I intend to leave this page up as a little time capsule of my experiment in learning and sharing learning. I hope people still find it to be useful.

Please forgive me for the long piece. But as someone with a lot of knowledge about pesticides and their use, and organic, new and novel farming techniques, I found this article by Scientific American to be an appalling hit piece against non-conventional agriculture. It's so laden with misdirection, half truths and outright lies that I feel the need to address it directly. The 'myths' that the author presents are already very much on the minds of people concerned about the future of our food system, but the way they are used here is highly deceptive, and twists what could be a thoughtful criticism of the industrialization of organic agriculture into a broad and baseless attack upon non-conventional agriculture as a whole. Allow me a moment, and let me demonstrate how these myths, though grounded in truth, are distorted into slanderous lies by the author. But, before I even get to the myths, a few statements in the opening paragraph deserve some scrutiny.

"In the past year or two, certified organic sales have jumped to about $52 billion worldwide despite the fact that organic foods cost up to three times as much as those produced by conventional methods. More and more, people are shelling out their hard-earned cash for what they believe are the best foods available."

This statement sets up the central premise of the article: that if you spend your money on organic food you are a fool who is being ripped off. But at its core is a lie. Indeed, if you go to a supermarket, and buy organic food from the veggie section, you might pay up to three times more for foods which are labeled organic. You won't necessarily, but you certainly could. However, if you go to a farmers market, enroll in a CSA, or grow the food yourself with your own sweat equity, you can actually pay less for food grown with organic methods than you would pay for some flawless but tasteless conventional veggie in the grocery. If you grow it yourself, you end up spending a tiny fraction of what you would pay at the store. You can even grow heirloom varieties that taste great, and are great for you, but can't be easily transported to the store regardless of whether they are grown conventionally or using organic methods. As a corollary example, if I go and buy batteries at a supermarket, or a photo shop, I might pay far more than I would pay if I bought equivalent batteries online, but that doesn't mean I am a fool for buying batteries at all.

A huge misdirection is hardly a good way to start an article out, but it gets worse from there. Let's address each of these 'myths' one by one.

Myth #1: Organic Farms Don’t Use Pesticides

"When the Soil Association, a major organic accreditation body in the UK, asked consumers why they buy organic food, 95% of them said their top reason was to avoid pesticides. They, like many people, believe that organic farming involves little to no pesticide use. I hate to burst the bubble, but that’s simply not true. Organic farming, just like other forms of agriculture, still uses pesticides and fungicides to prevent critters from destroying their crops. Confused?..The top two organic fungicides, copper and sulfur, were used at a rate of 4 and 34 pounds per acre in 1971. In contrast, the synthetic fungicides only required a rate of 1.6 lbs per acre, less than half the amount of the organic alternatives."

Notice the misdirection there? Just because 95% of people polled said that their top reason for buying organic was to avoid pesticides does not mean that 95% of people don't know that pesticides of various sorts are used in organic agriculture. A large portion of those people are probably buying organic to avoid specific pesticides, like the highly toxic insecticides widely used in conventional agriculture. The whole point of the organic standard (weak as it is, in some ways) was to restrict pesticides to those that had a very long track record, and are widely regarded to not damage the environment when used properly. Copper and Sulfur compounds, though less effective per pound (that is why more has to be used) work fairly well. Copper can be toxic in moderate doses, but Sulfur (though it is an irritant) isn't bad at all with an LD50 of around 5 grams/kg. You'd have to be grabbing handfuls of the stuff and eating it to seriously hurt yourself. Conventional fungicides are not that bad either, frankly, but conventional insecticides are often weird neurotoxins with a high acute toxicity, and that is what most people don't want on their food. That whole paragraph was, at best, mendacious. There are some good points in this section about the futility of 'letter of the law' organic agriculture and the need to thoroughly test all pesticides, but the overall effect is one of sowing confusion with little in the way of facts to back it up. The author tries to bolster their weak case by bringing up the example of Rotenone, but even here there is nothing to stand upon.

"Rotenone’s use as a pesticide has already been discontinued in the US as of 2005 due to health concerns, but shockingly, it’s still poured into our waters every year by fisheries management officials as a piscicide to remove unwanted fish species."

Using the example of a pesticide that is natural, but has proven harmful and thus was removed from use hardly makes the case that organic food is a scary thing, covered with pesticides. If anything, it's a good example of the system, for once, working as it should.  The inclusion of the anecdote about fisheries management is a bizarre non sequitur. The management of fisheries has absolutely nothing to do with organic agriculture standards. Another study which the author pointed to, that demonstrated that organic food sometimes makes it to market with off-standard pesticides coming along for the ride, does not support an attack upon organic agriculture either. It is as logical as saying that because some peanut butter has been contaminated with disease causing bacteria, you should avoid peanut butter as a whole. If you mess up, or lie, does it matter what label your product is being sold under? The producer is culpable in that case, not the organic certification or organic agriculture. Suggesting otherwise is deceitful.

"The point I’m driving home here is that just because something is natural doesn’t make it non-toxic or safe. Many bacteria, fungi and plants produce poisons, toxins and chemicals that you definitely wouldn’t want sprayed on your food."

Since the organic standard seeks to find pesticides which are both natural and safe, and the example of Rotenone actually serves to prove this, this statement comes very close to being an outright lie. It seeks, at the least, to give someone an impression that is not true; that is, that the pesticides that are used in organic agriculture are unsafe and untested.

"Not only are organic pesticides not safe, they might actually be worse than the ones used by the conventional agriculture industry. Canadian scientists pitted ‘reduced-risk’ organic and synthetic pesticides against each other in controlling a problematic pest, the soybean aphid. They found that not only were the synthetic pesticides more effective means of control, the organic pesticides were more ecologically damaging, including causing higher mortality in other, non-target species like the aphid’s predators. Of course, some organic pesticides may fare better than these ones did in similar head-to-head tests, but studies like this one reveal that the assumption that natural is better for the environment could be very dangerous."

Yes, perhaps organic pesticides are not effective if used in stupid, inappropriate ways. Good thing we have a process to figure out when and how we should use the tools available to us. It's called science, and an example of science demonstrating how things should not be done does not prove that things are done that way generally, and further, it helps us to not make the same mistakes in the future. This study improved organic agriculture, and using it to bash organic agriculture is ironic at best.

"Even if the organic food you’re eating is from a farm which uses little to no pesticides at all, there is another problem: getting rid of pesticides doesn’t mean you’re food that is free from harmful things. Between 1990 and 2001, over 10,000 people fell ill due to foods contaminated with pathogens like E. coli, and many have organic foods to blame. That’s because organic foods tend to have higher levels of potential pathogens. One study, for example, found E. coli in produce from almost 10% of organic farms samples, but only 2% of conventional ones. The same study also found Salmonella only in samples from organic farms, though at a low prevalence rate. The reason for the higher pathogen prevalence is likely due to the use of manure instead of artificial fertilizers, as many pathogens are spread through fecal contamination. Conventional farms often use manure, too, but they use irradiation and a full array of non-organic anti-microbial agents as well, and without those, organic foods run a higher risk of containing something that will make a person sick."

This statement is stunning in it's apparent ignorance of recent history. The only big scare involving contamination coming from an organic farm in recent memory was the German E.coli scare involving an organic sprout farm, which turned out to not be the true source of the bacteria. However, we have recently had two massive outbreaks of salmonella which were firmly traced to a massive, industrial peanut butter factory where birds were crapping directly into the product, and an massive conventional egg farm that was treating its birds so poorly that bacteria were growing inside of the eggs themselves. Sure organic farms have E.coli on some of their produce; it's fertilized with manure. What is more important is that the E.coli not be a pathogenic variety, and livestock that are not pumped full of antibiotics are poor incubators for virulent, antibiotic resistant bacteria. And as far as using irradiation to sterilize manure, balderdash! The process is so expensive it's only used on things like sushi in countries where it is regularly practiced, I've never once heard of it being used on manure in any commercial operation. Why bother, when you can just compost the manure until it's own metabolic heat sterilizes itself, as mushroom growers do?

Myth #2: Organic Foods are Healthier

I won't be pulling quotes from this part of the piece, because the case is pretty weak. The studies that are cited in this section only serve to show that the same plant, grown under different conditions, will be largely the same afterwards. This is because the crops which are being grown in these studies are the same ones that have been carefully bred for their ability to transport well, be picked by machines, and look pretty when ripened away from the bush. But if you compare heirloom varieties, such as those which were in broad usage in the 1950's, with today's produce, you find that the modern plants are significantly less nutritious. And very few to no heirloom varieties are grown in conventional agriculture. And the flavor of heirloom varieties is excellent. I dare say that if you put an old fashioned tomato on a plate next to a modern, truck ripened one, any one who couldn't tell the difference would have to be suffering from a disorder of their sense of taste or smell.

Myth #3: Organic Farming Is Better For The Environment

More quotes:

"As an ecologist by training, this myth bothers me the most of all three. People seem to believe they’re doing the world a favor by eating organic. The simple fact is that they’re not – at least the issue is not that cut and dry."

Are they not, or is the issue not cut and dry? Perhaps the author should step back to basic logic before they move on to ecology, writing sentences that self-contradict is only good writing if you intention is to confuse and deceive.

"Yes, organic farming practices use less synthetic pesticides which have been found to be ecologically damaging. But factory organic farms use their own barrage of chemicals that are still ecologically damaging, and refuse to endorse technologies that might reduce or eliminate the use of these all together."

Good thing we aren't required to buy our organic food from factory organic farms, cause that would be quite a shame. This sentence is a textbook straw man argument.

"Take, for example, organic farming’s adamant stance against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). GMOs have the potential to up crop yields, increase nutritious value, and generally improve farming practices while reducing synthetic chemical use – which is exactly what organic farming seeks to do."

Indeed, genetic modification technology does have the potential to up crop yields, and increase nutritional value, but can the author point to a single instance in which such a modified organism has made it to market? I was aware of two good projects that were working on improving the nutritional value of rice and cassava, but both have had their funding either cut or constantly jeopardized. You know what does get to market? Stuff that makes a lot of money, like herbicide resistant plants that encourage farmers to dump far too much herbicide (which the same company, coincidentally, sells) on their fields. This practice has resulted in the emergence of herbicide resistant superweeds that are likely to destroy any benefits that the resistant crops provided in the first place as time passes. And you know one major benefit of spraying BT toxin on plants rather than engineering it into the plant itself? You can wash off the toxin in the first case, but not in the latter one. And, evidently BT doesn't get destroyed in the mammalian gut like we were all told, soothingly, by the GMO producers. A study at the University of Sherbrooke Hospital Centre in Quebec found that 93% of infants in the study had BT in their blood! I am perfectly willing to accept making exceptions in the organic standard for modified plants that actually do improve nutrition, or allow the use of marginal soils. But if we were to do so today, we would have to write exceptions for exactly zero GMO plants.

"But the real reason organic farming isn’t more green than conventional is that while it might be better for local environments on the small scale, organic farms produce far less food per unit land than conventional ones. Organic farms produce around 80% that what the same size conventional farm produces (some studies place organic yields below 50% those of conventional farms!)."

This study which the author cites as proof of this statement dates from 2002, which is practically ancient in terms of the pace of modern crop science. More recent studies do not support the contention that more land would have to be used under novel management systems than under conventional agriculture. In some cases, organic methods have been shown to have significantly higher yields than conventional methods. Hiding behind starving people is a common refuge for proponents of conventional agriculture, but those people are starving under a system which is dominated by conventional agriculture. If we spread simple, low cost and locally appropriate organic methods to the people who are starving, instead of expecting them to take out a loan for a tractor, some GM seed and a load of herbicide, perhaps they wouldn't be starving in the first place.

Myth #4: It’s all or none

This section serves as the conclusion, so it also serves up all of the previous mischaracterizations, misrepresentations and lies for another dose in summary. But there are a few, in particular, that I want to address.

"Organic farming does have many potential upsides, and may indeed be the better way to go in the long run, but it really depends on technology and what we discover and learn in the future. Until organic farming can produce crops on par in terms of volume with conventional methods, it cannot be considered a viable option for the majority of the world. Nutritionally speaking, organic food is more like a brand name or luxury item. It’s great if you can afford the higher price and want to have it, but it’s not a panacea. You would improve your nutritional intake far more by eating a larger volume of fruits and vegetables than by eating organic ones instead of conventionally produced ones. "

First, organic farming can produce crops in equivalent, or greater volumes under the right conditions, and certainly does produce crops in greater volumes in circumstances where the farmer cannot afford chemical fertilizers and all of the shiny accessories of modern agriculture. There are links to studies that demonstrate that earlier in this piece, but I want to stress that the people in that situation are the ones that suffer the most food insecurity, and thus organic techniques can help the people who need it the most in a way that conventional farming techniques cannot. And trust me, to a farmer who is looking at having to take out a loan to buy what is needed in conventional agriculture, and in the process loses the option of saving seed from year to year, conventional farming is what seems like a luxury. The knowledge and skills that are needed for an organic farm to work can be much more cheaply distributed than the machines and chemicals that are required for conventional monoculture.

"What bothers me most, however, is that both sides of the organic debate spend millions in press and advertising to attack each other instead of looking for a resolution. Organic supporters tend to vilify new technologies, while conventional supporters insist that chemicals and massive production monocultures are the only way to go. This simply strikes me as absurd. Synthetic doesn’t necessarily mean bad for the environment… New technology isn’t the enemy of organic farming; it should be its strongest ally."

This statement a broad mischaracterization of the argument for organic agriculture. Organic farming supporters do not tend to vilify new technologies; many of them are at the forefront in adopting new techniques, like the use of worms to produce vermicompost, and the use of combined aquaculture/hydroponic systems.  Many organic farmers see these technologies as a great ally in their fight to feed the people. The author seems angry that they refuse to adopt her favored technologies, but why should they if many of them (like GMO's) have failed to deliver on many of their promises? They are just selective in their adoption of new technologies, which is entirely different from hostility towards progress. Synthetic might not necessarily mean bad, and indeed I can't think of a single organic farm that I have visited that doesn't use synthetic materials like modern plastics in their operations. But synthetic chemicals are difficult if not impossible to comprehensively test in a natural environment, as the example of the vast environmental effects of Bisphenol A has amply demonstrated. GMO's are similarly difficult to test, so the organic standard has thus far excluded them. But that's the thing, it's not really the proponents of organic that have this all or nothing mentality. I, for one, know for certain that the use of certain synthetic fungicides will be a necessity for the foreseeable future in the production of a number of fruits that would rot on the tree without them. Really, if you want to look for the party that wants to destroy the other one, the real culprits are those that make the big money off of conventional agriculture. The constant suing of farmers that don't use GMO seeds is one example, as is the way that certain agricultural giants have been trying to stamp out seed cleaning operations for years now, in an effort to capture the market for seeds entirely.

"As far as I’m concerned, the biggest myth when it comes to organic farming is that you have to choose sides. Guess what? You don’t. You can appreciate the upsides of rotating crops and how GMOs might improve output and nutrition. You, the wise and intelligent consumer, don’t have to buy into either side’s propaganda and polarize to one end or another. You can, instead, be somewhere along the spectrum, and encourage both ends to listen up and work together to improve our global food resources and act sustainably."

Finally, some truth in this article. The fact is that you don't have to choose sides, but the author certainly seems to have, since this article is nothing short of a flagrant hit piece. Let me make this clear; I have been at a project in Milwaukee that produces more food per square foot than anything conventional agriculture could ever dream of, and does it with entirely organic methods. You might have heard of them, they're called Growing Power and they are awesome, producing enough food for 10000 plus people in just a few acres. Feeding the world without industrial, petrochemical farming is very much possible, and it's time to stop pointing at bad actors that take advantage of the sloppiness of the organic certification to argue for sticking with the old system. Speaking of that sloppiness, Growing Power themselves can't get organic certification, because they are in a city and they can't prove that there was never any oil spilled on their property. But the techniques are sound, and they should be widely adopted. Our agricultural system is clearly broken; it is poisoning our waters with fertilizers, eroding our soils, and failing to feed many people. While this article might appear to be an attack upon a broken system, it proved less an attack upon the system as a whole than an attack upon the usage of techniques that do not make certain business giants rich, built entirely upon a foundation of untruth. Scientific American should be ashamed of themselves for printing this trash.

A lab at MIT, led by Dr. Daniel Nocera, have invented a new and novel form of storing energy that may prove to be an important milestone in the development of alternative energy. In fact, the obvious utility of the process has engendered a bit of excitement, but this excitement has also generated some misconceptions about the process that I would like to clear up, now that I have a more complete understanding of how it works.
    In essence, what Nocera's group has developed is a method for splitting oxygen and hydrogen with far greater efficiency than the old electrolysis process. The process is essentially a catalytic one, and uses cobalt and phosphate compounds which react under a charge to form the final catalytic form, which splits the water into it's component parts using an electron transfer much like what occurs in photosynthesis. I don't want to rain on everyone's parade here, but I've been reading a lot of stories about this technology that miss the point about what the real breakthrough is here, and what it does.  This is a vital development, but let's go through some misconceptions about what this technology is before I move on to what this technology promises.

    1) This is not a leaf! A leaf is a highly complex organic structure that has many functions, including gathering light, converting it to a storable form, and water, gas and temperature regulation. This technology can only convert electricity into a more storable form; it's analogous to the process of gluconeogenesis (i.e. the production of sugars) in the leaf, not the leaf itself. You will still need to have some conventional photovoltaic system, and a fuel cell, to complete the 'leaf'. Part of the reason for this misconception is that the Nocera team did in fact show off a demo system that had all of those things together in one unit, but that demonstration of the value of the technology is not the story here; the water splitting process itself has so many other uses in the energy arena that it boggles the mind!

    2) This is not a revolutionary solar product! This is a revolutionary way of storing free electricity. The source is irrelevant; it could be solar, sure! But it could be used to store energy produced from wind, tidal, or geothermal power. You could even use it to store power generated from fossil fuels, though I'm not sure how that would be useful, since fossil fuels themselves are already potent stored forms of energy.

    3) This is not going to be on store shelves soon! New inexpensive compact systems will have to be developed to work with this catalyst to store gasses, and then convert them back into electricity in a closed loop, if the demo product that the Nocera group showed off is to become a reality. This will take time, as will durability testing of the catalyst itself. Catalysts are famously fragile, and it could be that under harsh conditions the catalyst will break down. If that is the case, then the unit that produces gases from electricity will have to be separated from the energy generation system in a separate, climate controlled unit, but this is not an insurmountable technical challenge by any means. However, in the research that the group has published, it does seem that the catalyst is pretty resistant to pH and temperature changes, which is a good sign that durability issues will not be a big headache.
    
    What this technology represents is something even better than a mere power generation method; it's a way to put the methods that we currently have to generate clean energy to work for us in a huge way! Many people complain that they always see wind generators standing still, but this is because there is too much power available, and the grid can't handle the extra juice. Indeed, we wasted 25 TWh of potential electricity generation from windmills last year because we had no place to store the power! In the past, methods of storing this excess energy were terrible expensive (batteries) terribly inefficient (hydrolysis) or just terrible (complex and potentially dangerous spinning flywheels). Some estimates say that this new catalyst can break water at more than 10 times the efficiency of older hydrolysis methods, and this is an enormous leap in the right direction. This technology can level the load, and set aside the electricity output of these generators until it is needed. The result; we can run our wind generators 24/7, or as long as the wind holds out, and when it does stop we will still have flowing power! Similarly, we can store power from photovoltaic sources to use overnight, or on cloudy days. This technology will also make the production of gasses like hydrogen and oxygen for medical and welding uses far cheaper, and allow for the development of home 'fill up' stations for fuel cells and anything that could use a boost of oxygen! This is a huge development, but don't be mistaken; it is just one part of the puzzle, albeit a vital one. We will have to watch the development of the technology carefully, but for now I wish the best of luck to the Nocera team in developing this energy storage solution, because we need such things if we are to build a future of sustainable and uninterrupted power.

Crossposted at CleanTechnica

The wreckage of the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima facility, as of 3.21.11 Image Courtesy NHK World

Now the possibility arises that the spent fuel pond may have evaporated, and without that coolant even well spaced spent fuel rods can overheat and melt down. The Japanese are attempting to execute brave but desperate plans to cool the reactors with water drops from helicopters and water cannons from fire trucks at the time of this writing. I wish the heroes that are fighting this the best of luck. Hopefully the better understanding of the health effects of radiation that we have today will lead to fewer deaths amongst them than amongst the people who tried to arrest the Chernobyl disaster, even if the worst should occur. These grim tidings bring to mind another major difference between nuclear energy and other power sources. If your solar panel fails, you are out of a few thousand dollars. If your windmill breaks down, you can usually fix it. If your engine pops a gasket, you are inconvenienced for a few days. But if your nuclear power plant really goes south and loses control of the chain reaction, large areas of the land will be rendered uninhabitable and thousands upon thousands of heroic people will die in the process of halting the chain reaction. It’s a whole different level of risk upon failure. Given what is known even now, it’s not premature to lay some blame for this catastrophe.

Tsunami. The word means “harbor wave” in Japanese. Think about that for a moment; why is a Japanese word the one generally used, world over, for the phenomena of large ocean waves crashing ashore with disastrous consequences? The reason for this quirk of language is that Japan has experienced more tsunami than any other place in the world. Around 200 tsunami have occurred there in recorded history, with some being really extreme events such as a ~20 meter tsunami that hit the the Sanriku region of Japan in 1896, killing tens of thousands of people. Most deaths from that tsunami occurred in Miyagi prefecture. Which also happens to be where the Fukushima power plant is located, right on the coast. Placing the critical backup generators on one of the lower levels of the structure, right on the coast in the one area on Earth that is most prone to tsunami is criminal negligence. These structures need to last for centuries and, despite the fact that they were absolutely critical to preventing a series of catastrophic nuclear chain reactions in not one but five reactors, the backup generators were sitting ducks to a common phenomena in the area. Once a diesel engine has been flooded with sea water. . well, it’s not a fixable inconvenience. The generator, and all of it’s associated electrical equipment, are very vulnerable to salt water, and once corroded all of those critical and hard to replace components are junk. The engineers and managers at Tokyo Electric Power and GE who were responsible for this decision in the 1970′s should be publicly ridiculed as incompetent, deprived of employment or pension and possibly prosecuted. I really can’t stress enough how much of a fantastic engineering failure the placement of the backup generators was. This fatal design flaw, in light of the history of Japan, should not have made it into the final design.

The other group I need to lay blame upon are not around in any numbers to accept it; the leaders of the post war era, both west and east. Rather than invest money in intrinsically safe reactor designs that produce waste that is less radioactive than the starting components, such as the traveling wave reactor design, you guys decided it was a swell idea to invest in breeder reactors that produce waste that is more radioactive than the fuel that goes in. Why do something that seems so stupid? One good reason is that reactors of this sort can create some of the fuel they consume, especially after reprocessing. But I would argue that the reprocessing step is the real reason that our leaders pushed for this design; it allows for the extraction of highly enriched uranium and even plutonium, and you know what that is good for. To build nuclear weapons, of course! Why use another system for generating power when the system developed for military purposes already does that, and allows you to build glittering racks of weapons that can be used to annihilate the entire human race as a bonus! Now this design is entrenched, and most nuclear electricity generation is accomplished in boiling water reactors or pressurized water reactors, both of which enrich fuel which requires reprocessing. Our leaders that arose from the trauma of World War II were driven mad with fear for one another, and so made a lot of mistakes. We will be paying for their mistakes in their place for a long time.

Looking forward, we are looking at an era of energy scarcity unless we invest now in new forms of energy generation. Nuclear can be a part of the energy future, even a big part, but first we need work out a design that is intrinsically safe, generates less dangerous waste, and can be mass produced. Accomplishing those three goals might seem pie in the sky, but that’s only because of our experience in the past 40 years with the flaws of breeder reactor designs. Ironically, it’s the military itself which has driven development of safer nuclear reactors for power generation. Most nuclear powered ships are currently steam turbine reactors, similar to land based reactors, except smaller. However, the maintenance issues with these reactors have prompted the development of metal cooled reactors, which are cooled with a liquid metal such as lead or sodium. This design change doesn’t provide complete safety, but it does allow for a much longer buffer of time to asses a situation and fix it than a water cooled reactor, and it allows the reactor to run unmoderated. This design is not perfect; a similar design on land leaked non-radioactive sodium in Japan in 1995. But it’s a step forward.

In the past few decades, a lot of fuss has been made about another design; pebble bed reactors. These sort of reactors use a breeder reaction to heat coolant in much the same way as a standard nuclear reactor, but the nuclear fuel is in the form of tennis ball sized pebbles rather than in the form of fuel rods. These pebbles are composed of tiny fragments of a uranium intermixed with a graphite matrix, coated with silicon carbide. In this way, the pebbles make up the fuel source, the nuclear moderator, and the fission product barrier, which makes the design much more simple than a conventional nuclear reactor. Additionally, the coolant is usually some form of noble gas that does not readily absorb neutrons, so there are no radioactive fluids to leak. The pebbles can be added and subtracted from the pebble bed, which allows for easy moderation of the reaction. And, as an additional bonus, the reactor should be resistant to melt down, as it can be cooled by natural circulation of the coolant even during an extended power loss, and the graphite matrix is highly resistant to heat. However, there are some major problems with this design. The graphite has many great qualities for use in a nuclear reactor, except for one; it is flammable. If there is no oxygen present, this is never a problem, but there is potential for a catastrophic fire that would spread radioactivity into the atmosphere if there should be a loss of coolant. Also, the silicon carbide coating, which in theory should resist fire and most forces quite well, is not very resistant to shear forces, and this has caused a few accidents. In one case in a West German research reaction in 1986, an attempt to remove a pebble lodged in the shoot shattered it, releasing radioactivity into the environment. After decommissioning, that same reactor was found to be contaminated with large amount of highly radioactive Strontium and Caesium dust. Pebble bed technology is very promising; it can not melt down even if all of the coolant is lost, it produces no radioactive fluids that must be stored as waste, and the workers are even exposed to less radiation than they are in conventional designs. But until the pebble technology itself is developed a bit further, in order to reduce breakage and dust creation, this technology can’t be considered an intrinsically safe solution.

Another new nuclear technology is the thorium breeder reactor. Thorium 232 is very common compared to uranium, and if it’s bombarded with neutrons it will enrich into uranium 233. This element can be used as nuclear fuel, and it produces a lot of electronics scrambling gamma rays, so it can’t be easily used in nuclear weapons. And the amount of energy that can be derived from a pound of thorium is considerably greater than the amount that can be derived from a pound of uranium, due to it’s complex transmutation from Thorium 232 to Thorium 233 to Protactinium 233 to Uranium 233. So, are there downsides? Yes. It’s worth reading through this interview with one of the people at the forefront of the development of this technology in the IEEE journal if you are really interested in the technology. In fact, the reactor Dr. Ratan Kumar Sinha describes in this piece has recently been finished and put up for review. At any rate, one thing that must be kept in mind is that while Thorium may be a relatively common and innocuous substance, and the wastes from the reactor at the end of it’s cycle much less dangerous than those produced by current systems, but while the reactor is running there is uranium and plutonium in attendance, and starting the thing up currently requires the use of these two elements too. In a way, this could be considered a valid method for the disposal of these highly enriched substances. However, in a truly catastrophic disaster scenario, in which the coolant is drained from the reactor, there is still the possibility for a melt down. On the upside, if there is no coolant loss, this design does allow for passive circulation, without the pumps being continuously powered, which is a vast improvement in safety over the 40 year old design that is repeatedly exploding on the Japanese coast right now. Perhaps we can look to Thorium as a way to solve our energy problems, if this technology proves to be safe and reliable in the Indian test reactor. We shall see.

Nuclear technology is a trade off. We can indeed create of massive amounts of energy with nuclear power, but we can also engender massive amounts of suffering if something goes wrong. At this point, simply assuming that nothing will go wrong cannot be considered a valid strategy when it comes to nuclear power. Recent events have made that abundantly clear. I would like to stress that pretty much any modern reactor is better prepared for disaster than the 40 year old design that is falling to pieces in Japan, and even that facility would be in much better shape were it not for a few fatal design flaws. But there are plenty of those old facilities sprinkled around the planet to become a reoccurring headache unless we make some effort to clean them up and safely store all of the waste. The fact that we are still storing dangerous reactor waste inside reactor buildings where so much can go wrong simply because we have no better place to put it should give us pause. The cost of storing these extraordinarily dangerous substances for thousands of years is never considered in the upfront cost of a new nuclear plant, and even where to store it is complicated by the difficulty in safely transporting such things to a permanent repository. As a result, our leaders have chosen to do nothing, and just let the waste sit perched, vulnerably, atop the reactors that created it. There are technical hurdles for other new energy technologies, such as solar and wind, particularly in regard to providing uninterrupted power regardless of the vagaries of the weather. However, we must bear in mind that these technologies are unlikely kill us if something goes wrong, and their potential to pollute the Earth doesn’t even bear comparison. It may be that the nuclear trade off between safety and massive uninterrupted power is a Faustian bargain, and that investments in safer energy technologies that pose less of a safety and maintenance concern are a better long term solution to our energy problems.

Crossposted on FailDrill

The earth may be giving, but the winds and the snows often conspire to take away that which the earth gives. So, for thousands of years people have been trying to protect a patch of earth from the vagaries of the weather. Enclosing an area and letting light in as a solution first appeared in Roman times, but was severely limited by the materials they had available. It wasn't until glass sheets were fabricated in the 1300s that enclosing larger spaces became possible, and even then at prohibitive cost. Nonetheless, enclosing a small space and putting a few spun panes of glass over it is so useful for starting seeds early, and keeping a few selected veggies available through the winter, that the technology spread steadily from the manors of the nobility to the backyards of people of more modest means as the centuries passed.  New methods of glass production in the 19th century for the first time allowed whole rooms to be made from glass, and the advent of float glass in the mid-20th century covered over acres and acres in order to grow high value crops. Today, greenhouses are large, climate controlled, and highly regulated environments that can be enormously productive, especially when multiple methods of food production are utilized in the same space. But even today their great expense means that they are impractical for growing all of our food, and many plants, like fruit trees and other perennials, are not well suited for the greenhouse environment. However, as the climate begins to behave in a less predictable fashion (when was the last 7 day forecast that was accurate in your experience?) we are going to have to save our oranges from the cold and our plants from disease with an increasing frequency. Thankfully, we have available to us a much cheaper and more portable way to control the environment in a space; the hoop house, or high tunnel. Unlike a greenhouse, a hoop house uses strong, stretchy polymers to block the wind and hold in thermal energy. While the first few generations of the design were plagued by fragility in high winds and poor weather, modern versions are in many cases stronger than their glass counterparts, due to the use of tense, UV-resistant plastics. Their cost effectiveness means that even large areas can be covered, and that even people of fairly modest means can set up a large controlled growing environment for the first time ever. 

While most greenhouses are climate controlled, the goals of hoop house owners are typically not to grow tropical plants in the snowy north, but rather to extend the growing season of normal food plants through the winter, so most hoop houses only use passive heating and ventilation. Passive does not mean ineffective, however; in a double layered hoop house (more about that later) with the use of suspended semi-transparent 'blankets' over the growing area, it is possible to grow greens and other low vegetables throughout the winter with, depending upon the sun, a 40-60 degree difference in the temperature between the inside and the outside!

Another major benefit of having the shelter open to the soil is that dwarf fruit tree varieties can live happily in an environment controlled enough to prevent freezing, even when it freezes in Florida and snows in San Francisco (!) while still enjoying the freedom of sinking their roots into the earth's own soil.

 Since high tunnels are usually secured by soil or stones and broken bricks piled up around the base of the shelter, rather than with a foundation, roots will not destroy the shelter if they are allowed to roam. And if a space should become contaminated with a disease, you can just move the hoop house to a clean location and let the infected zone go to seed for a few years. This is much less of a hassle and environmental hazard than the extensive cleaning and sterilization you have to go through should your greenhouse become contaminated. In fact, plant disease is a good reason to use a hoop house all year round; since the irrigation is controlled, and applied at the root, and pests are largely excluded by the enclosure, most diseases never even get the chance to start! This allows the grower to use less petroleum based pesticides and fungicides, and it allows the plants to grow faster since they are not fighting off pests, and over time this more than makes up for the oil and energy used to create the hoop house itself.

A hoop house can be a highly productive addition to a farm, large or small, or even a home garden, but the design that you choose to build will have a large impact upon the durability, heat retention, and long term cost of the growing space. The first hoop houses got their name due to their quonset hut like design, composed of semi-circular hoops of PVC or steel held together with a central spine. However, under snow load these structures collapse, they are often poorly ventilated in the summer, or opened outright which defeats their pest control benefits, and the plastic that was used was often not very transparent or well suited to long term use. And PVC piping, while attractive for it's upfront cost, ends up being a huge expensive hassle over time as it has to be replaced often. It surprises me that these designs continue to be used by many people when there is a superior design that costs only slightly more to set up; the gothic hoop house. These hoop houses have vertical walls, and peaked roofs, and as a result they have far more interior room than the quonset type. Gothic hoops are universally composed of galvanized or stainless tube steel of a good strong diameter, and thus can last for many decades. The design is more airtight in the winter, generally, and integrates cheap peak ventilation at the ends to keep the space from becoming a steamy hell in the summer. And, even better, they handle a snow load far better than quonset style hoop houses, and require neither extensive sweeping to keep them from collapsing, nor removal of snow from between the houses except in the most extreme snowfalls. These benefits greatly reduce the amount of work that the productive growing space demands in the winter. The best modern designs use two layers of high tensile strength plastic film, that can be expected to last between 4 to 10 years depending upon the type, with an inflated space in between. When combined with ground covers, these hoop houses can be amazingly effective at keeping out the cold without spending any money on heating at all! However, the use of two layers reduces overall light by 10% or more, and so plants that demand high light levels should be grown in single layer houses. Most plants are more warmth than light dependent for their survival, and so the sacrifice of a fraction of the light is worth it in exchange for another 6-10º F of heat. 

Given the modular design of hoop houses, it may be a temptation to just build an endless hoop house that stretches from one end of a field to another. Don't do it! It turns out that long hoop houses are terrible at holding in heat in the winter, and tend to be poorly ventilated in the summer as well. A good rule of thumb is to not exceed a width to length ratio of 1:2 in order to maximize thermal efficiency, and generally the greater the width the more efficient the space will hold heat. However, the design of the structure limits the width to around 40 feet at most, with 30 being a good, accessible width. A 30 by 60 hoop house is well served by a vent at each end of the space, and limiting the space also acts to contain epidemics, with care, to a very small portion of the plants on a large farm. If I were building a large complex of hoop houses to serve a great need for food, I would limit myself to 30x60 houses with fairly wide paths in between them. Placing the houses too close together can limit the light that the plants receive in the most productive months of the spring and summer, and promote the spread of disease via runoff, so it's also wise to avoid placing the hoop houses in each other's shadow. Open air crops, such as sweet corn, hay, or alfalfa, can be planted in strips between the houses if you wish; this can even act to break up a dangerous monoculture if the grower specializes in one crop inside of the shelters. However, if you choose to do this take care. Despite their relative cheapness compared to a conventional greenhouse, running into one with your tractor will still be a costly mistake! The frame of the structure is steel, and thus is very strong and durable, but an important choice must be made when building the walls at the ends. Walls made of sheet steel or, even better, two layers of sheet steel with a space in between them, will last as long as the hoops and can be welded or bolted together into a solid unit. However, they are more expensive to both purchase and assemble than the alternatives, plywood and plastic. Structural corrugated plastic has some of the longevity benefits of steel for less money, and even lets in some light, but it's fragile and can be hard to work with. Plywood is the cheapest, and is a better insulator than anything but a double layer of steel, but it rots and needs regular replacement. Choose whichever meets your budget, but bear in mind that choosing wood ends comes with a greater maintenance and replacement cost over time. 

Growing food in a 30" by 60" space represents ~5-10 hours of work a week after the initial set up, so be sure not to build beyond your ability to care for the space. However, such a hoophouse is very large for a home garden, and the productivity benefits of the structure could lead to very few trips to the grocery store and a lot of extra food to give or sell to neighbors, so the investment can pay off quite well. And small farms can use the space to sell food to CSA's and other locavore groups, increasing the profits from a space greatly while taking better care of the land in the process. The benefits of hoop houses to increase productivity and decrease costly inputs makes them a compelling investment even in the best of times, but in an age where unexpected shifts in the weather are spiking food prices in disruptive ways throughout the world, the use of shelters to shield our crops from the fickle weather may be critical for our success as a society.

 Crossposted at Insteading.com

The tragic earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, has left much of the city in ruins, killed more than 75, and left hundreds missing. Even as survivors continue to be dragged out of the rubble, and survivors reel in their shock, it's worth looking forward to how the city might be rebuilt to better deal with disasters like this in the future. Building for disaster resistance might be expensive today, but in the long run it is the very height of environmental and fiscal responsibility, as it prevents the great waste and expense of having to rebuild later. And this is without even considering the steep human cost of poor construction.

But first, let us step back and talk a bit about what causes structural damage in earthquakes like the one Christchurch has just experienced. Earthquakes are highly stressful events. Bear in mind that I don't mean this in the psychological sense, even though this is certainly true, as anyone observing the shocked citizens of Christchurch wandering the streets on the TV can attest. Rather, I mean this in a physical sense; earthquakes place lots of physical stresses upon buildings, particularly lateral stresses due to back and forth motions that conventional buildings are poorly designed to cope with, and when those stresses overcome the structural integrity of a structure, it collapses. There are two ways to deal with this; you can either take a conventional building design, and reduce the stresses acting upon it, or you can change the design to relieve stresses more effectively. Lets look at each in turn.

A conventional building can be simplified as a box on a platform, or foundation. The reason this basic design is so common is that it is a good compromise between the cost of construction and materials, and interior volume. But watch what happens if the ground shifts suddenly to the left or right.

 Because of conservation of momentum, the top of the building moves more slowly than the bottom, and so if you were to take a snapshot of a box structure during an earthquake, it would look much like this. While a box is very good at resisting gravity, when you add in lateral stresses it no longer has straight, load bearing walls. If the shaking is minor, the building will sway a bit and survive. But if the stresses are greater than that, as you can see in the illustration, this can result in a part of the building that has no real support against gravity. If this state persists for any length of time, the building collapses. And this is assuming that the building is elastic; if it has been made of stiff, but brittle, materials such as brick, the building can actually shatter due to the swaying action itself. One widely practiced solution is called base isolation, and involves placing a dampening system between the foundation and the load bearing walls. This dampener can be a lead post embedded in rubber, springs, or a set of large, very strong ball bearings in a gently sloped channel.In any case, the dampener takes the lateral stresses, and the building does not collapse. Here is an example of one in action; this one is lead cored rubber.

However, the dampeners themselves can be damaged in the process of absorbing this energy. And while it is better for the people to survive than not, it would be best if the building could be saved as well. 

Another, more recent development, is the use of a large, tuned pendulum mass damper, attached to the upper floors of the structure, and often equipped with mechanisms to move it actively in opposition to strong forces. Essentially, this works to give a building a sense of balance like we do. This technology functions very well to absorb the damaging stresses by simply moving a very large mass in the opposite direction to the force. The forces cancel out, and the building does not sway and collapse. The benefit of this technology is that it is more durable than technologies that are at the foundation level, and it's easier to repair since the device itself is not load bearing. Many super skyscrapers in seismically active areas now have an active, tuned pendulum in them. In the case of the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taiwan, the pendulum is suspended from the 92nd floor, and weighs a staggering 660 tons! In 2008, the pendulum worked well to cancel out earthquake forces, as seen in this video:

But perhaps the answer lies not in augmenting conventional structures, but in adopting unconventional designs. A good place to start would be to ask what sort of structures have proven to be resistant to earthquakes over long periods of time, like thousands of years. Take, for instance, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Dedicated in 360 AD, the building has served as a church, a mosque, and a museum ever since, despite the fact that the city it is in has been repeated destroyed by violent earthquakes. Why has it survived? Because the greater part of the structure is not a box, it's a series of domes. Domes (and their planar cousin, the pyramid) distribute lateral forces very well for three reasons. First, and foremost, even movements strong enough to get a dome to sway will not produce areas of the structure that have no support against gravity, because the base is much wider than the top. Second, domes distribute forces in all directions naturally, and thus the design is much better at dissipating energy. And third, most of the mass of a dome is low, and this lower center of gravity greatly reduces the chance of collapse. So, why aren't our cities made up entirely of domes and pyramids? Well, pyramids have less internal volume than an equivalent box, so that's one reason, though many skyscrapers have been made in a pyrimidal shape in geologically active areas. But domes actually have more volume than an equivalent box, albeit in a form that is a bit harder to utilize. So, in light of this, why are domes so rare?

Because, until recently, domes were very hard to build. Basically every piece that goes into a dome has to be custom made, and until the keystone is in place the structure is actually rather fragile. However, two recent building techniques have changed this, and made domes far easier to build, easier, even, than conventional structures.

The first technology is the geodesic dome, a structure composed of repeating icosahedrons covered by a protective skin.The use of repeating geometry allows for large parts of the building to be built from standardized pieces, which both cheapens and simplifies construction, and the geometry allows for the building to be both strong and lightweight. But the geodesic dome has a flaw. The weak point has long been the 'skin' itself; glass is too heavy to be easily used for this purpose, and if it breaks free of its frame it can be very hazardous to the people inside, and lighter composites like acrylic pose a fire hazard. As a result, the geodesic dome has become less popular over the past few decades. However, recent breakthroughs in composite glasses that are light, strong and fire resistant, may cause a resurgence in this design. Fun fact; the invention of Geodesic domes are usually credited toBuckminster Fuller, but in fact he only developed the mathematics that explains how the structures are so stable. The actual inventor is a German man by the name of Walther Bauersfeld, who built the first dome of this type for the Carl Zeiss company to house a planetarium.  

The second modern dome technology, one that is quietly becoming more and more popular on both a large and small scale, is the monolithic dome. Monolithic domes differ from geodesic domes in a few ways; they are very heavy, and they are formed in one piece. Building one requires the use of some sort of form, either a mound of dirt in earlier models, or an inflated airform in more recent constructions. After the form is in place, insulation, rebar, and concrete are sprayed onto the inside or the outside of it. As this cures, it forms a single, reinforced piece that makes up the entire structure. Over the past several decades, monolithic domes have proven to be extremely disaster resistant, defying tornadoes, earthquakes, and cyclones. Due to their largely concrete construction, they are even fire resistant, and should last for hundreds, or even thousands of years if well maintained. Even better, as the technology has matured costs have fallen to the point at which they are comparable, or even cheaper, than conventional structures, and considerably cheaper than conventional earthquake resistant structures. Once you consider how much more energy efficient monolithic domes are than conventional structures, it's hard to deny that they could play an important role in the creation of sustainable, disaster resistant cities. At this point, the only thing holding them back is the NIMBY attitude that is holding back so much sustainable technology. Domes look very futuristic or even weird compared to box structures. But, after a disaster, a standing dome is much better looking than a smoking pile of bricks, so it might be wise to get over it and start building domes everywhere!

Link through to CleanTechnica and read the whole article!

What you are looking at here is a 261mpg Volkswagen. It uses a hybrid drivetrain that uses a diesel rather than a petrol engine. This seems like a terribly obvious innovation, but that aside, it's a light, compact, two seater, with plenty of storage and a nice look. And it rates nearly 300mpg. So, it is possible after all! It even looks really cool, with gullwing dorrs and a nice cockpit. I hope it's not another rich boy toy, though. Excellent work, VW. 

Another, similar vehicle, from a smaller manufacturer, is the Aptera.

Check out the whole article over at Gizmag for a lovely gallery, and some more info.

On outfit out of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford has a new fuel technology that may well serve as a greatly needed transition energy technology, and perhaps as a good way to store energy in the long term. The group, newly spun off and rechristened Cella Energy, has a unique way of storing hydrogen in the works. 

Typically, to store hydrogen in any quantity, you need to have a high pressure tank, but this has many drawbacks. The tanks are very heavy, and so you will never be able to store more hydrogen than 5% of the total weight, and then there are the safety issues that come with storing a gas at high pressure. Newer technologies have attempted to chemically store the hydrogen in some sort of intermediary substance, or to encapsulate it into some sort of solid organic matrix. All of these approaches have safety, durability, and environmental concerns holding them back. But the Cella process is different, and if it overcomes a few obstacles that will bel highlighted later, it could serve as an excellent transition technology to an all electric future.

The Cella approach is similar to older methods that used an organic matrix to capture the hydrogen; the hydrogen can be effectively held under high pressures within pockets in the organic substrate. As the substrate is heated, the hydrogen will have less affinity for it, and thus then be released as gas. However, controlling the release of hydrogen from a solid matrix is very difficult. The Cella system circumvents this problem by using a liquid matrix, made up of billions of tiny polystyrene beads (yes, like your beanbag chair, but much smaller), which have tiny cavities to hold onto the hydrogen. Thus, the liquid 'fuel' can be drawn out of the tank and heated a bit at a time, allowing for a more controlled release of hydrogen. The fact that it's a liquid also means that it can be drawn out of the tank and replaced after use, which means that durability is not a factor, at least so long as the scaffold can be made cheaply and recycled. It's easy to recycle polystyrene, so that's no issue. The manufacturing process of the polystyrene scaffold ensures that the material can be made cheaply; it uses standard electrospraying techniques, such as those used to make non-woven fabrics like Tyvek, to produce the beads. 

Currently, the technology is capable of storing hydrogen at around 6% of the total fuel weight, which is superior to the old high pressure cylinders. They say that it can store up to 20%, which would be phenomenal if true. Combined with hydrogen fuel cells, the technology could easily power our electronic devices for a long time even at 6%, but the real excitement about this idea comes from it's compatibility with internal combustion engines. You see, most internal combustion engines can run off of hydrogen with minimal modification. If this technology is adopted, it would give us a nice bridge technology to carry us over until batteries have caught up with the storage capacity of liquid fuels. But there are a few more problems to overcome first.

In order to use this new fuel, cars will have to be modified with a new gas tank with an accessory attached to heat the solution in order to release the hydrogen. And, of course, since the matrix is to be recycled, a conventional gas pump won't do, since the pump will have to draw out the spent matrix and refill it anew. Then one must source the hydrogen, but technologies like this one I covered previously seem tailor made for this sort of solution.

The best part is the cost of the fuel; the scientists at Cella say that they can produce the fuel for the equivalent of around $1.50 a gallon. This price may be low enough to convince people to invest in the new parts to covert their vehicles over. Let us hope, because unless some fantastic battery technology is either in the works, or is sitting on the shelf somewhere, the range of electric only vehicles is going to be limited for some time to come.

h/t Gizmag

I really love how this one came out. . .

Here is one from the marsh. . .

And here are some houses on the shore. . .