— Tweet — Nuclear Power: Accident in France Kills 1, Injures 4 — NPR, and the Associated Press report “An explosion at a nuclear waste facility in southern France killed one person and injured four on Monday… The Nuclear Safety Authority declared the accident “terminated” soon after the blast at a furnace in the Centraco [...]
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Tweet Nuclear power diminishes National Security and the stability of the electric grid. Consider the Brunswick, Fort Calhoun, Millstone, North Anna, and Oyster Creek nuclear power plants, and the Fukushima melt-downs. And consider the “Mobley Factor.” The Brunswick nuclear plants in North Carolina, and the Millstone nuclear power plants in Connecticut were brought to [...]
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Tweet Andrew Restuccia and Ben German reported (here) on E2 Wire, “the Hill’s Energy & Environment Blog” that: Two nuclear reactors at the North Anna Power Station in Louisa County, Va., automatically shut down Tuesday shortly after a magnitude-5.9 earthquake shook the state and surrounding area. The plant lost offsite power and is now running [...]
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Tweet In “Why We Still Need Nuclear,” the “op-ed” piece written in the New York Times, July 30, 2011, Tom Kilgore, the President and CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority, seems to have made up his mind to attempt to complete the Bellefonte 1 nuclear power plant, in Hollywood, Alabama. Mr. Kilgore is in [...]
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Tweet The flooded Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant is not exactly like the nuclear plants at Fukushima Daichi and Fukushima Diana. There are three main differences: First of all, there’s one plant, not 12. The difference of scale is tremendous. Secondly, it was offline – shut down for refueling – when flooded. Meaning, [...]
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Tweet Bucolic? Pastoral? Looks that way, but looks can be deceiving. First of all, there’s Indian Point 1. Then there’s the water issue. Other issues are waste and national security. Indian Point 1 Brought online in August, 1962. Shutdown in October, 1974. Spent fuel is stored on site. Scheduled to be closed in 2026. Operated [...]
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Tweet After Chernobyl, Hans Bethe, pictured at left, said “the Chernobyl disaster tells us about the deficiencies of the Soviet political and administrative system rather than about problems with nuclear power” (PBS). Dr. Bethe is right. Managing nuclear power and our energy infrastructure is not limited to physics and engineering. It also involves economics, human [...]
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Tweet An op-ed article in the Telegraph, UK, last year urged President Obama “to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project” and by so doing we could “reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.” [...]
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Tweet On May 25, 1961 President John Kennedy said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” (Kennedy library and NASA) Ten years ago, before Sept. 11, Jim Gordon and his team [...]
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Asking a nuclear engineering professor “Is radiation bad?” is like asking Charlie Sheen “Is cocaine bad?” Wind and water turbines, geothermal systems, and photovoltaic solar modules produce power without burning fuel. While there are resource footprints in the manufacture, installation, and maintenance of these facilities, there are no mines, no wells, no wastes to manage in their ongoing operation. Shouldn’t we be asking “How do we get utility scale base load power from wind and sun?” Shouldn’t we be figuring out “How to shift from a fuel-based energy paradigm to a sustainable paradigm?”
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After Fukushima, the question is not: “Can we meet our needs with renewable, sustainable energy systems?” but rather it is “How can we meet our needs with renewable, sustainable energy systems?”
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By Peter Grier, CSMonitor.com, dated March 22, 2011. Japan nuclear crisis: Why are the spent-fuel pools so hard to control? – CSMonitor.com: As workers struggle to bring the Fukushima I nuclear plant back under full control, spent-fuel pools appear to be a source of continuing problems. On Tuesday morning, one pool was so hot that [...]
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Are there differences between Fukushima Dai-ichi and Chernobyl? And is Fukushima worse than Chernobyl? A teenager might say “Du-uh!” My friends from Brooklyn might ask “Is the Pope Catholic?” Even “Snooki” and “The Situation” might ask “Are you stoopid or what?” But the people at CNN, ProPublica and the NY Times are asking nuclear power [...]
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In Sustainability by Design, John Ehrenfeld defines sustainable design as “That which allows for and even stimulates flourishing forever. ” Nuclear plants are, according to Ehrenfeld’s definition, Unsustainable by design!” Washington, 1972: “If the cooling systems fails at a ‘Mark 1′ nuclear reactor, the primary containment vessel surrounding the reactor will probably burst as the [...]
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This seems to be worse than Chernobyl. Chernobyl was a meltdown at one reactor. There are reports of “partial melt-downs” at three reactors at Fukushima Dai-Ichi and “States of Emergency” at 9 out of 17 reactors at three sites northeast of Tokyo: 3 at Fukushima Dai-ichi, 3 at Fukushima Daini and 3 at Onagawa. I [...]
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The same messages can be communicated by signalling the letter "K" in Morse code via signal lamp. (While a proper signal lamp may be ideal, a flashlight, probably best employing red LEDs, will certainly fit the bill).
In Morse, the letter "K" is represent as Dash - Dot -- Dash.
The ICS also has a subset, the Medical Signal Code, which uses three-character phrases to communicate brief medical messages.