At Pro Publica, in an article titled Even In Worst Case, Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Will Have Limited Reach Abrahm Lustgarten

. . . spoke with seven top nuclear engineers and scientists to at least establish some boundaries for the disaster’s potential health and environmental impacts. The rough consensus: The long-term and most severe effects from radiation at the plant, where four of six reactors are in crisis and hundreds of tons of spent fuel is a risk, will be largely contained to the area around the plant, affect a relatively limited population and will likely not spread outside Japan. Full story »

by Talbot Eckweiler

Part two in a five-part series.

While driving North on I-90, I caught my first view of the city of Niagara Falls’ skyline. Tall spires of concrete, metal, and glass snaked toward the heavens: the miracle of man, evident in many a metropolis. To the right, in front of the city, squat patches of orange, yellow, red and green huddled together. My eyes may strayed from the road one more moment to watch a wide, rolling puff of hazy gray matter rise off the clustered trees and partially obscure the view of the city.

My first thought: “There’s some sort of forest fire! How am I going to get to the park?” However, there were no siren wails, no fire trucks rushing down the middle of the road. Nothing on the radio suggested there was anything wrong. Full story »

A couple of years ago we were on holiday out in Devon and Cornwall for a week or so, and on the way back stopped off in Totnes. Totnes is a small town—well, not that small. It has a population of 7,000 or so, a good size for a town. That’s an important point, size, as we’ll see. But it’s a lovely spot, with a fine long High Street that hasn’t been completely taken over by chains, a fine bookstore (always a defining criterion), and, well, just a nice feel to the place, lots of tea shops, and several interesting looking pubs, another good sign. I’ve got an informal barometer for the well-being of a place that depends on some complicated calculus that I couldn’t possibly explain involving bakeries, bookstores, libraries, concert venues, tea shops, pubs, being near the water, and walking. It’s an old hippie town too, which makes it even better. Undoubtedly there’s a vinyl store somewhere too. It turns out my instincts were sound in this case. Because Totnes is one of the leaders of the Transition Towns movement here in the UK, and idea that seems to be spreading like wildfire around the world. In fact, they more or less invented the concept. Full story »

Recently released emails written by employees of the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC and other Canadian government workers show that the Embassy directly lobbied the Bush Administration and Congress in an attempt to influence regulations and legislation that could restrict exports of Alberta tar sands-derived bitumen and petroleum. The emails further reveal that the Bush Administration had asked the Canadian Embassy to lobby Congress and to use its influence with key oil companies to convince them to lobby on Canada’s – and the Bush Administration’s – behalf. Full story »

There are times when I think Obama is the smartest politician I have seen in my lifetime, and there are times when I’m scratching my head, wondering what the hell? Most of the latter occurrences arise in the context of Obama’s Justice Department, which, as far as I can tell, has yet to prosecute a single Bush administration official for malfeasance, although I may have missed it if it did happen. Then there’s Afghanistan, which looks like an unholy mess. Then there’s financial reform—or, more specifically, the lack of it, which I trace directly to Obama’s very foolhardy appointments of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, under the aegis of that old charlatan, Robert Rubin. If Obama loses his re-election effort, it will be because he listened to people like Rubin and Summers and Geithner, instead of ignoring them completely, which would have been the smarter thing to do given their roles in creating the mess to begin with.

Then there’s the environmental and climate stuff, where I had high hopes. And I’m very glad we’ve got some EPA enforcement again. But then there’s the biofuels boondoggle, suggesting that Obama is just another farm state senator. Well, that’s sort of ordinary and predictable stuff, the kind of stuff that any senator (or ex-Senator who becomes President) does—look at the otherwise generally admirable Chuck Schumer and his entanglements with the financial industry. But what do I make of this—the Obama administration has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization against China’s renewable energy subsidies.
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One of my lists is currently engaged in a fairly dynamic discussion about “what is a progressive?”

In thinking about the issue, I realized that it might help to ask the question a slightly different way: what would a progressive society look like? Maybe I can better understand what it means to be progressive in 2010 if I reverse-engineer the definition from a vision of the future where things work the way they ought to.

I have argued that the success of the progressive movement hinges on seriously long-term thinking. It’s not about the 2012 elections or the 2016 elections or even the 2020 elections – those fights are about the battle, not the war.

Instead, if we do things properly, if we concentrate on and win the war, what does America look like on our Tricentennial? The following 40 articles suggest some ideas. Full story »

Sooner or later, they will all obediently troop to Iowa. Presidential wannabees of all stripes will march through diners and farms, pressing the flesh and taking the ethanol pledge. Flip-flops may occur, depending on whether someone is 1) leading in the polls, 2) trailing badly, 3) outside Iowa, or 4) speaking after the Iowa caucuses.

We need to support ethanol. Al Gore said that. In fact, he’s always saying that.

I support ethanol and I think it is a vital, a vital alternative energy source not only because of our dependency on foreign oil but its greenhouse gas reduction effects. John McCain said that in 2006.

But in a 2000 debate with George Bush, McCain said: We don’t need the subsidies and if it wasn’t for Iowa being the first caucus state no one on this stage would support ethanol. To which Bush replied: I support ethanol, I completely support ethanol, John. And I’d support it whether or not Iowa was first. But McCain elsewhere said this: Ethanol makes a lot of sense.
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A reader responding to my last article pointed out that increasing exports means selling something overseas that we make here. In January 2004, after three years of the George W. Bush administration, manufacturing jobs stood at 14.3 million, down by 3 million jobs, or 17.5 percent from July 2000. Employment in manufacturing was at its lowest since 1950. In spite of this, the United States has remained the world’s largest manufacturer. What are we making? Airplanes. Boeings. Cessnas. The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II will gross $323 billion in U.S. defense contracts alone in 2010, and Lockheed is also selling them to Israel for $96 million apiece. The UK will want some, too. They have Rolls Royce engines.

It’s pretty amazing that we need all these war birds 20 years after the Cold War ended. Full story »

On May 6, 2010, Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, was invited by the Republican members of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to present testimony that contradicted over 100 years of established chemistry, physics, and climatology. Monckton, a non-scientist who has a long history of making erroneous claims, was seated as and equal beside four scientists with PhDs in their respective climate-related fields.

Earlier this month, a group of climate scientists submitted a detailed rebuttal of Monckton’s testimony to the House. Full story »

As Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin sang solo in the nearby Dodge Theatre, 750 million gallons of water from the 16-foot-deep Tempe Town Lake near Phoenix roared through a burst dam at up to 15,000 cubic feet per second. Fortunately, no one died; no significant property damage occurred.

Eight dam sections made of inflatable rubber constrained the lake, four at each end. The $4.4 million dam began receiving water from the Central Arizona Project in 1999. In 2002, one of the 40-foot-long, foot-thick rubber bladders (covered by a 10-year warranty from Bridgestone Industrial Products) failed, requiring a repair. Tempe and Bridgestone officials have disagreed on how to prevent deflation and enlarging buffer zones around the dam. UPI reported that “[a] design flaw made it impossible to use sprinklers to keep the rubber cool and wet, which likely hastened its deterioration.” Also, said UPI:

Mayor Hugh Hallman told the Arizona Republic that work had been scheduled to start Wednesday on replacing the dam. He added the maintenance crew could have been killed if the collapse had occurred while the work was under way.

This dam was small and young. The average age of tens of thousands of dams tracked by a national database is 51 years old. Because state and federal budgets are fiscally challenged, dams in America are not inspected as often as law and common sense requires. That must change.
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Each day that I drive the 11 miles from my house to the university, I cross nine of America’s 601,396 bridges (as of 2008). Those nine are not likely to collapse. I have seen each replaced or rehabilitated in the last 10 years.

But you may not be as fortunate. You may need to drive across one or more of the 151,394 bridges the federal Department of Transportation lists as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. That’s 25 percent of American bridges. But fear not: Bridges are becoming safer. There were 3,930 fewer such bridges in the United States in 2008 than in 2007.

Whew. That’s a relief. At this rate, America will have no unsafe or obsolete bridges in only 153 years.

The repair and replacement rate of deficient or obsolete U.S. bridges is rising, however. According to DOT statistics, the number of lousy bridges has been reduced by 14,087 since 2000, an average of only 1,565 a year. So maybe (you remember, of course, all that talk about those shovel-ready stimulus projects?) that repair rate will increase, and we will have licked our bad bridge problem in only 100 years.
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You know, that apology…

“I’m speaking totally for myself, I’m not speaking for the Republican party … but I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday,” Barton said.

He called it “a tragedy of the first proportion, that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, a $20 billion shakedown.”

Barton’s point was that BP should pay for damage claims but should be allowed to follow the “due process and fairness” of the American legal system.

I’m certainly not qualified to comment on whether the US president has the right to force BP to cough up $20 billion.  Full story »

With considerable hoopla, BP has managed to fit a cap on the leaking pipe, which it claims is gathering gushing oil at a rate of about 10,000 barrels a day. CEO Tony “I can’t get my foot out of my mouth” Hayward claims that the cap will capture the “vast majority” of the gushing oil. BP has also ramped up spending, which is now running at about $27 million a day. The US Coast Guard is a bit less sanguine, unusual given their optimism to date, and is now talking about the Gulf being “under siege” until autumn. Which runs from late September through late December, it should be pointed out, so that could be another six months. But who’s counting? The natural comparison here is the Ixtoc I spill in 1979, which produced 140 million gallons, to date the largest spill of all time, which this may exceed. It’s good, I suppose, to remember that Ixtoc gushed for nine months. Ixtoc wasn’t deep, either—it was only 150 feet down, not nearly a mile.
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Andy Linter at Beowolfe.com spent some time with Google Maps recently and came up with a visualization tool for the scale of the BP oil slick. When you got to his site, his site grabs your location from your IP address and then moves an overlay of the present size of the oil slick from the Gulf to over your home. The image at right is how big it would be if it were centered near my home in the Denver metro area, Colorado.

After the last census I calculated what percentage of Colorado’s population lived between Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, and it was somewhere between 70-80% of the state. So if that slick were here in Colorado, 3.5 to 4 million people would be covered in oil.

Click on the image to get a feel for how much of your neck of the woods it would cover.

h/t to S&R’s own wufnik

So I’m watching a lot happen on the BP ROV monitor, with several things that look vaguely like R2D2 floating around, lots of lights that look as if they’re in the sky, many cables that look as if they’re stretching out into infinity, and strange looking contraptions giving each other the occasional whack. It definitely has a scifi feel to it. I couldn’t possibly tell you if it’s even live, but it sure looks interesting. Of course, I have no idea if Crap Shoot, as Greenboy referred to it (credit where credit is due, and that sounds about right, frankly), has the remotest likelihood of working. Let’s hope.

Whoa, here comes something really large. This could be it. But how would I know? Maybe there’s something even bigger coming along next. They seem to be cleaning it off now, or something.

I assume Monkeyfister will be providing entertaining commentary over the course of this, as will the thousands commenting here, here, and here.

And this is what they’re hoping to accomplish.

Update: Hank Stuever over at The Washington Post provides us with a TV Review of the gusher.

This should provide hours of an equal mix of horror and fascination. Good commentary can be found here and here, although none of it will make you feel better. Including the stuff about the ocean floor dropping.

Update: Here’s a more colorful one, which appears to be from a different angle.

Another update (May 25)–I swear that damn hole is sinking. Oh, then there’s this. We are in such deep shit.

The image at right is a composite of the most recent MODIS satellite image of the spill area in the Gulf of Mexico and a National Weather Service model of the Loop Current. It was created by Brad Johnson of Think Progress’ The Wonk Room.

The composite image shows that the oil spill area has almost certainly reached the Loop Current, which is one of the major currents in the Gulf of Mexico. The loop current runs right past the Florida Keys and then meets up with the Gulf Stream, and if the tar balls that have been washing up on Key West beaches over the last day or two are from the spill (they may be from older spills years ago), then we should assume that the MODIS satellite imagery is the minimum extent of the spill area. Given that scientists aboard a NOAA survey ship have observed a plume at least 45 km long and 10 km wide that’s thousands of feet below the surface (and thus not visually detectable from the surface), it’s reasonable to say that the observed surface slick does not represent the full extent of the spill to date. And NOAA has now closed 19% of federally-controlled Gulf waters to all fishing (map).

I was heading into work today when I heard someone on NPR talking about the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the rig’s owners Transocean. Apparently Transocean is trying to limit the company’s liability to about $27 million even though it has already been paid over $400 million by the company’s insurers. While I think that’s pretty shitty, that wasn’t really what grabbed my attention during the brief “coming up next” announcement.

No, what grabbed my attention was that the NPR guy said that the rig was “damaged.” Not destroyed, just damaged. And I might be OK with using the word “damaged” if it had only been the explosion and fire. But last I checked, it had sunk in water nearly a mile deep. That strikes me as needing an adjective that’s a bit more… serious than “damaged” implies. Full story »

This week saw a fine example of political gamesmanship from the Obama administration. He let down his base yet again by opening up certain portions of the U.S. coast to offshore petroleum drilling in an attempt to undercut his (supposed) foes across the aisle, and upped CAFE standards. The former has gotten a lot more press than the latter. Neither are quite what they seem.

All the opponents he hoped to undercut with the announcement are still unsatisfied, because he left some areas untouchable. That’s not going to make his environmentalist supporters feel any better, but no matter as the administration seems to believe that there is an infinite amount of room under the bus.

So to make them feel a little better, he tossed them a bone by raising CAFE standards. This man knows hollow, political gestures like he was born to make them. CAFE sucks. It’s a system designed to be gamed, and this grand announcement doesn’t change that.
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In case you haven’t heard, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is dead, done in by the nefarious failure to check a single reference in a 3000 page report. Or rather, that’s what climate disruption deniers want you to think. Here’s what’s really going on.

Back in 2007, Working Group 2 (WG2) of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) put together a large list of what climate disruption was likely to impact around the world. One of the impacts was reduced availability of fresh water due to rapidly melting glaciers around the world, and especially in the Himalayas. One of the specific claims was that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, an amazingly and likely unrealistically fast rate of melting. After an Indian government minister questioned this claim, scientists looked into it and found that the date was incorrect and that internal procedures for vetting references weren’t followed in this particular case. As as result, the IPCC has issued a formal statement of apology for the error.

And if this were about any other topic except climate disruption, that would be the end of it. Full story »