Stuff from far away is cool

I loved my Toyota, single bean chocolate and fair trade coffee have become two of my secret guilty indulgences, I still put gasoline in my car and wear Nikes, but golly gee whiz, let's not go overboard.

You might not want to eat the fish

Interesting series, Nuclear Waste?, about Patoka Lake, Indiana:
intro
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6
part 7
part 8
part 9
part next-to-last
part ___

I've collected all of them [so far] for you in order, but you'll have to check back later yourself at Pax Americana for the last post in the series, sine it isn't up yet.

Skilled negotiator or Caspar Milquetoast?

Barack Obama is spreading the message of Hope and Change and other Warm Fuzzies and has co-opted John Edwards' rhetoric on Standing Up to Special Interests. Meanwhile, his actual record demonstrates something between incremental change and a willingness to go along with the status quo.

My guess, and I'm SWAGging it here, is that he's a skilled negotiator and not a pushover. In both health care access and nuclear power regulation, he's achieved a middle ground between citizens and corporations. But 'middle ground' covers a lot of the playing field, and unfortunately for us citizens, it looks to me like the little guys' goal posts are still a lot further away than the big guys' goal posts are.

For the record, I think Hillary Clinton is also a skilled negotiator and no Caspar Milquetoast either. Given the same situations, I think she'd have gotten much the same results.

Not that I want to sound like I'm hating on Obama more than Clinton. They're six of one, half a dozen of the other if you ask me. Obama has a timeline for leaving Iraq and Hillary doesn't, but her health care plan has mandates and Obama's doesn't. Either way, one of the glass ceilings will finally be cracked and that's a good thing.

Florida may have thrown away their delegates by having their primary ahead of time, but it did give me a chance to vote for a real Democrat without having to write one in and for that I am grateful.



Caspar Milquetoast

Cool

The Air Force is leading the way on alternate energy, allowing companies to run wind farms and solar
power plants on its bases. Cool. Unfortunately, they also want to include nuclear power plants in the initiative. Scary.

On the other hand, we do have lots of BBs we've got to do something about.

Where are they now?

Those six wandering nuclear warheads, did anybody say where they ended up once they were discovered in Louisiana?

The latest news I can find [I didn't try very hard] is that they're blaming it on nuclear and exactly identical non-nuclear warheads being stored together in the same place. I don't which scares me more, the fact that they might really be storing the two together, or the fact that this might be a lie that they're feeding us to direct our attention away from whatever it is they'd like to cover up.

alt-FEMA

Q: What can we do about New Orleans? It's been 2 years, the place is a disaster, we've had 2 category 5 hurricanes already this summer, and the season is just now getting really hot. Besides, we've still got Mississippi to put back on the map.

A: We'll just nuke it! One B-52 with about a half-dozen or so cruise missiles, complete with nuclear warheads, ought to do the trick.

Oh, wait. Not headed for New Orleans, headed for Shreveport instead, to some Air Force base there, to decommission a couple few useless old missiles they had lying around in North Dakota. Yeah, riiiiight.

Beyond a few interesting curlicues in the Red River, Shreveport has nothing much to recommend it. You'd never miss it if they nuked that place. I'd never miss it anyway. I can see how Soybean Steve might disagree, though it's a bit fuzzy just exactly which Red River Valley the song is talking about. All of them, maybe.



From the CNN article:

Shepperd [a retired Air Force major general and military analyst for CNN] said the United States had agreed in a Cold War-era treaty not to fly nuclear weapons. "It appears that what happened was this treaty agreement was violated," he said.

[snip]

The Air Force announced that all flights of fighters and bombers in the United States will be halted on September 14 to allow for a review of procedures.

Once the mistake was discovered, the Air Force immediately began an inventory of all of its nuclear weapons, a military official said.

Today is September 5, what are they planning to do for the next 9 days?

Iran isn't going to nuke us

but Tennessee just might.

Some 35 liters, or just over 9 gallons, of highly enriched uranium solution leaked from a transfer line into a protected glovebox and spilled onto the floor. The leak was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid ``running into a hallway'' from under a door, according to one document.

The commission said there were two areas, the glovebox and an old elevator shaft, where the solution potentially could have collected in such a way to cause an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

``It is likely that at least one worker would have received an exposure high enough to cause acute health effects or death,'' the agency wrote.

It happened at Nuclear Fuel Services [that photo scares me], a company in tiny [and scenic!] Erwin, TN, that has been converting weapons-grade uranium into fuel for your neighborhood nuclear power plant [mostly a good thing], but can't tell you that it damn near nuked you because that would be giving out government secrets.

Tenn. Nuclear Fuel Problems Kept Secret
Monday August 20, 2007 9:01 PM
By DUNCAN MANSFIELD
Associated Press Writer

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant - including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

The leak turned out to be one of nine violations or test failures since 2005 at privately owned Nuclear Fuel Services Inc., a longtime supplier of fuel to the U.S. Navy's nuclear fleet.

The public was never told about the problems when they happened. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission revealed them for the first time last month when it released an order demanding improvements at the company, but no fine.

Read the entire article here.

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