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When couples marry, people will give them dates and peanuts – a reference to the wish Zaosheng guizi or “May you soon give birth to a son”. The word for dates is also zao and peanuts are huasheng
The powerful date and peanut lobbies are up in arms, claiming that such a ban will cost them more than peanuts. Their claim? "If you outlaw puns. Only criminals will have puns."
When Caille took us on a tour of the site, we were fitted with dosimeters to tell us how much we were being exposed to. Suddenly, a sound we didn't want to hear. Bob Simon: Hey, there's beepers going off. Nicolas Caille: No, no. It's not. It's normal. Bob Simon: You're sure? Nicolas Caille: Yes, yes, yes. I'm definitively sure. Bob Simon: I don't like a beeper in Chernobyl. I don't like that sound.
However, although Bob Simon twice shows he has no depth of understanding, there is no technical error in the transcript of that 60 Minutes show. Aside from the ooh-wow reactions of Bob Simon, it is exactly correct. (I haven't watched the video. I can imagine there is more ooh-wow in the video editing.) The main idea of the story is illustrated by this quote: "There's still so much radiation coming from the reactor that workers have to construct the arch nearly a thousand feet away, shielded by a massive concrete wall. When finished, the arch will be slid into place around the Sarcophagus, then sealed up."
In fact, the expense of covering the extremely dangerous parts of the area is enormous. That is a very serious issue, an issue of concern to everyone in the world. After many years, the work of reducing the danger is still not finished.
There is a nuclear disaster area in the United States, the Hanford nuclear site. I've heard about the some of the problems over many years from a manager of one of the departments of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Wikipedia article mentions some of the problems. Here is one quote: "Citing the 2014 Hanford Lifecycle Scope Schedule and Cost report, the 2014 estimated cost of the remaining Hanford clean up is $113.6 billion..." [my emphasis] Retrieved Dec. 3, 2014.
Here is another quote from the Hanford Wikipedia article: "From 1944 to 1971, pump systems drew cooling water from the river and, after treating this water for use by the reactors, returned it to the river. Before being released back into the river, the used water was held in large tanks known as retention basin for up to six hours. Longer-lived isotopes were not affected by this retention, and several terabecquerels entered the river every day. These releases were kept secret by the federal government."
What is called cleaning Hanford has now taken more than 50 years. The Wikipedia article is not, at present, completely clear about that fact, apparently because, as the quote above says, the U.S. government managed the information so that it did not get into the news, although much of the information was not actually a secret.
The problem is not in what is said in the transcript of 60 Minutes show, but in what is communicated. The average viewer has no understanding of nuclear radiation. The author of the Atomic Insights story is annoyed by the fact that the 60 Minutes story has the effect of making it more difficult to make progress in providing energy from nuclear reactors.
It is possible to make reliable, safe nuclear reactors. But, overall, nuclear reactors are still unsafe. The problem isn't in the underlying technology. The problem is lapses of management. Managers, and people in general, often do dumb things. Here are 4 examples:
1) CBS 60 Minutes management let Bob Simon do his "ooh-wow" reaction on camera, instead of educating himself. Lesley Stahl is even worse, in my experience.
2) Part of the destruction of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was the fact that people with no technical knowledge made technically important decisions. One of those decisions was to place the backup power generator in a basement rather than on nearby high ground. When the basement became flooded, there was no backup power, and that led to release of radiation.
3) Slashdot Beta is an example. Managers at Dice Holdings don't understand their purchase of the Slashdot technology discussion web site, but they try to make decisions without teaching themselves.
4) The handling of the web site for the ACA, the U.S. Affordable Care Act, showed that the executive branch of the United States government had no understanding of the challenges, as comments on Slashdot frequently said. The law uses the word "affordable", but the main real effect of the law is to draw more money into the original U.S. health care system that was already defective and extraordinarily expensive.
It would be possible, of course, to give thousands of other examples of defective management.
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