Maxim Fridental

Fukushima topic has lost its headline position in the news, but the situation there is far from being stable.

TEPCO was injecting water into reactors, because otherwise they would supposedly get hot and start contaminate air even more due to the smoke. And because the reactors are believed to have holes, the water didn’t run back through the pipes, but went somewhere in the basements of the building. Because the water was in a direct contact with the damaged fuel, it was highly radioactive: stay for 3–12 hours around it, and you’re dead.

Now, basements are not normally designed to be hermetical containers of water, especially of a highly radioactive water. So no wonder TEPCO had annouced a leak or two every now and then. The latest announcement has been made today, they’re just missing another 57 tons of water and have to clue where it went. So far, TEPCO has managed to keep the world quiet by displaying heroic measures to patch the leaks.

Buuuut, basements have another problem. They are not of unlimited size. Every day, around 500 tons of water is being added, and 0 tons water is being removed. Obviously, they need to drain basements, pump the water through some purifying device, and then perhaps use it again for cooling.

They timeline was as follows. They have calculated the time when basements will run full and the water starts spilling. And this is any time starting from right now. Last Friday, they have finished the installation of purifiers and made a first run, with not very good results. I do hope they will manage to fix it, but it is a damn tight deadline they have.

In case they fail, the consequences will NOT be immediately endangering, at least as far as I understand it. The water is still dangerous, but it will most probably go to the ocean, where it will be diluted down to normal levels. May be I’m wrong, but the only big problem of a leakage would be the huge impact on the whole asian sea food industry. Fishes and algae are known for concentrating radioactivity, and fishes can swim around and reach Russia, Korea or China borders. In case of a big leakage, people will (and should) stop eating asian sea food, similar as it happened with mushrooms in Europe after the Chernobyl. After decade of two, a whole generation will grow who don’t like sea food, don’t know names of fishes, etc. Only river and lake fishes will be used. Well, similar as in Germany they can’t tell boletus from birch boletus, believe milk mushrooms are poisonous, and only know champignons and mu-er…

I’ve stumbled upon this saying by Sergey Dovlatov, one of the best soviet writers:

The opposite of love is not disgust or even indifference. The opposite of
love is lie.

This has made me think trying to understand how did he mean it. But then, I’ve remembered the Bible, where we read:

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.

The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
(Romans 13: Love, for the Day is Near)

And this has suddenly made sense to the Dovlatov’s saying. Loving has something to do with treating others as good as yourself. In case you’ve already meet The Love of Your Life, you’ll treat her/him even better than yourself. On the other hand, lying is the opposite — it is obtaining something from others, and not planning to give an equivalent back.

Well, technically, when you say to a patient who is about to die tomorrow that he will surely heal, it is lying. But, yet again, having a sexual intercourse is also called making love. To me, these are just examples of how imperfect natural languages are at defining terms…

I prefer to use LOVE in its christian sense as another word for God, and to use LIE as another word for rip-off or scam. Having that, both sayings have now perfect sense to me.

Sometimes people you love would lie to you. This shouldn’t happen at all, but it happens, and is even so normal that people have words for that, like betrayal. It has also happened to me in my past life. Unfortunately, I’m not a Christian enough to still love the liars, and I’m even struggling to forgive them…

And sometimes, people you love just cannot love you back. Now this is what should be normal, because everybody’s different. But it is strange that I can’t find a neutral word for that. Unrequired love, ungrateful, thankless — all these sound negative and reproaching. May be because it hurts… But what word would you use if  you’re hurt, but still don’t want to sound negative, because you’re still loving and caring?..

There is a direct road between Fürth where I live and Erlangen. The road has a comfortable walkway alongside, with great sights and tons of fresh air, as well as a bike way. You need just a couple of hours to walk or 40 minutes to bike from city center to city center. In the last ten years, I’ve used this road quite a few times, recently even weekly.

In a small area of no man’s land, where Fürth has already ended and Erlangen not yet started, there is a small meadow. On the roadside, two crosses from a simple wood are staying. The one is somewhat larger, another one is very small, in the baby size. The crosses are decorated with artificial flowers and there are two names on them.

During the last ten years I’ve been using this road, I’ve seen quite a lot of changes around those crosses. Old flowers was removed, new flowers was added, a toy windmill was attached, any random garbage was removed, and the surrounding grass was cultivated.

I don’t know whether it is a mother who has lost her children, or a husband who has lost his wife and a child, or may be it is a completely different situation. Fact is, he or she or they are clearly missing their loved ones, and are living like this for at least ten years, may be longer.

I can’t imagine how it is.

Soon it will be two years I’m missing someone. Yes, only two years, but I’m already almost destroyed. I’ve gained weight, and in my room there are some things staying, which I wanted to throw away two years ago, but have never had any motivation or reason to do that since. I’ve started with the Denial stage according to the Kübler-Ross model, which partially lasts until today. I’ve skipped the Anger phase though, only to land directly in the Bargaining. This has lasted for several months, although I wasn’t too creative in thinking of deals with the fate. And then Depression came in, and the real hell begun.

But ten years, or even more! Those people should be completely crazy by now, whoever they are! Either that, or they have found a way to live with it, a way outside of the algorithm defined by Kübler-Ross. According to the model, the grieving must end with acceptance. But they haven’t accepted the death. You just can’t accept the death of the people you love. The on-going care around the crosses is a proof that the names on the crosses are not just combinations of letters, they continue living, even though only in memory.

Apparently, they have found the way to stop grieving, without having to accept the death. And if they could do it, I can do it too. I have it easier. We knew each other for not so long, and the person is not dead by any means, but rather the opposite: happy, successful, and preparing to give birth.

Of course, there is no other way than to part with some my dreams and wishes and to accept that this wonderful life I have imagined for myself will never happen. But, besides of that, there are still the warm feelings, and the uncontrollable smile looking at her pictures, and the admiration, and the deep respect, and gratitude for waking me up, and worries about her and her child, and the readiness to take next possible flight to her if my help is needed… What if it is possible to put all that feelings and longing to a winter sleep? And then to wake them up, when we meet again.

This is the task I’m going to work on.

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Level I. You don’t know who Dilbert is or don’t visit dilbert.com.
Perhaps you haven’t worked yet, like, working for money. Or you are extremely lucky with your first job(s).

Level II. You read dilbert.com and laugh.
You have seen something like this at work. These situations are funny exceptions, aren’t they?

Level III. You read dilbert.com and don’t laugh
At work, you jump from one Dilbert moment directly to another one.

Level IV. You start thinking you can make it funnier than Scott Adams and create your first mashup: http://dilbert.com/mashups/comic/123054/

The biggest danger of radiation is that it is so hard to grasp. I’ve learned some new facts about the radiaction in the last weeks, but am still quite helpless and lost. This post is an attempt to organize the knowledge.

For starters, the radiation by itself (the alpha, beta and gamma rays) is not much different from the sunlight or X rays. There is a source, sending the rays. To protect from them, you want to place an barrier between the source of the radiation and you, a barrier that would be opaque for these rays. The more density this barrier has, the better it would stop the radiation. Even the normal air is a (weak) barrier by itself, but several centimeters of it will stop alpha rays, several meters of it will stop beta rays, and several hundred meters of it will stop gamma rays. Generally, radiation rays would travel along a straight line, but there are materials that could reflect them like a mirror reflects the visible light. So I would consider myself absolutely safe from direct radiation if I’m farther than 50 km away from its source (due to the Earth curvature), and reasonably safe on the distance of 1 km.

Sometimes, when rays hit a material, the material itself can produce new radiation as a result of this impact, but this effect seems to be not a huge one, because it is rarely considered in my information sources.

Alpha rays is what we have inside of our CRT monitors, TV sets and the amplifier lamps (hello to all fans of the warm Hi-End sound). Beta rays is what we use in medicine. Gamma rays are similar to X rays and are used for material defects detection etc.

When you’re exposed to radiation, you get a dose. This behaves similarly to a sunburn: the stronger the radiation and the longer you are exposed to it, the worse is the dose. Like with a sunburn, you can expose either some parts of your body, or the whole body to it. Unlike the sunburn, the dose and the negative effects of it accumulate over the whole life span. The body is trying to work against the radiation, repairing the damage, so that being slowly irradiated over a year is much better for the health than getting the same dose in just one day. But body cannot compensate for the radiation damages completely, therefore one should avoid gathering unnesessary doses. Note that it has nothing to do with heavy metals accumulating in the body — this is a separate effect (I’ll touch the metals later on).

There are many units of the dose: sievert, gray and roentgen. They are all different in size and also have different meaning, but, considering that during an uncontrolled accident such as Fukushima there is no possibility to measure your dose exactly, one may reasonably assume that 1 sievert = 1 gray = 100 roentgen. It is not so easy to remember and to convert, particularly due to the “milli” and “micro” prefixes that are often used. I’m using a rule of thumb that a sievert (like $) is like a dollar to the roentgen, which is like a cent.

To get some feeling about the values, one should note these milestones:

an acute (over one day) dose of 3 sieverts and above is deadly;

cancer, infertility and offspring mutations very probably in the next 20 years after accumulating the dose of 0.25 sieverts;

average natural radiation dose per year is 0.006 sieverts.

To measure the strength of radiation, one can use the dose one gets per hour. The natural radiation on Earth has strength of 0,00000023 sievert per hour (0.2 mkSv/h). Something around this level your geiger counter would measure, if you bought one before the Fukushima-related panic sales exploded the prices.

So far I was speaking about a quite simple situation: visible and well identified sources of radiation, i.e. something that humans can detect and protect themselves against. Bad news are that the radiation is produced by individual atoms of the radioactive material. In case of an accident or a controlled nuclear explosion, the structure of the material will be damaged, either mechanically by an explosion, or due to burning because of high temperatures, so that the radioactive atoms (radioisotopes) will contaminate air, water and soil in form of gases and small particles, both invisible for human eye but still radiating.

For some unknown reason, the amount of radioisotopes is measured not in grams or moles, but in becquerel or curie. Curie is very large: 37 GBq, one would normally use it if something went seriously wrong. 1 Bq is very small, it is just one atom decay per second. Because the radiation strength produced by one becquerel depends on the kind of radioactive material, and because radioactive materials have different half-life and therefore different danger level, one typically measure amounts in Bq for each radioisotope that has been released to environment.

After release of the radioactive isotopes, they would fallout or otherwise contaminate some area, volume or things. When soils are contaminated, one typically uses Bq per square km or per square meter to define the contamination level. When air or water are contaminated, one typically uses Bq per cubic cm, per liter or per cubic meter. (Note that one liter is 1000 cubic cm, and one cubic meter is 1000 litres). When other things are contaminated, for example food, they can use Bq per kilogramm or gramm to indicate the contamination levels.

Contaminated environment can either irradiate you externally (you stay on a radioactive dust and it sends gamma rays through you) or internally (you breath isotopes with air, drink them with beverages, or eat with food). The latter exposure is much more dangerous, because the radiation have less barriers (in form of clothes and skin), and because the isotopes tend to stay in tissues of your body and continue irradiating you until they decay completely. Because, during your lifetime, you inevitably breath, drink or eat radioisotopes, the annual dose contributed to internal radiation should rise, so that your overall lifetime dose should rise quicker and quicker with age.

The meanest internal contamination can happen with the food. Fishes and mushrooms would get radioisotopes with contaminated water and accumulate them in their tissues, being in a sense biological radiation accumulators.

For contamination levels, there are limits defined by law, which are quite specific and detailed. For example, the Russian standard from 1999 allows for Caesium 137 (half-life 30 years), for children below 2 years, the mean contamination levels of 27 Bq / m3 in the air, and 11 Bq / kg in drink water. For Iodine-131, the numbers are 7,3 Bq/m3 and 6,3 Bq/kg respectively. At the same time, 1000 Bq / kg in food is defined to be the warning level for general population (the food is allowed, but population must be warned and educated) and 10000 Bq / kg is defined to be the action level (such food is not allowed and must be destroyed).

The Japanese limits seems to be 2000 Bq / kg in food and 40 Bq / kg in water. According to TEPCO and MEXT measurements on April 5th, they have levels of Iodine-131 from 2200 to 41000 Bq / kg directly on the Fukushima coast line, up to 420 Bq / kg in the sea distance of 15 km from NPS, and max. 66 Bq / kg at 30 km.

The outer fallout zone remained after controlled nuclear explosions seems to be defined by the value of 1 curie / km2 (37 Bq / m2) — supposedly, anything below that level is either hard to measure or doesn’t have much environment impact. Around Chernobyl, the prohibited zone is defined to be 40 curie per km2 or more, and the “periodic control zone” is 5 to 15 curie per km2.

There are tables allowing to calculate the dose in sieverts knowing the dose in Bq, as well as calculate the dose in Bq knowing, say, the air contamination in Bq / m3. If you don’t have them, just remember you breath 16 liters of air per minute, and you can get annual Sv by dividing Bq by 200 000 000 (for Cs-137).

Calculation example: you have breathed air with 1000 Bq / liter in it for 15 minutes. You have breathed 240 liters, or 240000 Bq. If it was Cs-137, it will remain in your body and reduce itself by 50% in the next 30 years, so that your annual dose will rise by around 1.2 mSv.

Another example: you’ve drunk one cup (250 ml) of 40000 Bq / kg water coming directly from the reactor. You’ve got 10000 Bq and your annual dose increased by 50 mkSv.

Any comments and additions / corrections are welcome.

Als ich heute von der Arbeit nach Hause ging, lief ich durch den Park. Unterwegs dachte ich an eine Person, die ich sehr vermisse. Das konnte also ein ganz gewohnlicher trauriger Spaziergang sein, wenn nicht das Frühling.

Was heute in dem Park von statten ging, kann ich kaum in Worte fassen. Knospen wurden heute zu Blätter. Das ist ein sehr kurze Augenblick, der Stunden, maximal ein Tag dauert. Ein Tag davor waren die meisten Knospen noch dicht geschlossen, und ein Tag danach gibt es schon kaum Knospen mehr. Und heute…

Heute gab es sie allen — Knospen, die kaum noch warten können, sich zu öffnen, dann die anderen, woraus schon eine grüne Rasierklinge des Blatts herausstreckt, und natürlich auch kleine, aber vollwertige Blätterchen, die ihre Knospe schon abgelegt haben. Und die Natur war so unterschiedlich und abwechslungsreich, dass ich kaum ein Hundert Meter in Ruhe laufen konnte, bis ich mich vor dem nächsten Wunder aufhalten musste.

Flauschige salat-grüne Knospen. Dunkel-grüne Blätter mit roten Adern. Weiß-grüne längliche Blätter. Braun-lackierte Zweige mit großen dunkel-roten Knospen und einer saftigen hell-grünen Flamme, die aus dem Fackel der Knospe erscheint. Ein Büschel von blau-grünen kleinen Blättern, die von der Farbe her an die Wassermelonenschale erinnern. Vier-fünf enge scharfe Blätter, die wie ein kleines Feuerwerk aus einer Knospe in alle Himmelsrichtungen schießen. Dunkel-grünes Wasser im Pegnitz, das zwischen den von Laub bedeckten und deswegen hell-braunen Ufern fließt. Dunkel-Orange Holz eines Baums, das im Winter gefällt wurde und jetzt auf dem neuen Grün liegt…

Die Gärtnerei hat schon Tulpen gepflanzt, aber ehrlich gesagt, sahen heute die sonst schönen Blümen zu schlicht aus im Vergleich zum Farbenpracht der Bäume. Da habe ich mir gedacht, dass jedes, auch sonst so unansehliches Lebewesen, wohl einen kurzen Augenblick im Leben hat, wo es so strahlend schön ist, dass es die etablierten Schönheiten in Schatten stellt.

Als der Park zu Ende war, habe ich einen alten großen Baum gesehen. Die Rinde war ganz schwarz, sie hatte keinen einzigen grünen Flecken, und der Baum schien schon abgestorben zu sein. Doch seine Zweigen waren voll mit komischen schwarzen Verdickungen. Das können unmöglich Knospen sein, dachte ich, kam heran und fasste sie vorsichtig an. Das waren Knospen! Sie hofften auch und warteten gedultig auf ihre Zeit, auf ihren einen Augenblick. Und ich weiß ganz bestimmt, dass diese Zeit kommt.

I believe, the Fukushima story is only in its beginning.

In the reactor buildings, they have now levels of radiation comparable with Chernobyl. The highly contaminated water is now in the basement of turbine room, and it is unclear for how long this basement can hold the water. Both the air and sea water are already contaminated, and winds and flows spread the contamination all around the world. 18 workers have already gained the dose that will with a very high probability lead to cancer within the next 20 years.

In Chernobyl, they say there were 250000 of “liquidators” who have received such doses. And in Chernobyl, the melt fuel has left the reactor and went to the basement — one can still hope that in Fukushima this is not the case.

I’m not a fundamental opposer of nuclear energy. The energetic potential is huge, and in some cases (like travelling long distances under water on in the space) it is hard to find any alternative. The dangers of nuclear accidents are relatively good understood. But, I think the mankind has gained  access to this power too early. We still don’t have society structure allowing us to safely play with it. In particular, humanity still hasn’t found the way to prevent short-term economical or political interests endangering engineering safety and soundness of the plants.

After Chernobyl, many have blamed communism to be the reason of such a catastrophe. Now we know that capitalism does no better.

We as a society do not think in hundred of years. We do not even think in decades. Many people I know don’t even care about the year behind the next year. And nuclear energy spans across hundreds of thousand of years.

In the news, there are references to resigned engineers who was building Fukushima plant. Unfortunately, there is no information about why they have protested.  And unfortunately, this didn’t stop other engineers to finish the work. Anyway, this situation might be the worst that can happen to an engineer — knowing that your design is killing people and making them ill, and will be doing that in the next hundred of years. And inability to change anything about it. So it is no wonder that quite a number of soviet engineers and nuclear scientists were ready to risk their lives. After Chernobyl, they went INSIDE of the reactor, climbing on the nuclear fuel rods, only to access the safety of the remaining ruins. When you look at their faces, you cannot imagine them in any Hollywood movie. And even though they were guilty themselves, at least partially, I have no choice but to call them heroes.

(make sure to watch all 5 parts)

And I was excited to watch the real HDD blinking me with its LED as it was reading and writing files. Yeah, IBM was my first PC having an operating system and a file system, and these new concepts were especially fascinating for me. And yeah, it has been made outside of the Soviet Union, somewhere far far away, in the unknown and exotic West. The Russian word for HDD was for some reason “winchester”, and I believed my HDD was also coming straight from England, the land of Sherlock Holmes, Jerome K. Jerome and Winnie the Pooh.

So, in the first weeks, I felt myself in a fairy tale. I’ve enjoyed every button press. I loved the UI of the database software we were using. I watched the HDD LED closely and knew exactly, when our software is going to access it.

But, after some time, the charm went away. We still had plenty of profiles to type, and because we were creative young men, plain typing has underutilized our brains. We started to compete against each other, trying to reduce the time needed to enter one profile. Besides of having fun, this had a positive side effect of finishing our first assignment sooner and therefore starting to learn programming sooner. I have analyzed the data entry process and found some shortcuts, but also some innate deficiencies that could only be fixed by changing the software. Nevertheless, I’ve reduced the typing time from two-three minutes to around 50 seconds for a basic profile.

When the time of my first assignment came, I was excited to know that it was developing of another profile database software, this time to store student profiles. With around 10000 students in the university at that time, and knowledge that I will have to help entering the data myself, I was determined to reduce the form entry time as far as possible.

I didn’t know the word “usability” at that time, but I know about ergonomics, which was something my father always regarded with reverence and fascination, so I was simply applying the ideas of ergonomics in software area.

Entering a basic student profile with my database software took 15 seconds. It didn’t have cool colors (IBM supported only 16 different colors anyway), and it didn’t impress with fine graphics (we’ve used text mode, 80x24 chars, IIRC). But it allowed for very efficient form entry and, at the same time, reduced the number of typing mistakes.

One of the best authors of books for children (of any age) is Владислав Петрович Крапивин. I re-read his books regularly, when I feel the need to reinforce my understanding of what a proper and true friendship and relationship is. His works are translated in many languages, so go grab and read them.

I’ve chosen the epilogue of his novel Лоцман to represent my overall feeling of what the year 2010 was to me. The main character of this novel is a well-known aged writer for children being on a, may be his last, journey. The epilogue consists of an apocryphal work about the childhood of Jesus, written by that author.

Please pay attention and forgive me that this is a unauthorized unofficial translation, which I’ve made myself. And so it goes:

Continue reading ‘Summary 2010’ »