Bulletin Board of Bad Behavior

Please take time to go to slate.com and see the photographic essay by Paul Fusco about Chernobyl today. Ignore the cheap sentiment of the choral soundtrack and listen to his voice. An amazing work.

The Russian nuclear engineers are a disgrace to the fucking human race. No offense but honestly if we will go to war with Iraq over nothing we should have been at war with Russia to close these reactors with not containment systems.

There are ones like this still in operation today. No wonder the EU doesn't give a shit about a nuclear Iran with these things around.

i looked into the fusco photo essay about three weeks ago but after about fifteen pictures i had to stop -- it was too gruesome for me. the image of those kids in constant pain who spend all day rolling over the floor is one i will probably never forget.

but i agree the essay is brilliant.

does this influence what you think about nuclear power?

All through college I shared housing with a chemical engineer. We were great friends (he was the best man at my wedding) he went on to do a masters at Sellafield. Sellafield is the british nuclear power station which collects and reprocesses the spent fuel rods from all the other nuclear facilities in Britain. Far and away the most potent plant in Britain and the one with the worst record on enviromental damage. The surrounding area is the tumor capitol of England, despite all the ways BNFL (British Nuclear Fuels Ltd) try to fudge the statistics. I went to visit him there once. The security is something else. British Nuclear Police have unlimited powers. They have the right to shoot first and ask questions never and they are allowed to use those weapons in up to a 50 mile radius of the plant. Back in the day I was very much against nuclear power/weapons. The main gripes against it were the obvious safety issues and the fact that costs were always presented without the bill for decommissioning factored in. There have been endless problems with the old reactor at Sizewell. (Called Sizewell A, I think.) Since then I'm led to believe that the immediate danger from greenhouse gasses has made the greens look at nuclear energy in a new light. Like I say I'm an old CND guy, nuclear power, even the fictional cold fusion, leaves me cold.

As an aside I remember that there was an operational B-52 operating out of England during the cold war. (1950's/60's) These planes were in the air 24/7 with nuclear payloads ready to go. One of the planes reported an under carriage malfunction and asked for advice. The plane was told to fly as far away as possible and crash. The crew disobeyed the order and brought the plane into land successfully. I think the whole thing was called, "operation broken arrow. I, and the rest of England, only know about it because of the freedom of information acts in the USA. If it was up to the Official Secrets Act of Britain we would never know. Reports on the safety of nuclear plants are dealt with in the same way. I really have no idea how safe they are.

highly interesting information tommy, thanks.

personally i also do not trust nuclear energy operators, no matter where. i think they do not deserve to handle a technology that has the potential to turn a landscape into a wasteland for a few thousand years.

i also agree with your point that nuclear energy would probably not be economical if the operators had to carry the full costs of disposal.

so what about global warming. i believe that it exists and that it is caused by humankind. but, as a person living in the country of "le waldsterben", i am sceptical about how bad it really will be, what should be done about it and what can be done. call me a lomberg greenie but i think there are better ways to spend the public's money.

by the way, does anybody think the greenhouse effect theory is being supported by nuclear operators?

and what about the effectiveness of humankind cooling the atmosphere with dust, a la kracatoa? why not shoot a few tons up there and see what happens ? i know this sounds wacky, but i am a guy who likes practical solutions to apocalyptical problems.

Global warming might be ready to get the treatment it deserves over here. Al Gore is the big story at the moment. Listened to a big debate on the radio today. Will he/won't he run against Hilary and McCain. Regarding the weather, one expert put it this way....there are six billion of us, we're about to add another three. A change in temerature is niether her nor there, Chicago was under sheets of ice only 150,000 years ago. Nature and the planet won't end if temperatures go up. Man won't die out. BUT if the climate patterns change and rain that falls on crops now starts to fall on the desert, then whole human societies will be wiped out. As a species we are leaning on the thermostat.

lots that i'm interested in here in this thread.

first, according to al, we won't be using nuclear. i just read an interview, i'll go and fetch it if you like where he makes two claims 1. the us / greens won't go nuclear -- 2. he won't go president

second a personal story, two of the folks i was with in honduras, a dentist and a nurse, met a bunch of russian kids in sweden, i think -- sloth, they were so impressed with the beauty of sweden -- but anyway, they met these russian kids who'd been eating radioactive food because they lived right down the road from the plant. they said they had terrible cancers and that really they weren't there to save lives, just there to support and encourage their spirits - -they all knew their lives were not going to last much longer. incredibly tragic, it's making me feel like crying now. terrible. the nurse i was with conveyed to me a story about one girl's grandma who made jam that glowed.

third a response to tommy and martino:
"Nature and the planet won't end if temperatures go up. Man won't die out. BUT if the climate patterns change and rain that falls on crops now starts to fall on the desert, then whole human societies will be wiped out. As a species we are leaning on the thermostat."

right you are tommy, have you seen what's going to happen to great britain?

the us is a blow hard for not signing kyoto, one more reason to give the thumbs down to bush and co (including clinton's senate -- look up the senators who gave kyoto the first fuck off and then write to them saying kiss your fucking job good by assholes -- you know!). they are shit heads that make us look like murdering, polluting dumbasses.

on a lighter side you can plant trees or go to

http://www.gocarbonzero.org/

to calculate how to plant more trees.

environmental science and other issues, no offense to folks who know, but just in case you don't: CO2 is the big greenhouse gas that kyoto, in 97, wanted to reduce, the us would not go along with it because they didn't think it was fair because the same limits weren't placed on china and india, wah, and it might hurt the economy, double wah.

(martino, the german government has not been full of the assholes that the government in the us has been, and they have lowered their emissions by 4 percent and report that the economy is just fine. i think. correct me if i'm wrong, but i've been talking to a german girl who told me that recently.)

anyway, trees help uptake CO2 -- ESPECIALLY NEWLY PLANTED FAST GROWING TREES. those are the best. as far as i know.

so the us can do things, the people of the us, even if our federal government is full of a bunch of stupid old shit heads.

there is so much more i'd like to say on these topics.

like

IRAN
and
FRANCE

but another day.

Another little thing you can do, if you want to help out a bit, it's just a little thing really, but. . . If you are a meat eater and you've got to have chicken; do not buy Tyson or some hormone pumped shit. Coleman Natural is better for you and a portion of your money goes to trees:

“The goal of the Coleman Eco-Project 2015 is to plant a total of 20 million trees throughout the United States in 10 years. The U.S. Forest Service will match the donations tree for tree, and will also plant the trees. Coleman formed working partnerships with the U.S. Forest Service and the non-profit organizations American Forests and American Farmland Trust. In addition to tree planting, education and training programs will be undertaken under the auspices of the Coleman Eco-Project 2015 to protect 50 million acres of working farms and ranches.â€￾

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/sit ... ewsLang=en

"and what about the effectiveness of humankind cooling the atmosphere with dust, a la kracatoa"

do you mean what they are calling "global dimming" here due to particles / particulates? the particles are found in things like soot and reflect the sun's light away from the earth. i've heard a weird theory. i sort of think it's very valid. the earth itself may be cooler in some areas downwind of massively produced soot and other industrially produced dimming particulates, BUT the sun is warming because of it (where is the light going? back to the sun . . . so the sun is getting hotter too.)

i don't know. i think combined with the global warming of the earth, this would be very not good. at all.

but i still don't know nearly enough about it, and global dimming may not even be what you're talking about.

i agree we all should do whatever we can to minimize our individual contribution to global warming. i walk when i can, i drive my vespa when walking is not practical, i take the train when the vespa is not practical, i try never to fly. and i am a vegetarian, more or less, which means that i have eliminated meat from my normal diet. (but a steak two or three times a year, or some venison? sure).

for me, using a suv is stupid and wasteful, especially in light of global warming.

i support organic farmers and i use organics in my girlfriend's garden.

those are matters of private ethics.

a different question is that of public policy. here, i tend to say two things. a) the money is better spent on other public-health and ecological matters, re björn lomberg. and b), i think as computer models evolve we will see in due course how dangerous global warming is and what we can do about it. the krakatoa explosion in 1883 caused a severe short-term climate cooling and a 20-year less-severe cooling; if a volcano can do that then humankind will be able to too, i would think. or look how the arctic sea was as warm as the caribbean 55 millions ago. it cooled after it got covered by a thick layer of azolla, which is a fern. surely in a generation or two science will be able to engineer something like that.

so i am not really worried about global warming. i worry about islamic suicide warriers, african murder-societies, about malaria and about unclean drinking water in the third world. and that's why i find it easy to say that nuclear power is not a solution.

thanks martino!
"the krakatoa explosion in 1883 caused a severe short-term climate cooling and a 20-year less-severe cooling; if a volcano can do that then humankind will be able to too, i would think. or look how the arctic sea was as warm as the caribbean 55 millions ago. it cooled after it got covered by a thick layer of azolla, which is a fern. surely in a generation or two science will be able to engineer something like that."

thanks for clarifying. that is not at all what we are calling global dimming, but then again maybe it really is. soot and ash, particulate matter from a "natural" source as opposed to an "industrial" source, and i don't know much about this global dimming business, it's new to me. my dad was actually telling me about it not long ago. makes me wish i'd finished my environmental degree, all of it does really.

the problem with particulates, why global dimming is absolutely not a solution humans want to global warming, is the same reason that nano-tech should not be our economic solution, it is just common sense i think. the size of the particulates, especially once they get down to nano size are too small and can destroy the human body. think asbestos. yikes!

yes, i agree completely -- they are very much ethical issues. al gore calls them moral issues. to me it is much much more a moral issue than say, sex. i'm think there is no morality involved in fucking. it is human. and basic. but that's just my code, to each his / her own, that i know.

you said private, which is well, i guess you'd have to explain more about your government to me in general. i mean here, in the us, what is private to our government would not be private to others perhaps. a person's sex / personal life is not private at all, ie ask myke if he can marry the person he loves or wants to fuck, or can he and that person openly join the military as a fucking couple -- so i mean the ethics behind anything in the united states government are so skewed to me.

but germany's government has a better public track record with kyoto? correct?

i agree about the computer models being better and better able to predict what shit is going to come down here because of our behaviors -- katrina times ten.


yes, there are lots of things to worry about. and you do much more than the average american to end global warming, most europeans do (i hate to generalize but like tommy sort of implied: "Global warming might be ready to get the treatment it deserves over here" -- we are slow and backwards about this shit), which is why i worry about global warming. the united states is so so so so far behind europe in its mentality about global warming. what seems to be second nature to some folks is unheard of in some places in the us.

people laughed at my dad for having a compost pile and growing stuff organically -- laughed. people have called me zealous for recycling.

do you remember all those big gulps and suvs you saw in the united states a few years ago -- they've not gone away (and people aren't recycling the gulp cups )

they cut down trees here like there is no tomorrow. it is so scary; we in the united states should know better, and to me, it's shameful.

back to what you were saying about the fern after the explosion, yes, it is weird how the earth can heal itself. when we stripped the land in the united states with bad farming practices that caused the dust bowl disaster, trees were planted to help rebuild the soil, and it worked.

flooding too will revitalize the soil, so man will bleed it dry of its nutrients, but a flood will put them back.