Submission Summary: 0 pending, 50 declined, 17 accepted (67 total, 25.37% accepted)
"In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed," Dr Semiletov said. "We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal."
Given that current climate data is indicating that the consensus models may be underestimating the rate and extent of climate change, additional rapid rises of another greenhouse gas may foretell faster and more dramatic changes than are currently being envisioned.
Hold on to your butts.
Cyberwar watchers took notice this month when a leaked intelligence memo claimed Russian hackers had remotely destroyed a water pump at an Illinois utility. The report spawned dozens of sensational stories characterizing it as the first-ever reported destruction of U.S. infrastructure by a hacker.
Except that the report was a completely untrue and the reality much more prosaic. The pump burned out, as they do from time to time. The mysterious Russian connection was due to one of the designers of the system calling in to check some logs after he was urgently contacted about some issues with the plant five months before the pump eventually failed. Normally this would not create a problem except for the small detail that we was on vacation at the time.
In Russia (insert 'In Soviet Russia' jokes here). The fact that someone had logged into the system from a foreign country fully five months before the pump failed was somehow conflated into a Stuxnet-type operation in the bowels of the American security watchdogs.
And we think we're paranoid.
But even in their most dire assessments, some experts had not expected even bursts of re-criticality to occur, because it was unlikely that the fuel would melt in just the right way — and that another ingredient, water, would be present in just the right amounts — to allow for any nuclear reaction. If episodes of fission at Fukushima were confirmed, Mr. Koide said, “our entire understanding of nuclear safety would be turned on its head.”
This view does not seem to be supported by some experts. A report in Nature News Blog notes that
... experts say that small amounts of fission in the reactor core would not be that surprising, and there seems no danger of either a self-sustaining critical chain reaction or significant release of fission products into the environment.
and further
"This does not look like a major release of radiation from the plant, but it is worth noting that even if the fuel is cooled, there is still a small amount of residual natural fission of the large amount of uranium fuel in the core," said Paddy Regan, a nuclear expert at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, adding that the amounts released would be far less than were the fuel to go critical. The detected xenon, he said, "does not appear to show any new radiological hazard from the disaster.”
Any one else want to chime in?
The Times paywall doesn’t launch in the United States for another week; the paper has plenty of time to plug this particular Javascript vulnerability, which goes by the name NYTClean, if it wants to. But the real question is: Is this a hole they really want closed? Or is this one of the intentional leaks in the wall?
I just got an email inviting me to access the site for free for the rest of the year. Seems like they aren't really serious about this and the whole implementation is pretty odd. I suspect a committee somewhere."
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
