how many megawatts Iqaluit's generators can put out, individually or in tandem, so I'm fudging it a bit. My numbers are coming from the approximate diesel fuel consumption chart at Diesel Service and Supply Inc., and though my suppositions may be way off, I'd like to think they're at least in the ballpark.

So, for the purposes of argument, let's assume that Iqaluit's four diesel generators are each capable of generating two megawatts of power, and that they're always operating at half load. At this rate, each generator consumes 273.3 liters of fuel per hour. Running twenty-four hours, as they very well might during winter months when the night lasts for twenty hours, they would burn 26,236.6 liters per day, and 183,647 liters per week.

Iqaluit is an expensive place to live in because so much has to be imported. Expensive enough, I say, without having to ship up tens of thousands of liters of diesel fuel every week just to make sure the lights stay on. If Ottawa is looking to build a new Arctic for the twenty-first century, I think they should look at twenty-first century solutions like nuclear battery power.

From the first time I heard of it, I was fascinated by the concept of the Toshiba 4S, effectively a miniaturized nuclear reactor optimized for situations just like Iqaluit's, needing only limited staffing, capable of generating 10 megawatts of power, and theoretically capable of going thirty years between fuelings. Toshiba is already working to use it at the proposed Galena Nuclear Power Plant in Galena, Alaska, a central Alaskan community far removed from the state's grid.

Providing for Iqaluit's energy needs with such a reactor would, I think, be a significant and appropriate investment in the future of Canada's Arctic. It would clean the local air and provide constant, reliable, emission-free electricity. I know that the current government has little interest in environmental issues, given its actions, but this sort of initiative could strike a blow for the environment while simultaneously investing in Nunavut's future.

The Mighty Atom, King Coal, and the Future of Australia

As far as I'm concerned, the single most pressing problem facing the future is environmental degradation. With the incoming Obama administration in the States looking to take a far more forceful tack on climate issues than did the Bush White House, I'm not quite as pessimistic about the future as I was during the night shift, when the combination of long stretches of time without seeing the sun and a great deal of opportunity to trawl through the Science/Environment sections of the New York Times and BBC News, among others, pushed me into "oncoming envirocalypse" territory.

Not that that's the realm of fantasy; I still have my concerns about the Arctic methane upwellings. Nevertheless, nevertheless--

One of the most significant contributors to climate change is the burning of coal to generate electrical power, and the fact that it is still so widely used indicates the vast degree to which modern civilization remains mired in nineteenth century modes of thought and action. Coal may be cheap, yes, but that's only because its dollar, or euro, or renminbi cost only includes what's needed to take it from a hole in the ground to a roaring furnace. Once it's in the atmosphere, it's someone else's problem.

We've had a solution to this for nigh-on sixty years now, and it's a testament to the short-sighted foolishness of humanity that it has not been implemented on a greater scale. Nuclear power, which according to Wikipedia produced 14% of global electricity in 2007, has always been the red-headed stepchild of the electricity industry. Now that there's an environmental consciousness growing in the West, new desires to Do Something are running up against that incessant buzzing whisper in so many peoples' ears that Atoms Are Evil.

Recently I came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, "Clearing the air" by Clancy Yeates, about the problems and possibilities Australia will face as its "addiction to cheap coal" faces the threat of climate change and the opportunities of new sources of power. The article's focus was primarily on renewable energy, solar and wind and the like, and how bringing such installations online in the near future could seriously decrease Australia's dependence on coal and, thus, its environmental footprint. But what I'm more focused on is its omissions.

In this five-page article, in its two thousand, six hundred and ninety-two words, the word "nuclear" did not appear once. Not even in the context of "nuclear power is, of course, no solution for Australia's environmental problems." Frankly I would have preferred that. Kneejerk anti-nuclear sentiment is something I've become used to. Not even mentioning it in an article meant to examine methods of weaning a country off of coal dependency strikes me as a serious oversight.

One of the reasons I enjoy living in Toronto is precisely because it is conveniently located to not one but two nuclear power plants, at Pickering and Darlington. Together with Ontario Hydro's early focus on exploiting the hydroelectric potential of Niagara Falls and, eventually, every single river in the province that could economically be dammed, I can feel confident that any given electrical device I turn on is not powered by coal. I can live with nuclear, because it lets me live with the concept of a future.

No matter what happens, it's unrealistic to think that coal burning won't play a major role in electrical generation for the near future. Nevertheless, it's irresponsible to continue in a state of affairs that sets up the choice between coal and renewables as the only option. Nuclear fission deserves a place at that table.