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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Mar 18, 2011 - 11:51am PT
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Well it's midnight in Japan and what exactly has been accomplished today no one knows. More press conferences with vague information. All the reactors were sprayed with water canon including one from a U.S. base. The level of radiation did not go down afterward. Nothing was said about whether the heat did or not. The French are shipping in plane loads (tons) of boron.Nothing got worse but nothing seems to have gotten better either.
There is however, a palpable sense of relief that international experts are arriving as no one trusts the Japanese government at this point. Thousands of people in the area surrounding the reactors are fleeing westward. Soon they too will create a humanitarian disaster that threatens to eclipse the tsunami victims living in shelters. The Japanese government mentioned for the first time today that they might have to evacuate the tsunami victims to other regions of Japan.
Once again hoping that tomorrow will be a better day.
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happiegrrrl
Trad climber
New York, NY
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Mar 18, 2011 - 11:52am PT
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rrradam - No offense, but....do you realize you just took it right back to a sort of damage control statement for nuclear energy in your post?
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
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Mar 18, 2011 - 12:08pm PT
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Seems the situation can only get better. And it will.
So what if gamma radiation is so strong now that humans cannot approach the
reactors and modern computer operated equipment has a reduced operating life
of perhaps hours until the chips fail (fire trucks?) and the containment is cracked and leaking unspeakable isotopes and some zirconium cladding fires fizzle away at the fuel bundles creating plumes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening
Radiation effects on electronics
Fundamental mechanisms
Gradual accumulation of holes in the oxide layer in MOSFET transistors leads to worsening of their performance, up to device failure when the dose is high enough; see total ionizing dose effects.
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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Mar 18, 2011 - 12:12pm PT
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Tom C.
I just want to be clear here. You think that it is reasonable to think that some black ops people in the government created a 9.0 earthquake to depopulate the earth by 10,000 people?
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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Mar 18, 2011 - 12:19pm PT
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rrrADAM and HFCS,
Prove it. Show me specifically where I was wrong.
You guys just throw out continual ad hominem attacks and say I'm wrong yet never prove it. You know just saying someone is wrong and then never proving it is a tactic that some very dishonest politicians use. It is called labeling, and then hoping the label sticks with never a shred of evidence. Say the lie long enough and loud enough and you hope others will believe it.
It's like the GOP saying Global Warming is a fallacy. Creating No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in which they have left every child/student behind including their parents, teachers, and administrators, hoping to crush public education. Or Race To The Top (RTTT) which is really race to the bottom. Someone wins and everyone else loses. "The Clear Skies" initiative which is anything but. "The Patriot Act," which is worse than George Orwell's world of 1984. I can go on and on. It is a very dishonest and deceptive tactic, yet you use it continuously.
Prove it.
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Brandon-
climber
Done With Tobacco
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Mar 18, 2011 - 12:29pm PT
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I just want to be clear here. You think that it is reasonable to think that some black ops people in the government created a 9.0 earthquake to depopulate the earth by 10,000 people?
Here is proof that the quake was created by man, lol.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRqcxjdRzGw
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Brandon Lampley
Mountain climber
Boulder, CO
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Mar 18, 2011 - 12:32pm PT
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I'm not am alarmist. A pragmatist. It was obvious 2days after the quake this thing was out of control. Also obvious the world wide public would freak out.
No new nukes for now. Shut down some old ones. China and the rest of us build more gas and coal plants. Cause the wider public still not freaked about the nasty negative externalities of them. And theres massive profits to be made still. Hopefully we'll pull our heads out and massively reallocate resources to renewables. And curb demand.
But you need an educated, thinking public, we've massively divested in public education. It will take a generation to change that. Wait we are intensifying our attack on public education.
This fuku disaster won't be resolved til it's buried in an enormous pile of sand and concrete.
I'm no expert on anything, but that helps me not get lost in the weeds. Klimmer is pretty darn good at it too.
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dirtbag
climber
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Mar 18, 2011 - 12:52pm PT
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Wind, same problem, plus it chops up many beautiful birds of prey.
Fatty, a study released a few years ago concluded the Altamont wind farm has killed a few million birds.
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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Mar 18, 2011 - 01:00pm PT
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Tom C.
I just want to be clear here. You think that it is reasonable to think that some black ops people in the government created a 9.0 earthquake to depopulate the earth by 10,000 people?
and you guys thought it was a natural disaster. hehe.....
i think tom c and klimmer are members of the same club.
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Brandon Lampley
Mountain climber
Boulder, CO
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Mar 18, 2011 - 01:01pm PT
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And for all us eggheads, it'd be fun sometime to have a discussion about Drake's equation and the variable (L), related to the inherently self-annililatory nature of intelligent life. Cause we're really talking about mitigation strategies here. Some of us want mid term progress. Big money wants more big money in the short term for shits and giggles.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Mar 18, 2011 - 01:04pm PT
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the inherently self-annililatory nature of intelligent life.
So food for thought: let's not lay all the blame on intelligent life then. For it was kinda set up from the get go by the constraints innate to this universe. If you get my drift...
.....
EDIT
-Just as intelligent life on earth was "set up" a couple hundred years ago to exploit the easy to get fossil fuels that pooled on the surface in Penn. One thing led to another and before any one generation knew it - boom - 7 billion people on this finite planet - and now later this century the bubbling crude fueling the party is going to run out.
So who - or what - is really to blame? Can you even blame anyone or anything?
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Seamstress
Trad climber
Yacolt, WA
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Mar 18, 2011 - 01:04pm PT
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I lived near a nuclear plant for 42 years with no incidents. I also had great faith in that company because of the people who worked there and the culture of the company. Mid sized companies are big enough to afford real training and safety programs, but not so big that bureaucracy drowns out all reality. Their safety record was excellent, and they made money. At that time, I worked in telecom and followed all utility proceedings in that state very carefully.
I have no faith in the ability of a government or regulatory agency to regulate any industry effectively. They can only make it harder and raise the incentive to hide problems. Having lived through many regulatory proceedings, it is amazing how varied the backgrounds are of the people who get to make the decisions. Many proceedings focused on technical decisions end up being college courses that most of these regulators would flunk at the end.
I would never want to live next to a coal or natural gas plant. Even though natural gas is a lot greener than other fossil fuels, the volatility scares me. The accidents in that industry hit the paper the next morning, and then disappear from our minds. The human suffering and environmental impact of coal is very large. The high human price paid to simply extract coal from the ground is huge. You won't see that on the front page of the paper very often. Coal plant emmissions have damaged this planet far more than any other generation technology that I know.
Wind can be a contributor, but it is not base load friendly today. Most renewable resources suffer from the same issue - it's availability is often contingent on weather. Our need for power is not similarly related. Storage mechanisms for power are not terribly efficient. Imagine "storing"power by pumping water uphil with excess generation, then releasing it when the wind stops blowing (sun stops shining, etc.) There are a lot of impacts to those type of storage mechanims.
Solar sounds great - but the economics are still marginal. There are downsides that people don't appreciate yet with the current state of that technology. We are building a couple of commercial solar facilities today. Acres of panels ties up a lot of land, needs to be tied into transmission lines, etc. The panels deteriorate very rapidly.
Energy is inherently dangerous. There are costs to all technology. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The team operating an asset determines much about the potential for disaster.
How do you ensure that any energy plant operates safely, and can respond to emergencies? If a company has an inappropriate safety/technical program, what do you do? Punishing a company does not fix a problem. It fosters behavior to hide the problems. Installing a operating team that is top notch to work on site and oversee operations for a perdiod of time at the company's expense. That makes sense to me. You don't see companies pledging to staff new plants with a mixture of seasoned staff drawn from facilities with great oeprating records. The focus of applications is always on the designs, costs, procedures, but not on the staff.
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golsen
Social climber
kennewick, wa
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Mar 18, 2011 - 01:10pm PT
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It will take many days before the situation there is stable. This is not TV.
I don't know if Nuclear Energy is "cost effective". However, if you think that the costs of coal fired power plant derived energy (45% of our Electrical Power) includes all of the health and environmental impacts in their cost equation, then you are sadly mistaken.
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Brandon Lampley
Mountain climber
Boulder, CO
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Mar 18, 2011 - 01:15pm PT
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We currently and likely never will be able to appropriately identify and price negative externalities for energy. We should try, but titanic forces of profit and greed have the upper hand in this fight.
HFCS, I'm picking up what you're laying down up there. I can't get on board with moral relativism though.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Mar 18, 2011 - 01:25pm PT
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hey there say, jan.... thanks for sharing from japan...
as to this:
The Japanese government mentioned for the first time today that they might have to evacuate the tsunami victims to other regions of Japan
i know i had a far-fetched hope that somehow these folks could have been moved to where they could get shelter, food and water... but perhaps now, they will find a way to do this...
even if it is only a group at a time... though, sadly now, too, it seems it will be harder still though to find a suitable area, with food in the other areas, now gone from the shelves as well...
:(
they are still in the prayers of many folks...
please keep sharing, jan... thanks for the update...
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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Mar 18, 2011 - 01:29pm PT
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Yo GOP Nuclear Energy/Nuclear industry apologists . . .
I got your talking points right here. Didn't you guys get the memo? . . .
Coulter tells O’Reilly: Radiation is good for you
Ann Coulter on O'Reilly : Discusses her column on Japan "A Glowing Report on Radiation"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FNFF61E_Dg
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x564610
Oh no, here we go. Ionizing nuclear radiation is good for you, just like The Patriot Act, Clear Skies Intiative, NCLB, Taxing the Rich is Bad, Taxing the Middle Class and the Poor is Good, Unions are Bad, Corporate America is Good, Teachers are the Ultimate Evil of Society and We Must Radicaly Defund Public Education, We Must Crush All Public Endeavors Run for The Good and Privatize Everything. Our GOD is Money, Greed, Power and Screw Everyone Else (I got mine why should I care?). . . and on, and on, and on.
Q: How did you learn to read, write, and do math? Who can you thank for that?
Fattrad,
Qs: Why are you the evil one and why do you celebrate evil? Did you not learn anything when you read The Torah?
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Mar 18, 2011 - 02:10pm PT
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rrradam - No offense, but....do you realize you just took it right back to a sort of damage control statement for nuclear energy in your post?
Yea, I need to just stick to relevant issues and details I can speak on... I have a bad habit of knee-jerk replies at times, and can get off on a tangent...
Like 'klimmer'... Which, BTW, you HAVE been shown where you've been wrong, in detail, numerous times, in numeroous threads, yet you just continue to reload and keep shooting.
In fact, I would wager that this isn't the first time you have heard this, and not just on this site?
Thing is, you REALLY believe you are right, even when shown you are wrong... I doubt this would make any sense to you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Here is the Cornell research paper it refers to:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64.2655&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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Mar 18, 2011 - 02:26pm PT
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rrrADAM,
Once again, I'll make it easy for you. On this thread, where have I been wrong? Specifically. Where?
I will admit to one error:
I thought the "Triangle of Life" sounded like good information, then others chimed in and exposed that the guy who came up with that has been debunked. I didn't know anything about the guy or the triangle of life until then. I admit I was wrong about that. Mybad.
You have given good information, but also and everyone can clearly see for themselves, you have been a nuclear industry apologist throughout the thread.
Edit:
Hey, I understand. Like I said my dad has been in the nuclear industry for 30 years. I know. We have had many arguements. But he does admit that there are massive problems in the industry. He is very honest about that.
Like Al Gore said,
"It is hard to convince someone of the truth of something when their job demands that they don't understand it," or something to that effect (paraphrased).
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PP
Trad climber
SF,CA
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Mar 18, 2011 - 02:29pm PT
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Seamstress, I was wondering if there were any nukes in the seattle/portland area. from humbolt north to alaska is a subduction fault zone similar to Japan and prone to high 8 earthquakes. Hope the nuke was designed for high 8 quakes otherwise they should shut it down ; because the quakes will happen.
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corniss chopper
climber
breaking the speed of gravity
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Mar 18, 2011 - 02:55pm PT
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Kept wondering why there were no specifics on how the back up diesel
generators at Fukushima failed when the 7 meter tsunami washed over the
site. Thinking it has to be so stupid and embarrassing they don't want it
to come out.
Basement Generators
Back-up diesel generators that might have averted the disaster were positioned in a basement, where they were overwhelmed by waves.
“This in the country that invented the word Tsunami...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17/japan-s-nuclear-disaster-caps-decades-of-faked-safety-reports-accidents.html
So the basements are full of sea water drowning the diesels.
An epic design flaw? Maybe maybe not.
But did General Electric design it this way or were water tight doors or
vents accidentally left open?
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