"I'd be more at ease if it were Nucular"

In case you didn’t know, my current location, the Secret Outpost Known as The WendelLair (secret except for the sign facing Highway 101 that makes the apartments look more like a motel) is a mere 5.5 miles (as the crow flies; using roads takes 12 miles) from the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, one of the more controversial construction projects in California in the 1980s, and, thanks to the controversy, one of the better managed and better regulated nuke plants anywhere.

Part of that management is news stories like this. “Forced outage” in English means: something looks wrong, you gotta shut it down. But the cause is interesting: “an increase in biological contamination affected the unit’s water pumps.” If this were the Nuclear plant in a certain animated TV show that has been running longer than John McCain, I would suspect a failed delivery of donuts to Homer. I have long wondered about the “biological” content of the pink frosting of those things. Fortunately for everyone concerned, you have to drive 25 miles north to Paso Robles or south to Santa Maria to find guys who resemble ol’ Homie. So, considering the reality of the area’s local biological stuff, it’s most likely the contamination was either a sick seagull, sick seal or sick squid that somehow got past the first series of filters at the seawater intakes. And the cleanup crew were once again disappointed that the recovered remains do NOT glow in the dark. Just the way things are done at a well-managed Nuclear Power Plant. I hope.

UPDATED: The linked story has been amended to note that the “biological contamination” was, indeed, jellyfish in nature, not jelly donut. And unlike seagulls, seals or squid, may have been glowing in the dark with no contact to radiation whatsoever. Jellyfish do that just to scare you. And quite effectively. And Thursday is cooler than Wendellsday was, but not yet cool enough.

Meanwhile, today a combination of Santa Ana Winds imported from Santa Ana and Indian Summer imported from India is going to warm the land around the WendelLair into the 90s, fahrenheit-wise. And since the Lair is W/O A/C, the internal temperature should be about 4 degrees warmer and MY internal temperature should be high enough to kill all e.coli bacteria. If I am able to operate any of my computing devices without burning my hands, I will be releasing much of that heat into Twitter, where I am late joining into a political “Yo Mama” competition among some high profile Twitterheads.