Nuke New England!
Posted on April 18th, 2011 at 3:03 pm by Steve


Imagine a “station blackout” occurs at the Pilgrim Nuclear Generation Station in Plymouth, MA. Within days, a hydrogen explosion shatters the secondary containment building, possibly breaching primary containment as well. The government orders a mandatory evacuation for areas within 20 km of the plant, but the BBC World Service is saying that the British government has advised their citizens not to travel within 50 miles of Plymouth.

This catastrophe at Plymouth (or Seabrook, or Vermont Yankee, or Millstone in Connecticut) hasn’t happened…yet. But the notion that “it can’t happen here” has taken quite a beating over the last month. If and when a disaster like this strikes, we’ll have hours to evacuate. Think for a moment what it would take to evacuate just the inner “exclusion zone” around one of these reactors. Where are we going to put all the people from Brockton, Plymouth, Taunton, Fall River, Buzzards Bay, Sandwich…? And what about the more than a million people that live within 50 miles? Remember that, even now, the US government is advising Americans not to travel within 50 miles of Fukushima, a month after the crisis began. How can we avoid travel to the entire Boston metro area?

Of course, Pilgrim only has one reactor, where Fukushima Daiichi has six. On the other hand, Pilgrim has more than TWO MILLION POUNDS of radioactive spent fuel assemblies stored on site. A loss of coolant water in the tightly-packed spent fuel pool at Plymouth – which has far less containment, and far more fuel, than the reactor core – could quickly lead to a fire and a massive excursion of radioactive isotopes of cesium, strontium, iodine, and others. An explosion could spread deadly plutonium and uranium particles for miles (as happened at Fukushima). In other words, even with fewer reactors, a station blackout at Plymouth could have worse radiological consequences than the ongoing disaster in Japan.


The spent fuel pool at Vermont Yankee

The reactor at Plymouth is a General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactor, the same design and vintage of the “troubled” reactors in Japan. Of course, America’s Nuclear Industry and Regulators (is there a difference?) are quick to point out that American reactors have strict safety standards and have been upgraded and so on. Ask them about the spent fuel pools. Ask them how long they can run the pumps to maintain sufficient cooling in the event of a station blackout (whatever the cause). Ask them the consequences of allowing the operator to store 2,918 spent fuel assemblies in a pool that was designed and originally licensed to hold just 880 assemblies.

Of course, the spokesman for Vermont Yankee is quick to assure us, “We believe pools are perfectly safe. It was designed to be safe and there are redundant systems so there is never a loss of coolant.” Indeed. For some reason, those fools in Japan neglected to design their pools to be safe, and that’s why they suffered a complete loss of coolant and melting of the fuel rods in the spent fuel pool. Silly Japanese!

Ghosts of Discount Retail Past
Posted on April 14th, 2011 at 11:35 am by Steve

Spotted on Somerville Avenue next to McGrath Highway… once the haunt of Mrs. B and a long-departed Stop & Shop; later the home of electronics retailer Fretter; and, most recently, host to the lowest rung of the TJX retail hierarchy, the now-defunct A.J. Wright.

Who Watches the (Weather) Watchmen?
Posted on April 13th, 2011 at 5:51 pm by Steve


I’ve long wanted to keep records of weather forecasts and compare them to actual results. But, I’m too lazy.

Fortunately, Forecast Advisor has started to do that for us! And, it turns out that my suspicions were correct.

At least for Boston, the weather forecasts are less than 80% accurate. Now, consider that these data are looking at just the 1-3 days ahead forecasts, and in fact are collapsing the data. The day-ahead forecasts are usually more accurate than the 3-days ahead forecasts. The company sells a data feed that I’m sure drills down to this level and beyond.

But consider: for March 2011, the National Weather Service predicted the high temperature within 3° F of the actual high temperature only 40% of the time! They accurately predicted the low temperature +/- 3° 53% of the time in March. They did slightly better with their precipitation forecasts – if they called for rain or snow, they were right about 83% of the time.

Over the past year, they did better on temperature predictions (63% right on the highs, 70% right on the lows) but worse on the precipitation calls (75% accurate).

What can we conclude? National Weather Service forecasts are better than chance… but not by a lot. Turns out, you don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows…

Libya Fun Fact!
Posted on April 12th, 2011 at 1:43 pm by Steve


Here’s a fun fact about Libya: every one of the more than 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched at Libya was embossed with the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Barack Obama! As John Pilger says, he’s America’s “First Black President to invade Africa.”

Stay tuned for more fun facts!

“Deficits Don’t Matter”
Posted on April 8th, 2011 at 5:37 pm by Steve


Today, the U.S. government is on the verge of “shutting down” over a budget impasse in the Congress. Republicans are insisting that massive spending cuts are required to avert disaster. Just today, Illinois Republican Representative Judy Biggert said, “We’re facing an economic disaster. We have to cut the spending.”

But during the Bush era, Republicans were singing a very different tune. After the 2004 elections, Dick Cheney famously said, “Reagan proved: deficits don’t matter” (according to then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill). Whether or not Cheney actually said those exact words, that’s certainly how the Cheney-Bush administration behaved:

During his eight years in office, President Bush oversaw a large increase in government spending. In fact, President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ. In his last term in office, President Bush increased discretionary outlays by an estimated 48.6 percent.

During his eight years in office, President Bush spent almost twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton. Adjusted for inflation, in eight years, President Clinton increased the federal budget by 11 percent. In eight years, President Bush increased it by a whopping 104 percent.

[source: Spending Under President George W. Bush, Veronique de Rugy, George Mason University.]

Conservative commentators must have been outraged, right? After all, deficit spending is mortgaging our children’s future!

Turns out, not so much. Here’s the tune that the Weekly Standard was singing back in 2005:

WHEN DICK CHENEY SAID, “Deficits don’t matter,” economists took that as proof of the economic illiteracy of the Bush administration. But it turns out there is a case to be made that Cheney was onto something.

On the deepest level, the vice president was echoing, in slightly exaggerated form, an idea put forward a few years ago by Irving Kristol, the Godfather of the neoconservatives who have had such a wide-ranging effect on Bush administration policy. Kristol wrote then, and still believes, that “We should figure out what we want before we calculate what we can afford, not the reverse.”

[…]

The deficits that Bush ran up in the years in which the country was teetering on the verge of a serious recession had the beneficial effect of righting the economy. In that sense, deficits not only didn’t matter, but were a force for economic good.

[source: Do Deficits Matter?, Irwin M. Stelzer, Hudson Institute]

Something has changed in the last five years, however. For some reason… can’t quite put my finger on it… but for some reason, Republicans now fear the DOOM of deficit spending:

“There’s no daylight between the Tea Party and me. What they want is they want us to cut spending. They want us to deal with this crushing debt that’s going to crush the future for our kids and grandkids. There’s no daylight there.”

[Source: John Boehner talking to ABC’s George Stephanopolous on April 7]

I wonder if having a Democrat in the White House could possibly have anything to do with their objections?

And besides… if they’re so worried about improving the government’s balance sheet, maybe they could do something about this:

General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

[Source: tG.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether, New York Times, March 24, 2011]

Nah. The Republicans would much rather shut down essential government services, fire public employees, and ensure that poor people become even more desperate for any crumbs the rich may throw their way.

In fact… isn’t that the GOP’s 2012 campaign platform?

On the Degradation of Language…
Posted on April 7th, 2011 at 3:25 pm by Steve