Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

I really should read my own blog.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

In my day, never was longer.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Let there be snark.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

The willow is too close to the house.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Measurement

Open Thread: Measurement

by | 55 Comments

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Here’s an interesting exercise. Grab a copy of Google Earth and use the measurement feature to measure the distance from the closest nuclear plant to your house and major hospitals in your area. In my case, in Rochester, the two largest hospitals and my house are within 30 km (~19 miles) of the plant that’s been operating for 40 years.

I have to go this morning, so here’s an open thread.

Reader Interactions

55Comments

  1. 1.

    Poopyman

    I’m well outside the 30 km radius from Calvert Cliffs, but the local hospital isn’t. And of course, the Cove Point LNG offloading facility is 3 — count ’em, 3 — miles from the reactors.

    Makes me feel all safe and shit, you betcha.

  2. 2.

    PurpleGirl

    The Indian Point plants are about 30-35 miles northwest from my house. My closest hospital (Elmhurst Medical Center) is about a mile northeast of me and still in that 30-35 miles radius of Indian Point.) When my friends lived in Peekskill, they were about 5 miles northeast from Indian Point and the nearest hospital to them was some 10 miles further northeast.

    (I didn’t use Google Earth because these are numbers I know from lots of debates about Indian Point and its location on the Hudson, north of NYC.)

  3. 3.

    Guster

    What are ‘brackets?’

    Wikipedia only tells me about the punctuation. People choose different teams (this is just for baseball?) and if their team beats another team … they advance in a bracket?

  6. 6.

    WereBear

    Passing on this fascinating article:

    How self-control leads to anger

    The short version:

    People who make an effort to exert self-control are attracted to aggressive art and public policy appeals, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. They also don’t appreciate messages that nag them to control their behavior.

    As I like to say about Republicans… their psychology, it explains so much.

  7. 7.

    Barkley G

    Mistermix – watch the use of the term “Kilometer” of “km” in the future. These terms are from the metric system which was invented in France.

    References to France and/or the metric system should be avoided at all time, unless you are writing a post about France’s awesome Nuclear Power Plants. It is OK to use France as a role model then.

    Just my opinion.

  8. 8.

    Corner Stone

    Soonergrunt should be happy. MSNBC’s Daily Rundown Washington Speak word of the day was “unique capabilities”, along with a barrage of admin people saying it in different press scenes.

  9. 9.

    PurpleGirl

    @Mike from DC: It gave me the names of five power plants; but it didn’t include Indian Point. It gave me Wolf Creek, Watts Bar, Waterford, Vogtle, and Vermont Yankee. I’ve heard of Waterford, Vogtle, and Vermont Yankee; I know I’m not near Vermont Yankee.

  10. 10.

    geg6

    Don’t need anything to measure because I already know. I live and work close enough to Beaver Valley I and II to have been issued iodine pills at work (less than 2 miles) and at home (less than 8 miles) after 9/11. The closest hospital is further away from work (7 miles) and about the same distance from work and home. And the plant sits right on the Ohio River, so it poses a danger downriver, too. Of course, there are also two coal fired plants in the exact same real estate along the river. On top of being ground zero for the Marcellus Shale fracking, Beaver County is environmentally fucked. It’s especially frustrating since we cleaned this shit all up after the steel and lead and zinc companies all withered and now we’re right back to square one.

  11. 11.

    MikeJ

    Hanford is pretty far off (almost 300 km). Of course there’s a plume of radioactive waste underground, that, when it hits the Columbia River, will do very, very bad things. Seattle will have to get by without radioactive mutant hipsters, but Portland will have a surfeit.

  13. 13.

    PurpleGirl

    @PurpleGirl: Wolf Creek is in Kansas, Watts Bar is in Tennessee, Waterford is in Louisiana, Vogtle is in Georgia, and Vermont Yankee is in Vermont.

    Yeah that feature really works (not).

  14. 14.

    Sly

    What the fuck is with all this “Obama didn’t get Congressional authorization for Libya! IMPEACH!” noise? I’m starting to see it creep into both Hippie and Winger discourses, which usually tells me that there is some greater stupidity at work. The kind of stupidity that explains the popularity of Ron Paul and such.

    Either that or the War Powers Resolution was repealed or overturned while I was busy playing Dragon Age 2, which I doubt.

  15. 15.

    MikeJ

    Speaking of Hanford, every time the gubbmint wants to cut spending, they always want to stop funding cleanup. I know the Republican “plan” defunds vaccinations and poison control centers. I wonder what they think of nuclear waste?

  16. 16.

    Dan

    I had a roofer come yesterday and it was raining so he couldn’t get up on the roof to measure it. He said he will measure my roof using Google Earth/Maps.

    holy crap!

  17. 17.

    gene108

    If we surrender to our Galtian Overlords, will they negotiate the surrender terms or demand unconditional surrender?

    They seem to be winning the class war.

  18. 18.

    cleek

    @Sly:

    Either that or the War Powers Resolution was repealed or overturned while I was busy playing Dragon Age 2

    i’m always surprised to learn what happened while i was play DA2. one that gets me every time is that clocks all race forward while i’m not looking. and the cats go unfed. and the wife untended.

  21. 21.

    Dennis SGMM

    The San Onofre nuclear generating station is 50 miles from me. I compensate for that by surfing the nearby beaches regularly.

  23. 23.

    Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy

    Poopyman: Shit, poopy, if you ever ride the Metro, you’ve seen the freight trains roll by with chemical tankers by the dozen. Those roll much closer than CC, and one derailment could cause a bad day in DC history.

    To say nothing of power shortages if the coal trains can’t get by. There’s more than one way to crash a modern society, mass-casualties or no.

  27. 27.

    Reader of the Most Depressing Blog Evah, Formerly known as Chad N Freude

    @PurpleGirl: I think the CNN computational device is broken or recovering from a night out with Charlie Sheen.

  28. 28.

    Cat Lady

    I’m about equidistant between Seabrook NH and Plymouth MA, both of which are located on some of the loveliest and most popular shorelines in the country, mostly accessible by winding back roads. I particularly enjoy sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on summer weekends and looking at the evacuation route signs, taking comfort in the fact that Masshole drivers will ensure that any emergency will be a cooperative and orderly process/

  32. 32.

    Corner Stone

    @Sly: Yeah, I saw Dennis waving his copy of the Constitution around on MSNBC yesterday.
    I’m just sceptical there’s a lot of “noise” regarding impeachment suggestions.

  33. 33.

    Vishnu Schist

    SCOLD ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    I live about 10 miles from an international airport, where if I go buy a ticket to Tokyo, I’ll get exposed to more radiation on the flight over as any of you iodine poppers have in your entire lives that can be directly attributable to the local nuke plant. If you really want to be zapped go live in Denver for a while.

    I know that we in the US need a good story to keep us interested, the scarier the better. And that FUX News and the like need us to have 15 second attention spans like acid trippers at Burningman (trust me it is much more interesting there). But go read some credible sources and I think you will walk away thinking differently, maybe not. I suggest you read every post since the start of this here:

    http://bravenewclimate.com/

    Once you have done that, I’m pretty sure you realize that nuclear power is a hell of a lot safer that that freight train of liquid chlorine tanks that rolled past your neighborhood last night. Maybe you should google the distance to that.

  34. 34.

    Judas Escargot (aka "your liberal-interventionist pal, who's fun to be with")

    Closest plant to me is Seabrook, ~20 miles: But that’s a PWR reactor.

    A little more concerning: I live just inside the 50-mile radius for the old Yankee Pilgrim plant in Plymouth, which is essentially the same BWR design as the older Fukushima reactors. Joy.

    Then again, living within 2 miles of this place, one of the oldest, most polluting coal-burning plants in the country, is arguably a more immediate problem.

  35. 35.

    geg6

    @Vishnu Schist:

    As a friend, acquaintance, and co-worker of people with intimate knowledge of Beaver Valley I and II and someone who co-wrote the training manual and tests for confined spaces for both of First Energy’s plants here (coal fired and nuke), I really feel quite able to assess the dangers of my local nuclear plant. I am not as sanguine as you are. I was also 20 years old at the time of Three Mile Island and vividly remember the clusterfuck that was the state and federal response to that. So excuse me if I don’t feel as you do about it.

  36. 36.

    MikeJ

    The good news about nukes is that in only 24,000 years we can worry about Hanford half as much as we do now.

  37. 37.

    Amir_Khalid

    Okay, so I’m not in America …

    There are four hospitals within 5km of where I live in Kuala Lumpur — five, if you count the National Heart Institute. The Malaysian government has only just started thinking about building a nuclear power plant … someday, maybe. Right now, I know of none in South East Asia.

    So I guess I’m lucky.

    The fault line nearest Malaysia is in the Indian Ocean, on the far side of Sumatra, which shielded us almost entirely from the 2004 tsunami. So, my fellow commenters: The nuclear power plant nearest you, how close is it to a fault line?0 Or to open ocean?

    ETA: Or to both?

  39. 39.

    Vishnu Schist

    @geg6:

    Uh listen dude, I know words like “confined space” sound really impressive, but I’m confined spaced entry trained, I’ve performed many. I’ve written the same manuals, I’ve planned, designed, constructed and operated wastewater treatment plants for about 20 years so I know a little bit about a few things. The one thing I do know is that 99% of what you are hearing on TV news and in the paper is pure gloss designed to keep your attention. If you really want to have clear picture seek out those in the know (which you appear to have done), now I invite you to read some additional credible sources, may or may not change your mind.

    Cheers

  41. 41.

    MikeJ

    The USGS database shows that there is a 24.308% chance of a major earthquake within 50 kilometers of Richland, Washington within the next 50 years. The largest earthquake in the Richland, Washington area was a 4.3 Magnitude in 1991.

    http://www.homefacts.com/earthquakes/Washington/Benton-County/Richland.html
    Handy search field there. Put in your town(I’d guess US only) and find earthquake stats. Site also has proximity alerts, showing how many superfund sites, etc are nearby, showing that there do exist plenty of non nukes things to kill you.

  42. 42.

    FlipYrWhig

    I knew it was close, but I didn’t know it was this close:

    My house is 7.5 miles from the plant in Surry, VA.

  43. 43.

    geg6

    @Vishnu Schist:

    I don’t take my picture of my local nuclear plant from the news or MSM, though there are good sources out there for the information. I get it from actual nuclear engineers, electrical engineers, geologists, and welding experts.

  44. 44.

    PurpleGirl

    @MikeJ: That is a neat site. I should spend some time reading there because there are stats about quakes within 100 miles of where I live. And there is superfund information about polluted sites in nearby areas.

  45. 45.

    Xenos

    The Cattenom Nuclear Plant, located on the Moselle in Lorraine, is 17 miles / 29 km away. It is a fairly new plant (commissioned 1986) containing four reactors. The major hospitals in the region are within a few kilometers of where I live, and are about the same distance away.

    The city of Trier, birthplace of St. Ambrose and Karl Marx, is just 80 km downstream from this plant. The major French communities in the region, quite conveniently, are located some distance upstream.

  46. 46.

    13th Generation

    @mistermix

    Funny you bring this up today. This morning our local Charlotte NPR station had a Duke energy flack on to talk about how great and safe nuclear power is (although the host is great, and grilled him pretty good on specifics.)

    The host asked him about evacuation procedures and are the locals aware of what to do? Of course they are he said, although I wouldn’t know what the hell to do if the siren went off, and the road jams would be a nightmare anyway.
    (it’s pretty rural north of Charlotte).

    I’m about 5 miles as the crow flies from the McGuire plant, BTW.

  47. 47.

    diakron

    Seeing as how I live in Lancaster, PA, you might think the closest NPP would be Three Mile Island, and it’s not far – about 24 miles from my home. But Peach Bottom, near the Maryland border, is closer at 21 miles. The region’s major hospitals are about five and eleven city blocks from my house. TMI is closer to hospitals in Harrisburg and York.

  48. 48.

    johnsmith1882

    CNN had an interactive thingy on its site to see the closest plant to your zip code. As Illinois is ground zero for nuke plants, I wasn’t surprised to see I live 21 miles (what is that in KM, about 33?) from the closest plant, with the second closest about 2 miles farther away. At least there isn’t a fault line in (northern) IL?

  51. 51.

    Thadeus Horne

    @Barkley G:
    Only the French, with little peters
    Measure things in centimeters.
    ‘Cause all the girls with slishy ginches
    By far, prefer their meat in inches.

  54. 54.

    Ab_Normal

    @MikeJ: My friends who are employed by Hanford contractors are looking at layoffs. Because, hey, who needs to clean up that radiation?

  55. 55.

    DPirate

    Where I grew up the nuclear plant was ~15 miles away, and the hospital was one mile away.

    Now, the hospital is 870 miles away, and the nearest nuclear plant is maybe in Japan…

    Actually, the nearest nuclear power plant is probably on a submarine nearby.

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