sailor went to sea sea sea

USS Chung-Hoon is headed for the South China Sea, where there have been recent minor confrontation between US and Chinese vessels

Chung-Hoon is a Burke class Aegis destroyer - good radar, but curious choice for sea defence, heavy on missiles and a bit slow and heavy to be playing bumping games.
Would have thought a frigate or two would be a better choice, nimbler better against surface harassment.

But, she's not the only ship at sea.
In fact were W still president, my eyebrows would be twitching, because the Eisenhower is overlapping with the Roosevelt in the Middle East, with the latter due to head back;
the Washington is out of her new Japanese home port, presumably not a million miles from the China Sea, but the Stennis was also just toodling around there also until this week;
and Nimitz, Truman and Reagan are all at sea doing quals.

So six carriers out and a seventh in area (don't think Stennis is back in US if the Net is telling the truth).
No way Obama would be doing anything stupid.... right?

On an unrelated issue we occasionally check in on Iran and what it is up to...

So, the Bushehr (large Russian design enriched uranium light water power reactor) is doing a "dry run" - loading fake fuel elements and trying out operations.
This makes sense, you want to check all the cranes and controls etc are working before you put the rather valuable enriched uranium rods in, and if there is stuff still to do, then you certainly do not want the core to go hot before you are ready.
Oh, they keep saying they'll power up Real Soon Now, but the Russians keep dragging their feet, can't keep doing that indefinitely.

You do want to announce this, as there are a lot of paranoid people about which would get twitchy as and when large heavy metal rods get moved to Bushehr and things start moving, which will also be very obvious to anyone looking on the ground or from above.

Apparently the fake fuel elements are lead rods, which seems strange.
I guess they are cheap, probably strong enough (the rods are long, thin and heavy) and have about the right mass and moment of inertia to be a good test.
Personally I'd have gone with natural or depleted uranium clad in zircon, but those might be trickier to make. Be handy to have set around though, especially in case you wanted to do a little surreptitious Pu-239 breeding on the edge of the core...

Anyway, Israelis are distracted right now. But not indefinitely, and this is an unstable situation.

Obama is not going to want to look "weak", but I'm figuring he knows that the US is not in a position to start a shooting war anywhere right now.

Hrmph.
Interesting times.