Reactors and radioactive materials at Fukushima Daiichi were destabilized by back-to-back beyond design-basis events. First was the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that felled the plant’s power lines, triggering diesel generators to maintain cooling of its reactor cores and spent fuel rods. Less than an hour later, the generators along with some of the plant’s last-resort battery power backup were gone, knocked out by a 14-meter tsunami wave that crested the plant’s seawall.

Human error and design limitations quickly compounded the impact of the loss of power. Operators mistakenly shut down battery-driven cooling on one reactor for three hours, for example. Within 24 hours of the tsunami, nuclear fuel in three reactors was melting down, and superheated fuel was generating hydrogen gas, whose ignition would blow open three reactor buildings in the days ahead, impeding response efforts and exposing elevated pools holding spent nuclear fuel.

So, that’s what we know happened. What’s surprising is that some of the obvious shortcomings of the plant’s design and operations weren’t recognized and dealt with well before the disaster.

What’s interesting and not surprising is that Fukushima is a textbook engineering failure, in that it wasn’t one flaw in design, execution, or operation that led to the meltdowns but a cascade of such failures, the absence of any one of which might have significantly limited the disaster or prevented it from happening altogether. Even with the beyond design-basis earthquake and the large tsunami following it, he plant might have remained under safe control had, for instance, the power lines not been knocked out for an extended period, or had the backup generators been out of reach of the tsunami.

The response from the US nuclear power industry has been to stage emergency equipment such as generators at strategically-located depots in anticipation of unanticipatable events. New nuclear power stations (yes, there are actually new ones under construction in the US) will use advanced passive safety features to safely shut down reactors in the event of an emergency and buy time for outside emergency response. Naturally such measures aren’t good enough for the Union of Concerned Scientists Anti-Anything-Nuclear Activists, cited later in the article, for whom no degree of risk can ever be small enough.

Starting with bovine stem cells, the Dutch researchers have grown muscle fibres up to 3cm long and 0.5mm thick. The fibres are tethered and exercised as they grow, like real muscles, by bending and stretching in the culture dishes. They feed on a broth of vegetable proteins and other nutrients, equivalent to the grass or grain diet of cattle.

 

At present the fibres are a pallid yellowish-pink colour, rather than the red of raw ground beef, because they do not contain blood, but Prof Post plans to improve their appearance.

Hopefully not by adding a bunch of dye to it.

The comments on the linked article are disappointingly luddite (and predictably smug  and preachy in the case of the vegetarians/vegans), but they did prompt me to wonder just how “natural” such synthetic meats might end up being. It’s a fair point that if you’re eating all the hormones and such required to grow the meat in vitro, it’s probably going to be less healthy for you than the real thing.

“The fact that this treatment can be administered up to a day after radiation exposure is so important,” said Millie Donlon, DARPA’s program manager for this effort. “This is because most of the existing treatments we have require they be administered within hours of exposure to potentially lethal radiation – something that might not always be possible in the confusion that would likely follow such an exposure event.”

The treatment – a combination of two readily-available and stockpileable pharmaceuticals – increases in mice the survival rate from a normally lethal dose to 80%, and there are indications it could be even more effective in humans. Note that it appears to treat only the immediate effects (“radiation sickness”) and there’s no mention of whether it reduces rates of long-term medical problems stemming from the exposure, such as cancers. Of course, one mustn’t be too greedy — I’m sure someone exposed to a lethal dose of radiation would consider the potential for cancer later in life an okay tradeoff to not dying a rapid and horrible death.

What might come of this discovery, if it does work as indicated?

• Long-term space activities outside LEO (including transportation to and from deep space destinations) might be perceived as less risky if solar flares or other high-exposure events are less of a problem;
• Spacecraft, stations, and surface facilities could be made simpler and lighter – if it’s accurate to consider this treatment as effectively raising the lethal dose (and again ignoring the long-term consequences in favor of short-term survival), structural countermeasures for extreme events don’t need to block quite as much radiation, and lighter or larger “storm cellars” become possible;
• Nuclear power accidents become less hysteria-inducing (but then so might nuclear weapons use – c.f. Michael F. Flynn’s The Washer at the Ford)

Interesting.

Apparently, Resveratrol also has some anti-rad properties.

Lockheed Martin [NYSE:LMT] has been selected by the U.S. Air Force for a contract award to support the Reusable Booster System (RBS) Flight and Ground Experiments program. The value of the first task order is $2 million, with a contract ordering value of up to $250 million over the five-year indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract period. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center are developing the RBS as the next generation launch vehicle that will significantly improve the affordability, operability, and responsiveness of future spacelift capabilities over current expendable launchers.

Initial RBS Flight and Ground Experiments task orders will provide for an RBS flight demonstration vehicle called RBS Pathfinder scheduled to launch in 2015. The RBS Pathfinder is an innovative reusable, winged, rocket-powered flight test vehicle that will demonstrate the Reusable Booster Systems’ “rocketback” maneuver capabilities and validate the system requirements that will drive refinements in the design of the operational RBS.

I have no knowledge of this program, but whether it’s a first stage or even just a strap-on akin to what was proposed numerous times to replace the Shuttle’s SRBs, it’s one promising step towards increased reusability, and thus affordable access to space.

Hmm…sorta makes one wonder why USAF is doing this and not NASA…

ADDED: the concept picture here suggests that it isn’t a first stage. Which makes sense: start with a small vehicle as a replacement for (say) EELV strap-ons, work out the kinks, and then progress to larger and more complex versions.

I really need to make a trip/pilgrimage there sometime.

This got me to thinking this morning about the visuals of the event, and it dawned on me that really, back then, we had nowhere near the ubiquitous video and personal communications technologies that we take for granted now. What would our memories of 9/11 look and feel like had there been ten thousand people in and around lower Manhattan and the Pentagon that morning with 10+MP DSLRs or HD video cameras?

A far, far more interesting question in that vein: how might the day have been different had there been a dozen or more cameraphones on each of the hijacked planes, recording (and perhaps live webcasting) the actions of the hijackers as events unfolded? Given some of the weird things recovered from the four planes afterward, some of these cameras would have undoubtedly survived intact, at least intact enough for the data to have been retrieved later. (Never mind that today’s better phones would have given the passengers a more immediate awareness of what was going on and some ability to coordinate with each other and the ground - which means we might have had two more Flight 93s, given that that flight’s passengers were motivated to act by the knowledge of what had already happened to the other three planes.)

This in turn led to a few other thoughts of what is different now and what has happened since then:

• Social media, video/photo sharing sites: Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Ustream, etc. have all come into being since 2001. Imagine too how different 9/11 would have been had people in the towers been tweeting or Facebooking what was going on inside, or sending pictures and video to the web. Or how many more people might have escaped from the upper floors had there been some way to learn from survivors and communicate to those still trapped the fact that there was still one stairwell intact through the impact zone. And how much less “Truther” bullshit there would be with near-holographic imagery and narrative of the entire sequence of events.
• “Trutherism” and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theorizing: I used to be interested in conspiracy theory stuff (it was fascinating as aberrant psychology), but before 2001 I had never seen it as widespread and accepted as a tool for looking at the world. And I don’t mean merely the ‘Loose Change’ variety concerned with 9/11 itself — look at how the American left has embraced the notion that behind every event (and especially every action of the Bush Administration) there is at work a sinister conspiracy involving their ideological enemies. It’s not simply mainstream, it has become the very water in which most leftists seem to swim. And yes, this kind of paranoia has afflicted the American right to some degree (witness “Birtherism” and some of the wilder ”seekrit Obama” notions), but nowhere near the degree it has with the left, to whom every GOP policy proposal is a dastardly plan to enslave America to corporations and the super-rich, every gathering of three or more liberty-minded citizens is a Koch-funded astroturfed racist/fascist Tea-Klanner lynchmob, every mention of faith by a conservative is proof they are Taliban-like theocrats who want to oppress women and turn America into a continent-spanning evangelical megachurch, every natural disaster is instigated and deliberately exacerbated by cruel and sadistic Republicans (especially George Bush), and every Republican caught with his pants down (figuratively or literally) is part of a baroque and sinister “culture of corruption” involving Opus Dei, “The Family”, secret gay associations and S&M clubs, child sex rings, Dick Cheney, the John Birch Society, or (somehow) all of the above. 
• Getting news from the internet rather than traditional outlets: I don’t think I’d ever heard of a blog until 9/11, when I came across a link to Instapundit that day on some discussion forum or other – probably Free Republic (which hadn’t yet become unreadable). Indeed, it’s hard to remember just what I read on the internet before blogs came along. Sure, there was Drudge, and there were sites for the mainstream news outlets (CNN, Fox, the networks, major papers), but 9/11  was unquestionably the catalyst for blogs specifically and for what has come to be known nowadays as citizen journalism.
  Of course, the explosion of alternative news sites might have been less…um…explosive, had Old Media done a better job of reporting on the events the 9/11 set in motion over the following years. It wasn’t merely that new sources of information suddenly became available, it was that the information they provided (especially in the form of fact-checking and alternative analyses/opinions) shone a megawatt-class spotlight on the failings previously illuminated by the Lewinsky affair and other Clinton-era scandals and the 2000 election fiasco: the Old Media could no longer be trusted to tell the truth about anything, or to present a sober, reasonable interpretation or analysis of the facts. And the longer and more vigorously Old Media pretended that this was not the case (ignoring bloggers, deriding them as ‘writing in their pajamas’, etc.), the more their attempts to continue steering narratives and selectively reporting facts undermined their influence and public trust.
• Security theater: do I really need to rant about TSA, which wouldn’t exist and whose moronic and ineffectual antics we wouldn’t have to endure were it not for 9/11?
• Islam in public awareness: before 9/11, I doubt one American in a thousand gave Islam or the cultures under its domination any thought beyond the violent and incomprehensible goings-on in the Middle East as shown on the nightly news. Now we have in our shared vocabulary terms like jihad, jizya, taqqiya, burqa, hijab,  halal, haram, imam, fatwa, Shia, Sunni, wahhabism, and kuffar, and in our common awareness concepts such as honor killings, female genital mutilation, suicide martyrdom, dhimmitude, 72 virgins, “islamophobia”, and worldwide caliphate. Ordinary Americans know a lot more about Islam today than they ever have…but what they have learned is unflattering, to say the least.
  There is also a greater attention paid and credibility given to the claims and goals of radical Islamists and Islamic terror organizations. When these people claim they want to kill non-Muslims around the world, take down the Great Satan, establish a global caliphate, or sing the other perennial favorites from the jihadist hit parade, people take them seriously. If such are really the goals of Islamic radicals, they really screwed the pooch by tipping their hand with 9/11 — now everyone (except elected officials, the media, and the left) is on to them.
• Israel in public awareness: I’ve always been positively disposed towards Israel in some degree, even before I was politically aware. Since 9/11, though, it seems we have been discussing Israel a lot more, and Israel itself has been under a rapidly growing threat despite the concessions it has made in pursuit of a peace agreement, all while more Americans more vocally and more deeply express their support for the country. (On the flip side, a vocal minority in academia and the activist left seems increasingly willing to unfairly criticize or demonize Israel for its every action, and more generally to revive both the ’genteel’ and crude forms of antisemitism which had been consigned to the historical garbage pile following WWII — something I never thought I’d see.) While some denominations of evangelical Christians (for example) have long supported Israel for reasons rooted in their faith, after 9/11 there seems to have emerged a more general sense of Israel as a front-line ally in the same fight that was suddenly brought to our own shores.
• The corrosion of the multicultural left: I started seeing this with that ugly rant a few days after by Sunera Thobani — I knew something like that was coming, it was utterly predictable that we would be made the villains and the perpetrators would be turned into the victims or even heroes. I was merely surprised that it took 3-4 days.
  Whether they would admit it or not, those pushing bogus ”multiculturalism” and its parallel concepts are in retreat. The new awareness of other cultures brought on by 9/11, and the access to more and less-filtered information on other cultures, has undermined the “noble savage” foundations on which these philosophies are based — no, America is not an irremediably evil entity deserving of all this and more, and no, all other non-Western cultures are not uniformly peaceful and enlightened and therefore superior precisely because they are non-Western, non-capitalist, non-technological, non-industrial, or non-[fill in the boogeyman].
  The more shrill and offensive people like Thobani and Churchill became, the less credibility they had beyond their hard-core devotees, the more they turned people off to the ideas they were trying to peddle, and the more apparent it became that their gratuitously offensive ”critiques” had probably amounted all along to little more than juvenile “shock the bourgeois” gimmickry aimed at generating followers, funds, and fame. And as the left continued to criticize America and the West for its treatment of minorities and women and such while blatantly ignoring the atrocities committed routinely in and by the nations and cultures and worldview we have been fighting the past ten years, it became clear that for all their impressively incomprehensible academic language and posturing, they’re merely self-loathing hypocrites with serious envy issues towards that which they claim to most abhor.

There’s a lot more in that vein, and I may add more later, but other responsibilities are calling. Suffice to say, the past ten years would have been vastly different without 9/11, and an attack like that would have turned out very differently had it happened today rather than in 2001.

If all goes to plan, engineers will launch the Falcon HTV-2 to the edge of space, before detaching the plane and guiding it on a hypersonic flight that will reach speeds of 13,000mph (about 20 times the speed of sound) on its return to Earth.

Those who think that the long-overdue termination of the Space Shuttle and NASA/Congress’ lack of clear vision on what should replace it indicate the U.S. no longer has what it takes to innovate in aerospace ought look at this (and the X-37b) before shedding additional tears or rending further garments. DARPA and USAF certainly seem to be cutting new edges — and that’s on top of the New Space companies who are recapitulating and improving upon prior efforts with new technology of their own.

Yes, “Spacewatch” is about noticing this kind of thing. Doing something about it is someone else’s problem, alas. Maybe once the Falcon Heavy is flying . . .

Hmm… Falcon Heavy…with a LEO payload of 120,000lbs, and a core diameter of 3.66m and a fairing diameter of 5.2m.

I can think of a potentially useful payload in the 60,000lb range with a diameter of a mere 2.1m…

Alberta-based private company Aviation Capital Enterprises says it has inked a deal with US aerospace colossus Lockheed, builder of the P-791, to “design, develop, build, flight test and Federal Aviation Administration certify a family of hybrid aircraft”. The first ship, dubbed “SkyTug” and able to lift 20 tons, is to be delivered in 2012. Further versions are to scale up to “several hundred tons”, apparently.

While in other articles they reference humanitarian and disaster-relief applications, the focus appears to be on unspecified commercial applications.

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Ahh, it seems like just yesterday when this idea was just a glimmer in some Skunk Works’ engineer’s eye, and now it’s all growed up…

Back in 1998 when some of my coworkers at Michoud were loaned out to work on this, it seemed like a clever but uneconomical idea — I mean, how much use would there be for an airship that could carry a dozen cargo containers anywhere in the world and land in places with no infrastructure beyond a parking lot or football/soccer field?

Clearly, events in the intervening decade have answered that question. Imagine how useful a fleet of full-sized airships like this could have been after Katrina, the Boxing Day Tsunami, the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and other natural disasters in remote areas or areas where the usual infrastructure (roads, airports) is temporarily inoperable.

It’s worth noting that there was a competitor of sorts for Aerocraft back in the day: CargoLifter. They didn’t have the same land-anywhere features, but the various CargoLifter vehicles were intended to carry large and bulky items too difficult or disruptive to transport by land.