Future eggs

I was reading a short report on the future of fake meat that contained this:

"The use of animals as a protein delivery mechanism is not sustainable," said Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Savage River Farms, Inc., which recently introduced a chicken substitute made from plant products.

"Through the careful replication of texture, taste, and 'mouthfeel,' food science is advancing the degree to which chicken, beef, and other meats no longer require an animal origin but can instead be entirely plant-based," said Brown.

Joshua Tetrick, founder and CEO of Hampton Creek Foods, also is using plants to replicate the nutrition and other characteristics of eggs -- for baking and more -- through the company's Beyond Eggs™ product.

Tetrick said the demand for eggs continues to rise globally, while feed and regulatory costs soar.

There are a couple of things I like about that:  calling animals a "protein delivery mechanism" strikes me as amusingly cold; it's as if an Artificial Intelligence which finds the whole idea of eating to be disgusting spoke the line.  But I also like the self explanatory branding of imitation eggs as "Beyond Eggs"(TM).

So, let's go looking at Beyond Eggs. 

Well, the English language certainly continues to get a technocrat workout at its site, where the product is described as:

A healthier and safer ingredient for your egg based applications.

I had a slice of egg based application with a cup of tea after dinner tonight, as it happens.

How was Beyond Eggs created?:

Our team of food science professionals, culinary scientists, and professional chefs brought their best to the table to create something extraordinary. We meticulously dissected the egg, looking deeply at its molecular makeup and nutritional profile. Then, we matched the functionally relevant components with plant-based ingredients....It all comes down to the functional properties. Does it emulsify? Coagulate? Replicating the functional properties of eggs required deep knowledge of biology, food science, and culinary science. Our team and product development partners have achieved something extraordinary.

It sounds almost as big an achievement as going to the Moon.

And, sad to say, I can't find a photo of what the product looks like.  Yellow goo in a plastic bag, I'm guessing, but I could be wrong.

I await the arrival of Beyond Eggs in my local supermarket.  Alternatively, I just might finally get around to having a couple of chickens in the yard.  Seems a tad less complicated.

Eagleton on Rousseau

What would Rousseau make of our selfish age? 

Terry Eagleton writes here about Rousseau.   It seems a good, short summary:

Above all, Rousseau is the explorer of that dark continent, the modern self. It is no surprise that he wrote one of the most magnificent autobiographies of all time, his Confessions. Personal experience starts to take on a significance it never had for Plato or Descartes. What matters now is less objective truth than truth-to-self – a passionate conviction that one's identity is uniquely precious, and that expressing it as freely and richly as possible is a sacred duty. In this belief, Rousseau is a forerunner not only of the Romantics, but of the liberals, existentialists and spiritual individualists of modern times.

It is true that he seems to have held the view that no identity was more uniquely precious than his own. For all his cult of tenderness and affection, Rousseau was not the kind of man with whom one would share one's picnic. He was the worst kind of hypochondriac – one who really is always ill – and that most dangerous of paranoiacs – one who really is persecuted. Even so, at the heart of an 18th-century Enlightenment devoted to reason and civilisation, this maverick intellectual spoke up for sentiment and nature. He was not, to be sure, as besotted by the notion of the noble savage as some have considered. But he was certainly a scourge of the idea of civilisation, which struck him for the most part as exploitative and corrupt.

 I liked this line too:

Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom.

A promising building battery?

Explainer: storing renewable energy

This article talks about storing energy from renewable power, but as it is written by a Professor involved in a particular project, and so it ends up being mostly about them - being flow batteries.  Can't say I've heard about them before.

There's also a link to RedFlow, an company which is developing and deploying these batteries.  When I can hook one up to a bunch of solar cells on the roof so I can off grid most of the time remains unclear.  (Well, maybe not.  They do seem to have products that appear designed for use at home, but I don't really understand how much power you can get out of them, say, overnight.)

Speaking of solar power, if you really could develop systems that can get people more or less off the grid, at some psychologically important figure like, say, under $10,000, would the psychology of carbon pricing be such that people would happily pay for this, regardless of its true economic sense?   I mean, the psychological value of being able to say to people at work whinging about the latest increase in their power bill "I don't pay for my electricity at all now" must count for something.

What an odd concept

BBC News - Vertical ship marks 50 years at sea

Have a look at the video - I have never heard of this weird ship before.

Colebatch on carbon pricing

The economists got it right, that's the truth

Last year the Economic Society of Australia surveyed its members on 46 policy issues. On some, it found economists evenly divided: on the merits of the NBN, for example, or whether Australia should promote nuclear power, whether patients should pay more of their health bills, and whether the GST should be lifted so income tax and company tax can be reduced.

But on other issues economic opinion is clear cut. Top of the list is whether taxpayers' money should be spent on big infrastructure projects without an independent publicly released cost-benefit analysis first to check the project stacks up. The survey found 85 per cent of economists want cost-benefit studies to be mandatory. (Who doesn't? Politicians.)

 

Surprisingly, the second most clear-cut response was on climate change: 79 per cent of economists agreed that price-based mechanisms - a carbon tax, subsidies or an emissions trading scheme - are a better way to tackle climate change than using direct regulation.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

The brain infecting parasite returns

Women infected with Toxoplasma gondii have increased risk of attempting suicide: study

This seems particularly bad news about this widespread parasite:

 The study found that women infected with T. gondii were one and a half times more likely to attempt suicide compared to those who were not infected, and the risk seemed to rise with increasing levels of the T. gondii antibodies. Previous mental illness did not appear to significantly alter these findings. The relative risk was even higher for violent suicide attempts. In contrast to the number of women who attempted suicide using any method (517) or violent methods (78), the number of fatalities through suicides in the cohort (18, with eight in Toxoplasma-positive mothers) was still too small to be conclusively analyzed statistically.

The researchers stress that there is more work to be done on the topic, but it stills seem bad news to me.

In other toxoplasma news, I'm sure I read somewhere about work being done in Australia on it.  Yes, here we go

A CAIRNS molecular biologist is working with an international research team to develop a vaccine to prevent cats from infecting humans with a potentially fatal parasite.

James Cook University scientist Rob Walker is focusing his research on Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that is dangerous to pregnant women because it can cause miscarriage or congenital defects to the unborn child, and can also kill people whose immune systems are weakened.....

Dr Walker, based at the Queensland Tropical Health Alliance at JCU Smithfield, is collaborating with scientists at the University of Zurich and at the National Institute of Health in the US on the pioneer research project.

It is a challenging field of research because scientists cannot replicate, in the lab, the fertilisation process which happens inside the gut of a cat, Dr Walker said.

Dr Walker’s research will focus on how to prevent the cyst-like embryo from forming its protective shell, which may be key to stopping the transmission process. His goal would be to create a vaccine for cats to stop the parasite from being transmitted to humans.

Good luck.

UPDATE:  it's a top week for media discussion of this intriguing brain parasite!   In Slate, it's noted that just as toxoplasma in rats makes them actually kinda like cat pee smell, it might have a bit of a similar effect on people:

In a recent study, Czech scientists gave men and women towels scented with the urine of various animals—horses, lions, hyenas, cats, dogs—which they rated for “pleasantness.” Turns out, men who tested positive for Toxo found the smell of cat urine more pleasant than men without Toxo. For Toxo researchers like me, this was a shock but not entirely surprising. Why? Toxo does approximately the same thing to rats.

 Hmm.  I seem to have missed that til now.  The Slate article is generally about perfumes and their use of animal scents, and it's all of interest.

It's all in the lifestyle

Naked mole rat may hold the secret to long life

I didn't know this, or if I have read it before, I'd forgotten:

Compared to the average three year life span of a common rat, the 10 to 30 year life of the naked mole rat, a subterranean rodent native to East Africa, is impressive. And compared to the human body, the body of this rodent shows little decline due to aging, maintaining high activity, bone health, reproductive capacity, and cognitive ability throughout its lifetime. Now a collaborative of researchers in Israel and the United States is working to uncover the secret to the small mammal's long — and active — lifespan.

If the secret turns out to be be "live naked and be a rat", I expect many men would find that acceptable.  The living underground in the dark might be the killer, though. 

"Say anything" Tony

Tony Abbott was on Radio National Breakfast this morning, and I was interested to hear him say that "the whole point" of carbon pricing was to hurt the coal, oil and smelting industries and this was clearly a bad thing.  Fran Kelly responded to the effect:  well, your own policy is to match the same CO2 reduction targets, and that's going to also be achieved by closing down dirty power and going with more clean energy, what's the difference?

Abbott's response I could paraphrase as "well, it just is."

I suppose he could have argued that his program has a greater emphasis on carbon sequestration, with their (largely unproven to be useful on a large enough scale) "bio char" idea, but he's not sharp enough to think to say that.

He also again promised to (if I recall correctly) keep pension increases intended to compensate for additional costs from the carbon tax even though he removes the tax.   This will be funded by other budget cutting.

He's the man who can achieve everything, it seems.

To even up the ledger, I have to say that Gillard appeared over-rehearsed and lecturing in her answers on Insiders yesterday.  All politicians do this a lot of the time, but it seems to hurt Gillard disproportionately.

As I have noted several times before, this is a weird period in Australian politics.  The people who most want to punish Gillard and Labor also don't want Abbott to live up to his promises and hope that he is insincere in his professed belief that something should be done re greenhouse gases.  They are currently prepared to forgive his inconsistencies and policies that seem to come out of no where (like his overly generous parental leave plan.) 

The carbon pricing is going to hurt Labor for quite a while yet, but there is simply nothing to be done about that.  Media reporting always has "tax" in the title, and it's new.  This just guarantees introductory unpopularity.   (It was a mistake for Gillard to give in so easily and just say "you can call it a tax if you want.")

A neat bit of Googling

Red Crucifix sighting in 774 may have been supernova

Short version:  a guy in California reads the recent story about a spike in carbon 14 in trees around 775AD, but no one knows of a supernova report around the time.  He Googles a bit and finds a possible candidate.

It's not quite up there with my putting two and two together about 18th century resuscitation methods, but it's close.   :)

The air in there

This Nature News story starts off interestingly enough:

Rabbits with blocked windpipes have been kept alive for up to 15 minutes without a single breath, after researchers injected oxygen-filled microparticles into the animals' blood.

Oxygenating the blood by bypassing the lungs in this way could save the lives of people with impaired breathing or obstructed airways, says John Kheir, a cardiologist at the Children’s Hospital Boston in Massachusetts, who led the team. 

and then takes a stranger turn when discussing other methods of oxygenating blood which have been tried in the past:

In the late nineteenth century, for example, US doctor John Harvey Kellogg experimented with oxygen enemas — an idea that has been revived in recent decades in the form of bowel infusers², says Mervyn Singer, an intensive-care specialist at University College London.

Oddly enough, Googling "bowel infusers" mainly comes up just with links to this article:  it seems a topic rarely searched.  Hardly surprising, I guess.

Anyway, the Googling did lead me to this more detailed article on the rabbit experiment, and oxygenating blood generally, if you're interested.  The suggestion seems to be that it might work on humans who can't breath for 20 - 30 minutes, tops.   Maybe it would have been handy for the astronaut trying to get back into the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey to be able to inject himself with a 10 minute supply of oxygen.   I wonder if this has already featured in a science fiction novel somewhere.

This has also put me in mind of the funny sequence in QI in which Stephen Fry and guests discussed the curious 18th (I think) century idea that it was important to have, um, anal smoke blowing devices, along the River Thames to help revive any drowning person pulled from the river.   Could it be that the oxygen content in that process may have actually helped someone by accident?   It's a curious thought.   I am happy to see that the video of this segment is available on line.  I'll save you the effort of clicking on a link:

Increased warmth

News from the US:

Heat Wave Spawns Deadly Severe Thunderstorms | Climate Central:

For the year-to-date, warm temperature records are outpacing cold temperature records by a ration of 7-to-1. Since January 1 there have been 21,402 daily high temperature records set, compared to just 3,338 daily records for cold high temperatures, according to a database maintained by the National Climatic Data Center.

In a long-term trend that demonstrates the effects of a warming climate, daily record-high temperatures have recently been outpacing daily record-lows by an average of 2-to-1, and this imbalance is expected to grow as the climate continues to warm. According to a 2009 study, if the climate were not warming, this ratio would be expected to be even. Other studies have shown that climate change increases the odds of extreme heat events and may make them warmer and longer lasting.

This is what carbon pricing is about.   No, Australia won't solve it alone.  Nor will any country, acting alone.  That's why it's a difficult problem, but sitting around for another 20 years saying "you go first" would be the worst outcome of all.

Yet more catching up with the 2000's

I wonder if readers understand why I am talking lately about movies I've only just seen on DVD.

Well, you see, my son was born in 2000, and a daughter a couple of years later, and that pretty much put a halt on seeing many movies at the cinema that you wouldn't take kids to.  This hasn't been that big a problem, as family friendly animation is so good now, it's been a pleasure seeing these films almost exclusively for the last decade.  But now with a 12 year old, he's more interested in a wider range of movies, so I can branch out a bit with DVD choices at home.  And besides which, with LCD TV and DVD players that have a modest sound system attached, watching DVD's now is a quality experience that it wasn't a decade ago.

Last night and today, we watched the following:

*  Napoleon Dynamite (2004):   America has quite this thing about eccentric middle America living in middle America, doesn't it?  The lead character is played in a way that is always bordering on being too cringeworthy, but I did get plenty of laughs and ultimately liked the way that it had the grace to let every oddball character have a happy ending.   Australian movies have often (too often) been built around oddball characters too, but I usually can't stand them:  there is frequently no generosity of spirit in the way the stories treat them.   (It was suggested to me today that The Castle is probably an exception, and I think that may be right, but believe it or not, my general allergy to Australian films means I still haven't seen it.)     

Anyway, the character I found most amusing in the film was Pedro:  why is it that I find depressed sounding Hispanics funny?

My son kept complaining after about 30 minutes that there was no real story:  "there is no problem to be overcome".  (I am pretty sure they must have been speaking about narrative structure at school lately.)   This is true; it has the slimmest of plots.   Yet it's memorable.

*  Oh Brother, Where Art Thou:   gosh, it came out in 2000?   I would have guess about 2005, but there you go.

What a brilliant and pleasing film.   The deep, deep well of Coen brothers' eccentricity has its best outing here since (I suspect) their first half dozen films.   Where do they get ideas like having a lead character with an obsession for a particular brand of pomade for his hair, or the staging of a Ku Klux Klan rally as a singing and mass choreography show?   It looks and sounds great too.

As for the acting:  Clooney has made a speciality out of playing characters who aren't as smart as they think they are, and even though I get the feeling from some interviews that he may be a tad annoying in real life, his willingness to repeat this on screen persona (which plays on his own good looks and smooth voice) makes me think he can't be all bad.

But the actor who really impressed in this film was Tim Blake Nelson, the guy who played the dim witted but kind Delmar.  I just thought he was absolutely convincing in every second on screen.  

I'll probably buy this one if I see it soon at Big W.

Rough landings

Here's some video of the recently completed Chinese space mission. 


A few comments: 

*  that landing looks very rough
*  I understand now that the woman astronaut could get a little privacy by going back to the capsule
*  that's a very casual looking summer dress being worn by a woman on national television, isn't it?

The point of philosophy

‘America the Philosophical,’ by Carlin Romano - NYTimes.com

There are a few paragraphs that I wanted to keep from the above review of a book that argues that American does  "philosophy" well:

...Romano seems to think that there is, and that America’s distinctive winning formula is mainly a down-to-earth approach to life, though the place’s diversity also plays a role. This brings us to his refashioning of the concept of philosophy, a stratagem that yields the curious result (among others) that Americans are by nature splendid ­“philosophers.” 

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are not the founders and titans of philosophy, according to Romano; rather, they hijacked it. The notion of philosophia was fluid in Plato’s time, and Romano wishes that the usage and practice of the less famous Isocrates, a rhetorician and educationalist, had caught on instead of that of his slightly younger contemporary. Isocrates (“A Man, Not a Typo,” as Romano headlines him) wrote that “it is far superior to have decent judgments about useful matters than to have precise knowledge about useless things.” For him, philosophy was the imprecise art of public deliberation about important matters, not a logic-­chopping attempt to excavate objective truths. Isocrates, Romano says, “incarnates the contradictions, pragmatism, ambition, bent for problem solving and getting things done that mark Americans,” and his conception of philosophy “jibes with American pragmatism and philosophical practice far more than Socrates’ view.” Romano writes sorely of “the triumph of Plato and Aristotle in excluding Isocrates from the philosophical tradition” and announces that “Isocrates should be as famous as Socrates.” 

 My first thought about this claim was that it is simply nuts, which is also my considered view. Romano offers no explanation of how Plato and Aristotle managed to achieve the nefarious feat of obliterating the wonderful Isocrates. The only demonstrable sense in which they excluded him from the philosophical tradition is that their work eclipsed his, just as the music of Johann Sebastian Bach eclipsed that of his older brother Johann Jacob. Puzzled by Romano’s high estimation of the relevance of Isocrates, even to the broadest conception of philosophy, I reread some of his discourses and emerged none the wiser, though I did remember why I had so quickly forgotten him the first time around. Where are Isocrates’ penetrating treatments of the soul, virtue, justice, knowledge, truth, art, perception, psychology, logic, mathematics, action, space or time? And if philosophy would be better off not trying to talk about such things, what exactly should it be talking about? Romano endorses the aims of Richard Rorty, a maverick American thinker who died in 2007. Rorty had urged philosophers to abandon their intellectual hubris and instead content themselves with interminably swapping enlightening tales from diverse perspectives. It was never quite clear why anyone would want to listen to such stories without endings. 

What of the idea that Americans are inherently practical? Many of the country’s best-known intellectuals have certainly liked to think of themselves that way. America’s principal homegrown school of philosophy is, after all, the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey, which was born at Harvard in the 1870s. According to pragmatism, our theories should be judged by their practical value rather than by their accuracy in representing the world. The ultimate fate of this idea was neatly put by a great American philosophical wit, Sidney Morgenbes­ser, who said it was all very well in theory, but didn’t work in practice. He meant that pragmatism sounds like a good ruse, but it emerges as either trivial or incoherent when you try to flesh it out. There are weaker strains of philosophical pragmatism, which investigate the meaning of our concepts by looking at how we use them. But this idea is mainly the property of Wittgenstein, who may have been gay but was certainly not ­American.

Stupid politicians

It's very, very easy to dislike all politicians over the asylum seeker issue.

The basic problem, as always, is that on shore processing of boat arrivals, and a relativity easy passage to Australian residence, has the unintended consequence of encouraging more dangerous boats setting off and sinking with large loss of life.

Of course Labor's softening of the process has led to the present situation.  But right wing numbskulls forget the bad publicity that Nauru and desert processing centres had generated under the last term of the Howard government:  I think it fair to say the public was happy to see what would happen under Rudd without them.

OK, so that didn't pan out.  Yes, yes, right wing numbskulls, you said so at the time.  Yes, yes, Labor has for a long time been making excuses about push/pull factors that were more about political bottom covering than anything else.   But the question is: what will work again now.

Enter Andrew Metcalfe, the immigration head honcho who used to work for Howard and knows a thing or two about the topic.  It would seem the Malaysian solution is his idea, and he strongly supports it and says Nauru will not work again (or at least not as well) as it did the first time around.   The UNHRC is happy to supervise the result, and hopes it leads to Malaysia treating all asylum seekers better.  It is ready to go.

Then the High Court intervenes.

In terms of political stupidity after yesterday's debate, this is how I rate it:

1.    The Greens:   in complete denial about the unintended consequence of their idealism.   Utterly useless and impractical.    Have no solution that will start working in anything less than 12 months, possibly longer.   Should be made to travel on a Navy ship that has to recover dead bodies.

2.   The Coalition:   refuses to accept advice of their former public servant Metcalfe;  insults Malaysia by saying they don't trust them to live up to a bilateral agreement even when it works strongly in their favour; does not trust UNHRC which is relatively confident about the Malaysian deal; wants to try an old solution despite the fact that it would take a minimum of several months to get Nauru up and able to take anyone at all again;  has big Joe Hockey cracking up when the government had already indicated that it would not send unaccompanied minor to Malaysia (and no one from the Government, or media, has been fast enough to point this out to him, or to say "hey, Joe, have a tissue, but if you go with the deal that involved opening both Malaysia and Nauru, we promise to only send them to Nauru.)   The Coalition wants its way and is not compromising.

3.  Labor:  has not played this as well as it should.   Here are the key points it should have emphasised:

a.   If you want a solution that is instant and can be put into effect from tomorrow, the Malaysian deal is the only option.  No one is going to Nauru for at least 3 to 6 months; do you want a rush of boat people to try to get here before then?;

b.   Stop pretending that you're now the big caring party for refugees, as if Nauru wasn't sending people nuts and had awful conditions.    And stop misleading the public about how the Malaysia deal works.  It's a "virtual towback" that will be done with maximum publicity to Indonesia and Sri Lanka, and if it works at all it will work quickly by people smugglers not being able to find 600 or so people willing to be the sacrificial lambs for those that come after them.  You may only get a few hundred to Malaysia anyway.  Those that go there are living in the community within 45 days, have the right to work and get their kids educated.   There is a strong case that this is a more humane outcome than leaving them sitting on a hot rock in the Pacific for a year in crap conditions before letting them come to Australia anyway.

c.   Stop ignoring the advice of the same public servant who you used to trust as to why Nauru, even when it is up and running again, won't work as well.   As for "towback" - don't be ridiculous, you're just pandering to people who can't remember why we stopped doing that before.  And TPV's:  there was also good reason why everyone went cool on them.   Admit you got things wrong too, and stop playing politics.
 
I have run out of time.  More later.

Update:

Here's what I have written elsewhere this morning:

Gillard has gambled on being able to win the public by appearing to be the one who was not seeking to claim political victory on this. As a result, she was not willing to make some key and obvious points about this, and I think this has backfired.

David Koch on Sunrise took the line with her this morning that she was the one who was not compromising, as she knew her policy would not get through the senate. When it does fail in the senate today, I think there is a fair chance that the public will have that view.

And they would be wrong, because Labor did not come out fighting on why the Malaysian deal should go ahead with one key fact:

Nauru is not ready to take anyone. It will take months before it can. There is a flurry of boats right now.
The only response on the table that is ready to go is Malaysia. If the Parliament wants an instant response to this immediate problem, this was the only choice.

Of course, all of the other arguments about how the Coalition is being hugely hypocritical and ignoring advice of Metcalfe and insulting Malaysia and still pretending that “tow back” is an option should be made as well.

But it seems to me the key point about the immediacy of the Malaysian deal got overlooked yesterday.

While we're talking physics...

Putting a new twist on optical communications - physicsworld.com

Here's a more detailed physics explanation of the story I noted last night about how extremely high data transmission speeds over optical systems are possible in the future.

Detective work

CERN calls press conference for 4 July... (Blog) - physicsworld.com

Sort of amusing to read the way the author of the above post has worked out that the 4 July press conference must be for a discovery of the Higgs announcement.

I wonder if that is all the LHC will ever come up with....

Science news of note

* New Toilet Turns Human Waste Into Electricity and Fertilizer 

Dubbed the No-Mix Vacuum Toilet, it has two chambers that separate the liquid and solid wastes. Using vacuum suction technology, such as those used in aircraft lavatories, flushing liquids would now take only 0.2 litres of water while flushing solids require just one litre.

The sound of it will probably frighten small children, and it will require cleaning 4 times more often that a normal toilet, would be my guess.   I'll pass on this one, even though it is from Singapore.

* Twisted light could let you download 70 DVDs per second 

Well, that's just ridiculous.   I wonder how many DVDs worth of information you have to transmit to reproduce a reasonable facsimile of me?   I can see transmitting people can't be that far off.

* Don’t want to catch the flu? Don’t breathe in the car

If you travel in a car with someone infected with the flu, your chance of getting sick is up to 99.9%, according to researchers.

The study compared 1989 and 2005 models of passenger cars and estimated the risk ranged from 59% to 99.9% for a 90-minute car trip when air was recirculated in newer, more air-tight vehicles.

The risk of getting sick travelling in a car is higher than travelling on a Boeing 747 for 17 hours with an infected person.

 Actually, it has occurred to me lately that shared use of tablet computers in households is going to increase flu transmission internationally.   Everyone in a household needs to own their own as a health measure.

* Belief in hell, according to international data, is associated with reduced crime  

But if that were true, crime rates in Catholic countries should have soared over the last 40 years. It would be at least that long since I've heard a good threat of fire and brimstone sermon from a Catholic pulpit. Catholics just don't worry that much about hell anymore.

Fukushima worries

7:30 last night ran a story on the possible next big problem at Fukushima:  one of the  fuel rod cooling pools appears to have been damaged, and if another large earthquake causes it to lose its water (sitting as it is high in a building), the exposed fuel rods would heat which may lead to a fire which may spread radioactive material far and wide.   The claim is that there is enough radioactivity there to cause the evacuation of Tokyo, if the wind was blowing the wrong way.

I haven't heard of the men making this claim, but they didn't exactly sound like Helen Caldicott types.  (Although there are her type around, including the Japanese Ambassador who featured on the story last night, even though his apparent over-the-top sounding claim that it has the potential to “destroy the world, the environment, and our civilization" didn't get a mention.)

Of course, one can go to some pro nuclear industry sites to read people who dismiss the danger.  This guy, for example, says (to paraphrase) "nah, Tepco says the pool is safe, and why wouldn't we trust them?  And besides which, the exposed fuel rods wouldn't cause a fire anyway."  Yet further down in comments someone says:

The risk of zircaloy fire in exposed fuel has been well documented for decades. Suggesting that it can't happen or that it's even unlikely is way out of bounds. This is especially true given your admission that the fuel in the unit 4 pool is relatively fresh. There's more than enough decay heat in the newer assemblies to melt them if they're exposed. Once that fuel goes molten the situation could easily spread to the other spent assemblies and result in a serious fire and release or even an excursion. You can't just wave this off. It's a real possibility if the pool is breached. I agree that it wouldn't be the planet killer that the doomsayers are calling it, but it would still be a level 7 incident in it's own right.

To which the response is:

 I think you've misinterpreted my position, here. I actually do think a failure in the structure of SP4 would be a very bad thing indeed, precisely for the reasons you indicate. I maintain my doubts about the zirc fire contingency, namely because outside of the freshest fuel, none of the fuel in the pool has sufficient heat to get anywhere close to this. Meanwhile, the "freshest" fuel is now a over year old - meaning the source term on the decay heat has decreased substantially. Again, I have provided my data for this, and you are free to check my assumptions.

 Suddenly his confidence about there being no possibility of a dangerous fire seems more equivocal.

 The most amazing thing about the story is this:   how silly is it to put a vital cooling pool 30 m in the air in a building in an earthquake zone?    I know Fukushima is old, and all, but really - what were the engineers who designed this thinking?

And yet when a disaster strikes, it's all "trust us - we're engineers".

Comparing two papers

Phillip Coorey in the Sydney Morning Herald calmly puts the case for holding Tony Abbott responsible for the failure to find a solution to an issue Labor did exacerbate (but with the agreement of the electorate which really was tiring of the Nauru off shore processing of asylum seekers at the time Rudd was elected):

Abbott wants people to believe that what worked last time will work again. Detention and processing on Nauru, temporary protection visas, and turning boats around when safe to do so.

Thursday's tragedy hangs a lantern once more on the issue.

There is little dispute that Rudd's abolition of Howard government policies has led to the situation now whereby the boats arrive regularly, filling detention centres to the point community detention is now required.

This system of onshore processing is the very situation for which the Greens and refugee groups have argued and the numbers arriving are even higher than the experts warned.

When the inevitable tragedy strikes, the Greens and others have nothing to offer, other than some utopian vision of a regional solution, something Gillard tried to start - and was burnt.

Last year, the High Court ruled Labor's Malaysia plan illegal and the government needs the opposition's help to legislate around that decision.

Abbott received the same briefing from the then secretary of the Immigration Department Andrew Metcalfe, as did the media. Metcalfe told Abbott his policies - of which Metcalfe was a principal architect - would not work again. Nauru would be no more a deterrent than Christmas Island because people now knew that once processed they would most likely be sent to Australia.

Temporary protection visas were not considered a deterrent and as for turning the boats back, the Indonesians would not permit it. Last time it was tried, it proved the most effective measure of all until the people smugglers started scuttling the boats when intercepted, endangering everybody.

As for the proposed policy of refusing refugee status to those who destroy their identification, to just where would you return them?

Abbott has been told not just by Metcalfe, but the Liberals' godfather of border protection, Philip Ruddock, that he should provide the numbers to allow Labor to adopt the Malaysia solution. Metcalfe called it ''virtual tow back''. Return 800 people to Malaysia and it would be like towing the boats back.

Labor has offered to use Nauru as well but Abbott refuses point blank to bend.

Some claim it will split the Coalition, yet Gillard had the guts to push it past the Labor Left. For Abbott, it is his way or nothing, but he should reconsider.

If he consents and the policy fails, it will be the government's failure.

If it works, it will be one less problem for him if he is elected.

And fewer people might drown.

Over at The Australian, meanwhile, we get former Liberal Party staffer  Chris Kenny writing, under the heading "The onus is now on Labor to deliver :

Predictably, the press gallery and the ABC have swung behind the government's argument that the chaos is Abbott's fault for not facilitating Malaysia. The public won't accept this. They know that once, thanks to tough, confronting and controversial measures, this problem was fixed. The government must concede its mistakes and show a genuine willingness to look at previous strategies.

The people-smuggling trade will be harder to stop a second time, partly because some of the bluff of the Pacific Solution has been deliberately exposed by Labor. But all previous measures, including temporary protection visas, must be on the table. Political pride seems to be the only obstacle to sensible action.

Note the disregard for advice and detail as to why the government has rejected TPV's, and a mere re-introduction of Nauru, as solutions?   What's important to Kenny is "what the public will accept".

Not content with that, The Oz also gives a column to Scott Morrison, Opposition spokeman on immigration, so that he can continue to blame the government, and again ignore the issue of the advice the government got from the most experienced public servant, which the Coalition used to trust.

 

The Australian's bias against Labor is extraordinarily clear, and its disingenuous editorial policies  (whereby, for example, it "believes" in AGW but gives a huge unfettered run to climate change skeptics in column after column) must be obvious to Rupert Murdoch and have his implicit approval.

Fairfax is needed more than ever, and if Gina Rinehart wants to turn it into Fox News, I'll be very upset.