EclecticLip

For the third year in eight, European nuclear reactors are having to shut down in summer, on account of the heat.  To understate things mildly, this does not bode well for nuclear as a major power source, in a warming world!  One-third of France’s nuclear capacity is currently offline, to avoid discharging excessively warm water into nearby rivers (water contains less dissolved oxygen as it gets warmer; pumping enough hot water into a river kills marine life).

France has 19 reactors, so if visualized as a litter of identical nineteen-uplets, this is equivalent to knocking six of them offline during peak periods when everyone’s turning up the “climatiseur”.  (Another three are run full-time to enrich the uranium fuel — sadly I can’t recall my source, but it was a generally reliable contributor to The Oil Drum — so electricity for civic purposes has dropped from sixteen to ten reactors’ worth.)

Back home, Ontario’s Bruce Power reactors are sited next to Lake Huron (a much larger body of water) so shouldn’t ever suffer this kind of problem.  For lake- or ocean-side reactors, the primary hurdle to nuclear power is cost — a hurdle with which the fuel cell industry is all too familiar. 

The estimated cost of nuclear power (as calculated by companies submitting bids to build reactors in various countries) is in the 20 cents/kWh range over the reactor lifetime.  Consequently, nuclear is more expensive than pretty much everything but solar photovoltaics — and the latter are getting cheaper as production scales up.  (Each time worldwide installations double, solar gets about 20% cheaper.  And installations are doubling every 2-3 years.)

Riffing on Europe a bit longer, the EU has met its Kyoto commitments.  (This is part of the reason they’re so angry at us Canadians, who so haven’t.)  Furthermore, they achieved this in 2007, *before* the economic slowdown, which by virtue of less manufacturing going on, is itself reducing global emissions rates.  (Indeed, last year was the first time since the second world war that global electricity consumption dropped, year-on-year.)

That Europe hasn’t descended into anarchic economic chaos (at least as of end-2007 mind you!) would doubtless come as a surprise to some commentators.  That is, if they heard the news in the first place — not likely — and if they believed it, which is even less so.  Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. 

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Seguing into the recession, the markets have begun heading down for another stretch, likely to revisit — and plumb below — the lows observed in October / March.  One reason for believing this is that on June 4, Jim Cramer said that we’re in a bull market.  (Which, by the rule-of-thumb that one should do the opposite of what he says, implies that general stocks are heading down.    )

To his credit, the Dow did trend up for eight calendar days after Mr. Cramer’s prognostication, cresting a robust 1.4% higher.  But it’s been an ugly few weeks since.  And is likely to continue to be, as numerous communal superstitions of stock traders, are pointing rather downwards — a long way downwards.

One effect of the ongoing malaise is that oil prices should head a lot lower (with negligible effect at the gas pump, of course!    ).  In combination with lower costs and prices across the board (as employers gain the upper hand in wage negotiations, and companies decide it’s better to sell goods at a small loss than sell nothing at all) this suggests a deflationary trend for a little while, at least for non-food items.  (With the weather, you never can tell…)

While deflation — kryptonite to a central bank — has done more damage to Tokyo’s financial district than all of Godzilla’s twenty-eight visits combined, there is an upside.  I don’t know if anyone’s discovered it yet, but I’m sure there is one.  Even slugs serve a purpose, after all. 

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Lastly, in my ongoing search for leadership literature which enriches readers’ lives (as opposed to the authors’) I came across this excellent research on the Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to their level of maximum incompetence.  Basically, someone might be a great engineer, but a terrible manager.  The reason they get promoted to manager is that they’re a great engineer — but since their engineering skills are overdeveloped, their managerial skills are probably underdeveloped.  It’s like how lobsters have a huge left claw, and a puny right one.

When this sort of thing happens, the company loses out in two ways — they lose the productivity of the great engineer, and suffer the burden of a subpar manager.

The solution, the researchers found, was to promote people *randomly*.  This gives a better chance of “naturally-gifted” managers getting managerial roles, and ensures the company keeps its superstar engineers, doing what they do best.  Since random promotions probably aren’t motivational, they offered that one could alternate in promoting the very best and the very worst performers, on the lobster logic that if someone doesn’t have the gift for being a good engineer (to continue the example)… they’re statistically more likely to have a gift for management!!

Oh, what I’d give to be a fly on the wall at one of those promotion meetings…