The Way the Future Blogs

100 miles north of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, two large ocean currents — the Kuroshio and the Oyashio — converge. (NASA satellite photo.)

“20 Chernobyls happening at once.”

That’s how Arnold Gundersen, a licensed core operator and former nuclear industry senior vice president, described the situation at Japan’s wrecked Fukushima atomic power plant — not when the Force 9 earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11 but in late June. As he described in an interview for Al Jazeera, reported on in the New York Times:

“Chernobyl had one core that melted down to a blob at the bottom of the reactor. TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, announced that Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed. They are all now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor. The molten core has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn’t exist. Nobody knows how to pick up that molten core material from the floor. There is no solution available now.”

Nor, Gundersen stressed, can you walk away and let it cool down by itself. “You probably have the equivalent of 20 Chernobyls happening at once. They are all in desperate need of being cooled.”

The present attempts to cool them down involve flooding the molten core with sea water. But much of the sea water flashes at once into steam, and much of that mass remains in the atmosphere as water vapor. Some of the rest of it falls as rain. The mass fraction that was not immediately transformed into steam stays in the ground or the underlying aquifer as liquid water — and water vapor, rain, steam and aquifer are all intensely radioactive.

We are already seeing strontium at 250 times the allowable limits in the water table at Fukushima. Contaminated water tables are incredibly difficult to clean. So I think we will have a contaminated aquifer in the area of the Fukushima site for a long, long time to come.

Six months or so back a local outfit asked me to make some predictions about the future. That’s not my regular line of work, of course. Sf writers do not predict the future, they just speculate about what sorts of futures might come our way, but I was feeling lucky so I took a shot. “By 2050 A.D.,” I said, “the whole stretch of southwestern states from Texas through Southern California will be officially designated a desert.”

And what do you know? This Sunday’s New York Times had an interview with Richard Seagar, head analyst of Southwest weather studies at Columbus University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Asked how long he thought the Southwest drought might persist, he said, “You can’t really call it a drought. . . . You don’t say, ‘The Sahara is in drought.’ It’s a desert. If the models are right, then the Southwest will face a permanent drying out.”

Not the only place, either. The same models that show Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix at risk of becoming “ghost cities,” show the same for more distant urban places like Perth, Australia, whose city planners warn that it may be the first to go.

Want another prediction while I’m hot?

All right. By 2050 the tornado belt, which has slowly relocated closer to my own area in Northern Illinois, will inhabit Canada’s southern provinces, and you can bet on that! (Of course, you might lose.)

Diagram of the workings of The Plant, an urban aquaponics farm in Chicago.

The idea started with Chinese rice farmers long ago They had learned that rice grew best when they flooded the fields, then drained them to harvest the crop at the end of the season. That was good farming, but why waste all that water that was doing nothing for all those months? One of them got the idea of throwing a bucketful of baby tilapia into the fields when they planted the rice seedlings, and, sure enough, then when they harvested the rice they also harvested a handsome crop of eating-sized fish,

That was what first started the tilapia boom a couple of decades ago, but an Illinois city farmer named John Edel has carried the idea a lot of steps farther. When tilapia eat they also excrete, and the water is fouled; when the are marketed they have to be degutted and beheaded, producing more waste. Edel puts the waste water and its polluters in a tank that he seeds with bacteria. The bacteria eat the waste and turn it into high-grade fertilizer … which, of course, is what closes the circle by making his next year’s rice crop grow so abundantly.

His objective, as Edel puts it from his indoor factory farm, The Plant, in Chicago’s old Stockyards district, is, “Nothing leaves the plant but food.”

If you happen to be in Chicago on May 7, you can tour the place, during its open house.

Shrimp farmed near Golconda, Ill. (Photo by Leah A. Zeldes.)

A few months ago, in the interests of full disclosure, we published a gourmet recipe for lobster bisque which may have made it unlikely that some of our readers will ever eat lobster bisque again. We now turn our attention to shrimp, perhaps the fastest-growing foodstuff we obtain from the seas in this 21st Century of ours.

If you’re not eating a lot more shrimp in your family’s diet these days you are out of step with the rest of the world. Shrimp are not only as tasty as all get-out and a great source of protein but they have proved beautifully easy to farm; over the last few decades the world’s farmed shrimp production has grown from under 100,000 tons a year to well over 3,000,000.

That is, it’s easy if you don’t trouble yourself about “externals” — that is to say, that sometimes large class of business costs that businessmen don’t usually worry much about, since they aren’t the ones who have to pay the bill. (For example, smoke damage to public health or fish-killing runoff from old-fashioned factories. See my essay on the subject, “Fossil Fuels and Bad Bookkeepimg.”)

In the case of the shrimp farms, almost all of which are set up in warm climates on the shore of a saltwater bay, the two biggest externals are ocean pollution (China’s coastal waters receive 4 billion tons of wastewater from industry every year — and 43 billion tons from shrimp farms) and destruction of mangrove forests, which are cut down to provide sites for the shrimp farms. (A bad business tactic. Those mangrove forests are where many kinds of food fish avoid predators in their earliest youth. Absent the forests, the baby fish die.)

Some of the higher externals are the costs that all us animals have to pay — shrimp, mighty elephants, cuddly kittens and you and me. That is, we eat and therefore from time to time we have to, excuse the expression, poop.

You might think that for shrimp that couldn’t matter much. They aren’t very big. In fact, they’re what you might call shrimpy, not that much bigger than my thumb.

But there are a lot of them, you see. And they all keep themselves busy all day long, eating and pooping, and the end result (sorry) is tons and tons of shrimp feces that have to be somehow disposed of.

Something needed to be done, right?

Something was. But before I tell you what that something is, I have a suggestion. If you enjoy dropping in on a Red Lobster on one of their all-the-shrimp-you-can-eat days — and especially if you have a weak stomach — I suggest that you postpone reading the rest of this to a later date. Maybe much, much later.

Continue reading ‘Want Some Seafood, Mama?’ »

 

In Montpelier, Vermont, the factory of the company called National Clothespin closed its doors for good in 2009. This is a pity, because it was the last of its kind. Now no one in America makes wooden-spring clothespins. So Americans must buy imported ones (if they can find them) or, alternatively, go to the home electric tumble-dryer or to the local Laundromat.

But, of course, you know that already, because, according to New Scientist, 80 percent of Americans already own a dryer, and most of the others keep Laundromats in business.

There are two troubles with that. The first is that doing laundry with electric help costs 10 percent more than the clothespin kind and adds the same amount to a household’s energy use. If we returned to the clothespin we could retire a few coal-burning power plants. And an electric dryer is one of the most dangerous appliances you can admit into your house, causing 15,000 household fires every year.

Progress is a wonderful thing. But sometimes what looks like progress ain’t.

Plant life at The High Line in New York City. (Photo by Ryan Somma.)

The Hydra Club’s Free Private Park That Could Have Been

Way back in the day, by which I mean in the years around 1950, the place to go in New York City, if you wanted to meet science fiction authors, was the Hydra Club. (One of these times I’m going to try to write a little piece about the Hydra Club. This, however, is not yet that time.)

Anyway, the club didn’t have a home of its own. Our members-only gatherings were usually in someone’s apartment; for more elaborate events, we rented space from a hotel or from one of the city’s membership clubs. A few of our members were unhappy with that arrangement, wishing we had a permanent home to call our own, so we could keep things in it. What kind of things? Oh, maybe furniture. Or books. Anyway, things. And at one of the members-only gatherings somebody — if I remember correctly, which is not guaranteed, it may have been Charley Dye, Katherine MacLean’s husband — came up with a suggestion. He knew of a neighborhood where there were a whole bunch of apartments for rent for practically nothing, so if we wanted to sing, or if Fletcher Pratt wanted to give us a drum recital, around some midnight, we wouldn’t be disturbing anybody, because nobody lived there to disturb.

We checked it out and found it was true. So we rented one of the apartments, I believe a three-roomer, for something (memory says) under $20 a month. And we found out why they were so cheap, and so vacant. The apartments lined both sides of an avenue running somewhere south of 14th Street. Down the middle of that avenue, though, ran a one-way stretch of elevated railway line, and along that line, at odd hours of the day and night, now and then ran a locomotive pulling a few refrigerated freight cars full of beef and pork carcasses connecting the butchering headquarters of the city, south of Canal Street, with the nation’s rail network at about where Lincoln Center is now.

Deterred by the noise, and the dirt, and the general ugliness of the thing, not to mention the problems in driving and parking on that avenue, nobody wanted to live there, and hardly anybody did.

I cannot imagine why some billionaire developer didn’t see the possibilities and make a few billion more. For that matter, I can’t see why none of us did; surely there was a way to make quite a lot of money out of the situation. But we didn’t. We stayed there for a few months, and then the nay-sayers among us won out. The apartment was hard to get to. It got dirty between meetings, from that soot and ash that inhabits big-city air, and no one wanted to clean it. And, perhaps most telling point of all, after a meeting broke up at somewhere around midnight, nobody really enjoyed walking through those dirty, dark and apparently unpoliced streets. So we gave up our little home from home and returned to the life of gypsies.

And time passed.

 
Time passed, and the city wove its magic. You might not expect much from that magic, because the major ingredients it had to work with were only soot, fly ash and bird poop. But they were enough.

There were no trains on that elevated railway any more. Much of the railway itself was gone because smaller-minded developers had seen the possibilities here, or at least small fractions of them, and most of the elevated structure north of somewhere around 23rd Street was torn down, the outgoing animal carcasses, and the returning chops and steaks, then transported by trucks.

Okay now, it’s quiz time.

Q. What happens to any flat surface left exposed to the air in New York?

A. It gets dirty.

Q. What happens to that dirty layer if you don’t clean it up?

A. It accumulates more layers of dirt.

Q. What happens to those accumulated layers?

A. Birds flying overhead poop onto them.

Q. What constituent of bird poop has evolved to make that a way of reproducing itself?

A. Plant seeds.

And so it was. The plant seeds, well supplied with fertilizer, watered by the next rain that comes along, grow. That’s just about inevitable, but nobody seems to have anticipated it.

What did happen was that the City Council at last decided to get rid of that remaining stretch of elevated railway, so they sent people to those apartments to give the very few tenants who lived there the good news that they were going to tear it down. And the word the people sent back was, “Like hell you are! We’re hiring a lawyer.”

And then the emissaries climbed up to the top of the structure, and what they saw took their breath away. A riot of wildflowers twenty blocks long, where the seeds transported in bird intestines had germinated and grown into the absolute best wildflower display in North America. It had been the little secret of the people who lived along that stretch of roadway, and they were not going to let it be destroyed. And it hasn’t been.

 
Well, it’s been changed some now. The city fathers weren’t going to ruin this self-starting wonder. They weren’t going to preserve it for just a few local families and their most trusted friends alone, either. They’ve civilized it. There’s a broad footpath that runs the length of it now, with drinking fountains and Porta-Potties and exhibits of quite nice local art and all that sort of thing, all kept spanking clean, and what they’re now calling The High Line has become one of the city’s tourist attractions most relished by the cognoscenti. And nobody built it. It built itself.

And ain’t nature grand, if you just leave it alone to do what it does best?

 
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