Integral Thought

It was with great sadness I read a couple of hours ago of the death of Anne McCaffrey from a heart attack at the age of 85. McCaffrey was one of the scifi/fantasy greats; I first read the Dragonriders of Pern series when I was 12. My mother introduced me to them as an example of good fantasy; my maths teacher lent me several of the books. It was the dragons of Pern that first inspired me to paint and draw dragons and discover I could draw at the age of 14.

Anne McCaffrey was always kind to her fans, answering all her correspondence herself. I can remember the day I received a letter from her myself - handwritten with a fountain pen using green ink, in which she goodnaturedly groused about her son Todd claiming the kitchen table at inopportune moments for games of Dungeons & Dragons with his friends and mentioning her beloved horses. Unlike most authors, McCaffrey didn't merely tolerate fanfic but actively encouraged it.

She was a regular at many scifi conventions, often as Guest of Honour, and always had a word for her fans.

Rest well, Anne McCaffrey. The dragons will keen your passing.

Originally posted at "http://arkady.dreamwidth.org/1278121.html"; you may comment either there or here.

Earlier today, about noon GMT, Turkey was struck by a magnitude 7.3 earthquake. The epicentre was about 10 miles north of the city of Van, near the lake of the same name; the region has been rocked repeatedly since then with a succession of more than 30 aftershocks, some reaching as high as 5.9 and all higher than 4.5, which are still continuing. Currently there are 45 confirmed deaths (some news agencies reporting 85) but it is estimated the toll could reach 1000 or more.

CNN has reported on the earthquake, as has the BBC. The Turkish Red Crescent is rendering aid to those affected, setting up disaster management centres and helping to co-ordinate relief efforts with the Turkish miliatary; the British Red Cross hasn't yet started an appeal as needs are still to be assessed and no request for international aid has been requested yet, but donations can be made to the British Red Cross general fund via the front page.

ShelterBox are assessing the situation and standing by for a request from the Turkish government. The DEC have not yet announced an appeal. The IHH is accepting donations now - scroll down and choose "Van Acil Yardim".

It is being reported on Twitter that Israel has offered aid to Turkey and been refused, but thus far Turkey has not requested aid from any other countries, though the international community is standing by to render assistance, and several countries have teams of their own earthquake specialists standing by in case of need. A plane with medical aid and supplies from Azerbaijan has just touched down at the quake-damaged Van airport.

The latest up-to-date information is being disseminated via Twitter using the hashtags #earthquake, #Van and #Turkey; the British Red Cross will post updates regarding any appeal on their Twitter account, @BritishRedCross.

Originally posted at "http://arkady.dreamwidth.org/1277283.html"; you may comment either there or here.

Before you start blaming the Tories, or your political scapegoat of choice, for the riots of the past three days, I strongly advise you to read this LiveJournal post by Rosamicula. 13-20% of school-leavers are near-illiterate, with no hope and no future but the dole and a life on the edge of society. That figure has stayed the same over the past 30 years, through successive governments. No one government has failed them; society as a whole has.

If you want to help your community recover from the damage done, start with the schools. Reach out to those kids. Give them a hand up, not a hand out; use that privilege you were born with, that privilege they were denied from birth, and help give them a future.

Originally posted at "http://arkady.dreamwidth.org/1274094.html"; you may comment either there or here.

Tomorrow we move house. We've spent the past week packing, with it getting steadily more and more frantic as the weekend approached. We could really have done without my having gone down with a migraine yesterday, but these things happen - it wasn't entirely unexpected, given all the stress this house move has caused us to date. Still, it meant I lost a packing day we couldn't really afford.

Even the dolls have been busy packing all their worldly belongings into boxes!



Anyway, phone line and internet get switched off here at some point on Monday. If all goes well, the phone at the new place should get switched on straight away, but it might not be connected until Wednesday. Either way, internet won't be back until Thursday at the earliest. I'll have my Blackberry and may be able to get my netbook to connect to the internet with it, but I'm not counting on it; so internet access is likely to be patchy at best. I might be moderately active on Twitter and Facebook via my phone, but that's about it. I can still be emailed, and texts are just fine! Apart from that, assume we'll be offline until further notice.

Behave yourselves whilst we're offline! ;-)

Originally posted at "http://arkady.dreamwidth.org/1270851.html"; you may comment either there or here.

This evening, whilst on our way to morris-dancing practice (Royal Liberty Morris in Hornchurch), my eldest daughter and I were greeted by the sight of a Passion play taking place in the car park of the Queen’s Theatre on Billet Road. It was quite the spectacle – mainly due to the hideous amounts of Fail on display. Unable to procure a donkey for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem on, they’d found a white pony as a substitute. The Roman soldiers looked like a bunch of riot police complete with batons. They managed to lose the crown of thorns, so Jesus had to be crucified wearing a natty pair of white boxers and a neon green party hat.

Yes, really. Neon green.

What really took the biscuit however was the Nazi Sanhedrin. Dressed all in black robes, they sat on a podium beneath red banners bearing a white circle and a black Imperial eagle.

I’ll leave you to think about the sheer offensiveness of that for a minute. Jesus being condemned to death by Nazi Stormtrooper Jews.

Apparently it was the final dress rehearsal for the Hornchurch Passion Play, which takes place roughly every five years. I have no idea who was responsible for the gross offensiveness of likening the Jews to the Nazis; the sheer insensitivity being displayed is frankly staggering though. I’m fairly certain that the third Station of the Cross (or first Station if you’re going the traditional instead of scriptural route) is not supposed to resemble the Nuremberg Rally complete with Nazi regalia….

Originally posted at "http://arkady.dreamwidth.org/1268588.html"; you may comment either there or here.

Both NHK and Kyodo news agencies are reporting fire has broken out at reactor 4, Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant - NHK saying hydrogen explosion, but no blast was heard. Fire broke out at 5:45am local time (20:45 GMT) - crews still trying to bring it under control. Spotted something had happened myself along with several other tweeters as a sudden slight spike in radiation levels at one of the sensors.

The fire was detected on the NE upper corner of the outer structure that houses no.4 reactor and was spotted by a worker who was carrying a battery to the central containment room on the opposite side.

Unlike reactors 1, 2 and 3 which shut down when Friday's earthquake and tsunami hit, reactors 4. 5 and 6 were already out of service for maintenance and the spent fuel rods from the cores submerged in containment pools. There are concerns that the spent fuel pool at number 4 reactor has been damaged, causing a leak; monitoring has shown that the water temperature had risen and it was feared that it might be boiling which could lead to a build up of hydrogen and an explosion similar to those which have already affected reactors 1, 2 and 3. At present TepCo are fully investigating to establish what the exact cause of this latest fire is, but no explosion was actually heard by any of the remaining 50 staff presently working at Fukushima Daiichi.

Radiation levels are now dropping again.

Originally posted at "http://arkady.dreamwidth.org/1266437.html"; you may comment either there or here.

For those curious about the "dangerous levels of radiation" in Japan arising from the Fukushima nuclear plant problems: Latest readings as reported by NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) in microsieverts: Shinjuku 0.81, Saitama-shi 1.22, Iwaki-shi Fukuoka 23.72.

Compare this to microsieverts you get from a flight from Tokyo to NY = 1...90; a stomach x-ray = 600; regular living in one year = 2400.

(I highly recommend checking out the links listed here for those who want more in-depth monitoring information and figures.)

Originally posted at "http://arkady.dreamwidth.org/1266280.html"; you may comment either there or here.

Tokyo has just been rocked by another earthquake. A few minutes ago a magnitude 6+ struck north Shizuoka; reports are coming in of some damage and injuries. The exact magnitude is not yet known; USGS hasn't yet released any data on the quake. The Japanese Meteorological Office has stated that this is a fresh earthquake, unconnected to the recent quakes and to the Tokai fault which Japan fears could cause "the big one"; a Tokai mega-quake could wipe out the centre of Japan and the majority of the population, but the Met Office spokesman is stressing that it is not that fault line that is involved here. There are reports of a fire at a hotel and some collapsed ceilings, but the Shizuoka nuclear power plant is unaffected.

Edit: Magnitude was 6.4, epicentre was Toruga Bay in Shizuoka.

Originally posted at "http://arkady.dreamwidth.org/1266020.html"; you may comment either there or here.

I've been watching events in Japan unfold with, I think, much the same sense of horror anyone viewing the footage must be feeling. I knew something massive had to have happened when I checked my email on Friday morning and saw over 30 notifications sitting in the "USGS" folder. I'm signed up to the US Geological Service earthquake notifications list, which means I get an email notification of any earthquake of magnitude 4.5 or higher. 30+ notifications invariably means something absolutely massive has hit; and sure enough, it had.

In the first 24 hours, there were over 150 aftershocks of magnitude 5.0 and over, of which more than 20 were magnitude 6.0 or higher, with 2 at 6.8, a 6.9 and a 7.1.

The Japanese Geological Service has since upgraded the initial temblor to 9.0; Robert Geller - seismologist working at the University of Tokyo - has referred to it as a 9.1. It triggered a tsunami over 10m high that raced inland several kilometres - and that raced across the Pacific at 500kmh to hit the opposite side of the ocean. In most places it had diminished to only 0.6m high, but local geography caused it to reach 2m when it hit some US coastal areas, causing significant damage to the marina at Santa Cruz and to Crescent City.

Initial measurements showed that the force of the temblor had forced a 500km long section of the ocean floor 7m towards Japan; measurements at an observatory in northern Tokyo showed it had moved 8m west. Subsequent GPS from 1200 sensors mshowed that the whole island of Honshu had shifted 4m to the west, and the Earth's axis had been tilted by 4-6" due to the force.

All these statistics are staggering enough without adding in the statistics of those injured, displaced, missing or dead. I've found it easier to concentrate on facts and figures; it's not that I'm callous to the loss of life - there is simply nothing I can do for it other than express sympathy and condolences, and post links to suitable charitable organisations, which I've been doing on Facebook, Twitter and a few online communities.

Increasingly I've been reading people expressing most concern over the damaged nuclear power plants, specifically Fukushima Daiichi (Number 1).

Fukushima is not going to become a second Tschernobyl, which I think is what everyone is dreading; it can't, because the conditions are completely different. The reactors are completely different types, for a start; for another, at Tschernobyl the reactor was still running when the meltdown occurred - at Fukushima all three reactors shut down automatically and safely the moment the earthquake was detected.

At Tschernobyl, the reactor core was fully powered and operating when (against all safety protocols) they decided to take all the safety systems offline to simulate a power cut - and then couldn't bring them back online again. The core started to overheat but they were unable to scram the control rods to shut down the reaction. The core went into meltdown and exploded, blowing open the top of the containment chamber and the roof of the plant, spreading radioactive vapour and contamination over a wide area. The core continued to burn for three days before they were able to bring it under control and quench it.

The situation at Fukushima is very different. As I said, the emergency systems kicked in automatically the moment the earthquake hit and the control rods were scrammed safely, halting the reaction. The core pile still holds a lot of residual heat however - in excess of 250°C. At this point the cooling systems should kick in to circulate water around the pile to cool it, but the power was knocked out. Back-up generators should kick in at this point, but the power station was built to withstand up to a magnitude 8.6 earthquake and a tsunami of up to 5.7m in height - and the earthquake was actually a 9.0 (they revised it yesterday from the initial reports of 8.9) and the tsunami was in excess of 10m, so the back-up generators were knocked out as well.

As the water in the reactor core evaporated, the fuel rods were exposed to the steam which split into oxygen and hydrogen. This started happening first in Reactor no. 1; they tried venting off some of the hydrogen, but detected radioactive caesium and iodine, which meant enough of the rods had been exposed to cause a meltdown as the zincaloy casing of the fuel rods melted. This meant the control rods were no longer fully inhibiting the reaction so the temperature started to rise to the point where the hydrogen exploded, which happened on Saturday. This only damaged the outer building shell of the reactor however, not the inner containment core.

Once they'd ascertained that the inner containment shell was still secure, they started pumping in sea water laced with boric acid; the boron in the boric acid retards any further reaction and basically acts as one huge liquid control rod. However, the core in Reactor no.3 went the same way as no.1 resulting in a hydrogen explosion that blew off the concrete roof over the reactor - again, without damaging the inner containment shell. They are flooding no.3 with sea water and boric acid as well, and are trying to do the same with no.2 - however they're having problems pumping in the sea water as fast as it is evaporating, and it's believed the core was, briefly, completely exposed for a short while. They don't know yet whether any melting of no.2's core has taken place, but they've detected hydrogen and rising pressure inside the core which suggests at least partial meltdown. They are carefully trying to vent off the hydrogen and prevent another explosion.

However, even if all three reactors go into complete meltdown, it won't be a disaster; each reactor stands inside an outer steel containment shell filled at the bottom with several metres depth of inert boron-containing concrete designed in such a way that if meltdown occurs, breaching the base of the reactor core, the molten core will spread out on the floor of the containment chamber, increasing the surface area so it will cool faster. Once it has all cooled and hardened, engineers in protective clothing would then break up the core mass and it would be removed to a nuclear waste processing plant. There would be no massive explosion and no radioactive contamination beyond a local amount.

Currently there are members of the US atomic energy commission, 12 French engineers who are experts in nuclear accidents and a consultant from Tschernobyl on site as well as British scientists assisting the engineers at Fukushima. Yukiya Amano, head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, says Fukushima's reactor vessels "have held and radioactive release is limited" despite the effects of the earthquake and tsunami.Japan has asked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to provide expert help at its damaged nuclear plant. IAEA will be giving daily briefings on the situation at Fukushima Daiichi, and is satisfied that TepCo have been given full, honest and detailed information on what has been going on - another way in which this situation is completely different to Tschernobyl, where the Russian authorities did not admit a major nuclear incident had taken place until other countries had started detecting elevated radiation levels. Thus far Russia has confirmed it is monitoring radiation levels at its nearest observatory on an hourly basis but detected no increase in radiation, which is in line with what TepCo has reported.

Originally posted at "http://arkady.dreamwidth.org/1265729.html"; you may comment either there or here.