Living in Peace and Wisdom on our Planet

Most readers here probably hear little about Bulgaria and its Eastern European neighbors, other than occasionally hearing about Ukraine and Georgia.  And even the coverage of events in those countries has been rather superficial.

An online friend from Bulgaria has given me insight into the political turmoil under which the Bulgarian people live.  It seems that news of the falling of the Berlin wall has not really reached Bulgaria's government.

The most recent major issue arose when Russia cut the natural gas supplies to the Ukraine.  This resulted as a by-product in a total shut-off of gas to Bulgaria.  According to my correspondent, however, there is a lot of electricity generated in Bulgaria and this would have been adequate to keep people's heat going during the gas confrontation.  Bulgaria exports a good deal of electric power.

Now enter the picture: nuclear energy.  Bulgaria has had for decades a six-plant complex of nulcear energy generation.  As a condition for entering the European Community (EC), they were required to shut down units 1 - 4 for design / safety reasons, while units 5 and 6 are considered modern and safe, and continued to operate.  However, Bulgaria refused to disassemble the first four units despite pressure from the EC.

Now, despite wide protests by their population, and according to some under pressure and in alliance with Russia, the government has petitioned to re-start the four dangerous reactors.  They are allowed to take such actions when necessary to rescue a major part of their economy, according to their EC membership agreements.

Now, I am not going to guess at the exact political relationships, maneuvering, and underlying agreements, and many weeks of research would be needed to do so, but clearly and explicitly the experts in western Europe determined those reactors to be unsafe, yet the Bulgarian government is making the moves needed for re-opening them.

Let me point out, if it is not obvious, that Europe has already had one nuclear power disaster, on April 26, 1986, with radioactive fallout descending on a large area of Europe outside the then-Soviet Union when the nuclear plant in Chernobyl exploded and released radioactive gas; I did not realize until recently that 400 times more radiation was released into the air via the Chernobyl incident than during the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.  Thousands have died directly from the Chernobyl, emissions, with unknown numbers but highly visible and severe birth defects following for years afterwards.  Europe would prefer not to have a repeat performance of such a situation!

So, what is this Bulgarian government eagerness to re-start dangerous nuclear power plants? It is another example, along with the invasion of Iraq for oil interests and the deadly civil unrest in Nigeria, this is another example of the lust for easy energy, and with it money and power, superceding a respect for human values.

There is an antipathy between the forces that want distributed power generation from renewable (basically free once installed) sources, and the forces that want to maintain control over the mechanisms of power generation.  A government whose primary goal is to keep a few individuals and their allies in control, will always try to centralize and dominate the generation of power.  Even in the United States, there is a trance-like continuation of the status quo in energy generation despite the inevitable instability and decline in such power sources.  Fortunately that long-time stance is changing somewhat with the new Obama Administration.

I am about to make an analogy, so listen carefully; those under 40 or outside the United States will probably not even know this bit of history.  In our old days, the entire national phone system was researched, developed, installed, maintained, and billed by a single company, AT&T (and their divisions such as Bell Laboratories).  In those days, there were regulations about what anyone could plug into the wall.  Running one's own wires violated the AT&T terms of use, and as far as I can recall, people were forced to rent phone equipment as part of their phone service.  Rates for long distance calls were also 10 times what they are today.

Now, the pretext for all this was the conception that if you let the public freely have control of the wiring and equipment in their own houses, the entire telephone network would collapse under the weight of renegade and shoddy equipment.  The major monopoly case against AT&T finally on January 1, 1984 resulted in the splitting of the giant into seven smaller companies, and ultimately allowed the public to choose their own equipment and run their wires inside their homes.

The result has continued to be a highly reliable system with greatly decreased costs for the public and businesses, and with a greater variety of choices of how to operate one's own telephone equipment and communication options.

Now, can't we apply the same thinking to our electric power grid and to our heat generation needs?  As with the AT&T monopoly, Isn't it time the government woke up and initiated net metering nationwide for residential and business customers?  Just this measure by itself would encourage citizens and companies to install solar and wind systems in abundance due to the power savings benefits through financial connection to the grid via net metering.  Communities, where appropriate, could also fund large-scale geothermal, wind farm, or solar farm power plants and mini-power plants.  We would end up with a far more efficient, non-polluting, redundant, local, and reliable set of energy options than we have currently.

There are many advocates for this kind of system, with the logic of shorter transmission of electric and heat energy, inherent local backup sources of energy, non-existent security risks from terrorist attacks or explosions (compared to giant power plants with nuclear and other fuels), and so on.  What I want to add to the discussion, and am doing so here, is the connection between energy terrorism in eastern Europe, and the failure of world governments to develop internal energy generation plans that free each country from threats by external governments based on energy supply (of any type).

As we enter a world of growing energy demand from China and India, and a still globally increasing need for energy despite the current recession, with oil supplies slowly declining into the future, do we not need urgently to get our domestic energy ducks in a row?

Obama's support for a modern electric grid is one vitally needed component that will ultimately support local, distributed electric power generation.  The rest of the pieces for fully and quickly rolling out renewable electricity AND energy generation, those pieces need proper funding as well – let's all keep our eyes on that goal, let our leaders know what we want, and hope and work for energy liberation in the future.