Recent content by joewein

I think you're confusing the Republicans with the Libertarians, and the Democrats with the Communists, but other than that you are correct ;-) You can not reduce politics to a single dimension such as government control vs individual freedom. It takes at least a two dimensional matrix to...

The difference was that this one was air-cooled. So when the cooling water intake was knocked out, the other EDGs in units 5 and 6 became unusable despite not being flooded, but this could keep going and save the day.

The "pig nose" must be those short pipe stubs sticking out to the right of the http://img.ibtimes.com/www/data/images/full/2011/05/25/103517-fukushima-daiichi-unit-1.jpg , in the top centre "cloud" section of the right hand wall. There are probably two of them because of the two IC units. It...

I see what I missed. Concrete is made from a mix of cement, aggregate, sand and water. I was only thinking about the chemistry of cement and water (plus air), but the aggregate may contain carbonate rocks (such as limestone or dolomite) too.

I also wonder how much extra CO2 would be released from concrete melted by corium once it's gone much beyond penetrating the concrete surface. It was under the impression that CO2 from air reacts with concrete mostly at the surface exposed to air and that deeper inside there would be far less...

I am curious when the radiation maps from the helicopter surveys for Hokkaido will be published. So far the area from Aomori to Gifu has been covered. Both of these prefectures at the far ends of the published area came out pretty clean. A couple of weeks ago there were reports that caesium...

You are probably thinking about Yasuhiro Sonoda, parliamentary secretary at the cabinet office who drank water in front of journalists about 5 weeks ago. That water was not from the basements of the wrecked units 1-3, where the water in this current leak originates from. It was from units 5...

While any increase in suicides is bad, a lower increase in Fukushima vs. Japan as a whole would at least appear relatively positive. It might indicate fewer people suffering from depression there than one might expect. On the other hand, about 0.1% of the population of the prefecture...

Steve, I think even in that scenario the unscrubbed vent path still plays a significant role, because the absence of more effective scrubbers may have acted as an incentive to postpone venting as much as possible in order not having to release unscrubbed gas into the environment around the...

An http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20111109f3.html" ) provided advice on how to decontaminate areas affected by nuclear fallout, such as in Fukushima, Tochigi and northern Chiba prefecture. Most of the advice is sound, but some is downright alarming: So let me get this right: you should...

That's a mistake, maybe by automated translation. Japanese: English:

Its use really declined from the 1950s. That turned an asset into a liability. Parts of Setagaya still had a more rural character then. Even now the Tokyo University of Agriculture has a major campus here, with fields and greenhouses. Setagaya is relatively affluent, so there may be more...

It was often claimed that the estimate had gone from 10% of Chernobyl in April to 20% in June, but that is not correct. There were two estimates in April at 7% and 12% by NISA and NSC respectively (an average of 10% I guess), the lower of which was updated to 14% in June. The initially higher...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/rc20111020a3.html" that appeared in the paper last Sunday.

It is indeed, but also not entirely surprising if it was an incinerator for grass, since grass already tends to collect fallout and incinerating organic matter would concentrate the dose. On the 5.82 vs. 0.91 microsieverts per hour, it's a large difference and it's to their credit that the...