Tag Archives: status

San Onofre and Diablo Canyon status graphs (NRC data)

Graphs for San Onofre and Diablo Canyon from NRC daily reactor status reports, per request.

Pride of Southern California Edison Co., San Onofre 2 in San Clemente, California, has been down for more than a year now, since 10 January 2010. Interesting the way it ramps down down from 100% to below 80% over a week, almost as if they were trying to cool it off. Will it stay down permanently?

San Onofre 2

San Onofre 3 has been down almost a year, since 1 February 2012. Cost of outage for both reactors so far: $317 million as of November.

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NRC Power Reactor Status Reports Graphed

Do you know how many outages nuclear reactors near here have had? Probably not, because that’s usually not in the news, and you have to dig into day by day NRC reactor status reports to find out. It turns out nuclear power is 0/7 instead of 24/7 on many a day.

Looking at all nine nuclear reactors within 200 miles of here, the graph drips downtime like tears.

Reactors within 200 miles

The available data on NRC’s website and graphed here goes back to 31 March 2006, through 29 January 2013. Let’s look at each of our closest reactors one by one. Hatch 1 on the Altamaha River, in addition to its recent 40% power on 21 January and 87% on 5 January, has had quite a few outages:

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There are no private schools in Finland: the opposite of Atlanta-imposed charter schools

Privatizing isn’t the answer, rote tests are irrelevant, and competition doesn’t help win. Those are a few of the lessons Finland learned that made its schools world leaders in education. So why would we consider letting Atlanta force privatized charter schools on us?

Anu Partanen wrote for the Atlantic 29 December 2011, What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success

“Oh,” he mentioned at one point, “and there are no private schools in Finland.”

Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education’s Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland, said that offhand while talking at a private school in New York. Nobody seemed to pay much attention. Maybe we should.

He also noted Finland has no standardized tests until the equivalent of high school graduation, and they don’t have any particular system for accountability for teachers or administrators.

“Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

So why do teachers and administrators in Finland so successfully take that responsibility?

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Copy charter schools or something else that works?

Instead of copying failed experiments like Hamilton County, Tennessee, how about copying some of the charter schools that do work? Or some other model that actually does work to improve education?

Sam Dillon wrote for the NYTimes today, Troubled Schools Try Mimicking the Charters

Classrooms are festooned with college pennants. Hallway placards proclaim: “No Excuses!” Students win prizes for attendance. They start classes earlier and end later than their neighbors; some return to school on Saturdays. And they get to pore over math problems one-on-one with newly hired tutors, many of them former accountants and engineers.

If these new mores at Lee High School, long one of Houston’s most troubled campuses, make it seem like one of those intense charter schools, that is no accident.

In the first experiment of its kind in the country, the Houston public schools are testing whether techniques proven successful in high-performing urban charters can also help raise achievement in regular public schools. Working with Roland G. Fryer, a researcher at Harvard who studies the racial achievement gap, Houston officials last year embraced five key tenets of such charters at nine district secondary schools; this fall, they are expanding the program to 11 elementary schools. A similar effort is beginning in Denver.

Charter schools were supposed to be pilot projects, so why not adopt what works there in public schools?

However, this still seems to be all about test scores. Maybe some public schools could look farther afield, Continue reading →

Why is Finland at the top of the world in education?

Attention to weak students. Status and autonomy for teachers. Educators running the show, not business people. All this creates a real educated workforce.

Lynnell Hancock wrote for Smithsonian Magazine September 2011, Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful? Here’s a clue:

“Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”
So what do they do? Drill the weak students on test questions? Nope: Continue reading →