Memento Mori

It’s strange how, when casting around for ideas to form the day’s blog entry - not always an easy task, especially as this particular blog is not themed - sometimes a forgotten document reappears at random from the hidden depths of one’s laptop. I’ve just experienced just such a serendipity. I was thinking of putting something down about a lovely piece I read in this weekend’s Financial Times Magazine, or even something on national debt with relation to Edward the First: but while I was idly searching for some note-taking templates - free, of course - a link I clicked on opened the app I’m now typing this on. Focuswriter is a tool I used for some time in the earlier days of the blog, but for some reason had stopped using some time ago. Anyway, the thing about the app is that it opens with whatever document was being worked on - or read, in this case - previously. The article that popped up onto the screen, was a 2017 paper, submitted by a Michael Peterson to the ‘Hazardous Time-scapes Workshop’ at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment & Society in Munich, Germany.

As I’d had half an idea the other day to comment on the increasing political pressure being put on what will almost certainly be a new Labour government to go down the new nuclear route rather than placing all their focus on renewables such as wind, solar, geothermal and tidal: a route which carries a lot of baggage, environmentally, economically and logistically. To claim the environmental high ground on behalf of nuclear energy is plain stupid: it may be a high energy density source of [heat], but the trade-offs in [very] long-term and [serious] environmental pollution & accident hazards far outweigh the benefits. Likewise, any claim that nuclear energy is cheap is completely bonkers: when the costs of building, commissioning and after a very short working life, decommissioning a nuclear power plant are taken into the final accounting, the costs are horrendous. Add to this the fact that a nuclear plant’s output can’t be just turned off and on at will according the rise and fall of electricity demand; which then necessitates the construction of some means of temporary storage of the surplus electricity produced, which is technically very difficult and expensive to achieve.

So far, temporary storage has been effected by the use of pumped storage schemes, but these rely heavily on very specific combinations of geophysical and topographic features, such as mountains, lakes and plentiful water-sources: viz North Wales, for example. All well and good, one might say, but the baby bear’s porridge landscapes necessary to fulfil all the requirements necessary are very few and far between. There are alternatives, such as high density fluid variants on the pumped storage theme, which are in the early stages of development at the moment, but which show great promise. Or, of course, there are large battery farms which have huge potential [pun intentional], but again are in the earliest stages of development and rollout. Anyway, the point is that the useful nature of these storage solutions applies equally, if not more so, to renewables, which - tidal and geothermal generation apart - are variable and often intermittent by nature.

If you add into the energy generation palette the rather more established technology of hydro [admittedly again geospecific, and with its own particular ecological impact, but tried and tested and on balance relatively low impact], and the arguments for new nuclear simply don’t stack up except in terms of its high potential for investor return: not only is it an energy-dense solution, it is profit dense to boot, with investors in and out with a profit long before the final costs hit the table, when of course that’s society’s [our] problem. The biggest problem with nuclear though, is the depth of its influence/impact ecologically into the very far future of the human race, which brings me back to the paper that appeared on my screen earlier tonight. How to communicate the location of, and danger from, of whatever nuclear waste ‘repositories’ have been and are being established in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is to be hoped, however - by me at the very least - that we will have stopped churning out and dumping the stuff before this century is out, but common sense seldom prevails and the profit motive is conveniently myopic when it comes to the planet’s future.

The thing is that nuclear waste’s capability to harm - its toxicity to life - continues for more than just a generation or so: Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, which means that its toxicity will remain for around a quarter of a million years. Modern humans have been around for just a little more than that: around 300,000 years. We’ve changed a bit since then, and so has human language and communication, so communication between us and our descendants at a distance of time of that order of magnitude would be as difficult - impossible - as us having a meaningful conversation with early man. And given that records of even very important stuff regularly gets wiped out by happenstance and the progress of history: ie storage media obsolescence, politics, war and sundry natural disasters, we couldn’t possibly guarantee that any reference material that we left to identify these ‘safe’ storage facilities of nuclear crap would suffice to give sufficient and ample warning to our hapless descendants. Sobering thought... BTW, I think I’m going to continue using Focuswriter again with my newly-acquired, old-style ‘clicky’ keyboard: it feels comfortable, like an old pair of shoes. Catch you later...