I'm not a radiophobe but... [Nuclear waste in Australia]

Recently, while out shopping, a Courier Mail* headline shouted out at me the words:

NUCLEAR BOMBSHELL
Australia's first radioactive waste dump proposed just two hours from Brisbane!

[*= I don't read this paper, which is sensationalistic and puerile even in comparison to other Murdoch papers, but sometimes its headlines intrude themselves into my vision, and, as with a car crash, it can be difficult to look away.]

This was puzzling to me because there are already a number of radioactive waste dumps in Australia, and moreover, one of them is only about one hour's drive from Brisbane. It's known as the Esk Storage Facility and it's located in a pine plantation about 10 km to the west of the town of Esk.

Here's a photo of it:

The Esk Storage Facility
Hey Guys, there's already a nuclear waste dump on Brisbane's doorstep!

And a picture of it from Google Earth:

The Esk Storage Facility from above

This is a state government facility built in 1994 and it mainly holds old medical radioactive sources.

This place is located in the catchment area of the Wivenhoe Dam (the largest of the dams which provide Brisbane with its water). According to our elected representatives, this is not a problem:

... We have heard such outlandish cries in the past few months that the district has now been branded because of a problem that is merely a figment of the imagination.

And it would appear that these unsubstantiated emotional outcries have only just begun.

We had Esk Shire Chairman, Cr Jean Bray—in an effort to draw more attention—claiming that Brisbane's water supply was at risk. It shows how little she knows about the matter that is to be stored there.

The matter doesn't dissolve in water and is not affected by it in any way. The storage site in Brisbane went under in the 1974 floods.

There was also the claim that an accident while waste material was being transported across the dam wall could cause havoc. Why? It would merely sit on the bottom until it was located by monitoring equipment.

[Hansard - QLD Legislative Assembly 10^th Oct 1991]

Unfortunately, this statement is untrue [as a general rule, you can assume that when a politician launches into a withering attack like this, they are not telling the truth]. By far the greatest proportion of the radioactive waste (approx 87% as per a report by the ARPANSA [Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency]) held at this site is caesium-137. Caesium-137 is normally present in the form of caesium chloride; which is highly water soluble. It is true such sources are hermetically sealed, however an accident that allowed such a source to get free could quite easily rupture the relatively thin encapsulation.

Fortunately this fact was realised because (according to the 1996 federal senate enquiry "No Time To Waste" ) radioactive waste delivered to the Esk facility now takes a longer route around the dam to avoid passing over the dam wall.

I suppose it should go without saying, but radioactive waste is very nasty stuff.

Consider caesium-137; the stuff mentioned above. It's produced in large quantities in nuclear reactors. It's a major component of the fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima. It's also used in medicine where its intense radiation is used to destroy cancer cells.

In 1987, there was an accident involving a medical Caesium-137 source. This was known as the "Goiânia incident", and it's documented in quite a bit of technical detail in a report put out by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency].

[Incidentally, there are a number of incident reports of this type put out by the IAEA and they make fascinating reading, although be warned that in places there are photos of horrible radiation injuries that will turn your stomach.]

The story goes as follows:

In 1987 a radiotherapy source containing approximately 31 cc (that is to say, slightly less than a shot-glass full) of caesium-137 chloride, was disassembled by a scrap metal merchant in the Brazilian city of Goiânia.

Unfortunately, in the words of the report, the following happened:

 That night D.F. [a guy who had purchased the remains of the source from the scrap metal merchant] then went into the garage where the pieces had been placed and noticed a blue glow emanating from the source capsule. He thought it looked pretty and that the powder might be valuable (like a gemstone) or even supernatural, and took the capsule into the house. Over the next three days various neighbours, relatives and acquaintances were invited to see the capsule as a curiosity.
...
Subsequently there were several instances of people daubing the radioactive powder on their skin, as with the glitter used at carnival time.

As a result of this, the caesium chloride ended up more widely dispersed than would otherwise have happened. Eventually, after a number of people became seriously ill (and subsequently died), the true nature of the situation was recognised.

There was a prolonged and laborious cleanup, during which approximately 3500 m³ of radioactive waste was removed from the area. This didn't even clean up all of the contamination (approx 14% was not accounted for), but merely brought radiation levels down to levels where people could safely move back into the area.If my calculations are right, this is over 100 million times the volume of the radioactive material that caused the incident.

This gives some perspective on just how potent the stuff is, and just how difficult cleaning up after an accident can be.

It is not at all "radiophobic" to be scared of this shit.

This all said, I'm not lying awake at night worrying about the Esk facility. You have to stick this waste somewhere and a purpose-built facility like this is probably your best option.

Interestingly, there's actually not so much waste in the place. According to the ARPANSA report I quoted earlier, there's only a total of 5.3 TBq of total radioactivity stored there, which is a bit over 1/10th of the amount that was in the Goiânia source. [Why so little? I'm assuming it's because the really big radiotherapy sources are all still in use; caesium-137 has a half-life of a fraction over 30 years, so they're good for a long time and they're not something you'd throw away lightly.]

More interestingly, there is another place close to Brisbane that contain much more radioactive material. This is the Narangba Food Irradiation Plant, which is located 30 km North of Brisbane.

The Narangba Food Irradiation Plant - looks like just another industrial building ...

According to a conference paper by the Australian Nuclear Association this facility was designed to accommodate up to 185 PBq of cobalt-60, although it was initially only loaded with 11 PBq. I haven't been able to determine whether the facility has subsequently been loaded up closer to its full capacity, but even 11 PBq is a lot; it's a bit over 2000 times as much activity as is in the entire Esk facility. At full capacity, that would increase to nearly 35,000 times.

... but contains over 2000 times as much radioactive material as the Esk nuclear waste dump.
[This photo is from the web site associated with this plant. I am not sure whether this shows the actual source array in use at Narangba, but it would probably look very similar to this.]

Cobalt-60 has a half-life of a bit over 5 years, so the source elements have to be replenished regularly. I'm assuming they get their cobalt-60 from the Lucas Heights reactor, which means the replacement source elements have to be trucked right up the coast, through both Sydney and Brisbane. [I'm not sure what becomes of the depleted sources, they can't be going to the Esk facility because this only holds a total of 470 MBq of cobalt-60, which is far less than even a single source element. Presumably they currently keep them on site, although eventually they'll need to be disposed of.]

I'm not sure how worried we need to be about this, though. The source elements consist of pellets of metallic cobalt (which is chemically a fairly inert material), doubly encapsulated in stainless steel, so there's much less chance of widespread contamination occurring in the event of an accident than with some other isotopes.

I'm sure that there are extensive safety precautions taken during both the transport of the source elements and the operation of the plant itself...

Then again there's a saying that goes "you can't make anything truly foolproof, because fools are so ingenious". And this is amply borne out by a fatal accident that occurred in the Nesvizh Irradiation Facility in Belarus in 1991 [which at that point was the fifth fatal accident to happen in an irradiation facility].

These places have some pretty fierce levels of radiation going on. A person would be subject to a lethal dose of radiation in approximately 30 seconds inside the irradiation chamber of such a facility. Consequently, there are some pretty elaborate safety precautions taken. Although there's a tendency (fostered by decades of cold war propaganda) to assume that in the old Soviet Union safety standards were lax and workers were incompetent, neither were the case here.

The operator who died was considered to be the most experienced operator at the plant. He had an engineering degree and had worked at the plant since its construction. He had had to pass a yearly examination on plant safety in order to retain his license to operate. This is a much higher level of both qualifications and experience than you'd find in the average Australian operator.

The entrance to the irradiation chamber consisted of a corridor with three separate right-angle bends in it (this was referred to as a "maze"). This was to ensure that there was no possibility of the radiation inside (which travels in straight lines from the source) getting out. At the entrance to this maze was one of the most unusual safety features that I've heard of; a pit trap in the floor(!).  There was a cover over the pit which was extended or retracted by an electric motor, and this this was interlocked, via a key mechanism, with the source in the chamber; basically you couldn't extend the cover over the pit unless the source was lowered into a safe position.

An unusual safety measure

Beyond the pit was a pressure plate on the floor, which would automatically drop the source to a safe position should someone walk over it. There were also gamma ray monitoring probes at various points and several emergency stop buttons. The mechanism for raising and lowering the source was of course fail-safe, with the force of gravity returning the source to its safe position.

As to what went wrong, the report states diplomatically:

As in many accident investigations, ambiguities exist in the description of exactly what took place during the accident. The operator stated that his own recollection of events was somewhat hazy as he was feeling sleepy at the time. However, both the authorities and those who treated the operator reported that he also appeared reluctant to give any precise details.

It seems that the operator was alerted to a product jam and needed to enter the the irradiation chamber to clear it. He should have pressed the "source down" button on the control panel, removed the interlock key from this panel, used the interlock key to close the cover over the pit, and then checked for radiation before entering the chamber.

It's not clear whether he actually pressed the "source down" button (possibly he meant to but forgot), however he left the interlock key in the panel. This meant the pit was still open, but rather than return to retrieve the key, he used the electric motor that activated the cover as a stepping stone to get over the pit.

Investigators were unable to determine how he managed to get past the pressure plate without activating it (apparently, even taking a flying leap over it would have been very difficult), or if he did activate it, how the source subsequently managed to raise to the active position (and if so, how he failed to hear this happening).

He then failed to look at the portable radiation monitor he carried with him before entering the chamber. You'd almost want to conclude that he was committing suicide, however after about a minute in the chamber he noticed the source was up and ran out calling for help.

It's not a laughing matter, but I have a picture of the guy, fighting his way, Indiana Jones style, past safety feature after safety feature to get into the chamber.

But that's what human beings are like, and why you should never trust anyone who says that some inherently dangerous technology can be rendered 100% safe.

But I'm not lying awake at night worrying about the Narangba Food Irradiation Plant either. It's unlikely that any accident would result in widespread contamination. If someone does something excessively foolish working in the plant, they'll probably die an unpleasant death, but in the overall scheme of things, that's no worse than falling into vat of paint stripper, or any of the thousand other horrible ways people can die in industry.

[As to whether we need to be irradiating food, that's a different story.]

One thing that would make me lay awake at night - at least if I thought he could get away with it - is Malcolm Turnbull's apparent desire to create a dump in Australia to receive the world's nuclear waste. We are talking about high-level nuclear waste here, which is fiendishly difficult to deal with. So much so that no country in the world has yet created a permanent high-level nuclear waste dump.

Turnbull appears to be strongly pro-nuclear, more so than he publicly admits. I'm not basing this on his public statements because I don't trust anything he says - but more that he has appointed strong (and in my opinion one-eyed) advocates of nuclear power - Ziggy Switkowski and Dr Alan Finkel - to important positions.

Why he would talk about a National Nuclear Waste Dump is a puzzle. It goes against the statement I made in my last post - which was that he was purely a political creature and stood for nothing. No purely political creature would dream of mentioning a National Nuclear Waste Dump; this idea has been under consideration on and off since at least as long ago as 1978, been subjected to committee after committee and report after report; and has ended up in the too-hard basket each time. [To make it clear; only the idea a national dump for waste existing within Australia was being considered. Until now no one had suggested taking waste from other countries.] Politically speaking, it's something to run a mile from. There are no winners - people are hardly going to thank you for not putting a nuclear waste dump in their back yard - and you're guaranteed to make some pretty strong enemies of those who draw the short straw.

Is he so full of himself that he thinks he can get away with it? If so, isn't that a terrible indictment of the man that the one issue he feels strongly enough about to spend his political capital on is the construction of a nuclear waste dump?

Or is it that he hadn't really meant to make a big issue of it, and it was blown out of proportion by Murdoch's gnomes in order to undermine him? This would also explain why the Mal Brough scandal just happens to be coming to light now, years after the actual event, and why the media are only now starting to question Mal's handling on the NBN. It does seem that certain elements of the media [and not just the cartoonists] are heartbroken at Abbott's departure and want him back.

But let's not get side-tracked...

A few days ago (5^th Dec 2015) there was a shipment of nuclear waste into Australia. The story was that used nuclear fuel from from Lucas Heights had been shipped to France to be reprocessed and we're now getting it back. Basically, the French extract the plutonium and uranium (or as much of it as they can get) out the for their own purposes, and send us back the rest. [Actually, it's not quite as simple as this; they don't actually segregate the waste country-by-country, but simply send us back an equivalent quantity of waste from their stockpile.]

ANTSO [the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation] has put out a press release about this. It was full of pap to placate the proles. One thing that particularly caught my eye was this section in their FAQ. Let's play "Spot the Falsehood":

Q. Is the waste returning to Australia dangerous?

 No. Intermediate-level waste is only harmful if not managed properly. It does not generate significant heat and is shielded during handling, processing and storage as a precautionary measure.

As a comparison, the Zwilag facility in Switzerland holds over 20 similar containers to the one returning to Australia, including containers with much more radioactive material. Since it is so heavily shielded and well controlled, the employees of Zwilag can walk around next to those containers without special protective equipment.

The first sentence "No.", reminds me of a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"this is obviously some strange use of the word safe that I wasn't previously aware of."

Look below at what's in this stuff; if you're not going to call it dangerous, then what in the name of Cthulhu would you call dangerous?

The second sentence starts with "Intermediate-level waste..", which we will see later is an incorrect categorisation.

The second sentence ends with ".. Only harmful if not managed properly.", which is classic weasel-wording. Think about it: this statement is always true by definition. If something causes harm then you're not managing it properly. Even something that's extravagantly dangerous is "only harmful if not managed properly". That it might be incredibly difficult to manage properly, and have terrible consequences if you don't, is a different issue.

The third sentence starts "It does not generate significant heat ...". As we'll see later this is not true. It puts out nearly 1 kW of heat; enough to cook your dinner on (although I wouldn't recommend doing this).

The third sentence ends by giving the false impression that the stuff is only shielded "as a precautionary measure", implying that it barely needs to be shielded at all. [Edit - In fact, even the massive amount of shielding present - each container weights 112 tonnes and incorporates 200 mm thickness of steel, 67 mm of lead, plus a special neutron-absorbing resin - still results in an uncomfortably high level of radiation in the vicinity of the containers.]

As for being able to ".. walk around next to those containers without special protective equipment", that's technically true but...  The radiation protection plan says that a person would be subjected to 5.0 μSv/hr working in the vicinity of these (heavily shielded) containers. That's around 30 times the background radiation level in Australia. If you were to work in this area 40 hrs/week 48 weeks/year, you'd be subjected to an annual dose of  about 10 mSv. This is half of the maximum allowed annual dose for "occupationally exposed personnel" (but 10 times the maximum allowed for members of the public). Since in reality a person isn't going to need to be in this area for more than a few hours at a time, a couple of times a year, this is not at all a dangerous situation (at least assuming everything goes as expected). Nevertheless, it's somewhat disingenuous to imply that you can stroll around these containers with complete impunity.

[Edit: Oh yes, and the "without special protective equipment" is also a deceptive statement. Protective clothing protects you from contamination (which would not be an issue here unless the containers are leaking), but it does not protect you from radiation. Why? because the thickness of lead required to give a useful amount shielding from gamma rays is far too great to incorporate into protective gear. According to a document from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, even one inch thickness of lead would be barely enough to reduce the radiation levels above to background levels. Consequently, it is wrong to assume that there is no danger just because protective clothing isn't needed.]

It took a lot of digging to find out what's in this waste, but the truth is out there; in the form of a supporting document to the license application for building a store for this stuff.

Here's what we got for Christmas:

Caesium-137	1.275 PBq
Strontium-90	8.559 PBq
Americium-241	340.6 g
Uranium	18.36 kg
Plutonium	391.8 g
Neodymium	11.07 kg

[They also state what was in the spent fuel we sent out, but I've omitted this for clarity.]

Our old friend caesium-137 is there: 25 times as much as the Goiânia source, and the French even did us a favour; we only got back a quarter of the caesium-137 we sent out. On the other hand, they gifted us 14 times the americium-241 we sent them (which is enough to make over a billion smoke detectors), so swings and roundabouts.

There's an absolute shed load of the equally dangerous strontium-90, and we've got back over a third of the plutonium we sent them.

The contents of the Esk repository are a rounding error compared to this (literally; they would at most affect only the last decimal place of all of these figures).

One thing that's interesting, is that they quote the heat output of this waste. This is actually an important factor because it's what separates High Level from Intermediate Level Waste, and it's one thing that makes High Level Waste difficult to deal with: you need to cocoon it in shielding to keep the radiation at bay, but this traps in the heat, and if you don't get rid of the heat, the temperature starts to rise and then bad things happen.

The stuff we sent out was putting out 2101 W of heat. The stuff we got back was putting out 950 W. The difference was almost entirely due to the lesser amount of caesium-137 we got back. Since spent nuclear fuel has all of the characteristics of High Level Nuclear Waste (but it isn't referred to as such, simply because it's not defined as "waste"), and what we got back puts out nearly half as much heat as the spent fuel (and would put out virtually the same if the French had given us back all our caesium-137 as they were entitled to do), how come this waste isn't classified as High Level?

I suppose it's just a matter of terminology, but it seems that people are going to great lengths to avoid calling a spade a spade.

Finally, I'll leave you with this comforting thought:

This waste is only a drop in the bucket compared to what we'd be seeing if Turnbull's dream came true. This was just the waste from a single 10 MW research reactor. The average power generation reactor is about 100 times the size of this and there are over 400 nuclear power plants in the world. They have many decades worth of waste stored away, waiting for someone to take it.

A Scary Thing

For my belated Halloween post this year, let me talk about a scary and evil thing - the horror that is Malcolm Turnbull.

This year's Halloween pumpkin - angelic by comparison

In January this year I predicted that Tony Abbott would be knifed, despite the belief amongst many that the Coalition wouldn't dare to do any such thing. It turns out I was right and they were wrong - Nya Nya Nya! :pokes out tongue:

Actually, I was mostly wrong; I got the timing of the knifing and the identity of the assassin wrong, and the media reaction was different to what I had anticipated. Nevertheless, I think my final words on the subject still hold true:

If this happens, don't expect things to get any better; Abbott is merely the symptom, and not the disease.

Abbott was a blundering fool. It was a thing of wonder and despair that he managed to keep the (low but still significant) level of public support that he enjoyed. However, in his favour, the damage he managed to do was limited by his incompetence.

Now he's gone and good riddance, but the result is that we have Lord Baelish on the Iron Throne. Great! Little Finger as prime minister and Reek as leader of the opposition.

Since Turnbull is fluent enough to string whole sentences together and doesn't come across as obviously unstable, it seems that his rise to power has been greeted with immense relief, and the popularity of the Coalition has soared (to as high as 56% two-party-preferred if you believe the latest polls).

Turnbull scares me.

One thing that strikes me about him is that he represents Politics (in the bad sense) in its purest form. He spins everything to his own advantage with the skill of an unscrupulous lawyer who can turn black into white. He never hesitates to make personal attacks against anyone who dares to question him. He has mastered the art of the Big Lie - unlike Abbott who wasn't smart enough to get away with it. He can be extremely convincing if you don't know the facts.

He doesn't seem to stand for anything at all. I know he's made some statements that seem progressive, but these were just some bullshit he's made up to placate the proles. If we judge him by his actions rather than his words, virtually nothing can be said in his favour.

Consider this:

1) He's supposed to recognise that Climate Change is actually happening and it's important to do something about it - yet he maintains Abbott's Direct Action plan. Direct Action was intended partly as a mechanism to subsidise polluters, and partly as a work-for-the-dole scheme to keep wages down. Environmentally speaking, it's next to useless.

2) He's supposedly in favour of Marriage Equality - yet he maintains Abbott's disingenuous policy of holding a plebiscite. A plebiscite is simply a vote to determine what the population believes on a certain issue; it doesn't create legislation and doesn't bind the government to do anything. Since the opinion of the population is abundantly clear on the matter already, all a plebiscite is doing is telling you what you know already, at considerable expense (I think it's around $100M). Why do it? It's simply a delaying action; they don't want to legislate and need to find an excuse to put it off.

3) He's though of as being more humane than Abbott, yet he still keeps refugees in death camps, and he still keeps that mindless thug Dutton (a weak and evil version of Hordor) in charge of the process. In this case, it's probably a matter of politics again. This terrible situation is bound to boil over into a major international incident sooner or later, and who better than Abbott's mate Dutton to take the blame. Fair enough, but meanwhile innocent people are being tortured in death camps, in a manner that would spark outrage if some other country did it.

Then there's the wrecking of the NBN. The most important infrastructure project in many decades, with incredible social and economic benefits. Deliberately trashed. He can't claim ignorance; he knew what he was doing. Many technical people - a lot of them Coalition supporters - contacted him prior to the election to acquaint him with the facts. There was even a petition, signed by a quarter of a million people, on the subject - which he ignored. Fair enough he was ordered to do it by Abbott, and there was some hope that he'd (quietly) reverse his stand when he come to power, but this too came to nothing.

He's even abandoned his quest for a Republic (although I'm beginning to believe that he was actually working with John Howard to split the republic vote and cause the 1999 Republic Referendum to fail - at the time I thought he was naive, and fell for an obvious divide-and-conquer tactic, but now the evidence seems to be in favour of it being deliberate).

So, in all of the above cases, he is knowingly letting bad polices, with obvious detriment to the people, the environment, the economy, and the country in general, continue unhindered. It seems that pretty much the only thing he has achieved was turning back Abbott's policy on knighthoods. Big Fucking Deal!

Overall, he's capable of doing even more damage than Abbott, and getting away with it too. A scary thing indeed.

The fascists are still trying to gas us

Recently a shocking crime was unmasked. Billions of dollars were stolen and thousands of people were killed.

I'm talking about the VW Emissions Scandal aka Dieselgate. "Oh that," you say, clicking on another link, "I thought you were going to talk about something important". Which makes you part of the problem.

Champions of the Big Lie, then and now

[Yes, this is an egregious Godwin, and moreover unfairly associates a great car with a couple of utter scumbags, but I think it's worth pointing out the history of this evil corporation.]

This is not merely a case of a company concealing facts to cover for some embarrassing or expensive stuff-up, but systematically engineering a system to break the law. How is this any less criminal than planning and then committing a straight-out robbery?

Then there are the deaths.

Clearly, any estimates of mortality in a case like this are only going to be very rough, but consider this: Many European countries have failed to meet targets for reducing NO_x pollution. In the UK alone, 23,500 premature deaths per year are estimated to be caused by NO_x pollution. Transport accounts for nearly half of all NO_x emissions. The hacked VWs were putting out up to 35 times the legal limits of NO_x. VW is Europe's largest car manufacturer, and this scandal has been ongoing for many years.

You do the maths: Whatever way you calculate it, there are thousands of deaths attributable to this hack. And that's not counting illnesses and environmental damage.

Why does no one seem to be upset about this? It's barely being reported on-line, and when it is, it attracts comments like:

"Meh, they all do it"

"I don't care, I didn't buy my car based on the NO_x emissions"

"This is the result of environmental agencies being too strict"

"I still trust VW to give me adequate compensation"

and even

"I admire their skill in pulling something like this off"

[These are paraphrased, but genuinely reflect comments I've read.]

Business Insider tells us why they think this scandal is "so annoying": apparently entirely because it will cause VW to lose market share in the US!

Not one word suggesting it's a bad thing to deliberately and cynically break the law, to steal billions of dollars, and knowingly kill people in the process. Presumably these things are just par for the course in Big Business.

Yet imagine if a criminal had committed a bank heist, and cold-bloodedly gunned down some bystanders in the process (that is to say stole 1000 times less money and caused 1000 times fewer fatalities) or, worse still, was a welfare recipient who had ripped off a few thousand; those same commentators would screech like their balls were caught in a rabbit trap and they'd demand that the perpetrator be hung, flogged, and then hung again.

Let us get angry at this. Let us demand that the board of this evil corporation have their heads put on pikes as a warning to others.

Silly scissors

One of the fun aspects of purchasing Chinese stuff on eBay is reading the instruction/warning labels.

Does this mean it's OK to stick them into adults?

Here is the label in its full glory:

Have a laugh, but don't look down on the writer. It's perfectly comprehensible and, if you can get past the poor (but forgivable) word choices, quite a reasonable warning label.

Contrast this to the idiotic warnings and deliberately obfuscated legalese to be found on products made by people whose first (and probably only) language is English.

Be Kind to Bots

Spare a thought for the automatic checkout machine who lives in a supermarket.

I have heard people swearing and cursing at them (and I've done it myself in the past), sneering at them, calling them stupid and so on, but I've never once heard anyone being polite to them. Anyone who returns the machine's "Thank you" always does so sarcastically.

Think for a moment about what this means.

It's considered acceptable, and even mildly amusing, to heap humiliating insults on a machine, but if you try to do the opposite, people will look at you like you're crazy and maybe say something like "You do know that it can't hear you, don't you?" in a pitying tone.

I find it somewhat worrying that only politeness and not abuse is considered to be irrational, and it's even more concerning when you realise that this is how people would have behaved towards slaves.

Imagine you had a servant, and they didn't understand what you said (through being deaf, or not speaking English, or whatever), would you consider it acceptable to abuse and insult them [assuming you could do so without giving your feelings away by body language]? If not, then why should it be acceptable to swear at a machine - which is literally acting as your servant - just because it can't hear you?

The machine might not be able to hear, but your actions say something about you.

Soylent Green is Pancakes!

Soylent Green is Pancakes!

Recently I was given some Soylent to try out. Soylent is a powder that that contains all of the nutrients required to sustain life. You mix it with water and drink it. In principle at least, you could live off the stuff indefinitely. And, yes, the name is an ironic reference to the fictional Soylent Green.

At first sight, it might seem to be a solution looking for a problem. Why would you want to eliminate the pleasure of eating food from your life? Isn't that like using artificial insemination so that you don't have to have sex?

It seems to be advertised on the basis that it's quick and easy to prepare, yet cheaper and healthier than takeaway. The idea is presumably that the archetypal computer geek, assailed with hunger but unwilling to relinquish the joy of debugging the latest Linux kernel to prepare dinner, slugs down a glass of Soylent, rather than ordering in a pizza and coke.

But it has more potential than just a convenience food for the time-poor.

Given that it's light in weight, will keep a long time without refrigeration and can be prepared without any special equipment, it might be useful on expeditions or in remote communities with limited access to fresh food. It would be a good thing to pack away as an emergency ration. It would surely have a place in disaster relief. Also, it might be helpful for those with eating disorders where "normal" food would trigger binging.

It's not going to find a place on everyone's table, but it's potentially a useful product.

An Aussie version of Solylent

The product I tried was not the original American formula, but an Australian version.   The Australian version comes in two varieties; "Chocolate" and "Premium". These differ from each other (and both differ from the American version) in contents and nutritional breakdown. All are formulated for a 2,000 calorie daily diet (obviously you can vary this by eating proportionally more or less). Puzzlingly, the American version has a significant excess proportion of fat and a deficit of fibre. The Aussie versions come much closer to the recommended proportions.

Here is the comparison (the quantities are for a day's worth of servings):

	US Version		AU Version (Chocolate)		AU Version (Premium)
Fat	96 g	43%	52 g	23%	67 g	31%
Protein	84 g	17%	121 g	24%	101 g	21%
Carbohydrate	204 g	40%	261 g	53%	235 g	48%
Fibre	16 g		30 g		48 g

[% refers percentage contribution to total calories]

Mmmm, Soylent!

Here's what the stuff looks like in person. This is the chocolate flavoured version. The colour isn't totally accurate - it's a fraction more brown than shown - but it's much closer than the example on the aussielent web site, which looks like a photo of pure cocoa powder.

I made half of it up as per directions.

Soylent; like a chocolate milkshake, only crunchy floury

The flavour was neutral and not unpleasant. After drinking, I felt full; as if I'd had a normal meal. I had thought that it might make me feel starved afterwards, but it seems my body registered the calories and responded appropriately.

The only problem - and this is a significant problem which will need to be addressed if the stuff is going to achieve any sort of public acceptance - is the texture. It's horribly floury; to the extent that it's unpleasant to drink, despite the otherwise acceptable flavour.

It has been suggested that the texture can be improved by letting it stand for a while. Some say it's better at room temperature, and others prefer it chilled. I tried it after standing for a considerable period at room temperature and then in the fridge overnight. I also mixed it thoroughly in a blender. Nothing seemed to make any difference to the texture.

It tasted to me like diluted cake mix or pancake batter.

Pancake batter? Now that's an idea!

If life gives you pancake batter...

As an experiment, I mixed some of the remaining Soylent with water and made pancakes. Since I only used water, and not the usual eggs and milk, the Soylent pancakes would be nutritionally the same as the original Solyent - with the exception of a little extra fat from the butter used to grease the pan, and possibly minus a small amount of the vitamins due to the cooking process.

The darker colour of the batter meant that the lacy patterns from cooking weren't as noticeable, and also they were a little more brittle (presumably due to the lack of eggs) and had to be turned with care, but otherwise they came out the same as normal pancakes.

Eaten alone, without any toppings, Soylent pancakes are virtually the same as ordinary pancakes but somewhat more flavourful. That is to say, they taste really good. Unlike the original drink, they are something that can be consumed with pleasure.

Needless to say, the remainder of the Soylent was used for pancakes. The picture at the top of this entry is an example. Obviously this goes against the philosophy behind Soylent, but if you're of an experimental frame of mind, I'd recommend giving it a try. As currently formulated, this seems to be the best way to use the stuff.

And here's an idea for some entrepreneur; sell Soylent in the form of pancake-like wafers. You could call it Lembas (which has much more pleasant associations than the loathsome Soylent Green), and cash in on the popularity of the Lord of the Rings

Return of the Rainbow Flag

Last Valentine's Day I made a post which featured a rainbow flag made from synthetic caviar. Now is probably a good time to post an explanation of how it was done.

Synthetic Caviar

Technical Background

Synthetic caviar is produced by a process known as Spherification. This technique relies on an unusual property of the substance sodium alginate.

Before I go any further, sodium alginate is not a weird and sinister chemical synthesised in the laboratory of some evil food corporation, but a substance extracted from seaweed. You could think of it as a vegetarian version of gelatin. You will have eaten it many times before; amongst other things, it's used to create the "cherries" in fruit buns and the fillings in stuffed olives.

Sodium alginate has the same effect as gelatin (i.e. converts a liquid into a gel), but it achieves this by a different mechanism, and this mechanism can be exploited to create unusual food items.

When a small quantity of sodium alginate is dissolved* in water, it gives the resulting solution a syrupy texture. This solution is stable, and unlike gelatin, doesn't set when it becomes cold (although it will become noticeably more viscous). Sodium alginate is often used as a thickening agent in foods for this reason.

[* = technically, it doesn't actually dissolve but in fact disperses; the difference is academic from the point of view of cooking.]

Where the interesting part comes in is that when sodium alginate comes into contact with a liquid containing calcium, it converts to calcium alginate, which forms a firm gel. Once formed, this gel is stable, moderately tough and unaffected by temperature.

So what you can do is add sodium alginate to an appropriate liquid, drip blobs of it into a bath containing calcium solution, and then fish them out once the outside has firmed up. You end up with a sphere that's firm on the outside, but with a liquid centre.

You can also do Reverse Spherification where you drip a calcium-rich substance into a sodium alginate bath.

With the right ingredients, you can make not only synthetic caviar, but also a wide variety of other unusual foods.

Plusses

• Looks really cool.
• Not difficult to do. The process can be performed by a school child.
• It is unusual enough that it can be a science fair project, or can be an impressive party trick. The spheres are unaffected by alcohol, so you can make all sorts of weird cocktails with them. Try dressing up as a mad scientist and serve them up in test tubes, beakers, etc.
• Ingredients aren't overly expensive.You only need tiny quantities anyway.
• The main ingredient is extracted from seaweed and is environmentally sustainable, acceptable to vegans, Halal and Kosher. So (assuming you choose your other ingredients wisely) you're safe from offending pretty much anyone.

Minuses

• Can be time-consuming to make more than a relatively small quantity (you can buy special tools to make them in bulk, but these are fairly expensive).
• Must be used soon after preparation. The texture starts to deteriorate after a few hours (depending on the ingredients, the spheres either start weeping or harden up right through). You can make up the alginate solution the night before, but not the spheres.
• Ingredients aren't readily available at your local grocery store (although can be ordered on line fairly easily). 

The Rainbow Flag of caviar [click for larger image]

The Recipe

If you think you might want to give it a go, a good starting point would be to download the Texture - A hydrocolloid recipe collection, by Martin Lersh from the Khymnos blog.

Don't be intimidated by the size and technical detail. Go to the "Sodium alginate" section and look over some of the recipes for caviar.

For a pictorial description of the process (with some incredible photography) check out the Luxirare blog. Don't let the professionalism of this site put you off, either; you can achieve amazing effects without any special technical skills or equipment. It's really easy, in fact.

The synthetic caviar featured on this blog was made as follows:

1) Firstly, a 1% solution of sodium alginate was made (1 g of sodium alginate in 100 ml of hot water).

This is actually the most difficult part of the whole process. Sodium alginate doesn't dissolve in the sense that sugar or salt does, but it basically absorbs water and swells up into a lumpy mass of jelly, with hard bits in it. Left by itself this mass will keep absorbing water and most likely will eventually attain an even consistency, however this would take a very long time and you need to give it some help.

Some people use a blender to dissolve the sodium alginate. This is easy to do and works very quickly, but beats an enormous amount of air into the mixture, which means it has to be left for several hours for the air bubbles to clear.

I used very hot water (just off boiling), and slowly added it to the alginate, mixing by hand all of the time. A flat tool like an ice-cream stick or the blade of a butter knife works best for mixing for mixing; with a fork, lumps get stuck between the tines.

After about 10 minutes of mixing, the mass was nearly all broken up with a few harder lumps floating around. When left to sit for half an hour, the lumps had dissolved and all of the air bubbles had cleared. I'm not sure whether the hand mixing put in fewer air bubbles, or whether the hot water made them clear faster.

BTW, This solution is stable and can be kept in the fridge for at least a few days.

2) The solution was then portioned out into a number of small glasses, one for each colour and appropriate colourings and flavourings (rose water, grape juice etc.) were added. The original alginate solution was made more concentrated than was required in order to allow 50% or so extra liquid in the form of flavourings to be added.

You will have to experiment with what works best for you here. I found that simple food colours and essences were easiest to deal with, and they would be recommended as a starting point. I found that very acidic (lemon juice) or sticky (mango nectar) liquids were hard to deal with. I tried to use sodium citrate to reduce the acidity of the lemon juice, but it didn't help much and simply added a salty flavour.

3) 2 g of calcium chloride was then dissolved in 200 ml of warm water in a glass.

Calcium chloride can impart a (very slightly) salty taste. This is not generally noticeable, but may be an issue when using very subtle flavourings. In this case, you can substitute calcium lactate.

4) The spheres were created by dripping the appropriate solution into the calcium chloride solution with a 10 ml syringe. Approx 5 ml of solution was used at a time, after which the spheres were retrieved from the solution with a sieve, rinsed in water and set aside. The spheres only need to sit a short time in the solution (say 30 seconds) to firm up.

The Ingredients

The Main Ingredients

In Australia, you can get the ingredients from Gourmet Goldmine and The Red Spoon ^co.

It's best to get the smallest size packs, which are around 80 g. An evening's experimenting might only require around 2 g, so even 80 g will go a long way.

You'll also need scales capable of measuring down to about 0.1 g and a 10 ml syringe. You can get the syringe on line or from a chemist. Don't be scared; it is not illegal to buy syringes in Australia.

In Defence of Tony Abbott

This Australia Day, what could be more patriotic than coming out in defence of our glorious prime minister Tony Abbott, captain of Tame Team Australia?

Tony Abbott is a national embarrassment and the worst prime minister, by a long margin, I have had to endure in my entire life. Almost certainly he is Australia's worst prime minister ever.

I've heard it said that he combines the intelligence of George W Bush with the compassion of Margaret Thatcher. I suppose this statement was intended as an insult, but it's actually flattery since he is inferior to both of his role models in these respects.

He is a pathological liar. He is sufficiently bereft of empathy that I suggest he would meet the clinical definition of a psychopath. He doesn't think things through, believing he can make things up on the spot, yet he can't think on his feet either. He is cowardly and violent; an archetypal bully. He is spiteful. He panics easily. He is not suited to wielding any sort of power.

The media banged on and on about Julia Gillard's "lie" (which amounted to a tedious hair-splitting argument about whether an Emissions Trading Scheme counted as a Tax or not). They don't do this about Abbott. This is partly down to media bias, but also because Abbott has told so many lies it's difficult to know where to even begin. If you try to highlight just a few lies, you end up ignoring, and by implication accepting, scores of other equally bad examples of dishonesty. People have had to resort to listing his lies and the lists run into the hundreds. Check out Tracking Abbotts Wreckage; you will notice that the page is very slow to load, presumably because of its length.

His beliefs, in so far as you can tell what they are through the screen of lies and contradictions, are a mixture of the bizarre and frightening. When someone considers it an important reform to bring back knighthoods, or spend $250m putting chaplains in state schools, you really have to wonder what century they think they're living in.

For a while I was wondering whether there was more to his actions than met the eye; that beneath a veneer of jaw-dropping incompetence there was some deep and cunning scheme afoot. After all, it's not a trivial task to become Prime Minister. You surely have to a reasonably high level of brain power to be able to plot and scheme your way right to the top.

For instance, putting refugees in (what amounts to) death camps is totally evil and the sort of thing that should have those responsible up before an international tribunal, charged with crimes against humanity. Even if you had no morals, it's still undesirable in that it's an extremely expensive and inefficient option, which also breaches international law and therefore weakens your hand internationally.

Yet there are logical reasons why an intelligent (if totally unscrupulous) person might still go down this path. It's Fascism 101; if you demonise a group, you can blame them for any of society's problems, and you can appear strong - even heroic - by taking tough action against them. The benefits in this regard might well outweigh the costs.

Similarly, smashing up a government enterprise or destroying an industry might also be a rational decision if your mates can loot the wreckage.

However, the damage being done is too wide-spread for that, and the only possible scheme that seems compatible with his actions is if he were an anarchist/libertarian (or possibly even an agent of some rival power), who is selflessly sacrificing his image to destroy the state apparatus, bring the country to its knees, and tarnish forever the office of prime minister. But this doesn't seem likely; especially the self-sacrificing part.

So when am I going to get on with defending him?

Actually, I did a Tony Abbott here; that is to say, I lied. At least, I'm not going to try to find some creditable aspect of his personality that has hitherto been overlooked, and claim that as a consequence we should think less badly of him. While he may indeed have some positive characteristics (although discovering them would be like panning for gold in a sewage pond in the middle of summer), I am going to make a different point:

By concentrating on how loathsome Tony Abbott is, we run the serious risk of underestimating how bad the rest of his government is.

The destructive and idiotic policies he is trying to implement are in the main part Coalition policies. Abbott is obviously just a tool; a puppet, elevated to his current position by external forces. While some of his most idiotic ideas seem to be of his own making, he is in general following a script laid down by others.

And in this respect, he is typical of the current cabinet. Hearing Joe Hockey speak about how he finds windmills "utterly offensive" and "a blight on the landscape" brought this home to me. Hockey doesn't strike me having any aesthetic sensibilities at all and in reality probably wouldn't even notice a wind farm if he were chauffeured through the middle of one every day. He is obviously just regurgitating words put into his mouth by others.

If, as seems likely, Abbott gets a knife in the back some time soon, we should not be relieved that we have exorcised this demon. Whoever replaces him might quite easily be worse.

Imagine if we got someone who was a little bit cunning; smart enough to hide their intentions a little better and who was able to swallow their pride enough to negotiate with others.

Imagine if Abbott had been able to get Jacqui Lambie on side - and surely it would not be an onerous task for a warmonger to get an ex-military cop on side - he would not now be crippled by a hostile senate and he could get even more nasty legislation passed. In fact, imagine if he'd been able to negotiate with Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor (both closer in ideology to the Coalition than Labor) after the previous election - he could have formed government in 2010.

To make an analogy with the Game of Thrones; if Abbott were Joffrey, Scott Morrison would be Ramsay Bolton and Malcolm Turnbull would be Lord Baelish. Julie Bishop might be Cersei. [edit: I was also going to link Peter Dutton to Hordor, but Hordor was strong, good-natured and fulfilled a useful role.]

Swapping one of these for another is hardly cause for celebration.

I've heard it said that they wouldn't dare to replace Abbott after all of outrage they confected when Rudd was "knifed" by Gillard. And especially not by Bishop, who shares many of Gillard's characteristics (unmarried woman, no children, ex-lawyer, etc.) that the media attacked so fiercely. Sympathetic to the coalition though they are, the media wouldn't stand for it.

Like Hell they wouldn't!

They'd do a 180 degree turn so fast that the fillings would fly out of their teeth.

I can just see the Murdoch media now: Abbott would be portrayed as stepping aside gracefully in a statesman-like manner, and Bishop will reluctantly take the helm. It will all be because he was unable to sell his wonderful policies to the ignorant proles who don't understand what's good for them. He will be a martyr. Bishop will be a hero. The word "knifing" will never be uttered. If Rudd and Gillard are mentioned at all, it will only be to contrast the "civilised" and "adult" behaviour of the coalition to the "shambolic" and "vindictive" way the ALP handled a similar situation.

And of course, you'll see the media become ardent feminists overnight; at least in so far as this allows any criticism of Bishop to be written off as a misogynistic attack.

The beauty of the situation, at least from the point of view of the Coalition, is that those in the ALP have virtually no way to use this "knifing" to their advantage. Since the ALP defended Gillard in this same situation, they can't turn around and attack Bishop without having their own words turned against them. They can rail against media double standards of course, but that can simply be dismissed with the remark: "they would say that, wouldn't they".

Anyway, I'm not any good at predicting these things, but I'd be surprised if Abbott doesn't feel the cold steel between his shoulder blades within the next few months. And my money would be on Bishop wielding the knife.

If this happens, don't expect things to get any better; Abbott is merely the symptom, and not the disease.