Quote of the Day
No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
Helen Keller
Well, At Least Readership Is Stabilizing
The blog reached a new multi-month low in pageviews although the last few days readership has picked up. I like to think this is one of the more unique political blogs out there in terms of format, features and commentary. Interestingly, China won the international readership page view race this month, with Canada a close second.
Lightning Round
- Donald Trump for President? Thumbs DOWN!
- Ohio Legislature Union Reform Law? Thumbs UP!
- Schumer (D-NY) Making a Straw Man of Tea Party? Thumbs DOWN!
- Tim Pawlenty GOP Presidential Startup? Very good recent interview: he may be the PERFECT candidate to run against Obama: Thumbs UP!
- Newt Gingrich GOP Presidential Campaign Startup? Thumbs DOWN!
Whereas conditions remain serious, one minor sign of progress on the major websites and blogs I monitor is a shrinking number of daily updates. For example, for days, I've been seeing 3 daily posts on the Daiichi site to the NEI blog; there was only one today. Right now, in addition to routine spraying and injections, there seems to be a focus on worker safety with draining puddles inside building (to enable further work on restoring instrumentation and repairing/replacing equipment, especially residual heat removal pumps) and drawing down tunnels/trenches (thought related to recent measured surges to seawater/groundwater contamination). There are minor differences between the different sites and blogs, which might reflect timing of the information.
Atomic Power Blog notes:
- morning: Dewatering the reactor 1 through 3 trenches continues, with the reactor 1 tunnel down a meter. There is some discussion about the upcoming resin spray of the area, which essentially should pin down radioactive debris from becoming airborne (but will not neutralize it).
- afternoon: Radioactive iodine at 10,000 times the acceptable threshold has been found in the groundwater at Fukushima; there is speculation about the source, but a leading suspect is reactor 2 (because of the comparably higher volume of water added).
- evening: No recent data except a rant about Health Physics practices involving whether the TEPCO workers/subcontractors have and/or are wearing their self-reading, self-alarming dosimetry.
IAEA reports that that reactor condensate tank for reactor 1 is full and work is ongoing for pumping condensate to suppression pools for reactors 2 and 3. (This delays draining of turbine room basement floor contaminated puddles.) About two-thirds of food samples from Fukushima region meet conservative Japanese safety standards. Only 4 villages in the Fukushima prefecture have safety restrictions on drinking water and 3 of those reflect only the higher standards for infants.
NEI notes:
The Hiroshima Syndrome blogger reports several examples of HS, including French and Japanese PM's paying politically correct lip service to nuclear power safeguards, discrimination against Fukushima refugees, and even the refusal to bury or cremate dead tsunami victims for fear of spreading radiation.
NEI notes:
- SMR's: It may be that one of the end results of the Fukushima experience may be increased interest in smaller, scalable reactors (up to 300 megawatts vs. more than 1000). TVA, along with other companies and countries, is look at replacing fossil fuel plants with these, and the key question is whether the sales volume can drive price to a level competitive with larger reactors. (The smaller units are more manageable and can help mitigate, say, geographic risk.)
- afternoon: Continued as needed injections into the 3 problem reactors and spraying of the 4 affected spent fuel pools. Workers completed draining the contaminated turbine room basement for reactor 3. For the stabilized Daini site, there was smoke yesterday at one of the reactors, caused by a short circuit in a pump.
The Hiroshima Syndrome blogger reports several examples of HS, including French and Japanese PM's paying politically correct lip service to nuclear power safeguards, discrimination against Fukushima refugees, and even the refusal to bury or cremate dead tsunami victims for fear of spreading radiation.
Fox News Continues Scaremongering Coverage on Fukushima
I'm limiting my time watching cable news, principally Fox News, but there were a couple of stories I heard discussed. To be fair, they were also discussed elsewhere, including the print media. The issue I have, again, with Fox News is the fact they continue to promote stories without sufficient context.
The first story sounded ominous: iodine found in West Coast milk samples? Now FNC did not hype the milk as unsafe to drink, but the question is the materiality of the story. It turns out the levels are 5000 times BELOW the threshold of LNT heuristic for safety. (There has been a similar scare about rain samples in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.) Keep in mind that iodine has a half-life of 8 days from its availability in Japan...
A quote you did not hear on Fox News? "[FDA senior scientist Patricia] Hansen said the radiation in Spokane [milk sample] is tiny compared with levels a person receives watching television or taking a round trip cross-country flight."
I fully expect Fox News to disclose that watching Fox News exposes you to more radiation than the milk they're discussing, don't you think? Who knew you not only have to worry about whether the airline pilot is sober or air traffic controllers are asleep, but now the radiation while you're flying? (No doubt passengers on the flight will want to make sure their milk isn't from Spokane...)
Another item focused on an unexpectedly high reading outside a certain radius of the Fukushima plant. (This may be the recent item I reported where they were going to repeat a certain test.) The anti-nukes, of course, immediately seized upon this as indisputable proof of the Fukushima contagion--but any researcher with a background in statistics is immediately suspicious of outliers. People know that sometimes medical tests are wrong--e.g., so-called false positives for cancer. I'm not saying the reading is erroneous, but when you consider that the readings of air, milk, and water all over Japan trending safer, what is the reason to believe the preponderance of evidence is wrong and a solitary data point is the truth? The HS blogger notes that this is a localized problem, not endemic for the surrounding area and IAEA does not recommend extending the evacuation radius beyond the current 30 kilometers.
Scaremongering On Steroids
I have a second (nutrition/diet) blog which I haven't published for a while. The basic context is that I have a number of email subscriptions focusing on health and nutrition, including alternative medicine and natural foods. I knew that one of the newsletter editors was in an anti-nuke Fukushima panic; as I've mentioned in past posts, I routinely sample the writings of people or organizations with alternative views: it's part of the free market of ideas and my personal interdisciplinary research style. But there are limits to my patience, and today's email resulted in an unsubscribe action. I won't publicly flame the mailer, but I think excerpts from the email helps explain exactly why I've been focusing so much attention over the past 3 weeks on providing a more balanced perspective. In part, my motivation is due to the fact that I believe that nuclear power plays an important role in energy security for the United States and can diversify part of our energy dependence on fossil fuels; this has been a consistent theme in my blog posts, and I'm seeing a global overreaction to a situation stemming from one of the largest natural disasters in Japanese history.
The email starts off: "Make no mistake, Fukushima is in a meltdown, and radiation is now showing up in U.S. milk products." No, it's not in meltdown. There likely some fuel damage in 3 reactors during the early hours of the crisis, but the control rods in all 3 reactors seated between fuel rods, stopping nuclear fission. There were issues with water pumps (getting water into the reactor pressurized vessel (RPV)), and automatic vents were failing, requiring manual pressure release of steam. High pressure makes coolant injection more difficult; without water to mitigate heat, temperature rises. Zirconium, the cladding over fuel (the first level of containment), has a very high melt point, and fuel has an even higher melt point. However, decay heat drops power to less than 1% over the first day. As injections with seawater and boric acid ("liquid control rods") resumed, the situation stabilized. Only estimates of fuel damage can be made, inferred by relative concentrations of contaminants.
One speculation is whether melted fuel (particularly from reactor 2) leaking from any openings in the zirconium cladding of the various fuel rods made it to the bottom of the RPV, and somehow worked its way through several inches of concrete and steel (and note there is a third layer of containment beyond that). It seems unlikely any suspected leak (if one exists) is significant, given the nature of ongoing efforts to control temperature and pressure through as necessary coolant injections.
Note I'm not saying the situation is normal; it remains serious. The cooling systems still aren't functional; instrumentation and pumps aren't fully operational. But the situation is being described out of proportion to the actual danger.
I have been very critical of Fox News for uncritical interviews with Michio Kaku, a physicist with a political agenda against nuclear armaments and nuclear power; I've noted that Fox News failed to disclose Kaku's bias; proper disclosure is a matter of journalistic ethics. The newsletter provided the following excerpt from the Kaku (whom the writer notes is a physicist) video:
If it goes to a full-scale evacuation of all personnel, it means that firefighters are no longer putting water onto the cores. That's the only thing preventing a full-scale meltdown at three reactor sites. Once they evacuate, then we past the point of no return. Meltdowns are inevitable at three reactor sites, leading to a tragedy far beyond that of Chernobyl, creating permanent dead zones in Japan..."If there is a full abandonment of the reactor site, we could be in freefall... Three raging meltdowns [are] in progress, one spent fuel pond [is] open to the air...
I think that when someone abuses his academic credentials, it's a violation of professional ethics. This is rampant, irresponsible speculation, far beyond the facts, the crucible for any scientist or researcher. Dr. Kaku is either intentionally or incompetently ignoring the differences in containment and other design differences between Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors.
I'm trying to place the timing of the video. As near as I can tell, the interview took place over last weekend after the Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan warned of a suspected breach last Friday; the earliest Youtube copy of the interview I've seen references March 27. The prime minister was attempting to explain how two TEPCO subcontractors, whom violated safety procedures by walking (without protective wear) in a standing puddle in the turbine room basement for reactor 3 and had to be treated for radiation burns. Clearly at the beginning of the interview, Kaku is referencing Kan's inference of a possible leak to explain the contamination in the puddle. He refers to TEPCO as the "laughing stock of the scientific community" and specifically argues that the rating of the disaster should be a 6 (on a 7-point scale) (there are specific criteria for each rating level, and Kaku seems to be making a superficial comparison to Three Mile Island, arguing since TMI involved one versus 3 problem reactors at Fukushima, Fukushima would be rated worse; that a "world-renowned scientist" should engage in such intellectually lazy, vapid analysis without exercising due diligence is utterly pathetic.)
Now Kaku has left himself a lot of wiggle room in his rant by saying his hypothetical assumes no workers can safely continue maintain coolant in the RPV's, but he totally ignores the fact that ambient radiation levels have steadily declined, and air, food, water, and milk samplings continue to improve below LNT safety thresholds. How many of Kaku's scientific colleagues will let him engage in such Chicken Little nonsense without rebuking his irresponsible behavior?
The problem with a scientist abusing his credentials and undermining his own credibility, effectively crying "fire!" in a movie theater, is that it results in public panic. Consider the reaction of the newsletter writer to Kaku's warnings:
ARE YOU PREPARED YET? If you are...NOT prepared for radioactive fallout, you are falling behind the curve on what this world-renowned physicist is describing as "three raging meltdowns" happening right now. I cannot repeat this strenuously enough: I urge all ... readers to get squared away NOW with extra food, water, emergency medicine, iodine sources, extra fuel in your cars and a well-thought-out plan for what to do if a radiation fallout emergency is declared.
It sounds to me like someone forgot to take his meds...
To the rest of mankind: RELAX... It's going to be fine. I promise. When I was in undergraduate school, there was a panic about an approaching comet; I remember this gig I did in 1999 where a fellow DBA was busy stocking months of food in some shelter away from the city, obsessing over the upcoming Y2K disaster. There will always be crackpots. Glenn Beck obsesses over the Anti-Christ/Twelfth Iman. And we're not even talking yet about Mayan predictions of 2012.
If you really want something to worry about, then consider the prospect that the American people might actually reelect Barack Obama in November 2012. That's the really scary nightmare: it means over half the American voters have lost their memory and are stark raving mad...
Political Humor
A few originals:
- The missing Bronx Zoo Egyptian cobra found its way back to the reptile house. Even venomous snakes don't feel safe out alone in NYC at night...
- Sen. Schumer (D-NY) thought the mute button was on for a media conference call while he prepared his partisan colleagues on how to deliver their talking points about Speaker of the House Boehner (R-OH) and other House Republicans on budget negotiations: "I always use the word extreme...That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.” I don't think that's what President Obama meant by a need for greater transparency in government...
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Beach Boys, "Wouldn't It Be Nice?"
