February 16, 2009

• O Brave New World!

  I’m feeling a little like Miranda from my favorite Shakespeare comedy, The Tempest.  I am marveling not so much at the people in this new world as at technology, and not even at particularly new technology.  I know very little about the latest things.

  How far behind the times I am!  Much of that is by choice.  I prefer life on the edge of wilderness.  I avoid crowds and urban pollution when I can.  For fifteen years in middle age I lived off the grid.  I got onto it again not through effort or investment of my own, but because ten years ago someone gave me this trailer and it was already hooked up to the power grid. 

  It is in a cell service void and if someone here wanted to make a cell call,  he’d have to drive down toward the spring and stop on top of the hill before the waterhole.  It would be pointless, under the circumstances, for me to have a cell phone, but I am ever so glad that Greyfox has his.  Not only does it mean that he no longer has to walk to a pay phone or drive to a free phone to call me.  It means that this morning as he browsed books at the Wasilla Public Library book sale, he could call me frequently to ask if I wanted a particular book or video.  Technology is great, and the Old Fart is super!
  

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  I was chilled when I saw an article in today’s International Newsletter from Der Spiegel Online.  I wonder what it might mean for the general level of background radiation in the biosphere.

  Customs officers in Hamburg were routinely inspecting a load of stainless steel waiting for shipment to Russia.  “Their radiometers indicated unusually high levels of radiation. They measured a level of 71 microsieverts per hour, a level that in 24 hours would exceed the amount permitted for an entire year.”  The container was immediately returned to the ship and sent back to India.

  This was, however, no isolated case. For months, similar cases have been found across Germany, all involving bits of metal contaminated with radioactive cobalt. And most of them come from the same source: three steelworks in India, in particular a company called Vipras Casting, based in Mumbai. Germany’s environmental authorities are alarmed.
  . . .

  More than 500 elevator buttons, which came to Berlin from France, showed radioactivity levels of 270 becquerel per gram. The buttons have since been replaced. A component found at a company in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and tested on Jan. 19 radiated an astounding 600 becquerel per gram.
  . . .

  Just how the radioactive isotope cobalt 60, which can be found in nuclear power stations or some medical technology, is finding its way into the Indian steel industry isn’t completely clear. It may be that sources of radioactivity, from hospitals for example, are being thrown into blast furnaces along with other scrap. The resulting steel is then sold to to companies abroad.

  The dangerous import from Asia shows the downside of globalization. Cheaper is not always better. Machine manufacturers and metal-working companies in Germany know that the cheaper the steel coming from a supplier is, the more likely it is that a high proportion of the metal is from India.

  full story here

  Since last August 180 tons of radioactive metal has been seized, but some of it has gotten through.  In nineteen incidences reported this month, involving twelve German states, investigators found radioactive bars, steel cables, chippings, and valve housings.

  With recent publicity within Germany regarding this issue, people have begun checking the radiation levels in their own business and industrial establishment.  Some have already found cobalt 60, and more discoveries are expected.
  

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  Another story, from International Herald Tribune, might not (or, then again it might) involve release of radioactive materials.  In the North Atlantic earlier this month, a French nuclear submarine collided with an English nuclear submarine.  This being a matter of international military security, not much detail has been released.  It is known that both subs were damaged.  From the fact that it took the French vessel several days to “limp” home, it has been inferred that the collision occurred far out in the deep Atlantic.

  Another inferrence was that they were involved in war games.  Both subs carried ICBMs with multiple warheads.  “According to military journals, Le Triomphant carries 16 ballistic missiles with a range of 5,000 miles, each with six warheads. H.M.S. Vanguard is a Trident-class submarine, 492 feet long and weighing 16,000 tons. It, too, carries 16 missiles, each with three nuclear warheads.”  Some are calling on the British Royal Navy to replace all its old Trident-class subs within the next 20 years.

  In 2007, 2 sailors on the H.M.S. Tireless were killed off Alaska under the polar ice cap when an oxygen generator exploded.  “A Royal Navy inquiry into the explosion said ‘systematic failings’ in the oxygen-generating system, which had caused seven incidents aboard British nuclear submarines in the 14 months before the explosion, were probably to blame for the explosion.”  The Tireless belongs to the hunter/killer class of submarines, Trafalgar class.

  I am in favor of world peace and demilitarization.  How about you?
  

  • 7:37 pm
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