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E. chromi
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Category Archives: Current Events
South Pole
A friend and colleague is currently wintering over at the Amundson-Scott station on the south pole. She is sending us periodic email updates on life at the station. As they come along I’ll share bits of them. A colleague of hers posts his observations on his blog. They recently celebrated their once-per-year sunset at the equinox.
There are all sorts of station closing activities I volunteered for early on. I trained for what is called “Flight Following” to man the Comms Center in the winter whenever any flights are flying farther South than 60 degrees. South Pole’s unique position on top of the plateau makes radio reception unusually clear while closer to the coast it is often obscured. So our job is to relay messages if we hear the pilot unable to reach his coast air traffic control. I also periodically do checks in the Power Plant so those people can occasionally get a day off.
It’s almost like a commune down here. Or at least what I assume communal living would have been like in the ’60s, Kind of a fun existence for a few months. But it is damn COLD! I took my glove off to operate my camera to film sunset up on the roof of the station – our daily temps are about -80 F, with windchill well below -100 F. A gust of wind kicked up after I had been filming for less than 2 minutes and I almost couldn’t make my hand work well enough to climb back down the steps. Today there is still a blister on my pinkie finger from frostnip. Human flesh freezes within a minute when exposed to that sort of cold. –South Pole Susan
I guess I won’t be complaining about the cold anymore.
Link for Nuke Updates
Another good site for well informed updates on the unfolding Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster can be found at MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub.
Thanks to Les for the heads up.
Things to notice about the disasters in Japan
Everyone is rightfully concerned about Japan and what is to become of the region around the Fukushima Dai’ichi generating station. The quality of information by the various broadcast outlets is improving somewhat in my estimation. What the rest of the world should take note of is the stoic and highly admirable manner in which the Japanese have responded to the earthquake*tsunami*nuclear-disaster trifecta that has fallen upon them. In a US city there’d be looting and widespread felonious mischief as local criminal entrepreneurs rose to the occasion.
Another thing that I hope is noticed is the manner in which the failures initiated and propagated at the power station. The unfortunate low elevation of the emergency generators is the obvious one. But there is something else that is dramatically affecting how the incident propagates. If you look at the cutaway diagrams of the plant you will see the highly compact nature of the facility. The footprint of the buildings are quite small given the amount of equipment and processing that occurs there. In particular, the location of the cooling pools for the spent fuel assemblies is at the upper level of the structure, above the reactor spaces.
The upper level with the cooling pools has an overhead crane that can move along the length of the facility. The fuel elements can be pulled up and out of the reactor and moved laterally into the pool. The General Electric design is quite efficient in the use of acreage. But in the event of a major upset with fire, explosions, major radioactive material release, and structural damage, the compactness of the facility and the elevation of the spent fuel cooling pools works for prolonged incident propagation and against termination.
The very altitude of the cooling pool spaces presents a major hurdle to taking control of the situation. Having this problem at ground level where you could directly apply resources to the event would be bad enough. But to have it many stories above ground places huge constraints on the responders. Designers of power plants should be thinking about where hazardous energy can be released and how responders will deal with it. Problem- all facilities design projects are constrained by severe cost considerations. Designers prefer to think about the most efficient designs, not how their brain child is going to fail.
Credible Information on Fukushima
It is difficult to find truly informed opinion on the Fukushima reactor disaster in Japan. The Daily Kos Community site by Richard Blair seems very credible from what I can discern. The writer claims to be a Nuclear Power Operations-certified systems engineer in GE Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs). I have no reason to disbelieve it.
Actually, Rachel Maddow (and writers) did a very even handed presentation this evening of the basics of reactors, radiation, and nuclear power generation on her show.
Blair (writing under the pseudonym Richard Cranium) shares some interesting insights on the Fukushima boiling water reactors. It’s worth a look. It is part of a larger effort at information aggregation called the Japan Nuclear Disaster: Mothership.
Bug Hunt: Los Angeles
Big, angry, armored termite soldiers from the Planet “O” land off the coast of SoCal and make an amphibious assault. Luckily for humanity they land near Camp Pendelton. Thus begins Battle: Los Angeles.
Filmed in a documentary style, this movie follows the travails of a platoon of Marines on a mission to pick up civilians at a police station in Malibu and take them to a forward operating base (FOB) before heavy bombardment of the coast begins. The aliens take and keep the initiative early in the invasion.
The invaders aren’t misunderstood ET’s with big blue cow eyes. These bipedal and possibly cyborgish critters are loaded with high velocity rounds and are fiendishly single-minded in their attempt to secure the planet. Aaron Eckhart plays the lead character, Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz. Along the way the platoon picks up USAF staff sergeant Elena Santos played by Michelle Rodriguez. The casting of Rodriguez was particularly smart from the marketing perspective. Hotties with automatic weapons are irresistable to the male moviegoer. I’m thinking of Ripley making her escape from the Nostromo.
OK, guys, this is not a chick flick. It’s not especially bloody, but it is filled to the brim with male bravado and long satisfying bursts of full automatic gun fire. Wives and girl friends may be unmoved by the machinegun aesthetic. Just thought I’d mention it.
It’s not Academy Award stuff, but it is worth seeing on the big screen.
On a separate topic, for the fans of Dune, there is this link.
China Syndrome in Japan
The China Syndrome is a fanciful “theory” that postulates that when a nuclear reactor undergoes a meltdown, the hot core material melts through the pressure vessel and through the concrete containment flooring below into the ground. All the way to China.
Well, this really can”t happen because the core, hot as it is and dense as it is, could only go to whatever depth matches it’s density. I don’t think many people really understand what happens to core material when it breaches the containment and encounters the subsurface. Further, it’s hard to say if the core material will remain intact as a single unit long enough to retain a critical condition as it spills outside of the reactor vessel assembly.
The fuel elements are, I believe, ceramic in nature, making them refractory. Refractory materials have quite high melting points. A reaction mass that has some fluidity might well split off isolated blebs which could then take the whole mass away from a critical condition. This would tend to dampen the reaction rate and allow the reaction mass to cool below the melting point of the mass.
Quite apart from the dispersion of the core material is the loss of moderator around the reaction mass. This would occur as the primary coolant water flashes to steam as the pressure vessel is breached. Loss of moderator reduces the number of neutrons in the resonant range and the power should drop accordingly. The decay heat from the fission products should be fierce.
As a molten parcel of reactor core heats up the surface material below it, the molten flooring, soil, or bedrock must be fluid enough to allow the core to displace it downward. It could be that the blob gets elongated and increases the surface to volume ratio enough to allow the loss of neutron flux to cause the blob to cool below the melting point of the ground. How a self-heating blob of core material behaves under the pull of gravity in a variable and possibly refractory rocky matrix is not an easy problem.
Ground water would be problematic for the neighborhood because eruptions of contaminated steam would be expected to issue from the crater.
I hope these poor fellows are able to get their reactors under control before the area gets too hot. If the reactor spaces and control rooms get too hot it is going to complicate the remediation.
It is worth reading the updates from NISA.
Some Comments on Public Schools
I know public school teachers very well. There is much talk about the kind of job public school teachers are doing these days. Much of the discussion is very negative. A lot of people seem to think that American public school education is in some kind of decline. Conservatives in particular seem to have a good deal of criticism to direct at public school teachers.
While I suspect that this grumbling on the right has more to do with vengeful, angry little boys who have grown to be vengeful, angry men, I’ll set this hypothesis on the shelf for some more aging.
In Coloado we have an annual test battery for public school students called the CSAP’s. It was an initiative set forth by conservative legislators who have a very negative view of public education in general and of teachers unions in particular. The CSAP’s start tomorrow in fact. My 9th grade kid will spend the next week taking them.
It is funny. No matter how tight the legislation is, people will always find a way to game the system. I know of one principal who was selected to open a brand new elementary school nearby. While at his previous elementary school in a poor neighborhood, he had access to the students CSAP scores. Prior to his departure he contacted the parents of the top 70 or so students and invited them to come to his new school in a more affluent neighborhood. Nearly all of them did, leaving the previous school in the lurch. Test scores plummeted at his previous school last year because of this. The parents of the recruited students had a good many volunteers among them. The level of volunteerism dropped substantially as well, adding to the workload in a school already depleted of hourly teachers aids.
Yes, the aforementioned principal seems guilty of some kind of malfeasance or corruption. He’s gaming the system. But he fell out of the sky into a system begging for gamesmanship. He did it to pave his way into a superintendant slot someday and I’ve no doubt that he’ll get it.
The great fallacy of this issue in the public forum is that it is up to teachers alone to keep kids on track. Having been married to a special education teacher I can say that there are a great many parents producing kids that are improperly wired, emotionally disturbed, sociopathic, and/or neglected or abused. Many kids go to school hungry and go home to high stress environments where there is rampant drug abuse, alcohol, and family violence.
It is not uncommon for some elementary students to be the only family members who can speak English. Parents in such homes are not able to help with home work. They are not able to communicate with the schools owing to cultural aversion to such contact or because they are undocumented.
I believe that our culture has changed considerably since my age cohort was in public school. College was a distant aspiration for many of us. College was not needed to work in the trades. We could get on-the-job training or attend some kind of trade school. Or, join the military. These were the options. We had been to the moon, tamed the atom, and built massive industrial capacity for manufacturing an ever growing array of widgets and medicines. Arguably, something was working well if industrial output is the measure.
But over time, with greater affluence in the US and abroad, the technology gap between the US and other nations began to shrink. Other cultures were developing their own magic dust and secret sauce. The advantages of the US system began to diminish relative to other cultures. But the one thing that didn’t change is the bell curve. As a population we still produce offspring who populate the bell curve of abilities and interests.
I suspect that we have begun to intepret the “below 50th percentile” population in the various bell curves in a most disturbing way. Could it be that we are interpreting the very existance of the low academic achieving population as some sort of educational or societal failure? Are we expecting modern education to skew the curve toward the high end against the natural spread of abilities and aptitudes in our culture? Is the notion of excellence skewed towards academic achievement rather than the myriad other activities that make a productive life? Is high academic achievement the only acceptable result of education of our population?
Not everyone needs to be a scientist or an engineer or astronaut. We need to continue to identify youth who have such interests and aptitudes and carefully cultivate them toward such opportunities. But we also must pay attention to those who have more ground based aspirations and abilities and value them just as highly. It is like a food web.
The notion that we should engineer our schools to produce more super achievers is faulty and unfair to the 99 % who won’t become scientists or astronauts. Even if we could multiply the population of scientists, engineers, and astronauts, the economy cannot accomodate them. Such professions are near the apex of the career pyramid.
I have come to believe that US culture has failed a large number of its youth. Just look at the rates of incarceration in the USA. A culture truly concerned about the wellbeing of its individuals wouldn’t have a few million of them in jail. Could it be that the conditions in which we imprison citizens reflects what we truly think about individuals? I think the current malaise in public school education manifested as high dropout rates and low achievement and the epidemic of convicted felons may be connected as part of a larger failing of our society.
Nuclear Emergency in Japan
The recent earthquake in Japan has triggered an actual nuclear emergency at the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant. According to IAEA, the explosion earlier today originated in the Unit 1 reactor building and was not the result of explosive breach of the primary containment. One character interviewed on CNN called it a six sigma event.
If memory serves, water dissociates at ~2300 C. The cracking of coolant water by overheated fuel elements would result in the generation of noncondensable gases (H2 and possibly O2) that would add to the pressure excursion. Venting is the only option at that point. This was an issue at TMI. The explosive concentration range of hydrogen is very wide.
IAEA goes on to say that Units 1,2,and 4 are experiencing increased pressure, but Unit 3 is in a safe cold shutdown condition. Tokyo Electric Power Company received permission to inject boronated seawater into the Unit 1 reactor.
This is very ominous news. Plainly, if the cooling loops were dumping enough energy out of the reactor they would not inject corrosive sea water into it.
There is a lot of talk about a meltdown. As of this post, nothing has been disclosed about the actual state of the Unit 1 reactor core. There has been no word on the state of the fuel elements or the state of the coolant loops. I assume that the reactor design has a negative reactivity coefficient that will attenuate the reactivity with water coolant loss or void space formation. The link on reactivity coefficients delves into a number of interesting and perhaps not-so-intuitive effects on reactivity during an upset condition.
Budget Hand Waving
It is interesting to watch how the various factions of our culture interact on the matter of governmental budgets. It is though a budget is an end in itself. It is though a budget is the final product of government. Many apply a puritanical spin on budget and debt concepts. This country produces Cotton Mather characters every generation.
What is important about a budget item is what it does out in the field. OK, elected officials pushed the funding for a particular program or acquisition. It seems to me that what is of interest is the result of the funding, not the protracted battle for funding. The headline should be the funded project and the politicians can take their credit in the Congressional Quarterly.
The contrived acrimony over budgets is a battle over abstraction. People make wild claims as to the market or social imperatives and morality of various magnitudes of spending. Spastic gesticulations and flying spittle get air time on the tube. But perhaps we should go to the actual object of the budget item and have a look? Who knows what we’ll find?
What the republicans bring to the proceedings is a plan for nothing less than social reconstruction. They plan to wrest control over government so they can kill it. The Teahadist wing and their antebellum jive appeals to a subset of the electorate more at ease with the Luddite ideals of the John Birch Society than to the social ideals of the 20th century.
I can’t believe that history will look favorably on the conservatives and their irretrievably antisocial doctrines. People who have benefitted in more ways than they understand from the massive civil infrastructure of the USA now want to stop contributing to it.
It’s too bad there isn’t a libertarian confederate homeland for them to go to. They could spend their days privatizing themselves silly while sitting there in the shade, counting their Krugerrands and sipping Mint Julips. Wait a minute, that sounds pretty relaxing …
Lamentations on Chemistry 