Monthly Archives: May 2012

Information Storms and the Limits to Information

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By Mary Logan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File: Sine_wave_amplitude.svg Kraaiennest

My first significant memory of big storms came as a 5 year old, as Hurricane Carla advanced on Port Aransas, Texas, where my father, HT Odum was administrator of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute. That day, as we were due to evacuate, HT took me on his final rounds of the Institute before leaving. We walked out on the Port Aransas pier, and I remember that my father had to lift me over the gaps where missing planks had already disappeared from storm waves (my mother was later horrified at my proud retelling of the story). We stood there halfway out on the pier, and I received my first lesson in hurricane science and energy transport in waves. We counted wave troughs, heights, and wavelengths, and he explained the dynamics of wind energy, relating the sizes of the pulses to size and scale of storms. Local weather creates little wavelets, and large distant weather creates bigger, more powerful pulses that have higher impact on beaches. We talked about excess heat in the atmosphere, and how hurricanes act as Nature’s way of dispersing extra heat. It was my first lesson in storm/energy analogies, and I have never looked at storms the same way since.

Odum often drew an analogy between the way meteorological storms such as hurricanes disperse heat and the way that other systems do, including information systems.  After Tom Abel’s excellent post last week on trends in education in a world in transition, it is a good time to share Odum’s analogy linking storms of information and weather storms. But to make that analogy, we first need a meteorology lesson, starting with the second law of thermodynamics.

2nd law thermodynamics (MTB) most of the energy is dispersed

The geobiosphere of the earth transforms sunlight through a number of heat engines that transform the earth’s potential energy of heat along with solar heating through temperature gradients into kinetic energy of circulating air and water. These maximize the use of energy and help to self-organize the natural capital of the earth through whirl cells of activity at different levels of scale. There are a number of different planetary heat engines driving these whirl cells: surface-sky, north-south atmospheric, oceanic, and up-down geothermal earth engines (Odum, 2007, p. 107).

Odum, 2007, p. 111 whirlcell diagram; different levels of scale, energy transformity and flow

The second law dictates that potential energy that does not go into storage is dispersed during processes. Meteorological storms or whirl cells at different levels of scale serve the purpose of dispersing and distributing excess atmospheric heat and water, transforming the landscape through rain and wind, and even creating social eddies in the form of fire from lightning to release minerals and restart succession. The distributed water creates geopotential energy by forming water at high altitudes. The main classes of whirl cells form a hierarchy of energy and transformity, beginning with latent heat flow and ocean cumulus, then land convection, temperate cyclones, hurricanes, mesosystems, and finally polar jet streams at the top of the “atmospheric food chain” (Odum, 2007, p. 112).

At the local scale, thunderstorms take disorganized heat energy and turn it into winds and rain that are organized both vertically and spatially over local landscapes. With more extreme temperature gradients, winds spin into tornadoes. At the larger scale, hurricanes prowl the lower latitudes and disperse ocean heat. With extreme storms such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and supercells, there is a direct relationship between the amount of heat and the severity of the storm. Supercells occur, for example, when a thunderstorm’s updraft builds vertically until it reaches an equilibrium of drier air that no longer cools, typically at the tropopause (between 30,000 and 60,000 feet, depending on latitude), at which point it spreads out horizontally. In transient, unstable conditions, a dome of overshoot can even form on top of the anvil, created by short-lived strong updrafts indicating potential for severe weather.

Odum, Crafoord Lecture (1987, p. 60) Information Storm

We can make an analogy between energy degradation/heat dispersal in storms and entropy in economic systems. As our energy production and consumption peaks, what happens to the volumes of information that we are producing? How much of the information is useful, and how much is dispersed as ephemeral heat entropy or dispersed as information rainfall to flow across the landscape? Sustaining information requires continual processing of information to select and refine information, and make and replace copies that are lost, broken, or otherwise depreciated. Information is tested, refined, and shared and adapted to local variation. Shared information has the highest emergy embodied in it. Our current society is experiencing an information storm that has expanded both vertically and horizontally, as the costly, noisy information explosion of the past century disperses, mixes, filters, copies, selects, and stores information. And the internet allows an extreme, global form of information sharing that is not possible in traditional ways. The internet serves as a novel, networked form of information testing, allowing many rapid interactions among many to process information quickly, perhaps providing feedback and steering currents for the information storm. If society is experiencing a series of information storms and the rain is the information, and the wind is perhaps the more destructive parts of the storm, such as gossip and media frenzies, perhaps the internet can be compared to the river carrying the information-water across the landscape, as Babauta suggests.

Odum, 2007 Information storm

If a surge on input energy of one kind is added to a system, it creates a bulge in the energy spectrum, causing energy to be propagated upscale and downscale. For example, the average distribution of energy in water waves is like the figure at right, with many waves of small energy and few of larger energy. When a storm passes, it generates waves with energy in the middle of the spectrum, causing a bulge in the spectral graph. Some waves interact to form larger waves, but most lose energy to friction, moving downscale to waves of lesser energy and heat (Odum, 2007, p. 7).

The same self-organization that occurs in the non-living structures of weather and climate also occurs in the social learning systems of human economies. Maintaining structure of thunderstorms and information storms requires continued flow of energy over time. Our superheated global economy creates a global internet information storm that can be compared to a tornadic supercell, creating a strong updraft of information spreading into an anvil top and a dome of overshoot that will not last. Those who view the current information storm as a stepping stone on the way to the Singularity or an information society may not understand the degree of continuous, incremental energetic transformation that is required to maintain and expand a highly technological society.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/best-science-maps/?pid=1052

In the map of science at right, the explosion of journal articles since World War II appears to have peaked. What does that mean for our science? Similarly, our monetary system is a form of information that has exploded, resulting in a super-circulation of paper wealth mostly represented by paper debt in derivatives, securitized assets, and bonds, outside the real economy, creating a surreal digital super-economy consisting of the  financial, insurance, and real estate sectors that can be viewed as a supercell. Most of the money is circulating outside the real economy at this point,

BIS Pyramid of Global Liquidity circa 2007?

with paper being swapped for more paper as symbolic representations, with little real work produced. The current digital money storm is like a supercell with a rotating top made up of anvils of derivatives forming cloud tops that will dissipate after the storm passes. The storm is creating waves of money that transfer energy but no material, similar to ocean waves. But our information storm is not yet done. If we fail to hold money supplies constant on resources, we may have to deal with severe inflation as resources diminish, which will accelerate the spin of the economic storm and the chaos that could occur from currency instability.

Television and the internet are the primary sources of information for our modern society. Competitions and sports championships become outlets for competitive behavior that might otherwise be turned to violence and war. Social causes, fashion magazines and polarized religion and politics provide outlets for excess, creating avenues for release of energy in an overheated economy.  How many of these channels for energy release will become less useful or available in a lower energy society? Can we realign our goals and reorder society into less wasteful pursuits without destroying it in the process?

Is our information system in a dome of overshoot similar to a supercell? Has information accumulation peaked, as the figure above showing the history of science journal publishing suggests? Will information decline take the form of less and less usable information, similar to a low-precipitation supercell that produces little rain? What happens if the internet cannot be supported, as Tom Abel pointed out last week? What are the limits to information? Access to information decreases as it becomes more complex, however, so there is a limit to what can be supported (Odum, 2007, p. 245). Does information devolve into another instance where a digital divide dictates who has access to college education and internet access–and what does that do to society? What parts of our information storm are of value, and how do we retain those parts in long-term information storage if the digital information systems fail us?  Is digital information detracting from long-term information storage in a durable format? Where is the consolidation of knowledge and simplification of principles for all of this information that we have created? What do we preserve, and how do we preserve it? How do we teach more efficiently? Can we maintain cooperation and global information sharing in a prosperous way down?

Information Principles and Policies for Descent

  • The value of information is increased by sharing it among many, so share free information for unified cooperation
  • Developing shared information such as common objectives requires large resources
  • With declining resources, less information and less education can be supported
  • Art and literature are powerful amplifiers for generating unified action
  • Information is necessary for efficiency, diversity, and organization; information use increases as growth stops in order to adapt by developing efficiencies and responding to resource shortages
  • Urban centers concentrate information (in addition to energy and materials)
  • More information is stored than is used at any one time. Information depreciates and requires energy to maintain and/or grow, so select and consolidate information for libraries
  • Direct electric power to useful information processing and sharing
  • Balance emergy trade equity to replace free exploitation
  • Hold money supplies constant relative to resources, which means decreasing money supply over time to match economic contraction, in order to avoid severe inflation
  • Reduce expectations of unearned income from stocks, bonds, and other sources (Odum, PWD draft, 1987)

The principles of energy transformity, hierarchy, and energy can be applied to everything including information.

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Goodbye Faculty: What’s the point of a University anyway?

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by Tom Abel

La poule aux oeufs d'or 1905 movie poster (goose with the golden eggs)

Goodbye faculty, hello neoliberal MOOCs.  I read a NY Times article last week and was clued into a recent ‘innovation’ in education which may soon be sweeping the globe.  Massively Open Online Courses or MOOCs are being produced and promoted by some of the most prestigious universities in the world, such as a just announced MIT-Harvard ‘nonprofit’ partnership, and another with Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, and Michigan.  MOOC courses include video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback and student-paced learning, and most so far have been produced in the areas of engineering, computers, software, etc, but courses in all fields are clearly coming.  Most of the article is techy and upbeat, but they let this quote slip in.  George Siemens, a MOOC pioneer ominously said, “But if I were president of a mid-tier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a circuits course.”  Get it?  This is the end of universities as we know them.  A few top universities produce coursework for the world and there’s no need for any of the rest of you out there.  Still, the reporter tries to keep it positive and ends with this quote, “What’s still missing is an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses.”  That’s right, we’ll still need you to ‘customize’ the MOOC course for your classrooms.

So I started to search for articles on MOOCs.  It’s all tech hype and whiz-bang.  I could find nary a discouraging word.  And I certainly could not find what I was really looking for, which is the corporate strategy behind all of this.  Why are the big boys interested?  I have some of my own ideas that I will try to relate and that refer particularly to issues of peak and descent.

Inelastic Demand

Education has a remarkably inelastic demand curve and even in a contracting economy people will spend their last dollars to educate their children.  Along with healthcare, high-tech weaponry, food, water, drugs, and internal ‘security’, Americans will pay almost any price for education, which is why the Right has furiously worked to privatize it and as well the rest of these.  In a time when economies around the globe are stagnating (due to flattening or declining net emergies) they are the last growth industries of the capitalist growth economy.  Furthermore, higher education is one of the few commodities that the US produces that is wanted by anyone else in the world.  So not surprising, the men with the money say, do more of this!  Do what it takes to expand this sector and cut costs!  There is only one problem, there will be resistance.  Those damn entrenched academics!

So to go out on a limb, I want to make some predictions.  I haven’t the time to detail this or smooth it out, so I’ll leave it in bullet form.  First, I predict that investors, corporations and universities have a multi-step plan:

http://www.retronaut.co/2012 /01/works-progress-administration-posters/ 1917

Step 1 (all of this is underway)

  • It’s Free!  Anyone can take the courses!
  • But the big boys are investing millions – huh, how can they give it away?  You’ll see…
  • Promise academics that it will not replace them.
  • Introduce MOOC courses as a separate sphere.
  • Traditional students are not allowed to take them.
  • Build knowledge and acceptance.
  • Give graduates(?) degrees – credentials!
  • Invest in public relations campaigns to promote and sooth – spend millions here.
  • Sell all this as cheaper (free!), do-it-yourself education.
  • Classes are self-design, self-organize, no higher level requirements, content, purpose – just learn stuff!

Step 2

  • Gradually shift and integrate into traditional student curriculum.
  • Sold to teachers as teacher’s aid – it’s to your benefit(!), you can use it to ‘customize the content of your own highly interactive courses!’ – sure
  • But administrators can now make classes (massively) bigger.
  • So overall fewer teachers are needed.
  • The administrators that promised that MOOCs would not replace faculty are now gone, and well sorry, things change.
  • Deskill, deskill, deskill – faculty become (part-time, contract) technicians for playing course material.

Step 3

  • No more academic teachers.
  • Courses are all electronic media.
  • Every course imaginable is already in the can.
  • Only class technicians are required.
  • Charge the same or more(!) tuition dollars! – Inelastic demand curve of education!
http://www.lorejournal.org/2001/06/ Tom Tomorrow 11-15-99

Seeing Education Through a Macroscope

The information in education, and its production and maintenance in universities, looks different when seen from the next larger scale

 A History of the World

  • European and US growth was fueled by “storages” of resources (metals, topsoil, fossil fuels, timber), much under foot, but a good portion extracted from the colonial world and later by overseas corporations working with (undemocratic) governments
  • By the consumption of these storages in real work processes, the US and EU built new stores of information (techniques for finance, banking, engineering, medicine, and drugs), to become the information centers of the world

Information Era MTB-12 http://www.emergysystems.org/lectures.php

  • By its stores of information, the US and Europe can continue to command the resources and labor of the world for some time, trading information for labor and goods from around the world for the benefit of their corporations and elites

The Arc of Oil Growth

  • Education has followed the arc of fossil fuel growth
  • On the wave of oil growth we chose to expand the availability of advanced education (with the GI Bill) to nearly everyone (of the right gender)
  • Cheap public universities rode that wave of oil-led growth through the 50s-60s
  • Now as real growth has slowed and peaked we have gradually abandoned publicly funded education (healthcare, social security, and unemployment insurance)
  • The neoliberal economists say, for the majority of you, society can no longer afford to educate your children beyond the 12th grade
  • Public funds, shared contributions (taxes) from all adults, will no longer be available for higher education because we need your (shrinking) tax dollars to buy high-tech weaponry to maintain control of resource flows and in general to project power in a world that is growing ever more rebellious
  • But this creates another problem
  • The US/EU economies need specialized workers with skills to support especially the health and information industries
  • We can get them over there!

Why is labor cheaper over there?

  • Cities form centers of convergence on a landscape. People live at various locations. As goods and information are upgraded at each step more money is required. It therefore takes more money to live in city vs rural, core vs periphery. (Based on Odum and Odum 2001, Fig 7-6)

    Why is labor cheaper in the developing world?  Because the production of their workforce has been heavily subsidized by free inputs from nature

  • This cheap labor is tapped throughout a surge of economic growth, re: Japan’s cheap labor in the 60s and Taiwan’s in the 80s, and now China/India
  • Today’s factory workers in China and India were raised on farms(!), and their parents are still living there very cheaply and self-sufficiently, and so they do not require as much money to live
  • Our companies can either entice the cheaply minted workforces to immigrate to the US/EU or employ them via outsourcing (using overseas call centers and software design centers) or foreign-owned international subsidiaries
  • But this cannot and will not last
  • As workers in the new cities have children of their own, they must raise those children at higher cost – China is beginning to face this problem now just as did Taiwan and Japan
  • If there is a next China/India coming, I do not see it
  • But the bigger point is that this strategy has no real future
  • As the world shrinks and international flows of resources and people dry up, nations will need to rely on their own – their own food, their own renewable resources, and their own workforce
  • It is worse than short-sighted for the US to miss the chance to educate its own population while there are still some resources to do so and while there is a large public university system still in place

The Mission of the University in Society

  • “Conservation of information…through teaching and archiving is the first mission of universities” H.T. Odum 1999
  • Universities have several functions
  • Educate future professionals for the workplace
  • Train the next generation of faculty
  • Employ professors
    • For research
    • For the maintenance of highly specialized knowledges
    • For their teaching and mentoring skills

  • An information cycle. All information is maintained in cycles like these. That includes cycles for teaching and for research. Information cycles of different types differ in cycle time, space, inputs, impact, and intermediate 'carriers'.

    Faculty perform the work of maintaining academic information in the “information cycles” of their research and teaching

  • Both information cycles use (durable) paper publications dispersed widely as their intermediate carriers
  • Written publications are stored in libraries around the world
  • “The long range memory of society… is the library”

The deskilling of academia

  • The overriding goal of the plan is to reduce overhead to universities and increase profits:
    • Cutting overhead? – Cut faculty
    • Increase profits? – Add students massively
  • Academic professionals are expensive, full-time employees are expensive, with required benefits, workplaces, etc
  • The point as always is cut costs, mechanize, cut labor, deskill
  • The result is a fully commoditized, Fordist education product

Research goes where?

  • Maintain a few locations of academic research – ‘flagship’ universities with corporate partners – or simply disconnect research from universities entirely

Diluted, diminished, devalued education content

  • In MOOCs, lectures and content is self-selected, self-designed
  • While students are unaware of this fact, much of course knowledge and content in any course (half?) is in the structure of a course
  • The education value of a course is the sustained and repeated and progressively assembled content that can only be delivered over many lessons in a structured course
  • Furthermore, at most universities, courses are assembled into programs that are structured, and which also convey a great deal of information
  • Course and program structures are the products of a long history of refinement, and are continuously evolving under the perceptive attention of faculty
  • The self-design of a MOOC program trades the great value of this feature of higher education for the marketability of education in bite-sized chunks, sold under the quintessential neoliberal slogan of ‘freedom’ of choice

The poor teacher

  • Who needs them?!
  • What do they add anyway, the knowledge is in the material!
  • MOOCs also depend heavily on this misunderstanding of the education process
  • Teaching is communication, and regular speech operates on many simultaneous channels – voice, intonation, facial expression, gesture, and body language in addition to content
  • Teaching is interaction, which includes give and take
  • Teachers respond to student interest, involvement, they ad lib, they expand, they digress, etc, etc.
  • The techs think they can emulate some of this, do you believe them?
  • I was on an Amsterdam canal tour 30 years ago and again last year
  • This year’s tour was painful, boring, slow, with big gaps between recorded speaking bits triggered by the driver-technician
  • The older tours with a guide were exciting, fun, interesting, filled with questions and historical-political-whatever digressions, all triggered by questions from the audience, or spontaneously produced by the guide seeking to fill awkward silences or perceived needs – in all, extremely educational
  • Try making even a smart interactive program do that!

Muzzling social criticism

  • No more pesky, critical, party-crashing liberal arts and social science majors!!
  • Liberal, critical academia is gone – classes are self-selected – no required classes, no general education in first two years, so for most students there will be no liberal education.

Neocolonialism

  • Developing countries do not require universities, just networks
  • The US becomes the source for all exported education – like an export crop
  • Diversity and descent are eliminated – knowledge is what the US says it is

Privilege for the rich

  • Of course(!) a few traditional universities will be maintained for elites (Yale, Harvard) with faculty, small classes, lectures, etc

Academia in a Descending World

  • Should some of this be expected?
  • Odum said that in descent there would not be energy for continued expansion of higher education into new research fields
  • Instead, we would need to aggregate and preserve the many general principles that were produced in the time of growth
  • So to be fair we should ask, ‘Can capitalist production (even in the extreme forms of MOOCs) nudge things in the right direction?’
  • It may be that this step of producing electronic course materials is valuable for synthesizing bodies of knowledge, as in these MOOC courses, and also in producing textbooks, and the many academic ‘encyclopedias’ that seem to be appearing everywhere (at great cost to libraries)
  • Can the result be good in the long run?

Problems

  • The global internet is fragile!
  • If it fails, which it could in many scenarios, then the Third World and many more of us are SOL
  • Related to that, Odum frequently characterized the internet as “short-term memory” of the many ideas discussed in a society, and thus not a viable repository of long-term storage
  • The problem is that the carriers within electronic “information cycles” are indeed fragile, prone to Second Law depreciation
  • Paper copies, stored in libraries, and dispersed around the world are far more durable stores of the information produced by cultures
  • A more general principle of descent is that with less energy the world will become again more local, less global
  • Education production should become decentralized, like everything else – not concentrated into single global centers
  • Producing electronic course materials may be valuable, but only if it is then dispersed to the smaller-scale centers

Recommendations

  • Libraries
    • Materials need to be maintained in paper which is a far more durable carrier, and many copies should be made and dispersed
    • Maintain local internet for local knowledge transfer

Transmission of Essential Information between Pulses (Odum, 2007, p. 392)

 

  • Broad Education
    • In descent, the world can support fewer highly trained people
    • In a descending world we will need generalists with a broad education in a diversity of subjects, including the social sciences and liberal arts!

Education in a Different World

As growth capitalism falters it is feverishly dismantling a system of information production that worked well in the growth years.  Besides producing information, it produced hope across societies for the end of past inequalities.  Growth periods instill optimism, hope for social justice in state societies that are perhaps intrinsically unjust.  As the growth era ends, must we accept a return of the old injustices?  Today we understand these historical processes for maybe the first time in history.  Today we live in democracies, in name at least.  We thus have tools in information and organization that are also new to the world, tools that give us some control over our future if we use them.  But we need to understand most fundamentally, that the growth years of fossil fuels are at an end.  And we need to understand that an economic system that demands growth by its nature is an ill fit to the world, at the very least.  It is time for new principles of economics to arise, principles that assure fair trade, that recognize the (unpaid) contributions of nature to production, that recognize nature’s limits, and that do not demand growth.  Education in that different world should be broad to encompass the great advancements in all fields that followed and nourished the growth years of fossil fuel.  We do not know what types of knowledge will be of greatest value in the years ahead.  We should then prepare our children (all of them) with a flexible grasp of core principles in many fields and with an understanding of the connections that join them all.  So armed, they will be most ready to find their ways through the ups and downs of the years ahead.

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The Unclear Lobby

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No one really knows the net yield of nuclear power because at present its use is subsidized by fossil fuels in a thousand ways that cannot be estimated until we try to run a nuclear system without them. Will nuclear power have a more concentrated value than the wood output of the solar system, or of coal, or of cheap oil from rich deposits? The new power plant seems to be more economical than the competing fossil plants as long as it is running on the accumulated storages of nuclear fuel and fuel prospecting done on fossil-fuel subsidy. Is nuclear power at this level of net power delivery possible in a culture that does not have the accompanying fossil fuels? (Odum, 1971, p. 135).

by Mary Logan

I am broaching this topic in support of the Japanese people, in order to add my voice to the many who are challenging assumptions regarding the clean green nature of nuclear power. Choosing a nuclear future means that we choose profit over the future of humanity. The nuclear lobby is connected to climate change campaigns and the defense industry. The lobby deals in deception and omission; thus the title for this post that is part of a series of posts about laying siege to empire.

The Uranium Processing Chain

http://www.retronaut.co/2010/05/nuclear-toys/ Oak Ridge Associated Universities (OARU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection

In order to understand the motives of the nuclear lobby, we must understand the complex Uranium processing chain. Gordon Edwards of Canada describes the entire process in a 10 minute video lecture here. Uranium mining creates uranium byproducts such as radium-226, thorium-230, radon gas, and polonium 210 that get released during the process into tailings. These byproducts remain exposed and radioactive; up to 85% of all radioactivity remains in the tailings. Uranium mining is energy intensive and also creates greenhouse gases.

Of the uranium that is mined, less than 1% is U-235 (fissile), and more than 99% is U-238 (fertile). Since the U-235 is needed for bombs, and nuclear power plants (NPPs) need ~4% U-235 fuel, enrichment is performed to increase the percentage of highly enriched uranium. The mined uranium is milled, and then refined, and then fabricated into fuel. In the refinery process, the U-235 is enriched to make more U-235 from U238. Loan guarantees exist for this process.  Inside a reactor, the U-238 transmutes into Plutonium-239, which can then be separated chemically much more easily from U-238 to also make bombs, as Pu-239 is an ideal nuclear bomb material. Depleted uranium is U-238 waste from the enrichment process, which is also recycled into bombs. The enrichment process is energy intensive and it also creates large amounts of greenhouse gases.

Uranium Chain (Odum, Energy Basis, 1976, p. 181) The AEC was morphed into the NRC and DOE in the 1970s.

Other fuel is then used in NPP reactors. Nuclear reactors fission hazardous toxic substances and then moderate and cool the fission process and associated water to 300 degrees C, and then we transmit the power as electricity, which is either used or lost in transmission.

The spent fuel is stored in increasingly dense configurations in unsafe conditions in spent fuel pools (SFPs) that are often perched over the tops of the nuclear reactors. The spent fuel needs to remain there, actively cooled for 5 or more years, until it is cool enough (with less fissioning) to be placed in metal casks, at the cost of about $1 million/cask (estimated–it’s complicated). There are no plans to deal with spent fuel.

Breeder Reactor (Odum & Odum, 1976, p. 184)

Some spent fuel is reprocessed , which is then made into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel, which is newly proposed for use in NPPs as fuel, but can also be used for bombs. No MOX fuel is legally allowed for use in the United States yet, as the plutonium in the MOX fuel is extremely hazardous. Reactor 3/SFP 3 which exploded at Fukushima was the one loaded with MOX fuel, and there have been reports of both plutonium and uranium scattered about. MOX fuel has much more dangerous isotopes and is both hotter and more volatile. Spent MOX fuel is much more hazardous because it contains on average five times more plutonium than spent uranium oxide fuel.

In reprocessing, other isotopes such as plutonium are extracted for use by industry and the plutonium is also used to make bombs. The nuclear industry, the defense industry, and the US military are inextricably intertwined.  Bombs spread depleted uranium (DU) in wars; 350 tons of DU in Iraq-1, 1700 tons in Iraq-2, and more in Afghanistan. The emissions from the entire process of nuclear production, including uranium tailings, enrichment wastes, NPP spent fuel, depleted uranium, bombs, and resulting plutonium are redistributed across the landscape, bioaccumulating over time and creating additional stressors for a society impacted by waning resources.

“The ultimate effect of a pollutant or toxin is not only related to its transformity, but more importantly to its concentration or empower density (emergy per unit area per unit time, i.e. seJ/m2*day) in the ecosystem. Where empower density of a stressor is significantly higher than the average empower density of the ecosystem, it is released into, one can expect significant changes in ecosystem function” (Brown & Ulgiati, 2009, p. 318).

Nuclear Power’s Climate Renaissance

Nuclear power lobbyists have achieved a renaissance and new image for nuclear power in the last decade, with many proposed new NPPs in the US.

One turning point, people on both sides of the issue agree, was that proponents took advantage of the public concern over climate change and carbon-producing fuels beginning in the early 2000s and were able to recast themselves — first to fence-sitting lawmakers, then to the public as a whole — as a “clean” alternative that would not harm the environment. “It was a brilliant campaign,” said Tyson Slocum, an energy expert at Public Citizen, which opposes nuclear energy because of concerns about its safety, security and cost. While everyone was focused on shutting down coal plants, they had a couple of years to themselves to just talk to the American public in very sophisticated ad campaigns and to reintroduce a generation of Americans to nuclear power,” he said. “That was very powerful” (Lichtblau, 2011, NYT).

Just whose agenda is climate change? Many environmentalists including James Hansen, Bill McKibben, and George Monbiot among others have adopted the position that a nuclear future is safe and necessary for our future. Yet the expansion of nuclear power that would be necessary to replace fossil fuels and maintain Business as Usual is unrealistic and dangerous. Limiting factors other than the most important one of net emergy exist. With peak oil comes peak uranium. Nuclear energy is a non-renewable source. There are still 435 reactors in operation worldwide today that require 175 million pounds of uranium per year. However, current production rates are facing a deficit of about 40 million pounds (Hall, 2012). And considering that we are entering water wars, is there enough water left to cool NPPs? Owners of NPPs in north Georgia were worried about continued operations during Georgia’s drought several years ago. France, which creates 80% of its electricity from nuclear power, uses 40% of the water in the country to cool its plants. Proposals for nuclear power plants in Utah are reigniting water wars. Nuclear power suffers from limits of net emergy, limited water, and non-renewable uranium sources.

 Regulatory Capture

The US Department of Energy (DOE) in the US is run by a nuclear engineer, Steven Chu, who is cheerily pro-nuke. The DOE is pro-nuke.  Radiation monitoring authority was handed off by the NRC to the NEI lobbying body. The response by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)  to Fukushima radiation releases in the US has been to propose a rewrite of standards that would have astronomically increased risk. For example, proposed drinking water standards for the EPA would be raised by 831 times for Strontium 90, while I-131 standards would be raised by 89,000 times. NRC and DOE direct the EPA on these matters, and nuclear lobbies direct the NRC/DOE.

http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/2012/ 04/us-list-of-clunkers-map.html

Many federal subsidies and tax breaks have evolved in the development of nuclear power. The government finances, insures, and pays for NPPs.  Special tax breaks exist for new NPPs. Nuclear plants crowd out other renewables, and only work with a number of taxes and subsidies. Tax breaks are also available for decommissioning plants, although NPPs are being recertified instead of decommissioned, which is not profitable. This process is referred to by insiders as sharpening the pencil (Donn, AP). Twenty year license extensions have been granted as regulations for relicensing have been revised to skip inspections, and narrowed over time. In the US, 31 plants have applied for relicensing, and every one has been approved. Over half of all US NPPs are over 30 years old, nearing the end of their planned lives. Taxpayer backed loan guarantees exist for new NPPs, which have a history of huge cost overruns causing cancellation. The newest scheme of nuclear utilities is to demand that the taxpayer pay upfront for these white elephants. For a complete coverage of taxpayer support of the nuclear industry, see Sanders and Alexander (Alternet, 2012). The power of the nuclear lobby is also felt in subtle, more indirect ways.

http://www.nei.org/filefolder/Infographic_-_Emission_Free_Sources_2011

While nuclear industry lobbying is widespread and aggressive, its impact is not always readily apparent. Take, for example, the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, which the Senate is expected to debate this summer. The bill—also known as S.2191, or America’s Climate Security Act—does not mention the word “nuclear” once in its 200-plus pages. Yet an aide to Senator Joe Lieberman called the measure “the most historic incentive for nuclear in the history of the United States,” according to Environment & Energy Daily. One section of the Lieberman-Warner bill says that “25 percent of all the funds deposited into a new climate change worker training fund shall be reserved for zero and low-emitting carbon energy that has a rated capacity of at least 750 megawatts of power,” notes Tyson Slocum, the research director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “That’s a huge threshold, so that’s going to exclude wind and solar right off the bat. . . . The only thing that could possibly meet that target would be nuclear power.” Similar language in another section of the bill effectively reserves another half a trillion dollars for the nuclear industry, according to Slocum (Farsetta, 2008, The Progressive).

Exelon’s Political Action Committee (PAC) is EXELONPAC. The company is positioned to profit from “expensive carbon” and has been lobbying for cap and trade of carbon dioxide emissions. “Exelon CEO John Rowe is a vociferous and longtime advocate of climate change legislation. In 2009, Forbes reported that if the Waxman-Markey climate legislation — supported by Obama — became law, ‘the present value of Exelon’s earnings stream would increase by $14 a share, or 28%.’” Executives at the company have close ties to the Obama administration as advisors and fundraisers. “Frank Clark, CEO of Exelon’s Chicago-based subsidiary ComEd, was an Obama advisor and fundraiser, and Exelon director John Rogers has also raised funds for Obama” (Wikipedia on Exelon, 2012).  

It is clear to me that we need to protect ourselves as best we can, since the government is choosing to protect private nuclear corporations over its citizens. In Japan, the regulatory capture makes it hard to separate the government from TEPCO. The company is being nationalized this summer. Will we be able to detect any difference when it is nationalized?

Capture of the Media

http://www.retronaut.co/2010/05/nuclear-toys/ Oak Ridge Associated Universities (OARU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection

Some of my resources who have the courage to speak truth to power are listed below. Without these voices, my impression of the Fukushima disaster from mainstream media reports would be that everything is just fine in Japan.

One needs the suspicion of Machiavelli these days to parse out the underlying motives and players in the media storm regarding complex environmental issues and energy resource companies. Consider that if you see an expose on BP and the Gulf, that there may be a clean green nuclear lobbyist lurking somewhere behind the piece. Or if you see a climate change advocate, such as James Hansen, consider that they are potentially pro-nuclear. Or if you see an environmentalist such as George Monbiot touting electric cars, his solution for future electricity may be nuclear. As resource availability gets tighter, we’re seeing the wealthy resource companies direct their lobbying and PR efforts against each other. Many agency players are muzzled. The World Health Organization is not allowed to discuss health impacts of radiation. Nuclear engineers / researchers sign contracts that prevent them from talking. Even PBS and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show now have nuclear sponsors. The DC-based Nuclear Energy Institute is global, even representing Japan’s Tepco. Excessive concern over the climate or fossil fuel-related ills is often backed by the nuclear lobby. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Time Magazine, Scientific American, and many other newspapers and journals have suggested that Fukushima is no big deal, or that “nobody died from Fukushima
”, “there will be no or very few cancers or deaths from Fukushima
,” Fukushima is not as bad as Chernobyl, or that any concern about aspects of Fukushima is just hysteria. “No immediate health effects” appears to be the most common rejoinder to new announcements.

Nuclear energy is only cost-effective because there is no insurance coverage for a melt-down. There is no solution for reactors or spent fuel pools that have melted down. NPPs are the only alternative technology requiring an emergency evacuation plan, and the current evacuation plans in the US are not current, as the populations and the amount of spent fuel at each plant has expanded greatly since the original plans were put in place. As populations have expanded, the ability to evacuate large populations or to emigrate in response to crisis has diminished. The industry benefits because we can’t see, smell, or feel radiation, and because most damage has “no immediate effects on health” and takes 5 to 10 years to reveal itself. The companies who would be expected to compensate, decommission, and decontaminate are private corporations bent on profit-making as their primary goal, with the ability to disband in a catastrophe. As one woman in Japan said, “doing nothing costs nothing.”

Emergy Yield Ratios of Types of Electricity (Odum, Environmental Accounting, 1996, p. 149)

Electric feedback; thereIfixedit.com

Japan is arguably one of the countries that is furthest into economic energy descent as a result of its 20 year recession. As a result of the Fukushima disaster, the country has shut down all of their nuclear power plants as of May 6th, 2012. So what is the current emergy yield ratio of nuclear power? Consider Japan’s plight as a bellwether for other countries not so far into descent. Not only are the Japanese not receiving any energy from their 50+ NPPs, they now have to go to considerable effort to maintain power to the plants and protect stored waste as NPPs are abandoned and TEPCO is nationalized. Running nuclear power in a collapsing economy is like trying to raise yourself up by your own bootstraps. The argument can be made that becoming too reliant on an energy source that provides electricity, but that is absolutely reliant on electricity for vital cooling could be a mortal fault.  If the grid goes down, and we lose the 20% contribution of nukes to electricity, then what does that mean for the continued long-term cooling of NPPs? As the net emergy yield of nuclear power plants wanes, the question becomes not will we build more but instead can we decommission the ones that we have safely and what do we do with the waste?

http://nukeprofessional.blogspot.com/2012/04/ clunkers-everywhere (SteveO)

The problems are so far “beyond the design capacity” of the [Fukushima] plant that the Japanese are working in uncharted territory, said Michael Friedlander, a former senior operator at U.S. nuclear power plants (CNN, April 10, 2011).

“No nuclear power plant has ever considered the inability to get on long-term core cooling for more than a week, much less three weeks,” Friedlander said. There are 104 overloaded NPPs and their associated SFPs in the US vulnerable to the same power outages as those in Japan. Those who say it couldn’t happen here lack imagination. Nuclear reactors are tiny stars that we try to harness and control in order to boil water. Isn’t there an easier and safer way to boil water?

The cost of failure is deadly. Any cutoff of electricity of over 100 minutes would mean a meltdown of NPPs and their overloaded spent fuel pools. If we can’t figure out how to run 50-year old nuclear power plants for a month or longer without external electricity sources for cooling, then we’d better start this casking process now. The industry will go bankrupt as crises accumulate, and it will be the failing governments’ responsibilities to nationalize the remains, while also having many, many other crises to worry about simultaneously. It would be better to decommission the plants now while we still have the fossil fuel support to do so. Japan has weighed the risks and halted all plant operations. Why are we so worried about climate change when it would take one long regional blackout to potentially cause catastrophic damage globally? Perhaps the only benefit here is that Fukushima may become the biggest boost to relocalization ever—it will put eating local food of known origin/lading on the map.

http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/04/more-and- more-mutated-dandelions-in-tokyo/

I write today about the nuclear lobby to add my voice to those wanting to hammer the last nails into its coffin. The Americans started all of this, and we need to finish it. Some would say that the Fukushima crisis in Japan is the Americans’ just desserts, given the wind and fallout patterns of the jet stream at the mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere. I have a daughter, and if she chooses to have a child, I would like it to be healthy. Tell your legislators to stop nuclear support and to work towards dealing with our very dangerous spent fuel pools. Get yourself a geiger counter, question Pacific seafood, and be watching for fasciated dandelions. While external exposure to radiation is relatively harmless, the internal exposure is a very different matter, and once the isotopes enter the food chain, they bioaccumulate and biomagnify up the food chain. Our governments choose to avoid testing, raise limits, and suppress data rather than protect the public. Background levels are going up, and in the interest of the health of my family, I am teaching my clan about the unseen dangers of internalized isotopes, especially the long-lived ones, as they bioaccumulate and biomagnify in our ecosystem. Is nuclear power at this level of net power delivery possible in a culture that does not have the accompanying fossil fuels? It is now apparent in Japan that the answer is no.

Header art is Starry Night Over the Rhône, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh, Musée d’Orsay.

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Cooperative Living

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by Mary Logan and Darcy Dugan

Do you want to live more efficiently and reap the benefits of a closer community? Cooperative living is a great strategy for getting and staying out of debt while building community, resilience and security in a tenuous economy. But it requires a change in attitudes, and a return to more communal ways of living. You don’t necessarily need to relocate into a brand new cohousing situation; there are a range of options. While we live in a close-but-separate multi-family dwelling, by design and by chance, we’ve achieved some important cohousing benefits – shared space and sense of community. So here’s our cooperative living story, as told from the perspective of both top floor and bottom floor residents–I’m going to refer to the people who live with us as our nearest neighbors, as we don’t really think of them as tenants, but as friends. Living together with extended family is nothing new, but here in Anchorage, we are often far from family, and friends are the family we choose for ourselves (Edna Buchanan).

Types of Cohousing

Cohousing options are as varied as one’s imagination. In Anchorage, several cohousing initiatives have begun to infill with planned communities. Cohousing (or pocket neighborhoods) is described as a type of cooperative living in which residents actively participate in the design and operation of their own neighborhoods. Cohousing residents are consciously committed to living as a community. The physical design encourages both social contact and individual space. Private homes contain all the features of conventional homes, but residents also have access to extensive common facilities such as open space, courtyards, a playground and a common house (www.cohousing.org). Other options include communes, intentional communities, and rental housing cooperatives.

While cohousing communities that are designed from the ground up optimize many benefits of cooperative living, a wide array of simpler approaches can also provide many benefits that don’t exist with isolated single family homes. One of the simplest and most common options is the sharing of a house  by unrelated people, usually primarily for the purpose of reducing housing costs.  This is particularly common among university students and young people first leaving home. This arrangement has the key cohousing characteristics of common facilities, resident management, and non-hierarchical structure and decision-making. A common but slightly more hierarchical variation of house sharing is when a homeowner rents out a bedroom in their house.  With this approach, one gains the cost efficiency of shared living space plus regular community-building interactions with their house mates.  In this common scenario, however, cooperative governance of the living situation is usually reduced, as the homeowner is likely to dominate in the decision-making process.

Close-but-separate living arrangements can generate benefits of cooperative living too.  There is a growing interest in creating accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in single family homes.  To the extent that ADUs exist in single family neighborhoods is largely unknown, as many are illegal suites, flying under the zoning radar, against zoning and/or code enforcement that limits the number of unrelated people living together. Vancouver’s experiences with zoning and illegal suites in an expensive rental market are especially interesting (in the Tyee).

Three generations, Gainesville, FL

As usual, my father, HT Odum was my model for how to live in descent in an ecological fashion, and he exposed me to the concept of cohousing as well. While he was focused on modeling and writing rather than home design, he did pay attention to practical matters where he felt that they really counted. HT purchased a house in Gainesville, Florida in 1968 that was close to campus. He was considering peak oil even then. He created an ADU for the random return of children and extended family, with the thought that perhaps caregivers could live in the unit, if need be, as he and his wife Betty aged. North central Florida gets cold fronts in the winter, so HT made sure that the living spaces had several different types of heating sources–gas, oil, and a fireplace as backup. In opposition to the trends, he planted trees all over the property, and let the front yard get overtaken by shade and forest floor. He favored his beloved wetland cypress trees, which he planted down by the sinkhole pond. He piled pine needles on the concrete driveway to allow nature to break it down and send the land back to its original state. Snags were allowed to stand, and deadwood was allowed to lie. Ducks frolicked in the pond, and my augmented feeding with commercial duck food provided a microcosm experiment for me of what happens when surplus energy is supplied to a system–as you can imagine, it’s not all good. HT and his brother Gene taught and role modeled age-old values of frugality, resilience, and ecological living that are finally re-emerging culturally from the jet backwash of fossil fuel living.

In Anchorage, we looked for permanent housing about five years ago with a bit of acreage to build a house where we could have a significant garden, and create resilience in a number of ways. We had been living in traditional suburban housing our entire lives, saving for the day that we could live our lives on our own terms. We found a 1 ¼ acre lot on the hillside where we could have a well and septic, and be within bikeable distance to jobs. Our builder insisted on no less than 2200 square feet, and we were constrained by many building codes, so we opted to design a home where we could live cooperatively. Our house is smaller than most newer houses in Anchorage, and it houses two households. Remodeling an existing home would have been greener, as the emergy basis of new housing is very high in Anchorage, but we couldn’t find any likely candidates at the time in a very expensive, tight Anchorage real estate market. Retrofitting the suburbs will be necessary as we go forward.

“Marrinder Cyclone’s Room, Provence” Martha Odum, 1986, watercolor

Perhaps the most helpful component of remodeling or building anew for cooperative living is the separate entrance that affords privacy and a sense of autonomy for occupants. We designed a home with a bedroom and bath on each floor, including the main floor of the house, an important element for consideration of aging. We finished the walkout basement rental unit ourselves, learning many skills in the process. The main floor bedroom is designed to be flexible, typically used as shared guest space that is accessible to both units. Or the extra bedroom can be closed off and integrated with either living space, depending on our needs. Floors are all tile in order to allow for wood boiler hydronic heat and to avoid carpets, as wall to wall carpeting and its maintenance is not sustainable. Most garages in Anchorage are attached, and benzene and other fumes are a health hazard, so we opted for a detached garage with shared storage space for bikes, skis and gear. Our garage doubles as wood-fired boiler shed, ski waxing bench and chicken coop, and it is really more of a bike barn than a garage. Later on it could be converted to a real barn if need be, as cars fall out of favor. The garage gets minimal heat in the winter from either a garage heater or more commonly from referred heat from the wood-fired boiler. The plumber who did our heating had to order a thermostat for the garage online, as there is no place in Anchorage that sells thermostats that go below 50 degrees!

We used permaculture principles wherever we could, within the restrictions of zoning policies. We let Nature do the work on the property through self-organization. Building from scratch allowed us to leave the trees around the house—we hand cleared the lot and used the wood for our wood-fired boiler during the first years of its operation. Most of the property was left for nature to manage. We repopulated the part of the yard that had been cleared with a compost/soil mix, threw wildflower mixes on it, and then shepherded what came up, guiding the succession by weeding invasives by hand. And we thinned a friend’s spruce forest to replant trees on bare spots. We opted for a permeable gravel driveway, inspired by Eugene Odum’s long gravel driveway. Now, when the tires of our car or bikes leave the pavement to turn onto our gravel drive surrounded by the trees, my blood pressure drops and my heart opens. The sound and the feel of the gravel announce to my body the arrival home to a different way of living, separate in values and form from the empire at large.

Benefits of Cooperative Living

Economic pressures in the future will necessitate more extended family living, smaller housing footprints in square footage per person, and less single-family housing. For young adults who have school debt to overcome, or who are saving for a home, various forms of extended family living are a logical solution. Cooperative living allows for symbiosis, synergy of efforts and diversity of thought. Our neighbors have been multicultural, providing lessons on diverse culture through extended French and German families, languages, and ways of living and being.

Some of the many benefits include:

Retronaut.co WPA posters

  • Opportunities to share tools, skills, services such as babysitting, cars, snowblowing, convenient exercise partners, laundry, built in ride/car sharing, garden care, pet care (who let the dogs out?)
  • Better nutrition–treats, meals, and cooking supplies migrate up and down the house
  • Economies of scale for utilities, Costco runs, DSL (we justify the fast connection and other upgrades with the rent money!)
  • Better home security with additional residents, and housesitting is unnecessary during vacations
  • Community gardens and barns are easier when shared
  • Expanded friendship circles; cheechakos and sourdoughs benefit by sharing their experiences and networks
  • Added, consistent income streams! Our insurance and taxes for the home are offset (and then some) by our neighbors’ rent payments. That monthly check makes a big difference in our independence and control over our lives!

Problems of Cooperative Living

Rules are one issue in any communal living setting, developing from a natural need for control and resulting in some loss of autonomy for members. Larger or commercial cohousing ventures may have less cohesive community and may need to fall back on legal contracts or formal mediation. These arrangements marry new social arrangements with traditional legal and financial contracts better suited to a growth economy and single family housing. We need to rethink our legal framework for housing.

From an economic perspective, debt-based arrangements work best in situations where there is more growth and more money in the future to pay off the mortgage, since debt requires interest, which requires growth of the economic system and the money system over the long term. Expectations of growth allow us to assume debt casually with the expectation that it will be easy to pay off in the future. Legal contracts that mortgage a large chunk of property over the long term among a group of people during tenuous times may create stress for those holding the contracts. Staying out of debt and living below our means provides a buffer of savings for resilience in a chaotic economy.

Code issues may be difficult to overcome in order to develop a creative sustainable cohousing situation. Current zoning favors monoculture housing of single family dwellings in un-walkable communities with strict separation of commercial and residential zones, so creating ADUs or cohousing may result in battles with your municipality and your neighbors to try to get them to think differently. We have one neighbor who is not fond of either our chickens or our cohousing, perhaps because they represent a diminished status for the neighborhood in her view. Our suite is now a legally permitted ADU, ahem. While the McMansion as a status symbol may be fading, most Americans still ascribe much of their wealth and status to their homes.

Darcy’s smooth disclosures

We’ve been quite delighted with our neighbors, who have become friends as well. Synergies abound. For example, on several workaday mornings, my husband has gone out to the garage at 5:30 in the morning to get on his bike to go to work, only to find that the smoothie sprite has deposited a fresh smoothie in a mason jar tucked in his helmet, with a whimsical poem attached. Or we come home to find a dessert elf has deposited cookies on our counter.  What’s not to love about this arrangement? And on the days that we begin to feel old, our nearest neighbors’ youth and energy is contagious. For instance, our smoothie sprite was up at 5 am this morning, before work, in typical all-out summer-in-Alaska fashion, sledding on Flattop Mountain. Life is short, play hard! And our neighbors get to play hard because when they come home, the driveway is plowed and housing chores are taken care of already.

Darcy Weighs In

Cohousing for my husband Toby and me has created a perfect world. When we were first searching for living space and saw the email and photos of the Logan’s unit, we were skeptical due to the distance across town from our jobs.  (I wasn’t sure how far I could bike happily and consistently). It was late November and we tramped up to their bright birch-encircled home with our Sorels. I don’t think we could have anticipated the offer that was about to be posed:  a tidy, thoughtfully-designed compact space, a parking spot in a garage, a hot tub ten steps away in one direction and a forested back yard fire pit twenty steps in the other, wireless internet, laundry upstairs, an attached guest room . . . and two strangers who immediately offered to open their home to us — sharing all these things like family. I particularly remember that five minutes into our introduction, one of them said “you’re welcome to use the rest of the house when we’re gone . . . it’s a great space – you can throw parties.” (The other quickly following up with “as long as they’re not too wild!”)  Welcome to the best cohousing experience ever.

Back in the car leaving their driveway, it was a non-decision. The benefits were clear.  Neither of us were new to co-housing (I’d shared a drafty new England dwelling with six other ladies in grad school) but this was a new level. The structural set up had been so well thought out the outset, and offered with such warm hands, that we couldn’t pass it up.

Looking back, however, the best aspects weren’t advertised in that first meeting.  It’s the fact we now have mentors upstairs that have ruminated on so many important aspects of life and are willing to share their wisdom. Toby and I are in our 30s with a lot ahead of us to learn, and seeing their lifestyle — from concrete things like devising an innovative heating system and greenhouse, to broader things like their commitment to sustainability, relationships, and community — has been extremely inspiring. Additionally, we have people a few vertical feet away who care. They know when we’re home alone and might appreciate a dinner invite, when we’re late from an outdoor trip, or when something comes up we might be interested in learning about. I think my mother sleeps better at night because of this. I know we do.

I will conclude by saying the bike (or drive) across town couldn’t be more worth it. We feel the benefits of co-housing each day, and are also able to save money to eventually build our own home. With the experience we’ve had with the Logans, I think we’ll work towards replicating the model when the time comes.

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