Author: amcneish

The last place I lived in the UK before coming to the US was a small village in the west of England. The village was distinguished by its great country pub, its history that went all the way back two thousand years to Roman times, and by its close proximity to a nuclear power station. Our cottage sat on the outskirts of the village with a clear view of the power station about two miles across farmer’s fields. On cool, calm nights I could hear the power station’s PA announcements in the faint distance.

I never considered it to be dangerous to live there although many others at that time were demonstrating against nuclear power with the expectation that these stations would explode like an atomic bomb. There was a heated political debate going on in the UK at that time about continuing with nuclear power. In the pub one night I asked one of my neighbors about his opinion on this topic. He was set against nuclear because of its perceived dangers. I pointed out that although I considered the dangers to be low they were at least democratically shared amongst all the consumers of the power generated. I continued by comparing this to the use of coal power which in the UK at that time in an average year killed about 50 miners and retired about 3000 with health issues, mainly lung disease. My neighbor replied that since he wasn’t likely to become a coal miner he much preferred coal power to nuclear where he did share a risk. As someone who comes from a coal mining ancestry I was not best pleased with his opinion, but I let it pass.

My only regular contact with the power station was the weekly servicing of a radiation monitor that was mounted on a power pole beside the road just over our garden hedge. Since I was working most days I didn’t see this happen very often. One day that I was at home they turned up as I was mowing the front yard. A small white van pulled up. The driver got out and removed an extendable ladder from a rack on the van roof. He placed the ladder up against the power pole and extended it up toward a small box attached to the pole. A young lady then emerged from the van. She was dressed in a white boiler suit and wore a white hardhat. Carrying a clipboard she climbed the ladder and unlocked the box. She then removed the radiation monitor and looked at it – then she screamed. The scene was like a cartoon. She seemed to descend the ladder without touching the steps and while turning around in midair with feet pounding. The clipboard and hardhat went one way as she ran up the road in the other direction, still screaming. My life passed in front of my eyes – were we all going to die of radiation poisoning?

As it turned out we were not in any danger. The lady returned when she calmed down, picked up her hardhat and clipboard, and climbed back up the ladder where she again read the display on the monitor. When she came back down she noticed me leaning on the handles of my lawnmower and staring at her in astonishment. She explained that she was terrified of spiders – arachnophobia – and had encountered a really large and hairy member of the species when she opened the box, thus explaining the histrionics. At this point she got back into the van, the driver collected the ladders and placed them back on the roof rack and the drove away. I believe my heart was still racing an hour or so later but I put it down to the yard work.

As I mentioned above, there was a vigorous debate about nuclear power going on in the UK at this time. The UK had experienced one of the worst nuclear accidents in 1957 at Windscale, Cumbria, when one of the reactors designed to produce plutonium and tritium caught fire and spewed radioactive contaminants into the atmosphere. This reactor design consisted of a large pile of graphite bricks with horizontal holes drilled through the pile. Fuel cartridges were pushed through the holes to become irradiated before falling out the far end into a water pond to cool. This whole arrangement was cooled by atmospheric air that got sucked in at one end and sucked out the other end by natural convection by being directed up a chimney and vented to the atmosphere.

If you imagine that this arrangement sounds dangerous, it is, but the government wanted the plutonium and tritium for the UK nuclear weapons program. When the fire occurred and vented the radioactive contents of the fuel bundles into the atmosphere, the UK government hushed it up lest public opinion endanger their nuclear weapon ambitions.

Since the inception of the idea of using nuclear reactors to generate electricity a number of reactor designs have been produced and distributed throughout the world. The Windscale experience led the UK to develop the Magnox Gas-Cooled Reactor design for use throughout Britain. This reactor is a graphite-moderated CO2 gas-cooled design.

This design is not only a reasonable one for producing electricity, it’s also a weapons-grade plutonium generator. The one next to my house was one of these reactors and holds the record as the longest serving nuclear reactor in the UK.

In the midst of the nuclear debate in the UK, our local power station decided to open its doors to the public to let them see the internal operation of the power station. It was to be open on a Saturday and Sunday to conduct guided parties of the public around the power station. I had to go see. There were hundreds of people there awaiting their tours but it was all well organized and I was quickly part of a group led by a power station worker in the dress uniform of white boiler suit and white hardhat.

There were two reactors in the power station, both constructed of prestressed, reinforced concrete. At the bottom of each reactor, there were a number of huge electric motors that drove the fans that circulated the carbon-dioxide gas to cool the core. As we followed our guide around the cylindrical concrete construction of the reactor we could feel the warmth from the walls, It was quite toasty in the reactor hall. We finally emerged out of a door into a large hallway that stretched for some distance. In one corner there was a large grey-green metal machine that looked like some kind of alien robot. A lady in our party approached our guide, pointed at the machine, and asked, ‘Is that the reactor?’ Our guide answered, ‘No, that’s the refueling machine.’ ‘Well, where is the reactor’ she asked. ‘You’re standing on it’ the guide replied. I think she must have jumped about a foot in the air before scuttling off through the door and down the stairs to safety. It was hilarious. I did wonder what she thought she had been looking at as we climbed the stairs around the concrete edifice. Despite this lady’s reaction, the weekend was a resounding success with thousands of visitors over the two days.

The nuclear reactors in use today for the generation of electrical power were designed during the era of the Cold War. These designs were substantially motivated by military objectives; either to produce fissile materials or to power warships. Efficient power generation was of course the main aim, but the military requirements did compromise their design. Perhaps the most hazardous design was that used in the Soviet Union, including the one in Chernobyl. It uses boiling water and a graphite moderator.

When the coolant level fell, the hot graphite was exposed and reacted with steam to produce a large bubble of hydrogen. When the hydrogen ignited it blew the top off the reactor as well as blowing out the bottom. The result was that the reactor core melted into a kind of lava and flowed out of the containment and into the basement. All of this was caused by a rushed safety test that was conducted by operators and managers who were being forced to meet an artificial schedule or suffer the wrath of the Party bosses.

In the case of the Fukushima meltdown, it was not a reactor design flaw that caused the accident, it was the installation of the auxiliary support systems that failed to take into account the extraordinary circumstances that befell the reactors. The Fukushima reactors were a boiling water design that during a shutdown required that the primary coolant be circulated through the core until its temperature fell to safe levels. The reactors had steam-driven pumps to circulate the coolant with electrically powered backups used as the core cooled and the steam pressure fell.

The electrically driven pumps could use the power being generated by one of the other reactors, assuming it too was not in shutdown. In addition, they could use power from a dedicated conventional power station located some distance away. As a final backup, they had an array of diesel generators located in the basement plus a host of batteries on the roof. On the fateful day of the earthquake, the tremor instigated an emergency shutdown of all of the reactors that were in operation at that time. It also disconnected the conventional power station from the grid. The diesel generators were enough to keep the coolant flowing for days until the tsunami topped the seawall and drowned them. Only the batteries were left and they ran down after a few hours. Eventually, the loss of coolant caused the core to be exposed and a hydrogen gas bubble exploded, destroying the containment and exposing the melting core to the environment.

In my opinion, this disaster was caused by a lack of imagination when they designed the backup generator installation. Had the generators been distributed around the site, high and low, and had the seawall been built to a height higher than twice the highest imaginable tsunami, and had the conventional power station been hardwired to the reactors, perhaps the disaster would not have happened. As it was pressure to do enough at an acceptable cost, and within a manageable timescale, resulted in a system that was vulnerable rather than robust, with all that it has entailed.

Until nuclear fusion becomes available to deliver unlimited energy with no radioactive hazard, fission reactors will be the cleanest and most reliable source of the power we need. However, I suggest that the new breed of nuclear reactors that are based on safety science rather than military necessity are the way forward.

Before COVID there was polio, sometimes called infantile paralysis. First identified in the late 18th century it was not isolated as a virus until the early 20th century. Epidemics of polio were identified occurring in Europe in the late 19th century in the US in the early 20th century where it became one of the most serious childhood diseases. In those days up to 5% of children and up to 30% of adults died after contracting polio with many more left paralyzed to a greater or lesser extent, usually in their legs. Many spent weeks, months, or years, in an iron-lung as part of their recovery. Perhaps the most identifiable polio sufferer for Americans is Franklin Delano Roosevelt who it’s thought contracted the disease as a young man and was left mostly paralyzed in his legs by it.
Before the advent of vaccines for common childhood diseases and their widespread use, being a child involved running a gauntlet of hazards such as typhoid, measles, whooping cough, mumps, diphtheria, tetanus, chickenpox, and polio. In the early part of the 20th century, large families were common. While these large families were probably a consequence of a lack of contraception, it is also likely that they were also a response to the higher rate of childhood mortality than we see today. Death in childhood was not an unusual occurrence and polio was a major contributor.
The first successful and widely used polio vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk and others in the mid-1950s. This vaccine used an inactivated virus that was grown in kidney tissue taken from Rhesus Macaques (monkeys). It was delivered by injection. A later vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin and others used an attenuated live virus and was delivered on the more familiar sugar cube. It is this later formulation that is widely used today.

This then brings me to the story of my uncle and his involvement with the polio vaccine.

My uncle Tommy lived in the south of England in the county of Kent. In the 1960s one of the jobs he had was working for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer where he drove a truck. This is the same company now in the news for its production of the COVID vaccine. Back then they were a producer of polio vaccine. My uncle had the job of driving his truck up to London Airport, now called Heathrow, every week to pick up the monkeys that were used to make the virus vaccine. Since the monkeys were flown in on a transport aircraft that arrived at night, these journeys were nocturnal. He drove to the airport in the evening, arriving after dark, waited around for the plane to land, and then loaded up with the monkeys in cages before heading back to the factory, arriving in the early morning.

On one of these trips, as he was headed home he was pulled over by the police. For some reason, they wanted to know what was in the truck. “A wagon load of monkeys” he replied. The police were not impressed with this reply and demanded that he open up the truck for their inspection. Now it turns out that the truck he was driving had a side door that could be used to check the health of the cargo. It also had a rear roll-up door that was used for loading and unloading. Since he was by now a bit miffed, he led the boys in blue around the back of the truck to the rear door. It was pitch black as he threw up the roll-up door so one of the constables shone his flashlight into the cargo bay to see what was there. He illuminated a large rhesus monkey that was seriously irritated at having been removed from his home, stuffed into a cage, transported in a cold and noisy airplane, locked into the back of a smelly truck, and now woken up by a dazzling flashlight in his face. His annoyance overflowed, so he pissed right in the face of the cop.
You may imagine that the policeman’s displeasure became magnified as he discovered that the urine of large male rhesus macaques is particularly noxious. He and his partner left in a rush, got back in their police car, and roared off, leaving my uncle with a barroom story that would entertain his audience for decades to come.
In 1961 there was a serious outbreak of polio in the city of Hull in England. Like with COVID today there was not much that could be done other than to immunize the whole population as soon as possible. They eventually immunized over 300,000 people to suppress the epidemic. However, at the beginning of this campaign, they did not have nearly enough vaccine available; my uncle Tommy came to the rescue. His truck was filled with vaccine doses and he headed off to Hull to deliver these urgent supplies. His journey encountered no holdups so he arrived at the outskirts earlier than anticipated. He was so prompt that he arrived at the town hall before the mayor, his entourage, or the media were ready for him. He was immediately turned round to head back to the outskirts where a police escort accompanied his truck to be greeted by the assembled dignitaries and the TV cameras. Delivery of the vaccinations to those in need was not much delayed but I am reminded today in the COVID era that symbolism aways triumphs substance in politics.
It turns out that all vaccines have their side effects. The polio vaccine is no different. In its early days, the inactive vaccine created from monkeys caused a number of serious infections in the US. These infections were traced to faults in the inactivation process leaving the vaccine contaminated with live virus. After this production problem was corrected the vaccine has been shown to be widely effective with an infection rate of slightly more than one case in one million inoculations. The early, monkey-based vaccine used from 1950 to 1960 is thought to have contained a monkey virus that may have increased the cancer risk for the 100 million US citizens who were vaccinated at that time.
As I listen to the news I hear chatter asking why the Pfizer vaccine has to be kept so inconveniently cold, and why isn’t there enough vaccine to inoculate everybody who wants it now, and who should get it first. I’m struck by the lack of thanks that the entitled have within themselves. In their ignorance, they have no idea how long it took to develop vaccines in the past. It took decades from the discovery of the polio virus to develop a safe and effective vaccine that was cheap and simple enough to produce that it could be manufactured in sufficient volume to inoculate the entire population. Would that the naysayers and moaners knew just how remarkable this achievement is. They might also get a taste of how easy it might be for someone to develop a new virus that is more infectious than smallpox and more deadly than Ebola.

It seems that John Kerry, he of hanging chads fame, is to become Biden’s climate czar. I must admit that I had expected Al Gore to be the pick for this job but perhaps he is busy with other matters such as carbon futures trading. I assume that Kerry is well qualified for this position since I had heard rumors that Alexandria Ocasio—Cortez (AOC) with her outstanding qualifications was the prime candidate for this pick. Maybe she too is too busy with her global socialist revolution to be much bothered with being a Biden czar; who knows.
So what does a climate czar do? Since he’s a czar I suppose he will rule the climate with divine right; a bit like King Canute and his issue with the tide. I fully expect an edict that defies the climate to change in any way; no hotter, no colder, just peachy all the time. I also anticipate executive orders that direct us ordinary citizens to quit our cars, take the bus, and to use Amtrak rather than fly anywhere. These new rules will not apply to the Brahmins of the American aristocracy that rules us; they will continue to fly their private jets, drive in their chauffeured limousines, and generally emit their huge carbon footprints while using taxpayer’s money to pay for the offsets.
John Kerry is a particular case in point. Married to Teresa Heinz an heir to the Heinz fortune, Kerry has a published net worth of over $250 million and has managed to amass 6 houses, 12 cars, 2 yachts, and a private jet. I suspect that despite his privilege he will admonish us commoners to slash our carbon footprint lest we increase the global temperatures by 0.1C over the next half-century.
Meanwhile, like all of his privileged class, he will continue to spew vast clouds of carbon dioxide into the air because he needs to. In this, he will mirror Lori Lightfoot, Mayor of Chicago, who during the COVID-19 pandemic demanded that the Chicago peasants stay home while she went to the beauty salon to get her hair done because she needed to look good in public. Nancy Pelosi was also notable for her trip to a hairdressing salon while under lockdown because she too needed to look her best. How she couldn’t find room to have her hair washed and blow-dried in her extensive mansion is yet to be explained. Just recently our Austin Mayor, Steve Adler, remonstrated with the residents he claims to represent to stay home to minimize the transmission of COVID. He made this plea from his holiday home in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where he had flown in with seven of his acquaintances by private plane. He subsequently apologized for being so imperious.
As a generalization, the privileged class stayed asleep during science class or were busy conspiring how to get invited to the best parties. As such, their scientific knowledge is limited to what somebody told them. It appears that somebody told them that the world would come to an end because of global warming caused by an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide emitted from human activity. Those who might question this assertion are called ‘deniers’ and are treated less well than the objects of the Spanish Inquisition.
Look at the chart below. It shows the best estimate of global temperature by NOAA over the last 500 million years. Those who were not busy trying to date that hot cheerleader in high school might notice that the planet’s temperature is currently well below the average over that period. Those who were in the high school smart clique, more interested in getting laid than getting an education, will be wondering what a chart is and what ‘average’ means.
I think I hear the grinding of cranial gears. How about CO2 you may be thinking. Well here’s another one of those pesky chart thingies. You may again note that today’s temperatures are about as low as they have ever been. It’s also the case that atmospheric CO2 is about as low as it’s ever been. Worse, the CO2 trace doesn’t seem to match the temperature trace very well at all. There are times when CO2 is high but global temperatures are low and times when CO2 is low and global temperatures are high. How can this be?

I do not expect John Kerry or any other politician from the left to explain this anomaly. In their irrepressible pursuit of other people’s money to spend, I expect to get the usual calumny that 97% of scientists agree that Global Warming is man-made, caused by CO2 emissions.

When challenged they will claim that the computer models prove them correct.They remind me of the scene in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when the Magratheans built the computer Deep Thought and challenged it to calculate the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. After 7.5 million Deep Thought responded with the answer; 42. I think that John Kerry is to be the head programmer and all the rest of the Biden team will be his acolytes and computer technicians.

The Friday morning before Thanksgiving week I jumped into the shower as usual and got cold shock; the water was at best tepid at its usual setting. I wondered if my wife had used up most of the hot water by surreptitiously doing a load of laundry or running the dishwasher before I got in the shower. Was this some retribution for some sin I had unknowingly committed? No matter, I turned the heat all the way up. The shower went from tepid to a slightly warmer kind of tepid. Since I was already wet all over I proceeded to finish my shower in double-quick time.
After I got dried and dressed I tackled my wife about the possibility of her denying me a hot shower either by accident or design. I got the sort of response that I deserved. She hadn’t done anything to the hot water. I paused to think of what other causes there could be for the ‘hot’ water being cold. The previous month we had our roof shingles replaced after a large hail storm had damaged them, and all the other roofs in our neighborhood. We have a gas-fired water heater so perhaps the roofers had somehow blocked the flue pipe by mistake; seemed reasonable. I grabbed a flashlight and went to investigate.
Our water heater is located in our garage. Like many suburban homes in America, our water heater consists of a large cylindrical tank sitting on its end with, in our case, a gas burner at the bottom. Electric water heaters use an immersed heating element but when our house was built we chose gas. A flue at the top vents the combustion products out of the roof. A cold water inlet pipe is attached to the top of the tank and a warm water outlet pipe is attached at the bottom and connected to the hot water pipework of our home. In this way, the hot water pressure matches the cold water pressure throughout the house allowing for invigorating and warm showers here rather than the dribbling stream of tepid water available in the U.K. of my youth.
The gas burner is controlled by an electronic control box on the outside of the tank that allows you to set the water temperature and relight the pilot light if it goes out. This box has a flashing LED light on it to announce that all is well. It was out.
No problem thought I, it must have blown out when the garage door was open, I’ll just relight it. Relight instructions were printed on a large label on the outside of the tank. No matches are required to perform this task, just turn a knob to ‘pilot’ and press it for a few seconds to light it up. Off we go. I thought I heard it light and the ‘I’m all right Jack’ LED light started to flash in an appropriate way. Job done!
Not long afterward I checked the ‘hot’ tap but only cold water came out. Back in the garage I noted that the LED had quit flashing again. I was joined at this point by my wife who came by to offer advice and to Quality Control my relight procedure. With her ‘help’ reading out the checklist I managed to get the LED to start flashing again. A couple of minutes later it quit again. We now knew we needed professional help.
I seemed to remember that we had this water heater replaced not that long ago under warranty when it quit working. My wife checked the paperwork and it turned out that it was exactly two years and a day since it was installed. While I pondered the serendipity of appliances failing on the Friday before a holiday week and only hours after the expiration of the extended warranty, my wife called the installer who promised to send someone round on the following Tuesday. That’s okay I thought until I realized that it would be at least four days before we could have hot water again. Although freshly showered I distinctly felt that I was smelling the faintest whiff of BO.
When the heater failed two years previously we had used the showers in the changing rooms of our activity center that is only a mile away. But, this is 2020 and COVID is running rampant so the activity center showers were closed. Luckily our next-door neighbors came to our aid and we were invited to shower at their house. All we had to do now was to await salvation and to figure out how we could wash the dishes and do laundry.
Our neighbors stepped up again to solve our laundry problem leaving us with the dishes. We had to resort to our childhood by boiling water in a kettle and hand washing our dirty dishes in the sink. Quickly we became frugal with our dishes. If my wife had toast for breakfast I would wipe off the breadcrumbs and reuse the plate for my toast. Pots and pans got reused too. We got quite good at minimalist cooking to reduce our dishwashing workload.
The plumber arrived on Tuesday as promised and after inspecting the heater he declared that the fault was not just the usual pilot light thermal sensor problem but that the burner was broken. I was dubious but quickly asked how long it would take to replace. The answer was not good. He said it would take less than 30 minutes if he had one, but he didn’t have one on his truck. Not only that, when he called the depot they didn’t have one either; it would have to be ordered from the supplier. Now recall that this was on a Tuesday of Thanksgiving week so when I asked how long it would take I was not encouraged by the reply of “only a few days”.
We celebrated Thanksgiving without hot water for the shower, the washing machine, or the dishwater. Our long-suffering neighbors took us in for Thanksgiving dinner and kept supporting our need to shower and do laundry. At this point, we were becoming somewhat frugal with our change of clothing too. Dishwashing was the one thing we had to do for ourselves but we were getting quite efficient at it. Pots and pans were soaked as we washed the dishes with hot water from the kettle. Then they too were cleaned before all were rinsed and left to drip dry on the counter. They were then dried with a dishcloth and put away until the next time.
On Monday morning we called the plumbing service to chase up the burner. It had not yet arrived but they promised that they would have it for a Tuesday service call. I was not happy as I asked them why they couldn’t do it today. As luck would in the early afternoon one of the supervisors came by with a new burner for our water heater. The plumber who would install it was finishing up another job and would be here within the hour. About 40 minutes later, as promised the plumber arrived. He quickly installed the burner and lit the pilot light. The LED flashed happily but only for a few minutes before going out. It seems that it wasn’t the burner that was wrong. The plumber explained that the problems we were having with our water heater were always caused either by a fault in the burner or the control box. I was slowly seething. When I asked if he was going to replace the control box I got the same reply as last time that he didn’t have one on the truck. He did assure me that they had them at the depot and that he would return on Tuesday to install a new controller.
Tuesday morning came and went but in the early afternoon, the plumber returned, this time with a control box from their ready supply at the depot. He installed the box, flushed out the tank, turned everything on, including the flashing LED. This time it didn’t go out, our hot water was restored. Oh Joy! Sure enough, after about 45 minutes to heat the water, it was a race for the shower.
But, the story is not yet complete. It’s now Thursday and we have had hot water restored for two days. While my wife was out this morning I was heading for the Kuerig when I noticed the dishwasher. Since there’s no light on the outside to indicate that it is in a washing cycle or that it has completed its allotted task, we hang a dishcloth over its handle as a signal. Sure enough, there was a dishcloth; the dishwasher needed emptying, dang! I started my coffee brewing and got down to the task of sorting out the cutlery and putting away the knives, forks and spoons. Then came the large plates and Pyrex dishes. Now the smaller plates and the cereal bowls, and the mugs, cups and saucers. Onward to the kitchen utensils and the hoard of plastic-ware we always seem to use. What a chore. My coffee was not exactly piping hot by the time I finished.
Then I thought about last week when we were washing everything by hand. How quickly we forget how well we are cocooned by the fruits of technical innovation and civilization. How quickly we forget how fragile that cocoon is and how quickly it can crack to leave us in the lurch, washing our dishes by hand.