Bar blogging, books, and music

Well, the below two posts were a little rough; I'm not used to this live blogging thing. Missed parts of the conversation between Don and Mike (where Mike explained that yes he had heard of the bag ordinance and no, he'd voted against it).

I spoke with Pete Bowers during Mike's musical event about the possibility of bringing the Into the Woods cabin to the library land; that would be nifty to get that historic building back in action again. From Everything2.com:

An excellent coffeeshop/alternative bookstore located in Fairbanks, Alaska very near UAF and next to the Oaken Keg. Yours truly slaved there one summer cleaning books and pulling espresso for darkness starved poets, celtic musicians, drunken carnies and your average itinerant Alaskan workers.

Into the Woods paid $7/hr. in books and a portion of the evening tips. The other portion of the tips went to the mandatory 11:55pm run to the Oaken Keg for Into the Woods Afterhours, a key reason to work there indeed. There's nothing like drinking beer with your employer at 2 in the morning and wishing it was dark so you could actually get some sleep.

And an entry on the end of its existence as a bookshop and indeed, a cabin in the woods where it was built:

A small town bookstore/coffee shop died too quietly January 1, 2001. Into the Woods was the renegade bastion of human evolution; set neatly off from the road it was hidden from everyone by old and cool Alaskan forest.

I worked there off and on for a few years and in that time we had weekly Celtic jams, French classes and films, a G'wichin table, Green party meetings, song writing workshops, poetry readings and several surprisingly well-received concerts. Open noon to midnight every day we could find a willing worker the bookstore was one of scant few businesses in this mostly frozen (frozen in so many more ways than literal) town that didn't encourage the sterilely generic Seattle-Starbucks look that is growing so hip up here.

Our last year was too much of a struggle though. The owner had to take a job up North to keep the shop open and summer light-all-the-time mania burned out our over-worked employees at a monthly turnover. Finally an unfortunate and overly principialed brawl with the land owner (the University of Fairbanks) left us owing back rent, no access to the bank roll and a letter of eviction.

So, we rallied the troops and wrote a petition, spoke with the President of the University, raised money to cover back rent, cleaned up the land and worked on the shop itself. Then we asked for another chance. In retrospect I think we were too idealistic to think that the University would take our bid over the possibility of renting the land to some commercial business that would bring in far more money than our beautiful no-profit.

We moved 8 years of books and life out of the cabin then decided to take the shop with us. In an endeavor unlike any other people filed diligently out of the proverbial woodwork to help move out and move the building. The actual structure of Into the Woods is now 3 miles out of Fairbanks waiting empty in different woods.

Last month the University evicted the neighbors on the old land and razed their house, taking quite a few old trees out with it. We resorted to civil disobedience and took 5 dead stumps back to the University in time for Earth Day. We left them at the Commons, the cafeteria, the dorms and at the office of the President. Nailed to each stump was a signed letter stating our disbelief of their total disrespect for the originality and heritage of the land and a high class glossy photo of an amanita from the land. A couple days later we spoke with the President to gauge his reaction... he smiled blankly on a said he had absolutely no idea of what we were talking about.

The university didn't end up leasing the land to anybody. The trees are still standing, the property remains an empty lot. But the cabin was rescued, along with the manuscript that describes its history. Pete Bowers and John Goodhand have had it, still ready to move, on property near Cripple Creek Tire & Auto (now known as Everything Auto, I think, but nobody calls it that). Pete wants to use it as a place for music and poetry slams, which I think is just fine. We could move the library books associated with both, open it up as a place to practice or jam, put out a donation jar to pay for electricity and fuel, and keep it going in the spirit it developed as a bookstore and coffeehouse back when Connie Huffman was running it.

Into the Woods revived!

Possible location and industry for the first oceangoing arcology

Arcology: portmanteau of architecture and ecology. There's only one arcology in existence right now, that I know of: Arcosanti, a village in the Arizona desert. This was originally conceived by Paolo Soleri, who wrote Arcology: The City in the Image of Man.

It seems to me that the perfect location for the next arcology would be the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific Trash Vortex.



Numerous architects have experimented with the idea of a city-sized ship (or an artificial, ship-like island), although the floating city in as massive a form as envisioned by science fiction writers and visionary architects such as Soleri, Eugene Tsui, Jean Philippe Zoppini, and others has yet to be designed beyond the art concept stage. From Artect.net:

Despite increasing stresses on our existing societal structure and a world population rapidly growing to unsustainable levels, land based arcologies appear unlikely in the foreseeable future. The answer may reside with the remaining seventy percent of the Earth’s surface, our oceans. Ocean arcologies could utilize ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) or derive energy from the ocean’s perpetual motion to provide abundant pollution-free energy. Fresh water would be available via desalination. Despite the inherent dangers and high expense, the surface of Earth’s oceans are already littered with surprising structures from Sea Forts in the Thames Estuary to the famed remnants of Florida’s Stiltsville and of course the ubiquitous oil rig.

A few problems exist with dotting the oceans with cities like this, however, one of which is a lack of resources. Undersea mining, of course, is one way to deal with a lack of solid raw resources, but garbage pickup is another. And there's plenty of garbage out there. So, a city floating in its midst could harvest that resource, and thereby improve the health of the surrounding fisheries and the also the beaches of the world.

Sustainability is a big issue with cities like this, so renewable energy and urban agriculture--not to mention fresh water collection or distillation--are factors to consider. Vincent Callebaut is another architect looking at the feasibility of the oceangoing urban structure, as a response to climate change. The illustrations of his Lilypad city are beautiful and very interesting. Worth a look! He also has a concept for another type of floating island/cities.

Updates on Ester nukeage

The public hearing at the Planning Commission on the permit for Reeves' nuclear power plant has been moved to June 16, per Dermot Cole (glad he's keeping an eye on this one).

On the question of being a nuke-free zone

Memory is a tricky thing. In 2003, three resolutions were introduced to the Ester Community Association at the spring meeting. They were published in the Republic and a poll conducted during the Fourth of July Picnic, where they were overwhelmingly approved by poll participants. However, the actual vote on them did not take place until the fall meeting, at which point two of the three were withdrawn and the one remaining, on making Ester a PATRIOT Act-free zone, was passed.

So when Mike Musick spoke at the GVEA meeting recently (fourth video in the member comments), saying that Reeves' plan to install a modular nuclear power generator might require a bit of discussion with the community association because Ester had declared itself a nuclear-free zone, he was only partly correct. Although the formal resolution was introduced and a public poll conducted, the resolution itself was not passed.

Mark Simpson referred to these resolutions as "hare-brained" in his August 2003 piece in the Republic, "Assemblies and Agendas," but now we are faced with the actual possibility of nuclear power in our neighborhood. Mark's main issue was with what he saw as the politicization of the ECA:

You see, it’s not the anti-PATRIOT Act stance I’m disgusted with—it’s the hijacking of an honorable, useful, apolitical association of people to fulfill the aims of some short-sighted political activists. It puts the ECA on a level with the Berkeley City Council, forever passing wacky pronouncements, rather than the Peace Corps, actively engaged in bettering lives. The ECA could host a forum, a debate, or a “teach-in,” or rent its hall to others to do so, but it best serves its members by remaining above the fray.

I saw the no-nukes resolution then not as a political issue, but as a health and safety issue, and I still do. And now is when having our community on record about it in the form of a resolution would have been a good thing.

The few people I've spoken with out here or conversed with via Facebook about the nuclear power plant aren't taking it seriously. They seem to see it as a quack idea with no real merit. However, two other commentators at the GVEA meeting besides Musick spoke about it, and they seemed to be taking it quite seriously. (The first spoke in favor of it, the second pointed out the hazards of it.) I think it's a mistake not to treat this as a genuine possibility. From what I've read, the Hyperion power plant would be an order of magnitude of improvement over the large-scale types that are causing such problems around Fort Greely [PDF] (not to mention the big headline-grabbers like Chernobyl).

Even if Reeves decides the price tag is too steep, the fact remains: small-scale nuclear power is fast becoming the Next Big Thing, despite the ever-present and apparently intrinsic drawback to this kind of power: mind-bogglingly long-lasting deadliness. It is becoming cheaper, more accessible, and more tempting to communities across the world as a power resource, and Reeves won't be the last Alaskan to think about it as a reasonable option.

Note: Bill Stringer wrote a letter to the editor in yesterday's News-Miner about the waste heat problem a small generator might cause. In the comments, it is quite clear that there are many people who see nuclear power as a feasible option for Alaska. A few useful links in the comments include:

New Commercial Reactor Designs, a list from the Energy Information Administration of the US government;

"Galena Electric Power—A Situational Analysis," the draft final report prepared for the Department of Energy by ISER and dated Dec. 15, 2004;

and a list of civilian nuclear accidents from Wikipedia.

Reeves wants to do WHAT!?, or, nuclear power for Ester

Oh good god.

Found this first on Fairbanks Open Radio, and now in an article by Dermot Cole in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner: John Reeves has applied for a permit to install a portable nuclear power plant on a 4-acre lot near Ester. He makes the following nonsensical claims: that nuclear energy is the "cleanest, safest, cheapest form of energy available" (um, yeah, when it's 93 million miles away).

Before I get into the details of this, here's the date for the public hearing on the permitting:

Tuesday, May 19, 7 pm, FNSB Planning Commission. You can e-mail the entire commission at planning@co.fairbanks.ak.us.

Hyperion Power Generation, the company Reeves would like to work with, is creating small, self-contained modular power plants, rather like the Toshiba company's proposed modular power plant for Galena. (As of last year, this power plant was still scheduled for permitting approval with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.)

Hyperion's modules are smaller than Toshiba's by quite a bit (only about two meters cubed) and use no weapons-grade material. Here's how the Guardian describes them:

The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory.

Let's see: "clean".

The biggest problem with nuclear power is the waste, both mining waste and power industry waste. The Star (Toronto) describes the problem succinctly:

The fact is the units would still produce nuclear-fuel waste – a football-sized amount for each reactor – and while it would be collected by Hyperion and managed at a central location, a large part of the population believes it immoral to create and leave behind highly toxic waste for future generations.

Can a company like Hyperion be trusted to transport, collect and manage this waste from potentially thousands of sites?

And will Hyperion be around for thousands of years to look after its mess? Will the governments of the countries in which these potential sites are to be located be stable enough to properly regulate the nuclear industry and plants within their borders, again, for thousands of years?

To claim that they are "greenhouse gas-emission free" is nonsensical, just as it is for anything these days. Transporting the module back and forth every 7 to 10 years is going to require something in the way of fuel, and there is no industrial equipment manufactured today that doesn't rely on fossil fuels somewhere in its creation. Mining uranium, of course, has its own set of problems above and beyond greenhouse gas emissions (the uranium mining industry has a lousy health and safety record).

Side note to Alaska's political bloggers: any of you recall the Elim student protest and Palin's mining plans for the Seward Peninsula? The student blog doesn't appear to have been updated since September 2007, but there's some more news items that showed up in 2008. Northwest Alaska isn't he only place that needs to be thinking about this question, though: Bokan Mountain near Ketchikan is described as Ucore Uranium's "flagship property".

[I really don't get why Palin is so pro-mining and so unfriendly toward renewable industries like fishing (which bring in more money than mining!).]

"Safest":

I'm not sure what these companies think they are doing, trying to sell nuclear power plants to people in a state riddled with fault lines and volcanoes and flooding rivers. I read a ludicrous claim somewhere (can't find it now...) that because an item is buried, it would be safe from earthquake. Um, what? the earth moves, and not just on the surface—down for miles! And radioactive material, if it gets loose, is decidedly unsafe. In any quanitity.

There are a couple of big advantages that these small modular-type power generators have over the traditional sort of nuclear power plant. One of them is no mechanical systems: no moving parts, nothing to break down and cause havoc thereby. The other is that the expense in building and maintaining them is considerably less than with a big plant. The uranium hydride used as fuel is far less nasty than the fuel typically used in nuclear power plants. And it's not going to be useful for people intending to make their own nuclear weapons.

Now let's address "cheapest."

Typical large-scale nuclear power has been heavily subsidized. There's no way it could compete with oil, coal, wind. solar, geothermal--any other method. It's the most expensive form of power generation out there, excepting maybe using a gadzillion mice on excercise wheels...and most estimates of cost never even touch the expense of guarding the waste properly from 260,000 years...mostly because the plan is to bury it in the ground and forget about it. The mini-nuke option is cheaper, by a lot, but it still doesn't address this long-term problem and expense.

I'm wondering. The borough didn't have any zoning plans for wireless phone transmitter towers, so they popped up all over and caused a fuss. I'm betting they don't have any zoning in place regarding nuclear power plants, either.