Interestingly I was an observer to a disaster today without even knowing it.

My parents are out of town for a while and because I live quite near to them, I am staying at their home to take care of the dogs and keep down the fort.   Their home is in Guilford CT, which is about 15 miles, as the crow flies, from Middletown CT.   That’s slightly closer than where I’d otherwise be.  A bit before noon, I felt and heard what I would describe as  “surge” of wind or vibrations.    My parents house is fairly large and when a gust of wind hits it broadside, you can hear and feel the windows and walls rattle.   This event was a bit like that, but far more acute.  While wind gusts last a few seconds, this was more like a surge of pressure that lasted under a second.   It shook the house more than normal, to the point where it felt a bit like it might have been a seismic event, transmitted through the ground.

It was noteworthy enough to make me go to the window and look outside to see if there was something going on, like maybe a big truck or something else that could account for this weird sudden surge of pressure and vibration.   The event was not like a “BOOM” but perhaps a bit like a “thud,” although not an easily heard sound.   It may have been infrasonic – the kind of sound that you don’t hear directly but which you can feel in your chest and which you can hear indirectly due to the reverberations it causes.

It’s hard to describe the event, but the words “thud,” “woosh” and “surge” are the best I can come up with.

In any case, I went back to what I was doing, which was writing the previous post (the one about diamonds).

Turns out a natural gas power plant blew up and killed at least five people!!!

It seems a bit ironic that it’s called the “Clean Energy Plant” or at least it was, before much of it was blown up.   It’s far too early to tell exactly what happened here, but it’s worth noting that the event is not entirely unique.   Some enormous explosions have occurred at natural gas fired power plants over the years, as well as at natural gas pumping stations, storage depots and other facilities that support them. A massive natural gas explosion in New Jersey left hundreds homeless in 1994 and deadly natural gas explosions have occurred in recent years in Russia, Texas, Virgina, Alaska, several parts of Canada, China, India and numerous other places. This includes explosions at the power plant location, as was the case in St. Petersburg Russia.

I have to admit that while I’m acutely aware of the potential for disaster that lurks wherever you find massive amounts of flammable gas, this reminder hit especially close to home.   In addition to living near a natural gas power plant, I also live about 20 miles from a nuclear plant.  The nuclear plant, unlike the gas plant, has never killed anyone or had a major incident that effected the safety or property of those who live in the area.    This shouldn’t be surprising, however, because while the American  natural gas industry’s safety record is fairly descent, it’s far from spotless, unlike the nuclear energy industry which has never had even a single solitary incident in it’s history that endangered the local community or caused loss of life to citizens in the area.

During its history of roughly five decades, there have been a handful of worker fatalities in the US nuclear industry.  Nearly all of them have been from common workplace accidents found in all industries, such as falling off of a ladder or catwalk.   There has never been a death of a worker at a US nuclear power plant due to reactor malfunction or a nuclear accident.  There has been only one death attributable to a “nuclear” accident of any kind – a worker died as the result of a criticality accident in 1964 at the Woods River Junction reprocessing plant when he improperly mixed a solution of uranium and plutonium, resulting in unexpected critical.    Of course, the US is not alone in this.   With the exception of the former Soviet Union, most other countries with a nuclear industry have a spotless record and the rest have a nearly spotless one.

Sadly, in a single event, the natural gas industry has killed five times that many.   So which one is the dangerous one again?

In light of the upcoming Valentines Day holiday, when diamonds are often purchased as a means of telling your significant other how much you buy into media hype and advertisements, I thought it was about time I posted about some of the pervasive myths and the realities of diamonds.   This post does contain some actual scientific and historical facts verses myths, but it also has some social commentary that I figured I might add.

Some would argue that this is why I’m single, because the fact of the matter is that I’m not keen on buying diamonds*.   If I did ever buy a diamond as an engagement ring it would be synthetic.   Yes, this may limit my options, although most of those excluded would hopefully not be anyone I’d be interested in anyway.

If this seems written from a male perspective, it’s because, traditionally, it’s the man who is generally expected to purchase expensive jewelery.   Diamonds are not generally given from women to men, except perhaps in narrow circumstances of things like cuff-links or tie tacks.

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In the near future, we may see a transition to an electric-based transportation system, specifically with electric vehicle drive trains and vehicles which drive on battery power, with or without an additional internal combustion engine to provide for extended range operation.  This is already starting to happen with hybrid vehicles being produced by most manufactures and models like the Chevy Volt coming out, which are equipped with a fully electric drive-train and the ability to travel short distances without burning any fuel.

This is where the idea of “vehicle to grid” power comes in.   The idea is that since we don’t drive our cars all the time there will be a large number of batteries and motor-generators connected to the power grid.  So why not use them for something?   The basic idea is that the vehicles would charge during times of relatively low power demand and that during times when demand is high, these vehicles would instead discharge to provide power to the grid.  Owners who back-feed the grid with power from their cars would be paid a premium for the power to make it worth their while.    Power would be priced based on grid demand, thus allowing vehicle owners to make money by charging when demand is low and discharging when demand is high.

The image on the right comes from this website.

Apparently those who are behind this concept believe that in the years to come our power grid will be pushed so close to the brink of complete collapse that it will be necessary to resort to vehicles for energy storage and generation in order to avoid regional blackouts becoming a common occurrence.

There are three basic vehicle-to-grid systems proposed, based on the vehicle type:

1. Battery Electric Vehicles – The vehicle’s battery charges when plugged in during times when there is power avaliable on the electric grid, but if there is a time of high demand when power is in short supply, the process is reversed and the battery discharges electricity back on to the grid
2. Plug in hybrids/Extended Range Electric Vehicles – These vehicles have batteries which allow them to travel short and medium distances on only battery power.   They also have a gasoline or diesel engine connected to a generator to provide power when driving beyond the range of batteries.   Since the batteries on these types of vehicles are of limited capacity, they would be exhausted after only a relatively short period of time and most of the electricity back-fed to the grid would come from the internal combustion engine powering the generators.
3. Fuel Cell Vehicles – These vehicles would never charge from the electric grid and would get all their power from fuel, such as hydrogen, which would be purchased at filling stations just as gasoline is.  Today most hydrogen comes from the steam reforming of natural gas, but since the entire point of using hydrogen is to allow for an “renewable” form of energy that is not fossil fuel based, presumably this hydrogen would be produced from water by means of electrolysis or thermochemical reactions.  (using hydrogen as a fuel presents other issues that go beyond the scope of this post)

So this sounds like a great idea, right?   Actually it’s a horrible idea.
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Natural News… GROAN.    It’s that site that seems to put all the quackery, scaremongering and bad medical and enviornmental advice in one place.   However one of the authors there thinks he has got skeptics all figured out, and knows exactly what we “skeptics” believe.   Well, as a one who would generally consider myself a skeptic, I have some bad news for this guy:  We don’t actually all believe the same things.   Sure, amongst skeptics, there are some thing we tend to agree on, for example homeopathy – you’d have to be a complete nut job not to realize that bullshit stinks.   Yet, on other things, I have found myself in disagreement with other skeptics quite frequently.

Thus I can only speak for myself, but I felt compelled to answer what this guy is telling me that I believe, because I believe that what he believes I believe is a bit unbelievable.

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Why would you kick someone when they’re down? Simple – because you don’t want them to get back up again. While that may sound a bit cruel, if the one you’re kicking happens to be fond of spreading disease and death across your country, it’s actually about the most merciful thing you can possibly do for the health and well-being of everyone.

In Australia, the AVN, or Australian Vaccine Network – a major anti-vaccine and anti-science advocacy group got some extremely bad press not long ago when a newborn baby died of whooping cough – a disease that can be kept in check by vaccination and which has been spreading in the country due to low vaccine rates as a result of misinformation.   Recognizing that this was a big blow to the AVN, an impromptu effort was made by skeptics, medical professionals, rational thinkers and others in Australia and elsewhere to keep the pressure on the organization and put them on the defensive when it comes to their lies and the concequences.

A number of forces helped in the PR assault.   The Australian Skeptics lead the charge, while individuals and groups helped by donating the funds to run ads in several Australian papers.  Bloggers and podcasters helped spread the word and when the Australian media ran stories slanted in favor of the AVN, readers and viewers deluged them with complaints. Groups like “STOP AVN” used social networks like Facebook to gain support and members.

Well it seems to have worked.   This ran on the primary blog of the Australian Vaccine network:

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In one of the greatest  losses of information in human history, eclipsed only by the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, it seems that the original tapes containing recordings of the unconverted vide0 from the Apollo-11 mission have most likely been destroyed.   This probably occurred sometime in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s, although it has not been specifically confirmed that all copies were degaussed at the time, it is known that many tapes in the collection from the era were.

At this time, there remains a very slim chance that there may be some of the original M22 tapes, most likely the on-site duplicates, that may have escaped degaussing and are hidden away somewhere in the US, Guam or Australia.  Although, that seems at best, a very long shot.   More likely to have survived was at least one recording, a possibly two made at the Parkes observatory on a modified  Ampex VR-660 video tape recorder.   If this tape exists, it is most likely in the archives of either the US government or the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. However, thus far, efforts to locate these tapes has also proven fruitless.

There is, however, another potential source of at least some of the information lost during the scan conversion process, which could be of use in the efforts to restore the video recordings, or which at least could provide some additional record for posterity:  Still images.

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Technology generally improves as time goes on and in addition to lacking new features, old technology is subject to years of wear and tear.   This generally means that new systems are better, but that’s not a hard and fast rule.   This is even more true considering that many older pieces of technology were “over-engineered,” literally built to tougher, stronger and even safer standards than current technology.  The reason for this is experience and precision of engineering.   At the time, there was not as much experience with construction of vehicles and buildings and tolerances and failure points were not known with the precision that they are today.   Ironically, this lead to construction that was actually far better than it really needed to be, simply because conservative engineers made the factor of safety more generous to assure that their designs were safe, even when in uncharted territory.

In a few cases, this was increased by some early bad experiences.   For example, the first passenger jet, the De Havilland Comet suffered a number of accidents resulting from metal fatigue, which was traced to the corners of the aircraft’s windows.   This revelation caused designers at De Havilland to redesign the aircraft, replacing square windows with round and adding extensive structural strengthening.   When Boeing designed the 707, they were aware of the dangers that had plagued the early Comet designs and likewise, designed a very conservative and overbuilt airframe.   Having had decades of experience with these aircraft, it’s been discovered that they can safely log far more hours than the original designers had estimated.   For this reason, a decades-old version of the Comet is still serving the British Air Force and is expected to for at least another ten years, while the 707-based KC-135 continues to serve the US Air Force.

There are other factors that come into play with older technologies.   In many cases, materials, labor and fuel were cheaper, allowing for bulkier construction which.  In some cases, newer, cheaper and less robust methods of construction did not exist.   In addition to this, there has been pressure on designers to make products that don’t last too long.   After all, if a company’s product lasts 50 years, it will be 50 years before they get to sell a replacement.   The term for this is planned obsolescence.

Yet another reason why older systems may be better is that they tend to be more simply constructed and easily modified.   It’s said that “wasn’t designed to” does not mean “can’t” and this can be very true with designs that have the avaliable space and strength to accept major modifications to their design or use.   The B-52, for example, was designed to carry nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union and penetrate heavily defended airspace.   Today it serves as a heavy conventional bomber and has the nuclear role of delivering nuclear-armed cruise missiles, despite the fact that air launched cruise missiles of this type didn’t even exist when it rolled off the assembly line.   The B-52 is example of a system  that may be so old that many of the instruments and control systems it has since been fitted with didn’t even exist when it was built.

They Just don’t make ‘em like that anymore (When Older is Better):

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Those who know me are probably aware that I’m not very happy with the current administration’s handling of the monetary system, government spending, domestic policy in general, buisiness regulations and many many other things.   Politically, I’m pretty much a libertarian, at least to some degree.  I tend to favor less social spending, less buisiness regulation and more pro-enterprise policies.   I prefer the budget be kept balanced and I prefer the government focus on things with stratigic value, such as scientific research, over things like entitlement spending.

However, I have to admit that even those who I don’t generally support do occasionally get it right, and President Obama has actually done a few things which I can’t help but applaud.

Via the New York Times:

Obama Acts to Ease Way to Construct Reactors

The Obama administration moved vigorously on two fronts Friday to promote nuclear power, proposing a tripling of federal loan guarantees for new projects and appointing a high-level commission to study what to do with nuclear waste.

Administration officials confirmed that their 2011 federal budget request next week would raise potential loan guarantees for the projects to more than $54 billion, from $18.5 billion. A new Energy Department panel will examine a vastly expanded list of options for nuclear waste, including a new kind of nuclear reactor that would use some of it.

The current loan guarantees were provided in the 2005 energy act but have not been disbursed because of bureaucratic delays. The Energy Department has said it would start issuing those soon. Because the loan guarantees are supposed to cover 80 percent of construction costs, the current amount of $18.5 billion would cover only about three projects.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has been saying for weeks that the administration would seek a greater amount of guarantees; commercial investment has been hard to come by because there is so much uncertainty about the cost and schedule for building plants.

When President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Wednesday that the country should build “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants,” it was one of the few times he got bipartisan applause.

The idea may have more support among Republicans than Democrats, but even opponents of nuclear power concede that the loan guarantees may be necessary to muster enough votes for the kind of measures that many environmentalists favor in a climate and energy bill, like firm national goals for renewable energy and a cap on carbon dioxide emissions.

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Skilled amateurs have built some pretty amazing things – things you might expect to beyond the capacity of a private citizen.   These include things like particle accelerators, nuclear fusion reactors (Farnsworth Fusors), radio telescopes, weather radar systems, robots of various types and sizes, aircraft and almost anything else you can think of.

Of all the amateur science and technology projects, however, I think this takes the cake.

Yes, it’s a submarine.  A fully functional submarine, complete with deisel engine, electric battery bank, life support systems and everything else a submarine should have.  Obviously this is not the safest thing in the world to build, if you don’t know what you’re doing.   However, Danish submarine Peter Madsen seems to know what he’s doing pretty well.  He built one the world’s biggest and longest endurance home built submarine several years ago – the Kraka. There’s no doubt that the Kraka is an amazing piece of work for something somebody welded together in his garage, but it was relatively shallow diving and only had enough space to crawl around in. More recently he built an even larger and more capable submarine, the UC3 Nautilus, which is large enough to accommodate several people comfortably and has a galley, sleeping berths and everything else you’d find on a small yacht or pleasurecraft. If that isn’t enough, these submarines even have the ability to launch and retrieve scuba divers by an underside hatch and a system to equalize the pressure to that of the water at depth.

Clearly Peter Madsen has spent quite a lot of time and money on these amazing craft, but he did weld them together in his home workshop. Absolutely amazing. It just goes to show what you can do if you really set your mind to it. Now he just needs to build a nuclear reactor so he can construct a “real” submarine as opposed to a surface vessel that can hold its breath for a little bit. Still, even this amateur diesel-electric is cooler than anything I own.

We’ve reported before over the professional disgrace of Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield is one of the worst cases of everything a researcher and a physician should not be.   With complete disregard for the safety and welfare of others and his own professional obligations Doctor Mister Wakefield has not simply cherry-picked or spun data in favor of his claims:  he just plain lied.   Let me make this clear again:  he didn’t take improper measurements or use the data in an improper way, he simply made up facts that were not true.   And if that’s not bad enough he did it in regards to a matter of extreme consequence to public health and to the state of medical research.

Sadly, he’s gotten quite a lot of support and many have even seen his disgrace by British and other national medical bodies as more proof that he’s being persecuted by a big conspiracy.

No surprise, the GMC (General Medical Council) – the British body responsible for investigating things of this nature has returned its verdict:  guilty of professional misconduct, violations of ethics and other infractions against professional standards.

Via the Times Online:

Doctor in disgrace

The consultant who sparked the MMR vaccine scare now faces being struck off

The descent into professional disgrace of Andrew Wakefield is now almost complete. The doctor who fanned an unwarranted panic by suggesting a link between the three-in-one measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism — prompting a fall in vaccination rates that spawned a startling rise in cases of measles — was condemned yesterday by the General Medical Council for acting “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in conducting his research. He now faces the possibility of being struck off the medical register.

Nobody can doubt the GMC’s diligence. After conducting hearings over a period of two and a half years, it ruled that Wakefield had carried out invasive and unnecessary tests on children that were against their best clinical interests: he paid children £5 for blood samples at his son’s birthday party, acting, said the GMC, “with callous disregard” for the suffering of children.

The Lancet long ago regretted having published Wakefield’s initial study 12 years ago. No respected research has ever supported the findings that led Wakefield to brand his studies a “moral issue” that made him unable to support the continued use of the MMR jab. Indeed, a landmark study in Japan found that, on using single vaccines instead of the MMR, the number of diagnosed cases of autism actually rose sharply.

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