Atomkraft… Nein Danke?

This may be one of these posts where I show real ignorance, but let’s hope it generates discussion. I have the feeling that the arguments around nuclear energy are highly polemic, and not really that well founded. There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction against nuclear power, and my generation has heard since childhood that it is bad for us, and that only bad people support it. Even the anti-nuke logos and stickers seem to have been designed by an advertising agency on Sesame Street.

I guess the biggest argument is that “something terrible could happen, and lot’s of people could get sick or die.” This is true, but it seems a little irrational. There are tens of thousands of aircraft that take off and land safely every day, and the track record improves every year. Why can’t we apply that same skill and discipline in monitoring world-wide energy generation?

Our primary energy source right now is oil and coal. If you factor in illnesses such as cancers and other diseases, it is hard to argue that these are leaving humans unscathed. Add the various wars we have to fight in order to protect resources – the death and injuries, the collateral damage to human life and property – it could be argued that our current energy policy hurts and kills more humans than any reactor accident. I include the long-term effects… just as a reactor accident would contaminate a site for years, it takes generations for a country to recover from a war, and most societies never come back from the brain drain and destruction.

What about waste products? Storing spent nuclear fuel is no more dangerous than our current strategy, which stores spent carbon fuel in our atmosphere. It may be out of sight and out of mind, but it is in our lungs and depleting our ozone layer. The waste issue is what makes alternative energy sources so attractive.

It seems that the human mind can focus on a single helpless disaster more than a series of small incidents. People are horrified by plane crashes, yet many MANY more people die in traffic every day. But somehow that is less visible. The deaths of soldiers and civilians in the war for resources happens “over there” to other people, and seems less prominent. Sure, there are some well-intentioned people protesting foreign wars – often the same people who oppose nuclear power, by the way – but most people just ignore the topic entirely.

Alternative energy sources provide hope, but it doesn’t seem like any version can keep up with growing demand. Sun and wind require a lot of space, and aren’t yielding sufficient energy to serve the current need. Unfortunately, power generation has never been as big a problem as power transportation. You can capture wind energy in the great plains of the United States, but getting it to the coast is a different problem. Simply put, we will need to improve every link of the value chain, from generation through transportation all the way to consumption. We will not simply find a new source that we can plug into the top end of the power grid which will solve our energy problems.

Any government seeking to carve out a niche of expertise should be supporting research, both through tax cuts and direct funding. The same minds that develop computers and software could achieve great things in a short time. But we are not having honest conversations about energy technology. There are a lot of powerful voices seeking to protect existing business, and on the other side are people who dream of a future when alternative energy will make everything better somehow. That is utopian, because it ignores what we need now, what we will need in the future, and what sources are available to us at this time. We need to seek out new energy sources, and we need to develop technologies that make energy use more efficient. But we should be making nuclear energy part of any real future model, and should invest a lot of effort and skills into improving its yield as well as safety.

Facebook

I don’t know what posessed me, but I decided to join Facebook last week.

…as though my prior forays into Social Networking were so successful…

The first few days are overwhelming. I am suddenly in touch with hundreds of people, many of whom I haven’t seen in thirty years. I attended a number of schools, which means I have a much larger circle of people to reconnect with than most others I know. Add in the various online communities I participate in, and it becomes a wide circle of people.

It’s great fun to surf through the players of your own personal history, and see what everyone else has been up to. Most won’t admit it, but the first thing people do when they join Facebook is to see what various ex-crushes and high-school sweethearts look like. The next thing is seeing whom they still might be friends with from the old days. It’s one of the great guilty pleasures of the internet. It’s even more fun if you’ve managed to keep your looks, and can show off a good-looking family and a successful career.

Some of the people are difficult to recognize… I think Facebook ought to develop some kind of forensic app, an age regression software that will show the middle-aged men staring out from their poorly-shot profile picture as the young teenagers in uniforms they once were. Even worse are the members who are unwilling to show themselves at all, and instead post pictures of their toddler, or a favorite cat.

I have to admit it’s a joy to reconnect with some old friends. I find that my instincts were right. Some are living interesting, engaged, and involved lives, whereas others… are posting pictures of their favorite cats. There are some I always thought were a little “thick”, and lo and behold, their hobbies and affiliations bear out what I had already suspected. But in most cases the common ground that made someone my friend has remained in place, and we have moved along the same trajectory over time.

Much more difficult is the Friends of Friends phenomenon. Every time you reconnect with someone, their friends see the connection. Well, many of them will then send you a Friend Request as well… At first I accepted all of the requests, and my network grew exponentially. Size may matter to a teenager, but it has become quickly apparent that I value quality over quantity. I am now “Friends” with people I barely know. It’s these people that are often the most active… they enjoy their network action, and will comment on everything incessantly. Some of it is funny, occasionally it’s stupid, most of it is irrelevant, and all of it is a huge distraction.

I’m not above this kind of behavior, by the way. You can only see someone’s profile if you’re Friends with them… well, I’ll send a Friend Request to people I didn’t know that well back then, but I want to see what their lives are like these days. I figure I can “cancel” the Friendship later (Facebook won’t tell ‘em) but in the mean time I get to see if they’re still as cool (or artsey, or sporty, or intimidating) as they were back then.

But I am ruthless. I will begin “unfriending” people by next week. I’ve already started turning down various invites, especially those of teenage kids. Some of my friends have offspring with their own internet accounts, but I have no interest in filtering what I say… and I am even less interested in what they did last weekend. I have now moved my Facebook link to Internet Explorer. I use Firefox for serious work, whereas the other browser is reserved for spare time activity and frivolous surfing.

Nonetheless, the final verdict is positive. It is proving to be a fun way of staying in touch, and Facebook is well-written… the granular privacy settings that allow you to grant different types of access to virtually every member you’re Friends with ensures that you can have some fun, and still look like a serious business person at the water-cooler on Monday morning.

Poke!

24 Hour Air Traffic

Unbelievable.

The yellow dots are airplanes.

Click the little arrows at the bottom right of the video to see it full-screen… better yet, let it load completely, and then rewatch it. There is a definite ebb and flow of air traffic.

24 hours in one minute:

worldairtraffic0-24h

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In-Game Obama

Reason number whateverhundred I like Obama better than McCain: he’s buying in-game advertisement.

What’s that, you wonder?

Video games have become very sophisticated virtual environments, and the console manufacturers (Microsoft and their XBOX, Sony and their Playstation 3) are enabling advertisement that runs inside the video games. Seeing as a lot of games either mimic sports, or some kind of urban setting, it’s pretty easy to have billboards (or virtual video monitors) inside the game’s landscapes.

So if you’re online pretending to be a Formula One driver, you’ll go racing past a billboard for Foster’s. That’s not just there for realism, it’s actually paid for by the beer-maker. And what’s cool is if you race past that same corner a few weeks later, the same sign will now have an ad for sportswear, or pizza, or whatever the typical gamer might be interested in buying.

So what’s up with Barack Obama? His campaign bought ad space in nine different video games this month… mostly sports and racing games. So if you’re cruising the data-streets at night breaking virtual laws, you will be reminded to vote for the Democratic candidate.

The game consoles are permanently online these days, so it’s easy to update the game code. Even cooler is that they can target it regionally, so it’s only being shown to owners of these game systems in swing states.

Here’s a screen shot from the dubious Burnout Paradise:

The rest of us will be shown Cola ads I guess.

Electric Kool-Aid?

I am an absolute hobbyist when it comes to energy policy. I know even less about energy generation and distribution. But being in the US during this election year is interesting, because energy is one of the big topics. Germany has the same problem of course, but it seems more acute here in the US.

One of the biggest problems (beside how to power all the air conditioners) is the vast distances, and the fact that 70% of all Americans now live in a suburban environment. That means that every American family member over the age of 16 expects to have access to a car. It’s all about private transportation, and putting a couple of buses out on the street is not going to fix the problem.

T. Boone Pickens, former oil man, take-over investor, and current hedge fund manager is aggressively pitching The Pickens Plan. He proposes building wind farms to create energy that would be used to generate power for homes and businesses. This would free up the natural gas that is currently being used at powerplants, and use it for consumption in cars. All this would give the United States a period in which to develop alternative energy sources. Of course, natural gas is not a renewable resource, but Pickens argues that it is cheaper and local, and subsequently a viable alternative to oil for the US. His website site does a pretty voter-friendly job of describing it. It’s a little unclear at times whether he’s identifying a solution to a national problem, or a business opportuntity, but I imagine to a man like T. Boone Pickens the perfect solution is both.

Andy Grove, the man who built Intel, has also put his hat in the ring. In a conversation with Bloomberg yesterday, he summarized his commitment toward electric cars. Note the rather urgent tone he’s adopting – he believes that the battle for resources might drive us to war or cause us to starve, and that we need to act now. I’m surprised he failed to mention Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place, but it seems Grove is supporting teams from Silicon Valley.

Interestingly, both Pickens and Grove consider the reduction of green house gases and the inherent climate change a secondary mission. Their primary concern is keeping the economy from collapsing.

I think the electric car has a big chance in the US. Americans like cars, and they like technology. It just needs to be reliable. More importantly, they need to agree quickly on standards. If every car/company/distributor is going to have a different kind of battery/charger/voltage then electric transportation will wither on the vine.

But when I think about Germany, one thing is obvious when comparing it to the United States: Only in America could private men like T. Boone Pickens or Andy Grove pick up the slack and drive the national agenda. In Germany everyone expects everything to come down from the government, and people fundamentally mistrust anything else. It is clear that Amercan dependancy on foreign oil, and the lack of an alternative strategy for power and transportation, is due to weak leadership. Well, if the government won’t do it, people will. I don’t believe Pickens and Grove came up with these ideas out of the blue. I’m sure scientists and activists laid a lot of the groundwork for them, but they have the civic pride and courage to stand up and do something about the problem they see. I wish we had these kinds of people in Germany.