Not to be outdone by New Jersey, a bill has been introduced in the Pennsylvania House to criminalize the TSA nude-o-scope and grope. Now, apparently, with 10x the radiation, absolutely free!
Year: 2011
You Remember the Guy that Paid $1 for Newsweek?
Like You and Me, Only Better
California lawmakers want to be able to carry concealed weapons. But many who do, don’t want you to be able to enjoy the same rights and privileges they do. I wonder how the Second Amendment is worded in their world.
Statement from the Bradys
“We’re just going to pretend you said you were cool with our agenda, Barry!” They kind of have to look at the bright side of things. They don’t have much else to bitterly cling to.
Meltdown?
Hearing reporting that the last explosion took out the pumps that could bring seawater into the reactor vessel, meaning the cores are or will eventually be uncovered. This means a meltdown is only really a matter of time. This has happened twice before at Three Mile Island, where the secondary containment held the core and very little contamination of the site occurred, and Chernobyl where the reactor blew up, caught on fire, and spread radiation through half a continent and contaminated an area the size of New Jersey. This should be more like a TMI event, though the damage here is going to be measured in billions of dollars to clean up the mess even if it’s limited to the site, which it should be.
More on Japanese Reactor Woes
“Why I’m Not Worried About Japan’s Nuclear Reactors”
I am writing this text (Mar 12) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together.
Read the whole thing.
Obama Speaks on Gun Control
He mostly says we need to do a better job of getting states to report mental health records to NICS. That’s the meat of it. The rest of platitudes. In speaking of “porous background checks,” he did not call for closing the gun show loophole. I would imagine the Bradys are going to be less than thrilled with this, but they’ll try their best to extract what little marrow was left in the bone the President just threw them. Obama has basically just called for the bill that passed after Virginia Tech, only with vigor this time. Since I didn’t have any serious objection to that bill, I don’t really have any serious objections to more incentives, provided they are respectful of federalist principles, and respect the sovereignty of the states.
UPDATE: I’ll leave it to readers to decide what it means that Obama released this to the Arizona Star, and not to the New York Times or Washington Post, at a time when the news cycle is focused pretty exclusively on what’s happening in Japan. Also, think about what that says about how highly Barry thinks of the Bradys.
UPDATE: More from Dave Hardy here. He also doesn’t think this is going to live up to the expectations of the gun control groups that endorsed Obama.
What’s Going on with Japan’s Nukes?
Fears of another Chernobyl are greatly overstated. Chernobyl happened due to an inherently unsafe reactor design (RBMK), and some poor decisions on the part of an inexperienced work crew. Japan’s reactors are better designed. Unfortunately, the actual information coming out of Fukushima is scarce, and the media has been hysterically recycling the same information over and over again. I am not an expert on nuclear power, but I know a little of the principles involved. Some things are curious, and if anyone who knows nuclear power can explain, it might help put the pieces together:
- Once a reactor scrams, there’s still a substantial amount of decay heat that needs to be removed from the reactor. Most nuclear plants have redundant systems to keep coolant flowing. Power was knocked out to the plant by the earthquake, which triggered all the reactors to scram. The redundant diesel generators kicked in for a few minutes, until they were taken out by the tsunami.
- Without coolant circulating, it was inevitable that water in the reactor would heat up and pressure would build, causing engineers to have to vent pressure straight from the reactor vessel. This typically would release short-lived radiation (mostly radioactive Nitrogen isotopes with a short half life).
- Radioactive isotopes of Cesium and iodine were detected around the plant, however, and we know from the hydrogen explosion of the containment building that the reactor was venting hydrogen gas as well. This is Three Mile Island territory, and is a strong indicator the reactor core has at least partially melted, probably due to water levels in the containment vessels dropping too low.
- My guess would be that’s why they decided to pump in boronated water. Boron is a nuclear poison, but wouldn’t do anything to get rid of decay heat (I believe,) so this is more evidence that engineers probably think they are dealing with at least a partial core meltdown. As far as I know, the insertion of the control rods should essentially shut down fission in the reactor core, leaving only decay heat remaining as a source of energy, which would be unaffected by boron. Anyone know why they’d pump boronated seawater into the reactor if there wasn’t fear of core melt?
- We’re now learning of problems with other reactors. With functional cooling, decay heat is generally dissipated within a few days, after which the reactor should essentially be shut down thermally. Though the amount of decay heat that needs to be gotten rid of is a function of how hot the reactor was running before the scram. It’s possible some of the other plants were running at lower power, and thus did not find themselves in as much trouble so quickly? Or was the problem bigger than we were lead to believe, and now we’re just finding out about the other plants?
Fukushima is a boiling water type reactor, which is probably the most common type of nuclear plant in the world. One of the malfunctioning reactors is a GE design, and another is a Toshiba design. You can see from this list here how many other types of plants like this are in the world. One is right in my back yard. You can also see that the troublesome Fukushima reactors are second generation with varying levels of containment. Interestingly, it looks like they had this reactor scheduled for decommissioning at the end of this month. It looks like one of the troublesome reactors has an earlier generation of containment vessel. It’s not clear to me whether or not the hydrogen explosion destroyed all containment of the steel reactor vessel or only a secondary containment.
I understand that a China Syndrome type scenario is not really possible, and the worst that would happen here is the site is contaminated, with a billion or so dollars in cleanup costs associated with it. Three Mile Island’s core melted into the containment vessel, which it as engineered, and released next to no radiation to the outside. That still cost a billion dollars to clean up.
The worst aspect of this, I think, will be all the opponents of nuclear power jumping on this hobby horse and trying to ride it as far as they can. Fukushima I is an old reactor design. The new ones are safer, and wouldn’t exhibit the problems that are cropping up at Fukushima I. The solution here isn’t to abandon nuclear power, but to replace our aging nuclear power infrastructure with new, more modern plants.
US Embassy in Mexico Releases Statement
They say Gunwalker is “an operation that dismantled a major arms trafficking ring that has been called Fast and Furious.” Read the whole sad thing. Their damage control is pathetic. From what we’ve seen so far, there was enough evidence to bust those rounded up and indicted for quite some time now. Why did it take this long to make an actual bust?
Special Treatment from Teacher
In what is perhaps, a third grade moment for the Brady folks:
Mr. Skinner’s statement indicates that CDC is placing the NRA in a preferred position by giving it advance notice of firearm-related studies CDC has finances, before those studies are published or otherwise available to the general public. Needless to say, CDC has given the Brady center no such “courtesy” notification of studies before they are published, nor are we aware of any other gun violence prevention organization receiving such notice.
Waaah! We can’t have teacher giving special treatment now, can we? Cry me a river. Their side has enjoyed the upper hand for the better part of two decades. Now they whine that the tables are turned. Get used to it.