Why is so much attention being paid to the nuclear reactor?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not a scientist, but this article by William Tucker in the WSJ seems to make a great deal of sense and is worth quoting at length.

The gist of it is that Fukushima Daiichi ain’t Chernobyl. Nor is it likely to be much of a problem except an economic one, as well as a political one if it’s exploited by the anti-nuclear power forces:

If the pumps are knocked out in a Generation II reactor””as they were at Fukushima Daiichi by the tsunami””the water in the cooling system can overheat and evaporate. The resulting steam increases internal pressure that must be vented. There was a small release of radioactive steam at Three Mile Island in 1979, and there have also been a few releases at Fukushima Daiichi. These produce radiation at about the level of one dental X-ray in the immediate vicinity and quickly dissipate…

None of this amounts to “another Chernobyl.” The Chernobyl reactor had two crucial design flaws. First, it used graphite (carbon) instead of water to “moderate” the neutrons, which makes possible the nuclear reaction. The graphite caught fire in April 1986 and burned for four days. Water does not catch fire.

Second, Chernobyl had no containment structure. When the graphite caught fire, it spouted a plume of radioactive smoke that spread across the globe. A containment structure would have both smothered the fire and contained the radioactivity.

If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact. Researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from the steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing. With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor.

What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. The problem has been with the electrical pumps required to operate the cooling system. It would be tragic if the result of the Japanese accident were to prevent development of Generation III reactors, which eliminate this design flaw.

Much of the MSM, however, seems hard at work to keep such information from us. Granted, it’s a bit technical, and requires a soupé§on of intelligence to understand, but not anything beyond the range of most people. However, here are some answers to the question I posed in the title of this post:

The more ominous outcome—or the possibility of it—fits into the agenda of the left very nicely.

Compared to the earthquake and tsunami, it is a story with focus and a single locus rather than a spread-out tale of death and destruction over a wide area.

It is happening in real time. Therefore, it has a powerful element of suspense, rather than just tragedy.

There is a movielike aspect to the story being hyped by the press—“The China Syndrome,” to be exact. So many people think they know the possibilities, because they’re been prepared to think that way by the film, which provides the template. The actual events that occurred at Chernobyl—the technical aspects of which elude most people or have been forgotten—can be used in the same way to stir up anxiety. Anxiety has two functions: it boosts viewership/readership and it serves the needs of the anti-nuclear-power folks, who will stir it up (and count on scientific illiteracy, as well) in an attempt to curtail the development of nuclear power in this country and around the world.

[NOTE: It is ironic that the worst problem here may come through an attempt at recycling nuclear waste:

Nuclear experts are particularly worried about the No. 3 unit, supplied by Toshiba Corp., because it uses an unconventional fuel called MOX fuel, short for mixed oxide.

It is made by mixing low-enriched uranium with plutonium that has been recycled from a global stockpile of defunct nuclear weapons. This recycling is part of an international effort to decrease the number of nuclear weapons and move from “megatons to megawatts.”

MOX fuel has greater concentrations of “actinides,” or radioactive elements and runs hotter than conventional fuel, so a shut down plant would have to deal with more “decay” or residual heat from fuel rods.

This reminds me of another recycling problem that seems to have arisen with a completely different product—cardboard cereal boxes made from recycled paper that might leak chemicals toxic to human beings (hat tip: Artfldgr).

The law of unintended consequences strikes again.]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s some of the metaphorical fallout (of the political variety) in Germany, where the Spiegel headline blares “Nuclear Disaster ‘Will Have Political Impact as Great as 9/11.'” It ignores a host of things, including the fact that, at least so far, there has been no nuclear disaster—except for the effect on the functioning of the plant itself, which will almost undoubtedly never go online again.]

Japan: epicenter of disaster

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s the quake, and then there’s the aftermath. Sometimes, as in Japan today, the latter is worse than the former.

Not that the former wasn’t really really bad. It was, and it lasted for over two minutes. I’ve been in several quakes in California of moderate magnitude (which is many thousands of times less than the force of this one), and the most each ever lasted was probably 15 seconds, if that. I cannot imagine how endless and terrifying this one must have seemed.

So far, the resultant tsunami seems to have caused the majority of deaths. Now, even drinking water is a problem in some areas. And then, of course, there are those nuclear power plants that have been dangerously compromised. Because Japan was a pioneer in nuclear power, quite a few of its plants are around forty years old, and were built in a time of lesser seismic activity in which earthquake protections were more lax. The newer ones are better, but all portions of the old ones had not been sufficiently updated.

Many people in the comments section here have noted the abysmal ignorance about earthquakes and nuclear power plants exhibited almost uniformly by the press. Not only are they uninformed, they don’t seem to be taking the time and proper steps to become informed, and are fear-mongering and comparing the reactors in Japan to that in Chernobyl, which had a different design. Could it be that they have an agenda?

One of Japan’s exports in the post-WWII years has been disaster movies. This is one come to life, minus the monsters (although if we wait a bit, maybe…). Although Japan is used to earthquakes, it’s not used to something of this magnitude, which sweeps away—along with the houses, boats, trains, and people—the illusion of control

Apocalypse now?

The New Neo Posted on by

The scenes on the television are surreal. Buildings and cars and trains and boats tossed around and floating in water like so many discarded toys in a flooded garbage dump.

Fire.

And now, a potential (or already partial) nuclear meltdown. The frantic efforts to avert more major trouble there are a bit hard to follow and quite technical, but so far the damage seems mostly contained although the threat of a far greater catastrophe is present.

Our global communications now are so good that videos of all these catastrophes are beamed into our livingrooms and bedrooms in real time. The combination of modern technology and ancient scourges and primal fears is a shock to the system, and a reminder.

Japan, of course, has had more than its share of these particular catastrophes, although not always together like now. Earthquakes and tsunamis have plagued the island nation for all its recorded history. And Japan has the dubious distinction of having been the only country ever attacked with nuclear weapons. Although a nuclear power plant is not an atomic bomb, trouble there is a small echo of that earlier blast.

The quake that hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was the largest ever recorded in Japan. Although Japan is very advanced at earthquake-resistant construction, such a huge quake was not necessarily foreseen. The largest previous quake near a nuclear power plant occurred in 2007 in the vicinity of the the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Japan, although it was “only” a 6.6 on the Richter scale. The plant survived intact, but it was shaken “beyond design basis and initiated an extended shutdown for inspection, which indicated that greater earthquake-proofing was needed before operation could be resumed.”

I’m a proponent of nuclear power. But it’s clear that plants need to be located as far from fault lines as possible (very difficult in a country like Japan) and made even stronger. The part of the plant at Fukushima Daiichi that seems to have been most damaged was built in the late 60s and opened in 1971. That’s a pretty old design; things have improved greatly since then. But I have no idea whether even a new design would have fared very well in an earthquake of this magnitude.

[NOTE: Ace has been doing good updates on this.]

The Guten Tag Hop Clop and Hansel and Gretel

The New Neo Posted on by

I believe I have done a great service to the world in unearthing the provenance of Mel Brooks’ immortal “Guten Tag Hop Clop” from the musical version of “The Producers.”

You may have thought it was merely a ridiculous German song and dance, featuring that famous German song-and-dance man, Will Ferrel (in the movie) wearing lederhosen and a helmet, and slapping himself and others silly. But did you know it drew its inspiration from a popular opera (hint: one I wrote about the other day)?

Here, in case you haven’t committed it to memory and your recall needs refreshing, is the Brooks song:

And now please observe Exhibit B, the song known in English as “Brother, Come and Dance With Me” (and in German as “Bré¼derchen, Komm Tanz Mit Mir”) from the Humperdinck opera “Hansel and Gretel:”

And here’s is the original folk version (minus the lederhosen); you can see how much Humperdinck added to it:

Earthquake and tsunami in Japan

The New Neo Posted on by

The terrible earthquake and tsunami last night in Japan recalls the fact that tsunami is a Japanese word:

The term “Tsunami” comes from the Japanese word for harbor (tsu) and wave (nami). The origins of the word are not surprising given that the majority of tsunamis occur within the Pacific Ocean and vicinity of Japan.

The term is said to have originated with fishermen when, upon returning to port, found the area surrounding the harbour devastated, even though they had not been aware of anything out of the ordinary while fishing in the open ocean.

Japan is perfectly positioned for such a thing. It has a lot of coast and a great many earthquakes, although last night’s seems to have been the strongest in Japanese history and (depending on the list) the sixth or seventh strongest worldwide. These days, in a country such as Japan with earthquake resistant buildings, as well as almost instantaneous worldwide communications and a massively updated warning system since the Asian-wide tsunami of 2005, it is possible that the death toll for even such a massive event will remain relatively low compared to the comparable earthquakes of history. But we don’t know yet; early statistics are always slow to come in such disasters.

For those of us who only watch, it’s a vivid reminder of just how helpless we all are in the face and force of overwhelming nature:

As the commentators in the video said, the flood moves surprisingly fast. And the tsunami wave moves even faster across the ocean—at about jet speed, 500 miles an hour—although by the time this one hit Hawaii, the force of the wave had not only been greatly diminished but warnings had been obeyed and the beaches long since evacuated.

[NOTE: Here’s a previous post I wrote about tsunamis, and disasters in general.

And here’s a pretty decent animation of how a tsunami works.]

[ADDENDUM: Unfortunately, there were some deaths on the US west coast after all.

And speaking of boxing…

The New Neo Posted on by

…which we were the other day, in the comments section on this thread in which I’d said I couldn’t stand the sport—caused me to recall the single worst moment of boxing history I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness.

It occured on June 28, 1997. Does that ring a bell for any of you boxing aficionados? I was with my husband and son visiting my husband’s family, which had paid to watch the Tyson-Holyfield rematch on TV. Yes folks, I got to see the famous ear-chomping in real time, an experience that was a great deal worse (or better, depending on your point of view) than having merely heard about it afterward and watching the replay.

I hadn’t remembered, until I looked it up just now, that Tyson was angry at Holyfield for a head-butt that Tyson thought intentional but that the ref (and most onlookers) considered accidental. Nor did I recall that Tyson came into the ring for the crucial round without his mouthpiece and was ordered to put it in before the action began (so the bite seems to have been planned with malice aforethought; Tyson spit out the mouthpiece again right before he lunged forward to make a meal out of Holyfield’s ear). I do remember my perception that Holyfield had been dominating Tyson in the earlier rounds, and that Tyson had a wild look of desperation in his eyes.

I also hadn’t remembered that Tyson was allowed to continue with the fight after biting Holyfield, a decision almost as shocking as the bite itself, and which enabled him to go on to take a chunk out of Holyfield’s other ear (which fortunately was later surgically re-attached after being found in the ring where Tyson had spit it out—no cannibal, he!).

Mike Tyson is a brutal and angry man. The fact that he’s also clearly troubled, and that his childhood was a vale of tears, goes a little way towards explaining him but certainly does not excuse him. For example, “According to an interview in Details [Tyson’s] first fight was with a bigger youth who had pulled the head off one of Tyson’s pigeons.”

After the Holyfield debacle Tyson should have never been allowed in a ring again. But he was too valuable a money-making commodity to ban forever, and so he fought another day. I couldn’t bring myself to watch a YouTube video of the moment, or post one here; it’s just too repulsive.

Will Wisconsin be our Greece?

The New Neo Posted on by

The bill that restricts collective bargaining for public service unions has been passed in the Wisconsin Senate and the protesters were carried out of the capital building by Madison police, while Wisconsin Republicans receive death threats and there are rumblings of a general strike.

There is no question that this is a front in a larger war. How bad it will get is anyone’s guess, but the unions big shots are well aware of what is at stake. That’s why so much outside money and so many outside agitators have been thrown into the fight. It’s also why Democrat senators have been so desperate to get their way that they’ve taken the unprecedented step (at least, as far as I know) of leaving the state rather than let the democratic process go forward in the usual manner. And although President Obama has been silent lately (as is often his wont), he tends to go quiet while letting others do the dirty work for him.

Peter King McCarthy

The New Neo Posted on by

Ten years ago, shortly after 9/11, I would have been surprised at the furor over Rep. Peter King’s daring to suggest a House hearing on homegrown terrorism that focuses mostly on Islamicist terrorist groups in this country. But not any more.

Here’s a sampler of the way it goes:

This committee cannot live in denial,” King said, accusing critics of trying to “dilute” the focus by turning attention to groups other than Al Qaeda.

“Only Al Qaeda and its Islamist affiliates in this country are part of an international threat to our nation,” King said.

He said the hearings “must go forward, and they will.” He said backing down would amount to a “craven surrender to political correctness.”

But Ellison warned that they could unfairly increase suspicion of Muslim Americans by lumping them together with violent extremists.

“When you assign their violent action to the entire community, you assign collective blame to a whole group,” Ellison said. “This is the very heart of stereotyping and scapegoating.”

But from the time of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, nearly everyone has bent over backwards to make sure the Muslim community as a whole is not targeted. Even the evil George Bush hardly ever used the word “Muslim” or “Islamic” when he spoke of the terrorists, in hopes of holding off the PC crowd, although he had fat chance of ever doing that.

But that hasn’t stopped the allegations from liberals and the left. Just Google “Peter King McCarthy” and you’ll get tons of links making that comparison.

Lost in the fray, of course, is the fact that the abrasive McCarthy was often correct: there were a great many Communists in the government who were seeking to undermine this country, and almost all of McCarthy’s accusations turned out to be true when the Soviet files were opened and confirmed them. His name has become a synonym for “witch hunt,” but witches of the Salem sort are imaginary (pace, Wiccans) and Communists are most assuredly not (see this).

Speaking of those Communists and the nefarious Joe McCarthy, one of the first articles that comes up in a “Peter King McCarthy” search is this piece by Joanna Molloy, which appeared in the NY Daily News back in December of 2010, when the King hearings were already being discussed. Its headline, not atypical of the genre, is “Pete King’s plan to grill Muslims is flashback to Joe McCarthy’s Hollywood witch hunt for Communists.”

Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? I’ll give you a bit more of the article:

Rep. Pete King’s proposal to hold hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims is something straight out of the Bad Ideas Department.

Make that the Worst Ideas Department.

Just substitute the word “movie” for “Muslim” and you’ve got McCarthyism. As in Sen. Joe, who called in actors from Lucille Ball to Judy Holliday simply because they had had naughty liberal thoughts.

McCarthy found nothing on Holliday, but ruined her life and scores of others in Hollywood.

Molloy may write for the Daily News and I may be just a lowly blogger, but even I know that Molloy (and, presumably, the entire editorial staff of the Daily News, which not only did not catch her error but highlighted it in the headline) is confusing McCarthy’s investigations with the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee, with which McCarthy was completely uninvolved.

It’s a common misconception among the uninformed, and a common assertion among the propagandists on the left who would make use of their ignorance. What’s more, to be a little bit nitpicky here, was Judy Holliday’s life actually “ruined” afterward? As a child of the 50s, I seem to recall her being in a ton of shows and movies afterward. And in fact that’s correct:

In 1950, Holliday was the subject of an FBI investigation looking into allegations that she was a Communist. The investigation “did not reveal positive evidence of membership in the Communist Party” and was concluded after three months. Unlike many others tainted by the Communist scandal, she was not blacklisted from movies, but she was blacklisted from performing on radio and television for almost three years.

In 1952, she was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to “explain” why her name had been linked to Communist front organizations…

In November 1956 she returned to Broadway starring in the musical Bells Are Ringing with book and lyrics by her Revuers friends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and directed by Jerome Robbins, for which she won the 1957 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. In 1960 she starred in the film version of Bells Are Ringing…

Holliday went on to a few more movie and Broadway roles before she unfortunately died of breast cancer in 1965, at the age of 43. No doubt Joe McCarthy was responsible for that, as well.

Burglar/intruder calls 9/11 on homeowner

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a lot of those “stupid criminal” things. But this one is in a class by itself.

It’s not really clear what this guy’s intent was; that’s why I wrote “burglar/intruder.” He does seem a bit unbalanced—or, as the homeowner succinctly says, nuts.

NPR’s Vivian Schiller: two strikes and she’s out

The New Neo Posted on by

We last heard of NPR’s Vivian Schiller (not to be confused with NPR’s Ron Schiller) in connection with the network’s Juan Williams firing. She survived that controversy. But in one of those hubris/nemesis moments, she’s been asked to leave by NPR as a result of the recent James O’Keefe’s sting.

In this case, Vivian Schiller doesn’t seem to have been directly involved; she may be the fall guy. However, it’s not that she’s not guilty of maintaining the climate there in which Ron Schiller’s remarks found a comfy home. But note I wrote “maintaining;” she certainly did not create it, nor do I think that climate will change once she’s gone, although I applaud her departure.

No, the only thing that might change at NPR is how free employees and executives might feel to express those views—even in private, because now they know they might be speaking to impostors rigged with recording devices.

One of the reasons this is happening at present is quite simple: it is part of a battle being mounted by the right against funding for NPR. The right has long maintained that NPR has a strong leftist ideology, and the Ron Schilling tapes offer excellent evidence for that charge to those who might somehow have still remained unconvinced. NPR can hardly afford (literally) to allow such a perception to go unchallenged, and thus Vivian Schiller must go in a vain attempt to give the appearance of outrage and change.

In other but related news, Ron Schiller isn’t going to the Aspen Institute after all. He’s toxic at the moment, and rightly so.

Ohio matters, and other news

The New Neo Posted on by

This is good news if true, because Obama has not been so very popular in Ohio lately. Ohio does seem to be a vital state in presidential elections, especially close ones: remember 2004? Here’s a 2009 article that discusses the importance Ohio has played historically in presidential elections.

And here’s some bad news on a different (although not utterly unrelated) topic.

And remember this event that occurred forty years ago (completely unrelated, I might add)? I do. You might have noticed that I’ve never written an article about boxing. That’s no accident; it’s a sport I can’t stand. Your mileage may differ.