Monbiot in being-sane shocker

My perception of reality was somewhat shaken today by an article by George Monbiot which I would struggle to disagree with:

Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.

If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work.

Indeed, not only is it a rather rational analysis of the Fukushima situation
(although the email consensus here at Slug towers would disagree on the 'poor design' bit; some parts are sub-optimal but unless you’re psychic you only find out from trying it. We’d say the plants were just old. And the Japanese are not noted for cutting corners to save a few Yen; you only have to look at the place and interact with their nuclear industry to see that. But I digress)
but also a rather robust sandbagging of the oft-suggested green candidates for alternative energy production. The article is really rather brilliant.

He better get back to normal soon, or my world may well come off it’s axis.

Because I have to link to such genius

 

(Click for biggerer)

I don’t know how he does it.  XKCD

Dave comments…

“4.4%? And that's CPI? Christ.

I reckon you're actually living in Buenos Aries or Weimar Germany. If you hear either people banging pots and pans or see boiled crow on a restaurant menu, you'll know which it is.”

Yes, thanks for that.  I’m sure he’ll be first to tell me how fucked I am when I’m fighting stray dogs for first dibs on roadkill. 

It can be done

This the Joban line in the Hitachi-Naka city area of Japan:

By anyone’s conservative assessment of the situation: that is buggered.  Estimated time to repair?

6 weeks.

Far be it to from me to speculate how many months that’d take over here…

Still more informative than the BBC

But still…

That’s that cleared up for you.

Rational response…or the other thing

You don’t have a resource like M.M.Dave© on standby and not use him to educate the unwashed. 
So I asked, “Dave, what the blistering blue fuck is this?”:

“This is the rarely seen 'nuclear safety concern based on arbitrary value of a randomly selected parameter'. Haven't seen this move for years.

They've gone for age, and picked 31. Not 32, not 30. 31's when safe ends.

So to logic; you think the calculation of earthquake forces is wrong - shut down all. You think the calculation of flooding, or the vulnerability to common cause failure in flooding is wrong - shut down the ones on the coast. You're worried about that specific design - shut those down.

But no. This has the special feature of causing lots of economic damage whilst fundamentally failing to address any legitimate safety concerns.

10/10”

FYI, Doom Merchants

You see, I was thinking this wouldn't be Japan if the data wasn't available in a progress tracking table:

http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS01_1300273535P.pdf

Updated 3/4 times a day.

Hard to tell the difference

 

A hoax?  It reads more like a pre-emptive headline draft to me. 

Apparently the Emperor is concerned, also.  I honestly didn’t know they still had one.  I suppose this changes everything.  I was going to stick to listening to the blokes that do this for a living, or indeed, just take dictation from Dave.

But if an aging monarch says he’s worried, well, I’m off to stock up on iodine and paint my windows black.

The Beast

This has gone ‘round the world twice by now, but I couldn’t let it pass without comment.

You often can often find Youtube clips of kids being dreadful to each other,  such is the nature of the day.  Further, you quite often see would-be bullies, who’ve organised a friend to video their victim’s torment, biting off more than they can chew and getting a good hiding.

What you don’t often see is instant justice quite as satisfying as this:

However yon scrote thought his day would turn out; I don’t think it featured those events.
 
The big guy got suspended, and I can kind of see why the school would pretty much have to do that; what with the overt pondlife smashing and all. 
But no matter, he can kick back for a couple of days and  go back to school knowing that his days of torment (and they were numerous, apparently) are over.

Obviously there has been much cheering and frowning on the intertubes, as best commentated here by Popehat. Needless to say, the reaction from some quarters is all so very predictable:

[P]olice and bullying experts are concerned by the video’s publication on Facebook and the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the older boy’s retaliation against his attacker.

“We don’t believe that violence is ever the answer,” [seasoned bullying expert John] Dalgleish says. “We believe there are other ways that children can manage this.” …

“The longer term way is about developing better relationships between kids in the school, that will then empower young people to not be passive bystanders when these acts occur but to stand up and say ‘this is wrong’,” Mr Dalgleish says.

“The short term solution is to have individual counselling with each of the children.”

Yeah you could do that. Or you could feed the fucker into the pavement and teach him a valuable life lesson while practically guaranteeing yourself increased social standing and self-respect.  Or at least eternal recognition in the hallowed halls of ED, and be immortalised as a /b/ meme for at least 3 months.

Sometimes violence really is the answer.*

 

*Caveat: Might help if you are several times the size of your assailant who very obviously has shit for brains, as in this example

Get A Grip

 

You see that? Fuck all.

To read the gleefully apocalyptic commentary from the MSM on the recent unpleasantness over at the Japanese nuclear sites, you would think that it was the end of days; time to stock up on canned food and shotguns.
I’m pretty sure the Beeb won’t be happy unless someone produces multi-headed babies and Godzilla is awoken.

So I put it to this blog’s long-suffering muse/plagiarisee My Mate Dave, who if you haven't figured by now has a bit of an atomic bent, and with whom I watched the events unfold while thoroughly and irresponsibly obliviated in a bar in Vienna:

“Are the Japs actually boned or should I swim across there and declare myself king of Fukushima?”

And he spoke thus:

“Nah, media get more hysterical the further away from disaster things get.

They're now going on about how "spent fuel pools are exposed to the open air". What, like four at Sellafield have been since the first was finished in 1951? It's a swimming pool. A roof is a good idea, but the water is what makes it work. I'm not claiming this is a good engineering solution (the less said about B30 the better, for any man's sanity), but a disaster-free 60 years suggests they may make the end of the week.

The hmm, explosion or whatever at unit 2 seems to have failed in some respect the pressure suppression pool, which is a big toroidal vessel around bottom of plant. The steam in this thus guffed out and gave that high 400mSv reading (which was measured on the power station site).

The Japanese PM on TV said this is a level which is potentially harmful to health, which it is, but the BBC are now reporting "radiation levels harmful to health" without adding the qualification "if you were actually inside the power station, standing next to the leaking part spewing radioactive gas, when this measurement was taken, and had stayed there, and the radiation level had stayed the same, which it didn't because now it's a thousand times lower".

They're gettin' cooling. Decay is working it's inevitable magic, so the cooling situation improves. They're worried about the spent fuel pools, as they also require cooling (but emit much less power and are less densely arranged), but I'm guessing they may have lost some water due to sloshing in the incident, and well, it's been 5 days nearly. For the guys that managed cooling the reactor for a day job, this is a trivial task. I assume they're trying not to seawater them, but it's an option if a good plan doesn't work.

I reckon this will end with no dose to members of the public above that allowed (which is the situation now, not that you'd guess from watching the news), and the operators ending up with some guys above their annual allowance as well as the guy killed in the actual earthquake. Logically everyone in media and German politics (seriously, what the hell is this shit?) would end up feeling really quite stupid about the fuss they'd made in a couple of weeks time. But they won't.

Get swimming. I did know a good hotel there, but.....”

So be told, hand-ringers.  Nothing to see here, move along.

Belgium

 

It occurred to me -while idly browsing random toss on Twitter- that Belgium has no government and hasn’t had a government in quite a while. 
They seem to be coping. 
Unthinkable.

Alas the concern is that business as usual might not be enough.  They've a debt/GDP ratio of about 100%, and are getting an increasing bond spread with respect to German bonds. And while cutting spending is the way forward, it is a political decision that they have no one to make...

Obviously if everything money was spent on was self evidently necessary there would be no decision that needed making. And probably no debt crisis.

M.M.Dave suggests that maybe what they need is something like Texas; the state legislature meets in January, in odd-numbered years only.

Just a thought.

(And they have the same dramas we do with the public sector on an entitlement bender, but what can you do?  Well, you can sack them all, but this needs someone to do the sacking. Right before setting their charges and leaving the building, obv.)