Diablo Canyon Nightmare Scenario: The Quake to Make Los Angeles a Radioactive Dead Zone
July 13th, 2019Cryptogon always supplies you with the most pleasant reading for the weekend.
Via: CommonDreams:
Nothing significant has been done to improve safety at two coastal reactors upwind of ten million people that are surrounded by earthquake faults in a tsunami zone like the one where the four Fukushima reactors have already exploded.
Had Friday’s 7.1 earthquake and other ongoing seismic shocks hit less than 200 miles northwest of Ridgecrest/China Lake, ten million people in Los Angeles would now be under an apocalyptic cloud, their lives and those of the state and nation in radioactive ruin.
The likely human death toll would be in the millions. The likely property loss would be in the trillions. The forever damage to our species’ food supply, ecological support systems, and longterm economy would be very far beyond any meaningful calculation. The threat to the ability of the human race to survive on this planet would be extremely significant.
The two cracked, embrittled, under-maintained, unregulated, uninsured, and un-inspected atomic reactors at Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, would be a seething radioactive ruin.
New York: Massive Power Outage In Midtown, Times Square, Other Sections Of Manhattan, Thousands Affected
July 13th, 2019—
Update: ConEd Restoring Power, No Cause of Outage Given
—
Via: CBSNY:
A large power outage has struck Midtown, Times Square, Hell’s Kitchen, and other parts of Upper Manhattan.
CBS2 began to hear reports that that all restaurants had gone dark in Hell’s Kitchen around 7 p.m. Saturday evening.
There are also no working street lights in those affected sections of the city.
According to the Con Edison website, over 45,000 customers have lost power throughout the city as of 9 p.m.
The FDNY reports that they are receiving calls from residents without power in the West 40s all the way north to 72nd Street and from Fifth Avenue west to the Hudson River.
Brain Implant Restores Partial Vision to Blind People
July 13th, 2019Via: Guardian:
Partial sight has been restored to six blind people via an implant that transmits video images directly to the brain.
Some vision was made possible – with the participants’ eyes bypassed – by a video camera attached to glasses which sent footage to electrodes implanted in the visual cortex of the brain.
University College London lecturer and Optegra Eye Hospital surgeon Alex Shortt said it was a significant development by specialists from Baylor Medical College in Texas and the University of California Los Angeles.
“Previously all attempts to create a bionic eye focused on implanting into the eye itself. It required you to have a working eye, a working optic nerve,” Shortt told the Daily Mail.
“By bypassing the eye completely you open the potential up to many, many more people.
“This is a complete paradigm shift for treating people with complete blindness. It is a real message of hope.”
The technology has not been proven on those born blind.
The US team behind the study asked participants, each of whom has been completely blind for years, to look at a blacked-out computer screen and identify a white square appearing randomly at different locations on the monitor.
The majority of the time, they can find the square.
Paul Phillip, who has been blind for almost a decade, says that when he wears the glasses to go on his evening walks with his wife, he can tell where the pavement and grass meet. He also can tell where his white sofa is located.
“It really is amazing to be able to see something even if it is just points of light for now,” Phillip said.
Giant Batteries and Cheap Solar Power Are Shoving Fossil Fuels Off the Grid
July 12th, 2019If the electricity from solar plus storage is, “Cheaper than any power generated with fossil fuel,” why aren’t these systems shooting up like weeds?
The availability of batteries is the bottleneck.
We’ve heard about Tesla’s rumored 1GWh energy storage system and things like the 800MWh system below. This is a drop in the bucket, in terms of overall energy mix, and yet, cell availability is already constrained.
Electric vehicles are the priority. As a result, fixed storage is, literally, taking a backseat.
Volkswagen said that by 2025, it needs 150 gigawatt hours worth of battery production capacity in Europe and another 150 in Asia. By 2030 this figure will double.
The German automaker is retooling 16 factories to build electric vehicles and plans to start producing 33 different electric cars under the Skoda, Audi, VW and Seat brands by mid-2023.
300GWh for VW alone by 2025?
Hmm.
China is clearly aiming to dominate this situation:
It’s notable that China keeps extending its already substantial lead in planned lithium-ion battery capacity. Currently, over 70% of planned capacity for 2023 is in China. Significant additions in March came from Great Wall Motors/SVolt (Jiangsu factory), Sunwoda (Nanjing factory), and EVE Energy (Huizhou factory), amongst many others.
Finally, in other news: Pentagon Races to Track U.S. Rare Earths Output Amid China Trade Dispute:
The Pentagon is rapidly assessing the United States’ rare earths capability in a race to secure stable supply of the specialized material amid the country’s trade conflict with China, which controls the rare earths industry, according to a government document seen by Reuters.
I hug my Tesla Powerwall 2 everyday.
Via: Science:
This month, officials in Los Angeles, California, are expected to approve a deal that would make solar power cheaper than ever while also addressing its chief flaw: It works only when the sun shines. The deal calls for a huge solar farm backed up by one of the world’s largest batteries. It would provide 7% of the city’s electricity beginning in 2023 at a cost of 1.997 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for the solar power and 1.3 cents per kWh for the battery. That’s cheaper than any power generated with fossil fuel.
…
The new solar plus storage effort will be built in Kern County in California by 8minute Solar Energy. The project is expected to create a 400-megawatt solar array, generating roughly 876,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity annually, enough to power more than 65,000 homes during daylight hours. Its 800-MWh battery will store electricity for after the sun sets, reducing the need for natural gas–fired generators.
Epstein Begs Judge For House Arrest At $77 Million, 21K Sqft Mansion With ‘Artificial Eyeball Wall’
July 12th, 2019Via: ZeroHedge:
Jeffrey Epstein’s attorneys have informed Judge Richard M. Berman that their client wants out of his 100 sqft holding cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in lower Manhattan he’s been in since his arrest last Saturday at Teterboro airport.
Instead, the registered sex-offender and self-admitted pedophile would agree to house arrest at his palacial 21,000 sqft, $77 million 1930s Manhattan mansion where investigators found a cache of child porn.
…
According to the New York Times,
“The seven-story residence at 9 East 71st Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, sprawls across 21,000 square feet and has five bathrooms, a two-story reception room and many bedrooms, including three three-room suites on the fourth floor.
It also has a heated sidewalk in front to melt the snow during the winter months. On the second floor is a mural that Mr. Epstein had commissioned in recent years: a photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Mr. Epstein portrayed in the middle.
…
At the base of the stairwell, one of the visitors said, Mr. Epstein had placed a chess board with custom figurines, many dressed suggestively — each piece, he noted, was modeled after one of his staffers.
He decorated the home with other oddities, like a life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier, and had arranged a small dining room to resemble a beach scene.
…
“a main hallway that was covered with rows of artificial eyeballs from England that had been made for wounded soldiers.”
Suzanne Eaton: U.S. Molecular Biologist Found Murdered in Nazi Bunker on Crete
July 12th, 2019Via: Independent:
The body of an American scientist has been found in a bunker used by the Nazis during the Second World War on the Greek island of Crete.
Suzanne Eaton died as a result of a “criminal act”, says Antonis Papadomanolakis, a state coroner who examined her body.
A post-mortem concluded the molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden in Germany died of asphyxiation.
The 59-year-old, who went missing a week ago, had been attending a conference on the Mediterranean island.
Research Credit: D
AI Poker Bot Is First to Beat Professionals at Multiplayer Game
July 11th, 2019Via: Nature:
Machines have raised the stakes once again. A superhuman poker-playing bot called Pluribus has beaten top human professionals at six-player no-limit Texas hold’em poker, the most popular variant of the game. It is the first time that an artificial-intelligence (AI) program has beaten elite human players at a game with more than two players.
“While going from two to six players might seem incremental, it’s actually a big deal,” says Julian Togelius at New York University, who studies games and AI. “The multiplayer aspect is something that is not present at all in other games that are currently studied.”
Mass Exodus from Tesla’s Autopilot Team
July 10th, 2019Definitely see, Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars.
A friend of mine, who happens to be involved with AI research, completely dismissed Musk’s claims that Tesla is anywhere near to having a full self driving capability.
And now…
Via: ZeroHedge:
Several key members of Tesla’s Autopilot team have left the company together after CEO Elon Musk expressed unhappiness with the progress in developing fully automated driving capabilities, according to The Information. Musk is also reportedly upset that some team members have told him that they can’t meet his timelines for developing the technology.
Parents Are Hiring ‘Screen-Free Coaches’ to Help Keep Kids Off Their Devices
July 10th, 2019“Is there a ball somewhere? Throw the ball… kick the ball.”
Via: Global News:
It seems like some parents have forgotten what parenting was like before smartphones and tablets.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, some parents in the U.S. are hiring screen-free parenting coaches to help them raise phone-free children.
The trend, which is picking up in several U.S. states, allows these screen-free coaches to go into homes, schools and religious institutions to lecture parents on how parenting worked before screens.
“I try to really meet the parents where they are, and now often it is very simple: ‘Do you have a plain old piece of material that can be used as a cape?’” one coach told the site. “‘Is there a ball somewhere? Throw the ball… kick the ball.’”
Another parenting coach, Gloria DeGaetano, based in Seattle, told the site coaches in small cities can make up to US$80 an hour in small cities or rural areas and up to $250 in larger cities.
For the most part, coaches added, parents had forgotten what life was like before screens because they’re glued to their own devices.
Desperate to Get Rid of Homeless People, Businesses Using Prickly Plants, Fences, Barriers
July 10th, 2019Via: Los Angeles Times:
L.A. has struggled to stymie the growing number of obstructions that residents and business owners are creating to target homeless people. There are now about 59,000 people without homes in L.A. County. Within the city of Los Angeles, the population soared 16% this year to more than 36,000 — the majority of whom are living outdoors on city streets.
In parts of South L.A., business owners have built chain link fences around their buildings. Venice has seen a proliferation of sidewalk planters. In Koreatown, orange mesh fences are so common that a Twitter account documenting their existence has sprouted up. Still other Angelenos have taken to planting rosebushes and pointy cactuses in the “furniture zone,” the city’s designation for the sometimes paved and sometimes grassy area between the sidewalk and street.
That’s where obstacles are being placed the most, usually without permission from the city.
