Hanford Plutonium Waste

Greetings,

Speaking of energy, waste, consumption and a deadly beautiful mess, here's a new story from the New York Times on the Hanford Nuclear facility in Hanford, Washington. Scary shit.

I've blogged about this before. I lived in Hanford in 1999-2001. One Sunday an engineer friend took me out for a six hour tour. I made images. A gallery is on the sidebar. I used material in my literary memoir, A Century Is Nothing, and have included an excerpt. 

...After she left to explore the Snake he went to buy stamps, specifically images from the Hubble Space Telescope with names like Eagle Nebula, Ring Nebula, Lagoon Nebula and Galaxy NGC 1316.

He launched into a brief but stimulating discourse with the young unarmed postal worker woman about how amazing and beautiful were the colors and definitions of the galaxies mentioning how incredible it is to consider, even begin to glimpse them while trapped inside a federal building five short miles down wind from the Hanford Nuclear Reactor where fifty-five million gallons of buried radioactive waste seeped into water table levels near the Columbia River.

Department of Energy teams dived into, under, and through Columbia waterfalls near tributaries where the confluence of Northwest rivers gnashed their teeth snaking, roaring past abandoned nuclear plants as radioactive waste in decaying drums left over from W.W.II was flowing 130 feet down, down toward water tables.

Fascinating. He turned another fragile yellow page marked Top Secret Evidence or T.S.E. “It’s called Technicium, TC-99,” said an Indian scientist on a shuttle between reactors. “This is the new death and we know it’s there and there is nothing we can do to prevent it spreading.”

The waste approached 250 feet as multinational laboratories, corporations, and D.O.E. think tanks vying for projects and energy contract extensions discussed glassification options and emergency evacuation procedures according to regulations. Scientists read Robert’s Rules Of Order inside the organized chaos of their well order communities. Hanford scientists, wives and their children suffering terminal thyroid disease ate roots and plants sprinkled with entropy.

NYT story... 

Hanford Watch...

Metta.

Fooling and Tooling

Greetings,

On Earth inside the Milky Way galaxy filled with 100 billion stars is a small town. In the town is a market where people meet, eat, drink, walk around, sleep, talk, gossip, sell, barter, trade, buy, cry, beg, laugh, and use tools to make things.

What are tools? Tools are things to make things. They make something and use it to make other things. This is called human activity. People once used stones to sharpen other stones to make tools.

Can you show us someone making something?

Ok. Here is a man using a mechanical tool to make a gold bracelet. His tool is made of iron, steel and other materials. It uses energy to work.

Where does the energy come from? The energy comes from machines converting sun, wind, ocean currents, burning coal and processing high grade uranium 235 isotopes into energy. 235 is capable of sustaining chain reactions producing energy to run machines called plants.

Do you mean a plant is a tool? Yes. A plant is a living organism and very valuable. As well, there are plants that kill humans, like hemlock. Plants collect energy from the sun to grow. Humans harvest plants for medicine and food and so on.

If a man and woman combine their tools can they make things grow like plants? Yes. More like weeds. This human activity is called procreation. Earth has about 6 billion examples and signs of intelligent life is rare.

Show us another tool. Ok, A woman's fingers are tools. She uses her tool to sew colorful objects on a piece of fabric with another tool. The tool is a metal needle. Humans evolved opposable thumbs enabling them to grasp objects. Her thumb is opposable to her forefinger allowing her to use the tool with precision.  

We have time for one more tool. Show us a good one.

This man lives in a poor rural village in Sichuan, China. He is a tool like the gold worker and the seamstress. They are controlled by others and used to perform unpleasant tasks for someone else. They are the means of production in a social and economic sense.

He is using a tool to make new tools. I said this at the beginning of today's story. The stone tools he makes will be used to make a wall, another tool. 

Why do they need to make another wall? They already have a famous wall.
The Chinese have been building walls for 5,000 years. It's in their genetic makeup. 
What is genetics?
A sledgehammer. 

Thank you for your attention.

Metta.

Fools

Greetings,

I'm a fool weather I dance or not so I may as well dance. This is what one fool said to another fool.

They fooled around behind naked dark glasses studying human fool stupidity, volatility of desire's rampant manifestation inside a radiant energy field. Fools are particle colliders, small sub-atomic energetic expanding fields with a distinct glowing full moon dancing overhead.

Dancing fools practiced calligraphy with a calm open mind. Fools danced with silence between notes. The infinite white space is silence.

• it's clear because there is no meaning
• laughter forgets everything inside dawn's vapor
• a young girl remembers how to draw outside the lines
• a tongue quickly adapts to a violin
• colors become silent inside forests
• a wok needs heat to play the piano
• fireflies are dead relatives of stars remaining on Earth to help fools
• dancing memories create a new fiction
• sleep is popular among large groups of sheep
• destiny is determined without knowing
• a mountain and a sword create harmony
• whistling causes earthquakes
• a good fool is hard to find
• fools speak of joy and poverty's boredom with theoretical lightness
• how can we speak of joy on this dark suffering planet asked a fool
• how can we speak of anything else, said a fool. we've heard enough of despair
• 1984 is a reality in many countries where a woman carries the world on her back
• this is what some fools learned, dancing

Metta.

Split the difference

Greetings,

Do you want the short version or the long version? This a perfectly appropriate question in life's chess game of experiences and conversations, especially while traversing the road less traveled on Earth, a spinning rock.

If you flesh out the short version with some immediate specific personal details it becomes longer, growing as threads of character development and destiny as character is destiny inter-twine a kind a rope made of hemp fibers or tightly woven reeds from a river in Mesopotamia which you can employ to hang yourself or pull yourself to safety or easily used by someone in the story before, during or after you finish what erupted as a simple sentence with a line long enough to hang laundry on taking on a life of it's own because you are a conduit, a towering magical volcanic mountain releasing hot molten lava from a highly charged pressurized center. 

A burning ring of fire.

Give someone a match and they'll be warm for a minute. Set them on fire and they'll be warm for the rest of their life.

This molten conglomeration of dust, mud, water, soil, sediment, sandstone, gas, graphite, gypsum, rocks, boulders, pebbles, 24-carat carbon diamonds, fossilized fragments of vegetarian dinosaurs, compressed plankton and every imaginable geological logical particle known to man, woman and child and even others blasts it's way out of the deep red hot core of existence into the atmosphere where it cools, then gravity, the scourge of civilization and it's malcontents, contributes it's force as the dense weight of mass falls, slithers, slides, rumbles, cascades, rolls, strolls, runs, flowing down, down, down engulfing everything in it's path melting the landscape, carving new strata grand canyons gouging out a path for the quickly cooling massive debris reaching it's crescendo before slowing to a mere glowing vein.

Metta.

2-million year old bones in Spain.

Carmen, a famous chef in Eugene, Oregon.

220 Volts of Stupidity

Hi. My name is Mr. Electric. I am the energy driving your machines, tools, lights, music systems and biology. I am the current flowing from here to there, in and out, up and down, before and after, left and right, top to bottom, and circular momentum of gravitational forces.

I am the current surging through your left ring finger when you try to reconnect the broken adapter to the floor strip of plug outlets. I am the immediate surging supply of 220V electricity blasting, tingling up your arm through muscles, tissue, veins, tendons and flesh before petering out near your left shoulder blade.

I am the after effect of a numbing sensation near the tip of said finger and various meridian points along your left arm. This will eventually fade away into a blur like some almost forgotten face, heartbeat, musical note, dust particle or breath of air.

Yet, it will always remain with you, this charge, this bolt of flying electric buzz. The light is steady. You are now fully charged and you may disconnect from the energy source. Congratulations.

Metta.