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Technology Review has a short article on what has been learned since the meltdowns last year – What We Learned About Nuclear Safety From Fukushima:
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.
Interesting factoid: ProFlowers.com, currently “suspending” its advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show over the manufactured Sandra Fluke/contraception “controversy, was founded by Congressman Jared Polis (D-Boulder).
The first in a series, it would appear – The Vetting, Part I: Barack’s Love Song To Alinsky:
From today through Election Day, November 6, 2012, we will vet this president–and his rivals.
We begin with a column Andrew wrote last week in preparation for today’s Big relaunch–a story that should swing the first hammer against the glass wall the mainstream media has built around Barack Obama.
Interesting. It’s starting to become clear what the talk about Andrew Breitbart’s big March 1 announcement and the Obama videos he mentioned at CPAC were about. Check your popcorn supplies – it might soon be time to start popping.
It’s apparently on the mind of the Governor and some legislators here in Colorado:
When I first heard mention of this last week, I scoffed because it struck me as just another bandwagon-jumping scheme akin to “green energy”. But as the video points out, there are good reasons to consider a spaceport in Colorado beyond the “us too” factor. The most important being the fact that there are a lot of commercial aerospace companies in Colorado, including Dreamchaser-builder Sierra Nevada, who might profit from providing and/or using services at the spaceport, and the airport’s proximity to a major hub airport, which can feed passengers and high-value cargo into potential future point-to-point suborbital transportation services.
I’m against “public-private partnerships” and subsidies and the like on principle, but it’s an idea worth looking into – perhaps there is a way that a spaceport could be created at Front Range without requiring such things. Unfortunately, I doubt our current legislature will do it, and if they do, I fear the bloated, corrupt, ineffectual result that would come of any such effort.
…was actually last Thursday, but I’ve been so swamped for the past week I haven’t had time to celebrate.
The first post in the MarsBlog archives originated on Blogger, and had to do with the discovery of evidence of flood volcanism on Mars involving a volume of water the size of Lake Erie. In reality, I was proto-blogging via hand-coded entries on the Louisiana Mars Society webpage for about six months before this — this particular entry only documents the switch to a true blog platform, but it’s the only anniversary date I can claim. MarsBlog (as LAMSAccess) existed on Blogger for about two months, until a hiccup at the Blogger site caused blogs to be randomly cross-published on different URLs for some reason, after which I very quickly moved it to Moveable Type, and then to WordPress about four years ago.
It’s really hard to believe that I’ve been doing this as long as I have. I had come across blogs as early as 1999, if I recall correctly, but really didn’t “get” them until I discovered Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, USS Clueless, and Transterrestrial Musings on or in the days after 9/11.
Now the funny part…
I’ve been helping teach classes in blogging and social media for People’s Press Collective for three years now, but only today actually applied some of those lessons myself. Until about two hours ago, I hadn’t logged into Twitter (as myself rather than PPC) for over two years, but I decided it was time to take my own advice and use Twitter as a news ticker for space-related items so as to break my long blogging dry spell. Not that I can guarantee that will increase my posting frequency, but it sure as heck can’t hurt.
It’s also a bit past the tenth anniversary of the genesis of what became In the Shadow of Ares. Carl and I came up with the idea to write some form of Mars-related young-adult fiction at the Mars Society conference at Stanford University about two weeks before 9/11, and then worked out the core of the book’s plot in late January, 2002. Interestingly, the prologue involving a spacecraft suffering (fatal, as it turned out) atmospheric entry problems was written in largely its final form on February 18, 2002 — just short of a year before the Columbia accident. Hopefully it won’t take quite as long to write the sequel, whose prologue and first act are now in detailed outline form, ready for writing.
This might have something to do with it: Starting an Online Store is No Easy Business
It took 10 months, a fat bundle of paperwork, countless certificates, long hours of haggling with bureaucrats and overcoming myriad other inconceivable obstacles for one group of young entrepreneurs to open an online store…
Antonopoulos and his partners spent hours collecting papers from tax offices, the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the municipal service where the company is based, the health inspector’s office, the fire department and banks. At the health department, they were told that all the shareholders of the company would have to provide chest X-rays, and, in the most surreal demand of all, stool samples.
Which both fails to surprise me from what I’ve read of the processes for starting new businesses in Europe generally, and does surprise me given my impression during my visit there in 1995 that everyone seemed to be running one or more small businesses.
But this is both surprising and funny:
Antonopoulos describes the massive difference between the treatment he and his partners received from the Greek authorities and the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA), whose approval Oliveshop.com needed in order to export its products to the USA.
“I contacted the FDA and they sent us an e-mail with directions immediately. I filled in an online form and was done in five minutes. We received the approval 24 hours after making our application.”
Of all bureaucracies, our FDA is shown to be a model of efficiency. Who woulda thought it?
And this part fits my own experiences with setting up an online business (People’s Press Collective). It took me all of an hour to fill out the state and federal LLC forms online, and part of that was waiting for the federal tax ID to be emailed to me automatically. No begging for permission. No X-rays or stool samples (?!). No funny business. Once we had the tax ID, we could open a business bank account as easily as a personal one.
Speaking of banks…Bruce seems to think that “international bankers” (and you know who they are…) are at the root of Greece’s problems, rather than a bloated, overly-bureaucratic state apparatus which promised everything to everyone believing the bill would never come due as it now has. I guess you have to have someone to blame when a state reflecting a lot of your own utopian ideals (minimal work hours, cradle-to-grave social welfare schemes, etc.) goes belly-up.
Well, maybe not all that soon – they’re predicting 10-20 years, which would fit nicely with our timeline for In the Shadow of Ares: Scientists Prepare Test-Tube Burger
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.
Nice combination of time-lapse star photography and…an original soundtrack by Bear McCrary: If Battlestar Galactica Was A Nature Film It Would Look Like This
Temporal Distortion from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.
[hat tip: Gina]
Over at PJM Kathy Shaidle lays out Five Reasons Star Wars Actually Sucks.
Having seen large portions of several of the old and new movies over the Thanksgiving holiday, I can add one more to the list: Obi-Wan Kenobi is a despicable “hero”.
Prior to the release of the prequels, I always had this impression of the character as being a wise and noble mentor to the young Luke Skywalker, a father figure whose efforts to help the latter learn his true nature and value are cut tragically short. In November I watched Episode 3 and most of Episode 4 back-to-back, and found Kenobi now comes across as dishonest and incompetent hack (or worse):
- His incompetence and inattentiveness regarding the young Anakin’s training and his failure to recognize the blatant, flashing-neon warning signs of the latter’s willfulness and disobedience led to Anakin’s temptation to disallowed romance and his corruption to the Dark Side. He was too young, inexperienced, and headstrong himself to take on such an important and demanding task, but he did it anyway, even begged for it.
- He walked away and left the maimed and burned Anakin to die, without properly finishing the job of killing him – finishing Anakin off was his responsibility, since his failures had led to Anakin becoming what he had become and because he was the one who had cut him to pieces. It was his duty to make sure the threat was eliminated, and having gotten to the point he did, and being a supposedly noble Jedi, it was his duty to exercise the virtue of mercy by finishing Anakin off instead of leaving him to suffer in agony for minutes or hours longer. This is where the “or worse” comes in – his incompetence let Anakin survive long enough to be rescued, but his leaving Anakin in agony revealed a cruel indifference to the latter’s suffering if not a vindictive satisfaction with it.
- When he first meets Luke in Episode 4, he lies to him regarding the fate of Luke’s father. In hindsight, this is as much a self-serving lie to cover up his own involvement in Anakin’s fate as it is the white lie for the not-quite-ready-to-know-the-truth Luke that it always used to seem.
- If we accept that his duty while in exile (as established at the end of Episode 3) was to conceal and protect Luke, how do we reconcile that task with the fact that Kenobi lived in a remote dwelling far away from the Lars farmstead, too far to keep watch on Luke, and that he had apparently never had contact with Luke for the first eighteen years of his life? Why was the Jedi master not training the boy from childhood to use the Force to protect and conceal himself incase he himself were to be discovered or to die? Again, incompetence…had Luke been better prepared, he would have been more effective in confronting the challenges that faced him.
- When entering the cantina, Kenobi would have been smarter to have used his “Jedi mind tricks” to persuade Luke’s two harassers to leave him alone rather than to lop off one of their arms and thereby draw unwanted attention to himself and his companions. Incompetence, and another instance of indifference to the suffering of others (specifically, others he has maimed with a light saber).
- Finally (though there are no doubt more instances to be found), Kenobi lies to Vader when he boasts that he will “become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”. It was all braggadocio – he never followed through on that threat.
It was all very disappointing to notice these elements in a character I used to like. But, it just goes with the territory when you’re talking about the Star Wars franchise.
UPDATE: Brian Preston responds, on behalf of science fiction fans. I should add for my part that I don’t agree with Shaidle’s attacks on science fiction as a genre, just with some of her criticism of the Star Wars movies. Some were good, and fun, but not great, and when you look at them with a critical eye towards character development and such, they really suffer.
Not only did I not know until just now that he passed away a year and a half ago, I also didn’t know he went a little wacky in his later years.
What a pity. I was pretty fond of his earlier stuff – the Giants series was one of my favorites as a kid (I don’t believe in it, but I’m still a sucker for a good Velikovskian yarn), and Voyage From Yesteryear was one of my first real introductions to libertarian ideas, since I didn’t read any Heinlein until I was eighteen. And just this morning I was randomly thinking about the premise of The Genesis Machine.
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