I've seen this video described as a musical depiction of all the nuclear bombs ever detonated. But that sort of makes it sound like you're about to get a particularly bombastic version of the 1812 Overture. Instead, "1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto is more like an infographic with sound effects — or, possibly, a mash-up of the games Simon and Global Thermonuclear War.

What you get is an interesting depiction of nuclear tests through time — 2053 of them (including the non-test explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). I found it particularly interesting to watch the slow ramp up over the course of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when months or years would tick by between tests. After that, beginning in the late 1950s, you see these patterns of sudden flurries of explosions, usually happening in the US and the USSR almost simultaneously. The cultural sense of panic is almost palpable.

Baker was a 23-kiloton nuclear weapon that was detonated underwater at Bikini Atoll in 1946. The goal was to see what would happen to Navy boats if they were in the region where a nuclear bomb went off. The boats you see in this photo were unmanned, but there were sailors relatively close by, taking these shots. There's evidence that they weren't properly protected against fallout, and later used contaminated water to drink and bathe in. (Also, as a fictional side effect, Bikini Atoll nuclear tests like Baker might have been responsible for the creation of Spongebob Squarepants.)

My Modern Met has compiled several photographs and video that give you an up-close, mind-boggling view of the explosion — including the massive column of water that shot into the mushroom cloud and the 2-mile-high tidal wave that followed.

"Studies by the Imperial navy and others have already discovered that the cloud separated, but the photo confirms it and is thus valuable," a museum official told the Japan Times.

The photo had appeared in history books about Hiroshima, but the whereabouts of any copy of the photo or the negative was unknown until now, according to the museum. (...) The materials were contributed by a late survivor, Yosaburo Yamasaki, in or after 1953. It is not known who took the photo. It will be displayed at a museum located next to the school from this spring.

Along with Japan Times, AFP reports that the black-and-white photo was likely taken some 30 minutes after the bombing on August 6, 1945, roughly 10km (6 mi) east of the impact center. That site is located in what is now the town of Kaita, Hiroshima Prefecture (Google Maps link).

"The existence of this shot was always known in history books, but this is the first time that the actual print has been discovered," a curator at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum told AFP. "A shot showing the mushroom cloud split into two like this is very rare." More at Discovery News.

(Image: HONKAWA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL / AFP)

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/new-hiroshima-bombing-photo-sh.html/feed 33 http://boingboing.net/2012/10/30/sandy-slows-us-nuclear-plants.html http://boingboing.net/2012/10/30/sandy-slows-us-nuclear-plants.html#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:39:54 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=190841 Snip from Reuters update:

Those pumps are not essential since the reactor has been shut for planned refuelling since Oct. 22. However, a further rise to 7 feet could submerge the service water pump motor that is used to cool the water in the spent fuel pool, potentially forcing it to use emergency water supplies from the in-house fire suppression system to keep the rods from overheating.

On Tuesday, an NRC spokesman said the levels reached a peak of 7.4 feet -- apparently above the threshold. As of 6:10 a.m. EDT waters were at 6.5 feet, with the next high tide at 11:45 a.m. He said the company had moved a portable pump to the water intake structure as a precaution, but has not needed to use it.

Mother Jones today published a second part of the video secretly recorded at a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton. The first bombshell will forever be known as "47 percent," but the portion getting attention today focuses on a response the Republican presidential candidate gave to a question about the Israel/Palestine peace process. The tl;dr there: he doesn't believe it'll happen, and intends to "kick the ball down the road" and let the next administration deal with it, or something like that.

But here's a derpworthy moment in the video that may be of interest to science fans, and people who have actually done some reporting on how so-called "dirty bombs" work.

Here's a transcript for the relevant portion of the video:

If I were Iran, if I were Iran—a crazed fanatic, I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we'll just say, "Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we're going to let off a dirty bomb." I mean this is where we have—where America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people. So we really don't have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

But you don't need "fissile material" to create a dirty bomb. David Corn at Mother Jones writes:

Romney didn't appear to understand that a dirty bomb—an explosive device that spreads radioactive substances—does not require fissile material from a nuclear weapons program. Such a bomb can be produced with, say, radioactive medical waste. If Iran's nuclear program poses a threat, it is not because this project will yield a dirty bomb.

Someone on Romney's staff should sit the guy down and force him to watch this PBS NewsHour story by Miles O'Brien from last year, a straightforward explainer on how dirty bombs work, and how it's not necessary to have a "nuclear program" in place to create one.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/18/mitt-romney-does-not-understan.html/feed 73 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/10/for-those-with-cancer-make-yo.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/10/for-those-with-cancer-make-yo.html#comments Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:15:23 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=180202

Science blogger Ed Yong whipped up this awesome graphic and made me a one-off tshirt to wear to radiation treatment for breast cancer.

Cancer patients, radiation oncologists, radiation therapists, and the people who love them all can make their own t-shirts and stickers with the JPEG if you are so inclined!

Thanks, Ed!

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/10/for-those-with-cancer-make-yo.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/24/report-hackers-targeting-iran.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/24/report-hackers-targeting-iran.html#comments Tue, 24 Jul 2012 18:14:39 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=172887

Mikko H. Hypponen of F-Secure publishes an email he claims is from a scientist with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (or AEOI), which details a new "cyber attack" wave against Iranian nuclear systems.

Snip: "There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC."

Mikko can't validate the email or the tale therein, and neither can we, but if it's true? Heh.

* The 'shoop above is mine, not the hackers'.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/07/24/report-hackers-targeting-iran.html/feed 29 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/17/full-body-burden-memoir-about.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/17/full-body-burden-memoir-about.html#comments Wed, 18 Jul 2012 03:22:03 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=170134

Kristen Iversen grew up in the shadow of two big secrets. The first was private. Her father was an alcoholic, and his problem grew bigger and harder to ignore or hide as Iversen got older. But the other secret didn't belong to just her and her family. Instead, it encompassed whole Colorado communities, two major corporations, and the US government.

Iversen grew up near Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapons plant near Denver. In much the same way as Iversen's family related to her father's alcoholism, Rocky Flats presented risks that nearly everyone involved preferred to ignore or cover up. In fact, years after several public exposes had made it very clear that Rocky Flats made nuclear bombs and that the corporate and government entities that ran the facility had cut corners and allowed massive amounts of plutonium to escape into the surrounding environment, people who lived in Iversen's neighborhood near the plant still refused to give up their long-held belief that it produced nothing more than Scrubbing Bubbles and dishwashing detergent.

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats is memoir—albeit one that captures documented history as well as a family's private struggles. It's not really meant to be a book about science. But I think it's a powerful, well-written memoir that science buffs should read.

For better or for worse, the story of technology in the 20th century was the story of children growing up. At the beginning of the century, the zeitgeist of science was all about miracles. It was an age of wonders. There were never any side-effects. That changed mid-century, as we began to come to terms with the fact that our toys could be dangerous and that the people with the power to use them didn't always think (or care) about the potential harms.

As we think about and negotiate what our relationship with technology is going to be in the 21st century—and, for the record, I think that means synthesizing a mature perspective where we accept that everything has risks and worry about risk mitigation instead of the impossibility of complete risk avoidance—we are going to have to learn and learn from stories like this one.

On the one hand, that means understanding how governments, companies, and scientists have misused technology, and made unethical, dangerous decisions about it. Stories like the one Iversen tells are important, because they force us to look at how those decisions really affect people—even if you never find evidence of increased cancer rates or miscarriages or other kinds of expected physical damage, the psychological trauma has real impacts. And those impacts matter. (Think about what we know about Chernobyl, where, by some estimates, the psychological fallout has been worse and affected more people than the nuclear fallout.)

On the other hand, stories like the one Iversen tells are important because they also force us to think about our expectations and the fact that reality is sometimes a lot different. The outcomes we expect aren't necessarily the ones that happen. When Iversen is expecting to hear, any day now, that her father has drunk himself to death, someone does die. But it isn't him. Likewise, despite anecdotal evidence of rare and childhood cancers peppering this book, Iversen writes that nobody ever found a statistical increase in cancer or other health problems in the neighborhoods near Rocky Flats.

Along those same lines, when Iversen tells the story about how illegal and unethical behavior at Rocky Flats was exposed, it's not framed as a fight between "all the good people" and "the evil, faceless corporation". Instead, she captures the conflict within the community. Sometimes, even plant workers who are afraid of the risks posed by this kind of breach of public trust are more afraid of losing their jobs. Sometimes, they take criticism of what's happened at the plant as a personal attack against them. That, too, is important information to consider when we think about the future of technology and culture.

Shorter story: This is a great memoir that will get you thinking about the way society and technology interact. It's also a very fast read. I breezed through the 344 pages in a weekend—a speed that I usually associate more with my fiction-reading. Deep thoughts. Great storytelling.

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen

Photo: Oi Nuclear Power Plant, via Wikipedia.

The No. 3 reactor at the Ohi (or Ōi) nuclear plant in Japan went back on the grid Thursday morning, according to a statement from its operator, the Kansai Electric Power Company. The nuclear reactor in western Japan became the first in the country to restart since last year's tsunami and earthquake caused a nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant, and led to intense debate over the future of energy in Japan.

Also today in Japan, a parliamentary inquiry concluded that the nuclear accident at Fukushima "was a preventable disaster rooted in government-industry collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture." Hiroko Tabuchi at the New York Times has more.

At Nature News Leigh Phillips reports on a group called the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation, which is dedicated to the suppression of science in general and technological innovation in particular. The group is behind several bombings and shootings, mostly targeting nuclear scientists and nuclear energy advocacy groups. Now, the Olga Cell says that it's joining forces with other anti-science terrorist groups around the world. This group is apparently communicating with Individuals Tending Towards Savagery, though it's not clear how close the collaboration is.

On 11 May, the cell sent a four-page letter to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera claiming responsibility for the shooting of Roberto Adinolfi, the chief executive of Ansaldo Nucleare, the nuclear-engineering subsidiary of aerospace and defence giant Finmeccanica. Believed by authorities to be genuine, the letter is riddled with anti-science rhetoric. The group targeted Adinolfi because he is a “sorcerer of the atom”, it wrote. “Adinolfi knows well that it is only a matter of time before a European Fukushima kills on our continent.”

“Science in centuries past promised us a golden age, but it is pushing us towards self-destruction and total slavery,” the letter continues. “With this action of ours, we return to you a tiny part of the suffering that you, man of science, are pouring into this world.” The group also threatened to carry out further attacks.

Read the rest of the story at Nature News

Earlier today, David told you about a news story that's everywhere right now: The fact that the Kodak company ran a small nuclear facility at its research lab in Rochester, New York.

The facility closed down in 2007, but I can totally understand why this story interests people. It's nuclear! And it is really weird for a corporation to be sitting on 3.5 pounds of uranium. Like David said, this is unusual today. David did a good job covering this in a sane way. The TV news I saw this morning at the airport ... not so much. That's why I like the detail provided the Physics Buzz blog, where Bryan Jacobsmeyer explains, better than I've seen elsewhere, just what exactly Kodak was doing with their nuclear system. Turns out, it's really not all that odd for this specific company to own this specific piece of equiptment when they did. That's because of what Kodak was. We're not just talking about a corporation in the sense of middle managers and salesmen. We're talking about original research and development—a job for which a californium neutron flux multiplier is quite well suited.

In fact, these research reactors can be found on several university campuses, and they are operated under strict guidelines without any nefarious intentions.

Researchers working at Kodak wanted to detect very small impurities in chemicals, and Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) proved to be one of the best techniques to find these impurities. During NAA, samples are bombarded with neutrons, and elemental isotopes from the sample will absorb a small fraction of these neutrons.

Many of these stable elemental isotopes will become radioactive after gaining a new neutron; consequently, they will emit gamma rays. With the right equipment, researchers can measure the precise energy levels of this radiation and narrow down which elements are in the sample.

Basically, it provided a way to sift through the components of a sample at a molecular level, and spot the things that shouldn't be there. Originally, the lab used just californium. Later, it added uranium plates that helped make the system more powerful.

Read the full Physics Buzz post

Via Jennifer Ouellette

What happens when you get the chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the chief scientist of Greenpeace, an energy and environmental policy expert, and an environmental activist/politician in a room together to talk about nuclear energy?

You can listen to the whole (very, very interesting) conversation—part of the Science Question Time series—which was recorded last Thursday at the Institute of Physics in London.

I recently started describing my position on nuclear energy as "frienemies"—I'm not strictly against it, and think we're likely to need it, but I also have some serious issues with how safety is regulated and what we will do with the waste. I think this nuanced discussion did a nice job of laying out the benefits and detriments in a reasonable way. The discussion gets heated, but it is pleasantly lacking in the sort of wild-eyed propaganda and not-particularly-comforting-corporate-pronouncements that tend to characterize these sorts of debates. (Or, rather, it would be, were it not for one memorable audience heckler.)

Download the audio file.

Visit the Biochemical Society's website for updates about future Science Question Time events.

What could possibly make a 1960s-era nuclear war worse than you'd already assumed it would be? How about being packed like sardines into a fallout shelter with 13 of your soon-to-be-closest friends?

Frank Munger is a senior reporter with the Knoxville News Sentinel, where he covers Oak Ridge National Laboratory—a nearby energy research facility that previously did a lot of civil defense research. Munger turned up this, and several other photos, of mockup nuclear shelter arrangements tested out in the basement at ORNL when the facility was trying to establish best practice scenarios for surviving the Apocalypse.

They look ... less than pleasant.

That said, though, they may not have been meant as long-term arrangements. Munger linked to an Atlantic article that makes an interesting case related to these photos: If what you're talking about is one relatively small nuclear bomb (as opposed to massive, hydrogen bomb, mutually assured destruction scenarios), the idea of "Duck and Cover" isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. If you could get these 14 people out of the way of the fallout for a couple weeks, their chances of survival would rise exponentially. Fallout shelters were not meant to be "the place you and your people live for the next 50 years."

The radiation from fallout can be severe -- the bigger the bomb, and the closer it is the the ground, the worse the fallout, generally -- but it decays according to a straightforward rule, called the 7/10 rule: Seven hours after the explosion, the radiation is 1/10 the original level; seven times that interval (49 hours, or two days) it is 1/10 of that, or 1/100 the original, and seven times that interval (roughly two weeks) it is 1/1000 the original intensity.

See the rest of Frank Munger's photos of ORNL fallout shelter mockups.Read the rest of The Atlantic article on "duck and cover". ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/14/the-apocalypse-will-be-a-lot-l.html/feed 28 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/09/must-listen-radio-nuclear-p.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/09/must-listen-radio-nuclear-p.html#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:47:01 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=148321

Veteran radio journalist and master storyteller Alex Chadwick (who's also a personal friend—he's taught me so much about journalism over the years) hosts a must-listen radio documentary premiering this weekend on public radio stations throughout the US.

BURN: An Energy Journal is a four-hour, four-part broadcast and digital documentary series exploring "the most pressing energy issues of our times."

Part One of the series, titled "Particles: Nuclear Power After Fukushima," coincides with March 11, the first anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. I've listened in entirety, and followed along as the BURN team researched and produced over the past few months, and I can tell you this is truly powerful work. The show also includes PBS Newshour reporter Miles O'Brien, reporting from inside the Fukushima exclusion zone on his recent trip there.

Carve out some time and listen to it on-air, or listen online at this link.

Snip from description:

Included in the riveting premiere episode is an exclusive, first-time-ever interview with an American who was on-site at the Daiichi nuclear plant when the earthquake and tsunami struck. Carl Pillitteri, a maintenance supervisor and one of 40 Americans in Fukushima on that fateful day, describes his terrifying ordeal as he desperately attempted to lead his men to safety through the enormous, shuddering turbine buildings in total darkness.

More about the radio series follows.

For BURN: An Energy Journal, Chadwick, a beloved public radio correspondent with 30 years of broadcast experience whose storytelling abilities and integrity have been compared to Charles Kuralt's, finds intimate, human-scale stories to explain and explore the very serious energy challenges that face communities across this country and around the world. He interviews an intriguing array of scientists and engineers, policy makers and citizen activists, research visionaries and maverick inventors, concerned parents and committed young people. These personal stories illuminate how and why we face an energy crisis, the dilemma of the continuing demand for energy, the realities and consequences of a mostly carbon-based industry and infrastructure, and some possible alternatives to what looks increasingly to be an ever-more-challenging energy and climate future in the coming decades.

(...) In Part One, "Particles: Nuclear Power After Fukushima," which is airing on the first anniversary of the disaster this coming Sunday, March 11, Chadwick examines the future of nuclear power after the disaster and asks the essential question: "What have we learned from Japan . . . and now what?" In addition to the Carl Pillitteri story and others, the host presents recordings of telephone and other conversations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Emergency Operations Center in the early days of the disaster, released at the request of BURN. Chadwick also profiles Greg Hardy, a Los Angeles-based engineer who has spent much of his career examining the vulnerability of nuclear plants to earthquakes. Hardy says he's comfortable living between two nuclear facilities along California's coast, even after Fukushima. But Hardy's wife is skeptical. The show travels to Japan, where PBS Newshour reporter Miles O'Brien reports from inside the exclusion zone. The series also visits Germany, where the government plans to shut down its nuclear reactors by 2022.

BURN: An Energy Journal's three other one-hour specials include:

Hunting for Oil | Risks and Rewards - An Earth Day special that coincides with the two-year anniversary of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the worst in U.S. History. What became of all that oil? And what's the future of offshore drilling? What are our options?

Energy Efficiency | Taking It to the Streets - A one-hour special for the Fall, 2012, dedicated to the promise of energy efficiency. Energy Secretary Steven Chu says "Energy efficiency isn't just low hanging fruit; it's fruit laying on the ground." Beyond petroleum, coal, nuclear and alternative energy, many believe efficiency is the "fifth fuel, "a huge, untapped resource.

An Energized Presidency - The culminating hour of BURN will be an Election Special for broadcast in October, 2012. Should we have a comprehensive national energy policy rather than a patchwork of laws and regulations? BURN will explore our energy policies and how they are being defined by the political parties and 2012 presidential candidates.

BURN: An Energy Journal is produced by SoundVision Productions in partnership with APM's Marketplace and The Story, PBS NewsHour, and with a grant from the National Science Foundation. The BURN radio specials are distributed by American Public Media. Part one of the series airs on 250 stations throughout the US.

Japanese photographer Satoru Niwa, whose work I blogged in a previous Boing Boing post, has a new series from Fukushima marking the one-year anniversary of the March 11 disaster: Invisible You. Again, beautiful, evocative work. Above: a shot from the town of Namie, which is some 40 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. View the full gallery here (warning: Flash).

Airing tonight on PBS Frontline (check your local listings, or watch it online!), a documentary film that provides the definitive inside account of what really happened, moment to moment, during the Fukushima disaster. "Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdown" features exclusive interviews for the first time with Japan's prime minster and the top executives at TEPCO.

Tomorrow, Frontline is hosting a chat with the film's producer/director, Dan Edge, and Boing Boing science editor Maggie Koerth-Baker will be participating.

There's a terrific interview with Edge on the public radio program Fresh Air.

Yesterday, the United States' Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the construction of the first two nuclear reactors to be built in this country since 1978. They're both part of the same power plant complex, near Augusta, Georgia.

As David Biello points out in an excellent analysis of this news over at Scientific American, these reactors are not part of a nuclear renaissance in the U.S. That's simply not happening. But they represent some important shifts in technology. These reactors employ passive cooling systems. Basically, in the event of an emergency, you don't need to rely external pumps or generators to keep the reactor cores cool.

You'll recall, of course, that this was the key problem at Fukushima. The tsunami damaged the generators that powered the pumps, so when the reactors began to heat up, there was no way to get cooling water into them. In Georgia, the new reactors will, instead, rely on gravity. If one of these reactors gets too hot, a heat-sensitive valve will automatically open, releasing cooling water that's stored directly above the reactor core.

Obviously, this doesn't make the reactors fail-proof. If you support nuclear energy, you're going to see this (and the fact that the NRC approval is conditional on utility Southern Company demonstrating that they have learned from the lessons of Fukushima) as a step in the right direction. If you're absolutely against nuclear energy, you're going to be deeply disturbed by this project no matter what happens.

I sit somewhere in the middle. I'm uncomfortable with nuclear energy—as it currently exists—being presented as a long-term energy solution. It can't serve that role as long "bury it" is our only means of dealing with nuclear waste. And whether it's a good idea at all depends on how stringent regulatory oversight is willing to be.

At the same time, though, we are dependent on steady, ever-increasing supplies of electricity. Right now, we get 20% of that electricity from nuclear reactors, most of which are reaching the end of their functional lives. The question of what will replace them is a serious one. There are steps we can take to reduce our energy consumption. We can, and should be, adding more wind, solar, hydro, and other renewable resources to our electric generation mix. But there are some very good reasons why we can't, right now, shut down all the coal, all the nuclear, and all the natural gas power plants. All three of those sources of generation come with big safety and health problems. But we are going to continue to use one or more of them for decades to come. Renewables should be our long-term solution. In the short-term, though, we have some nasty and subjective decisions to make about what risks we're willing to live with. I'm not enthusiastic about nuclear. But a new nuclear power plant, in my mind, is better than a new coal power plant. The trouble with making these kind of decisions, though, is that there's lots of room for reasonable people to disagree.

Members of UKC Japan care for dogs rescued from inside the exclusion zone, a 20km radius around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (REUTERS)

As regular Boing Boing readers will recall, I traveled to Japan some months back with PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien to produce a series of stories about the aftermath of the March 11 quake/tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster that followed.

In the course of reporting our story about Safecast's crowdsourced efforts to monitor radiation, we encountered abandoned pets inside the evacuation zone.

Reuters today published an article about new efforts to save animals abandoned by families forced to flee their homes after the nuclear disaster.

"If left alone, tens of them will die everyday. Unlike well-fed animals that can keep themselves warm with their own body fat, starving ones will just shrivel up and die," said Yasunori Hoso, who runs a shelter for about 350 dogs and cats rescued from the 20-km evacuation zone around the crippled nuclear plant.

The government let animal welfare groups enter the evacuation zone temporarily in December to rescue surviving pets before the severe winter weather set in, but Hoso said there were still many more dogs and cats left in the area.

"If we cannot go in to take them out, I hope the government will at least let us go there and leave food for them," he said.

Inset: Mr. Hoso, who is also director of the United Kennel Club Japan (UKC Japan), speaks in front of a destroyed house in Namie town, inside the 20km exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, January 28, 2012. A photo gallery of more images from their rescue efforts follows (all images: Reuters).

A cow which escaped from a farm is removed from a highway by members of UKC Japan in Namie town, Fukushima prefecture. (REUTERS)

A dog rescued by UKC Japan members is seen inside a cage in Namie town.(REUTERS)

Ashes of cats who died after being rescued from the exclusion zone, in urns at UKC Japan's pet shelter in Samukawa town. (REUTERS)

Dogs rescued by UKC Japan inside the exclusion zone around Fukushima, in cages at the group's pet shelter in Samukawa. (REUTERS)

Dog rescued by UKC Japan from near Fukushima plant, inside a cage at the group's pet shelter in Samukawa. (REUTERS)

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/31/after-nuclear-disaster-a-hars.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/27/my-favorite-museum-exhibit-3.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/27/my-favorite-museum-exhibit-3.html#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:18:04 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=140993

Earlier this week, I challenged readers to send me photos of their favorite museum exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. Over the next few days, I'll be posting some of these submissions, under the heading, "My Favorite Museum Exhibit". Want to see them all? Check the "Previously" links at the bottom of this post.

Mike Anderson sent in this photo from the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, NM. The museum is home to two (now de-weaponized) nuclear bombs. In 1966—back when these bombs were actually capable of exploding—the United States Air Force accidentally dropped them on Spain.

The accident happened when the plane carrying four of these Mk28 type hydrogen bombs collided with another plane during a mid-air fueling. One bomb fell into the ocean and was eventually recovered. The other three landed near the village of Palomares in southern Spain. Two of the bombs actually detonated—sort of. Only the non-nuclear explosives went off, turning them into what we'd call "dirty bombs" today. Some 650 acres, a little more than a square mile of farmland and rural communities, were contaminated. The U.S. military ended up excavating 1,400 tons of soil from this area and shipping it to the United States for disposal.

You can read an oral history of the cleanup effort. The Brookings Institution has more detail on exactly what happened during the accident and its aftermath.

Previously in this series:

[Video Link]

"Nuclear Aftershocks," the PBS Frontline documentary which Maggie described in a Boing Boing review as "brilliant," airs tonight online and on local PBS stations at 10pm. I've seen an advance copy, and I agree that it's excellent—though I'm admittedly biased, since I love everything Miles O'Brien does, and collaborate with him creatively from time to time. A preview of the documentary is above. They have some cool web extras up at the Frontline site, including a map of how much nuclear power each US state relies on.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/17/frontline-post-fukushima-docum.html/feed 18 http://boingboing.net/2011/12/14/wild-monkeys-and-boars-to-meas.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/14/wild-monkeys-and-boars-to-meas.html#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 23:33:55 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=134295

Many challenges remain in measuring radiation leaked from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, after a devastating quake and tsunami 9 months ago left that site crippled. The crowdsourced efforts of a DIY tech group called Safecast were the subject of a report I produced with Miles O'Brien for NewsHour; other projects to capture this badly-needed data have been led by young mothers.

Today, a story is circulating about a group of researchers from Japan's Fukushima University who plan to enlist the help of wild monkeys, and maybe wild boars, to monitor radiation starting in Spring of 2012.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Researchers from Fukushima University plan to kit wild monkeys out with radiation-measuring collars to track the contamination levels deep in the forests, where it’s difficult for humans to go. (...) The monkey collars are geared with a small radiation-measuring device, a GPS system and an instrument that can detect the monkey’s distance from the ground as the radiation level is being tallied. Mr. Takahashi said more contraptions may be added, but these will be the three main ones.

So, it sounds like they'll capture the critters, tranquilize them, attach the devices, then free them again back in the wild to roam around and passively gather/transmit readings.

CNN reports that veterinarian Toshio Mizoguchi of the Fukushima Wildlife Rehabilitation Center (run by the regional government) came up with the idea. He wanted to find a way to observe the effect of radiation on the wild animals near Fukushima.

The researchers will first focus on the mountains near Minamisoma city, about 25 kilometers/16 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Some 14 monkey colonies are known to inhabit this area. Minamisoma city and its mayor Katsunobo Sakurai became "internet-famous" when the mayor posted a desperate appeal for help on YouTube.

During our reporting trip to Japan, I went with Miles to interview mayor Sakurai, by the way -- the interview didn't make it into our NewsHour piece, but man, he was really a fascinating character. Apparently things have not been easy for him personally or politically since.

More around the 'net about the "radiation-measuring monkeys will save Japan" story: CNN, ABC, Telegraph.

(Thanks, Miles O'Brien)

(Image: Snow Monkeys, or Japanese Macaques, bathe in the onsen hot springs of Nagano, Japan. This site is a considerable distance from the area that will be the focus of this project, and I'd imagine a different species may be involved.)

The crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's upper part of the No.3 reactor building is seen from a bus window, November 12, 2011. REUTERS/Kyodo.

On Saturday, Japanese government representatives and TEPCO officials escorted a group of Japanese and foreign journalists inside the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant for the first time since March 11. This was the first time media were allowed in after a tsunami and earthquake eight months ago triggered the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.

TEPCO and government officials hoped to show the world that the situation inside Fukushima is under control, eight months later. Visiting reporters had to wear protective gear, and undergo radiation screening. They saw crumbling reactor structures, huge piles of rubble, twisted metal fences, dented water tanks, and trucks overturned by the massive tsunami wave. Smaller administrative buildings nearby remain just as they were when office workers fled the oncoming wave, on March 11.

Authorities said they are hoping to reach full cold shutdown, but the reactor at Fukushima is not yet fully under control. It may take decades to safely close this site.

Reports from today's tour: Reuters, Associated Press, and the New York Times, with more here. AP also has a report today on conditions for workers. Related: The Institute of Nuclear Power Operations has released a detailed, minute-by-minute timeline of the events that unfolded at Fukushima Daiichi on March 11. The report was delivered on Nov. 11 to U.S. industry executives, the NRC, and of Congress. A NYT article on the report is here.

VIDEO: Watch Miles O'Brien's PBS NewsHour report inside the Fukushima exclusion zone, about efforts to monitor and share data about radiation levels throughout Japan (I helped shoot and produce). YouTube, PBS.org.

A worker (C) is given a radiation screening as he enters the emergency operation center, November 12. The poster (L) reads "No tobacco and gum on the premises". REUTERS/David Guttenfelder.

A A worker inside the emergency operation center listens to a speech by Japan's Environment and Nuclear Crisis Minister Goshi Hosono (not in picture), November 12, 2011. REUTERS/David Guttenfelder.

Employees of TEPCO work inside the Fukushima Daiichi emergency operation center, November 12, 2011. REUTERS/David Guttenfelder.

A radiation monitor indicates 73.20 microsieverts per hour at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, November 12, 2011. The power plant's No.4 reactor building is seen in the right side of this picture. REUTERS/Kyodo.

The crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's No.4, No.3, No.2 and No.1 (R-L) reactor buildings are seen from bus windows. REUTERS/Kyodo.

The crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's No.4 reactor building is seen through bus windows. REUTERS/David Guttenfelder.

Officials from the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) and journalists pass by a newly built sea barricade next to the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, November 12, 2011. REUTERS/David Guttenfelder.

Japanese officials wearing protective suits and masks ride in the back of a bus while a second bus carrying officials and journalists follow as they drive through the contaminated exclusion zone. REUTERS/David Guttenfelder.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/12/inside-fukushima-first-photos.html/feed 6 http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/collie.html http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/collie.html#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:40:52 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=128745

PBS NewsHour's Jenny Marder wrote a really interesting feature about the abandoned pets inside the Fukushima evacuation zone in Japan. I encountered some of them when I traveled to the area with Safecast and PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien (our resulting PBS NewsHour report video is here).

Jenny digs into what happened with the volunteer effort to rescue and adopt the abandoned pets, and talks to scientists about the effect of fallout on animals (including intergenerational and genetic changes, like what the world saw within bird and wild animal populations after Chernobyl). Snip:

At the tail end of Miles O'Brien's latest NewsHour report on radiation in Japan, a golden dog with a thick red collar trots into the street of the abandoned town, Katsurao, and weaves along the center divider.

Miles asks, off camera: "Do we have anything to feed him?"

The piece, which airs tonight, reports on the group Safecast, which has measured, mapped and crowdsourced data on radiation levels in locations throughout Japan, particularly in the hot spots near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The dog was one of several scrawny, undernourished dogs and cats they encountered, most likely abandoned by their owners during rapid evacuation.

Read more: What's the Fallout for Dogs Near Fukushima? (The Rundown News Blog | PBS NewsHour)

(Photos in this post by Sean Bonner: all iPhone snapshots of abandoned pets we encountered in the evacuation zone, shot during our drive from Tokyo to Fukushima in August, 2011)

[Video Link: YouTube, PBS.org]

I traveled to Japan with PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien to help shoot and produce a series of NewsHour stories about the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters. One of these just aired, and is above. It's the story of how a group of hackers and internet folks are working with Japanese volunteers to harness DIY technology to record and share data about radiation hotspots.

We traveled with Safecast on a radiation-data-gathering drive from Tokyo to inside the voluntary evacuation zone, close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. We monitored readings on the ground and in the air with the Safecast team all along the way. You'll see what those contamination levels were, and what and whom we encountered, in this video.

Some of the voices in this piece are familiar names to regular Boing Boing readers: Joi Ito, Sean Bonner, and others. One DIY/Maker/hacker culture hero we interviewed whose work you see is Bunnie Huang (I was thrilled that this project allowed me to meet Bunnie in person for the first time).

In the NewsHour story, airing exactly eight months to the day after the March 11 disaster, you'll see the geiger counters the Safecast team have developed with Sebastopol, California-based Dan Sythe and International Medcom. The successor to the "B-Geigie" Safecast is using now will be a device Bunnie designed (which looks really elegant, by the way). Oh, and these geiger kits were assembled in the very cool Tokyo Hacker Space, a central site for the Safecast movement.

Here's a related post on Safecast.org, and here's Sean Bonner's original drive report from our trip together.

Ganbare, Nippon.

(Photos in this post: iPhone snapshots by Xeni Jardin.)]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/safecast-draws-on-power-of-the.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2011/11/10/hacking-geigers-safecast-crow.html http://boingboing.net/2011/11/10/hacking-geigers-safecast-crow.html#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:21:27 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=128642

Watch Online "Hacker" Group Crowdsources Radiation Data for Japanese Public on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.

On PBS NewsHour tonight, a report I helped the program's science correspondent Miles O'Brien produce about the challenge people in Japan face of finding and sharing reliable data about radiation contamination, after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Embedded above, a conversation between Miles and NewsHour host Hari Sreenivasan about our report, which focuses on a grassroots group called Safecast that measures, maps, and publishes data on radiation contamination levels throughout the country.

While in Tokyo, Miles spoke to Hari Sreenivasan about his trip with Safecast workers into the voluntary exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where they detected levels reaching the equivalent of six X-rays per day.

He also filled us in on his conversations with Japanese officials working in evacuated areas and Japanese residents eager for more information about the consequences of the nuclear accident.

I'll post the video for the full feature when it's available online.

That last source of exposure works because the higher you get, the less you can rely upon Earth's atmosphere to shield you from radiation in space. It's the same reason why there's an increase in radiation exposure associated with climbing a mountain. All of these exposures are small. Small enough that most people don't need to worry about them. (For instance, a pregnant woman can safely take an airplane trip. You'd have to be a pregnant flight attendant, regularly working long-haul flights, before the exposures would start adding up to a quantifiable risk.)

But because we use these small-dose numbers to talk about relative risk and when radiation should and shouldn't scare us, it's interesting to know where they're coming from ... and how accurate they are. That's why I was interested in something weird noticed by Ellen McManis. She operates a research nuclear reactor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and like many of us, she's curious about how much radiation people are actually being exposed to as a part of everyday life. Unlike us, however, McManis actually has access to things like dosimeters. With the help of her colleague, Reuven Lazarus, she recently took one on a cross-country plane flight—from Portland to DC, with a layover in Chicago. To her surprise, she found that the dose her dosimeter registered was actually a lot lower than the dose she'd been expecting.

I was using a RADOS RAD-60 dosimeter, which gives you an instant reading of how much radiation you've been exposed to while the dosimeter is on. We use them for visitors and people who don't have their own permanent dosimetry yet. Over the course of ~5 hours on the plane, I got a total of 0.3 millirem (or 3 microsieverts). I usually see a number quoted of 1 millirem per hour [for airplane exposure], or 3-to-5 millirem per cross-country flight, so that's an order of magnitude lower than expected.

Now that is interesting. If you look at Randall Munroe's Radiation Dose Chart (my favorite source for putting these small doses into context), you'll see that his well-researched numbers estimate an exposure of 40 microsieverts (the same thing as 4 millirem) for one cross-country plane flight. McManis' real-life reading was definitely a lot lower than the go-to estimate.

But why?

The truth is that McManis didn't really know. Her dosimeter was recently calibrated. She also checked it against a known source of radiation in the lab, and had turned up a result that was completely normal, so it seemed like this wasn't an issue of a wonky dosimeter.

Luckily, off-duty nuclear scientists aren't the only people taking measurements of in-flight radiation exposures. The official estimates, the ones used by people like Randall Munroe, come from an organization called the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety.

Back in 1996, the European Union started counting radiation exposure on board airplanes as an occupational safety hazard. Remember, travelers generally don't have anything to worry about. But, for people who work on airplanes, the risk is large enough to be worth paying attention to, especially on certain routes. EU-based air crews are limited to 100 millisieverts of exposure every 5 years, and 50 millisieverts in any given year*.

How do they track that? You could, theoretically, give a personal dosimeter to every person working onboard an airplane. But that gets expensive, for reasons we'll talk about later. Instead, the EU has chosen to manage this with a system based on computer models—models that have been verified against more than 10,000 hours worth of real-world dosimeter readings.

It's called the Sievert System, and it works because the sources of radiation at 30,000 feet are fairly constant. Subatomic particles come from the Sun and from deep space to bombard our atmosphere. Reactions between those particles and our atmosphere produce secondary particles. Those secondary particles penetrate airplanes, and our skin, where they can damage our DNA.

There are factors that can alter the dose. Solar activity, for instance, means an increase in subatomic particles striking the atmosphere. Altitude matters, because the higher you are, the less atmosphere there is to protect you. Finally, latitude is also important. The particles penetrate our atmosphere more easily at the poles, says Jean-François Bottollier-Depois, head of the External Dosimetry Department at the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety. By the time you get to 60 degrees latitude, he says, you will be experiencing a dose 2x as high as that at the equator. (Again, remembering that we're talking about very small doses.)

But these are all issues that can be factored into a computer model. All you need to know is the routes a pilot or crew member will fly in a given month, and the level of solar activity. The Sievert System uses that information to calculate monthly exposures for individuals.

Bottollier-Depois says the System also checks its work. Back in the early 90s, his team tracked the doses received by cosmonauts aboard Mir, so they know what the dose is in space. Earthside, they sent dosimeters on numerous flights, choosing a variety of routes, and taking measurements in different locations on the planes. They also used multiple dosimeters on each flight, so they could be sure that the dose recorded was accurate. And they still do these practical tests today, updating the Sievert System database to account for long-term changes in solar activity.

With all that experience under his belt, Bottollier-Depois had a pretty good idea of why Ellen McManis' measurements came out so wrong. In fact, it has to do with why the EU chose a model-based system, rather than real-time, individual dosimetry. All dosimeters are not created equal.

"If you use a classical dosimeter, it is measuring photons and electrons, but those account for less than 40% of the total dose aboard aircraft," he says. "The difference comes from the fact that you have other particles like neutrons, and those represent most of what you receive in a dose aboard an airplane. They can't be detected with classical dosimeter. You need very specific technology for that."

Expensive, specialized dosimeters pick up the particles that are most common at flight altitudes. Normal, old dosimeters don't. To McManis, that difference makes a lot of sense.

"I was using a personal alarm dosimeter that relies on ionizations to work, and neutrons don't ionize things," she says.

For more information, check out these links:

French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety — How far advanced is research on the health effects of low doses?

Sievert System page — You can calculate your own flight exposures here, and learn more about how the system works. (Heads up: In my experience, the site is often not working. If it won't load, check back in a couple days.)