March 28, 2011 archive

Our regular featured content-

• Six In The Morning by mishima
• On This Day In History by TheMomCat
• Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat

And these articles-

• Evening Edition by TheMomCat (an able substitute for a daily feature)
• Pique the Geek 20110327: How Nuclear Reactors Work. Part the Second by Translator (a weekly feature)
• Monday Business Edition by ek hornbeck (a weekly feature)
• The Curious Libya ‘opposition’ by Edger
• Cheaters by ek hornbeck
• Evening Edition by TheMomCat (an able substitute for a daily feature)

Special live blogging of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament–

• Regional Finals Day 1

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I believe that America can be greater than it ever was before.

That does not mean that its destined to be. Destiny makes us lazy. Destiny is like those post-Tour de France cycling criteriums where the top three places were guaranteed to the three big TdF heroes taking part ~ if you are in shape and need to keep going, maybe Destiny can keep the momentum going ~ but its no way to build up to race fitness.

Indeed, it does not mean that its at all likely. It may well be massively unlikely. But whether an outcome is likely or unlikely is an issue for passive spectators, watching from the sidelines. The issue for participants is whether the game is worth the candle ~ whether the prize substantial enough to make it worthwhile playing to win.

Our modern mess media trains us to the passive observer role, with their habitual “trackside race call” coverage of public affairs. However, if we participate, that trains us in the active player role, and the real life experience is a deeper lesson than the color and noise on the noise box.

In a video report from McClatchy News, Shashank Bengali reports on the situation at one western Libya/Tunisia border crossing, describing a scene of very few people – mostly non-Libyan migrant workers – leaving Libya, with most who are crossing calling the situation internally in Libya “fine”. What seems to be unclear is why not many Libyan nationals are leaving if conditions in the country are as bad as depicted in western media:

UPDATE 1-Japan says plutonium found at Fukushima

http://af.reuters.com/article/…

TOKYO, March 28 (Reuters) – Plutonium has been found in soil at various points within Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex but does not present a risk to human health, operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said on Monday.

And

Hazardous Radiation Detected Outside Damaged Japanese Reactor

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/…

Radiation levels that can prove fatal were detected outside reactor buildings at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant for the first time, complicating efforts to contain the worst disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

{This may not be put together well as I’ve got some thirty plus years of thoughts rushing through my head, have since watching this last night,  as I lived in and watched all this go down and the growth of their total control, not only here but across this planet, as compared to the first some thirty years of growing into and starting in the working professions.}

That own our Government, now are covered under the First Ammendment, and ‘our’ representatives fighting so hard for while now gaining millions in campaign contributions, from their real employers, because corporations are now individual citizens and can give unlimited funds to garner what all they want!

I thought foreign contributions to political campaigns were illegal, that’s what all the Republicans were screaming about any Democratic Candidate from President on down for these past decades!

Are they now individual citizens of other countries as well, buying the political needs not for good business practices but all for the bottom line.

Libya: coalition attacks Sirte for first time

Coalition planes launched air strikes on Sirte, Col Muammar Gaddafi’s home town, for the first time on Sunday night.

2:39AM BST 28 Mar 2011

Libyan television confirmed the Gaddafi stronghold had been the target of strikes by “the colonial aggressor”, as had Tripoli, and there was a large deployment of troops on the streets of Sirte.

Nato commanders say Libyan regime forces have begun digging in to make a stand in Sirte, raising the prospect that a bloody battle lies ahead as rebel forces barrel westward.

Regime forces who retreated in the face of the rebel advance have begun locating their armour and artillery inside civilian buildings in Sirte, Nato sources said, a tactic designed to make air strikes fraught with risk.

Sirte, which Col Gaddafi repeatedly tried to turn into Libya’s capital, is dominated by members of his tribe, the Gaddafi, who remain largely loyal to the regime.

For the search terms “worst case, Fukushima,” Google returns the same very short story from “experts” all over the world.

And here’s the official story from the Chief Scientific Officer of the entire United Kingdom, Professor John Beddington!

Let me now talk about what would be a reasonable worst case scenario.  If the Japanese fail to keep the reactors cool and fail to keep the pressure in the containment vessels at an appropriate level, you can get this, you know, the dramatic word “meltdown”.  But what does that actually mean?  What a meltdown involves is the basic reactor core melts, and as it melts, nuclear material will fall through to the floor of the container. There it will react with concrete and other materials … that is likely… remember this is the reasonable worst case, we don’t think anything worse is going to happen.  In this reasonable worst case you get an explosion.  You get some radioactive material going up to about 500 metres up into the air.  Now, that’s really serious, but it’s serious again for the local area.  It’s not serious for elsewhere even if you get a combination of that explosion it would only have nuclear material going in to the air up to about 500 metres.

So if only we can persuade all those melting reactors to behave reasonably, like an official scientist, then even the worst case isn’t “serious for elsewhere!”

Hurrah!

And likewise at Scientific American, where “Nuclear Experts Explain Worst-Case Scenario at Fukushima!”

And just what is that worst-case scenario? “They’re venting in order to keep the containment vessel from failing. But if a core melts, it will slump to the bottom of the reactor vessel, probably melt through the reactor vessel onto the containment floor. It’s likely to spread as a molten pool-like lava-to the edge of the steel shell and melt through. That would result in a containment failure in a matter of less than a day.”

Containment failure! And that’s the end of the SciAm story! They don’t even get as far as the Official Chief Scientific Officer, who mentioned a relatively small explosion, which wouldn’t be much of a problem outside the the immediate environs of Fukushima Prefecture.

But we might also ask ourselves how accurate all those “nuclear experts” have been so far.

Are they getting it right, or getting it wrong, and how far wrong?

For example, when they sent a couple of engineers wading into radioactive water at Fukushima #2 just a couple of days ago, how far wrong were the “nuclear experts” about how much radioactivity thoise unfortunate waders would encounter?

They were wrong by a factor of 10,000!

The real situation was ten thousand times worse than their reasonable prediction!

So maybe we should ask a few common-sense questions about the reassuring official story, such as…