Japan’s effort to contain the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant suffered a setback, an official said on Friday, citing evidence that the reactor vessel of the No. 3 unit may have been damaged.
The development, described at a news conference by Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, raises the possibility that radiation from the mox fuel in the reactor — a combination of uranium and plutonium — could be released.One sign that a breach may have occurred in the reactor vessel, Mr. Nishiyama said, took place on Thursday when three workers who were trying to connect an electrical cable to a pump in a turbine building next to the reactor were injured when they stepped into water that was found to be significantly more radioactive than normal in a reactor. The No. 3 unit, the only one of the six reactors at the site that uses the mox fuel, was damaged by a hydrogen explosion on March 14. Workers have been seeking to keep it cool by spraying it with seawater along with a more recent effort to restart the reactor’s cooling system.
In another development on Friday, the Japanese government said it would help people who wish to leave the area around the crippled plant, a sign that efforts to reassure frightened residents have failed to persuade people to stay.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Uh-oh
Can't see it happening
Given the currently unsolved problem of radiation in space, and the complete lack of any planning for a spacecraft big enough to accommodate a crew for the (what, one to two year?) return trip without them going stir crazy, I just can't see that a trip to an asteroid makes a sensible next step in space. At least if you go to the moon or Mars, you can get to stretch your legs in gravity at the half way point.
Makes bed even better
You have to lift your hands to touch the screen, though. Can't they do something about that?
The vege burger
I don't mind trying vegetarian products from the supermarket every now and then. It's sort of interesting to see how good they can make their fake meat products. My wife has started doing a curry with fake chicken from Malaysia or somewhere: it's not bad, and I had the fun the other night of telling my son he had been fooled into thinking it was meat.
I think I have even mentioned in this blog before that, when I was single, I used to sometimes make chilli con carne using chunk style textured vegetable protein. But the after effects were such that married life meant I had to give that up.
This story will horrify at least one reader, hey Jason.
Help me Obi Wan, they took my carrot
Back to the Future correct
Viewing them reminds me that, when watching Back to the Future Part 3, I had thought that the 1885 version of Hill Valley looked a little too old time Western. But this is obviously not the case, when you see photos of the real era.
Fukushima notes
With the news last night that a couple of workers from the reactor are in hospital with radiation burns, it’s clear that the current operations remain very dangerous. Even modest advances are being greeted as big progress: for example, yesterday’s news that lights have been turned on in a couple of control rooms.
Time magazine has an interesting entry about the ongoing issues at the plant. As the New York Times noted, one concern is the use of seawater as a temporary coolant:
As seawater evaporates, salt scaling could insulate the reactor fuel and impede heat transfer and thus cooling. In a worst case, as the rods heat up, their zirconium cladding could rupture, and gaseous radioactive iodine inside could leak out; the uranium core itself could even melt. This, of course, would release event more radioactive material.
The BBC has a sort of retrospective of the last couple of weeks which is well worth reading too.
Meanwhile, I have stumbled across another example (apart from Andrew Bolt) of a climate change skeptic who has been in an unseemly rush to declare that there has barely been a major problem at all.
The Register, as I recall, has long been keen to run anti climate change articles. If you have a look at the list of article titles by one Lewis Page, who himself appears to be quite the CO2 skeptic, it makes for mildly comic reading:
14 March: Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!
First lines:
Japan's nuclear powerplants have performed magnificently in the face of a disaster hugely greater than they were designed to withstand, remaining entirely safe throughout and sustaining only minor damage. The unfolding Fukushima story has enormously strengthened the case for advanced nations – including Japan – to build more nuclear powerplants, in the knowledge that no imaginable disaster can result in serious problems.
15 March: Fukushima update: No chance cooling fuel can breach vessels
16 March: Situation worsens - still no cause for alarm
17 March: Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good
18 March: Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA
21 March: Fukushima: Situation improving all the time. Food, water samples OK, Hyper Rescue Super Pump in action
22 March: Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear. Hysteria rages unchecked as minor incident winds down
23 March: Radioactive Tokyo tapwater HARMS BABIES ... if drunk for a year. Iodine isotope will all be gone in weeks, though
The glass is always more than half full for Mr Page.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
A new political truism revealed
Sad for them, but true.
Consume a nut, anytime of day
Need I say more?
[By the way, this and the last post represent the return of my use of the Blog This doo-dah from Google. I thought it didn't work on current versions of Firefox, but seemingly it does. It is, by far, the easiest way to open a blogging post window. Just click the button while you are looking at a page, and it opens a blog post window with the title of the article as a link at the top. I have found no other blogging add on that does the same, wonderfully simple, thing.
I thought it was a Firefox add on which had gone missing, but I see now that it is a Google tool for use with Blogger. It's very good, anyway.]
Really worth it?
It's one thing to have transplanted internal organ, where you're not necessarily reminded daily that part of someone else is now part of you. But it seems to me to be quite another to have a hand transplant. There's quite a lot to any transplant:
Personally, even with no hands, I think I would be much more interested in having the latest and greatest robotic version than a transplant: I have a preference for Luke Skywalker over Dr Strangelove.There is also a danger Mr Walsh's body could reject the new hand, with the first few months the most dangerous period.
He will require medication for the life of the transplant to slow his immune system and ensure it doesn't attack the transplant.
St Vincent's doctor, Robyn Langham, said that leaves his body less equipped to deal with rogue cells that might appear in the body.
"Those rogue cells do have the potential to turn into cancers," she said.
She said Mr Walsh may also be at greater risk of contracting metabolic conditions such as diabetes and osteoporosis.
To be fair...
While I find Garnaut a very credible figure, and consider in principle (as did the Coalition until Tony Abbott took over) that carbon pricing is an important step to reducing Australia's greenhouse gases, it still has to be said that the full structure of the scheme that the government settles on might prove to be very ineffective and not really worthy of support for a number of reasons.
The problem is, while the Coalition is on its "direct action is really a market scheme (and by the way, half of us believe there is no problem to be addressed at all)" wander in the wilderness, they are cutting themselves out of making credible contribution to getting the carbon pricing scheme right.
This is the tragedy of the current situation.
That went well
The blog then had at least one post notifying people of yesterday's larger scale organised protests.
After yesterday's protest in Canberra, quite of few of your rabidly climate change skeptic and vehemently anti-Gillard commenters (basically, apart from a handful, they don't come in any other variety there) decided that the "look" of the protest was not so good for Tony Abbott. (Who, as I have mentioned before, is now receiving criticism from Catallaxy commenters for not doing a good job. Yet the advice he has been offered by some there is to stop trying to straddle the fence and come out more vehemently against climate change as deserving any response.)
Tony Abbott has now said he "regretted" some of the posters yesterday.
It is odd that Catallaxy commenters think that the posters yesterday were bad PR for the right of politics. One might assume then that they must also understand then the bad language and wild hyperbole of their threads is a very bad advertisement for the "centre right".
As I noted yesterday, Julia Bishop complained some in Labor calling Coalition members "climate change deniers" by quoting scientists who don't think there is a problem with climate change.
As I have said ever since Abbott took over the leadership from Turnbull, climate change "scepticism" in the Coalition - which is apparently evenly split on the topic in Parliament - is a poison to its intellectual standing.
And Catallaxy is a joke.
Attention Jason: as should be clear from the low numbers of readers I've had for years, I've always blogged for my own satisfaction, and if others read it, that's fine. You can link to it at Catallaxy if you want, but it does not matter to me whether you do or not.
Update: this counts as a "meltdown"? At fairly regular intervals, I used to tell off many of the regulars at Catallaxy, in much more vehement terms than this, as a result of the absurdly personal (and wildly inaccurate) criticisms hurled towards me for my views on (virtually) any topic. So I am criticising it from here now. Big deal.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
So that's what not doubting the science looks like...
So much for Tony Abbot's party room strategy, which he broke first himself, of not questioning the science but just attacking the tax.
All very droll, if you ask me.
UPDATE: I've often wondered about the use of "denier" myself. There is no doubt at all that a significant fraction of those on the climate change sceptic side do not believe in it on purely ideological grounds, because they rehash continually arguments which even cursory thought (or cursory Googling) should have otherwise lead them to abandon long ago. (The argument from incredulity is perhaps the best example: "that tiny fraction of the atmosphere can cause that much trouble?! Bah, I don't believe it".) It seems to me that something stronger than "skeptic" is needed for that group.
On the other hand, I reckon that there has been a trajectory over the last few years, evident from blogs like Watts Up With That and others, for the main bulk of climate change scepticism to move from arguing that the temperature record does not really show modern warming (probably because their pet projects in that regard have failed) to the position of grudging acknowledgement that the world is warming, but not at a rate large enough to be a worry.
These people (the "lukewarmenists") don't deny climate change, and may agree that CO2 has probably caused it, although they may still deny that projections of future temperature increases (or sea level rise) can be given any credence as the basis of policy.
That's the problem with "denier". Different people "deny" different things. I don't think it really does invoke the Holocaust denying stigma to any greatly offensive degree. For one thing, it's been a long time since Holocaust denial was really a big cultural issue - David Irving must be getting on in age. I doubt younger folk automatically think of the connection when they hear "denier". But it's probably too blanket a word to cover the slippery world of the "inactionists."
(Has anyone used that before? Google seems to suggest not. It's pretty good.)
Make lots of cash from home
On March 15, Paul reintroduced one of his pet bills, H.R. 1098: Free Competition in Currency Act of 2011." The bill, which has no cosponsors, is divided into three parts: the elimination of laws specifying what constitutes "legal tender"; the lifting of a federal ban on private mints; and the elimination of sales and capital gains taxes on gold and silver coin sales. Paul's vision is of a future in which anyone can mint their own currency, with the hope that "the prospect of American citizens turning away from the dollar towards alternate currencies will provide the necessary impetus to the U.S. government to regain control of the dollar and halt its downward spiral."
A human face on evacuation
Update: Nature has a story up too about the highly uncertain science of low level exposure to radioactive contaminants. I think this is one of the most balanced stories on it that I have seen.
Another type of cautionary tale
People who exercise regularly have a much smaller risk of having a heart attack immediately after sexual or physical activity, said lead author Dr. Issa Dahabreh of Tufts Medical Center in Boston....The studies involved only people who'd had heart attacks or had died suddenly from a heart problem. The studies looked at what the people were doing during the hour or two before their heart attacks and compared that to the same people's activity on normal days with no major heart problems.
That study design is used to try to answer the question, "Why did the heart attack occur now?"
Physical activity and sex increased the risk of heart attack by a factor of about three, according to the analysis of the pooled results. Exercise increased the risk of sudden cardiac death by nearly five times. The researchers didn't find a triggering relationship between sex and sudden cardiac death, that is, a sudden death from a heart problem.
So, it still sounds like exercise was the bigger danger than sex. That's the lesson I choose to take from it anyway!
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Cautionary tales of instant expertise
"there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors"As it turned out, Oehman had not worked in the field of nuclear science at all, and New Scientist has an interesting report explaining how Oehman came to write the article, and how it was picked up as having more authority behind it than it deserved.
It was all sort of a mistake, not written for wide publication at all. Oh well. Everyone can be an instant expert on the internet, even by accident it seems.
A second cautionary tale tonight regarding Andrew Bolt. He quotes a story from his own paper today which claims an ANU study shows a temperature rise of .5 degree over 160 years. The IPCC figure was .76 degree C over the same period. What gives? say Andrew.
Answer: the accuracy of journalists, Andrew.
The full quote from the body of the report on the study is (with my emphasis):
"There is sufficient evidence in the long run of temperature records to support the existence of a warming trend," Prof Breusch said today. "From the 1850s to today it's somewhere over half a degree (celsius) a century.That is, no inconsistency exists. Several people in comments have already pointed this out to Andrew, who has found time to make a couple of other posts but not to come back and acknowledge the error.
Poor Andrew. He's really become quite upset ever since Julia Gillard belled the cat (about time, I say) with this last week:
''I ask, who would I rather have on my side?'' she said. ''Alan Jones, Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt?Exactly. Andrew's agitated response ever since that speech keeps reminding me of Jones' famous words from Dad's Army "they don't like it up 'em".''Or the CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science, the Bureau of Meteorology, NASA, the US National Atmospheric Administration, and every reputable climate scientist in the world?''
UPDATE: Andrew Bolt has corrected his post, but in a rather unusual way:
Readers point out that the report of the ANU survey is wrong. The survey found that rise to be about .5 degrees per century, thus about the same as the IPCC. Except, of course, that the IPCC has all that 0.7 degrees of warming since 1850 occuring in just the past century…Wouldn't that be all the more consistent with AGW then? Or does he mean the IPCC is inconsistent with the ANU survey in a corrupt way? What's the point of his point?
Send in the robots
The always interesting William Saletan at Slate comes to the rescue. It turns out that different countries have been looking at such developing such robots, but the country which has actually got a bunch of them ready for nuclear disasters is (to my surprise) France:
Two years after Chernobyl, French nuclear operators created Group Intra, a consortium charged with maintaining a fleet of robots for use in major nuclear accidents. The group is on call around the clock and pledges to deliver equipment and operators anywhere in France within 24 hours. Its robots have hydraulic manipulator arms and can go 10 hours without external power. Some can be remotely controlled from a distance of 10 kilometers.You can see some photos of the indoor French robots here (very Wall-E I reckon). The outdoor ones remind a little of equipment from Thunderbirds.
So they do cheese, wine and disaster robots very well. What more do you need?
Answer: no
(The sentence following that rhetorical question is: "The floors are crawling with barely-clothed women pitching products. People shrug and say that's what happens at trade shows, but why does that have to be the case at our shows?")
HP covers all the big issues.