A year and a half ago, I ranted about the media’s nuclear ignorance and hype while covering the Fukushima tsunami and damage to the Daiichi reactor cores. I always like to follow up on my rants with new news on the fallout, pun intended. Dr. Richard Muller of the UC Berzerkeley does a nice job of putting things in perspective in his recent article published in The Wall Street Journal. He also saves me the pain of reeducating myself on radiation energy and cell damage. The REM (Roentgen Equivalent Man – go ahead, dazzle your coworkers) is the unit of…
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This week I provide my own analysis of raw data to nail this Jell-O to the wall, and I’m done. It’s all good. Does anyone know what the “O” stands for? Orama? Jell Orama? First a recap from last week from which I got some blowback. But would you believe it if I told you I received substantially more support and backslapping from critics of climate change? As with any highly charged issue, readers/observers tend to attack on a hair trigger anything that challenges established positions and assign you to a broad group of in-duh-viduals to which you do not…
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AAAAAAAAHHHH! Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off! Disclosure: I am not a nuclear physicist but I do have the equivalent of a MS degree in nuclear engineering from a classified (as in secret) U.S. nuclear laboratory. A week ago I was sitting here writing my blog in the aftermath of the Japanese devastation: Billions of dollars of damage, at least 10,000 fatalities, and parents finding their deceased children or elderly parents in smashed vehicles and destroyed buildings. What is the media absolutely obsessed with? Why of course, something they know absolutely nothing about. I have never seen…
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Back in the day when I was in the nuclear Navy, Greenpeace was not so infrequently pulling stunts like running their zodiacs up on the top of submarine hulls to make their unfounded statements of radiation releases to the environment. Since 9/11, you can bet they stopped this practice. Even back in the early 1990s the hatch was guarded by a burly guy sporting a short barrel shotgun with the largest shell chamber I’ve ever seen. Stopping power. The fact is, the US Navy runs the cleanest nuclear plants in the world with thousands of operating reactor YEARS and not…
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