Inside the guts of a geyser

I never thought I would live to see the day when enterprising researchers put a camera down the conduit of a geyser.  It always seemed like a good idea to me.  So it has been done, as the video below shows, and they learned that the inner plumbing of a geyser is more complicated (and in a sense, less complicated too) than what had been thought before.

More complicated in the sense that there appear to be little piles of rubble all around, sort of like a little cave, and many of these little piles of rubble act as boiling points, just like the little bubble pebbles that are put in beakers in the chem lab to prevent explosive BIG bubbles of scalding hot acid.  (That's a good thing to avoid.)  Less complicated in the sense that the plumbing had been envisioned more as a complex series of tubes.  This is just basically a cave flooded with hot boiling water.

This also explains to some extent why geysers can be off and on.  Just a small shift in the location of a couple of boulder blocks might totally change the generation of the right size and number of bubbles to cause an eruption.  And then the geyser might not erupt for years until another shift gets the bubble pattern right again.  Also, an area of the underwater cavern might get cut off or restricted by a rock pile shift.

Anyway, cool to watch.  This was filmed at the Valley of the Geysers in Kamchatka.

And I like nuclear energy

Interesting points made here:

The top 5 reasons intelligent liberals don't like nuclear energy

Summary:
1. Ignorance.
2.  Bad psychological connections.
3.  Waste.
4.  Damn them Republicans.

"It does not help that climate change deniers such as Republican Senator James Inhofe are also pro-nuclear power. The only way to stop oneself from making such flawed political connections is to be reminded that this is not a political issue. Objections to and support for nuclear power should go beyond political partisanship. The merit of nuclear power lies in the science and thus bows to no political or partisan mongering, and especially not to dedicated deniers like Inhofe. It’s important for liberals to separate the scientific pros and cons of nuclear energy from the political credentials of those who support or oppose it."

However, the weirdest thing is that climate change is one of the best reasons FOR nuclear power.  If the skeptics would give up their quixotic and increasingly creationistic campaign against the realities of science on climate, then we would have more impetus for major expansion of nuclear power.


5. Fear of the Unknown .

Read the article at the link to get the full explanation of each point.

Will Julianne Hough be able to act?

I am a big Julianne Hough fan. Her dancing was amazing, she's marvelously good-looking, she's likable, and fame doesn't seem to have affected her too much -- plus her mega-rich and decent-looking BF Ryan Seacrest seems to know what he's got and treats her right.

But the problem is, she's tried to branch out from the dancing base with mixed success.  Country singing didn't seem to work, even though she had good pipes and the sexiest video this side of Lorrie Morgan in a low-cut dress. It seemed, however, that the establishment didn't like a bright-smiled, long-legged hoofer trying to get into their business without paying the requisite honky-tonk dues.  So she has gone acting, starting from her foundation with "Footlose", still doing the dance and song thing with "Rock of Ages", and now this Valentine's Day goes for the romantic ring with "Safe Haven".

So there are two questions. 
A) Can she act?  B) Are established actors going to be miffed at her for getting in above the ground floor?

I don't know. The "Safe Haven" trailers look promising, and there are OBVIOUS comparisons to "The Notebook".  Unfortunately, because she's the lead here, I think if she falls flat and gets panned, it's going
to take her awhile to recover.

Well, I should point out she looked great at the premiere.  That's a start.

The 60-second Movie Review was fairly kind to it.

Rotten Tomatoes, however, was not.  There is, however, one of the more massive disparities between the Tomatometer and the audience "like" rating (70%) that this might still be a decent romantic movie.  Curious about the weird twist at the end that's mentioned in a couple reviews.

If not fish, what?

Because of the vastness of the overfishing crisis facing the world, I frequently chide countries and citizenry that eats lots of fish on their overconsumption of the already-overfished fisheries.  And unfortunately, there are certain things about seafood that make it desirable as a dinner dish, such as:

1. It tastes good, frequently;
2. It looks good, frequently;
3. It's good for us, frequently (except for the mercury), and
4. Tradition.

Now, I am not advocating and end to eating fish.  What I'm advocating, just as I advocate energy conservation measures IN ALL THEIR FORMS, is eating LESS fish.  A modest reduction in the amount of seafood consumed in this world could go a long way toward restoring the beleaguered fish stocks. 

And note that I have NO problem with eating seafood that is not overfished, and some that should be overfished, like lionfish and Asian carp.  Barramundi looks like it could be a good choice, likewise for tilapia and catfish.  And  hatcheries seem adept at raising and releasing trout.

So we could change patterns of consumption quite readily, and help out the fish that need help, such as the dangerously overconsumed tuna.  The EU is taking steps that need to be taken, realizing that the path they're on is unsustainable. (It'd be nice if they also went more for nuclear energy, because renewables aren't going to cut it unless we come up with amazingly better batteries, but that's  another article).

The subject of this is what we could replace the fish with.  And I have three ideas:

1. Turkey - My meat of choice. Turkey is not consumed nearly enough, even though just about every deli has smoked turkey breast available.  But other than that, we see it as a holiday food.  Turkeys are big, raised to be eaten, and taste superb.  What's not to like?  According to some stats I looked up quickly,
turkey is the #4 choice of protein for Americans, and consumption has doubled since the 1970s.  If we could only make it taste more like tuna...   But here's the thing.  Americans eat about 7.3 kg of turkey per capita, Canadians 4.2 kg,  and Europeans (see below) 3.6 kg.  We need to get the Euros to eat more  turkey, and we need to eat more...

2. Rabbit - Europeans eat about 8 kilograms of rabbit per year, a lot more than us in North America.  And there is a lot of rabbit out there to be eaten.  Rabbits reproduce famously well, they can be barbecued (just ask Katniss  Everdeen), and it also goes well in stews and meat pies.  And they don't take much to feed.  If we could come up with genetically engineered rabbits with  omega-3 fatty acids, we'd be in REAL business.

3. Scallops.  OK, yes, it is technically a seafood.  However, scallops are  not free-swimming, net-caught, pelagic fish.  Scallops are picked as a Seafood Watch "Best Choice", because farm-raised scallops are pretty benign to the environment.  They taste great, are profoundly easy to cook, are low fat and  high in protein.  Plus, many of the wild types are also a best choice  (despite the bottom dredging for a couple of them). 

So there we go.  Cut back on the fish a bit, eat more turkey, rabbit,  scallops (plus as much lionfish and Asian carp as you can stuff into yourself), turn the Asian carp into fishmeal for fish farms for some of the more desirable farmed fish, and we ought to be able to satisfy  the world's appetites and rebuild the fisheries at the same time.

Good fish have bad mercury

One of the best ways to get people to stop eating something is to tell them that it has something bad for them in it.

For some reason, this doesn't seem to work for fish.  Lots of fish (especially the top-end popular kinds) have too much mercury in them for safe human consumption.

Mercury is bad for us.  Very, very bad. 

So we should stop eating popular fish.  Now.

Tell Japan.

Large levels of mercury being found in fish

 BRI and IPEN found that mercury contamination is worse in some regions than others. For example, the fish in certain spots in Japan and Uruguay is so high that the organizations recommend not consuming it at all.  But they also found that mercury contamination is basically everywhere – all over the globe: rivers, lakes, oceans, etc.  (Their stated goal though is to reduce this contamination.)  What’s more, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 86 percent of the fish we eat is imported.

Mercury Levels in Humans and Fish Around the World Regularly Exceed Health Advisory Levels

Global mercury hotspots

A couple of comments on Biello's op-ed

David Biello said some sad things about nuclear power recently:

Is nuclear power doomed to dwindle?

This leads me to make a couple of brief comments.

Biello uses the Crystal River plant shutdown to lead off the article.  Then he follows with this factum:

" What will replace the reactor’s 860-megawatts worth of power? Electricity generated by natural gas turbines, according to Duke. In fact, cheap natural gas may sound the death knell for the nation’s dwindling number of nuclear reactors, now down to 102. "

The problem is, burning natural gas is STILL not good for climate change.  The big natural gas boom (fracking and the like) is not good for climate change.   So the momentum swing back toward nuclear will (at least could) happen when the urgency of climate change becomes apparent. 

(Which is why climate change skeptics make me very angry, frequently.)

Biello alludes briefly to this problem at the end of the article.  If we burn more natural gas, our emissions dip won't stay dipped very long, because we constantly need more power.  We Americans are not energy conservationists - yet, that is.

The problem is, nobody is talking about the transportation sector yet.  Cars and every other vehicle with an internal combustion engine still pretty much use oil-derived gasoline to get around.  If we replace lots of IC vehicles with electrics, which is possible, then we'll still be burning fossil fuels in natural gas plants to power them, not nuclear.  Hence, more carbon dioxide.  We're still stuck with that.

Here's another thing Biello says:

"Nuclear power has more steam in countries such as China, which continues to push forward with a massive construction program in a bid to cut down on coal burning. Last week, Westinghouse lowered the top of the containment dome on its first new AP1000 reactor in Sanmen. But even 80 large nuclear power plants will do little to restrain China’s now world-leading greenhouse gas emissions (and air pollution) from all of the country’s coal burning."

When I read that, I just wondered if Biello read this:

China to cap dirty coal

""The State Council of China took a decision (February 2013) that implies putting a cap on coal consumption of less than four billion tonnes, which is a huge amount of coal but it's not much more than they're consuming now."

Is it achievable?  Perhaps not, but it's a goal.  And with China trying to reach its goals, the nuclear renaissance will likely continue - at least with China leading the way.  If we (U.S., that is) see China making real progress with clean nuclear power and greenhouse gas emissions reductions, then there might be a rather sudden sea-change in the nuclear prospects in this country.

Crystal River nuclear plant in Florida shuts down permanently

After the attempted repair of the Crystal River plant failed, I doubted that they would make another attempt to fix it, and I was right.  What is really daunting, however, is the cost of the plant that Duke Power will still try to get back - $1.65 BILLION.   That seems to me to be another good argument for the mini-nuclear power plant model.  However, the Westinghouse AP1000 could still make inroads in the bigger plant category.


Florida nuclear plant will be closed permanently