Rats! AND - Fukushima.

Boy, I tell ya, the blogging just doesn't get any better than when two of your topics suddenly merge.

The BBC news feed today is carrying this story; about rats and Fukushima; simultaneously.

Did you know?  That the power was cut to the crippled nuclear power plants at Fukushima a couple of days ago?  It barely hit the news- but, yes; it was a problem; the power loss meant all the old nuclear fuel waste in the "storage pools" - wasn't getting any cooling.  Yes, if that continues long enough, the water will evaporate, and the rods melt- eventually with the potential for going "critical."  It's really not a good thing.  But why clutter up the news?

   You didn't hear about the fish they caught in the bay off the Fukusima plant a couple days ago either- the one more than 7,000 times more radioactive than the limits for consumption.  A record, in fact, for radio-cesium contamination.  Which biologically- could only happen if the nukes are still very actively leaking extreme radioactivity into the bay, every day.  Which TEPCO denies, and no one else is inspecting.  We'd rather not know.

   Cesium from the original disaster could not be that hot, two years out.  The real puzzle, to me- your friendly local Physics professors - KNOW this- and remain silent.  I don't like that fact very much.

  The rat?  Chewed through some electrical connections, and got fried- and shut down the power.

 Murphy's Laws are the reason why nuclear power cannot be made safe enough.  And here we are.  I will bet you the farm- if any engineer ever included specs on rat-proofing nuclear power plants- it was long ago, and long forgotten- and nobody in Japan was worrying about rats in the wires.  And they should have been.

   Happy Spring!  We hit -1°F last night here; with about 10 inches of hard packed frozen snow to fight through.  Keep it in mind- "global warming" does not mean "uniform"- it means bigger storms and weather excursions.  There's still nothing between us here on the Iowa-Minnesota border and - the North Pole.  Nothing to stop polar air from wandering down here, when it's in the mood.

The THWASPCO/Potty House in Winter-

That's "Three-Hole Wind And Solar Powered Composting Outhouse", in case you missed that earlier.

Some time ago, I made a comment over at NoImpactMan, to the effect that "everybody going back to mud huts" IS indeed an "option".  

It took me quite a while to realize some of the participants there did not understand what I meant by that.  It's not that universal mud huts is an option we would CHOOSE, as a society.

It's that we could all to easily find ourselves living that way- if we don't fix some of the problems facing us.  The potential for societal collapse is that big.  We won't choose it- the universe will enforce it, if we continue to ignore physics.

Seemed obvious to me- pretty dumb (of ME), huh?

Wherever humans live, there are seasons; either cold/warm, or wet/dry, or light/dark, or calm/windy - etc.

One of the factors contributing to planetary overload is the increasing assumption that whatever dwelling/city you build; it should be built to serve your needs perfectly - 100% of the time.

I think we probably cannot afford it.  And I can tell you from long personal experience- it won't kill you to be hot, cold, wet, or dry, some of the time.

We look, for example, at the country farmer housing/village in China/India/Brazil- and the more sheltered among us are appalled.  My gosh, the houses are made out of... mud.  (Literally; or adobe, or rammed earth, or thatch...)  The streets aren't paved.  They use outhouses.  Each house has one lightbulb.  It's horrifying that humans should be forced to live this way!  We think.

They frequently don't think so, until they get a satellite tv link, and start watching re-runs of Dallas.

Then, since this is what the whole world tells them, they start to "need" paving, highways, indoor plumbing, refrigerators, and prefab plywood houses.  It's a disaster.  They have no recognizable "cash-flow" to pay for all this, of course; so they tend to abandon their 8,000 year old sustainable agriculture/polyculture pathways, and plant a "cash-crop" - like cotton, or opium.  So they can buy Spam, bagged rice from California...  etc.  One crop failure of the new cash crop and - they starve.

Sitting cosy in our Chicago condo, it's hard to realize- about HALF of all the humans on the planet still live this way.   World Bank data.

As far as I can decipher the bureaucratese, a mere 25% or so of the world lives on $1US (one dollar) per day; or less.  What's a little harder to discover is that another 25% or so lives on - TWICE that.  That is - $2US/day (two dollars) - or less.  Rich folks.

Life in the mud-hut world is far from bucolic; it entails occasional hunger, frequent lack of basic medicine, total lack of advanced medicine; short lives and too much hard work.  

Here's what I'm trying to get around to- the capital investment in our "modern" city/suburb infrastructure is utterly incomprehensible to anyone living on $2/day.  And a disproportionately large chunk of it goes to make our modern world "100%" functional, 100% of the year.

Highways are not a really good example to work with here; since a lot of the "frills" associated with fancy highways are also for safety - hard to argue against.  But the numbers are more easily accessible than most; and for most of us- the costs are surprising.  From GAO - (slide 16)

WSDOT found:
– Reported costs ranged from about $1 million to $8.5 million
per lane mile.
– The median reported cost was about $1.6 million per lane
mile.
– Five states reported costs significantly higher than other
states—ranging between about $3.1 million and $8.5 million
per lane mile. (See fig. 1.)

So- when your town builds one mile of 2 lane road- it tends to cost around $3.2 Million.  More if it's mountainous, or swampy.

You have any idea what a mud village could do with $3.2M?  Build a hospital?  (mud would be fine)  Educate 3 doctors?

Are all the roads in your neighborhood NECESSARY?  How many are there so people can get to work 10 minutes faster?  Or because there's one house way at the end of the road?

Staggering amounts of money are spent by us on infrastructure that is useful - for a small percentage of time; or a few people.  This is mostly unnoticed- and I think is not being discussed as a possible source of "saved" energy and resources.  Of COURSE it's my right to have an all weather road to my door!

Quite a few thinkers believe that one of the "answers" in the coming centuries to humanity's problems has to include a more even access to resources - water, fuel, money.  Besides the airy-fairy nonsense about fairness or justice - it's just practical.  Those damn poor people eventually get cranky, when they have nothing left to lose- and start banding together, and burning cities, and stuff.  (take a look at history, please)

3 billion people now live on less than $2/day.  How much more do they have to lose?

Analysis will show, I am quite confident, that the cost of providing services  "100%/24/7/52" -is usually about TWICE the cost of providing services "92%/23/7/46".  That's huge; and those resources are desperately needed elsewhere.

Would you be willing to put on a sweater for a couple weeks - so a village in India could have a doctor?  That's what it could come down to, in the centuries ahead.

SO - where the heck is the THWASPCO in all this blather?

Well.  It's a sanitation service that makes many people recoil in horror.  "I COULDN'T live like that!"  they'll say- and the most astonishing part to me; they believe it.  Never mind that a) all your great grandparents lived this way, and b) more than half the people on the planet still do.  Yes, you COULD.  You just don't know it.

Why do we have one?  

A) we couldn't afford a "normal" sanitation system- which would have cost about 6-8 times more. (Freeing resources for much more critical needs.) 

 B) once we got into the needs and design aspects- this system actually does an environmentally superior job of handling waste- by a long shot.

Oh, yah, and C)  luckily for us all, your tushy just doesn't have many "cold" sensors in it.  Sitting on a below-zero seat is like jumping into 50°F water- seems chilly for a couple moments, then you're used to it.  NO BIGGIE.

Basically, the THWASPCO provides perfectly comfortable services about 8 months of the year.  It's got substantial solar heat gain when the leaves are off- making spring and autumn pretty cozy.  It MAY get too hot for a few days in mid summer.  In midwinter- yeah, you notice it's not cozy.

So?  Cope.

And how, precisely does one use an outhouse in -20° weather?

Very, very quickly.

More tomorrow.  :-)

Not in the plans

Too much going on in the Big Woods; it's been hard to steal time to get here; sorry about that.

Not everything that happens is on the list. I've had solar (photovoltaic) power in the Little House for 20 years or so. In all that time, it has served me very well. It's not a path without bumps, however, which we may get into someday (like the old phone company batteries we got for free- huge, glass cased, single cell batteries with a high power rating- that were totally unsuited to our uses, which I carried carefully up the ladder, then down the ladder...)

Something you really need to understand. Being a pioneer is bloody expensive.

I never set out to "be a pioneer"; it just happened that what I was interested in doing- no one else had done here before. When you're doing something new - you WILL screw up; and that's expensive, in every way possible.

When I installed my 3rd collection of solar panels, 20 odd years ago- I screwed up. Because of a worry that was current then, and no one even mentions now- the potential threat to glass looking up at the sky from hail.

What!? Is hail a concern for solar panels?? Well, no, not really. But back before some of us knuckleheads went out and got experience, it WAS. Glass is glass, and if you drop big balls of ice on it, it could break. The reality is- this particular catastrophe happens so seldom it's not worth worrying about- at all. Your array is far more likely to be hit by lightning, or a tornado.

But back then, it was a worry. Particularly for me, because of where I am- in the summer the sun is very high, and in the winter very low. Summer is when we have thunderstorms- just when the panels are tilted the least; i.e. most likely to get broken. And we DO have big, nasty thunderstorms, on a regular basis.

So in a fit of brilliance I very carefully crafted plywood backing for the panels, so they weren't just a piece of glass waiting for a hailstone, but a piece of glass lying on a perforated (for heat escape) sheet of 3/4" marine plywood. Much less likely to break. Probably.

Outcome- 99.999% of hailstones just bounce off of solar panels (a true statistic I made up). And- wood rots. Even marine plywood. Eventually.

So I found myself, at year 20, with a solar array that was starting to fall to pieces. It was getting fragile to the point where one good windstorm could rip it into fragments- and falling off the roof WOULD smash the panels, no question. We took the array down; and for too long have been unable to muster the time and personnel to put it back up. Last weekend, we finally did.

The roof on the Little House is steep- when I built it, we were having normal winters, often with heavy snow, and it seemed like a good idea. These days I wish we'd built it with a less "A-frame" type top- I'd prefer that the little snow we get stay on the roof and keep us warm.

Steep roof also means it's tricky working up there. And while I put it up alone the first time, it's really not a sensible job for somebody 58 to tackle without help.



When I say "in the Big Woods" - that's the truth. It's a pretty silly place for a photovoltaic installation. The best site we've got is on the top of the roof; on a mast as high up as I could reach to work without too much danger of leaving my family precipitously. Over the years- the surrounding trees have continued to get taller, cutting our sun more and more. Still- it makes most of the power we use. In winter, or very cloudy spells, we will use a little Honda gasoline generator for back up; but it's usually once a week at most. Chances are if we were out of the woods, we would use far less gas, even with this very small array.

What goes up on the mast is kind of a museum of solar panels. Used to be 3 types, now only two-



The more modern panels are Arco's; the lovely old antique round cell panel is a Solarex. Actually- the older Solarex was better built; though it has so much wasted non-photon catching surface-



Something under the glass on the Arcos is browning; probably an adhesive? And at this point it's certainly cutting some of the capacity of the cells. Eh. So, my little pieces of rock put out a few less milliamps. I'll probably live. The glass on the Solarex panel is still as crystal clear as the day it was born.

Here is the process; me and a son up on the roof, bolting and wiring- 2 on here.



It takes a fair amount of time. You just can't afford to drop a bolt- most of them are special in some way, and finding it on the ground is no joke. So you don't drop anything. Which means moving slow. You also can't afford to step off the scaffold. It's all just a bit nervewracking. Amazing how good it feels to have your feet on solid ground when you get down.

Then, finally - it's up. This time with a steel frame; nothing to rot. Guy wires on; turnbuckles tight.



It's hard to explain the psychological impact of getting it back up. Great relief, in part. Satisfaction. Security.

The batteries are inside the house- so as I type this, I'm listening to the cozy sound of- batteries bubbling hydrogen right close by my desk. Can't tell you how much I've missed that.