Was Fukushima too big to fail?

When George Bush started bailing out corporations and Barack Obama continued we were told that those corporations were too big to fail. The dangers of massive corporations dragging down all of us were noted, they were bailed out, and were they then downsized? Nope. What is up with that?

Fukushima was out of the control of the Japanese government. It was big and the tsunami was bigger. It failed. So, put up your hand if you learned anything from that. Germany? Yes, we see you learned. Japan? We hope so! The US? No hand?

We have just been told today that the economy is tanking again in part because of Fukushima. A Japanese disaster is an American disaster these days. We have 110 nuclear reactors in the US. How many could suffer massive damage like Fukushima before we wreck our economy for many years to come? "Only" four of these plants are in similar earthquake and tsunami zones? Well, what else might surprise us? What if a nuclear power plant gets hit by a massive tornado? Lucky thing there was no nuke in Joplin, Missouri. How many 200 mph trucks flying through the air would it take to breach a reactor? What happens when floods overwhelm a nuke on the Mississippi River? Can't happen? Right. Neither could Fukushima. I've been to the Prairie Island nuclear power plants and on-site storage of massive amounts of high-level nuclear waste. They are smack in the floodplain of the biggest river in North America. The potential exists there to poison that river for generations. All it takes is one bad hand from Mother Nature, one demented terrorist in a small airplane loaded with explosives, one human operator error.

The reality is that nuclear power has always been for too risky, so it cannot exist without government exemption from liability. The risks are just plain stupid.

And, of course, the nuclear executives and p.r. people are quick to claim that it's 70 percent of the emissions-free base load. Well, it's 100 percent of the radioactive baseload. Baseload? Bonneville Power Administration literally cannot even give away electric power right now, the hydro base is so rampant. Shut down the nukes and buy it cheap from BPA! No hydro, wind or solar disasters can come close to a nuclear disaster. Insurance companies will happily handle solar and wind without government shields.

If our economy and our ecology--in the long run, they are the same--are too big to fail we should stop using nuclear power.

Peter and the wolf

My old friend Peter Edmunds is living far from his Minnesota roots, where he used to run a log building restoration company. He's now down in Deming, New Mexico. How sweet. Another snowbird, retired to bask in the sun.

But Peter's story has no such ending. He and his wife, Polly, have started Border Partners, a cross-border Deming-Palomas, US-Mexico initiative operating to help facilitate appropriate technology, food sharing and schoolchildren empowerment. They have also wandered into a dangerous drug and border war with their nonviolent programs.

From Peter's notes earlier this week, on 2 December:

After several months of comparative calm the savagery in Palomas returned to the front of everyone’s consciousness this week.

When I arrived on Monday morning for my Wind Power Class with the Palomas high school students, Luis, one of our key Palomas facilitators, immediately advised me, saying:

"I want you to go home, back to Deming. No one is on the streets, and we are all being very cautious.”

His hurried explanation revealed the latest horror:

Over the weekend the Mexican Federal Police and the military--equipped with helicopters and armored trucks--raided the town, arresting 25 people. Then, acting on a tip, they began to excavate an area located about ten minutes south of town. The army unearthed twenty victims at a clandestine mass grave site there. The seventeen men and three women have been buried there within the past year. The victims included two people from Deming who went missing in October.

Reading about all this from a distance is one thing; having wonderful friends in the thick of it is another. I can still see Peter running his log building crew. He employed me once in a while when I needed some cash, even though I had no skills in that area, but Peter is a loyal man. If he decides you are worth his friendship, he goes all the way. He kept many peace activists working for many years before his "retirement," which has only turned into full-time unpaid work for others less fortunate.

Bringing solar power to Mexico is coals to Newcastle, but to a Newcastle without a coal plant. Peter has been a hobby alternative energy developer for many years. I still laugh when I think of his efforts to create a waste paper adobe in northern Wisconsin. The mad inventor had me helping him after I was released from prison for one of my plowshares actions (dismantling part of a nuclear command facility). Peter actually paid my to hang out as he did his Gyro Gearloose experiments with bales of old newspaper and a homemade slurry. Now he's in adobe country at last, probably living in a newspaper palace, walls full of old headlines and Doonesbury comics.

As my generation slides into retirement, I cannot think of a better couple of role models than Peter and Polly Edmunds. They've been living lives of service for decades and used their log restoration company to help those of us who were nonviolent activists earn a living to support our real work of nonviolent resistance to militarism. Now they are spending their golden years still giving, to those who are trying to survive in our southern border war zone.

If you can afford a few dollars for such a worthy effort, please visit their site and donate this season.

Kill, Baby, Kill-- or PeacePower?

Will our codependent addiction to oil and militarism kill us before we decide to change? This is becoming a more open and futurefright question daily. Michael Klare, arguably the world's expert on this intertwined inquiry, is realistic and therefore pessimistic. Deepwater Horizon is unfathomably disastrous and yet is only the warm-up throat-clearing moment as we rush after oil that is left in our precious Earth, oil that is now guarded by hostile geology, hostile environmental conditions, and hostile regimes. Easy oil is all gone. The price for oil in the future will include many more wars and spills. Future? The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is prelude and our pathetic dependence will preclude our survival. We need intervention and treatment. No one will do it except us, civil society in civil resistance to Death by Oil.

From the wellsprings of al Qa'ida in Saudi Arabia to the insurgency of the Niger Delta, grassroots indigenous opposition to oil corporations and their despoliation is now at a high pitch and only growing. War will be a concomitant to oil extraction as people continue to tire of theft, corporate interference with governance, and ruination of their environments.

Oil in and offshore Alaska is predicated upon the ruination of that environment. Conditions on land and offshore are both environmentally hostile and vulnerable, with weather that makes Deepwater Horizon efforts look easy. No platform, even built on an artificial island, can withstand collision with the massive icebergs that are calving off melting Arctic icecaps. Few watercraft can navigate and the thousands of watercraft trying more or less vainly to stop the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would not be capable of any help.

Prevention is predicated upon finding and developing other sources of energy now. Solar is by far the best bet. The deserts of the planet are perfect platforms for placement of vast solar arrays that would provide power for electric heat, electric vehicles, and virtually all other current energy needs. Wind--really a derivative of solar, since the sun's heat creates the temperature differentials that produce wind--is the best and immediately available second source.

Needs, not greeds.

The days of eating breakfast from the four corners of the planet are done. If you wish fresh mangoes, move to Sri Lanka. Lettuce in January? Learn to grow it in your living room. Humankind evolved from eating local and we will once again do so.

We will see how the end of oil shipping produces new hybrid power for oceanic vessels--time to rediscover sails and fit out ships with solar cells that charge batteries alongside windchargers. No more cheap shoes/toys/shirts/gadgets etc. from China--unless you live there or near there.

The first major step is conservation. Reduce what we produce and cut consumption.

The second major step is manufacturing and installing alternatives we know how to make that fit well into our grid. Photovoltaics are nothing new and we simply need to shift quickly to mass production. We can bail out Wall Street and maintain 1,000 foreign military bases and fight wars in two, three, or four countries? Stop that and go solar electric--vehicles and indoor climate control. Let Wall Street catch up and let the people of the Middle East and Central Asia and Africa and South America decide their own affairs. Our role as global tough guy is so over. The steroids have are killing us and we need to heal or die. Developing solar, wind, and electric vehicles will create for more jobs than shooting people and building bombs.

The third major step is research, testing, and development of new carbon-free, nonradiological technologies to gather and distribute electricity and make hyper-efficient use of it. Within this major step are the immediate bridges to an infrastructure that will sustain society--many recharging stations, for instance. If we would stop the daily contracts for $hundreds of millions to weapons makers and pour a fraction of that into a new exploration of technology to help humankind live well on a healing planet, we would have a far longer species life expectancy.

Our choice. Civil society will make that choice or it won't be made. The failure of corporations and politicians is complete, total and irredeemable. Only we can fix this by taking responsibility for our collective future. We make those choices daily and doing nothing is a choice for extinction. Choose life. All power to the peaceful.