Month After Meltdown(s), Japan AEC Asks for Public Input -- and Gets It. (Transcript)

PDF : 国民の皆様から寄せられたご意見 （期間：平成２３年３月８日～平成２３年４月５日)  and an American attempting to understand it

An input of which there appeared to be no dearth.  I found this transcript to be fascinating -- the many, many angles from which one can approach "no, duh, nuclear energy IS a really stupid idea, we knew it was going to be, and now we know that we don't even know now exactly how bad an idea it will have turned out to have been, but we nonetheless seem to have to experience it being this very very stupid bad of an idea first hand.  We thought we would share some of our experiences, since you seem to not be doing anything important at the moment, like dismantling the infrastructure of nuclear power or educating citizens about the effects of radiation, or renewing your abandoned duty to protect the children -- the adults of tomorrow -- from the slow deaths caused by your short sighted self-sabotaging indifference, opportunism, and greed."  


Wait -- that was my public comment submitted to the JAEC.  Those who were recorded in this document were much, much more polite.  Pardon me....

But now, without further ado, here is my slightly retouched machine translation of 

(8) The Public Submitted Comments From Everyone (period: April 5, 2011 - March 08, 2011)   

(PDF - 

国民の皆様から寄せられたご意見 （期間：平成２３年３月８日～平成２３年４月５日）(PDF:920 KB)

     With 'adobe job security formatting' -- so if you don't have Acrobat™, you may not be able to read it)

(data URI 

     to original link - right click and save to desktop, 

     or just follow clickstream directions above)

第１１回原子力委員会定例会議 (TXT) -

     original 174 page Japanese document extracted therefrom) 

(TXT

     un-retouched text extracted in sections via googletranslate therefrom) 

(PDF -

     'Retouched' machine translation -- corrections not completed -- reads better.  

     Attempts were made to confine revisionary impulses to punctuation, 

     where it is hoped less harm could be found to have been done to the underlying meaning.)

     (h/t Crisis Maven.)

(HTML - 

    Version. in English by, with several hours lasted, overlong work gladly,

    Made against, such as: syntax, punctuation, and other, Error        Definite Inroads.)              

Here's hoping my Gentle Readers find something of worth......

Tell me what you think.*

IMPLICATIONS EXPRESSED IN THE FOLLOWING GREYED OUT PARAGRAPHS HAVE BEEN RETRACTED WITH RECEIPT OF NEW INFORMATION. SEE UPDATE FOLLOWING.


1 Of perhaps parenthetical interest is the strange difficulties I had actually obtaining the document.  It is offered, as far as I understand, to the public without reserve. There is no registration or other explicit tracking going on, nor is there, as far as I can tell, any request for money, or any other information.  An English translation is offered by the site itself -- in my case, most welcome -- ah, but it ends one page before the page that links to this PDF.  I thought it more appropriate to take screenshots of www.aec.go.jp than to link to it, considering that they thought it more appropriate to give me the next image, rather than the PDF they had promised:


2. (And that isn't even the best one, but that's fodder for another post.)  So here is what you see when you visit: 


3. And if you then click for English in the upper right, a statement on their motivations and purposes, to wit, "...promoting international cooperation, with a view to ... contributing to the improvement of both the welfare of human society and the living standard of the people":


4. Note also that unofficial transcripts are made available, online, for the 'people' (not necessarily Japanese, if I read that correctly) to view.  Which I venture no one is able to do quite so easily; do tell in comments if you experience otherwise....  So a click to Commissioner's meeting brings us to 2011


5. Now suddenly, though the index is translated, it becomes Japanese only. So much for the world-as-one--society feeling left over from their mission statement (and blessings upon the babel fishies and their kin). A click on the link for "12 Apr The 11th" materials yields:


6.Which translates to -- (isn't it wonderful how you can just sit back, take your hand off your mouse, and take it easy?) -


7. At last, the prize, there at the bottom of the page.  Anyone who can read it direectly the way they usually read PDFs, tell me please.  If you would, tell me what browser you are using, etc.  

                                             

UPDATE: Adobe Acrobat ™ reads it just fine.  I retract any implications I may be making below.  I leave them here for academic purposes, because I still resent having to have one corporation's software.... but am sure the AEC meant me no harm...  With apologies. Sigh.  

*I, for my part, have more to say as well.  

But am exhausted, 

and have news up with which to catch... *smile*

Be seeing you.

Video Presentation On Chernobyl & Fukushima - (EXCELLENT)

From The Infinite Unknown.net, comes this must see gem:

A MUST-SEE! Prof. Hiroaki Koide also measured radiation levels in Tokyo. The Japanese government never admitted to this amount of contamination in Tokyo. Prof. Hiroaki Koide concludes that if Tokyo has been contaminated this much, then ‘areas within Fukushima prefecture must be seriously contaminated’.

More of a discrepancy than you think.  For understanding the nuts and bolts of what such a disaster means for the world -- an understanding complete enough to withstand the tests to which it will be put should you speak or write upon the subject (and if you ask me, it is imperative). 


I found it riveting, despite its being subtitled.  







If you can, arrange a group viewing.  This world needs all the help it can get right now.


Be seeing you.

Familiar (Self) Interpellallation | a video interlude

Video : twenty-three seconds; post-video mental processing may take a little longer; full comprehension of the extent to which this cat is BUSTED may entertain you for the rest of your life.

From Wikipedia

h/t Trudy S & of course noobdaily

Be seeing you.

"'Link in Your Mind' Cyberattacks and Fukushima"

Click on the title for a better formatted version*




-- one not *&*&%Rrr%%'ed up by Blogger. No thanks to Blogger, twelve hours later. Thank you for letting me vent. -- one not *&*&%Rrr%%'ed up by Blogger. No thanks to Blogger, twelve hours later. Thank you for letting me vent.

'New' Propulsion Tech: Jets That Move Like Classic UFOs

New, huh. Kind of makes you wonder. 

From the D-Dalus site:

Over recent months we have witnessed unprecedented global challenges that range from the oil platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, threats from global terrorism, Somali pirates, earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand and Japan and the consequent nuclear disaster, and despotic regimes deploying aircraft and artillery against their own people. As each event unfolded, we seemed frustrated by the limitations of our conventional tools in trying to generate a swift and effective solution. How valuable it would be if we had an instant response fleet of aircraft that could provide intimate visual coverage of events, even pre-warning or tracking of such phenomena as tsunamis, oil slicks, small boats, radioactive leakages, arms traffic, the deployment of mines and IEDs etc. Where it is too dangerous for human presence, how ideal it would be if we could deploy a robotic platform that could fly through smoke and radiation, enter buildings, recover casualties or hazardous materials, hold and direct fire hoses or deliver lifesaving equipment. next to a rock face or wall.

Be seeing you.

MUST-READ: Bill Kiesling's Guide for Surviving Nuclear Meltdowns

My alternate title: 

"Nuclear Energy In Theory and As Practiced, With Illustrations at Times Gruesome, Wit Often Morbid, and Heart Most Decidedly In The Right Place."

Bill Kiesling : "The Fukushima Experiment: A nuclear meltdown survival guide"

...In the years following the Three Mile Island accident much was learned about what the utility did, and did not know at the time of the 1979 reactor meltdown in Pennsylvania. It became painfully obvious that the control room operators, the utility executives, and the government overseers of Three Mile Island simply did not know at the time what was happening inside their damaged nuclear reactor core. Why they did not know is really the heart of the matter, and the thing we should consider. In the event of a runaway nuclear reactor (politely called a "power excursion" by the industry), Tepco executives in Japan, like their counterparts in Pennsylvania, don't have the foggiest idea what may happen when their reactors melt. If you live within two hundred miles of a nuclear power plant, consider this: If the plant suffers a meltdown, no one on earth will be able to tell you what to expect... Read more

\

Kiesling chronicles the incident cited by Nuclear Engineer Arnie Gundersen of Fairewinds, as precedent for the unlikely nuclear criticality that he deduced was indeed occurring  at Fukushima.  

Yes.  For those of you who did not know, or who (like me) thought such was not possible outside of a nuclear warhead, this is not the case.  In fact, material at TepCo's Fukushima Daiichi Reactor Complex keeps going critical, intermittently.  This is the only explanation for the presence, so many months after the initial incident, of any amount of short-lived radioactive elements such as Iodine-131, which has a half-life of eight days.  Had there been no new criticalities, it would have decayed away by now.  (And I'm not even mentioning the blue neutron beams that have been reported). (View Arnie explaining all this here.

....tragedy visited another experimental reactor on January 3, 1961. At about nine in the evening, three technicians were performing a maintenance operation on the SL-1 reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho. The SL-1 was one of 17 test reactors scattered across 892 square miles of Idaho desert at the AEC's National Reactor Testing Station. The tiny SL-1 was meant to produce electricity for about a dozen homes in arctic military bases. For some time the reactor's nine control rods had been acting up, as had other reactor functions. The SL-1 had been shutdown for about a week in expectation of major repair work, its control rods pushed firmly down and disconnected from the mechanical control rod drive. The number nine control rod was the most important. It was the only rod that could start the chain reaction when lifted away. To ensure that the cadmium control rods would not stick or jam, technicians had been "exercising" them, lifting them a few inches, then returning them. That night three technicians were standing on top of the reactor, reconnecting the control rods to the mechanical drive. The number nine control rod had to be lifted four inches by hand to be connected to the machinery. During this operation the rod was lifted too far. In a fraction of a second the reactor became critical, a power excursion followed, and an estimated 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 atoms split. By the time help arrived, one man was found dead. A second technician was rushed outside, but was so radiated that he had to be examined by a doctor wearing protective clothing. The second man quickly died. The third technician was found dead on the ceiling of the reactor building. A piece of control rod was jammed through his groin, pinning his corpse to the ceiling at the shoulder. For twenty days, the bodies were packed in water, alcohol and ice, while scientists tried to cleanse the dead tissues of uranium. Finally the men were buried, but their heads and hands had to be removed and buried with other nuclear wastes.  Read more

Bill Kiesling's time saving 

"list of rules for understanding nuclear meltdowns 
and why they happen:"

Rule 1: Commercial atomic energy technology is a pseudo-science and is not based on proper scientific experimentation. Rule 2: Commercial atomic energy is instead based on voodoo economics. Rule 3:          The nuclear power industry is doing its level best to destroy the nuclear power industry. Rule 4:         You are the experiment. Rule 5: They build a better model fool every year. Rule 6: People don't like or understand atomic energy. Rule 7: There are no safe levels of radiation. Rule 8: Theoretical physicists live to a ripe old age, experimental physicists die of radiation poisoning. Ergo, stay away from nuclear accidents. Read more

Be sure to check out the rest -- here's the introduction... 

The Fukushima Experiment A nuclear meltdown survival guide Japan's Tepco utility executives and government officials are alternately accused of covering-up, withholding information, or downplaying the severity of their nuclear accident. Truth is, as many of us nuclear meltdown veterans know, those utility executives and officials are as much in the dark as the rest of us. If you live within two hundred miles of a nuclear power plant, consider this: If the plant suffers a meltdown, no one on earth will be able to tell you what to expect. Welcome, then, to the Fukushima Experiment ... by Bill Keisling Read more

Be seeing you.

'Johnny Mnemonic' Chip Successfully Stores, Transfers Memories in Rats; Soon to be Tested On Primates

Get ready for the future.  It is already here.

"Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off—literally with the flip of a switch." USC:  Restoring Memory,  Repairing Damaged Brains: Biomedical engineers analyze —and duplicate— the neural mechanism of learning in rats LOS ANGELES, June 17, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire The paper is entitled “A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory.” Besides Deadwyler and Berger, the other authors are, from USC, BME Professor Vasilis Z. Marmarelis and Research Assistant Professor Dong Song, and from Wake Forest, Associate Professor Robert E. Hampson and Post-Doctoral Fellow Anushka Goonawardena. Berger, who holds the David Packard Chair in Engineering, is the Director of the USC Center for Neural Engineering, Associate Director of the National Science Foundation Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems Engineering Research Center, and a Fellow of the IEEE, the AAAS, and the AIMBE. Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget. “Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget,” said Theodore Berger of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. Berger is the lead author of an article that will be published in the Journal of Neural Engineering. His team worked with scientists from Wake Forest University in the study, building on recent advances in our understanding of the brain area known as the hippocampus and its role in learning. In the experiment, the researchers had rats learn a task, pressing one lever rather than another to receive a reward. Using embedded electrical probes, the experimental research team, led by Sam A. Deadwyler of the Wake Forest Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, recorded changes in the rat’s brain activity between the two major internal divisions of the hippocampus, known as subregions CA3 and CA1. During the learning process, the hippocampus converts short-term memory into long-term memory, the researchers prior work has shown. “No hippocampus,” says Berger, “no long-term memory, but still short-term memory.” CA3 and CA1 interact to create long-term memory, prior research has shown. In a dramatic demonstration, the experimenters blocked the normal neural interactions between the two areas using pharmacological agents. The previously trained rats then no longer displayed the long-term learned behavior. “The rats still showed that they knew ‘when you press left first, then press right next time, and vice-versa,’” Berger said. “And they still knew in general to press levers for water, but they could only remember whether they had pressed left or right for 5-10 seconds.” Using a model created by the prosthetics research team led by Berger, the teams then went further and developed an artificial hippocampal system that could duplicate the pattern of interaction between CA3-CA1 interactions. Long-term memory capability returned to the pharmacologically blocked rats when the team activated the electronic device programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function. In addition, the researchers went on to show that if a prosthetic device and its associated electrodes were implanted in animals with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually strengthen the memory being generated internally in the brain and enhance the memory capability of normal rats. “These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes,” says the paper. Next steps, according to Berger and Deadwyler, will be attempts to duplicate the rat results in primates (monkeys), with the aim of eventually creating prostheses that might help the human victims of Alzheimer’s disease, stroke or injury recover function. Read more

Alexander Higgins sees a connection between the location of the researching University and The Newly Emergent and Ever So Friendly US Police State:

Scientists working at the University of Southern California, home of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, have created an artificial memory system that allows thoughts, memories and learned behavior to be transferred from one brain to another. In a scene right out of a George Orwell novel, a team of scientists working in the fields of “neural engineering” and “Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems” have successfully created a chip that controls the brain and can be used as a storage device for long-term memories. In studies the scientists have been able to record, download and transfer memories into other hosts with the same chip implanted. The advancement in technology brings the world one step closer to a global police state and the reality of absolute mind control. Read More

And indeed, the DoD is mentioned in the Smart Planet write up of the press release:

The Matrix reality: Scientists successfully implant artificial memory system ... today we have macaque monkeys that can control a robotic arm with thoughts alone. We have paraplegics given the ability to control computer cursors and wheelchairs with their brain waves. Of course this is about the brain controlling a device. But what about the other direction where we might have a device amplifying the brain? While the cochlear implant might be the best known device of this sort, scientists have been working on brain implants with the goal to enhance memory. This sort of breakthrough could lead to building a neural prosthesis to help stroke victims or those with Alzheimer’s. Or at the extreme, think uploading Kung Fu talent into our brains. [snip]  A microchip implanted into a rat’s brain can take on the role of the hippocampus—the area responsible for long-term memories—encoding memory brain wave patterns and then sending that same electrical pattern of signals through the brain. Back in 2008, Berger told Scientific American, that if the brain patterns for the sentence, “See Spot Run,” or even an entire book could be deciphered, then we might make uploading instructions to the brain a reality. “The kinds of examples [the U.S. Department of Defense] likes to typically use are coded information for flying an F-15,” Berger is quoted in the article as saying. Read more

Thank you Mr. Higgins.


Watch out, everybody.  It will be a wild ride for some of us.  Extra care will be needed not to get swept away by the tide ever so gradually into actions with which we neither agree in principle nor in practice.  Your consent and attention is the most important, most coveted thing you own.

“Unlike me, 

many of you have accepted the situation 

of your imprisonment and will die here 

like rotten cabbages.”

--No.6; Free For All

The Prisoner

Be seeing you.