Solving That Pesky Nuclear Waste Problem

Thinking Of The Children

Key Facts, From The Nucular Energy Institüt, A Nuclear Industry Lobbying Group
(Uh, 'Editing' By Mongo)

• All the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. nuclear energy industry in the past 50 years -- about 72,000 tons -- if stacked together would only cover a football field to a depth of six to seven yards (Think of a single-story Ranch House, 300 feet long, and 150 feet wide, that if you tried to live in, you would die). This of course does not count all the byproducts of the U.S. nuclear weapons industry, which would cover the State of Kansas to a dept of eight inches. Its nighttime glow would be seen as far away as Pluto, and you could roast marshmallows in Alberta and Los Angeles. Cool, huh?

• Used nuklar fuel is a solid material that looks something like string cheese and is stored at nuclear power plants. Normally, it's placed in concrete pools filled with water or Old-Growth tree sap, or in containers covered with wax paper. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission determined that this method is both "wacky" and unsafe, but heck, we like the smell of the sap and the the wax paper only catches fire on occasion. We never intended this storage to be permanent -- we always thought all this stuff could be shot into the sun, or sold to Developing Countries™ as building materials.

• Since the Obama administration suspended the NRC’s review of the Yucca Mountain repository in 2010, the federal government has been bad, and we never liked them and it's all their fault. We're looking at that whole Kansas option again.

• Advanced technologies are being developed to make new Apps, hire more Uber drivers, open new pizza restaurants, create new careers for Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber, and new iPhones and Iron-Man-like exoskeletons. Oh, and about recycling used nuclear fuel; right, sure. These technologies are mostly in comic books or movies for pre-teen children, and if they ever come true will reduce but not eliminate nuklar stuff.  So don't worry your little heads about that.

  Disposal of radioactive stuff in a "permanent geologic repository" is necessary until, oh,  roughly 308,000 A.D. We were thinking about asking the Indians if they could, you know, move again -- so all that empty Reservation land we shoved them into could be put to good use.

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Random Black Dog Bark Bark Barking

In These Times

(Winston Churchill -- world leader, champion of England's titled class; boozer, dilettante painter and cigar aficionado -- used to call the bouts of depression which seized him periodically as "The Black Dog". I'm not a black dog, but am feeling a bit 'dark' these days (indeed; no surprise there), so be warned.)

The current economic situation in the United States, also described as 'The New Normal', could be summed up in these points:

• Salaries and Wages = Nearly Flat For Over A Decade -- Luckily, we have had almost no inflation during the same period, but if you're not bringing home more money even a modest rise in prices can hurt;  
• It's Not That Jobs Are Created; It's What Kinds Of Jobs -- Employment numbers have gone up to a degree in construction and some manufacturing sectors, but the broadest gains in total jobs have been in the Service Economy -- maids and waiters and towel boys and gardeners and spa attendants and boat crew lackeys;
• Unemployment Figures Continue To Ignore The Lost Workforce -- A news item like "US Jobless Claims Hover At Pre-Recession Levels... [which offers] further evidence of the economy's underlying strength" might make you believe everything is 'finally getting back to normal' after the Go-Go, 'Lil' Boots' Bush years and the Crash.  
• >>> The numbers receiving unemployment payments, as reported, is shrinking -- but the number of people who have been unable to find work since the fall of 2008 (no pun intended) is ignored. No one really knows how many people are in this category -- and even the new Fed Chairman, Janet Yellen, questions whether there is more unreported 'slack' in the labor market than unemployment figures suggest.
• The Gap Between The Top One-Tenth Of One PerCenters And Everyone Else Has Grown in the past decade. Period. We are a more stratified and less socially-mobile culture than at any time since the end of the Second World War. 
• >>> The proof is in two points:  The average annual income of the bottom 90% of Americans is approximately $30,000 -- the annual income of the .01% is $24,000,000 ; and, the distribution of all wealth (not just annual income, but 'who owns what') in America is lopsided:  42 percent of everything is owned by the top One Per Cent, while the bottom 80% of the population owns just 5%.  That's of everything -- real property (homes, office buildings, land), stock, bonds, cash, cars, et al.

The current definition of The New Normal is "Secular Stagnation", where job growth is modest (we still haven't reached the percentage of full-time employed in the overall U.S. workforce as existed before 2008).  Large corporate employers have continued to keep wages low, while executive and managerial bonuses have gone up. The pension and health coverage benefits of their retirees is shrinking, and those just entering the workforce understand their employers will only provide the minimum, band-aid-for-their-conscience safety net of benefits. It ain't your grandfather's work-world any more.

Obligatory Image Of Happy Children, Enjoying Life In Modern America ©

In Middle Of Nihilist Blog Rant

 It's just one Dog's opinion, but you might have the feeling, looking around, that we're becoming a society where a layer of the truly wealthy, the Owners, live in security and privilege, nearly invisible to the rest of the world, while the rest of us... don't.

We buy the products and use services which they've significantly invested in -- or, they own the raw materials, or the land, or the ships. It's like the difference in San Francisco between those who "ride the bus", and everyone else (though employees of Google and Facebook and eBay and Yahoo are just as much Tools and servants of the .01% as the rest of us). We're fleeced by corporations, finance companies and banks, manufacturers, and employers from our first day to our last, and in the end a company the wealthy own will rent our children pennies to put on our eyes.

But, take heart. Paul Kingsnorth, former environmental activist, is fairly certain that we are moving swiftly into a period of climatic upheaval and that the chance of an apocalyptic die-off in the human population, a Mad Max coming to a street near you, is a certainty as ecosystems fail and power systems can't be sustained. Meaning that (according to Kingsnorth, and other environmental researchers) no matter what we do, we're doomed.

The good part, I suppose, is that the Uberwealthy will suffer, die, and slide into extinction along with the 99%. And there won't be any pennies left for the Boatman, let alone our eyes.

Well. I recall a comment made by Martin Luther -- devout christian; constipation sufferer, author of the 95 Theses whose efforts created the Reformation and centuries of civil war in the christian world; religious and political radical, misogynist and anti-Semite.  He said: If I were told that the world would end tomorrow, I would still go into the garden and plant an Apfelbaumchen (little apple tree).

And so must we all.

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MEHR: BITTE SCHIESSEN SIE MIR SOFORT:  As another sign that civilization has passed its peak and is now in irreversible decline, if you were a shareholder of Warren Buffet's Berkshire-Hathaway corporation, you would be attending the company's annual meeting in Kansas City -- and like any gathering In These End Times, you get the chance to take home a Tschochki or two, you lucky, far-sighted investor, you.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. will sell rubber ducks of Chairman Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman Charles Munger wearing Mexican-themed outfits at the company’s annual meeting, which falls two days before Cinco de Mayo. The “fiesta ducks” sport sombreros, multicolored ponchos and — in Buffett’s case — a maraca, according to an advertisement in the visitor’s guide to the May 3 event, which will be held at the CenturyLink Center in Omaha, Nebraska. The souvenirs will be sold by Berkshire’s Oriental Trading party-supply business for $5 a pair.

 View The Terror And Shame: Click On Image To Enlarge! Easy! Fun!

(Picture courtesy of the Berkshire-Hathaway Annual Meeting Brochure,

Which You Can See In Its Entirety Here)

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12/12/12

Boneryänker's Almanach

Zwölf-Zwölf-Zwölf.  Sehr Ausgezeichnet, Dude!

See You in A Hundred Years!

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Boneryänker's Almanach

We Really Were That Close: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

President Nixon Urges Americans To Take Shelter, 1962

Just a thought:  If Richard M. Nixon had been President, rather than John F. Kennedy, on October 16, 1962, American response to a discovery of Russian IRBM's in Cuba would have been resolved in a very different way.

Nixon was an insecure human being, and a true-believing Cold Warrior.  It would have been a near-certainty that the same response plan pushed on JFK by the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- an air attack on the missile sites, followed by an invasion of Cuba -- which Kennedy successfully resisted, would have been Nixon's decision.

It's now known that the Russians also had short-range, tactical nukes in Cuba (referred to as "Frogs"), and local control of those devices had been released to Russian commanders of Soviet troops handling them in the field.  The hardline Soviet Politburo members had approved this and were just as fucked-up lizard brain crazy as Nixon expecting to use them on any American invasion, which was already beginning to stage in ports along the Gulf of Mexico.

If the Russians had used their tactical nukes, escalation to a full thermonuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union would have followed in a matter of days, if not hours.

Several hundred million people would have died outright, and over the next few months as food supplies dwindled and Winter set in. If you're American, or European, you would probably be dead now, or never born -- or, born into a horribly broken, radioactive world.

It might be argued that, had Nixon been elected, the 1961 Bay Of Pigs invasion by CIA-trained and supported right-wing Cubans would have been provided U.S. air support and may have succeeded in forcing Castro from power. And, had Nixon been elected, that likely would have happened.

(Nixon lost the 1960 election by the thinnest of margins -- some conservatives believed the election had been stolen by the Kennedys in Texas and Illinois; they were more than pissed. When Kennedy -- who reluctantly went along with the plan -- later refused to commit U.S. warplanes to support the Cuban expatriate invaders, some in the military and the CIA began to hate him; JFK dismissed several critics who went public.)

(But the major result of the Bay of Pigs was the Russian suggestion to move their IRBM missiles into Cuba, arguing that it would be a strategic fait d'accompli -- by the time America knew what was happening, it would be too late, and they would never again attempt to invade the island. Castro thought this logical and agreed.)

The Bay Of Pigs was planned by the CIA in 1959 and 60 to rid the hemisphere of a Communist threat: The "Big Red Dog", in our own backyard.  But if Nixon had pushed it all the way, it also might have forced the Soviets (whose hardliners wouldn't have passively accepted an invasion) to react -- possibly seizing West Berlin,  and creating another on-the-brink crisis.

The strategic nuclear forces of East and West were on a "Launch On Warning" status in the late 1950's and early 60's.  One lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis for both sides was that the unthinkable really was possible -- and fortunately for humanity, some on both sides refused to accept that annihilation was inevitable, and took steps to allow everyone to move back from the brink.

But in the alternate historical reality pushed by America's Right, JFK wasn't an American hero -- just some indecisive candyass liberal, an oversexed toad, an appeaser to global Communism, 'cause a real man woulda kicked their Red asses.

Oy.  Some people never learn anything.

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It Cannot Be Repeated Enough

Little Rupert, 5 Years Old, Testifies (Again) In Merrie Olde Anguland

I've said it before: If you want to bite into what Little Rupert has to sell, fine.

Just don't blame anyone but yourself if it tastes like you're sucking Joseph Goebbels' underwear.

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Und: I've said before:

Rupert pumps sewage on his customers because he doesn't have a high regard for human beings, generally -- I've always assumed that you lie to or steal from people you don't respect. Little Rupert must hold humanity in utter contempt, since all his media provides is a formulaic, lowest-common-denominator style of entertainment. No truth at all; no accuracy, and no information that isn't right-wing propaganda.

And when you hold your customers (i.e., other people) in contempt, Rupert, you scumbag -- like you, the people who pump that sewage believe they can do whatever they want in pursuit of your goals. You set the example for them to follow. They did what they did because you rewarded them for doing so then and continue to do so, now.

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Boneryänker's Almanach

Random Barking: Barrel-Bottom, Masochism Sunday

I'm watching 'Inside Washington' on PBS -- which features Charles Krauthammer (who has the same hair colorist as Ronald Reagan, Mommar Ghaddafi Duck and Silvio! Berlusconi). Everyone, including the host, seem so bored and jaded tossing around what passes for news analysis that anyone (including the host) piping up and asking, "When do I get paid for this?" wouldn't be out of character.

Also featured is The Lovely Nina Totenberg, a pundit / commentator for National Public Radio. Incidentally, her name, auf Deutsch, means, "Mountain Of The Dead".

(Well, as loveable Bender would say: Don't blame me; I didn't name her.)

This is what happens when you've been effectively stuck inside your home for a week, doing little more than producing mucus -- you externalize your experience by watching a television analogy to mucus production.

Ooops; gotta go -- now it's The McLaughlin Group.

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