From the Poetry Vault...

Here are some old and new bits of poetry/lyrics I've written...

"Memento"

I look in the mirror and what do I see?
A forest of eyes staring at me,
I look in the mirror and what do I see?
Classmates I took still laughing at me,

[Refrain]
I wait for you
I talk for you
I run for you
I live for you

I look at her body and what do I see?
Closer to attaining perfect symmetry,
I want to be her and she wants to be me,
I change her and mold her 'till she becomes me

Look into her dead, almond shaped eyes,
The eyes, the eyes, the eyes, the eyes,
When she is reborn, I have a surprise
In the form of a day where everything dies

[Refrain]


"Poisonous Words"

I hear voices talking in my head
They say things that make me see red
I can't believe some of the things they said
They told me that I'd be better off dead

I see people living in hardened sin
Immersed enough to make my head spin
I don't know why I let these people in
They make me retreat inside my second skin

When you spew words of poison
I feel light headed and I start to weep
Your head is full of poison
You make me weary and I want to sleep

This world hurts me in ways I've never known
I need to find my way all on my own
I let out a sigh, a long and weary groan
For I let you cast the first stone


When you spew words of poison
I feel light headed and I start to weep
Your head is full of poison
You make me weary and I want to sleep
This world is full of poison
It gets so much that I just can't stand
People are so full of poison
They go through life selling their own brand

"Society Today"

A man sits on the streets with broken shoes on his feet
He can't get no job, he's an ex-con, got caught on the beat
Next to him lies a dirty broken used syringe
Looking at him, you might think that you'd feel a little tinge of sympathy
But no, instead wherever he goes
People look at him in disgust, and they turn up their nose
"Don't look at him honey" say the moms to their kids
And others hurry by, he's a taboo that society forbids
His lids droop, you'd think that someone would stoop
Down to his level and pick him up, give him some food
And no one does, not the businessmen in their designer suits
They think of him as the part of society that pollutes
National economy denies his right to shelter inside
Under a roof, this is physical proof that the system abides
To the will of the rich, the upper class, the ones who wage wars
The ones who run the stores, sit at home and get bored
While their trophy wives sit and cry themselves to sleep
There ain't no love in a family when you've got money to reap
And the companies know it and they sure use it to their advantage
The world governments screw us over and constantly mismanage
Our money, some of the most beautiful people are ugly
Corrupted by money, drowning in a bottle of bubbly
While the working class strive to live a bearable life
Another cop gets shanked on the streets with a knife
And the moral of this sad, pessimistic tale
Is that the world as we know it is going off the rails
And just look around and you will see just what I mean
Genocide, people dying because they've got no freedom
So what can we do? Should we just sit around,
And wait for this city to burn down to the ground?
We gotta get up and act, shout in a united voice,
"We can change things as long as we've got freedom of choice!"
We don't have to follow what the government says
We are individuals, we go through life at our own pace
We can make a change so that no one will live poor
And the youth of the nation won't have to die in wars
You may say I'm an idealist but since when was that bad?
It doesn't make me a pushover, it doesn't make me mad
All I want is mankind to realize we're all one
If we can't do that, I fear the end has begun

Huzzah for crap poetry! More to come.

Right vs. Left : Why All The Hate?

In America, there are hardly any centrist politics at all nowadays; it seems that you're either lumped in as a "liberal" or a "conservative", regardless of whether or not your political ideologies conflict with that of the rest of the community.
America has come a long way since the McCarthy "red-scare" era, but it still has a journey to undertake if leftist ideologies are to take a better hold. I feel that Europe is considerably more evolved than the Americas when it comes to politics, because we do actually have that freedom when it comes to our political ideologies. This is evidenced in France through the strong presence of leftist parties such as the PCF (Parti Communiste Français) and the PS (Parti Socialiste), as well as some of the extreme right parties such as the FN (Front National).
I personally think the liberal and neo-con parties would be united if they formed together to struggle against a common enemy: the far-right racist and neo-Nazi racial separatist parties that seem to be springing up like wildfire across the United States. While freedom of speech is supposedly valued in the United States, these civil liberties are exploited by such personalities as Tom Metzger, a neo-nazi radio host and self confessed racist who used his radio show as a medium for spewing forth his racist agenda, urging like-minded individuals to strike out against the US government. While law enforcement agencies such as the police and the FBI are keeping a close eye on Metzger, they have so far been unable to charge him with breaking the law, as he words his message in such a way that he is not actually breaking the law, and protected by his first amendment rights.
I believe that if the United States government were to pay more attention to people like Metzger, the leftist community and the centre-right politicians would have a common enemy, thus sweeping aside more trivial disputes that they have between each-other. This would be beneficial, as the parties would not be trying to simply win elections, but would work together to create a better society to live in.

Chernobyl 2008: Where are we now?

This is actually a repost of a previous blog I posted some time ago. Since we've just passed the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, I thought it would be appropriate for us all to remember just what happened on that day...

The 26th April 1986 is burned into our memory, and will stay there for many years to come. The Chernobyl disaster has become perhaps one of the most dramatic arguments supporting the end to nuclear proliferation. Surprisingly enough, within the past decade or so, the 30km exclusion zone surrounding the NPP and Pripyat has become an increasingly popular tourist destination among those who wish to visit the exclusion zone and soak up some of the history and the atmosphere.

A Little History

It was April 25th 1986, and the technicians working in Reactor 4 were in the process of preparing the reactor for shutdown, so that maintenance could be performed on the reactor and various performance tests could be exacted. The head of the maintenance operation decided to test the efficiency of the fail-safe systems, making sure that the reactor could generate enough electricity to power up the safety protocols preventing a meltdown of the reactor. The reactor itself was an RBMK-1000 model which required water to be continuously circulated through the core, in order to cool down the nuclear fuel and prevent any accidents.
The plant's reactors themselves had back-up generators as a precaution, though it would take 40 seconds for the generators to power up to full speed in case of an accident. Nevertheless, the maintenance team went ahead with the preparation, as they felt they could react in time lest something go wrong, despite a test run already coming up negative. The reactor output (in other words, the amount of electricity the reactors produced) had been gradually reduced to 50% causing a regional power generator to go offline. This was an unexpected complication for the team, as they had not projected that this would happen. Nevertheless, it wasn't a massive setback so they continued with the test. The grid controller at Kiev furthermore requested that the team stop the reduction of the output rate, as they needed electricity for rush hour and the like in the evening. The plant director agreed and postponed the testing, and left a skeleton crew to watch over the plant during the night. The crew itself had very little experience when it came to these types of tests, and were indeed insufficiently advised concerning reactor safety, this was one of the main factors responsible for the meltdown, yet the worst was still to come.
The crew were unaware of the postponement of the reactor shutdown, whether it be through communications errors or simple incompetence. They therefore followed the original test protocol that had been planned out prior to the decision to postpone the testing. This meant that the power level supporting the safety protocols that safe-guarded the reactor were decreased too rapidly, leaving the reactor incredibly vulnerable. The reactor started to produce more nuclear toxins (Xenon-135) which further dropped the power output, further endangering the integrity of the reactor core. The operators, through sheer inexperience simply believed that this was a malfunction in the automated power generators and not because of reactor poisoning. They then decided to try and increase the productivity of the reactor by extracting the control rods from the reactor's core.

Then came the day of the experiment itself. Officially, we know that it started at 1:23:04AM on the morning of April 26th. Through what was possibly an equipment malfunction, the unstable state of the reactor did not show on the control panel, therefore the team were unaware of the fact that there was something wrong. The steam leading to the turbines was then shut off, and the water cooling the reactor decreased in flow. The turbine was further disconnected from the reactor, which in turn increased the amount of steam contained therein, heating up the core. The reactor had an elevated void coefficient (the rate at which a nuclear reactor can change as steam bubbles form in the coolant) and the reactor started to become unstable.
At 1:23:40 AM the team noticed that something was going wrong and ordered an immediate shutdown of the reactor, re-inserting the control rods into the reactor core. The emergency shutdown was known as a SCRAM and Anatoly Dyatlov, who was the deputy chief engineer of the plant further stated in his book Chernobyl, How did it Happen? :

Prior to 01:23:40, systems of centralized control … didn't register any parameter changes that could justify the SCRAM. Commission … gathered and analyzed large amount of materials and, as stated in its report, failed to determine the reason why the SCRAM was ordered. There was no need to look for the reason. The reactor was simply being shut down upon the completion of the experiment.

The mechanism that inserted the control rods was incredibly slow, which in turn reduced the amount of coolant generated around the reactor, meaning that the emergency shutdown increased the reaction rate. At this point, nothing could be done to reverse the effects. A massive energy surge fractured several of the control and fuel rods, making it impossible to shut down the reaction. The reactor then suffered an immense steam explosion which blew the lid off of the reactor. The sudden surge of oxygen in the reactor then sparked a fire and the reactor exploded.


Crisis Management

Due to the fact that the crew were unaware of the immensely high radiation levels contained within the reactor itself, they performed several severe miscalculations. In the reactor building, the worst hit areas contained up to 20 000 Roetgens per hour (500R/h is a fatal amount). Nevertheless, a geiger counter measuring up to 1000R/h was unavailable at the time, due to the Soviet economy decline that the 80s experienced. The Geiger counters that were being used at the time read off-scale levels of radiation, therefore the crews only knew that the radiation contained in the area was somewhere over 3.6R/h. Alexander Akimov, the crew leader assumed that because of these low readings, the reactor was still intact, ignoring the fact that there was massive chunks of debris lying all around the reactor. Another Geiger counter was brought in, and read accurate readings, but they were assumed to be defective and the readings were disregarded. Akimov and his crew therefore stayed in the reactor building, and were dead three weeks later from radiation poisoning.
After the accident, several firefighter crews arrived at the scene, but were not told of the severity of the accident or of the nature of the accident; they assumed that it was a simple electrical fire, and therefore were in the dark about the toxic radioactive materials they would be handling. By 5AM the fires on the roof of the plant were extinguished, and the crew focused their attention on the fire in the reactor. They decided to try and drop sand, boron, lead and clay into the reactor in order to try and smother the fire. This did nothing, and in fact further fueled the fire. This can be evidenced by looking in the underbelly of the reactor; large lava flows were created thanks to the superheated material.
Pripyat was then evacuated. The residents were told that the evacuation would only be temporary. This means that you can still see many of the personal belongings of residents still in the city today. Having said that, many people have taken to looting, despite government warnings.
The liquidators were then sent in to assist in the clean-up. I have nothing but the utmost respect for these men; they were volunteers and they knew precisely what they were getting in to. Teams would work for up to two minutes each, running across the plant roof and clearing a small piece of debris off, then running back to safety. Hundreds of these men died not long after, all that remains of them is a large vehicle graveyard on the outskirts of the Zone, and a monument to their bravery in Chernobyl itself.

Aftermath

Since the fatal experiment, Chernobyl has now become an internationally recognized symbol for the fight against nuclear proliferation. Many countries were affected by the explosion, and still are to this day.
One would expect Chernobyl and the 30km disaster zone surrounding it to be completely barren of life, though this couldn't be further from the truth. Ukranian authorities are reporting a surge in the Elk population, a species which were dwindling before the disaster, and it also appears that there are no serious mutations among animals except a slightly elevated cancer risk for mice.
The reactor core itself is still probed and explored by several scientists, trying to find out where the nuclear fuel went after the explosion. Ironically, they have suffered two deaths from heart related problems. One would expect radiation to be the culprit.
There are still problems though; the sarcophagus surrounding the reactor is slowly crumbling. Plans have been made to construct another sarcophagus around the reactor, but due to lack of funding this has been delayed. If the sarcophagus were to crumble, another accident could happen, resulting in another release of toxins into the air, which could affect many countries in Europe, such as Belarus, a country which already has an elevated child deformity rate as an direct cause of the radiation. In fact there is an orphanage in Belarus itself housing many children with mental deficiencies and Leukemia. Many people visit this place on their way to Chernobyl, to help the children and donate money to the orphanage.

Other than that, what's to say? It's easy enough to get into the Zone itself. It's an interesting place, regardless of what happened there.

Peace