Brought to you by the Department of Unnecessary Precision

Saw this sign while getting gas in Roswell this afternoon. The funny thing is, 100 miles later, I saw a sign that read, "Road construction next 23.72 miles." New Mexico: The High Precision State, featuring the nation's strategic stockpile of significant digits.

Do yourself a favor, and read this exceptional article from The Atlantic Online. If you subscribe to the Atlantic Online, you can also read the second half of the story, which is even more incredible. Maybe I just get excited about this because nuclear nonproliferation is my business, but this is some of the most eye-opening stuff I have ever read. Unfortunately the part that I think is most important to the genereal American audience is in the second half. It discusses what our intelligence apparatus knew about Pakistan's involvement in nuclear proliferation to North Korea, Iran, and Libya, and as a result brings up some serious questions about the nature of our strategic partnership with the Pakistani government in our fight against "terror." I think this article alone is so worth reading that it justifies the expense of a subscription to the magazine.

Today my new camera arrived. It's a Canon SD630, and it looks great. Will try to get some use out of it this weekend and report back on how it handles.

Also today, I got the parachutes and kevlar shock bridles for the GroganBuster rocket. You may remember me mentioning this rocket; I started it about two years ago and it has been languishing in a state of almost done-ness for most of that time. I think it's time to finally get it finished and fly it. It's 8 feet tall and 4" in diameter. Very large.

Finally, I bought a bunch of camping food because tomorrow I go down to the Guadalupe Mountains for some volunteer work in the caves of Lincoln National Forest. I haven't been to one of these events in a long time and it'll be good to get back. I leave tomorrow after work.

On the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, I wanted to share some thoughts about it. As a professional nuclear engineer who works with the IAEA's Chernobyl monitoring team, the Chernobyl disaster hits me awfully close to home. Aaron linked to an excellent photo essay on Chernobyl and I was inclined to comment on it as a response to his post. The length of this response has rapidly exceeded the maximum post length for his blog scripts, so I am posting it here for everyone to read [Thanks for inspiring this, Aaron]. The presentation he linked to is excellent, but it leaves one critical element out—that the real cause of the accident lies in the design of the reactor facility itself.

There were certainly a lot of mistakes made by the operators that evening, some bad judgement, and a bizarre series of unfortunate coincidences. However, the reason these factors were able to lead ultimately to a catastrophic failure of the core containment was simply that the safety system relied on "administrative" controls rather than "engineering" controls.

An engineering control is a system that physically prevents an unwanted event from taking place. Interlocks exist to make it physically impossible to perform some action unless a defined series of prerequisite conditions exist. A simple example of an engineering control is the outward-opening hatch on a submarine—it is physically impossible for a human to open the hatch while the submarine is submerged because the force of the water outside keeps the hatch closed.

An administrative control is a procedure that must be followed (e.g. "ensure that switch A is off before turning switch B on") in order to stay within proper operating parameters. Following the procedure, obeying the rules, etc. will guarantee that a reactor system stays within the state space you want it to be in. However, it requires both voluntary compliance on the part of everyone involved and a lack of mistakes or accidents that put the system outside of the anticipated state space. To put it simply, administrative controls are not robust to human error and force the designer of the system to think of every possible mistake that might be made. In the case of Chernobyl, there were simply too many "off-nominal" constraints placed on the reactor system simultaneously and the human controllers were not able to compensate for the unfamiliar consequences of their actions quickly enough.

It's not that the Soviet reactor designers were unfamiliar with engineering controls; but there were bypass switches on a bunch of them. And as soon as a human can make the choice to cut an engineering control out of the system, it becomes only an administrative control.

I don't see the fault of the disaster lying with the operators on duty that night or even with the people who planned the backup system test which caused so many off-nominal circumstances to come into play. The reason the engineering control overrides existed comes from the unconventional design of the reactor. When the Chernobyl reactors were designed (there are two of them of identical design, one of which continued to operate well into the 1990's), the Soviet military-industrial apparatus dictated that the reactors would have a dual role. On the one hand, they would provide power for the city of Chernobyl and the surrounding region. On the other hand, they would produce plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, these two requirements do not play well together. A power reactor needs to be on and running pretty much all of the time (we call this the "availability" of the power from the reactor, and in general you shoot for a 90%+ availability). To harvest plutonium from waste fuel, you have to remove the fuel assembleys from the core which generally requires shutting down the core operation.

To reconcile these two conflicting requirements, the designers attempted a novel idea which was to have independant coolant systems for each core fuel assembley. This allows you to shut down a single fuel element and remove it from the system while keeping the others operating and generating power.

The problem with this idea is that it requires a vast array of small coolant pipes coming into and out of the core, packed very closely. Because they are so densly packed, there simply isn't room to make them as thick as you would like. The rule of thumb in reactor design is to have an enormous safety margin for things like material strength, shielding, etc. This in itself is a sort of engineering control; the pipe cannot burst because it is so thick that the pressure required to do so simply couldn't be achieved by flash-boiling all of the water in the system. In Chernobyl's case, these sorts of failsafes were compromised in the interest of meeting the unrealistic design requirements that came down from management.

The thin-walled coolant manifolds were ultimately what led to the demise of the reactor. When the reactor power spiked due to the lack of moderating rods, the coollant couldn't handle the increased heat and boiled, creating an over-pressure situation in the feed manifolds. One of them burst, sending metal shrapnel into the forest of densly-packed thin-walled coolant pipes. More or less instantly, the entire system of coolant piping failed and released the steam load into the core containment vessel which was woefully under-sized to handle this release. Again, shortcuts had been taken to allow for the fuel harvesting equipment above the core which reduced the baffle capacity of the containment vessel. The vessel itself over-pressured and blew the roof off the building. Mind you, this was a 15' thick steel-reinforced concrete roof, so we're talking about a lot of pressure. The containment roof panel was found hundreds of meters away.

The Chernobyl reactor design wasn't just "bad," it was unquestionably irresponsible. The designers cut into safety margins on numerous critical systems, removed engineering controls, and in general reduced the safe operating margins of the reactor in order to accomodate the design requirements. They knew they were doing it, and in doing so were vastly increasing the possibility of a tragedy. But in essence they had no choice; had they taken the moral high ground and refused to go forward with the design, they would have been replaced by someone who would. The design made the reactor failure inevitable, but the system in which they worked prevented the designers from doing much about it. So, on behalf of a contaminated world, I'd like to thank the Soviet beaurocracy which set us on the path to this disaster.

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We've come a long way since 1986 and we've learned some tough lessons. Although the American public is still afraid of nuclear power (and has been ever since TMI), the rest of the world is progressing nicely with cleaner, safer, and more fault-tolerant reactor designs. Failsafes are now incorporated at all levels of the design. International oversight and regulation is commonplace. A modern reactor is a tightly-constrained device that is basically a hugely-redundant pile of engineering controls that allows only normal operation to continue. Furthermore, failure of any major system (even catastrophic, unrealistic, instant failure) leads to a smooth shutdown of the reactor. One example of this is designs where the only thing keeping the moderating rods out of the core is the coolant pressure. So even if you were to turn off the coolant pumps (or even instantaneously drain the entire coolant loop), the moderating rods would fall into place and shut down the core—and there's nothing anyone could do to prevent this from happening. It's a failsafe. Another example is the pebble-bed design, where there are no rods at all and the coolant fluid acts as part of the reaction catalyst—again draining or venting the coolant causes the reactor to die off gracefully. Toshiba recently released a reactor design that was so safe and automated that it didn't require any human presence at all other than oversight for our peace of mind.

The existance of extremely safe, peer-reviewed, regulated reactor designs is very important for the future of a power-hungry humanity. One of the reasons we are constantly agreeing to build reactors for other countries is to ensure that they use a design we feel comfortable with them operating (we did it for North Korea, Russia did it for Iran).

Unfortunately, after living through TMI and Chernobyl, it is very difficult to convince anyone that nuclear power can be done safely. It literally takes an advanced degree in reactor engineering to understand the complexity of these systems, where the risks lie, and how they can be mitigated. Even though I have a Ph.D. in Nuclear Science & Engineering, I did not concentrate on reactor design and thus I am still ignorant of the finest details. But I have learned enough to say the following with authority: reactor designs exist that eliminate the possibility for a repeat of TMI or Chernobyl. Human error on a modern reactor can only lead to the unintentional shutdown of the system. I wish I knew a way to convince people of that who didn't have the time or interest to learn about safety margins, reactor design, and nuclear physics.

While at the rocket launch last weekend I followed a butterfly around and took a bunch of pictures. Out of about 100 pictures taken, approximately 4 meet my criteria for successful photography. Such is the luxury of a digital camera.

Variegated Fritillary Butterfly. 300mm f/4L at a distance of ~2m.

Yesterday I climbed Mount Sherman (14,036') and Gemini Peak (13,981') near Fairplay and Leadville, CO. This was my 18th Colorado fourteener. Sherman is generally considered one of the easiest 14ers to do since you can drive as high as 12,900' if the road is clear and the gate is open. The normal 2WD parking area is at the Leavick Mine, 11,300'. For this trip, there was a lot of snow down low and I couldn't get within a mile of Leavick, so there was a lot more hiking and vertical than normal for this peak. On the summit ridge there was a sustained 40-50mph wind which tested the limits of my gear. My new gaiters and gloves worked great.

I was going to spend another day or two up in CO climbing, but the weather report for today and tomorrrow was not promising so I came home last night. Photo gallery of the climb is here.

Out of the blue, there appears to be a non-zero chance that I might find myself in western Belize for a week or so this summer. There is an archeological dig funded by the National Geographic Society which involves researching the use of speleothems in Mayan rituals. The research will involve going into a number of caves and retrieving rock samples to analyze and compare to speleothems found at above-ground sites. The archeological team is already assembled, but they aren't cavers and wanted some real cavers with vertical rope experience to act as sherpas and guides.

I'm not sure how our grotto got involved, but we're sending down a handful of folks to train the archeologists. The team provides us with room & board if we buy our own plane tickets. If I can fit it in around a probable Russia trip and a possible Vienna trip, I'm so there.

Had my polygraph today. All I can say is that I wasn't impressed with the rigor. My colleagues had warned me not to ask questions or the test would take longer or have to be re-done. So I waited until he said we were done and had told me I passed before laying into the technical questions. A lot of my questions got answered with phrases like, "Well that was a different kind of chart," or, "We have a different test for that sort of thing." He was very forthcoming with how the actual sensors worked and produced the lines on the chart, but beyond that it all got a little wonky. At at least two points I caught the operator flat-out lying to me. I should hook him up to the damn machine.

As far as I could tell, the polygraph compared three sets of answers: answers that were obviously the truth "Are you currently in New Mexico?", answers where I was instructed to lie, and answers to the questions they actually wanted to know. If the charts for the answers to the questions of interest more closely resemble the known true answers, then it is assumed that I am telling the truth, etc.

The only problem was that, for the intentionally dishonest answers, I was instructed not to just lie—but to really concentrate on the fact that I was lying. The whole process seemed very unrealistic to me; I could sense myself reacting to the lie because I was asked to fixate on it. At one point I answered too quickly (and I'm guessing it didn't register), so he instructed me to be more focused on the lie so that the result would be better. Buh? Of course when I really focused on the fact that I was lying, it showed up great on the chart. But I had my reservations as to whether or not someone who was able to remain calm under pressure and didn't get worked up about the fact that they were lying would return a positive result. My questions along these lines were all deflected.

In the end, I think it was a waste of my time and your money. If polygraph examinations are making this country safer, it's only from [terrorists|spies|sex offenders|unlucky innocent people} who are also really bad liars.

Soleil's new owner, Jess, has posted some photos of Soleil and Kitsu on her blog. Apparently they're getting along great. Yay!

Cerro Pedernal as rendered by Georgia O'Keefe. (I forgot to take a photo of this scene for comparison; Sierra might lend me one.)

Cerro Pedernal
Elevation: 9,862'
Clean Prominence: 1,342'
Key Prominence Saddle: UTM 13 364826E 3999484N 8,500' (+20)

Sierra and I drove on 4WD roads to within a mile of the summit and about 1,400' below. Hiked north, straight up the increasingly steep slope following good cairns until we reached the eastern end of the summit block and the boundary cliffs that rise about 50' from the top of the slope. Had to contour west along the cliff base to a weakness at about the midpoint of the cliff face. There, a brief class 3 traverse (it was only about 12'; I'd call it class 4 if there weren't basically zero exposure, but it did involve climbing a vertical wall with good handholds) led to a sloping ramp leading to the right and up above the cliffs to the summit knife. We spent some time taking pictures of Abiquiu Lake and the Ghost Ranch area, then made our way to the western end of the ridge, which is the highest point.

The wind up on the summit ridge was tremendous and extremely cold. We grabbed the summit register and headed back to the shelter of a nearby bush. Sierra insisted that we sign the register with a Haiku, which I was grudgingly persuaded to participate in writing. I think we ended up with something good, though I've already forgotten what it was. Whatever we wrote in the register was sensible, serious haiku, which obided by the rules of a traditional Japanese haiku (impersonal, invokes a season, descriptive, etc.). Sierra saw to it that none of my smart ass comments made it into the final version. But she's not here now, so I can write the haiku that should have been:

Of course, this vastly superior haiku breaks more or less all of the rules of traditional haiku, but more accurately reflects my feelings at the summit. Actually it wasn't that bad. The view was amazing and it was only cold when we were out at the exposed western end retrieving and replacing the register. The climb was fun and the weather was pleasant except at the summit. On the way down, we stopped at some patches of exposed agate rock and grabbed a few specimens for Sierra's rock tumbler.

Photo gallery

Cliff had this posted on his door this morning; I thought it was funny.

Monday was the first day of the Los Alamos Ultimate Frisbee season. I've been coming to ultimate here since my first summer in town, 1999. In that time, it has been a truism that the first month or so of games will be sparsely populated and getting new people to show up is like pulling teeth. On the first day, in particular, we've been lucky to get enough people for a 3 on 3 game. This year, for reasons unknown, we had 17 people show up—enough for a full 7 on 7 game plus three subs. It was incredible. Furthermore, there were several new people in attendance. We're not sure what strange alignment of the planets brought this on, but it was great!

Another oddity was that it wasn't difficult to get people to get together after the game for food and drinks at TriBev. Some years the ultimate crowd can be a little anti-social, but this time it seems to be off to a great start and I'm excited.

Today is the second game of the season, and I'm not going. I'm also not at work. Because I feel like I've been run over by a truck. I think this probably stems from my over-enthusiastic efforts to ramp up my physical fitness starting this past weekend. The Organ Needle climb was a big one, and it usually takes me a few days to lose the soreness in my legs. But on Monday, when the soreness was at its peak, I decided to run for two hours at Ultimate, which left me really hurting. Then last night I played handball. Probably some mistakes were made here. Anyway today I woke up feeling like complete ass and I'm resting. Hopefully I'll have recovered sufficiently by this weekend to allow a low-key outing of some kind.

I've been running a hideously outdated version of MovableType (2.661) and I noticed that MT-Blacklist was not catching as much of my comment spam as it used to. Turns out they end-of-lifed it when MT 3.2 came out, because 3.2 includes built-in spam catching schtuff that renders blacklist obsolete. So I decided to upgrade. This is a test post to see if everything is working.

OK I'm back from a weekend of tooling around southern New Mexico and I have pictures to show for it. On Friday I drove down and delivered Soleil to her new owner. I got to meet Kitsu, the male glider who is destined to become Soleil's new boyfriend. The new owner seems very cool and I'm expecting to see pictures of Soleil in her new habitat sometime soon. After that I drove over to Akela Flats to watch Mike practicing for his race this weekend.

Mike on a borrowed Honda while his Ducati is in the shop. Notice his number, which of course is the mass of the electron. Why, you ask? Because pi was already taken by a friend of his (see photo gallery, click above).

Mike, Christina, and I had dinner at some really weird resturaunt in the middle of nowhere called The Adobe Deli. I had a huge steak in preparation for the next day's climb. They french onion soup was phenomenal. I bid Mike and Christina farewell and drove back to Cruces to camp out before the big hike. Here's the mountain I would climb:

Organ Needle, the right-most summit in the photo, is the tallest point in the rugged Organ Mountains east of Las Cruces. Click for photo gallery

This was the first time I've camped in my new truck, and everything went very well. The weather was perfect and I was very comfortable. A good night's rest and a hearty dinner left me in prime climbing condition the following morning and I felt very strong during the entire climb. I think all the handball I've been playing recently has really paid off in terms of my physical condition. At 4,100' of vertical, this was a very significant climb for me but I came away not at all tired. So I'm really excited for the coming summer climbing season. I'm also tentatively planning a trip to Orizaba this winter (~18,500' near Mexico City). Anyway I succeeded in climbing Organ Needle and it was definitely one of my favorite mountains to date.

Organ Needle conforms to what I am going to call the "Parabolic Approach," in that it gets progressively steeper until, at the end, you are climbing a vertical rock face via a system of cracks and ledges. It reminded me a lot of Wetterhorn, only larger (though less high in an absolute sense). In the first half of the linear distance traveled, I had only gained one sixth of the elevation. The bulk of the elevation gain comes in two brutally steep (30°+) cliff-base traverses. The summit is really small and the views of White Sands and the rest of the Organ Mountains are tremendous.

It took me 5 hours to reach the summit, and another 3:45 to get back to the truck. When I returned to Las Cruces, I was really hungry and thirsty. So I went to the Outback Steakhouse and ate their largest steak in about 10 minutes, along with approximtaely 12 glasses of water. I think my waiter thought I was weird. It was perfect though; just what I needed. Drove home last night, arriving just after midnight (after a breif nap at the Santa Fe rest stop for safety's sake).

Nice work, Jack.

I've decided that, since I'll be down by Las Cruces anyway, I should make a bid for Organ Needle (9,012'). This peak is the highest point in the Organ mountain range as well as Doña Ana county. It is the 8th most prominent peak in New Mexico (3,700'+). It is considered one of the best mountain climbs in New Mexico, and has the most technical easiest route of all major summits in the state (class 3+ pitch just below the top). For an in-depth route description, you can read Gerry Roach's writeup on the peak.

At 4,000'+ of gross gain, this will be a full-day affair so I will attempt it on Saturday. After delivering Soleil to her new owner Friday morning, I'm going to stop off at the race track near Deming to see Mike (my boss) race his motorcycle. Then I might head up into the Gila Wilderness and see what there is to see. Friday night I will camp at the Organ Needle trailhead. Saturday night might be spent at the track with Mike or possibly at Rock Hound State Park or the Aguirre Springs campground. Sunday I imagine I'll be tired and will just drive home. That's my plan.

I've been struggling with this for some time now. Ever since Noid died last year, Soleil has been on her own and just hasn't seemed as happy. Sugar gliders are really social creatures and seem to thrive on the company of others. I've tried to increase the amount of time I spend with her as a result of her lost companion but I doubt it's a suitable replacement. I decided recently that I either had to get her a new friend of put her up for adpotion.

This was a tough call to make because I really like Soleil as a pet, but with my new job I'm travelling a lot and gone for extended periods and I feel like that's not fair to them, even if I had a second glider.

Just as I was struggling with this decision, I met a woman from El Paso who is trying to bootstrap a sugar glider breeding business. She also lost one of her gliders recently and is now left without a breeding female. I've decided to let her adopt Soleil. She's got a great habitat setup and is clearly very excited about providing a good home for the gliders. It's going to be a real bummer letting her go, but I think it's probably best for Soleil. I'm going to drive down to El Paso on Friday with the glider and and assortment of her favorite toys. *sniff*

This Wednesday, at two minutes and three seconds after one in the morning, the time and date will be:

Let's celebrate. File this one under "DORK."

So what's the protocol for driving without a license if your license has been stolen? I fully intend to be at the DMV on Monday morning when they open... but what about today? Am I under house arrest? Should I walk to the DMV tomorrow morning? Don't ask how I got home from Albuquerque last night...

I am now in the market for a new point-and-shoot camera. Being small enough to conveniently carry around is a high priority, 4+ MP would be good, as would the use of either CF or SD since I have card readers for those formats built into my travel laptop. I can't decide whether the use of non-proprietary (e.g. AA) batteries should be a requirement; I can get replacement AA's all over the world whereas I don't always have reliable access to a power outlet in some of the places I travel to. I recognize that the use of regular batteries means increased size, weight, and reduced lifespan on a single charge. Suggestions and pointers to reviews appreciated.

Doug paid 50,000 frequent-flier miles to get his trip upgraded to business class, and on the way home he put in a request for a "companion upgrade." These upgrades are subject to availability and they didn't have room on the Moscow-Atlanta flight, but I did get upgraded on the Atlanta-Albuquerque flight. It is SO much more comfortable up there in the front. I can't wait until I have enough miles where complimentary upgrades start becoming a reality.

Usually, daylight savings time is a pain in the spring because we lose an hour. But when you're coming back from points east, it's simply one less hour that you have to adjust for. Now I'm only 10 hours off instead of 11! Somehow that loses its significance when it's only 9%... but it was a nice thought.