Feeling better

Yesterday's news from the IAEA that TEPCO engineers had managed to pull a mains power line to Fukushima #1's reactor #2 made a huge difference in my mood, despite the later correction saying that they'd started pulling a power line, not completed it. The lack of major new catastrophes, the apparent effectiveness of the water spraying from the SDF trucks, and a hefty dose of THE BLUE HEARTS helped too. It's funny, because yesterday's weather here was quite gloomy, and the weather of the previous days was bright and sunny, but in both cases my mood was exactly the opposite.

In other news...there seem to be an increasing number of blogs written by nuclear scientists, students, etc, stepping in to "fill the gaps", as it were, and explain the basics of nuclear fission and how nuclear power plants fit together. http://plainenglishnuclear.blogspot.com/ is one of them; it answered a lot of the lingering curiosities that were kicking around in my head ("How are they pumping seawater if they have no power?" etc.)

As an aside, though I've got a decent general-science-student's knowledge of how reactors and their safety systems work, I've been reading up on the details lately, as I'm sure many of us have. I love (for some value of "love") how the term "excursion" gets used in the nuclear literature (eg "power excursion" , "criticality excursion" ), as if the reactor had, you know, just snuck out to go for a nice stroll when nobody was looking.