A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables: Scientific American

The article below is referred to in another fine article Trashing the Planet for Natural Gas: Shale Gas Development Threatens Freshwater Sources, Likely Escalates Climate Destabilization by Karen Charman which comes via business insider .

The article is further discussed at climate sanity 


what is the best way? Are all ways bad in some way? What if the basic assumption were that there will be pain, how do we make the right decision? How do we convince ourselves that total costs must be accounted for and included in the discussion and create an agreed upon standard for this kind of accounting independent of the solution that might result?

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables

Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here's how

By Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi  | Monday, October 26, 2009 | 166

Image: John Lee Aurora Photos

experts on nuclear power

from
this blog

Track the performance of various expert voices addressing the nuclear crisis in Japan and you’ll get a pretty good sense of the magnitude of this problem. For a complex example of the problem's dimensions: a blog post from an MIT professor that was originally sent to his friends and family to offer an explanation of the reactor's design and of nuclear power, but that also expressed in no uncertain terms the opinion that there would be and could not be any significant release of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Since that time, the post's author has offered an intelligent retrospective analysis of his own credibility or lack thereof, and his work has been incorporated into a wider effort to “clean up” the expert assessment in a more useful ongoing resource for public understanding.

I don't want to single out this author as a conspiracist, and I appreciate his effort to rethink and recontextualize his initial entry into the public debate, something that other highly vocal experts who were quick to debunk fears about the Japanese accident have not done. The problem with expert participation in the online public sphere is not just that our information can iterate wildly across a wide domain almost instantly. It is also that the online public sphere is absolutely loaded with people who really do use their status as experts to serve as mouthpieces for some kind of paymaster outside of their own universities: researchers who shill for Big Pharma, experts who are peddling some rent-a-solution into the NGO ipeline for implementation in development work, and so on. It is not wrong to view a lot of public expertise coming from university faculty with skepticism.

A public intellectual has to engage issues of public concern earlessly, but they also have to try and live by the code of a ronin, to be a masterless samurai, not out of shame or inability to find a patron but because that's what inquiry requires.

Oe on Fukushima

The Atomic Bomb, Nuclear Energy, and Japan : The New Yorker

Tokyo Postcard: History Repeats
by Kenzaburo Oe March 28, 2011

By chance, the day before the earthquake, I wrote an article, which was published a few days later, in the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun. The article was about a fisherman of my generation who had been exposed to radiation in 1954, during the hydrogen-bomb testing at Bikini Atoll. I first heard about him when I was nineteen. Later, he devoted his life to denouncing the myth of nuclear deterrence and the arrogance of those who advocated it. Was it a kind of sombre foreboding that led me to evoke that fisherman on the eve of the catastrophe? He has also fought against nuclear power plants and the risk that they pose. I have long contemplated the idea of looking at recent Japanese history through the prism of three groups of people: those who died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who were exposed to the Bikini tests, and the victims of accidents at nuclear facilities. If you consider Japanese history through these stories, the tragedy is self-evident. Today, we can confirm that the risk of nuclear reactors has become a reality. However this unfolding disaster ends—and with all the respect I feel for the human effort deployed to contain it—its significance is not the least bit ambiguous: Japanese history has entered a new phase, and once again we must look at things through the eyes of the victims of nuclear power, of the men and the women who have proved their courage through suffering. The lesson that we learn from the current disaster will depend on whether those who survive it resolve not to repeat their mistakes.

This disaster unites, in a dramatic way, two phenomena: Japan’s vulnerability to earthquakes and the risk presented by nuclear energy. The first is a reality that this country has had to face since the dawn of time. The second, which may turn out to be even more catastrophic than the earthquake and the tsunami, is the work of man. What did Japan learn from the tragedy of Hiroshima? One of the great figures of contemporary Japanese thought, Shuichi Kato, who died in 2008, speaking of atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, recalled a line from “The Pillow Book,” written a thousand years ago by a woman, Sei Shonagon, in which the author evokes “something that seems very far away but is, in fact, very close.” Nuclear disaster seems a distant hypothesis, improbable; the prospect of it is, however, always with us. The Japanese should not be thinking of nuclear energy in terms of industrial productivity; they should not draw from the tragedy of Hiroshima a “recipe” for growth. Like earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural calamities, the experience of Hiroshima should be etched into human memory: it was even more dramatic a catastrophe than those natural disasters precisely because it was man-made. To repeat the error by exhibiting, through the construction of nuclear reactors, the same disrespect for human life is the worst possible betrayal of the memory of Hiroshima’s victims.

Effects of Japan Disaster

Effects of the Tohoku disaster and options for Japan's response | The Japan Times Online

By TERUHIKO MANO
Special to The Japan Times

More than three weeks after Tohoku and the eastern parts of the Kanto region were hit by a massive earthquake that triggered a tsunami and a nuclear power plant crisis — there are few indications of when Japan might get the situation under control.

Why is the disaster having such a major impact on the economy and what can be done to deal with it?

Pookushima

This gives pooh a bad name

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Tsunami video and farmers in fukushima

Farmers Livelihoods Wither in Japan s Nuclear Crisis  from NYTimes By MICHAEL WINES

"At least one farmer has been pushed over the edge. ... a 64-year-old farmer  ...killed himself one day after the government imposed a
ban on the sale of cabbages from the prefecture...The farmer [had] lost his house in the
earthquake but had a field of 7,500 organically grown cabbages ready for
harvest when the prohibition was announced."

TOWA, Japan If Japan s leaders regard the collapse of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex as this nation s greatest crisis in decades, Saichi Sato has a different perspective. From where he sits in this leafy village of 8,000 about 25 miles from Daiichi, he says, this is the greatest crisis in 400 years.

Mr. Sato, 59, is a 17th-generation family farmer, a proprietor of 14 acres of greenhouses and fields where he grows rice, tomatoes, spinach and other vegetables. Or did grow: Last week, the national government banned the sale of farm products not just from Towa, but also from a stretch of north-central Japan extending south almost to Tokyo, for fear that they had been tainted with radiation.

Already, Mr. Sato stands to lose a fifth of his income because of the ban. If the government cannot contain the Daiichi disaster, he could lose a farm that his family has tended since the 1600s.