[onlooker]

Why Civilization cannot and will not resume:
I am posting this topic as we have already discussed greatly the drivers of a die-off and the likelihood of this occurring. I am curious as to what others see arising in it’s wake. I for one do not believe anything like the civilization we have can be preserved. First of all fossil fuels will be mostly exhausted, we need an abundant energy source to maintain this advanced civilization. Second the aftermath will be too tumultuous to retain any semblance of BAU, thirdly if war(s) break out too much devastation. But above all I think because the humans who make it through the bottleneck let’s say for arguments sake one billion will forsake civilization for something more akin to a Permaculture more simplified social organization as opposed to more advanced organization. So all signs point to our present civilization pretty much disappearing and surviving humans banding together hopefully retaining some technical and general wisdom and know how as they will certainly need it. It would be a complex transition with a wide range of possible best to worse case scenarios however, I am pessimistic because of the sorry state of the planet. Perhaps these remaining humans can come to settle an area relatively hospitable in terms of it’s food and water and be relatively uncontaminated. One caveat, nuclear waste disposal poses an especially dire and difficult challenge as of course our changing climate.

[KaiserJeep]

I believe that you vastly underestimate the resiliency and redundancy built into the BAU infrastructure.

For example, I am on vacation now, and was just in a grocery store with a shopping list. I happened to be looking at tomatoes,ttomato sauce, and tomato paste for making italian dishes. I counted 35 different varieties. Possibly six of these were national brands that I recognized, the rest were presumably local, or at least confined to a local distributor. There must be thousands of brands of tomato products in the USA, whereas 10 to 15 could represent all the necessary distinctions between organic/corporate, tomato species, with/without halepenos, etc.

While shopping for a flatscreen HDTV with a friend, I saw a dozen high quality sets with the performance and features, in the screen size I was seeking.

My point would be that we actually possess multiples of the means of production for virtually every item that we consume. There is lots of fat and lots of redundancy in the system. Lean times, whether caused by a financial crisis or the advent of war or the rise in price of a commodity such as oil, need bring about only a consolidation of resources, a simplification of distribution. But whether we are talking about canned tomato products or high tech HDTVs, there will still be demand, production, distribution, and consumption.

Nothing will be lost. Everything will be more expensive. Wealthy countries such as the USA will focus more on fundamentals and necessities. Those economies which have less slack will focus on and see a reduction to the bare necessities of life itself. Those third world countries where food imports make the difference between malnutrition and starvation, will unfortunately starve.

All viable forms of alternative and renewable energies will come online, and be entirely insufficient to support the present lifestyles of everyone everywhere. But civilization will not end nor will knowledge be lost. With digital record keeping, nothing is ever lost.

[SeaGypsy]

KJ, how can a self professed computer engineer state that 'with digital record keeping nothing is ever lost'?!? Do you know anything about permanent archiving & its dependence on energy? The fragility of solid state digital devices?

[dolanbaker]

With digital archives, the most important factor is to maintain the equipment that can read the old data and/or transfer to newer media at regular intervals to avoid data becoming "marooned" on unreadable media. The 1980s Domesday project used laser discs and the BBC micro to create and store the project, by the end of the century, there was no way to read the disks. It required a bit of reverse engineering and scouring of car boot sales to build something that could recover the data.

[Tanada]

KJ, how can a self professed computer engineer state that 'with digital record keeping nothing is ever lost'?!? Do you know anything about permanent archiving & its dependence on energy? The fragility of solid state digital devices?

Paper and Parchment still have by far the longest track record for transmitting information from one generation to the next and accumulating knowledge. Before that you had clay tablets, carved rock or wood, and human memories. When we switched over to parchment in antiquity it became possible to accumulate information, lessons learned today could be sent down the generations to your descendents long after you were reduced to dust. We can with great difficulty translate rune stones from Scandinavia or Mayan pictograph walls from Mesoamerica, but figuring out how to read the Dead Sea Scrolls was not that difficult. The culture that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls died out, but the constant chain of parchment documents from 2000 ybp to today has left us familiar with the language and alphabet used in creating those scrolls. Ancient Chinese and Japanese writings have the same benefit and transitioned to paper earlier than the west did.

Digital storage is nice and high tech and all, but none of the media it is stored on last very long. You can put a good quality encyclopedia of knowledge on DVD, but without a DVD reader and computer it is just a coaster for your cup. The plastic in the disk oxidizes in such a way that after a decade or two it starts becoming increasingly brittle, and one bad scratch is all it takes to erase that whole Encyclopedia of knowledge.

If you really want to pass knowledge down to the generations you imitate the people who built the Georgia Guidstones and carve your message into granite in multiple languages. It helps if you keep it simple.

[Scrub Puller]

Yair . . .

Seagypsy. I think KJ is delusional . . . canned tomatoes may be relevant, flatscreen TV's not so much and he doesn't realise the only permanent record of our passing will be afforded by the simple technology of words etched into stone.

Cheers.

[Tanada]

Why Civilization cannot and will not resume:
I am posting this topic as we have already discussed greatly the drivers of a die-off and the likelihood of this occurring. I am curious as to what others see arising in it’s wake. I for one do not believe anything like the civilization we have can be preserved. First of all fossil fuels will be mostly exhausted, we need an abundant energy source to maintain this advanced civilization. Second the aftermath will be too tumultuous to retain any semblance of BAU, thirdly if war(s) break out too much devastation. But above all I think because the humans who make it through the bottleneck let’s say for arguments sake one billion will forsake civilization for something more akin to a Permaculture more simplified social organization as opposed to more advanced organization. So all signs point to our present civilization pretty much disappearing and surviving humans banding together hopefully retaining some technical and general wisdom and know how as they will certainly need it. It would be a complex transition with a wide range of possible best to worse case scenarios however, I am pessimistic because of the sorry state of the planet. Perhaps these remaining humans can come to settle an area relatively hospitable in terms of it’s food and water and be relatively uncontaminated. One caveat, nuclear waste disposal poses an especially dire and difficult challenge as of course our changing climate.

We are not going to burn up all the fossil fuels this go around, either we progress to a better alternative or we collapse long before it is all gone. Nuclear waste poses almost no threat other than in Hollywood movies and trashy novels. The ceramic fuel is extraordinarily stable chemically, meaning it stays physically in one piece. Radiation follows the cubed/squared law, the source distributes its energy over the volume of the radius to the source while your body can only absorb what strikes the square surface area half of your total body surface area. Move twice as far away and you get 1/8th the dose from any source. Put a few feet of steel/concrete/dirt on top of the source and you can't even detect it from 50 feet away, or you already dropped dead and your surrounding pile of dead things should have been enough to tell you keep away.

[dorlomin]

There is a real wimpy defeatism that equates any problem with catastrophe. A threat to the current suburban American lifestyle is not the end of civilisation. We are currently producing more energy than at any point in human history, our problem is there is no real urgency in changing our energy mix. At worst urban transport will go back to electric trams with overhead cables. Most of the cost of computing hardware is to recoup the development costs, the energy and material input are small. At worst the rate of growth in computing power will go linear as we continue to produce the same design.

[onlooker]

Thanks Tanada for that pointer about radiation, i was under the impression that leakage was a big problem. Well that is why i frequent this site, because of a whole bunch of smart people on it.

[dolanbaker]

Electric trams are already being reintroduced to cities around the world. So transition to lower forms of energy is already happening.

[Newfie]

After the die off......

I don't know how far we will fall technologically, that is hard to say.

Socially and culturally I suspect humanity will learn nothing. I don't see a feedback mechanism whereby we evolve into something else.
We will be just as we are now.
Great Chiefs and petty administrators. A few with wealth, the balance scraping to get by in some degree of poverty.

But it's all just a guess, no one here will ever really know. We will all be dead.

[onlooker]

Maybe not Newfie, but the events to unfold will be so dramatic that they can serve as catalysts for inner change within humans. If all that will transpire does not changes people to their very core I do not know what will. But again the future as always is murky I even hold out hope for an unexpected visit from ET, so we shall see but it may be that you and I will not witness the changes of greatest magnitude yet to come. So all of us here discussing these matters may not in this lifetime learn how things ultimately unfold.

[dorlomin]

After the die off......

Newfie is one of our regual ghouls who hang around threads like the Ebola one hoping to enjoy the site of lots of death. Unfortunately him and his evil (Dohboi, MBS etc) friends have had to move onto new issues to fantasize about "die offs".



Cue some scrambling to rationise their lust to be entertained by disasters.

[GHung]

Onlooker: "Thanks Tanada for that pointer about radiation, i was under the impression that leakage was a big problem. "

Yeah, well, Tanada skipped the part about if that fuel isn't kept cool for several decades it'll burn and go airborn. If the cooling pools aren't maintained and constantly cooled/replenished it is a big problem. Ask the folks at Fukushima. Suggesting that these energy sources and their extremely long-lived by-products can just be turned off or walked away from in the case of collapse, or that societies will be able to afford to maintain the ~12,000 tonnes of high-level waste currently created each year, following a severe protracted economic decline, is nothing more than sociopathic handwaving and denial.

Of course, most expect that folks will simply move away from the danger zones (millions/billions of them?), the same way we assume billions of people will move away from current coastlines as sea levels rise. Not sure why someone would try to minimise that.

[dohboi]

Thank goodness that dor is back with ad hominems and character assassination--what did we ever do without him!

By his twisted logic, all meteorologists, since they track potentially lethal storms, are just despicable ghouls who enjoy the sight of people dying in storms and who fantasize about the mass death that will occur when the next super storm hits.

Just bizarre, really.

[KaiserJeep]

I HAVE been in rthe computer business since the days of ferrite core memory and punched cards.The 14" optical disks I wrote in 1986 are perfectly readable, and I have readable1/2" magnetic open reel tapes older than those.

DO NOT make the mistake of inferring that any experience from PCs also applies to real high-end computers.

Nowadays when we reach the end of life with a particular form of media, we archive several of the devices that read the media right alongside the media itself.

Current LTO6 tape devices are small enough that two tape drives fit into a box the size of a ladies shoe box.

Non-volitile solid state memories are moving into the role of backup devices. Think of thumb drives, terabytes in size.

Note however, that virtually everything that was ever digitized is still online today. Last year I gave written affidavits about some E-Mail I wrote when I was still wearing a uniform and the Web was called DARPANET.

Everything you ever shopped for, every site you ever visited, every word you ever typed, it is all there. Many lives are completely documented there, including words from people dead for decades.

It is all there, forever. You could not erase your presence if you tried. People who vanish into the witness protection programs are being found with software that analyses online writing styles and finds individuals who are hiding. That is why such people are advised never to go online again. But could you do that?

[Tanada]

Onlooker: "Thanks Tanada for that pointer about radiation, i was under the impression that leakage was a big problem. "

Yeah, well, Tanada skipped the part about if that fuel isn't kept cool for several decades it'll burn and go airborn. If the cooling pools aren't maintained and constantly cooled/replenished it is a big problem. Ask the folks at Fukushima. Suggesting that these energy sources and their extremely long-lived by-products can just be turned off or walked away from in the case of collapse, or that societies will be able to afford to maintain the ~12,000 tonnes of high-level waste currently created each year, following a severe protracted economic decline, is nothing more than sociopathic handwaving and denial.

Of course, most expect that folks will simply move away from the danger zones (millions/billions of them?), the same way we assume billions of people will move away from current coastlines as sea levels rise. Not sure why someone would try to minimise that.

False. Cooling pools are only needed for the first 18 months after fuel is removed from the reactor, not for several decades. Secondly the fuel itself does not burn, it is a ceramic oxide, what burns if anything is the zirconium alloy tubes the fuel is stored in to make up a fuel element. Doing that will release volatile fission products like Iodine and Cesium that vaporize at relatively low temperatures, but unless you are standing within a mile down wind on the day it happens your exposure will be trivial. Nobody outside of Fukushima Daichi got so much as radiation poisoning, let alone died. Two people on the site waded through some contaminated water and received very minor burns on their feet and ankles.

There is a grand total of about 75,000 tons of spent fuel in the USA after 50 years of commercial nuclear power. The very great majority of that spent fuel is well past the 18 month period when it needed water cooling. I would like to know where you got the odd figure of 12,000 tons a year of spent fuel from.

[GHung]

Tanada: "I would like to know where you got the odd figure of 12,000 tons a year of spent fuel from."

Wikipedia, confirmed by other sources (NRC, IAEA):

"HLW accounts for over 95 percent of the total radioactivity produced in the process of nuclear electricity generation. The amount of HLW worldwide is currently increasing by about 12,000 metric tons every year..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

All U.S. nuclear power plants store spent nuclear fuel in “spent fuel pools.” These pools are robust constructions made of reinforced concrete several feet thick, with steel liners. The water is typically about 40 feet deep, and serves both to shield the radiation and cool the rods.

As the pools near capacity, utilities move some of the older spent fuel into “dry cask” storage. Fuel is typically cooled at least 5 years in the pool before transfer to cask. NRC has authorized transfer as early as 3 years; the industry norm is about 10 years.

The NRC believes spent fuel pools and dry casks both provide adequate protection of the public health and safety and the environment. Therefore there is no pressing safety or security reason to mandate earlier transfer of fuel from pool to cask.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the NRC issued orders to plant operators requiring several measures aimed at mitigating the effects of a large fire, explosion, or accident that damages a spent fuel pool. These were meant to deal with the aftermath of a terrorist attack or plane crash; however, they would also be effective in responding to natural phenomena such as tornadoes, earthquakes or tsunami. These mitigating measures include:

Controlling the configuration of fuel assemblies in the pool to enhance the ability to keep the fuel cool and recover from damage to the pool.
Establishing emergency spent fuel cooling capability.
Staging emergency response equipment nearby so it can be deployed quickly

According to the Congressional Research Service (using NEI data), there were 62,683 metric tons of commercial spent fuel accumulated in the United States as of the end of 2009.
Of that total, 48,818 metric tons – or about 78 percent – were in pools.
13,856 metric tons – or about 22 percent – were stored in dry casks.
The total increases by 2,000 to 2,400 tons annually.

http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/faqs.html

'How long is spent fuel allowed to be stored in a pool or cask?"

NRC regulations do not specify a maximum time for storing spent fuel in pool or cask. The agency’s “waste confidence decision” expresses the Commission’s confidence that the fuel can be stored safely in either pool or cask for at least 60 years beyond the licensed life of any reactor without significant environmental effects. At current licensing terms (40 years of initial reactor operation plus 20 of extended operation), that would amount to at least 120 years of safe storage.

However, it is important to note that this does not mean NRC “allows” or “permits” storage for that period. Dry casks are licensed or certified for 20 years, with possible renewals of up to 40 years. This shorter licensing term means the casks are reviewed and inspected, and the NRC ensures the licensee has an adequate aging management program to maintain the facility.

The most recent waste confidence findings say that fuel can be stored safely for 60 years beyond the reactor's licensed life. Does this mean fuel will be unsafe starting in 2059 [60 years after Dresden 1's original license ended]? What if the spent fuel pool runs out of room even before the end of a reactor license? What is the NRC going to do about this?

The NRC staff is currently developing an extended storage and transportation (EST) regulatory program. One aspect of this program is a safety and environmental analysis to support long-term (up to 300 years) storage and handling of spent fuel, as well as associated updates to the “waste confidence” rulemaking. This analysis will include an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) on the environmental impacts of extended storage of fuel. The 300-year timeframe is appropriate for characterizing and predicting aging effects and aging management issues for EST. The staff plans to consider a variety of cask technologies, storage scenarios, handling activities, site characteristics, and aging phenomena—a complex assessment that relies on multiple supporting technical analyses. Any revisions to the waste confidence rulemaking, however, would not be an “approval” for waste to be stored longer than before—we do that through the licensing and certification of ISFSIs and casks. More information on the staff’s plan can be found in SECY-11-0029.

But here's the thing, Tanada. I have a background in nuclear power ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_P ... Curriculum ) . My former supervisor is a director of waste mitigation and disposal for a major energy company and, while he supports current strategies professionally (as a least worst short-term sollution), he has major concerns, personally, and admits that this problem is being "grossly minimised" by the NRC and the industry; "....fucking complicit in ongoing long-term criminal conduct"... is how he stated it (admittedly, after a few beers). Considering his 35+ years in the industry, his background and education in this specialty, and my personal knowledge of his integrity, I think I'll defer to his opinions. Certainly not as casual an attitude as you project.

[dorlomin]

How do peoples timelines for these "end of civilisation" type things work?