There were slave owners

The Times publishes a fascinating adaptation from the new book 1861: The Civil War Awakening, by Adam Goodheart, which I just received an advance notice of and is on my list of books to read after I finish up James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. The article tells the story of how the seeds of emancipation were planted in the first days of the Civil War, as three escaped slaves sought asylum at a Union post at Fort Monroe in Virginia literally hours after the State of Virginia approved secession, and the (at least to me) unsung heroism and creativity of Major General Benjamin Franklin Butler who had just taken command of the fort.

A long, long way from anywhere real safe

Nothing to worry about here.

Experts estimate that about seven tons an hour of radioactive water is escaping the pit. Safety officials have said that the water, which appears to be coming from the damaged No. 2 reactor, contains one million becquerels per liter of iodine 131, or about 10,000 times the levels normally found in water at a nuclear plant.

It all just seems like an episode of The Simpsons. Homer tries to avert nuclear disaster by plugging a hole with "more than 120 pounds of sawdust, three garbage bags full of shredded newspaper and about nine pounds of a polymeric powder that officials said absorbed 50 times its volume of water." D'oh!

Maybe the earthquake and tsunami-triggered near-meltdown was a black swan, but what's happening with the water really shouldn't be seen that way, and has been a pretty obvious consequence of the plan to pump tons of seawater into the reactors and storage pools. Where does the water go afterward? It seems to me that there were always two choices: it either vaporizes and spreads via air (makes you long for the days of acid rain, I guess), or it flows back out into the ocean (or into the ground water). Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't think all the sawdust in the world is going to prevent one or the other of those things happening. Can someone explain this better? Or maybe we're still just supposed to be satisfied that everything is hunky-dory.

None of this is to say that dumping seawater on the reactors and spent fuel pools was a mistake at the time. Sometimes, you must do what you have to do to avert catastrophic consequences. But sometimes those solutions present you with other dangers, and, at least in the reporting, there seems to have been scant consideration of those consequences. Did anyone factor in the long-term dumping of radioactive material into the ocean? Was there a comparison of the impact of one event to the other? I don't have any of these answers, but I'd like to know if someone even bothered to take these and the many other tradeoffs, into consideration, rather than what it appears - literally plugging holes and bailing water as we sail into the belly of the Kraken.

Everyone glow in the dark

What I have learned from the news over the last couple of weeks is that there is absolutely nothing to fear from any radiation. At all. Everything is good. Always.

Seriously, the sloppiness and credulity of the reporting has been astounding. At most, you would think they would report that there is no evidence that radiation at the levels being reported is dangerous - if that's even true (which seems unlikely to me). But no, instead we have the unskeptical reporting that everything is "safe." As Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in The Black Swan, "Contrary to popular wisdom, our body of knowledge does not increase from a series of confirmatory observations." That is, you cannot know something for sure through verification, only through negative instances. But not if you ask our media, not if you ask our officials. Everything is safe.