[OBSCURA] Jeremy Gilbert, "Original subway tiling revealed"

Original subway tiling revealed a photo by jer1961 on Flickr.

"Original subway tiling, covered for something like 40 years, revealed at St. Andrew Station, Toronto"

[LINK] "Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power"

Ian Irving's tweet pointed me to George Monbiot's article announcing how Fukushima made him a nuclear energy supporter.

You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.

A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium"

I've differences with some of the details of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's take in the Daily Telegraph--non-thorium nuclear technologies can be safe, and projecting Chinese hegemony indefinitely into the future is a mistake--but not substantive ones.

If China’s dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia’s industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West’s entrenched consumption.

China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say.

Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.

“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.

“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.

“They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.”

Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder. The metal has its own “issues” but no thorium reactor could easily spin out of control in the manner of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or now Fukushima.

Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University said thorium must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the fission process. “There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam. There are not enough neutrons for it continue of its own accord,” he said.

Dr Cywinski, who anchors a UK-wide thorium team, said the residual heat left behind in a crisis would be “orders of magnitude less” than in a uranium reactor.

The earth’s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said. Thorium is as common as lead. America has buried tons as a by-product of rare earth metals mining. Norway has so much that Oslo is planning a post-oil era where thorium might drive the country’s next great phase of wealth. Even Britain has seams in Wales and in the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Almost all the mineral is usable as fuel, compared to 0.7pc of uranium. There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years.

[URBAN NOTE] Two notes on urban transformation in Detroit-Windsor

Divided between American Michigan and Ontarian Windsor though it may be, the Detroit-Windsor area remains a single metropolitan area with grave problems.

First comes Jeff Green and Keith Naughton's Bloomberg article "Detroit Population Plunges to Century Low With Suburban Flight".

For three years, Jayesh Patel, an attorney, and his wife, Neethi, a pediatrician, were what he called “reverse commuters.” They worked in the suburbs and lived in the city of Detroit. Last July, the Patels moved out.

They joined 237,493 who left Detroit over the last decade, a 25 percent decline that left the city with 713,777, down from a peak of 1.85 million in 1950. The Patels abandoned their neighborhood of Victorian homes in the Corktown district, founded by Irish immigrants at the turn of the 20th Century, and moved to the affluent suburb of Birmingham in search of better schools for their two children.

“I was just shocked,” Kurt Metzger, director of Data Driven Detroit, which collects demographic information, said about the 2010 Census figures for the city. “Even in my wildest dreams, my most depressed nightmares, I wasn’t expecting this big of a decline.”

Detroit’s population fell from 951,270 in the previous decennial tally -- a loss of 65 residents per day since 2000 -- making it the lowest official count since 465,766 in 1910, according to U.S. Census data released yesterday. It joins St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati and other Midwestern cities unable to reverse a six-decade population loss.

[. . .]

Detroit’s black population fell 24 percent and white residents declined 44.4 percent, pushing black residents to 82.2 percent of the city, from 81.2 percent, the data showed. White residents now make up 7.8 percent of Detroit, or slightly more than Hispanics who account for 6.8 percent of the city, up from 3.2 percent in 2000.

“It’s not just white flight anymore, it’s black movement to the suburbs,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “Part of it is younger people leaving. The city isn’t where they want to be anymore. There are opportunities in the suburbs.”

Second, via the Burgh Diaspora comes a story ("Mini-Motown finds there’s life after autos
") describing how Windsor--and other problematic post-industrializing cities in the North American Midwest--is taking advantage of low, low real estate prices and a relatively moderate climate to attract migrants. (Windsor was at risk of losings its television station in 2009.)

Spring is in the air in Canada’s southernmost city. And, for once, the melting snow is exposing more than rust. Windsor, Canada’s beleaguered motor city, is experiencing early signs of a rebirth, a get-off-the-mat revival for a rust belt community that for the past few years has suffered through a double curse: the highest unemployment and some of the lowest real estate values in the country.

For decades, Windsor has been the “motor capital of Canada” – a miniature twin of the once-mighty juggernaut Detroit, the now near-ghost town just across the river. When the domestic auto industry died in the last decade, it nearly brought these cities down with them.

[. . .]

In those darkest days, modest investment started to trickle in. In October 2008, European solar manufacturer Siliken S.A. announced it would establish a factory in Windsor, employing 175. In January, Quebec-based Premier Aviation announced it would expand its aircraft servicing facility at the Windsor Airport.

But the biggest news was that a consortium including South Korean giant Samsung announced in December it would begin manufacturing steel towers for wind turbines in the city, delivering a modest but symbolically important 300 full-time jobs by 2012. The move is significant not only because it is a rare investment from an Asian country, but also because it moves the city incrementally away from the once-ubiquitous Big 3 auto manufacturers who gave the city both its brightest days and darkest hours.

The area now counts more than a dozen alternative energy companies doing business.

[. . .]

“We have the very best climate in Canada. Did you know there are 14 states to the north of us?” asks [one person]. “Right now, I’m looking at grass and bikes coming out.”

Real estate investment in the area from that cohort alone is estimated to already be $110 million. Since the initiative was launched in September 2008, 278 Ontario families have moved to the area – two-thirds from the Toronto area. Perhaps more surprising is the power to draw from the West. Krista Del Gatto, Executive Officer of The Windsor-Essex County Real Estate Board, notes that fully 28 per cent of the arrivals – 103 families – are from Alberta and B.C. Even 200 retirees have been courted away from the pricier West Coast.

[LINK] Dividing Libya (?) and a divided Netherlands Antilles

Marginal Revolution links, in the post "The history of Libyan unity and partition", to a 1949 academic paper discussing how the great powers, after the Second World War, were divided on the subject of keeping Libya--united as a political entity only via Italian colonialism, that in the 1930s--a unified polity.

In 1949, Benjamin Rivlin wrote an instructive piece “Unity and Nationalism in Libya” (JSTOR), excerpt:

…the Big Four have been sharply divided on the question of Libyan unity…In supporting the Sanusi claims, Great Britain has become the chief advocate of a divided Libya…Similarly, the United States has given support to a divided Libya by abandoning its original proposal for an international trusteeship, in favor of support for the British position…Not to be forgotten is…France, also, advocated a partitioning of Libya, but a partition of its own special variety. Under the guise of “border rectifications,” France has laid claim to the Fezzan in southwestern Tripolitania and to all of Libya south of the Tropic of Cancer…The French claim is based primarily on the fact that Free French troops wrested this desert region from Italian control, and is an attempt to bolster the sagging prestige of France as a world power by a tangible reward for its role in the war.

The Soviet Union opposed a partition of Libya and favored Italian trusteeship. Back then, it seems that Europe took the lead role and the U.S. followed along. Here is one good sentence:

In examining the history of Libya one is struck with the fact that only on rare occasions has the area constituted a unified political entitity…there have never been firm bonds of union.

The difference between the two territories goes back to antiquity, when the territory was divided by rule by Greece and rule by Phoenicia. Even when Italy claimed the country in 1912, it effectively governed over two separate territories, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. What is the fundamental principle of division?:

The division of Libya into Cyrenaica and Tripolitania down through the ages is no mere quirk of history. It reflects, rather, the basic physiographic character of the territory. A great natural barrier — the Gulf of Sirte [now Sidra] and the projection of Libyan desert along its 400-mile shore — divides Cyrenaica from Tripolitania, limiting communication between the two territories and to a very large extent shaping their economies. Trade between the two territories has played a minor role, and the movement of the nomadic tribes in both territories has been and remains north-south, not east-west.

The commenters suggesting that a partition might be a good idea--especially the one suggesting a three-way division between Tunisia, Egypt, and Chad--don't seem to be sensible to me.

GeoCurrent Events' Martin Lewis, meanwhile, discusses how the Netherlands Antilles never made it as a separate and unified country, Dutch plans notwithstanding.

Like the unrest in Turks and Caicos, the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles has been little mentioned in the press. Indeed, an internet search under that name would lead one to believe it still exists, given the continuing stories on its sports teams, economy, maritime boundaries, and tourism prospects. Yet the Netherlands Antilles was officially disbanded half a year ago, on October 10, 2010. The six Dutch Caribbean islands now have independent relations with the Netherlands: three as “special municipalities,” and three as “constituent countries.”

The Netherlands Antilles was always a geographically and culturally awkward place. Its core originally consisted of the three “ABC” islands—Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao—lying off the Venezuelan coast. Having maintained close relations with the mainland, these islands developed a Portuguese-based language called Papiamentu (in Aruba, Papiamento). The remaining Dutch Antilles—Saba, Saint Eustatius (“Statia”), and Sint Maarten—lie far to the northeast in the Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles. Here the basic language is a Creole form of English. The northern islands are much smaller; Saba covers five square miles (thirteen square kilometers) and is home to fewer than 2,000 people, whereas Curaçao covers 171 square miles (444 square kilometers) and is home to more than 142,000. Sint Maarten is the giant of the northern Dutch possessions, with 37,000 people on thirteen square miles (thirty-four square kilometers), yet it covers only half of the island on which it is located; the rest forms the French “overseas collectivity” of Saint Martin.

During the Cold War, the Netherlands planned on relinquishing its holdings in the Caribbean to a single new country. Such plans were complicated by the historical enmity between Aruba and Curaçao, the most populous of the islands. Aruba had long agitated for separation from the Dutch Antilles, a status that it gained in 1986, with a provision that it would advance to full independence a decade later. But most Arubans, like most other residents of the Dutch Caribbean, soured on the notion of independence as they witnessed the political and economic turmoil that followed the gaining of sovereignty by the former Dutch possession of Suriname on the South American mainland. In 1994, the Netherlands’ government agreed that Aruba could remain an autonomous area under Dutch sovereignty, its official status becoming that of a “constituent country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands.”

Although the animosity between Aruba and Curaçao was the biggest obstacle to Dutch Antillian unity, the other islands also had their own disagreements. Dissention about the political future of the islands grew intense. Some islanders wanted more separation from the Netherlands, others more integration. In referendums held between 2000 and 2005, only Saint Eustatius voted to remain in the Netherlands Antilles. Curaçao and Sint Maarten opted to follow Aruba, becoming fully autonomous “constituent countries” within the Kingdom. The voters on Bonaire and Saba, meanwhile, chose closer ties with the Dutch homeland. In the end, they, along with Saint Eustatius, were transformed into “special municipalities” of the Netherlands.

[ISL] "The Mystique of Mustique"

Part of a recent focus on the Caribbean, GeoCurrent Events' Martin Lewis has a post describing how Mustique, an unprepossessing island of the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, was launched as a tourist destination for the ultra-rich and trendy.

Mustique, a 1,400 acre (567 hectare) acre island, was radically transformed after 1958, when it was purchased by Colin Tennant, a Scottish aristocrat with a passion for pleasure. The island had once supported sugar plantations, but by the mid-20th century they had been long abandoned. When Tennant shelled out $67,500 for Mustique, its scrub-covered pasturelands supported one small village of around 100 people. His family was not pleased, fearing that the water-short island would be a boondoggle, but Tennant countered by pointing out that “wintering there would be cheaper than heating the castle.”* His goal, however, was to develop the island into an exclusive resort for the British aristocracy and their associates. He jump-started the scheme in 1960 by giving a ten-acre plot to Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth’s party-loving younger sister, as a wedding gift. Margaret built an estate on Mustique, which now rents for $18,000 to $28,000 per week, and came to adore the island. She invited selected friends and rumored lovers to purchase land as well, most notably Mick Jagger. In the meantime, Tennant continued to pour money into the island, exhausting much of his fortune in the process: “I had to borrow money and sell my Lucian Freuds, including my own portrait,” he complained.

By the 1970s, Mustique’s reputation as a place of privacy and parties for the glitterati was well established. All people arriving on the island are screened carefully, and “paparazzi and gossip writers are put on the next flight out.” As a result, harried celebrities claim that they can “behave naturally” on Mustique. Such “natural” behavior has often veered in rather wild directions: “At one early party, the young entertainers from the village didn’t have anything on and one of the ladies said, ‘Why are all those men wearing sporrans?’ But when Princess Margaret was present, there were limits.” Tennant’s final bacchanalia on the island took place in 1999 in a tented pavilion “decorated with erotic wall hangings from the Kama Sutra.” Princess Margaret, naturally, was the guest of honor.

The property relations and legal framework of Mustique have undergone several changes over the past half-century. The government of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines early on gave tax-free status to foreign property owners. It subsequently passed two acts, one in 1968 and one in 1989, designed to regulate tourism and limit the number of private villas, now capped at 110. In 1976, Tennant sold the Mustique Company, which holds legal title to the island, to a private consortium, although he continued to serve as master of revels; in 1988, the island’s property owners banded together to purchase the company. The roughly 100 land-holders, including Mick Jagger, Tommy Hilfiger, and Shania Twain, currently own the company and island. Serving them are the some 1,000 company employees, who reside in a village on the island.

Go, read.

[LINK] "declare independence. don't let them do that to you!"

Taking his post's title from the Björk song of the same, Yorkshire Ranter Alexander Harrowell argues that in the neoliberal globalized world, independence provides advantages--in otherwise well-functioning regions--only insofar as statehood gives polities room to maneuver, at the edges of the global financial system and/or legality, that some people and agencies might find convenient.

[I]n the world of "interdependence", why would anyone want independence? If even major powers are constrained by rules, what's the point? Between the 1980s and the great financial crisis, there was a fashion for a sort of soft nationalism, especially in Europe, in which it was argued that small states were worth having precisely because so many of the big questions of peace and war and fundamental economics had been reserved by institutions like the EU, NATO, the Bretton Woods structures, the WTO, and the less formal systems of the international community. Although there was not much point in having a Scottish Army, by the same token, it didn't matter. Therefore things like "Europe of the regions" and friends were a valid proposition.

One of the most dangerous toys left to a small state (or autonomous province) was its financial system. If you couldn't have a Ruritanian foreign policy, you could decide to be a freewheeling sin city of a financial centre, which would give your ruling elite the sort of self-importance the dance of diplomacy did in the Edwardian era. And, in the years when the financial sector itself was exploding in size, it meant real money. Importantly, the same slice in absolute terms means a lot more in relative terms to a small state. So, everyone and their dog wanted to be their regional money centre. In much the same way as the Edwardian small powers insisted on having a battleship or two of their own, they all insisted on having a bank of sorts and building up whatever local financial institutions were available into investment banks. This could be on the grand scale (RBS, WestLB) or on a much smaller one, like some of the Spanish cajas or the Hypo Alpe-Adria in Jörg Haider's fief. (As Winston Churchill said about the proliferation of battleships, it is sport to them, it is death to us.)

[. . .]

Essentially, I think, the one product that any degree of legal independence lets you produce is impunity. The legal status of independence is important here - without it, you're limited to hawking the bonds of the Serbian Republic of Northern Krajina to unusually dim marks, but with it, you can be of service to the world's plutocrats.

[. . .]

Criminal and civil jurisdiction, as impunity services go, have lost some value over the years as extradition treaties proliferate, legal norms are internationalised, and contracts come with arbitration clauses. Further, ever since the US Marshals hauled off Noriega, it's been at least conceivable that an extradition request may be delivered by 1,000lb air courier, in a vertical fashion and without warning. But facilitating tax evasion, the concealment of ownership, and the registration of ships and aircraft without taking responsibility for them are all highly valuable services.

Go, read.