

It’s a story that has actually been important for a while because an earthquake–in a place prone to earthquakes–or a severe storm or perhaps another tsunami have the potential to dislodge these rods, expose them to air and begin a reaction that might release a radioactive cloud that would reach around the globe. Figuring out how to get the rods out of harm’s way, however, has proven exceedingly difficult. But shortly, the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company, is going to try, and any mistake in moving the rods could be very, very environmentally damaging and dangerous to human health.





Man-made systems not only have much shorter histories to work from, but they can interact with natural systems in unpredictable ways. Recall what happened at the Fukushima nuclear plant: The tsunami was so high that it breached the plant’s seawall, flooding emergency diesel generators located in basements, generators that were supposed to power pumps to cool the reactor core and fuel rods in the event of a power outage. Backup batteries for those pumps ran out of power within a day. And, that’s when the trouble began that led to hydrogen explosions which damaged buildings–damage that ultimately compromised the fuel rod storage.

Let me quote from an earlier piece of mine, "Calculating calamity: Japan’s nuclear accident and the ‘antifragile’ alternative":



Furthermore, he notes, models used to calculate such risk tend to underestimate small probabilities. What’s worse, the consequences are almost always wildly underestimated as well.

We could conclude that nuclear power is unsafe or, at least, risky enough that we don’t want to build more potential Fukushimas, and leave it at that. But, we would be remiss in not noting that the rest of the world’s energy system, based primarily on fossil fuels faces risks of unknown proportions as well.



Natural gas production in the United States–still (almost certainly wrongly) touted as the world’s next natural gas superpower–has been just about flat since the beginning of 2012. Coal supplies seem ample, but coal quality is declining virtually everywhere, and estimates of minable coal have actually been dropping for decades.


Coal prices leapt upward in the last decade though they have come down from their peaks. World natural gas prices remain high, though a local glut in the United States has lowered prices there–but only to levels that remain 70 percent higher than the average price in the 1990s. Why should we accept optimistic pronouncements about supply now?


The fact is, we don’t know what we don’t know. In our energy policy and planning across the world, we act as if we know future fossil fuel supplies precisely–just as we acted as if we knew the risks of nuclear power rather precisely–that is, close to zero.

All this suggests that we ought to have a bias toward energy supplies that cannot decline in the long run, namely renewables–and that cannot create environmental havoc with just one accident. Strangely, this is a surprisingly tough sell in a world that has already been sold on the idea that we have precise knowledge of our energy future–when, in reality, all we have are risks, many of which cannot be even be remotely quantified.
