Crikey has a story about some poll manipulation by the nuclear power industry - ANSTO poll goes radioactive, quietly changes no to yes.

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation has been caught out trying to manipulate a web poll on its own web site.

On Friday Crikey noted that ANSTO had run a poll on its web page for the question “Should nuclear power be a part of Australia’s future energy mix?” which that day had votes “against it” running way ahead of support.

Thursday and Friday saw a big spike in traffic to the site, perhaps because nuclear opponents were drawing attention to it and urging people to vote. “I am against it” went further ahead.

But sometime over the weekend, someone at ANSTO changed the poll, removing “I’m against it” and replacing it with “It is one of the options”.

This prompted a flurry of emails to ANSTO this morning from enraged nuclear opponents angry that the outcome of the poll had been entirely reversed.

Crikey asked ANSTO’s media manager Sharon Kelly what had happened. According to Kelly, ANSTO’s web manager Peter Hindmarsh amended the poll without authorisation over the weekend because of the “Against It” vote spike. It has now been altered again, with “It is one of the options” replaced with “No”, rather closer in meaning to the original option, with an explanation of why it was changed. ...

“This is a small but perfect example of the dishonesty that surrounds the ‘debate’ about nuclear power in Australia,” Greens spokesman on nuclear issues Senator Scott Ludlam said.

“ANSTO ran a popularity poll on their website, which they lost comprehensively. Instead of learning something, they decided to turn a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’. What a perfect symbol for the way the larger nuclear power debate is being run in Australia.”

Across the Pacific, The New York Times has an article on the slow demise of the aging stock of existing nuclear plants - The Dilemma of Aging Nuclear Plants.

From the time the world’s first commercial nuclear power plants were switched on in the late 1950s, installed generating capacity rose rapidly over two decades. It leveled off in the 1980s as new building programs were scrapped in the wake of the accident at Three Mile Island, among other factors.

Contractors generally designed plants to last for 40 years — a standard enshrined in the United States in the adoption by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or N.R.C., of a 40-year licensing regime.

A large part of the world’s installed nuclear power capacity is now coming to the end of that designed life span.

Caught between approaching retirement deadlines and public opposition to new plants, industry operators are pushing to extend the life of their plants to 60 or even 80 years — and this despite problems of premature aging of major components that have already obliged many to replace their plants’ steam generators at heavy capital expense.

Running plants longer is one way to recoup the extra cost and raise returns on investment over the full life of the plant. But it has safety implications.

The 40-year life span was a design specification, said Guillaume Wack, director for nuclear plants at the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, or A.S.N., the French nuclear regulator.

“It’s like a car,” Mr. Wack said in an interview. “The manufacturer says it will run for 100,000 kilometers” — 60,000 miles — “and last two years. That’s the theoretical life. After that, it depends on how you run it. If you drive carefully with regular checkups, it could last much longer. If you drive recklessly and don’t maintain it, it will wear out more quickly.”

Heading back to Crikey and the topic of the media, they have an article on the low profile the ongoing oil spill off the north west coast has been accorded - Our quietly spreading Exxon Valdez in the Timor Sea.

For the two months since the accident happened we have had an oil slick visible from space, covering an area of thousands of square kilometers. The size, extent and duration means that hundreds if not thousands of our most precious wildlife will have been exposed to the toxic effects of oil, as well as untold damage to the underwater ecosystem and contamination of the food chain. If this was oil off our favourite beaches and swimmers and surfers were at risk, then there would be public outrage. Out of sight should not mean out of mind.

We know from the Exxon Valdez disaster that impacts from an oil spill can be seen 20 years later, so we can expect this environmental disaster will continue to unfold for years to come.

I am at a loss as to why this marine disaster has hardly registered on the Australian radar - press coverage appears to have been piecemeal at best, with little comprehensive coverage of the local, regional and international consequences.

The political response has been limited to hand-wringing stop-gap measures and to paying for a series of failed attempts to plug the spill and some apparently ineffective mopping-up operations.

The Australian reports that even the local oil industry has become embarrassed by the spill - Industry lashes oil spill firm.

It has been almost 10 weeks since sweet light crude oil, gas and condensate started spewing from the drill unit off the Kimberley coast in the Timor Sea.

Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association deputy chief executive Mark McCallum said it had tarnished the sector's "excellent environmental record". "There are safeguards and technological measures available designed to prevent well blowouts," Mr McCallum said.

And to top it all off, Reuters reports the rig caught fire this weekend (with the company claiming the leak had been plugged the same day) - Leaking Timor Sea oil rig catches fire.

An oil rig operated by a unit of top Thai energy firm PTTEP in the Timor Sea, which has been leaking for 10 weeks, caught fire on Sunday, officials said.

The West Atlas rig operated by PTTEP Australasia, a unit of PTT Exploration and Production (PTTEP) (PTTE.BK), started leaking on Aug. 21 and efforts to stop the leak have failed.

PTTEP finally stopped the leak on Sunday, but as it was trying to fill the hole with heavy mud, the West Atlas rig and Montara wellhead platform caught fire, said Australian officials.

The Long Now blog has a post on an old Bruce Sterling speech, looking at threats to the longevity of their planned clock, and some techniques for overcoming them - The Ten-Thousand-Year Clock and Library. Go read the whole thing - it made me laugh.

John Ruskin died in January 1900. When the architect Henry Wilson heard the news, he said, “Is Ruskin dead? Thank God! Give me a cigarette!”

That was an expression of sheer psychic relief, you see. This is what that reaction would sound like in our own context: “Hey man == the Long Now clock is dead.” “What happened to it?” “I guess it got too popular. Noone went there any more. They had to shut it down.”

So, “Thank God, give me a cigarette,” you know? Thank God that this strange scheme of these dated New Age elders, these obsolete Silicon Valley digital Californians, is not going to be there any more, ticking, ticking, spinning, spinning, all through our own twenty-first century, like some kind of terrible reproach! If I’d known it would feel this good to have old Ruskin die, I’d have killed him myself!

So this is a serious threat, and if our beloved gizmo is going to survive it, it’s going to require some cultural realpolitik. This is not a monument or library == yet. If it comes into being, it will be generally perceived as a bizarre novelty built by a cabal of gizmo-obsessives. Visionary people, the kind of people who put up with science fiction writers as dinner entertainment.

I’m optimistic about this part. This is much to its secret benefit == the strange reason why it’s coming into being. Pop gurus and pop stars and pop fiction people, getting together with librarians and archivists and thinking seriously about ten millennia. There is considerable oxymoronic cultural power there. A good contradiction gives a social idea great strength. We might yet succeed in doing something useful and practical, if we keep our heads about it, and don’t get all carried away by our own press. Disposable, trendy, pop culture people are a hundred times lot more likely to get away with a thousand-year project than Albert Speer was.

It’s a good thing to do; I’m an enthusiast about it. I think it’s good for us whether it works out in ten thousand years or not. I think it’s well worth doing even if it fails swiftly and completely in some deeply humiliating way. As members of a virtual intelligentsia, we are trying to recognize and heal some of our own clear inadequacies as thinkers and culturati, and that is the proper spirit in which to do something like this. It’s an act of Emersonian self-improvement, a giving-back, almost a penance. It’s a good project, a worthy gesture. It’s not senseless or cranky, it’s responsible and wise.

The problem is that pop-culture really does date quickly and badly. This project can never be allowed to smell rancid. To survive, it needs mythic proportions and great seriousness. It needs profundity and sublimity. It can’t be too cute, too neat, too sexy, too well-engineered. It has to be born with a beard.

Now I want to suggest some design tactics by which this trough area, this span of campiness and corniness, might be successfully bridged.

First of all: this is the cheapest and easiest: use mystification. The public should be infected with the creeping suspicion that there is something in this project which has not been publicly revealed. That there is a secret, higher project behind the public project. This is a psychological operation, intended to keep people off-balance and waiting on tenterhooks. Waiting for the other shoe to drop == a shoe which will never drop.

There are any number of ways to accomplish this. The simplest is to say nothing, and wait for rumors to build up on their own, because they certainly will. Certain terms have already come up in our discussion which have the proper kind of Gothic resonance for this. A term like “Dark Archive,” for encrypted files time-stamped and hidden away for centuries, is very suggestive. So is “The Dracula Room for Undead Media.”

The second simplest way is to boldly invent some fake rumors. Simply make up a dramatic, archaic-looking, Masonic myth, with a mystic eye in the pyramid, and some impressive Latin mumbo-jumbo slogans: Novus Ordo Seclorum, E Pluribus Unum. You’ve all seen it done.

The most effective method, however, would be to have two clocks. First, the obvious public clock, on display. Second, the secret mystified clock. The two of them keep time in perfect harmony, but the first one is exposed to all the winds and gales of public enthusiasm and disdain, whereas the second clock is never revealed. Blurry pictures of it are periodically let slip. It might even have a live webcam. But no one can approach the mystic clock. No one can harm it. It is beyond mortal touch. It is never subject to public judgement. No one knows where it’s kept.

Why do this? Because this shadow clock makes it impossible to derive any psychic relief from the death of the public clock. You can’t enjoy a cigarette after Ruskin dies == because there’s ANOTHER RUSKIN, still going strong! This also has great morale benefits for the keepers of the public clock. If it’s broken by a vandal or hacked by a hardware hacker eager for publicity == the common kind of lunatic who wants to set fire to the temple == then there is no break in the cycle of timekeeping. A backup heartbeat is still going on in a secret location.

You don’t necessarily need a secret location. It would be almost as mystically glamorous to have a public yet physically inaccessible location, like, for instance, the depths of Marianas trench. Drop a self-winding Long Now clock down there, sealed in some kind of thermos bottle. You could wire the clock to run untouched by human hands, powered by, let’s say, the renewable voltage in ocean slime. In this condition, even the *organizers* can’t shut it down. It’s an *autonomous* shadow clock. A kind of temporal doppleganger. An ahistorical, remote-control timebomb, divorced from all human influence. These Gothic aspects are deliberately played up in public relations.

It might not be necessary to build this second clock. The *myth* of a second clock might work almost as well. If the second clock really does exist == then it might be wise to promulgate the myth of a shadowy Third Clock.

I know this sounds like a cheap trick. But it’s likely to work. In Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION trilogy of classic science fiction novels, there’s a Foundation of cultural archivists, established to protect human knowledge from a cultural breakdown. There’s also a secret, Second Foundation. When it comes to human psychology, the old tricks are the good ones. The Aum Shinri Kyo cult, the guys with the nerve gas in the Tokyo subway == they were major fans of those Asimov FOUNDATION novels. The whole set-up really preyed on their minds, somehow.