Reactive Radio (active)...

      What is happening out there in the "real" world, a world many of us insulate ourselves from simply because it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate truth from fiction (look at the popularity of historical "fiction" in libraries, which may be a descriptive indicator of how we'll remember these times).  And even with all the vaccine mis-information still going around (yes really, numbering around 300 false narratives as defined by NewsGuard), how is one to sort out perhaps even larger events such as what is happening in the Middle East, or in your own city for that matter?  Even the London Review blog had to ask why the U.S. still has military bases in Syria and other Middle East countries?  And why does the U.S. export so many weapons to the Middle East (such "military aid," which basically means free weapons, includes fighter jets, missiles, and armaments and account for 80% of Kuwait's military imports, 75% of Israel's, and 62% of Saudi Arabia's wrote a report from the Council on Foreign Relations.)*  Are we promoting peace or war?  So it was refreshing when  one of my long-term friends came out for his annual ski visit, a chance for us to catch up on what was new and what was old since we've known each other for nearly 50 years and our memories are still fairly intact.  But the reality we discussed was that we should be planning for another ten years of life, that is, if we were lucky we could likely count on ten "good" years left for us to travel and to do what we could while we could (we both hope to live longer but then we're both realists).  Such a figure of your dwindling able-bodied time here on Earth is something even the federal government reminds you about at this age, telling you that you are now officially on the tail end and to start paying those taxes on whatever retirement you had set aside in a 401k or similar fund.  The end may not actually be that near for me (IRS tables have me living to age 96...yeah, right) but it feels as if it is definitely closing in.  And perhaps the biggest reminder of that, for me at least, was yet another visit to the library; it seemed that each time I popped in there, there was something else I wanted to read or to listen to or to learn.  And this time, it happened to be about explosives (what??)...

Int'l Radiation Symbol: REMM

                                   Int'l Radiation Symbol: REMM

       It could have been that line from Barbra Streisand's autobiography (at a whopping 2,496 pages) when she was concerned about the world's growing nuclear arsenal (Chernobyl had just happened) and decided to give a personal fundraising concert for "friends," those Hollywood folk out of the range to most of us, all in an effort to help change the political landscape (funny how history loops back around).  She wrote: ...once again, I didn't want to grow old and regret not having taken the risk of standing up for what I believe.  For the rest of us, solving world situations seems much more simple as we tend to just react to whatever we read or hear, and we then gasp or cheer at the result.  Of course, there are no bombs exploding outside our windows and our taps still run with fresh water even as we bask in a hot shower or wash our clothes for the umpteenth time.  And of course we, the people, would solve the immigration flow or get that aid to those war refugees; heck, we'd even stop the influx of drugs from the cartels...easy peasy.  But these days, instead of diplomacy and cooperation among world leaders, such "solutions," even the rather complicated ones, seem to boil down to force.  Who's a more powerful leader or what country has the biggest weapons or the most bullets...or money?  Turns out that the chemical and physics world is little different.  Put the right molecules together and you have wonderful cooperation (think water); but mix a few stray molecules where they shouldn't be and let the fireworks begin.  Such thoughts are "good" for wars if you're planning to explode something encased in metal which can then shatter like glass and send both shards and razor-like pieces randomly through the air in all directions like mines and cluster bombs.  But when you add another basic element, such hard and destructive techniques aren't necessary.  Adding that element suddenly becomes something even more powerful.  And this element is everywhere in our planet.

      Here's how Robert Macfarlane put it in his book, Underland: Uranium was created in supernova explosions around 6.6 billion years ago, and is part of the space dust out of which our planet is formed...Uranium is mined as ore in Canada, Russia, Australia, Kazakhstan, and perhaps soon in the south of Greenland [not mentioned is that uranium was mined, and may be once again, in the Grand Canyon]. the ore is crushed and milled; the uranium is leached out with acid, converted to a gas, enriched, consolidated and then processed into pellets.  A single pellet of enriched uranium one centimeter in diameter [about the width of a pencil] and one centimeter long will typically release the same amount of energy as a ton of coal.  Those pellets are sealed within gleaming fuel rods, usually made of zirconium alloy, which are bundled together in their thousands and then placed in the reactor core, where fission is initiated.  Fission produces heat which is used to raise steam; the steam is ducted to turbines, turning their blades and producing electricity.  Once the fission process has slowed below a horizon of efficiency, the rods must be replaced.  But they are still intensely hot and lethally radioactive.  The unstable uranium oxide continues to emit alpha and beta particles, and gamma waves.  If you were to stand next to an unshielded bundle of fuel rods fresh from the core, radioactivity would plunder your body, smashing cells and corrupting DNA.  You would be likely to die within hours, vomiting and hemorrhaging...Over a quarter of a million tons of high-level nuclear waste in need of final storage is presently thought to exist globally, with around 12,000 tons being added to that figure annually.

      So when words such as "still intensely hot" are used, exactly what does that mean?  Mark Miodownik in his book Liquid Rules explained it a bit more when he talked about what happened at Fukushima when the tsunami hit their six reactors (Japan has 54 other nuclear reactors and all of them withstood the earthquake, as did those at Fukushima), and the problem wasn't the earthquake but the tsunami that followed (which traveled at the speed of a jet as it crossed the ocean).  As he explained, three of the reactors were already "off" for refueling, and the remaining three were shut down in response to the earthquake as a safety protocol.  But even when reactors are shut down, the fuel rods still need to be constantly cooled which is where backup diesel generators come in, and those are backed up by battery generators, which can only operate for 24 hours.  But the tsunami broke through the sea wall with ease and flooded the diesel generators (which triggered the battery backups), then proceeded to destroy 45,000 buildings and nearly 250,000 cars; getting the replacement generators up and running became an impossibility.  Wrote Miodownik: Twenty-four hours after the tsunami hit, the batteries died and the temperature inside the reactor started to rise.  When nuclear fuel rods melt they look a lot like lava, but the liquid is much hotter.  Lava comes out of a volcano red-hot, typically at 1800°F.  Liquid uranium-oxide nuclear fuel is much more fearsome, a white-hot liquid with a temperature exceeding 5000°F.  It will melt and dissolve pretty much anything it comes in contact with.  At Fukushima, it melted its way through the ten inches of steel that had been containing it, and then continued to eat through the concrete floor of at least one of the reactors.  But that was just the beginning.  The nuclear fuel in the reactor is encased in an alloy made from zirconium.  It is incredibly resistant to corrosion, except at high temperatures.  At 5000°F, the zirconium alloys react strongly with water, producing hydrogen gas.  It is estimated that as a result of the meltdown, one ton of hydrogen gas was produced in each of the plant's reactors.  On March 12, the hydrogen gas reacted with the air inside the reactor containment building, creating an explosion that destroyed the complex.  The author notes that almost all of the world's nuclear reactors are on coastal locations...

      250,000 tons of "still intensely hot" material (make that 262,000 tons of it by the end of this year).  What do you do with it?  How do you contain it?  Where do you put something that needs a LOT of coolant all the time, as in centuries, before it begins to decay enough?  In Belgium, one of the few countries to address this dilemma, they have named their experimental solution HADES (the U.S. storage site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada has been abandoned --so far-- since it is located on two major fault lines; it was [and is] designed to hold a capacity equal to --wrote essayist John D'Agata: ...the radiological equivalent of two million individual nuclear detonation, about seven trillion doses of lethal radiation [that would be 350 times the dosage to kill every human on this planet]).  One completed storage facility is in Finland but can only hold a maximum of 6500 tons of spent nuclear fuel (less than 4% of the nuclear fuel still being held in cool-water storage).  In that Finnish site, copper-iron cylinders 18" thick and weighing 25 tons..."will be nested in a bed of water-absorbing bentonite clay, inside a cored-out tube of gneiss, 1,500 feet down into the gneiss and granite bedrock."

      It's similar to the WIPP, or what the U.S. government defines as: ...a deep geologic repository, designed and constructed to provide underground disposal for the department’s defense-generated transuranic waste.  Located 2,150 feel below the earth’s surface in an ancient bedded salt formation, the WIPP site occupies 16 square miles in southeastern New Mexico, 26 miles east of the city of Carlsbad.  Transuranic waste to be disposed of at the WIPP comes from the department’s nuclear weapons programs.  This waste consists primarily of clothing, tools, rags, debris, residues and other non-liquid disposable items contaminated with trace amounts of radioisotopes.  So if you missed that, the key words were "trace amounts."  Still, even with those small amount, here's how MacFarlane described the containment process: The Waste Isolation Pilot Program in New Mexico is currently due to be sealed in 2038...First the chambers and the access shafts will be backfilled.  Then a thirty-foot-high berm of rock and ramped earth with a core of salt will be constructed, enclosing the above-ground footprint of the repository.  Buried in the berm and the earth around it will be radar reflectors and magnets, discs made of ceramic, clay, glass and metal, engraved with warnings: 'Do Not Dig or Drill.'  The berm itself will be surrounded by an outer perimeter of 25-foot-high granite pillars, also bearing warning signs.  Set flat near the berm will be a map measuring 2,200 feet by 600 feet...an obelisk will indicate the WIPP site: You Are Here...Close to the WIPP map what is called a 'Hot Cell' will be constructed: a reinforced concrete structure extending some sixty feet above the earth and thirty feet down into it.  'Hot' because it will house small samples of the interred waste, in order to demonstrate the radioactivity of what is buried far beneath.  Within the curtilage of the berm an information chamber will be built of granite and reinforced concrete, designed to last a minimum of 10,000 years.  The chamber will carry stone slabs into which will be inscribed more maps, timelines, and scientific details of the waste and its risks, written in all current official UN languages, and in Navajo.  Note that all of that is just for the small amount of residue from our nuclear weapons program and NOT from our nuclear reactors, that quarter-million tons of "spent" but still hot radioactive fuel.

      Phew, why on earth would I take so much time to detail such an elaborate procedure when it has seemingly nothing to do with our current (and fortunate) daily lives?  Perhaps because so many nations have nuclear weapons, from small targeted bombs to those apocalyptic versions we hope will never be used, as in never (not to mention all the countries which use nuclear reactors to produce energy).  When the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, higher-ups such as Eisenhower and Admiral William Leahy (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time) were aghast at the decision, saying that Japan was already defeated and ready to surrender (such thoughts came out after the bombs were dropped).  Even intelligence officers deeply embedded in the war: ...recalled the shouts of 'Why?' and 'How could they do that?' echoing around the office, wrote a piece in the London Review.  In shifting from the war in Europe to that of Japan, the article added this: The British, by contrast, had abandoned the pretence of precision early on and taken to targeting cities with the objective, euphemistically termed, of ‘dehousing’ the population at large.  Eventually the US bombing force in Europe, commanded by Spaatz until he was reassigned to the Pacific after Germany’s defeat, followed the British lead [Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, the air force general in command of the nuclear bombing force]...The strategy had been adopted by his subordinate commander, Curtis LeMay, after earlier attempts to precision-bomb military targets from a high altitude, for which the B-29 bomber had been developed at enormous cost (more than the Manhattan Project), had utterly failed.  In March 1945 a fire raid on Tokyo by B-29s – flying so low that their crews could smell burning flesh – destroyed much of the city and killed upwards of a hundred thousand people [the bomb dropped on Hiroshima initially killed 20,000 fewer people].  With no interference from Spaatz, LeMay progressively laid waste to one Japanese city after another, more than sixty of them by early August 1945.

     Such concepts are difficult for me to comprehend, especially how they can still be happening in places such as Gaza; but with the publicity surrounding the movie Oppenheimer (which I haven't seen), it brings to mind our quest to explore hidden energy in even the smallest things.  So another pleasant diversion came when I listened to Jill Blakeway's audio books about her own quest to find the power of healing within ourselves. Her book, Energy Medicine, finds this doctor of acupuncture venturing around the world to seek out the power of our own bodies to heal.  Wrote the author: Energy medicine refers to the wide range of healing modalities used to diagnose and treat illness by manipulating the energy—the vital life force referred to as “qi” in Chinese medicine—that pulses through the cells of our bodies.  Noted the publisher: ...even this seasoned practitioner admits she doesn’t truly understand how some of her patients are healed under her care, and retains a healthy skepticism about her own abilities as well those of her peers...In Energy Medicine, Jill invites us on her global journey to better understand, apply, and explain this powerful healing force.  Moving from her own clinic to the halls of academia, she talks to top healers, researchers, and practitioners—from the Stanford and Princeton professors researching the physics behind energy medicine and healing; to a Chinese Qi Gong master who manifests healing herbs directly from her palm; to a team of skeptical scientists who use “hands on” healing to repeatedly cure mammary cancer in mice.  She also tells the story of how she discovered energy medicine and became one of the most sought-after healers in the world.  "Healers" from around the world demonstrate to her a variety of methods to tap this inner energy, some explaining that the "medicine" of the mountain people is far different from that of the people of the river.  She witnessed manifestations where healers almost magically materialized ointments and powders from their hands, all after a visual hands-off diagnosis.  As skeptical as any of us would be, Blakeway was equally so, closely watching the empty hands of the healer fold together and within a short time, open again to reveal a solid "medicine," one the healer felt was needed (Blakeway herself took the powder being offered).  Hearing or reading such stories it becomes difficult to believe; but then there was my wife's blood clot...

     As with many things in life, the major things seem to somehow happen on weekends, and generally later in the evening when all things are closed and the next day is a Sunday.  This happened to my wife when she attended a Pilates class as she usually does, but came back mildly complaining that she may have overdone the stretching.  Her calf hurt a little, and it proved a bit worse by the next day (Saturday); the concern came when she worried that she may have developed a blood clot since a) she's had blood clots before; and b) the pain in her calf was now feeling strikingly similar.  She decided to pop a few Eliquis tablets, a blood thinner she had leftover from an earlier trip since her doctor advised her to take one as a preventative on longer airplane flights.  But come the next morning, we both decided that she needed to have it looked at; and while our local clinic had an ultrasound, there was nobody to operate it, this now being a Sunday.  The InstaCare facilities we called did not even have an ultrasound machine, which left us only one option...go to the Emergency.  A quick workup, some blood work, and soon an ultrasound machine was whisked in and I watched in fascination as sounds and colors flicked out on the screen as if capturing the world of blood flow now pulsing in my wife's leg (she did indeed have a blood clot which, left untreated, could have been life-threatening).  So here's the end point, I had no idea of how it all worked, but I was glad that such devices existed.  And therein lies the dilemma...

     The Fournier transform was described in a brief Popular Mechanics article as: ...a key algorithm that turns the graph of a signal varying time into a graph that describes it in terms of its frequencies.  In the 1950s, television was just black-and-white.  Engineers at RCA developed color TV and Fournier transforms to simplify the data transmission so that the industry could introduce color without tripling demands on the channels by adding data for red, green, and blue light.  Viewers with black-and-white TVs could continue to see the same images as before, while viewers with color TVs could now see the images in color.  Packaging signals that represent sounds or images in terms of their frequencies allow us to analyze and adjust sound and image files, says Richard Stern, a profressor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.  When the signals are represented in terms of frequency, you can suppress or strengthen those frequencies.

     Admittedly, I don't understand any of it.  I don't understand electronic "cycles" and frequencies, just as I don't understand how heart monitors or voice recognition systems work (often used as an additional "password" in online banking).  How do such machines as MRIs or ultrasound machines break down those unknown and unseen worlds so "easily" that we take them for granted?  For that matter, how can a tiny atomic element have so much power hidden inside?  And if we can't see those hidden worlds, then who are we to doubt that we don't have similar worlds and powers within ourselves (Blakeway agrees with most of the healers she met, that all of us have an energy that emanates from what she terms "the source," but that most of us haven't tapped into it).  To think that an element such as uranium can both cure and destroy, but as we have found throughout human history, humans can do much the same.  We will always have people ready to beat down others and to glow with power as if on a quest to become a Lord of the Rings.  But that same power also can be used in another way, to heal and to calm, and such power exists within each of us.  This same message appeared in the fun but quirky movie, The Green Lantern (it was advertised as: In a universe as vast as it is mysterious, a small but powerful force has existed for centuries.  Protectors of peace and justice, they are called the Green Lantern Corps...the Green Lanterns have little respect for humans, who have never harnessed the infinite powers of the ring before.)   The sole human, facing a power little-known anywhere, has to tap into that and on the verge of defeat says, "Never doubt the strength of my power."  Such fantasies are fun, even if they do sometimes fail to convey a bigger message.  But such inner strength was better exemplified in real life by the ending of the movie Society of the Snow, a docu-drama based on the real-life struggle of surviving a plane crash deep in the snow-filled Andes.  The closing line there from one of the survivors, one of only a few who made it through the 72 days of bitter cold and no supplies, was simple: Take care of each other...

*So the debate came down to this: was (is) the U.S. violating its own Leahy law by sending such armaments to dictatorial governments such as Saudi Arabia, or to governments such as Israel which is violating human rights, according to the UN.  Here's how the Council of Foreign Relations report put it: The United States cannot provide security assistance to foreign governments or groups that commit gross human rights violations, a red line enshrined in the so-called Leahy Law.  Moreover, the Biden administration announced in February 2023 that it would not provide arms to recipients deemed likely to commit serious human rights violations.  Some legal scholars and other critics have alleged that the United States has not applied the Leahy Law with regard to Israel as it has with other Middle Eastern countries.  Military aid primarily comes in the form of grants with the U.S. "sending" money which the countries never receive but can use to "buy" our weapons.  Basically, we provide countries weapons...even Iraq, Afghanistan, and the UK which is the world's 2nd largest exporter of defensive armaments (what???).  Israel continues to receive twice as much military aid from the U.S. compared to other nations, but the UK is not far behind.  Wrote a piece in LRB: According to research by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), the UK has licensed more than  £472 million in arms exports to Israel since 2015...The headline figure is taken from the value of standard licenses, but the UK also operates a system of open licenses that permit transfers of unlimited --and unspecified-- quantities of particular military goods.  Since 2015, 57 such licenses have been granted for export to Israel, ten of those in 2022.  They include British components for the American-designed F-35 aircraft...In recent years the government has become increasingly hostile to Freedom of Information requests on arms, but there is enough publicly available data to be certain that the planes currently flattening apartment blocks and refugee camps in Gaza rely on components engineered and manufactured in Britain.  The piece went on to note a quote back in 2008 from the now-current head of Israel's defense, Gadi Eizenkot: We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel...from our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases...This is not a suggestion.  This is a plan that has already been authorized.  It is widely accepted --although never admitted-- that Israel has nuclear weapons...