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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."
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.
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.
So what happens to all the Pokemon in the Kanto region?
signature is pants
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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!
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.
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!
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!
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!