Space disasters from Engineer Jobs:
This universe, or the next, could kill us at any moment.
While popular fiction is glutted with robot uprisings, zombie plagues, and apocalyptic warfare, none of our fictive inventions match fundamental physics for terrifying beauty and finality.
Gamma Ray Bursts, … Rogue Black Holes, … Vacuum Decay.
(Oh my.)
Via the New York Times, a reminder to always take officials with a grain of salt when they issue statements denying that the oceans and air are being poisoned:
The stricken nuclear power plant at Fukushima has probably been leaking contaminated water into the ocean for two years, ever since an earthquake and tsunami badly damaged the plant, Japan’s chief nuclear regulator said on Wednesday.
In unusually candid comments, Shunichi Tanaka, the head of the Nuclear Regulation Authority, also said that neither his staff nor the plant’s operator knew exactly where the leaks were coming from, or how to stop them.
The operator, Tokyo Electric Power, has reported spikes in the amounts of radioactive cesium, tritium and strontium detected in groundwater at the plant, adding urgency to the task of sealing any leaks. Radioactive cesium and strontium, especially, are known to raise risks of cancer in humans.
Until recently, Tokyo Electric, known as Tepco, flatly denied that any of that water was leaking into the ocean, even though various independent studies of radiation levels in the nearby ocean have suggested otherwise.
The work of “pranksters” providing the public with technically correct information. ANIMAL New York reports:
Relax, they’re not real. MTA spokesman Adam Lisberg, who dismissed the postings as “the work of pranksters,” told us so. But though neither of the posters were distributed by the MTA or any other state or city agency, both are totally truthful in their contents.
The NYPD will indeed be pumping the city with invisible gases called perflourocarbos this summer, in an effort to test how more harmful airborne substances would spread in the event of a chemical attack. And the nuclear power plant at Indian Point Energy Center is so at risk and so close to the city the Natural Resources Defense Council warns of a disaster ten to 100 times worse than Fukushima if it ever encounters seismic activity. Should you be worried? That’s up to you.
If you’re planning on being cryogenically frozen and then revived in the 22nd century, consider selling your apartment in Tokyo now. New Scientist writes:
Sydney, Tokyo and Buenos Aires watch out. These cities will experience some of the greatest sea level rises by 2100, according to one of the most comprehensive predictions to date.
Sea levels have been rising for over 100 years – not evenly, though. Several processes are at work, says Mahé Perrette of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Some land is sinking, some is rising. The gravitational pull of disappearing ice sheets lead to a fall in sea levels in their surrounding areas.
Perrette has modeled all of these effects and calculated local sea level rises in 2100 for the entire planet. The global average rise is predicted to be between 30 and 106 centimeters. Coasts around the Indian Ocean will be hard hit, as will Japan, south-east Australia and Argentina.
The art group Anti-Banality Union has created a feature-length movie which is impossible to stop watching. Fifty Hollywood blockbusters portraying the spectacular obliteration of New York City were cut up and interwoven (somehow fitting together seamlessly), revealing the meta-narrative running through them all — the “death-drive on the part of capitalist culture”:
Unclear Holocaust is a feature-length autopsy of Hollywood’s New York-destruction fantasy, gleaned from over fifty major studio event-movies and detourned into one relentless orgy of representational genocide. It is the unrivaled assembly of the greatest amount of capital and private property heretofore captured in one frame, that, with unfathomable narrative efficacy, suicides itself in an annihilatory flux of fire, water, and aeronautics…We see the Cinema as it really is; an unequivocal annihilation, the auto-genocidal mass fantasy of a megalomaniacally depressed First World.
Relevant in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, a conversation between BOMB Magazine and Rebecca Solnit about this hazardous, even deadly, phenomenon:
The term “elite panic” was coined by [sociologists] Caron Chess and Lee Clarke of Rutgers. Elite panic [is] the way that elites, during disasters and their aftermath, imagine that the public is not only in danger but also a source of danger. In case after case how elites respond in destructive ways, from withholding essential information, to blocking citizen relief efforts, to protecting property instead of people.
[Elites] believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line and that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface—that was very clear in Katrina. Timothy Garton Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true.
One and a half years later, the consensus seems to be that the site of the Fukushima nuclear accident cannot be cleaned up or contained until future generations invent the technology to do so, Washington’s Blog notes:
World-renowned physicist Michio Kaku said recently: “It will take years to invent a new generation of robots able to withstand the radiation.” The world leader in decommissioning nuclear reactors, and one of the main contractors hired to clean up Fukushima – EnergySolutions – made a similar point in May:
Concerning the extraction of fuel debris [at Fukushima], “There is no technology which may be directly applied,” said [top EnergySolutions executive] Morant.
A top American government nuclear expert – William D. Magwood – told the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works:
There will need to be new technologies and new methodologies created to be able to enable them to clean the site up and some of these technologies don’t exist yet, so there’s a long way to go with that…There’s a long, long way to go.
Photo: Mononeko (PD)
According to Russia Times, a Japanese public health organization has released grim finding: Aafter examining 38,000 children from the Fukushima Prefecture, site of the infamous nuclear disaster, the organization has estimated that a third of the prefecture’s children will be at risk for developing cancer as a result of radiation poisoning.
The Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey reports that over 13,000 of the children examined exhibited swollen cysts or nodules on their thyroids. Radiation penetrates soft tissues and settles in thyroids. Over time, the nodules can swell and become cancerous.
The children of the effected Prefecture will receive cancer screenings every two years until they turn 20, and will then continue to receive screenings every five years until the end of their lives.
Some physicians in the international community feel that the Japanese are not adequately publicizing the results of the study and minimizing the true danger that the children face.… Read the rest
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Scott B. Williams is the author of several books on travel, emergency preparation and survival, including Getting Out Alive: 13 Deadly Scenarios and How Others Survived, Bug Out: The Complete Plan for Escaping a Catastrophic Disaster Before It’s Too Late, and Bug Out Vehicles and Shelters: Build and Outfit Your Lifesaving Escape. However, his most recent book is a work of fiction: The Pulse: A Novel of Survival of Surviving the Collapse of the Grid:
As massive solar flares bombard the Earth, an intense electromagnetic pulse instantly destroys the power grid throughout North America. Within hours desperate citizens panic and anarchy descends. Surrounded by chaos, Casey Drager, a student at Tulane University, must save herself from the havoc in the streets of New Orleans. Casey and two of her friends evacuate the city and travel north, where they end up in the dangerous backwaters of Mississippi, forced to use their survival skills to seek refuge and fight for their lives.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, Casey’s father, Artie, finds himself cut off and stranded. His Caribbean sailing vacation has turned into every parent’s nightmare. Warding off pirates and tackling storms, Artie uses the stars to guide him toward his daughter.
The Pulse is a compelling action-adventure novel that reveals what it would take to survive in a world lit only by firelight, where all the rules have changed and each person must fend for himself.
Join host Matt Staggs as he and Scott B. Williams discuss the likelihood of a mass catastrophic event, essential survival techniques and the frightening world of The Pulse.
A gripping, short documentary video of the horrifying challenge confronting the Soviet Union’s “biorobots” — soldiers, scientists, and civilians who were tasked with the emergency cleanup following the explosions at Chernobyl. Radio-controlled robotic machines were used at first, but their circuitry broke down from the radiation, leaving humans with shovels as the only option.
