Connecting place to narrative

“Chicago” (oil on canvas), by Elizabeth Enders, in her show “A Different Time, A Different Place,’’ at the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, Conn., Oct. 14-Jan 14. A New London native, she divides her time between Waterford, Conn., and New York City.

—Courtesy of the artist and the Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York.

The museum says:

“Exploring landscape, nature, and the role of place in the imagination, this exhibition presents the recent work of contemporary artist Elizabeth Enders (American, born 1939). In vibrant paintings and watercolors, Enders depicts abstracted landscapes, inviting viewers on a wide-ranging journey. Inspired by experiential knowledge and by places and events of the past and present, Enders renders volcanoes, rivers, oceans, deserts, fields, plants and tropical foliage, along with unusual monuments and structures found in places such as Egypt and Iceland. Such pieces consider how place is connected to meaning and narrative. ‘‘  

The historic and spooky Seaside Sanatorium, in Waterford

Llewellyn King: Nuclear literacy can save nuclear power

The Millstone Nuclear Power Station, on Long Island Sound in Waterford, Conn.

WEST WARWICK

In its first two decades of service, the Douglas DC-3 -- maybe the most amazing, safe and hardworking aircraft ever built -- was denounced in folk legend as wildly unsafe. It was branded a flying coffin by those who didn’t know the data.

The myth that it wasn’t airworthy matured into an out-and-out lie. In fact, the DC-3 was the workhorse that rapidly accelerated modern passenger aviation.

The DC-3 was saved by growing aviation literacy in the public. Can nuclear literacy save nuclear power, one of the greatest tools in containing global warming? I believe that it can. Literacy trumps myth and superstition. 

While nuclear power has comparisons with the venerable DC-3, it is far more important than any single airplane. Those who turn their backs on nuclear power -- so needed as climate change accelerates – are akin to those who without knowledge were turning their backs on passenger aviation in 1935.

Today’s major public argument against nuclear power is that it leaves behind radioactive materials -- lumped together as nuclear waste – which will be radioactive for 10,000 years, about twice recorded human history.

This argument conjures up images of a monster, breaking out of its repository and marching the Earth, laying waste to whatever stands in its way -- a nuclear blob from a science fiction movie.

Truth is, in about 200 years, most high-level nuclear waste will have decayed into something less radioactively aggressive. In  the first 30 years, it gets less toxic and more manageable.

As this explanation by William Reville, an eminent emeritus professor of biochemistry at University College Cork, published in the Irish Times, explains succinctly, “ The intense radioactivity reflects the preponderance of short-lived radioisotopes that are disintegrating quickly.

“This high rate of nuclear decay means the level of radioactivity declines quickly – the radioactivity of spent nuclear fuel reduces to 10-20 percent of its initial activity within six months of its removal from the reactor and within a few decades, the radioactivity reduces by a further factor of two. Radioactivity danger is largely gone within 100 years and within a few thousand years, the stored spent fuel is little more radioactive than the uranium ore that first came out of the ground to be fabricated into new fuel rods.” 

Despite this science, when I advocate nuclear, which I have done for a long time, people roll their eyes and say, “What about the waste?” The waste does need to be stored safely, but it decays to a safe state quite quickly.

The most agonized-over nuclear material is the transuranic plutonium. Yes, it will last thousands of years, but it is easily shielded because it is an alpha emitter: It can’t penetrate human skin and can be blocked with a piece of notepaper. Natural uranium, found in rocks nearly everywhere, is an emitter, as is thorium, found in conjunction with rare earths. Radiation is everywhere. It isn’t the devil’s incarnation.

Those facing the climate crisis tend to shy away from nuclear and advocate only wind and solar. Little thought is given to the waste that these low-density energy sources are themselves going to produce.

Wind will create a huge volume of physical waste from the disposal of carbon-fiber turbine blades. These don’t recycle, unlike the steel towers on which the turbines rest. Eventually, tens of millions of tons of solar panels will make their way to landfills.

If you want to fret about waste -- and you should -- look to the garbage that is crowding the landfills, especially plastic which doesn’t break down. Look to the billions of tons of junk that is making its way into the oceans, killing marine life, and shudder.

The Earth can take a lot of nuclear waste from power plants, advanced medicine and reactors aboard navy ships and spacecraft. But can it take much more of the alternative? 

Aviation literacy saved aviation from myth, even after disasters. Myth is a dangerous force when it is the foundation of policy.

If you want a good, safe myth, go with the tooth fairy.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Linda Gasparello

Co-host and Producer

"White House Chronicle" on PBS

Mobile: (202) 441-2703

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Those boots are history

“Vern has gone up to the attic to hunt for a fish pole and  I trailed along after him. The attic was just like that of any other North Country farmhouse – cobwebby corn, and old clothes; corners piled full of haircloth trunks, boxes, and dead furniture. I saw a homemade cradle, an ancient spinning wheel, a flax-carder, piles of books and magazines and then, suspended from a nail, two pairs of rivermen’s boots….Vern took them in one huge hand and held them almost tenderly. ‘These boots, young feller,’ he said to me, ‘may be said to mark the passing of an era.’’’

From Spiked Boots: From New England’s North Country, True Stories of Yesteryear, When Men Were Rugged and Rivers Wild, by Robert Pike (1905-1997), a scholar and writer who grew up in Waterford, Vt., on the Connecticut River.

Looking across the Moore Reservoir at Waterford, Vt.

Llewellyn King: Reality check on Biden’s clean-energy plan

Keep it going: Millstone Nuclear Power Station, in Waterford, Conn.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The closest President Trump came to laying a glove on former Vice President Joe Biden in their first debate was on the environment.

Biden’s published clean-energy plan — which is more a gushing hydrant of wishes — is somewhat incoherent, certainly expensive at $2 trillion, and looks counterproductive.

It is built on the left-wing assumption that all commerce, and the electric power industry particularly, is managed by people who would trade away the future for a few pieces of silver; that humanity stops at the corporate door.

This was true once. I’ve been in meetings where circumventing restrictions on coal were discussed and where global warming was regarded as a Communist conspiracy.

But now environmentalism is as active in corporate boardrooms as it is in the inner sanctums of Democratic thinking. Younger workers in corporations and shareholders have been demanding this activity. Biden needs to smell the roses, be less woke more awake.

Particularly disturbing are the list of executive orders Biden says he’ll sign on his first day in office. One would hope after the flood of executive orders signed by Trump, many of them sowing more confusion than direction, that Biden would abide by more acceptable norms of governance. Substantial environmental law needs Congress.

If, as his published policy says, Biden signs these orders on day one of his presidency, on day two the courts will be flooded with lawsuits seeking to uphold the laws already in place, not to have them modified by extra-legal action.

The fact is that business today is not the business of yesterday. It is leading an environmental revolution and is, arguably, in the forefront of a new business dawn. This is especially true in the three places where the difference in greenhouse gas releases count: electricity production, transportation, and manufacturing processes which use a lot of heat.

A wind of change is sweeping through the United States on environmental issues, and it should be allowed to blow free and strong. It is more complete, more encompassing and, in the end, will be more effective than if a possible Biden administration tries to control or direct it.

Consider these indicators of the low-carbon wave that is sweeping across the country:

—  Five of the nation’s largest utilities are aiming to be carbon- free by 2050: Southern Company, Xcel Energy, Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, and Public Service Enterprise Group. Others are also on board with the same objective.

—  Amazon is buying 100,000 electric delivery vehicles. Uber and others with delivery fleets are doing the same. Companies with large roof areas, like Walmart, are installing solar to become self-generators of clean electricity.

—  The oil and gas industry, which has most to lose after the rapidly declining coal industry, is pouring resources into carbon capture, utilization and storage.

—  More than 70 of the world’s largest financial institutions — including Bank of America, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock — have banded together to account for the carbon emissions content in their lending and investing. The group is known as the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials and is administered by the global consultancy Guidehouse. It is huge in its implication.

—  A plethora of electric vehicles is about to hit the market, some from new startup companies, others from famous marques from Europe and Detroit. This bounty’s effect will be that there will be more people, who can’t afford a Tesla, going electric. Commercial charging stations will follow. No need for Biden’s plans to build stations. Government is best kept clear when the market is working.

—  New inventions are coming to solar, wind and storage. CPS Energy, the city-owned electric and gas utility serving San Antonio, recently announced it wanted ideas for 500 megawatts of innovative generation and storage and has had over 200 creative suggestions. It also is seeking 900 megawatts of solar from existing technology and 50 megawatts of storage. That is green creativity at work.

What the Biden administration, if it is to be, must do is, as often as not, get out of the way. It should take action where action is clearly needed. Don’t try to speed up a rushing stream with dams.

One such place where it might strike a blow for clean air is to find a mechanism to save the 12 or so operating nuclear-power plants that are to close in the next five years. Their zero-carbon output equals thousands of new windmills.

Their loss will be a carbon-reduction catastrophe. Biden should be told.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.