And now for something completely different: Dabke dance flash mob in Lebanese airport - [link]

So "we aren't doing it now" is an argument for doing nothing.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be building wind, solar, geothermal, landfill methane and any other effective alternate energy facilities; beefing up the grid; and working on storage technology. We need to do that, but I still think we're going to need central station generating for the foreseeable future, and I'd rather have nukes than coal. The new designs have far more passive cooling, including having cooling water located over the reactor so it feeds by gravity.

Finite amount of money. I'm not suggesting shutting down existing nukes prematurely, but the money we spend on new nukes could buy a combination of grid improvements and wind and solar that would displace more coal. And it is not like the cheapest wind and solar are not central station generating. Wind and solar both get cheaper in the 10s or 100s of Gigwatt ranges.

Having worked at a wind power company that made turbines, I'm going to note that wind power is not without its environmental costs. Raptors tend to fly the same wind patterns that fuel turbine farms and get chopped up pretty good in the blades. Are the negative environmental consequences of coal worse? Definitely. But when your wind farm is littered with eagles and hawks its a tough sell at times.

Crap. Unit 3 had a hydrogen explosion like Unit 1's. It wasn't unexpected, but I was hoping they'd get a break.

May the final contingencies work just as well. Huge blow, nevertheless. Japan is largely reliant on those plants and they need them eversomore now.

It is a tough sell. But lca pretty much shows wind is lower environmental impact than other means of generating electricity. (Negawatts are even lower, but we are not going to zero use unless something goes very very worng.)

However raptor death is mostly Altamont. More recent wind farms manage to avoid that through better tower design and turbine placement. Unfortunately they still kill bats. But I'd rather have wind turbines everywhere than nukes.

The second explosion is like the first - damaged the building but inner containment is still sound for the moment.

IOShallowN, huge welt on the back of my hand in addition to bruising. It's gonna hurt during tomorrow's swim.

Swear to god, I'm going to throw the next kid leaning on the lane divider out of the freaking pool.

Huh. Southern Japan now has a volcano erupting.

Earthquake. Tsunami. Nuclear Power Plant Crises. Volcano.

Until a minute ago in human history there was no central power -- now we sort of can't function without it.

I'm not going to move into the hills and join a militia anytime soon, but there is something to be said for getting as off the grid as one can. Transmission stops being an issue, storage is less of an issue (or you can sell it to the nabes). There are pretty powerful energy lobbies that hamper (or at least are uninterested in developing) those technologies so its tricky -- but no one is going to war over swamp coolers, heat pumps, solar cells, and windmills so they really are in our interest as a nation.

As a city dweller I don't really have those options, but we have some others. The transoms over our front doors are long gone in this building, but when I open that door and a window its a frikkin wind tunnel in here. I'm pretty confident that 90 years ago they had few days too hot to tolerate pretty easily in this building.