Masdar, the first eco-city - Problem articulation

Problem narrative

In 2008, the world quietly underwent a major shift in balance. According to UN estimates, 2008 was the first year in history when more than half of the world’s population lived in cities. Essentially, these cities are unsustainable, but provide challenges and opportunities for environmentally conscious developers. In order to make them more sustainable, building design and practice, as well as perception and lifestyle must adopt sustainability thinking.

There are around 3.4 billion people stuffed into every available corner of urban space, and these numbers are set to increase. Over the next 30 years, the populations in cities of Asia and Africa are expected to double, meaning that we need to find room for another 1.7 billion people. Cities all over the world in their current infrastructure are expected to become even more unsustainable.

The pressure cities are putting on the planet’s resources is huge. At a time when humanity has woken up to its responsibility to the environment, the continuing urban swell presents an immense challenge. In response, cities all over the world are setting high targets to reduce carbon emissions and to produce clean energy. For example, London has planned a 60% reduction in CO2 emission by 2025. Unfortunately, projections show that over the same timescale, London will emit around 51 million tonnes of CO2, which is a 15% increase of the 2006 figures.

Carbon emissions are not the only sustainability problem cities face. Besides many other pollutants, cities are entirely dependent on other areas for consumable resources such as food and clean water. As populations continue to soar, these severity of these issues will increase. Many governments are attempting retrofit existing cities with new technologies or to reduce emissions to improve their sustainability. Abu Dhabi, the richest United Arab Emirates States, is currently constructing the world's first eco-city - a city intended to be entirely self-sustaining.

Study Purpose

The purpose of this study is to explore the feasibility of an eco-city, that is, a city that is entirely self-sustaining with minimal need for resources from other localities. The concept of an eco-city, that is, a city with zero carbon emissions and uber-efficient structures for sustainable living is now becoming a reality. The first eco-city is Masdar and is currently under construction in the United Arab Emirates, is expected to be completed in 2015.

Questions the study will address

• How will Masdar be able to utilise existing technologies more efficiently than modern cities to achieve sustainability?
• How does Masdar plan to provide enough power, water and food to its 50,000 intended inhabitants? Is vertical farming the answer to food issues?
• How will the land area (6.5 square kilometres) be developed to provide the basic needs of modern cities?
• How will the design of the city including transportation and building design and distribution help achieve sustainability?

(Un)intended Consequences of the Chelyabinsk Disasters

In my previous blog, I talked about the importance of proper storage of nuclear waste and some basic variables in a nuclear waste management system. While some variables in the system, such as the radioactive elements themselves and their half-lives are easy to track and measure, others were not so clear. Today, we will look at the Chelyabinsk Disasters closely from a systems dynamics perspective and try to come up with the dynamics and feedback loops that came back to haunt the people of the region.

Reconstructing the mental model behind the nuclear arms race

The first thing to do when trying to reconstruct the dynamics is to examine the mental model of those who came up with the nuclear policy in Chelyabinsk, that is, the Soviet Union government. The story begins at the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The emergence of nuclear weapons at the end of the war sparked an arms race between the two superpowers. The atomic weapons complex Mayak built in the late 1940s 80km north of Chelyabinsk was one of many such facilities constructed. The first plutonium production reactor was built at this complex. Only seven years later, the first of three major nuclear disasters struck the province.

It is clear that the United States' nuclear capacity put pressure on the Soviet Union to keep up. This forced the Soviet Union to start a nuclear weapons programme of their own to improve their nuclear capacity. Of course, the United States government was well-aware of the increased effort of the Soviets to catch up, which put additional pressure onto the government to stay ahead. The natural thing to do would be to ante up and improve their own nuclear programme and hence their nuclear capacity. This puts even more pressure on the Soviet government to invest more and more into the programme. The end result is a reinforcing feedback loop, which I have called the "Nuclear Arms Race", in which both the US and Soviet governments continue to increase their nuclear weapons programme, trying to stay one step ahead.

Rebuilding the unintended consequences leading to the death of thousands

In my opinion, the three Chelyabinsk disasters can be directly linked to feedback loops generated by the Soviet nuclear programme, which not only killed and contaminated over a million people, but also caused a ripple effect that reduced the Soviet nuclear programme (Please note that in my mental model, I am not considering the possibility that the Soviet government ignores the suffering of the people and do nothing. Tragically, the facts are that the four villages along the Techa River were never evacuated and that less than one percent of the people affected by the 1957 explosion were evacuated.)

The first feedback loop, called "Irresponsible Waste Disposal", is linked to the first and third disaster. In both cases, a more intense nuclear programme resulted in more nuclear waste. A facility has a limited capacity to treat and store waste. Since it costs time and money to improve waste treatment which could have gone into more research, the amount of untreated waste disposed into rivers and lakes increases, which increases the risk of nuclear contamination. More contamination means more manpower hours must be wasted to evacuate civilians and to seal-off highly contaminated areas, which reduces the effort into the nuclear programme.

The 1957 disaster could have been caused by the feedback loop I'm calling "Pressure Creates Accidents", in which an intensive research programme increases the schedule pressure on the workers at Mayak. With less time available to finish a task, workers may have been force to neglect maintenance of various components of the reactor, therefore increasing the chance of a malfunction leading to an explosion. In the 1957 explosion, the coolant system of a waste containment unit malfunction, releasing 20 million Curies of radioactivity into the atmosphere. Again, the disaster means that time and money must be 'lost' on helping civilians, which reduces the funds available for the nuclear programme.

Avoiding future disasters

In the end, it was the narrow-minded obsession of the Soviet government to have a more powerful nuclear arsenal than the Americans to cause these disasters. For them, this was more important than the safety of over a million of their citizens and this is why there were multiple tragedies. Even when the Techa River was killing those who depended on it, they failed to evacuate all of the villages. Even though they chose to ignore some villages, the river was sealed off, which would have certainly inhibited the nuclear programme.

To finish off this post, I found a very interesting video called "Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet" on Youtube. It is divided into 7 parts, the first of which I have posted on this blog. The other parts can be found on Youtube for those who are interested in more detailed coverage.

High-level radioactive waste management

Introduction

Radioactive waste is a waste product containing radioactive material, usually the product of a nuclear process such as nuclear fission. Radioactive waste can also be produced by industries that are not directly connected to the nuclear industry. Radioactive waste is classified as

• low-level, from hospitals, industry and used protective clothing.
• medium-level, found in chemical sludge and metal reactor fuel.
• high-level waste from nuclear reactors.
• transauranic waste, which is radioactive waste emitting alpha-particles with a half-life greater than 20 years).

Radioactive contamination can occur through ingestion, inhalation, absorption or injection of radioactive waste.

In the United States alone, the Department of Energy states that there are “millions of gallons of radioactive waste, thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel and material and huge quantities of contaminated soil and water.” For example the Fernald Ohio site had 31 million pounds of uranium product, 2.5 billion pounds of waste, 2.75 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and debris and a 223 acre portion of the underlying Great Miami Aquifer had uranium levels above drinking standards.

Defenders claim that the problems of nuclear waste do not come close to approaching the problems of fossil fuel waste. In fact, emissions from fossil fuels kill far more people than nuclear waste does and a coal power plant releases 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant of the same wattage. The World Nuclear Association provides a comparison of deaths due to accidents among the different kinds of energy production. The deaths per TW-year of electricity produced from 1970 to 1992 are quoted as 885 for hydropower, 342 for coal, 85 for natural gas and 8 for nuclear.

Nuclear Disasters in Chelyabinsk

However, while the statistics seems to indicate that nuclear waste is, on average, the safest fuel, the history of nuclear power and nuclear waste paints a far darker picture. The most tragic example of nuclear contamination in history is that of Chelyabinsk, which has been declared by western scientists to be the most polluted spot on Earth. The region endured around forty years of nuclear contamination and has suffered three major nuclear disasters.

Chelyabinsk was one of the former Soviet Union’s main military production centers, including nuclear weapons. Accidents, nuclear waste disposal and day-to-day operation of the Mayak reactor and radiochemical plant contaminated a vast area of the province. Much nuclear waste was dumped in the Techa River and the contaminated water killed so many people in the 1950s that 22 villages along the river banks were evacuated.

In 1957, a nuclear waste storage tank accident released radiation that was double the amount released by the Chernobyl accident. The accident was kept secret but almost 11,000 people had to be evacuated. The severe environmental contamination has caused many health issues to increase dramatically over the past 33 years. In fact, 21% increase in the incidents of cancer, a 25% increase in birth defects and 50% of the population of child-bearing age are sterile.

Disaster would strike yet again in 1967 at Lake Karachay. Nuclear waste was being dumped into two self-contained natural lakes near the Mayek reactor; Lake Karachay for high-level waste and Lake Staroe Boloto for medium level waste. During a long drought that summer, Lake Karachay dried up and the radioactive waste from the exposed lake blew over an area of 2,200 square kilometers.

Proper Waste Management

The story of Chelyabinsk may have been avoided if the high-level radioactive waste being carelessly disposed of was properly handled. The proper handling of these wastes is a daunting task, since radioactive wastes remain deadly to living organisms for many years. The two primary radioactive waste products, Technetium-99 and Iodine-129 have a half-life of 220,000 and 15.7 million years respectively. There are also transuranic radioactive elements in spent nuclear fuel, including Neptunium-237 and Plutonium-239, both of which remain radioactive for thousands, if not millions of years. High-level radioactive waste requires sophisticated treatment and proper management to isolate it from the biosphere.

The main problem with nuclear waste management is how to keep the waste in storage until it decays after thousands, or millions of years. Hannes Alfven, a Nobel laureate in physics, identified two prerequisites for the effective management of radioactive waste,

• Stable geological formations
• Stable human institutions over hundreds of thousands of years

As far as we know, no human civilization has lasted over hundreds of thousands of years and there are no known geological formations of adequate size for a permanent radioactive waste repository that would remain stable over the required timescale. However, avoiding confrontation with the risks involved with managing radioactive wastes can lead to even greater consequences in the distant future. Radioactive waste management is a kind of policy analysis that requires special attention, not only on ethical grounds, but also because of the high degree of uncertainty and futurity involved.

Welcome to Dane's Systems Thinking Blog

Hi, my name is Dane Zammit. I am currently one of 22 guinea pigs in the SERM programme. SERM stands for Sustainable Environment Resource Management which is being offered by the University of Malta and James Madison University. So far the experience has been a positive one and I am looking forward to the start of 2nd semester.

After I finish this programme, after a short break, I hope to find a job in the energy sector, particularly in wind technology. I have no plans to immediately do a Ph D, but I might go down that direction in a few years.

Outside of school, my main interests are video games, ice hockey and a card game called Magic the Gathering. I'm a big fan of role-playing games and strategy games and my favourite hockey team is the New York Rangers.