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(My Responses)

Dubious Comparisons.

The authors state that, due to internal political considerations, Japan has repudiated certain long-term commitments of the Kyoto Protocol, taking effect in ten, or twenty, or thirty years. This paper was of course written before the earthquake, but a naive reader might get the impression that the Japanese nuclear accidents during the earthquake were somehow related to Japan's distinctive policy.

Japan is an island, or, rather, four islands. It has an oceanic climate, rather than a continental climate, similar to Western Europe, and in contrast to the United States. Its electricity requirement, on a per capita basis, is roughly comparably to that of Western Europe, and about half of that of the United States, with much less in the way of daily surges associated with air conditioning in this country. In Western European terms, Japan is not an outlier as far as nuclear power goes. It has about as much nuclear power per capita as Belgium or Germany, less than France, and more than Britain.

The singular thing about Japan is that it has just taken a massive earthquake and tidal wave-- and has come through in fairly good order, considering.

The authors make a lot of dubious comparisons. For example, in note 37 of the full paper, they refer to the state of New York's renewable energy target of 24% by 2014, and the state of California's target of 33% by 2020, seemingly much higher than Japan's target of 1.63%. Leaving aside whether these are comparable data (the American figures include increased efficiency in energy usage, and there is more scope for increased efficiency in a continental climate than in an oceanic climate), the authors lump everything into one big bucket, labeled "renewable," and do not ask how much is traditional hydro-power. They neglect to mention that New York proposes to meet its target with hydro-power coming from the James Bay project in Quebec. A Japanese equivalent would be to build an undersea electric power line to Vladivostok, and proceed from there to Irkutsk, and draw upon the power of the great Siberian rivers. Apart from technical issues, that would involve political complications of the highest order. Parenthetically, I understand that the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, with its own hydro-power developments, is pursuing undersea cables to Nova Scotia, in order to bypass Quebecois obstructionism. Likewise, the hydro-power resources available to California reflect the existence of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Rocky Mountains. California, Oregon, and Washington contain most of the population west of the Continental Divide-- obviously, they have vast hydro-power resources in their hinterlands. Hydro-power is cheap if you can spare the land, but if you have to displace people, that is something else again. Experience shows that dams sometimes give way, especially under such provocation as earthquakes. When that happens, there is a flash-flood. In building dams, one has to take account of who lives downstream. In a densely populated country, such as Japan, that can be difficult.

The Japanese simply chose not to unilaterally commit to being the world leaders in green energy, doing things other people did not do, over the next thirty years. I realize this may be a disappointment to "green" enthusiasts, but it is not unexpected.

My resonse to Jan Kunnas, History Offers Hope that We Can Reduce the Risk of Global Warming, HNN Post, Aug 3, 2009

08/06/2009 06:31 AM

http://hnn.us/articles/100828.html

History is not a Substitute for Engineering.

I found Jan Kunnas' essay uncomfortably diffuse, and when I went and looked at the posted introduction of his dissertation, that was not much better. It did not compare favorably to much shorter business-school case-studies, which are expected to be produced in a few weeks, or to military staff college paper, which is typically expected to be produced overnight ("The Panzers are rolling. Make up your mind, fast!"). Kunnas talks vaguely about technological changes without spelling them out. Energy policy is not so complex a topic that one has to shroud it in statistical regression, or proceed by historical analogy. We understand how machinery works. We don't understand how the human mind works. When the professional scholar tries to approach a mechanical problem as if it were the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution, he tends to get lost in Rube-Goldberg-isms.

A quick bit of Googling and Wikipedia-crawling reveals that in 1977-80, about 2500 Megawatts of nuclear power plants (Russian-built and Swedish-built) began operating in Finland. Furthermore, nuclear power and District Heating/Cogeneration, taken together, make up a major share of Finland's electric supply. The natural gas which fuels the district heating power plants comes from West Siberia. Of course, the Siberian gas fields were largely opened up in the 1980's. Yes, naturally, those changes would have had a substantial effect on sulfur emissions. A reasonable proposal for reducing Finland's carbon emissions would involve combining smart drilling with deep geothermal, in effect, producing artificially, by remote control, what nature has supplied in Iceland. One would drill wells down to, say, 10,000 feet and then turn sideways and drill large numbers of collection galleries, and circulate water through them to reach boiling point. This is not a new idea, of course. Wily Ley devoted a chapter to the subject of geothermal energy in his _Engineers' Dreams_ (1954), and reached the point of an "artificial geyser."

Carbon reduction is basically just a question of committing the necessary funds. It needn't involve very many people materially altering their lifestyle, if they don't want to. There is a political question of how the public comes to accept the necessity of such funding, and _that_ is within a historian's grasp. For example, one could presumably write about the politics of district heating. It might possibly turn out that the people who were promoting it were trade unionists or whatever, and that the people opposing it had involved fantasies about their urban houses really being out in the wilderness, and were prone to invoke the symbolism of the old pagan gods. If so, that might turn out to be a worthwhile topic to study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Finland

http://www.energia.fi/en/news/energy%20year%202007%20-%20electricity.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Finland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#Finland

http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/national_energy_grid/finland/EnergyOverviewofFinland.shtml

http://www.naturalgas.org/naturalgas/processing_ng.asp#sulphur

[In response o Kunnas's complaint that Ihad misundersood him, I repliedthat:]

RE: http://hnn.us/articles/11858.html
http://hnn.us/comments/60973.html

Here Is An Example

All right, I'll bite. Look at this previous post:

http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=60407#60407
in:
http://hnn.us/articles/11802.html

The root issue is that Gerald Posner and Daniel Pipes are political journalists pontificating about what is in essence an engineering problem-- how to get usable oil from a damaged/contaminated oil field. To the best of my knowledge, neither Pipes nor Posner has any identifiable claim to be considered an engineer. Furthermore, the statement of impossibility, being inclusive, is one which only the most distinguished of engineers is entitled to make. It implies that the speaker knows all there is to know about engineering. Quite frankly, the problem does not seem as difficult as the Manhattan Project, or the logistic aspects of Operation Overlord.

Does it matter whether they are Liars?

I am not greatly interested in whether Pipes and Posner are liars or ignorant fools. The latter are more dangerous. As one commentator remarked about sincerity: "Everyone's sincere! Easiest person to fool is yourself. "

I think you haven't quite grasped the whole concept of "virtual reality" and "telework." The workers would not be in the oil fields. The workers would probably be in India, fifteen hundred miles away. They would be operating the machinery via electronic controls and long-distance telecommunications, experiencing the whole business as if they were playing a video game. They would no more be afraid of the radioactivity than you are afraid of the fire-breathing dragons in the more conventional variety of video game. A bulldozer might have twenty or thirty little video cameras mounted on it, enough to give the driver a better view than he could ever have from the driver's seat. The bulldozer would probably be fitted with "fly-by-wire"-type controls similar to those in advanced airplanes, designed to keep it pointing in the same direction until specifically directed to turn. The workers would probably be safe enough in Abu Dhabi, but if they feel more comfortable back home in Mumbai, why not accommodate them? Robots are used to repair nuclear reactors now. Of course they get contaminated, but they never leave the reactor enclosure. If they break, they are simply replaced, and shoved off to the side. It is better to be wasteful of machines than of men.

You understand, the things I'm saying about your people, I've also said about Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone ("De-Industrialization of America, " etc), so it's not a partisan thing. The Neo-cons are basically sixties leftists, and they all think about the same way, whether or not they changed sides. There is a certain technophobia which runs through their thinking. It's not just ignorance, but a pervasive resentment of people who know how to control technology well enough to adapt it to their needs. If you are making an argument which hinges on technology, then of course you do have to understand technology.

05/19/2005 08:30 PM

05/25/2005 05:02 PM

In the first place, the cited article

Sanjiv Singh, The State of the Art in Automation of Earthmoving
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~ssingh/pubs/asce97.pdf

is eight years old. That is a very long time in terms of electronics. In the second place, the author is talking about peacetime economics. He is mostly concerned with the extent to which computers can replace human labor, and save money. Wartime economics are something different. So are disaster economics. There are helicopters rusting on the ground beside the power plant at Chernobyl, and they will never leave Chernobyl. They were used as mobile cranes to dump gravel on top of the reactor, in order to seal it off. By the time it was over, of course, the helicopters were much too "hot" to be removed. It is not generally considered economic to use helicopters in that fashion, but, you will agree, there were special circumstances.

I think I would be inclined to take exception to your denigration of "toy" robots. In the film, Flight of the Phoenix, a German model airplane engineer says to a stubborn American pilot (as near as I can remember): "Mr. Livingston, a toy airplane is something you wind up and it rolls along the floor. A _model_ airplane is something entirely different. It flies. If anything, the stability requirements are greater because there is no pilot to correct for errors." If the kind of robot one buys at Radio Shack lasts for five minutes in the field, it may still have done enough work to justify its modest price. One good question to ask about cheap, expendable systems is: if one fails completely, are you any worse off than you were before? If the answer is no, then a ninety percent failure rate might be perfectly acceptable.

To the extent feasible, one would bypass as much infrastructure as one could. One would use slant drilling to intercept oil wells a few hundred feet underground, rather than fighting fires at the surface. One would use a self contained piece of equipment, basically similar to an offshore oil rig, except that it would ride on a massive array of small trucks. You would have a system of leveling beams which is fairly tolerant of any one truck failing, and the system might only be good for one mile an hour, but that is enough. Most of the well sites are not more than a hundred and fifty miles from the sea, and it's a one-way trip. The idea behind this system is that as much as possible of the assembly gets done in Singapore or Korea. You try to design in enough redundancy so that most malfunctions can be coped with by shutting down the afflicted component, and using another one. That's the sort of design approach that the U.S. Navy takes to building warships. It's just that the oil industry has traditionally been rather more tight-wadded.

Back in 1991, the conventional wisdom was that oil fires were hard to fight, because you were supposed to fight them in heroic Texan fashion, a la Red Adair, with minimal equipment. The clever Hungarians didn't think so. They took a surplus Soviet tank, a surplus Mig fighter jet engine, and a non-surplus American industrial robot arm, and fitted the whole business up for remote control. The tank drove up to the burning oil well, the jet engine blew the fire away from the tank, and the robot arm fitted a plug over the well top. That was the real secret-- that the Hungarians didn't feel compelled to prove that they were more Texan than the Texans.

Another point: you do not have to attain perfection. You merely have to get the quantity of onsite work down to the point where it can be done by the inevitable "danger junkies."