tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88444865379016412412024-03-13T14:19:51.745-07:00WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKEUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger54125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-2557560687185768862007-05-08T14:48:00.000-07:002007-05-08T14:55:38.600-07:00WAS "WITT REPORT" A FRAUD ??<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisx0KX55VC_w-WIZ9im4iEFFWENLAJo7nv1BaqfHkB13tAaqs7ne2p9_85D6djZtzVn6FVzWU4DsUFuSa9qVhudYG5Kf47-90VjLoEbQH56jKzYcgmSWGPvyjemiGhx42OLpeu1yixlYQ/s1600-h/beriwal.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisx0KX55VC_w-WIZ9im4iEFFWENLAJo7nv1BaqfHkB13tAaqs7ne2p9_85D6djZtzVn6FVzWU4DsUFuSa9qVhudYG5Kf47-90VjLoEbQH56jKzYcgmSWGPvyjemiGhx42OLpeu1yixlYQ/s400/beriwal.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5062310576684045330" /></a><br />"Witt Report" Fraudulent, Plagiarized ?<br /><br />Did an overly money-hungry James Lee Witt hire an icompetent to write his famous report supposedly condemning Indian Point? Is his ghostwriter, Madhu Beriwal guilty of the failed New Orleans plan, and the drowning deaths of 1000 people? Here's an article from Sourcewatch--Truth in Media.<br /> <br />http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Madhu_Beriwal<br /> <br />Madhu Beriwal<br />From SourceWatch<br />Madhu Beriwal is founder, president, and CEO of Innovative Emergency Management (IEM) of Arlington, Virginia.<br />Contents<br />· 1 Big Political Contributions<br />· 2 Other Activity<br />· 3 Related SourceWatch Resources<br />· 4 External Links<br />· 4.1 Articles & Commentary<br /> <br />GOP Contributions<br />Beriwal is "a big-time contributor to Politicians.. She's given thousands of dollars to pols, including Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, Louisiana Rep. Bobby Jindal, Rep. Richard Baker of Louisiana, the National Republican Congressional Committee, former Arkansas Sen. Tim Hutchinson. Vitter was the largest recipient of funds from Beriwal." [1]<br />Other Activity<br />Madhu Beriwal, President of Innovative Emergency Management (IEM), had no experience in hurricane emergency management. Yet the FEMA contracted out New Orleans evacuation planning to IEM. They were paid $500,000 to come up with an emergency evacuation plan for New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. They spent it on a hurricane simulation called Hurricane Pam that was marked with bitter in-fighting between state and local emergency management officials. They never came up with the evacuation plan. Over a 1000 people drowned due to IEM's failure to simulate a major hurricane hit on New Orleans properly.<br /><br />Beriwal is also author of the NY Power Authority's Witt Report [2], a review of Indian Point nuclear power plant's evacuation plan. Prior to ghost writing the Witt Report, she had no prior experience in nuclear emergencies, and in fact simply copied entire chapters of the EPA radiation manual, as the substance of her (and Witt's) report. In an article for September 2003 Homeland Protection Professional [3] Madhu summarizes her advice. "People will be people" she says. Implying they are wary of government authority and will do things their own way - in panic. She seems to be blaming the victims for their misfortune. At any rate, it gives Beriwal a way to not do a competent job, and then say that people will mess themselves up anyway, so why bother.<br /><br />James Lee Witt [4], who subcontracted the NY job (and others?) to Beriwal's firm, was FEMA Director under Bill Clinton and later private consultant for Florida's Governor Jeb Bush , and for Nextel Corporation. Witt spent the months after Katrina riding around Mississippi & Louisiana in a 55 foot luxury RV, stopping to sell Nextel phone contracts to municipal authorities in areas where phone service was out. His money making disaster profiteering resulted in his cynically bestowed nickname "Master of Disaster". While thousands mourned dead loved ones, lost homes, and slept on cots in the streets, Witt made over 3 million dollars from his "Fuss-Bus" travels during the immediate post-Katrina weeks. Another big open question is why no one is doing anything about IEM's complete and total failure in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Also called into question is the veracity of the plagiarized "Witt Report", and whether Beriwal had the expertise required to put out such a document. It might even be said that thousands pinning their opposition to Indian Point on Witt, have pinned their beliefs on a fraud. Concerned citizens should be asking tough questions about Madhu Beriwal and IEM.<br /> <br />Related SourceWatch Resources<br />· FEMA contractors<br />· "Hurricane Pam" simulation<br /> <br />External Links<br />[edit]<br />Articles & Commentary<br />· Wayne Madsen, "FEMA Privatized Hurricane Disaster Recovery Planning for New Orleans and Southeastern Louisiana. Firms that received the contract are big GOP contributors," Global Research, September 7, 2005.<br />· Tim Padgett, "Preparing for the Worst. Madhu Beriwal, who helped New Orleans plan for a hurricane disaster, reflects on failures and lessons," Time, September 12, 2005.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-1209795807514120522007-05-06T02:46:00.000-07:002007-05-06T02:48:37.957-07:00You've read the spin....Now Read The Facts<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkkzAN4P7asvRXAal-5sGxFWOa3-pfsW2HYFQSRjFamygEIisreIric3P70R9UwfppIIxt6IdM8P0a055-Euze4T3JNPy0Tre5Rl6olAdubWdM4rkbREWLjktcF2exl4hGgO5ZplqUdvs/s1600-h/GAQP_1.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5058502169053139874" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkkzAN4P7asvRXAal-5sGxFWOa3-pfsW2HYFQSRjFamygEIisreIric3P70R9UwfppIIxt6IdM8P0a055-Euze4T3JNPy0Tre5Rl6olAdubWdM4rkbREWLjktcF2exl4hGgO5ZplqUdvs/s400/GAQP_1.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power<br /><br /><br />Your typical city dweller doesn’t know just how much coal and uranium he burns each year. On Lake Shore Drive in Chicago—where the numbers are fairly representative of urban America as a whole—the answer is (roughly): four tons and a few ounces. In round numbers, tons of coal generate about half of the typical city’s electric power; ounces of uranium, about 17 percent; natural gas and hydro take care of the rest. New York is a bit different: an apartment dweller on the Upper West Side substitutes two tons of oil (or the equivalent in natural gas) for Chicago’s four tons of coal. The oil-tons get burned at plants like the huge oil/gas unit in Astoria, Queens. The uranium ounces get split at Indian Point in Westchester, 35 miles north of the city, as well as at the Ginna, Fitzpatrick, and Nine Mile Point units upstate, and at additional plants in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New Hampshire.<br />That’s the stunning thing about nuclear power: tiny quantities of raw material can do so much. A bundle of enriched-uranium fuel-rods that could fit into a two-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen would power the city for a year: furnaces, espresso machines, subways, streetlights, stock tickers, Times Square, everything—even our cars and taxis, if we could conveniently plug them into the grid. True, you don’t want to stack fuel rods in midtown Manhattan; you don’t in fact want to stack them casually on top of one another anywhere. But in suitable reactors, situated, say, 50 miles from the city on a few hundred acres of suitably fortified and well-guarded real estate, two rooms’ worth of fuel could electrify it all.<br />Think of our solitary New Yorker on the Upper West Side as a 1,400-watt bulb that never sleeps—that’s the national per-capita average demand for electric power from homes, factories, businesses, the lot. Our average citizen burns about twice as bright at 4 PM in August, and a lot dimmer at 4 AM in December; grown-ups burn more than kids, the rich more than the poor; but it all averages out: 14 floor lamps per person, lit round the clock. Convert this same number back into a utility’s supply-side jargon, and a million people need roughly 1.4 “gigs” of power—1.4 gigawatts (GW). Running at peak power, Entergy’s two nuclear units at Indian Point generate just under 2 GW. So just four Indian Points could take care of New York City’s 7-GW round-the-clock average. Six could handle its peak load of about 11.5 GW. And if we had all-electric engines, machines, and heaters out at the receiving end, another ten or so could power all the cars, ovens, furnaces—everything else in the city that oil or gas currently fuels.<br />For such a nuclear-powered future to arrive, however, we’ll need to get beyond our nuclear-power past. In the now-standard histories, the beginning of the end of nuclear power arrived on March 28, 1979, with the meltdown of the uranium core at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The Chernobyl disaster seven years later drove the final nail into the nuclear coffin. It didn’t matter that the Three Mile Island containment vessel had done its job and prevented any significant release of radioactivity, or that Soviet reactors operated within a system that couldn’t build a safe toaster oven. Uranium was finished.<br />Three Mile Island came on the heels of the first great energy shock to hit America. On October 19, 1973, King Faisal ordered a 25 percent reduction in Saudi Arabia’s oil shipments to the United States, launching the Arab oil embargo. Oil supplies would tighten and prices would rise from then on, experts predicted. It would take some time, but oil was finished, too.<br />Five months after Three Mile Island, the nation’s first energy secretary summed up our predicament: “The energy future is bleak,” James R. Schlesinger declared, “and is likely to grow bleaker in the decade ahead. We must rapidly adjust our economics to a condition of chronic stringency in traditional energy supplies.” Fortunately, some argued, the U.S. could manage on less—much less. Smaller, more fuel-efficient cars were gaining favor, and rising gas prices would curb demand. The nation certainly didn’t need any new giant electric power plants—efficiency and the development of renewable sources of power would suffice. “The long-run supply curve for electricity is as flat as the Kansas horizon,” noted one right-thinking energy sage.<br />In the ensuing decades, however, American oil consumption rose 15 percent and electricity use almost doubled. Many people aren’t happy about it. Protecting our oil-supply lines entangles us with feudal theocracies and the fanatical sects that they spawn. The coal that we burn to generate so much of our electricity pollutes the air and may warm the planet. What to do? All sober and thoughtful energy pundits at the New York Times, Greenpeace, and the Harvard Divinity School agree: the answer to both problems is . . . efficiency and the development of renewable sources of power. Nevertheless, the secretary of energy, his boss (now a Texas oilman, not a Georgia peanut farmer), and the rest of the country should look elsewhere.<br />The U.S. today consumes about 100 quads—100 quadrillion BTUs—of raw thermal energy per year. We do three basic things with it: generate electricity (about 40 percent of the raw energy consumed), move vehicles (30 percent), and produce heat (30 percent). Oil is the fuel of transportation, of course. We principally use natural gas to supply raw heat, though it’s now making steady inroads into electric power generation. Fueling electric power plants are mainly (in descending order) coal, uranium, natural gas, and rainfall, by way of hydroelectricity.<br />This sharp segmentation emerged relatively recently, and there’s no reason to think it’s permanent. After all, developing economies use trees and pasture as fuel for heat and transportation, and don’t generate much electricity at all. A century ago, coal was the all-purpose fuel of industrial economies: coal furnaces provided heat, and coal-fired steam engines powered trains, factories, and the early electric power plants. From the 1930s until well into the 1970s, oil fueled not just cars but many electric power plants, too. And by 2020, electricity almost certainly will have become the new cross-cutting “fuel” in both stationary and mobile applications.<br />That shift is already under way. About 60 percent of the fuel we use today isn’t oil but coal, uranium, natural gas, and gravity—all making electricity. Electricity has met almost all of the growth in U.S. energy demand since the 1980s. About 60 percent of our GDP now comes from industries and services that use electricity as their front-end “fuel”—in 1950, the figure was only 20 percent. The fastest growth sectors of the economy—information technology and telecom, notably—depend entirely on electricity for fuel, almost none of it oil-generated. Electrically powered information technology accounts for some 60 percent of new capital spending.<br />Electricity is taking over ever more of the thermal sector, too. A microwave oven displaces much of what a gas stove once did in a kitchen. So, too, lasers, magnetic fields, microwaves, and other forms of high-intensity photon power provide more precise, calibrated heating than do conventional ovens in manufacturing and the industrial processing of materials. These electric cookers (broadly defined) are now replacing conventional furnaces, ovens, dryers, and welders to heat air, water, foods, and chemicals, to cure paints and glues, to forge steel, and to weld ships. Over the next two decades, such trends will move another 15 percent or so of our energy economy from conventional thermal to electrically powered processes. And that will shift about 15 percent of our oil-and-gas demand to whatever primary fuels we’ll then be using to generate electricity.<br />Electricity is also taking over the power train in transportation—not the engine itself, but the system that drives power throughout the car. Running in confined tunnels as they do, subways had to be all-electric from the get-go. More recently, diesel-electric locomotives and many of the monster trucks used in mining have made the transition to electric drive trains. Though the oil-fired combustion engine is still there, it’s now just an onboard electric generator that propels only electrons.<br />Most significantly, the next couple of decades will see us convert to the hybrid gasoline-and-electric car. A steadily rising fraction of the power produced under the hood of a car already is used to generate electricity: electrical modules are replacing components that belts, gears, pulleys, and shafts once drove. Steering, suspension, brakes, fans, pumps, and valves will eventually go electric; in the end, electricity will drive the wheels, too. Gas prices and environmental mandates have little to do with this changeover. The electric drive train simply delivers better performance, lower cost, and less weight.<br />The policy implications are enormous. Outfitted with a fully electric power train, most of the car—everything but its prime mover—looks like a giant electrical appliance. This appliance won’t run any great distance on batteries alone, given today’s battery technology. But a substantial battery pack on board will provide surges of power when needed. And that makes possible at least some “refueling” of the car from the electricity grid. As cars get more electric, an infrastructure of battery-recharging stations will grow apace, probably in driveways and parking lots, where most cars spend most of their time.<br />Once you’ve got the wheels themselves running on electricity, the basic economics strongly favor getting that electricity from the grid if you can. Burning $2-a-gallon gasoline, the power generated by current hybrid-car engines costs about 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. Many utilities, though, sell off-peak power for much less: 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. The nationwide residential price is still only 8.5 cents or so. (Peak rates in Manhattan are higher because of the city’s heavy dependence on oil and gas, but not enough to change the basic arithmetic.) Grid kilowatts are cheaper because cheaper fuels generate them and because utility power plants run a lot more efficiently than car engines.<br />The gas tank and combustion engine won’t disappear anytime soon, but in the imminent future, grid power will (in effect) begin to top off the tank in between the short trips that account for most driving. All-electric vehicles flopped in the 1990s because batteries can’t store sufficient power for long weekend trips. But plug-in hybrids do have a gasoline tank for the long trips. And the vast majority of the most fuel-hungry trips are under six miles—within the range of the 2 to 5 kWh capacity of the onboard nickel-metal-hydride batteries in hybrids already on the road, and easily within the range of emerging automotive-class lithium batteries. Nationally, some 10 percent of hybrid cars could end up running almost entirely on the grid, as they travel less than six miles per day. Stick an extra 90 pounds—$800 worth—of nickel-metal-hydride batteries in a hybrid, recharge in garages and parking lots, and you can shift roughly 25 percent of a typical driver’s fuel-hungriest miles to the grid. Urban drivers could go long stretches without going near a gas station. The technology for replacing (roughly) one pint of gasoline with one pound of coal or under one ounce of uranium to feed one kilowatt-hour of power to the wheels is now close at hand.<br />So today we use 40 percent of our fuel to power the plug, and the plug powers 60 percent of GDP. And with the ascent of microwaves, lasers, hybrid wheels, and such, we’re moving to 60 and 80 percent, respectively, soon. And then, in due course, 100/100. We’re turning to electricity as fuel because it can do more, faster, in much less space—indeed, it’s by far the fastest and purest form of power yet tamed for ubiquitous use. Small wonder that demand for it keeps growing.<br />We’ve been meeting half of that new demand by burning an extra 400 million tons of coal a year, with coal continuing to supply half of our wired power. Natural gas, the fossil fuel grudgingly favored by most environmentalists, has helped meet the new demand, too: it’s back at 16 percent of electricity generated, where it was two decades ago, after dropping sharply for a time. Astonishingly, over this same period, uranium’s share of U.S. electricity has also risen—from 11 percent to its current 20 percent. Part of the explanation is more nuclear power plants. Even though Three Mile Island put an end to the commissioning of new facilities, some already under construction at the time later opened, with the plant count peaking at 112 in 1990. Three Mile Island also impelled plant operators to develop systematic procedures for sharing information and expertise, and plants that used to run seven months per year now run almost eleven. Uranium has thus displaced about eight percentage points of oil, and five points of hydroelectric, in the expanding electricity market.<br />Renewable fuels, by contrast, made no visible dent in energy supplies, despite the hopes of Greens and the benefits of government-funded research, subsidies, and tax breaks. About a half billion kWh of electricity came from solar power in 2002—roughly 0.013 percent of the U.S. total. Wind power contributed another 0.27 percent. Fossil and nuclear fuels still completely dominate the U.S. energy supply, as in all industrialized economies.<br />The other great hope of environmentalists, efficiency, did improve over the last couple of decades—very considerably, in fact. Air conditioners, car engines, industrial machines, lightbulbs, refrigerator motors—without exception, all do much more, with much less, than they used to. Yet in aggregate, they burn more fuel, too. Boosting efficiency actually raises consumption, as counterintuitive as that sounds. The more efficient a car, the cheaper the miles; the more efficient a refrigerator, the cheaper the ice; and at the end of the day, we use more efficient technology so much more that total energy consumption goes up, not down.<br />We’re burning our 40 quads of raw fuel to generate about 3.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year; if the automotive plug-and-play future does unfold on schedule, we’ll need as much as 7 trillion kWh per year by 2025. How should we generate the extra trillions of kilowatt-hours?<br />With hydrogen, the most optimistic Green visionaries reply—produced by solar cells or windmills. But it’s not possible to take such proposals seriously. New York City consumes so much energy that you’d need, at a minimum, to cover two cities with solar cells to power a single city (see “How Cities Green the Planet,” Winter 2000). No conceivable mix of solar and wind could come close to supplying the trillions of additional kilowatt-hours of power we’ll soon need.<br />Nuclear power could do it—easily. In all key technical respects, it is the antithesis of solar power. A quad’s worth of solar-powered wood is a huge forest—beautiful to behold, but bulky and heavy. Pound for pound, coal stores about twice as much heat. Oil beats coal by about twice as much again. And an ounce of enriched-uranium fuel equals about 4 tons of coal, or 15 barrels of oil. That’s why minuscule quantities contained in relatively tiny reactors can power a metropolis.<br />What’s more, North America has vast deposits of uranium ore, and scooping it up is no real challenge. Enrichment accounts for about half of the fuel’s cost, and enrichment technologies keep improving. Proponents of solar and wind power maintain—correctly—that the underlying technologies for these energy sources keep getting cheaper, but so do those that squeeze power out of conventional fuels. The lasers coming out of the same semiconductor fabs that build solar cells could enrich uranium a thousand times more efficiently than the gaseous-diffusion processes currently used.<br />And we also know this: left to its own devices, the market has not pursued thin, low-energy-density fuels, however cheap, but has instead paid steep premiums for fuels that pack more energy into less weight and space, and for power plants that pump greater power out of smaller engines, furnaces, generators, reactors, and turbines. Until the 1970s, engineering and economic imperatives had been pushing the fuel mix inexorably up the power-density curve, from wood to coal to oil to uranium. And the same held true on the demand side, with consumers steadily shifting toward fuels carrying more power, delivered faster, in less space.<br />Then King Faisal and Three Mile Island shattered our confidence and convinced regulators, secretaries of energy, and even a president that just about everything that the economists and engineers thought they knew about energy was wrong. So wrong that we had to reverse completely the extraordinarily successful power policies of the past.<br />New York has certainly felt the effects of that reversal. In 1965, the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) announced plans to build a $75 million nuclear plant in Suffolk County, to come on line by 1973; soon after, it purchased a 455-acre site between Shoreham and Wading River. A bit later, LILCO decided to increase Shoreham’s size and said it wanted to build several other nuclear plants in the area. Public resistance and federal regulators delayed Shoreham’s completion. Then Three Mile Island happened. In the aftermath, regulators required plant operators to devise evacuation plans in coordination with state and local governments. In early 1983, newly elected governor Mario Cuomo and the Suffolk County legislature both declared that no evacuation plan would ever be feasible and safe. That was that. By the time the state fully decommissioned Shoreham in 1994, its price tag had reached $6 billion—and the plant had never started full-power commercial operation. To pay for it all, Long Island electric rates skyrocketed.<br />What scared many New Yorkers—and thus many politicians—away from nuclear power was what had originally attracted the engineers and the utility economists to it: nuclear facilities use a unique fuel, burned, in its fashion, in relatively tiny reactors, to generate gargantuan amounts of power. Do it all just right, end to end, and you get cheap, abundant power, and King Faisal can’t do a thing about it. But the raw material itself, packing so much power into so little material, is inherently dangerous. Sufficiently bad engineering can result in a Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl. And these days, there’s the fear that poor security might enable terrorists to pull off something even worse.<br />How worried should we really be in 2005 that accidents or attacks might release and disperse a nuclear power plant’s radioactive fuel? Not very. Our civilian nuclear industry has dramatically improved its procedures and safety-related hardware since 1979. Several thousand reactor-years of statistics since Three Mile Island clearly show that these power plants are extraordinarily reliable in normal operation.<br />And uranium’s combination of power and super-density makes the fuel less of a terror risk, not more, at least from an engineering standpoint. It’s easy to “overbuild” the protective walls and containment systems of nuclear facilities, since—like the pyramids—the payload they’re built to shield is so small. Protecting skyscrapers is hard; no builder can afford to erect a hundred times more wall than usable space. Guaranteeing the integrity of a jumbo jet’s fuel tanks is impossible; the tanks have to fly. Shielding a nuclear plant’s tiny payload is easy—just erect more steel, pour more concrete, and build tougher perimeters.<br />In fact, it’s a safety challenge that we have already met. Today’s plants split atoms behind super-thick layers of steel and concrete; future plants would boast thicker protection still. All the numbers, and the strong consensus in the technical community, reinforce the projections made two decades ago: it is extremely unlikely that there will ever be a serious release of nuclear materials from a U.S. reactor.<br />What about the economic cost of nuclear power? Wind and sun are free, of course. But if the cost of fuel were all that mattered, the day of too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power would now be here—nearer, certainly, than too-cheap-to-meter solar power. Raw fuel accounts for over half the delivered cost of electricity generated in gas-fired turbines, about one-third of coal-fired power, and just a tenth of nuclear electricity. Factor in the cost of capital equipment, and the cheapest electrons come from uranium and coal, not sun and wind. What we pay for at our electric meter is increasingly like what we pay for at fancy restaurants: not the raw calories, but the fine linen, the service, and the chef’s ineffable artistry. In our overall energy accounts, the sophisticated power-conversion hardware matters more every year, and the cost of raw fuel matters less.<br />This in itself is great news for America. We’re good at large-scale hardware; we build it ourselves and keep building it cheaper. The average price of U.S. electricity fell throughout the twentieth century, and it has kept falling since, except in egregiously mismanaged markets such as California’s.<br />The cheap, plentiful power does terrific things for labor productivity and overall employment. As Lewis E. Lehrman notes, rising employment strongly correlates with rising supplies of low-cost energy. It takes energy to get the increasingly mobile worker to the increasingly distant workplace, and energy to process materials and power the increasingly advanced machines that shape and assemble those materials.<br />Most of the world, Europe aside, now recognizes this point. Workers in Asia and India are swiftly gaining access to the powered machines that steadily boosted the productivity of the American factory worker throughout the twentieth century. And the electricity driving those machines comes from power plants designed—and often built—by U.S. vendors. The power is a lot less expensive than ours, though, since it is generated the old-fashioned forget-the-environment way. There is little bother about protecting the river or scrubbing the smoke. China’s answer to the 2-gigawatt Hoover Dam on the Colorado River is the Three Gorges project, an 18-gigawatt dam on the Yangtze River. Combine cheaper supplies of energy with ready access to heavy industrial machines, and it’s hard to see how foreign laborers cannot close the productivity gap that has historically enabled American workers to remain competitive at considerably higher wages. Unless, that is, the United States keeps on pushing the productivity of its own workforce out ahead of its competitors. That—inevitably—means expanding our power supply and keeping it affordable, and deploying even more advanced technologies of powered production. Nuclear power would help keep the twenty-first-century U.S. economy globally competitive.<br />Greens don’t want to hear it, but nuclear power makes the most environmental sense, too. Nuclear wastes pose no serious engineering problems. Uranium is such an energy-rich fuel that the actual volume of waste is tiny compared with that of other fuels, and is easily converted from its already-stable ceramic form as a fuel into an even more stable glass-like compound, and just as easily deposited in deep geological formations, themselves stable for tens of millions of years. And what has Green antinuclear activism achieved since the seventies? Not the reduction in demand for energy that it had hoped for but a massive increase in the use of coal, which burns less clean than uranium.<br />Many Greens think that they have a good grip on the likely trajectory of the planet’s climate over the next 100 years. If we keep burning fossil fuels at current rates, their climate models tell them, we’ll face a meltdown on a much larger scale than Chernobyl’s, beginning with the polar ice caps. Saving an extra 400 million tons of coal here and there—roughly the amount of carbon that the United States would have to stop burning to comply with the Kyoto Protocol today—would make quite a difference, we’re told.<br />But serious Greens must face reality. Short of some convulsion that drastically shrinks the economy, demand for electricity will go on rising. Total U.S. electricity consumption will increase another 20 to 30 percent, at least, over the next ten years. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, moreover, will let the grid go cold—not even if that means burning yet another 400 million more tons of coal. Not even if that means melting the ice caps and putting much of Bangladesh under water. No governor or president wants to be the next Gray Davis, recalled from office when the lights go out.<br />The power has to come from somewhere. Sun and wind will never come close to supplying it. Earnest though they are, the people who argue otherwise are the folks who brought us 400 million extra tons of coal a year. The one practical technology that could decisively shift U.S. carbon emissions in the near term would displace coal with uranium, since uranium burns emission-free. It’s time even for Greens to embrace the atom.<br />It must surely be clear by now, too, that the political costs of depending so heavily on oil from the Middle East are just too great. We need to find a way to stop funneling $25 billion a year (or so) of our energy dollars into churning cauldrons of hate and violence. By sharply curtailing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, we would greatly expand the range of feasible political and military options in dealing with the countries that breed the terrorists.<br />The best thing we can do to decrease the Middle East’s hold on us is to turn off the spigot ourselves. For economic, ecological, and geopolitical reasons, U.S. policymakers ought to promote electrification on the demand side, and nuclear fuel on the supply side, wherever they reasonably can.<br /><br />Tags Indian Point, American Survival, Global Warming, High Tech Energy<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-87035294600478408462007-05-04T11:09:00.000-07:002007-05-04T11:10:48.671-07:00WHY INDIAN POINT IS ESSENTIAL<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBthL5Ka2KdJll78Bl9009wfQDqawhWdEmzIubWbRdNQY0cvP-apZT2EygXr7KwWPcyw8yrG-URoOBTRkAlbBr6BgTXaNqgVOrj_Hm2rQIATAeJy70zN1vcuWcZ4pZ42ZcylqUC-2Bivc/s1600-h/AFTERSHIT.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBthL5Ka2KdJll78Bl9009wfQDqawhWdEmzIubWbRdNQY0cvP-apZT2EygXr7KwWPcyw8yrG-URoOBTRkAlbBr6BgTXaNqgVOrj_Hm2rQIATAeJy70zN1vcuWcZ4pZ42ZcylqUC-2Bivc/s400/AFTERSHIT.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5060537803162817522" /></a><br />http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_nuclear_power.html<br /><br />Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power<br />Peter W. Huber, Mark P. Mills<br /><br />Your typical city dweller doesn’t know just how much coal and uranium he burns each year. On Lake Shore Drive in Chicago—where the numbers are fairly representative of urban America as a whole—the answer is (roughly): four tons and a few ounces. In round numbers, tons of coal generate about half of the typical city’s electric power; ounces of uranium, about 17 percent; natural gas and hydro take care of the rest. New York is a bit different: an apartment dweller on the Upper West Side substitutes two tons of oil (or the equivalent in natural gas) for Chicago’s four tons of coal. The oil-tons get burned at plants like the huge oil/gas unit in Astoria, Queens. The uranium ounces get split at Indian Point in Westchester, 35 miles north of the city, as well as at the Ginna, Fitzpatrick, and Nine Mile Point units upstate, and at additional plants in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New Hampshire.<br />That’s the stunning thing about nuclear power: tiny quantities of raw material can do so much. A bundle of enriched-uranium fuel-rods that could fit into a two-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen would power the city for a year: furnaces, espresso machines, subways, streetlights, stock tickers, Times Square, everything—even our cars and taxis, if we could conveniently plug them into the grid. True, you don’t want to stack fuel rods in midtown Manhattan; you don’t in fact want to stack them casually on top of one another anywhere. But in suitable reactors, situated, say, 50 miles from the city on a few hundred acres of suitably fortified and well-guarded real estate, two rooms’ worth of fuel could electrify it all.<br />Think of our solitary New Yorker on the Upper West Side as a 1,400-watt bulb that never sleeps—that’s the national per-capita average demand for electric power from homes, factories, businesses, the lot. Our average citizen burns about twice as bright at 4 PM in August, and a lot dimmer at 4 AM in December; grown-ups burn more than kids, the rich more than the poor; but it all averages out: 14 floor lamps per person, lit round the clock. Convert this same number back into a utility’s supply-side jargon, and a million people need roughly 1.4 “gigs” of power—1.4 gigawatts (GW). Running at peak power, Entergy’s two nuclear units at Indian Point generate just under 2 GW. So just four Indian Points could take care of New York City’s 7-GW round-the-clock average. Six could handle its peak load of about 11.5 GW. And if we had all-electric engines, machines, and heaters out at the receiving end, another ten or so could power all the cars, ovens, furnaces—everything else in the city that oil or gas currently fuels.<br />For such a nuclear-powered future to arrive, however, we’ll need to get beyond our nuclear-power past. In the now-standard histories, the beginning of the end of nuclear power arrived on March 28, 1979, with the meltdown of the uranium core at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The Chernobyl disaster seven years later drove the final nail into the nuclear coffin. It didn’t matter that the Three Mile Island containment vessel had done its job and prevented any significant release of radioactivity, or that Soviet reactors operated within a system that couldn’t build a safe toaster oven. Uranium was finished.<br />Three Mile Island came on the heels of the first great energy shock to hit America. On October 19, 1973, King Faisal ordered a 25 percent reduction in Saudi Arabia’s oil shipments to the United States, launching the Arab oil embargo. Oil supplies would tighten and prices would rise from then on, experts predicted. It would take some time, but oil was finished, too.<br />Five months after Three Mile Island, the nation’s first energy secretary summed up our predicament: “The energy future is bleak,” James R. Schlesinger declared, “and is likely to grow bleaker in the decade ahead. We must rapidly adjust our economics to a condition of chronic stringency in traditional energy supplies.” Fortunately, some argued, the U.S. could manage on less—much less. Smaller, more fuel-efficient cars were gaining favor, and rising gas prices would curb demand. The nation certainly didn’t need any new giant electric power plants—efficiency and the development of renewable sources of power would suffice. “The long-run supply curve for electricity is as flat as the Kansas horizon,” noted one right-thinking energy sage.<br />In the ensuing decades, however, American oil consumption rose 15 percent and electricity use almost doubled. Many people aren’t happy about it. Protecting our oil-supply lines entangles us with feudal theocracies and the fanatical sects that they spawn. The coal that we burn to generate so much of our electricity pollutes the air and may warm the planet. What to do? All sober and thoughtful energy pundits at the New York Times, Greenpeace, and the Harvard Divinity School agree: the answer to both problems is . . . efficiency and the development of renewable sources of power. Nevertheless, the secretary of energy, his boss (now a Texas oilman, not a Georgia peanut farmer), and the rest of the country should look elsewhere.<br />The U.S. today consumes about 100 quads—100 quadrillion BTUs—of raw thermal energy per year. We do three basic things with it: generate electricity (about 40 percent of the raw energy consumed), move vehicles (30 percent), and produce heat (30 percent). Oil is the fuel of transportation, of course. We principally use natural gas to supply raw heat, though it’s now making steady inroads into electric power generation. Fueling electric power plants are mainly (in descending order) coal, uranium, natural gas, and rainfall, by way of hydroelectricity.<br />This sharp segmentation emerged relatively recently, and there’s no reason to think it’s permanent. After all, developing economies use trees and pasture as fuel for heat and transportation, and don’t generate much electricity at all. A century ago, coal was the all-purpose fuel of industrial economies: coal furnaces provided heat, and coal-fired steam engines powered trains, factories, and the early electric power plants. From the 1930s until well into the 1970s, oil fueled not just cars but many electric power plants, too. And by 2020, electricity almost certainly will have become the new cross-cutting “fuel” in both stationary and mobile applications.<br />That shift is already under way. About 60 percent of the fuel we use today isn’t oil but coal, uranium, natural gas, and gravity—all making electricity. Electricity has met almost all of the growth in U.S. energy demand since the 1980s. About 60 percent of our GDP now comes from industries and services that use electricity as their front-end “fuel”—in 1950, the figure was only 20 percent. The fastest growth sectors of the economy—information technology and telecom, notably—depend entirely on electricity for fuel, almost none of it oil-generated. Electrically powered information technology accounts for some 60 percent of new capital spending.<br />Electricity is taking over ever more of the thermal sector, too. A microwave oven displaces much of what a gas stove once did in a kitchen. So, too, lasers, magnetic fields, microwaves, and other forms of high-intensity photon power provide more precise, calibrated heating than do conventional ovens in manufacturing and the industrial processing of materials. These electric cookers (broadly defined) are now replacing conventional furnaces, ovens, dryers, and welders to heat air, water, foods, and chemicals, to cure paints and glues, to forge steel, and to weld ships. Over the next two decades, such trends will move another 15 percent or so of our energy economy from conventional thermal to electrically powered processes. And that will shift about 15 percent of our oil-and-gas demand to whatever primary fuels we’ll then be using to generate electricity.<br />Electricity is also taking over the power train in transportation—not the engine itself, but the system that drives power throughout the car. Running in confined tunnels as they do, subways had to be all-electric from the get-go. More recently, diesel-electric locomotives and many of the monster trucks used in mining have made the transition to electric drive trains. Though the oil-fired combustion engine is still there, it’s now just an onboard electric generator that propels only electrons.<br />Most significantly, the next couple of decades will see us convert to the hybrid gasoline-and-electric car. A steadily rising fraction of the power produced under the hood of a car already is used to generate electricity: electrical modules are replacing components that belts, gears, pulleys, and shafts once drove. Steering, suspension, brakes, fans, pumps, and valves will eventually go electric; in the end, electricity will drive the wheels, too. Gas prices and environmental mandates have little to do with this changeover. The electric drive train simply delivers better performance, lower cost, and less weight.<br />The policy implications are enormous. Outfitted with a fully electric power train, most of the car—everything but its prime mover—looks like a giant electrical appliance. This appliance won’t run any great distance on batteries alone, given today’s battery technology. But a substantial battery pack on board will provide surges of power when needed. And that makes possible at least some “refueling” of the car from the electricity grid. As cars get more electric, an infrastructure of battery-recharging stations will grow apace, probably in driveways and parking lots, where most cars spend most of their time.<br />Once you’ve got the wheels themselves running on electricity, the basic economics strongly favor getting that electricity from the grid if you can. Burning $2-a-gallon gasoline, the power generated by current hybrid-car engines costs about 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. Many utilities, though, sell off-peak power for much less: 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. The nationwide residential price is still only 8.5 cents or so. (Peak rates in Manhattan are higher because of the city’s heavy dependence on oil and gas, but not enough to change the basic arithmetic.) Grid kilowatts are cheaper because cheaper fuels generate them and because utility power plants run a lot more efficiently than car engines.<br />The gas tank and combustion engine won’t disappear anytime soon, but in the imminent future, grid power will (in effect) begin to top off the tank in between the short trips that account for most driving. All-electric vehicles flopped in the 1990s because batteries can’t store sufficient power for long weekend trips. But plug-in hybrids do have a gasoline tank for the long trips. And the vast majority of the most fuel-hungry trips are under six miles—within the range of the 2 to 5 kWh capacity of the onboard nickel-metal-hydride batteries in hybrids already on the road, and easily within the range of emerging automotive-class lithium batteries. Nationally, some 10 percent of hybrid cars could end up running almost entirely on the grid, as they travel less than six miles per day. Stick an extra 90 pounds—$800 worth—of nickel-metal-hydride batteries in a hybrid, recharge in garages and parking lots, and you can shift roughly 25 percent of a typical driver’s fuel-hungriest miles to the grid. Urban drivers could go long stretches without going near a gas station. The technology for replacing (roughly) one pint of gasoline with one pound of coal or under one ounce of uranium to feed one kilowatt-hour of power to the wheels is now close at hand.<br />So today we use 40 percent of our fuel to power the plug, and the plug powers 60 percent of GDP. And with the ascent of microwaves, lasers, hybrid wheels, and such, we’re moving to 60 and 80 percent, respectively, soon. And then, in due course, 100/100. We’re turning to electricity as fuel because it can do more, faster, in much less space—indeed, it’s by far the fastest and purest form of power yet tamed for ubiquitous use. Small wonder that demand for it keeps growing.<br />We’ve been meeting half of that new demand by burning an extra 400 million tons of coal a year, with coal continuing to supply half of our wired power. Natural gas, the fossil fuel grudgingly favored by most environmentalists, has helped meet the new demand, too: it’s back at 16 percent of electricity generated, where it was two decades ago, after dropping sharply for a time. Astonishingly, over this same period, uranium’s share of U.S. electricity has also risen—from 11 percent to its current 20 percent. Part of the explanation is more nuclear power plants. Even though Three Mile Island put an end to the commissioning of new facilities, some already under construction at the time later opened, with the plant count peaking at 112 in 1990. Three Mile Island also impelled plant operators to develop systematic procedures for sharing information and expertise, and plants that used to run seven months per year now run almost eleven. Uranium has thus displaced about eight percentage points of oil, and five points of hydroelectric, in the expanding electricity market.<br />Renewable fuels, by contrast, made no visible dent in energy supplies, despite the hopes of Greens and the benefits of government-funded research, subsidies, and tax breaks. About a half billion kWh of electricity came from solar power in 2002—roughly 0.013 percent of the U.S. total. Wind power contributed another 0.27 percent. Fossil and nuclear fuels still completely dominate the U.S. energy supply, as in all industrialized economies.<br />The other great hope of environmentalists, efficiency, did improve over the last couple of decades—very considerably, in fact. Air conditioners, car engines, industrial machines, lightbulbs, refrigerator motors—without exception, all do much more, with much less, than they used to. Yet in aggregate, they burn more fuel, too. Boosting efficiency actually raises consumption, as counterintuitive as that sounds. The more efficient a car, the cheaper the miles; the more efficient a refrigerator, the cheaper the ice; and at the end of the day, we use more efficient technology so much more that total energy consumption goes up, not down.<br />We’re burning our 40 quads of raw fuel to generate about 3.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year; if the automotive plug-and-play future does unfold on schedule, we’ll need as much as 7 trillion kWh per year by 2025. How should we generate the extra trillions of kilowatt-hours?<br />With hydrogen, the most optimistic Green visionaries reply—produced by solar cells or windmills. But it’s not possible to take such proposals seriously. New York City consumes so much energy that you’d need, at a minimum, to cover two cities with solar cells to power a single city (see “How Cities Green the Planet,” Winter 2000). No conceivable mix of solar and wind could come close to supplying the trillions of additional kilowatt-hours of power we’ll soon need.<br />Nuclear power could do it—easily. In all key technical respects, it is the antithesis of solar power. A quad’s worth of solar-powered wood is a huge forest—beautiful to behold, but bulky and heavy. Pound for pound, coal stores about twice as much heat. Oil beats coal by about twice as much again. And an ounce of enriched-uranium fuel equals about 4 tons of coal, or 15 barrels of oil. That’s why minuscule quantities contained in relatively tiny reactors can power a metropolis.<br />What’s more, North America has vast deposits of uranium ore, and scooping it up is no real challenge. Enrichment accounts for about half of the fuel’s cost, and enrichment technologies keep improving. Proponents of solar and wind power maintain—correctly—that the underlying technologies for these energy sources keep getting cheaper, but so do those that squeeze power out of conventional fuels. The lasers coming out of the same semiconductor fabs that build solar cells could enrich uranium a thousand times more efficiently than the gaseous-diffusion processes currently used.<br />And we also know this: left to its own devices, the market has not pursued thin, low-energy-density fuels, however cheap, but has instead paid steep premiums for fuels that pack more energy into less weight and space, and for power plants that pump greater power out of smaller engines, furnaces, generators, reactors, and turbines. Until the 1970s, engineering and economic imperatives had been pushing the fuel mix inexorably up the power-density curve, from wood to coal to oil to uranium. And the same held true on the demand side, with consumers steadily shifting toward fuels carrying more power, delivered faster, in less space.<br />Then King Faisal and Three Mile Island shattered our confidence and convinced regulators, secretaries of energy, and even a president that just about everything that the economists and engineers thought they knew about energy was wrong. So wrong that we had to reverse completely the extraordinarily successful power policies of the past.<br />New York has certainly felt the effects of that reversal. In 1965, the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) announced plans to build a $75 million nuclear plant in Suffolk County, to come on line by 1973; soon after, it purchased a 455-acre site between Shoreham and Wading River. A bit later, LILCO decided to increase Shoreham’s size and said it wanted to build several other nuclear plants in the area. Public resistance and federal regulators delayed Shoreham’s completion. Then Three Mile Island happened. In the aftermath, regulators required plant operators to devise evacuation plans in coordination with state and local governments. In early 1983, newly elected governor Mario Cuomo and the Suffolk County legislature both declared that no evacuation plan would ever be feasible and safe. That was that. By the time the state fully decommissioned Shoreham in 1994, its price tag had reached $6 billion—and the plant had never started full-power commercial operation. To pay for it all, Long Island electric rates skyrocketed.<br />What scared many New Yorkers—and thus many politicians—away from nuclear power was what had originally attracted the engineers and the utility economists to it: nuclear facilities use a unique fuel, burned, in its fashion, in relatively tiny reactors, to generate gargantuan amounts of power. Do it all just right, end to end, and you get cheap, abundant power, and King Faisal can’t do a thing about it. But the raw material itself, packing so much power into so little material, is inherently dangerous. Sufficiently bad engineering can result in a Three Mile Island or a Chernobyl. And these days, there’s the fear that poor security might enable terrorists to pull off something even worse.<br />How worried should we really be in 2005 that accidents or attacks might release and disperse a nuclear power plant’s radioactive fuel? Not very. Our civilian nuclear industry has dramatically improved its procedures and safety-related hardware since 1979. Several thousand reactor-years of statistics since Three Mile Island clearly show that these power plants are extraordinarily reliable in normal operation.<br />And uranium’s combination of power and super-density makes the fuel less of a terror risk, not more, at least from an engineering standpoint. It’s easy to “overbuild” the protective walls and containment systems of nuclear facilities, since—like the pyramids—the payload they’re built to shield is so small. Protecting skyscrapers is hard; no builder can afford to erect a hundred times more wall than usable space. Guaranteeing the integrity of a jumbo jet’s fuel tanks is impossible; the tanks have to fly. Shielding a nuclear plant’s tiny payload is easy—just erect more steel, pour more concrete, and build tougher perimeters.<br />In fact, it’s a safety challenge that we have already met. Today’s plants split atoms behind super-thick layers of steel and concrete; future plants would boast thicker protection still. All the numbers, and the strong consensus in the technical community, reinforce the projections made two decades ago: it is extremely unlikely that there will ever be a serious release of nuclear materials from a U.S. reactor.<br />What about the economic cost of nuclear power? Wind and sun are free, of course. But if the cost of fuel were all that mattered, the day of too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power would now be here—nearer, certainly, than too-cheap-to-meter solar power. Raw fuel accounts for over half the delivered cost of electricity generated in gas-fired turbines, about one-third of coal-fired power, and just a tenth of nuclear electricity. Factor in the cost of capital equipment, and the cheapest electrons come from uranium and coal, not sun and wind. What we pay for at our electric meter is increasingly like what we pay for at fancy restaurants: not the raw calories, but the fine linen, the service, and the chef’s ineffable artistry. In our overall energy accounts, the sophisticated power-conversion hardware matters more every year, and the cost of raw fuel matters less.<br />This in itself is great news for America. We’re good at large-scale hardware; we build it ourselves and keep building it cheaper. The average price of U.S. electricity fell throughout the twentieth century, and it has kept falling since, except in egregiously mismanaged markets such as California’s.<br />The cheap, plentiful power does terrific things for labor productivity and overall employment. As Lewis E. Lehrman notes, rising employment strongly correlates with rising supplies of low-cost energy. It takes energy to get the increasingly mobile worker to the increasingly distant workplace, and energy to process materials and power the increasingly advanced machines that shape and assemble those materials.<br />Most of the world, Europe aside, now recognizes this point. Workers in Asia and India are swiftly gaining access to the powered machines that steadily boosted the productivity of the American factory worker throughout the twentieth century. And the electricity driving those machines comes from power plants designed—and often built—by U.S. vendors. The power is a lot less expensive than ours, though, since it is generated the old-fashioned forget-the-environment way. There is little bother about protecting the river or scrubbing the smoke. China’s answer to the 2-gigawatt Hoover Dam on the Colorado River is the Three Gorges project, an 18-gigawatt dam on the Yangtze River. Combine cheaper supplies of energy with ready access to heavy industrial machines, and it’s hard to see how foreign laborers cannot close the productivity gap that has historically enabled American workers to remain competitive at considerably higher wages. Unless, that is, the United States keeps on pushing the productivity of its own workforce out ahead of its competitors. That—inevitably—means expanding our power supply and keeping it affordable, and deploying even more advanced technologies of powered production. Nuclear power would help keep the twenty-first-century U.S. economy globally competitive.<br />Greens don’t want to hear it, but nuclear power makes the most environmental sense, too. Nuclear wastes pose no serious engineering problems. Uranium is such an energy-rich fuel that the actual volume of waste is tiny compared with that of other fuels, and is easily converted from its already-stable ceramic form as a fuel into an even more stable glass-like compound, and just as easily deposited in deep geological formations, themselves stable for tens of millions of years. And what has Green antinuclear activism achieved since the seventies? Not the reduction in demand for energy that it had hoped for but a massive increase in the use of coal, which burns less clean than uranium.<br />Many Greens think that they have a good grip on the likely trajectory of the planet’s climate over the next 100 years. If we keep burning fossil fuels at current rates, their climate models tell them, we’ll face a meltdown on a much larger scale than Chernobyl’s, beginning with the polar ice caps. Saving an extra 400 million tons of coal here and there—roughly the amount of carbon that the United States would have to stop burning to comply with the Kyoto Protocol today—would make quite a difference, we’re told.<br />But serious Greens must face reality. Short of some convulsion that drastically shrinks the economy, demand for electricity will go on rising. Total U.S. electricity consumption will increase another 20 to 30 percent, at least, over the next ten years. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, moreover, will let the grid go cold—not even if that means burning yet another 400 million more tons of coal. Not even if that means melting the ice caps and putting much of Bangladesh under water. No governor or president wants to be the next Gray Davis, recalled from office when the lights go out.<br />The power has to come from somewhere. Sun and wind will never come close to supplying it. Earnest though they are, the people who argue otherwise are the folks who brought us 400 million extra tons of coal a year. The one practical technology that could decisively shift U.S. carbon emissions in the near term would displace coal with uranium, since uranium burns emission-free. It’s time even for Greens to embrace the atom.<br />It must surely be clear by now, too, that the political costs of depending so heavily on oil from the Middle East are just too great. We need to find a way to stop funneling $25 billion a year (or so) of our energy dollars into churning cauldrons of hate and violence. By sharply curtailing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, we would greatly expand the range of feasible political and military options in dealing with the countries that breed the terrorists.<br />The best thing we can do to decrease the Middle East’s hold on us is to turn off the spigot ourselves. For economic, ecological, and geopolitical reasons, U.S. policymakers ought to promote electrification on the demand side, and nuclear fuel on the supply side, wherever they reasonably can.<br /><br />Tags Indian Point, American Survival, Global Warming, High Tech EnergyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-81147301185150953222007-04-27T04:51:00.000-07:002007-04-27T04:53:11.851-07:00Responsible Use of the ISA....for dummies<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPoFpY3YIcKk1obuB2r2GWMEF9qKkYSxeYPuDs2_ZoDd1-4pyQOkbsG1AXq26T18ZU6Cpih9uxrScbA7oH_hn1BlLsF3YdM83PjFA6KeT1MHqXgcc0TOPPL7h1C58sqWHNakwjZfCBP0k/s1600-h/meb.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPoFpY3YIcKk1obuB2r2GWMEF9qKkYSxeYPuDs2_ZoDd1-4pyQOkbsG1AXq26T18ZU6Cpih9uxrScbA7oH_hn1BlLsF3YdM83PjFA6KeT1MHqXgcc0TOPPL7h1C58sqWHNakwjZfCBP0k/s400/meb.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056676761753920018" /></a><br />The difference between the general public repeatedly being shown acceptable safety conditions by an alarmist press wrongly deeming them possible emergencies, and a truly degraded or dangerous nuclear plant , ...has not been made sufficiently clear.<br /><br />Even an absolute collapse of local political confidence in NRC and its day-to-day oversight cannot be solved by re-inspecting all 104 nuclear plants whenever a local political figure gains traction for the idea in his/her constituency. Such a development can only result in the squandering of resources, funding, and effort into situations not warranting such activity. Taken to its extrapolated worst case, this strategy would flood all 104 nuclear plants with hordes of intrusive inspectors, impeding plant operations, and possibly inducing the very events they came to inspect against.<br /><br />One of the first principles espoused in the international IAEA document 75-INSAG-3, "Basic Safety Principles for Nuclear Plants", in its preamble by nobel laureate Mohammed El Baradei, is that effort must be targeted to need. "It is important to avoid concentrating resources on efforts that have only marginal effects"..<br /><br />With local governmental figures voicing ephemeral concerns brought to their attention from activist, intervenor, and opposer groups, outside of any indication that acceptable safety has truly been compromised, we see a clear need for a high level separation of fact and claim, perhaps by a national or international committee, establishing guidelines, and trip-points for the beneficial use of independent safety assessments, and likewise setting precise indicators barring the frivolous use of ISA as a political panacea.<br /><br />The basic safety case for each of the 104 American nuclear plants has been set out in their Preliminary Safety Analysis Report and their Final Safety Analysis Report. Deterministic comparison of each plant's adherence to its written safety case is provided in real-time by the presence of resident NRC inspectors, and the NRC Reactor Oversight Program.<br /><br />Probabilistic analysis of the major US plant types can be done by qualified researchers at any time, setting out the risks versus the probabilities in general, allowing guidelines to stand as required reading for those who would inspect, and re-inspect, frivolously, without knowing anything at all about the limits of mere inspection. <br /><br />(Inspection as a tactic cannot predict an unforseen event. The very evening an ISA is completed at plant "X", a meteor could strike the containment dome, and breach the reactor core--- the inspection would have been a total waste of time). <br /><br />Politicians ignorant of Probabilistic Risk Analyses seek an absolute "How Safe Is It?" answer , one that eternal inspection, by its very nature, cannot supply. PRA can provide that overview. Therefore politicians should direct the Congressional Research Service to commission a national PRA report on the 104 reactors, as their own internal legislative guide on how to avoid useless calls for repeat ISA's. In point of fact, politicians have been slyly misguided by intervenor and opposer public relations operatives posing as "technical experts", and given the Maine Yankee ISA & shutdown as the one and only way to find out if your local nuke is dangerous. Actually, the MY ISA found the plant was acceptable for further operation. It was a bereft conglomerate corporate culture that had no further interest in its nuclear asset, and bailed out. So even in the case of Maine Yankee, the public was never told how safe the plant was, or was not.<br /><br />In the face of this impossibility to get blood from a stone, vis-a-vis the ISA tactic, politicians must be educated where to look for this information. I would challenge Senator Clinton and Congressman Hall to write up legislation empowering NRC or CRS to do a "PRA Constitutional Report" on each of the American reactors, with appropriate funding and a clear legislative charter., and to report the results in a high level national safety assessment.<br /><br />After this report had scientifically charted the relative safety of all 104, then , and only then, would ISA become a useful tool, targeted at whatever specific need had been scientifically unearthed in the PRA Constitutional. This also has the benefit of closely following the IAEA methodology set out in 75-INSAG-3, the high-level agenda-free international document most trustworthy as an authority in these matters.<br /><br />Without such a framework, any call for an ISA, without clearly demonstrated need, can rightly be called frivolous misuse of legislative priviledge. Within such a framework, established need can form the basis of any future calls fo an ISA.<br /><br />Reference Documents may be found at:<br /><br />http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/P082_scr.pdf , links to the current international standard for safety at nuclear plants. "75-INSAG-3" <br /><br />http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub991e_web.pdf, is the IAEA publication setting the international standard for judging safety in nuclear plants built to earlier standards.<br />The document is named "INSAG-8"<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!" src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-56950892829715146662007-04-26T06:57:00.000-07:002007-04-26T06:59:36.760-07:00JORGE FITZWITHERSPOON SPEAKS !!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG4IburWlaJPkgVFhZODSvsLYgnN1rVXEuaMUWbSX2knQHDKbPVQcrf1ouSHVDkOAHDzhaFQd8fpRZ2bekYrVmrwOl5QryoJ8zLmtSeO1xHHwyKgMK5rpb12krE27A8HXW_gSnetww1kY/s1600-h/liar.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5057732558158336914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG4IburWlaJPkgVFhZODSvsLYgnN1rVXEuaMUWbSX2knQHDKbPVQcrf1ouSHVDkOAHDzhaFQd8fpRZ2bekYrVmrwOl5QryoJ8zLmtSeO1xHHwyKgMK5rpb12krE27A8HXW_gSnetww1kY/s400/liar.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Yellow Journalism on the Hudson (?)<br /><br />In an amazingling brassy and overt display of journalistic delinquency, Gannett Journal News reporter Jorge FitzGibbon manages to read a clearly worded Manhattanville poll, where 47 percent of local residents say they want Indian Point open, having judged it as posing little or no risk, versus 33 percent wanting it closed, and somehow produce the blatantly deceptive banner headline:<br /><br /><strong>"POLL: PUBLIC WORRIED ABOUT INDIAN POINT"</strong><br /><br />Are you kidding Mr. Fitzgibbon? I have a copy of the Gannett Code of Journalistic Ethics here on my desk, and I can see at a glance , that you have skewed the facts.<br /><br />Digging deeper than the headline, we see FitzGibbon intentionally blurring the two opposing sides, coming up with an untrue, unscientific description barely mentioning the pro-nuclear landslide, and claiming deceptively "residents still have worries" Oh yeah, Jorge? Maybe the 33 % on the anti side worry, but the wording of the survey question specifically asks if respondents have concerns, and the 47% majority specifically state that do not have any concerns.<br /><br />What malicious alchemical formula can you use to turn gold back into non-factual lead, as you have done in taking the facts ....47% for, only 33% against, and coming up with this huge blunder of journalistic arrogance:<br /><br />"Poll: Public worried" ?<br /><br />Imagine a 47 to 33 landslide in any election. Let's say--- John Kerry 47%, GW Bush 33% in 2004, for instance (or the reverse). Piles of books would be written about the greatest landslide in modern electoral history. Robert F Kennedy would be out of a job---you can't electronically hack a fake 14% discrepancy in Ohio or anywhere else--- the gap is just too large.<br /><br />And.... add to that 14% gap, the fact that it occurs after seven long years of feverish organizing, letter writing, blogging, and furious emailing, by mock-local groups covertly paid to spread fear by the G.R.A.C.E. foundation, Tamarind foundation, and the antinuke Helene Heilbrunn Lerner foundation, as well as Riverkeeper, Wespac, Ipsec and their duped contributors --- all for naught. Or rather .....all for a very clear minus 14.<br /><br />Shame, Fitzgibbon.... Shame on you. And shame on Gannett for abetting such malicious unethical "journalism."<br /><br />Actually journalism is the wrong word. Faux journalism maybe. Agendist Propaganda is coming closer. Maybe it would be more accurate to simply say:<br /><br />Yellow Journalism.<br /><br />I expect Mr. FitzGibbon to launch into a huffy retort tomorrow, perhaps telling us how corrupt the good nuns over at Manhattanville have become, shilling for Entergy , and publishing false survey reports. It's no more than I would expect from a Goebbels-on-the-Hudson.<br /><br />Yes, I kind of like that .....<br /><br /><strong>Goebbels-on-the-Hudson....</strong><br /><br />has a Gannett-type ring to it!<br /><br />Kind of FitzGibbon-esqe !!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-21924363084741445622007-04-23T10:30:00.000-07:002007-04-23T10:31:48.921-07:00Use your ISA Responsibly, or not at all<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPoFpY3YIcKk1obuB2r2GWMEF9qKkYSxeYPuDs2_ZoDd1-4pyQOkbsG1AXq26T18ZU6Cpih9uxrScbA7oH_hn1BlLsF3YdM83PjFA6KeT1MHqXgcc0TOPPL7h1C58sqWHNakwjZfCBP0k/s1600-h/meb.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPoFpY3YIcKk1obuB2r2GWMEF9qKkYSxeYPuDs2_ZoDd1-4pyQOkbsG1AXq26T18ZU6Cpih9uxrScbA7oH_hn1BlLsF3YdM83PjFA6KeT1MHqXgcc0TOPPL7h1C58sqWHNakwjZfCBP0k/s400/meb.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056676761753920018" /></a><br />The difference between the general public repeatedly being shown acceptable safety conditions by an alarmist press wrongly deeming them possible emergencies, and a truly degraded or dangerous nuclear plant , ...has not been made sufficiently clear.<br /><br />Even an absolute collapse of local political confidence in NRC and its day-to-day oversight cannot be solved by re-inspecting all 104 nuclear plants whenever a local political figure gains traction for the idea in his/her constituency. Such a development can only result in the squandering of resources, funding, and effort into situations not warranting such activity. Taken to its extrapolated worst case, this strategy would flood all 104 nuclear plants with hordes of intrusive inspectors, impeding plant operations, and possibly inducing the very events they came to inspect against.<br /><br />One of the first principles espoused in the international IAEA document 75-INSAG-3, "Basic Safety Principles for Nuclear Plants", in its preamble by nobel laureate Mohammed El Baradei, is that effort must be targeted to need. "It is important to avoid concentrating resources on efforts that have only marginal effects"..<br /><br />With local governmental figures voicing ephemeral concerns brought to their attention from activist, intervenor, and opposer groups, outside of any indication that acceptable safety has truly been compromised, we see a clear need for a high level separation of fact and claim, perhaps by a national or international committee, establishing guidelines, and trip-points for the beneficial use of independent safety assessments, and likewise setting precise indicators barring the frivolous use of ISA as a political panacea.<br /><br />The basic safety case for each of the 104 American nuclear plants has been set out in their Preliminary Safety Analysis Report and their Final Safety Analysis Report. Deterministic comparison of each plant's adherence to its written safety case is provided in real-time by the presence of resident NRC inspectors, and the NRC Reactor Oversight Program.<br /><br />Probabilistic analysis of the major US plant types can be done by qualified researchers at any time, setting out the risks versus the probabilities in general, allowing guidelines to stand as required reading for those who would inspect, and re-inspect, frivolously, without knowing anything at all about the limits of mere inspection. <br /><br />(Inspection as a tactic cannot predict an unforseen event. The very evening an ISA is completed at plant "X", a meteor could strike the containment dome, and breach the reactor core--- the inspection would have been a total waste of time). <br /><br />Politicians ignorant of Probabilistic Risk Analyses seek an absolute "How Safe Is It?" answer , one that eternal inspection, by its very nature, cannot supply. PRA can provide that overview. Therefore politicians should direct the Congressional Research Service to commission a national PRA report on the 104 reactors, as their own internal legislative guide on how to avoid useless calls for repeat ISA's. In point of fact, politicians have been slyly misguided by intervenor and opposer public relations operatives posing as "technical experts", and given the Maine Yankee ISA & shutdown as the one and only way to find out if your local nuke is dangerous. Actually, the MY ISA found the plant was acceptable for further operation. It was a bereft conglomerate corporate culture that had no further interest in its nuclear asset, and bailed out. So even in the case of Maine Yankee, the public was never told how safe the plant was, or was not.<br /><br />In the face of this impossibility to get blood from a stone, vis-a-vis the ISA tactic, politicians must be educated where to look for this information. I would challenge Senator Clinton and Congressman Hall to write up legislation empowering NRC or CRS to do a "PRA Constitutional Report" on each of the American reactors, with appropriate funding and a clear legislative charter., and to report the results in a high level national safety assessment.<br /><br />After this report had scientifically charted the relative safety of all 104, then , and only then, would ISA become a useful tool, targeted at whatever specific need had been scientifically unearthed in the PRA Constitutional. This also has the benefit of closely following the IAEA methodology set out in 75-INSAG-3, the high-level agenda-free international document most trustworthy as an authority in these matters.<br /><br />Without such a framework, any call for an ISA, without clearly demonstrated need, can rightly be called frivolous misuse of legislative priviledge. Within such a framework, established need can form the basis of any future calls fo an ISA.<br /><br />Reference Documents may be found at:<br /><br />http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/P082_scr.pdf , links to the current international standard for safety at nuclear plants. "75-INSAG-3" <br /><br />http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub991e_web.pdf, is the IAEA publication setting the international standard for judging safety in nuclear plants built to earlier standards.<br />The document is named "INSAG-8"<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!" src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-25448401362539905602007-04-22T12:19:00.000-07:002007-04-22T12:27:07.639-07:00WORD...OUT OF IPEC<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFbHDUBSeyAnYM8SGpTpX3ZuaJ74yZNC4TC_2gshvazbdsqh4EuMrsK-B3DMGI4Yp-9VLrP7zTI9dJDabCwsLfhobshlhzopIclW-f8M3fJEs7RWdQHrUUemLuuxDvwzOYodTU0w7_7vM/s1600-h/www.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFbHDUBSeyAnYM8SGpTpX3ZuaJ74yZNC4TC_2gshvazbdsqh4EuMrsK-B3DMGI4Yp-9VLrP7zTI9dJDabCwsLfhobshlhzopIclW-f8M3fJEs7RWdQHrUUemLuuxDvwzOYodTU0w7_7vM/s400/www.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5056335109990425090" /></a><br />Imagine what it might be like to hold in your hand, the viability of the lifestyles of 20 million people. People you will never meet, but people dependent on your conscientious actions 24 hours every day, forever. Our American Civilization itself, riding on your shoulders. There are those who try to imagine this connection irresponsibly, without ever having the actual power delegated to them, and the actual moral obligation. Whatever they may fantasize, is fine, if they can begin to approach that state of connectedness that your invisible energy providers take for granted 24-7-365. Your energy providers, including those at IPEC, are aware of your needs. They know, individually, that their every single action in any day, upholds the health, prosperity and the happiness of some neighbor-- of every neighbor, every second of every day, forever. We think of you all the time.<br /><br />If all goes well, we hope you will never notice us. We want you to have all the benefit, and none of the concern. We want you to prosper, and forget about the politics. We want your life to flow, uninterrupted, from minute first to minute last, unfettered by activist bantering, celebrity career posturing, political fear mongering, and outright deception on behalf of advertising aimed to raise the fame prospects of faux Jeremiahs, "mock-sure" of impending doom, a doom which somehow never seems to materialize, except on those weeks when a collection campaign is held, to pay for further nonsense worries, for yet one more unsettled year of unfulfilled predictions..<br /><br />Mankind is not god. No way of living is ordained by almighty fiat as unarguable, perfect, sinless, and totally beneficial. For every home built, some forest is lost. For every mile driven, some CO2 is released.There is not, and cannot ever be "a perfect society". We know that, regrettably, as sure as sunrise, sunset, death & taxes.<br /><br />So... reams of Jeremiad bluster about imperfection, about doom, about deceit, and human fallibility, are fine insofar as they remain personal revelations of personal angst, but fail utterly in making a world, in exciting, in motivating, in reassuring, and in actually DOING anything at all, for any of us.<br /><br />More than a Feeling.<br /><br />As the pop rock anthem of 1970 sang to us, we need more than a feeling, in order to reach full potential, to help each other, and to change reality and the world for the good. The daily efforts of the 1600+ conscientious expert local power-makers working for Entergy at IPEC, do this for you constantly, do it caringly, and do not harrass you, do not ask for strained belief in wild scenarios, or strained requests for moneys never returned, or give empty promises never intended to be kept. <br /><br />Nor do we frighten you with scenes of what will never be, maliciously deeming it "what might be", when , in fact, it never has happened, and in truth, never will happen. If America is to remain a viable entity, supporting its people, it cannot fear every imaginary mouse dreamt up by overly creative movie writers, or overly creative movie writers falsely calling themselves "watchdogs" or "activists".<br /><br />A true activist empowers his society as it really is. Thus the working folks at IPEC are the true activists, lighting your nights, powering your schools and hospitals, silently & reliably always present in your life , --not to frighten, warn, change, or dun you for donations, but to allow you be great,... each in your own way.<br /><br />Malicious destroyers, casting doubt on every viable alternative society might try, are not activists, but rather deluded egomaniacs, hawking "perfection or nothing", and thus, in the way of all things real, ensuring nothingness prevails. Their impossible dreams are not worth our common undoing, to prove some sentence they uttered was more than idle argument. We need IPEC. We want IPEC. IPEC wants us. We get along. We agree. There is no problem.<br /><br /> Let those who invent false problems out of activist arrogance watch the rest of us succeed, bow their heads, and follow.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-45455780029764458532007-04-20T10:57:00.000-07:002007-04-20T11:07:37.454-07:00HAVE A CIGARETTE, ON THE WAY TO THE RALLY<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimfbLp6FWNlW-B3d7Z9i7GFHJC3drkHCj2gVpCGxruh4jbNiXjLGi-ACpcPU-TRKMgy40VXl3Uttmj8Bu6gn4QLuDuWxbEP29K-mLshlIB3bwU3dLNT5G1WmG5h6JmU3ktrfJtTC42IqU/s1600-h/4yearoldsmoker.jpeg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5055571752568005106" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimfbLp6FWNlW-B3d7Z9i7GFHJC3drkHCj2gVpCGxruh4jbNiXjLGi-ACpcPU-TRKMgy40VXl3Uttmj8Bu6gn4QLuDuWxbEP29K-mLshlIB3bwU3dLNT5G1WmG5h6JmU3ktrfJtTC42IqU/s400/4yearoldsmoker.jpeg" border="0" /></a><br />ITS WHAT I'VE BEEN TELLING YOU HERE FOR MONTHS<br />YOU SMOKE, YOU USE GASOLINE, YOU DRINK ALCOHOL,<br />YOU OVEREAT AND GROW OBESE, AND YOU DO IT ALL WITH<br />NO FEAR AT ALL.<br /><br />Then why grow tense about mythical nuclear fallout?<br />For one thing, the drinking , smoking, gasoline and fatness are REAL!!<br /><br />The nuclear fallout, which has never happened to you, and will never happen to you , is 100% IMAGINARY.<br /><br />Even if it could happen some day, that day is not today, so have another Marlboro, chugalug another Merlot, swill down some prime rib and cheesecake, and go fill up your car at the gas pump, before attending the anti-nuke rally, fatso!<br /><br />http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/49/abstract<br /><br />Are passive smoking, air pollution and obesity a greater mortality risk than major radiation incidents?<br /><br />By Jim T Smith<br />Centre for Ecology<br />Winfrith Technology Centre,<br />Dorchester, Dorset DT2 8ZD, UK<br /><br /><br />Background<br /><br /><br />Following a nuclear incident, the communication and perception of radiation risk becomes a (perhaps the) major public health issue. In response to such incidents it is therefore crucial to communicate radiation health risks in the context of other more common environmental and lifestyle risk factors. This study compares the risk of mortality from past radiation exposures (to people who survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs and those exposed after the Chernobyl accident) with risks arising from air pollution, obesity and passive and active smoking.<br /><br />Methods<br /><br /><br />A comparative assessment of mortality risks from ionising radiation was carried out by compiling radiation risks for realistic exposure scenarios and assessing those risks in comparison with risks from air pollution, obesity and passive and active smoking.<br /><br />Results<br /><br /><br />The mortality risk to populations exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident is no higher than that for other more common risk factors such as air pollution or passive smoking. Radiation exposures experienced by the most exposed group of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to an average loss of life expectancy<br />significantly lower than that caused by severe obesity or active smoking.<br /><br />Conclusion<br /><br /><br />Population-averaged risks from exposures following major radiation incidents are clearly significant, but are far less than those from other much more common environmental and lifestyle factors. This comparative analysis, whilst highlighting inevitable uncertainties in risk quantification and comparison, helps place the potential consequences of radiation exposures in the context of other public health risks. The public is generally unaware that existing risk factors which they routinely ignore, are far greater than any radiation-related risks, should they<br />ever occur.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-8055493487999309312007-04-17T07:10:00.000-07:002010-04-08T01:50:55.694-07:00HELEN CALDICOTT'S SICK "PHILOSOPHY"<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFeaBEbT5kAROshkkcp4MJ1WkVSSQwYjOnn4CiR8BBY6aTyr2JmhS_Nb2T45dd7xQ_l3m12VUd8mO72pMyMDHQCD2wVjt4_bbWjdIr09u4p8-uawhQfbJihjDhEfop9setVWFNHe5n-yM/s1600-h/Anorexia.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFeaBEbT5kAROshkkcp4MJ1WkVSSQwYjOnn4CiR8BBY6aTyr2JmhS_Nb2T45dd7xQ_l3m12VUd8mO72pMyMDHQCD2wVjt4_bbWjdIr09u4p8-uawhQfbJihjDhEfop9setVWFNHe5n-yM/s400/Anorexia.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054391682323128722" /></a><br />
<br />
BULIMIA IS NOT THE ANSWER<br />
<br />
A note to the backward-looking, anal-obsessive Dr.Helen Caldicott<br />
<br />
<br />
What we perceive as life, is a thermodynamic process. It has a front end, a reactive gut, and a back end. At the front end it seeks or takes in local energy, in its gut it "uses" the energy, and at the back it releases processed, depleted material. In short it eats, it respirates, and it defecates. Because this is the innate nature of all life, there cannot be any life which leaves no waste. In terms of individual creatures, or individual species, waste can be either innocuous, distasteful, or eventually poisonous, when enough has accumulated. However in planetary terms, there is no place for the concept of waste.The accretion of various processed and/or depleted materials by one species, simply sets the stage for Darwin's evolutionary laws to result in another more parsimonious species that lives on the richly deposited life-resources, once viewed as useless, by the older, obsolete life form making them.<br />
<br />
The methane-breathing hordes of the pre-Cambrian left their oxygen "waste" for today's species to savor as the essence of life itself. The guano-producing creatures who gave us our phosphate deposits provided rich fertilizer for our farms. The numberless shelled creatures of long ago have given us our limestone continents, and even more numerous bacteria, our fossil fuels. Coral reefs are an ongoing depositing, visible to our eyes, but typical of the wider pattern of life itself.<br />
<br />
In planetary terms, therefore, there can never be an ideal steady state. The planet's essence is not static. Change is paramount. Whatever exists now, is a moment's flicker in an eons-old fire, a fire that consumes the planet eternally, or until the sun burns out and goes cold. A species, like coral, that inhabits, uses, and forever changes the place it inhabits, is not committing a "sin of pollution".The birds or bats who "foul" their islands or their caves with guano are not guilty of malicious "bad housekeeping". Bird species, and bat species need not apologize to Gaia for their guano. In fact it is their gift to Gaia, to make of it a new beginning, which Gaia always has done. By giving back their gift of evolved, changed Gaian essence, these creatures have both embodied Gaia, and done her good work for her. In fact it is their planetary duty to process what they find, and leave it changed. If it were not Gaia's wish that these species exist, they would not have arisen. The evolutionary path trod by their ancestor and precursor species led to their existence, by the self same process they engage in now, it has never changed, and if we think it has been "good" in the past, we are forced to accept the long vision that it is also "good" now, as it happens before our eyes.<br />
<br />
So then why do many among us view the "man-guano" we produce as evil? Why, uniquely among all creatures that ever existed, or ever could exist, why must homo sapiens sapiens leave exactly zero evidence of ever having lived as a Gaian creation, breathing in, but not breathing out, eating but never defecating, living, but never leaving any gift behind for future species? As a nest-builder, mankind leaves his version of a coral reef in his infrastructure, his cities, his dams, his huge garbage middens, sources of great archaeological richness. Is the coral itself now to dismantle each reef, at the end of each creature's tiny life, to leave the ocean "just as they found it"? ( What might be an efficient policy for a public hiking trail can be a monstrous crime, when applied to humanity as a whole).<br />
<br />
It is a delusion. It is a futile wish, a desire for false one-ended perfection, an effort to assuage a self-invented guilt by penitent abstention, self-denial, species-denial, history-denial, and finally life-denial. It is born in an ignorance of just what living species are, and thus what they are constrained to do. It is an imaginary delusion that mankind is a god, and therefore not subject to the eternal scientific, thermodynamic , and Gaian rules that determine planetary evolution. At its lowest and most embarrassing level, it is a simple wish to not have any anus. Were mankind changeable into the "perfected" creature many greenists propose as our ethical next step, it would be a creature that would simply never leave any waste. We would breathe in oxygen, but never breathe out CO2.... We might eat food (Vegan, as they would advise us).... but we would use it entirely, and thus never emit any urine, feces, buildings, or other lasting evidence of having processed the Gaian surround. It's a crock. <br />
<br />
In a sustainability framework, this new anus-free human race would be ideal. Free of the guilt of "fouling" our planet, we could simply grow less in numbers on a continual basis, until we were rightly seen once again as food for other species, who would then eat us, and deposit us as THEIR waste, in the end.<br />
<br />
So-- sustainability,... far from being a high moral concept, a way to successfully find our "true station" on the planet, is none of these things, but in fact is an ill-conceived self-mutilation. Stasis is not only an impossibility in a living thermodynamic surround, to seek it eventually stunts the expansive impulse describing the host creature as vital, current, and processing on behalf of the planet, and twists current existence into a refusal to process on behalf of Gaia, a delinquent posture of false altruism, never giving back, and thus interrupting evolution itself, in a megalomanic desire to preserve humankind's flickering instant as an eternal "sustainable" set- piece, and the races to come after be damned..... <br />
<br />
Sustainability is therefore a monstrous hubris, born of self-deification, and over-mentalization. In point of fact there is a single sustainable condition, well known to all. That condition is death. By pathological mentalization, some young women imagine their bodies to need constant reduction, and so they abstain from food, or purge when they do eat, in an effort to achieve an unreachable, delusive "perfect" state, a state that in the end, untreated, will very certainly turn out to be their own death. In exactly analogous fashion, "Sustainability" is preached as an end to the very techniques that have led to mankind's current flourishing condition, a state of great health and vitality the world over, overrunning new habitats at every turn , an obviously successful adaptive episode, processing the planet's heritage fully and joyously, urging us instead to take up new, less fruitful, less expansive, less responsive, more isolating strategies---- for what purpose? That the planet may be denied our existence as who we truly are, as who the planet itself has evolved us to be, and be given a wan, mentalized, mutilated, bulimic ideal in its stead?<br />
<br />
It stems from the bipolar nature of human thinking. In ancient languages, the words for up, & down, or for hot & cold are the same word. Only their use denotes which of the paired concepts is meant each time it is spoken. Thus we dream in opposites, always opposing. Since we seem successful, and happiness is reachable now for billions, unhappiness must also exist, in exactly equal measure. Maybe it does, or maybe it does not. Reality is not the issue. Perception of "balance" in the human mind is the great quest, and in this mentalization, greenists seek what is unfindable. They seek balance in an unbalanced , dynamic, evolving reality, and it is not to be found. In fact, the only true "balanced" condition vis-a-vis life, is the absence of life, either non-existence, or death. That a mentalization seeks balance and finds death, is a great human conundrum, dealt with in differing ways by Buddha, Christ, and the pagans. Buddha urges each to seek his own mental death, Christ invites us to worship his proxy death, and the pagans simply kill each other for the honor and the blood thrill.<br />
<br />
Thus sustainability, as a philosophy, mines the same human quirk as Buddhism, much in vogue in the West, and infects media with invitations to mass bulimic purgings on all sides. The West, rejecting its worn-out Christianity, heartily embraces its new crypto-buddhist task, and purges en-masse, still forced to attain great individual freedom & wealth, but guilt-ridden about it unless it is bought off by some visible self-mutilation, be it a piercing, declasse clothes, or the refusal to eat meat. These mutilations must occur under the gaze of the less fortunate, to have best emotional effect. As an internal reactive mentalization, it can be viewed as a superstition, or a comforting delusion. Since it works against the very success tactics used by 99% of the human race, it is false, and if pursued relentlessly, it is evil. Muslims correctly regard it as an end-stage pathology, a sin, and thus a need for conversion to Islam.<br />
<br />
Thus those who tell us coal use emits CO2, and nuclear power results in spent fuel are spouting a banality, as if it were big news, simply for the way it makes them feel. Forgetting to look forward, where our destiny lies, they turn back, to decry our own back-end, our waste-depositing apparatus, and, focused tightly on the anus-of-mankind to the exclusion of all else, they catalog the droppings, with great and obsessive fascination, urging the entire species to fear their own leavings, never realizing that the race, and the planet, are done with it, and need to move on, despite it.<br />
<br />
This article proposes no new strategy to move forward, except that full acceptance of all aspects of human endeavor will be required, barring nothing, in order to fully process our Gaian surround, <br />
and that looking back has been taught to us from ancient times as a mistake, one that turned Lot's wife to a pillar of salt.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
tags: Indian Point, nuclear, helen caldicott, bulimia is not the answer<br />
<br />
<a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!" src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-19313843417178930192007-04-17T06:45:00.000-07:002007-04-17T06:46:22.975-07:00dr. helen is not the answer<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFeaBEbT5kAROshkkcp4MJ1WkVSSQwYjOnn4CiR8BBY6aTyr2JmhS_Nb2T45dd7xQ_l3m12VUd8mO72pMyMDHQCD2wVjt4_bbWjdIr09u4p8-uawhQfbJihjDhEfop9setVWFNHe5n-yM/s1600-h/Anorexia.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFeaBEbT5kAROshkkcp4MJ1WkVSSQwYjOnn4CiR8BBY6aTyr2JmhS_Nb2T45dd7xQ_l3m12VUd8mO72pMyMDHQCD2wVjt4_bbWjdIr09u4p8-uawhQfbJihjDhEfop9setVWFNHe5n-yM/s400/Anorexia.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5054391682323128722" /></a><br /><br />BULIMIA IS NOT THE ANSWER<br /><br />A note to the backward-looking, anal-obsessive Dr.Helen Caldicott<br /><br /><br />What we perceive as life, is a thermodynamic process. It has a front end, a reactive gut, and a back end. At the front end it seeks or takes in local energy, in its gut it "uses" the energy, and at the back it releases processed, depleted material. In short it eats, it respirates, and it defecates. Because this is the innate nature of all life, there cannot be any life which leaves no waste. In terms of individual creatures, or individual species, waste can be either innocuous, distasteful, or eventually poisonous, when enough has accumulated. However in planetary terms, there is no place for the concept of waste.The accretion of various processed and/or depleted materials by one species, simply sets the stage for Darwin's evolutionary laws to result in another more parsimonious species that lives on the richly deposited life-resources, once viewed as useless, by the older, obsolete life form making them.<br /><br />The methane-breathing hordes of the pre-Cambrian left their oxygen "waste" for today's species to savor as the essence of life itself. The guano-producing creatures who gave us our phosphate deposits provided rich fertilizer for our farms. The numberless shelled creatures of long ago have given us our limestone continents, and even more numerous bacteria, our fossil fuels. Coral reefs are an ongoing depositing, visible to our eyes, but typical of the wider pattern of life itself.<br /><br />In planetary terms, therefore, there can never be an ideal steady state. The planet's essence is not static. Change is paramount. Whatever exists now, is a moment's flicker in an eons-old fire, a fire that consumes the planet eternally, or until the sun burns out and goes cold. A species, like coral, that inhabits, uses, and forever changes the place it inhabits, is not committing a "sin of pollution".The birds or bats who "foul" their islands or their caves with guano are not guilty of malicious "bad housekeeping". Bird species, and bat species need not apologize to Gaia for their guano. In fact it is their gift to Gaia, to make of it a new beginning, which Gaia always has done. By giving back their gift of evolved, changed Gaian essence, these creatures have both embodied Gaia, and done her good work for her. In fact it is their planetary duty to process what they find, and leave it changed. If it were not Gaia's wish that these species exist, they would not have arisen. The evolutionary path trod by their ancestor and precursor species led to their existence, by the self same process they engage in now, it has never changed, and if we think it has been "good" in the past, we are forced to accept the long vision that it is also "good" now, as it happens before our eyes.<br /><br />So then why do many among us view the "man-guano" we produce as evil? Why, uniquely among all creatures that ever existed, or ever could exist, why must homo sapiens sapiens leave exactly zero evidence of ever having lived as a Gaian creation, breathing in, but not breathing out, eating but never defecating, living, but never leaving any gift behind for future species? As a nest-builder, mankind leaves his version of a coral reef in his infrastructure, his cities, his dams, his huge garbage middens, sources of great archaeological richness. Is the coral itself now to dismantle each reef, at the end of each creature's tiny life, to leave the ocean "just as they found it"? ( What might be an efficient policy for a public hiking trail can be a monstrous crime, when applied to humanity as a whole).<br /><br />It is a delusion. It is a futile wish, a desire for false one-ended perfection, an effort to assuage a self-invented guilt by penitent abstention, self-denial, species-denial, history-denial, and finally life-denial. It is born in an ignorance of just what living species are, and thus what they are constrained to do. It is an imaginary delusion that mankind is a god, and therefore not subject to the eternal scientific, thermodynamic , and Gaian rules that determine planetary evolution. At its lowest and most embarrassing level, it is a simple wish to not have any anus. Were mankind changeable into the "perfected" creature many greenists propose as our ethical next step, it would be a creature that would simply never leave any waste. We would breathe in oxygen, but never breathe out CO2.... We might eat food (Vegan, as they would advise us).... but we would use it entirely, and thus never emit any urine, feces, buildings, or other lasting evidence of having processed the Gaian surround. It's a crock. <br /><br />In a sustainability framework, this new anus-free human race would be ideal. Free of the guilt of "fouling" our planet, we could simply grow less in numbers on a continual basis, until we were rightly seen once again as food for other species, who would then eat us, and deposit us as THEIR waste, in the end.<br /><br />So-- sustainability,... far from being a high moral concept, a way to successfully find our "true station" on the planet, is none of these things, but in fact is an ill-conceived self-mutilation. Stasis is not only an impossibility in a living thermodynamic surround, to seek it eventually stunts the expansive impulse describing the host creature as vital, current, and processing on behalf of the planet, and twists current existence into a refusal to process on behalf of Gaia, a delinquent posture of false altruism, never giving back, and thus interrupting evolution itself, in a megalomanic desire to preserve humankind's flickering instant as an eternal "susainable" set- piece, and the races to come after be damned..... <br /><br />Sustainability is therefore a monstrous hubris, born of self-deification, and over-mentalization. In point of fact there is a single sustainable condition, well known to all. That condition is death. By pathological mentalization, some young women imagine their bodies to need constant reduction, and so they abstain from food, or purge when they do eat, in an effort to achieve an unreachable, delusive "perfect" state, a state that in the end, untreated, will very certainly turn out to be their own death. In exactly analogous fashion, "Sustainability" is preached as an end to the very techniques that have led to mankind's current flourishing condition, a state of great health and vitality the world over, overrunning new habitats at every turn , an obviously successful adaptive episode, processing the planet's heritage fully and joyously, urging us instead to take up new, less fruitful, less expansive, less responsive, more isolating strategies---- for what purpose? That the planet may be denied our existence as who we truly are, as who the planet itself has evolved us to be, and be given a wan, mentalized, mutilated, bulimic ideal in its stead?<br /><br />It stems from the bipolar nature of human thinking. In ancient languages, the words for up, & down, or for hot & cold are the same word. Only their use denotes which of the paired concepts is meant each time it is spoken. Thus we dream in opposites, always opposing. Since we seem successful, and happiness is reachable now for billions, unhappiness must also exist, in exactly equal measure. Maybe it does, or maybe it does not. Reality is not the issue. Perception of "balance" in the human mind is the great quest, and in this mentalization, greenists seek what is unfindable. They seek balance in an unbalanced , dynamic, evolving reality, and it is not to be found. In fact, the only true "balanced" condition vis-a-vis life, is the absence of life, either non-existence, or death. That a mentalization seeks balance and finds death, is a great human conundrum, dealt with in differing ways by Buddha, Christ, and the pagans. Buddha urges each to seek his own mental death, Christ invites us to worship his proxy death, and the pagans simply kill each other for the honor and the blood thrill.<br /><br />Thus sustainability, as a philosophy, mines the same human quirk as Buddhism, much in vogue in the West, and infects media with invitations to mass bulimic purgings on all sides. The West, rejecting its worn-out Christianity, heartily embraces its new crypto-buddhist task, and purges en-masse, still forced to attain great individual freedom & wealth, but guilt-ridden about it unless it is bought off by some visible self-mutilation, be it a piercing, declasse clothes, or the refusal to eat meat. These mutilations must occur under the gaze of the less fortunate, to have best emotional effect. As an internal reactive mentalization, it can be viewed as a superstition, or a comforting delusion. Since it works against the very success tactics used by 99% of the human race, it is false, and if pursued relentlessly, it is evil. Muslims correctly regard it as an end-stage pathology, a sin, and thus a need for conversion to Islam.<br /><br />Thus those who tell us coal use emits CO2, and nuclear power results in spent fuel are spouting a banality, as if it were big news, simply for the way it makes them feel. Forgetting to look forward, where our destiny lies, they turn back, to decry our own back-end, our waste-depositing apparatus, and, focused tightly on the anus-of-mankind to the exclusion of all else, they catalog the droppings, with great and obsessive fascination, urging the entire species to fear their own leavings, never realizing that the race, and the planet, are done with it, and need to move on, despite it.<br /><br />This article proposes no new strategy to move forward, except that full acceptance of all aspects of human endeavor will be required, barring nothing, in order to fully process our Gaian surround, <br />and that looking back has been taught to us from ancient times as a mistake, one that turned Lot's wife to a pillar of salt.<br /><br /><br /><br />tags: Indian Point, nuclear, helen caldicott, bulimia is not the answer<br /><br /><a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!" src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-46202617592643125692007-04-09T06:00:00.000-07:002007-04-09T06:01:35.200-07:00INDIAN POINT INCIDENT<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA0__ukoLRRW-v9WLMG92lYFalLATYW5OmkNHR9PhNIEGo3a-dfNRo80_2vIk0LC5haIzEWbOFw95UJ029HcxW4iMKkI60aICZkSKbkeMTRijZMBJJoM7pqZW5U2TKqrdLuLFYMqPALDU/s1600-h/4.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA0__ukoLRRW-v9WLMG92lYFalLATYW5OmkNHR9PhNIEGo3a-dfNRo80_2vIk0LC5haIzEWbOFw95UJ029HcxW4iMKkI60aICZkSKbkeMTRijZMBJJoM7pqZW5U2TKqrdLuLFYMqPALDU/s400/4.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5051412762450110322" /></a><br />Note: The picture above is NOT the Indian Point transformer fire.<br />It is another of the thousands of such fires that happen each year.<br /><br />I have a point of comparison to apply, to judge the significance of any incident at Indian Point, even ones that have not happened yet. You see, I had 20 years' experience working in a conventional fossil power plant, planning the repair work it needed on a daily basis. When I went to work there, I thought mechanical things were all like automobiles. An automobile is designed to work perfectly, without any care at all, for 3 years or 35,000 miles, and then basically get thrown into the crushing machine, to come out as next year's model.<br /><br />in this 3-year perfection honeymoon, the automobile is unique, totally unlike every large mechanical thing on the planet. It has been streamlined into a commodity. You just sign on the line, and never change the oil, and 3 years later you lease another one. This is not typical. Most stuff needs a lot more attention than a car requires.<br /><br />In large installations, like factories, or fossil power plants, about 150-250 items are broken, failed, worn out or needing attention every day. A townhouse complex I lived in years ago was much the same. The maintenance crew there was about 15 men, augmented by contract gardeners. The complex would not have hired 15 people on a full time basis, if there was nothing for them to do. That simple enclave of a dozen brick buildings had maybe 50 to 100 unfixed problems being worked on at any time.<br /><br />Now just imagine yourself being in the real estate market for a townhouse, and being handed a sheaf of papers as you approach the place, listing stuck toilets, failed radiators, uncollected garbage, windows that failed to open, cable TV hookups that didn't work, seamy stories of the personal problems of some of the maintenance mechanics, contagious sicknesses in certain children living there, and a hysterical pre-cooked agenda, telling you to never rent there, because of the great danger, and urging you to call your congressman, to have the place torn down.<br /><br />Would you become afraid of the Townhouses? Would you join up, get agitated, and march around the place holding placards? (admittedly,.... some poor souls would...... its just that most people would not). In point of fact, I thought the maintenance there was lousy, and I moved out. However, the place is still there, and the townhouses are selling for about $450,000 dollars, so the broken toilets didn't seem to affect the realities of the marketplace.<br /><br />In that fossil power plant where I planned and staged the repair work for 50 mechanics and 30 technicians, we had about 1500 outstanding unfixed problems at any time, and incidents happened constantly. Once a mugger, pursued by the police, ran in the front gate, climbed a transformer tower, and got fried to a crisp by the 345KV electricity. That kept us down for about 8 hours. Once a 48 inch high pressure steam line ruptured, and two workers and a fire lieutenant were scalded to death before it was brought under control. That caused a 2 month outage. Once a supervisor led his men to the wrong compartment, and set them to work dismantling the wrong 13KV breaker. They were both incinerated, the lucky man dying in 2 days, the unlucky one taking 3 weeks to die. The entire plant staff of 400 people was bussed to both the funerals. It sucked. Once a worker was careless and cut the wrong cable with a power saw. He lost his sight. He was 45 years old , and lives today as a blind man. A worker made a slip up while pouring powdered caustic into a vat, and got covered with harsh caustic solution, removing the skin from 80% of his body. He lives on disability now, and looks quite a bit less attractive than he did before the incident. Once the entire office complex burned completely overnight, causing 2 million dollars' damage, and resulting in the place being run from rented construction trailers for a year.<br /><br />There was never a week's period, where something did not break, or fail, or explode, or hurt someone. The rythm of steady disaster was constant. It was a high risk, high energy business, and nobody was dismayed by it. Those working on oil rigs will tell you the same. That's how it is, for those of us who work reality jobs. There's nothing wrong because of it. Its regrettable, should be avoided if possible, but its also perfectly normal, expected, even, in its own way.This kind of real-world enterprise cannot be run without it.<br /><br />But kindly note, dear reader, that none of you ever heard anything about it. Not a single word. You see, people are generally oblivious to the agonies of those who serve them. Who cares if the chef scalds his finger? Just serve my steak, and be quick about it. I only heard about it, because I had to write the work orders to fix the stuff. My predecessor had quit, because he couldn't keep up the pace. I was young, wanted to show the world, so I dug in for all it was worth, and fixed disaster, after disaster, after disaster, after disaster, for 20 years. Therefore, when I see all the alarmist ranting about Indian Point, I have a point of comparison.<br /><br />The number of incidents at Indian Point is orders of magnitude less than at the fossil power plant where I worked. The number of failures, is likewise way, way lower than at a typical factory or plant of any kind. The safety regimes preventing the life threatening stuff (for the workers) are so much better at Indian Point, that nothing like that happens there, most of the time. The inherent overdesign built into the plant is so robust, that no danger ever exists for people outside the fence ...AND... a specific watchdog agency is built in to the woodwork in the nuclear industry (NRC) , to make sure this is true, on a 24 hour, seven day, 52 week basis, forever, by law.<br /><br />So, if a transformer burns , its not a point of worry to me, because Entergy is so good, none of our toasters or TV sets even stopped working because of it.(In case you hadn't noticed). Entergy didn't even need the fire department. Looking at pictures of Entergy's fire brigade, I thought it WAS the fire department. But it wasn't. It was just Entergy's capable, professional well trained, well equipped employees, as good as any fire department, stopping a nasty fire in minutes.<br /><br />Oh, and yes, as the newspapers have relished in saying "There was no release of radiation" . They love saying that, overtly acting as if trying to calm you, while at the same time covertly trying to worry you. Journalistic duplicity, I'd call it. Reporters love the wild, the garish, the worrisome, and want to jiggle your emotions if they can. They get promotions when they succeed at this. For those not wishing to be manipulated in this way, its best to shrug it off. It's THEIR thing, not ours.<br /><br />So then why am I hearing all these things about Indian Point? Simple. Indian Point is famous. They would like you to believe its notorious, but its not. AND something next is gonna break there soon, we can count on it. But we shouldn't worry about it. <br />That's life.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-44073518705363639502007-04-01T08:30:00.000-07:002007-04-01T08:35:45.484-07:00GAIA's OWN INDIAN POINT<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicYj1PGCQnE899SQN3Nl8BPsD-IZNvW17DOMI6O2GYetLHfOFQa7oPRg4bayc3KPq4bKhltKpXsshyphenhyphent7OIQ6qLT9BemNWF1MVYfwEalRflNJEemkjyzcv9olYWlEhZLTlLXV_qdm4DwCg/s1600-h/core2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicYj1PGCQnE899SQN3Nl8BPsD-IZNvW17DOMI6O2GYetLHfOFQa7oPRg4bayc3KPq4bKhltKpXsshyphenhyphent7OIQ6qLT9BemNWF1MVYfwEalRflNJEemkjyzcv9olYWlEhZLTlLXV_qdm4DwCg/s400/core2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5048483226731080002" /></a><br />A large uranium reactor in the earth's core, is the primary heat source upholding our planetary ecosystem.here is a little search info to get you started<br /><br /> Enjoy!<br /><br /><br />Jeff Atwell<br />Mount Vernon, Ohio<br />Quentin Williams, associate professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz offers this explanation:<br />There are three main sources of heat in the deep earth: (1) heat from when the planet formed and accreted, which has not yet been lost; (2) frictional heating, caused by denser core material sinking to the center of the planet; and (3) heat from the decay of radioactive elements.<br />It takes a rather long time for heat to move out of the earth. This occurs through both "convective" transport of heat within the earth's liquid outer core and solid mantle and slower "conductive" transport of heat through nonconvecting boundary layers, such as the earth's plates at the surface. As a result, much of the planet's primordial heat, from when the earth first accreted and developed its core, has been retained.<br />The amount of heat that can arise through simple accretionary processes, bringing small bodies together to form the proto-earth, is large: on the order of 10,000 kelvins (about 18,000 degrees Farhenheit). The crucial issue is how much of that energy was deposited into the growing earth and how much was reradiated into space. Indeed, the currently accepted idea for how the moon was formed involves the impact or accretion of a Mars-size object with or by the proto-earth. When two objects of this size collide, large amounts of heat are generated, of which quite a lot is retained. This single episode could have largely melted the outermost several thousand kilometers of the planet.<br />Additionally, descent of the dense iron-rich material that makes up the core of the planet to the center would produce heating on the order of 2,000 kelvins (about 3,000 degrees F). The magnitude of the third main source of heat--radioactive heating--is large, but quantitatively uncertain. The precise abundances of radioactive elements (primarily potassium, uranium and thorium) are is poorly known in the deep earth.<br />In sum, there was no shortage of heat in the early earth, and the planet's inability to cool off quickly results in the continued high temperatures of the Earth's interior. In effect, not only do the earth's plates act as a blanket on the interior, but not even convective heat transport in the solid mantle provides a particularly efficient mechanism for heat loss. The planet does lose some heat through the processes that drive plate tectonics, especially at mid-ocean ridges. For comparison, smaller bodies such as Mars and the Moon show little evidence for recent tectonic activity or volcanism.<br />We derive our primary estimate of the temperature of the deep earth from the melting behavior of iron at ultrahigh pressures. We know that the earth's core depths from 2,886 kilometers to the center at 6,371 kilometers (1,794 to 3,960 miles), is predominantly iron, with some contaminants. How? The speed of sound through the core (as measured from the velocity at which seismic waves travel across it) and the density of the core are quite similar to those seen in of iron at high pressures and temperatures, as measured in the laboratory. Iron is the only element that closely matches the seismic properties of the earth's core and is also sufficiently abundant present in sufficient abundance in the universe to make up the approximately 35 percent of the mass of the planet present in the core.<br />The earth's core is divided into two separate regions: the liquid outer core and the solid inner core, with the transition between the two lying at a depth of 5,156 kilometers (3,204 miles). Therefore, If we can measure the melting temperature of iron at the extreme pressure of the boundary between the inner and outer cores, then this lab temperature should reasonably closely approximate the real temperature at this liquid-solid interface. Scientists in mineral physics laboratories use lasers and high-pressure devices called diamond-anvil cells to re-create these hellish pressures and temperatures as closely as possible.<br /><br /><br /><br />http://athene.as.arizona.edu/~lclose/teaching/images/lect8.html<br />Lecture 8<br />History of the Earth <br />Chapter 3<br /> The dynamic Earth (Introduction to Geophysics)<br />Most geophysical processes stem from the transfer of heat from the Earth's core to its surface. <br />Why is the Earth's core hot?<br /> 1. The radio active decay of Uranium (U), Thorium (Th) and Potassium (K). Each radio active decay (the loss of some neutrons and protons) releases very little energy. However, all the countless events acting together release a large sustained amount of energy overtime. In the core of the Earth this energy is trapped and so the Earth's core is heated up.<br /> 2. As the solid inner grows latent heat is released as the molten outer core freezes to solid rock. Eventually the whole Earth will be solid and there will be no magnetic field.<br /> 3. Residual formation heat. Some of the kinetic energy (1/2mv2) of the impacting planetesimals would have been converted to heat. This residual formation heat helped melt the core initially.<br /> 4. Another early heat source was the heat produced as the heavy elements (like Iron (Fe) and Nickel (Ni)) "falling" into the core. This process also generated heat from friction.<br /> The exchange of heat from the hot core to the cool surface is called convection (heat rises, cold sinks). In this manner the whole Earth has a series of big convective cells in its mantel. The result is a complex series of movements of the crust of the Earth as it "rides" on top of the convective cells below.<br />Plate Tectonics <br />In the 1950s and 60s geophysicists started to develop the concept of Plate Tectonics. Plate tectonics is the theory that describes the motion of the continental plates "riding" the tops of these massive convective cells in the Earth (like a conveyor belt). <br />Here is a movie showing how the plates have moved the continents<br />Today these plates move by about 10 cm/yr<br /> • when these plates stick, and then suddenly slip, an Earthquake occurs<br /> • when the heavier ocean crust sinks below the lighter (granite) continental crust (at subjection zones) there will be Earthquakes and Volcanos -the ring of fire around the Pacific is built this way. The Continental crust will also be crumpled, and as a result it is typical to see mountain ranges along the edges of these faults (for example the rocky mountains and the Andes).<br /> • Seamount Island Chains -like the Hawaiian Islands- are made when one hot spot in the Earths mantle leads to continuous eruptions in the same spot. But as the crust moves along the ocean floor a chain of new islands appear.Sometimes (but not often) two continental plates collide. In this case neither plate is heavier and so they both "crumple". This is occurring today as the Indian plate collides with the Asian plate. The result of this collision is the Himalayas which are the highest mountains on Earth.Why is a hot core important for life on Earth?<br /> 1. the surface temperature is higher<br /> 2. active volcanism can out gas the atmosphere and oceans<br /> 3. volcanism is required to form land masses above the ocean<br /> 4. hot spots in the sea floor can be "safe" habitats for life<br /> 5. hot springs and even hot water deep in the Earth can harbor life<br /> 6. volcanoes play a role in the Earth's carbon cycle<br /> Basin and Range<br />Tucson is located in a unique part of the world. The area where we live is called "Basin & Range" geography. This denotes that in Eastern California, Arizona, and New Mexico the terrain is dominated by short (often parallel) mountain ranges with large dry basins between them. This is a highly unusual land form caused by a unique event in the Earth's history.<br /> • About 20 million years ago the continental plate of the Southwest became "attached" somehow to the pacific coast plate which was moving northwest at the time.<br /> • Added to this was intense heat from magma close to the surface.<br /> • The end result was the unique "Basin & Range disturbance" where the coast of California was pulled away from Arizona by some 38% of its original size.<br /> • The hard cold rock on the top splintered into dozens of parallel ranges, while huge basins over 1 km deep were opened up between the rangeThe whole stretching event took a few million years. Then due to erosion the valleys filled in and the ranges wore down --further filling the valleys.<br />The reason Tucson exists today is because of the "fossil ground water" trapped in the huge 1 km deep valley basin exists below the city.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Radioactivity in Earth's core up for a look<br />vast uranium field serves as natural reactor<br />Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer<br />Monday, November 29, 2004<br /><br />Researchers are preparing to prove the discoveries of San Diego geologist, J. Marvin Herndon, who has found a huge, natural nuclear reactor or "georeactor" -- a vast deposit of uranium several miles wide -- at Earth's core, thousands of miles beneath our feet. Herndon and many others believe it explains otherwise puzzling phenomena of planetary science, such as fluctuations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field. "Herndon's idea about (a reactor) located at the center of the Earth, has opened a new era in planetary physics," said four Russian scientists at Moscow's Institute for Nuclear Research and Kurchatov Institute in a Jan. 28 paper published online.<br />It might sound bizarre, the very idea of a "natural" nuclear reactor -- a geological version of commercial nuclear power plants such as Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s Diablo Canyon plant near San Luis Obispo. The reactor at the Earth's core is just a much bigger and deeper version of an extinct natural nuclear reactor that scientists discovered in a uranium mine in Gabon, Africa, in 1972.<br />The Gabon reactor consists of geological deposits of uranium that, being radioactive, naturally emit subatomic particles called neutrons. These neutrons split the nuclei in adjacent uranium atoms, causing them to emit more neutrons and, thus, to split even more uranium atoms -- in effect, it's a slow-speed chain reaction. Research in the 1970s revealed that the Gabon reactor operated intermittently for a few million years about 2 billion years ago.<br />Scientists have long known the planet's core is divided into a solid and liquid part composed largely of iron, the liquid circulation of which powers Earth's magnetic field. They have not thought of the core as a repository for uranium, because uranium was not understood until 1945. Although the inevitability of uranium in the core was proposed in 1939 by scientist Walter Elsasser, on the basis that it is the heaviest naturally occurring element, so it would migrate to the core via gravity.<br />Herndon has demonstrated how a uranium georeactor in Earth's core explains reality better than older scientific ideas, by providing more convincing ways to:<br />-- Explain the ratios of helium isotopes emitted from volcanoes in Iceland and Hawaii. Those ratios are consistent with the ratios of helium isotopes emitted by a nuclear reactor.<br />-- Explain why planets such as Jupiter emit far more heat than they absorb from the sun. Herndon thinks they, too, have natural nuclear reactors at their cores. (Because heat is continually generated by the decay of radioactive elements in Earth's crust and mantle -- the regions above the core -- scientists are uncertain whether Earth emits more heat than it receives from the sun.)<br />-- Explain variations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field, which fluctuates over time. Herndon has shown that in the core, the georeactor drives the motions of the liquid iron that creates the magnetic field. But the georeactor varies in activity levels over time. Those activity variations, he believes, might explain intensity variations in Earth's magnetic field.<br />Now, Rob de Meijer and associates at the Nuclear Physics Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands, are planning to demonstrate Herndon's proposals. They're drawing blueprints for a large device that could detect ghostly particles called antineutrinos that have escaped from Earth's core. When put into operation, it will capture antineutrinos that would fly through the roughly 4,000 miles of solid rock and emerge at the Earth's surface.<br />The European scientists have proposed drilling a shaft more than 1,000 feet deep into the island of Curacao in the Caribbean. They hope to lower into the shaft devices called photomultipliers, which could detect particles from the hypothetical deep-Earth georeactor.<br />The estimated cost: $80 million. In an e-mail to The Chronicle, de Meijer said he is seeking funding from the Dutch government and industrial consortiums. He and his team plan to visit Curacao in January to take the geological samples needed to design the subterranean antineutrino "antenna," as they call it.<br />Curacao is a good location for the antineutrino detector because "the island's rocks have relatively few natural radionuclides that could mask the (antineutrino) signal from the Earth's core," the journal Physics World noted in September. The detector could be confused by antineutrinos emitted by commercial nuclear reactors, but Curacao is far enough from the southeastern United States that reactors in Florida won't affect it.<br />"Dr. Herndon is a brilliant and original thinker. I agree with his proposal" said geoscientist David Deming of the University of Oklahoma.<br />"The problem with most scientists working today is that they have no knowledge of the history of science," Deming adds. "As late as 1955, continental drift was regarded as the equivalent of alien abductions, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. By 1970, continental drift was an accepted part of the new theory of plate tectonics."<br />Richard Muller, a noted physicist and author at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. Since the 1970s, Muller has done pioneering research in diverse fields, including cosmology and planetary sciences.<br />"Herndon's discovery is a very positive contribution to deep Earth science. He raises issues that are worth exploring at some length. " Muller adds. "I consider his work to be 'out of the box' thinking, and as such, it is valuable as a step forward in our understanding of reality."<br />On a side note, in case you're wondering: Unlike the planet-busting reactor of Superman lore, neither the Gabon reactor nor Herndon's hypothetical deep-Earth reactors could explode like atomic bombs. A-bombs require highly concentrated amounts of fissionable materials that are explosively compressed together in a fraction of a second -- far faster than the snail's-pace processes that would be characteristic of the natural reactors.<br />Herndon received his bachelor's degree in physics at UC San Diego in 1970. He studied nuclear chemistry and meteorites in graduate school at Texas A&M, where he received his doctoral degree for a thesis on meteorites. Operating as an independent scientist, over the years, he has published papers in prestigious journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. His main allies are non-Americans, like the de Meijer team. On Dec. 16, Herndon is scheduled to deliver the prestigious annual "Christmas Lecture" at the European Commission's Institute for Transuranium Elements in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is felt that the huge antinuclear bias in American society is preventing other U.S. academics from getting on board, as they might lose tenure positions or funding by bucking the strong academic antinuke culture on this issue. Had his two sons -- now physicians -- planned to become scientists, he says, "I would have steered them away from it because you can't make a living and do legitimate science; you have to 'howl with the wolves' or you don't survive. This is a sad testament to our times. There's something very wrong in American science." <br />Herndon’s proposal<br />According to traditional theory, the core of Earth consists of iron. The SanDiego scientist J. Marvin Herndon has argued that a large deposit of uranium also exists in the core, where it powers a natural nuclear reactor or “georeactor.” Herndon believes the nuclear process is responsible for variations in the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field.<br />During the radioactive decays, the georeactor releases ghostly particles called antineutrinos, which fly through thousands of miles of solid rock to Earth’s surface. Scientists will test Herndon’s georeactor by using special instruments to detect the antineutrinos as they pass through the outer crust.<br />Sources: nuclearplanet.com; www.ansto.gov.au/edu/about/about_neutron.htm;<br />Other scientists have expanded Herndon's proposal to include Thorium and Potassium.<br />nasa<br />http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/29/MNGPIA17BL45.DTL<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000B2C71-BCF0-1C71-9EB7809EC588F2D7<br />Why is the earth's core so hot? And how do scientists measure its temperature?<br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.physlink.com/News/121103PotassiumCore.cfm<br /><br />Radioactive material is the primary heat source in Earth's core<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Radioactive potassium, common enough on Earth to make potassium-rich bananas one of the "hottest" foods around, appears also to be a substantial source of heat in the Earth's core, according to recent experiments by University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists.<br />Radioactive potassium, uranium and thorium are thought to be the three main sources of heat in the Earth's interior, aside from that generated by the formation of the planet. Together, the heat keeps the mantle actively churning and the core generating a protective magnetic field.<br />But geophysicists have found much less potassium in the Earth's crust and mantle than would be expected based on the composition of rocky meteors that supposedly formed the Earth. If, as some have proposed, the missing potassium resides in the Earth's iron core, how did an element as light as potassium get there, especially since iron and potassium don't mix?<br />Kanani Lee, who recently earned her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science Raymond Jeanloz have discovered a possible answer. They've shown that at the high pressures and temperatures in the Earth's interior, potassium can form an alloy with iron never before observed. During the planet's formation, this potassium-iron alloy could have sunk to the core, depleting potassium in the overlying mantle and crust and providing a radioactive potassium heat source in addition to that supplied by uranium and thorium in the core.<br />Lee created the new alloy by squeezing iron and potassium between the tips of two diamonds to temperatures and pressures characteristic of 600-700 kilometers below the surface - 2,500 degrees Celsius and nearly 4 million pounds per square inch, or a quarter of a million times atmospheric pressure.<br />"Our new findings indicate that the core may contain as much as 1,200 parts per million potassium -just over one tenth of one percent," Lee said. "This amount may seem small, and is comparable to the concentration of radioactive potassium naturally present in bananas. Combined over the entire mass of the Earth's core, however, it can be enough to provide one-fifth of the heat given off by the Earth."<br />Lee and Jeanloz will report their findings on Dec. 10, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, and in an article accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.<br />"With one experiment, Lee and Jeanloz demonstrated that potassium may be an important heat source for the geodynamo, provided a way out of some troublesome aspects of the core's thermal evolution, and further demonstrated that modern computational mineral physics not only complements experimental work, but that it can provide guidance to fruitful experimental explorations," said Mark Bukowinski, professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, who predicted the unusual alloy in the mid-1970s.<br />Geophysicist Bruce Buffett of the University of Chicago cautions that more experiments need to be done to show that iron can actually pull potassium away from the silicate rocks that dominate in the Earth's mantle.<br />"They proved it would be possible to dissolve potassium into liquid iron," Buffet said. "Modelers need heat, so this is one source, because the radiogenic isotope of potassium can produce heat and that can help power convection in the core and drive the magnetic field. They proved it could go in. What's important is how much is pulled out of the silicate. There's still work to be done "<br />If a significant amount of potassium does reside in the Earth's core, this would clear up a lingering question - why the ratio of potassium to uranium in stony meteorites (chondrites), which presumably coalesced to form the Earth, is eight times greater than the observed ratio in the Earth's crust. Though some geologists have asserted that the missing potassium resides in the core, there was no mechanism by which it could have reached the core. Other elements like oxygen and carbon form compounds or alloys with iron and presumably were dragged down by iron as it sank to the core. But at normal temperature and pressure, potassium does not associate with iron.<br />Others have argued that the missing potassium boiled away during the early, molten stage of Earth's evolution.<br />The demonstration by Lee and Jeanloz that potassium can dissolve in iron to form an alloy provides an explanation for the missing potassium.<br />"Early in Earth's history, the interior temperature and pressure would not have been high enough to make this alloy," Lee said. "But as more and more meteorites piled on, the pressure and temperature would have increased to the point where this alloy could form."<br />The existence of this high-pressure alloy was predicted by Bukowinski in the mid-1970s. Using quantum mechanical arguments, he suggested that high pressure would squeeze potassium's lone outer electron into a lower shell, making the atom resemble iron and thus more likely to alloy with iron.<br />More recent quantum mechanical calculations using improved techniques, conducted with Gerd Steinle-Neumann at the Universität Bayreuth's Bayerisches Geoinstitüt, confirmed the new experimental measurements.<br />"This really replicates and verifies the earlier calculations 26 years ago and provides a physical explanation for our experimental results," Jeanloz said.<br />The Earth is thought to have formed from the collision of many rocky asteroids, perhaps hundreds of kilometers in diameter, in the early solar system. As the proto-Earth gradually bulked up, continuing asteroid collisions and gravitational collapse kept the planet molten. Heavier elements – in particular iron - would have sunk to the core in 10 to 100 million years' time, carrying with it other elements that bind to iron.<br />Gradually, however, the Earth would have cooled off and become a dead rocky globe with a cold iron ball at the core if not for the continued release of heat by the decay of radioactive elements like potassium-40, uranium-238 and thorium-232, which have half-lives of 1.25 billion, 4 billion and 14 billion years, respectively. About one in every thousand potassium atoms is radioactive.<br />The heat generated in the core turns the iron into a convecting dynamo that maintains a magnetic field strong enough to shield the planet from the solar wind. This heat leaks out into the mantle, causing convection in the rock that moves crustal plates and fuels volcanoes.<br />Balancing the heat generated in the core with the known concentrations of radiogenic isotopes has been difficult, however, and the missing potassium has been a big part of the problem. One researcher proposed earlier this year that sulfur could help potassium associate with iron and provide a means by which potassium could reach the core.<br />The experiment by Lee and Jeanloz shows that sulfur is not necessary. Lee combined pure iron and pure potassium in a diamond anvil cell and squeezed the small sample to 26 gigapascals of pressure while heating the sample with a laser above 2,500 Kelvin (4,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which is above the melting points of both potassium and iron. She conducted this experiment six times in the high-intensity X-ray beams of two different accelerators - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory - to obtain X-ray diffraction images of the samples' internal structure. The images confirmed that potassium and iron had mixed evenly to form an alloy, much as iron and carbon mix to form steel alloy.<br />In the theoretical magma ocean of a proto-Earth, the pressure at a depth of 400-1,000 kilometers (270-670 miles) would be between 15 and 35 gigapascals and the temperature would be 2,200-3,000 Kelvin, Jeanloz said.<br />"At these temperatures and pressures, the underlying physics changes and the electron density shifts, making potassium look more like iron," Jeanloz said. "At high pressure, the periodic table looks totally different."<br />"The work by Lee and Jeanloz provides the first proof that potassium is indeed miscible in iron at high pressures and, perhaps as significantly, it further vindicates the computational physics that underlies the original prediction," Bukowinski said. "If it can be further demonstrated that potassium would enter iron in significant amounts in the presence of silicate minerals, conditions representative of likely core formation processes, then potassium could provide the extra heat needed to explain why the Earth's inner core hasn't frozen to as large a size as the thermal history of the core suggests it should."<br />Jeanloz is excited by the fact that theoretical calculations are now not only explaining experimental findings at high pressure, but also predicting structures.<br />"We need theorists to identify interesting problems, not only check our results after the experiment," he said. "That's happening now. In the past half a dozen years, theorists have been making predictions that experimentalists are willing to spend a few years to demonstrate."<br />The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.<br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0437778100v1<br />Nuclear georeactor origin of oceanic basalt 3Hey4He,<br />evidence, and implications<br /><br />J. Marvin Herndon*<br />Transdyne Corporation, 11044 Red Rock Drive, San Diego, CA 92131<br />Communicated by Hatten S. Yoder, Jr., Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC, December 20, 2002 (received for review November 21, 2002)<br /><br />Nuclear georeactor numerical simulation results yield substantial<br />3He and 4He production and 3Hey4He ratios relative to air (RA) that<br />encompass the entire 2-SD (2s) confidence level range of tabulated<br />measured 3Hey4He ratios of basalts from along the global spreading<br />ridge system. Georeactor-produced 3Hey4He ratios are related<br />to the extent of actinide fuel consumption at time of production<br />and are high near the end of the georeactor lifetime. Georeactor<br />numerical simulation results and the observed high 3Hey4He ratios<br />measured in Icelandic and Hawaiian oceanic basalts indicate that<br />the demise of the georeactor is approaching. Within the present<br />level of uncertainty, one cannot say precisely when georeactor<br />demise will occur, whether in the next century, in a million years,<br />or in a billion years from now.<br />helium u mantle u nuclear reactor u Earth core<br />Early in 1939, Hahn and Strassmann (1) published their<br />discovery of nuclear fission. Later in the same year, Flu¨gge<br />(2) speculated on the possibility that self-sustaining nuclear<br />fission chain reactions might have taken place under natural<br />conditions within uranium ore deposits. Applying Fermi’s nuclear<br />reactor theory (3), in 1956 Kuroda (4) demonstrated the<br />feasibility that thick seams of uranium ore might have undergone<br />sustained nuclear fission 2,000 million years ago or earlier when<br />the relative proportion of 235U was greater. In 1972, French<br />scientists (5) discovered the intact remains of a natural nuclear<br />fission reactor that had operated 1,800 million years ago in a<br />0.5-m-thick seam of uranium ore at Oklo, in the Republic of<br />Gabon. Later other reactor zones were discovered in the region<br />(6). In 1992, Herndon (7), applying Fermi’s nuclear reactor<br />theory, demonstrated the feasibility of planetary-scale nuclear<br />fission reactors as energy sources for the giant outer planets,<br />three of which radiate approximately twice as much energy as<br />they each receive from the Sun. Beginning in 1993, Herndon<br />(8–10) demonstrated the feasibility of a planetary-scale nuclear<br />fission reactor at the center of the Earth as the principal energy<br />source for the geomagnetic field and as a contributive energy<br />source for other geodynamic processes, such as plate movement.<br />In 2001, Hollenbach and Herndon (11) published results of<br />numerical simulations of a deep-Earth nuclear fission reactor,<br />conducted at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge,<br />TN, which confirmed the previous considerations of Herndon<br />(8–10) and demonstrated that 3He and 4He would be produced<br />by the georeactor.<br />Clarke et al. (12) discovered that 3He and 4He are venting from<br />the Earth’s interior. The 3Hey4He ratio of helium released to the<br />oceans at midoceanic ridges is about eight times greater than in<br />the atmosphere (RyRA 5 8 6 1, where R is the measured value<br />of 3Hey4He and RA is the same ratio measured in air 5 1.4 3<br />1026), and, therefore, cannot be ascribed to atmospheric contamination.<br />Iceland plume 3Hey4He values have been found (13)<br />as high as '37 RA. Natural radioactive decay of uranium and<br />thorium will lead to 4He production; but for three decades<br />geophysicists have been unaware of any mechanism deep within<br />the Earth that can account for substantial 3He production.<br />Lacking knowledge of a deep-source production mechanism,<br />deep-Earth 3He has been assumed to be of primordial origin (12,<br />13), trapped within the mantle at the time that the Earth formed.<br />In the belief that deep-Earth 3He is primordial, various implications<br />have been drawn concerning mantle structure and<br />dynamics (14, 15). But the ratio of primordial 3Hey4He is thought<br />to be '1024, a value inferred from gas-rich meteorites (16),<br />which is '1 order of magnitude greater than helium released<br />from the mantle. In ascribing a primordial origin to the observed<br />deep-Earth 3Hey4He, the assumption implicitly made is that the<br />primordial component is diluted by a factor of '10 with 4He<br />produced by the natural radioactive decay of U and Th in the<br />mantle andyor in the crust. The alternative suggestion (17), that<br />the 3Hey4He arises instead from cosmic dust, subducted into the<br />mantle, necessitates the assumption that the influx of interplanetary<br />dust particles was considerably greater in ancient times<br />than at present and also necessitates the assumption of a 10-fold<br />dilution by 4He. Based on nuclear reactor numerical simulation<br />results, Hollenbach and Herndon (11) have suggested instead<br />that the observed deep-source helium is in fact the product of<br />and evidence for a deep-Earth nuclear fission reactor (8–10).<br />Previous georeactor numerical simulations by Hollenbach and<br />Herndon (11) were conducted at a single power level with the<br />SAS2 analysis sequence contained in the SCALE Code Package<br />from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (18). Because these<br />codes were developed for use with government and commercial<br />nuclear reactors, cumulative fission yields are reported over<br />time. The 3Hey4He values published by Hollenbach and Herndon<br />(11) were likewise cumulative. But instantaneous values are<br />more geophysically representative and more revealing. One<br />purpose of the present article is to present instantaneous helium<br />fission yields ratios through steps in time at multiple power<br />levels, thus facilitating comparison with 3Hey4He ratios measured<br />in deep-source lavas. Another purpose of the present<br />article is to show that the nuclear reactor fission yield helium<br />isotope ratios are not necessarily constant, but rather appear to<br />be related to the extent of actinide fuel consumption at time of<br />production. Still another purpose of the present article is to<br />address the question of the georeactor lifetime and demise.<br />Methodology<br />The background as to why a large portion of the Earth’s reservoir<br />of uranium is expected to exist in the core, precipitate, and<br />ultimately collect at the center of the Earth has been set forth in<br />refs. 8–11 and stems from the deep interior of the Earth having<br />a state of oxidation similar to the Abee enstatite chondrite (10).<br />The numerical simulations presented in this article were conducted<br />at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory by using the same<br />computer codes and input parameters as described in Hollenbach<br />and Herndon (11), the source to refer to for details.<br />Calculations were made with the SAS2 analysis sequence<br />contained in the SCALE Code Package from the Oak Ridge<br />National Laboratory (18) that has been developed over 30 years<br />and has been extensively validated against isotopic analyses of<br />commercial reactor fuels (19–23). The SAS2 sequence invokes<br />Abbreviations: RA, ratio relative to air; TW, Terra-watt.<br />*E-mail: mherndon@san.rr.com.<br />www.pnas.orgycgiydoiy10.1073ypnas.0437778100 PNAS u March 18, 2003 u vol. 100 u no. 6 u 3047–3050<br /><br /><br />Previously, in the absence of knowledge of a deep-Earth<br />production mechanism for 3He, the assumed primordial origin of<br />3He was essentially taken as fact with little justification. In light<br />of the evidence presented for a deep-Earth nuclear reactor origin<br />of the 3Hey4He of oceanic basalts, the burden of proof now falls<br />on those who would still argue for a primordial or cosmic origin<br />to show in detail the specific geophysical circumstances whereby<br />their individually assumed separate helium reservoirs, differing<br />in space and time and differing by nearly an order of magnitude,<br />mix to yield the relatively narrow range of 3Hey4He values shown<br />in Table 1.<br />Conclusions previously drawn relating to the geophysical<br />implications of oceanic basalt helium data, for example, mantle<br />degassing, should now be reassessed. Such reassessment is<br />beyond the intent and scope of the present paper. Nevertheless,<br />the subject of high 3Hey4He values in certain measurements of<br />so-called plumes, specifically Icelandic and Hawaiian, deserves<br />comment.<br />For years efforts have been made to find unambiguously high<br />3Hey4He values in plume-derived oceanic basalts (25, 26). A<br />main motivation of those investigations, based on the assumed<br />primordial origin of the 3He, was to find helium least diluted by<br />4He. Those investigations should be continued and encouraged,<br />not for the original motivation, but because the high 3Hey4He<br />values may very well reflect the beginnings of the demise of the<br />georeactor and should be investigated.<br />One shortcoming of oceanic basalt helium isotopic measurements<br />is that the time of formation of the helium is unknown. But<br />from Fig. 1, one can see that helium time of formation is<br />important for assessing the time of demise of the georeactor.<br />Efforts should be made to address that shortcoming, such as<br />described below.<br />At the pressures that prevail within the Earth’s core, density<br />is a function almost exclusively of atomic number and atomic<br />mass. Only very light elements might be able to escape from the<br />core and find transport to the surface through some volcanic<br />system. Helium is one example. When an actinide nucleus<br />fissions, it typically splits into two heavy fragments. But once in<br />approximately every 104 binary fission events, the actinide<br />nucleus splits into three pieces, two heavy fragments and one<br />very light fragment. Tritium (3H), which decays into 3He, is a<br />light fragment from ternary fission. Other ternary fission products,<br />which should be sought and which might be found in<br />deep-source oceanic basalts, are shown in Table 3.<br />All of the isotopes shown in Table 3, with the exception of<br />10Be, are stable. Generally, light-element, ternary fission products,<br />if radioactive, have very short half-lives. A notable exception,<br />however, is 10Be, with a half-life of 1.5 3 106 years. Both<br />10Be and 9Be are produced by the georeactor with an initial ratio<br />10Bey9Be 5 6. Although a major technological challenge, serious<br />efforts should be made to find evidence of nuclear fission<br />produced beryllium in high 3Hey4He oceanic basalt samples and<br />then to devise a means for using 10Be to obtain helium time-offormation<br />data.<br />In Fig. 1, the 3-TW, 5-TW, and 6-TW nuclear reactors cease<br />to maintain criticality at 5.6, 4.4, and 4.0 gigayears, respectively.<br />That these times are very close to the present epoch in the<br />lifetime of the Earth may well be cause for concern. The<br />long-standing idea that the Earth will continue much as it has for<br />at least another 4.5 gigayears stems from the 1940 reasoning of<br />Birch, who could not have known of the implications (27)<br />resulting from the 1960’s discovery of nickel silicide and siliconcontaining<br />metal in enstatite chondrite meteorites. The data<br />presented in Fig. 1 show that terminal failure of the georeactor<br />is approaching, but that time frame is not well defined, considering<br />the uncertainties, and might be as short as 102 years or as<br />long as 109 years.<br />Conclusions<br />The helium observed for the past three decades in oceanic<br />basalts has been demonstrated to have been produced by a<br />nuclear reactor at the center of the Earth. The nuclear georeactor<br />numerical simulation results, even for the simple, preliminary<br />cases shown, yield a narrow range of 3Hey4He RAs that<br />encompass the entire 2-SD (2s) confidence level range of<br />tabulated (24) measured 3Hey4He ratios of basalts from along<br />the global spreading ridge system and lead to substantial 3He and<br />4He production.<br />Nuclear georeactor produced 3Hey4He ratios are not necessarily<br />constant, but rather appear to be related to the extent of<br />actinide fuel consumption at time of production. High 3Hey4He<br />ratios are produced near the end of the georeactor lifetime.<br />Nuclear georeactor numerical simulation results and the observed<br />high 3Hey4He ratios measured in Icelandic and Hawaiian<br />oceanic basalts indicate that the demise of the georeactor is<br />approaching, but the time is not yet precisely determined. As the<br />georeactor dies, the geomagnetic field that it presumably powers<br />after a time will begin to collapse. But unlike previous geomagnetic<br />collapses, that have restarted and re-energized the field, a time will<br />come when the actinide fuel of the georeactor is too diminished to<br />initiate self-sustaining neutron-induced chain reactions; the georeactorwill<br />die and sometime thereafter the geomagnetic fieldwill die<br />and will not restart. At some point in time after the georeactor dies,<br />there will be no geomagnetic field and life on Earth will never be<br />the same. The challenge now is to determine precisely the time of<br />georeactor demise. Within the present level of uncertainty, one<br />cannot say whether that time will come in the next century, in the<br />next millennium, in a million years, or in a billion years. But one<br />thing is certain: georeactor demise will occur.<br />High praise and deep appreciation are extended to the Oak Ridge<br />National Laboratory and particularly to Drs. D. J. Hill, D. F. Hollenbach,<br />and C. V. Parks for graciously assisting a small business conducting<br />unfunded, not-for-profit, but important, basic research.<br />1. Hahn, O. & Strassmann, F. (1939) Naturwissenschaften 27, 11.<br />2. Flu¨gge, F. (1939) Naturwissenschaften 27, 402.<br />3. Fermi, E. (1947) Science 105, 27–32.<br />4. Kuroda, P. K. (1956) J. Chem. Phys. 25, 781–782.<br />5. Neuilly, M., Bussac, J., Fre´jacques, C., Nief, G., Vendryes, G. & Yvon, J. (1972)<br />C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris 275, 1847–1849.<br />6. Gauthier-Lafaye, F., Holliger, P. & Blanc, P. L. (1969) Geochim. Cosmochim.<br />Acta 60, 4831–4852.<br />7. Herndon, J. M. (1992) Naturwissenschaften 79, 7–14.<br />8. Herndon, J. M. (1993) J. Geomagn. Geoelectr. 45, 423–437.<br />9. Herndon, J. M. (1994) Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. A 445, 453–461.<br />10. Herndon, J. M. (1996) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 93, 646–648.<br />11. Hollenbach, D. F. & Herndon, J. M. (2001) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 98,<br />11085–11090.<br />12. Clarke, W. B., Beg, M. A. & Craig, H. (1969) Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. 6, 213–220.<br />13. Hilton, D. R., Gro¨nvold, K., Macpherson, C. G. & Castillo, P. R. (1999) Earth<br />Planet. Sci. Lett. 173, 53–60.<br />14. O’Nions, P. K. (1987) J. Geol. Soc. London 144, 259–274.<br />15. McDougall, I. & Honda, M. (1998) in The Earth’s Mantle, ed. Jackson, I.<br />(Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, U.K.), pp. 159–190.<br />Table 3. Potential in-core nuclear fission signatures in<br />oceanic basalts<br />Isotopes Nuclear data Deep-earth data<br />3He, 4He Have Have<br />6Li, 7Li Have Need<br />9Be, 10Be Have Need<br />10B, 11B Need Need<br />20Ne, 21Ne, 22Ne Need Have<br />Herndon PNAS u March 18, 2003 u vol. 100 u no. 6 u 3049<br /><br />the ORIGEN-S isotopic generation and depletion code to<br />calculate concentrations of actinides, fission products, and activation<br />products simultaneously generated through fission, neutron<br />absorption, and radioactive decay. The SAS2 sequence<br />performs the 1D transport analyses at selected time intervals,<br />calculating an energy f lux spectrum, updating the timedependent<br />weighted cross sections for the depletion analysis, and<br />calculating the neutron multiplication of the system.<br />With the exception of power levels, the values used as input to<br />the SAS2 are the same used by Hollenbach and Herndon (11)<br />and are as follows: initial volume of uranium 5 5.6807 3 1017<br />cm3; initial atom ratio 235Uy238U 5 0.3038; uranium density 5<br />36.84 gycm3; steady-state fission power 5 3.0 Terra-watts (TW)<br />(3.0 3 1019 ergsys), 5.0 TW, or 6.0 TW. Time steps of 2 3 106<br />years were used throughout. Reactor operation was assumed to<br />have commenced 4.5 3 109 years ago and ceased when the<br />effective neutron multiplication constant Keff , 1 (3). In each<br />case, fission products were removed on formation; all 3H is<br />assumed to have escaped the high neutron flux of the subcore<br />reactor region before decaying to 3He.<br />Results and Discussion<br />From the Oak Ridge National Laboratory numerical simulations,<br />values of the 3Hey4He ratio, relative to the same ratio in<br />air, RA, at each 2 3 106 year time step for each power level are<br />shown in Fig. 1. For comparison, the range of values of the same<br />ratio, measured in oceanic basalts, is shown in Table 1 at a 2s<br />confidence level. The entire range of values from oceanic basalts,<br />shown in Table 1, are produced by self-sustaining nuclear fission<br />chain reactions as demonstrated by the georeactor numerical<br />simulations results presented in Fig. 1. The agreement is extremely<br />strong evidence for a deep-Earth nuclear reactor and the<br />solution of the three-decade-long mantle helium controversy and<br />is unlike the alternative view, which rests on assumptions.<br />In Fig. 1, the upward trend over time of the ratio data for each<br />power level is principally the consequence of the gradual removal<br />of 238U, the major source of 4He, by way of its natural<br />decay and by its conversion to transuranic actinide fuels (a<br />process of neutron absorption and b-decay termed fuelbreeding).<br />For a particular power level, the highest 3Hey4He<br />values represent the most recent production, especially near the<br />end of the nuclear fission lifetime of the georeactor.<br />The limitation on the upper limits for 3Hey4He depends on the<br />georeactor being critical, i.e., able to sustain chain reactions (3),<br />as its actinide fuel approaches depletion. The main factors<br />affecting that circumstance are the amount and nature of<br />the initial actinide subcore and the operating history of the<br />georeactor.<br />For the present investigation, no special efforts were made to<br />extend the range of 3Hey4He values, for example by assuming<br />variable power levels over time or by including 232Th. One may<br />reasonably expect, therefore, that the high values for 3Hey4He,<br />shown in Fig. 1, may not be true upper limits. As with the range<br />of isotope ratios, the number of atoms of 3He and 4He produced<br />by the georeactor numerical simulations over the lifetime of its<br />criticality, as shown in Table 2, may likewise not be true upper<br />limits. The initial uranium content used for the nuclear reactor<br />numerical simulations is close to the maximum one might<br />reasonably expect. Thorium, however, was not included because<br />of uncertainties in its abundance in the core (11) and may<br />provide additional fissile material by transmuting to 233U by<br />neutron capture and double b-decay. But at the present time no<br />one knows georeactor power level history, and, hence, fuel<br />consumption in the past. Ultimately, one may hope to narrow the<br />uncertainty by improved understanding of oceanic basalt helium<br />data and a deeper knowledge of nuclear georeactor boundary<br />conditions and dynamics.<br />Fig. 1. Nuclear reactor numerical simulation results for three power levels<br />showing the 3Hey4He RAs produced during 2 3 106-year increments over the<br />lifetime of the georeactor. Each data point represents the ratio of the 3He and<br />4He fission yields for a single time step. The pronounced upward trend of the<br />data results from the continuing reduction of 238U, the principle source of 4He,<br />by decay and breeding.<br />Table 1. Statistics of 3Hey4He relative to air (RA) of basalts from<br />along the global spreading ridge system at a 2-SD (2s)<br />confidence level<br />Propagating lithospheric tears 11.75 6 5.13 RA<br />Manus Basin 10.67 6 3.36 RA<br />New rifts 10.01 6 4.67 RA<br />Continental rifts or narrow oceans 9.93 6 5.18 RA<br />South Atlantic seamounts 9.77 6 1.40 RA<br />Mid-Ocean Ridge Basalt 8.58 6 1.81 RA<br />EM Islands 7.89 6 3.63 RA<br />North Chile Rise 7.78 6 0.24 RA<br />Ridge abandoned islands 7.10 6 2.44 RA<br />South Chile Rise 6.88 6 1.72 RA<br />Central Atlantic Islands 6.65 6 1.28 RA<br />HIMU Islands 6.38 6 0.94 RA<br />Abandoned ridges 6.08 6 1.80 RA<br />Adapted from ref. 24.<br />Table 2. For each power level, over-lifetime-of-georeactor<br />production of 3He and 4He, in atoms, time of reactor demise,<br />and over-lifetime-of-georeactor ratios of 3Hey4He<br />3He atoms 4He atoms Demise in years 3Hey4He RA<br />3 TW 1.73 3 1036 2.59 3 1041 5.6 3 109 4.77 RA<br />5 TW 2.21 3 1036 2.26 3 1041 4.4 3 109 6.99 RA<br />6 TW 2.39 3 1036 2.14 3 1041 4.0 3 109 7.98 RA<br />3048 u www.pnas.orgycgiydoiy10.1073ypnas.0437778100 Herndon<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://athene.as.arizona.edu/~lclose/teaching/images/lect8.html<br />Lecture 8<br />History of the Earth <br />Chapter 3<br /> The dynamic Earth (Introduction to Geophysics)<br />Most geophysical processes stem from the transfer of heat from the Earth's core to its surface. <br />Why is the Earth's core hot?<br /> 1. The radio active decay of Uranium (U), Thorium (Th) and Potassium (K). Each radio active decay (the loss of some neutrons and protons) releases very little energy. However, all the countless events acting together release a large sustained amount of energy overtime. In the core of the Earth this energy is trapped and so the Earth's core is heated up.<br /> 2. As the solid inner grows latent heat is released as the molten outer core freezes to solid rock. Eventually the whole Earth will be solid and there will be no magnetic field.<br /> 3. Residual formation heat. Some of the kinetic energy (1/2mv2) of the impacting planetesimals would have been converted to heat. This residual formation heat helped melt the core initially.<br /> 4. Another early heat source was the heat produced as the heavy elements (like Iron (Fe) and Nickel (Ni)) "falling" into the core. This process also generated heat from friction.<br /> The exchange of heat from the hot core to the cool surface is called convection (heat rises, cold sinks). In this manner the whole Earth has a series of big convective cells in its mantel. The result is a complex series of movements of the crust of the Earth as it "rides" on top of the convective cells below.<br />Plate Tectonics <br />In the 1950s and 60s geophysicists started to develop the concept of Plate Tectonics. Plate tectonics is the theory that describes the motion of the continental plates "riding" the tops of these massive convective cells in the Earth (like a conveyor belt). <br />Here is a movie showing how the plates have moved the continents<br />Today these plates move by about 10 cm/yr<br /> • when these plates stick, and then suddenly slip, an Earthquake occurs<br /> • when the heavier ocean crust sinks below the lighter (granite) continental crust (at subjection zones) there will be Earthquakes and Volcanos -the ring of fire around the Pacific is built this way. The Continental crust will also be crumpled, and as a result it is typical to see mountain ranges along the edges of these faults (for example the rocky mountains and the Andes).<br /> • Seamount Island Chains -like the Hawaiian Islands- are made when one hot spot in the Earths mantle leads to continuous eruptions in the same spot. But as the crust moves along the ocean floor a chain of new islands appear.Sometimes (but not often) two continental plates collide. In this case neither plate is heavier and so they both "crumple". This is occurring today as the Indian plate collides with the Asian plate. The result of this collision is the Himalayas which are the highest mountains on Earth.Why is a hot core important for life on Earth?<br /> 1. the surface temperature is higher<br /> 2. active volcanism can out gas the atmosphere and oceans<br /> 3. volcanism is required to form land masses above the ocean<br /> 4. hot spots in the sea floor can be "safe" habitats for life<br /> 5. hot springs and even hot water deep in the Earth can harbor life<br /> 6. volcanoes play a role in the Earth's carbon cycle<br /> Basin and Range<br />Tucson is located in a unique part of the world. The area where we live is called "Basin & Range" geography. This denotes that in Eastern California, Arizona, and New Mexico the terrain is dominated by short (often parallel) mountain ranges with large dry basins between them. This is a highly unusual land form caused by a unique event in the Earth's history.<br /> • About 20 million years ago the continental plate of the Southwest became "attached" somehow to the pacific coast plate which was moving northwest at the time.<br /> • Added to this was intense heat from magma close to the surface.<br /> • The end result was the unique "Basin & Range disturbance" where the coast of California was pulled away from Arizona by some 38% of its original size.<br /> • The hard cold rock on the top splintered into dozens of parallel ranges, while huge basins over 1 km deep were opened up between the rangeThe whole stretching event took a few million years. Then due to erosion the valleys filled in and the ranges wore down --further filling the valleys.<br />The reason Tucson exists today is because of the "fossil ground water" trapped in the huge 1 km deep valley basin exists below the city.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Radioactivity in Earth's core up for a look<br />vast uranium field serves as natural reactor<br />Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer<br />Monday, November 29, 2004<br /><br />Researchers are preparing to prove the discoveries of San Diego geologist, J. Marvin Herndon, who has found a huge, natural nuclear reactor or "georeactor" -- a vast deposit of uranium several miles wide -- at Earth's core, thousands of miles beneath our feet. Herndon and many others believe it explains otherwise puzzling phenomena of planetary science, such as fluctuations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field. "Herndon's idea about (a reactor) located at the center of the Earth, has opened a new era in planetary physics," said four Russian scientists at Moscow's Institute for Nuclear Research and Kurchatov Institute in a Jan. 28 paper published online.<br />It might sound bizarre, the very idea of a "natural" nuclear reactor -- a geological version of commercial nuclear power plants such as Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s Diablo Canyon plant near San Luis Obispo. The reactor at the Earth's core is just a much bigger and deeper version of an extinct natural nuclear reactor that scientists discovered in a uranium mine in Gabon, Africa, in 1972.<br />The Gabon reactor consists of geological deposits of uranium that, being radioactive, naturally emit subatomic particles called neutrons. These neutrons split the nuclei in adjacent uranium atoms, causing them to emit more neutrons and, thus, to split even more uranium atoms -- in effect, it's a slow-speed chain reaction. Research in the 1970s revealed that the Gabon reactor operated intermittently for a few million years about 2 billion years ago.<br />Scientists have long known the planet's core is divided into a solid and liquid part composed largely of iron, the liquid circulation of which powers Earth's magnetic field. They have not thought of the core as a repository for uranium, because uranium was not understood until 1945. Although the inevitability of uranium in the core was proposed in 1939 by scientist Walter Elsasser, on the basis that it is the heaviest naturally occurring element, so it would migrate to the core via gravity.<br />Herndon has demonstrated how a uranium georeactor in Earth's core explains reality better than older scientific ideas, by providing more convincing ways to:<br />-- Explain the ratios of helium isotopes emitted from volcanoes in Iceland and Hawaii. Those ratios are consistent with the ratios of helium isotopes emitted by a nuclear reactor.<br />-- Explain why planets such as Jupiter emit far more heat than they absorb from the sun. Herndon thinks they, too, have natural nuclear reactors at their cores. (Because heat is continually generated by the decay of radioactive elements in Earth's crust and mantle -- the regions above the core -- scientists are uncertain whether Earth emits more heat than it receives from the sun.)<br />-- Explain variations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field, which fluctuates over time. Herndon has shown that in the core, the georeactor drives the motions of the liquid iron that creates the magnetic field. But the georeactor varies in activity levels over time. Those activity variations, he believes, might explain intensity variations in Earth's magnetic field.<br />Now, Rob de Meijer and associates at the Nuclear Physics Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands, are planning to demonstrate Herndon's proposals. They're drawing blueprints for a large device that could detect ghostly particles called antineutrinos that have escaped from Earth's core. When put into operation, it will capture antineutrinos that would fly through the roughly 4,000 miles of solid rock and emerge at the Earth's surface.<br />The European scientists have proposed drilling a shaft more than 1,000 feet deep into the island of Curacao in the Caribbean. They hope to lower into the shaft devices called photomultipliers, which could detect particles from the hypothetical deep-Earth georeactor.<br />The estimated cost: $80 million. In an e-mail to The Chronicle, de Meijer said he is seeking funding from the Dutch government and industrial consortiums. He and his team plan to visit Curacao in January to take the geological samples needed to design the subterranean antineutrino "antenna," as they call it.<br />Curacao is a good location for the antineutrino detector because "the island's rocks have relatively few natural radionuclides that could mask the (antineutrino) signal from the Earth's core," the journal Physics World noted in September. The detector could be confused by antineutrinos emitted by commercial nuclear reactors, but Curacao is far enough from the southeastern United States that reactors in Florida won't affect it.<br />"Dr. Herndon is a brilliant and original thinker. I agree with his proposal" said geoscientist David Deming of the University of Oklahoma.<br />"The problem with most scientists working today is that they have no knowledge of the history of science," Deming adds. "As late as 1955, continental drift was regarded as the equivalent of alien abductions, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. By 1970, continental drift was an accepted part of the new theory of plate tectonics."<br />Richard Muller, a noted physicist and author at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. Since the 1970s, Muller has done pioneering research in diverse fields, including cosmology and planetary sciences.<br />"Herndon's discovery is a very positive contribution to deep Earth science. He raises issues that are worth exploring at some length. " Muller adds. "I consider his work to be 'out of the box' thinking, and as such, it is valuable as a step forward in our understanding of reality."<br />On a side note, in case you're wondering: Unlike the planet-busting reactor of Superman lore, neither the Gabon reactor nor Herndon's hypothetical deep-Earth reactors could explode like atomic bombs. A-bombs require highly concentrated amounts of fissionable materials that are explosively compressed together in a fraction of a second -- far faster than the snail's-pace processes that would be characteristic of the natural reactors.<br />Herndon received his bachelor's degree in physics at UC San Diego in 1970. He studied nuclear chemistry and meteorites in graduate school at Texas A&M, where he received his doctoral degree for a thesis on meteorites. Operating as an independent scientist, over the years, he has published papers in prestigious journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. His main allies are non-Americans, like the de Meijer team. On Dec. 16, Herndon is scheduled to deliver the prestigious annual "Christmas Lecture" at the European Commission's Institute for Transuranium Elements in Karlsruhe, Germany. It is felt that the huge antinuclear bias in American society is preventing other U.S. academics from getting on board, as they might lose tenure positions or funding by bucking the strong academic antinuke culture on this issue. Had his two sons -- now physicians -- planned to become scientists, he says, "I would have steered them away from it because you can't make a living and do legitimate science; you have to 'howl with the wolves' or you don't survive. This is a sad testament to our times. There's something very wrong in American science." <br />Herndon’s proposal<br />According to traditional theory, the core of Earth consists of iron. The SanDiego scientist J. Marvin Herndon has argued that a large deposit of uranium also exists in the core, where it powers a natural nuclear reactor or “georeactor.” Herndon believes the nuclear process is responsible for variations in the intensity of Earth’s magnetic field.<br />During the radioactive decays, the georeactor releases ghostly particles called antineutrinos, which fly through thousands of miles of solid rock to Earth’s surface. Scientists will test Herndon’s georeactor by using special instruments to detect the antineutrinos as they pass through the outer crust.<br />Sources: nuclearplanet.com; www.ansto.gov.au/edu/about/about_neutron.htm;<br />Other scientists have expanded Herndon's proposal to include Thorium and Potassium.<br />nasa<br />http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/29/MNGPIA17BL45.DTL<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000B2C71-BCF0-1C71-9EB7809EC588F2D7<br />Why is the earth's core so hot? And how do scientists measure its temperature?<br /><br /><br /><br />Jeff Atwell<br />Mount Vernon, Ohio<br /><br /><br /><br />Quentin Williams, associate professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz offers this explanation:<br />There are three main sources of heat in the deep earth: (1) heat from when the planet formed and accreted, which has not yet been lost; (2) frictional heating, caused by denser core material sinking to the center of the planet; and (3) heat from the decay of radioactive elements.<br />It takes a rather long time for heat to move out of the earth. This occurs through both "convective" transport of heat within the earth's liquid outer core and solid mantle and slower "conductive" transport of heat through nonconvecting boundary layers, such as the earth's plates at the surface. As a result, much of the planet's primordial heat, from when the earth first accreted and developed its core, has been retained.<br />The amount of heat that can arise through simple accretionary processes, bringing small bodies together to form the proto-earth, is large: on the order of 10,000 kelvins (about 18,000 degrees Farhenheit). The crucial issue is how much of that energy was deposited into the growing earth and how much was reradiated into space. Indeed, the currently accepted idea for how the moon was formed involves the impact or accretion of a Mars-size object with or by the proto-earth. When two objects of this size collide, large amounts of heat are generated, of which quite a lot is retained. This single episode could have largely melted the outermost several thousand kilometers of the planet.<br />Additionally, descent of the dense iron-rich material that makes up the core of the planet to the center would produce heating on the order of 2,000 kelvins (about 3,000 degrees F). The magnitude of the third main source of heat--radioactive heating--is large, but quantitatively uncertain. The precise abundances of radioactive elements (primarily potassium, uranium and thorium) are is poorly known in the deep earth.<br />In sum, there was no shortage of heat in the early earth, and the planet's inability to cool off quickly results in the continued high temperatures of the Earth's interior. In effect, not only do the earth's plates act as a blanket on the interior, but not even convective heat transport in the solid mantle provides a particularly efficient mechanism for heat loss. The planet does lose some heat through the processes that drive plate tectonics, especially at mid-ocean ridges. For comparison, smaller bodies such as Mars and the Moon show little evidence for recent tectonic activity or volcanism.<br />We derive our primary estimate of the temperature of the deep earth from the melting behavior of iron at ultrahigh pressures. We know that the earth's core depths from 2,886 kilometers to the center at 6,371 kilometers (1,794 to 3,960 miles), is predominantly iron, with some contaminants. How? The speed of sound through the core (as measured from the velocity at which seismic waves travel across it) and the density of the core are quite similar to those seen in of iron at high pressures and temperatures, as measured in the laboratory. Iron is the only element that closely matches the seismic properties of the earth's core and is also sufficiently abundant present in sufficient abundance in the universe to make up the approximately 35 percent of the mass of the planet present in the core.<br />The earth's core is divided into two separate regions: the liquid outer core and the solid inner core, with the transition between the two lying at a depth of 5,156 kilometers (3,204 miles). Therefore, If we can measure the melting temperature of iron at the extreme pressure of the boundary between the inner and outer cores, then this lab temperature should reasonably closely approximate the real temperature at this liquid-solid interface. Scientists in mineral physics laboratories use lasers and high-pressure devices called diamond-anvil cells to re-create these hellish pressures and temperatures as closely as possible.<br /><br /><br /><br />http://www.physlink.com/News/121103PotassiumCore.cfm<br /><br />Radioactive material may be primary heat source in Earth's core<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Radioactive potassium, common enough on Earth to make potassium-rich bananas one of the "hottest" foods around, appears also to be a substantial source of heat in the Earth's core, according to recent experiments by University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists.<br />Radioactive potassium, uranium and thorium are thought to be the three main sources of heat in the Earth's interior, aside from that generated by the formation of the planet. Together, the heat keeps the mantle actively churning and the core generating a protective magnetic field.<br />But geophysicists have found much less potassium in the Earth's crust and mantle than would be expected based on the composition of rocky meteors that supposedly formed the Earth. If, as some have proposed, the missing potassium resides in the Earth's iron core, how did an element as light as potassium get there, especially since iron and potassium don't mix?<br />Kanani Lee, who recently earned her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and UC Berkeley professor of earth and planetary science Raymond Jeanloz have discovered a possible answer. They've shown that at the high pressures and temperatures in the Earth's interior, potassium can form an alloy with iron never before observed. During the planet's formation, this potassium-iron alloy could have sunk to the core, depleting potassium in the overlying mantle and crust and providing a radioactive potassium heat source in addition to that supplied by uranium and thorium in the core.<br />Lee created the new alloy by squeezing iron and potassium between the tips of two diamonds to temperatures and pressures characteristic of 600-700 kilometers below the surface - 2,500 degrees Celsius and nearly 4 million pounds per square inch, or a quarter of a million times atmospheric pressure.<br />"Our new findings indicate that the core may contain as much as 1,200 parts per million potassium -just over one tenth of one percent," Lee said. "This amount may seem small, and is comparable to the concentration of radioactive potassium naturally present in bananas. Combined over the entire mass of the Earth's core, however, it can be enough to provide one-fifth of the heat given off by the Earth."<br />Lee and Jeanloz will report their findings on Dec. 10, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, and in an article accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.<br />"With one experiment, Lee and Jeanloz demonstrated that potassium may be an important heat source for the geodynamo, provided a way out of some troublesome aspects of the core's thermal evolution, and further demonstrated that modern computational mineral physics not only complements experimental work, but that it can provide guidance to fruitful experimental explorations," said Mark Bukowinski, professor of earth and planetary science at UC Berkeley, who predicted the unusual alloy in the mid-1970s.<br />Geophysicist Bruce Buffett of the University of Chicago cautions that more experiments need to be done to show that iron can actually pull potassium away from the silicate rocks that dominate in the Earth's mantle.<br />"They proved it would be possible to dissolve potassium into liquid iron," Buffet said. "Modelers need heat, so this is one source, because the radiogenic isotope of potassium can produce heat and that can help power convection in the core and drive the magnetic field. They proved it could go in. What's important is how much is pulled out of the silicate. There's still work to be done "<br />If a significant amount of potassium does reside in the Earth's core, this would clear up a lingering question - why the ratio of potassium to uranium in stony meteorites (chondrites), which presumably coalesced to form the Earth, is eight times greater than the observed ratio in the Earth's crust. Though some geologists have asserted that the missing potassium resides in the core, there was no mechanism by which it could have reached the core. Other elements like oxygen and carbon form compounds or alloys with iron and presumably were dragged down by iron as it sank to the core. But at normal temperature and pressure, potassium does not associate with iron.<br />Others have argued that the missing potassium boiled away during the early, molten stage of Earth's evolution.<br />The demonstration by Lee and Jeanloz that potassium can dissolve in iron to form an alloy provides an explanation for the missing potassium.<br />"Early in Earth's history, the interior temperature and pressure would not have been high enough to make this alloy," Lee said. "But as more and more meteorites piled on, the pressure and temperature would have increased to the point where this alloy could form."<br />The existence of this high-pressure alloy was predicted by Bukowinski in the mid-1970s. Using quantum mechanical arguments, he suggested that high pressure would squeeze potassium's lone outer electron into a lower shell, making the atom resemble iron and thus more likely to alloy with iron.<br />More recent quantum mechanical calculations using improved techniques, conducted with Gerd Steinle-Neumann at the Universität Bayreuth's Bayerisches Geoinstitüt, confirmed the new experimental measurements.<br />"This really replicates and verifies the earlier calculations 26 years ago and provides a physical explanation for our experimental results," Jeanloz said.<br />The Earth is thought to have formed from the collision of many rocky asteroids, perhaps hundreds of kilometers in diameter, in the early solar system. As the proto-Earth gradually bulked up, continuing asteroid collisions and gravitational collapse kept the planet molten. Heavier elements – in particular iron - would have sunk to the core in 10 to 100 million years' time, carrying with it other elements that bind to iron.<br />Gradually, however, the Earth would have cooled off and become a dead rocky globe with a cold iron ball at the core if not for the continued release of heat by the decay of radioactive elements like potassium-40, uranium-238 and thorium-232, which have half-lives of 1.25 billion, 4 billion and 14 billion years, respectively. About one in every thousand potassium atoms is radioactive.<br />The heat generated in the core turns the iron into a convecting dynamo that maintains a magnetic field strong enough to shield the planet from the solar wind. This heat leaks out into the mantle, causing convection in the rock that moves crustal plates and fuels volcanoes.<br />Balancing the heat generated in the core with the known concentrations of radiogenic isotopes has been difficult, however, and the missing potassium has been a big part of the problem. One researcher proposed earlier this year that sulfur could help potassium associate with iron and provide a means by which potassium could reach the core.<br />The experiment by Lee and Jeanloz shows that sulfur is not necessary. Lee combined pure iron and pure potassium in a diamond anvil cell and squeezed the small sample to 26 gigapascals of pressure while heating the sample with a laser above 2,500 Kelvin (4,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which is above the melting points of both potassium and iron. She conducted this experiment six times in the high-intensity X-ray beams of two different accelerators - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory - to obtain X-ray diffraction images of the samples' internal structure. The images confirmed that potassium and iron had mixed evenly to form an alloy, much as iron and carbon mix to form steel alloy.<br />In the theoretical magma ocean of a proto-Earth, the pressure at a depth of 400-1,000 kilometers (270-670 miles) would be between 15 and 35 gigapascals and the temperature would be 2,200-3,000 Kelvin, Jeanloz said.<br />"At these temperatures and pressures, the underlying physics changes and the electron density shifts, making potassium look more like iron," Jeanloz said. "At high pressure, the periodic table looks totally different."<br />"The work by Lee and Jeanloz provides the first proof that potassium is indeed miscible in iron at high pressures and, perhaps as significantly, it further vindicates the computational physics that underlies the original prediction," Bukowinski said. "If it can be further demonstrated that potassium would enter iron in significant amounts in the presence of silicate minerals, conditions representative of likely core formation processes, then potassium could provide the extra heat needed to explain why the Earth's inner core hasn't frozen to as large a size as the thermal history of the core suggests it should."<br />Jeanloz is excited by the fact that theoretical calculations are now not only explaining experimental findings at high pressure, but also predicting structures.<br />"We need theorists to identify interesting problems, not only check our results after the experiment," he said. "That's happening now. In the past half a dozen years, theorists have been making predictions that experimentalists are willing to spend a few years to demonstrate."<br />The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. <br /><br /><br />Other articles in this field:<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <br />Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation with KamLAND: Evidence of Spectral Distortion - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 31 » T Araki, K Eguchi, S Enomoto, K Furuno, K Ichimura … - Physical Review Letters, 2005 - APS Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation with KamLAND: Evidence of Spectral Distortion. T. Araki 1 , K. Eguchi 1 , S. Enomoto 1 , K. Furuno ... Cited by 169 - Related Articles - Web Search<br />Neutrino geophysics at Baksan I: Possible detection of georeactor antineutrinos - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 8 » GV Domogatsky, VI Kopeikin, LA Mikaelyan, VV Sinev - Physics of Atomic Nuclei, 2005 - Springer Page 1. Physics of Atomic Nuclei, Vol. 68, No. 1, 2005, pp. 69–72. From Yadernaya Fizika, Vol. 68, No. 1, 2005, pp. 70–73. Original ... Cited by 10 - Related Articles - Web Search<br />Quest for a nuclear georeactor - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 9 » RJ de Meijer, ER van der Graaf, KP Jungmann - Radiation Physics and Chemistry, 2004 - Elsevier Quick Search: within All Full-text Sources Quick Search searches abstracts, titles, keywords, and authors. Click here for more information. ... Cited by 8 - Related Articles - Web Search<br />Background for Terrestrial Antineutrino Investigations: Scientific Basis of Knowledge on the … - group of 4 » JM Herndon - Arxiv preprint hep-ph/0407148, 2004 - arxiv.org Page 1. Background for Terrestrial Antineutrino Investigations: Scientific Basis of Knowledge on the Composition of the Deep Interior of the Earth ... Cited by 7 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Solar System Formation Deduced from Observations of Matter - group of 3 » JM Herndon - Arxiv preprint astro-ph/0408151, 2004 - arxiv.org Page 1. 1 Solar System Formation Deduced from Observations of Matter J. Marvin Herndon Transdyne Corporation San Diego, California 92131 USA August 9, 2004 ... Cited by 7 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Background for Terrestrial Antineutrino Investigations: Radionuclide Distribution, Georeactor … - group of 3 » JM Herndon, DA Edgerley - Arxiv preprint hep-ph/0501216, 2005 - arxiv.org Page 1. Background for Terrestrial Antineutrino Investigations: Radionuclide Distribution, Georeactor Fission Events, and Boundary ... Cited by 6 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Protoplanetary Earth Formation: Further Evidence and Geophysical Implications - group of 4 » JM Herndon - Arxiv preprint astro-ph/0408539, 2004 - arxiv.org Page 1. 1 Protoplanetary Earth Formation: Further Evidence and Geophysical Implications J. Marvin Herndon Transdyne Corporation San Diego, California 92131 USA ... Cited by 6 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Geo-Neutrinos: a short review - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 4 » G Fiorentini, M Lissia, F Mantovani, R Vannucci - Nuclear Physics B (Proceedings Supplements), 2005 - Elsevier Page 1. Geo-Neutrinos: a short review Gianni Fiorentini a , Marcello Lissia b , Fabio Mantovani c and Riccardo Vannucci d a Dipartimento ... Cited by 6 - Related Articles - Web Search<br />Imaging the Earth’s Interior: the Angular Distribution of Terrestrial Neutrinos - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 6 » BD Fields, KA Hochmuth - Earth, Moon, and Planets, 2006 - Springer Page 1. Imaging the Earth’s Interior: the Angular Distribution of Terrestrial Neutrinos BRIAN D. FIELDS Department of Astronomy ... Cited by 6 - Related Articles - Web Search<br />Neutrino Geophysics at Baksan (Part II): Possible Studies of Antineutrino-and Radiogenic Heat … - group of 2 » G Domogatsky, V Kopeikin, L Mikaelyan, V Sinev - Arxiv preprint hep-ph/0409069, 2004 - arxiv.org Page 1. arXiv:hep-ph/0409069 v2 8 Sep 2004 Neutrino Geophysics at Baksan (Part II): Possible Studies of Antineutrino- and Radiogenic ... Cited by 3 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br /><br />All Results<br /><br />T Araki<br />B Berger<br />K Eguchi<br />S Enomoto<br />K Furuno<br /> <br /><br /> <br />Inverse beta decay reaction in$^{232}$ Thand$^{233}$ U fission antineutrino flux - group of 4 » G Domogatski, V Kopeikin, L Mikaelyan, V Sinev - Arxiv preprint hep-ph/0403155, 2004 - arxiv.org Page 1. arXiv:hep-ph/0403155 v2 17 Mar 2004 Inverse beta decay reaction in 232 Th and 233 U fission antineutrino flux G. Domogatski ... Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Experimental Status of Geo-reactor Search with KamLAND Detector - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 3 » J Maricic - Earth, Moon, and Planets, 2006 - Springer Page 1. Experimental Status of Geo-reactor Search with KamLAND Detector JELENA MARICIC for KAMLAND COLLABORATION University of Hawaii ... Related Articles - Web Search<br />Strategy for Applying Neutrino Geophysics to the Earth Sciences Including Planetary Habitability - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 4 » NH Sleep - Earth, Moon, and Planets, 2006 - Springer Page 1. Strategy for Applying Neutrino Geophysics to the Earth Sciences Including Planetary Habitability NORMAN H. SLEEP Department ... Related Articles - Web Search<br />Neutrino geophysics at baksan: On searches for antineutrinos and radiogenic-heat sources in the … - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 3 » GV Domogatsky, VI Kopeikin, LA Mikaelyan, VV Sinev - Physics of Atomic Nuclei, 2006 - Springer Page 1. ISSN 1063-7788, Physics of Atomic Nuclei, 2006, Vol. 69, No. 1, pp. 43–50. c Pleiades Publishing, Inc., 2006. Original ... Related Articles - Web Search - BL Direct<br />Far Field Monitoring of Rogue Nuclear Activity with an Array of Large Anti-neutrino Detectors - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 4 » EH Guillian - Earth, Moon, and Planets, 2006 - Springer Page 1. Far Field Monitoring of Rogue Nuclear Activity with an Array of Large Anti-neutrino Detectors EUGENE H. GUILLIAN Department ... Related Articles - Web Search<br />A Geoneutrino Experiment at Homestake - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 6 » N Tolich, YD Chan, CA Currat, BK Fujikawa, R … - Earth, Moon, and Planets, 2006 - Springer Page 1. A Geoneutrino Experiment at Homestake N. TOLICH, Y. -D. CHAN, CA CURRAT, BK FUJIKAWA, R. HENNING, KT LESKO and AWP POON Institute ... Related Articles - Web Search<br />Probing the Earth’s Interior with the LENA Detector - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 5 » KA Hochmuth, FV Feilitzsch, TM Undagoitia, L … - Earth, Moon, and Planets, 2006 - Springer Page 1. Probing the Earth’s Interior with the LENA Detector KATHRIN A. HOCHMUTH Max-Planck-Institut für Physik (Werner-Heisenberg ... Related Articles - Web Search<br />Georeactor Variability and Integrity - group of 2 » JM Herndon - Arxiv preprint physics/0510030, 2005 - arxiv.org Page 1. Georeactor Variability and Integrity by J. Marvin Herndon Transdyne Corporation San Diego, California 92131 USA October 3, 2005 ... Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Frontiers in earth sciences: new ideas and interpretation G Scalera, G Lavecchia - 2006 - earth-prints.org Page 1. 451 ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, SUPPLEMENT TO VOL. 49, N. 1, 2006 10 The Mediterranean as a slowly nascent ocean GIANCARLO SCALERA ... Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Inverse-beta-decay reaction in the antineutrino flux from the fragments of 232 Thand 233 U fission - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 3 » GV Domogatsky, VI Kopeikin, LA Mikaelyan, VV Sinev - Physics of Atomic Nuclei, 2005 - Springer Page 1. Physics of Atomic Nuclei, Vol. 68, No. 2, 2005, pp. 234–236. Translatedfrom Yadernaya Fizika, Vol. 68, No. 2, 2005, pp. 259–261. ... Related Articles - Web Search<br /><br /><br />Solar System Processes Underlying Planetary Formation, Geodynamics, and the Georeactor - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 9 » JM Herndon - Earth, Moon, and Planets, 2006 - Springer Page 1. Solar System Processes Underlying Planetary Formation, Geodynamics, and the Georeactor J. MARVIN HERNDON Transdyne Corporation ... Cited by 3 - Related Articles - Web Search<br />The KamLAND anti-neutrino oscillation experiment - Obtenir à l'UQAM - group of 4 » J Maricic, JG Learned - Contemporary Physics, 2005 - Taylor & Francis Page 1. The KamLAND anti-neutrino oscillation experiment JELENA MARICIC* and JOHN G. LEARNED University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2505 ... Cited by 3 - Related Articles - Web Search<br />Whole-Earth Decompression Dynamics - group of 5 » JM Herndon - Arxiv preprint astro-ph/0507001, 2005 - arxiv.org Page 1. Whole-Earth Decompression Dynamics J. Marvin Herndon Transdyne Corporation San Diego, California 92131 USA June 30, 2005 Abstract ... Cited by 3 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search - BL Direct<br />Some comments on Herndon's nuclear georeactor - group of 3 » W Seifritz - Kerntechnik, 2003 - nuclearplanet.com Page 1. W. Seifritz Some comments on Herndon’s nuclear georeactor Dedicated to Dr. Rudolf Weber who died too early by drowning in the Mediterranean Sea ... Cited by 5 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search - BL Direct<br />Impact and Application: Quest for a Nuclear Georeactor RJ de Meijer, ER van der Graaf, KP Jungmann - Nuclear Physics News, 2004 - Taylor & Francis Page 1. 20 Nuclear Physics News, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2004 impact and applications Quest for a Nuclear Georeactor Introduction In a time ... Cited by 2 - Related Articles - Web Search<br />Mantle Decompression Thermal-Tsunami - group of 5 » JM Herndon - Arxiv preprint physics/0602085, 2006 - arxiv.org Page 1. http://arXiv.org/physics/0602085 Mantle Decompression Thermal-Tsunami J. Marvin Herndon Transdyne Corporation San Diego, CA 92131 USA ... Cited by 2 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Report of the APS Neutrino Study Reactor Working Group - group of 12 » E Abouzaid, K Anderson, G Barenboim, B Berger, E … - 2004 - osti.gov Page 1. Ъдгжи г и ШЫ Цйижвг Ыийн Ъигж Ягжв жгйд К гйоИ УК вжзгвИ К жв г бИ К жжИ ... Cited by 2 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Thermonuclear Ignition of Dark Galaxies - group of 2 » JM Herndon - Arxiv preprint astro-ph/0604307, 2006 - arxiv.org Page 1. Thermonuclear Ignition of Dark Galaxies J. Marvin Herndon Transdyne Corporation San Diego, CA 92131 USA April 13, 2006 Abstract ... Cited by 1 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />Probing the Earth's Interior with the Low Energy Neutrino Astronomy Detector - group of 3 » KA Hochmuth, F Feilitzsch, BD Fields, T Marrodan, … - Arxiv preprint hep-ph/0509136, 2005 - arxiv.org Page 1. arXiv:hep-ph/0509136 v1 13 Sep 2005 Probing the Earth’s Interior with the Low Energy Neutrino Astronomy Detector Kathrin ... Cited by 1 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search<br />A Search for an Electron Antineutrino Signal in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory - group of 3 » JL Orrell - 2004 - johnorrell.net Page 1. A Search for an Electron Antineutrino Signal in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory John Laurence Orrell A dissertation submitted ... Cited by 1 - Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search - Library Search<br /><br />Experimental Status of Geo-reactor Search with KamLAND Detector - Obtenir à l'UQAM I Blog, C our FAQ, R Zone - Earth, Moon, and Planets, 2006 - ingentaconnect.com Page 1. Experimental Status of Geo-reactor Search with KamLAND Detector JELENA MARICIC for KAMLAND COLLABORATION University of Hawaii ... Related Articles - Web Search<br />MEASUREMENT OF NEUTRINO OSCILLATION WITH KAMLAND - group of 2 » JA Detwiler - 2005 - kamland.stanford.edu Page 1. MEASUREMENT OF NEUTRINO OSCILLATION WITH KAMLAND a dissertation submitted to the department of physics and the committee on graduate studies ... Related Articles - View as HTML - Web Search - Library Search<br />CCEEAA--CCNNRRSS DDAAPPNNIIAA--IINN22PP33 DD UU, G UU, T OO - gdrneutrino.in2p3.fr Page 1. CCEEAA--CCNNRRSS DDAAPPNNIIAA--IINN22PP33 RR AA PP PP OO RR TT DD '' AA CC TT II VV II TT EE DD UU GG DD RR NN EE UU TT RR II NN OO ... Related Articles - View as HTML - Web SearchUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-68393341356315783042007-03-31T06:54:00.000-07:002007-03-31T07:03:15.380-07:00Why We Post<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrFZuf3Hh_dfvXJDhyphenhyphenLl634tBqt9PH6FbZzsqPi6izJkQyoM2CZytTIxcCxLCCG9usZTW82UxlI3lRNCMd0_KIH7_3DRrQ-HCRpvuZ4KHhQLEA_Q7JbfkgQuuzOavEfAhiQJEHMZ0mfoU/s1600-h/flake7.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrFZuf3Hh_dfvXJDhyphenhyphenLl634tBqt9PH6FbZzsqPi6izJkQyoM2CZytTIxcCxLCCG9usZTW82UxlI3lRNCMd0_KIH7_3DRrQ-HCRpvuZ4KHhQLEA_Q7JbfkgQuuzOavEfAhiQJEHMZ0mfoU/s400/flake7.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5048087995250567362" /></a><br />White Nuclear Snowflake is a privately conceived, totally unfunded volunteer effort undertaken to inform the public about certain issues in a deeper and more revealing way, exposing truths beyond the ordinary journalistic level. White Nuclear Snowflake has no corporate , governmental, or organizational affiliations whatsoever. White Nuclear Snowflake has never once been guided, influenced, steered, or remunerated in any way by anyone, except its own authors. White Nuclear Snowflake is 100% independent, a public service done in a spirit of freedom, truth, and common understanding. The individual words of the name have particular implications, and were chosen creatively , because of those implications. White means pure, 100% unsullied. Nuclear means graced with the unlimited power of the earth itself, and Snowflake means arising spontaneously, out of the surround, a crystal embodiment of reality....... White Nuclear Snowflake.<br /><br />Our deepest hope, is to live up to all three of the themes, in each post written.<br /><br />Our suspicion, is that the human race has only just begun to awaken.<br /><br />Our mission, is to bring it a cup of coffee, once it wakes up, say hello, and decide where to go from here.<br /><br />All sojourners are cordially invited along for the ride.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-70581298544613313562007-03-30T05:31:00.000-07:002007-03-30T05:32:56.956-07:00Have your rifle ready? Your Kerosene?Indian Point does not stand in isolation. It is the northernmost facility in the old Con Ed superstructure, and it gives its power to the world even to this day, through Con Ed's Buchanan transmission yard. So what?<br /><br />The Con Ed system, including Indian Point was vastly overbuilt, doubled and redoubled, back-fed a hundred different ways, because Con Ed, as the world's first electricity provider, understood that people could make mistakes, so they built their entire system to be marvelously people-proof. Thomas Edison never trusted anyone. Rather than trust his engineers to be good engineers, he just instructed them to build double or triple the machinery actually needed, so that he would never require their skills. The Con Ed system is/was therefore a very reliable system.<br /><br />True, Con Ed has downsized lately, and failed some of its repair commitments through lack of staff, but just over the line, in Putnam, where Con Ed never was the provider, the system gets a lot more rickety.<br /><br />A relative of mine, from Putnam, tells me of the recurrent outages up there, which especially impact them because they use well water--which goes unavailable in an electrical outage.(as does their heat). So up in Putnam, where the normal unreliability of rural electricity holds sway, they live a lot more tenuous an existence than us down here in urbanized Westchester, with our urban electric system, including Con Ed and Indian Point.<br /><br />Close Indian Point, and you will move the area in its entirety-- including NYC, Poughkeepsie, White Plains, and all the urban enclaves, directly into a rural electric situation, only without any of the private backups that farmers learned to provide themselves.<br /><br />I truly believe the public has no idea what it means to spend two weeks, or a month in a blackout after almost every storm, and to routinely keep backup generators, kerosene heaters, and a squirrel rifle & ammunition around, as well as canned goods , to tide you through the inevitable repeat outages that make life insecure out in the hustings.<br /><br />And.... were it to happen repeatedly in an urban locale.... its likely that criminal elements would learn just how to use it to full advantage, much as in the urban riots of the 1960's, only this time repeating after each storm, permanently, forever.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-44037336673461423032007-03-30T02:34:00.000-07:002007-03-30T02:35:05.687-07:00THE MAGIC GIFT FROM GAIA<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieV4aHqOVajb5Jd4KkKRN5RhGyuep8W48PJOuHYxSwo21l69lPvGTb_3xZs-QAuwiWrkrYfLwYdv6L0nmDpNDtugnYoNod-3QjRqTh4jYCXph7-L-V6IsZH3Jdd_4D6oMcj4YJ1hruZSk/s1600-h/whaless.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieV4aHqOVajb5Jd4KkKRN5RhGyuep8W48PJOuHYxSwo21l69lPvGTb_3xZs-QAuwiWrkrYfLwYdv6L0nmDpNDtugnYoNod-3QjRqTh4jYCXph7-L-V6IsZH3Jdd_4D6oMcj4YJ1hruZSk/s400/whaless.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5047332841215682722" /></a><br /><br />God made uranium. Uranium developed naturally as a result of the physical maturation of elements within stars, and it forms the warming power within the earth. Inside the earth's core, is a white hot mix of molten iron, and molten uranium. The devil did not put it there. In point of fact there may not even be a devil. The heat energy occurring naturally within the core of our home planet , comes strictly from U235 fission. The iron by itself would not be warm. It takes the U235 to warm the earth, and thus provide the very cozy environment in which we live.<br /><br />Without the uranium's warming power, life would probably not have arisen on this planet, and without the uranium, life certainly would not continue, as the oceans would freeze, and earth would be an ice ball.<br /><br />To survive the human-induced global warming, it will require the massive use of nuclear power generation (along with wind and solar) to enable the human race to survive its self-induced environmental damage, caused by burning coal and oil .<br /><br />Although nuclear substances have great curing powers in nuclear medicine, it's generally not uranium, usually cobalt or other isotopes, that is used. However, if the dying out of all humanity due to global warming is taken as a "big health issue", then yes, U235 fission power can be considered a "cure". It will cure us of dying out as a race.<br /><br />Therefore I would call uranium the "Life Stone", the "Survival Stone", "Gaia's Gift", and perhaps even "God's Holy Stone", the one stone that can save 7 billion humans from dying horribly within the next 100 years, as the<br />earth heats up to 145 degrees farenheit, and civilization grinds to a halt, due to global warming caused by oil use, and coal use, and we choke on our own massive carbon footprint.<br /><br />This mineral also powers Indian Point, a super clean, environmentally aware and very Green piece of the future, on the Hudson in New York State.<br /><br />Ask Al Gore<br /><br />Tags Indian Point Entergy Green Nuclear Butterfly Riverkeeper Al Gore An Inconvenient Truth Robert F Kennedy jr Solar Nuclear Renaissance<br /><br /><a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!" src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-89068099013589654702007-03-29T06:13:00.000-07:002007-03-29T06:14:18.946-07:00Nuclear Power will Save the Human Race<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieV4aHqOVajb5Jd4KkKRN5RhGyuep8W48PJOuHYxSwo21l69lPvGTb_3xZs-QAuwiWrkrYfLwYdv6L0nmDpNDtugnYoNod-3QjRqTh4jYCXph7-L-V6IsZH3Jdd_4D6oMcj4YJ1hruZSk/s1600-h/whaless.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieV4aHqOVajb5Jd4KkKRN5RhGyuep8W48PJOuHYxSwo21l69lPvGTb_3xZs-QAuwiWrkrYfLwYdv6L0nmDpNDtugnYoNod-3QjRqTh4jYCXph7-L-V6IsZH3Jdd_4D6oMcj4YJ1hruZSk/s400/whaless.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5047332841215682722" /></a><br /><br />To the few antinuke stragglers still lost in the 1980's, it seems that a great sellout has occurred--- the old "anti" passion is not around anymore, and a few words to the left-behinds may be in order.<br /><br />Something very important has happened.The modern world is about to need nuclear generated electricity in a big way, <strong>just to survive</strong>. Most of the major players, on both sides of the old issue realize this now.....<br /><br />Even Al Gore........<br /><br />Wall Street Journal, 3-28-07<br />By William Tucker<br /><br />Al Gore recognizes that any solution to global warming is going to require a revival of nuclear power. He was edging toward that in his House of Representatives testimony last week -- yet downplayed the idea on the following grounds: "Nuclear power plants are the costliest to build and they take the longest time and at present they come in only one size -- extra large."<br /><br />This is a curious notion. At present, the U.S. Navy has 10 giant aircraft carriers and 50 submarines that run on nuclear power; the average reactor generates about 200 megawatts (MW). The French Rubis class of submarines still operates on 48 MW. Although these reactors are enough to provide power for the lifetime of a submarine or drive a 100,000-ton aircraft carrier, they are small by commercial standards.<br /><br />When Adm. Hyman Rickover "beached" a submarine engine at Shippingport, Pa., in 1957 to create the first country's civilian nuclear reactor, it produced only 60 MW of electricity. Dresden 1, built privately in 1960, was 210 MW and Indian Point 1, built by Con Edison in 1961, produced 275 MW.<br /><br />Once the technology was established, reactors quickly grew to the 500-1000 MW range for one simple reason -- bigger is better. The principles of thermodynamics dictate that a single 1,200 MW generating station operates much more efficiently than two 600 MW plants. The same thing holds true for coal plants, nuclear power's chief rival in the electricity field. Both coal and nuclear plants are now built to the 1,200-1,500 MW range for economic reasons.<br /><br />Yet all this hardly suggests that nuclear reactors "come in only one size -- extra large." Many research reactors produce only 5 MW. We've never reached the point where nuclear electricity runs cars or airplanes -- as early dreamers suggested -- but in theory it's possible.<br /><br />"Mini-reactors" are now being suggested in many remote locations -- just as wind and solar energy are thriving where other power sources are not available. In Galena, Alaska, far up the Yukon River, Toshiba has proposed a 10 MW reactor to replace the town's diesel generators, which now produce electricity at ten times the normal price. The Russians have started building "floating reactors" as small as 3 MW to transport into isolated outposts of Siberia, where weather conditions make construction of power plants impossible. Both Canada and Venezuela are considering small reactors to cook the oil products out of the ground at remote tar sand deposits.<br /><br />One of the most promising technologies is the "pebble bed modular reactor," in which nuclear material is reposited in tennis ball-sized graphite-coated spheres that sit in the reactor vessel as in a giant gumball machine. Each pebble is a "mini-reactor" with all the necessary components and a collection of them produces enough power. "We've found the optimum size to be around 250 MW," says Prof. Andrew Kadak, who has been working on a design at MIT.<br /><br />Since balls can be inserted and withdrawn individually, the reactor never has to shut down for refueling. Temperatures do not climb high enough to cause a meltdown and proponents say this eliminates the need for an expensive containment structure -- although environmentalists dispute this. South Africa is scheduled to complete a 200 MW pebble bed reactor by 2012.<br /><br />In his public testimony Mr. Gore seemed to be convoluting several things, suggesting somehow that nuclear plants are too expensive and take too long to build because they only come "extra-large." This is not true.<br /><br />Nuclear plants take more time to build and are more expensive than comparative coal plants, but they are not prohibitively expensive. The Japanese are now building reactors in five years at competitive prices. Higher construction costs are more than compensated by lower fuel costs and higher capacity ratings. America's existing nuclear plants are now operating so profitably that Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal recently proposed a windfall profits tax because the state's reactors were making too much money.<br /><br />And this is all before environmental considerations are factored into the equation. In three years of operation, a 1,500 MW coal plant will spew three million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere -- the prime source of the world's carbon emissions. An identical nuclear reactor will produce only a few bundles of highly radioactive fuel rods that can be safely stored in a nearby storage pool. Yet coal currently pays for none of these environmental damages. A carbon tax of roughly $10 per ton would level the playing field and make nuclear power far more competitive.<br /><br />The reason building nuclear plants has been expensive and time-consuming is because of exaggerated popular fears of the technology. The public is now coming around. Seventy percent now consider nuclear plants acceptable, meaning new plants will probably not become bogged down in endless court delays.<br /><br />The only reasonable scenario for avoiding global warming is to substitute nuclear power for coal as our prime source of base-load electricity, supplementing it with wind and solar electricity for our spinning reserve and peaking-power needs. If Al Gore were to support a nuclear-solar alliance -- a joint effort by the carbon-free technologies to impose a tax on carbon emissions -- we could take giant steps toward solving the problem.<br /><br />Mr. Tucker is author of "Terrestrial Energy: How a Nuclear-Solar Alliance Can Rescue the Planet," forthcoming by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.<br /><br />Tags Indian Point Entergy Green Nuclear Butterfly Riverkeeper Al Gore An Inconvenient Truth Robert F Kennedy jr Solar Nuclear Renaissance<br /><br /><a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!" src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-71126780054762762322007-03-22T12:10:00.000-07:002007-03-22T12:11:02.112-07:00OVER BEFORE YOU KNOW<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNcW-Hfq1YwtsWA4x_YvMTw16frWJ1tv8zZRFJs0ArFcEWkrBlWmXrM8U3XMvZ74X3z3Kgqm5j0up4GfmYx7kOaSbr_-bYdwnzphQSpZFnas5UssidjkTlGf_oYCo4jocR30ilweU70Ak/s1600-h/scr_001.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNcW-Hfq1YwtsWA4x_YvMTw16frWJ1tv8zZRFJs0ArFcEWkrBlWmXrM8U3XMvZ74X3z3Kgqm5j0up4GfmYx7kOaSbr_-bYdwnzphQSpZFnas5UssidjkTlGf_oYCo4jocR30ilweU70Ak/s400/scr_001.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5020699872949543922" /></a><br /><br /><br />THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE ANNOUNCED<br /><br />Socially, there will never be a perfected system. Therefore, any argument from a social ideal is an argument based on delusion.<br />The empirical, the factual, tell us that multiple modalities interact moment to moment, and their intent is as unknowable as the inner content of all humans, taken as a single data instance. It is orders of magnitude too large to compute. It cannot be summed up, shortened, or simplified, unless absolute freedom and absolute human rights are to be quashed. Therefore the greater good is to always have an imperfect, mixed system. In such a system family, tribe, ethnos, religion, philosophy, commerce and raw passion must all have a place, for it is to be a best fit for the human animal, who resonates to all these modes. As far as science, there can never be a social science, for the reasons exposed above. All social science is tyrrany.<br />All knowing implications that assign value to certain acts, certain interactions, and proscription to other acts, other interactions are pleadings to mold the innately paramount human spirit into an innately inferior single modality. This is cultural imprisonment, with a pseudo-science delusive theory as its nightstick.<br /><br />Therefore the very stance of the left, that there is a form to human interaction, and that the form can be studied, improved, or perfected, is a defacto wish to truncate the human spirit, foisted as a projected curse outward on to the vibrant chaotic amalgam which is all human life. It is a cult of false knowingness. It is a church without a god. It is a studious delusion, and a neurotic avoidance of the basic human duty---full engagement with all humans, equally.<br /><br />Were progress to be possible, it could not be planned. It must of needs be struggled for. The new model will emerge only from the full engagement of all, energized even through conspiracies, criminalities, fixes, arrangements, and all the multitude of steering techniques outside the dry planner's board room. The one proscription which is valid, stems not from social science, but from deep inner human craving-- there must be no hate. But in the imperfect, hate will exist, so we may say-- let many work to the elimination of hate at all times. Other than this, all must be tolerated. All must be glorified. Spirit in Man is Godhood emerging. For Godhood to manifest, the full complement of living humanity must be in the mix. Therefore, no classes, no aristocracy, no intelligentsia, no hubris-of-the-word, no ethnic cleansing, no mass eliminations, no great wars, no barriers, no boundaries, no limit on the meeting, spirit to spirit, human to human, all to all.<br /><br />The man has not been born , who could understand this, and engineer its coming. But every mind alive can make it come.<br />If a step forward can be made, it will be accidental, or seem so. It will be over before it is known about. Omega will not be announced.<br /><br /><a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-89882399384748709622007-03-20T06:48:00.000-07:002007-03-20T08:36:56.035-07:00ALICE ENTERS WONDERLAND<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkvTSt-vmJ-uASQX9CGYdPxeyeYl0jCD2naPKwD1Z6q5tCHZ196lZrWELEZeA6KH1r2TCrlnzm1-GjDAWTvrmodBS89enpZYtXMW0Tk1bWaD9opEUruHZxqEaesN4eedFkspNsJfPfuBc/s1600-h/AliceCardsDrop.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkvTSt-vmJ-uASQX9CGYdPxeyeYl0jCD2naPKwD1Z6q5tCHZ196lZrWELEZeA6KH1r2TCrlnzm1-GjDAWTvrmodBS89enpZYtXMW0Tk1bWaD9opEUruHZxqEaesN4eedFkspNsJfPfuBc/s400/AliceCardsDrop.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5044002692358782546" /></a><br />Jim Knubel's article in TJN recaps some points made over the weeks here about the press-burst spewed by local Democratic party notables last month, talking about an "Independent Safety Assessment" at Indian Point. One spot where Knubel and I disagree, is when he asserts that all the Demo-clique members want to simply close Indian Point. If and when positive press can be gained by spouting a "Shut it down" line, I'm sure any one of these professional issue hoggers would say exactly what would help them the most, in the public eye.<br /><br />I find the fact that they are NOT saying "Shut it down" very telling.<br /><br />The public wants the benefits of having Indian Point on line, and our savvy politicoes are aware of this want, based on an undenied general need. However, having been elected partly via the efforts of paid green and NIMBY groups, the Dems are hoist on the horns of a service dilemma.<br /><br />If they appear to serve the public, they lose their partisan support. <br /><br />If they serve the activists, they lose, bigtime, for the region and the public at large. <br /><br />Their Solution? <br />Call for Alice in Wonderland to step in.<br /><br />By banding together to demand an unneeded and obsolete ISA, they can appear reasonable to the public, while at the same time appearing to their contributing activist foundations to at least be "punishing the demon".<br />It's PR magic. They get to do nothing, and look green doing it.<br /><br />What is truly needed, is a re-assessment of the Luddite myth-mongering cartel that has been employing long term paid PR hacks to cook up astroturf pseudo-grassroots "concern", spewing distortions, and attempting to set society against itself, to benefit their purely private no-nukes agenda.<br /><br />Democratic researchers might start with the names Helene Heilbrunn Lerner, Alice Slater, G.R.A.C.E., Tamarind Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, along with Amsterdam Based N.I.R.S./WISE. A veritable crap-storm of fear-drenched nonsense has been put on the street for at least a decade by these oligarchs-in-camouflage, pawning their social-engineering experiment as "grassroots" concern. Google it for yourself. They total maybe 50 people. (but wield a billion PR dollars). That's who is "concerned", not anybody else. Don't let paid PR footsoldiers claim to represent the public. They do not. <br /><br />Ironically, all our local Democratic officeholders <br />inadvertently admit they know this to be true, <br />by calling for an ISA.<br />.<br />.<br />.<br /><a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-72041638780904011112007-03-19T06:31:00.000-07:002007-03-19T06:32:19.026-07:00BACK TO THE RIFT VALLEY?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvbK1JDUH78u6rLD5XSgCZwlR0rsU41I-Qy7buS-KRoeaebkHbdS_mVIVrmcNtk6oHo11-ZZj_BEGLyGMSCm-fWk9QF1RWp-B49QrEyU7HI1aw25Tia3qJEYNWgbfuBIKbaDpCstVrKSk/s1600-h/wolf"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvbK1JDUH78u6rLD5XSgCZwlR0rsU41I-Qy7buS-KRoeaebkHbdS_mVIVrmcNtk6oHo11-ZZj_BEGLyGMSCm-fWk9QF1RWp-B49QrEyU7HI1aw25Tia3qJEYNWgbfuBIKbaDpCstVrKSk/s400/wolf" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5043626529904604146" /></a><br />It's a funny thing about physics. There is basically one, single, unitary physics, that has been true from the first picosecond of existence, and will remain true until the end of time. Therefore, there is no such thing as "nineteenth century physics", or "twentieth century physics". What was true in 1837, is still true today, 100% unchanged.<br /><br />Which brings up a further realization. Any knowlege unearthed by Bohr, Fermi, Einstein and others in the 1930's, was as true in the time of the pharaos as it will be in the year 9595. We just remained ignorant until WWII. It existed just the same, all along. Also, the process of U235 fission,the so-called nuclear process, is the process which heats the earth's core, and has continually heated the earth's core for 14 billion years. So we see that nuclear science is not "twentieth century science". It is the way nature itself is arranged, forever. There is no possibility of an alternative system. Physics is not swayed by politics. Whether it is the Iranians doing nuclear engineering, or the North Koreans, or the Chinese, or the South Africans, or the Israelis, or the Pakistani's, or the Indians, or the Brazilians, or the Russians, or the French, or even the Americans, the discovery of nature's eternal truths is not an evil plot hatched by Dr. Strangelove to provide Helen Caldicott with a lecture career, it is the inevitable compilation of knowlege upon former knowlege that has made man unique among the animals, the first animal destined, it would seem, to eventually penetrate every hidden secret the universe has embedded within it, for some grand racial or planetary destiny as yet unknown. ( For more on that note, read the works of Teilhard de Chardin, or the Koran.)<br /><br />I myself truly hate fire. <br /><br />I loath its destructive properties. I shudder at the thought of the WWII Tokyo firebombings, and the Hamburg & Dresden firestorms, literal maelstroms which killed far, far more than all the atomic explosions that have ever happened. I hate the witchburnings of Massachusetts, and the middle ages, I hate the christmas tree fires related to be by my fire-chief father, telling of entire families wiped out in a few minutes. I hate the branding of slaves by the Romans, I hate Nero's burning of Rome, I hate the crude witless fire religions of Baal and the wicker-man druids. I hate the fire that claims the lives of thousands of poor people each year in kerosene heater mishaps, eradicating entire families in horrific scenes of pain and loss. I hate the intentional east Indian kitchen fires, which horribly take the lives of lower caste brides once their dowrys have been paid. I hate the huge industrial fires which now choke our atmosphere, and kill 1,000,000 people per year, mainly the very young and the very old. I hate the cleverly constrained fire knowlegeably packed into each bullet, each artillery shell, each improvised explosive device, and maliciously packed within each rocket propelled grenade shot at our young people in harm's way, maiming, killing, reducing their humanity to cooked, torn, useless meat.<br /><br />But fire, a natural reaction of heat, air, and fuel, does not care that I hate it.<br /><br />As historical evidence will show us, fire has been here without man, before man, and not requiring man, to burn entire continents in repeat forest fires, and prairie fires whose imprint remains today in carbon layers unearthed by archaeologists.<br /><br />So mankind, it seems, as mankind now exists, cannot be imagined in the absence of fire. Without cookfires and hearthfires, how can man inhabit anything but the fruit-laden tropics? Man without fire cannot live in Canada, Germany, Poland, Russia, Manchuria, Japan, most of North America, all of Scandinavia, and vast stretches of lower south America. Man cannot exist above 1000 feet elevation, without fire at his side, and so is further constrained to just the bottomland. <br /><br />Since I loathe the destruction attached to fire,.... must I now condemn humanity to retreat from Europe and Asia, back into the tropical bottomland of Africa's rift valley, to cringe in fear without metal, without adequate tools or weaponry? Should I orchestrate a vast removal of all things human from the Americas, from all the mountain areas, a vast voyage of revulsion back to the paleolithic haunts of our distant forebears? Would all fire's evil be left behind by this tactic?<br /><br />Could all future witch burnings, slave brandings, and bride burnings be prevented by making this move? Could all the evil done by steel weapons, swords, guns, hatchets, maces, lances & daggers be forever prevented because without fire, we have no means to smelt the evil equipment of death?<br /><br />And without steel, and bronze, and fire, will the "New Humanity" become a sainted race, living in harmony by nurturing Christian Science principles and eating a vegan diet, somehow overcoming our defenselessness by close cooperation, perhaps selecting a few victims to throw to the hyenas , appeasing them each time they appear , rather than using the old, crude, failed and disproven masculine method, of fashioning weapons, and thus eating hyena, rather than the other way around?<br /><br />And what about "The Next Fire"?<br />What about the next physical truth discovered that unleashes great energies into man's use? With 98% of all the academic study ever done in all of history being done today, and 98% of all scientists who ever lived being alive right now, and 98% of all high energy-producing equipment ever fashioned being built even as we speak, there is a very high likelihood that a new craft, a "Power-Beyond-Nuclear" is glimmering right now in the first data taken by CERN's new Atlas device, just constructed high in the frigid uplands at the French-Swiss border. <br /><br />Should we "Take the Moral Course" , and immediately shut Atlas down , before something so problematical comes leaping out of its data streams, that all the innate competitiveness in the human race finds even more powerful ways to kill hyenas, and lower caste dowry brides? How many child care centers can be built within its 20 mile circular annulus? How many homeless shelters? How many refugee intake compounds, instead of a single megalomaniacal atom smasher, doomed to start a new round of proliferation, and a hateful arms race?<br /><br />But thinking a bit more calmly, the question arises---- Yes, once we have shut Atlas down, and built all the nurture centers in its shell..... How do we heat the place? How do we feed the refugees? How do we transport them there? How do we enforce order, and prevent cliques turning into gangs? How do we weed out the malicious "Jihad Refugees" taking advantage just to kill kaffirs when the opportunity arises? How do we power simple waste removal? What about bears?<br /><br />For that, we are going to need fire.(and thus all that comes with it).<br /><br />So despite my noble hopes, and my millennial aspirations, ..... it seems we are doomed.<br />Doomed to a hostile world, where fire makes steel, which kills. Doomed to a world where men defend themselves, and think, and experiment, trying to approach heaven via knowlege, seeking always "The Next Fire".<br /><br />And if we reject that fate, and seek to return to being hyena-bait, as of old... those proposing the move should remember full well, that giving up all fire's bad attachments means giving up all of fire's good attachments along with it, and choosing a child or old person each day, to throw to the hyenas, who were here before us, and who rightly view us , in full environmental justice, only as food.<br /><br />If you are skilled in handling analogy as a learning tool, it might have occurred to you by now that each thing I write here about the phenomenon of fire, is also applicable to the equally neutral physical phenomenon of U235 fission.<br /><br /> Have a nice day.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-71468421682119870292007-03-16T07:00:00.000-07:002007-03-16T07:01:11.305-07:00PUNISHING PITTSFIELD (?)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNS1emffDmYfO0a2x6WULC7VnNkPVRtt-TWaQLfmbFPo1csRnTytDpHJZbdYseVFNMkeA6k6fmJFmD9aaJyJwP41JSocOLIUXKhgE9peewQyUHSBE3r5s1zf2O9g74Lxxv0_BXKsXTmLs/s1600-h/gore.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNS1emffDmYfO0a2x6WULC7VnNkPVRtt-TWaQLfmbFPo1csRnTytDpHJZbdYseVFNMkeA6k6fmJFmD9aaJyJwP41JSocOLIUXKhgE9peewQyUHSBE3r5s1zf2O9g74Lxxv0_BXKsXTmLs/s400/gore.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5042521134171632610" /></a><br />Considering John Hall's Hydro Plan<br />(Al-Gore-Two-Faces-NIMBY-Trickle-Down-Award-of-the-year)<br /><br />Because I'm priced and taxed out of the Hudson Valley in considering housing for my retirement years, I've developed an affinity for Windows Live Local, which has a wonderful "Bird's Eye View" feature, letting you view major portions of the USA, from about 1000 feet up. It beats Terraserver's satellite views, and Google Earth's false perspective views, by letting you actually see that chicken farm right down the road from your Arkansas dream house, or that huge car body dump just behind that bargain priced Vermont farmhouse. I've noticed a lot of active sand & gravel quarries throughout western Massachusetts, in fairly close proximity to new upscale development, and it started me thinking about Saint Lawrence Cement, Scenic Hudson, and low-head hydropower.<br /><br />I have duly sent in my contributions to Scenic Hudson every year for decades, and a "Stop the Plant" sign graced my front lawn until the rain turned it to paste on a stick. I considered an open-pit cement mine with a 500 foot stack to be an unneeded monstrosity on the Hudson, seeing as it would have only brought about 60 jobs to the region.<br /><br />But low head hydropower, on a scale to meet the expected 5000 new megawatt demand, (or the shortfall from closing IPEC), would require concrete production on a scale to match the construction of the New York State Thruway 50 years ago, (the event that originally brought the St Lawrence cement plant to the area). The clearing of all the damsites, the terraforming, the actual construction, and the re-gridding of the area with hundreds of new transformer step-up stations, towers, high tension poles, and, ultimately, the new widely-dispersed electric power maintenance operation, one that will have the effect of taking the now-invisible prime mover generation assets sequestered in Indian Point, Bowline, & other brownfield campuses, and scattering them willy nilly in everybody's backyard, all this could very easily transform the region negatively, in ways not yet envisioned by those dreaming only of a forest paradise, and not realizing that a forest paradise generates no electricity.<br /><br />For one thing, a multiplicity of generating stations, is a multiplicity of terrorist targets, or even just vandalism targets, and is also a multiplicity of workers' trucks, paved parking lots, trash collection, maintenance spills, stacking yards, restricted razor wired compounds, dangerous high voltage high energy-containing structures by their hundreds, or even thousands, of necessity respecting no neighborhood, no mountainside, no trout stream, and bringing opportunistic eminent domain landgrabs by the hundreds for sure, industrializing the very woods we love so much, because that's where the water flows.<br /><br />So my pristine hike, with my springer spaniel Murphy, just might find us waving to those hydro guys in their truck, (as they toss their coffee cups by the road), smelling the waft from the maintanance crew's Port-O-San, just as we are blocked by that razor wire and its armed guard, right near that pile of pipes, under that transmission tower that didn't used to be there, before New York's 2800 new low head hydro generating stations were built.<br /><br />Moreover the concrete for the dams has to come from somewhere. So if we blocked St Lawrence Cement at Greenport, and patted ourselves on the back for it, immediately prior to requiring twice the amount of cement the place would have produced, thus dooming some folks in Massachusetts to bear the dust, the smoke, the trucks, and the scarring above and beyond their existing ugly gravel quarries, wouldn't we then qualify in spades for the <STRONG>"Al-Gore-Two-Faces-NIMBY-Trickle-Down-Award-of-the-year"</STRONG>, for screwing everybody in Pittsfield, to make Beacon's concrete for them?<br /><br />I don't know. I can't say for sure. But it does give me pause.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-34277488281244993742007-03-14T06:31:00.000-07:002007-03-15T15:43:01.949-07:00GRANDSTANDING FOR ECO-PAPPARAZZI ?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZzlEZnTj3VofniSnxaNB4ln-kdLlKTUXG3DlB9M6gVXLK62723uOOP9wKQ7YZSkmnD9y9_FSrLawmiW6UIzK42c8EkhUippKImhV8IyxhvWlETyFK2B6gRvlatQcQ6PVxCew8cnQGXko/s1600-h/ay02.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZzlEZnTj3VofniSnxaNB4ln-kdLlKTUXG3DlB9M6gVXLK62723uOOP9wKQ7YZSkmnD9y9_FSrLawmiW6UIzK42c8EkhUippKImhV8IyxhvWlETyFK2B6gRvlatQcQ6PVxCew8cnQGXko/s400/ay02.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5041771859946976178" /></a><br /><br /><br />I was amazed to find the entire 2006 evaluation of Entergy's Indian Point Energy Center publicly available at the following NRC website urls:<br /><br />http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/IP2/ip2_chart.html<br /><br />http://www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/IP3/ip3_chart.html<br /><br />Linking on to the public site, I was able to see that both units had all "Green" ratings for 2006, where green is performance within acceptable safety parameters, and a further list of all the coaching points NRC had brought to advise the units how to do better.<br /><br />These are known as "findings" A finding is an area that NRC wants to see improvement on. A green finding has no safety impact, and is NOT a violation, simply a coaching point, on how to improve.<br /><br />By reading through the green findings for IP2 & IP3, I was able to gain a feel for how the plants were coping. As in the GAO-2006-1029 report quoted earlier on this blog, it seems to the interested reader, to be fairly clear that things are going well at Indian Point.<br /><br />So two separate agencies of the United States Federal Government agree on this. The NRC, a quasi-judicial agency of the executive branch, and the General Accountability Office, a pure investigative agency of the Democrat-dominated Legislative branch. The GAO report covers the years from 2001 through 2005, and the NRC report covers 2006.<br /><br />How deflating it must be, for agendist local politicians to read that these two prestigious expert agencies both agree that Indian Point is completely safe, and running well, in dovetailing reports done at separate times by separate agencies, agencies with widely differing missions to serve.<br /><br />It ought to be a clarifying experience, allowing politicians and the public to determine just who is bullshitting whom, vis-a-vis Indian Point. What part of "Safe" do they not understand? What part of "Well Run" do they not understand?<br /><br />And as far as "Fine-'em" Feiner, who declared he wants NRC to take money from Entergy, it also answers his big attention grabbing media stunt-question of last week. When Feiner ingenuously asks "Why is Indian Point not being fined?" the NRC answer is: "Indian Point has no findings greater than Green".--- in plain words---There's nothing to fine. Read the two reports, and it will be explained to you, and to Feiner, and John Hall, Hillary, and Chuck-the-cluck Schumer, too.<br /><br />NRC does not fine plants that are running safely. NRC does not interrupt its valuable & deeply revealing Reactor Oversight Inspections, to do uncalled-for, attention-grabbing Independent Safety Assessments.<br /><br />So where does that leave the Gang-of-Six? It leaves them waving their little red books as they march around their little Tien Anmen Square mockup in the local press in Mao-like lockstep, <br />shouting their antinuke red guard slogans, to display their proper political orientation to all their papparazzi in media, who have always liked a communal demonstration, with slogans, even better than reality.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-34995716541841578222007-03-08T07:23:00.000-08:002007-03-08T08:12:18.738-08:00DOESN'T ANYBODY READ THIS STUFF?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8SrbaP6rjPiE1cjX2Rcp_dNprMPRzpK-880YlYoiuDFDa24ASxCrj-P2d0vlzhvf-GV7ChybkJwz7uIYYt1uJ9tJQdT_XhJzc32hRw4ZuuK9mWob5T7t2UqsBHEMRFtupYc6jw2B-V4Y/s1600-h/YYY.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8SrbaP6rjPiE1cjX2Rcp_dNprMPRzpK-880YlYoiuDFDa24ASxCrj-P2d0vlzhvf-GV7ChybkJwz7uIYYt1uJ9tJQdT_XhJzc32hRw4ZuuK9mWob5T7t2UqsBHEMRFtupYc6jw2B-V4Y/s400/YYY.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5039573934845708914" /></a><br />HAVEN'T YOU READ YOUR OWN GAO REPORT?<br /><br /><br />In response to Several Democrats' call for an Independent Safety Assessment at Indian Point, I decided to see what resources were out there, if I were a congressperson, and just wanted to know how well NRC was managing Indian Point, without passing a special law, or holding a lot of wasteful press conferences.<br /><br />And Whaddya know! I didn't have to believe NRC. I didn't have to ask Entergy. And I didn't have to pass a new law, either! The GAO, Congress' own investigative arm, had already published a report in September, 2006, describing just how well NRC was doing, managing the oversight of Indian Point.<br /><br />I couldn't believe it! Had the anti-nuclear staffers of these Democrats hidden the GAO report from them? Probably, is my own conclusion.<br /><br />Anyway, the report contains tables, showing Indian Point's safety rating improving continuously, since 2001. (2001 was the year that Entergy bought the place, by the way). The same charts show Indian Point firmly "In the Green". I guess that ought to reassure Hillary, and Mr Hall, Schumer & Hinchey.<br /><br />All they have to do is read this post, or link to:<br />http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d061029.pdf<br />They don't have to even bother Congress with a useless new brouhaha, attracting a lot of attention, and wasting $20 million doing it! Of course, you don't get any media coverage, reading a report!<br /><br /><br /><br />GAO-06-1029<br />September 2006<br /><br /><br />NUCLEAR<br />REGULATORY<br />COMMISSION<br />Oversight of Nuclear<br />Power Plant Safety<br />Much Improved<br /><br />(these are exerpts, the whole report is much longer).<br /><br />NRC provides an overall assessment of each plant’s performance through assessment letters issued to plants at the end of each 6-month period describing their specific performance and the level of oversight that will result. In addition, NRC has mechanisms to make available its oversight results, such as an Internet Web site devoted to the ROP that provides detailed summaries of each plant’s performance.<br /><br />In the area of performance indicators, there were 156 instances out of more than 30,000 reports, or less than 1 percent, in which data reported for individual indicators were outside of NRC’s acceptable performance category. NRC assesses overall plant performance and communicates the results to licensees and the public on a semiannual basis.<br /><br />Since 2001, the ROP has resulted in more than 4,000 inspection findings concerning nuclear power plant licensees’ failure to fully comply with NRC regulations and industry standards for safe plant operation, and NRC has subjected more than 75 percent (79) of the 103 operating plants to increased oversight for varying periods. <br /><br />In addition, the nuclear power industry formed an organization, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO), whose mission is to “promote the highest levels of safety and reliability, to promote excellence, in the operation of nuclear electric generating plants.” INPO provides a system of personnel training and qualification for all key positions at nuclear power plants, and workers undergo both periodic training and assessment. INPO also conducts periodic evaluations of operating plants, focusing on plant safety and reliability, in the areas of operations, maintenance, engineering, radiological protection, chemistry, and training. Licensees make the results of these evaluations available to NRC for review, and NRC staff use the evaluations as a means to determine whether its oversight process has missed any performance issues.<br /><br /><br /> NRC increased its inspection resources by 9 percent in 2004, and then by another 5 percent in 2005, and was able to fully implement its baseline inspection program at all plants for both years. NRC reports show that resources expended in 2005 were almost 20 percent higher than those expended in 2002.With its current resource levels, NRC program officials believe they will be able to continue to implement all program requirements.<br /><br /><br />Physical plant inspections are the main tool NRC uses to oversee plant safety performance. NRC defined specific inspection areas by developing a list of those elements most critical to meeting the overall agency mission of ensuring nuclear power plant safety. These safety elements—or key plant inspection areas—are known as cornerstones. <br /><br /><br />During fiscal year 2005, NRC reported that inspectors spent 411,490 hours on plant inspections, which consist of baseline, supplemental, and special inspections. About 73 percent of this time was devoted to baseline inspections, which are conducted on an almost continuous basis. Baseline inspections are conducted by the NRC inspectors located at each site and specialists who travel to each site from NRC’s regional offices. These inspections are designed to detect declining safety performance in each of the cornerstones, and to review licensee effectiveness at identifying and resolving its safety problems. There are more than 30 baseline inspection procedures conducted at intervals that range from quarterly to triennially. Each of the baseline procedures specify a range of sample activities to inspect. Inspectors then select the type and number of activities to review on the basis of factors such as the sample activities available; their risk significance; the amount of time since a particular system or component was last inspected; and the inspector’s judgment, which is based on information such as reviews of the licensee’s corrective action program, allegations, or plant employee interviews. Risk is factored into the baseline inspection procedures in the following four ways: (1) areas of inspection are included in the set of baseline procedures, in part, on the basis of their risk importance; (2) risk information is used to help determine the frequency and scope of inspections; (3) the selection of activities to inspect within each procedure is informed with plant-specific risk information; and (4) the inspectors are trained in the use of risk information in planning their inspections. In addition to the more than 30 baseline inspection procedures, inspectors spend an average of 750 to 1,100 hours per year, conducting plant status reviews. These reviews are to ensure that inspectors are aware of plant conditions on a routine basis and include such activities as reviewing control room activities and status, attending licensee meetings, and conducting walk-downs of various plant areas.<br /><br /><br />Whether NRC takes enforcement actions in response to plant performance problems depends on whether there is a violation of a specific regulatory requirement.<br /><br /><br />When NRC issues greater-than-green inspection findings at a plant, it conducts supplemental inspections. One plant was subject to NRC’s highest oversight level in 2001 & 2002 because of a red finding for the failure of a steam generator tube. NRC conducted its most intensive supplemental inspection 2 months after the red finding was determined The licensee prepared a plan to address its deficiencies, and determined that a multiyear effort was necessary to develop and implement all corrective actions. Once the corrective actions were in place, NRC inspectors conducted follow-up inspections to examine the adequacy of the licensee’s efforts. Supplemental inspections, performed by regional staff, expand the scope beyond baseline inspection procedures and focus on diagnosing the cause of the performance<br />deficiency. There are three levels of supplemental inspections that are increasingly expansive in the breadth and depth of their analysis. The lowest level of supplemental inspection assesses the licensee’s corrective actions to ensure they were sufficient in both correcting the problem and identifying and addressing the root and contributing causes to prevent recurrence. The second level of supplemental inspection has an increased scope that includes independently assessing the extent of the condition for both the specific and any broader performance problems. The highest level of supplemental inspection is even more comprehensive and includes determining whether the plant can continue to operate and whether additional regulatory actions are necessary. The highest level of supplemental inspection is usually conducted by a multidisciplinary team of NRC inspectors and may take place over several months. Also, as a part of this supplemental inspection, NRC inspectors assess the adequacy of the licensee’s overall programs for identifying, evaluating, and correcting its performance issues, among other things.<br /><br /><br /><br />In addition to its various inspections, NRC also collects plant performance information through its performance indicator program, which it maintains in cooperation with the nuclear power industry. On a quarterly basis, each plant submits data for 15 separate performance indicators—quantitative measures of plant performance related to safety in the different aspects of plant operations. Working with the nuclear power industry, NRC set thresholds for acceptable performance and assigned colors to each of the indicators to reflect increasing risk. In contrast to inspection findings, a green indicator does not indicate a performance deficiency but instead reflects performance<br />within the acceptable range, while white, yellow, and red represent decreasing levels of plant performance. NRC inspectors review and verify the data submitted for each performance indicator annually through their baseline inspections<br /><br /><br /><br />On the basis of the results of its oversight process, NRC provides plant licensees and the public with an overall assessment of each plant’s performance. At the end of each 6-month period, NRC issues an assessment letter to each plant to describe its placement on the action matrix, what actions NRC is expecting the plant licensee to take as a result of the performance issues identified, any specific enforcement actions NRC has taken, and any documented substantive cross-cutting issues. If a substantive cross-cutting issue is identified, the letter will describe what actions NRC intends to take to monitor the issue and how the licensee is expected to respond to NRC with the corrective actions it intends to take. NRC also holds an annual public meeting at or near each site to review its performance and address questions from members of the public and other interested stakeholders. <br /><br />In addition, NRC reviews the conclusions of independent plant assessments, such as those conducted by INPO. The purpose of this review is to selfassess the NRC inspection and assessment process to ensure that NRC is identifying similar performance issues.<br /><br />NRC communicates the results of much of its oversight process to members of the public through an Internet Web site devoted to the ROP. This Web site makes available plants’ inspection reports and assessment letters, and other general materials related to NRC’s oversight process. NRC also provides a quarterly summary of every plant’s performance, consisting of its inspection findings, the color of each performance indicator, and its placement on the action matrix. NRC also provides a<br />short description of each inspection finding issued during the quarter.<br /><br /><br />In addition to its plant-level assessments, NRC assesses the results of its oversight process on an industry-level basis. NRC management holds an annual meeting to (1) discuss any significant performance issues identified at specific plants and (2) analyze the overall results of its inspection and performance indicator programs and compare them with other industrycollected and reported performance data. NRC program officials said that if they identified any negative trends or inconsistencies, they would take action to better understand and address the cause.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://autopinger.com/ping.aspx?eac=6h9jN%40wrQ0uy7Zdn%2f67x4VBM%2fXDaKd0wANE02VrhM0j2AHaiusACor0Lx9l0hXOUWNgOh8MGTp2u6nE0LYnqT6cOux%40rnWC5KDmTpn18jkABPPxApyw3KwZUa3izgrZOTXh72pbjZ17UXW7xH0fWYzcm6%2fJCSd1uNUTuvBiKYLlk8GEdHHypsx7wxidPdqx5rvrHcrplywlKl2Ub2lIt5pAfDqUZCg44YiW2LcHKTI1rCulK8RnneA%3d%3d"><img src="http://img.autopinger.com/quickping.gif" border="0" alt="Blog: WHITE NUCLEAR SNOWFLAKE - Get your quick ping button at autopinger.com!"></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-82051383992001887372007-03-07T10:51:00.001-08:002007-03-07T10:51:49.104-08:00ANTINUKE IS ANTIPEOPLE<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje_CxWAYdhJpgG1T9c5gY2TU2IFI-PP2G2n4HUptA8eK5aKt_IuJRA9DjiigQ1qK49nZbezMOtCOTKehXgsbeFXgBa5S1HHtyLjzA4pJZ8IFHcbd3Wwy8KhumM4HdmFWYWKDBFVCmkpfwb/s1600-h/paulR.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje_CxWAYdhJpgG1T9c5gY2TU2IFI-PP2G2n4HUptA8eK5aKt_IuJRA9DjiigQ1qK49nZbezMOtCOTKehXgsbeFXgBa5S1HHtyLjzA4pJZ8IFHcbd3Wwy8KhumM4HdmFWYWKDBFVCmkpfwb/s400/paulR.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5038952305522909810" /></a><br /><br />ANTINUKE = ANTIPEOPLE<br /><br />How easily those misled by "movement angst" misconstrue reality. A merchant plant operator entered the Lohud in 2000, intending to take NYPA's & Con Ed's unwanted, neglected, outliers, their atypical nuclear assets, and make them a winning proposition. Entergy's will, its vision, its avowed intention, was to reshape the assets, make them a single united service benefit for the region, and apply all the best methods to aid the customer base, the northeast region consumer, in continuing to prosper, expand horizons, and never suffer any return to former levels of less wealth, less freedom, less hope, less empowerment, or their ultimate ramifications, want , disenfranchisement, and/or deprivation.<br /><br />This is a very people-centric vision. The assets are here, written in concrete and steel, but corrupt Con Ed myopia, along with NYPA state-agency myopia, did not choose to see any bright future. It took the naivete' of Entergy, to think of us all, the regional rate payer, as worthy of rescue.<br /><br />However, the society at large hereabouts, is not done with its amazing self hate. It is not done flirting with doomism, defeatism, less-ism, choking NIMBYism, and the intellectual detritus of a long leftist opposition history, here near Peekskill. <br /><br />Answer me this. <br /><br />If Paul Robeson strode the streets of Peekskill in 2007, as he once did in the riot days, would he tell his people: "Fear your future"? Would he say to them (and to us): "Let these wealthy folks have their pristine condo landscape, free of us blue collar trash"? Would he say: "Forget moving up. What you got now, is good enough".? Is that what he would say?<br /><br />Or would he say: "These folks from New Orleans want to serve YOU!" Wouldn't he say: "Take what they offer you!" Take prosperity. Take jobs. Take low taxes. Take Low electric bills. Take development, and new places of work. Take a land in which people not endowed with trust funds can hold their heads up and say "I work"..... "I pay my taxes"..... "I'm as equal as any man.".....and make it stick, by not hunkering down to wealthist myths of white-water-rafting as a life endeavor. Because I truly believe the great man would see through the charades, and reach out his hands, and tear down their tissue paper lies and sing out: "Let my (working class) people go"<br /><br />Anybody see it any different?<br /><br />If so, we are gonna have a talk, I guarantee it!<br /><br />tag: Indian PointUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-50536826853798915372007-03-07T09:43:00.000-08:002007-03-07T09:44:31.400-08:00GENESIS OF TRIBAL MYTH --1997<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNcW-Hfq1YwtsWA4x_YvMTw16frWJ1tv8zZRFJs0ArFcEWkrBlWmXrM8U3XMvZ74X3z3Kgqm5j0up4GfmYx7kOaSbr_-bYdwnzphQSpZFnas5UssidjkTlGf_oYCo4jocR30ilweU70Ak/s1600-h/scr_001.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNcW-Hfq1YwtsWA4x_YvMTw16frWJ1tv8zZRFJs0ArFcEWkrBlWmXrM8U3XMvZ74X3z3Kgqm5j0up4GfmYx7kOaSbr_-bYdwnzphQSpZFnas5UssidjkTlGf_oYCo4jocR30ilweU70Ak/s400/scr_001.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5020699872949543922" /></a><br /><br /><br />In shaping a picture of the NRC for Congress, the General Accounting Office, in its 1997 report: GAO/RCED-97-145, May 30, 1997, stated: <strong>Determining the safety of plants is difficult because NRC does not precisely define it. Instead, NRC presumes that nuclear plants are safe if they operate within their approved designs (design basis) and meet NRC's regulations. However, NRC's regulations and other guidance do not provide either the licensees or the public with the specific definitions and conditions that define the safety of a plant. As a result, NRC does not have an effective way to quantify the safety of plants that deviate from their approved designs or violate regulations. Determining a plant's safety condition is, therefore, a subjective judgment.</strong><br /><br />The GAO's 1997 statement about NRC and the definition of safety is off the mark, because it ignores the very basis of safety in the nuclear industry.<br /><br /><br />Rather than embody safety in the agency, or in a single static model imposed upon 103 plants, the licensing system has imposed a vast creative task individually on each licensee, prior to the granting of each license. The task involves the writing of a detailed Safety Analysis Report. The definition of safety, for that plant, is embodied in the Safety Analysis Report, a huge document running to ten or more volumes, with internal references to thousands of calculations stored elsewhere, and hundreds (if not thousands) of detailed design drawings, also stored elsewhere.It is known as the SAR, or (final) FSAR. So, defacto, the engineering designers who wrote the FSARs and the technical specifications have also written the safety standards, 103 differing safety standards for 103 plants. Each standard is extremely concrete, there is no vagueness. However each standard is huge, and there are 103 separate versions.<br /><br /><br />This kind of a document cannot be inspected casually, or cursorily by GAO, nor can operator compliance with it be casually determined by observing the NRC. To wrongly imply that NRC methods were lax, or "subjective" is a misleading and self serving statement, designed to lift the onus of comprehending the FSAR system, off the shoulders of the GAO team, and deposit GAO's unreadiness to prepare its inspectors onto NRC's doorstep, as a vague accusation of "subjectivity". With 103 versions of law, residing in 103 FSARs at 103 Nuclear plants, the amount and difficulty of material is just too great for GAO to assess, much less sum up. GAO failed to adequately comprehend this system, and wrongly reported it to Congress as an NRC shortfall. It is in point of fact, the defacto status of present regulatory law. As law, as a sitting legal structure, it ought not be mischaracterized as an administrative shortfall. <br /><br /><br /><br />Perhaps if it understood its intended mission more completely, GAO might have proposed a new legal structure, complete with a general unified FSAR, but of course, it lacked the technical competency to even determine the nature of what it was assessing, and so could not have successfully replaced it with a more comprehensive upgrade. As it is, GAO has shuffled its feet unknowingly, at the periphery, accusing NRC of not safeguarding the public, when in fact it was GAO failing its mission, the mission to understand just where the concrete jot and tittle of nuclear safety was embodied--- in the FSARs and the tech specs, and not within NRC. This kind of a safety standard demands the dedication of a qualified set of resident inspectors, tasked with climbing the extremely steep learning curve in each FSAR, as a preparation for understanding how each individual plant is fulfilling its specific commitments to each FSAR. Once the subject matter is mastered, then the individual inspector, be he an NRC resident inspector, or a GAO inspector, can be ready to realistically compare plant performance parameters to the mammonth compendium of promised performance parameters, that is the FASR and The Technical Specifications. With such knowlege in hand, the judgement is not subjective. It is extremely objective. Meet tech specs=pass. Not meet tech specs= fail.<br /><br /><br /><br />This is the American system. If it is monumentally complex, and thus not amenable to easy GAO mastery, that fact just makes any casual GAO suggestions made after a cursory look-see a lot less than enlightening. Therefore must Congress remain in the dark, and simply trust NRC? Perhaps, but better that they understand their own inpectors' blind spots. Therefore allow me to analyze the GAO assertion,line by line, in the light of what I've revealed above.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Determining the safety of plants is difficult because NRC does not precisely define it.</strong><br />This is not true. Determining plant safety is difficult, because it is precisely defined 103 separate ways in 103 FSARs, and because each FSAR , with its accompanying references may take a year or more for a talented individual to comprehend.<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>NRC presumes that nuclear plants are safe if they operate within their approved designs and meet NRC's regulations.</strong> <br />This is true, but is not a shortfall. The vast system of redundant safeguards embodied in each FSAR provides large margins of safety, and its initial approval came only after detailed critical evaluation to the best scientific/engineering standards. Such trust is not ill-founded trust.<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>However, NRC's regulations and other guidance do not provide either the licensees or the public with the specific definitions and conditions that define the safety of a plant.</strong><br />This is not true. The Technical specifications provide an absolutely precise and objective standard to the licensees, and to NRC. Perhaps GAO is suggesting a tech spec primer series be prepared for public consumption along the lines of <strong>"A nuclear plant is safe, when its tech specs are met"</strong>, with explanations. I doubt if the public would be interested. GAO, on a mission to find the tech specs, missed them entirely, and now it reports that NRC has none. Would the public do any better?<br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>As a result, NRC does not have an effective way to quantify the safety of plants that deviate from their approved designs or violate regulations.</strong> <br />This might have been germaine in 1997. In 2007 it is not true. The Reactor Oversight Process is now in place, giving objective banded scoring to each plant, in all major areas. Note that this statement is not about safety per se, but rather it is about the reporting of safety conditions to the general public. <br /><br /><br /><br /><strong>Determining a plant's safety condition is, therefore, a subjective judgment.</strong><br />This was not true in 1997, and it is most certainly nonsense in 2007.<br /><br /><br /><br />In missing the absolute inflexibility of the tech specs, and by looking in the wrong place for the exactitude (looking within NRC, rather than in the license), GAO overlooked the very concrete methodology for maintaining plant safety, as being non-existent. This failure has now propagated itself outward through the Congress, and the public, as a tribal myth, wrongly accusing NRC of laxity.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8844486537901641241.post-55355912153160772822007-03-06T15:11:00.000-08:002009-12-04T03:17:30.958-08:00ELITIST DOOM CULT MUST GO AWAY<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje_CxWAYdhJpgG1T9c5gY2TU2IFI-PP2G2n4HUptA8eK5aKt_IuJRA9DjiigQ1qK49nZbezMOtCOTKehXgsbeFXgBa5S1HHtyLjzA4pJZ8IFHcbd3Wwy8KhumM4HdmFWYWKDBFVCmkpfwb/s1600-h/paulR.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5038952305522909810" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje_CxWAYdhJpgG1T9c5gY2TU2IFI-PP2G2n4HUptA8eK5aKt_IuJRA9DjiigQ1qK49nZbezMOtCOTKehXgsbeFXgBa5S1HHtyLjzA4pJZ8IFHcbd3Wwy8KhumM4HdmFWYWKDBFVCmkpfwb/s400/paulR.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
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ANTINUKE = ANTIPEOPLE<br />
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How easily those misled by "movement angst" misconstrue reality. A merchant plant operator entered the Lohud in 2000, intending to take NYPA's & Con Ed's unwanted, neglected, outliers, their atypical nuclear assets, and make them a winning proposition. Entergy's will, its vision, its avowed intention, was to reshape the assets, make them a single united service benefit for the region, and apply all the best methods to aid the customer base, the northeast region consumer, in continuing to prosper, expand horizons, and never suffer any return to former levels of less wealth, less freedom, less hope, less empowerment, or their ultimate ramifications, want , disenfranchisement, and/or deprivation.<br />
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This is a very people-centric vision. The assets are here, written in concrete and steel, but corrupt Con Ed myopia, along with NYPA state-agency myopia, did not choose to see any bright future. It took the naivete' of Entergy, to think of us all, the regional rate payer, as worthy of rescue.<br />
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However, some hereabouts, are not done with their amazing self hate. They are not done flirting with doomism, defeatism, less-ism, choking NIMBYism, and the intellectual detritus of a long and zany leftist opposition history, here near Peekskill. <br />
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Answer me this. <br />
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If Paul Robeson strode the streets of Peekskill in 2009, as he once did in the riot days, would he tell his people: "Fear your future"? Would he say to them (and to us): "Let these wealthy folks have their pristine condo landscape, free of us blue collar trash"? Would he say: "Forget moving up. What you got now, is good enough".? Is that what he would say?<br />
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Or would he say: "These folks from New Orleans want to serve YOU!" Wouldn't he say: "Take what they offer you!" Take prosperity. Take jobs. Take low taxes. Take Low electric bills. Take development, and new places of work. Take a land in which people not endowed with inherited trust funds can hold their heads up and say "I work"..... "I pay my taxes"..... "I'm as equal as any man.".....and make it stick, by not hunkering down to wealthist myths of white-water-rafting as a life endeavor. <br />
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Because I truly believe the great man would see through the charades, and reach out his hands, and tear down their tissue paper lies and sing out: <br />
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"Let my (working class) people go"<br />
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Anybody see it any different?<br />
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If so, we are gonna have a talk, I guarantee it!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com