Richard Zurawski

The quest to modernize, to make life easier, has truthfully given us much, but at the same time taken much from us. Invariably, the task savers, the short cuts and the innovations of modern technology have only shifted the burden from one place to another, usually with an added cost taxing the burden. Usually that burden has been shifted from people to the environment, where the ecosystem has paid for our advances. Its a case of out of sight, out of mind. If we don’t see the effects or feel them directly then the cost is non existent.

Take something as simple as the clothesline. A wonderful, effective and low energy device. It uses very few resources, is technologically simple, doesn’t need a complex set of instructions, warranty or need to be plugged into the household electrical circuit. It has functioned for thousands of years, needing only the benevolence of the weather, to accomplish a very important task; dry our clothes.

Was it more work to use. Yes, admittedly it required a bit more back bending and effort, and was slightly slower than the tumble, lint collecting, scented heaters that toast, roast and churn our modern day clothes. That is not to say that on a wet, cold dreary day a clothes dryer isn’t a modern marvel of convenience. There is a time and place where it does fit in and make life easier. But then on the sunny day with a warm breeze fluttering through the leaves, hanging out the laundry is an almost Zen experience, where you can almost reach out and touch the gentle solar photons and become one with the puffy, drifting clouds. I kid you not. It can almost feel that way.

When was the last time you chose to hang out the laundry, instead of throwing it into the dryer drum? Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to go back to the days of hauling water from the creek and pumping it into a cistern, but there is a joy in the naked simplicity of the clothesline. It is truly a simple, effective marvel that should be in a hall of fame. It can be as simple as rope strung out between two oaks, or it can have all the latest plastic coated, galvanized non corroding steel wire on bearinged pulleys.

I wonder how many people have lost the simple pleasure of hanging out the laundry on a warm sunny day and then taking the time to feel the sun, smell the roses and listen to the buzz of insects nuzzling petunias.

Try it. The added benefit is amazing. When the lights go out at night and you snuggle under your comforter, between sheets caressed in the sunny breezes your dreams will sweeter by far that any you would get from the tumbled, scented, freshened, puffed, and cooked bedding. And you will have eased, ever so slightly, the burden we have shifted on to our beleaguered environment.

There are pros and cons to living in a geothermally active zone. The people in Indonesia live in constant fear of the next great and devastating volcanic eruption that can be not only locally disastrous but have global effects.

For the folks in Iceland, an island sitting atop the longest mountain chain in the world, the mid-oceanic rift, which is parting the Atlantic Ocean, sending North America and Africa apart at five centimetres a year. It is what powers their island. They have turned the heat of plate tectonics to their advantage. The virtually limitless heat from the churning mantle of the Earth provides them with electricity, heat and no pollution. They don’t need wind farms, tidal dams, nuclear power plants or hydroelectric generators. The heat from the Earth powers just about everything on Iceland, which the exception of the automobiles, trucks and ships, which are still fossil fueled.

This state of affairs had me wondering a bit as the temperature of the past few days experienced its inevitable seasonal downturn. What about using the Icelandic geothermal energy, which is just about limitless, easy to tap and simple technologically to be the first step in a closed hydrogen power loop. Sea water surrounds the island and water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen. Use the geothermal energy to create electricity, which in turn fractionates the water into oxygen and hydrogen. Let the oxygen spin off into the atmosphere, store, liquify and transport the hydrogen to where it is needed. When it is burned, and make no mistake, hydrogen is a wonderful, powerful and light fuel. It powers and heats whatever you want it to. And when it does, all it creates is water. And if in the process of transmitting the hydrogen escapes, the transport ship flounders and runs around — the awful destruction that we have seen this past week in the Black Sea with the Russian tanker running aground – killing and fouling and maiming any lives it touches is completely mitigated. The hydrogen combines with the oxygen and again creates water.

No pollution in the mining, pumping, shipping, using…nothing, nada. It’s clean, the technology exists and is safe. Imagine Iceland and other geothermally active hotspots as being the hydrogen-producing locations. They could become the Saudi Arabias, Iraqs, Irans and Albertas. We already collect energy from one part of the world and ship it to another. Only hydrogen is so much easier to deal with. It doesn’t need to be refined or reprocessed. Once the hydrogen is produced, all you need to do is look at the infrastructure. We already have a huge oil shipping infrastructure. That could easily be modified to hold hydrogen. And once it is where you want it to be, the hydrogen could be piped in the natural gas pipelines that already exist all around the world and connect virtually every city to fossil gas. Just replace that with hydrogen.

The more I think about it, the more and more I wonder. Cars can be cheaply and safely modified to run on hydrogen. The engines would be virtually identical. What is holding us back? Could it be that we have been sold a bill of goods? Drilling, pollution and a legion of other dangerous and planetary damaging practices could be averted in one swell foop!

It was called the war to end all wars; the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month commemorating it. Yet, 21 years later, it re-ignited to lay waste to Europe again. Again, it was the war to end all wars. When it was over, my father barely survived — an orphan without a family, without a country, with horror for memories. Yet somehow, in spite of it all, he had the presence to bring himself, his wife and son to the sanctuary called Canada.

And, I have grown up without war, without horror, but also without half my family. As I read the newspaper each morning, I am struck that everywhere, we are participating in yet more war, and if anything, we are more addicted to the rhetoric and killing than ever. Our soldiers die in far off lands and families there and here suffer and shed tears. Ever has it been thus; more wars, more tears, more rhetoric, more propaganda where the truth becomes as shredded as the bodies of the people that war rips apart.

I remember my father trying to forget, silently glimpsing in his mind’s eye what he didn’t want me to experience. The shadow of the Second World War never left my father, never gave him a single moment’s peace in the years after the war had officially ended. No father, no mother, no sisters, no brothers came to visit him, share a chat, reminisce, light a cigarette, smile, or while away the moments. The dead only visit to share tears in memory. Every thought of them must have cut him. His life became one of just tomorrows. Remembrance and yesterdays were banished and he rarely spoke of them.

I wonder at the young men who come from the devastated countries to our fair shores for solace, like my father did so long ago. Those men, who have lost everything except their own lives, who cannot look back and remember, because remembrance crushes them and tears at them without mercy.

My father has since passed, but even so, I will remember for him. I will imagine the days when there was peace and he was a young boy in a land not yet fractured and turned into a graveyard. I will remember smiles, family and happiness, because he could not look back without pain and tears.

And maybe some time in the not too distant future, sons won’t have to remember for fathers.

Sticking with my geothermal theme, I have listened with interest, about the almost eruption of yet another volcano in the Indonesia, one that appears to have halted itself for now. By a quirk of geology Indonesia is home to some of the most dangerous volcanoes on the planet. And in the past some of the most devastating volcanoes from Pinatubo in the early 1990s to Krakatoa to Tamora, the largest eruption in 10 thousand years have occurred in this part of the world.

But by far the most devastating was the class 8 mega-colossal eruption of a volcano called Toba about 73 thousand years ago in Indonesia. About 3000 cubic kilometres of material was ejected making it almost thirty times larger that Tambora in 1815. It is possible that Toba was the largest eruption in the past 25 million years.

I really hadn’t thought much about volcanoes and their effects on the Earth and its ecosystem until I read about Mt Kelud and the danger it posed to Indonesia. Then I began to wonder what it must be like for people and the ecosystems of 73 thousand years ago when Toba erupted.

I did some research and found that it appeared to had such a devastating effect on the world that people almost all died out. One of the studies that I read about said that the total population of humans may have plummeted to just 10 thousand in total globally and that this may have also caused the extinction of many of the other hominids. This study was able to make that conclusion by looking at the DNA of people from around the world. By tracing the female mitochondria researchers are fairly certain that all people to day are descended from that small gene pool who survived. The DNA dating shows that we have not yet had time to diversify sufficiently and because of that genetic bottleneck we are all quite common to one another.

It also tells us that the differences that many people use to divide us, are in fact superficial. Things like skin colour really seem not to be a racial divide and that people of the same skin color might be genetically less related to one another than people of differing skin colour. For instance two white from Europe might be further apart genetically than an Ethiopian and and a Scandinavian.

Funny that. We spend all that time and effort to differentiate and divide ourselves from others and something like an eruption tells us that we have been using erroneous criteria to segregate ourselves. So maybe its time not to divide at all. Maybe its time to celebrate the fact that we have survived and that survival can be used to link us all together.

Strange how a news event turns the screws of thought and conjecture.

From time to time I wonder at the marvelous processes that drive the inner works of this fine planet and how it all, so neatly, seems to fit into an amazing pattern. During this past week, with the advent of Noel on our fine beaches, I had occasion to venture to Peggy’s Cove. It is one of my favourite places on Earth. And every time I venture out I find something new to marvel at.

Watching the surf pound itself into oblivion wave after wave is a perfect way to while away the hours. The rocks around Peggy’s have been next to water in some way or another for more than one half a billion years. The continents have been drifting about the face of the Earth for nigh on four-and-half-billion years and show no sign of stopping that process. The reason is that a scant 100 kilometres beneath my feet and that roiling ocean the Earth is hot, incandescent and plastic. This mantle’s movement is what drives what we call plate tectonics.

I remember hearing about a project back in the sixties, whose purpose was to drill a hole through the crust to the mantle of the Earth, to the hot magma, product of radioactive decay, and tap into a free, pollutionless, endless source of energy. I remember wondering why it was abandoned and why we headed off to the moon. It was at the same and would have born infinitely more fruit and so much less expensive as well. That project was called the Moho project.

You see the crust is primarily made of of a oxidized compounds of silicon and calcium and carbon and is by and large poor in metals. The mantle on the other hand is rich in metals like iron and nickel. The places on the crust where we do find an abundance of heavy metal deposits, chances are it was created by an impact that dredged up the elements from the mantle.

In addition to metals there is also the thermal boon, the limitless quantities of heat that we could tap into to drive our turbines and engines. We could pump water into the hole and it would vapourize and be the motive to generate electricity. Clean, limitless and would never shut down, pollute or end.

Like the waves pounding against the rocks, we keep pounding away at fossil fuels and close our eyes to the wonders that lie so close and yet so far away. Imagine a clean world of hydrogen cars, where thermal power would drive the fractionation plants that would create the clean fuels for almost any process we could think of. And the waste? Water. Clean pure and ready to be released back into the ecosystem.

Now that is a footprint I would like to have.

Now that we are in the recovery mode after the onslaught of the storm named Noel, I thought it might be nice to recap and paraphrase the Bard on Avon, with a turn of his famous phrase from Romeo and Juliet, which basically says, no matter what it is called a rose still smells as sweet.

And so it is in the minds of some people, that no matter what it is called, if a storm packs winds of 130 clicks then it is dangerous. Valid point, to a degree. And that is where the arts and the sciences part. Yes, the winds were of hurricane force and the downed trees and pounded shorelines are testament to the sated fury of Noel, no matter what its appellation. But the nomenclature is not merely to obfuscate or to separate the scientifically anointed from the illiterate or tilt towards pedantry.

When Hurricane Noel transformed from hurricane to extra tropical Storm, it told us something of the nature and future behaviour of this massive cyclone. The change in name was a scientific shorthand for….Oh oh…heads up folks.

As climate change settles in and we are reaping its questionable benefits, the prognostications of the good scientists at Environment Canada take on a different hue. You see, climate change models tell us that that these transmogrified Hurricanes get much larger and widespread and rather than have their fury abated by cold northern climes, actually become recharged and refreshed as they head north. And they become more numerous. Just what we need more and more intense cyclones.

So when Noel made the transition from Hurricane to ET, it wasn’t just an exercise to add to the lexicon of meteorology. It was to inform and explain, that things were going to get ugly and that we could expect no weakening of the storm, that it would blossom and spread its ferocious winds across an area that would dwarf its 2004 predecessor Juan. Where the path of Juan was crucial, not so with Noel. In terms of size, Juan was a pin prick compared to the raging swath of Noel. All of Atlantic Canada was affected, with the highest most vicious winds being recorded in Wreckhouse Newfoundland at 180 lmh.

Soon, because of climate change, there will be more press conferences explaining the differences, and soon, it is to be hoped, we will all understand what the difference is between a tropical Hurricane and the ET. Its important because a name can be more than just a name. Sometimes its an education.

You can learn a lot by looking at what nature has to offer and has done with the resources at hand. In the four billion years that life has been on our planet, it has been able to create and sustain an environment that has been perfect for life, no matter the changes and the challenges that have come. How did life do this? Not with fossil fuels, wind power or tides. Life was able to harness the power of hydrogen.

The lowly hydrogen atom has a lot to recommend it. It is the most common element in the universe, is in plentiful supply on the earth, if you know where to look for it. It is highly reactive, meaning, it makes an excellent fuel and component for life’s building blocks.

Very early on in the earth’s history, life deciphered and patented the method for utilizing the sun’s radiation to provide the energy for getting energy out of the hydrogen economy. Something called the mitochondria was invented and ever since been part of the photosynthetic process for getting at pure hydrogen to fuel life through the sun’s radiation. We could learn a lot from these wonderful little fuel cells that algae, plants and so many microbes employ, which, in fact, forms the bedrock for all other life. You could even say that those of us who do not employ photosynthesis are scavenging and parasitizing the rest of the kingdoms that do.

People, in sharp contrast, base their energy needs on the carbon economy, and because of that are threatening to destroy the environment upon which we are all dependent. So how do we get at the hydrogen economy and what makes it so good? It’s a long story to tell completely, but in a nutshell it goes like this.

Hydrogen is the ultimate clean fuel. And we have it in almost inexhaustible quantities. All you need is water and an electrical energy source to separate the hydrogen and oxygen. You can get that from solar cells, wind power or fission reactors. Once you have the water separated into hydrogen and oxygen, discard the oxygen into the air. It won’t hurt anything, besides you will need it later when you burn the hydrogen. Then store the hydrogen and use it for your car, airplane or heating your house, office or store. The wonderful thing about hydrogen is that it is light, burn releasing huge amounts of energy and is totally none polluting when it is burn, because all you get back is water!

The real question now becomes, what took us so long. How is it that dumb plants and algae and microbes figured it out and we didn’t, haven’t or won’t. Who’s looking dumb now?

On this Hallowed Evening I am going to write a few words that some people are going to find very, very scary. I am going to make the case for Nuclear Power. Madness, you say? Not quite say I. Nuclear power done poorly, now that is madness. But, of course that is not what I advocate. Nuclear power has the potential to rescue us from what I see as a far greater danger, Climate Change. As in all technologies, how the technology is handled and used, is where the danger lies. So let’s look at the danger and compare it to what we have going against us now.

Firstly, let me state that all technologies, once implemented have risks associated with them. The automobile is a glorious example of that fact. Each year millions around the world succumb to automobile collisions, not to mention the environmental and atmospheric degradation and climate change associated with its manufacture and effluent. That’s tens of thousands each and every day who die because of the car. Yet there are no marches to get rid of this blight upon the face of the Earth. Its considered a necessary evil and the million who are its victims are treated a collateral damage.

So, how do I make the case for Nuclear Power? Let me start by separating the nuclear bomb from nuclear electricity. Tying the two together makes no more sense than tying a war tank to a Honda Civic. That being said, let’s turn the risk pyramid upside down and examine nuclear power generation at its worst. By far the worst accident in the entire half century of nuclear power generation was Chernobyl. Bad design, bad motives and bad government made it inevitable that this disaster would happen. The worst scientific estimates for the loss of life so far, some two decades after the reactor fire, sets the toll at under a hundred. In addition to the direct deaths during the accident, there has been the rise in cancer rates and other associated illnesses, which scientists put at under ten thousand. Then there is the Exclusion Zone, where due to the fallout people are excluded from living. Almost the entire area is now safe to live in, though some of the region is still off limits.

In all the total cost of Chernobyl is dwarfed by the cost the automobile inflicts on us each and every year, in any way you choose to look at it.

The second part of small essay is that the nuclear reactors being built today are as far from the type that was used in Chernobyl as the first steam powered car is from a Toyota Prius. Safety and reliability have now exceeded just about any other technology we have. What remains now is to develop and implement a safe and reliable disposal of the waste fuel. And when you compare all the nuclear waste from all the reactors to all the coal fired plants spewing deadly climate change gases and talk about sequestering the CO2, again it is obvious that putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle is far easier, safer and reliable than continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Before you shut the nuclear door, look at the risks, the facts and real threats.