WhirledView

At Last – A Good Idea in Nuclear Reactors?

by Cheryl Rofer

The Guardian reports on a small nuclear reactor that can provide electricity to 20,000 homes. The reactor would be installed underground and refuelled every 5-10 years. Hyperion Power Generation, located in New Mexico, plans to build the reactors. According to the Guardian, Hyperion now has more than 100 firm orders for reactors.

As usual, there isn’t as much information as I’d like to see, but there are some tantalizing hints. This website (from an organization I’ve never heard of) claims that the reactor design is based on the TRIGA reactor, which has been installed in many universities around the world. The original TRIGA design required highly enriched uranium fuel. That fuel, because it might be made into nuclear bombs, is now being replaced with fuel enriched only to reactor grade, not capable of being made into bombs.

Question: How does that work? For fission to take place, there must be a critical mass of uranium-235. If the fuel is less enriched, there must be more total uranium in the core. This problem has apparently been overcome, however, in the replacement fuel that is being loaded into university training reactors.

Installing the reactor underground is a good idea for many reasons: it is safe from having an airplane flown into it, human access can be limited, and, if anything goes wrong with the reactor, soil and concrete will attenuate radiation. However, there have to be two kinds of access: for heat removal and for refueling. In this drawing (too many pyramids – never mind), you can see two tubes going to the surface for heat removal.

A nuclear reactor produces heat, not electricity. The heat, just like the heat from a coal plant or solar thermal, runs a turbine that produces the electricity (or, in the drawing, runs a desalination plant). Turbines need maintenance and therefore cannot be sealed underground. So the heat from the underground reactor must be brought to the turbine. Typically reactors have a fluid that cools the fuel elements and a working fluid. The fluid that cools the fuel elements becomes slightly radioactive, so it cannot be blown through a turbine and exhausted to the atmosphere. It is run through a heat exchanger, where it heats the secondary coolant. Heat exchangers need maintenance, too, so they would likely be located at the surface, with the turbine. The two tubes in the drawing allow the primary coolant to cycle from the reactor to the desalination plant and back.

Election Day

by Cheryl Rofer

I can see that I am likely to drive myself crazy until tonight, checking the newspapers and other blogs compulsively. So, even though WhirledView readers aren't very talky, I'm going to start an open thread where I hope you'll share your voting experiences. I'll start with mine.

I voted early last Friday at the Santa Fe County building on Grant Street. Voting was upstairs in the courtroom, which is dominated by a colorful mural of events in New Mexico's history. The procedure was to fill out a form requesting an absentee ballot, hand it in, and then sit down in the courtroom until your name was called and you were given your ballot. Those rickety plastic voting "booths" were at the front of the courtroom. Santa Fe County uses optical scanners, of which there was one.

Things were a bit confused at the first desk giving out the absentee ballot forms, which was where you had to hand the form back in. There was only one woman at the desk, with other poll workers sort of hanging around. Nonetheless, the line wasn't too long and there were places to sit while you filled out your form, which I did and sat down to wait.

As I waited, a poll worker I knit with was helping an elderly black man in a motorized wheelchair. I waved at her, and she motioned me to come over. The man needed help in reading the ballot; his vision was limited. So I read the ballot to him and pointed at the ellipses to fill in for his choices. The poll worker brought me my ballot so I didn't have the distraction of trying to hear my name.

The man was happy to hand the ballot in himself, so I went off and marked mine.

Later, the poll worker told me that the man said that this was the first election he had voted in, and that he seemed quite pleased to have done so.

Monday Morning Bits & Pieces

by Cheryl Rofer

An Obama campaign worker tells me

In NM as of Thursday, 60% of all Dems have voted early…72% have voted in LA [Los Alamos County]. In order for McCain to win NM, everyone who votes on Tuesday would have to vote for him and there would have to be a big turnout. Every night the Obama campaigns puts in the data that the canvassers give them about what they learned about everyone they talked to and each day it gets a list of who voted from the County Clerks. This campaign is SO organized!

Meanwhile, in Washington... I wrote about the Bipartisan Policy Center's report on Iran a week or so ago. Carol Giacomo tells us that this report is part of yet more agitation in DC that appears to be headed toward war with Iran, analogous to the buildup to war with Iraq, but under the radar because of the overwhelming coverage of the campaign.

Meanwhile, Trita Parsi and Andreas Persbo make a nice case that inspection will provide early warning if Iran gears up for nuclear weapons production. Shows what you can do if you know something about the technical side of things.

Voting Blue

By Patricia H. Kushlis

New Mexico is one of the most politicized states in the country: Elections are especially fun here where tales of past electoral fraud and cliff-hanger results regale uninitiated and veterans alike and where even University of New Mexico political scientists who specialize in that sort of thing suddenly assume almost media celebrity status at home and abroad.

Besides, this state is one of the thirty five with early as well as absentee voting so I thought I’d explore where things stood from the banks of the middle Rio Grande in the Land of Enchantment just two days before the polls open November 4, 2008.

Swing and Bellwether

This is a swing and bellwether state with a tradition of voting for the winner of the national popular vote. The only time New Mexico failed to vote for the “winning” presidential candidate in nearly a century was Elections 2000 when the voters supported Gore by 366 votes in a cliff-hanger election – but you know all too well the finale that year. I personally consider New Mexico to have a solid 100 percent record of picking the real winner despite what anyone might claim otherwise – because, lets face it, the popular vote went for Gore and W won the election only because of scuzzy political shenanigans in Florida where his brother just happened to be Governor and a conservative U.S. Supreme Court that should have kept its opinion to itself.

The Big If . . .

Regardless, this state’s five electoral votes also help determine the outcome of a close race. This is why we get an inordinate amount of national political and media attention in the days, months and hours leading up to the Big Event.

One recent scenario has McCain winning the presidency without Pennsylvania if he carries Colorado and New Mexico. That’s a big if – and if he’s counting on New Mexico for that extra edge – I think he and his strategists are living in la-la land. The elections site FiveThirtyEight (see map above) has New Mexico in dark blue now – although RealClearPolitics’ colorists seemingly haven’t figured that one out yet – which makes me wonder why that website isn’t as up-to-date as it wants us to believe – or what else am I missing?

Rocky Mountain High?

Diplomatic Faux-Pas: Damage Control Needed

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Reality check please. The UK Independent reported on October 3 that the British Ambassador to the US Sir Nigel Sheinwald had “expressed pointedly negative views of the Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama in a leaked, private seven-page letter to the prime minister.” The memo was originally leaked to the Daily Telegraph according to the Independent’s story. Both stories were filed from Washington. The internal British diplomatic memo was written just before Obama’s meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown last summer.

Looks like the British Foreign Ministry has two major problems on its hands:

• first how to spirit Sir Nigel out of town at the stroke of midnight if Barack Obama wins the elections; and
• second how to stop future leaks of this sort from inside the Ministry or perhaps from inside the British Embassy in Washington itself.

Now I heard an Ambassador from another EU country encourage members of a private group during the primaries to vote for Hillary – something I thought curious at the time but also something an envoy assigned to represent his or her government abroad should have thought more than twice about saying.

But what was the purpose of leaking this particular memo to the press during the final weeks of the campaign?

After all, it was foremost a private, internal assessment of Obama’s strengths and weaknesses as seen from the vantage point of the British Embassy – whether I agree with the assessment or not - before Brown was to meet Obama in London last summer.

Who was it designed to help or to hurt?

New Mexico: Swing State

by Cheryl Rofer

New Mexico has only five electoral votes, but its vote in the last two presidential elections has been close, and it has one senatorial and three congressional seats fully up for grabs this year. All three of our sitting representatives decided to go for broke in the primaries, so only Tom Udall (D) is left standing for the Senate seat, and all the candidates for the congressional seats are newbies.

So we're getting more attention than usual from the national media.

The News Hour has been featuring New Mexico all this week.

The Los Angeles Times looks at our undecided Latino voters.

Slate checks out the small towns.

New Mexico and Freedom’s Watch

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Would someone please explain to me why the ultra-right wing Florida based 501(c)(4) organization named Freedom’s Watch has placed one of New Mexico’s three Congressional races, CD#1, in its bull’s eye?

Lucky us: we’re only one of six Congressional races in the country that this wonderful group with close ties to the Bush White House, that the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and funded primarily by a big time, recent Republican convert as well as Las Vegas and Macao gambling tycoon has chosen to so ‘honor’ this November. The other races, according to Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post are Alabama’s 2nd, Illinois’ 10th, Nevada’s 3rd, New Jersey’s 3rd and 7th. But if you look at the statistics, New Mexico’s 1st and Illinois’ 10th are by far the largest recipients of Freedom Watch’s largesse.

This is a peculiar Congressional District. Although it contains more registered Democrats than Republicans, it has elected a Republican Congressional representative in every election since its creation.

A Wide Open Race

The race for New Mexico CD#1 is once again wide open: a well known Republican and now former county sheriff named Darren White is being challenged by – or is challenging Democrat Martin Heinrich a former Albuquerque City Council member. Now White had the greater name recognition going into the race. This normally helps in an election campaign – but Heinrich has been running a smart, well organized operation since before the Democratic primary in June which he won handily. At this point the polls are slightly in Heinrich’s favor.

Who Is John McCain? And why did he come to Albuquerque?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

John McCain dropped by the ballroom of the University of New Mexico's Student Union Building yesterday where he - according to various news reports - spent most of his speech attacking Barak Obama. I wasn't, however, on the invite list so can't give you a firsthand report.

According to the local media, including The Lobo, UNM's student newspaper, the McCain event drew about 1,000 attendees plus several hundred noisy demonstrators whose heckling could be heard inside the ballroom itself. The tickets, I assume, were carefully guarded and distributed by the Republican powers that be in the state. Oh, well.

Now it was gutsy of the McCain camp to stage this designed-for-the-national-media-nearly-local-stealth-invite-event in UNM's Student Union Building right in the center of the campus. The state's flagship and largest university - after all - is not normally the bastion of Republicanism although I remember a lively student Republican club in previous years.

I've been told that the campus Obama Campaign is large, very active and - as is the case with the Obama campaign operation elsewhere in town - highly organized. I've also been told that, in contrast to the energized and disciplined Obama folks as well as considerable Republican presence in the past, the campus Republicans this year have been almost invisible.

It was interesting that The Albuquerque Journal - our local conservative but subscription only access rag - mentioned that several hundred anti-McCain demonstrators surrounded the building. This newspaper all too often failed to report the large local anti-Bush, anti-Iraq invasion demonstrations in 2003. The Lobo placed the number of demonstrators yesterday at 250 - a number I assume the reporter got from campus security. If so, this count would probably be more accurate than the several hundred referred to in the Journal and elsewhere.

If it's Monday, it must be . . . where?

The most perceptive report of the event, however, included what didn't happen inside - as opposed to only what did. This was in the article in The New Mexican, the Democratic leaning paper based in Santa Fe. In contrast to The New Mexican, the reports in the The Albuquerque Journal and The Lobo featured sound-bites of McCain's latest anti-Obama diatribe followed by quicky after-event interviews with a few McCain supporters - or leaning McCain supporters who had been present at the happening and liked what they had heard. So Rove's "smear and fear" tactics must be having some - at least short term - effect on attendees. But neither paper reported what McCain didn't say that if he had would have been music to New Mexican ears.

Short shrift to New Mexicans

Not only did McCain give New Mexico and New Mexicans short shrift, but more surprisingly, he apparently never once mentioned its four Republican candidates running for the US Senate and Congress. He also gave only a quick tribute to retiring senior Senator and Republican stalwart Pete Domenici who was also there. Among the missing in McCain's acknowledgments was Republican candidate Senatorial candidate Steve Pearce who reportedly was in the audience. Kind of like New Mexico Republican politicians had become the proverbial invisible men - and that New Mexico's five electoral votes really didn't matter in the overall scheme of things.

Tuesday Chamisa Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

A few months back, I showed you my very pruned chamisa bushes. I never did get around to the other big ones I wanted to try to tame; maybe next year. They're all blooming now, that brilliant gold color that lasts only for a week or so. There are supposed to be a couple of cold fronts headed toward us for the end of the week, so that will probably be when they dry out. These three photos are in the same order as I showed the bushes after they had been pruned and grown out a bit.

I thought that this past weekend I could clean the hummingbird feeders and put them away, but as I refilled them last night, one hummingbird was wistfully checking out the position one feeder is usually in, and this morning, as I photographed the chamisa, two were still fighting out whose territory it was, and I think there may have been a third.

It's the young ones, or perhaps the females, that stay behind. It's very difficult to tell them apart. The mature males were tanking up for the long haul at least a month ago and are long gone. What I keep wondering is if it's the immatures that leave last, how do they know where to fly?

When the chamisa blooms, people claim it causes their allergies. It's certainly obviously in bloom, and there are great fields of it. I must have eight or ten large plants like these and any number of smaller ones in my yard. I did get around to pruning some of the smaller ones so that maybe I'll head off their being too sprawly.

But there are many things blooming at this time of year, their last gasp to produce seeds. Here's the best writeup I can find on chamisa, Ericameria nauseosa; not as good as some I've found for other plants. Nauseosa, yes. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: chamisa scent is like something you have to scrape off your shoe, with a too-sweet addition. Here's another version, probably from a New Yorker who has spent all of five minutes in Santa Fe, not at all close to a chamisa bush in bloom, impressed by our mountains and views and chamisa's vivid yellow.

I don't think that chamisa contributes much to fall allergies, unless you bury your face in that yellow. Chamisa is in the sunflower and aster family, Compositae. Dust your fingers across the blooms and they'll pick up the heavy yellow pollen that needs to be moved by pollinators like the painted lady butterflies (too shy for photos) that were dancing around those plants this morning. Allergies need light, wind-scattered pollen like that from hairy bursage, of which I still have too much in my yard. Anything with conspicuous flowers in unlikely to cause allergy. The flowers are conspicuous to attract the pollinators needed to move that heavy pollen.

Former US Diplomats support Obama – a letter to the editor of THE NEW MEXICAN

By Guest Contributor Ret. Ambassador Peter Sebastian

The following letter to the editor appeared as a commentary in The New Mexican on September 7, 2008. Ambassador Sebastian has given WhirledView permission to republish the letter as submitted. WhirledView has recently learned that more than 300 former career diplomats have now signed the declaration in support of Senator Obama’s candidacy for president. The number of signers continues to rise.

As a Santa Fe resident and subscriber to THE NEW MEXICAN conversant with its editorial positions, I believe you agree that the next Administration will have, as one of its most urgent tasks, the reestablishment of Washington's international credibility.

This task has emerged as a major theme in the presidential campaign as a result of what many Americans, myself included, believe to have been the abandonment by the current Administration of the principles of bipartisanship at home and close coordination with allies abroad. These are principles which I was proud to serve during a professional lifetime in the US Foreign Service, and in which I continue to believe.

I have, therefore, joined with more than 250 former career diplomats with long experience in the conduct of US foreign relations under both Republican and Democratic Administrations, in a call to fellow American voters, regardless of political affiliation, to join in supporting Senator Obama. We believe that he has the vision and the will to restore the respect and leadership we once enjoyed, will work to restore bipartisanship at home and embrace foreign policies which better serve the interests of the country.

I enclose a copy of a declaration scheduled to be released on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 in Washington, DC. together with a list of its signers. Given the number of signers, it probably exceeds the space normally available to "Letters." I none-the-less hope that THE NEW MEXICAN will see fit to publicize it in whatever form it deems appropriate.

I thank you for your consideration of the foregoing and remain,

Sincerely,

Peter Sebastian
American Ambassador, ret.

BEGIN DECLARATION:

"EXPERIENCE SPEAKS OUT: FORMER US DIPLOMATS FOR OBAMA

We are a diverse group of over 200 former Foreign Service officers. Each of us has had extensive experience in implementing the international affairs and national security policies of both Republican and Democratic administrations. We have first hand knowledge of the grave multiple challenges of the Cold War, a period of peril but one in which the United States wore with honor the mantle of leadership. In cooperation with other democracies, and dialog with countries that were not, our nation found solutions to problems which seemed intractable. Senator Obama can place our national again in that position of trust, credibility and respect.