Feral Pizza

The Costco parking lot is being overrun by feral pizzas. I got a shot of this slice imitating the curb and rock. Camouflage is one of their tactics to obtain the element of surprise as they lay in wait to ambush unsuspecting shoppers.

The talk at the men's breakfast this morning was on the problems with the Fukushima nuclear power plants after the earthquake and tsunami. The speaker, Dr. Ronald Knief, is a nuclear engineer who works for Sandia Labs and does consulting for the DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and international organizations. He was at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Station for 10 years, and worked on-site at Chernobyl. He was professor of chemical and nuclear engineering at the University of New Mexico from 1974 to 1980. He's one of the few people who really knows what's going on with the Fukushima reactors. 

The main issue is that the earthquake and resulting tsunami were much greater than geologists ever expected to occur. The plant was built to withstand an 8.0 earthquake and a 7 meter tsunami. The earthquake was a 9.0 and the tsunami that inundated Fukushima was 14 meters. The facility actually withstood an earthquake 10 times more powerful than it was designed for, and the backup diesel generators were working until the tsunami destroyed the fuel tanks and got seawater in the generators. Without electric power to keep the cooling systems operating and operate the safely valves, heat and hydrogen built up causing explosions that heavily damaged the buildings. The spent fuel tanks also started heating up, because the cooling system for them could not function without power. Even though the Japanese raised the threat level to the same as Chernobyl, Fukushima is not a Chernobyl because it has containment and safety features Chernobyl did not have.

I thought some of the most interesting comments he made were when we were just talking. He said one expert was asked if he would eat sushi from fish caught off Japan. The expert said he was more concerned about the mercury in the fish from coal production than radiation from Fukushima. Dr. Knief also said he worked at a nuclear plant where there was a coal-fired plant across the river. He said every time the wind shifted and blew the emissions from the coal plant over the nuclear plant, the radiation from the coal emission set off the radiation sensors, and they had to shut down the nuclear plant and do a safety check. Another interesting comment was that with radiation we know what we have, how it affects living organisms and how long it will be around. That is not the case with most emissions and chemicals we are exposed to daily.

We worked in the yard most of the afternoon. I took a few breaks to photograph insects,  blossoms and a few flowers. I put up a wasp-like bee and I grayish-brown butterfly I managed to sneak up on. I also went for a walk in the bosque at sunset. I was trying to photograph a spider that had made it's web between some leaves, but the sun was freaking out the auto-focus on my macro lens. I finally had to set it to manual focus at 1:1, and focused the best I could on the web with it turning the sun into a yellow disc as it filtered through the foliage in the background. Unfortunately, the spider ran off before I could get all the adjustments made.