Rats! AND - Fukushima.

Boy, I tell ya, the blogging just doesn't get any better than when two of your topics suddenly merge.

The BBC news feed today is carrying this story; about rats and Fukushima; simultaneously.

Did you know?  That the power was cut to the crippled nuclear power plants at Fukushima a couple of days ago?  It barely hit the news- but, yes; it was a problem; the power loss meant all the old nuclear fuel waste in the "storage pools" - wasn't getting any cooling.  Yes, if that continues long enough, the water will evaporate, and the rods melt- eventually with the potential for going "critical."  It's really not a good thing.  But why clutter up the news?

   You didn't hear about the fish they caught in the bay off the Fukusima plant a couple days ago either- the one more than 7,000 times more radioactive than the limits for consumption.  A record, in fact, for radio-cesium contamination.  Which biologically- could only happen if the nukes are still very actively leaking extreme radioactivity into the bay, every day.  Which TEPCO denies, and no one else is inspecting.  We'd rather not know.

   Cesium from the original disaster could not be that hot, two years out.  The real puzzle, to me- your friendly local Physics professors - KNOW this- and remain silent.  I don't like that fact very much.

  The rat?  Chewed through some electrical connections, and got fried- and shut down the power.

 Murphy's Laws are the reason why nuclear power cannot be made safe enough.  And here we are.  I will bet you the farm- if any engineer ever included specs on rat-proofing nuclear power plants- it was long ago, and long forgotten- and nobody in Japan was worrying about rats in the wires.  And they should have been.

   Happy Spring!  We hit -1°F last night here; with about 10 inches of hard packed frozen snow to fight through.  Keep it in mind- "global warming" does not mean "uniform"- it means bigger storms and weather excursions.  There's still nothing between us here on the Iowa-Minnesota border and - the North Pole.  Nothing to stop polar air from wandering down here, when it's in the mood.