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Movie Review: Michael Madsen's Into Eternity

With Chernobyl's 25th anniversary a few weeks past (ignored, for the most part, by Western media), and the Fukushima nuclear disaster fresh in everyone's minds, now is as good a time as any think about nuclear energy's role in our civilization. Into Eternity, a Finnish documentary released in 2010, takes a very unique look at the nuclear power industry, one not typically thought about. Rather than nuclear proliferation or the plants themselves, it focuses on the geologic storage of spent nuclear fuel (aka SNF), in particular, Finland's Onkalo repository.

The movie skimps on technical details, some of which I will talk about here.

Nuclear waste can be divided into two levels: high-level and low-level. Low-level nuclear wastes include things such as clothing, plant construction materials (e.g. concrete) and machinery that have come in contact with anything nuclear.

High-level nuclear wastes include spent nuclear fuel and chemicals used to process and create nuclear fuel. The movie focuses on spent nuclear fuel, which in most nuclear power plants are things called fuel rods. Fuel rods

At the moment, the US does not have a storage plan for spent nuclear fuel. There is one geologic storage site, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southeastern New Mexico, but the site is relatively small and destined for storing the generation I nuclear wastes of America's nuclear weapons programs, not that of commercial reactors. A larger site, Yucca Mountain, well isolated in the Nevada Test Range (where nuclear weapons were tested for decades, and much contamination remains), was shelved in 2010 by the Obama administration, leaving America's nuclear energy industry without secure storage for its spent nuclear fuel.

Much of the topics Into Eternity touches, such as communicating the dangers of nuclear wastes stored at sites via markers and monuments, has similarly been discussed for the US' Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

Drupal 7 upgrade post-mortem

This weekend, I upgraded Samat Says (this blog, in case you missed the memo) to Drupal 7.

For my Drupal 4.6/4.7-based site, I had created my own theme, Sands. Lack of time prevented me from porting Sands to Drupal 5 or 6, and it's unlikely it will be ported forward. I'm probably going to recreate it with one Drupal 7's many starter themes, however.

Patient care in the ICU in terms of vectors and topological spaces

Biomedical Informatics, Medicine

A few weeks ago, Timothy G. Buchman gave a talk at the Columbia DBMI weekly research seminar. During the QA session, someone asked why patients in intensive care units (ICUs) were given such “extreme” treatments, often causing them to develop new health problems and complications, keeping them in the hospital. He replied with this wonderful mathematical metaphor about patient care.

You are a point in an n-dimensional space. Each dimension is some vital sign or homeostatic attribute, e.g. blood pressure, blood glucose, temperature, etc. Homeostasis is defined a polytope in that space. As you do the various things of life, your point moves within the space defined by that polytope. For example, when you eat, your blood sugar goes up, and the point moves along in the blood sugar dimension; when you take a cold shower, your body temperature is reduced, and you move along in that dimension. Young people have a large space inside their homeostatic polytope

When you leave this homeostatic polytope, you're considered “sick.” If you travel to far from it, you die.

People who enter the ICU have points that are moving away from their homeostatic polytope. Their movement away can be represented as a vector, representing how quickly their condition is deteriorating.

Treatments in the ICU represent vectors that try to point you back towards your homeostatic polytope.