The Evolutionary Psychology of Fukushima

[GliderGuider]

The Evolutionary Psychology of Fukushima

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Human civilization is engaged in the project of using materials and energy of all kinds to create ever-increasing amounts of order and structure in the world. At the same time, in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we are creating ever-increasing amounts of entropic waste. No problem there, it's what we're supposed to be doing. We might prefer to stop making waste and just create structure, but unfortunately that's not how the game is played in this particular universe.

There is even one more problem. As Neil Young famously noted, "Rust never sleeps." Anything we build must have more energy and material constantly fed into it for as long as we wish to maintain it. That's the Red Queen's race. It's the place that Tim Garrett of Utah thinks most of the energy we use goes - not to build new stuff, but just to keep the old stuff from falling apart. I'd be willing to bet that a similar proportion of the material we generate goes for the same purpose. So our conceit of "creating structure" comes with an additional hidden ecological price tag, a bill that must be paid in perpetuity. It's the Gillette principle: buy the razor once, buy new blades forever.

The thermodynamic foundation of this enterprise is tightly connected to human social behavior by way of our evolved psychology. That linkage completes the coupling of the whole physical/genetic/psychological/behavioral/cultural edifice into a solid, persistent dissipative structure.

Over the last million or so years, the human brain appears to have evolved some qualities that are now working against us. Here are some of those qualities that are crucial to understanding how climate change and Fukushima (and by inference the rest of the Global Clusterfuck) have happened.

1. We place far more importance on finding and using energy (food, thermal fuel and electricity) than on what happens to the waste products.
   
2. We pay far more attention to concrete, immediate threats than to distant, abstract risks.
   
3. We act immediately on threats that affect our daily lives, but spend very little energy addressing complex future risks.
   
4. As our primary evolutionary advantage, the human brain functions mainly as a limit-removal mechanism. As a result we pay far more attention to opportunities than to consequences.

All of those behaviors had their origins in adaptations to problems we faced repeatedly over long periods of time earlier in our species' history. According to evolutionary psychologists, these behaviors became encoded into special-purpose problem solving mental circuitry - i.e. the mechanisms that generate these behaviors are physically encoded in our brains. This physical encoding happens because it's far more efficient and faster to have a piece of special-purpose "hardware" to solve a class of recurrent problems than to arrive at behavioral solutions from fresh algorithmic analysis every time. This worked very well through many tens of thousands of years of slowly-changing history. The difficulty it poses in a fast-changing modern environment is obvious.

It's very hard to override this solution-generating circuitry using conscious logic. Most people tend go with the generated solution because it works most of the time - and that tendency is itself an evolutionary adaptation. Because most of the time the presented solution will be close enough for horseshoes means that conscious double-checking is generally a waste of time. Even doing the analysis to determine that the "solution" may be wrong is too hard or energy intensive for most people. So we tend not to do it. If it feels right, we usually assume it is right. Oops...

The examples of nuclear power and fossil fuels make the operation of these mechanisms very clear once you know to look for them:

1. We place far more importance on finding and using the energy itself than on what happens to the waste products of CO2 and spent nuclear fuel.
   
2. We pay far more attention to concrete, immediate threats like the loss of jobs or declining standards of living than to distant, abstract risks like climate change or the possibility of a nuclear meltdown.
   
3. We act on threats that affect our daily lives. Only once a reactor has melted down or droughts and floods threaten our food supply does society at large pay attention and begin to act.
   
4. Our brains function mainly as a limit-removal mechanism. As a result we pay far more attention to opportunities ("We can power civilization the modern way, by splitting atoms!&quot than to consequences ("Oh, we can deal with the spent fuel later, there's lots of time for that.&quot

Humans also tend to assume that our intellect is strong enough that it can control our actions, govern the direction of our development and deal with the risks. Unfortunately, the forces that shape our behavior have a very strong genetic or "hardware" component that is difficult to recognize, let alone overcome through reason.

Adding to the dilemma is the fact that we have evolved similar special-purpose mechanisms to promote social group cohesion. These mechanisms entrain our personal behavior to conform with that of people around us, so that the group can present a united front. Objectors, malcontents and whistle-blowers are subjected to enormous social pressure to get back in the fold or risk ostracism. So people who say things like, "Perhaps we shouldn't use every last source of energy we can, and maybe we should apply the Precautionary Principle once in a while," are about as welcome in broader society as skunks at a picnic. They are ignored, derided, harassed, or even sanctioned through job loss or imprisonment.

I do not think that humans are generally stupid or exceptionally greedy - at least not exactly. We are living with psychological influences that are very old, and are embedded in the physical structure of our brains. The way we have evolved makes it much easier for us to go along with each other and continue expanding the human experiment than to go against social norms and practice restraint.

Does this mean that our behavior is deterministic? Perhaps not, philosophically speaking. What it does mean is that our behavior is constrained and shaped by so many physical and biological mechanisms that are outside our awareness and beyond our control, that it might as well be deterministic. If we assume that human behavior is in fact deterministic, we won't ever go too far wrong.

[hunter]

1. Japan will continue on with nuclear power because they've really got no other options...

... if they want to maintain their expected "lifestyle."

Same with every other culture. We'll burn fossil fuels, build and maintain nuclear plants, whatever it takes.

[PamW]

2. NOT TRUE for the scientists..

We place far more importance on finding and using the energy itself than on what happens to the waste products of CO2 and spent nuclear fuel.
We pay far more attention to concrete, immediate threats like the loss of jobs or declining standards of living than to distant, abstract risks like climate change or the possibility of a nuclear meltdown.

Perhaps the "man on the street" doesn't have spent nuclear fuel and avoiding meltdowns on their mind; but that's not true of the nuclear scientists that are continually working to address those issues.

For example, the scientists at Argonne National Lab have addressed the nuclear waste issue and the meltdown issue:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

With regard to nuclear waste:

Q: And you repeat the process.

A: Eventually, what happens is that you wind up with only fission products, that the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years. There are a few very long-lived ones that are not very radioactive.

No more "thousands of years storage problem" with the fuel cycle that Argonne implemented.

As for avoiding meltdowns:

The electricity-producing plant reactor has a lot of valves, a lot of pumps, a lot of mechanical things that can go wrong. And the thing that you don't want to happen is to have the coolant, at once cooling the reactor and also then acting as the source of heat for steam to produce electricity. You don't want that flow to stop. That's what happened at TMI. That's what happened at Chernobyl. And if it does stop, then what happens? And in the IFR what happens is, the reactor just shuts itself down. There's no mechanical devices needed to do that. There's no operator interaction. There isn't anything. It's just in the nature of materials. When the coolant flow stops, the reaction stops. That's remarkable.

where if you cut off the coolant from the reactor, what would happen? And there are two ways to cut off the coolant. One is that simply the pumps that are pumping the reactor stop. The reactor just shut itself down. And in the afternoon, we brought the reactor back up to full power again and did an accident situation where the reactor's unable to get rid of the heat it produces, because the heat normally is taken away by the electrical system, and so we isolated the electrical system from the plant, and the reactor then has to deal with the heat it produces itself. Again, another real accident situation. Again, the reactor just quietly shut itself down.

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is "inherently safe" or "passively safe"; because it will shut itself down, and only requires "passive" cooling. You don't need pumps to force cool the core after shutdown; the IFR can get adequate shutdown cooling via natural convection; which just requires gravity. No earthquake, tsunami, or other natural disaster is going to vanquish gravity.

PamW

[madokie]

3. Has nothing to do with the present nuclear power plants

No one is going to spend the money and time to construct these new plants you advocate so your problem solved is bullshit from the word go.
Just more nuclear power industry obfuscation and lies and I suspect you very well know that but since I also suspect you have a vested interest in the industry we can't take anything you say as fact nor factual.

At the end of the day you still have an enormous amount of very dangerously radioactive waste product.

[PamW]

4. 100% WRONG and UNINFORMED, as per usual.

madokie,

First, I have ZERO vested interest in nuclear power. I don't work for the nuclear power industry, and I'm not invested in the nuclear power industry.

I'm a SCIENTIST, and like 98% of the other scientists; I support nuclear power. That is an INFORMED opinion based on my own understanding. Contrary to the claims of another poster; I don't have to trust the nuclear industry and their safety claims. I have the scientific and technical where-with-all to make my own decisions.

Evidently you don't understand that you can also recycle the spent fuel from current nuclear power plants; since that is what the French and other countries that use nuclear power are doing.

Your last statement doesn't follow logically. Evidently you don't understand the physics of nuclear decay. Radioactive species decay until they reach a stable, non-radioactive state. In the end, you are not going to have a bunch of radioactive by-product; you are going to have a bunch of non-radioactive by-product.

The only question is how long it takes to get to the non-radioactive state. That depends on the lifetime of the radioactive species. In my previous post, I quoted nuclear physicist Dr. Charles Till as to what the lifetime of the waste would be:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.ht

...the waste is only fission products that have, most have lives of hours, days, months, some a few tens of years...

That's NOT the thousands or millions of years claimed by the propagandists that you've been listing to.

I don't understand why people listen to propagandists with no scientific training, and zero scientific credentials, when they can listen to people like Dr. Charles Till who are eminent scientists in the field. It's just like the climate deniers; if you don't like what the scientists say about the science; ignore them and invent your own "facts".

PamW

[madokie]

7. At the end of the day we still have thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste

60 plus years worth. If you think for a minute that someone is going to build a reprocessing plant to reprocess all this material you are kidding yourself.
Every one of these sites through out the world that has a nuclear power plant on them will not be safe to be inhabited by anyone, man or beast for a long long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_%27Ndrangheta http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-France_details_nuclear_waste_inventory-0608124.html

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-France_details_nuclear_waste_inventory-0608124.html
'Assuming that France's current fleet of nuclear power reactors are granted 50-year operating lives and that all used fuel is processed, Andra forecasts that the national radioactive waste inventory will increase to 1.9 million m3 by 2020, with 45,000 m3 of ILW and 4000 m3 of HLW. By 2030, the inventory will reach 2.7 million m3, with 49,000 m3 of ILW and 5300 m3 of HLW.'
Even with all this reprocessing the French are doing, that you are talking about, the pile of nuclear waste is still growing. Exactly what I'm saying from the get go.

[PamW]

8. Don't need to build anything...

Last edited Tue Sep 17, 2013, 10:02 AM - Edit history (2)

madokie states:
If you think for a minute that someone is going to build a reprocessing plant to reprocess all this material you are kidding yourself.

We don't need to build anything. The US Government still has the facilities of "H Canyon" at the DOE's Savannah River Site:

http://www.srs.gov/general/news/factsheets/esrs_h_canyon.pdf‎

Located at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS), H Canyon is the only hardened nuclear chemical separations plant still in operation in the U.S. The facility's operations historically recovered uranium-235 (U-235) and neptunium-237 (Np-237) from aluminum-clad, enriched-uranium fuel tubes from Site nuclear reactors and other domestic and foreign research reactors using a chemical separations process.

For example, consider the 5300 m3 of HLW. That is a cube just 17 m or a little over 50 ft on a side! You mean to say that in exchange for three-quarters of a century of clean, abundant power; France can't find space for a 50 ft cube???

Evidently, you also don't realize that the amount of material asymptotes and doesn't get much bigger than that. The reason is the lifetimes of the materials as detailed by Dr. Charles Till in the above referenced interview.

You are still stuck in this mindset that the waste will just keep growing as it is made. However, as waste DECAYS, it transforms from radioactive to stable ( non-radioactive ). For example, Iodine-131 which has a relatively short half-life decays to Xenon-131. In about 4 months of sequestering Iodine-131; it will have decayed to non-radioactive Xenon-131. Do you realize what that means? You don't need to store it anymore!

THAT is the part that you keep failing to conceptualize. You reach a point where you are releasing as much material as you generate.

As an analogy, and help in understanding; think of a winery or distillery. Those operations have warehouses full of wooden casks full of wine or distilled spirits. Do they have to keep building more warehouses forever and ever?

NO - because after a period of time - say 25 years for a really good Scotch - they SELL the stuff they have been storing and it LEAVES the storage facility. They reach a point where the amount of aged product they can sell, EQUALS the amount of new, un-aged product that they are producing each year.

When that happens; the amount of new un-aged product that goes into storage ( i.e. "aging" ) is equal to the amount of finished, aged product that they take out of storage to sell. So the storage / aging facility doesn't have to keep growing.

Are you up to understanding the analogy to a winery / distillery??? Can you see how the storage needed just doesn't keep growing as you have ERRONEOUSLY been claiming due to lack of understanding?

The facilities that the French have at La Hague on the Cotentin penisula in Normandy are sized just like the aging warehouses of a winery / distillery so that the storage facilities that they have are all that will be needed unless France drastically increases their electric production. Even then; it's a factory sized complex that can accommodate any realistic electric production level for France. The French dedicated this factory-sized complex to handle the disposal for their energy generation.

Why can't we do the same? Is a factory-sized complex too much to devote to the effort; when the payoff is clean, abundant electric power.

You have to get over this ERRONEOUS propaganda that the amount will be ever increasing. First; it's not very much. Although the USA has 77,000 metric tonnes of waste for a half-century worth of energy generation; that amount will fit in the space of a typical high school gymnasium.

Additionally, you have to realize that 96% of the waste is Uranium-238. Uranium-238 is found buried in the ground naturally. Although it is slightly radioactive, there's no reason that it needs tens of meters of concrete for shielding. We could put 96% of the waste we have back into the ground where we got it.

That would leave us with about 4% of a high school gymnasium; in return; we got 20% of our electricity for over half a century.

That's really not asking very much!

PamW

[GliderGuider]

6. Scientists are human, just as driven by their unconscious emotions as the rest of us.

And nobody listens to them anyway.

So it goes.

[AtheistCrusader]

5. I'm torn on this one.

I tend to assume that TEPCO is doing what it should be, and the best minds are already applied to the task.. but...

Something caught my eyes in the news this morning. It took 500 engineers to float the Costa Concordia off that reef. Five HUNDRED engineers.

I am not an engineer by profession, though I dabble as the task at hand requires.. but perhaps my initial estimate of manpower is off on the Fukushima cleanup by... Idunno, a factor of ten, just on the planning/engineering side.