Category: anonradio

ASFO 2025–06–07

Brighton is in Britain (Blighty if you’re feeling mean), and this weekend, so am I. In this pre–recorded message, I invite you to consider the question of whether, from the viewpoint of Sir Thomas More, we may not already be living in the post–Singularity, trans–human future. Certainly the conditions of human life have been fundamentally altered since his day!

Supplementary Show

2025–06–13 I finish up A Snapshot in Time with a brief but interesting section entitled Future, a series of questions and answers about nuclear power safety (meant to educate the public into acceptance, which may not actually work all that well), and some brief biographies of senior Westinghouse personnel. There is a glitch halfway through, owing entirely to my error and ill–preparedness.

ASFO 2025–05–31

No matter how many times I say it, it remains true : international air travel is for the birds! But at least the 6 line of the Munich subway is back in operation. Also I once again criticize the mindset that “nobody ever changed the world working 40 hours a week” — design and engineering decisions made by overworked people in understaffed offices are likely to be bad, or at best, less than good.

Supplementary Show

2025–06–03 More from A Snapshot in Time, mostly an extended description of the corporate structure of Westinghouse PWRSD. Next time we will get to some more interesting material!

ASFO 2025–05–24

Looking realistically at the present world situation may not be good for one’s health. It certainly isn’t popular. I give a bit of an after–action report from last week, and try to contrast the Canadian (CNSC) and US (NRC) systems of nuclear–energy regulation. Neither is as good as it could be, but the CNSC model probably works better in practice. And I interrogate the possibility that the Law of Unintended Consequences may be expected, occasionally, to produce unintended benefits.

Supplementary Show

2025–05–30 More of A Snapshot in Time, largely a description of the Pressurized Water Reactor Nuclear Steam Supply System, interlarded with extensive explanations from me.

ASFO 2025–05–17

Weather determined what I was doing in the time slot this week — ironically enough, considering that a key advantage of atomic power over other zero–emissions energy sources is that it is not much influenced by the weather. The skies are clear, and I was in Haltom City, as I said last week. And I missed my chance to pre–record a show.

Supplementary Show

  • 2025–05–20 PWRSD 1976 : A Snapshot in Time is a kind of yearbook from the nuclear power operation at Westinghouse. There is some fascinating material in it, including a description of an absolutely hair–raising bit of messing around with uranium in a metallurgical laboratory (not the Metallurgical Laboratory). Unfortunately, although the printing job is professional–looking, something awful seems to have happened in the galley stage, as more than once entire lines of text have disappeared.
  • 2025–05–23 Something of a mess, as I continue to read from A Snapshot in Time, but much of what I’m trying to read is tabular material.

ASFO 2025–05–10

More public outreach — the Friends of the Haltom City Public Library annual Book Sale and Flea–for–All may seem an odd place to talk to people about atomic power, but you have to go where the people are. Also a quick calculation that Comanche Peak 1&2 have generated as much power since they came into service as 3700 large wind turbines in their whole working lives ; the new Pope and his priorities, with a quote from the famous encyclical letter of Leo XIII, On the Condition of the Working Classes ; and a scathing editorial from a Spanish grid executive and renewables proponent, explaining that the big blackout should not have come to a surprise, because integrating wind and solar into the grid is more expensive and difficult than the Spanish Government has been willing to face, and also pointing out that shutting down nuclear power is not compatible with reducing CO₂ emissions.

Supplementary Shows

  • 2025–05–13 “So ignorantly, myopically, and statically conceived and so obsolete is the whole housing art that its death led the Crash of 1929, since when its ghost script has been kept in rehearsal by US government subsidy at a total underwriting cost to date of $200 billion.” Finishing up Design Strategy, and moving on to the epilogue of Utopia or Oblivion. (Minor glitch at the beginning.)
  • 2025–05–16 “In this way we discover that the buildings, which controlled energy conditions of heat, cold, dry, and wet, were in effect machines because machines process and control energy. Because we are conditioned to think of the house as static, we fail to realize that the automobile is as much a part of the house as is the addition of a woodshed.” And with that, we complete our reading of Utopia or Oblivion : The Prospects for Humanity (1969) by R Buckminster Fuller.