Mike climbing to the roof of the BN-350 fast breeder reactor facility

We successfully concluded our safeguards work yesterday afternoon and in an hour we are catching a plane back to Almaty in eastern Kazakhstan. It's been a fascinating trip and I have numerous interesting pictures to share. But as the connection here is very slow and unreliable, this is the only one you get for now. It was taken during our multi-ladder climb to the roof of the facility to bring the GPS time-synch node online. I would never have guessed that I would find myself scaling the side of a former Soviet reactor facility as part of my job.

On the subject of Adventure Factor, there isn't much to add other than I pinched a nerve in my knee and was hobbling around like a gimp for a couple days. Other than that, pretty much everything has gone extremely well. I got my luggage, which arrived intact, sans coconut. The concrete samples that I am here to measure arrived, successfully passed through Kazak customs, and are now in the spent fuel pond room. I managed to get three of the 21 tests I have to run conducted on Saturday before we left.

Unfortunately, I will have to lower the adventure factor for the remainder of the trip to almost zero for the following reason: The Rennaissance Aktau Hotel is now open for business. I think the first day they accepted guests was Friday; we moved in today after Jim negotiated with their business manager to allow us to stay for the DOE per diem rate ($140/night) instead of their normal lowest rate ($260/night). Sweet. So yeah, no more roughing it. This place has two pools, a sauna, clean drinkable unsmelly clear water, and all of the amenities of a swanky hotel, which it is.

The appearance of this hotel is really the end of an era that I have just caught the tail end of. Since 1991, commercial oil interests have been slowly gearing up to position Kazakhstan as a major oil exporting state. As it turns out, one of the cheapest ways to get oil from Kazakhstan and into a major pipeline network is to float it across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and extreme southern Russia. Aktau, as the largest port city in Kazakhstan, is the natural exit point for these exports. The recent explosive growth in both the Kazak oil industry and in the local port facilities here in Aktau has led to a tremendous amount of wealth being invested in what has been a terribly poor city for decades.

The BN-350 breeder reactor facility received a tremendous amount of government funding during Soviet times as it was part of the Soviet weapons complex. When the Soviet Union collapsed and that money evaporated, the city of 150,000 people was suddenly confronted with the fact that it was unable to support itself on the meager income of its port facilities. A decade of this took its toll on the city, which lapsed into disrepair and poverty.

Now that the oil money is coming in (and coming in the hands of private industry rather than government), the city is revitalizing. It is a bizzare contrast—half of the city is decrepit old Soviet-era structures and the other half is shiny new buildings or under construction. New buildings are popping up everywhere and they are extremely fancy. I have not seen a single new structure that I would call modest. All of the new houses are enormous. The new hotels, condos, and office buildings are all first-rate. All of this is to service the oil industry.

I get the impression that the populace of Aktau is scrambling to come to terms with all of this money. Most of the young people appear to be better off financially than the older folks, as they have secured jobs with the emerging oil industry and the businesses that have sprung up around it. Every employee at the Renaissance Aktau Hotel is under 30, as far as I can tell, and look to be doing very well for themselves. Contrast this with our contact at the reactor facility, who has been working there for 20 years and makes $300/month. Businesses that are not able to take advantage of the oil money are going to have a hell of a time competing, and government-funded facilities like BN-350 will probably continue their slide into decrepitude.

Still, spending time in Aktau has become considerably less adventurous in the last decade. When LANL and IAEA inspectors first came to Aktau in the mid 1990's, the country was still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was no money coming into the town and no infrastructure for hosting guests. There was a single hotel with extremely poor living conditions, lots of crime, no clean water, a single grocery store with bad food and no selection, etc. Most of the resturaunts served food that was unsafe to eat. It was really wild-west. In the last 5 years, a major grocery store has appeared as well as several modern resturaunts. This made the inspector visits more tolerable. My stay at the Victory Hotel with its brown water, etc., represented the status quo as of the last inspector visit. The move to the Renaissance Aktau Hotel means that inspectors in Aktau can now operate at a "western" level of comfort at all times except while actually in the BN-350, which is rather run-down.

To be honest, I got a kick out of dealing with the issues surrounding life in pre-Renaissance Aktau ...but getting into that shower this morning with hot clean water, clean towels, etc... that was awesome.

Not to fear... the next project our team is likely to take on will be Semipolitinsk, which has no oil industry at all. Dirt poor wild-west excitement. I'm looking forward to it. But for now, I'm off to the sauna.

And ill-fitting orange hardhats.

That's me standing in the spent-fuel pond room. A floor of removable diamond-plate steel plates separates me from a giant pool of rather contaminated water and a whole bunch of spent fuel rods from a fast breeder reactor, assorted test sources, and what-not.

It took me a year and a half to upload this picture. More to come when I have more time.

Oh and today it is so windy that the Caspian has 2 meter waves.

So the battery has run out on the cell phone, and the charger is in Mike's baggage. I have extinguished my collection of new, clean, Kazakhstani clothing and am now stealing socks from the radiation suits at the facility. But none of this really matters anymore, since....

They Found Our Luggage.

Mike's two bags will arrive at the airport tomorrow morning. For whatever reason, my two bags and Heather's one will arrive Friday morning. Whatever... The thought of clean clothes is a welcome one... and having all the hardware I brought to do the measurements I'm here to do will be a step forward.

Since arriving in Almaty with no luggage several days ago, the following story has been told and retold many times:

Several years ago, a guy in our group took a trip here and his luggage disappeared. After about a week and a half, the airline called to say they had found his bag. He drove to the airport, where they handed him a paper bag containing a pair of socks, a pair of underwear, and a coconut. The story has become embellished to the point where no one seems to know whether or not all (or any) of the items were his, but there have been numerous comments and speculations regarding what portion of our belongings will be there for us, what condition they will be in, and the quantity of coconuts that await us.

OK I'm on a really bad dialup connection from my hotel room, so this is going to be brief. I'm doing well, safe, etc. Still no luggage. We went to some goofy market in town and bought Kazakhstani clothes so we'd have something to wear. Let me tell you: buying underwear from a strange girl in a bazaar-type setting is weird enough. The fact that the only kind of underwear we could find was really embarassing speedo-esque boxer briefs was more weird. The fact that the sizing is totally different here is embarrassing. Whereas I wear a large in the US, an XL here feels like I am losing circulation to my legs. And the final nail in the embarassing underwear saga coffin is that Mike and I managed to wear the exact same ultra-small speedo boxers yesterday when we had to change into our radiation suits with all the other guys. So we were sorta... in uniform.

No, there will be no pictures. (I'm sure this comes as a tremendous relief to everyone except Nina.)

The reactor facility is really fascinating, it is overrun with cats (which we feed from a big ziploc of catfood whenever we come across them) and the lunches they feed us are really gourmet. Last night I had dinner at a shashlyk (kebab) place on the shore of the Caspian Sea.

Even with the cold showers and dirty clothes, I'm having a blast.

So, one million hours later.... I have arrived in Kazakhstan. I have now travelled more than half way around the world, and in a direct sense, I can't really travel much farther without leaving the surface of the planet. It is currently about 1:00am Monday here, which makes it 1:00pm Sunday back home. It turns out we have a 7 hour layover here, so they've put us in a really swanky hotel (The Almaty Hyatt) for the night.

Oh, and they lost all our luggage. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

ugh

Yeah between the three of us, we had 5 checked bags and none of them made it. Mike's two bags were in Lufthansa's computer as not having made it onto the plane back in Frankfurt. Heather's bag, my bag, and the equipment case are .... elsewhere. They told Mike that they couldn't get his bag into Almaty before Wednesday, and it would take another day to get it to Aktau, where we will be by then. Yeah. So that's at least 4 days with just my carry on. Luckily this sort of thing was anticipated. I have basic toiletries and money. Lufthansa customer service hooked us up with an emergency kit that included a T-shirt and more toiletries. They also gave us 7000 KZT each (~$55-$60) for our troubles, so we'll see what that gets us. Maybe I can find some boxers with cyrillic writing on them or something.

I just see this as upping the Adventure Rating™ of this trip, which is fine. It's a challenge. And besides, my nose is all stuffed up so I can't tell how bad we all smell.

Having fun despite the lack of clean socks. Tomorow, we fly to Aktau and go shopping for replacement stuff! :)

OK, so I'm packing up my machine and taking a nap before heading off on my big Kazakhstan adventure. I am going to attempt to have email access while there, so feel free to send me a hello. If you want me to send you a postcard, feel free to email me your address. Bear in mind that receiving a postcard requires that I succeed in both acquiring access to email as well as navigating their almost-certainly byzantine postal service.

We will have a satellite phone while there, so if you really need to get in direct contact with me during the next two weeks, contact the N-1 group office at Los Alamos National Lab and ask them how to make a call to our phone. When calling, bear in mind the time difference: western Kazakhstan (UTC +5) is 12 hours later than Mountain Time (UTC -7). Also, we are not allowed to bring the phone into the reactor facility, so during local working hours we will not be directly reachable by any sensible means¹.

If all goes well, I will be able to make some calls out once a day [probably in the evenings which means early mornings USA time...] and have sporadic dial-up internet access from my hotel room. If so, you'll be getting regular updates. If not, I'll be back on November 1st.

¹ I'd say "$5 to anyone who can get them to put me on a phone at the facility during working hours...," but to do so would probably require some kind of amazing social engineering that would bring with it the unpleasant side effect of a heightened state of alert of BN-350, all of Kazakhstan, and the Galgamek Catholics².

² It's late, and I'm intentionally sleep-depriving myself so I can wrap my sleep schedule around 12 hours in a day.

I realize that most of you are probably not too familiar with the geography of Kazakhstan, so here's a map of where I will be:

I'll be in Aktau for the majority of the trip, though I will spend a day in Almaty hiking in the Himalaya.

As you can see, there are some rather newsworthy countries nearby. Luckily, the scale of this map is enormous (e.g. I'll still be over 500 miles from Iran).

As stated earlier, the occupational medicine center gave me a prescription for an industrial-strength sleep aid called "Ambien" for use on my impending trip. I asked people how it worked and I got mixed responses. Half of the people said that it worked awesome, they slept like a baby for about 8 hours and woke up feeling wonderful. The other half said they had psychotic dreams, woke up disoriented and feeling sick. So I decided to test-drive it before using it on my trip.

I took one last night at my usual bedtime. I was wondering if it would kick in really fast and just knock me out; it didn't. In fact, there was nothing about last night's sleep that seemed out of the ordinary, except that I slept a bit longer than usual. Of course, I was taking the Ambien at a time when I would have been sleepy anyway. The real test will come when I take it on Saturday evening in an attempt to sleep through the 9 hour flight to Frankfurt and wake up Sunday morning feeling refreshed. I leave Denver at 5:20pm and arrive in Frankfurt at 10:35am, local time, having flown for 9 hours. It is critical that I sleep through this flight if I am to rotate my sleep schedule by 12 hours in a day. Hopefully, taking the Ambien at a time that my body isn't used to sleeping will be as painless and effective as it was last night.

With the 9-80 schedule back in effect at the Lab, and Monday being a holiday, this was my first 4-day weekend in a long time. I wanted to do some mountaineering but the weather was looking like only one or two days would be worth it. So I drove up to Colorado on Friday night and camped near the base of Mount Shavano.

I was really late leaving home (10pm), so I didn't arrive until 2am, and as a result I slept in to the relatively late hour of 7:30am. The weather was perfect, however, so the late start didn't put me at risk. There were six people ahead of me on the trail, all of whom passed me while I was still making my way up. I made good time as far up as the saddle, but was really dragging ass beyond there. At the summit of Shavano I took a bunch of pictures and drained the batteries in the camera, only to find that I had neglected to put the spares in my pack. There's a gallery of the pictures I did get available by clicking on the above image.

Everyone had passed me going down by the time I made it to the summit, so I had the place to myself. I left my pack on Shavano and made the "quick" one-mile journey over to Tabeguache with just a bottle of poweraid. By the time I got back to Shavano I felt like I had been beaten with a bat and was really worked, so I took a nap at the summit for an hour. If you can believe this, I woke up becuase a vulture landed near me. I guess 5,500' of vertical was enough to make me nap like I was dead.

Imagine, if you will, a staircase a mile high. Climb that, and then walk an additional 10 miles, and you'll have an idea of how I felt. Oh and then climb back down. So I chose this hike because it had a ton of vertical. I wanted something that would allow me to test the limits of my inhaler-enhanced capabilities. Usually it's my lungs that prevent me from making further progress on a climb. With the inhaler, it was definitely my legs. I just wore them out. And that happened long before I made it back up to Shavano from Tabeguache. The thought of 4,500' of descent was not pleasant.

But the descent was reasonably straightforward. It's class 2 trail all the way and I had my shock-absorbing trekking poles. I made it down in three hours. Drove to Alamosa for the traditional post-mountaineering steak dinner at True Grit, only to find that they were experiencing rush hour and wouldn't seat a table of one. Fuckers... I ate a Burger King. At least there I didn't have to wait half an hour for my food—I was starving.

Anyway, successfully climbed Shav & Tab, fourteeners #16 and #17 for me. Could see North Carbonate from the summit of each, which is humorous. This was the most vertical gain I've ever done in a day by over 1,000'.

Picked up a copy of the recently-released We Love Katamari for PS2. It's the sequel to Katamari Damacy and it's just as much fun to play. New maps, new goals, more boards, and a new interface for between-game logistics. But basically more of the same great game. I spent most of the evening playing it. The level where you're on fire is hard!