It’s summer, middle of June, you are getting up, looking out of the window and the sun smiles at you. You get dressed, thinking of nothing evil, but when you want to leave for work you suddenly realize it’s only 13°C. Five minutes later dark clouds cover the sun and a chilly breeze blows under your much too light clothes. You realize, you are not dressed appropriately.
You realize, you are not in Germany any more. Continue reading rain/deer
It was about time. The rear wheel was rusty, the chain was squeaking, one of the tubes had been mended for the third time. The brake wire was torn apart for the second time – and it’s the only brake. My old city bike was indeed a wreck and one of the reasons for that -besides it being old- was driving in the winter season. But not the temperature damages the bike, but the humidity, the salt distributed to get rid of the street’s ice cover, and the lousy condition of many streets altogether. Every scratch on the paint was the starting point for beautiful blossoms of rust on the frame. I needed a new bike.
And not just anyone. Since I already owned a racing bike and the old one for the winter, it had to be one of those sleek single speed bikes where driving in the summer promised to be fun. I ordered a very simple (and inexpensive) Gepida bike forged in Hungary. The parts are, naturally, from somewhere far East and altogether of lower quality, but the frame is really nice.
The second part of the image is an impression of the scenery where I ride the bike, a perfect example of a bike track in Leipzig. In the beginning properly separated from cars, it turns into a merely decorated part of the road and finally ends in Nowhere… Always a funny situation, when cars and cyclists are brought together so instantly. But honestly: There have to be exemplary city governments who brought up better and more sustainable solutions than just painting the road with a few white stripes. And indeed there are. When I was abroad in Turku, the first surprising thing for me (besides the language) were two-laned bike tracks separated from the cars by lots of green.
Here in Germany most cities are tailor-made for car traffic, and that is true for many other EU countries as well. To get an overview how willing people in the EU are to cycle in the city, we can plot data from an EU comission survey. And as extra candy, add the European ‘capitals’ of bike friendliness.
Now it happened. The unimaginable came true. Japan has just announced to exit atomic energy until 2040. Of course, Japan is not exactly Europe, but this is interesting in two ways. First, I coincidentally wrote about the rule role of nuclear energy in Europe and the accidents taking place in the past 60 years of civilian nuclear energy.
And second, because the nuclear superpower Japan performed a U-turn in its energy policy, joining an illustrous club of nations, which decided to phase out or refuse nuclear energy in general. Let’s take a closer look at these countries on a map (this one’s from wikipedia):
In my last post I plotted a map with the major nuclear power plants and the nuclear share of total energy production per country. The cherry-pickers of you know, that energy is not really “produced” but only transformed from one state (heat) into another (electrical current), according to the first law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is boring, that’s why we will create another map. This time, it’s about the consequences of nuclear energy usage. More precisely, the guardian has collected some data on 33 accidents in power plants since 1952. The severity of these accidents is rated by the IAEA using the so-called INES (International Nuclear Events Scale) ranging from 1 to 7.
Today we will approach a literally very hot topic. The use of nuclear power to satisfy our huge energy demand is a controversy ever since, but it has recently gained momentum due to the Fukushima disaster (pics, maps). But this is just the newest in a long line of incidents since the very first commercial reactor was connected to the power grid in 1954 (Obninsk in the former Soviet Union, with a capacity of 6 MW). Remember Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and now Fukushima, where it’s still hard to measure the consequences due to the sneaky nature of nuclear radiation.
But the risk of failure of power plants is just one aspect of this energy branch, and in my opinion it’s the most negligible. Of course it is impossible to build 100% safe nuclear power plants, but you can minimize the risk by using inherently safe reactor types (yes, we have those) like the Pebble Bed Reactor, not building plants in earthquake active areas (Fukushima…) or doing strange overheating experiments (Chernobyl…). The question is rather if nuclear power is a “clean” energy source and should be part of the energy mix of the future: I would say no. Power plants are not producing energy out of nothing, they must be fed with uranium (characteristics and mining), which is a scarce resource and may run out just like oil, gas and coal. But before I answer the question, if we can live with renewables as our sole energy source, let’s take a look on the situation in Europe.
Europe by numbeRs 