Energy Lessons

Remem­ber 2010? When coal min­ers died and almost died? When the Gulf of Mex­i­co became dump­ing grounds for crude?

And the les­son learned? I’m sor­ry, the les­son that should have been learned? These activ­i­ties are com­plex and dan­ger­ous. Acci­dents will hap­pen. And greed increas­es the chances of accidents.

And now it is 2011. As I sit com­fort­ably in my home typ­ing this, engi­neers and sci­en­tists in Japan are scram­bling to try and con­tain the dam­age to a few nuclear reac­tors. Those reac­tors have become dam­aged through a sequence of events that would strain creduli­ty in a dis­as­ter movie. Impos­si­ble odds do come home.

I sup­pose there are areas that are not prone to earth­quakes. A map of faults shows France to be large­ly free of them. I do not know how much that means but it sounds like a good thing.

I won­der what the worst case sce­nario is for wind farms? Solar arrays? Tidal pow­er gen­er­a­tors? Conservation?

With any luck, Japan will not expe­ri­ence the worst case sce­nario. With any luck, we will see that there is a bet­ter road.