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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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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Every year I hear this same bullshit and it never irritates me less:

Via NPR:

Nuclear Power Criticized On Hiroshima Anniversary
On Saturday, Japan commemorated the 66th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, but the ceremony was different this year.

In March, a massive earthquake triggered a meltdown at the Japanese nuclear plant in Fukushima. The plant continues to leak radiation in the worst atomic accident since Chernobyl. Saturday’s ceremony focused on the nuclear attack on Japan in 1945, but the country’s ongoing nuclear disaster loomed large.

The atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m., killing 70,000 people instantly. As the bell tolled Saturday, most people froze, closed their eyes and put their hands together to pray.

Cicadas roared in the trees overhead.

Prime Minister Naoto Kan remembered the dead from long ago, then he spoke of Japan’s most recent atomic tragedy.

“I deeply regret believing in the security myth of nuclear power and will carry out a thorough verification on the cause of this incident,” he said.

The “security myth” was the Japanese government’s pledge that it could control the atom. Officials said the same forces that leveled Hiroshima could be harnessed to power this resource-poor nation. Most Japanese believed it for years.

In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, a poll showed that 70 percent of Japanese now want nuclear power phased out.

After Saturday’s ceremony, anti-nuclear activists took their cause to the streets of Hiroshima. They drew a direct line between the two atomic events separated by more than six decades.

One group of activists peeled off and headed to the Chugoku Electric Power Co. The company has been trying to build a plant 50 miles from Hiroshima for the past three decades. Local resident have been fighting the whole time. Saturday, they shook their fists at the granite walls of the company’s headquarters.

Toshiyasu Shimizu, a member of the Kaminoseki town council, says fighting the plant has felt lonely at times.

“People, including those in the neighboring town, were not interested. But now they see nuclear power as their own problem, so there has been a dramatic difference,” he says.

After all these years, Shimizu says, he feels like most of the country is beginning to agree with him

They’re not the same:

Lets get something straight:  Nuclear weapons are not nuclear power reactors and nuclear power reactors are not nuclear weapons.  Power reactors don’t produce the kind of material usable for weapons and are operated by different entities for different purposes.   Many nation states have nuclear power programs but do not have nuclear weapons.  Conversely, a nuclear power program is not necessary to produce nuclear weapons.   The US, for example, amassed hundreds of weapons in the 1940’s and early 1950’s, yet the first electricity producing commercial reactor was not operational until 1956, long after the weapons program was well established.

Both nuclear weapons and nuclear power reactors use nuclear fission.  That is the extent of their similarities.  Yet not even this is quite the same, since weapons use fast fission of a supercritical mass of material without a moderator, while reactors use a continuous thermal-spectrum reaction in low enrichment material.    Fission is a fundamental source of energy as broad and natural as fire and nuclear energy is as broad a category of energy as chemical energy and even more fundamental to nature.

On Ionizing Radiation:

Nuclear weapons produce radioactive fallout.  Nuclear power plants also produce radioactive material, although except in the case of catastrophic failure, it is contained and sequestered.   None the less, it would be a mistake to see radiation as some kind of evil entity unique to artificial nuclear reactions or uniquely dangerous.   ANY kind of energy can be deadly if it is not contained and exists in sufficient quantity.   People have been killed by the loss of containment of high pressure steam or heat.  Others have died when insulation breakdown exposed them to electricity or when a machine flew apart and the mechanical energy bashed their skull in.  Historically, if you actually look at how many lives are lost, the failure of proper containment of radioactivity is quite low in deaths per gigawatt hour.

Ionizing radiation is also a fundamental force of nature, just as other forms of energy are.  It is part of the electromagnetic spectrum and exists with or without human activity.  It’s produced by stars, lightning bolts, natural radioisotopes and other sources.   It is also produced by humans, in many cases intentionally to produce medical images or destroy tumors.   Medical radiation has saved countless lives.   Its dangers exist only as a product of its missus.  Just as a medical laser or scalpel can heal or harm.

Finally, most of the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had nothing to do with ionizing radiation.  Most died as a result of heat, overpressure or trauma falling debris.

Why is it, we that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the focus of so many memorials, so many demonstrations and such intense media attention when much greater loss of life has gone largely forgotten?

This is photograph shows a Japanese city that has been completely destroyed.  Only a handfull of scattered concrete or stone buildings stand and they are gutted and empty.   However, this is not Hiroshima.  This is not Nagasaki.   This is Tokyo.   Tokyo, which was never subjected to nuclear attack was largely reduced to cinders and rubble.  More than 50% of the enormous city was completely destroyed.   The total number killed during the Second World War in Tokyo is unknown.   The official counts top 100,000, but in reality, it was probably far more.

Tokyo was destroyed by a combination of conventional high explosive bombs and incendiary bombs.   It was the incendiary bombs that caused the most damage.   The destruction of Tokyo was accomplished by several B-29 bomber raids, with each attack involving dozens or hundreds of aircraft, up to 520 bombers in some cases.   During the Second World War, the US developed highly effective tactics for the use of incendiary bombs.    These included the use of high explosive bombs to blow open roofs and break apart buildings followed by wave after wave of incendiary bombs, packed with super hot burning white phosphorus and sticky napalm, which would splatter onto structures and anything else in the area and create a nearly unstoppable inferno.

Especially effective against cities with many wood structures, firebombing produced a man-made firestorm, a massive city-wide blaze that firefighters could do little to stop.   The flames would become so violent they would form tornado-like vortexes of flames that engulfed whole structures.   The heat could melt glass and crack concrete.   All organic material in the area became fuel.    For those unfortunate enough to be caught in the flames, there was no escape.   In most fires, victims die of smoke inhalation, but in these firestorms, people could be burned to death before they could take many breaths.   Some bodies were cremated on the spot, others were burned beyond recognition.   A few managed to escape the heat and flames in cellars or other sheltered areas, only to suffocate due to the flames consuming all available oxygen.

But Tokyo was not alone in being leveled by firebombs.   There were many more.   At least 25,000 died in the firebombing attacks on Dresden alone.   Hundreds of thousands more, mostly civilians died due to explosive and firebombing of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Milan, Kobe and elsewhere.   In Japan alone, more than 50 cities were destroyed or heavily damaged by bombing.  Of course, such raids were not limited to the Allied side of the war effort.   The Luftaffa laid waste to Rotterdam, Stalingrad and Warsaw.   Bombing of London, Belfast and other British cities was intended to destroy the cities and kill hundreds of thousands or millions.   It was only due to advanced radar and highly effective air defense, combined with the limited bomb loads of German aircraft that saved the British Isles from similar destruction, though thousands of lives were still lost.   The Japanese also engaged in massive aerial bombardment in China, the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must be understood not as isolated events but within this greater context of strategic bombing of World War II.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed large portions of the cities and killed tens of thousands.   This is really no different than the other air raids of the era, except that it was done with only one aircraft and one bomb.  It took a fraction of a second and not days.   It used a different technology.   Otherwise, it was no more deadly or devastating than conventional bombing.

Of course, the ethics and effectiveness of citywide bombing can be debated. At the time, precision bombing was not available in any large scale and the destruction of urban areas was considered the most effective way of both forcing an enemy to consider surrender and destroy their ability to make war. The Second World War was the last true example of total war, where the entire economies and industries of world powers are shifted completely to making war and as such, are considered targets in their own right.

So perhaps we should ban fire, since that has proven to be a much more horrific weapon.   It’s killed scores more than nuclear weapons.  It’s easier to acquire, nations are more prone to using it, it is just as indiscriminate, perhaps more so, it kills in a mercilessly painful manner, it’s environmentally destructive and it can easily get out of control and cause more damage than had been planned.

Of course, fire also powers everything from automobiles to candles and even the cells in our body use a form of low temperature, enzyme-catalyzed combustion in cellular respiration.

Finally, why I like nuclear explosions:

(Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb)

To most the image of a nuclear explosion is one of horror and destruction.   There’s certainly good reason for this.  The idea of such a device being used against humanity, to destroy cities and end lives is a horrific one.   Nobody would want to see a modern nuclear weapon used in anger.  The consequences would be a nightmare.

Yet a nuclear explosion is also something else.  It is a release of energy, a huge release of energy.   That’s really all that an explosion is.   Explosions can be used for fighting wars or for fireworks, mining, seismic sounding, explosive welding and any other number of purposes.  Nuclear explosions are huge because of the density of the energy source they tap.  They use the most fundamental type of energy in the universe and do so with very high efficiency.

Nuclear bombs are by far, the most energetic devices humans have ever created.   And unless there is a source of antimatter in large quantities for the taking, they will be the most energetic devices humans have ever created.   The largest bombs produce more energy than all humanity produced for thousands of years yet they could fit in your garage.   When set off, they are the greatest expression of humanity’s ability to harness the forces of the universe to produce energy – so much energy they transform huge areas of the atmosphere into plasma and create shockwaves that travel around the earth.  Large nuclear explosions can create their own weather systems, move mountains or carve enormous chambers under the earth’s crust.

It’s a nearly cosmic level of energy.  It has no upper bounds, as explosives can be built using the Teller-Ulam design to any size.   This is humanity’s great step toward something almost unimaginable.

While fallout concerns have greatly limited peaceful nuclear explosions on earth, the potential is even greater beyond this planet.  Nuclear explosives could potentially change the orbit of asteroids, mine asteroids and comets and propel spacecraft to a significant portion of the speed of light.

On earth, nuclear explosions have proven as awe-inspiring as they are destructive.   They are the only example of humanity seeing the effects of unrestrained thermal fusion up close.  The elements einsteinium and fermium were first observed in the fallout of a nuclear blast. The power of nuclear explosions has helped unlike the secrets of the ionosphere, the earth’s crust and fundamental properties of matter.

It is simply energy: A huge amount of energy. Whether it is destructive depends on how it is used.  Like all forms of energy, it has dangers and can be a weapon.  It also has much greater potential.

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.

There have been a number of photographs taken of alleged “cryptids” such as bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.   Many are poor quality and could be anything.  Others are fairly good views of something, but are likely hoaxes with the photos either staged or doctored.   Now it appears that one group thinks offering 2,000 USD will change that.

Via io9:

This summer, io9 is going cryptozoological. We’re offering a $2000 bounty to the person who sends us the best authentic photo or video of a “cryptid,” or mystery animal. And that’s just the beginning of Cryptid Summer.

Illustration of Sasquatch by Rick Spears (get his book about cryptids here!); photograph of the beach by Pichugin Dmitry/Shutterstock.

A cryptid, according to Wikipedia, is “a creature or plant whose existence has been suggested but that is unrecognized by a scientific consensus, and whose existence is moreover often regarded as highly unlikely.” Think Bigfoot or the Montauk Monster. Cryptids are often urban legends, but there is a scientific side to these mystery animals, too. New life forms develop all the time, and in very unexpected ways. Many animals would have been considered cryptids until scientists began to study evolution and zoology. Think about Cryptid Summer as an opportunity to explore the strange side of evolution and life science.

The Bounty
io9 will be offering a $2000 bounty for the best photographic or video evidence of a genuine cryptid. In August, we will invite our panel of experts, including zoologists, the team behind excellent cryptid blog Cryptomundo, cryptid expert Loren Coleman, and a photoshop analyst, to judge which pictures are the most authentic. We’ll give the bounty to the one that they judge to be the most mysterious yet authentic creature.

How to enter:
Send the picture as a .jpg attached to an email explaining where you took the photo, what you saw, and how the cryptid behaved. If you have a video, we prefer .mov files. Please include your full name and a way we can contact you. Do NOT send photos or video that you didn’t personally take.

I fully expect them to get plenty of entries, but authenticating them? Well that depends on how gullible they are.

The problem with authenticating a photo:

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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.

Could the “Roswell Incident” of 1947 have been more than the crash of an American balloon-borne sensor system?   According to a relatively new claim it was in fact the crash of a secret Soviet spy aircraft.  The idea that the Soviet Union might attempt to conduct aerial reconnaissance flights over the US in the late 1940’s does not seem that far fetched until you read the entirety of the claim being made.

Via Yahoo News (includes video clip of Daily Show Interview)

New book says USSR was behind Roswell UFO
By Claudine Zap

Is truth stranger than conspiracy-theory fiction? A new book on Area 51 that’s already generating a ton of buzz says there was no alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Instead, Stalin did it–maybe.

According to Annie Jacobsen, the reporter who authored “Area 51,” the spaceship was actually a Soviet spy plane that came down during a storm. Jacobsen claims it was filled with bizarre-looking, genetically engineered child-sized pilots. Then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was hoping, Jacobsen alleges, that the news would cause widespread panic in the U.S.

The story gets even stranger: The leader of the USSR had apparently been inspired by the 1938 radio adaptation of the HG Wells story “War of the Worlds,” produced by Orson Welles. The broadcast triggered panic in some listeners who tuned in and mistook it for a real-life alien invasion. (Though later students of the episode claim that the media of Welles’ day vastly exaggerated the scale of public alarm over the broadcast.)

And those ET-looking aviators? They were scientific experiments created by the “Angel of Death,” Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, for the USSR after the war. The flight was piloted remotely, according to accounts in the book, and was filled with a crew of “alien-like children.”

According to Jacobsen’s source, a retired engineer who was put on the project in 1978, the look of the human experiments could explain the alien conspiracy theories: “They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes.”

Is any of this true? There’s no way to prove it. Documents surrounding the Roswell incident are still classified–as is virtually all information related to the mystery spot.

Still, lack of proof hasn’t exactly stopped the book from sparking speculation on the media circuit and on the Web. In the last day, Yahoo! searches skyrocketed 3,000 percent for “area 51 book.” And the tome is penned not by a crackpot conspirator, but a respected journalist.

Even the New York Times gives her credence, writing in its review: “Although this connect-the-dots UFO thesis is only a hasty-sounding addendum to an otherwise straightforward investigative book about aviation and military history, it makes an indelible impression. ‘Area 51′ is liable to become best known for sci-fi provocation.”

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In general, scientists try to use terminology that is clear, straight forward and describes what something is in a way that avoids confusion.  Unfortunately, there are times that terms can be deceptive or downright misnomers.   This can happen for any number of reasons.  Often it is because something is believed to be something that it is not and even after the error is corrected the name sticks.   Other times categories may broaden as more is learned or things once considered related may diverge. There may be more complex historical reasons.

Unfortunately, these terms can make things very confusing, especially for those who are new to an area of study.

A few examples:

Haemophilus influenzae - A pathogenic bacteria which has absolutely nothing to do with true influenza, a viral infection. In 1933, the bacteria was incorrectly identified as the cause of influenza. The name apparently stuck, even after the mistake was identified.

Heavy Metal – This term is commonly used for toxic metal elements. The term is accurate for poisoning by metals like mercury or lead, which are heavy. However, it is also used for other types of metal poisoning, such as beryllium poisoning are also considered to be “heavy metal poisoning” even though beryllium is not heavy at all. In fact, the weight of a metal has nothing to do with its toxicity. Bismuth, for example, is heavier than lead, but non-toxic.

Because of the confusion over this term, IUPAC has taken the unusual step of suggesting that the term no longer be used and instead be replaced with the more accurate and straight forward “toxic metal.”

High Frequency/Shortwave Radio - HF radio uses frequencies between three and thirty megahertz, corresponding to a wave length of anywhere from 160 to about 10 meters.    By most current standards this is not high at all and the length of the waves is quite long.   Cell phones use frequencies of at least 800 mhz with wave lengths of less than one meter.  Indeed, most modern broadcasting, networking and other wireless devices use much higher frequencies.

It is therefore possible to have a statement that, on the surface seems to make no sense at all, such as “When you’re dealing with really low frequencies, such as with an HF radio system, it’s common to have inductively loaded antennas.”

The confusion comes from the fact that, at one time, the most important frequency range for radio communications was in the 300 kHz to 3 Mhz region.  This was thus dubbed the “Medium Frequency” range.  Frequencies up to 30 Mhz were considered to be “high.”  As technology evolved, however, even higher ranges started to be used.  These were dubbed “Very High Frequency” and then “Ultra High Frequency,”  finally, needing more extreme adjectives there was “Extremely High Frequency.”

But EHF is really not extreme by current standards, and VHF is more like “medium frequency,” while HF is considered “low.”   Confusing, isn’t it?

Bluegreen Algae – Not algae at all, but actually a type of bacteria.

Nutritional Calorie – Actually one thousand physical calories.

Fossil Fuel – Though fossil fuels are produced by the decomposition of ancient biological material, the process is not related to fossilization, which is the mineralization of biological material.

Cold Cathode – Most cold cathodes actually operate at an elevated temperature from the environment.  They’re not actually “cold.”  They just don’t have an independent heater.

Geomagnetic North Pole – The magnetic pole of the earth is actually equivalent to magnetic south of a magnet.  It’s all rather confusing.   A bar magnet has a “north pole” and a “south pole.”   Since opposites attract, if a bar magnet is placed in the magnetic field of another magnet, the north pole will point to the south pole of the larger magnetic field.   The “north pole” of the earth is the direction to which the “north pole” of a magnet will point, and therefore is actually magnetic south.

Any additional examples would, of course, be appreciated!

While the world was obsessing over the problems with cooling the cores at severely damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, there are a few things that seem to have gone all but unreported.

This is a terrible situation that goes far beyond the nuclear plant issues.

• As of this posting, at least 2,800 Japanese are confirmed dead. The actual number of dead is unknown.   Many thousands more are missing and feared dead.  Estimates of the actual dead range from ten thousand to more than twenty thousand.  In some areas, half the population is missing and feared dead.
• The number of seriously injured is unknown, but believed to be enormous.   Japanese hospitals are flooded and many hospitals have sustained serious damage and are left with limited or no water or electricity.
• Infrastructure has been destroyed.   Numerous sewer and water systems in Northern Japan are so damaged that major sections will need to be completely rebuilt.   Telecommunications links are severed.  The electrical grid has been severely damaged with transformers, power stations and transmission lines destroyed.   Trains are unable to run because of destroyed track and highways are damaged, making it difficult to transport victims to safety and get supplies to the damaged areas.   Even outside the area directly effected by the quake, power shortages may cause rolling blackouts and energy rationing.
• The number of Japanese left homeless has been reported in he millions. Some of those displaced will likely be able to return to homes that are severely damaged, but recoverable.   However, the total number who have completely lost their homes and all their property is unknown and may be hundreds of thousands or more.
• Hundreds of thousands of Japanese businesses have been destroyed.   Even large businesses like auto makers have seen extensive damage. Millions of workers may be out of a job.
• Reconstruction estimates are now up to 180 billion US dollars and may increase.   The scope of this event is so large that it is almost impossible to fix a single cost to it, as it is so large it exceeded the limits of conventional market economics and could undermine the monetary system of Japan.   Insurance companies and financial institutions are in danger of being wiped out along with retirement funds and other savings.
• Though it has hardly been reported in the media, dam failures have destroyed thousands of structures.
• The crisis has exceeded the ability of japan to provide temporary housing, food and other supplies.   Many are without food or water.
• Refineries are severely damaged, some resulted in huge fires and discharges of oil.
• With sewer and water systems destroyed, thousands of bodies washing in from the sea and huge areas flooded, Japan faces a sanitary and ecological disaster that may dwarf Hurricane Katrina.   The tsunami that followed the quake inundated sewage treatment plants, chemical storage facilities, gas stations and industrial areas.   The level of chemical and biological contamination remains unknown.  Meanwhile, fires are dumping huge plumes of smoke into the atmosphere.

The New York Times has a very sobering gallery of before and after satellite images of the areas hit by the quake and tsunami.

Meanwhile the media is having a field day with the nuclear reactors.   Though the plant was damaged heavily, this is the least of Japan’s problems.

I fear that the continued obsession with the nuclear reactor situation may lead to precious resources and attention being diverted from those who need it most.

A little bit off topic, but here’s a great example of why things are not always quite what they seem on television.    By picking the right sequence of shots and editing it together cleverly, you can make something seem much different than it is.

The following infamous outtakes are from a commercial for Paul Masson wines staring Orson Welles.   While Welles may have been one of the best actors and directors of our time, by the end of his life he was a raging alcoholic.   In the takes bellow he was quite obviously tanked.   It was filmed in the late 1970’s.

And here’s the final product.   Welles came back to the studio (presumably a bit more sober) to do the voice-over for the final commercial. Yet the visual portion of the ad is entirely from the original takes.  No new video was taken.

A lot of classic editing tricks can be seen here. Notice that while the voice of Welles and background music and sounds imply a continuous scene, the actual footage of Welles never lasts more than a few seconds before cutting away. Other scenes of the party and the wine fill the time while Welles actual appearance on camera is very brief. Still, it’s amazing they were able to salvage anything from the takes with a drunken Orson Welles.