Current Chaos Manor mail (original) (raw)
Monday March 21, 2011
Good radiation chart -
Hi Jerry,
Here's a very easy to read radiation chart.
Thanks for helping control the hysteria.
-- E.C. "Stan" Field
Very instructive. Thanks
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Nukes, overfishing, Stewart Brand, Server Sky
The unfiltered TEPCO press releases are terse but useful: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/index-e.html . Tepco has lives to save and a power grid to rebuild. Spoonfeeding reporters, who don't accurately report the information they do get, is not high priority. When in Tokyo, visit TEPCO's museum in Shibuya district. Pick up their strange English brochure "Let's Make Friends With Electricity". As an electronics tinkerer, I have shaken hands with high voltage far too often :-)
The Fukushima Daiichi radiation releases are mostly falling into the ocean off Japan. Fish are a large part of the Japanese diet, and they heavily overfish these seas. Perhaps because of fear of radiation, they will slow down for a while, and the fish populations will recover. More gruesomely, perhaps the thousands of human corpses that washed out to sea will not end up in shark stomachs on dinner plates in Japan. Yuck.
Searching your site does not bring up Stewart Brand's recent book "Whole Earth Discipline". A lot you will agree with and learn from, from a different perspective.
My big project these days:http://server-sky.com . Data centers in orbit. Gigawatt space solar power used in situ. Applying Moore's Law to space and energy. How thick does a satellite have to be? Microns or less. How much does a megawatt of satellite power need to weigh? Kilograms or less. Paraphrasing Ivan Bekey: "don't do with beams and struts what you can do with light pressure and information". Lots of amazing discoveries emerging from this oddball way of looking at things. Launch loop will continue the cost reduction - other smart people are now advancing that banner. Now to turn all that into a book.
Hang in there. I look forward to our meeting at Worldcon 100. You will be 109, and at 88 I will still be "babes-in-dipes". We will debate whether it should still be called Worldcon when the sites and the attendees are mostly digital and off-planet ...
Keith
-- Keith Lofstrom
Integrated Circuits
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Oil concessions
Jerry:
Missiles in Gadaffy's home? Why?
I recall that it was just about a year ago that the mastermind of the Lockerbie bombing was released to Libya due to alleged health reasons. Perhaps not coincidentally, British Petroleum was soon thereafter granted lucrative oil leases in Libya. One would think that the Brits and perhaps the French would be grateful enough to support Gadaffy against rebells and certainly not incite rebellion as someone has obviously done. The evacuation of tens of thousands of Chinese workers from Libya suggests that perhaps Gadaffy had reneged and granted the oil concessions to China.
I expect that disaffected youths whose Arab and African origins will not be mentioned will soon be torching Renaults and Citerons in Paris.
Meanwhile, it is reported that the fighter jet that the rebels shot down with a ZSU-23 was one of their own. I can't wait until they bag a French Jet.
Jim Crawford
==
Two Different Wars in Libya
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12776418
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/live/africa/libya-live-blog-march-18 ----
Most Respectfully,
Joshua Jordan, KSC
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A Report from Japan
Took our towels and left!
Dear Jerry,
We decided to take our towels and decamp to my in-law's house south of Mt. Fuji on Thursday. The response to Fukushima wasn't showing much progress and the threat of some kind of major release from the containment pools started to look imminent if some progress wasn't made. I wasn't so much worried about the radiation per se as being stuck in Tokyo if some kind of shelter-in-place did come through. It may have been irrational, but getting out definitely helped our peace of mind. We stopped at a service area close to Mt Fuji and had a snack at the Starbucks there. The atmosphere was noticeably different. People in Tokyo have been handling it very, very well but there has been an undercurrent of tension. On the plus side, we had a major meeting with a potential partner company right before leaving Tokyo. Their accounting staff was supposed to be present but had decided to stay home so we had a very productive meeting.
Reactors 5 and 6 have the cooling back on and should be no concern. They finally got enough equipment present and in use that the water spraying started to have an effect. The power has been connected back to Unit 2 and they're checking the equipment to see how much damage has occurred and hopefully the pumps will be back on tomorrow. Unit 1 will be powered from Unit 2. That leaves 3 and 4 as potential problems. 4 has nothing in the reactor and the top is blown off so water can be sprayed into the spent storage pool. 3 has been quiet to date. Storage pool problems seem to be preceded by a hydrogen explosion, so if 3's storage pool becomes critical the root will probably blow off first and then they can spray water in at worst.
We are continuing to check the news but we will probably head back to Tokyo this afternoon (Sunday). The situation looks to have tipped in favor of bringing it under control without any more major incidents. Lots of hot, nasty, dirty, dangerous work ahead but I have faith in the workers once they have a viable direction.
I think I'm taking 3 major lessons away from this (as regards power plant design):
Plants appear to be designed for no more than 24 hours without power. Had the diesels survived at Fukushima this would have been a non-event. Had TEPCO been able to restore power within the first 24 hours this would have been a non-event. I'm sure that it's hard to imagine that a power plant can be without power for a significant amount of time, but it's been a week and they're just beginning to get the power routed back in. The newer, passive cooling designs are looking better and better.
Planners may not be taking into account devastation around the plant. Fukushima was mostly intact. The surrounding countryside, roads, etc. were not.
The spent fuel storage pool is a major blindspot. Certainly I always thought of them as just big pools with stuff sitting in them, relatively inert and it's becoming obvious that people who should have known better were thinking of them the same way. I think the pools need some kind of containment structure. It definitely should be discussed and analyzed better. Every plant in the world has a storage pool, don't they?
I've seen people renewing the call for 100% safety from the nuclear industry. That's been the call for a long time and those assurances have been given. Unfortunately, as we well know, nothing is 100%, especially something so complex and dangerous as nuclear power. Cooking stoves are not 100% and we've been using those for a long, long time. Furthermore, once something has been declared as 100% safe there is no incentive, in fact there is major disincentive, to look for problems to fix. We need to accept that there's risk in everything. Living next to the seashore looks to be more dangerous than living next to the nuclear power plant.
Regards, Dave Smith Kakegawa, Japan
If it helps your peace of mind by all means do it, but there is no radiation reaction necessity. On the other hand the electricity that was being produced won't be, which means power shortages. On the gripping hand, being on high ground given the probability of more aftershocks and possible tsunamis is not unwise.
Good luck.
Jerry Pournelle
Whether or not leaving Tokyo was rational is definitely debatable. Radiation, of course, isn't going to travel that far and fallout should not be carried that far by the winds. However, people are already stressed to the breaking point. Truck drivers are refusing to deliver food and water into the areas around Fukushima adding to the problems there. Were any kind of major problem at Fukushima announced, I don't think I can predict the reaction in Tokyo. While there might not be an actual problem, perception of a problem could create its own disaster. Tokyo is, for all intents and purposes, impossible to evacuate and we saw three options if a panic were to start: 1) Be ahead of the wave. 2) Be in the crush or 3) stay behind and deal with the consequences (perhaps no radiation, but empty stores and a dark, cold apartment). We chose 1. Fortunately things are stabilizing, we had a couple of nights with a lot less stress and my wife's mother was very happy to spend time with her grandchildren. Generally a win all around for us.
We're going to pick up some staples before we head back and I'm making damn sure the car's gas tank is full from now on!
Cheers, Dave Smith
Be well. God bless you.
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_The Legacy of Heorot_ for Kindle.
http://www.amazon.com/
The-Legacy-of-Heorot-ebook/dp/
B004Q9TC8C/jerrypournellcha
--- Roland Dobbins
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Nuclear robots
Hi Jerry,
Some thoughts on the use (or rather the lack of) hardened robots in a damaged power plant. There is an intervention group with the proper gear that was never called in. See my blog entry at http://ballonbleu.blogspot.com/2011/03/robo-atomjacks.html
Regards, Frank Schweppe
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Letter from England
I dreamt I was trying to comment out portions of a program written two-dimensionally on a floor. It wasn't a trivial exercise.
The current Government has agreed to a referendum on the UK voting system ("first past the post"). Labour is opposed as it prevents them from ruling as a minority party. <http://tinyurl.com/6eq5zdq> I'm afraid I don't consider that a compelling argument.
Internal Ministry of Defence politics affecting readiness. <http://tinyurl.com/5stfou9>
Stampede to university fees of �9000/year <http://tinyurl.com/654v8yl>. The universities least likely to charge the full fees are the ones experiencing the largest cuts in funding. I had a suspicion it was headed this way after a chat with a Tory politician last Christmas in London--I went away wondering if we lived in the same universe. Of course I have had the same reaction after talking with a trade union organiser--"Tax and Spend!"
The UK Government would also like the UK bachelor's degree reduced to two years. The current three-year degree is regarded by North American colleges as equivalent to the four-year bachelor's, but only if it includes a substantial research project during the final year. The fact that the current UK bachelor's can be delivered in two years should make you a bit suspicious, so let me walk you through the figures: (1) A North American full-time student attends (theoretically) 12 hours of lecture or the equivalent per week for 36 weeks during the academic year, for 432 contact hours per year and 1728 hours for a four year degree. (2) A UK academic year is 24 weeks of teaching, with typically 9 or 10 hours of contact time per week, or about 240 contact hours per year. The UK doesn't have TAs, so lecturers handle tutorials. (3) 720 contact hours can be delivered in two years by lengthening the academic year to the 36 week standard or by shortening the nominal semester length to 8 weeks. Either increases the lecturer workload by 50%, nothing else changing, which is the real reason for the strike action. (4) UK students are required to take A-levels as a prerequisite to university, usually in three fields. That gives them the equivalent of an additional 240 contact hours at entry. So a UK bachelor's degree is about half as much work as a North American degree, and it shows. I don't think degree equivalency can be maintained.
--
"If academic research is not devoted to finding the truth, it is a form of propaganda, and not necessarily to be preferred to other forms, much cheaper and perhaps more persuasive." (Russell 1993)
Harry Erwin
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'And that's the root of Tokyo's current electricity problems: utility companies in west Japan are unable to make up for all of the lost power.'
<http://www.itworld.com/print/140626>
---- Roland Dobbins
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'My guess is that all those automated, robotic trading programming are picking up the same chatter on the internet about "Hathaway" as the IMDb's StarMeter, and they're applying it to the stock market.'
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
dan-mirvish/the-hathaway-effect-how-a_b_830041.html>
-- Roland Dobbins
We are a long way from the Cordwainer Smith story of the boy who bought the Earth. I think it time someone did a serious analysis of the effects of computerized speculative trading. I am quite sure there are Black Swans lurking in there.
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Logistics: China Enters The Big Leagues,
Jerry
China joins the big leagues:
http://www.strategypage.com
/htmw/htlog/articles/20110318.aspx�China quickly mobilized military forces, and commercial transport, to evacuate 35,000 Chinese citizens from Libya in late February and early March. A Chinese warship was quickly summoned from the anti-piracy flotilla off Somalia, to protect <http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlog/articles/20110318.aspx> the commercial ships quickly chartered to take most of these Chinese expatriates out via the eastern Libya port of Benghazi. Others were moved by chartered bus to Tunisia and Egypt, while a few thousand were flown out using chartered aircraft, and four Chinese Air Force Il-76s flown in (via Sudan, a Chinese ally).
�For the last two decades, China has been a growing factor in the sea <http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlog/articles/20110318.aspx> and air transport industries, because of booming exports and raw materials imports. Sending warships to the anti-piracy patrol for the past two years was another exercise of China's growing global reach. But the prompt and orderly evacuation of nearly 40,000 Chinese from Libya was a masterful demonstration that China had entered the big leagues, as far as global logistics was concerned.�
Res ipsa loquitur
Ed
More interesting is the question of what were 40,000 Chinese doing in Libya? What were they working on? It is likely to be oil...
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Meanwhile, back on Mothra Island
World Nuclear News reports: Peach Bottom recognised for habitat work 06 January 2011
Staff at Exelon's 1140 MW Peach Bottom nuclear power station have been recognised by the Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) for their work in creating wildlife preservation areas and helping to stem the global tide of biodiversity loss.
The WHC's Wildlife at Work certification was awarded to a number of programs at the plant, including the construction of bat habitats, a butterfly garden and the installation of motion sensor cameras.
Russell Seitz
Mothra! So!
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SKYTea scores Superior Ratings at North American Tea Championship!
Please celebrate with us!
No.1 Special Masala Chai scored a superior rating of 84 and no other company after us came close, they said! Means in only having launched in September, we have been honored above all other well respected American companies. I mean we sent if off cause you all kept saying it was off the charts ridiculously good... but wow!
THEN! We were cheeky enough to also send our best selling House Breakfast No.3 And guess what?! The judges agreed with a superior rating of 78!
Please don't forget our other specialty though of Single Estate Organic Fair Trade Rare stuff :D A highlight for this season�s menu is the Organic Hand Picked Jade Bao Zhong. Only 22lbs in existence, we were given one pound of it! Very delicate light almost a green tea with lily and orchid notes and a hint of macadamia nut.
The website is almost finished! Ummm, I didn't design it so I'm allowed to say it's... AMAZING. So please keep tuning into <http://www.sky-tea.com/> for its debut!
We are very excited, having just launched, to take the tea world by surprise. Thank you so much for being crazy about our tea line and telling everyone about us. We really appreciate all you who follow us on Facebook/Twitter. We are having a lot of fun with it and hope you are too.
Warm Regards, Jeni
- SKYTea Co.
www.sky-tea.com <http://www.sky-tea.com/>
Full Disclosure: Jeni (JQ) is my one time starlet grand niece.
===========
"I also note that Germany has shut down the seven older of their seventeen plants in response. I guess they're afraid of tsunamis over their design limit."
The German reactors were already operating past their design life and had been granted an extension, over major opposition. The ones being closed are part of 17 plants than had been given a 12 year extension last year.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12745899
So, the move is political. (Surprise, surprise, surprise!)
Lee Keller King
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Libya and congress
Jerry,
Watching the events unfolding in the Middle East, I have a question, which you have already asked and I think needs to be answered.
Where IS Congress in all this? Were they consulted? Then why aren't they helping the President make his case? Were they not consulted? Then why aren't they raising hell about it?
How can I get an answer from my representative? If I send a letter or a phone call, I'm going to get a form letter.
Republicans mock President Obama for going to Rio, but they've been so invisible during this crisis we may need to start putting their faces on milk cartons.
Respectfully,
Brian P.
I suspect Congress is stunned. And the President is not in the country. Governors have no executive power when they leave their state, but that does not apply to the President of the United States of America, who can order the Navy to fire missiles while he is in Brazil.
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Question answered. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/
news/150901-boehner-wants-obama-
to-explain-us-role-in-libya
So they weren't consulted, evidently, and don't know why we're there. I realize it's too late to unring the bell, but shouldn't Congress be more involved in these questions ? Isn't the War Powers law on the books specifically so they can jerk the rug out from under an adventurous president?
Respectfully,
Brian P.
It would be useful to know what the mission is. I would also like to know if there are any people in all the world that the United States does not have the obligation to protect. I can understand war against Gaddafi with the goal of apprehending or killing him. I can understand war against Libya with the goal of conquering the oil fields and raising an American flag over them as compensation for the Barbary Pirate actions against the people of the United States (pity that Somalia has no oil). I do not believe the latter policy is useful, and I am not sure that hanging Gaddafi is worth what it will cost (was taking off Saddam Hussein's head by tearing it off when he was dropped too far worth a TrillionTrillion TrillionDollars?). I do suspect that if we are to engage in wars of assassination there might be better tools for the job. Delta Force offense, Secret Service defense, and do remember that the enemy always gets a vote.
I don't like Gaddafi, but I didn't like Saddam either. I suspect that putting out a contract on Saddam Hussein would have cost a lot less than a TrillionTrillion TrillionDollars. I would guess that a billion dollars and a US passport -- bring me his head or proof that you killed him, no questions asked -- would do it. Indeed, I suspect that offering a billion dollars to the first winner of a fair election might be a good old college try at nation building...
I have no idea what the mission is in Libya, but I do think we had better be prepared to furnish the victors a lot of ammunition to fire in the air.
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US Troops under foreign command -
Hi Jerry,
You'd asked: "Does anyone know why the President seems anxious to put American forces in combat under a foreign general?"
I believe that the political strategists are in control of the White House. First, they dither, then they support it with words, but not a resolution in the UN, then we have the resolution and wait until the 8th anniversary of the Iraq war (that must have been on purpose), then support it with missiles, not planes, then with planes, but they don't want to take responsibility, so they're trying to abdicate command and control. They're afraid that Obama will be blamed 1) By Americans for getting us into another war in which we have no compelling national interest, and 2) by the Arab world (note: not the royal dictators) for attacking yet another Muslim country. I fully expected the Arab league to do what they've done - goad the US into doing their dirty work for them, but then playing the other side of the populist aisle to protect their own positions.
They waited until the worst possible time to intervene - right after the rebels no longer had a credible chance of winning. If we'd have gone in early, they might have won (not to say that would be better), and a bit later there'd have been no point. But having goaded them with words, Obama trapped himself into doing 'something' or risk being compared to Bush and the Iraq rebels. I'm stunned that the market is up today - we'll see what happens with oil prices as this drags into a third front in the neo-con crusade to liberate the world. This, quite simply, is not good.
The White House is in desperate need of adult supervision.
Regards,
Doug
P.S. I'm very glad we're not traveling to Europe this summer for vacation. I expect the terrorist response to happen some weeks or months from now.
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Just a note: "Cuius regio, eius religio" meant that "whose prince, his religion." That is, whatever religion the prince wanted to practice would become everyone's state religion. The Elector-Duke of Bavaria was staunchly Catholic, so Bavarians remained Catholic. The Elector-King of Saxony preferred Lutheranism, so Saxony became Lutheran. The Elector-Markgraf of Brandenburg chose Calvinism; then changed his mind and chose Lutheranism, and his subjects had to follow suit. The fooferaw between Lutherans and Calvinists continued until Bismark finally forced them into the combined "Evangelische Kirche," which is a Lutheran church with a coat of Calvinist paint.
It also seems unfair to call them "The Wars of Religion." The German Princes did not declare themselves independent of the Empire because they had become Protestant. They became Protestant because they wanted to become independent of the Empire. Remember, the Pope was financing the "Protestant" side. The same is true of the Wars of the French Succession. The three great Houses shifted alliances and usually included both Catholics and Huguenots on both sides. "Paris is worth a mass," Henri Bourbon famously declared, and blithely changed his religion to suit his ambition.
MikeF
The problem with writing about one thing and using something else as an illustration when there's no longer any agreement over history is nearly insoluble. Your first paragraph is correct, and my translation of the Latin phrase used by my correspondent, while literally correct, didn't make it clear that it applied to rulers, not to just anyone.
Whether the Thirty Years War was one of religion is a far more complex matter. The Emperor was raised by Jesuits and applied his intolerance of heresy in Austria with good effect: he then tried to apply it to Bohemia and caught a tiger. He had to be bailed out by Spain and the Catholic League (which as you point out was not really on the Pope's side, the alliance that let Don John of Austria win at Lepanto being over and done). Certainly some of the Princes in Germany chose religions for political purposes, and in Sweden the choice had been made long before Gustavus came to the throne, and his intervention on the Protestant side was political (for the German Liberties, etc. and for control of the Baltic) -- as well as induced by the exhortations and subsidies paid him by Richelieu in France. Richelieu was a Cardinal but a French Cardinal who happened to be the Chief Minister. Even so, the Thirty Years War was as much over the Edict of Restoration as anything else, and the Emperor's insistence on that --
This could go on for a long time, and when done we probably would not settle much. The Thirty Years War was more political than religious perhaps, but the sheer viciousness of it was certainly intensified by religious fervor. Wallenstein's biography in Wikipedia is a good argument for not relying on Wikipedia for accuracy: it makes him "religious but not zealous" when so far as I know there is no evidence that he had any sign of a conscience; but that is another story. The atrocities of the Thirty Years War were enormously exacerbated by armies supporting themselves by living off the land. But I ramble.
I can agree that the Thirty Years War was as much political as religious. Beyond that would require a much longer discussion and would not be very relevant to the point I was trying to make about today's wars. Thanks.
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"Excess" radiation and cancer
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter031711.php3
"There is...burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine."
So maybe those TSA full body scanners are good for people's health if not their privacy.
Charles Brumbelow
Bringing up the enormously complex question of radiation hormesis, which is established in principle, but nearly as controversial in science/policy disputes as anything I know of. At some point I will do a long essay on the subject.
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