I post articles because I think they are of interest. Doing so doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree (or disagree) with every—or any—opinion in the posted article. Help your friends and relatives stay informed by passing the digest on.
Resources
For those who want further information about the topics covered in this blog, I recommend the following sites. I will add to this as I find additional good sources.
Happy St. Pat’s Day
“Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” –Yates.
How You Can Help the Earthquake and Tsunami Victims in Japan
Excerpt: Even if you're thousands of miles away, there are ways that you can offer support to the earthquake and tsunami relief effort in Japan. Here are a few of them:
AmeriCares Japan Relief Fund
A solid charity where I made my contribution. Not on the list above.
Fukushima Nuclear Accident – 16 March update
Excerpt: Note that this is a blog, not a news website, and thus the following analysis, like all others on BraveNewClimate, is a mixture of news and opinion -- but facts remain paramount. First, the situation is clearly (but slowly) stabilising. As each day passes, the amount of thermal heat (caused by radioactive decay of the fission products) that remains in the reactor fuel assemblies decreases exponentially. When the reactors SCRAMed on 11 March after the earthquake, and went sub-critical, their power levels dropped by about 95 % of peak output (the nuclear fission process was no longer self-sustaining). Over the past 5 days, the energy in the fuel rods dropped by another ~97 %, such that the heat dissipation situation is getting more and more manageable. But we're not out of the woods yet, and the reactor cores will need significant cooling for at least another 5 days before stability can be ensured. Yesterday there appears to have been a fracture in the wetwell torus (see diagram: that circular structure below and to the side of the reactor vessel) in Unit 2, caused by a hydrogen explosion, which led to a rapid venting of highly radioactive fission product gases (mostly noble [chemically unreactive] gases, the majority of which had a half-life of seconds to minutes). It also caused a drop in pressure in the supression pool, which made the cooling process more challenging. However, despite some earlier concerns, it is now clear that containment was not breached. Even under this situation of extreme physical duress, the multiple containment barriers have held firm. This is an issue to be revisited, when the dust finally settles. (…) What is known is that this is a situation very different than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. There was no operator error involved at Fukushima-Daiichi, and each reactor was successfully shut down within moments of detecting the quake. The situation has evolved slowly but in a manner that was not anticipated by designers who had not assumed that electrical power to run emergency pumps would be unavailable for days after the shutdown. They built an impressive array of redundant pumps and power generating equipment to preclude against this problem. Unfortunately, the tsunami destroyed it. (As noted in the first line of the excerpt, this info is from a blog. That's because this "mere" blog is giving us better information than most "news" sources, though not as quickly as "news" sources are trying to give it. This can lead to some confusion. Last night--about 11:30PM on 15 Mar--ABC News jolted me out of bed by announcing that the Fukushima reactors were being "abandoned." What they were actually reporting was that all non-essential personnel had been ordered out of the area by management (do you really think the file clerks should have stayed to man the ramparts?). The only problem with this is the sensational reporting. Those personnel had been ordered out nearly twenty-four hours earlier, but ABC hadn't previously reported it, so they thought it was news even though anyone actually paying attention in real time knew it wasn't. As usual, what our "news" organizations are giving us is information without context. Thus, we have to get the context from a "mere" blog. Ron P.)
