A Rant

There are a number of things I have intended to post about on this blog, but it seems that every time I get close to finishing something, I'm overtaken by events.

The main thrust of the blog was intended to be shining a light on things that one takes for granted and showing that there is more to the story than it may appear. Something to challenge people's assumptions, make them uncomfortable, and hopefully make them think.

Not to say that I have any profound wisdom to impart, or that I'm necessarily even right, but if I can at least make people think, that's surely a good thing.

The difficulty I face is that every day I see so much outright idiocy, and jaw-droppingly evil decisions being made, that I don't know where to start or what approach to use. Ideally, I would like to construct robust logical arguments, with carefully selected references, and illustrated with relevant examples, but this approach is just simply not valid when I'm faced with things that are plainly ludicrous to anyone capable of thinking.

What sort of logic works when people are not only claiming that 1 + 1 = 3, but are going around and beating up anyone who says otherwise?

What can you do other than point out that it's stupid?

Let's just look (in no particular order) at some of the things going on at the moment:

1) We have the ongoing Centrelink Robodebt lunacy. I would have thought that since this malicious and disastrous policy was so plainly exposed, the Coalition would at the very least have thrown some scapegoat (probably the unfortunate intern who coded the logic [and BTW, I take back my suggestion they used COBOL, more likely it was something like Brainfuck to save on using all those expensive letters and numbers]) under the bus. Instead, they're not only defending it, but seeking to expand it to aged pensions.

The whole Robodebt business is like the punch-line of a joke which begins "Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller and George Orwell walk into a bar...", and the fact that it's one of the lesser evils we face just shows how bad things have become.

2) We have the government proposing laws to weaken encryption so that it can gather even more confidential data on its citizens, at the very same time as their Medicare records were found to have been hacked. This on top of the still-unresolved Census debacle of last year.

It gets worse though; in the process of proudly announcing these proposed laws, our prime-minister claims that that the laws of Australia override the laws of mathematics.

For FUCK sake, this is literally a scene out of 1984.

3) And what the HELL is going on with the Carmichael Mine?

Here we have a corrupt foreign billionaire seeking to open one of the biggest coal mines in the world. This at a time when we've just had two consecutive massive coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, and at the same time as an ice shelf larger than Kangaroo Island has just broken off Antarctica.

The mine is not even economically viable; they're going to give Adani a billion dollar handout, not even collect royalties for decades and give them unlimited free water, at the expense of farmers.

The only justification given for this is "jobs". Now I want to write more about this in future since it's wrong on a number of levels, but for the moment I'll just say that the intention is to automate the mine to the max. We will probably have trucks driven by remote control from India, by people paid 50c/hr. There might be a bit over a thousand local jobs. If it were simply about jobs, then it's a ludicrously inefficient use of money; it's costing us nearly a million dollars per job, which is more than the people involved will ever earn back.

It's also amazing that a racist/xenophobic place like Australia isn't upset that Adani is an Indian. Seemingly, being a billionaire makes you an honorary White Man or something.

If it were just to Coalition supporting the mine, that would be understandable - they are after all irredeemably corrupt and evil (we're taking about people wearing hi-vis shirts in parliament; no longer even trying to hide their corrupt ties to the mining industry, but flaunting them) - but both the state and federal Labor Party are behind this. Why?

What are the Greens doing about this? Busy falling on their swords, one after another. First the hissy fit with the NSW branch, then Scott Ludlum and now Larissa Waters gone. They are the closest thing we have to a sensible political party and their very best people are abandoning their posts one after another, just at the time they're needed the most.

It's heart-breaking, and makes me not a little suspicious that something underhand is going on.

4) And let's not get started on fracking and Coal Seam Gas. The phrase "fugitive methane emissions" should in itself be enough for anyone with a brain to demand that it be banned outright.

5) Now we have the terrifying prospect of a massive new paramilitary police force; merging the incompetent ASIO, the politically motivated AFP, the Nazi thugs from Border Farce, and more, all under the control of the worst possible person to wield such power: my nemesis, the anti-Possum Dreaming; Peter Dutton.

What's going on? Even in banana republics, an aspiring dictator would have to be smart enough to sweet-talk the colonels into staging a coup d'etat. Dutton is far too stupid to do this, but somehow he just gets handed the power on a plate, while sitting there like a useless potato.

We can only hope that he's too incompetent to wield such power effectively, but this is a very thin straw to grasp at; like giving a toddler a machine-gun and hoping he's not a very good shot.

6) When considering ludicrous idiots getting handed extraordinary power, one's mind is naturally drawn to the clown that the United States has seen fit to elect to its highest office.

There is no excuse for this in a country which claims to be a democracy.

The guy is outright corrupt, he is ridiculously incompetent at everything he does and he has a particularly obnoxious personality. For FUCK sake, the guy is a fucking rapist, which should in itself be enough to disqualify him from leading any civilised country - and should surely disqualify him a hundred times over in a prudish country like the US where they pretty much crucified Bill Clinton for much less. Trump's personal "qualities" have been known for a long time. Here is a page from a Robert Crumb comic from 1989:

HUP No. 3, page 20 
[click for readable image]

So nearly thirty years ago he was widely considered to be "one of the most evil men alive".

No one can say they didn't known what he was like, and don't give me that rubbish about "The Russians Done It" either. Do you think that the vast array of US spy agencies, with almost unlimited money and power at their disposal, would allow a country, that had traditionally been their mortal enemy - a threat they had been specifically built to counter - to interfere with such a critical process as a presidential election and do nothing about it?

The only possible argument you could give for voting in such a person would be that you believed The System to be so irredeemably bad that the only alternative is to wreck it as quickly and thoroughly as possible. But this would be a desperately dangerous game to play. Who knows what the outcome would be: Handmaid's Tale territory? Nuclear war?

What is worse is that Trump is only a symptom of a much more fundamental problem. Like Tony Abbott, he is just the most prominent pustule on the face of a plague victim.  Getting rid of him (and don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen) might reduce the chance of some immediate disaster caused by extreme stupidity, but won't really fix anything.

7) And this disease has seemingly spread everywhere. The UK is in chaos with Brexit and a minority government dependent on religious extremists. The Middle East is an ongoing disaster area that's been getting steadily worse for the last two decades. Turkey is rapidly falling into dictatorship...

.   .   .

Anyway.

The point of this rant is not so much that everything is hopeless and we should all slash our wrists, or that we need to rise up in revolt at once, but more to give an excuse as to why I haven't been posting so much. Things keep happening which make me feel that what I'm writing is lame and irrelevant and I get discouraged.

I'll try to do better in future.

Turnbull's Victories

Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has had some big successes since his party formed government.

I will consider here only those successes related to the IT field, since Turnbull is considered by some to be an IT genius who brought the Internet to Australia (he bought shares in the now-defunct Ozemail and sold them a few years later at a massive profit).

To the uninitiated, it might seem that his actual performance has been more like a three-train wreck; that is to say, not only a disaster, but something where you marvel at how it's physically possibly for it to have happened.

[Based on an illustration from here]

But looking at it from the point of view of the Coalition, it has been instead a series of mighty victories.

Victory 1: The NBN

[Based on a stock photo from here]

There is no question that the wrecking of the NBN was deliberate.

Turnbull's FTTN (Fibre-to-the-node) network is inferior to Labor's FTTP (Fibre-to-the-premises) system in every conceivable way. It costs just as much to install, but is orders of magnitude slower, it's not upgradable, it won't last as long, it's much less reliable and it has enormous ongoing operating costs. The technical community - despite an intrinsic right-wing bias - are uniformly against it. Have a look the Whirlpool forum to see what I mean; whenever a Coalition troll ventures in to spruik Turnbull's FTTN, they are immediately shot down with technical arguments by experts in the field.

Not only is this obvious now, but it was obvious right from the start.

Soon after gaining office in 2007, the ALP's original proposal for the NBN was actually something very much like Turnbull's FTTN network. At the time, the Coalition correctly called it out as useless. The term "Fraudband" was actually coined by Nationals Senator Fiona Nash to describe this network.

So the Coalition knew, nearly 10 years ago, that FTTN was a dud.

So how come they ended up in favour of it?

It seems that just before the 2010 election, opposition leader Tony Abbott had a luncheon with his master Rupert Murdoch, whose influence and profits were being threatened by expanding Internet usage.

The very next day Abbott rashly announced that he would destroy the NBN.

I think he was then quickly taken aside and given a stern talking to by his handler Peta Credlin ("Not like that you fool, the NBN is popular; you need to destroy it by stealth"). He therefore entrusted this unpopular task to his main rival, Malcolm Turnbull. I think he expected Turnbull to fail, or at least come out of it looking bad.

Turnbull, however, exerted his lying skills to their fullest. He first proposed a wireless system as an alternative to Labor's NBN, and when that was laughed down, he then went with FTTN. He had a plan fully costed and worked out, he said, and ready to go the moment they won government. It would be a third of the price of Labor's system and would be finished much sooner. Their 2013 pre-election promise was for everyone to be connected by 2016.

The technical community saw through these lies at once (although some took a bit longer), but the Coalition had all of the mainstream media on their side. All of the traditional media stood to lose out as the Internet expanded, so they made sure to stifle any objections to the plan.

Now we can see how things turned out. Nowhere near finished, abysmal speed and reliability, $20B over budget so far; all as predicted. Last time I checked, Australia had dropped to 60th in the world in Internet speed. An appalling thing for a first world country.

In other words, it all happened exactly as planned and is a big victory to the Coalition. Those responsible for getting the Coalition into power  -  the mainstream media, and in particular Rupert Murdoch - have their influence and profits preserved for a little longer. Meanwhile, the NBN has been crippled to the extent of becoming a burden to the taxpayer, so no one will complain when it's given away to Telstra, to further cement their monopoly position.

What is the betting we'll see some Coalition politicians offered well-paid positions on the Telstra board when they lose their seats next election?

Victory 2: The 2016 Census

In 2016 there was a sudden increase in the number of people named Winston Smith in Australia
[won't reveal the source of this one ;)]

The ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) gathers statistical data on the nation. Reliable data is critical for running the country. If you are distributing resources, you need to know what resources you have and who needs them. If you are implementing a policy, you need to have some feedback on whether it's achieving its goals.

However, since the Coalition came to power in 2013, they haven't had any use for objective data. The decisions they have made have been based on a mixture of ideology and implementing the requests of their corporate sponsors. The problem with having objective data available is that it might contradict these decisions, and in that case there's the need to go through the tiresome process of suppressing the data, censoring or discrediting anyone who publicises it and so on.

Of course it's theoretically possible that, by chance, objective data might support their decisions, but why risk it? Far better to just invent the data as you need to; it's quicker and cheaper to do and always gives the right answer.

Therefore, in 2014, the Coalition made crippling budget cuts to the ABS. These came on top of a previous set of crippling budget cuts by the previous Labor government (who I am by no means defending as they were probably inspired by the same motives).

Things got so dire that when Brian Pink retired as Chief Statistician in January of 2014, they couldn't find anyone to replace him and the department struggled on without a head for several months. But then things got worse: the Coalition appointed David Kalisch as Chief Statistician. Now I don't know for sure that Kalisch is any more than a useful idiot, but there is some reason to believe he's a coalition stooge.

Firstly, Kalisch isn't even a statistician. He is an economist, which these days means someone whose role is to think up reasons why money should taken from the poor and given to the rich. Therefore it would be fair enough to assume that he at least sides with the Coalition politically.

Of interest is that the fact that his appointment was rushed through, along with a number of other partisan appointments, just before Christmas in 2014 - which is a traditional time of year to hide shenanigans.

In February of 2015, he was already spin-doctoring unemployment figures in the government's favour.

Soon afterwards, he was delivering the line that the 2016 census should be scrapped. Given that the census is critically important to the role of the ABS this would seem a very strange thing to say - although not so strange if he was testing the waters on behalf of the coalition.

There was some backlash about this and he was forced to change his tune. Then some Machiavellian plotter (I would like to know who) came up with a quite ingenious strategy: They would announce that, unlike previous years, the ABS would be retaining people's names for data matching purposes.

On the face of it, this didn't make any sense; why expand the scope of the census immediately after you've claimed there wasn't enough money to even hold it at all. Therefore there was much speculation that the motives were entirely sinister. Hitler used the German census data to track down Jews. More recently, the United States used census data to track down Muslims. With those on the left already nervous (if not terrified) about abuses of power by the Coalition there was therefore considerable outcry about this.

This was all part of the plan.

Either no one would care very much and people would fill out their census forms dutifully, thus giving the Coalition a treasure trove of data to use against its enemies, or there would be mass disobedience, which would render the census useless. Either way they would win.

Then came the online census debacle.

Before this happened, I had an inkling that something wasn't quite right. I had heard some people saying the encryption on the ABS server wasn't up to scratch. It's never a good idea to take rumours like this at face value, so I checked myself and it turned out they were right. Specifically; I ran an SSL security check on the ABS server and found the encryption protocols available did not provide Forward Secrecy. Forward Secrecy is something you particularly want with something like a census and it's not difficult to set up.

At the time, even my own personal Possum TV server provided Forward Secrecy. [And I'm not trying to make myself out to be a security guru here; if you can set up a server, it's really not rocket science to configure the encryption right. Literally all I did was Google something like "best SSL configuration for Apache" and followed the instructions on the first (trustworthy) site I found.]

When it came to the actual night of the census, things went worse than even I had thought possible. I have looked at a submission by the ABS to the senate enquiry on this embarrassing business, and despite spinning everything in the ABS's favour, it was still obvious that they were totally unprepared and flew into a flailing panic when things started to go wrong.

After the event, Turnbull beat his chest talking about how he would bring those responsible to account. Still waiting on that. Maybe he should look in a mirror.

Victory 3: Centrelink "debt" recovery

Centrelink's sensitive and understanding robo-debt-collectors
[source]

Words fail me when it comes to describing what a mess they've made of this; it makes even the census debacle look good by comparison. It's like they sent the intern to a short course on whatever retarded programming language they use there, probably COBOL, and asked him write a data matching program, with no oversight, then rolled it out with no testing and met all complaints with the unanswerable "The computer is always right".

However, to say that this incredible debacle is an unintended consequence of cost-cutting is wrong, and to think that it is hurting the Coalition is also wrong. I believe this is all deliberate and the Coalition is benefiting from it.

The people who are upset about this are people who would never vote for the Coalition anyway.

The Coalition is more interested in winning back voters who have deserted it for lunatic Fascist parties like One Nation. The average One Nation voter most probably considers those on welfare to be scum who should be put against a wall and shot. The idea of welfare recipients being mistreated is music to their ears.

The Coalition want this to hurt people. They need it to be unfair, and be seen to be unfair. The more the progressives scream about how evil and stupid it is, the more the One Nationists like it and the more the Coalition knows they are doing the right thing (at least for a certain value of "right").

The Overall Strategy

There is a common theme to all of these victories. They all involve interfering with, and under-funding, key public services to the extent that they become incapable of performing their roles, ultimately leading to spectacular failures.

Quite apart from the benefits to the Coalition listed above, these victories all have some additional benefits in common:

Firstly, the Coalition gets seen to be prudent economic managers because they are "willing to make the tough decisions" to save money. It's true the NBN disaster is costing enormous amounts of extra money, but since the NBN was originally a Labor initiative this can be blamed on Labor.

Secondly, these sort of things get progressives really riled up, thus taking the focus off other extremely important problems - such as the Coalition's bitter and relentless war against the environment and the crimes against humanity being committed in the refugee death camps.

Thirdly - and I think this is the most important reason - it opens the way for privatisation. Noam Chomsky summed up this strategy in a 2011 speech:

"That's the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."

I'm not sure what their ultimate aim is; possibly some Libertarian paradise where the only government services remaining are the police and military. In which case, future generations will think Orwell's 1984 was a historical novel, and will marvel at how good people had it back then.

Let's hope the in-fighting between the many crazies in the Coalition (e.g. that dickhead Bernardi who somehow thinks there's a need for yet another reactionary fringe party: The "Australian Majority Party". Off to a good start there, idiot - even the name is a lie.) prevent them from achieving this.

Another Political Rant

My local "member" - Peter Dutton
[Click on image for the full horror]
source

I should probably give up speculating on politics because I'm not very good at it.

It looks like I grossly overestimated Malcolm Turnbull. I had thought that the ingenious way he had destroyed the NBN, while at the same time spinning his sabotage as improvements, and his well-timed and efficiently executed knifing of Abbott, were marks of some supreme Machiavellian intellect.

It appears that in reality these were the pinnacle of his achievements and beyond that he is nothing more than a pompous windbag with a gigantic ego. He thinks he knows everything but in fact he has no skills beyond telling lies, and does not even realise that any more skills than this are needed. I though he had an evil plan and, with his Saruman-like skills (and a little help from Sauron aka Rupert Murdoch), would entice the population down the road to some horrible corporatist dystopia. In fact, he seems to have no plan at all and considers it beneath him to even devise a plan.

I take back what I said about him deliberately splitting the vote in the 1999 Republic Referendum. There is a saying that goes "Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.", which I think perfectly applies in this case.

He is no Lord Baelish. I can't think off-hand of any Game of Thrones character who combines such an inner feebleness and incompetence - a lack of both knowledge and skill that rivals even Tony Abbott - with the external veneer of a master manipulator.

I have also underestimated Peter Dutton. I had thought of him as being of the intellectual calibre of Hordor, with the difference that instead of being a good-natured giant fulfilling an important role, he was a nasty and useless weakling.

While this is all still true, I underestimated his sheer brutality. Maybe his extreme stupidity renders him insensitive to the suffering of others. If only he were merely useless, and didn't have the power of life and death over people!

Seriously! A refugee under his "care" attempts suicide by self-immolation - which is quite possibly the most painful way it's possible to die - and all he cares about is censoring an "unflattering" photo of himself. As if it's possible for a mere photo to make him look any worse than he actually is!

I will be doing everything I can to make sure this loathsome scumbag loses his seat in the forthcoming election, but I would really prefer to see him shipped off to rot in one of his own concentration camps.

And, yes, that most likely is the shadow of a swastika on his forehead in the photo.

Where the Mutton-head deserves to be.
Source

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.