Last weekend, a group of influential British business people published a letter in the Independent which attempts to "make the economic case" for having the UK stay in the EU. The letter of course is a reaction to unrest within PM David Cameron's Conservatives (over half of Tory backbenchers demand a referendum on the topic), as well as the rise of Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party, which in recent polls is almost as big as the Tories (which trails Labor by a mile and a half). The letter raises a bevy of interesting questions, some of which are not nearly as easy to answer as people have come to believe.

The benefit of European Union membership outweighs the cost

The economic case to stay in the EU is overwhelming. The creation of the Single Market was instigated by Britain, and is now the world’s largest trading bloc, containing half a billion people with a GDP of £10 trillion. To Britain, membership is estimated to be worth between £31 billion and £92 billion per year in income gains, or between £1,200 to £3,500 for every household.

What we should now be doing is fighting hard to deliver a more competitive Europe, to combat the criticism of those that champion our departure. We should push to strengthen and deepen the Single Market to include digital, energy, transport and telecoms, which could boost Britain’s GDP by £110 billion.

The Prime Minister is rightly working hard on a Free Trade Agreement between the EU and US which could be worth as much as £10 billion per year to the British economy. On exiting the EU, we would lose not only the benefits of this free trade agreement, but all 37 already in existence. Renegotiating these would be costly, time-consuming and the UK alone would lack the colossal bargaining power of the EU.

The City of London is Europe’s global financial centre. Some of the EU’s ideas put this standing at risk. So the Government needs to work hard to protect it. But there is also a huge opportunity to promote London’s capital markets to help solve the problems of the EU banking system. We should promote the cause of EU membership as well as defend our position. The benefits of membership overwhelmingly outweigh the costs, and to suggest otherwise is putting politics before economics.

(Signed in a personal capacity) Roland Rudd, chairman, Business for New Europe; Dame Helen Alexander, chairman, UBM; Sir Win Bischoff , chairman, Lloyds Banking Group; Sir Richard Branson, founder, Virgin Group; Sir Roger Carr, chairman, Centrica; Sir Andrew Cahn, vice chairman, Nomura, public policy EMEA; David Cruickshank, chairman, Deloitte LLP; Lord Davies of Abersoch, vice chairman, Corsair Capital; Guy Dawson, director, ASA International; Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, deputy chairman, Scottish Power; Sir Adrian Montague, chairman, 3i; Nicolas Petrovic, CEO, Eurostar; Sir Michael Rake, chairman, BT; Anthony Salz, vice chairman, Rothschild; Sir Nicholas Scheele, chairman, Key Safety Systems Inc; Sir Nigel Sheinwald, non-executive director, Shell; Sir Martin Sorr elL, chief executive, WPP; Malcolm Sweeting, senior partner, Clifford Chance; Bill Winters, CEO, Renshaw Bay

So being an EU member means up to £92 billion ($140 billion) in additional profit for the UK?! These fine businessmen and pillars of society give no source for their numbers, unfortunately, which raises the question where the data comes from, how it's calculated etc. Also, obviously, "between £31 billion and £92 billion per year in income gains" is quite a spread (the difference is close to $100 billion); perhaps throwing around large numbers is deemed more important than accuracy.

The graph below from Her Majesty's Trade and Customs Office not only shows a substantial trade deficit for the UK with the rest of the EU, an interesting fact by itself, it also suggests (in a rough estimate from adding up monthly numbers) that total UK exports to the other 26 EU countries is maybe £12.5 billion per month, or £150 billion annually, while the UK imports some £200 billion per year from them. How these numbers include "up to £92 billion in additional profit for the UK" from the trade relationship is hard to see.

Probably Branson and co. are more interested in the promise of an even greater treasure up for grabs if the British government could achieve an EU law reform to "deepen the Single Market to include digital, energy, transport and telecoms", which they claim could boost Britain's GDP by £110 billion (which is quite a bit more than all other "additional" trade put together).

Or maybe they're really aiming for that "huge opportunity to promote London's capital markets to help solve the problems of the EU banking system". If we ignore for a moment how silly that sounds (Northern Rock, Bob Diamond anyone?), sure, grabbing control of Europe's entire banking system could be a huge winner. But it would never be accepted in Germany. Or France. So what then? Opening Virgin Money branches in Greece or Estonia or Slovenia can only have limited appeal, certainly if you have to share the spoils with Frankfurt.

Oh, and this one's good too: "What we should now be doing is fighting hard to deliver a more competitive Europe"... Really? Who's going to help you do the competing? Spain, Italy? They're bankrupt! Or how about "The Prime Minister is rightly working hard on a Free Trade Agreement between the EU and US which could be worth as much as £10 billion per year to the British economy."? That's just 0.6% of UK GDP, even if the number's correct. Maybe the Prime Minister would do better to focus his hard work somewhere else. I know, he won't: we'll globalize till we fall off the edge of the globe.

Britain's economy is far weaker than it appears - with bank "assets" at 800% of GDP and government debt at 90% of GDP-, the main difference with continental Europe being that it has its own currency, while the rest are constrained by the Euro, which can not now nor ever will be able to provide for every single different country what it needs. And grabbing bigger shares of the markets of broke economies hardly seems a recipe for Britain to grow out of its own funk.

The more interesting issue at hand might be to figure out which part of any profits Britain does achieve from its EU membership actually benefit the British population, and which part remains in the coffers of corporations and their staff and shareholders. Case in point: tax evasion as a whole, both corporate and individual, has apparently become so bad that even Cameron is looking to go after the perpetrators, not an obvious step for the most business friendly party in Britain, while at the same time Shell and BP are under serious EU investigation for price fixing in oil and gas markets (what was your heating bill again, grandma?).

Or one might ask how much resilience the UK economy has lost because of its EU membership; what part of what's now imported could still be grown or manufactured at home, if only the infrastructure was still there, and how many jobs have disappeared because of this?

I have no desire to mingle in internal political discussions about Britain's EU membership, but arguments like the ones made in the letter warrant scrutiny, as much as the still prevalent blind faith in the EU itself, does; not so much the underlying idea of unification as a deterrent for warfare, but the apparatus that has grown from the initial idea and that will lead to warfare if it isn't soon cut down to a healthier size.

That of course is where Nigel Farage comes in, who has firsthand experience of how and to what extent the European Parliament does or does not function. If you haven't seen them yet, YouTube has plenty of quite entertaining Farage videos. I have no opinion on Mr. Farage's political convictions, I don't know them nor do I care much. But I do understand some of his discontent regarding the EU.

And there's another point to make when pondering the numbers in the businessmen's letter. If it's true that the UK makes up to £92 billion in additional profit from being an EU member, where does that money come from? Who pays? Or is the EU truly a tide that lifts all boats? Where everybody wins? That would be hard to argue if you look at Spain or Greece. Ten years ago, perhaps, but not now.

Looking at this BofA graph, what you see is that youth employment in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain has basically fallen since the very moment the Euro was introduced. How's that for a rising tide?

And if we are only halfway right in thinking that perhaps the tide doesn't lift all boats, whose boat do you think it does lift? If Britain is on the "positive" side of the equation, can we assume that Germany is too? As for the other European countries, are there any of them except these two that for now seem to be left standing? Among the larger ones, Italy and Spain are out. France? Does anyone still have faith in the French economy? Who else is there? Smaller nations like Sweden, Finland, Austria perhaps. Holland's household debt levels are too high to make it a contender.

All in all, a direly poor harvest, one large country and less than a handful smaller ones, and certainly no proof that the EU lifts all boats. Quite the opposite, in fact, it looks much more like proof that the EU has turned into a bitter disaster. With a bit of poetic license one could say that it eats poor people for breakfast so money flows to the rich can continue: no trickling down but flowing up. First you take their money, then you take their children's money and when there's no more money to be taken you eat them.

The EU was designed to lift all boats (or at least it was marketed to the European people that way). It has utterly failed to achieve this goal. And that makes the EU a failure. It doesn't matter that Brussels itself does not see it that way, the people and countries who end up on the wrong side of the equation are the ones who in the end decide. If Italy and Spain etc. opt to stay in either of the unions (EU and Eurozone), all they can expect is more of the same (or, rather, less). The history over the past few decades makes that bitingly clear.

And it's not as if now, when both the chickens and the cows have come home to roost, the richer countries or richer citizens within countries are going to say: here, take some more of mine. They will instead insist that only growth can help "everyone" out of the quicksand. But when your unemployment is 25% or so, growth is not an option, not even close. Not as long as you remain members of the Eurozone.

The best shot the PIIGSC have at growth - and at being masters of their own homes - is to leave the Eurozone, start off afresh with a new (or old) currency and devalue the heebees out of it. It's not just the best shot, it's the only shot, and that's why it'll inevitably happen. Not in all countries, and not everywhere at the same time, but there will be a first country to take that route, and then more will follow. Brussels simply has nothing left to offer that could forever convince all of them to stay put. Brussels has become an impediment.

From the moment the Euro was introduced, the economy - as measured by youth employment in the periphery - has deteriorated. Over the past 5 years, it has deteriorated as measured by just about any indicator. For sure, the deterioration has come first, and worst, to the poorer countries of the union, and to the poorer citizens of each country. The rich of each country are better off now, and the poor are poorer.

What that means is that first the eurozone, and after it the entire European union, have lost their legitimacy - in their present shape. The people who brought Europe this disaster still hold the reins, and they are trying to do more of the same: more centralization, more control, more European laws to overrule national ones. They're busy pushing through banking unions, fiscal unions, claiming that these are the recipe to right all that's gone wrong.

There are 37 separate trade agreements, but when you look at the recent downfall of the PIIGSC, you can only conclude that these agreements benefit mainly or only the rich. Which is why letters like the one above still get written.

Of course this is more true for the Eurozone than the EU, the former is where the inherent fault lines in the latter come to collide . And if Britain discusses a new form of EU membership, other countries can perhaps follow suit and some new kind of looser union may appear.

Don't put all your money on that shade of red though. The way things are going right now, the risk is very real that the imminent implosion of the Eurozone will mean curtains for the entire Brussels grand theater. In a very chaotic fashion that will leave open power vacuums for people of even more questionable moral standards.

Photograph:
William Henry Jackson "Silver Springs on the Oklawaha, Florida" 1902

Why do we do it? Sure, we discount the future, and consensus is that's genetic, but it's not just our own future we discount. In fact it's not even the one we discount most: that would be our children's future. We don't just take what we need, we take all we can, and leave them with the consequences. After us the deluge. Even though love and protection for our children, and their children, is supposed to be at least as hard-wired into our genes as discounting the future is. Science even suggests that our main subconscious aim in life is simply to propagate our genes. Go forth, multiply and go away.

So, assuming this love for our children thing is valid, why is it that we burden the children we apparently love so much with these endless heaps of waste left over from our activities, many of which have nothing to do with our survival as such? At best it's a strange way of showing our love, at worst it looks more like the exact opposite of love. If mere survival was the goal, we could take it a lot easier, put on an extra sweater, walk to the store, that basic sort of thing, and build our communities to fit that kind of lifestyle.

We don't. We do the opposite. The more energy we have access to, the more we feel the urge to burn. And we produce children to help us do it, and raise them accordingly. There seems to be a pattern here. We make sure every next generation is even more dependent on burning even more energy, and less capable of doing without. Not because we don't understand this can only end in tears and blood and piles of corpses; we do. All the evidence says we simply can't help ourselves. So wearing that extra sweater is useless; we'd just come up with something like keeping it on in summer and jacking up the airco, so at least we can keep burning that oil and gas and electricity, in increasing amounts.

Still, not every human being and society seem to have done this all the time. For a long time, some Native (North) American peoples have at least in writing pledged to leave the earth in the best possible shape for the next 7 generations. Which might as well be 70, or 700 generations, since obviously the idea is not that everything blow up in the 8th generation. The Iroquois, or Six Nations (they call themselves Haudenosaunee), who live in Canada and the US northeast, have an ancient constitution, The Great Binding Law, in which is stated:

In all of your deliberations in the Confederate Council, in your efforts at law making, in all your official acts, self-interest shall be cast into oblivion. Cast not over your shoulder behind you the warnings of the nephews and nieces should they chide you for any error or wrong you may do, but return to the way of the Great Law which is just and right. Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground – the unborn of the future Nation.

In the words of Onondaga (one of the Six Nations) faith keeper Oren Lyons:

"We are looking ahead, as is one of the first mandates given us as chiefs, to make sure and to make every decision that we make relate to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come. . . ." "What about the seventh generation? Where are you taking them? What will they have?"

And even shorter :

"In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation... even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine."

If we would be obliged by our laws, in every decision we make, to take into account what the consequences would be for coming generations, a lot of our decisions would be different from what they are now. So why don't we? Undoubtedly it's at least partly because, unlike our mainly patriarchal societies, among the Iroquois it's the women who take the most important decisions and have the final vote. They are a matrilineal society, which means the women are the "clan heads", and inheritance passes down from mother to daughter, not father to son.

That's not to say this is some sort of perfect model, the Iroquois are not perfect people and they are often infected by our modern lifestyles just as much as we are, but it IS a path to a different approach, and proof that people indeed can organize themselves in ways that, through benign social control, make it harder to pursue the scorched earth based lives we presently live, in which we seem to have no real consideration at all for what we leave behind for those who come after us while we are heading for a brick wall at 100 miles an hour thinking: "They'll think of something".

These things (re)surface when reading about the way Germany deals with its nuclear waste issues. Which automatically leads to the question how everyone else does it.

When it comes to "safe storage", whether it's temporary or permanent (however one defines that), there are geological issues (volcanic outbursts, tectonic shifts etc.) and there are more "earthly" issues (warfare, bankrupt and/or collapsing societies etc.). What all of the proposed "solutions" have in common is that they involve continued spending well into the future. No matter what your stance on the topic, it's clear that we will require future generations to spend certain, most likely huge, amounts of money, time and effort in dealing with the waste we have produced in order to support our lifestyles. Moreover, they will be required to be substantially smarter than we are. They will have to come up with answers to problems we've been unable to solve.

The story with nuclear energy and nuclear waste is the same as with the financial system and the excessive debt we will leave behind unless the heavens bestow us with miracle growth . Both involve moral judgments and decisions that we probably wouldn't have the moral right to make, if we would be obliged by law to consider the effects on our children. Plus, not to forget, the two are closely connected. This is true for more issues than nuclear waste or finance, of course - it's just as valid for CO2 emissions or any and all sorts of chemical pollution.

There are not only abstract moral, religious or philosophical issues to be addressed by us - here and now - . There are practical issues as well. Certainly given the levels of debt we're raking up and passing along, how can we guarantee that our grandchildren will have the means to continue to deal with our nuclear waste? It is really brutally simple. We can't. So what does that make the legacy we leave them with? To the proverbial neutral Martian, it might seems more like we aim to leave them behind with as much misery as we can conjure up for the next 7 generations, something in the order of Dante's nine circles of hell.

Here's the first of two Spiegel articles on Germans and their nuke waste conundrum. Remember, after Fukushima Berlin decided to get rid of all nukes, 6 of them right away. This one is from May 10:

Nuclear Headache: Task of Decommissioning Plants Is Herculean

When politicians put far too much pathos into their speeches, people should be on their guard -- with a notable exception. There is one issue where no comparison is overinflated and no superlative appears exaggerated: Winfried Kretschmann, for instance -- the governor of the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg and a member of Germany's Green Party -- spoke of "theological timeframes" that now need to be decided upon.

His counterpart from Lower Saxony, Stephan Weil of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), refers to a different time horizon for his actions: the Schöningen Spears, a number of 300,000-year-old Paleolithic hunting weapons that archaeologists found in his home state. And the co-floor leader of the Green Party in the German parliament, Jürgen Trittin, reminded his fellow politicians that this was about "finding a site for the most dangerous waste that mankind has ever produced."

The issue is nuclear waste and its safe disposal. Germany will have to build a storage facility deep underground that can survive the ravages of wars, revolutions and even another ice age. Indeed, the remains of the nuclear age will have to be kept in a final repository for 1 million years - longer than the human race has existed.

[..] What the representatives of the people would rather not talk about, though, is the decommissioning of Germany's nuclear power plants. They were once the cathedrals of industrial progress. But now their cooling towers and domes have become widely visible symbols of human folly.

It's a monumental task that the Germans won't complete until 2080 "at the earliest," says nuclear expert Michael Sailer from the Öko-Institut, a non-profit research and consulting association for sustainable technology in Berlin. "After all, these are conservative estimates without any leeway for setbacks."

But it doesn't look as if things will go smoothly. On the contrary, the phasing out of nuclear power is accompanied by the agonizing challenge of decommissioning existing reactors: Eight nuclear power plants that were rapidly taken offline at the behest of the German government in the wake of Japan's Fukushima disaster have to be dismantled concurrently, followed by an additional nine facilities by the end of 2022.

There is still no roadmap for the decommissioning. To make matters worse, critics say that they see initial indications of eroding safety standards for decommissioning licenses as authorities struggle to cope with the mountains of nuclear waste. [..]

As if there weren't already enough outstanding problems, a new type of nuclear waste has emerged for which there is still no final destination: graphite waste and depleted uranium that can't be sent to the Konrad mining shaft. Instead, these materials that have been thoroughly contaminated with radionuclides will most likely have to be buried in a future final repository for highly radioactive waste. [..]

Germany's four main energy companies apparently see no problem, though, in the decommissioning of nuclear power plants, at least that's the conclusion drawn by a reference study that they commissioned from an engineering company called NIS-Ingenieursgesellschaft. [..] The "decommissioning of Germany's light-water reactors" is "assured," they wrote, adding that the impact on people and the environment is "negligible." [..]

The engineers see the decommissioning timetable as a simple enough matter, at least in theory. First, the fuel rods have to cool off during what is known as the post-operational phase. Then there are two possibilities: Either decommissioning begins immediately or the reactor is mothballed. "Safe containment" is the name of the process by which the remainder of the reactor is left standing for up to 30 years until the radiation inside the building is further reduced.

But critics of Germany's nuclear industry are pushing for a quicker solution. They fear that the operating utility companies may be bankrupt before the power plants have been dismantled. Their concerns are not unfounded. After all, Germany's Energiewende - Germany's plan to phase out nuclear energy and massively increase its reliance on renewable sources -- is eroding the business model of the former electricity monopolists. At the same time, energy giants such as E.on have billions in debts.

Take away points:

"a monumental task that the Germans won't complete until 2080 "at the earliest".

And that's just the decommissioning of the plants, before any of the waste has been stored. At the earliest 67 years from now. That's at least three generations into the future. More likely 5 or 6. If it ever gets completed, which is by no means guaranteed.

" ... the remains of the nuclear age will have to be kept in a final repository for 1 million years".

An important timeline definition, a much debated issue. We’ll get back to that.

"theological timeframes".

A great phrase, absolutely. Still, when you think about it: how many religions do you know that are a million years old?

Apart from the more general nuclear waste problems, Germany has some specific ones as well. From Der Spiegel again, this one 3 months ago. Makes you wonder how many situations like this exist elsewhere in the world:

Abyss of Uncertainty: Germany's Homemade Nuclear Waste Disaster

It's hot and sticky 750 meters (2,500 feet) underground, and the air smells salty. Five men are standing in front of an oversized drill. They have donned orange overalls and are wearing bulky special shoes, yellow hard hats and safety glasses. They turn on the machine, and the rod assembly slowly eats its way into a gray wall.

For over seven months now, the team has been trying to drill a hole with a diameter of eight centimeters (three inches). They are attempting to reach one of the former excavation chambers of Asse II, an old salt and potash mine near the northern German town of Remlingen, in the northwestern German state of Lower Saxony. Behind a barrier 20 meters thick, thousands of drums filled with nuclear waste have been rotting away for over three decades.

The drilling ultimately aims to provide a glimpse of the first of 13 chambers filled with barrels of waste, and to provide information on the condition of these containers -- and on what measures need to be taken to remove them from the 100-year-old maze of tunnels.

It took two years to prepare this journey into the contaminated salt. Engineers had to redevelop measuring devices, design new machines and write computer programs. The men on the drilling team have volunteered for the job. They are working in a hermetically sealed space. To prevent any radioactive dust particles from reaching the rest of the mine, a constant vacuum is maintained here. There is special vinyl flooring that can be decontaminated, and the walls are lined with custom-made tiles.

Germany cast itself into one of the most technically ambitious, and thus most costly, ventures of its industrial history -- a bold, perhaps foolhardy, project that will consume at least €4 billion ($5.3 billion), but more likely somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion. It's a decontamination project that will take 30 years, or longer. And no one can say with certainty whether it will ever be completed.

The initial stage has already revealed that the intended retrieval of the drums is an expedition into the unknown. The team has driven the drill pipe 35 meters into the salt, yet after a good seven months of work, they still haven't found the chamber with the stored radioactive waste. Geologists now believe that it has been missed by roughly 2.5 meters because the mountain has a life of its own and changes shape as the salt shifts from south to north.

[..] Germany's Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) [in 2010] estimated that it would take three years to prepare the project. Most recently, the BfS said it would need 10 years for the fact-finding phase alone. The BfS still has no detailed concept for the retrieval, no timetable, no script that maps out the technical procedures. It's essentially a flight by the seat of the pants, and problems are encountered for which no solutions have been found anywhere in the world. [..]

The public was originally informed that Asse was merely being used to "research" how radioactive waste reacts in a final repository. The public finally rebelled [..] in 2007, when the former operator of the storage site, the Munich-based German Research Center for Environmental Health (HMGU), decided to flood the tunnels with a magnesium chloride solution.

Citizens' initiatives were formed, internal papers were leaked, an investigative committee pored through thousands of binders -- and it all resulted in the biggest environmental scandal in postwar German history. Now, all political parties firmly believe that the only acceptable message to local residents is the promise to retrieve the drums of radioactive waste.

[..] the debate will resurface with every additional delay, every cost overrun, every bit of geological bad news and every internal report that questions the project's chances of success or the logic of retrieving the nuclear waste. The people who live in Germany's northern Harz mountain range have grown edgy due to Asse's misuse as a nuclear waste repository, and they feel that they have been lied to and deceived. They also realize that many officials at the BfS, the Federal Environment Ministry and the licensing agencies think the retrieval project is absolutely insane.

[..] ... special concrete is being pumped into the dilapidated tunnels. Indeed, in addition to having 126,000 drums filled with radioactive refuse, Asse's system of tunnels, which resembles the architecture of an anthill, is in danger of collapsing. "This is a totally ramshackle construction," says [mining engineer Jens Köhler].

For decades, the tunnels were allowed to fall into decay because the facility was about to be closed. In order to at least get some forewarning of an impending collapse, engineers have installed a micro-seismic system, the first of its kind anywhere. Twenty-eight monitoring stations register even the minutest tremors in the mine. Even a dropped hammer will be caught by the sensors.

[..] When it was decided to retrieve the 126,000 drums, the BfS made a video that demonstrated how easy the job would be: It showed how robots would collect the barrels, compress them or wrap them in foil, and then bring them up to the surface. The video claimed that the operation would be completed by 2025, at the latest.

Now, it's clear that it won't be possible to retrieve even a single drum during the current decade. The salvage operation will mainly require the construction of an additional system of tunnels -- basically a new mine next to the old one -- and this primarily presents a moral dilemma for environmentalists.

[..] The new mineshaft won't be operational before 2025. To make matters worse, there are still no plans for a packing facility or for an immense hangar in which up to 50,000 cubic meters (1.8 million cubic feet) of radioactive waste -- and just as much contaminated salt -- could be stored following retrieval.

[..] Back when the area was an isolated corner of West Germany, not far from the border with East Germany, many of the locals saw the research facility as their ticket to getting ahead. Asse offered jobs, growth and the promise of a brighter future. Children's birthdays could be celebrated with a guided underground tour of the mine, and the HMGU invited local politicians to Munich for Oktoberfest. And since nuclear waste doesn't stink, doesn't cloud the air and doesn't leave any visible traces, Dettmann says that they put any possible dangers "out of their minds" at the time.

It wasn't until someone attending a wedding talked about how water had rushed in and the mine was in danger of flooding that a group of local residents decided to inform themselves -- and finally realized "that we had been taken for a ride here for 40 years," says Dettmann. [..]

Last year, one of the top people at the BfS quit the agency to work for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) -- and he left with a bang: Michael Siemann, the project manager for the retrieval, said on television that a safe retrieval of the waste was, in his opinion, unrealistic for technical reasons. "Many people know this, but no one wants to say it," he noted, out of fear of bad press and incurring the wrath of the public. The geochemist said that, in view of the decrepit condition of the tunnels and the lack of robotic technology, he felt that there was neither the time nor the means to safely bring the waste aboveground. But, he added, politicians don't want to hear this.

NOTE: at present the plan is to start moving the barrels around by 2036. A huge leaking disaster that nobody who presently holds a position of power will need to take responsibility for, because they will be long gone by the time the next deadline looms and is replaced by another one somewhere comfortably far enough into the future. Short term interests rule the decision making processes that involve long term problems. That's our political systems in a nutshell, we have nothing else, but it bites all the more harder in this case, and therefore shows much clearer where those systems inherently fail.

Which is for instance that unborn generations have no voice, and we, who are supposed to vote - and live - with their interests in mind, choose our own interests over theirs instead. Anytime you read that your government, or the UN, very strong in this, claims that something must be done by 2050 or so, you know you're being taken for a fool. But you'll buy it anyway, because you discount the future just as much as those who make such claims. Much easier, but it is what makes you that fool.

Let's address some of the inevitable more positive views on the nuclear topic. There are lots of people out there who will keep on claiming that there are options for nuclear out there that are not only clean, but that will solve the entire nuclear waste problem too, because they're based on re-using that waste. However, these options, be they (fast) breeding reactors or some other type, have one thing in common: there are none, or close to none, of them operational.

And you can argue about why that is, maybe it's cost (breeders are more expensive than conventional nuke plants), maybe it's a conspiracy driven by the existing nuclear industry, but the fact remains that many breeder projects were started up and the vast majority were suspended, many after not delivering any energy to speak of. Thorium has been around since at least the 1950's, but there's still not a single fully operational thorium reactor today. This doesn't mean that breeder and thorium don't hold any promise, it just means they're at best just that: promises.

Any new reactor based on these technologies will take at the very least a full decade to complete, and that is very positive way of looking at it. There is no guarantee any of them will ever come to fruition, which means none of the efforts to store waste can be halted just because they might solve any issues. Plus, obviously, their history doesn't speak in their favor. Can they produce clean energy? No, the 2nd law of thermodynamics says they can't. Can they produce cleaner energy? Perhaps, but that's by no means a given.

And the clock keeps on ticking, and time is running out. Moreover, breeders and thorium would have their own waste issues even if they were to live up to their promise - which they haven't for decades -. For now, they are a technocopian issue, not a realistic one. They're a science fiction promise on paper, and that's all they are. While the clock is ticking. And public opinion is against any form of nukes, period, which raises both cost and timeline. Is that what we want to leave our kids? A promise that so far hasn't stopped not giving?

Even if you don't have any doubts about the viability of "new generation" reactors, and there's ample reason to have them, the simple fact of the matter remains that time is running out for them. Even if breeders were feasible, they're not active. They have to be built form scratch, against a whole lot of odds, and every single one of them would make any project more expensive than all the optimistic estimates around. While money's running out. Or did you think it wasn't?

Before we go stateside, here's another European waste piece from Reuters, June 2012:

Europe makes big bets on nuclear waste burial

Finland has already started to build Onkalo, which is designed to take waste over a period of 100 years and then store it for at least 100,000 years, safe from population, fire, flood and other risks.

France plans a similar project in Bure in the country's east, [encapsulated in 150-million-year-old rock (that according to French geologists hasn’t moved around much in the last 20 million years] [The "subsurface" facility would be classed as a "very long term storage facility" (ETLD) rather than a final repository, since it is supposed to be "retrievable" - i.e. the waste can, at least in theory, be removed at a later date.]

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimated the total amount of discharged spent nuclear fuel to have risen to around 345,000 metric tons (380297 tons) in 2010, up 50% from a decade earlier. "Since radioactive material in storage will remain hazardous for many thousands of years, maintenance — or institutional control — would be required for such periods of time or until permanent disposal is implemented," the IAEA said in a report. In the past 1,000 years alone, an institution would have had to survive the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, plague, scores of revolutions and dictatorships and two World Wars.

Environmentalists in Finland say it's unclear how secure Onkalo will be centuries from now, with the risks that climate and seismic shifts could allow waste to leak out and contaminate ground water. Reijo Sundell, president of Posiva which is the company building the site, said the bedrock is so solid it's likely to move as one piece in any geological shift and the spent nuclear fuel - encased in capsules of copper and cast iron and surrounded by buffers of bentonite clay - would remain intact. [..] "We are not saying that no capsules will ever break, but our standpoint is that even if some canisters break, radiation dosages on the ground cannot exceed the international limit of 0.1 millisievert," he said.

France plans to start storing waste underground from 2025 at Bure, in a remote and picturesque part of eastern France, chosen for its thick layers of argillite rock and low population density. Construction has not yet begun on the storage facility, and the French project is still subject to public debate. Work on the industrial site is due to start in 2017.

Officials at Andra, France's nuclear waste management agency, hope the €35 billion plan, if successful, will become a model for other countries and provide a business opportunity. "The French model is a real reference in the world, whether in large countries like the U.S., China and even Russia or in smaller countries," said Gerald Ouzounian, head of Andra's international division.

Japan is considered too earthquake-prone and densely populated to try underground disposal, and a loss of public trust over nuclear safety following the Fukushima accident has made it even more difficult than before to find a host site. But last year's earthquake and tsunami also raised awareness of the dangers of storing spent nuclear fuel in pools at reactor sites, currently common practice with many nuclear operators.

In Germany the prevailing notion is that storage can only be called safe if it's guaranteed for 1 million years. Finland talks about "at least 100,000 years". French engineers sound very confident about Bure, but the population is not so terribly convinced. There's also the fact that nuclear waste from other countries is being shipped to France to this day, leading to dangerous and much contested transports. Since Japan is deemed unsafe for any and all storage, it will need to export all its nuclear waste. But who's going to take it? Some poor country that may not be able to guarantee the same safety standards that the richer are discussing?

The US, which at present has its nuclear waste spread out over 79 temporary facilities across 34 states, spent some $15 billion since 1978 on the Yucca Mountain "deep geological repository nuclear waste storage facility" project in the Nevada desert (less than 100 miles from Las Vegas). Controversy was never far away, but it still took until 2004 for the US Court of Appeals, ruling on a series of lawsuits filed by the state of Nevada, to inject a sense of realism into the discussion. Why that first had to cost $15 billion is unclear. The EPA knew it was bound by law to follow recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences (which came in 1995), but instead stubbornly held on, till the end, to its own ideas.

Curious, because what the EPA was holding on to was a 10,000 years safety standard for a project involving materials with much longer half lives. Some examples: Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years, Technetium-99 220,000 years, Uranium-238 1 million years, Neptunium-237 2 million years, Iodine-129 15.7 million years.

Moreover, apparently Yucca Mountain sits on top of an aquifer, in the vicinity of 33 active earthquake faults and an active volcanic field; there are six craters within 20 kilometers of the site, the last of which formed by eruptions just 80,000 years ago. What's not to like, right?

Here's how Eureka County reports the Court of Appeals decision on its YuccaMountain.org site:

On July 9, 2004, the Court of Appeals ruled on Nevada's Yucca Mountain Lawsuits. The Court ruled that the EPA's 10,000-year safety standard on radiation containment at the site was arbitrary and inconsistent with the congressionally-mandated recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences. The Court also struck down the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing standards insofar as they include a 10,000 year compliance limit.

The National Academy of Sciences said the radiation safety standard should be set at a higher limit, when the waste would be at its peak radiation levels - at least 300,000 years from the time the waste is sent to Yucca. The EPA was required by law to base its rule on NAS' recommendation, but chose to set the standard at 10,000 years instead.

DOE itself has expressed doubts in the past about being able to meet a longer time limit. As quoted by the Court, former project director Lake Barrett wrote in 1999 that a safety standard significantly longer than 10,000 years would be "unworkable and probably unimplementable."

And this is how the EPA itself put it in 2005:

Public Health and Environmental Radiation Protection Standards for Yucca Mountain, NV

On July 9, 2004, in response to a legal challenge by the State of Nevada and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated portions of our [EPAs] standards that addressed the period of time for which compliance must be demonstrated. The Court ruled that the time frame for regulatory compliance was not "based upon and consistent with" the findings and recommendations of the NAS and remanded those portions of the standards to us for revision.

a. What Were NAS's Findings (Conclusions) and Recommendations on the Issue of Compliance Period? As the Court noted, NAS stated that it had found no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual-risk standard to 10,000 years or any other value, and that ‘‘compliance assessment is feasible * * * on the time scale of the long-term stability of the fundamental geologic regime - a time scale that is on the order of 10⁶ [10 million] years at Yucca Mountain." As a result, and given that "at least some potentially important exposures might not occur until after several hundred thousand years * * * we recommend that compliance assessment be conducted for the time when the greatest risk occurs" (NAS Report pp. 6– 7, [1995]).

President Obama has since, also under strong pressure from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), who for years had made it his lifelong and signature goal to "kill" the project, declared Yucca Mountain dead. Funding stopped in 2010.

In May 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said:

"Yucca Mountain as a repository is off the table. What we're going to be doing is saying, let's step back. We realize that we know a lot more today than we did 25 or 30 years ago. The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is saying that the dry cask storage at current sites would be safe for many decades, so that gives us time to figure out what we should do for a long-term strategy.

We will be assembling a blue-ribbon panel to look at the issue. We're looking at reactors that have a high-energy neutron spectrum that can actually allow you to burn down the long-lived actinide waste. These are fast-neutron reactors. There's others: a resurgence of hybrid solutions of fusion fission where the fusion would impart not only energy, but again creates high-energy neutrons that can burn down the long-lived actinides. ...

"Some of the waste is already vitrified. There is, in my mind, no economical reason why you would ever think of pulling it back into a potential fuel cycle. So one could well imagine - again, it depends on what the blue-ribbon panel says - one could well imagine that for a certain classification for a certain type of waste, you don't want to have access to it anymore, so that means you could use different sites than Yucca Mountain, such as salt domes. Once you put it in there, the salt oozes around it.

These are geologically stable for a 50 to 100 million year time scale. The trouble with those type of places for repositories is you don't have access to it anymore. But say for certain types of waste you don't want to have access to it anymore - that's good. It's a very natural containment. ...whereas there would be other waste where you say it has some inherent value, let's keep it around for a hundred years, two hundred years, because there's a high likelihood we'll come back to it and want to recover that.

"So the real thing is, let's get some really wise heads together and figure out how you want to deal with the interim and long-term storage. Yucca was supposed to be everything to everybody, and I think, knowing what we know today, there's going to have to be several regional areas."

It's no major surprise that Chu talks like a technocopian. Whether it's a great idea for the future of America that people like him lead the discussion on these topics, and focus these on "solutions" such as the so far ever evasive fast breeders, remains to be seen. Chu suggests that "we" made a lot of progress ("we know a lot more today than we did 25 or 30 years ago"), but at least as far as safe storage is concerned, that definitely doesn't seem to be the case: in fact, no progress was made at all in the past 35 years.

Can Steven Chu 100% guarantee us that certain salt domes are stable for 50 to 100 million years? No, he can't. But he says it anyway. The least he could do is to admit that the best he can do is suggest a least worst option. He doesn't. Steven has religion. But that doesn't cut it.

And maybe it doesn't matter anymore. Chu left his post in April, and just this Thursday the Senate confirmed his successor, Ernest Moniz, who left his mark with for instance an article entitled Why We Still Need Nuclear Power, written for Foreign Affairs in 2011, which basically reads like a five page ad for nuclear energy. As for the waste issue, the new US Energy Secretary says:

[..] spent fuel should eventually be kept in dry casks at a small number of consolidated sites set up by the government where the fuel could stay for a century. At each site, the aging fuel would be monitored, so that any problems that arose could be addressed. The storage facilities would keep Washington's options open as the debate over whether spent fuel is waste or a resource works itself out.

In short: nuclear energy is great and clean and necessary, and as for its problems, "They will think of something". Like in a century from now?! We can't let our economy be hurt by pesky little problems that won't hurt us in our own lifetimes anyway. After us the deluge.

As for the blue-ribbon panel that Steven Chu mentioned, they issued their report in early 2012 (see brc.gov). The fact that it was co-chaired by octogenarian Washington stalwarts Lee Hamilton (D) and Brent Scowcroft (R) should give you an idea of where this was going from the beginning. The former Homeland Security advisor and the former National Security Advisor and Kissinger protégé sure made for a nice team. Of course the report starts out nice enough:

[..] this generation has a fundamental, ethical obligation to avoid burdening future generations with the entire task of finding a safe, permanent solution for managing hazardous nuclear materials they had no part in creating."

The fact that Hamilton was 80 and Scowcroft 86 years old when they wrote this makes one wonder what exactly they mean when they say "this generation". One thing's for sure: their own generation has utterly failed to comply with the "fundamental, ethical obligation" they talk about. Perhaps it would have been good for the two lifelong power brokers to recognize their own failure?

As a whole, the report, (judging from a summary), lacks any real meaning. In a nutshell, it does nothing but advise "the government" to find better ways to find and create storage facilities. What those ways would be, not a clue. You and I could have done the same, and we might not have needed a full two years to do it. By the way, the new Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel were also on the panel; just to confirm you know from which way the wind was blowing.

US nuclear policy is still in the same firm hands (albeit a next generation) it always was. That is to say: the nuclear industry. Nothing has changed in that respect, in spite of the disaster Yucca Mountain has turned in to. The Court of Appeals has been clear: the NAS has the decisive vote. It's likely that Washington will try to change that simple fact. What do scientists know anyway? New official government policy is to seek out a new singular, permanent site, with estimates placing a facility to be ready by about 2050.

Nuclear waste is an issue that no human being has been able to solve, period. And it's not for lack of trying, with often limitless budgets.

Japan has been scared away from nuclear power by what was in essence a pretty simple large wave, awfully tragic but not exactly out of the blue in that part of the world. Germany closes 6 nuke plants because of that wave and has no idea what to do with its waste, other than send it to France. Finland believes in its safe storage plans, but has no proof to show for it. France has a huge stake invested in its own repository, and - like Finland - claims it’s a model for the planet, but that too is still merely suspended in mid air.

In other words, nothing is sure about what we are going to do with the waste produced by our nuclear plants. Nothing. We know that deep burial is the only option, or we should say it seems to be, but at the same time it isn't, because there are no deep burial sites anywhere in the world that are actively taking in waste.

What is sure is that the waste is there, ever more of it as we go along our merry ways. There are ideas being thrown around, but they have been for a long time, and nothing has stuck so far. So it's really all nothing but a mighty big gamble we're taking. That's not just some opinion that can be countered with other, different opinions, it's a simple fact.

We sacrifice our children’s futures at the altar of our own petty conveniences. And that has us return to the question: Why do we do it? If we assume that we do indeed love our children, we must have gotten our wires pretty badly crossed at some point: this nuclear gamble we're making does not rhyme with that love. It certainly doesn't seem to be a gamble we make for our childrens' benefit: it's for ourselves only.

It looks like our primitive hard-wired propensity towards burning any and all accessible energy surpluses wins out over the less primitive and therefore perhaps less hard-wired love for our children. That may have consequences for any theory about how important propagating our genes is, or at least shift such a theory, but it seems obvious: we love ourselves more than we love our children. And that, simply as a cool cold observation, should perhaps make us think. Or have us admit to ourselves that we are not who we like to think we are. That our frontal lobes will never be able to overrule our reptilian brains.

Then again, The Great Binding Law of the Iroquois tells us of a notion that we can overcome our most basic instincts. There's something there that holds a promise for mankind. But it's a receding one. And it's not technocopia that will deliver us from nowhere. We will have to do that ourselves. No more nuclear waste until we are sure about what to do with it doesn't sound all that crazy.

There are simply problems we can't solve. Blind optimism (is that genetically hard-wired too?) that we will be able to solve them at some point in the future sounds real cute, but it also leads to the kind of dangerous wager made only by fools, or people who are not driven by conscious thought. Perhaps progress should mean making a next step in our evolution, where we recognize our propensity to destroy and not let it lead us all the way down. It's late in the day, though, and things don't look good.

Ireland was one of the first European countries to get hit by the financial crisis. It decided to bail out its banks at the direct cost of the taxpayer. In 2012, those banks were still overleveraged (and still are today) to the same level as for instance Cyprus, with assets over 800% of GDP. Probably only Iceland has been worse (UK?!). According to IMF/EC, 2012 Irish national debt was 117% of GDP; not a pretty number either. This all as a lead-up to a May 5 article by Dan White in the Irish Independent that TAE's own Nicole Foss sent over recently. But first a little history, for who may be bit shaky on it, just for fun, and to explain how Ireland got to have its present population of 4.5 million people.

The population of Ireland in the 1830's, when it was part of Britain, was around 8.5 million. There are estimates of as much as 10-12 million; in those days counting everyone, even in a census, was an obvious struggle. Ireland then had perhaps 30% of the overall population of the kingdom, a sharp contrast with today.

In 1845, the Great (Potato) Famine hit home. Over the next 5 years, 1 million Irish died of hunger and disease, and 1 million emigrated. And it didn't stop there. Millions more emigrated in the following decades, and the country remained dirt poor, so starvation didn't stop either. Some say Britain liked things that way (religion was always a big factor). Only in the 1916 Great Rising, the -catholic - Republic of Ireland gained independence, while - protestant - Northern Ireland became part of the UK.

Ironically, it was the very same potato that, once it came to Europe from the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, allowed for a huge increase in population in Ireland and beyond. The "Old World" didn't have a crop that all by itself people could live on. Now they had one. And then someone imported blight.

Today, the Irish Republic counts 4.5 million citizens, or 4 million less than in 1830. Northern Ireland's 1.8 million make up some of the loss, but the picture is clear: 180 years later, during which time world population rose from just over 1 billion to just under 7 billion, and Britain went from some 20 million to 63 million, Ireland's population still hasn't recovered (will it ever?).

There is the Irish diaspora, however. Approximately 15 times as many people of - often fiercely proud- Irish descent live elsewhere in the world today than live in Ireland. In the US alone there are over 40 million.

So today, we have (the Republic of) Ireland at 4.5 million people. That's useful when looking at debt numbers. Especially since it is just about 70 times less than the US at 315 million. Irish unemployment is 14.1%, youth unemployment 30.3%, both numbers somewhat recovering from deeper pits.

One more thing before we get to the article: it refers to GNP, Gross National Product. Refresher: it's almost the same as GDP, but not exactly. The latter is a measure of the value of goods and services produced in a country, the former is a measure of the value of goods and services produced in a country by its domestic institutions and individuals. For most countries both will be quite similar, but in Ireland, GNP is estimated to be perhaps as much as 25% smaller than GDP.

The reason for this is that Irish tax laws make the country very attractive for foreign companies (there are some 600 American ones alone operating in the Republic). Ergo (simplified): a lot of the revenue generated in GDP leaves the country as profit for mother companies, and doesn't count towards GNP. This makes some voices even claim that recent GDP gains are false signs of a recovery, and that when measured in GNP, there has been no recovery whatsoever. One more detail: Irish property prices have fallen over 50% since 2007.

So there: Ireland's initial cost for the bailout of its banks was €40 billion ($52.4 billion if you use a 1:1.31 exchange rate). In 2011, US "investment manager" BlackRock conducted a stress test that concluded that the four Irish banks still in business, AIB, Bank of Ireland, Permanent TSB and EBS (now part of AIB), would require an extra €24 billion of capital. So that added up to €64 billion ($83.5 billion). In comparative US terms (70 times bigger), that was $5.85 trillion.

And thus we finally get to Dan White, who says the Irish are far from done bailing out. He starts off referring to numbers published by (Danish, thus foreign) Danske Bank Ireland the week before, and takes it from there:

Taxpayer beware! Irish banks need another €30 billion at least

[..] The latest write-offs mean that Dankse will have written off almost €3.6 billion, just over a third of a loan book which had a total peak value of just over €10.5 billion. If that isn't enough to give taxpayers a bad case of the heebie jeebies then nothing will.

For those of us who have followed the crisis from the beginning Dankse has been a useful pointer to future developments at the Irish-owned banks. Unlike its domestic counterparts, who are still in denial about the full extent of their problems, Dankse has been upfront about its loan losses. Where Dankse goes today the Irish-owned banks look set to follow tomorrow. [..]

The BlackRock stress tests concluded that total loan losses at the continuing Irish-owned banks would amount to between €27.5 billion and €40 billion. The biggest single source of these losses would be residential mortgages with BlackRock forecasting losses of between €9.9 billion and €16.9 billion.

The other big generators of losses were forecast to be commercial real estate lending (between €8.1 billion and €10.3 billion) and corporate lending, including SMEs (between €7 billion and €9.5 billion). [SME=small business]

Even on the basis of the banks' own figures it is clear that these projected losses were hopelessly optimistic. According to the most recent AIB results, €8.1 billion of its €39.5 billion Irish mortgage book was more than 90 days in arrears at the end of December 2012.

Over at Bank of Ireland €3.6 billion of its €27.5 billion Irish mortgage book was more than 90 days in in arrears at the end of last year, while €5.5 billion of Permanent TSB's €24.5 billion Irish mortgage book was similarly suspect.

At the end of December 2012 some €38 billion of owner-occupier mortgages and €10.6 billion of buy-to-let mortgages were in arrears, while a further €6.7 billion of owner-occupier and €3.2 billion of buy-to-let mortgages had been restructured but were not in arrears. By value that's the equivalent to over 41% of the total €142 billion stock of outstanding mortgages held by the domestic and foreign-owned banks.

Apply this pro rata to the €91.5 billion of Irish mortgages held by the domestic banks and one is looking at over €37 billion of compromised loans. With property prices having fallen by at least 50% since 2007 it would seem reasonable to provide 50% against these loans, say €18.5 billion.

In addition the Irish-owned banks have at least €50 billion of loss-making tracker mortgages on their books. Some of the foreign-owned banks have been offering to reduce loan balances by between 20% and 25% for tracker customers who are prepared to switch to a variable rate. Even a 20% write-down on trackers would cost the Irish banks another €10 billion.

Throw in a further 20% provision for those mortgages not currently impaired, €11 billion, and the Irish-owned banks are looking at mortgage losses of €39.5 billion, €22.6 billion more than forecast by BlackRock in its "worst case scenario".

And that's barely the half of it.

The Irish-owned banks have €27 billion of SME lending on their books. Last month the Central Bank's director of credit institutions, Fiona Muldoon, revealed that 50% of SME lending was in distress. On the basis of a 50% write-down of the distressed loans and a 20% precautionary write-down of the remainder that translates into a further €9.4 billion of losses, €4.9 billion greater than BlackRock's "worst case scenario".

The Irish-owned banks also still have almost €30 billion of commercial property lending on their balance sheets. Once again one has to ask, just how realistic is BlackRock's "worst case scenario" of €10.38 billion of losses.

By the time one adds losses on other lending, to large corporates, personal loans, credit cards etc. and it is hard to see how the cost of any fresh bank recapitalisation could come in at under €30 billion. That would bring the total cost to the Irish taxpayer of "fixing" our bust banks to almost €100 billion.

Clearly greater love hath no government than that which lays down its citizens for its banks!

Looking through White’s numbers, for instance "Irish-owned banks have at least €50 billion of loss-making tracker mortgages on their books", I'm thinking even he stays on the cautious side, but they're bad enough as is already. The "total €142 billion stock of outstanding mortgages" translates to $186 billion, which in "US Size" (x70) would be over $13 trillion, about on par with the US at $41.350 per capita, but in a country that has no particular history of owning homes. It's not home value, it's mortgages. Not assets, but debt. And prices have already fallen over 50% in Ireland since 2007.

As late as October 2010 Ireland declared itself "fully funded well into 2011", but just one month later, in November 2010, the government asked for a €67.5 billion "bailout" from the EU and the IMF as part of an €85 billion 'program' (the Irish State "funded" €17.5 billion itself). By August 2011 total funding for the six biggest banks by the ECB and the Irish Central Bank came to about €150 billion; at that point the largest of the six, Bank of Ireland, had a market capitalisation of just €2.86 billion.

The question then becomes how Ireland is going to facilitate another €30 billion bank recapitalisation. The government stated this spring it was getting ready to ask for further aid, but EU forces apparently - and curiously - have a completely different take on this. Before Ireland was recently handed a 7-year extension on paying back the loans, the "donors" made clear they not only don't feel like approving extra aid, they want Ireland to exit the bailout scheme and return to the bond markets for funding. As the Irish Times reported on April 12:

Euro zone believes deal will see Ireland exit bailout this year

An imminent deal to postpone Ireland’s bailout repayments will be enough to secure a smooth exit from the EU-IMF programme later this year, according to the chief of the euro zone finance ministers. The position set out by Dutch minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem is in defiance of the Government’s claim for further aid to ease the cost of propping up Allied Irish Banks and Bank of Ireland.

Although the IMF has strongly backed Dublin’s push for the ESM rescue fund to bear historic debts of the two banks, Mr Dijsselbloem indicated in an interview with The Irish Times yesterday that a decision on that front might not be taken for at least another year.

That is well beyond Ireland’s anticipated return to private debt markets at the end of the bailout and means he expects the Government will be able to do without a specific pledge of bank debt relief from the ESM fund.

Asked if the return to market financing would be eased by a definitive commitment of ESM aid, Mr Dijsselbloem insisted that the two issues should be separated. "The access to the markets is relevant right now, and this year, and we will try to help Ireland and Portugal in exiting the programmes," he said.

"The direct recap instrument ESM isn’t available at the moment," he added. "What we can do is to look at the maturities of the EFSF loans and that’s why we are . . . discussing a proposal by the troika on more time for Ireland and Portugal [NB: 7-year extension since granted]. That would greatly help both countries going back to the markets and finding their own funding."

While agreement on whether the ESM can retroactively bear historic debts is anticipated in June, Mr Dijsselbloem said a decision on which countries can use the scheme will only be taken after a common bank supervisor is set up in the middle of next year.

The Government campaign for ESM aid relies on a pledge by euro zone leaders to break the link between bank and sovereign debt, but Germany and like-minded allies, such as the Netherlands and Finland, remain sceptical.

Last week, the IMF reiterated its call for the ESM to take equity stakes in the two Irish pillar banks, arguing that it could play "an invaluable role in marking prospects for recovery and debt sustainability more robust". However, Mr Dijsselbloem said he could not predict whether the retroactive application of the direct recapitalisation instrument would be sanctioned at all.

In other words, there's now a substantial stretch of financial no man's land in Europe. The EU still doesn't have its newest "direct recap" instrument, the ESM Stability Mechanism, ready yet while its predecessor, the EFSF, is still sort of active, though it can't take on any new commitments, and what's - still - being discussed is in what shape EFSF loans can be transferred to the ESM - if they can at all - . Of course a banking union could play a large role in all this, but that looks as far away as ever.

Meanwhile, affording Ireland and Portugal more time to pay back loans appears to be seen in Brussels as some kind of end solution, but how realistic is that? Ireland would need to cough up, what, €10 billion a year over that 7 year period (?!), while, in the short term, ingesting another €30+ billion into its banks. Anyone who doesn't think of Dijsselbloem, Lagarde and Draghi as the next reincarnation of the genius of Albert Einstein might come away with some doubts as to whether this is going to work out.

Nor does this stop at Ireland, of course, or Portugal. Take for instance this loud warning about Spain from everyone's favorite right-wing anti-Europe correspondent for the Telegraph, Jeremy Warner:

Spain is officially insolvent: get your money out while you still can

I'd not noticed this until someone drew my attention to it, but the latest IMF Fiscal Monitor, published last month, comes about as close to declaring Spain insolvent as you are ever likely to see in official analysis of this sort. Of course, it doesn't actually say this outright. The IMF is far too diplomatic for such language.

Let's take the projected budget deficit first. This is expected to decline quite steeply this year to 6.6% of GDP, but that's mainly because the cost of bailing out the banking sector fell substantially on last year's budget. On a like-for-like basis, there has in fact been very little fall in the underlying deficit. And nor on the present policy mix is there ever likely to be, for that's where the deficit is projected to remain until the end of the IMF's forecasting horizon in 2018. Next year, the deficit is expected to be 6.9%, the year after 6.6%, and so on with very little further progress thereafter. [..]

The situation looks even worse on a cyclically adjusted basis. What is sometimes called the "structural deficit", or the bit of government borrowing that doesn't go away even after the economy returns to growth (if indeed it ever does), actually deteriorates from an expected 4.2% of GDP this year to 5.7% in 2018. By 2018, Spain has far and away the worst structural deficit of any advanced economy, including other such well known fiscal basket cases as the UK and the US.

So what happens when you carry on borrowing at that sort of rate, year in, year out? Your overall indebtedness rockets, of course, and that's what's going to happen to Spain, where general government gross debt is forecast to rise from 84.1% of GDP last year to 110.6% in 2018. No other advanced economy has such a dramatically worsening outlook. And the tragedy of it all is that Spain is actually making relatively good progress in addressing the "primary balance", that's the deficit before debt servicing costs.

What's projected to occur is essentially what happens in all bankruptcies. Eventually you have to borrow more just to pay the interest on your existing debt. The fiscal compact requires eurozone countries to reduce their deficits to 3% by the end of this year, though Spain among others was recently granted an extension. But on these numbers, there is no chance ever of achieving this target without further austerity measures, which even if they were attempted would very likely be self defeating. In any case, it seems doubtful an economy where unemployment is already above 25% could take any more. [..] Spain is chasing its tail down into deflationary oblivion.

All this leads to the conclusion that a big Spanish debt restructuring is inevitable. Spanish sovereign bond yields have fallen sharply since the announcement of the European Central Bank's "outright monetary transactions" programme. The ECB has promised to print money without limit to counter the speculators. But in the end, no amount of liquidity can cover up for an underlying problem with solvency.

Europe said that Greece was the first and last such restructuring, but then there was Cyprus. Spain is holding off further recapitalisation of its banks in anticipation of the arrival of Europe's banking union, which it hopes will do the job instead. But if the Cypriot precedent is anything to go by, a heavy price will be demanded by way of recompense. Bank creditors will be widely bailed in. Confiscation of deposits looks all too possible.

I don't advise getting your money out lightly. Indeed, such advise is generally thought grossly irresponsible, for it risks inducing a self reinforcing panic. Yet looking at the IMF projections, it's the only rational thing to do.

Let's cautiously summarize it this way: Europe's finances - still - are in tatters. Ireland and Spain are just two examples. We can come up with similar stories about a handful (or two) of other countries. Perception for now remains that Draghi will do whatever it takes - re: buy buy buy - to rescue anyone and everyone. But that perception rests on the idea that he can, in the first place. Jeremy Warner puts his finger on a sore spot that doesn't get nearly enough attention anymore:"... in the end, no amount of liquidity can cover up for an underlying problem with solvency".

The illusion of central bank omnipotence, be it in setting interest rates or in buying up any and all kinds of paper, will continue until it doesn't; we have our media, our politicians and our own gullibility and wishful thinking to thank for that. In the meantime, though, hardly any of the problems in Europe are truly being solved. Moreover, those that are even attempted will increasingly involve bail-ins as a way of funding bail-outs.

It's just a matter of time until the walls come down, and of course it's ironic that the longer reality can be kept hidden underneath the carpet, the less real it seems. But that's simply a predictable consequence of having short attention spans. And we should be able to look beyond that.

Picture top: Vincent van Gogh - The Potato Eaters - 1885

Dalit or Untouchable Woman of Bombay according to Indian Caste System - 1942 - Wikimedia Commons

Throughout history and throughout the world, there have been classes of untouchables. Best known perhaps (other than Elliott Ness and Wall Street bankers) are the caste that goes by the name in South Asia, a.k.a. the Dalits, but there are/were also for instance the Cagots in France, the Burakumin in Japan, and the Roma and Jewish populations in medieval Europe though the Middle East. In the US, one could include the black and native populations. Wikipedia has this definition:

Untouchability is the social-religious practice of ostracizing a minority group by segregating them from the mainstream by social custom or legal mandate. The excluded group could be one that did not accept the norms of the excluding group and historically included foreigners, house workers, nomadic tribes, law-breakers and criminals and those suffering from a contagious disease. This exclusion was a method of punishing law-breakers and also protected traditional societies against contagion from strangers and the infected.

The origin of the phenomenon may have started simply as a way to exclude criminals and diseased people from a community, but obviously that's not where it led.

Untouchability typically means none to limited access to public resources, schools, churches, temples, and having to live outside of established communities and villages. Often - but not always - there was a connection with certain occupations, especially those seen as impure, such as handling the dead (this could include executioners), and dealing with human and animal waste. In parts of Europe, dealing with money was seen as impure, from a religious point of view, which drove a lot of Jews into the field, since they were banned form most other occupations.

I could write a lot more on the interesting though often cruel and barbaric history of untouchability in a wide definition of the word, but I want to focus on what started to make me think of it, modern unemployment numbers in the western world. That is to say, we are now on the verge of casting a huge group of people, essentially our own neighbors, outside of our communities. They are no longer allowed to participate in what makes our societies tick.

This is true for people of all ages (see: Companies won't even look at resumes of the long-term unemployed), but it's an absolute "disaster that got tired of waiting to happen" among young people. Eurostat published this graph last week:

Youth unemployment in Greece (EL) is at about 60%, in Spain (ES) at 55.9%. Then Portugal and Italy at 38.3% and 38.4%, Ireland at 30.3%. Add a bunch of eastern European nations and you have the obvious suspects. Among the others, though, some truly stand out. How about Finland at 19.8%? That's an AAA country, EU core. Same story, only worse, for France: 26.5%. Sweden (SE), supposedly doing so well without the euro: 25.1%. Belgium at 22.3%, the UK 20.7%. They make the US look sort of OK at 16.2%, or at least they serve to somewhat hide how ugly that number really is. In comparison, the EU "hard core" gets no higher than Holland at 10.5%.

Of course there are people who will argue that some of the youth included are in school, not looking for jobs. But given such notions as A) governments' propensities to present rose-colored numbers and B) the numbers of kids enrolled in schools only to not be counted as jobless, I would be wary of overemphasizing the argument.

The numbers, let's focus on Europe for now, are certain to only get worse. How do we know? Easy as pie. It's a matter of political principle. All those unemployed young people are nobody's priority but their own. They simply don't have the political might yet to swing policy decisions in their favor. That is still with the generations of their parents and grandparents, who will vote against anyone trying to cut their wages and benefits. Who will even demand, and receive, government help in dealing with the losses on the homes they bought at irresponsibly elevated prices; they'll claim the government should have warned them.

Losses on homes is one thing the young need not worry about: purchasing a house is way out of reach for them, and for most will remain so for the rest of their lives. The lack of - conventional - political might threatens to doom the young to a life of subservient survival. What might they have will have to come from unconventional methods to change matters. For now, the situation is locked, even as it's sinking fast. What happened in Portugal over the past month is a "great" example of how Europe deals with its issues.

You may remember that in early April, Portugal's highest court declared a set of austerity measures included in the government’s 2013 budget illegal, saying they couldn't single out public workers for salary and benefits cuts. Then, before you could think: democracy works!, the EU/ECB/IMF troika paid an an "unscheduled" visit to Lisbon. The result? Portugal fires another 30,000 public workers. That's right, if you can't cut their benefits, you just fire them.

Of course this is merely the latest in a long line of troika induced measures. 50,000 public sector jobs were already lost in the past two years , and 205,000 jobs disappeared overall in 2012 alone, and 500,000 since 2008.

What do these numbers mean? Here's a helpful little exercise: The US is 30 times the size of Portugal. So to put them in an American perspective, it's like 900,000 public workers are fired in one fell swoop, after 1,5 million lost their jobs in the two years prior, in an economy that lost 6.15 million jobs overall in just the last year(!), and 15 million since 2008.

Not that the troika is done just yet:

Still, an I.M.F. report issued in January concluded that "Portugal’s education system remained overstaffed and relatively inefficient by international standards." It suggested "making the education system more flexible and limiting the state’s role as a supplier of education services" by eliminating 50,000 to 60,000 jobs. 15,000 public school teachers lost their jobs in the past two years.

That's right, their words, not mine: making the education system more flexible [..] by eliminating 50,000 to 60,000 jobs. Again, that would compare to firing between 1.5 and 1.8 million American teachers.

Can Portugal afford to lose all these teachers? Maybe not: about 63% of Portugal’s adult population has not completed high school. Plus, recently graduated teachers can forget about ever getting a job. And so 60,000 young and educated Portuguese emigrate every year. I don't know about you, but to me it's starting to feel like a scorched earth policy.

The European Commission, meanwhile, not only has no answer to these problems, it doesn't even have any intention of doing anything about them. Quite the opposite. The EC wants to continue with the "reforms" it has forced upon PIGSIC countries (can I buy a K?), and we all know what that means: jobs must be cut. Which in turn means that unemployment will rise. Even if they don't say it in so many words. In order to create jobs, you need to cut them first.

From the Telegraph:

[Olli Rehn, the EU's economic and monetary affairs commissioner], had no good news for Europe's growing ranks of unemployed and admitted that "mitigating" against unemployment was all that could be done under the present austerity policy that rules out public-led investment to boost jobs.

He also warned that growth across the EU would return too slowly to reduce unemployment in the short term as European economies remain dependent on exports to offset the impact of the recession and lack of investment caused by the financial and sovereign debt crisis.

"We are living through a very difficult process of adjustment and it is having an unfortunate toll on employment," he said.

"We need consistent consolidation of public finances and structural reforms to boost growth. We need to reform labour market policy to fight youth unemployment. We have to use all possible ways and means to turn the trend in the European economy and mitigate effects of current protracted recession."

And from Bloomberg:

"High unemployment points to the need for continuing the course in structural reforms," said Marco Buti, head of the commission’s economics department. "The reduction in fiscal deficits is making headway in a differentiated way."

That last bit is just meaningless weirdspeak, if you ask me. "The reduction in fiscal deficits is making headway in a differentiated way." Maybe he simply means to say that the people may be screwed, but the banks are fine.

What I do understand is that his words again come down to: "High unemployment points to the need for job cuts". And that remains a strange point of view, especially when seen from the eyes of the unemployed.

So is there any good news? Perhaps that depends on your point of view as well. For instance, I read this in the Telegraph:

"Austerity is finished. This is a decisive turn in the history of the EU project since the euro," [French finance minister Pierre Moscovici] told French TV. "We're seeing the end of austerity dogma. It's a victory of the French point of view."

First of all, that "victory" looks about as Pyrrhic as can be. Several EU nations get more time to cut their deficit to the mandated 3% maximum, but that's just because they're even more broke broker brokest than anyone was ready to admit last time around. And the EU did another round of adjusting predictions downward, a move that's devoid of any meaning if you repeat it every single time. There was also another round of "but next year we'll see the return of growth", but really, who listens anymore? As for the "French point of view", the people hate President Hollande so much after less than a year in office they long back for the good old days of Sarkozy. France is so screwed, but no-one has the guts to say it out loud.

Oh, right, and the EU was proven wrong in Italy. That must have hurt, even if they didn't say so. The return to power of Silvio Berlusconi caused yields on Italian 10 year bonds to plummet. Ergo: they should have left the midget mummy in place, so the markets spoke.

On the whole though, there is just one conclusion left for southern Europe, and I apologize in advance for repeating myself. Countries like Greece and Portugal and Italy need to get out of the Eurozone as quickly as they can. They badly need to regain of their own monetary policy. They must be able to devalue their currencies vis a vis Germany and Holland and the US. Moreover, if they don't leave, they will be swept up (and under) in the wave of bad data that will come out of the EU core. That will start a much bigger squeeze of the periphery than the one we've seen so far. It'll be like being trapped underneath a badly wounded behemoth, not something you should volunteer for.

The Eurozone (and probably the EU as a whole and as a mechanism) has nothing left to offer its poorer members but a world of pain. But it's up to the people themselves to make sure they get out in time. And all the countries still have europhiles in power. Italy got close, but it's already back to the days of old with the same old president and a new PM from the same old school. And if leaving half your children with the prospects of being condemned into meaningless lives, of being ostracized as modern day untouchables, is not enough to wake you up and say No Mas, you really need to wonder what is.

Brussels is not going to create jobs for Europe's young people, they're instead going to cut more jobs, they say so themselves. What they intend to do is squeeze the politically relevant - older - part of the population, but only so far. They don't want them to revolt. That leaves only the young to be squeezed more. Brussels incessantly produces positive looking economic growth numbers, and then incessantly adjusts them downward. They do this because it puts people to sleep. It works. People actually believe that things will get better, that their economies will start growing again and it'll all be fine.

People who are in power will do almost anything to hold on to it. That includes politicians, bankers, corporate executives. We can all identify those groups, and we love to rage against them. But political power in our societies is also defined by age. In that the young have very little of it, and the older have a death grip. That can work, and has worked, as long as - economical - trend lines are positive. It no longer does, however, when these lines break.

Then you don't have one society anymore, but several, starting with older haves and younger have nots. And of course everyone's parents have more than they do, but until now there was the prospect of going out and getting as much as or more than, one's parents have (a better life for my children). That prospect is now gone. But people are slow to realize and accept that. They'd rather believe otherwise, and there are scores of politicians and media willing to keep that faith alive. After all, their own livelihoods depend on it.

Unfortunately for our children, our believing it just about literally means we throw them away with the bathwater. And that can of course only spell trouble down the road. Unless we create all those millions of jobs for them. But we're not even trying: our politicians are busy only keeping us from blowing our gaskets over budget cuts and tax raises; they don't care about out children, because they're not the ones voting them in power. This is not a road to nowhere, it's a road to surefire mayhem. There will inevitable come a point where the younger generation we now leave out to dry gains the voting power and asks: What have you done for me lately? And then, what will be the answer?

But the reality is that in Europe too, "Companies won't even look at resumes of the long-term unemployed". And there are millions of long-term unemployed. Who will never have a real job. Which means that you will arrive at a point where this is no longer a problem solvable within current paradigms. So maybe we need to change those.

Our definition of work has slowly slid from doing something that is useful to yourself, your family and the society you live in, to doing something, a job, that will allow you to buy as big a car and home as possible, and consume as many products as you can whether you need them or not, in order to keep the economy growing. This change in definition has gone largely unnoticed until now, but in light of the levels of - youth - unemployment we see in ever more places, maybe we should take another look at what it means.

Maybe countries like Italy and Greece and Portugal would do better at this point in time to get out of the rat race posing as a force for the good that is the EU. Maybe they have to get back to basics, to making sure they can independently feed themselves, build shelter, and get clean water to everyone.

Maybe competing with Germany and Holland for a scarce musical chair is not the way to go; looking at those unemployment numbers, one might easily come to entertain that idea. And feeding and clothing oneself is not exactly a bad thing to begin with. Our ancestors did, that's why we're here. Maybe it's the best chance they have to engage their young people: in (re)building their societies. And even if things in the global economy do improve somewhere down the line, what exactly would they risk losing?

Better be quick though: the EU has one of its numerous edicts coming out soon that bans people who grow their own food in their gardens, in small plots and allotments, from using their own seeds. They must instead by law buy their seeds from vendors "ordained" by Brussels (yeah, there's Monsanto again...).

Any one of these countries can tell Brussels to go take a hike, and they'll pay back the debt over 50 years in a currency of their own choosing. But they're not doing it. Not so far. Coincidentally, in the graph above, if you look at Iceland, you'll notice they're doing about the best of the lot, with fast falling jobless numbers. Iceland didn't have to leave a monetary union, granted, but still.

They can either cling to our faith in a recovery that's been promised for years while everything has only gotten progressively worse, or they can do something about it. And that will soon be true for all of us. We're just still living in a theater of illusion grace to the fact that we have collectively decided to keep our debts hidden under the carpet, which today no longer works in southern Europe, and tomorrow will grind Germany, Japan and the US to a halt.

If we go there in blind faith, the future - however brutal it may be - still belongs to the young, and guess who will become the untouchables?