The Great Pause Week 73: Descending the Volcano
"Natural climate solutions are waiting, palms outstretched, for the capitalization to get rolling."
MONACO, December 12, 2029. Microsoft founder Bill Gates released to authorities today the engineering study his foundation commissioned following the catastrophic explosion May 8th in this city. The report by consulting firm Explogenics describes second-by-second details of the attack that sank Gates’ nuclear-powered yacht, Earth 300, along with 12 other super yachts within the blast radius, and contaminated a large portion of the Monaco waterfront, which is still cordoned off.
The terrorist suspect apprehended in the immediate aftermath, French national Franz Wilber, confessed to police he was “getting back at Gates” by firing a single bullet into his yacht because he believed the billionaire had implanted microchips in his brain while forced to undergo a compulsory vaccination in 2021.
According to the engineering study, the event began when Wilber, concealed on a balcony close to the Earth 300’s anchorage, fired a single rifle shot into an open porthole 132 meters from his position. The shot passed through the window and penetrated an insulated cooling duct for the ship’s air conditioning system, coming to rest in ceramic coating surrounding a coolant pipe. The impact created a microcrack in the interior steel pipe and within milliseconds, exposed to the heat and pressure of the liquid sodium coolant circulating though the pipe from the nuclear reactor, propagated a crack that exposed a pinhole aperture to the interior. In contact with moist ambient air, the molten, radioactive sodium underwent a heat-generating explosive reaction, creating a fireball that acted like a pipe bomb inside the steel and ceramic plumbing enclosure that ran the length of the ship.
The initial reaction though the pinhole served as a trigger for a much larger event, opening up the cracked pipe and exposing the entire molten sodium contents surrounding the reactor core to the moist air. This created the much larger secondary explosion that destroyed the marina and was observed more than twenty miles away. It sent fragments of the reactor core hurtling in all directions, some traveling more than a kilometer. The explosion killed 132 persons immediately, another 418 from radiation sickness in the following weeks, and injured at least 4300.
Authorities have not said whether they will charge Gates with criminal negligence in bringing the Earth 300 into a crowded port.
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In many of these posts I have referred to Charles Mann’s book, The Wizard and the Prophet, that described the bipolar cultural warfare fueling many of our problems.
Sebastian Junger’s Tribe is another book I like. It describes in imperfect detail — the kind that begs Michael Pollan to tackle — how our genetic evolution inclines us to form herds and either migrate towards noble goals or be stampeded off a cliff.
Mann’s prophet tribe is led by his central character William Vogt, although he could have as easily described John Muir, David Brower, or Chief Seattle. William Vogt was one of the original thinkers behind the environmental movement, at one point the director of Planned Parenthood, and a strong proponent of re-wilding.
Mann means ‘prophet’ in an almost derisive sense — the old man in the sackcloth and sandwich boards railing against the sins of the world. History may well prove Vogt a prophet in the other sense — a man well ahead of his time, accurately forecasting what would later come to be.
— The Great Pause Week 38: Corn Science Objectors (12/6/20)
To prophets, billion-year experimental laboratory experiments in evolutionary biology describe an elegantly complex and interconnected universe that supplies all needs. We adolescent two-legged interlopers — bulls in the porcelain shop — disturb that harmony at our peril. We need to learn respect, awe, and a tender touch.
Mann’s wizard tribe contains the inventors, engineers, and dreamers, led by the charismatic Norman Borlaug, who, by intention or consequence, change the world.
Borlaug was a technophile. He found ready support from the Rockefeller Foundation and many governments for his cornucopian vision of a limitless human prospect. He almost never wanted for funds to carry out large scale projects and was in part responsible for spreading to factories around the world the Haber-Bosch process of making nitrogen, rapidly hybridizing seed into genetic monocultures, and modernizing agriculture to resemble an automotive assembly line.
Wizards are the grand disturbers around whom a new order must align. There is little in the Anthropocene that remains untouched, from viral transcription to subatomic binding energy; election-warping social media algorithms to cryptocurrency. For Borlaug it was chemical fertilizer and mechanical harvesters.
What seems to become clearer as we pass through to the second year of our Great Pause is that the tribal alignment Mann describes could as easily apply to the divisions between economists and public health guardians. The former go long on Big Pharma. The latter short ICU beds and PPE.
I have nothing against Climeworks raising 100 billion in private capital. As a VC investor friend often says, “There is no competition because so far nobody is putting up real money.” If Climeworks can draw out a small downpayment for a livable future by going to the hottest geothermal geolocation — Iceland, site of Jules Vernes’ Journey to the Center of the Earth — and instead of descending into a volcano to discover the last remaining dinosaurs, pull dollops of CO2 from the carbon-rich volcanic air and pump it back down into those deep subterranean caverns to bond permanently with basalt, I will not argue, even if they suffocate a few dinosaurs in the process.
Nuclear power, however, is another matter, as my Gates yacht scenario illustrates.
Retrofuturism
Last month Vancouver-based General Fusion announced it was on track to supply commercial fusion electricity in the UK. The $300 million dollar prototype, funded by public and private sources, blows smoke rings and then pounds them into plasma by hammering steel pistons onto the tokamak exterior to pulse concussion waves through the interior. Lead engineer Rube Goldberg told CNBC the device will not generate energy when it goes online in 2025, but will “demonstrate the viability of the approach.” By “the approach” General Fusion may mean stringing along taxpayers and investors for yet another decade.
Decimal positions were moved, not to increase safety, but to gaslight investigators.
In 1975, physicist Amory Lovins called the nuclear industry a dying dinosaur, but cautioned that its thrashing tail might still be dangerous. Even putting aside the obvious fault-lines with bomb proliferation, costs, and uninsurability, by 1978 there was ample epidemiology to rule out the viability of atomic power as an energy source.
By that date we had plenty of proof of devastating disease and mortality among radium watch dial painters, Hiroshima survivors, the Tri-State Leukemia victims, the Mancuso study of Hanford plutonium workers, the Bross study of thorium and uranium fuel fabrication workers in Tennessee, the Oak Ridge cancer clusters, the Navajo downwinders, and the mill tailings clusters in Edgemont, South Dakota. That was long before data came in from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, but those were accidents, and you know, accidents happen.
These other gruesome fatalities were all planned. They were the design basis. In 1981, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stipulated to the United States Supreme Court in Honicker vs. Palladino, and published in the Federal Register the number of routine, design-basis, non-accidental deaths to be expected from then-licensed US power reactors. They set that number at 1.7 million civilians, disproportionately those living closest to the plants. I would say they were low by at least an order of magnitude based on best science, but let’s give them their number.
The industry reacted to the official government number by fielding public relations teams on loan from Big Tobacco. Almost overnight the “biology” terminology used for 40 years to describe ionizing radiation’s effect on the human body — Roentgens, rads and rem — changed to more obscure “physics” terminology — Becquerels, Sieverts and Grays — obsoleting many of the epidemiological studies done before the 1990s. Correlations suddenly seemed to casual readers to be off by orders of magnitude. Decimal positions were moved, not to increase safety, but to gaslight investigators.
Almost forgotten in all this was Dr. Rosalie Bertell’s 1985 book, No Immediate Danger, that provided epidemiological evidence to sustain the proposition that higher ambient nuclear radiation exposure (lifetime exposure has doubled since 1945) reduces the body’s immune capacity, and specifically resistance to radiation exposure — in successive generations. Bertell theorized that nuclear energy’s greatest public health danger — largely being ignored — is that the two curves could cross some time in the future, with generations of immune-compromised individuals being born into a natural global environment sufficiently radioactive that they cannot survive, leading to human extinction.
I already know what our wizard friends would say to this. “Don’t worry,” they would say. “We have CRISPR!” Presumedly we will just genetically engineer humans to remove the damage we’ll cause by building a new generation of small modular thorium reactors cooled by molten salt. The pro-nuke wizards label nuclear opponents concern about radiation “irrational.
The greatest irony in all this is that it is so unnecessary. I have previously described in these pages how natural climate solutions with none of the attendant risks of the high tech, high energy, high profit kind are waiting, palms outstretched, for a much smaller amount of capitalization — minuscule compared to fission or fusion — to get rolling.
If ramped up to a planting rate of 200 million hectares per year (Mha/yr), equivalent to four Spains, in 24 years [climate ecoforestry] would cover 4.8 Gha and be sequestering 14.6 gigatons of carbon per year (GtC/yr) or 2.7 times the current net global emissions. Can we find 4.8 Gha to plant? Yes, and without disturbing existing farms, cities, or having to green the deserts (although that may also be desirable as we restore larger hydrological cycles). The land is there at the margins, and it has been inventoried and cataloged. Climate change is actually expanding the no-longer-commercially-viable land available for these uses.
Because Earth’s oceans balance carbon concentrations with the atmosphere, as carbon is withdrawn from one, the other responds by refilling it. To remove six gigatonnes from the atmosphere and have it stay that way, we have to actually remove twelve.
The model shows that continuing rotational cycles at 200 Mha/yr on the same land would sequester a cumulative 667 GtC (2446 GtCO2-e), the amount of carbon required to bring atmospheric CO2 back to pre-industrial 300 ppm by year 56. By lowering fossil fuel emissions to zero (by 2035? 2050?), 300 ppm could be reached even sooner. If the rate of implementation were raised to 300 Mha/yr, the goal of 300 ppm could be reached in years 35 to 37 from startup.
— Climate Ecoforestry: Want to leap the social barrier to cool living? Behold: a stargate! (3/5/17)
Bronson Griscom of Nature Conservancy and a team of 32 international researchers reached similar conclusions in 2017 with their “Natural Climate Solutions” study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.
The response of the nuclear boosters, confronted with the obvious limiting factors to their ability to scale — not the least of which is massive mortality and morbidity even to the point of near term human extinction — has been to sweep it under the rug so future generations will grow up ignorant until oops! They do it again.
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References
46 Federal Register 39573 (August 4, 1981)
Griscom, B.W., Adams, J., Ellis, P.W., Houghton, R.A., Lomax, G., Miteva, D.A., Schlesinger, W.H., Shoch, D., Siikamäki, J.V., Smith, P. and Woodbury, P., Natural climate solutions. Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, 114(44), 11645–11650; 2017; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1710465114
Honicker v. Hendrie, et al, 465 F.Supp. 414 (M.D.Tenn.,1979)
Honicker v. N.R.C., et al, 59o F.2d 1207 (D.C.Cir., 1979)
Schell, J., The Fate of the Earth (1981)
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As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.
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Comments
Crazed ape tribes we are, cant see how this can be changed.
Thanks for your insights Albert.