Yet Another Interview with my Dad, a Nuclear Engineer, about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Disaster in Japan
Because of this lovely copy-and-paste journalism, I have decided (for now) not to cross-post my latest interview with my dad here on Skepchick. Instead, I am posting a link to my copyrighted geology blog:
Third Follow-Up Interview with my Dad
Don’t get me wrong- if you want to repost some or all of this content, I want my dad’s information to be circulated as widely as possible. Please just send me an email to ask permission first if you want to use the entire interviews, not just excerpts ([email protected]). While Skepchick is under creative commons, it’s lazy journalism to copy, paste, and not notify the original author.
CFACT, here are several examples of proper ways to reference my blog posts:
Scientific American: Guest Blog
The rest of you with blogs, twitter, and facebook- please pimp these interviews with my dad. Just please don’t copy-and-paste them in full without emailing me first. Pretty please.
Pretty please just post the photograph here of you in your soccer uniform. It’s so cute, and I’m still kinda in shock we had kids running around a field dressed like that.
One possible insight I’ve noted in regards to all of the reactor problems concerns the communications situation. If you look at the available transcripts for an airplane accident, one of the first things to fail is the communications between the air and the ground. Not that the radio fails, just that the pilots cut down a lot on how much they talk to the controllers. They’re busy. I’m a private pilot and one of the rules of thumb I was taught was “Aviate, navigate, communicate”. Communication is the first thing to drop in a crisis. To transfer this to the reactors (or similar situations), the people at the power plant are just trying to “fly” right now. This leaves the “communicate” to people that aren’t in the “fly”-loop since if they know enough to really interpret the mess, they’re probably better used trying to fix it than talk about it. It gives the appearance of there being an attempt to suppress information, which I can’t deny may or may not be happening, but seeing this pattern in something I already have some familiarity with gives me pause in assuming that there’s some chicanery at work.