Foundation and Energy

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov

In 92, after an attempt to ring the warning bells on our corrupt and increasingly dysfunctional politics, I fled for a few months to the hinterlands of China and Indonesia. In a small book store on Java, I found a copy of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and read it while traveling the buses across the teaming mass of humanity that is Java and through the last crumpling stands of ancient forest on Sumatra. The book left a profound impact. First, as I discovered later, though it was science fiction, Asimov used Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as the basis for the storyline, and I am a great lover of history. Secondly, it gave me an insight to the politics of technology.

Foundation is about a declining galactic empire/civilization. A group of people understand its faltering and form the Foundation, whose idea is to keep alive some of the best of the civilization, so that it will not be as long a time between decline and renaissance. In the first book, they literally keep on the electricity of a small planet on the former empire's fringe. Knowledge of such matters has become so scarce, electricity is basically considered magic, and when trouble comes, they turn-off the electricity as a show of power.

The unfortunate thing about electricity today is most people consider it magic. They know they flip the switch and the lights go on, it might as well be magic, and that leaves power of energy very concentrated, a rather small group in charge. Science fiction became reality in 2000 and 2001 in California, when a group of energy companies and Wall Street took over the electricity system in California and started turning the lights off to extort higher payment. No one went to jail, but Gray Davis the hapless and inept Governor, felt the citizens' ire three years later and became the first Governor recalled in the state's history.

Over in Europe, the Russians pulled a similar trick a few years back in the middle of winter by squeezing natural gas supplies to the now Russian gas dependent Western Europeans. Der Spiegel has a good piece(tx yves) about Germany's attempts to build various pipelines to remove itself from the "Russian Yoke." While being dependent on the fuel source, and thus susceptible to cut-offs, isn't quite as magical as turning the generators off, it does again show the reliance of what we deem modernity on fossil fuels.

Which gets us to the announcement of the Obama administration and nukes, which is problematic on many levels. First, the administration announced it was providing $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for building new nukes to the Southern Company, a paragon of corporate integrity. I suppose one could say this is an improvement over the after the fact debt guarantees we've provided Wall Street, but nuclear power has never been ever to survive without massive government subsidies. I don't have anything against subsidies, just what is subsidized.

Nukes are the most undemocratic of technologies. They are centrally controlled and require both a police force and priesthood to secure and run. We still have not figured out the waste problem, leaving the future a problem that's going to be around for thousands of years. Haven't we done enough for the future already? Finally, the more nukes the greater the proliferation of technologies and raw materials to build nuclear bombs. While we hear a lot about the Manhattan Project, the real effort in building the first atomic bombs was in Tennessee and Washington states, not New Mexico, where they had to build the vast industrial infrastructure, reactors, to make the bomb's fissionable material. Which is why Iran can't hide their nuclear programs, creating the nuclear material is a vast industrial process. More reactors bring the price of making bombs down.

Nuclear power is the energy of the military industrial complex. The amount of money spent on its development and implementation has and continues to dwarf all alternatives and efficiency. The Department of Energy remains the Department of Nuclear Power. The 2011 budget calls for $20 billion dollar for nukes, with $2 billion on renewables and efficiency.

If we're going to have democracy in the 21st century, we need a democratic energy system. If we're going to have that, people are going to have to become much less ignorant on energy issues. I can suggest starting with Peter Asmus' "Introduction to Energy". It should be core curricula for every high school student in America.