Battle LA

Yes, I actually saw a movie in the theater!  It happens about once or twice a year.  Actually, this year I’ hoping for a total of four.  In order, Battle LA (check), Thor (likely), Cars 2 (take the kids, almost certain) and Captain America (take my brother, very likely).  All in all, a banner year.  Enough of that though, on the review.

First and foremost, Battle LA is not really an alien invasion movie.  Sure, there are aliens running around trying to exterminate the human race, but that isn’t really the focus.  The focus is entirely on how the platoon of Marines headed by Aaron Eckhart’s Staff Sargaent Nantz deals with the situation.  Nantz, is of course the real focus of the story as we discover quickly when we are introduced to him running on the beach and getting passed by a bunch of younger, faster marines.  As the story moves forward we learn that he is planning on retiring, apparently unable to deal with the guilt and stigma of a tour in Iraq in which most (if not all) of his platoon died.  This of course makes the platoon he gets put in charge of more than a little nervous.  He does eventually win them over, first with a John Wayne moment in the middle of the movie and later with a speech about how the loss of his men in Iraq and the loss of his men that day eats at him constantly. 

I want to return to the John Wayne moment as it highlights some of the movie’s strongest points.  These points come together in the way Nantz behaves after he gets back from blowing up the drone that could have obliterated the platoon.  He isn’t high fiving and saying things like “No problem,” or “yippy-ki-ay!”  John McClain, he isn’t.  Not that I have a problem with Mr. McClain, this just isn’t that kind of movie.  Instead Nantz makes is way to the back of the bus, sits down and shakes.  He may be a hero but he knows he isn’t invulnerable either.  This realism and the way Eckhart pulls it off so convincingly are my favorite parts of the movie.  The rest of the performances area solid, from the father-son relationship of a couple of the civilians they rescue to Michelle Rodriguez doing her typical tough-chick routine, no one really disappoints.

In conclusion, the movie has been called Black Hawk Down with aliens.  Having seen Black Hawk Down just a couple of weeks before seeing Battle LA, I completely agree.  Both are war movies that are more about the people getting shot at than they are about the shooting.  My only complaint about Battle LA is that the ending is too…easy.  Since, this one hasn’t made to video yet, I won’t ruin it but if you are like me, you’ll be willing to overlook the ending in light of how awesome the rest of the movie is.  So, if you haven’t seen it yet, get yourself to a cheap theater or save it on your Netflix cue as soon as you can.  You won’t regret it.

Next:  Thor!

Japan Nuke Plants in a nutshell

First, sorry this took so long.  Work was pretty darn busy all last week and home life is by its nature insane so I just had no time to work on this.  So, let’s get down to business.

The earthquake triggered a shutdown of the plants, which initially went as planned.  The problem was that darned tsunami.  The first thing to note here is that the site was designed to handle a 6.5 meter tsunami.  The one that hit was 7 meters.  Yes, a lousy foot and a half of water is what caused all this mess.  In any case, the tsunami took out at least one of the emergency diesels directly and got the other one either by taking out some power lines or the fuel source.  I don’t have that much detail.  It was at this point that things began to get a little crazy.

Without the diesels , the coolant pumps continued to work off of batteries but after they went out (eight hours if I remember right), the pumps stopped and some important valves failed closed.  That is actually one of the odd things; why on earth would emergency cooling valves fail closed on a loss of power?  Perhaps there was a good reason or perhaps the layout of the plant prevents the establishment of any natural circulation anyway. 

In any case, from here, the water in the core just got hotter and hotter, boiling into steam and increasing pressure in the containment while also reducing the level of liquid in the core itself.  As we know, the pressure was dealt with by releasing the steam into the service floor enclosure.  This would have been fine except that the hydrogen and oxygen in the water had become separated, forming an explosive mixture that went boom.  Now, recall that this is a BWR, with the steam basically coming straight from the core itself.  It was these releases that are responsible for the food and land contamination that you have heard about.

As for the water in the core, the solution as we know has been to keep the core covered with seawater.  Unfortunately, this didn’t happen until the core had been up to ¾ uncovered.  That is very bad, at least for the plant.  Essentially there is no doubt that there was at least a partial core meltdown in at least two plants.  Put simply, they’ll never work again.

Since then, we know that there have controlled on uncontrolled releases of contaminated water into the ocean.  Fortunately, most of the contamination is due to iodine so it will decay quickly.  However, there was so much of it that at least some of the water was 100 Rem on contact (just found that out the other day).  That is HUGE!  You don’t want to be anywhere near that stuff.  It most likely won’t kill you, but it will make you very sick for a very long time.  And if you stay around it to long (say a few hours) it will kill you.  Or turn you into a superhero.  

As for the radiation in general, the area of the site only got up to an average of 12millisieverts or 1.2 Rem/hour with some areas peaking at 400mSv or 40R/hr.  The 40R/hr is bad, don’t walk, run out of that field if you can help it.  The 1.2R/hr general area dose rate is also a lot hotter than anything I have to deal with but it shouldn’t hurt you unless you spend all day in such a field, and even then, it should only make you sick. 

Concerning the way TEPCO has handled things, it would seem to me that for the most part they have done a good job, except in certain instances such as when they claimed that plutonium found on site was left over from old weapons testing.  Also, they apparently don’t play nice with WANO which is a global monitoring agency for nuke plants.  I’m willing to get that that will change or they’ll get out of the nuclear industry all together.  We’ll see. 

Finally, it would seem that they finally have their leak plugged so it should be all uphill from here.

One more thing.  I wanted to just say that the guys who stayed behind to restore emergency power to those plants are nothing short of amazing and should be recognized as the heroes they are.  I read some leaked emails and those guys were working for days even weeks without sleep or food, not knowing what happened to their families in the tsunami.  Please pray for them. 

One last thing.  If you want to see the plant for yourself, you can find it on Google Earth.  Just type in Fukushima, move to the eastern coast, zoom in and scroll south.  When you come to an obviously industrial site that has four primary rectangular buildings in a row, only three of the buildings aren’t so rectangular any more, you’re there.  The destruction that you will see is the result of the hydrogen explosions. 

Someone has done my work for me.

We got a powerpoint from Areva the other day at work.  Areva is one of the bigger and better contractors in the industry, so they have some good info on what happened.  Unfortunately, I can't post the powerpoint for some reason or another so I'll need a day or two to distill it.  I'll post the results afterwards.  After that, maybe I can get to some other things.