Much to do has been made of the fact that the majority of nuclear plants in the United States are scheduled to operate beyond the initial operating period that was estimated when they were first constructed. This all seems to have started when the Associated Press “broke” the story, despite the fact that it had never actually been a secret at all. None the less, many followed reporting how plants were being stretched far beyond the expectations of what their designers had intended, exposing the public to untold risks as they rust and fall apart.

Of course, this is not really the case. The plants have undergone numerous upgrades and refits over the years and continue to be upgraded and inspected to maintain high levels of safety. New procedures and new systems retrofitted to older reactors have improved their efficiency and safety beyond what it was originally. Of course, even with improvements, the older Generation II reactors still are not as good as new Generation III+ designs, but none the less, they are perfectly safe and reliable sources of power.

The primary reason why the designs have outlasted what was assumed to be their design life comes down to economics. While it has become cheaper and easier to extend the life of reactors, it has also become much more difficult to build new ones. The original designers might have presumed that after twenty or thirty years, their designs would have been so far surpassed that new power plants would have made them obsolete and redundant.

Unfortunately, they had not counted on just how difficult it has become to build a new reactor.  Just getting the permits to build a new nuclear reactor can take upwards of a decade, and a combination of political lobbying, lawsuits and other tactics by special interest groups meets a potential reactor operator at every step of the way, possibly even derailing plans completely before construction is completed but after billions have been spent.   There exists no other facility whose construction will be opposed by so many with so much effort at so many levels.   Paperwork costs alone can top the hundreds of millions, and final costs for construction have skyrocketed since the 1970’s.

Thus we have what we have and their life is extended to the maximum possible since replacements remain so difficult and expensive to built.

This does not mean that they are unsafe.  In fact, there are many examples of technology lasting far longer than its designers had anticipated.

Reasons why something may outlast its original design life:

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If you have been watching the news or seen any news sites today you have likely heard about the reports of an explosion at a French nuclear facility.   The explosion has repeatedly been reported to have happened at a “nuclear power station” or “nuclear plant.”   This is false.   Reports of fears of radiation releases are also not accurate since the explosion did not actually occurs anywhere near high level waste material or any nuclear reactor.

Background of the Marcoule Site:

The Marcoule site is a large industrial site that conducts activities related to nuclear technology and nuclear energy. It was first setup to produce and process materials for the French nuclear weapons program in the 1950’s. The last French reactors dedicated to plutonium production for weapons were shut down in the 1980’s and activities related to refining and processing weapons materials at Marcoule ceased in 1997.

Beginning in the 1970’s, the Marcoule site has shifted from weapons-related activities to nuclear energy and nuclear materials-related activities in support of the French nuclear energy program. This includes research and development of nuclear energy systems, fuel fabrication and materials processing, remediation and disposal. In 1995, a MOX fuel fabrication plant opened at Marcoule, making the site an integral part of France’s nuclear fuel reprocessing program.

Activities at the site also include such things as the remediation and recycling of low level materials from nuclear reactors, processing of medical radiological waste and the fabrication of components and materials for nuclear systems.   Marcoule is the primary site in France for receiving materials from decommissioned nuclear reactors.

There are currently no active nuclear reactors on the site, although it has hosted some nuclear reactors in years past.   The site has three inactive UNGG reactors, which were built starting in 1955.   The last of these reactors was shut down in 1984.   These reactors are gas cooled, graphite moderated reactors, similar in principle to the British Magnox reactors, though developed entirely separately.  Like early Magnox reactors, the UNGG reactors did produce electricity, but were primarily built to breed weapons-grade plutonium.  The site is also the home of the Phénix reactor, an experimental fast-spectrum sodium cooled reactor which was operated from 1968 until 2009. Phénix is now in cold shutdown and is expected to be fully decommissioned in the near future.

As an industrial nuclear site which now functions largely for civilian purposes, but which was originally built for weapons material, the Marcoule site may be considered analogous to the Savannah River or Hanford Site in the United States or to the Sellafield site in the UK.

Information On the Explosion:

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It seems every time there is any development in nuclear technology, the media immediately starts equating it with weapons and assumes that it will be used for such. Not only that, but it also seems that the prevailing belief is that the only way to keep the world safe is to assure the United States does not engage in the new technology, because, if we don’t, well then obviously nobody else will, right?

Via the New York Times:

Scientists have long sought easier ways to make the costly material known as enriched uranium — the fuel of nuclear reactors and bombs, now produced only in giant industrial plants.

One idea, a half-century old, has been to do it with nothing more substantial than lasers and their rays of concentrated light. This futuristic approach has always proved too expensive and difficult for anything but laboratory experimentation.

Until now.

In a little-known effort, General Electric has successfully tested laser enrichment for two years and is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that would make reactor fuel by the ton.

That might be good news for the nuclear industry. But critics fear that if the work succeeds and the secret gets out, rogue states and terrorists could make bomb fuel in much smaller plants that are difficult to detect.

Iran has already succeeded with laser enrichment in the lab, and nuclear experts worry that G.E.’s accomplishment might inspire Tehran to build a plant easily hidden from the world’s eyes.

Backers of the laser plan call those fears unwarranted and praise the technology as a windfall for a world increasingly leery of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.

But critics want a detailed risk assessment. Recently, they petitioned Washington for a formal evaluation of whether the laser initiative could backfire and speed the global spread of nuclear arms.

“We’re on the verge of a new route to the bomb,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist who advised President Bill Clinton and now teaches at Princeton. “We should have learned enough by now to do an assessment before we let this kind of thing out.”

New varieties of enrichment are considered potentially dangerous because they can simplify the hardest part of building a bomb — obtaining the fuel.

General Electric, an atomic pioneer and one of the world’s largest companies, says its initial success began in July 2009 at a facility just north of Wilmington, N.C., that is jointly owned with Hitachi. It is impossible to independently verify that claim because the federal government has classified the laser technology as top secret. But G.E. officials say that the achievement is genuine and that they are accelerating plans for a larger complex at the Wilmington site.

“We are currently optimizing the design,” Christopher J. Monetta, president of Global Laser Enrichment, a subsidiary of G.E. and Hitachi, said in an interview.

The company foresees “substantial demand for nuclear fuel,” he added, while conceding that global jitters from the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan “do create some uncertainty.” G.E. made those reactors.

Donald M. Kerr, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab who was recently briefed on G.E.’s advance, said in an interview that it looked like a breakthrough after decades of exaggerated claims.

Laser enrichment, he said, has gone from “an oversold, overpromised set of technologies” to what “appears to be close to a real industrial process.”

…

The plan was to exploit the extraordinary purity of laser light to selectively excite uranium’s rare form. In theory, the resulting agitation would ease identification of the precious isotope and aid its extraction.

At least 20 countries and many companies raced to investigate the idea. Scientists built hundreds of lasers.

Ray E. Kidder, a laser pioneer at the Livermore nuclear arms lab, estimated that the overall number of scientists involved globally ran to several thousand.

“It was a big deal,” he said in an interview. “If you could enrich with lasers, you could cut the cost by a factor of 10.”

The fervor cooled by the 1990s as laser separation turned out to be extremely hard to make economically feasible.

Not everyone gave up. Twenty miles southwest of Sydney, in a wooded region, Horst Struve and Michael Goldsworthy kept tinkering with the idea at a government institute. Finally, around 1994, the two men judged that they had a major advance.

The inventors called their idea Silex, for separation of isotopes by laser excitation. “Our approach is completely different,” Dr. Goldsworthy, a physicist, told a Parliamentary hearing.

….

In May 2006, G.E. bought the rights to Silex. Andrew C. White, the president of the company’s nuclear business, hailed the technology as “game-changing.”

Mr. Monetta of Global Laser Enrichment, the G.E.-Hitachi subsidiary, said the envisioned plant would enrich enough uranium annually to fuel up to 60 large reactors. In theory, that could power more than 42 million homes — about a third of all housing units in the United States.

The laser advance, he added, will promote energy security “since it is a domestic source.”

In late 2009, as G.E. experimented with its trial laser, supporters of arms control wrote Congress and the regulatory commission. The technology, they warned, posed a danger of quickening the spread of nuclear weapons because of the likely difficulty of detecting clandestine plants.

Experts called for a federal review of the risks. In early 2010, the commission resisted.

Late last year, the American Physical Society — the nation’s largest group of physicists, with headquarters in Washington — submitted a formal petition to the commission for a rule change that would compel such risk assessments as a condition of licensing.

“The issue is too big” to leave to the federal status quo, Francis Slakey, a physicist at Georgetown University and the society official who drafted the petition, said in an interview. He added that Mr. Obama or Congress might eventually have to get involved.

This year, thousands of citizens, supporters of arms control, nuclear experts and members of Congress wrote the commission to back the society’s effort. Many of them cited well-known failures in safeguarding secrets and detecting atomic plants.

But the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in Washington, objected. It said new precautions were unnecessary because of voluntary plans for “additional measures” to safeguard secrets.

A commission spokesman said the petition would be considered next year. In theory, the risk-assessment plan, if adopted, could slow or stop the granting of a commercial license for the proposed laser plant or could result in design improvements.

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Tonight the ABC News program Nightline Primetime will be featuring a segment called Beyond Belief: Psychic Power.

I happened to have the opportunity to go to attend the taping of a portion of this program. It’s actually a bit of a long story but they needed 12 men to participate in a psychic evaluation. I volunteered but it turned out they had more than 12 as it was (additional persons were called in case someone could not make it.) Thus I became an “alternate” and ultimately was not used for their evaluation group.

However, I still did get to hang around and help out a bit in the psychic evaluation, which was done by the James Randi Educational Foundation as part of their Million Dollar Challenge. Several self-proclaimed psychics were tested to see if they could read the test subjects accurately. I can’t actually tell you if any won the million dollars. You will have to watch to find out.

I’m really looking forward to seeing this show. Although it’s hard to tell what it will be after it is finally edited, the producers and reporters were generally very friendly to the skeptical side of the story. It’s a rarity to have skeptic organizations made a part of any media report on the paranormal and when they are, they usually are only given a chance for a token comment. In this case, skeptics were a major part of the production and the producers were extremely accommodating of the JREF’s protocol to assure the tests were valid and properly controlled.

I feel very privileged to have been a part of this production.  You *might* even see me in the background when the psychics are being lead into their interviews.  I don’t know if the footage with me in the background is actually going to be used.

The show will be airing at 10 PM Eastern, 9 Central in the US.

Check local listings outside these time zones.  If you are outside the US, the episode will likely be available after it airs.

Finally, for what it’s worth, if anyone happens to come out and claim the psychic tests were rigged, then all I can say is that I’ll attest to the fact that they were not.   Documentation of this can be provided, of course, but I’ll also say that I was there, I saw the items being places in envelopes and the sequestering of the test subjects.   Everything was double and triple checked, agreed upon protocols were followed to the T.

There is a segment of the show where a psychic works with pictures of persons in sealed envelopes.   Each picture was placed in two folders and then in the envelope.   *I* personally put them in the envelopes.  This was witnessed and verified by an ABC news producer, production assistants and members of the JREF staff.   They were then sealed and placed in a secure area until they were used.   This is how the challenge is always done:  extreme measures are taken to make sure it’s unquestionably valid.

Note:  I’m trying something new here.   Thus far all the posts you’ve seen on this site have been written by me, Stephen Packard.    Recently I got an email from someone interested in authoring a post on the production of gasoline.  He thought this site would be a good venue for such an essay.   So here it is.

How it’s Made – From Pipeline to Pump

by, Jeremy Fordham

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Okay, I just got back from Las Vegas where I spent this past weekend with 1600 other skeptics, amateur and professional science enthusiasts, entertainers, magicians, free thinkers and other generally fun people.   I saw a lot of familiar faces and met many new ones.

And I’d really like to post about it, but I have work piled up, since I took a whole week off, and because I also didn’t get back until very early this morning and I really need some sleep.

In the meantime, I’d like to thank everyone from the James Randi Educational foundation for all the work that went into the Amazing Meeting 9 and all the speakers and presenters who contributed to it.

Sorry for the lack of posts for the past week. They will resume soon.

If you happen to be at involved at all in the organized skepticism community, then you likely know about “elevatorgate.”   Basically it’s a rather unfortunate series of events involving Rebecca Watson, Richard Dawkins and others.    I’m intentionally not linking to the quotes (you can find them easily on Google if you so choose) but I will paraphrase the situation:

Watson was at a hotel for some conference she spoke at.  She stayed out late, going to the bar or whatever.  Then, at 4 AM she went back to her room, taking an elevator.   Some guy from the conference was on the elevator.   He tried to strike up a conversation.  He said he found her interesting and suggested she might want to come back to her room for a cup of coffee.  She declined.   They exited the elevator and that was that.

Now according to Watson this made her very uncomfortable.  It was an elevator, which is the quintessential (if not factually supported) place for rape to occur.  She was a woman and he a man and our society is one in which women are most often the victim of sexual assault and men most often the aggressors.   It was forward and the act of inviting a woman back to your room in a hotel has some obvious undertones (even if it didn’t necessarily mean anything other than he actually wanted to have some coffee.)

Richard Dawkins took Watson to task on this with some rather sarcastic comments which seem to be intended to point out that she really wasn’t a victim of anything and in a world where women are having their genitals cut in Africa, can’t drive cars in much of the Middle East, are sold into slavery in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and where many places still operate in a near-feudal manner, Watson is not really in that bad of shape and should just get over the fact that someone asked her an awkward question in an elevator, which probably was not the best venue.

What followed was a lot of really far-out feminists coming to Watson’s defense and attacking Dawkins.  They said he didn’t understand because he was a heterosexual Caucasian male from a privilege background, while Watson is a … heterosexual Caucasian female from a privilege background.   They repeatedly said how men “Just don’t get it” – that women live in a world of terror where every guy they encounter is a potential rapist and where the very act of making a social invitation means they must fear that you are planning on assaulting them.   Some either didn’t get Dawkin’s sarcasm and disgust for the culture of victim-hood that has permeated western society or thought he was somehow putting down women who actually do suffer horrible acts of violence by asking those who were asked to coffee to grow some thicker skin.

Of course, I’m a man so I can’t ever understand this.  Somehow others can know what I can understand but I can’t understand what they can.   Somehow they know what my background is and my life experiences but I don’t know there experiences.   And also, apparently every woman knows “what it’s like to be a woman” because there is only one single experience of being a woman, it’s not like, they are all different or anything, or like there is no one ‘anywoman’ who can tell you what the experience is for all XX chromosome members of humanity.

Oh and if you see a paradox here, that just proves you’re already a bigot and a rapist.

But before going into this any further, there’s a question nobody seems to have asked:  DO RAPES ACTUALLY HAPPEN IN HOTEL ELEVATORS?

Sure, they have happened.  In the history of human race and the billions of hotel stays that have been made, they have happened.   But lets get something straight:  people have also been struck by meteors on at least two occasions.

As Wattson suggested, if you Google “Hotel Elevator Assault,” you will find plenty of pages, but then take a closer look.  Many of them are about how to avoid it, some of them are about her and others simply have all three words together in the same page, such as “Kobe’s accuser said after the assault, she went to the hotel elevator” or “The alleged attacker was seen on a security camera exiting the elevator on the 11th floor.”

But what about actual occurrences of women being raped or assaulted in hotel elevators.   Is it common?   Sure, it’s commonly feared.   People fear dying because of nuclear power plant accidents too.  People fear having their throat slit by an intruder in their bed at night.   Yet these are pretty small risks.

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If that headline sounds a bit grandiose , it’s because it is.   We’ve achieve a victory, a big one.   By the ingenuity and effort of mankind a tiny destructive organism that recently existed by the trillions has been wiped from the face of the earth.   This hasn’t happened many times before, but when it does, it’s a huge victory, and one which we hope to repeat many more times.

In this case what has been eradicated is not a human disease but one that decimated livestock.   Rinderpest, or the “German Cattle Plague” was a virus related to measles but attacking bovines, such as cattle and some related species.   At times outbreaks had decimated both meat and dairy herds around the world.  It has destroyed herds since at least Roman times and even in the later half of the 20th century, it was causing billions of dollars in damage.   It ruined farmers and herders and epidemic levels in Africa contributed to famine in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

For centuries, the battle to control Rinderpest met with some success through quarantine and inspection for the disease.   Yet the threat continued to exist.  Various vaccines were developed, with early experiments going back as far as the 1700’s.   Sir Arnold Theiler is credited with producing the first fully effective general purpose vaccine for Rinderpest in the early 20th century.   More advanced vaccines would be developed throughout the century.   Organized international efforts toward eradication began in 1920 when the World Organization for Animal Health was formed with the specific goal of controlling Rinderpest.

And now it’s gone!

VIA CNN:

Deadly animal disease that shaped history is eradicated
- It decimated herds and caused disaster, devastation and death associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, the French Revolution and the colonization of Africa.

But after years of global efforts, rinderpest — German for cattle plague — doesn’t exist anymore. It is the first animal disease to be eradicated and only the second disease ever, after smallpox in 1980.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization declared Tuesday that the world was rid of rinderpest.

“This is of tremendous benefit to people and is also a relief for a lot of animal suffering,” said Peter Cowen, an associate professor of epidemiology and public health at North Carolina State University.

“The eradication of rinderpest in the animal health world is every bit as courageous an effort and as creative an effort as was the eradication of smallpox,” he said.

Rinderpest is not exactly a household name. For starters, it did not exist in America. And it affected only cloven-hoofed beasts — cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, yaks.

Animals don’t have silly ideas about vaccines causing autism or being made by the evil corporations that spread chemtrails and try to use microwave weapons to make us buy transfat-containing irradiated GMO products from Haliburton and the Freemasons.   Most farmers know a thing or two about animal health and realize how important protecting their herds are.   So there are no issues with eradicating these diseases by vaccination as there are in humans.

But we *can* do this with human diseases.  We did it with Small Pox and we can do it with Polio, and Measles and Mumps and Rubella and others.

I recently came across the television show “Filthy Cities.” It’s originally broadcast on BBC-2, although in the US it can be found on The Discovery Channel. (and amazingly, they redid the entire show in a shot-per-shot retake with an American host for the US version.)

As far as historical documentaries go, it’s not the most scholarly.   That said, I was happy to see such a show exists, because it touches on an all too underreported aspect of history:  the past was pretty damn miserable.   The great cities of the world, whether London, Paris or New York spend centuries stewing in human and animal waste, garbage, thick smoke and a variety of chemicals discharged from tanneries and factories.   Human waste was disposed of in the streets and litter collection was nearly non-existent.   Horses and other animals contributed to the problem.   Without modern sanitary mortuaries and refrigeration, even dead corpses could rot in summer and could be hastily burred in shallow graves.

The word “filthy” does not even do justice to how miserable it was.

Things began to get better with the Industrial Revolution.  While sewers of some type date back to the Roman empire, the first modern city-wide sanitary sewer system took shape in Paris in the mid 1800’s.   It was an enormous step forward.  Other cities followed.   Still, other problems persisted.   Regular collection of refuse and carting away of rotting material was not universal for large cities until well into the 20th century.   The disposal of horse manure (and horse carcases) was a problem that was never really rectified until diesel and gasoline vehicles overtook horses for street transportation.

Not all the major improvements occurred in such a distant past. As late as the 1950’s, the use of coal for heating in the heart of cities could make the air almost unbreathable. Many large cities continued to dump huge amounts of raw sewage into local bodies of water until fairly recently. Boston Harbor frequently contained dangerous levels of fecal bacteria until the opening of the Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant in 1995.

Of course, things were not necessarily much better in rural areas either.   Latrines and outhouse pits stunk in the summer and the lack of hot or running water meant people could go months without bathing.  The thatched roofs of cottages may look quaint in pictures, but they began to rot after only a few years, becoming infested with insects and leaking.   During periods of heavy rain, roads became a stew of mud and animal feces, and those who had to travel them didn’t have the luxury of modern rubberized boots.

Here are two episodes of the series, viewable in full:

(Warning – They’re a bit graphic at times)
Filthy Cities: Revolutionary Paris
Filthy Cities: Medieval London

Of course, the filthiest conditions were generally those of the poor and working class, while the wealthy had at least somewhat better living conditions. Given the circumstances, it’s not surprising that so many died from infectious disease. If anything, it’s amazing people actually could survive in such filth.

Most today just have no idea how good we have it.

It’s been less than a month since the MESSENGER Probe entered orbit of the planet Mercury and began returning data.  MESSENGER is the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury and it is hoped that it will provide the  most complete data to date on the surface profile and composition of the planet.

Unfortunately, it has also already attracted the attention of some nutters who seem to think that an “X” seen on the planet means some kind of intelligent life has already been on Mercury.

Via News.com.au

X on Mercury’ – the new ‘Face on Mars’?

AFTER six-and-a-half years and $450m, NASA’s Messenger probe has paid its way.

Sent to become the first craft to orbit Mercury – from Earth, anyway – Messenger’s successful rendezvous briefly reignited interest in the Sun’s nearest neighbour.

Since March 30, it has sent back thousands of images from the surface, but apart from the novelty factor of the first few, most since have only been of interest to the kinds of people who waited six-and-a-half years for them.

So we’ve seen lots of craters and erosion, but then again, what did we expect from an environment exposed to temperatures that range from between 485C to -184C? Signs of life?

What that means is outside the field of view are two impact sites. The criss-crossing lines are made up of mounds of “ejecta” thrown up by whatever struck the planet.

So in reality, it’s all just a coincidence, albeit a fascinating one.

Or is it?

No. it is just a coincidence.

First, notice a few things about the X:

It’s not a perfect cross. It does not intersect at perfect right angles and it’s not symmetrical. The upper line of craters actually fades out and the bottom line is crossed by yet another line of craters that does not have any obvious geometric relation to the other parts of the lines of craters.   It’s also not exactly centered in the larger crater.

So what we have is an entire planet (which is a pretty big place) which is covered in craters and which just happens to have at least one place where two lines of craters intersect at nearly right angles in the approximate center of a larger crater.

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