Slashdot Mirror
Electricity Rationing Starting Monday In Tokyo
siddesu writes "Japanese officials are announcing a schedule for electricity blackouts to last from tomorrow until the end of April. Practically all suburbs of Tokyo will be affected by the blackouts. The 23 districts of central Tokyo seem to be exempt for the moment, but if supply is not sufficient, blackouts are possible. Electricity will be interrupted for about 3 hours a day in each area."
Problem solved.
But from what I heard, not your mom.
meep!
Back in my day, we didn't even have rationing.
Anonymous Coward
Says my buddy in Japan in an e-mail 10 minutes ago when I showed him this Slashdot post: "This already started. Trains are stopped this morning because of this. Many traffic jam too due to people evacuating from kanto area"
I wonder how much of the power capacity issues is due to Japan using a combination of 50Hz and 60Hz power preventing them from easily sending power between the two systems? Though I guess they could have a high voltage DC intertie betwen the two, so maybe it's not so significant after all.
Does anyone know why they haven't rectified (no pun intended, well ok, maybe a little) this situation years ago? Seems like there's lots of reasons for a country to have the same power standard.
I'd think everyone would just use their portable devices during the outages and then recharge the devices once power is restored, effectively shifting the load to the on-grid period.
Think commercial and manufacturing uses, Refridgeration, Lighting, Heat, Servers, Electric Rail.
It that works look for the Japanese to start doing this regularly. They have negative population growth and it's a problem.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A million iPhones do not take up a significant proportion of daily electricity usage.
Now, as to whether an iPhone is useful without a base station...
What's going on with ham radio in Japan? Seems there's not a lot of news from individuals vs other disasters.
I'd think everyone would just use their portable devices during the outages and then recharge the devices once power is restored, effectively shifting the load to the on-grid period.
Even in japan with all of its cool electronic devices, mobile devices account for a tiny portion of the overall grid load.
Think refrigerators, washer/dryers, cooking appliances, electric heating, lighting, plus all of the industrial users.
My Android cell phone battery holds around 5 watt-hours of power (double it if you want to account for charging and other efficiency losses). My (American) refrigerator uses around 1600 watt-hours of power per day. So charging my phone uses a fraction of the power used by my refrigerator.
That's probably a good thing. Japan's population is aging. Whilst for the past half century the population was growing, over the next half century projected to decline such that 2050 will have a lower population than 1950.
It's an honor thing. It's not that Japan is being stubborn or just refusing to accept help for no good reason. For them, accepting help would be a display of weakness, which is heavily frowned upon. The Japanese highly value honor and humbleness. They don't like to ask others for things like that because it feels like taking charity. They see more honor in pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and overcoming through their own hard work and solidarity.
Remember that these are a people who, for many centuries, had a proud tradition of disemboweling themselves when they screwed up in order to restore their family's honor. That's pretty hardcore dedication to honor. So I don't figure their refusal for help as unkindness or stubbornness. It's just their tradition and ways, and I respect that, so I really don't feel offended at all at their saying "No thanks."
True, the honor thing does come into play. But you have to admit, it does go a little too far when you run the risk of, say, nuclear fallout.
Do you have some bizarre notion that other nations offered to beam their electrons at Japan but got turned down?
This doesn't have anything to do with refusing help or not, it has everything to do with large amounts of critical infrastructure being damaged or destroyed.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Wow, way to mix Japan up in a Vietnamese meme.
That doesn't make sense. They don't ask for or accept help, because they are humble. What's more humble than accepting help?
OK then, how about:
North Japan is Best Japan!
All of their plugin-robot-overlords are fucked.
Honor only goes so far, is it honorable to let your countrymen and woman die because you are too stubborn to accept help from other nations when your infrastructure is failing and the simple lack of fresh water and food will kill people?
And you're right, it's not unkind or stubborn, it's downright stupid. Save your people, work on saving face afterwards
Normal people worry me!
Power rationing will be insanely complex to manage. Their entire people-transit system is reliant upon electric trains and monorails. It makes sense that their trains are on separate circuits, but I sure don't envy the poor bastard who has to make that power schedule workable.
Obviously it's absolutely their right to accept or decline offers of help as they wish, but I don't see what saving face has to do with it. I'm not even saying that they were necessarily wrong to decline help (I actually haven't seen too much in the news about that aspect), but your assertion that sticking to tradition simply because "that's the way it's always been done" is anything other than a textbook example of stubbornness (and perhaps even stupidity) seems flawed, and retaining a metaphysical concept of "honour" at the potential expense of people's lives and the nation's recovery is far from what I'd call a "good reason" for refusing help.
Now, it might well be the case that there are good reasons for them to decline help, and if so then that's fair enough, but when culture and tradition have demonstrably negative effects on the general good of the population, they should without question be abandoned. Tradition alone is never a good reason to do something - if the tradition does have a sound logical basis then do things for that logical reason, not for the sake of the tradition itself; I'm not just talking about Japan here, either (although my potentially uninformed understanding is that tradition is generally considered more important there than in the West) - there are plenty of ideas that should have long since been consigned to history all over the world.
You had days?
rewriting history since 2109
You'd almost think that NONE of the comments here have grocked the problem. It's about the loss of generating capacity from damaged power stations reactors!
Have you thought about founding an oil company? I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Several nuclear powered warships from allies could temporarily provide a significant portion of the lost power. And at reasonable rates, too; I'm sure with the US Navy's budget problems they might be convinced to rent-a-carrier for a few months at the right price. Whatever their temporary economic woes, Japan should be good for it.
The US Navy's aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships are an important part of relief efforts because they're mobile helicopter launching platforms. In a disaster, helicopters (and V-22 Ospreys) are the only good way to get around.
When President Obama said something in response to the earthquake, the first thing he said was that aircraft carriers were on their way:
Here's a report from today on defense.gov:
The Navy just spent $662-million renovating the USS Enterprise. They're going to "throw it away" in 2 years, because it's an expensive ship to operate. I propose dedicating this ship to disaster relief. They can keep it in Hawaii, remove the fighter jets, and load it with heavy lift helicopters and everything that could possibly be needed in any type of disaster. Japan needs a lot of tents right now, but there probably aren't many in the Ronald Reagan's inventory.
This is an evolution of my posts here last summer, "To Save the Gulf, Send the Enterprise" - thank you all for visiting, the feedback, and the +1's. :)
When Disaster Strikes, Send the Enterprise. Or at least do a proper study, before throwing the ship away.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Portable devices use piss for power, by virtue of being portable.
Using the microwave for enough time to warm up a TV dinner uses far more power than fully charging everything portable I own. Well, I have more laptops than normal folks so maybe that doesn't quite hold true. but the point remains.
Say 5 minutes at full tilt in a 1000W microwave = 300kJ.
A 50Wh laptop battery has 180kJ
A mobile phone's 1Ah li-ion batt has 13kJ, etc. So I could completely charge my phone 23 times for the same amount of juice. (well, somewhat less, the charging has some loss).
Avg car battery is something like 3MJ on the other hand, which is almost an hour of microwaving food on high.
Now bring in things like electric stoves, ovens, clothes dryers, such cases...
Sent from my PDP-11
If Japan had deficit spent more on earthquake research, they might have been able to avoid this disaster.
They did. Their buildings are much more earthquake-resistant than any other country. This was an extremely powerful quake, one of the most powerful recorded, there's inevitably going to be damage. Anytime you have an extremely powerful natural disaster, you're going to encounter problems. Aside from fusing the earth's plates with nukes or moving the entire island away from the fault lines, I don't know what you're suggesting they could have been more proactive about.
I don't think Japan actually refused help. The first BBC video I watched of the nuclear accident was news about the US military airlifting (not just offering) coolant to the overheating reactor. I'm pretty sure the Japanese would be more than willing to accept aid that comes with no strings attached.
Besides, as another poster implied, this is a story about rotating blackouts ("offered to beam their electrons"). Portable generators are at best a stop-gap measure that begs the question of where you get the fuel to power it up. More practical would be food, tents, first aid, portable toilets, used clothing, and maybe search-and-rescue robots.
And that's why we saw so many nations involved in aid and rescue after Katrina. The response there was totally people first, face later.
What's that got to do with the price of fish?
Honor only goes so far, is it honorable to let your countrymen and woman die because you are too stubborn to accept help from other nations when your infrastructure is failing and the simple lack of fresh water and food will kill people?
And you're right, it's not unkind or stubborn, it's downright stupid. Save your people, work on saving face afterwards
Just because you and I don't agree with a cultural practice, doesn't make it wrong.
You had punctuation marks
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Avoid it? Avoid it how? By asking the earth to please not quake? By forecasting the earthquake with an accuracy for which there is no credible method?
No wait, I know - they could have "deficit spent" enough to move all their coastal towns a mile inland, then built a 50 foot wall around the entire country, with gates to load and unload ships at new docking facilities.
Pardon me for getting a little exercised and calling this AC a FUCKING RETARD HEARTLESS BASTARD PIECE OF SHIT.
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
Here in Tochigi just north of Tokyo and south of Fukushima (where the reactors are) the blackouts have been cancelled (or perhaps postponed).
cheers, david
Yes. They are refusing help. That is why they have officially asked for aid.
http://homepost.kpbs.org/2011/03/video-japanese-government-officially-asks-for-help/
Less poverty and a better education system?
Dilbert RSS feed
Not that significant. The Fukushima I power plant was supplying something like 2 Gigawatts of power, which is about 10 Nimitz class carriers managing to push all their power onto the grid. Never mind that there are many other generation failures.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The Japanese are civilized? And have been for many hundreds of years?
Is this a troll? Is Japan refusing our assistance?
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Several nuclear powered warships from allies could temporarily provide a significant portion of the lost power. And at reasonable rates, too
I can't find generating capacities for their nuclear power plans, but a Nimitz class aircraft carrier can deliver 190MW of power from the reactors to the shafts (via steam), so even if you could convert all of that steam to electricity that would account for a tiny fraction of the power that the nuclear power plants can generate.
Fukushima Dai-ichi has 4.7GW of generating capacity.
And there's the problem of figuring out where to plug it in even if you could find enough ships to generate even 1GW of power. It's not like there's a big extension cord laying out by some dock that they could just plug in to. It would likely take months if not years to engineer a solution and construct the appropriate facilities.
Here's a good example of why the multiculturalism movement is worthless and destructive. "Well, it's their way, so I can't criticize it." Bullshit. Letting hundreds or thousands more of your own people die because you're "too proud" to accept help is immoral. Leaders who take that course instead of doing what they can to ease their people's misery should be excused from government, and probably prosecuted for criminal malfeasance.
Some people (not parent poster) use this argument to excuse female genital mutilation, the burka, virtual house arrest for women, honor killings, and "The Jersey Shore". I'm not advocating invasion over these horrible "cultural traditions", but can't we at least start with, "that's wrong - you shouldn't be doing that"?
On the bright side, at least in this disaster Japan is accepting help from the world.
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
that pride also makes them nod and say yes when negotiating with western partners, even when that means LYING to your face. Its more honorable to lie directly into your face than to disagree lol.
Not to mention honor demands from them covering up nuclear accidents (Monju).
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Uh, yes, and GP used them right. GP's talking about the amount of energy the battery holds and the refrigerator consumes, not about power.
Dilbert RSS feed
Negative population growth isn't a problem on an over populated island thats completely incapable of sustaining itself without the rest of the world providing imports for it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
That wasn't particularly noticeable during WWII.
The Japanese have a very strong culture of obeying authority, regardless of whether that authority is leading them to do good or bad. Part of that culture involves being very keen on reporting any transgressions of their neighbours, no matter how trivial, to the authorities.
For sure they have a much lower crime rate than the rest of the world, and that's a good thing. But it's a side effect of a culture that isn't necessarily positive. And many of the other side effects are negative. For example their suicide rate is very high.
Nothing prevented them from obeying the law and handing it to the people in the US who had the same skills.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Thank you for your wonderful example also of over-generalizing, and utterly failing to look at facts.
1- There may be a good reason why the help offered (which is what ?) does not help with the issue at hand (which is what ?). Any help from any one does not help with any and all problems.
2- This has nothing to do with genital mutilation and such, but please don't let that derail your rant.
3- If you want to talk multiculturalism, you may want to try and weight both sides of the issue. I think the gist is that there's "good" stuff in all cultures, and "bad" stuff too, so one culture should not be allowed to wipe out all the others. You're good with examples of bad stuff from other cultures... know of any good ones from them ? or bad stuff from yours ?
I personally, think your post is worthless. And destructive.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Some people (not parent poster) use this argument to excuse female genital mutilation, the burka, virtual house arrest for women, honor killings, and "The Jersey Shore". I'm not advocating invasion over these horrible "cultural traditions", but can't we at least start with, "that's wrong - you shouldn't be doing that"?
Sure. But then again Americans are very bad at accepting when the rest of the world points at what they do wrong, saying "that's wrong - you shouldn't be doing that".
Yep. Also, please take the elevator up when there's power, so that you only have to go down by foot. Same with breathing-assist apparatus: take big gulps of air while you can, then try for that apnea world record.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
And would they beam the electricity through a distribution grid that is destroyed to houses which don't exist anymore?
Or did you think all they'd need to do would be to have an ensign run down to some magical hookup in downtown Tokyo with a big extension cord?
It's an honor thing. It's not that Japan is being stubborn or just refusing to accept help for no good reason. For them, accepting help would be a display of weakness, which is heavily frowned upon. The Japanese highly value honor and humbleness. They don't like to ask others for things like that because it feels like taking charity. They see more honor in pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and overcoming through their own hard work and solidarity.
What a load of bullshit honestly. There is already US search teams on the ground in Japan and US search aircraft carriers of the coast of Japan providing landing platforms and US airbases provided backup airfields for commercial flights that couldn't land. Hardly seems like not accepting aid to me.
Remember that these are a people who, for many centuries, had a proud tradition of disemboweling themselves when they screwed up in order to restore their family's honor. That's pretty hardcore dedication to honor. So I don't figure their refusal for help as unkindness or stubbornness. It's just their tradition and ways, and I respect that, so I really don't feel offended at all at their saying "No thanks."
Seppuku was a warrior tradition started around the 12th century which lasted for about 700 years. It probably started with a belief that the soul is contained in the stomach and was thus linked to religious practice and later evolved into an honorable way to serve out a death sentence. It's worth remembering though that at the height of their power and refinement in the Edo era, the warrior class never made up more than 10% of the population and even then were mostly bureaucrats and it's doubtful that every warrior believed in the practice of seppuku. It was only in the Meiji-era that it was elevated and romanticized as a form of traditional martial morality and national morality. In other words, 90% of the population never practiced it in the first place. Of the remaining 10% who made up the warrior class for many it was probably a gruesome and fearful but honorable way to serve out a death sentence and not something they would consider otherwise. Or in other words nobody anywhere near serious about sociology or at all knowledgeable about Japan uses a hugely romanticized and elevated in pop. culture custom to judge the actions of modern Japanese (except maybe to matters of support for the death sentence as a form of criminal punishment although even that is questionable. After all lots of other countries also support it). It's like using the extremes of Victorian upper class moral codes as a lens through which to judge the modern British.
Here let me give you some more realistic reasons, which have actually been discussed in the Japanese media, as to why foreign aid workers aren't so helpful:
Culture
“Looting simply does not take place in Japan. I’m not even sure if there’s a word for it that is as clear in its implications as when we hear ‘looting,’" said Gregory Pflugfelder, director of the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University.
Japanese have “a sense of being first and foremost responsible to the community,” he said.
To Merry White, an anthropology professor at Boston University who studies Japanese culture , the real question is why looting and disorder exist in American society. She attributes it largely to social alienation and class gaps.
The bad part is that SE had just finished a data center move Monday, and that was postponed. So the quake hits days after SE has gone to the trouble of moving their MMO servers around, but before Fukushima #1's scheduled closure two weeks later. It will be interesting to see what happens. I'm just glad I was online when it was going down and got to ride out the last hour with everyone else, just like when my server got merged away a year ago.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
A game I play (Final Fantasy 11) has taken their servers, etc... offline for at least the next week, starting Saturday evening their time.
Also a lot of extraneous power usage (lighting monuments, for example) has been shut down as well.
Indeed. They are quite capable of handling this, as they have been preparing for this event for years. They also seem a little hesitant to accept all help (they did accept some, in particular dog rescue teams), likely as they do not want too many unknowns in the way of their own efforts.
And on top of all that, the Japanese are remaining calm and organized. No Looting, stealing kids (e.g. Aceh), mass panic or the likes. Bringing in a boatload of foreigners from all over messing about without too much coordination will make matters much worse. Then there is the Japanese pride, and lastly there is the fact that this really is not as bad as the media make it sound. If the quake would have struck further south, the tsunami would have wiped Tokyo off the map (as the water would have then entered Tokyo bay.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Couldn't we use the reactors aboard our nuclear vessels to provide some electricity if the ships aren't moving? ie, the USS Ronald Reagan and other Nimitz-class carriers have two Westinghouse A4W reactors producing 94MW each. I'm not sure if that could all be diverted to electrical transmission, but if so a few nuclear ships could temporarily provide power for a large area.
The US did refuse an offer of 1600 medics+supplies from Cuba. Nobody is immune to stubborn pride.
I don't know what it would have to do with anything, but in any case you could not be more wrong.
Islam (muslims) account for about 0.1% of the population.
The majority say they do not have a religion and do not believe in any god. Though culturally many are non-practicing buddhists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_religion
P.S. You're very ignorant.
Goddamn I wish I had some mod points right now. +5 informative, +5 historical accuracy.
I tip my hat to you sir.
Obeying authority is what some people consider "civilized".
Sad but true.
How we know is more important than what we know.
a other name for rolling blackouts
Oh please, do we REALLY need right wing bullshit like this? really? News Flash: Those generations paid into the fund huge sums of money, many of whom like my grandparents didn't even live long enough to collect a single penny. If BOTH sides wouldn't have used those funds like giant IOUs to pay off their Wall Street cronies and hand out "too big to fail" bailouts every time some money man wrote a check then there wouldn't be a problem.
But please, go back to listening to the same bunch that has been feeding you huge piles of unbelievable bullshit (how about them WMDs?) while helping their friends like Haliburton make huge sums of money while incorporating overseas so they don't have to pay taxes as I'm sure they really have your interests at heart! BTW I got a really nice bridge you might be interested in, I heard it goes to nowhere so it has really low mileage!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
odd, someone said that just before you showed up.
rewriting history since 2109
Portable devices are typically 'less' than their always connected counterparts.
They also tend to be more energy efficient since they want to stretch the life of the batteries.
There are also less portable devices than wired devices in most cases.
And the idea is that everyone is going to draw all the power they can when its on, and they accept that, so they manage it by simply limiting the duty cycle so that you just don't have the time to suck down the same power you normally would.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Too true. I live in Ireland, and a discussion came up about what would happen if an earthquake+Tsunami of that magnitude hit this country close to say, Dublin.
My conclusion was that you would basically have to write off the whole state. Half the buildings would collapse, Dublin would be submerged, and there would be no infrastructure or competence to mount a rescue or recovery operation. Those not killed in the mass collapse of buildings, would die soon after from starvation and disease. The response of most of the population would be, naturally, to emigrate.
But... this conclusion would probably hold for most other western states as well. We all remember Hurricane Katrina. The mantras of free market solutions and small government have left most western nations with barebones disaster response capabilities. A major Earthquake, Tsunami, Hurricane or firestorm in the wrong place could probably turn most western countries into Haiti within hours.
By contrast, the Japanese need only put up with power cuts. Nuclear plants aside--they have a well developed emergency response infrastructure. No skyscrapers collapsed and people actually got a warning that a Tsunami was coming, despite the nearness of the epicentre. The army was out collecting people the very next day. Again, compare this response to what happened in New Orleans.
Japan was far more prepared than any other Western nation, and their preparations have paid off. Pray your country is never visited with a disaster of this magnitude.
May the Maths Be with you!
generations paid into the fund huge sums of money
Sure, but you're missing a crucial piece of the equation. Unlike personal savings, rightly or wrongly, state managed pension plans depend on two things -
1) The contributions people made into the pool during their working lives
2) The contributions being made into the pool by people who are still working
If however, the number of individuals in #2 continue to shrink, well you're in trouble.
News Flash: Those generations paid into the fund huge sums of money, many of whom like my grandparents didn't even live long enough to collect a single penny.
It maybe interesting for you to know that most people they collect well beyond what they pay in. After 8-10 years people collect everything they've paid in. This is ONLY a count of retires, not including slugs who collect because they have phantom back pain or are "disabled" by an alcohol problem.
The argument isn't "right wing" as so much as facts. Please use facts.
http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/research_strategies/market_insight/retirement_strategies/planning/when_should_you_take_social_security.html
If the original poster wants to talk about energy, then perhap the poster should use the word "energy" instead of the word "power"..
1- There may be a good reason why the help offered (which is what ?) does not help with the issue at hand (which is what ?). Any help from any one does not help with any and all problems.
Losing mod points, but yes, this. There is a HUGE logistical challenge in managing searches like this, and adding in people that don't know the language or the area at all just needlessly complicates managing the search. The Japanese are accepting help where help makes sense, but the mythical man month applies just as much to search and rescue as it does to software engineering.
Monstar L
Don't you wish Fleshlights could transform into other things like dinobots?
"Me Grimlock have funny taste in mouth"
I have been a proponent of nuclear here on Slashdot for a very long time, and hopefully the issues with the reactors aren't as bad as the news that is dribbling out. However, this terrible disaster has caused me to have a lot of long thoughts about nuclear energy in general and I am quite sure that the situation in Japan looks terribly unappetizing. Hopefully Daiichi Number 3 is not on fire right now, and that the combined synergies of the Japanese government, the U.S., and other wealthy nations can come together to prevent even more nuclear carnage. In a way it is sadly ironic that the only nation to have ever been bombed with a nuclear weapon would embrace nuclear technology and its inherent benefits and dire drawbacks and then continue to run aging plants in extremely high risk areas. Newer reactors may indeed be safer, but their placement should be in areas with little to no seismic activity. Then again, I suppose that there are always other natural disasters including meteor impacts and the like, but the odds seem remote of a nuclear plant being hit by an impactor.
It's just a travesty on so many levels, and comes at a time when we need energy in the world that is affordable and not based on carbon... My prayers go out to everyone in Japan and I guess there will be many stories and narratives of this event for years to come. It feels like more than the Earth shifted the other day. This feels like a paradigm shift, but what into what future, into what other parallel dimension did we travel? It is just so awful on so many levels, and reminds me how utterly powerless us humans are in the face of such phenomenal seismic power. That the destruction hasn't been worse, or even that the reactors have held mostly intact this long is a testament to Japans stringent design codes and standards.. I kind of stand in awe of how the Japanese seem to be bearing this catastrophe with a silent and brave spirit that won't be beaten. Anyway, I doubt rolling blackouts are a large burden.... and whatever burden it is, the brave people of Japan will shoulder it, and move forward.
This should help a little:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=beware-the-fear-of-nuclearfear-2011-03-12
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
My neighbour got SMS text messages from the heart of the disaster zone yesterday. Phone calls impossible.
Bush didn't get kicked out by the people- there's a term limit. Believe me, most Americans would've had little trouble electing him a third time. *sigh*
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Negative population growth is not a problem.
The only problem is that they seem content to let an entire generation build helper robots for old people instead of upgrading critical infrastructure, like nuclear reactors.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
1/10 - Too Randian
It might have gotten more play and attention on DU or Daily Kos.
And when Cuba has a disaster they refuse help from the US.
Show me where George W. Bush was on the 2008 ballot. Thats right, he wasn't on it.
In the US a President can only serve two terms, thats why Clinton didn't run in 2000 and why Bush didn't run in 2008, nothing about being "kicked out."
One single-point-of-failure stands out. The diesel generators were under the building, so depended on the seawall. Battery capacity was apparently quite small.
One report said there was a safety device to ignite hydrogen before too much built up, but it required electricity from the mains. The story seems a bit fishy, as electricity has been restored and Unit 3 still blew up. Had the gases been too great to ignite for more than two days?
Most critically, the decision whether to vent radioactive gas vs. try to contain it seems not to be clearly laid out in policy. I can't imagine there is a policy to let the building blow up. Yet that was the decision today. Officials announced it might blow up several hours ahead of time.
At Three Mile Island they tried a plasma device to convert hydrogen back to water or something, but finally ended up venting.
A radical policy would be too allow one unit to keep running if the plant was expected to lose mains and diesel. After all, we have seen they do not shut down quickly enough to prevent problems. The NYT says it will take one year now of bathing and radioactive venting to cool down the pile.
But I doubt these plants are set up to power themselves anyway. I seem to recall they depend on the grid to make it all work.
Donate and help:
USA Redcross Japan Fund (Credit Card or Amazon Payments):
https://american.redcross.org/site/Donation2?idb=0&5052.donation=form1&df_id=5052
Redcross Japan (Via Google Crisis Response, using Google Checkout):
http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html
You have just described all insurance, public or private.
Social Security is a multi-generational insurance policy. It is currently solvent enough to pay the current level of benefits until 2037 and 80% of benefits for 40 years after that. It could be made to pay full benefits beyond 2037 with some pretty minimal adjustments. That takes into account the baby boomers. When you hear about taxpayer money going into Social Security benefits, those are just proper repayments for the money that was borrowed against the trust fund.
There's not really an indication that the size of the US workforce is going to decline, although it's quite possible that jobs will decline as they do whenever the top tax rate goes below 50%. Yes, every single time since the beginning of income tax, when the top tax rate went below 50% we had shrinking GDP, rising unemployment and bubble economies. Every single time the top tax rate went above 50%, we had growing GDP, lowering unemployment and never a bubble economy. If that's a coincidence, it's a very strange coincidence, don't you think?
So, to summarize: Social Security is solvent. Raising taxes on the rich has always meant better times for the country. The current debate over taxes and government spending is completely phony and not based on anything but ideology.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hey, now. It doesn't have to be racism. It can also be plain old nationalism.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Sure, but you're missing a crucial piece of the equation. Unlike personal savings, rightly or wrongly, state managed pension plans depend on two things -
1) The contributions people made into the pool during their working lives
2) The contributions being made into the pool by people who are still working
If however, the number of individuals in #2 continue to shrink, well you're in trouble.
I don't think the problem is really who is paying into the fund when. The problem is simply that if you have a shrinking population then you have fewer workers for every retiree -- and that means that each retiree must consume a smaller amount of labor from the marketplace, unless you want to screw over the working man by transferring a larger portion of the fruits of his labor to retirees. There is no "retirement plan" or strategy that will change this, it's basic math.
Which is actually pretty scary, because it means that if we haven't restructured social security by the time the social security administration starts trying to redeem its bonds, we're going to get serious unrest from working people who have to pay huge taxes for services they're not receiving.
Well you know what they say, don't you? What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. That holds just as true for civilization as it does in evolution at large.
Japan has had prior experiences with earthquakes, so it should come to no surprise that they've had a game plan in the works along with prior public drills.
Look up the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Our modern fire department system got a major overhaul as a direct result of that catastrophe. From extra fire hydrants to fire drills, the rest of America learned a valuable lesson about urgent preparedness.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yeah they require the grid. Mostly because even one reactor requires a huge load. But these reactors already have steam turbines to power backup cooling pumps. Batteries are needed for the control systems, but the main driver is the excess heat itself. There's really no reason they should have failed. Batteries shipped in by helicopters could have kept them going indefinitely.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
What are you on about? Japan hasn't refused help. There are search and rescue teams on the ground, right now, from many countries including the US. The US Navy is using carriers to provide landing/refueling statons for aircraft. The Australian Air Force is airdropping food, water and other supplies (including radiation detectors). There's just two examples I can think of off the top of my head that I've seen in the last 24 hours and I'm sure there are many more...
And your argument is that preserving that symmetry is the most important objective in deciding whether or not to accept help?
When I was growing up we had "rationing" of electricity. It was called California, circa 2000AD.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
When you made your post, it was already Monday in Japan. Trains had started to run more frequently on Sunday, but now the trains here (I'm in Japan at the moment) are running a much reduced schedule. The Narita Express (direct line from Tokyo to Narita airport) isn't running. Buses to the airport are sold out.
I took a taxi to Narita and was shocked at how quiet it is here. I surmise they have canceled a lot of flights.
Many shops are closed. Since the trains are on a very reduced schedules, people can't get to work.
The electricity shortage is going to have a big impact on GDP if it isn't solved soon.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Really? Letting people die when there is another, clear cut solution isn't wrong?
Right now there are rescue teams from 10 countries including "nations like china and korea" working in Japan.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/14_12.html
Sure sure, you're talking about Kobe. Would you please give me source that shows that Japan actually turned down the offers from "nations like china and korea" in Kobe? After doing that, would you give me another one that shows that the decision is because the offers came from those countries mentioned?
A major Earthquake, Tsunami, Hurricane or firestorm in the wrong place could probably turn most western countries into Haiti within hours.
I assume you are excluding Australia. Major earthquakes are the worst natural disasters and thankfully are very rare here. However cyclone Yasi was on par in strength and size to Katrina, most of the buildings in it's path stayed intact because government regulations demand cyclone proof housing and all the older houses had already been blown away in previous cyclones. Cyclones, floods, drought and firestorms are a way of life down here, we usually have 2-3 cyclones cross the coast each year, a really major bushfire every 10-20 years, and massive floods evey time there's a strong el-Nina. There's nothing you can do about it except be well prepared before hand, send in the troops to clean up afterwards, and learn from your mistakes. Which is exactly what Japan have done. Dublin is not somewhere that is prone to natural diasters so they haven't had to learn from their mistakes. New Orleans is of course accustom to hurricanes which makes Katrina a story of gross incompetence in preparedness and bordering on criminal neglect in the aftermath.
Cyclone proof = Must be able to withstand 300km/hr winds.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
My area's blackout was supposed to begin 30 minutes ago but the fridge is still on as well as my router. Living with this until the end of April will be hell...aftershock just now...fark...can't get to work...all the supermarkets selling out of everything...convenience stores look like they're out of business...
Wow, you really have no clue just what resources are put into earthquake preparation in this country(*), do you? And you really think the seventh worst earthquake in recorded history is somehow comparable to Katrina, eh?
The building codes are the strictest in the world, schools and businesses have multiple earthquake drills a year, there are educational earthquake and tsunami centers all over, they have the military do training drills...well, I don't know exactly how often, but I see it a LOT. The coasts are barricaded with concrete tetrapods to take the kick out of oncoming tsunamis, and they seem to keep adding tetrapods on top of the old ones. They have air raid sirens at the ready, and they drill them fairly regularly (again, I don't know the frequency in hard numbers, but it's frequent). A week before the earthquake, my son came home from kindergarten telling me how hikinamis are much worse than tsunamis---they teach all this shit to the kindergarten kids to keep them prepared. And so on and on and on.
Would you kindly inform us in concrete terms what the Japanese should have done that they didn't to prepare for the seventh worst earthquake in recorded history?
(*) By "this country" I mean Japan.
The worst natural disaster in recorded history occurred less than a week ago, and you people are discussing a schedule for electricity blackouts to last from tomorrow until the end of April, where practically all suburbs of Tokyo will be affected by the blackouts???? My *god*, people, GET SOME PRIORITIES!
The bodies of nearly 10,000 dead people could give a good god damn about the advent of LAN parties, your childish Lego models, your nerf toys and lack of a "fun" workplace, your Everquest/Diablo/D&D addiction, or any of the other ways you are "getting on with your life".
And thus, the Tea Ceremony Party was born...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We all remember Hurricane Katrina. The mantras of free market solutions and small government have left most western nations with barebones disaster response capabilities.
I see what you did there. Katrina had zero to do with "free markets" and everything to do with corrupt local officials and just plain shitty citizens. I suppose "Schoolbus" Nagin didn't get a lot of press overseas. Look him up. A similar storm, Rita hit Texas a year or two later and the government responded adequately, and Texas is a poster boy of small government. I suppose that didn't make the news in Europe - inconvenient truths and all
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That's value nihilism. In effect, it's the same as Pangloss saying that we "live in the best of possible worlds." I believe it's a misguided application of some people's understanding of "multiculturalism", that it means that we should just shut up and get along to avoid conflicts. This sort of thinking has hideous consequences.
Emotions! In your brain!
A culture cannot "wipe out" another forcibly so easily, unless you commit genocide. However, I think what the parent is getting at is that people who like to "get along" and be accepting culturally usually are unable to appreciate the use of force in order to prevent bad things from happening. All use of force means that you impose your will upon another, but in order to avoid the acceptance-apathy trap one has to be able to be both judging and accepting at the same time, as the situation warrants. And there's actually nothing inherently wrong about destructiveness - there is nothing wrong with being a spider, what's wrong is eating butterflies. And other spiders, of course, unless it's warranted.
Emotions! In your brain!
That the destruction hasn't been worse, or even that the reactors have held mostly intact this long is a testament to Japans stringent design codes and standards
The Fukushima reactors have remained intact throughout the quake and tsunami -- a quake seven times more powerful than they were designed for. Ironically, the point of failure were the fossil fuel backup generators that were installed to cool the reactor cores after they were scrammed as a precautionary measure -- those were washed away by the tsunami and the truck-mounted replacements could not be connected properly...
It's only a problem if you think within the box of wall street extrapolating technology at current levels only into the future. What Malthusians forget is that technology increases and resources become less scarce. If Japan had deficit spent more on earthquake research, they might have been able to avoid this disaster.
Most of the destruction was caused by the tsunami that followed the earthquake, not the earthquake itself. Interestingly, building against earthquakes (tough base) will weaken your structure against tsunamis (porous base).
Exactly. Swedish news says that there's been one search-and-rescue expert sent over (Maybe from the SSG elite military unit or similar?) but that they explicitly has refused help en-masse because they want every search team to be escorted by Japanese military personell - not because of nationalism or such, but because of practical and logistical reasons. They would get in the way - presumably they know what they are talking about.
Emotions! In your brain!
We all remember Hurricane Katrina. The mantras of free market solutions and small government have left most western nations with barebones disaster response capabilities.
I see what you did there. Katrina had zero to do with "free markets" and everything to do with corrupt local officials and just plain shitty citizens. I suppose "Schoolbus" Nagin didn't get a lot of press overseas. Look him up. A similar storm, Rita hit Texas a year or two later and the government responded adequately, and Texas is a poster boy of small government. I suppose that didn't make the news in Europe - inconvenient truths and all
Can't mod you up, so I'll just add something. Being small is actually useful for organising things. That's what the big government people don't get. I'm sure the government had enough people/equipment to do better than they did, but that's all made harder by having a big coordination job.
Think commercial and manufacturing uses, Refridgeration, Lighting, Heat, Servers, Electric Rail.
These uses may also move to the on-time instead of being put off.
I believe GP's statement holds, albeit not because of batteries but of delayed usage.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
No, wait, that was really stupid. It's a UN-affiliated guy who also has "extensive experience in aid coordination." As part of a 6-man UN team; 2 more people are on standby, presumably to pool into another team if they decide to send one.
Emotions! In your brain!
In addition to the link Doctor_Jest provided you, there's some things to keep in mind. It's highly unlikely that this could ever get to Chernobyl levels no matter what. The Chernobyl reactor did not have a containment shell, when the core melted down and the cooling water vaporised into steam there was nothing to contain the explosion, so it took out the surrounding structure easily and spread massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment. The Japanese reactors all have containment shells, so the core would have to manage to breach the containment shell before massive amounts of radioactive material could get into the environment. This is highly unlikely to happen. In fact, all signs are that at least a partial meltdown has already occurred, but the containment shells are still intact, exactly as designed. The explosions have been due to excess hydrogen released due to the heat of the reactors breaking down coolant water. These damaged the surrounding buildings, but not the containment shells.
And while a comparison to Three Mile Island is a better example, the damage caused by the Three Mile Island incident has been overblown/over-hyped for years. Almost none of the radiological contamination there made it out of the facility. And of what was released, it was nearly all in gaseous form. While there are some groups who dispute this, all the detailed studies have found no evidence of high levels of radiation in the environment after the incident, making those groups' claims unlikely to be true. And of course, as the link Doctor_Jest provided tells you, the cancer risk isn't as high as most people think even after serious radiation releases like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki or the Chernobyl release.
So don't let this scare you, modern reactors are designed to contain even a core meltdown, which is what the Three Mile Island reactor did (the containment shell was not breached), and what is happening so far with the Japanese reactors. Keep in mind that one of the affected Japanese reactors was built in 1970, and reactor design has become safer since then. But even so, the containment shell is doing its job.
Japan has suffered major damage and casualties and will take months to get back to any sense of normality but given the magnitude of the situation I think they're coping pretty well. I am certain in the aftermath that there will be massive scope for improvement, to mitigate future disasters through in building designs, emergency response, warning systems, to tsunami proof survival shelters, nuclear plants design etc.
Do you have some bizarre notion that other nations offered to beam their electrons at Japan but got turned down?
I'm not sure how quickly it could have been deployed, but Russia has been retrofitting some of its nuclear-powered ships as mobile power plants over the last few years. The idea is that they can be parked near a costal city and augment the existing power supply. The original goal was to sell nuclear power to countries that didn't have their own generation capabilities, but they're also useful in the case of a natural disaster. China may have something similar.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Anytime you have an extremely powerful natural disaster, you're going to encounter problems."
Only difference is with wind generators, you only risk making a dent in the shrubbery.
"...oh and the exploding nuclear reactor buildings."
Which were built from the same blueprint than 23 existing US reactors.
"What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger."
What doesn't kill you, gets you radiation-sickness.
Katrina hit in August of 2005 and then Rita came along in September of the same year. We all know what Katrina did but remember that Rita hit the same basic coastline. Texas and Louisiana share a border. Having lived in the northern part of Louisiana most of my life and taken in a refugee or two, believe me when I say that it was no laughing matter. It is way to easy to sit there reading /. and just post whatever you want but the real world is not so simple. I can tell that most folks trolling or attempting to be inflammatory have never been put to the test with real tragedy. If you had, you would be much more forgiving to those that are going through rough times. House gone, beloved pets left behind to fend for themselves, not sure where the rest of your family is or if they are even alive. Let me tell you folks, that shit aint funny.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Rita
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
because the Governor of that state didn't sign the papers the Pentagon and White House faxed to her.
Utter nonsense. If they really had a contingency plan, details like that would've been on a comprehensive checklist and rehearsed ahead of time. It's like saying we didn't get the chance to retaliate a Soviet nuclear strike because the president didn't get the warning faxed to him (horrible fictional analogy, I know, but illustrates my point).
Katrina is the epic fail, compared to the epic competence displayed by the Japanese.
Katrina killed 1,836, they just found another 2,000 bodies in Japan
We had days of warning for Katrina, while they had zero to a handful seconds (for those who were far away from the epic center) for the earthquake and tsunami.
Correct. It's the net increase in human suffering that makes it wrong.
Now, if there were a completely unanimous vote amongst all those affected, then fine, it's their honour and their suffering. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert that this didn't happen.
Katrina had zero to do with "free markets" and everything to do with corrupt local officials and just plain shitty citizens.
"shitty citizens" had fairly little to do with it as well. One could argue that some of the problems in the aftermath were due to ordinary citizens, but it's not the citizen's fault that the levies broke, or that there was no way for those without cars to evacuate, or that when some tried to leave on their own police from a neighboring town fired warning shots.
What had a lot to do with it:
1. It was a category 4 hurricane when it landed and the levies were theoretically built to withstand a category 3 hurricane.
2. Governments at all levels had decided it was cheaper to give the appearance of solid levies rather than actually building solid levies, so even the category 3 rating was suspect.
3. The top federal officials were either massively misinformed, intentionally playing really really dumb, or were actually really really dumb. What surprised at least one reporter talking to FEMA director Michael Brown was that the reporter knew a lot more about what was going on than Michael Brown did.
4. Military command & control actually interfered with effective rescue operations. The only agency who really handled things well was the Coast Guard, which basically said "forget the rules, don't worry too much about orders, do whatever you need to do to get people out of there as quickly as you can." In other words, management that trusted the grunts to do their job well, and got the heck out of the way.
I am officially gone from
In Shanghai, skyscraper condos are made out of poured concrete. Floor, walls, and ceilings are stone cold. I've felt warmer in an igloo in winter time. Anyways, they still have these building catch on fire from time to time. You can find plenty of news coverage on Youtube. If it's not the bamboo scaffolding that's acting as the fuel, it's someones grease fire setting their furniture ablaze. Never underestimate the power of "stupid".
Life is not for the lazy.
moving the entire island away from the fault lines
Sounds great, please get right on it :-)
Do you know how life expectancy is calculated? Do you know what the current retirement age is?
It's amazing, but if you do all the math, most people end up taking out about what they put in. Some people take out more, some people take out nothing. But the millionaire who lives to be 80 will take out exactly the same amount as a guy like you, who makes $31,500, assuming you work for another twenty years. And this is exactly as it should be, since it's an insurance policy, not a "ponzi scheme". The difference between it and any other annuity is that the Social Security Administration does not take 20% off the top for fees and profits.
Because then we'd have lots of starving old people because most Americans don't know fuck-all about investing their money. How did your 401k do from 2000 to 2008? Oh, I'm sorry, you're too young to have more than about $1500 in your 401k, since I'm betting your company either does zero contributions to your 401k or they'll match maybe 5% of your own contributions. See, it's called "Social" Security because it protects society from having a lot of dumbfucks who end up old and poor because they invested in MiniDisc technology.
You want to put it to a vote? Americans love Social Security because it's been incredibly effective in creating a strong middle class. Just like the unions, another institution that a certain group in the US wants to destroy.
Tell you what, Jr. Just pay your social security taxes and when you retire remember this conversation. You're welcome. There are places you can go where there is not "big government". Somalia comes to mind. Let's see how well you do there, John Galt.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But... this conclusion would probably hold for most other western states as well. We all remember Hurricane Katrina. The mantras of free market solutions and small government have left most western nations with barebones disaster response capabilities. A major Earthquake, Tsunami, Hurricane or firestorm in the wrong place could probably turn most western countries into Haiti within hours.
The Government's job is to provide protection from foreign powers.
Nobody can protect against natural disasters. If one happens, it's up to the people to respond to the disaster and do what they need to survive and maintain order in their area without help from the government; since a disaster implies also a breakdown of government and government property/services just as much as it implies damage to personal property.
The government only needs to be concerned about disaster plans for working towards restoring public infrastructure.
The government can't "save" you from acts of God, nor is it their job.
Classic misunderstanding. Nodding from a Japanese person does not indicate agreement - it merely indicates that they are paying attention. It is very common for western companies to misunderstand this. Personally I find this hilarious.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Virtually everything in your post needs citations. "The Government's job is to provide protection from foreign powers." I think most people would agree that is ONE of their jobs, yes, but your favorite libertarian thinker saying something doesn't make it fact. I think one of the government's jobs is to protect against natural disasters or mitigate the damage, since as other people have pointed out, the free market sure doesn't do that.
Only difference is with wind generators, you only risk making a dent in the shrubbery.
I'm guessing that's in fact not the only difference between wind and nuclear power in the case of Japan, and I'm going to guess further that those differences were what made them build a nuclear plant rather than wind generators.
when I was growing up, we rationed everything from electricity to meat to cigars.
Listen to OTR and you will find a references sprinkled in among the comedy shows of the 1940s and 50s, even mention of The Office of Price Administration (OPA)
Rather than directing blackouts I'm surprised the Japanese government hasn't (at least I haven't heard they have, I may be wrong) asked for voluntary reduced dependence upon electricity. The Japanese are still very much a country which will readily pull together at the drop of a suggestion, as is being reported via BBC World Service.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He was referring to Ike.
And for the record, Houston was largely unscathed, and even Galveston was more or less untouched beyond a bit of water damage. My local comic book shop had power and was open for business the day after the hurricane hit, and I lived in Galveston County.
Classic misunderstanding. Nodding from a Japanese person does not indicate agreement - it merely indicates that they are paying attention. It is very common for western companies to misunderstand this. Personally I find this hilarious.
Not if they keep saying "yes" all the time. And my company knew they were lying 10 minutes after the meeting.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Back in my day, we didn't even have rationing.
You had days?
Just one.
Bow-ties are cool.
Well you know what they say, don't you? What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.
Sometimes it's "That which doesn't kill you, causes permanent cumulative damage." or "That which doesn't kill you now maybe kills you later."
Bow-ties are cool.
even, now that you are here.
/ no reason to jump in to this at all.
Classic misunderstanding. Nodding from a Japanese person does not indicate agreement - it merely indicates that they are paying attention. It is very common for western companies to misunderstand this. Personally I find this hilarious.
Not if they keep saying "yes" all the time.
It's idiomatic. Get over it.
Bow-ties are cool.
This whole thing has got to be a major setback for the Babylon Project. I know it's kind of a controversial plan, but if it fell through at this point it could leave Shinohara and Hishii in dire straits. They've built a huge chunk of their business on the specialized gear needed for reclamation of Tokyo Bay.
Bow-ties are cool.
I think one of the government's jobs is to protect against natural disasters or mitigate the damage, since as other people have pointed out, the free market sure doesn't do that.
The purpose of government's is well-defined in the US:
Note that preventing natural disasters has nothing to do with Justice, domestic tranquility, or the common defence. You could argue that some natural disasters might be preventable, and that would fall under promoting the general welfare, but that's as far as you get.
Look: nothing can protect you against natural disasters, or an earthquake of 8.5 or higher on the moment magnitude scale. The government can do things to help ensure the people are prepared, but the government cannot protect you from a natural disaster... the government cannot prevent or stop a natural disaster.
The government can't even prevent itself from being impacted by a natural disaster -- the government employees live in the country too, and there's no magic aura surrounding government infrastructure to insure they can continue to function after all infrastructure was obliterated by an earthquake.
Japan is among one of the most prepared places for powerful earthquakes, and look how helpless their government still is to do anything to have stopped the earthquake from killing thousands?
You're correct, but it's my understanding that Japanese consumer appliances (kitchen stuff, heating/lighting, and washer/dryer) are much more efficient than what we're used to in the US.
In particular, I know that most Japanese people don't even own a washer or dryer. They have hand-operated mechanical washers and air-dry (I guess). I'm sure plenty of people nowadays do have washers and dryers, but it's only recently that they've been widely used there and most houses and apartments are quite small so people still don't have the room for them.
Physics says otherwise given the following points.
A power plant can only produce so much power.
You can't use more power than is being produce.
They are doing rolling blackouts because they can't produce enough power and need to distribute that power among the different areas.
All combined this means that less power will be used.
for example, If it took 3 power plants to produce 100% power, and only 1 plant is running, then only 33% power is being produced. No matter how people redistribute their usage no more than 33% of the normal power can be used because it simply isn't being produced.
You could argue that some natural disasters might be preventable, and that would fall under promoting the general welfare, but that's as far as you get.
Disaster preparedness, and recovery afterwards would fall squarely in the general welfare section. "That's as far as you get" seems pretty far to me.
Furthermore, I'm not making a constitutional argument. I'm saying: in my opinion governments SHOULD have a responsibility to limit the damage of natural disasters, regardless of what it says in the constitution. Obviously times have changed since the constitution. There's more that governments can do today in emergencies. For example, during the drafting of the constitution, tsunami warning systems were limited to asking yourself "Is there a big wave crushing everything?"
Japan is among one of the most prepared places for powerful earthquakes, and look how helpless their government still is to do anything to have stopped the earthquake from killing thousands?
I'm betting dollars to yen that the government was the one that MADE IT one of the most prepared places for earthquakes with strict building codes. Japanese businesses are like all businesses in that they'll gladly cut corners on safety to save a buck. Free market forces did not demand that those buildings be able to withstand unusually powerful quakes, just as they haven't in California, though businesses there have known a massive quake is coming for years.
A radical policy would be too allow one unit to keep running if the plant was expected to lose mains and diesel. After all, we have seen they do not shut down quickly enough to prevent problems.
Actually nuclear reactors can shut down very quickly, within a matter of seconds. The problem is then you still need cooling to deal with heat produced by radioactive decay.
But I doubt these plants are set up to power themselves anyway. I seem to recall they depend on the grid to make it all work.
Probably more a case even one reactor (and one generator) produces too much power. Without a connection to the power grid there is nowhere for that energy to go.
The idea is good... Get some kind of semi-industrial UPS with suitable batteries and charge it while the power is on, and use the stored energy while it's off. This way, the blackouts won't affect you and you'll use that much more charging the thing while the power is on, effectively (if enough people used them) canceling the 'saving' of energy that was the purpose of the blackout.
Sounds like a lot of money to spend for little gain The per-capita energy use in Japan is 8000KWh/year, so figure in a 2 person household, the average energy use is:
16000KWh/year * (1 year / 365 days) * (1 day / 24 hours) = 1.8 KWh/hour
If a rolling blackout lasts 8 hours, then you need to have 14.4KWh in your batteries. Assuming 12V batteries:
14400 W-hour / 12 volts = 1200 amp hours
So lets go online and buy some batteries. If we get some nice SLA deepcycle batteries here:
http://www.batteryspec.com/cgi-bin/cart.cgi?action=link&product=83
You might think it would only take 10 of them to power this hypothetical household (1200 Ah), but if they want to get more than a 100 or so cycles out of them, they can't go below 50% discharge, so they actually need 20 batteries so that's $4200 for the batteries alone, plus a couple thousand $$ for the inverters, charge controllers, transfer switches, and they need to find someplace to store 1500 lbs of batteries in their small Japanese apartment. And during an earthquake instead of just worrying about a bookshelf tipping over, they'll have to worry about a 1500 lb battery rack falling, and possibly spilling acid gel across the apartment. Or, if you were thinking that the building management would build this huge battery pack in the basement or parking area, a generator would be more cost effective.
Tell me again why this is a good idea?
But if the plant can run and everything works (all pumps, all control and monitor functions works and don't set off alarms), the rest is minor and can wait. Trust your monitoring. If it's worth the money spent on developing and installing it, it has to be good enough to use to determine whether the plant can be started or not.
Unless, of course, the problem is a microscopic crack in a turbine blade that isn't found until the blade ejects itself through the turbine housing. Then instead of a 2 week inspection you have a 6 month shutdown to install a new turbine.
Now, what I don't understand is this. Japan sits on the edge of a continental plate, like Iceland, but while Iceland gets a lot of their energy from geothermal plants, Japan is almost entirely nuclear. Isn't this just plain stupid? - Nuclear power in a major earthquake zone with endless and limitless geothermal energy readily available?
Except that Iceland only gets 24% of their power from geothermal and they use 1/100th of the electrical power of Japan. Japan has almost the same geothermal generating capacity as Iceland (500MW vs 600MW) and more is on the way, but rather than being stupid, maybe it's not trivial to scale to 100 times more geothermal power generation? Just like there's limitless wind energy, solar energy, wave energy, it's a mater of scale.
If you think that's bad, check out the poster below who said they use piss for power! Piss is not a unit of power *or* energy!
The problem is that low birthrates don't just mean a reduction in overall population (which I tend to agree would be a good thing for the world in general) it also means a greater proportion of the population are too old to work and in some cases too old to look after themselves.
One way to work arround this is to allow lots of immigration but that can mean the natives becoming a minority in their own country within a few generations which many people find rather unpalatable. It also only works as long as there are high bithrate countries to act as a source of immigrants.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It depends what you mean by self correcting. Ultimately the old people will die but not without potentially a lot of suffering happening first and if the birth rate stays low the problem won't go away because there will remain more old people thand young people.
I see a few outcomes of a sustained very low birthrate.
1: the old people have sufficiant money invested in foreign investments to pay for their retirement despite the inevitable shrink in exports and the number of younger citizens remains just about sufficiant to care for the old people, manage the imports and possiblly maintain some small ammount of other acticity.
2: the people work until they drop and people who can no longer look after themselves are simply left to die and/or institutionalised with a very minimal level of care because there simply isn't the resources to care for them properly.
3: the goverment allows massive immigration of young people to try and produce a population with a greater weight towards the productive (and hence taxpaying) age range. This solves the immediate problem but unless the immigrants take on the native culture it is likely to lead to the native culture being becoming within a few generations..
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Thank you for your wonderful example also of over-generalizing, and utterly failing to look at facts.
1- There may be a good reason why the help offered (which is what ?) does not help with the issue at hand (which is what ?). Any help from any one does not help with any and all problems.
I replied specifically in the context of Japan's refusal to accept needed medical aid from the U.S. after the 1995 earthquake. You, however, could not have been more over-generalizing, you hypocrite.
2- This has nothing to do with genital mutilation and such, but please don't let that derail your rant.
3- If you want to talk multiculturalism, you may want to try and weight both sides of the issue. I think the gist is that there's "good" stuff in all cultures, and "bad" stuff too, so one culture should not be allowed to wipe out all the others. You're good with examples of bad stuff from other cultures... know of any good ones from them ? or bad stuff from yours ?
I was obviously comparing the acceptance of such negligence to more abusive practices, noting that multiculturalists apologize for a whole range of bad behavior, from neglect to mutilation. And I didn't exempt my own culture from that criticism. Nor did I suggest in the slightest that one culture should "wipe out all the others". You simply made that up. Talk about ranting, pot meet kettle.
I personally, think your post is worthless. And destructive.
Really? I'm being destructive to suggest (suggest, mind you), that we criticize objectively bad behaviour when we see it? Wow, that's really... openminded of you.
Just wondering here... I sent $300 to a reputable non-religious agency that's providing both short and long-term aid to the victims in Japan. While it's a small gesture, I'm guessing it's more than you have done, which is exactly nothing (aside from running your mouth).
Feel free to spew nonsense again, but I'm done with this thread. I can't afford to spend any more of my time educating you.
Don't take it personally, but I'm not going to read your pithy response to my post.
being becoming
That should have said becoming a minority.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register