Avoidable deadly flaws






Incandescent light bulbs are forcefully being replaced by LED lamps and fluorescent lamps. Those new lamps have severe drawbacks:

This leads to health problems and an overall decrease of the quality of life. But... those shortcomings are easy to deal with:

The harm is important but the solutions are simple and cheap. They just need to be enforced, so that it would no more be interesting for the manufacturers to spare a few cents on each lamp. How is this possible in democracies? Why are people not even being informed of the problems, so that they could prefer the products of decent manufacturers?

Something comparable occurs with nuclear power plants. A friend made me understand that no nuclear plant can survive a passive shutdown. What this means is that pumps, and a strong source of energy for these pumps to work, must always be present to cool down the nuclear core, even if all control rods have been lowered to neutralize the neutron activity. Otherwise, if the heat is not forcefully evacuated, the core will melt and may explode. This is what happened in Fukushima. But... nuclear reactor designs that won't melt and least explode if the plug is pulled, do exist...

One thing common to nuclear power plants and power-saving lamps is that they make use of raw materials that are mined in poor countries. The mining causes heavy environmental damages and poisons entire populations. Again, clean mining techniques do exist. But they will not be implemented, to spare a few money, which contributes to bribe the local politicians, or have them killed if they don't comply.

Even restricted domains of high technology are not spared. The Space Shuttle had major flaws, which made unavoidable that astronauts be killed. Two shuttles were ultimately lost but the public doesn't know that a few more flights had failures that were on the brink to lead to a fatal accident. My point is not that the shuttles should have been flawless. This is not possible in the current state of science and technology. Space rockets are a technology of the extreme and accidents are unavoidable. The point is that the Shuttle has not been designed in a way that the astronauts would have a chance to survive the failures. The enhancements after the Challenger tragedy were just a patch. The Russians too had major failures occurring during the launches and re-entry of Soyuz spaceships. But the astronauts survived... because the failure modes had been anticipated and the vessel was conceived in such a way that the astronauts had a high chance to survive.

Why do important things that surrounds us need to have a useless major flaw? This is not just like programmed obsolescence, which makes a device cease to work, or appear undesirable, after a short time. These are direct attacks on our health, security and that of our children.

I already mentioned that one reason is to spare a little money. This does makes a difference in which factory will prevail in the ruthless battle for supremacy.

A friend described to me how hardware items are being chosen in the administration he worked in. To put it humoristically, vendors just need to switch the thing of in front of a few persons and say "voilà !" The vendor who made the most graceful bow will get the contract. If there are concerns for health or security, the vendor will manage to find a neatly-dressed expert that will explain with a grave paternalistic voice, affectionately mocking his contradictors, that there is no concern at all. In Belgium, all schools were once equipped with a quite expensive kind of computer, that was quite inadequate for educational purposes, just because the Minister of Education told someone to choose something. And that someone thought that those computers had a nice look. Many things are chosen or authorized by governments on the simple impression of pleasantness or enchantment.

Another problem is that in order to harvest the gigantic fortunes that are at stakes, the best position is not to produce and sell the items but to hold the patents. If you have something that works, you have to ensure that the least possible enhancements will be made to it. Because, the more new ideas will be used to better the item, hence the more new patents, the less the thing belongs to you and the less billions you get. The people who hold the patents that allow for the first applications of a new technology, will earn fortunes, but they will have to spend a great part of it in propaganda and attacks to prevent newcomers to insert themselves.

In the case of the Space Shuttle, nationalism was a strong contributor to the accidents. Challenger was launched despite the freezing cold in Florida, even though the specifications of the boosters by the manufacturer clearly stated that they must not be used at such low temperature, because Challenger had to be in orbit for the address that was to be made by Ronald Reagan. More deeply, there was a superstition that American hardware cannot fail. In the mind of the white collars who forced the engineers and the astronauts to launch, the true American fluid would hold the Shuttle together whatever happened. To think the opposite was treason. They had no hint to the fact that if something like the American fluid exist, that would be the competence and dedication of the engineers and the astronaut. Ultimately they relied on the willingness of the astronauts to sacrifice their lives.

Whether they are fueled by greed or magic thinking, those catastrophes would not be made possible if the general public did not let them be. I remember that when I was a kid, the French astronaut Patrick Baudry explained that the Space Shuttle is ill conceived. But no-one listened. The stupid flaws I talked about in this text, and many more, have always been denounced. That whistleblowing is now openly available on the Internet. But nobody reacts. Journalists in respectable media wouldn't dare to report undesirable facts that would seem unbelievable. People either have not been educated in order to understand the challenges, or feel helpless, because none has been trained to unite and fight the oppressor. The education to democracy damps down to just knowing that democracy is good and dictature is bad, like in a dictatorship you just have to know that the dictator is good and the other dictator in the nearby country is bad. "Democracy" became a kind of stable dictatorship.

"It is possible to make the thing correctly. Millions have been spend and top experts have been recruited, so for sure the thing has been made correctly..."


I found a fluorescent lamp that emits a lower electromagntic pollution. It is sold by HEMA ; the 350 lumen "flame" model. I believe it is derived from the new "soft tone" lamps made by Philips. Yet it produces a spectrum with narrow color bands, with a quite ugly result.


Fairewinds Identifies Safety Problems in all Reactors Designed Like Fukushima:

http://vimeo.com/29294797



Eric Brasseur  -  September 2  till  September 23 2011