A list of things this week because I am too tired and sick and upset at the world to handle the logic of longer form writing.
Panda Philanderer
For years now, Mum has been unnaturally obsessed with the fact the pandas Wang Wang and Fu Ni loaned to Adelaide Zoo by the Chinese government have never bred.
‘They sent us duds,’ she has exclaimed on more than one occasion. She’s never managed to raise quite so much enthusiasm for the sex lives of the Bolivian squirrel monkeys. I dare say it’s because she visited Wang Wang and Fu Ni during a trip to see a friend in Adelaide some years ago now and the pandas were not actively engaged in coitus at the time; a lack of thrust she interpreted as a personal rejection. My entire family is obsessed with the sex lives of animals.
They’ll say it’s because of life on the cattle station or living in the country or something that sounds plausible, but it’s really because they are sick. My sister tells me to grow up, it’s a fact of life in the family group chat whenever they start to discuss animal appendages and I object, as if I just need to make my peace with the testicular heft of a Brahman bull and to improve my lot in life. It won’t, believe me, I’ve tried.
When the news broke during China Premier Li Qiang’s visit to Adelaide that the nation would be loaning two new pandas to the zoo for possible breeding I was running on the spot in the living room (long story) and studied Mum’s reaction.
‘I hope these ones work,’ she said, to nobody in particular.
Nuclear Fiction
I’m quite fond of the science behind nuclear power. Humankind can do terrifying things with all kinds of technology, of course, but the achievement of drawing energy from something invisible to the naked eye, the atom, and using it to power the monument of civilisation is undeniable. It’s also hideously expensive and water-intensive like pulverised coal power stations running an average of 2.4 litres per kilowatt hour which is less than that required to run a fridge for a day. Nuclear is not renewable. It produces a lot of waste which, yes, is radioactive to varying degrees (most of it for half a century, the very worst for up to 10,000 years) but its the management of these logistics that add some 10 per cent to the cost of nuclear power production. Things can and do go wrong. I’ve toured the area around the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi site and, yeah, nobody wants that.
But I’m not here to ring some alarm about nuclear power. It’s just, for a technology that is founded on discoveries so brilliant it seems especially galling that Peter Dutton has matched the scale of the science with his own version of stupider fission: by cracking open a single neuron in his brain and harnessing the power of its degradation for the dumbest of political ambitions: to keep coal and gas alive and thriving at least for the next two decades. That is what his distraction of a policy means, in the end, and I am only mentioning it at all to point that out. As much as I give their management a hard time, the CSIRO has been leading the field on electricity generation cost research in collaboration with the Australian Electricity Market Operator (Finding AEMO movie when?) and its most recent GenCost report from last month features a compelling update on the fate of the world’s only commercial small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear project with published costs and ready for construction. The project was canned in November.
UAMPS (Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems) is a US regional coalition that develops local government owned electricity generation projects. Up until the project’s cancellation in November 2023, it was the developer of a nuclear SMR project called the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) with a gross capacity of 462MW.
It was planned to be fully operational by 2030. After conversion to 2023 Australian dollars, project costs were estimated in 2020 to be $18,200/kW which is only slightly below the level that GenCost had been applying ($19,000kW). This validated GenCost’s use of the higher cost range in the theoretical data available at the time.
In late 2022 UAMPS updated their capital cost to $28,580/kW citing the global inflationary pressures that have increased the cost of all electricity generation technologies. GenCost 2022‐23 found that most technology capital costs had increased in 2022 by 20%, up to a maximum of 35% for onshore wind. Accordingly, we had increased our own cost estimate of nuclear SMR by 20% to $22,470/kW. However, the UAMPS estimate implies nuclear SMR has been hit by a much larger 57% cost increase.
It’s also worth noting that GenCost thinks the earliest a full-scale nuclear reactor could be operational in Australia is 2040. Some submissions from, ahem, interested parties, attempted to seduce the CSIRO into conceding it could be done earlier in Australia by looking at the experience of the UAE which gave rise to perhaps my favourite gentle rebuke in recent report history:
Total development time for the first large‐scale nuclear plant in the UAE was 13 years (spanning from 2008 with the release of their nuclear strategy19 until 2021). However, stakeholders have also pointed out that the UAE is not a democracy and therefore may have abbreviated some stages of permitting that will take longer in Australia due to the greater degree of public consultation in many of its governance processes.
With that little context in mind, here’s the comparison chart for different energy sources by cost per MegaWatt hour over the lifetime (LCOE) of a project for 2030 and 2050 respectively:
Look, everybody wants to be the one to debunk Dutton’s nuclear fiction once and for all. I suspect he doesn’t care. Nor does any of this seem to matter to the growing crowd of Anything But Renewable warriors who fight for something altogether more confusing than policy pragmatism. They fight against woke. How sad it is to be defined by something you hate.
Nuclear reactionaries, indeed. So much waste.
While I think it, however, is anybody else getting this vibe?
Israel’s Descent
Adam Shatz of The London Review of Books has easily become the thinker who most embodies my perspective on the generation defining horror of what is being done to Palestinians, in Gaza, following the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. I wish I could just quote the entirety of his most recent essay, it’s that good. I will highlight a substantial section nonetheless. From the very start:
When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there. The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.
The Israeli government refers to these episodes of collective punishment as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the last fifteen years, it has launched five offensives in the Strip. The first four were brutal and cruel, as colonial counterinsurgencies invariably are, killing thousands of civilians in retribution for Hamas rocket fire and hostage-taking. But the latest, Operation Iron Swords, launched on 7 October in response to Hamas’s murderous raid in southern Israel, is different in kind, not merely in degree. Over the last eight months, Israel has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians. An untold number remain under the debris and still more will die of hunger and disease. Eighty thousand Palestinians have been injured, many of them permanently maimed. Children whose parents – whose entire families – have been killed constitute a new population sub-group. Israel has destroyed Gaza’s housing infrastructure, its hospitals and all its universities. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced, some of them repeatedly; many have fled to ‘safe’ areas only to be bombed there. No one has been spared: aid workers, journalists and medics have been killed in record numbers. And as levels of starvation have risen, Israel has created one obstacle after another to the provision of food, all while insisting that its army is the ‘most moral’ in the world. The images from Gaza – widely available on TikTok, which Israel’s supporters in the US have tried to ban, and on Al Jazeera, whose Jerusalem office was shut down by the Israeli government – tell a different story, one of famished Palestinians killed outside aid trucks on Al-Rashid Street in February; of tent-dwellers in Rafah burned alive in Israeli air strikes; of women and children subsisting on 245 calories a day. This is what Benjamin Netanyahu describes as ‘the victory of Judaeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism’.
The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to refer to a ‘conflict’ between two peoples after one of them has slaughtered the other in such staggering numbers. The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.
But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide, and among international jurists and human rights experts there is a growing consensus that Israel has committed genocide – or at least acts of genocide – in Gaza. This is the opinion not only of international bodies, but also of experts who have a record of circumspection – indeed, of extreme caution – where Israel is involved, notably Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch.
The charge of genocide isn’t new among Palestinians. I remember hearing it when I was in Beirut in 2002, during Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp, and thinking, no, it’s a ruthless, pitiless siege. The use of the word ‘genocide’ struck me then as typical of the rhetorical inflation of Middle East political debate, and as a symptom of the bitter, ugly competition over victimhood in Israel-Palestine. The game had been rigged against Palestinians because of their oppressors’ history: the destruction of European Jewry conferred moral capital on the young Jewish state in the eyes of the Western powers. The Palestinian claim of genocide seemed like a bid to even the score, something that words such as ‘occupation’ and even ‘apartheid’ could never do.
This time it’s different, however, not only because of the wanton killing of thousands of women and children, but because the sheer scale of the devastation has rendered life itself all but impossible for those who have survived Israel’s bombardment. The war was provoked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack, but the desire to inflict suffering on Gaza, not just on Hamas, didn’t arise on 7 October. Here is Ariel Sharon’s son Gilad in 2012: ‘We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.’ Today this reads like a prophecy.
Exterminationist violence is almost always preceded by other forms of persecution, which aim to render the victims as miserable as possible, including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoisation, ethnic cleansing and racist dehumanisation. All of these have been features of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian people since its founding. What causes persecution to slide into mass killing is usually war, in particular a war defined as an existential battle for survival – as we have seen in the war on Gaza. The statements of Israel’s leaders (the defence minister, Yoav Gallant: ‘We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly’; President Isaac Herzog: ‘It is an entire nation out there that is responsible’) have not disguised their intentions but provided a precise guide. So have the gleeful selfies taken by Israeli soldiers amid the ruins of Gaza: for some, at least, its destruction has been a source of pleasure.
Read the whole thing, if you can, the clarity never lets up.
Diesel the donkey found alive after 5 years, living with elk
I guess you cling to what you can, given the world. And this week it has been the news that Diesel the donkey, who got spooked while on a hike with his human owners five years ago and has been missing ever since, was found alive and well running free with a herd of wild elk.
Diesel’s family, Terrie and Dave Drewry, searched for him but eventually had to give up hope of finding the absent ass. Earlier this year, another man on a hike filmed video of a bizarre sight: a donkey hanging out with his elk herd. The video has since gone viral and the Drewrys know that Diesel is not only alive but thriving.
‘He's killed coyotes protecting the herd and possibly a mountain lion,’ Terrie told CBS News.
They don’t plan to get him back because he seems happy, the family said.
Mr Squiggly Rick for PM…when he’s feeling better, of course.
If the new pandas, on loan from China, have a baby here, is it an Australian citizen and do we own it? Could you ask your mother?