This is a piece that was written for my Creative Nonfiction class, Spring 2009 semester. It is considered a Lyric piece. There is a good chance I’ll use this in my applications to grad school so any comments are appreciated.

I saw a bird today; it separated from a flock poised on a parking garage above the crowded city street where I sat, my toes tapping the brake, longing to see green. The bird broke from a random pattern and floated softly to fall upon the lamppost to my right. It caught my eye and seemed to shutter for a moment, either finding something strange in my gaze or merely brushing the morning dew from its feathers.

Another living thing, I thought.  Not human.  How odd.

A horn shattered the moment; the bird was gone, replaced by a new kind of bird delivered by the man in my rearview mirror. I grimaced and eased onto the accelerator.

Driving is a simple thing when you do it every day: automatic and instinctual. It makes me think that perhaps nature was a bit forward thinking in providing us such capacities to numb our senses, multi-tasking so that we could think of other things while our bodies took us to our destinations.

It’s not the same when walking through the woods. Once, a long time ago, I spent a whole week in the mountains hiking through a segment of the Appalachian trial.  Sixty miles, seven days, everything you need on your back. Every day the most reckless (or maybe just more fit) of our crowd would trudge on ahead while my friend and I maintained a leisurely pace, soaking in the dense forest as we walked. On one day we hiked over an entire mountain. At the top I saw why people went to mountains to gain wisdom. The world stretched before me; I felt like I could reach out and gather it into my arms.  At night we slept in hammocks. The stars were so bright that the leafy branches above me seemed to contain a million fireflies hovering in the cool night breeze.

Now it’s nearly seven years later and the only route I travel, day after day, involves nothing but concrete, plastic, and metal.  I wake up in my cozy little apartment and travel down sidewalks, avoiding the dew-filled grass, to sit in my car as it takes me far away. I step out in a cathedral of concrete where I leave the car to sleep while I’m gone. I walk down paved paths to monstrous buildings of brick, glass, and metal. People are the animals, buildings are the trees. Trees and birds have become like weeds and insects, pests to be casually noticed but mostly ignored.

I had another instance, once, camping with a friend up in North Carolina. There was a lake that, in the dead of night, we walked through the dark to examine. As we drew near the distant sound of crickets melted away and all sense of feeling withdrew.  It was not a lake we approached but the manifestation of infinity. The perfectly still lake, in that perfectly quiet night, in that perfectly distant world—one could not see where the earth and sky began. All was black expanse of stars. I had a feeling and a thought: life could be about this.

I don’t have time for that anymore. But I have not forgotten. When I walk in from my car at night sometimes I pause and look around, longing for a coherent world. At first I only find patches of grass and isolated trees. But then, for a moment, this noisy world will fall quiet and the feeling will return. I look upward and see the stalwart and undying figure of Orion, always looking down over this world we have both possessed and created. Perhaps, I thought, we have missed something in the course of our busy lives, our crowded history. This is God, and we no longer see her. All we have is concrete and birds and humans; that’s it.

Even as early as the 1940s and 50s, people worried about peak oil and the inefficiencies of every day life.  Back in the 50s, however, there was one clear solution: we could take the same technology that had provided nuclear bombs and turn it into a clean and efficient source of energy that could meet all of our growing energy needs. In 1955, an international conference was called in Geneva in which countries openly exchanged previously top secret information on nuclear technologies, it’s leaders calling this the first step towards a new world peace and cooperation. Earlier, the legendary physicist Niels Bohr pressured Roosevelt and Churchill to work together with the Russians on nuclear technology to prevent a deadly arms race, promote cooperation, and push nuclear technologies in a beneficial direction (they refused). All around the world people developed an immediate fear of nuclear weapons and intense hope for nuclear power.  It could save the world or it could destroy the world.

Now new technologies like genetically modified foods (GMOs) and nanotechnology are being heralded as  the next saviors of the world (just read a bit of Kurzweil) even as we find that the problems of fifty years ago are becoming the emergencies of today.  The world is still fragmented, nuclear proliferation happened, global warming is getting worse, we’re running out of oil, and too much of the world still lives in conditions of poverty and sickness. What happened to nuclear power? Wasn’t it supposed to save us? Wasn’t it supposed to yeild tremendous solutions, even bringing world peace?

The reasons why nuclear power failed to deliver even a fraction of its promise is complicated but there are five major highlights that people who were involved and know the history will tell you all contributed to the radical failure of this amazing new technology. These things serve as lessons for our current technologies and also as we try to resurrect nuclear power as a viable alternative source of energy.

1) Nuclear has an automatic dread-factor
A lot of research has gone into understanding why in the 70s and 80s, people insistently opposed nuclear power.  For the past two decades, hundreds of papers have been published by psychologists, philosophers, and political scientists trying to understand why the public became suddenly outraged and set against nuclear power. Many experts simply declared the public irrational. Others, however, realized what should have been obvious: nuclear power is scary.

Nuclear technologies started up with two cities getting obliterated in an instant, using a single bomb.  Following that the entire world exploded into an arms race that led to bomb shelters and world-wide fear. How can you expect someone to trust something that uses the same technology that you are most deeply afraid of, that a good portion of the population is convinced they will die of (at least this is the general impression I get from talking to people who lived during the time)?

If the connection to Nuclear weapons isn’t enough, then the fear of nuclear waste will be.  Nuclear waste has been called the “Achilles Heel” of nuclear power.   It is radioactive, it doesn’t go away, and no one wants to have it near their home.  In the field of risk management this is called Nimby-ism. Not-In-My-Back-Yard.  Over the past two decades, the US has spent over $90 billion just preparing for the Yucca Mountain waste depository in Nevada, only to shut the project down due to controversy.  We still don’t have a place to put the waste so we store it on-site at the nuclear reactors. For a while, members of the U.K. were just dumping it into the sea.  That’s just what we need, radioactive fish!  Or at least that’s what anyone will think when they hear about it.

The first reaction of experts is to point out statistics and tests to say that this stuff isn’t nearly as dangerous as it seems and that we really shouldn’t be afraid of it.  Nuclear power is far safer than many other technologies, including the automobile, and it’s waste is much less toxic than most alternatives, including coal and oil burning plants.  Their reaction was to try to correct the naive public, shouting loudly that the technology was safe and there was nothing to worry about.  But it was the scientists who were being naive. There is much more to the public’s dread of nuclear power than mere statistics. For instance, renowned risk-psychologist Paul Slovic, points out that a large portion of the public judges risk based on the level of Dread they feel over it and the level that the risk is Unknown.  Nuclear power is a classic case of an unknown, dreaded risk–you never know when there might be an accident or what is being done to prevent an accident and if there is an accident the results will be catastrophic.

But instead of reacting to mitigate and reduce the level of dread and unknown, scientists simply tried to convince people it was safe, which made the public even more suspicious of the scientists, engineers, and managing elite. And in the end it is the public concerns that win out in a democratic society, rational or not.

By the time Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl washed over the news, most people wanted nothing to do with nuclear power.

A picture of the Genkai Nuclear Power plant by dominiekth via Flickr

2) Nuclear Power isn’t completely safe.
Three-Mile Island was proclaimed very loudly to be a freak accident. In fact, if you look over the incredible number of odd coincidences that led to the accident it is hard to disagree. Some of the stuff was just bizarre, like the fact that there was a manufacturing tag hanging over one of the warning lights that could have let the operators know that there was a problem.  The supporters of nuclear power made sure that they played up this fact, insisting that such bizarre chains of events were incredibly unlikely and could easily be prevented if we were careful. (To see a full video of the Three-mile island incident, I’d recommend viewing the 1999 PBS documentary on it)

Following the accident, the government asked a few prominent scientists and academics to explore why the accident happened and what could be done about it. Two theories became prominent, both put forward by sociologists. LaPorte developed the high-reliability theory that suggested that the nature of a system is what makes it dangerous (it’s a nuclear power plant!). To make it safer we need to develop a system that has what is called “engineered safety,” in which the machine shuts down safely in the event of a problem, normally with multiple backups and feedbacks to handle problems. If the system fails, you simply add more backups and checks to make it safer. Eventually you have a highly reliable system that with sufficient safegaurds to be considered safe.

In contrast to this, Charles Perrow proposed the Normal Accident Theory.  This states that it is because systems are complex that accidents happen and that these accidents are normal and therefore will continue to occur.  Accidents are inevitable when you have a system that is interactively complex and “tightly coupled.”  This means that anything that has many parts working together, with operators having little understanding of what is going on and little or indirect control over the results, you are bound to have some sort of unanticipated events that will not be handled. For example, they talk of normal accident theory in regard to spaceship accidents like the Challenger accidnet. It is easy in retrospect to know that an O-ring failed, allowing rocket fuel to breach the external fuel tank and cause an explosion. But the system was too complicated for them to predict before hand. A rocket ship simply has too many parts and there were too many unpredictable factors. For example, the day was particularly cold, which allowed the O-rings to contract and let the fuel through.  Furthermore, there was no way for anyone to know why the accident happened or to prevent it from happening from the beginning. It is also important to note that the O-ring itself was a safety mechanism that failed, so simply adding more would not necessarily prevent the accident. Even if it could have, it is only possible to know that in retrospect.

The same idea is applied to Nuclear Power plants. This is an immensely complicated system; just take a look at the diagram below.  This system is incredibly complex and has many parts working together to ensure the safety of the whole.  If one fails, others might as well, despite redundant protections. Three-mile island occurred because of a string of unpredictable events that failed despite and in some instances because of the protective measures put into place.

There is one hope that nuclear power could be safe but it predates the major nuclear era to a time when academics were still toying around with the earliest reactors. This is a concept called “inherent safety.”   As Freeman Dyson explains in Disturbing the Universe,

“Inherent safety” [means] that its safety must be guaranteed by the laws of nature and not merely by the details of its engineering. It must be safe even in the hands of an idiot clever enough to by-pass the entire control system.

In other words, the goal was to make it so that a Nuclear plant simply couldn’t melt down.  The odd thing is, if you were to toss this idea around today people would probably think its ridiculous. But that is what Dyson and his colleagues did over a summer through a company called General Atomic all the way back in 1956. The result was a small “safe reactor” called the TRIGA that was sold to hospitals and universities for the purposes of creating radioactive materia for treatments and study.  While it was not 100% safe (what is?) the way it was built dramatically reduced the likelihood of a meltdown because the radioactive core automatically and quickly stabilized even when the control rods are pulled out rapidly from the core. To accentuate the difference, for an engineered safe system, when an emergency happens you put systems in place to handle the problem. For an inherently safe system, the possibility of the emergency is counteracted by the way it is built. In this case it completely takes out the possibility of a meltdown due to the control rods being removed.   However, the core concepts of the TRIGA were never implemented on a large scale into Nuclear Reactors, nor was this central aim of “inherent safety” applied to other reactors.  In our new generation of Nuclear Reactors we need to revive this concept if we are to build reactors that can be considered safe.

3) Nuclear lost its innovative drive.
TRIGA is evidence that a group of enthusiastic scientists, engineers, and businessmen can get together and create innovative ideas that overcome the initial problems seen in a new technology. It is this excitement that surrounds a new technology that provides rapid innovations and a flourishing of new ideas. We saw this with the computer industry and now with the Green technologies and hopefully we are starting to see it again with the auto industry. It doesn’t necessarily have to be young people just getting out of college (the people working on TRIGA were all established scientists who had worked on the nuclear bombs a decade earlier) but there has to be a fundamental air of innovation. It is well known in the business world that a company that gets stale and static will not last long. Innovation is the key and the key to innovation is that you have people who actually enjoy what they are doing. To again cite Dyson:

The fundamental problem of the [nuclear] industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors. It is inconceivable under present conditions that a group of enthusiasts could assemble in a schoolhouse (as they did to build TRIGA) and design, build, test, license and sell a reactor…Sometime between 1960 and 1970, the fun went out of the business. The adventurers, teh experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control…The accountants and managers decided that it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors. So the weird reactors disappeared and with them the chance of any radical improvement beyond our existing systems.

Because of this loss of excitement, Nuclear Power quickly became a static technology stuck in an era of inefficiency and expense. It sounds an awful lot like what happened with our space program or the auto industry. Just look how much of a struggle it has been to get electric cars on the market?  As we’ve seen with the electric car, a lockdown on innovation will perpetually make it appear like it just isn’t “possible” to have a “cost efficient” electric vehicle.  On the other hand, if GM had not crushed its EV-1 (see Who Killed the Electric Car?) we might actually have had the innovations for efficient battery-powered vehicles by now. Likewise, if Nuclear Power hadn’t been so locked down and constrained by the mass of bureaucracy sucking all the life out of the industry, we might have a much safer, cheaper, and environmentally friendly Nuclear reactors by now.

4) Nuclear could never handle its political weight
The nature of nuclear technologies means that this bureaucratic intervention was virtually inevitable.  The political importance internationally and internally was too great to leave it to the hands of the free-market. This has always been the stance with nuclear technologies and most likely always will be. The same knowledge and technology to build a nuclear power plant can be applied towards building a nuclear bomb. Therefore, Nuclear Power inevitably means a lot of state control, secrecy, and protection.  Nuclear Power becomes easily identified with “The Man” to the young hippies frustrated over increased government control, a sentiment that has largely continued today.

This was exacerbated by the political backing that nuclear power received early on, developing into what is known in political science as an “Iron Triangle.”  An Iron Triangle is a monopoly of power on any policy due to intense cooperation between a congressional committee, a regulatory agency, and the producers (For example, there is a current Iron Triangle in agriculture preventing any change in subsidies)  This nuclear Iron Triangle consisted of The Atomic Energy Commission, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, and the large utility companies who built the reactors. They prevented any major changes in the legislation on Nuclear power for twenty years before opposition forced its break-up.  So not only did nuclear involve big government but it had tight control over the industry, thereby becoming perfect targets for a politically frustrated new generation.

Now that generation is leading the world and the suspicion still lingers.

5) Nuclear took too long to fulfill its promises
When a technology is as hyped as nuclear power was, people get tired of hearing of it after a little while.  If they keep hearing about it before too long they begin to get suspicious.  This is already happening today with GMOs, people are beginning to think that modified foods are just a new way for companies to control farmers and force into new markets (see The Future Of Food@Hulu).  It is natural for people to be suspicious whenever the people who are proclaiming a new technology will save the world are the only people who seem to be benefiting.  This is a particularly touchy situation with technologies that take thirty, forty, or fifty years to start to finally flower.  For instance, there was a lot of excitement around AI during the 60s and 70s but after two decades of only minor accomplishments, people don’t even take forecasts of intelligent robots seriously even though weak forms of AI permeate our society.

Once again we find that Dyson sums it up beautifully

If we had been wiser, we might have foreseen that after thirty years of unfulfilled promises a new generation of young people and of political leaders would arise who regard nuclear energy as a trap from which it is their mission to liberate us. It is only natural that the dreams of thirty years ago should not appeal to the young people of today. They need new visions to keep them moving ahead.

So it is that Nuclear Power faded away and for a good thirty years no new nuclear reactors were built in the United States. Now, after all that time, the first new nuclear reactors are being built just a few miles away from where I live here in Columbia, South Carolina. Perhaps our new generation is finally breaking through these problems that have plagued this otherwise remarkable technology. Perhaps this time around we can use Nuclear Power with a little more wisdom and with a little more caution and care than we did previously. The promise of harnessing nuclear energy has not changed and the problems of peak oil and a crowded world has only gotten worse. If we are to move forward towards a sustainable earth we must use everything in the playbook, and nuclear energy is the best item we’ve got there for the time being.  So it goes that this old technology may redeem itself in the eyes of Americans and finally fullfill its potential to improve our lives.

This article was written using notes from lectures by Neil Woods, Political Science Dept. University of South Carolina. Prof. Woods does not endorse any of the statements in this article. It was also written using research paid for by the University of South Carolina’s Nanoscholar program which I participated in during the 2008-2009 school year.

Picture Credits: Three Mile Island Diagram via World Nuclear Association; First Nuclear Picture by mandj98; Last nuclear picture by koert michiels

I’ve mentioned in two posts recently the effect that globalization has upon the power of individuals (one on the dilution of opinion, the other on the illusion of ineffectiveness). However, there is an increasing trend that is of utmost importance that I’ve, thankfully, noticed is coming to the forefront lately. This is the idea of maintaining an emphasis on the local while simultaneously thinking globally.

We live in a world that is full of paradoxes, in which we are forced to think on multiple levels if we are to flourish as a society and as individuals. This is one of those paradoxes. We are an incredibly complex and interconnected society.   This can give us the impression that what we do in our local area makes no difference. Indeed, this is the impression we get as people living in the United States. We live in suburbs where we are disconnected to everything–we have to drive to work, to school, to the mall, or any other place we want to go. Driving gives one a sense of distance from the place you live, so that instead of seeing a local community you see various places connected by an unknown distance of roads measured in driving time rather than physical, tangible distance.  Our lives are filled with large multi-national corporations that treat us with a distant friendliness and small businesses are replaced with Wal-Marts and various other chains.  Our food is grown far away in large corporate industrial farms.  Local news organizations have given away to large aggregate media conglomerates who focus, inevitably, on the larger national news.  Likewise, local politics becomes drowned out in national politics so that you’ll hear no end to presidential races but easily miss out on the much more important (as far as effect in your immediate life) local races.

But all of these things are results of our own social construction and are not the reality. The reality is: you still live in a local community. Local politics still govern your life. Your local area is of great importance to your lifestyle. The climate, the resources, the culture–all of these things are still tied to your area despite our increasingly global world.  This is much more evident in large cities, where the election of mayor is still a big deal and everyone is aware of the actions taken in the city, or the few remaining small communities, where people still know the mayor and own the land that is affected.  But for the majority of Americans, I get the impression we’ve lost our sense of locality.  Our nationalized media and emphasis on national politics is proof.  The end result: we neglect our local communities, allowing large corporate developers to tear apart our land, pave over large swaths of it with concrete and asphalt, and neglect the varieties and particulars of our local area.

What we need to do is learn to balance our sense of interconnected global (or more aptly, national) community with our local one.  This is increasingly coming to people’s attention in three ways:

1) Environment and Peak Oil
With concerns about global warming and environmental destruction mounting, people are again realizing that the way they treat their local communities is incredibly important. It isn’t just the world that is falling apart, it is your backyard as well.  In a recent Powerdown show featured on Treehugger they featured this idea quite prominently.  It combines the idea of Peak Oil with climate change and local environment, an idea also featured in the End of Suburbia video. As is stated in the show “While our climate says we should change, peak oil says we have to.”  With the end of cheap oil, we’ll have to revert back to local organizations to support a lot of our consumption. While we are developing alternative sources of energy, we are beginning to realize that we cannot just keep consuming energy needlessly. So not only is it important that we preserve our local fauna but that we have to create more self-sufficient communities.  We must walk out that front door and realize that the new, needlessly sprawled development of cookie-cutter houses is not only tearing apart your local environment but is building on an insustainble way of life.  It is not harming someone across the world, it is harming you, because you live in that local environment.

The video features several movements that have gained momentum to try to build more locally organized, self-sustainable communities.  My favorite part of this is the variety that is incorporated into the ideas there, that solutions are not the same for everyone, everywhere but dependent on local needs, culture, climate, and resources (a lesson we learned from the Green Revolution).  The idea is that people on a local level explore solutions as local communities. Many of these solutions are unique to the area and different places will develop different ideas about how they will create a sustainable community. This is incredibly exciting–it offers the potential to reforge the identity of small communities, create a rich variety of solutions and innovations, and create more ecological human civilizations.

For those who want to watch it, here is the video.

The Powerdown Show – Transition Towns and Energy Descent Pathways from Rob Carr on Vimeo.

2) Return to Local Business
There is an excellent trend among businesses to reorient themselves to local communities. In no small part this is due to the increased proliferation of the internet which is providing businesses with cheap and immensely beneficial ways to cater to the needs of localities. In June’s issue of Wired, there were some excellent articles on how this is reshaping the economy. This quote, from the introductory article, is particularly pertinent:

What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. Those bets get riskier and the payoffs lower. And as Wall Street firms are learning, bigger companies are going to get more regulated, limiting their flexibility. The stars of finance are fleeing for smaller firms; it’s the only place they can imagine getting anything interesting done.

As venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, “It turns out the rule ‘large and disciplined organizations win’ needs to have a qualification appended: ‘at games that change slowly.’ No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed.”

The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.

The three follow up articles emphasize how this is revamping the economy to favor small businesses, even to the point that socialism is redefined in a new, much more beneficial form.  The best example they use is how Detroit can be and ought to be remade using smaller car companies.  Overall, the impression is that we are finally moving past the era of large corporate exploitation and onto the era of a global world, formed of millions of interconnected small communities.

3) Return to Local Politics
The concept of nations has always been somewhat arbitrary.  There is an excellent blog-entry that I found at a site called The Daily Clarity on whether the concept of nation-states is even relevant anymore.  The impression is this: nation borders are somewhat irrelevant. They change and always have changed due to any number of circumstances. Nations always attempt to form a national identity and use this identity to craft wars and to take advantages of resources.  But, as Stuart Ford says in his entry,

Countries, in today’s age, are  not  big enough individually, with very few exceptions,  to deal with the global issues  that confront their populations – security, environment, the global economy, resource allocation and on. These issues need collectives such as the UN, the Arab League of Nations, G20,  the EU, NATO and on to make any meaningful impact, as the issues are larger than any individual country’s borders.Making head-roads on these issues requires co-operation and collectivism of many nations.  Countries had to combine their efforts, resources and intellects to make any meaningful progress on the major issues of the day.

The counterpart of this is that all of the issues of individual communities become overlooked by these large supra-national organizations. And as they should be. Local issues should be handled by local politics while global issues should be handled by large global bodies.  What we ought to see in the coming years is a split between the two that rids us of the unecessary political middle steps. Instead of states and nations, I would suggest that we could have large global organizations representing whole regions and then small local political bodies on the level of cities. Not only would this be conducive to the dual-nature of a global-local world but also cut out the unnecessary bureaucracy of middle players that our new social organization could potentially bypass.

Conclusion
I have often heard people lament the end of local communities and the rise of globalized forces. These people, however, neglect to see the interesting dynamics that I have illustrated here, when local communities can actually become more important in a global world than they ever have been in human history. It will be exciting to see, moving forward, how these dynamics play out in our rapidly developing world.

Photo Credit: anjan58 via Flickr