Before Trinity, there was the B Reactor

A few days ago, the Hanford B Reactor, near Richland, Washington, was designated a National Historic Landmark. The eventual goal is to turn the building into a museum; the reactor has been shut down and defueled for 40 years, and many areas, including the control room and the reactor front face, are decontaminated and safe for the public to view.

This was the world's first industrial-scale nuclear reactor. Built quickly and under heavy secrecy during World War II, the B Reactor and its associated processing plants produced the plutonium for the first atomic bomb test at the Trinity Site, and later for the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Enrico Fermi himself oversaw its initial startup.

Understandably, the site's new status has provoked some dismay from letter writers, including one who felt "that designation honors the birthplace of the most devastating weapon of war ever created," and another who asked, "Is having unleashed the nuclear demon ... something about which we should boast?" This prompted me to write the following letter to the editor, which I thought I would also share here.

I read the two letters to the editor on Wednesday that expressed dismay about the Hanford B Reactor's new status as a national historic landmark. I thought I'd give a slightly different perspective.

Two years ago I had the privilege of seeing the B Reactor in person, thanks to getting a slot on one of the rare public tours of the Hanford Site. It was impressive, sobering, and thought-provoking. Standing there, I found it impossible to forget that what went on inside that hastily-constructed cinderblock building changed history. A new era dawned when the world's first atomic bomb, built with material produced by that reactor, was detonated. As a nation we may still be debating whether this was a step we should have taken, but we owe it to future generations to preserve the B Reactor Building as part of the context for that debate. It's an incredibly important part of history and it deserves its landmark status.

The dawn of the atomic age, and the Cold War that followed, have left very few public landmarks for people to look at and contemplate. I feel strongly that it's important to preserve what we can from that era -- not necessarily because we're proud of what transpired, but because those events changed the world.

Obama's poll numbers

Obama's poll numbers are dropping. He's roughly even with McCain in the popular vote, and has an insignificant lead in the electoral college, right now. The negative ads the McCain campaign has launched against him are apparently working; this is somewhat reminiscent of what happened to Kerry after the Swift Boat attacks.

Resist the temptation to panic.

Obama is, in my opinion, a cannier campaigner than Kerry. My suspicion is has campaign has been holding back, keeping their powder dry. Going negative when you already have a lead is usually a bad strategy, but my guess is now you'll start to see some pushback from the Obama campaign. Also, unlike Kerry, he has plenty of time before November to stage a comeback. Finally, we're about to enter the convention season, which tends to shake everything up; we won't know where things really stand until a week or two after the conventions, when the initial convention bounce has settled down.

Obama's gaffe

Some of Obama's answers at the Saddleback Presidential Forum are being portrayed as gaffes. Now that I've had a chance to browse the transcript, I think his biggest mistake was showing up at all.

In a general sense, there was no way that allowing a pastor to give him and McCain a series of religious litmus tests could go well for him. I also think having the first debate be a theological one is bad symbolism for a secular political race.

More specifically, though, many of the questions were clearly loaded towards the conservative view; they were questions that conservatives have glib bumper-sticker slogans for, but progressives find more nuanced. In my opinion Obama was being set up; the goal was clearly to get him to say something that could be used as a damaging sound byte. Questions like, "...at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?" were clearly designed to provoke a big applause line from McCain and a lot of dithering from Obama.

The worst example, though, was this question:

Does evil exist? And if it does, do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?

The very premise of this question is based on an oversimplified, neoconservative view of the world — a cartoon universe where people divide neatly into good guys and bad guys. G.I. Joe and Cobra. It's really more complicated than that, and it's destructive to think of the world that way, but there's no way of saying so without creating a wishy-washy sounding sound byte. McCain, of course, fully embraces that view, so he was able to simply say "defeat it," and then promise to follow bin Laden "to the gates of hell" if necessary. Big applause, good sound byte for his ads.

I hope Obama doesn't fall for any more McCain campaign events disguised as debates.

McCain's extreme stand on abortion and contraception

I'll confess I skipped the forum on faith that represented the first general election meeting between Obama and McCain. Questions of faith have become so ritualized in our political system that I didn't expect any major revelations. McCain, however, provided one when asked about the abortion issue:

McCain won a roar of approval when Warren asked him at what point a human being gets human rights: "At the moment of conception," McCain replied.

Now, that McCain opposes abortion is not a surprise, although polls show many voters are still unaware of it. This, however, is a much more extreme stance that could result in banning many forms of contraception. It also raises a whole raft of legal questions. It's hard to see how in-vitro fertilization could be legal, for example; surely if embryos have human rights, the rights of those that aren't implanted are being violated. There are also many activities that increase the risk of early miscarriages, including exercise and drinking beverages containing caffeine; if a woman experiences a miscarriage after engaging in one of these, is she guilty of manslaughter?

McCain's answer should firm up his support among the Republican base, but may hurt him with independents; a poll back in July found that only 45% of voters were aware of McCain's anti-abortion position. Now that he's clarified it in a big way, some of them may rethink their support.

A green anti-tip

I feel strongly that energy conservation is important. For that reason, it bothers me when I see bad advice passed off as "green tips." One I've seen frequently is the suggestion that you should buy a power strip with a switch and plug your cell phone charger into it, so you can turn it off when you aren't charging the phone. It sounds logical, but in most cases it won't save any noticeable amount of power.

Modern wall chargers are usually very efficient and draw almost no power when they're not actually charging a device. I did an experiment with my own cell phone charger by plugging it into a wattmeter, a device that measures power consumption. It used less than one watt with the phone disconnected, too little to even show on the wattmeter's display. I plugged a power strip into the wattmeter and plugged in all three of the chargers I normally use — phone, laptop, and camera — and found that all together they still drew less than 1 watt. This represents less than $1 per year at the current average U.S. electricity rate; compared to the rest of the power used in your house it's completely lost in the noise.

A simple check to see if your charger is of the newer, more efficient type is to feel its case after it's been plugged in but not in use for a while. If it feels warm to the touch, you'll save at least a little power by disconnecting it. If it's cool to the touch, you might as well leave it plugged in.

You could argue that disconnecting cell phone chargers when they aren't in use doesn't really hurt anything. I feel, though, that if we're going to ask people to invest time and money into conservation, we ought to make sure we're only asking them to do so when it will actually make a difference.

Screw life on earth

Just when you thought Bush couldn't get any worse, now he's out to gut the Endangered Species Act.

The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction projects might harm endangered animals and plants.

New regulations, which don't require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have been performing for 35 years, according to a draft first obtained by The Associated Press.

Once again, self-regulation is the answer. Apparently Bush had seen too many of those Chevron "People Do" ads and wondered why, in that case, the government did.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said late Monday the changes were needed to ensure that the Endangered Species Act would not be used as a "back door" to regulate the gases blamed for global warming. In May, the polar bear became the first species declared as threatened because of climate change. Warming temperatures are expected to melt the sea ice the bear depends on for survival.

Read that again. The Bush Administration wants to destroy any rationale for halting global warming. And they admit it. They're basically saying "Oh, no, you're not going to impede the corrosion of our planet's ecosystem that easily. We'll just stop protecting other animals!"

I don't even know where to begin with this. We knew neocons had no value for the lives of cannon fodder, let alone for any non-hominid life form, but it's a little hard to fathom that they're willing to drive their own futures off a cliff as well. What's more, in an age where most people see global warming as a threat to our future, it's astonishing that the Administration would bluntly put the short-sighted interests of Big Business out there as a casus belli against the rest of life on Earth.

January 20, 2009 can't come fast enough (assuming Obama is elected). We need to get these psychotic destructionists out of office.

Friday cat blogging

o/~ I'm just a cat in the box... o/~