randform

Short notice: I am giving a talk on contents of the game scheme article and the scientific platform article on July 1st at the open knoledge conference in Berlin.

An upload of an updated version of the article draft “New economic schemes in games” is at the corresponding randform blogpost.

This post is for commemorating the Chernobyl disaster which happened 25 years ago.
Unfortunately since then other nuclear tragedies happened – most notable of course the Fukushima tragedy, where even today we may eventually still hear bad news.

The company Siemens, which initially thought about a cooperation in nuclear technology with Rosatom (according to the article Le départ de Siemens relance les spéculations sur le capital d’Areva by jdf.com, mentioned in this randform post ) seems – according to the agency reuters: “Siemens could exit Rosatom nuclear venture” – to think about changing their plans.

Here an article on a website which is sponsored by Siemens by Akira T. Tokuhiro who lists 14 points as an “Initial Look at Lessons Learned From Fukushima”.

Here a link to photos from Chernobyl and other sites of nuclear tragedies.

I decided to put newer drafts of the article “New economic schemes in games” (where among others the dangers of future nuclear power generation are outlined) into that blogpost. The newest version is from today.
There are also parts of the article at the Azimuth project. I plan to put more parts there.

The discussion about an eventual criticality accident in Fukushima which started in the comment section of the blog post about the Fukushima plant continued partially on Azimuth within this comment.

Last weekend there was a demonstration against nuclear power generation in Berlin, which had about 70.000 participants.
Images of the demonstration after the click.

(more…)

In the blogpost on the return of investments I proposed to use games for testing new economical scenarious. I currently try to make an article out of that.
In the draft I sofar have given an overview about games and roughly motivated why I think that it may be a good idea to introduce new economical schemes. In particular I talk about the limitations of this planet, design and in particular about something that I dubbed “recycling-run-away effect”.

Amongst others I also try to line out why I think that the nuclear waste problem may be a worse problem than the safety of reactors (see also the first post on Fukushima).

Comments are appreciated, here is the draft:
update (06072015) :
It currently looks as if an article format is rather not suited for the writings and findings made within the context of the game draft article. It is also still not clear wether this project will ever be finished and if in which form. You may though still find on and off some informations in this context, likethis blog post is an example.

update (06072011) : This blog post is now used as a referrer URL for the game scheme article, thus newer versions of the article and comments will be uploaded more or less regularily. Please note that this offer to our randform readers costs our private money. Since randform is currently purely financed by Tim Hoffmanns income as a math professor, we may eventually be forced to reduce or close this offer, depending on download rate, inflation, etc. Most of the content of the article is also spread on the Azimuth project like the section about the Game environment. The Azimuth updates are usually more current.

->version July 06, 2011

The most essential content article of the article was presented on July 1st at the open knowledge conference 2011 in Berlin:

Talk: “Testing new toy economies/political structures in MMOGs” at slideshare.net

older versions of the article:

->version May 25, 2011

->version april 26, 2011

-> New economical schemes in games, version march 25, 2011

The german Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit (GRS) (which is owned by the state of Germany to about one half ) has regularily updated information (in english) about the Fukushima plant and other plants at trouble at:
http://www.grs.de/en/news/information-updates-japanese-nuclear-power-plants

A german version is at
http://www.grs.de/informationen-zur-lage-den-japanischen-kernkraftwerken-fukushima-onagawa-und-tokai

The report is by order of the german ministry for the environment.

The japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology has a japanese website on the Readings at Monitoring Post out of 20 Km Zone of Fukushima Dai-ichi NPP at:
http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1303726.htm

and of Readings of environmental radioactivity level by prefecture at:
http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1303723.htm

A partial translation of the pdf’s is possible via google translate
update 19.3.2011: there are now also english pdf’s of the measurements

update 20.3.2011: The above mentioned grs has also a website about the potential dangers of radiation however the old one, which is still in the Google cache was currently a bit more informative. There they say as a “rule of thumb” that

Als Faustregel gilt, dass die Aufnahme von etwa 80 000 Bq Cs-137 bei Erwachsenen einer Strahlenexposition von etwa 1 mSv entspricht.

translation without guarantee: 80 000 Bq of Cs-137 for an adult equates to about 1 mSv.

further translations:
The limit of import into Germany for caesium is 600 Bq/kg. For milk, milkproducts and kids nutrition is 370 Bq/kg. For the beginning of May 1986 (shortly after Chernobyl) the Commission for radiation safety recommended to eat and drink only milk with less than 500 Bq/l of Iodine 131 and green vegetables with less then 250 Bq/kg of Iodine 131 .

On sunday the 7 th fleet reported:

The U.S. 7th Fleet has temporarily repositioned its ships and aircraft away from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant after detecting low level contamination in the air and on its aircraft operating in the area.

The source of this airborne radioactivity is a radioactive plume released from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant. For perspective, the maximum potential radiation dose received by any ship’s force personnel aboard the ship when it passed through the area was less than the radiation exposure received from about one month of exposure to natural background radiation from sources such as rocks, soil, and the sun.

The ship was operating at sea about 100 miles northeast of the power plant at the time.

24*30 = 720

So this means the boat received a 720 fold radiation at a distance of about 160 kms of the troubled Fukushima nuclear plant from what’s supposed to be normal.

Even if one assumes that the density of such a plume disperses quadratically one would have 720*(160^2/270^2) = approx. 250 times higher dose then normal, or in other words in one hour one would perceive about a third of a months radiation dose above normal being in such a plume at a distance of 270 kms (which is the approximate distance between Fukushima and Tokyo). Luckily the ship could get out fast of the hazardous zone.

Unfortunately the possibilities to alter weather are very small. In fact there were experiments in Abu Dhabi and it seems China is also doing a lot of research in that direction, seen critical by some others. The latest research item in cloud seeding seems to have been laser shots into the air over the sky of Berlin (see also this article ).

The information about what’s really going on at the plant is fuzzy. It is understandable that some people would like to avoid a panic and thus would not make all information available to a broad uninformed public, who might draw false conclusions. But some people would like to appease people by making unscientific claims about certain likelyhoods (while at the same time claiming that nothing can be measured!). But one should think about how such an approach may impair credibility…this holds especially true for some certain news agencies, who’s reports are less based on facts but on biased commentaries disguised as “facts”.

So here a bit of information taken together:
An interactive map from the New York times of the Fukushima plant with a BWR design which (if I understood correctly) is by General Electric. An illustration by Hitachi of the concrete Fukushima plant seems to be in this pdf. The design looks a bit differently than the General electrics one…
A rather matter of fact and informative blog post about what happened at Fukushima by what seems to be a pro-nuclear writer (at least he cites pro-nuclear sources). What one got to hear sofar is that the reactor vessels and the containment of the troubled plants are still intact.

Our thoughts are with the japanese people and their grief.

Moreover we hope that the brave workers at the Fukushima power plants will succeed with their plans to avoid the worst. We hope that it will be possible to supply more and better equipment (see e.g. Kyodo news about the 5 fire pumps) to the dangerous Fukushima area and that with international help the results of the earthquake, Tsunami and nuclear disaster can be mitigated and that the worst possible nuclear scenarios won’t happen at Fukushima.

update 16.3.2011: I forgot to include a link to the

->overview on nuclear energy on randform

In this overview I actually saw the probability of a terrible accident with currently exisiting reactors as rather small. So in this overview I focused on problems with future types of nuclear energy generation (which include even more dangerous nuclear technology) and with the waste problem. I am asking myself now if I should give nuclear energy even more critical scrutiny.

our little postbox in munich two years ago

The last days there had been a big public discussion in Germany about scientific publishing. The reason for that discussion was that the former german minister for defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had included texts into his Ph. D. thesis, which were not by himself, but which were on the other hand not appropriately marked as a citation. The number of these plagiarized texts in his dissertation was so big that this “secretely pasting in” of texts by other authors had to be called systematic. As of march first, 2011 the site GuttenPlag had found plagiarized texts on 324 of 393 pages of his dissertation. After a longer process which included strong protests especially from the academic community, which included the revocation of his degree and a declaration of his doctoral advisor Peter Häberle Mr. Guttenberg finally resigned from his post as a minister for defense. Among others the declaration of his doctoral advisor Peter Häberle contained the sentence:

Die in der Promotionsschrift von Herrn zu Guttenberg entdeckten, mir unvorstellbaren Mängel sind schwerwiegend und nicht akzeptabel.

(translation without guarantee: The – to me unexplicable – found shortcomings in Mr. zu Guttenbergs dissertation are severe and not acceptable.)

The investigations into this case haven’t been finished, in particular the University of Bayreuth (which was in charge for the thesis) seems still to be investigating and e.g. checking wether the plagiarism was intentional fraud. There seems also to be the possibility of juridicial consequences (see e.g. here and here.)

In short the damage that had been done with this affair is quite big and thus a sensible question is “how could that happen and how could one prevent further cases like this?”

I hope that the future will bring more clearness into the case and will give an answer to the first question. Whatever the result will be it is already clear by now, that something went utterly wrong in how the dissertation was made and in how it was supervised.

In the randform post Alexandre Grothendieck writes a letter I had promised to speak about the proposal of a “closed pre-preprint section for the arxive for timestamping works” i.e. a kind of “safe” for work in progress. I think that such a section in an open access preprint archive could in particular be useful in the supervision process of a doctoral thesis and thus eventually help preventing similar cases as the above. It would also have other benefits. Let’s explain this.

(more…)

(more…)

A reply to a comment by Oekologisch Interressierter who wrote:

I think I read in an article in the new “Oekotest” that the german green party did a study that nuclear energy is not growing. That is there are more reactors to be shut off soon than there reactors that are being built. So the claim that nuclear energy is growing seems to be propaganda of the nuclear industry.

(more…)