WhirledView

Do You Think They'd Get Along?

by CKR

I knew the Emmy statuette reminded me of someone...

Emmy

Soviet Atomic Worker Monument at Sillamäe, Estonia

A Heavy Water Plant is Not a Nuclear Reactor - Updated

by CKR

This morning The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe all put the same story, with the same headline, on their front pages.

The headline is

Defying UN, Iran Opens Nuclear Reactor.

The first paragraph, however, says

KHONDAB, Iran -- An Iranian plant that produces heavy water officially went into operation on Saturday, despite U.N. demands that Tehran stop the activity because it can be used to develop a nuclear bomb.

Later in the article, we find

Iran has been a building a heavy water reactor near the plant for two years, but the reactor is not scheduled for completion until 2009.

I would think hope that editors could at least match up those words when they create headlines.

The article is from Associated Press. We'll let the writer off the hook for the headline, because someone else does that. But there are many who aren't doing their job, or maybe didn't get enough elementary science to know that a heavy water plant isn't a reactor. It would start with the headline-writer and an editor or two at AP; then there were all those editors at the NYT, WaPo, and Boston Globe who weren't doing their jobs, just slipping it in (at the top of the NYT home page) because it fits with the latest narrative: that the Iranians are nuclear bad guys, defying the world.

I'm wondering, too, about the writer's accuracy. I need to check the UN resolution, but I think it's just uranium enrichment that the UN has required Iran to suspend, not all nuclear activities. And uranium enrichment is different from heavy water production is different from a reactor.

Here are the differences: the heavy water plant produces (distills, most likely) heavy water from regular water. Heavy water contains deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen that has more neutrons in its nucleus, which makes it more effective at slowing down reactor neutrons to produce a chain reaction. An enrichment plant raises the amount of uranium-235, the fissionable isotope of uranium, from its natural abundance of 0.7% to reactor grade (about 3%) or weapons grade (greater than 90%). A reactor brings the uranium and heavy water together to produce a controlled nuclear chain reaction, which can be used to produce power and plutonium, another weapons material. The heavy water plant has no radioactivity involved, the uranium in the enrichment process is slightly radioactive, and a reactor is very radioactive.

Whoops! A more careful reading of the article gives this:

Nuclear weapons can be produced using either plutonium or highly enriched uranium as the explosive core. Either substance can be produced in the process of running a reactor.

So the writer flunks too. Highly enriched uranium comes only from enrichment plants, sorry.

Update below the jump.

August 22: The doomsday that wasn’t

By PHK

Remember the childhood stories of chicken-little running around cackling “the sky is falling, the sky is falling” and the little boy who cried “wolf” too many times? I do. These stories were part and parcel of my family’s lore – not to mention admonitions.

Well, a WV reader reminded me yesterday that Bernard Lewis, the only scholar the W administration seems to listen to, suggested in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that we should beware of August 22 this year because “the date corresponds to the . . . night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Mohammed . . . to “the farthest mosque,” usually identified with Jerusalem . . (and this) might well deem an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world.” Lewis continues: “It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.”

Wednesday Thunderstorm Blogging

by CKR

Not much time today, so here's what I've got.

We've been having more than the usual monsoons in New Mexico. You've probably heard about the flooding in Hatch on the national news.

It is wonderful to watch those great clouds sail across the sky, though. This one is at sunset.

The Exception to a Nuclear Test Ban

by CKR

Harold Agnew was the third director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was a student of Enrico Fermi’s, and he took photos on the Hiroshima mission. (I can’t find a good biography.)

I irritated him something fierce at one point. I won’t say he threw me out of his office, it just seemed like a really good idea for me to get up and leave. He called me a year or so later, jolly as could be and asked me how my job was going. We chatted for maybe twenty minutes.

He was always (probably still is) a plain speaker, even on the Wen Ho Lee case. And he had (probably still has) good ideas. I think we need to look at one of them.

More Secrecy

by CKR

We're not allowed to know how many missiles and nuclear weapons the United States had during the Cold War. Never mind that the number is different now because we've been disassembling them; never mind that those numbers were trumpeted at the time because we wanted to scare the Soviets. Never mind that those numbers have been available for twenty or thirty years, and there's no way to take back all the electronic and other archives that may contain them.

Those numbers might tell the terrorists something.

Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department, said the Pentagon excised the missile numbers. Under a 1998 law, Wilkes's agency focuses on scrubbing declassified documents for sensitive U.S. nuclear weapons information that, in the wrong hands, could be used to harm Americans, he said.

"It's not our call to do missile data," Wilkes said. "There's no question that current classified nuclear weapons data was out there that we had to take back," he added. "And in today's environment, where there is a great deal of concern about rogue nations or terrorist groups getting access to nuclear weapons, this makes a lot of sense."

So Wilkes is telling the terrorists that some data that they have is currently classified.

We don't know why it is classified, but someone who is paying close attention might be able to guess.

Wouldn't it be more effective mis/disinformation to leave the information out there, no comment, no furor, for whatever purposes. It could have been exaggerated to counter the Soviet threat. It could have nothing to do with today's numbers.

In any case, those numbers are in the thousands. So this is going to tell the terrorists how to get them?

Seems to me that it would be much more effective to be proactively transparent on these numbers and related facts. The more available they are, the better the public can compare the Cold War threat with today's. The United States could even show that it is disassembling nuclear weapons as fast as it can. That might make for a call for more action on that front, like melting the pits down so they can't be reassembled, but exactly what targets do we need thousands of nukes for? That question is above Wilkes's pay grade, but it would be nice if someone would tell us.

Poor Mr. Wilkes must feel like King Canute standing before an electronic tide. But I guess his job pays the bills.

Kudos to the National Security Archive for making this public. H/T to Armchair Generalist for the link.

Managing the Stage

By PHK

I saw Jules Massenet’s “Cendrillon” aka "Cinderella” at the Santa Fe Opera Friday night. I think, however, I'll leave the review of the performance to others.

What struck me the most, however, was the central role of the fairy godmother in Massenet’s version - the supreme onstage stage manager who - as Cinderella’s advocate - made the story turn out the happy way it did. One could argue, I guess, that Cinderella’s fairy godmother assumed the role of Yentl, the matchmaker, but no matchmaker I’ve ever heard of went to the extraordinary lengths to orchestrate or micromanage the proceedings the way this fairy godmother did. But then, what real life matchmaker can command fairies and wood sprites to do her bidding – effortlessly or otherwise?

Then I thought about the importance of the stage manager to productions whether on stage or not. Like the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” which I first saw in Moscow performed by a group of American and British amateur actors at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence. The stage manager in that production was NBC’s Moscow correspondent Gene Pell: he was excellent. This was years before the Soviet Union crashed. Then anything interesting took place behind closed doors or high walls.

But back to the centrality of stage managers: in many theatrical productions, the stage manager or puppeteer remains offstage and out of sight. The string-pulling power behind the throne, one might say, remains invisible.

And the theatrics in the White House?

George W. Bush’s VEEP, or stage manager Dick Cheney may be the secretive center of this secretive administration, a man who prefers to orchestrate the activities of this imperial presidency well under the radar screen while ever petulant prince-non-charmante W hides out on extended vacations in Crawford or cycles away in the White House exercise room supposedly reading Camus’s easiest.

Saturday Links

by CKR

I’ve been to Indian Market and spent more than I probably should have. I’ve had lunch and hoped to be able to weed my yard or maybe go back to Indian Market without my checkbook. But it’s raining and the grey over parts of the mountains suggests there’ll be more.

While I was in Estonia and then while my computer was down, I accumulated a pile of pages from Science magazine on websites and other remarkable things. A rainy Saturday afternoon is a good time to work through them. I’ve checked all these out and find them intriguing and informative, easy to use with lots of graphics.