Archive for March, 2008

The Day After Three Mile Island

Published
by
Larry
on March 29, 2008
in Chernobyl, Energy, Environmental Issues, Lessons Learned (or not), Nuclear Power, Oyster Creek and Three Mile Island
. 0 Comments

March 28, 2008 was the 28th Anniversary of the Meltdown at Three Mile Island, which makes March 29 the 28th Anniversary of the Day After Three Mile Island.

Still, it’s hard to say ‘Happy Anniversary.’ The last nuclear power plant to come on line in the United States, the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, took 23 years to complete. And no new nuclear power plants have been ordered or built.

This is in part because of Three Mile Island, and its sister-disaster, Chernobyl. While the American nuclear power industry says ‘We do it better’ the truth of the matter is that American reactors are safer because American anti-nuclear activists have forced the United States government to pay attention and American nuclear plant owners and operators to build in redundant safety systems. Continue reading ‘The Day After Three Mile Island’

John McCain, Sunnis and Shiites

Published
by
Larry
on March 22, 2008
in 2008 Presidential Campaign
. 0 Comments
Senator John McCain touts his foreign policy experience, yet he doesn’t know the difference between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq and Iran. Sunnis are a majority in the Arab and Muslim world. Most of the Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and Iranians are Sunni. Turks, Kurds, and Iranians are not Arabs. Iraqis are Arabs, and most are Shiite.
Not knowing the difference is kind of like not knowing the difference between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. Or Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, and Mormans in the United States. Or Puerto Ricans, Italians, and Irish Catholics in Brooklyn.

(Note - this blog is generally more about Policy than Politics. However, the two are inseparable, and people who would make and enforce Policy, i.e., Presidents of the United States, must understand Politics.)

“How Terrorism Works” an information graphic

Published
by
Jon
on March 20, 2008
in Information Design
. 0 Comments

How Terrorism Works - an information graphic by Andrei Michael Herasimchuk. We’ve requested permission to reproduce it - but, for the time being, you can see it on his blog, Design By Fire.

Disaster Accountability Project on the National Response Framework

Published
by
Jon
on March 20, 2008
in DHS and Exercises
. 0 Comments

Excerpts from The Disaster Accountability Project’s comments on the National Response Framework:

• “The NRF inadequately considers the needs of non-English speakers who may be foreign visitors or immigrants… Make the draft NRF readily available in Spanish and other languages spoken by a substantial portion of the population”

• “Make civil service positions less vulnerable to political pressures from above by embracing meaningful whistle-blower protections for all emergency managers, including those with security clearances; and provide an effective and supportive mechanism for receiving disclosures of inadequacies in emergency planning, exercising and response.”

• ” ‘Framework’ is indeed a more accurate name for this product ; but it is not entirely accurate. What is needed is a different product - a plan, not a name change.”

• “The description of the FEMA Director and DHS Secretary’s responsibilities conflicts with requirements of the Post Katrina Reform Act.”

• “Shifting NRF implementation to the DHS Secretary is not consistent with the intent of Congress as described in the Post Katrina Reform Act…The head of FEMA and not the DHS Secretary should be in charge of coordinating federal emergency response.”

• “Some ESF functions may be inappropriately combined, partitioned or privatized.”

• “Not all ‘lessons learned’ are publicly reported or followed up with changes to plans. For example, as TOPOFF 4 prepares to being, the TOPOFF III after-action report still has not been issued.”

• “Federal exercises frequently ignore recovery or give it lip service if addressed at all… Ensure that adequate exercise time is allowed to cover long-term recovery issues in reasonable detail.”

• “Logic suggests that the FEMA Administrator would be the coordinator of the federal response, not the DHS Secretary’s advisor… The roles of the FEMA Director and Director of Operations Coordination appear to conflict, calling to mind post-Katrina confusion.”

DAP release here. Link to Acrobat (.pdf) file of complete comments here.

If you care about these issues - and if you’re reading this, you probably do - the Disaster Accountability Project is asking good questions.

Disaster Accountability Project (main site)

Disaster Accountability Project (blog)

Cheney: Obama’s Speech “Important.”

Published
by
Larry
on March 20, 2008
in 2008 Presidential Campaign, 9/11 and Cheney
. 0 Comments

Interview of the Vice President by Martha Raddatz, ABC News

Shangri-La’s Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa

Muscat, Oman

10:20 A.M. (Local)

Q Mr. Vice President, I want to start with a speech Barack Obama gave. I doubt you’ve seen the entire speech, but he denounced comments by Reverend Wright, but he didn’t distance himself completely. Do you think he did the right thing?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Martha, one of the things I’ve avoided so far is getting in the middle of the Democratic presidential primary process. And I think I’ll stay there.

Q But it was an important speech.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It was an important speech, …

Click here for the full transcript, on ‘WhiteHouse.gov’

Huckabee defends Obama, Wright

Published
by
Jon
on March 20, 2008
in 2008 Presidential Campaign
. 0 Comments

Governor Mike Huckabee has come to the defense of Senator Obama and Reverend Jeremiah Wright:

“As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say ‘That’s a terrible statement!’ … I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names…”

Read the rest on Ben Smith’s Blog at Politico. Thanks to Ghost in the Machine.

While we purposefully try to stay out of partisan tangles - this one seems potentially incendiary, and nearly entirely manufactured. The opinion of one Jewish man with more family in Israel than in the United States: Reverend Wright is welcome at our house any time, and this doesn’t remotely disqualify Senator Obama, in my view, as a presidential candidate.

We’d like a return to a discussion of the issues on their merits: tax policy, energy policy, Iraq, universal health care, and disaster preparedness. Which, as we keep trying to demonstrate, all overlap.

Obama - in Context - A More Perfect Union

Published
by
Larry
on March 20, 2008
in 2008 Presidential Campaign
. 0 Comments

We The People, In Order To Form A More Perfect Union

Barack Obama, in Philadelphia, PA, Monday, March 18, 2008, excerpts.

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.
…
we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

Continue reading ‘Obama - in Context - A More Perfect Union’

» ThemeShaper | sandbox.popularlogistics.com

Published
by
Jon
on March 19, 2008
in Access to Tools, Environmental Issues, Environmental Remediation, Solar and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

howlbox1 JHussman_ID_Dept_FishandGame Kirk Johnson’s piece in today’s Times, “A Bid to Lure Wolves With a Digital Call of the Wild” is about
the Howlbox, a solar-powered, automated device which simulates wolf calls, and records the responses, making it possible to conduct a wolf census.

Under a research project at the University of Montana in Missoula, scientists are betting that the famous call-and-response among wolves can be used to count and keep track of the animals.

Tricked by technology, scientists say, wolves will answer what amounts to a roll call triggered by a remotely placed speaker-recorder system called Howlbox. Howlbox howls, and the wolves howl back. Spectrogram technology then allows analysis that the human ear could never achieve — how many wolves have responded, and which wolves they are.

“With audio software, we’ll be able to identify each wolf on a different frequency, so we can count wolves individually, kind of like a fingerprint,” said David Ausband, a research associate at the University of Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit, where Howlbox was developed.

The devices, using off-the-shelf technology, cost about $1,300, including $300 for a solar panel. Audio recordings in the wild are nothing new, of course. Bird and amphibian researchers, in particular, have long used recordings to find or flush out critters. Howlbox’s innovations are the tools of digital analysis and programmed instructions that tell Howlbox when to howl, when to sleep because the wolves are sleeping, and how to store each day’s file on a disk.

The experiment will begin with a pilot project in which four Howlboxes will be placed in remote areas of Idaho in June. That month was chosen because it is when the packs gather with their spring-born pups in what is called a rendezvous. howlbox2 JHussman_ID_Dept_FishandGame
Wolf pups will howl at almost anything, scientists say. But a test here in Montana in January also showed that adult wolves can also be fooled by a good sound system.

Money is a driving force behind the research, much of which is being paid for by the Nez Perce Indian tribe in Idaho, which has deep cultural links to the western gray wolf.

Traditional tracking tools like radio collars and aerial surveillance were used extensively after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s under the Federal Endangered Species Act. But federal protections will end later this month, and so too will the deep pockets needed for flyovers and catching and collaring.

A spokesman for the Nez Perce tribe, Curt Mack, said Howlbox might be a cost-efficient answer.

Spotted in “Counting Wolves” at Popular Science.

The biodiversity issues aside - we’re eager to take a look at the device - which might be adaptable for other purposes: automated warning systems, locating disaster victims - especially if mounted on a portable platform, like a ‘bot of some sort.

SurvivalReview.com goes online

Published
by
Jon
on March 18, 2008
in Gear and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

SurvivalReview.com is about a month old, and features reviews of survival gear, and so far, it looks good. Its principal author is, we believe, a recent veteran of USAF. SR describes itself this way:

online destination for unbiased reviews on outdoor and survival gear. We put all of the products we review through the POT (”Painfully Obsessive Testing”) procedure to insure that the info you are getting is legit. We will not provide “paid reviews” from vendors or manufacturers. We will strive to have the best photos and videos supporting the evidence we put out there. Hopefully we can build an aware community of survival and outdoor gear lovers. As always if you ever have a product you’ve been thinking about investing in or knowing more about shoot us an email and let us know what it is. We will do our best to put it through the POT. Happy Reading!

We wish them well, more obsession and less pain, and hope to point our readers to SR’s reviews when we can. Here’s an excerpt from a recent review:

The SureFire E1E Executive Flashlight is a high powered flashlight that fits easily in the palm of your hand. I love this little thing. It provides 15 lumens for 1.5 hours according to the specs but our testing has proven to exceed that runtime. The rugged Mil-Spec Type III hard anodized aluminum body has survived everything we’ve thrown at it. The glass at the business end is Tempered Pyrex, which is some tough stuff as well.

The tailcap switch is much more convenient than your typical MagLite. Push for momentary on, or press further to click it to constant-on. This could be very handy for signaling because short bursts on the tailcap switch makes morse easy.

VEXLabs’ Robotics Kits

Published
by
Jon
on March 16, 2008
in Access to Tools and robotics
. 0 Comments

Grant Imahara writes in the online BotMag about VEX Robotics, particularly their upgradable entry-level Explorer, which lists for $199. Link to review.

Robotics - perhaps like personal computers a generation ago - are becoming cheaper and more accessible. All sorts of implications, of course, in normal circumstances. But for emergency functions - particularly gathering information with lessened risk - robots cheap enough for local non-profit groups and simple enough to be set up, and repurposed, easily.

The Future of Energy

Published
by
Larry
on March 15, 2008
in Clean Energy, Energy, Nuclear Power, Solar and Wind Power
. 1 Comment

Thursday, March 6, 2008, I attended a seminar on solar and wind power at the Atlantic County Utilities Authority, ACUA, clean energy plant, hosted by Cassandra Kling of Clean Energy Holdings. It’s a small plant: 7.0 MW of wind and 0.5 MW of solar, it provides about 0.1% of New Jersey’s power. On the way back I drove into the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Ocean County, NJ, to look around and to get a visceral feel for the place. Oyster Creek provides about 10% of New Jersey’s power. (Click here for the official story or here for NJPIRG.)

There are armed guards outside the nuclear plant. There are watchtowers, presumably with armed sentries. They really don’t want people looking around, “getting a feel for the place”. They looked me over, looked at my driver’s license, searched my car – looked in the trunk, looked under the hood, looked in the front seat, the back seat, under the car, and then escorted me out of the complex. I felt like Arlo Guthrie in ” Alices’s Restaurant” (Click here for Arlo on YouTube“, here for Arlo.net) exceptin’ the fact that I wasn’t arrested.

Continue reading ‘The Future of Energy’

If it looks like we’re not posting - it’s because

Published
by
Jon
on March 12, 2008
in Blog issues
. 0 Comments

we’re waiting for Verizon to come and fix the DSL line.

NYT: A Heart Device Is Found Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks

Published
by
Jon
on March 12, 2008
in Comms, FDA, medical devices and risk assessment
. 0 Comments
To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart.The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

Barnaby J. Feder, “A Heart Device Is Found Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks, The New York Times

A Heart Device Is Found Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks - New York Times

Published
by
Jon
on March 12, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

A Heart Device Is Found Vulnerable to Hacker Attacks - New York Times
To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart.

The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

Chairman of NRC Panel indifferent to whether Indian Point hearings audible to audience - or participants

Published
by
Jon
on March 11, 2008
in Evacuations and Nuclear Power
. 0 Comments

From Matthew Wald’s piece in The New York Times [emphasis supplied]:

Opponents of the Indian Point nuclear power plants, including New York State, got their day in court on Monday - sort of - to explain why they thought the two reactors should not be allowed to operate 20 more years. It signified the first time that a state had stepped forward to flatly oppose license renewals.

But like much about the tangled history of the plants in Westchester County, the hearing before a three-judge panel appointed by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission was not that simple.

The proceedings got off to a prickly start when a member of the audience seated in a courtroom at the Westchester County Courthouse here complained to the panel chairman, Lawrence G. McDade, that he could not hear what was being said. “The acoustics here are what the acoustics here are,” said Mr. McDade, a former military judge, who was himself using a microphone.

The difficulty was that about 20 lawyers seated at five tables and flanked by cartons of documents, as well as another 20 or so who spilled over into the jury box, did not have microphones.

When Michael B. Kaplowitz, vice chairman of the Westchester County Board of Legislators, rose and said he could not hear the lawyers representing him - and that he was not a member of the audience but a participant - Mr. McDade told Mr. Kaplowitz that he could read the transcript later.

After a lunch break, Mr. McDade relented and had more microphones brought in.

Acoustics were not the only setback for those opposed to relicensing the two plants in Buchanan, on the east bank of the Hudson River 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.

It was immediately clear that for the opponents - the state, Westchester County and several environmental groups - to win the day, they would have to persuade the panel and the regulatory agency itself to reconsider what arguments are admissible.

The commission has ruled that for an argument to be considered in license extension hearings, it must deal with problems that may arise because the license is extended. The state contends, however, that the region’s extraordinary population density, when considered together with the threat of terrorism or earthquake, makes the plants unsafe.

“The presence of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in our midst is untenable,” the state argued in a legal brief.

Joan Leary Matthews, a lawyer for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, said in an opening statement that “whatever the chances of a failure at Indian Point, the consequences could be catastrophic in ways that are almost too horrific to contemplate.”

Sherwin Turk, a lawyer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that questioning whether the site was a good idea in the first place was not within the scope of the proceeding.

Foes of Indian Point Begin Legal Battle, The New York Times, March 11, 2008.

Preliminary evidence, then, supports these propositions:

  1. The NRC is interested in limiting the scope of the public hearings;
  2. the NRC doesn’t mind if no one can hear what’s being said

Attempts by persons or groups to conceal their actions may be interpreted as circumstantial evidence of consciousness of guilt (Wigmore On Evidence, 2nd edition, 1915, § 178). We could probably find more citations, but the point is - what’s the NRC got to be afraid of?