Setagaya Vaccination Update

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I live in Setagaya, the most populous of the 23 Special Wards (ku) of Tokyo. Out of about 195,000 residents aged 65 and over, about 141,000 have made reservations for vaccinations. Of those 73,000 have received at least one vaccine dose and 8,000 of these have received both doses. There are vacant reservation slots for another 54,000 people.

Starting from next Tuesday (June 15), tickets will be sent to the next group, including people with medical conditions and people aged 60-64. That includes my wife and myself. Note that it’s not your age today that counts but age on March 31, 2022. So anyone born before April 1, 1962 counts as age 60 and up! This is consistent with the system used for elementary school enrollment in Japan.

The next groups after that will be:

  • Age 50-59 (born before April 1, 1972): from June 30, 2021
  • Age 40-49 (born before April 1, 1982): from July 5, 2021
  • Age 30-39 (born before April 1, 1992): from July 12, 2021
  • Age 16-29: from July 20, 2021

Currently there is a published list of vaccination sites with available slots per day for each date until the end of August. At the moment free slots are available starting from early July (i.e. with a 3 week wait list). The wait list most likely will grow significantly, seeing the rate at which age groups will be added vs. the rate at which people are currently getting vaccinated.

Online reservations can be made 24 hours a day, except for website maintenance periods. Reservations can also be made by phone during daytime, but the number used is a 0570 number not covered by flat rate mobile phone plans and unreachable by IP telephony services such as Skype or Google Voice. For people who only have a mobile phone and who don’t have internet access this is not very convenient.

For the senior citizens the city has been offering a service where they can visit city run facilities who will help them make an online reservation using a smartphone. This service was further publicised via the jichikai (neighbourhood associations) in Setagaya.

Meanwhile the number of shots given to senior citizens has surpassed the number of shots to healthcare workers (10.7 vs 8.7 million doses) and first doses given to healthcare workers are exceeding 5 million, more than the 4.8 million previously quoted as the total number of healthcare workers eligible for them. Compliance seems exceptionally high.

In total, about 14.5 million out of 126 million residents have received at least one doses. The Olympic Games will begin in 44 days.

The TerraPower Natrium Reactor – a Quick Review

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TerraPower, a company funded by billionaire Bill Gates, has teamed up with several partners to build a demonstration nuclear power station in Wyoming by the end of the decade. Several sites are under consideration. The plan is to re-use the grid connection of a former thermal coal power plant, of which Wyoming has many.

The Natrium reactor developed by TerraPower in cooperation with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy is quite a departure from the design of the light water reactors (LWRs) that produce the bulk of nuclear power worldwide today. For one, its output is highly variable because it incorporates gigawatthour (GWh) energy storage using tanks of molten salt. The design is quite innovative, which creates both upsides and challenges.

After reviewing the company’s website and watching a webinar, I am quite impressed but also concerned. The reactor will still run on uranium and will produce radioactive fission products that will need to be contained and stored safely for thousands of years. This is still a largely unsolved problem. Countries that have been generating power from nuclear fuels are today sitting on thousands of tons of waste kept in intermediate storage, still without a proven long term storage solution. Eight decades since the start of the “atomic age” with the Manhattan Project that gave us nuclear reactors and atomic bombs we are only now seeing the first permanent storage site being used in Finland. Some consider this the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry. Proponents of nuclear power will argue that, given we already have existing waste, this is a problem we will need to address anyway and that the volume of highly active nuclear waste will remain relatively compact. Nevertheless, there is a lot that can go wrong there, especially if the volume keeps increasing.

What most excited me about the reactor concept was its incorporation of the heat store using molten salt tanks, which it borrowed from concentrated solar power (CSP). Everything from the molten salt tank to the grid connection is basically the same as in this type of solar power plant. The major difference is that the heat source is not solar power focused onto a tower by thousands of mirrors but an underground nuclear reactor. This means the designers could use existing technology developed to maturity over the last 2-3 decades for use in solar projects in Nevada, Australia, Morocco and other locations.

This part of the plant is conventional technology that will not be subject to the same regulatory oversight as the nuclear portion, making it easier and cheaper to build. At the same time, the nuclear portion of the plant is much smaller and simpler, requiring a lot less concrete and steel than in a LWR per MW of output capacity.

By incorporating the heat storage, the electrical output of the power station can be varied considerably – the TerraPower presentation showed a range of about 240 to 500 MWe, with 345 MWe available continually without charging or discharging the heat store. Output that varies by 100 percent roughly covers the demand swing between day and night in many power markets. If combined with solar and wind, the stored heat can be used to smooth out fluctuations in power output from those natural energy sources. Heat from the power station may also have applications for desalination, industrial processes and residential heating.

Conventional nuclear power stations such as PWRs or BWRs can not vary their output very much. They basically can only run at 100 percent load or be switched off. Once shut down, bringing them back up again takes a very long time. That makes them suitable only for base load but not for demand peaks such as in the afternoon or evening. For that they would have to be combined with energy storage such as pumped hydro, opportunities for which are limited by geography. Due to the literally built-in output flexibility of the salt storage system, a zero carbon grid could theoretically incorporate a lot more Natrium output capacity than would be possible with existing LWRs. From an economic point, it means the operators in a competitive electricity market with bidding for supplies can sell more power at lucrative peak prices instead of having to try to find buyers at night when demand and prices are low.

So what’s the catch? The nuclear reactor itself is a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR), basically a Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) without the breeding: Except for the absence of a breeding blanket made of depleted uranium that slowly turns into plutonium, the technology is very similar. Perhaps you remember the Monju reactor in Fukui, Japan that was shut down after a major accident in 1995. The operators attempted to hide the extent of a coolant leak and fire, which led to a 15-year shutdown. After a second accident in 2010 the reactor was eventually decommissioned. In 1966 the prototype Fermi 1 FBR in Monroe, Michigan suffered a partial meltdown. It was permanently shut down in 1972. Several other sodium-cooled fast reactors have been built around the world, such as the French Superphénix, the Prototype Fast Reactor in Dounreay, Scotland and the SNR-300 in Kalkar, Germany. All of the above have since been shut down due to high costs or troubles or, like the one in Kalkar, were never even started up.

While sodium has a high temperature range between melting and boiling point and is a good heat conductor, it also reacts violently with water and oxygen. Naturally, you can not put out a sodium fire with water. Normally the top of the reactor vessel is filled with an inert gas such as argon to prevent sodium fires but it needs to be opened for loading and unloading fuel, during which time the sodium has to remain heated above its melting point. You do not want to start a fire then.

If an LWR overheats, steam bubbles will form that reduce the criticality, interrupting the chain reaction. By contrast, control of the chain reaction in SFRs depends 100 percent on positioning of the control rods.

While the cooling pipes will not have to withstand high steam pressures as in a BWR, they will be subject to thermal stress: The coolant temperature in an SFR is much higher, around 550 deg C (1020 F) which is basically red-hot and hot enough to melt some aluminium alloys (and of course salt, for the heat storage). When SolarReserve decided to build a molten salt CSP solar power station in Nevada, it turned to Rocketdyne to make some of the metal parts, because of their metallurgical expertise in rocket engine nozzles that are also exposed to high temperatures.

There are other viable solutions for base load in a zero carbon grid, such as geothermal power, utility scale battery storage, thermal storage using rock heated electrically with surplus wind and solar or green hydrogen powering fuel cells or gas turbines. Costs for wind, solar and battery storage have been falling rapidly for years. Once renewables are cheap enough, you can partially address issues of intermittent output by overbuilding capacity and simply idling some of it when not needed. Or you can use spare output when supply exceeds demand to produce hydrogen, for making ammonia and for use by the steel industry.

Some of these solutions depend more on geography than the Natrium reactor, which can be installed on any continent and provide power at time of day and in any season. However, it would definitely need to be safe and reliable. Ultimately, this new technology will first have to prove itself.

Vaccination Progress in Japan

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The City of Setagaya (東京都世田谷区) has announced the dates when vaccination will be expanded beyond the current group 2 (residents aged 65 and above). Between June 15-19, coupons will be mailed to group 3 which includes:

  • people with existing medical conditions
  • people aged 60-64 (anyone born no later than March 31, 1962)
  • people working in elderly care

Group 1 were the health care workers, if you are wondering!

Currently about half a million vaccinations are happening in Japan per day, about 2/3 of them aged 65 and above, 1/3 health care workers. As of Friday, 2021-05-28, over 92 percent of healthcare workers had received at least one shot and over 60 percent had received both. That leaves them only about 350,000 shots short of full coverage for first shots. About 1.55 million healthcare workers have only received one shot, so fully vaccinating them with a second shot in the next three weeks will be the bulk of the remaining vaccinations for this group.
Of the people aged 65 and above, 12.46 percent have received at least one shot and 0.86 percent have received both. Meanwhile the Olympics start in 52 days…

Setagaya also announced that more reservation slots would be opened at mass vaccination sites for people aged 65 and above, recommending people in that group who currently have dates in August to move them to July (i.e. cancel in August, make new reservation in July). This will then free up those slots for the next group.
This means there’s a good chance that both my wife and I (who were born before the March 1962 deadline for age 60-64) will get vaccinated in August.

In my last post I had pointed out that daily vaccination totals for healthcare workers and people above 65 was being handled differently. One set was being updated retroactively, the other set only once per listed date.

Basically, for healthcare workers the government publishes daily numbers (on weekdays, excluding public holidays) of the number of total shots given since the previous published total. That’s why numbers only get added for the final date, once a day. It is also why no vaccinations are listed on Saturday, Sundays and holidays — not because no healthcare workers were vaccinated on those days, but because no results are published on those days. Consequently, healthcare worker stats do not show how many healthcare workers were actually vaccinated on a particular day.

For people aged 65 and over, they precisely track the totals by the date the doses are used. So there are entries for Saturdays and Sundays, even though it may take until Tuesday for them to be listed on the website. Furthermore, unpublished counts of shots already given weeks ago are still finding their way to the Prime Minister’s Office and are then added. Here’s the total given for April 14, as listed on the day the numbers for a given recent date were also added:

May 18: 2,533
May 20: 2,666
May 27: 2,793
May 30: 3,078

A near 20 percent increase for vaccinations that already took place over a month ago is quite surprising, considering that vaccinations are tracked with Android tablets with software specifically developed for the purpose. How can a computer-based system be so slow? It actually makes fax machines look good by comparison (yes, they are still widely used here in Japan)!


Tracking Vaccination Numbers in Japan

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The website of the Prime Minister’s Office in Japan (Kantei) is providing a daily update of vaccination progress in two categories: medical staff (doctors and nurses) and senior residents (age 65 and above).

To track these vaccinations, the government has issued tablet computers running software known as the Vaccine Recording System (ワクチン接種記録システム, VRS). It was developed by Milabo, a small privately held company founded in 2013. It describes itself as:

A start-up that provides child-rearing support services such as DX, immunization, health checkup, checkup scheduler, electronic maternal and child notebook, health center reservation system, mainly for local governments.

It had previously worked with the cabinet secretariat on the “MyNumber” personal ID system that assigns a personal identification number to every resident of the country. The budget for developing VRS was 385 million yen (about US$3.5 million).

The software in the tablets is used to scan bar codes and forms when people receive their vaccine doses. Theoretically this should allow the government to accurately track the progress being made.

However, the numbers published on the website keep changing even after they are published. For example, on Monday, May 17 the Kantei website listed a total of 69,526 doses (first and second doses) given to seniors on Monday, May 10 and 57,172 on Saturday, May 15. Two days later, on Wednesday, May 19 the numbers for those two days had been revised to 71,543 and 83,311 doses, respectively. That is an increase of 2.9 percent and 45.7 percent several days after publication.

What this suggests is that the software does not track the numbers and automatically uploads them to a government server at the end of the day (say, via a mobile data connection with a SIM card). Instead, there must be manual steps involved. Comparing the results published two days apart and looking back across 4 weeks worth of data, it turns out that daily totals still change after a whole month, for example by 46 doses from 2,533 to 2,579 for Wednesday, April 14 between May 17 and 19. I mean, really?

In rare cases the numbers have also decreased by 2 or 3 doses from the previously reported totals, which would be hard to explain by late reporting: the numbers should go up but not down! This could be cases were mistakes were made that made vaccination unreliable and so the cases were purged from the total.

The good news is that currently about 77 percent of healthcare workers have received at least one dose while 42 percent have received both doses. At the current pace of second doses it should take less than two weeks for all remaining healthcare workers to have received their first shots and three weeks after that anyone willing to get the first shot will have had their second shot too. For some strange reason, the healthcare worker counts seem unaffected by the late count updates and I don’t understand why.

One thing to look forward to is for the Moderna vaccine (mRNA-1273) to receive approval in Japan at the end end of this week. It is very similar to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in terms of safety and efficacy. It has already been imported into Japan since the end of last month.

There are about 7 times more senior citizens than there are health care workers, so the number will have to increase much more. There should be enough vaccine by the end of June/early July to vaccinate about 36 million of them, but will the local governments be able to keep up with setting up vaccination sites? Each prefecture and city has been left to figure it out on its own. There is no national vaccination reservation system, each local government was left to build its own system. If the bottleneck is not vaccine supplies but organisation then the Moderna vaccine will not help all that much.

If Japan manages to vaccinate all its doctors and nurses by early June and most of its people aged 65 and above by the end of July, that still leaves about 70 million people to be vaccinated after that, with no date yet when this is expected to start and how long it is expected to take. It looks like a long road ahead to herd immunity and for life to return to normal.

Covid Vaccinations in Japan

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Japan has been lagging other rich countries on the number of vaccine shots delivered per 100 people. It reportedly comes 37th out of 37 OECD countries. Other countries already started vaccinating in December or early January while Japan didn’t approve of the its first vaccine until February. Vaccinations of doctors and nurses started in initially small numbers in March. The elderly were added starting from April 12, but again numbers were initially very small.

My 81-year old mother in Germany got her second shot before the end of March. My 86-year old mother-in-law in Japan was not even able to make an application before yesterday (May 14) and is now waiting for the vaccination date to come. Tokyo is currently in its third state of emergency, struggling with its fourth wave of infections.

For the last 7 days with published numbers for vaccinations of healthcare workers and elderly residents (2021-05-05 to 2021-05-13) the daily average is about 193,000 doses per day. At that rate it would take 3 1/2 years to finish vaccinating the entire population.

Even other rich countries in the Pacific region that (unlike Japan) currently have few new Covid cases have vaccinated far more of their population. For example, with only 5 Covid-19 deaths in the past 12 months New Zealand has been virtually Covid-free, yet it has vaccinated proportionally twice as much of its population than has Japan. The same is true for Australia and South Korea, which both have proportionally fewer cases but more vaccinations.

Like other countries, Japan has struggled to secure sufficient vaccine supplies, but that is not the whole picture. Starting from April, far more vaccine doses have been arriving than were being used, leaving 24 of 28 million doses imported by the end of April still unused in early May.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) the expected vaccine supply in May and June should allow for bringing in enough Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for the entire 36 million residents aged 65 and above by the week starting 2021-06-28, which should allow giving everyone the first shot in early July, knowing there will be enough vaccine for the second shot three weeks later, thereby finishing to vaccinate the 65+ population by the end of July.

As an aside, Japan rigidly adheres to the 3 week interval set by the manufacturer, unlike the UK and Germany which had lengthened the interval between shots to maximize early partial immunity by giving as many people as possible a first shot: The protection given by the first shot is considerably stronger than half the final protection from both shots, so fewer people will become ill or die in a population of 10 million if 1 million are half-vaccinated than if 500,000 are fully vaccinated but the rest non-vaccinated.

Shipments arrive in boxes of 195 vials. Starting from the week of 2021-05-10, all boxes will be paired with low dead space syringes needed for 6 doses per vial = 1,170 shots per box. Previously only 5 doses could be extracted with the available syringes (975 shots per box).

2021-05-10 + 2021-05-17: 16,000 boxes = 18,720,000 doses total
2021-05-24 + 2021-05-31: 13,000 boxes or more = 15,210,000 doses or more
2021-06-07 + 2021-06-14: 13,435 boxes or more = 15,718,950 doses or more
2021-06-21 + 2021-06-28: 13,434 boxes or more = 15,717,780 doses or more

The “or more” in the numbers above refers to extra supplies that may be released from the central government’s stockpile whose size they don’t normally talk about.

Combined with the much smaller numbers in April that’s a total of 62,710 boxes, enough for two doses each for 35,490,000 residents aged 65 or above.

With supplies secured, the big question will be how fast the vaccine can actually be distributed. With the national government only taking care of import and distribution of vaccines, the actual vaccinations are left to local governments and are happening in a patchwork of different approaches. For example, in Setagaya where I live, the city website lists quite a few public vaccination sites to be set up at event halls, gymnasims, etc. in the next couple of weeks and months. There’s a website to make online reservations, once your mailed coupon arrives. This is similar to the approach in Germany. In my mother-in-law’s city in Saitama prefecture however, the city lists hospitals and small clinics, none of which can be reserved online yet (reservations are by telephone only) and many of them will currently only accept people already on their patient register. That approach is not very encouraging for cranking up the volume.

The central government-run vaccination sites to be set up in Tokyo and Osaka that are supposed to handle 10,000 and 5,000 vaccinations per day respectively will not be a game changer unless there will be many more such sites operating everywhere for the rest of the year. 10,000 shots a day for 3 months (the planned operating time of the Tokyo/Kanto site) will cover 2 shots for 450,000 people, a mere 5% of the 65+ population of Tokyo+3 (Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba) of 9 million and then there will be the much larger under-65 population still to take care of.

The next group in line will be the under-65 with pre-existing conditions, then everybody else (probably in decreasing age order). Japan will need many more mass vaccination sites, it will need to recruit and train staff (both people with a medical background and volunteers) and maybe also change some regulations to widen the circle of people qualified to give injections. Otherwise the vaccination process could drag on far into next year. Another winter with another wave of infections and an unpredictable cost in lives and economic pain would be disastrous.

See also:

Replacement Chainrings for Sugino Compact Plus Cranks (OX601D, OX801D)

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Since 2016 I have been using a Sugino OX601D “compact-plus” crank on my Elephant Bikes National Forest Explorer. A compact-plus crank offers lower gearing than conventional 50/34 “compact” or 52/36 “mid-compact” cranks. I use 42/26 rings. Another popular combination is 46/30.

These smaller tooth counts allow for lower gears, making hilly courses more accessible to many cyclists of different abilities. This used to be the purpose of triple cranks until they were largely abandoned by Shimano, Campagnolo and SRAM a couple of years ago. In 2013 Shimano dropped triples on Ultegra when it moved from 6700 to 6800. The following year it did the same to 105 with the switch from 5700 to 5800. So-called compact and mid-compact double cranks were supposed to be a replacement for triples, but in truth their gearing never went low enough for many cyclists on all kinds of terrain.

Most road triple cranks used a bolt circle of 130/74 mm or 110/74. That meant the middle could be no smaller than 38T (130 BCD) or 33T (110 BCD), though in practice 39T and 34T were more common. The 74 BCD allows rings of 32T and smaller, down to 24T. Shimano compacts give you only 110 BCD, excluding any inner rings smaller than 34T.

Into this void stepped Sugino with its compact-plus cranks that combined the more flexible gearing of triples with compatibility with double front derailleurs and shifters. They do that with a 110/74 BCD combination with 5 bolts, just like an old touring triple (typical configuration: 48/36/26).

Effectively, a compact plus crank is a triple in which the middle and large rings are replaced by one in-between ring that can do both jobs. So for example, instead of a 50/39/30 you would have a 46/30. You just give up some very tall gears, but those typically see very little actual use outside of road racing.

Eventually Shimano also jumped on the compact-plus bandwagon: It is now offering 48/31 and 46/30 cranks in its GRX group set for gravel bikes, using a proprietary 110/80 BCD setup with 4 bolts.

I’ve been very happy with my Sugino OX601D. The 42T large ring and the 26T small ring in combination with a 11-32 cassette (11 speed) provide just the right gear range for my kind of riding. I ride a lot of mountain routes with grades of 10 percent and more and 160 km or more in a day where I really appreciate being able to spin up a mountain in a low gear. If I push heavy gears, I end up paying for it with knee pain.

Recently I replaced my bicycle chain as it had worn and stretched and noticed in the process that the teeth of the large ring were quite worn too. I had put over 30,000 km on that crank already and should have replaced the most recent chain a long time ago. In any case, I realized that I now needed a new chain ring and it turned out that Sugino no longer makes it. That’s because the OX601D and OX801D cranks have been discontinued, along with the PE110S rings that were used on them.

Sugino only ever sold these cranks with ring combinations of 44T to 50T for the large ring and 30T or more for the small ring. The 40T and 42T versions of the PE110S were made specifically for use with the ZX801D, a Mountain Bike equivalent of the OX801D but Soma/Merry Sales in the US sold them as a combination with the OX601D. That’s where I had bought mine.

Sugino’s current compact-plus offering is the OX2-901D, the successor to the OX901D which in turn was the 10/11-speed version of the 9/10-speed OX801D. My OX601D is a cheaper but functionally identical version of the OX801D – basically just not as shiny. I had no problems running the OX601D in an 11-speed configuration, with an 11-speed chain, cassette and rear derailleur, but I guess there are some subtle differences with the latest versions, such as maybe the spacing between the two rings to optimize it for the narrower 11-speed chain.

The OX2-901D uses CP110S chain rings with the same 110 BCD bolt circle as the PE110S, but they’re for 11 speed. The large rings are offered in even steps from 44T to 52T and small rings (CP74S, CP110s) in even numbers from 30T to 36T. There is no 40T or 42T for the large ring or 24, 26 or 28 for the small ring as there was for the PE110S for the ZX801D because there’s no MTB equivalent of the OX2-901D. Sugono’s only concession to people needing lower gearing is the “Super Hill Climb” CY5-SHC, a 27T 74 BCD inner ring.

One option would have been to buy a CP110S 44T chain ring. Given the close family relationship between the OX2-901D, OX901D and OX801D/OX601D, I am pretty sure it would have worked worked just fine on my older crank. It would have raised the gearing on the large ring by about 5 percent though (44/42). On top of that, the difference in tooth count between the two rings would have increased from 16T (42-26) to 18T (44-28). The specification for my FD-CX70 says its maximum capacity is 16T, but it would probably would have still worked. However, 44/26 at the front with 11-32 at the rear would on paper have required a total rear derailleur capacity of 39, one more than the specification of my RD-6800-GS. That can get tricky.

Exceeding the total rear derailleur capacity theoretically creates problems during cross chaining, as the rear derailleur arm can not take up all the chain slack from switching between the two extreme positions. If the installed chain is kept short enough to not go slack when running on the the small ring at the front with the smallest sprocket at the rear, it risks the derailleur pulley making contact with the spinning cassette when running on the big ring at the front and the largest sprocket at the rear. That could be disastrous. The safer way is to keep the chain long enough for the big/big combination, which I quite often use. At worst your chain will slip in the small/small combination which should be avoided anyway (and which is easy to avoid, you just switch back to the big ring after the first couple of upshifts when you have reached the top of a steep climb).

Sugino rings are not the only choice for compact-plus cranks. French bicycle parts maker Spécialités T.A. also offers a wide variety of high quality chain rings that can be used on many different cranks. Specifically, the TA Zephyr rings are also ramped and pinned for Shimano STI and will work with 10 and 11 speed groups. When you are looking for a large ring for a Sugino OX crank, it is best to use a 110 BCD ring meant for a use as a middle in a triple. That’s because these rings are mounted on the inside of the OX crank spider, not the outside. This matters because some rings have bolt holes that are countersunk for mounting on a particular side, to match bolts with conical heads. So it makes a difference if the bolt enters the bolt hole from the left or the right. In any case, there’s a TA Zephyr 110 BCD middle in either 40T or 42T, making them suitable replacements for the PE110S 40T and 42T formerly made for the ZX801D that are no longer available (EDIT: for the 74 BCD inner replacement I used a TA Zelito, which are available in 24T, 26T, 28T, 30T and 32T).

It’s a pity that Sugino no longer offers chain ring combinations below 44/30, such as 44/28, 42/26, 40/26 or 40/24 which would all be possible with the dual bolt circle of 110/74 mm on OX and OX2 cranks. As long as TA offers the rings we can still create and maintain such combinations though.

Another great option are Rene Herse cranks, which are available in a wide range of chain ring sizes, supporting speeds from 9 to 12 speed. That may be my fall-back position a couple of years down the road.

EDIT: I bought a 110 BCD TA Zephyr 40T as the large ring and a 74 BCD TA Zelito 24T as the small ring replacement (www.bike-components.de/en). The shift quality with the Spécialités T.A. rings is fantastic. The OX601D now shifts better than with the Sugino rings, arguably as well as any mechanical shifting (non-Di2) setup of any brand or model I have ever used. I am extremely happy with it. Dropping the chain ring sizes by two teeth from 42/26 to 40/24 has not been any drawback on the flat or descents but has helped me on climbs.

“Questions About GDPR Data Access Process” Spam from Virginia

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  • NOTE: See recent updates below the original April 2021 post!

The other day, I received the following email:

Subject: Questions About GDPR Data Access Process for [DOMAINNAME]
To Whom It May Concern:

My name is [REDACTED], and I am a resident of Roanoke, Virginia. I have a few questions about your process for responding to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data access requests:

  1. Would you process a GDPR data access request from me even though I am not a resident of the European Union?
  2. Do you process GDPR data access requests via email, a website, or telephone? If via a website, what is the URL I should go to?
  3. What personal information do I have to submit for you to verify and process a GDPR data access request?
  4. What information do you provide in response to a GDPR data access request?

To be clear, I am not submitting a data access request at this time. My questions are about your process for when I do submit a request.

Thank you in advance for your answers to these questions. If there is a better contact for processing GDPR requests regarding [DOMAINNAME], I kindly ask that you forward my request to them.

I look forward to your reply without undue delay and at most within one month of this email, as required by Article 12 of GDPR.

Sincerely,

[REDACTED]

It’s a confusing email, but as it turns out, one received by many other website owners. In fact, there’s a thread about it on Reddit.

GDPR deals with processing personally identifiable information. Non-compliance can lead to stiff fines. It even applies to companies outside the EU if they process personal data of EU residents.

If you get a request regarding personally identifiable information from a EU resident, you will need to answer promptly or you can face fines. However, no such requirement exists under GDPR regarding data of individuals outside the EU.

I don’t know what the intention of the sender of this email email is, but I have my suspicions.

The email was sent from an address at “potomacmail.com”, a recently registered domain (2020-03-02). It was sent from an Amazon EC2 host (52.23.113.96). The HTML portion of the email contains an image reference to a single pixel “web bug”, an image loaded from the potomacmail.com website that will cause the IP address of the browser to be logged on that server when you open the email with a web client that doesn’t automatically block images from untrusted senders:

https://potomacmail.com/p.png?req=GDPR&target=1234

The URI contains a unique value (it was something other than 1234 in my case) that presumably identifies the recipient of the email. In other words, the senders of this email themselves collect personally identifiable information which, if the recipient happens to be in the EU, is subject to GDPR and its potential fines.

UPDATE (2021-12-11)
There is a similar spam e-mail going around recently, with almost identical wording but mentioning the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) instead of the European GDPR:

Subject: Questions About CCPA Data Access Process for [DOMAINNAME]

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is [REDACTED], and I am a resident of San Francisco, California. I have a few questions about your process for responding to California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) data access requests:

1. Do you process CCPA data access requests via email, a website, or telephone? If via a website, what is the URL I should go to?
2. What personal information do I have to submit for you to verify and process a CCPA data access request?
3. What information do you provide in response to a CCPA data access request?

To be clear, I am not submitting a data access request at this time. My questions are about your process for when I do submit a request.
(…)

This email was sent from an address at “yosemitemail.com”, a domain registered on 2020-03-02 with the same registrar at the exact same time as the “potomacmail.com” domain used in the GDPR variant of this spam:

Domain Name: YOSEMITEMAIL.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2498859495_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2021-03-08T03:30:04Z
Creation Date: 2020-03-02T02:15:46Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2022-03-02T02:15:46Z
Registrar: NameCheap, Inc.

Domain Name: POTOMACMAIL.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2498859494_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2021-03-03T22:25:43Z
Creation Date: 2020-03-02T02:15:46Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2022-03-02T02:15:46Z
Registrar: NameCheap, Inc.

As you can see, the creation time is the exact same, down to the second and the Domain IDs of the two domains are actually consecutive. Both sender domains were obviously created by the same registrant who uses them for the same purpose.

As far as I can tell, whether you are in California or outside, you are under no obligation to reply to this email. I would not advise replying to it.

UPDATE (2021-12-13)
The GDPR mails sent in the name of a person in Russia are sent from a domain registered via a different registrar about one month after the other two domains:

domain: NOVATORMAIL.RU
nserver: ns1crv.name.com.
nserver: ns2ckr.name.com.
nserver: ns3cjl.name.com.
nserver: ns4fpy.name.com.
state: REGISTERED, DELEGATED, UNVERIFIED
person: Private Person
registrar: RU-CENTER-RU
admin-contact: https://www.nic.ru/whois
created: 2020-04-06T05:35:06Z
paid-till: 2022-04-06T05:35:06Z
free-date: 2022-05-07
source: TCI

Another domain used for sender addresses is “envoiemail.fr” which was registered a day after “yosemitemail.com” and “potomacmail.com”

domain: envoiemail.fr
status: ACTIVE
hold: NO
holder-c: ANO00-FRNIC
admin-c: ANO00-FRNIC
tech-c: RT12727-FRNIC
zone-c: NFC1-FRNIC
nsl-id: NSL82816-FRNIC
registrar: 1API GmbH
Expiry Date: 2022-03-03T20:45:06Z
created: 2021-03-03T20:45:06Z
last-update: 2021-03-03T20:45:07Z
source: FRNIC

All four domains have their email hosted at Google. That is not unusual, lots of domains use Gmail for mail hosting these days. It is still worth pointing out though.

POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.COM.
POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.COM.
POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.COM.
POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.COM.
POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.COM.

YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.COM.
YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.COM.
YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.COM.
YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.COM.
YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.COM.

NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.com.
NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.com.
NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.com.

envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.com.
envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.com.
envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.com.

I am told the GDPR reply period of one month under Article 12 of GDPR only applies to data access requests, which the email specifically clarifies this is not.

UPDATE (2021-12-15)

It turns out that these deceptive emails using fake identities were sent out by a researcher at Princeton University as part of a study into how website operators implement GDPR and CCPA. In the most recent mails to website operators, the senders are now disclosing their background instead of using fake identities.

These GDPR and CCPA emails created great anxiety amongst the recipients (nobody wants to pay huge fines) and that should have been clear to the senders from the very beginning, yet they went ahead and spammed us as if we were human guinea pigs.

Even if somehow it wasn’t clear to them in the beginning, public blog posts and forum discussions after the April spam run should soon have shown them that this wasn’t going to end well. Why did they continue with the same mode of operation more than half a year later? And why did their university let them do that?

Normally I would expect to be able to easily distinguish between online scams and academic research but I guess, not any more. We are living in strange times.

Expiring the Internal Combustion Engine Car

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The US state of Washington has decided to ban sales of new cars with internal combustion engines (ICE, gasoline or diesel) by the year 2030. That is five years earlier than in the state of California.

There are two issues to overcome for a switch to battery electric vehicles (BEVs): supply and charging. Two common worries however will not stand in the way of BEVs replacing ICEs: cost and range. Let me explain.

Battery cost per kWh has been dropping for decades and this trend is expected to continue. THis is highly significant: Most parts of a BEV car other than the big battery cost either the same as in an ICE car or they’re cheaper. As a result, the cost of batteries will stop being a major obstacle to adoption of BEVs years before the end of the decade.

The same is true for range. Cheaper batteries mean BEVs with more capacity will become affordable. The higher the capacity, the more km of charge can be replenished in a given number of minutes. For example, a Nissan Leaf with a 40 kWH battery will fast-charge from 0 to 80% in 40 minutes. The Volkswagen ID.4 First Edition with an 82 kWh battery (of which 77 kWh are usable capacity) will go from 5% to 80% charge in 38 minutes, essentially double the charging speed (kWh added per minute) for a battery with twice the range. If you can add hundreds of km of range in the time it takes you to use the toilet and get a cup of coffee then BEVs will be just as viable for long distance trips as ICE cars.

By the middle of this decade there is likely to be a wealth of different battery electric vehicle models on the market, with even BEV laggards such as Toyota, Honda and Subaru having joined in. Production could increase to about 50% of new sales of several large makers (e.g. GM, VW). It will have to scale up further, with the necessary increase in battery production capacity, by the end of the decade to make this happen but it seems eminently doable. Right now, the major bottleneck to ramping up production is not lack of demand but limited availability of battery cells. Every big car maker getting into BEVs will have to build Gigafactories churning out battery packs, or team up with battery makers who make these huge investments.

The more BEV there will be on the road, the more the impact on the electric grid becomes an issue. If you have a car that can cover 300 km or more on a full battery and you can charge at home every night then most likely you will almost never have to seek out a charging station, unlike drivers of ICE cars who regularly will have to fill up at a gas station. BEVs parked in a driveway or garage with a nearby wall socket are much easier to accommodate than cars currently parking in the street or on parking lots, who will require capacity at paid public charging points, which are more likely to be used at daytime. The grid has plenty of capacity for off-peak charging (e.g. overnight), but if a lot of people want to do their charging at superchargers or other fast charging points, this could require an upgrade in generating and transmission capacity to cover a higher daytime peak load. Vehicle to grid technology would help to make this more manageable, as cars sitting idle in a driveway could provide spare power for the few cars doing the odd long distance trip.

In any case, I see a date roughly around 2030 as the Goldilocks target for a phase-out of ICE-powered new cars. For high income countries this goal is neither too unambitious nor too unrealistically aggressive. Japan’s goal by contrast for a phase-out by the mid-2030s that still allows hybrid ICEs like the Toyota Prius after that date is quite unambitious. By setting the bar that low, prime minister Suga pleases Toyota, as expected, allowing it to keep selling dated technology in Japan that they will no longer be able to sell elsewhere. That puts Japan in the company of developing countries, which will most likely continue using ICE cars exported from rich countries for years to come.

The sooner rich countries switch to BEVs, the shorter the long tail of CO2-emitting ICE cars still running in poorer countries will be.

Releasing Tritium-tainted Water from Fukushima 1

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The Japanese government has approved a plan by Tepco to release more than a million tons of water stored in tanks at the site of the Fukushima 1 nuclear power station. The water is supposed to be gradually released into the ocean starting two years from now.

Currently about 1.2 million t of contaminated water are stored on site, an amount that is increasing by about 170 t per day. Tepco is expected to run out of space at the end of 2022. Water is being injected into severely damaged reactors on the site to cool the remains of nuclear fuel left inside. It leaks back out, mingles with ground water that seeps in and is then purified through a filtration system called ALPS. This removes most of the radioactive contamination, but leaves tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen which can not be chemically removed from water. So it ends up in the storage tanks.

Proponents of the release argue that tritium poses little hazard in small quantities. Radiation from tritium is so weak, it only travels for a couple of mm through air and it is stopped by the dead cells on the outside of human skin. Even if ingested it does not accumulate in the human body.

The water released will be diluted to levels so low it would meet drinking water standards in Japan and in other countries. Opponents fear an economic backlash against local fisheries or argue in principle that Japan has no right to contaminate the Pacific ocean, which is not just their territorial waters but shared by many other countries.

Proponents call such criticism hypocritical, given that many other countries, including the Republic of Korea, routinely release tritium into the ocean from their own nuclear facilities.

The issue is complicated. First of all, whether the danger from the water release is real or exaggerated, fishermen will suffer economically because consumers will end up avoiding fish from Fukushima more than they already do, even if it was safe to eat. If the release is unavoidable, the fishermen should receive compensation for their economic losses. That is only fair.

The truth about the water is not black or white. The 1.2 million t of water that has accumulated over the past decade was treated in different ways at different times. Some may indeed contain only those low levels of tritium as a contaminant, but other tanks will hold water that still has significant amounts of caesium, strontium and other dangerous isotopes that unlike tritium can accumulate in organisms and pose long term hazards. More purification and testing will definitely be needed before a release can take place. As Motoko Rich and Makiko Inoue reported for the New York Times in 2019:

Until last year, Tepco indicated that with the vast majority of the water, all but one type of radioactive material — tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that experts say poses a relatively low risk to human health — had been removed to levels deemed safe for discharge under Japanese government standards.

But last summer, the power company acknowledged that only about a fifth of the stored water had been effectively treated.

Last month, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry briefed reporters and diplomats about the water stored in Fukushima. More than three-quarters of it, the ministry said, still contains radioactive material other than tritium — and at higher levels than the government considers safe for human health.

The authorities say that in the early years of processing the deluge of water flowing through the reactors, Tepco did not change filters in the decontamination system frequently enough. The company said it would re-treat the water to filter out the bulk of the nuclear particles, making it safe to release into the ocean.
(New York Times, 2019-12-23)

Long term there is no real alternative to releasing the water. Once its radioactivity has been reduced to only tritium, dilution and disposal at sea should pose little risk.

The challenge however is that Tepco and the government have a public trust problem, at home and abroad. How do we know the water released will be as clean as claimed?

Any release process needs to be transparent and independently verified to make sure there are no shortcuts or other shenanigans.

See also:

My team “Maillot 24Tokyo” ride of AR Nihonbashi Flèche 2021

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I survived my second Flèche ride from Toyohashi in Aichi prefecture back to Tokyo (on Strava) and my third Flèche overall.



Although we officially did not finish again, I rode 401 km altogether from Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon, including the entire 368 km route as planned, just not within the set hours. A Flèche is a randonneuring event where teams of 3 to 5 machines (tandems only count once) ride at least 360 km in 24 hours towards a central location / meeting point. At least 25 km have to be covered after hour 22 of the 24 hour ride. It was organised by AR Nihonbashi.

We used almost the same course again as last year, only the part close to Tokyo was different. The biggest difference overall was that it didn’t rain all day on Saturday as it had last year. Therefore I rode the whole day in shorts instead of in rain gear and the temperature was much more pleasant too.

To get to the start, I drove to Aichi by car the day before (I can’t rinko my Elephant Bikes NFE). I was joined by my wife and my son. Together we visited Cape Irago (Iragomisaki) on the Atsumi peninsula of southern Aichi. After dropping me off they drove back to Tokyo. The peninsula is beautiful. I was impressed by the natural forests that are a sprinkle of different colors, unlike around Tokyo where much of the current forests are regrown mono-cultures planted after post war clearcutting.

I had dinner with two other team members, then went to bed at 21:00.

The alarm went off at 05:15 and we assembled at 06:00 to get the bikes ready.

It was a 20 minute ride to the official start at a 7-11 on the outskirts, where we set off at 07:00. We head a very pleasant tailwind on our ride through farm country out to Iragomisaki, where we uploaded a group picture in front of a road sign to prove passage.

The view from the road next to the Irako View Hotel (伊良湖ビューホテル) was breathtaking. You could see the coast of Mie prefecture on the other side of the entrance to Ise Bay and various islands in the sea. I took in the view but we didn’t stop for a picture. Here’s a picture from Wikipedia (By Bariston – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0):

We headed into the headwind that would be blowing in our faces for the next 120 km. Sometimes we took turns leading the ride. Many of the farmhouses had a storehouse between it and the coastal side, probably to block the wind.

There were also many greenhouses. Regardless of shape and size, glass or plastic they all seemed to have fuel oil tanks with the JA logo (Japan Agricultural Cooperatives), so it’s a safe bet that JA sells most of the fuel oil consumed to help grow crops in the cold season. Lots of signs advertising melons which are currently out of season but we came across many kei trucks loaded with cabbages.

There were many wind turbines in Aichi and also Shizuoka, as well as many photovoltaic installations. Their ubiquity there highlighted for me how few of them we have in Tokyo and Kanagawa. Perhaps Chubu Power is easier to deal with for feed ins than Tepco is, especially for wind power.

At noon we stopped for lunch at a ramen and gyoza place about halfway between Cape Irago and Omaezaki.

As we passed the former Hamaoka nuclear power station (it is permanently shut down) we were passed by a group of three cyclists on mamachari. Actually, one was a hybrid bike with flat bars while the other two were bona-fide mamachari. It was team ”マチャリはロング向き！” (“Mamachari is suitable for long rides!”) running in the AR Nihonbashi event and they were steaming ahead of us.

We got to Omaezaki a little after 16:00. By then it was a Century ride (160.9 km / 100 mi), but not even half of what we had set out to do.

As the course turned north here, the headwind ceased and became more of a tailwind again. It got dark near Shizuoka City.

I had felt a bit sleepy after lunch but then felt OK again. Over the next couple of hours others became sleepy as we were riding through the dark and it became more and more of a problem.

I wasn’t able to see Mt Fuji on the drive on Tomei expressway on Friday because of low clouds and now I couldn’t see it because it was night time. After crossing Fuji city and Numazu we started our climb in Izu towards Atami toge. When we finally got to the top, we had to take another power nap break at the tunnel entrance. We put on all our extra clothes for the steep descent down to Atami (13 percent). After that my rear disk brake, which recently had been very noisy and not very effective (maybe due to oil contamination from the chain) has been working perfectly again, as the heat and wear effectively decontaminated it.

Dawn approached as we headed from Atami to Yugawara and Manazuru.

We had burnt up most of our time buffer for the sleep break planned at the 22 hour stop by then, but the sleepiness in the team only got worse. So after another long break at Manazuru we sent in our DNF-notification to the event organiser. We headed to Odawara and had breakfast at the station.

After that, my friends rinko’ed their bikes for the train home while I continued on the planned route to Yamato, then another 26 km to my home. I also needed a few naps to get me home safely.

With this ride, I now have 104 contiguous months of Century a Month.

I may join a 400 km brevet later this spring and a 200 km brevet or two again after the summer.

As for the Flèche that we DNF’ed twice now, let’s see what we can come up with next year. We may just try it again a third time 🙂