Breathing Hard

I love the gusting winds that sweep in off the Pacific and provide the city of San Francisco with free air conditioning and strange wind patterns. Two streets can run parallel; one is always a gusting wind tunnel, the other calm or slightly breezy. If you get around on foot or bike, you develop an overlay of wind patterns to accompany your mental map of the city streets.

The winds also keep me cool when I go out on longer rides. For every awful headwind there’s a tailwind that is almost like a second motor. I’ve had headwinds that had me standing up and cranking on the granny gear on level ground, and tailwinds that could sustain a 10mph coast. I was back in Atlanta a few years ago. On the day I was heading home, a real strong wind blew. I remember thinking it was pretty fierce, but not as strong as one particularly gusty stretch on the side of the San Bruno Mountain that I ride. Later, while waiting in the terminal, the local news was reporting on the wind because it had blown down some trees and a billboard.

Radiation from what everyone is calling the ‘stricken’ nuclear Fukushima Nuclear plant has been detected on the west coast. The tone of coverage is calm, reassuring, telling people not to panic. The radiation is so diluted over the Pacific Ocean that it is not harmless here. I'm not panicking or scared, but I'm worried.



I don't how much of the chasm between what is said and what can be seen coming from Tepco and Tokyo is just a cultural miscommunication. The Japanese are more understated than the British, and maybe the difficulty of translating Japanese to English is playing a factor too, but from here it looks like the Japanese are under a spell of self-induced delusion and denial. The Japanese government has downplayed the scale of the disaster at every turn and, forced by what everyone can observe, has slowly had to concede how bad it is, bit by bit, or risk losing all credibility. They've been straddling that line distinguishing propaganda that is just laughably wrong to the kind that has enough of a kernel of truth that if you squint at it for a bit, you can see how someone might put it that way.

The U.S. government and other assessments of the situation have been far more dire than Japan's. But even there still exists a gap between what we can see and what they are saying. The U.S. government said the situation was serious, but not too bad. Then you find out that they turned around a battleship, the USS Ronald Reagan, heading in to assist and positioned it 100 miles offshore after getting blasted with radiation. The U.S. evacuation zone is a little bigger than Japan's, and then you see that the U.S. government was concerned enough 175 miles away from the site of the meltdown to relocate another aircraft carrier.

So, I suspect the U.S. government is downplaying the crisis and will become less forthcoming as toxic winds blow in across the Pacific, in agreement with how they always soft pedal bad news during times of crisis that reflects poorly on a business or political interest. Our government’s behavior is a reflection of the nuclear energy industry, which sprung into action as soon as word came around about Fukushima to do damage control. Obama is in the pocket for nuclear energy, even creepily shilling for the nuclear industry in his remarks to express solidarity and concern for Japanese people in the wake of the tsunami and the meltdown at Fukushima.

Whatever our government says about the radiation heading our way, concern should be a few ticks higher. If they say there is nothing to worry about, it’s probably worth worrying over. If they say it might be trouble, it’s probably already trouble. If they tell you to get out, you are probably dead. Anyway, I’m not anxious or fearful about it because there is really nothing to be done. I’m depressed thinking about it, but not because I’m worried about me getting poisoned, though I’ve found myself wondering if there’s unfortunate stuff blowing in on that Pacific wind while riding or in other moments while walking around and having an otherwise enjoyable day. Nothing you can really do about it.

When I was in college, one of my computer science professors related a story about his experience as a consultant to the U.S. Navy. He was on a team updating an existing software system to port it from a previous model of fighter jet to the next generation. Anyway, after updating the software and debugging it for months, the time came for the live test. They installed it on several of the planes and are out on the runway while pilots taxi, waiting to take off. One of the navy pilots is sitting in the cockpit, waiting to take off, when, on total impulse, he pushes the button to bring in the landing gear. Well, the system lacked a feedback sub-system to check if the plane was in the air or not when this routine was invoked. The landing gear retracted and the jet crashed to the tarmac. The bug had existed for years and was installed on hundreds of previous generations of fighter jets and had missed their own months of development and  battery of tests. They were not careless or stupid people who had developed and maintained this system, it's just that no one had thought to look for such an obvious point of failure. When complex systems fail, it is often due to something that looks very simple and obvious and easily avoided in retrospect.

Nuclear energy shills and apologists are incensed about Fukushima, pointing out that the technology was outdated and questioning the stupidity of building a plant on a fault line. They think that with the proper management, nuclear energy is perfectly safe. They tell us, with titanic self-regard, that the safety systems of today’s nuclear energy cannot fail. A system is always infallible until it isn’t, and then failures look obvious in hindsight. For economic reasons, the best laid plan of every safety system is prey to taking shortcuts, pushing things a bit past their limits, of patching together a solution and accepting long term risks for short term needs. This will never change. The irony of is that those who condescend to the Japanese for not upgrading the plants technology or building it near the ring of fire and believe that no one else will repeat such dumb mistakes are exhibiting the exact same delusions of technological infallibility that led to the plants being built near a tsunami prone fault-line in the first place.

Obviously, things will go on after this mess is contained. But projecting out a few decades, these events are going to happen more frequently due to interrelated factors. One is that we are determined to sustain the unsustainable model of industrial capitalism. Among the problems is that energy is getting more expensive and there is a limit on its availability, and we’ve already proven a willingness to accept significant risks to keep things going. This is not going to change that equation and we are going to keep building these plants. Mistakes will be made, regrets expressed, and then we’ll keep going until much of the planet is contaminated enough to make anything living there sick and old before they're young.

The second problem is that as we go kicking and screaming into the process of de-industrialization, highly sophisticated and complex technologies will become brittle and increasingly difficult to maintain. So we are going to be building more of these plants at the same time that we are more likely to take shortcuts, have unexpected disruptions, and make do with less.

Its begun to occur to a growing number of us that infinite industrial growth is unsustainable, and the optimists believe that if we just think and plan with enough care and intelligence, we can have a more sustainable system, or least make it sustainable enough that collapse recedes far off into the distance. That's really the idea or hope tying environmentalists, green technophiles, and the global warming movements together - really much of the progressive political movement from financial regulation and so on operates with the same optimism - if we manage ourselves better, then we can design a system that prevents systemic ruin brought on by short sighted greed. That's what's depressing about the meltdown at Fukushima that is different than other man made tragedies. It kind of settles the question of our civilization, and not in favor of the optimists. 

By settled, I don't mean that civilization will end because of the fallout from Fukishima. I mean that for this to even happen, we are more or less doomed to repeat this folly until the aggregate toxins in the land, water, air and our bodies from industrial wastes undoes us completely. If the optimists were right, then Fukushima would have been impossible. Nuclear energy is unique in our technological portfolio, the dangers of it are well known and feared, unique in the sense that exposure to its waste afflicts several generations with deformity and infirmity, the waste exists on longer timeline than we are used to planning for, and the margin of error is so slim and the risks so great. Furthermore, it makes no sense from a big picture economically or as an energy source. Now, if our species couldn't avoid that a risk that made no sense at all for the usual reasons, a vested and narrow set of interests trumping an inattentive and easily manipulated majority for the pursuit of profit, then how are we to believe that any of the green energy projects are going to mean jack shit? Or that we can mitigate global warming with emissions caps? It's absurd and tragic enough to justify laughter and tears at once.