The mainstream news is still conjecturing about Putin’s new threat(s), now added to. Some of the MSM articles below try to understand its content, meaning, and seriousness . . .
But also there is one Yellowstone story that could calm us all down a bit. Resident Alien is playing on Netflix these days and here is a story from a future series and episode: Five Thoughts on Resident Alien‘s “Lovebird”
This week on Resident Alien, Harry decided he would move in with Heather to her home planet, naturally leading Asta to plot to break them up so he would stay committed to protecting Earth. D’Arcy, however, was more troubled to learn Ben is an alien abductee, and struggled with whether to tell him or not. Oh, and Max decided to steal Harry’s model of the Yellowstone Caldera for the science fair.
1. So Much… Tongue
I know, it’s a comedy, so it’s not very profound to say it’s funny as hell, but good lord, Harry and Heather’s sexual antics completely broke me; I know it’s absolutely revolting that they’re do it in Asta’s truck, on the sofa in Harry’s office, and in her bathroom, but goddamn it’s hysterical – like D’Arcy says, it’s as if Asta has two cats who are constantly in heat. The scene where Harry declares his plan to leave Earth was an amazing mix of plot progression and epic cringe comedy, and Alan Tudyk & Edi Patterson deserve all the awards for their relentless portrayal of Harry and Heather’s passion, as do Sara Tomko & Alice Wetterlund for not breaking character. And the shot of Heather pooping on Lady Liberty? Well, now I really have seen everything.
2. Truth Hurts
Harry can tell Asta and D’Arcy aren’t on board with his full-blown love affair and gets really obnoxious about it, stating they’re just jealous and that’s why they’ll die lonely old spinsters, among other rude comments. Still, his claim D’Arcy is needy gnaws away at her, leading her to decide to tell Ben the truth to prove she’s not selfish. Harry’s behavior was correct in the sense sometimes true friends call each other out on their bullshit, but he’s not self-aware to realize in his case that he’s just weaponizing the truth to hurt them, and that if he were in their shoes, they’d be trying to break him and Heather up too – which is all very ironic for the one giving a monologue about potentially causing an imbalance, chemical or otherwise.
3. Max You Little Shit
Max asks Harry for his help creating an impressive science fair display, but he and Heather bully him out of their home, not wanting to be bothered, so the boy steals the caldera model and the grey chemical Harry was studying while they’re in the bedroom. Stealing the model I can understand, that was petty revenge, but the chemical? That was very immature and reckless: did Max learn nothing from the last time he stole something mysterious from Harry? What a smug little man you’re becoming. At least the incident led Ben and Kate to admit they’re pretty bad parents, and Harry to discover the greys were planning to use the chemical in conjunction with the caldera eruption to make Earth’s gravity more suitable for them.
4. Patience is More Like an Archipelago Than a Town
There’s so much going on in Patience now, I’m not surprised Asta forgot to tell D’Arcy Jay’s staying with them now. Mike’s on Joseph’s trail, while trying to uncover what the physics formula in Peter’s diary is, but the constant mockery Liv is facing over the documentary causes her to lose faith in herself, and believe she caused Wendy’s murder by inviting Peter to the town. Torres also shows up to warn Mike that he’s stepping into something far beyond his usual field of expertise.
Fortunately, Kate cheers Liv up with her newfound interest in alien abductions, leading her to pass on details of a nearby support group; their conversation also causes Kate to discover the tracking chip in the back of her neck. D’Arcy then shares the truth with Ben, awkwardly it must said, and I could only imagine how helpful it would’ve been if she knew what Kate’s going through; still, at least Ben seems open-minded about the idea. Oh, and David Logan managed to duplicate Peter’s ability to see aliens’ true forms – what a busy episode!
5. Heartbreak!
The episode ends on an eerie note, as the little ditty Harry composes about Heather on the guitar gives way to Joseph grabbing her on the street, and blackmailing her into spying on him for the greys. Poor Harry: he’s especially vulnerable given he feels he can share everything with her. My first thought was that Mike better find Joseph soon, which led me back to him bumping into Torres on the street: wasn’t that rather sudden and random? And didn’t Mike mentioning her (still unseen) son come across awkwardly? What if it was Joseph in disguise? Or what if… Lena is a hybrid too?
Continued below (But not here on “All Things Nuclear” . . .
– We learn from her foster mother that Jay is ADHD and queer, so I take back what I said last week: Jay was the show’s first LGBT character.
– I’m not surprised Kate’s the worst-rated teacher at the school: I do not recall ever seeing her teach a class.
– Harry realizing he should’ve used “sex” instead of “intercourse” in his song was absolutely note-perfect, as I had the exact same thought. Oh no… what is this show doing to me?
– It’s wild we’ve had Terry O’Quinn in two episodes where he’s shirtless, doesn’t have any dialogue, and in this part, dressed like the Borg.
See you next week for “Bye Bye Birdie,” which certainly doesn’t sound ominous. I’m serious by the way, doesn’t the thought of Ann-Margret fill you with joy? Anyway, “time to say goodbye!”
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Christopher Chiu-Tabet
Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can’t speak Cantonese or Arabic.
Now back to a new kind of fiction, based on possible future reality: In order to edit and update the Preface to the in-progress novel “Ell Nuclear Diablo” , re-edited and now altogether in a single introductory opening to the story that will be presented here on a bi-weekly basis updated every two weeks on this nightly Post, I have delayed Chapter 1 for two additional weeks in order to provide the ‘Preface’ to new readers and others who may have already read part or all of the former draft, with a new suggestion about how the reader and I can keep up with current story as it is posted.
I will Post a single chapter at a time instead of in segments as I had originally planned to do. This will provide more continuity and easier recollection of the content of each story and the overall novel. I suggest that you copy and paste each chapter (including this revised and edited “Prologue” to your own download/document file under the file name “El Nuclear Diablo” and gradually add to the novel, which will make it easier to read on your own time and also have it all in one place rather than spread in new bi-weekly “All Things Nuclear Posts”. You can begin that ‘book-building’ effort tonight by copying the ‘Preface’ to the new file you set up. I hope you will assemble the book in this manner, but if you can’t but still want to read the story you can find it here either on Substack or on my own “LLAWs Worlds” website on every Thursday night’s Post. I have added a new Heading description to isolate the bi-weekly Post, beginning tonight, just below:
”El Nuclear Diablo” Preface (Thursday, 03/16/24)
El Nuclear Diablo
“Let the Bastards Freeze to Death in the Dark” ~Nuclear Industry Quote after the 3-Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, directed at concerned Scientists, worried citizens, and public protesters.
By Lloyd Albert Williams-Pendergraft (writing as the fictional “Albert Lloyd Williams)
Prologue (complete version)
. . . introduction written from Juneau, Alaska, by Albert Lloyd Williams, Nuclear Physicist & Chief Nuclear Engineer, Williams’ Atomic Laboratories, San Francisco
Early Spring, 2026
Does it really matter who, exactly, is to blame, or why humankind is savagely devouring the native resources of planet Earth until there soon will be nothing left but lichenless barren rocks, the salty seas, countless grains of sand, and a poisonous atmosphere? It ought to be not enough to just know it is a critical unvarnished ugly truth. The question should be more like, “When will it happen and is there no way out of it?” Should it not?
I can only wonder if highly intelligent, but virulent, forms of our human species have, for countless eons, long traveled through the universal cosmos continually seeking, finding, and lavishly consuming, ultimately ravaging the natural resources, the flora and the fauna, t the environments of this and other living rich blue-green planets also once full of fossil fuels and innocent living resources similar to Earth’s in order to ensure and serve their own survival at the expense of all else in their way. Obviously, we are the only species on this planet who rape and ravage the earth with such savagely uncontrolled vigor on such a large scale. We are the ultimate u ultimate fungus, the ultimate lethal mushrooms. And I have to also wonder if there are not multiple, or at least two species of us.
Not to ridicule Darwin at all, but does his theory of evolution, based on studies of inbreeding pigeons and chickens, really make much sense to you in this context? Does it not seem to you that we humans may be collectively aggressively demanding, ruthless, impolite, unwelcome extra-terrestrial galaxy-trotting invaders doing our parasitic thing here on Earth rather than a native natural-born integral integrated key part of our indigenous homo-sapiens and the native animal population—as Darwin would have us believe? What about the Octopus, sir?
Could it be possible we or they are simply biologically genetically patterned to look and act like homo sapiens? Or perhaps vice versa? At least some of us? Maybe even a whole lot of us? How do we know the difference between the real human beings and genetically altered or cloned ones? Which one am I? Which one are you? Do any of us know? I use the terms “we”, “us” or “our” and “they”, or “them”, or “their interchangeably here because in this context I don’t know who or what I am—an “us” or a “them”.
I just know that I am extremely uncomfortable with our or their willfully passionate desire to destroy everything on the planet for personal power, wealth, and a life of comfort at the expense of the rest of us or them. I don’t know about you, but it sure seems to be that way to me, so that’s why I consider myself to be an us.
At the very least we need to consider the possibility of at least one species of them and one of us. The only way we will ever know who we really are is through our unfettered natural mindful emotions—our feelings of love, care, and respect for Planet Earth, ourselves, and all her fauna and flora—or, conversely, our unnatural lack of those emotions or feelings. Yet we often disguise these characteristics, presenting the opposite of ourselves as themselves, or the other way around. But despite the hidden complexity, our future may depend on solving this psychological dilemma.
If our demise (at least partially) has happened before, it will likely happen again. And there is, in today’s worlds, a very quick, relatively easy long-lasting, if not eternally, way to create such a scenario as an extinction level event, not from an act of nature or a god, but from our own actions. ~llaw
# Before the Beginning of the End
Our small party of seven women (including two teen-aged daughters) and five men (one a teen son) left California from Carmel Bay bound for Juneau, Alaska, on a rainy Friday morning five days after the “accident” that began at Pacific Gas and Electric’s El Diablo Cañón nuclear power plant on a sunny Monday morning, disrupting the entire United States electrical power grid system in a single day before becoming a global disaster by Thursday afternoon. We all knew what had happened and we knew it was not an accident like the MSM was reporting to all of us around the world until by Thursday morning there was no reporting at all. What our little group did not know was who and what was responsible, but we all had our own suspicions. No one wanted to discuss them, because at this point it didn’t really matter anyway. The irrevocable damage was done. We also knew the rain was not a good thing now, or in the long run as time goes by. But, laughably enough, one of us who had the foresight to bring along a Geiger counter reported excitedly, a wide grin on his face, “Hey, it’s okay for now.” No one smiled back. We had a long way to go and we were no more than a mere one hundred and fifty miles north of the remains of the Diablo nuclear facility releasing massive doses of nuclear radiation from every ruptured cell it had, both internally and from its own filthy poisonous airborne waste.
These last several days we have followed spring’s warming north along the western United States and British Columbia coasts by yacht. Any boat is ripe for the pickings of choice at any deserted marina, which would likely be most all of them, although two of our crew also happen to be the legal owners of our schooner, which offers us all some conscience relief.
California, Oregon, and Washington (other than the shoddy shutdown activity at Diablo Canyon, have long been devoid of operational nuclear power plants with the exception of Washington’s inland Richmond plant (known as the “Columbia River Generating Station”), which, unlike Diablo Canyon was, is not in the process of closing, leaving it to be the only functional nuclear power facility anywhere in the entire Pacific Northwest or anywhere else along the western Pacific coastline from the Aleutians to Tierra del Fuego. We very soon will be looking forward to scientific help from the governmental and corporate experts in eastern Washington who are still to this day handling and cleaning up the fallout from the infamous Hanford plutonium military arms manufacturing disaster that has contaminated wide swaths of earth and the Columbia River for decades. Oregon has not had an operating nuclear power plant since the mid-1990s when their only facility, near Mt. St. Helens, developed structural cracks forcing the plant to close, and British Columbia has, quite honorably, never built one. Alaska’s only nuclear facility was shut down more than fifty years ago, and today it uses diesel engines to generate steam. Juneau is the closest downwind haven from nuclear airborne protection and freedom from contamination that the climate and geography can offer, along with the fortunate absence of nearby previously operational nuclear power facilities, providing at least a temporary refuge from the eastern Asian Pacific together with the central and eastern United States, eastern Canada, and European soon-to- be extinction level atmospheric conditions.
Some of the oceanographers, atmospheric scientists and meteorologists who were already here in Juneau are trying to determine the predicted world-wide safe zones and timelines, comparing Juneau’s and its surrounding weather patterns and wind history. They have long understood the favorable high-altitude wind currents from the north and southeast creating wind havoc among the treacherous three-thousand+ foot mountain ranges rising from sea level providing conditions that hopefully will carry airborne radiation far above and around us for a few months at least, giving us critical time to figure out just where the world’s few survivors will need to migrate and congregate. We know, too, that global communications will be inadequate to the point of probable futility, possibly requiring some of us to travel, sometimes long distances afoot, to gather these groups together and guide them to new promising safelands.
Our future could turn out to be very much like an extended encore and final Mad Max film, although, ironically, Australia has no nuclear energy power plants, which they banned officially in 1998. But true isolated tribalism will return everywhere to the few of us who are left to make our way on a mostly neutered and dead planet that will eventually consume Australia as well, although it may be the last bastion of life along with New Zealand, whose leaders have also banned nuclear reactors save for the joing U.S. military/Australia world-wide espionage Pine Ridge project near Alice Springs. Yet this death threat by human hands meddling with something akin to the power of the sun will eventually be a significant part of their survival story as well as our own.
A new way of life in a desolate lonesome world does not normally make for a pretty picture–nor a heart-warming romantic adventure tale. But still…so long as there is hope there is a story… ~llaw (Spring, 2026)
# Back in the Day
More than fifty years have passed since I first learned that nuclear power plants and weapons of mass destruction were fueled by uranium, an element my well-worn dog-eared Webster’s 1940-something dictionary defined essentially as a “worthless low-level radioactive mineral found in the ground.” The reason I remember this definition is because of a letter I received in January of 1969 from a mining company in central Wyoming’s “Gas Hills”, oddly named Lucky Mc (pronounced “Lucky Mac”) Mine, inviting me to an employment interview at the mine site and to please call to set up a date and time for the meeting. I had that old broke-spine 1940s Webster’s dictionary on my bookshelf in our small trailer house, so I looked up the definition. What the hell had changed? What were nuclear plants’ and nuclear bombs’ ingredients if not refined uranium? Of course I was pretty sure I knew the answer.
The mine, I was told in the letter, was owned by a company known as Utah Construction and Mining Company, which was then best known for building the Hoover Dam, but was now a major player in mining, primarily of coal and uranium. Intrigued, I found a pay phone at the General Store in Elk Mountain, Wyoming, and made the telephone call. The interview took place a couple of weeks later in mid-January, and I was offered a job as a senior accountant, which I immediately accepted, ending my old job as a field office manager for a highway construction company that had recently transferred me from Grand Junction, Colorado, to a new project between Laramie and Rawlins in southern Wyoming. So I had set up shop in an office trailer halfway between the two towns, preparing for road construction to begin in early spring.
But having a growing family with two young pre-school children and an infant daughter, I was thankful for the opportunity to settle into a new life in a more permanent location than highway construction offered, so I was pleased to accept the job offer.
As I learned my new job, I soon became the chief accountant and then the administrative manager at the mine site, directly overseeing more than one hundred white collar employees. The company grew rapidly in its uranium branch to include a new mine known as the “Shirley Basin Mine,” blossoming Utah Construction and Mining Company into a new and more sophisticated reformed Utah International Inc, and a bit later, a subsidiary of General Electric Company with a new name for the mining division known as Pathfinder Mines Corporation General Electric, among other well-known products, manufactured not-so well-known nuclear reactors so Utah International with its Pathfinder Mines was a natural fit. During those early days, I learned a lot about the mining and milling operations of uranium, including extremely complicated accounting, security, health and safety, as well as how the fuel production and the multi-step enriching process, governmental regulations, and how the marketing and selling of uranium was accomplished. In the beginning the only customer the company, as well as the entire uranium industry, had was the United States’ Atomic Energy Commission, and we were the major producer and provider of relatively stable basic enriched uranium (U308), which would be refined into U238 and U235, the active isotope in nuclear reactors (as well as nuclear weapons), to the government (including the TVA) until deregulation allowed us to sell mill refined U3O8 uranium to operational nuclear power plants as well as plants under construction and in development.
One of these new nuclear power stations was Pacific Gas and Electric’s under construction facility, known as the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, in San Luis Obispo County, California, near Avila Beach. The original facility, Unit 1 of course, began construction in 1968 followed by Unit 2 in 1970. During the following decade Utah Construction & Mining Company, by then known as Utah International Inc, profited immensely from the sale of uranium to American, Canadian, French, German, and other nuclear power facilities around the world. Doing business with PG&E was one of my first clues that rules and regulations were meant to be manipulated and broken by aggressive dollar-worshiping companies. But that’s another story, part of which I will relate later in the book.
# Back to the Present
What happened at Diablo Canyon between early 2024 and its planned decommission in late 2025, and the horrid global devastation that followed just two short years later, is what this story is all about, and it shames me every day of my life that I was once a willing contributor to the shape of the macabre issues to come within the nuclear power industry. There are few of us left alive who know the factually complete and chronological entirety of this doomsday tale, but I am thankful and even proud to be one of the few because I have the knowledge and the motivation to relate this horrific tale without prejudice. I have an absolute moral and ethical obligation to pass my knowledge of this world-class man-made armageddon (spelled with a small but still doomsday-deadly “a”) event along to those few who will come after the rest of us, hoping for a different way whether it be for better or for worse. Your choices and your chances are extremely limited, and I wish you, as well as us, all the best.
At an overly ripe eighty-something, as I write this dystopian-like tale, my mind is clear and fixed on the events that led to this catastrophe that with proper regulatory enforcement and diligent responsibility by the United States government and industry corporate officials might never have happened. A common failure of mankind is to brazenly think of ourselves as collectively invincible, making us just delusional enough to fool ourselves into believing that we are smarter and more resourceful than Mother Nature. We have proven ourselves wrong countless times concerning thousands of vital issues, but through the ages we have made and continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Who was the wise man who said, “The definition of insanity is making the same mistakes over and over again but expecting different results.”?
Just the relatively minor accidents at nuclear facilities (most of them politically covered up or not commonly known) over the years including the more well-known Hanford (Richland), Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—along with the common political knowledge that several nations—not all of whom were American allies—ability to cyber-attack our nuclear power plants and our electrical distribution grid systems, ought to have been enough to give us fair warning that—contrary to pseudo-science, corporate greed, political belief and public opinion—nuclear power was never safe, but in reality was and is the single most dangerous and destructive power generating concept ever developed for all kinds of reprehensible reasons. When something goes nuclear wrong, it goes irreparably wrong, most likely impossible to control or recover from the impending disaster that will last for several hundred to a few thousands, although the half-life of bismuth radiation has been measured at twenty billion billion (yes, twenty billion + billion), years so we in this lonely corner of the universe might consider ourselves lucky for no reason. In 2022 there were four hundred and fifty nuclear power plants operating world-wide and sixty more were under construction. Today, of course, there are none.
Despite Webster’s grandfatherly definition of uranium, this same earthly tragedy has apparently happened on our planet at least once before—more likely twice — and though much (including Biblical references, quiet speculation, and outright conspiracy theories) has been written about the evidence and the possibility, few of us seem to understand nor have ever cared that a similar nuclear world devastation actually occurred, at least once, thousands of years ago, nor that the archeological and anthropological scientific community did not investigate, research, endorse or even acknowledge the historical evidence. This does not surprise me, but today what scientists and historians believe is immaterial because now what is left of our world is all that we need to worry and care about—events of the past, rightly so, mean nothing. We are long past the life-saving threshold of learning from our mistakes. including our willful ignorance.
We humans seem to have been running a rigged three-legged race against one another to run asunder the entire planet against the natural environmental care and protections of Gaia. In a blind and greedy rush to subconsciously exterminate ourselves and fatally poison our only home—planet Earth and all her abundant bounty—we have, through American style financing of intentional international environmental degradation, hawkish threats of nuclear war, or the patriarchally personalized political, bureaucratic and corporate industrial pandemic earth-cancer super-spreaders that I call those who would “freeze ‘em to death in the dark.” I personally heard this same man say this same phrase, with their–often profane–variants, more than just once or twice. The phrase was coined by the President and CEO of a major mining company I was involved with, echoing his indignant objections to public protests over Three Mile Island in the 1980s. Note that all of these doomsday contestants during their race toward human extinction—indeed, by natural extension, including all life–had their in-common triple arsenal of the half-life of airborne nuclear radioactive emissions teamed up with ground and water waste radiation, their three legs at the end entirely unbound, allowed to run the basins and ranges without restrictions, making all of them self-proclaimed “winners” of their race into the likes of Dante’s, or, maybe, Diablo’s, Inferno.
###
Beginning, March 28, 2024: Chapter 1: On the Way to Juneau, Alaska . . .
We have reached Canada and passed through customs, mooring on Vancouver Island for the night, happy to find an open restaurant at the harbor, although we have more than ample food and other supplies on board the schooner, which, by the eay, bears the title “The Pacifier”. It has certainly lived up to its name during the early days of our journey north. It will take us three or four days to travel the additional 800 nautical miles along the coastline to reach Juneau.
At dinner we are delighted to meet a team of six employees from the Hanford Project, who are also on their way by boat to Juneau for essentially the same reasons we are and we agree to travel together the rest of the way, giving us a more comforting feeling concerning the remainder of our trip. Over our dining, we discuss the implications and share our knowledge about the future of North America and, indeed, the world and what the prospects are to provide pockets of preservation for human life, and in general where we think those places might be. The discussion is not a confident one, nor is it at all pleasant. But we all realize that we have to do our best to have some success in our unexpected new mission in our lives.
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ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one (for fun)Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… emergencies. These include emergencies … nuclear power. The agency prepares and … Emergency Management Agency – and the Federal Emergency Management …
