Iran Elections

There’s a lot of information floating about (whether the Iranian authorities like it or not) regarding the Iranian elections, so I’m going to abstain from writing about the elections to any great detail. I do however wish to draw attention to the supposed statistical evidence that the elections were rigged. Give these sources a read and decide for yourself…..

Walter R. Mebane of the University of Michigan has reported to have found

"moderately strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was affected by significant fraud."

This result is further substantiated by results published by Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews. The exective summary of the above report, which I suggest you read, is given below.

Working from the province by province breakdowns of the 2009 and 2005 results, released by the Iranian Ministry of Interior on the Farsi pages of their website shortly after the election, and from the 2006 census as published by the official Statistical Centre of Iran, the following observations about the official data and the debates surrounding it can be made.

•In two conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of more than 100% was recorded.

•If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory was primarily caused by the increase in voter turnout, one would expect the data to show that the provinces with the greatest increase in voter turnout would also show the greatest 'swing' in support towards Ahmadinejad. This is not the case.

•In a third of all provinces, the official results would require that Ahmadinejad took not only all former conservative voters, all former centrist voters, and all new voters, but also up to 44% of former reformist voters, despite a decade of conflict between these two groups.

•In 2005, as in 2001 and 1997, conservative candidates, and Ahmadinejad in particular, were markedly unpopular in rural areas. That the countryside always votes conservative is a myth. The claim that this year Ahmadinejad swept the board in more rural provinces flies in the face of these trends.

-UPDATE
These results are not significantly affected by the statement of the Guardian Council that some voters may have voted outside their home district, thus causing the irregularities highlighted by the defeated Mohsen Rezai. Whilst it is possible for large numbers of voters to cast their ballots outside their home district (one of 366), the proportion of people who would have cast their votes outside their home province is much smaller, as the 30 provinces are too large for effective commuting across borders. In Yazd, for example, where turnout was above 100% at provincial level, there are no significant population centres near provincial boundaries.

I'd also recommend this article, which does some last digit frequency analysis on the election results. Put simply humans are crap at making up random numbers. Psychologists have found that study participants tend to select certain digits more frequency than others when asked to construct sequences of random numbers. The Iran election results suggest the voting numbers released by Iran's Ministry of the Interior were manipulated, since statistical analysis of voting numbers highlights some curiosities -

"The probability that a fair election would produce both too few non-adjacent digits and the suspicious deviations in last-digit frequencies described earlier is less than .005. In other words, a bet that the numbers are clean is a one in two-hundred long shot. "

What happened at Chernobyl?

It’s interesting how seemingly innocuous photos can stir up a wide range of emotions once a little context has been applied. For me, photos of the Chernobyl disaster epitomises the dire consequences of not showing nature the respect she deserves.

I want to make it clear that I’m pro-nuclear, but the disaster photos fill me with both awe and fear at the consequences of mismanaged nuclear technology. In this post I want to share some of these photos and I hope to convey the context that, frankly, makes my skin crawl.

For anyone that reads this post it would be great to hear how these photos affect you.

Credit for all photos: Source: http://insp.pnl.gov/-library-uk_ch_1-1.htm


A brief introduction to Chernobyl

April 26th 1986 is a day that will have a lasting impact on a great many people. The Chernobyl power station is located near the town of Pripyat in the Ukraine and not far from the border of Belarus. The power station itself consisted of four RBMK-1000 nuclear reactors, each capable or producing well over 1000 million Watts of power.

On April 25th 1986 plant operators were planning a safety test concerning an emergency core cooling system. The experiment was essentially to test whether the nuclear core can be kept cool in the event of an external power outage. In the event of such an outage there would be a period of about a minute before the backup diesel generators would start the core cooling pumps. This period was of concern to planet operators since RBMK reactors need a very large amount of water to keep the reactor at a safe operating temperature. The planned test was to see if the rotational energy of the steam turbines (while spinning down) was sufficient to keep the water flowing for the minute-long blackout. The first failing of reactor design was that the core required constant cooling even when not actively operating. The spent fuel was highly radioactive and would generate 1-2 per cent of nominal reactor output, which would lead to core damage if the heat was not taken away by the cooling water flow.



This first photo shows the reactor hall of Chernobyl reactor 4.

The planned test took place later than expected and there was even a shift change during the experiment itself, which is most worrying since the night-shift workers had no idea what the test was about and merely had various scribbles on bits of paper to follow.

During the test it was planned to reduce the reactor power output to approximately 700 million Watts; however, a mistake by one of operators meant that the reactor was reduced to 30 millions Watts output (5 per cent of nominal output) and was dangerously close to shutting down and ruining the experiment. In order to increase the reactor output the operators had to override the automatic system and manually remove all but a few control rods – control rods as the name suggests inhibit and control the nuclear reaction i.e. the more rods in the core the lower the power output and vice versa. Moreover, as part of the test extra water was being pumped through the reactor core which lead to a further decrease in reactor temperature and output. The automatic safety systems that would have detected a decrease in steam due to increased water flow in the core were also disabled.

Let’s say this again because it very important and very scary. The plant operators disabled the automatic safety systems to allow them to remove virtually all control rods (against regulation) and allow the core to continue to operate despite the decrease in steam production. The way to control or inhibit a nuclear reactor is to absorb(using control rods and water) the neutrons emitted by radioactive decay – with the control rods removed and the increased water flow the operator’s ability to control the nuclear reaction was significantly diminished.

The reason why the operators removed virtually all control rods is because they were perhaps unaware of a phenomenon called ‘xenon poisoning’, which is essentially were the power generating ability of the reactor core is inhibited by the decay products of the nuclear fuel. This led to a very dangerous situation – with artificially increased water flow and all control rods removed the only reason why the core remained at a low power level was because the xenon poison and increased coolant water flow. Once the reactor reached an output of 200 million Watts the experiment was to continue – which if you recall was to cut the external power to the water pumps!

This next photo shows an engineer inspecting the coolant water channels that run through the reactor core.



The reactor operators were probably oblivious to the dangerous operating state of the core when they shut down the pumps. The steam turbines still pumped water through the core, but the flow was greatly reduced – which allowed more of the water to boil and become stream in the core. Steam doesn’t inhibit the nuclear reactor as well as water so the core temperature jumped rapidly and to make matters worse once the power climbed the xenon poison became overwhelmed and stopped retarding the reaction as it had done at lower power levels thereby also increasing the nuclear reaction and core temperature. The situation gets worse still – as the core heats up, more steam is produced which in turn increases the core temperature in a dangerous positive feedback loop. Moreover the top of the reactor became dangerously hot, since the coolant was partially blocked by the control rods. With the power output and the temperature of the reactor climbing fast the operators decided to insert all control rods to halt the nuclear reactions in the core; however, due to a design fault of the control rods the tips of the rods where made from a material that actually increases the nuclear reaction! As the operators tried to insert the control rods to shut down the reactor the nuclear reactions increased and the core output jumped to approximately 30,000 million Watts – almost 1000 per cent of nominal output. At these energies the fuel rods in the core ruptured blocking the reactor channels and the control rods channels became distorted thereby blocking any further insertion of the control rods.

Due to a lack of understanding of nuclear reactor physics and safety protocols the operators of Chernobyl reactor 4 had created a situation where virtually all control rods where removed and could not be inserted again to shut down the reactor. The positive feedback of the core design meant that the power would continue to increase and more water would boil to steam thereby increasing pressure in the reactor as well as allowing the reactor core to dramatically increase in temperature.

Moments after the attempted insertion of the control rods the steam build up reached such levels that the upper biological shield (UBS) protecting the core was blown off exposing the highly radioactive core to the environment. The UBS had a mass of 2,000 tonnes! A second more massive explosion was caused by a hydrogen build up in the core. Also, the exposure of the reactor core to the air caused the graphite core to catch fire! Parts of the graphite core were flung out all over the surrounding area that started various fires around the reactor building, since the roof of the reactor building was constructed from a combustible material – contrary to safety guidelines. At this point the nuclear reactor core was completely exposed to the environment and the graphite continued to burn until 10th May.

The aforementioned experiment took place just before the fuel rods were due to be refuelled, which means they were full of very highly radioactive decay products i.e. the experiment took place at the worst possible moment in the reactor refuelling cycle. Moreover, the reactor building did not have a proper containment vessel ... to save costs.

The damage to reactor 4 was dramatic…

Here we see that the reactor hall is completely obliterated. Photo was taken by a helicopter flyby.





The fire-fighters that arrived on the scene had no idea what they were dealing with and thought it just to be a regular electrical fire

"We didn't know it was the reactor. No one had told us."

They had no idea that the smoke and debris were so dangerous. Grigorii Khmel, the driver of one of the fire-engines, later described what happened:

“We arrived there at 10 or 15 minutes to two in the morning ... We saw graphite scattered about. Misha asked: What is graphite? I kicked it away. But one of the fighters on the other truck picked it up. It's hot, he said. The pieces of graphite were of different sizes, some big, some small enough to pick up ...
We didn't know much about radiation. Even those who worked there had no idea. There was no water left in the trucks. Misha filled the cistern and we aimed the water at the top. Then those boys who died went up to the roof - Vashchik Kolya and others, and Volodya Pravik ... They went up the ladder ... and I never saw them again.”

The graphite the fire-fighters were picking up and looking at were parts of the reactor core and were fiercely radioactive. The levels of radiation were calculated to be over 20,000 Rontgen (R) per hour in areas of the plant….a lethal dose of radiation is a mere 500 R per 5 hours. A lethal dose could be received in less than a minute in some areas …. and no one told the workers. Many fire-fighters died within weeks of acute radiation sickness. Of the workers that were drafted in over 600,000 were deemed to be highly exposed. However, it was the workers dubbed ‘bio-robots’ (more commonly known as liquidators) by the military that were at the highest risk. These brave men were integral to the clean up operation since mechanical robots could not be used – the circuitry of the robots would almost immediately fail under such intense radioactive bombardment. The liquidators that shovelled debris off the reactor roof could only spend 40 seconds working, due to the high level of radiation – and this was in protective gear. The equipment used by the liquidators currently sits in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl and after 20 years still gives off up to 30R per hour – a significant and dangerous amount of radiation.



I’ve cut significant corner in writing this post regarding the time line of events and physics, but it certainly recommend looking them up. It makes a harrowing read. Now I’ll post some of the more, in my opinion, frightening photos taken after the accident and they just give me the creeps.




This image is of someone inspecting the 'elephant's foot'. The elephant's foot is a 2 meter diameter pile of nuclear reactor fuel mixed with various other materials. When the nuclear reactor melted the reactor fuel melted through the floor into the basement and mixed with glass, steel pipes and anything else in its way. The mass has cooled enough to stop melting through the floor, but remains 'hot' due to radioactive decay. Spending much time in this room would be a very bad idea, since the radiation levels are very high. There are many of the 'nuclear lava pools' in the basement of Chernobyl. Here's another one:






This image is from inside the reactor hall and the object in main view is the 2,000 tonne upper biological shield. The UBS is almost vertical and sitting very precariously on the edge of the reactor - if it were to slip the resultant dust cloud of radioactive debris could be catasphropic.



This is an image from inside the reactor hall and gives an idea of the devastation caused by the meltdown at Chernobyl.


The accident at Chernobyl was a dramatic demonstration of nuclear mismanagement and flawed reactor design. Many people died trying to contain the disaster and it's aruged that many more will die as a result of the fallout. It's a shame how many people gave their lives without knowing the dangers they faced. Many workers reported a metallic taste in their mouth - a sure sign of intense exposure to radiation.

The legacy of Chernobyl is that many RMBK reactors have been made safer and training with nuclear reactors has been improved. Many commentators argue that the next Chernobyl will be Chernobyl itself - twenty years on and the containment built around Chernobyl is looking grim. The sarcophagus was built in a hurry and is dangerously unstable. If the sarcophagus were to collapse and/or dislodge the UBS the amount of radioactive material released by the collapse could rival the initial accident. After all, over 95 per cent of all the radioactive material originally in Chernobyl is still there....

Killer Grapes!

The end is nigh. Swine Flu has been recently been assigned the prestigious title of global pandemic by the WHO, but what are they not telling us?

Is Swine Flu just a cover-up of a more obscure and even more deadly infection? Fortunately the truth was ousted by BBC News 24.



The word on the grape vine (ba-dumsh) is that symptoms start rather mild, but can very quickly turn into a full-bodied, hint of mahogany scourge mainly afflicting business-lunches and the ASDA fruity bargain buckets.

Swine Flu Pandemic: Say Your Mind

Today’s jolly into the BBC News ‘Have Your Say’ forums yielded some interesting results. I’ve previously mentioned the right-wing crazies that descend on the aforementioned forum and somehow manage to stop drooling long enough to write a post. What’s even more interesting is that people actually rate these posts as being a meaningful comment rather than seeing them for the useless, conspiracy-theorist, ignoramus tripe that they are.

The top rated three comments on the ‘Have Your Say’ forum for ‘Global swine flu pandemic: Your reaction’ are:

We need to bring the world population down to sustainable levels, this might be a godsend! or Nature's way of redress.

ian cheese, london, United Kingdom
Recommended by 70 people

Thanks Ian for completely missing the point of what ‘pandemic’ means. Pandemic means an “epidemic over a wide geographic area and affecting a large proportion of the population” – it does not relate at all to its mortality rate. Concerns relating to Swine Flu are with regards to its impact on large populations and its ability to disrupt the mechanics of our civilisation.

It’s important to try and contain and retard the spread of pandemics such as Swine Flu, so that we have a well oiled mechanism for combating future pandemics that might have a significant mortality rate. The mortality rate of Swine Flu is currently holding steady at 141/30,000 or 0.47%.

Maybe they should have left it in the lab where it was first made.
Alex Jones is right, awaiting moderation forever

The biological processes for reassortment events are well documented. In fact the outbreaks of influenza that lead to the 1957 and 1968 pandemics were the result of reassortment events between an avian virus and human flu virus.

Conspiracy theories are not helpful.

Remember the big AIDS scare of the 80's?
Remember bird flu?
Remember the boy who cried wolf?
Amadeus McC

Wow, really!? I’m sure that Africa wouldn’t regard AIDS as a scare and in fact it has been also classified as a pandemic with, as of 2007, 33 million people living with the disease and over 2 millions already dead. Pandemics such as AIDS have had a dramatic impact of economic prosperity and human capital. Bird Flu is not new – see the pandemics of 1957 and 1968. The recent scares have been thwarted by both the astute actions of the WHO and because the new strain of Bird Flu is not thought to be transmitted human-to-human. Moreover, recent research has shown that the recent Bird Flu strain cannot survive in human nostrils – it is too cold.

If the WHO identifies a new thread that comes to nothing it’s not because they cry wolf, it’s because they work very hard to make sure it comes to nothing.

Funny funny funny...

I found a new website with xkcd humour-type comics. I thought I’d post some of the funnier ones here…

Terminator Salvation

Ho-ly shit. I’m not really sure how to go about writing a film review – so I won’t. I’ll just stick to making high-brow comments critiquing the films direction, cinematography and narrative. Urgh, that seems like hard work – sod it, the film was wank.

I quite enjoyed the first two jollies in the Terminator saga, but the third film was a little poopy and only salvaged because Arnie rocks as a cyborg killing machine. However, the fourth excursion takes us on a grim journey into the future where there is only war – a war between man and machine – and it is crap. There are so few redeeming features of Terminator Salvation and I left the cinema feeling, quite frankly, like McG had slapped the audience across the face with a massive CGI wang…. made of metal…. with spikes on.

I felt no connection to any character – Batman Bale was flat and uninteresting…yup, Bale actually used the Batman voice at several parts in the film for reasons unknown and could not have looked more uncomfortable at saying ‘I’ll be back’. The film was distinctly lacking in personality and the writers even had to resort to their old bag of tricks during the fight scenes rather than innovate or be creative. Moreover, the noticeable lack of plot and utter predictability was plainly insulting….I’ve seen more plot in an Eastender’s Christmas special.

The CGI was good though, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the film’s lacklustre performance that was ultimately one big explosion. If you like big bangs and nothing more then you might enjoy this film – if you actually want to savour the sweet champagne of character development, story-telling prowess and beautiful poignant direction then Terminator Salvation is not for you. Watching Terminator Salvation is like drinking week-old piss – not going to kill you, but it doesn’t taste good.

I’m not going to critique any science or plot holes as I’d be here a while, but the massive Terminator freaking rocked! Is it wrong I wanted the big metal clam to construct a kind of coup d'état to overthrow Skynet and live like a king with robot wenches and all….

Take your £8 and buy several tins of beans and stare at them for 100 minutes - it’s the same as watching the film. Or you could just watch Star Trek again….

Verdict Terminator Salvation: Utter stupefying clusterfuck.

Awesome T-shirt

The interwebs can be used for many things from watching porn, reading the news, watching porn, emailing friends, watching porn to checking one's Facebook profile for the latest goings on. Many be I’ll write about Twitter and Facebook at a later date, since it appears if one says anything negative about these social networking sites it is almost guaranteed to feature on the front page of some national press. The negative remarks don't even have to be scientifically rigorous to attract the attention of the media bloodhounds. This was nicely illustrated in a recent PhD Comics. But I digress.

While perusing today's news headlines I came across this little gem. The Three Wolf Moon T-shirt has surged 2,300% in sales due to a spate of tongue-in-cheek reviews. It appears to be increasingly common for reviewers to hijack various Amazon pages and write ironic reviews. The first Amazon review for the legendary T-shirt gave the item 5 stars writing "This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that's when the magic happened." The reviewer goes on to say that "I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt." The reviews were not all positive though with one reviewer wanting "more guns" and appearing concerned that one "cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed".

Of all the reviews I think my favourite line is that "the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt gave me a +10 resistance to energy attacks, +8 Strength... and I have successfully solved 7 crimes in my city".