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.
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'
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Less poverty and a better education system?
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
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.
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.
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.
odd, someone said that just before you showed up.
rewriting history since 2109
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!
I went to high school with a Roland Blackout...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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
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.
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.
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.
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"
And your argument is that preserving that symmetry is the most important objective in deciding whether or not to accept help?
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?
TEPCO owns over 70GW of generating capacity. A few hundred MW are not going to make much of a difference, and routing it onshore is a BIG problem.
Not a sentence!
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
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.
"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.