Random News Stories

[Frank Cox]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...le-los-angeles

Arnold Schwarzenegger rebuked for filling LA pothole that was not a pothole




Exasperated former California governor takes action but officials say ‘giant pothole’ is actually service trench dug by utility workers
Wed 12 Apr 2023 19.25 BSTLast modified on Wed 12 Apr 2023 19.54 BST

It was not one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most prominent roles, but is proving to be disproportionately controversial. The Hollywood star and former California governor filmed himself filling in a troublesome pothole near his Los Angeles home, proffering it as an act of civic responsibility by an exasperated resident. But he was then told by the authorities it wasn’t officially a pothole at all.
According to city officials, the “giant pothole” Schwarzenegger and a friend packed with quick-drying cement and topped with sand was actually an essential service trench for work being performed by a utility company in the Brentwood neighborhood.
Instead of solving a problem, the actor who generated mayhem and destruction in his best-known role as the Terminator, was creating one with his rogue deed, with SoCal Gas, the natural gas utility, now having to reopen the trench to complete the contract.
Schwarzenegger, a former two-term Republican governor of California, posted a video of the pair laboring to his 5.1 million Twitter followers.
“Today, after the whole neighborhood has been upset about this giant pothole that’s been screwing up cars and bicycles for weeks, I went out with my team and fixed it. I always say, let’s not complain, let’s do something about it. Here you go,” he wrote.
In the clip, a driver stops to thank him for taking action, and the actor said: “You have to do it yourself. This is crazy. For three weeks I’ve been waiting for this hole to be closed.”
But in a statement to NBC News, Los Angeles city officials said they don’t want Schwarzenegger to live up to his most famous on-screen catchphrase of “I’ll be back”.
“This location is not a pothole,” a spokesperson said. “It’s a service trench that relates to active, permitted work being performed at the location by SoCal Gas, who expects the work to be completed by the end of May.
“As is the case with similar projects impacting city streets, SoCal Gas will be required to repair the area once their work is completed.”
A representative for Schwarzenegger did not return a request for comment, NBC said.
Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, is not the first celebrity to become upset by a pothole and take action. In March last year, singer Rod Stewart posted videos of himself filling in holes near his estate in the Essex town of Harlow, after complaining his Ferrari couldn’t get through.

So they dug a trench and then disappeared for three weeks.

I don't blame him at all for patching it himself.

If you need a hole in the street you dig the hole when you're ready to do the work and close it up when you're done. Hours, maybe a few days. Not weeks.

[Jim Cassedy]

The annual tax filing deadline/headache is fast approaching here in the USA.
If you've ever taken a few questionable deductions, or leapt through a couple
of semi-legal loopholes to lessen your tax load, you're not alone- - in fact,
you're in pretty good company, as is evidenced in this article I found in a
1938 issue of Variety:

TaxesOfStars1938R.jpg

Adjusted for inflation, Babs Stanwyck's tab would come to $1,315,566 in 2023 dollars.
Busby Berkeley = $422.840 Dashiell Hammett & Stephen Fetchit would owe $44,955
and $30,553 respectively, if they were alive today.
(and they'd also be very old, and owe a crapload of late filing penalty fees! )

BONUS INFO:
The US tax filing deadline in 1937 was March 1st. It was changed to April 15th in 1955.
But if you're still working on your tax return, this year, you'll have till April 18th, since this
year the 15th falls on a Saturday, which would normally shift the due date till Mon, 4/17- -
which just happensto be "Emancipation Day" in Washington DC, and so everybody in
government takes the day off. So, we're all emancipated from paying taxes for an extra day.
(make the most of it!) - Jim C -

[Frank Cox]

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cana...ry-rum-butter/

What would you do with 133,000 chocolate bars? No, really. Crystal Regehr Westergard needs a plan. Fast.

The Alberta physiotherapist and candy company owner finds herself in the unusually sticky situation of having to give away that many Rum & Butter bars, after issues at the plant that manufactures them resulted in a glut of product – all marked with a looming June expiration date.

“It’s quite daunting. That’s one for every seven persons in Calgary,” said Ms. Regehr Westergard, speaking alongside a pile of Rum & Butters at her physiotherapy clinic in Camrose on Thursday. Her voice was strained, in the way of someone who can’t stop thinking about what to do with the 133,000 Rum & Butter chocolate bars.




“It’s immense,” she said. “If I think about it too much, I’ll start to shake.”

A full-time physical therapist, Ms. Regehr Westergard and her husband started Canadian Candy Nostalgia in 2018, recreating and re-releasing her mother’s favourite candy bar, the Cuban Lunch, which had been out of production for 27 years.

After the lauded Cuban Lunch launch – and because Ms. Regehr Westergard’s husband was such a good sport about their new sideline as chocolatiers – she wanted to bring back his favourite chocolate bar as well.

Enter the Rum & Butter.

The bar is comprised of eight squares, each containing a blob of gooey, non-alcoholic, rum-and-butter-flavoured filling. It’s rich with a touch of spice and the retro cool of a flavour that had – for no real reason – fallen from fashion. Think of a Caramilk bar, if the Caramilk bar had a big mustache and was hanging out listening to The Guess Who on LP.

Despite its popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, Cadbury stopped making Rum & Butters in 1996. (Ms. Regehr Westergard has come to know that sometimes big corporations just do this, no matter how much a food is loved.) The couple got the trademark, hired a designer to recreate the straight-from-the-rec-room packaging, and relaunched the Rum & Butter in 2021.

How sweet it would have been to end the story here.

But manufacturing and distributing a new product during the pandemic was a challenge – particularly for independent businesses – and as the factory they’d contracted to manufacture the bars struggled with staffing, production of Rum & Butters lagged.

Ms. Regehr Westergard was sympathetic. After all, you can’t stop the world, flip it back on and not have some problems. In this case, that meant what she calls “the backlog and the whoosh.” Fully staffed and up to full speed, the factory produced a truckload of Rum & Butters last spring.

And then, far too quickly, another.

Let’s pause here to consider the reality of 133,000 Rum & Butter bars. At first glance, it’s not so daunting. They don’t even fill a whole semi. But laid end to end, they would stretch 17 kilometres.

You could give one Rum & Butter bar to every person in the city of Red Deer, then one to every fan at Rogers Place for a sold-out Oilers’ playoff game, then one to every passenger on 26 fully-booked Westjet flights, then one to every musician in the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, then one to every performer in a large-scale musical production of Cats, then one to every member of the Regina Esperanto Club – and you would still have eight left to eat yourself.

For months, Ms. Regehr Westergard worked on moving the Rum & Butters, but the Rum & Butterswere simply not moving fast enough. A country’s appetite for retro chocolate, she observed, does not follow the same dramatic whoosh as a factory jumping back into life.

Chocolate bars don’t require “best before” dates in Canada, but Canadian Candy Nostalgia uses them. Though the bars will be perfectly fine to consume past June, for grocers and many consumers, the date on the package is a ticking time bomb.

As months melted by, Ms. Regehr Westergard accepted that the time had come for action, and started looking for ways to give the bars away for free. But that, as it turns out, is harder than you might expect. She held emergency meetings with her staff, and this week, even appealed to her 161 Facebook friends for help.

“Give them to the food bank!” some said. (A food bank can’t distribute that many chocolate bars before June.)

“Pass them out across Canada!” some suggested. (Who will pay for shipping? How will the bars be handed out?)

“I’ll take a box!” some offered. (The boxes are in pallets of 11,000 bars at a food safe warehouse in Calgary, and can’t be accessed or easily broken up by individuals.)

“Try contacting schools,” one friend advised.

“With 133,000 bars to get rid of, I could phone schools all day, and still not get rid of enough,” Ms. Regehr Westergard lamented.

It all seemed so daunting. So much time and work for every idea that may or may not pan out.

With a full-time job seeing patients and running her physiotherapy clinic, and plenty of regular work to do with Canadian Candy Nostalgia, she didn’t have the time or connections to chase down leads. Rum & Butters sell for about $2 each, and while Ms. Regehr Westergard is prepared to eat the cost of the loss, she can’t spend even more money to give them away.

And so, here we are. With 133,000 Rum & Butter bars sitting at a warehouse in Calgary, waiting to be given away. They’re available in minimum loads of 11,000, or could be taken all together. Pick up: ASAP.

“You’d have a cry if you had to throw them out,” Ms. Regehr Westergard said, practising the kind of deep breaths she advises her patients to use to deal with pain.

She truly loves to make people happy with chocolate. If someone can take them, and all those Rum & Butter bars could be eaten and enjoyed, she’ll be the happiest of all.

[Jon Dent]

Quite a life.

[Leo Enticknap]

In the LA Times:

Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel Corp. and creator of Moore’s Law — the mantra of boundless technological development that came to define the digital age — has died at age 94.

Moore died Friday at his home in Hawaii, according to the company and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

From humble roots as the son of the sheriff of Pescadero, Calif., Moore went on to create Intel, one of the greatest technological powerhouses of the 20th century.

Moore, who was trained as a chemist, was among the earliest pioneers in the creation of the integrated circuit, chips of silicon that came to form the backbone of modern technology.

He was among the small group of engineers and scientists, including Nobelist William Shockley, one of the co-inventors of the transistor, and Robert Noyce, the co-inventor of the integrated circuit, who put the silicon in Silicon Valley.

But what distinguished Moore beyond many of his legendary peers was that he also had a blend of skills that extended far beyond the merely technical.

As the chairman of Intel, Moore guided the company with a homespun demeanor and the spirit of a Las Vegas gambler.

Taking the risky path was something that came naturally to him, although he always maintained that his risks were clear choices that had to be taken.

“This is a fast-moving business,” he once said in an interview. “Unless you’re willing to take technical and financial risks, you’re doomed. Things change so fast, if you don’t, you die.”

Moore described himself as an “accidental entrepreneur,” although the success of Intel — and Moore’s status as one of the richest men in the country because of his Intel holdings — belied his humble assessment.

Although Moore’s co-founding of the microprocessor giant in 1968 assured his place in the history of modern technology, he may be best-known for what became known as Moore’s Law.

In 1965, Moore made a simple observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit appeared to be doubling every year.

The integrated circuit had been invented only seven years earlier, and the most that anyone had been able to etch onto the thin chips of silicon that would power the growth of the electronics industry was about 50 transistors.

Looking at a graph of chip development, Moore extended the line forward 10 years and predicted that by 1975 there would be 65,000 transistors on a single silicon chip. It seemed an outlandishly large number at the time, but Moore was right on target.

Moore amended his prediction several times during his life, eventually settling on the prediction that the number of transistors would double every 18 to 24 months instead of every year.

But although the exact equation of Moore’s Law was changed, its spirit of rapid technological advancement remained constant. It became the credo of the electronic world and a slogan of the digerati eagerly awaiting the next great thing.

“Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers — or at least terminals connected to a central computer, automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment,” Moore wrote in 1965.

The descendants of the first crude chips that Moore designed went on to power personal computers, automobiles, mobile phones and even watches.

“It’s kind of funny that Moore’s Law is what I’m best-known for,” he said in a 1997 interview with Business Week. “It was just a relatively simple observation.”

The accuracy of Moore’s Law became a cornerstone of business planning in the electronics industry.

Gordon Earle Moore hardly fit the image of a prophet of the digital age. He was down-home and practical, an unpretentious, slightly balding scientist who maintained a bit of his small-town roots in the midst of the heady pace of Silicon Valley.

Moore was born in San Francisco on Jan. 3, 1929, to Walter and Florence Moore. The family eventually settled in Pescadero, about 30 miles south, where his father was the chief deputy sheriff for the area.

Moore seemed headed for an academic career after graduating from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1950 and a doctorate in chemistry and physics from Caltech in 1954.

After a brief stint at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he went to work in 1956 for Shockley, who had set up his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, to further develop the transistor. Shockley was a heavy-handed, temperamental and capricious manager. After working for just a year, Moore and most of Shockley’s top scientists rebelled.

The “traitorous eight,” as Shockley called them, broke away and started Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. The creation of Fairchild was one of the crucial turning points in electronics history, allowing Moore and others to pursue research that helped their partner, Robert Noyce, to devise a commercially viable process to miniaturize whole circuits on a silicon chip — the integrated circuit.

Moore and Noyce left Fairchild in 1966 and two years later formed their own company to exploit the development of the integrated circuit. They named their company Integrated Electronics but later shortened it to Intel.

With the help of Arthur Rock, the first of Silicon Valley’s legions of venture capitalists, Noyce and Moore easily raised $2.3 million and began work. Noyce served as chief executive officer of the new company with Rock as chairman and Moore as executive vice president.

Intel began by making memory chips and rocketed to profitability by adopting a corporate strategy of innovating at a breakneck pace so that it could charge a premium for its products.

Moore took over as chief executive of Intel in 1975, just a few years before his company began being battered by the flood of cheap memory chips from Japanese manufacturers that turned Intel’s main product into a commodity.

Intel began losing money and laying off workers. By the mid-1980s, Intel had begun to lag in the very industry it had created.

By 1985, even Moore began to sound grim. The downturn, Moore told shareholders at the time, was “possibly the greatest in the history of the semiconductor industry.”

“We are flushing out the excesses of a badly overheated electronics industry,” he said. “What happened? Dame Fortune frowned. Intel must be well-positioned and ready when Dame Fortune smiles again.”

In 1984 and 1985, Intel still spent more than $1 billion on chip-manufacturing equipment and facilities. It was all part of Moore’s belief that staying on the cutting edge was the key to success and the company would eventually come roaring back.

Moore and the hard-charging president of the company, Andrew S. Grove, began to refocus Intel away from cheap memory chips to high-margin microprocessors — the brains of the computer.

In 1987, Moore relinquished the chief executive position to Grove, although he remained active in guiding the company as chairman.

Moore also busied himself as a member of the Caltech board of trustees and as a patriarch of the electronics industry.

In 1950, Moore married Betty Irene Whitaker, who survives him. Moore is also survived by sons Kenneth and Steven and four grandchildren.

[Leo Enticknap]

Looking it up on YouTube after reading the obituary was a mistake. I can't get the damn thing out of my head now!

I suspect that he might have been conducting extensive field testing of his "roach clip" device when he created it...

[Jon Dent]

Love that song. Practically required listening for cubicle drones.

[Leo Enticknap]

I remember once seeing a promotional film made when Britain's first nuke station opened (the sort of thing that schoolkids were subjected to on 16mm while sitting cross-legged on the floor of the gym, as a supposed Friday afternoon "treat"), which repeated the very same claim: that nuclear fission power would prove to be so cheap that it wouldn't even need to be metered. We know how that prediction ended up! IMHO, the reason that claim proved to be so wide of the mark was that the costs of safety and decommissioning at EOL were grossly underestimated. San Onofre closed in 2013, and they reckon that it'll be 2027 before the site is totally made safe: even as of now, there is no totally finalized plan for the long term storage of the radioactive crap they are pulling out of it.

Returning to random news stories, there was quite a good Telegraph obit today.

‘Napoleon XIV’, recording engineer who had a hit with They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa! – obituary

Jerry Samuels’s deranged ditty went to No 3 in the US and No 4 in the UK but rapidly descended the charts

Jerry Samuels, who has died aged 84, was an American recording engineer who, under the pseudonym Napoleon XIV, concocted the irritatingly memorable and deeply creepy one-hit wonder They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!

Issued as a single in the summer of 1966, the deranged ditty (it could hardly be called a song) consisted of “Napoleon”, accompanied by nothing more than a snare drum, a tambourine and hands clapping in unison, in a voice spiralling into a sort of manic falsetto, telling of the heartbreak, misery and subsequent mental disintegration that leads him to be consigned to a “funny farm where life is beautiful all the time”.

Only in the final line is it revealed that the cause of his angst is not a woman, but a runaway dog: “They’ll find you yet, and when they do, they’ll put you in the ASPCA, you mangy mutt!”

The single (whose B-side, !aaaH-aH ,yawA eM ekaT ot gnimoC er’yehT consisted of the A-side played backwards) shot to No 3 in the US charts and No 4 in the UK charts before registering the biggest drop in chart history when US radio stations stopped playing it following complaints from mental health organisations.

From the 1970s it became a staple of radio broadcasts and compilation albums by a US DJ and novelty-record specialist calling himself Dr Demento, along with other Napoleon XIV numbers such as I Live in a Split-Level Head and The Nuts on My Family Tree, none of which troubled the charts.

When last heard of Samuels was working as a piano-bar entertainer for senior citizens groups.

Jerrold Samuels was born on May 3 1938 in the Bronx area of New York. He learnt to play the piano as a child and began his career performing in local bars. In 1956 he recorded his first song, Puppy Love (not the Donny Osmond song), for the Vik Records label.

By his 20s he was working at Associated Recording Studios in New York as a recording engineer and songwriter, co-writing under a pseudonym As If I Didn’t Know, which became a hit for Adam Wade in 1961, and writing The Shelter of Your Arms, a big 1964 hit for Sammy Davis Jr.

Samuels began work on They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!, as an experiment with new editing technology that would let him raise the pitch on a song recording without changing the tempo. He adopted the name Napoleon XIV, credited his composition to N Bonaparte and persuaded Warner Bros Records to release it.

The success of the single inspired Warner Bros to issue an eponymous album including other songs by Napoleon XIV on a mental illness theme (I’m in Love With My Little Red Tricycle, Photogenic, Schizophrenic You, and so on) and a riposte to the title track entitled I’m Happy They Took You Away, Ha- Haaa! by a female artist going by the name of Josephine XV.

The album was not a success.

For many years Samuels made a living playing standards at piano bars, latterly in what The Philadelphia Inquirer described as “senior living facilities”. At one stage he was said to have founded and run a business selling “roach clips” – metal devices for holding marijuana cigarette butts.

In 1984 he created his own talent agency in Philadelphia for performers on the “senior living” circuit.

In 1988 he recorded a sequel to his greatest hit, They’re Coming to Take Me Again Ha-Haaa!, but as Dr Demento observed, “it was not really very good... Still, he created a masterpiece and nobody can take that away from him.”

He is survived by his second wife Bobbie and by two sons. Another son predeceased him.

Jerry Samuels, aka Napoleon XIV, born May 3 1938, died March 10 2023

[Jim Cassedy]

Nuclear standards are never compromised...

Think history begs to differ there.

I recently went down a weekend rabbit hole of watching awholebuncha interesting documenteries
about nuclear accidents on You Tube. One guy in particular has a whole series of them. To be
fair, many of these incidents were the result of 'people who should have known better' bypassing
safety procedures and interlocks while doing their jobs. There were also alotta stories about
radioactive contamination as the result of abandoned medical equipment that was never properly
de-commissioned and/or disposed of. It's kinda scary when U C how many incidents there were!

I went through school in the 1960's & early 70's. I remember learning about how we were all
going to be living in an amazing 'nuclear future' - - where nuclear reactors were going to make
electricity so cheap, the power companies were practically going to be giving it away because
it would almost cost then more to bill for it than to actually produce it. I remember watching one
film which predicted that by the mid 1990's, we'd all have small nuclear reactors, about the size
of a 60gal hot water heater, right in our homes, which would provide all your heating, hot water,
and electricity, using about a dozen small nuclear fuel rods, which would only have to be replaced
about every 10-15 years. (That was assuming we didn't all freeze to death by 1980, due to
'global cooling' which was also predicted to decimate populations worldwide because even if
you didn't freeze to death, you'd starve because the cooler temps would not support growing
of most crops, causing worldwide starvation ) They were serious about this.There were articles
supporting this written by scholars and scientists in every major magazine, and they were all j
ust as serious and adamant about the their "OMG- we're all gonna die! " stories of impending
doom then, as they are about their "global warming/climate change' theories now, which is why
I'm somewhat of a skeptic. ( NOTE: I didn't call it hoax- and I'm not going to get into a hissy fit-
debate about it. You're not going to change my mind, and I"m probably not going to change yours.
So we'll just have to agree to disagree) Fool me once. . . . . etc...

[Randy Stankey]

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone

Ozone is a powerful oxidant...and has many industrial and consumer applications related to oxidation. This same high oxidizing potential, however, causes ozone to damage mucous and respiratory tissues in animals, and also tissues in plants, above concentrations of about 0.1 ppm.

...as of 2012 at least five deaths had been reported due to [oxygen therapy]use on people with cancer.

If anyone can find this information with a dozen keystrokes on their computer's keyboard, why would anybody so stupid as to squirt it up their asses?

Oh...and...uh... Isn't this oxygen therapy supposed to have ANTI-oxidant effects? Hmm... That's a head-scratcher!

[Leo Enticknap]

If there is a history of prosecuting proponents of ozone "therapy" for peddling quack medicine, I find it interesting that Paltrow isn't actually selling it on her website (as she once did pebbles collected from a beach the claimed would deliver health benefits if inserted into the vagina). Presumably her attorneys have advised her that she would need to be able to show more than the placebo effect to stay out legal hot water on that score.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Who thinks of this stuff?

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scrip...cfm?fr=801.415

(a) Ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy. In order for ozone to be effective as a germicide, it must be present in a concentration far greater than that which can be safely tolerated by man and animals.

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_...ohibits%20the% 20medical,%2C%20adjunctive%2C%20or%20preventive%20 therapy. .

Beginning in 1991 the FDA has prosecuted and sent to jail several people presenting themselves as medical doctors and selling ozone therapy products as a medical cure or operating medical clinics using ozone therapy for healing human illness.^[31][32] Arrests following similar activity have been made in other countries as well, including Uganda and Thailand.^[33][34]

Ozone therapy is sold as an expensive alternative cancer treatment in Germany. David Gorski has described the practice as "pure quackery".^[2] Proponents of the therapy falsely claim it is a recognized therapy there, but ozone therapy is not approved by the German medical establishment.

[Leo Enticknap]

This is an absolute classic:

Gwyneth Paltrow Says She Inserts Ozone up Her Butt for ‘Wellness’

Oscar-winning actress and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow revealed in a recent interview that she inserts ozone up her butt for “wellness.”

After being asked “What’s the weirdest wellness thing that you’ve done?” by Dr. Will Cole during her recent appearance on his The Art of Being Well podcast, Paltrow said, “I have used ozone therapy, rectally.”

“Can I say that? It’s pretty weird, but it’s been very helpful,” the Thanks for Sharing star added, laughing.

Rectal ozone therapy refers to the practice of inserting “medical grade ozone directly into the colon via the rectum,” according to the ozone therapy website, drsozone.com.

The rectal ozone therapy seeks to boost oxygen efficiency, balance the immune system, reduce oxidative stress, improve blood circulation, and “detoxify the body on a cellular level,” the website adds.

“There may potentially be a role for ozone therapy someday, but right now it hasn’t been studied enough,” Cleveland Clinic pulmonologist Vickram Tejwani said in December about this type of therapy.

“We need more data on the potential side effects, which could be severe, before we start offering it as a mainstream therapy or treatment,” Tejwani added.

During her appearance on The Art of Being Well podcast, Paltrow also talked about the public scrutiny she has received in response to her bizarre life choices.

“For years it still hurts your feelings,” the Talented Mr. Ripley star said. “I just let it go, because I realized you’re never, ever going to be able to win everybody over. And the pursuit of trying to win somebody over is so awful.”

“Why do we have so much obesity, depression, and type-2 diabetes?” Paltrow added. “We have autonomy over our bodies; what we put into our bodies — when we have a certain degree of mastery of ourselves, we can really start to change our lives and feel really good.”

Speaking of what one puts into their own bodies — in January, Paltrow reminisced about what it was like being a celebrity in the ’90s, telling late-night host James Corden that one could “do cocaine and not get caught,” as well as take home random men because there was “no paparazzi” or people walking around with camera phones, posting celebrities’ activity to social media for all to see.

I wonder what the effect of this is on global warming? If she ends up farting out the excess, presumably that'll help to rebuild the ozone layer....

[Leo Enticknap]

You can add Three Mile Island and the Windscale accident of 1957 to that list, as well. Given that the primary cause of Fukushima was an earthquake, it's a debatable case, but it does beg the question as to whether this risk was evaluated when making the decision to build a nuke plant in that location in the first place. The fear of earthquake damage following Fukushima certainly contributed to the decision in 2013 to close the San Onofre power station on the Southern California coast (about halfway between LA and San Diego).

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Nuclear standards are never compromised...

Think history begs to differ there.

They were compromised at least three times that I know of...

1. During the tickling the dragon experiment. Look up "The Demon Core". Killed 2, and as many as six.

2. At Idaho National Labs, where not following correct procedures caused the SL-1 reactor to have a steam explosion. One person was impaled in the ceiling by one of the control rods. 3 people died.

3. Chernobyl. Not much need be said about this except no one really knows how many people it has killed so far.