An artist’s rendering of the BWRX-300 small modular reactor from GE Hitachi,
which is slated to start operating in Canada in 2028 GE Hitachi

While such reactors were once thought to be a solution to the complexity, security risks, and costs of large-scale reactors, the report asks if continuing to pursue these smaller nuclear power plants is a worthwhile endeavor in terms of meeting the demand for more and more energy around the globe.

The answer to this question is pretty much found in the report’s title: “Small Modular Reactors: Still Too Expensive, Too Slow, and Too Risky.”

If that’s not clear enough though, the report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.

“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”

Read more at:  https://newatlas.com/energy/modular-nuclear-reactors/

Apr 27, 2024
Sand Batteries: Check out EnergySage! https://www.energysage.com

The future of sustainable energy requires us to be able to store the excess energy we produce. At this time its a daunting process at large scale, that’s where sand batteries come in. While they only store thermal energy, they might just be the solutions for home heating!

Feb 25, 2024
Small Modular Nuclear Reactors are yet another apparently promising ‘silver bullet’ style solution to the Net Zero challenge. All the reliable, safe, baseload power of large centralised nuclear power stations but without the huge cost overspends and crippling project delays. What’s not to like, eh? Great on paper…but do Small Modular Nuclear Reactors pass the ‘sniff test’ in the real world?

David Hartsough is a Co-Founder of World BEYOND War, a global movement to end war – making it as illegal to kill people outside countries as it is inside! He has been Waging Peace since meeting Martin Luther King at age 15 – from civil-rights sit-ins to blocking nuclear weapons plants at LIvermore Laboratory. He’s blocked trains carrying munitions to fuel Central American wars — enforcing international law as laid out at Nuremberg. He’s Waged Peace in some of the most dangerous and war-torn places on the planet — including the Philippines, Iran, Kosovo and even the Soviet Union. Arthur met him in the early 60’s when David, a fellow Quaker, led the San Francisco to Moscow peace march — to end the cold war before it ended all of us!

At a time when the US and the World are teetering on the bring of tyranny, ecocide and nuclear extinction, we’ll talk to David about how we can inspire the frustrated and angry to gain real power by renouncing violence and waging peace!

David recommended these books: “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, “Waging Nonviolent Struggle”, “Global Security System: An Alternative to War” Also the film “A Force More Powerful” and these websites: ChooseDemocracy.us, WorldBeyondWar.org, Nonviolentpeaceforce.org, ThePoorPeoplesCampaign.org and Divestfromwarmachine.org

David invites you to buy his book “Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist”! You can read free chapters in PDF format here.

In the name of Jesus, who said “love your enemies,” and from the Inner Light of my own heart, I mourn the death of every person killed in war, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani of Iran included. May his children find consolation on the loss of their father.

To all those American politicians and commentators who have just said loudly, “No American will mourn the death of this man,” I ask this question: Is this the best that America can do? Is this all that America can do? How can we ask God to bless America if all America can do is kill people, assassinate leaders of other countries, and then threaten to kill even more people after that?

There MUST be a better way. We cannot possibly be so smart that we can put rovers on Mars, and then be so dumb that we can’t work out our disagreements with other countries. Even our high-tech military equipment silently accuses us: If we are smart enough to build fiendishly complex nuclear weapons, can we really be so stupid that we can’t talk to people in other countries? Something is deeply out of whack in our current psychology. (You can see my online library of conflict resolution resources at www.communication-skills.net )

Here are some more of my reflections on the current plague of violence and irrationality:

War is full of painful contradictions that burden and diminish all of us, participant and bystander alike: We Americans tend to celebrate our snipers, bomber pilots and stealthy special forces as noble and heroic warriors, while at the same time we denigrate as beastly assassins and terrorists the snipers, bombers and stealthy special forces of particular other countries.

To embrace such a double standard is to retreat into a form of socially approved irrationality edging on madness, a madness that can turn us into monsters, both on the stage of the world and in our everyday lives. We have seen this split-mindedness before in recent history, and it is at work today in ethnic cleansing campaigns around the world. How would people in the United States feel if some natural disaster caused U.S. citizens to flee to Mexico, and the Mexican government responded by separating children and babies from parents and put the children and babies in cages?

Jesus counsels us to treat others as we would like to be treated.  The sounds of endless military marching bands can never bang loud enough to drown out this quiet teaching.  Somewhere in our hearts we know that it is true.

Violence is often excused with the idea the “I had no other choice.” This is often put forth to blame external circumstances for our violent actions. But the question remains, in the ten years before the moment of violence, how much effort did we put into finding and practicing alternatives. In the short run, a person may be overwhelmed by circumstances. But in the long run, I believe that we will get what we put a lot of energy into preparing for. (Our trillions of dollars invested over decades in creating machines of death shows every other country what we have come to believe in.) What seeds are we sowing? What are we preparing to reap?

Right now it seems like there is no way out of the growing spiral of violence. But I am convinced this is exactly the moment when we most need to keep looking for a better way, to keep believing in a better way, to say, in loving defiance, they may blow me up, but I will never accept that this was the best that we could do.

Forgiveness and the Sorrow of War
(my personal name for a sculpture by Josefina de
Vasconcellos  at Coventry Cathedral)

TEAM HUMAN: Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and UK journalist George Monbiot
discuss the world we are making TOGETHER and how we could make it differently!

By Dennis Rivers  (2019 version)

In the face of the runaway industrialization that is now poisoning planet Earth, many people find themselves wrestling with deep issues about both the survival of life and the meaning of life. Confronted with pictures of Chernobyl victims and stories of frogs dying around the world, I find myself searching for ways to combat the downward trend. And one of those ways is by argument. How can I (or we) persuade the powers that be to change course. A few years ago Time magazine featured a cover story on tigers. Tigers are facing extinction in all their natural habitats. One person quoted in the Time story, a man from India, summed up the implications of the tiger survival issue by saying that if we can’t save the tigers from extinction, we probably won’t be able to save ourselves.

Well, as Samuel Johnson once said, “Nothing concentrates the mind like the thought of the gallows in the morning.” So here are some thoughts at the edge of the abyss.

One possible approach to our predicament is to look to nature herself for some hints as to how to extricate ourselves from our current predicament. This is the approach taken by my philosopher friend Ty Cashman in his article, “Nature, Activism and the Middle Way.” I refer to this as the ‘outside’ view, because it attempts to make sense of our situation by backing up and trying to present the big picture about human and ecosystem survival.

One problem that I see with looking to nature in this way, is that in nature everything passes away, without exception. Species come and go. Solar systems come and go. We can try to learn the wisdom of survival by observing organisms and ecosystems, but this view-from-the-outside will not tell us why we should struggle to survive. And since we are creatures of intention and relationship, we need some compelling reasons and goals to get us moving, and we need someone to relate to.

Ty says “It [nature] does need to be protected from the overwhelming human assault on it.” While I find this to be deeply true, this also seems to me to be way too distant a perspective. Viewed from the outside, the Universe (nature) is not in danger. It was here before we got here, features a lot of giant explosions,  and will be here after we’re gone. It’s human beings who are in danger of killing themselves off by killing off their sister and brother creatures in a spasm of greed and ignorance. My contention is that the outside view will not move people to save themselves and the Earth, because from the outside view it’s all gonna dry up and blow away anyhow, and/or I probably won’t be around when the bills come due. And there is nothing in nature, viewed from the outside, to suggest that humans are more important or worthy of survival than the trilobites that roamed the ancient seas.

What I’m calling the inside view is the view from inside my own life, from inside of being a person. Now while that might sound a little narrow, don’t write it off. From inside of our own lives we have access to resources that the outside view can’t touch. First of all, I have experienced my own sexuality, my urge to create. As Erik Erikson observes, sexuality is not just the energy to make new life, it is also the energy to build a world in which that life can flourish. So our much-maligned sex drive could actually be a positive force for helping the world, by helping us to feel involved with and connected to the natural world. Identifying more with the children who have come out of our bodies and our lovemaking could stir up powerful energies for nurturing the natural world as the world we give to them.

Closely related to sexuality is one’s sense of beauty. From the outside point of view, whether or not I experience beauty would hardly seem to matter. But if we look more deeply into the subject, we find that pleasure (that primordial form of beauty) has played a large role in the evolution of life. Color in plants and the eyes of insects co-evolved. The fragrance of flowers and the sweetness of fruit evolved to draw animals into a creative partnership with plants. (And those plants are still working on us. Just ask any rose gardener.) The experience of beauty and our yearning for beauty are actually powerful resources for human survival. The slaughter of dolphins is ugly. Chernobyl and the Bhopal chemical plant are ugly! A forest in balance is beautiful. One of the reasons we are in our current predicament is that industrial societies disconnect people’s sense of beauty in order to make them obedient cogs in the great (ugly) machine. Let us honor and encourage people’s capacity for beauty and delight. Such people will work to make the world a more beautiful place.

Finally, there is the issue of relationship. Human beings are literally made to relate. Our most powerful energies come from connecting our lives to the lives of other people and the lives of animals and plants. While religious people might question the above assertions and emphasize relating to God (or the Buddhamind, in the case of Buddhism), a close look at most religions shows that they emphasize a lot of compassionate person-to-person relating. So one powerful reason for working to save the world from ecological catastrophe is that I am here with you. It’s not just me alone contemplating a world gone haywire. (It is interesting to note, in this regard, that it is now an often repeated principle concerning soldiers in war, that they do not fight so much to serve their country as they fight to save their comrades.) All this implies that friendship could play crucial role in the future of eco-politics. We will do with and for one another and for all our children things we might never do for an abstract principle. And perhaps we could associate our abstract ecological principles with the people, such as Rachel Carson and Wangari Maathai, who have embodied them in a particularly radiant way.

Will humans survive? I don’t know. But I imagine that if we do it will be because we mobilized energies inside of ourselves and between us that were sexy, nurturing, delightful and deeply friendly. Lets survive together so that we and our children can experience the beauty of the Earth, and of all Her creatures, and of being fully alive.

Barack Obama greets nine-month-old Josephine Gronniger
(Public Domain photo by Pete Souza)

This week I’ve been thinking about the struggles going on to protect water supplies on the Standing Rock Reservation, and about the Alberta tar sands projects only a few hundred miles to the north.  For native peoples around the world, the Earth Herself is sacred, and Her waters as well.  So poisoning the Earth, or building industrial projects that create an ongoing unknown risk of poisoning the land and water, are not just material or political issues.  They are spiritual and religious issues as well.  This is not a theoretical risk at all.  Large amounts of  Dine (Navajo) land and water have been permanently poisoned with radioactive waste from uranium mining, causing a giant spike in cancer rates.  And the Alberta Tar Sands photos speak for themselves.  So native peoples have little reason to trust the assurances that they, their land, and their water, are not in danger from the white man’s projects.

Reflecting on the corporations willing to endanger someone else’s water supply in order to get rich building oil pipelines, I think it is time that we gave a proper name to the psychological illness that has been haunting us for several centuries: PIDM: profit-induced-destructive-mania. I intend to rally my friends within the counseling profession to have PIDM added to the DSM-5 as a recognized mental illness.

There are many strands of PIDM at work in U.S. culture. The long term effects of tobacco and greasy hamburgers kill hundreds of thousands of people a year, yet most of us prefer to look away from the spectacle of corporations enriching themselves by selling slow death behind smiling advertisements. We accept this as fairly normal, without really working through the implication that some forms of mental illness may be fairly common. The late psychoanalyst Arno Gruen explored this at length in his book, The Insanity of Normality (which I helped to republish after it was withdrawn from publication by its bought-out publisher).

People suffering from PIDM, a syndrome I see as a spiraling disorientation of both thinking and feeling, experience a chronic narrowing of the attention until they no longer recognize the people, animals, plants, oceans, forests and waters essential to their own survival here on Planet Earth, and begin a autism-like repetitive pattern of screaming, “Drill, Baby, Drill!”. PIDM is the economic parallel to Lord Acton’s observation that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, namely, that profits tend to disorient, and enormous profits disorient enormously. The contemplation of giant wins appears to disable people’s normal survival instincts. The same processes of disoriented thought appear to be associated with nuclear power as well, where the hope of generating mind-boggling amounts of cheap electricity causes otherwise sensible people to abandon their critical faculties, leading to catastrophes such as Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Just as anorexics cannot bear to face that fact that they are killing themselves, PIDM sufferers cannot bear to face the fact that they are killing their own planet, and the life-support system for their own children and grandchildren. Because of this self-injury component, some elements of self-hatred and suicidal ideation cannot be ruled out.

PIDM is like a Zika virus of the heart (it causes people’s hearts to get smaller). We need new clinical intervention strategies to reconnect EVERYONE on the planet with their own life energies (approaches such as Joanna Macy’s “Work That Reconnects”) and slow the lethal spread of PIDM and poisoned aquifers.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/military-force-criticized-dakota-access-pipeline-protests/