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Further Updates On Post-Tsumami Japan
DarkStarZumaBeach points out a frequently updated page from the International Atomic Energy Agency with updates on the situation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, which reports in terse but readable form details of the dangers and progress there. The most recent update says that the plant's Unit 2 has been re-wired for power, and engineers 'plan to reconnect power to unit 2 once the spraying of water on the unit 3 reactor building is completed.' Read on for more on the tsunami aftermath.
Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous."
dooms13 suggests (by way of The Register) that the disaster in Fukushima is nonetheless a demonstrated triumph for nuclear safety: "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive."
Something to contemplate while the rescue effort continues: imscarr writes "The coastline of Japan has drastically changed since the earthquake & tsunami. New bays have formed and many areas are completely flooded. These interactive before-and-after images show you the magnitude of devastation. Other photos here."
Adds reader madcarrots: "The Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB), a unit of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), directed by Professor Michel Andre, has recorded the sound of the earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, March 11. The recording, now available online, was provided by a network of underwater observatories belonging to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and located on either side of the earthquake epicenter, close to the Japanese island of Hatsushima."
dooms13 suggests (by way of The Register) that the disaster in Fukushima is nonetheless a demonstrated triumph for nuclear safety: "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive."
Something to contemplate while the rescue effort continues: imscarr writes "The coastline of Japan has drastically changed since the earthquake & tsunami. New bays have formed and many areas are completely flooded. These interactive before-and-after images show you the magnitude of devastation. Other photos here."
Adds reader madcarrots: "The Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB), a unit of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), directed by Professor Michel Andre, has recorded the sound of the earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, March 11. The recording, now available online, was provided by a network of underwater observatories belonging to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and located on either side of the earthquake epicenter, close to the Japanese island of Hatsushima."
Is that like a tsunami mommy?
Tsumami as opposed to tsusweet, tsusalty, tsusour, and tsubitter.
Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous."
The linked source does NOT validate that assertion whatsoever. The 'plume' is a forecast of the way a plume would take shape across the pacific, if it were to exist. No-one is saying that there is a radioactive smoke plume of any magnitude, including undetectable. It is a weather forecast, meant for internal consumption by various national nuclear agencies for contingency planning and leaked to the NYT, nothing more.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Do you think a 30 meters wall is able to survive the impact of a 30 meters tsunami wave? You know fucking nothing.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
I know enough not to build a nuclear plant on a tsunami prone coast that can't be protected by walls.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
From New York to Germany, politicians are proposing shutting-down nuclear plants.
Talk about jumping to rash conclusions. What are we supposed to use for power once the oil/coal becomes scarce and as expensive as silver? We need nuclear power as a replacement fuel (and supplemented by solar).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
A 30 meter wall would be the same height as a 10 story building... It might also stop the water from leaving the area thereby causing more problems. These things are usually designed with pretty good safety factors and with redundant systems. If it were just the earthquake or just the tsunami we probably wouldn't have this scenario, its the combination of both that caused it... Do remember an earthquake of this magnitude is a 1 in 1000+ year event. It's not realistic to plan for those when the life of your reactor is 50 years...
This link:
Bad Oehmen: Confirmation Bias, Sources & Astroturfing
Describes the curious case of how a reassuring first time web post ("Why I am not worried about Japans nuclear reactors") from a guy working on a liason project at MIT in a non-nuclear engineering or physicist role somehow got reposted 30,000 times in one day.
Just something to keep in mind when you see crap like "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then". Hey clueless, the cores haven't melted. Yet. They are losing their heat removal capacity over time as less and less water surrounds them. When they do get hot enough, they will melt their containers, and we will have a chernobyl-style release. Not exactly the same as chernobyl, because there's no graphite to burn. Instead the particulate radioactive isotopes and actinides (and plutonium, yay!) will be propelled into the atmosphere via hydrogren explosions. There's also a hell of a lot more uranium and plutonium on site since some clever laddie beancounter got the used fuel rods containment pools located above the reactors.
Fukushima hasn't completely melted down, yet. If it doesn't it will because we (the planet) threw everything we have at it.
Remain calm! All is well!
The MIT Department of Nuclear Engineering has a web site, updated regularly, which acts as a hub for information about the nuclear crisis, including helpful background information.
See it at: http://mitnse.com/
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
Making that assertion with no reference to the costs or consequences of the 1000+ year events is just insane. It might not make sense to plan for 1000 year events, but no trivial analysis could possibly demonstrate that.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Welcome to media hype and the anti-nuclear nuts run amok.
They are not running amok so much as running away from the industry shills and misguided nuclear enthusiasts, who, when each new batch of egg hits their face, remind us that raw egg can be very good for the skin.
To be fair, 50 out of 1000 is still a 1 in 20 chance. You can't plan for everything though.
Yeah, a 30-metre wall is ridiculous, especially because there are so much easier and cheaper options. If the backup generators were placed further up on the hill above the plant they would have been fine. This part of the coast is relatively steep-sloped, so it didn't even have to be very far away -- still inside the fence around the Fukushima plant site. Problem solved. Risk averted. No "big engineering" needed. Worst case, you have to reconnect them. Also, 30m is a bit extreme. From what I've been reading in the literature, the worst historical tsunami along this stretch of coast are "only" in the ~5-7m range, unless you're in a bay with a shape that is particularly effective at focusing the wave (and the nuclear plant is on a broad point, not a bay, and the obvious solution here is: don't build the plant at the head of a bay).
Why nobody thought to take adequate measures against this *known* scale of historical tsunami is something for which heads will probably roll in the subsequent investigations. Not designing for this level of tsunami is simply foolish on this coast.
I do think it might have been wise to keep the generators on high ground (or deep underground) in a coastal area prone to typhoons and tsunamis. Why they didn't do this is beyond me (seriously, who doesn't plan on a tsunami on the Japanese coast??).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's taken them nearly a week to get a police truck with a water cannon there (and it didn't work).
Why the fuck wasn't there a way to fly in a pumper truck, a generator, a long hose, and a ladder, to flood that building on Saturday or Sunday?
Are they so married to their procedures that they have no clue at all when thinking outside the box will save their asses? Do they have no foresight to try something preventive instead of waiting for the same sequence of disastrous results to occur in every reactor building?
Yes. And I know more than you. But don't let me convince you - just look at the concrete buildings still standing right next to the harbor. Look at the bridges, hospitals and schools that survived. Oh it will be expensive. And you'll have to fill it with earth, to take the weight. And it will crack. But it can be done easily.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Face it, they cut corners to make more of a profit. And talk about stupid, tsunamis happen all the time in Japan, this was built "after the fact." Are you seriously surprised that there was a tsunami of this size in Japan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_tsunamis
Face it, tsunami heights top five meters almost all the time.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I know enough not to build a nuclear plant on a tsunami prone coast that can't be protected by walls.
If only you were there 40 years ago when this reactor was installed to warn them of the dangers... maybe you could have told them to use a more modern design that doesn't require active cooling to remain safe. Maybe you already have a map showing them exactly where to site the reactors? Or do you have a viable alternative to nuclear in your back pocket?
Lots of people can use hindsight to show exactly what went wrong in *this* particular incident, but who can tell where the next natural disaster will strike and how it will manifest itself? Did you already tell California to shut down its two coastal nukes? And it's not like nukes are the only power generating hazard out there - TVA was lucky that the billions of gallons of fly ash discharge didn't kill anyone.
USA officials seem to have a lot of criticism for the Japanese and how they handled this incident, but truth be told, this reactor survived a quake 30 times larger than it was designed for and so far hasn't spun out of control into a large scale disaster. If they hadn't lost power it's likely that this would have been a very minor incident. If the USA wants to criticize, then they need look no further than their own backyard. In California their 2 coastal nuclear plants are designed for a 7.0 or 7.5 earthquake but there's a very good chance that California will have a larger quake in the next 30 years. Oh, and at one of them, they installed the seismic reinforcements backwards and at the other, the entire reactor was installed backwards. Oops.
The big problem I have (with my retrospectascope) is that they KNEW that there were very large tsunamis in the past. They KNEW that predicting wave height in any given place for any potential tsunami is impossible. Putting up a 100 foot or even a 100 meter concrete wall isn't especially difficult - it's a bit expensive but it's certainly do able. They KNEW that 'predicting' earthquakes is very imprecise and so far has an rather poor track record.
So tumble that through the ringer of planning and funding a major engineering endeavor and you end up with some engineering assumptions that look pretty damned stupid.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The most impressive thing to me is the creation of new inlets, and the loss of sand. I wonder how long (if ever) before the sand bars will reform.
BTW, they landed a plane at Sendai Airport. I imagine it will be a long time before normal operations are established there though. AFAIK, those military transports can take off and land on anything that's flat and not too muddy.
I was online this morning with a few people from Japan.
I found out that American schooled people are being evacuated, and that all of the "Military kids" of the higher echelons have already been moved out of the area.
Of course, these could just be rumors, but one guy was pretty convinced he was being evacuated today.
Agreed, you certainly can't plan for everything and you do try to plan for the worst case. That's why there's not just one backup system but a few different ones and the plant is designed with bigger safety factors than normal. Also each backup system is maintained by different personnel so the "human factor" can partially be taken out of the equation. It's impossible to have something that's 100% resistant to everything...
It's not starting back up. Ever. If the salt water wasn't enough, the potassium borate that they were pumping in (remember the report of the US delivering "coolant"? boron is a neutron absorber, it's not normally in the cooling water, it's used when the cooling water isn't working, and it gums up the core) was. Those reactors are useless forever now.
Streamlined bunkers of reinforced concreted with Stirling engines powering the emergency systems would probably have been a much better idea. Doesn't necessarily need external air supply and a damn lot easier to fix than diesels should something go wrong.
A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?
In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility. Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.
Do you know how often tsunamis larger than five meters hit the coast of Japan? Anyone who lives there could tell you the last time a tsunami this size or larger hit, a ten meter tsunami hit Okushiri in 1993, and before that, another ten meter tsunami hit Wajima in 1983. I'm not criticizing Japan, per se, I am criticizing the cost cutting tendencies of the nuclear industry, which could have a perfect safety record if they cared to.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I am not a nuclear scientist, but it would seem possible to me that given the amount of excess energy currently being dealt with at these reactors, they could have stopped the primary reaction (as they did) and continued to generate electricity to power the cooling systems. If the continuing radioactive decay is energetic enough to bring the core up beyond 3000C (the melting temperature of the fuel), couldn't it run the generators sufficiently to run the cooling system?
I'm sure there is a limitation here, but I'm not really certain as to what...
Cutting corners to up profits isn't really a big part of Japanese culture, especially 40 years ago with anything having to do with nuclear safety. Your accusations are as insulting as they are unfounded.
This was a worst-reasonable-case external hazard for a nuclear reactor, and it held up quite well. Much like Three Mile Island, there doesn't seem to be much harm done here, aside from the economic value of the plant itself. This whole CNN-fueled panic over a non-crisis is a sad diversion away from the real disaster (the thousands killed by the tsunami) and the relief efforts needed on the coast.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
1/1000 chance per year = .999 annualized chance of normal operation .999^(~436 reactors) = 1 in 3 annualized chance of meltdown somewhere in the world.
Clearly your numbers are off, but still, the point remains the same: when it comes to things with great potential for harm, you need a far higher standard than just 1:1000 chance of disaster. What's an acceptable rate of time for a 50% probability for an INES Cat. 6 event? 1:500 years? Each reactor would need to have an annualized INES Cat. 6 failure probability of 0.000317% (a 1 in 315,000 chance).
Great risk requires great caution.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
Aiming for a perfect safety record, or in general setting the bar too high, just causes people to game the system (just look at the games that go on with Japan's homicide police given the expectation of 90%+ solution rates for murders). Aiming for safe failure modes makes much more sense, and this plant was quite reasonable in that regard.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Cutting corners to up profit
THAT is bean-counter territory. every color and nationality has them; and the engineers take shit.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Nothing has a perfect saftey record. ever. The longer something is around the more likely problems will develop. Here they were hit not only a major quake which as saftey indicates they shut down for, but then got hit by a wave of water strong enough to move a cargo ship miles in shore.
No wall would have stopped that, as the wave would go around, the wall and then flood back into the wall still destroying the generators. That's if the wall wasn't knocked down on top of said generators by the shear force of the wave to begin with.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You do know this plant was built by GE, right? And that three engineers quite in protest over the unsafe design? Excuse me if I'm not concerned about insulting an American megacorporation.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Then don't build it on the coast! And listen when your engineers tell you it isn't safe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Do remember an earthquake of this magnitude is a 1 in 1000+ year event. It's not realistic to plan for those when the life of your reactor is 50 years...
so with 1000 reactors across the globe(442-6 in operation, 65 in construction), you can have one of these every year ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
t might not make sense to plan for 1000 year events
we DO when the radioactive crap will be here for thousands of years.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Those reactors are useless forever now.
If any didn't actually have something melt (and the water didn't have significant cobalt) they COULD be cleaned up and restarted. But it would be SO expensive that it's far cheaper to build new ones. (Post-apocalypse approval process and all...)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Except in this case there was no great harm, due to proper planning. When the dungheap hit the windmill, the failure mode was reasonably safe. Great risk comes from building a Chernobyl-style reactor. The best way to limit risk is to make the reactor fail as safely as possible, not arrogantly assume you can anticipate all the rare sources of risk and declare that you're not vulnerable to any of them!
There are modern designs that really take this to heart. While a "pebble bed" reactor perhaps isn't the ideal design for a for-profit power plant, it's a great example of starting from a fundamentally fail-safe design so that you're not trying to kid youself that you've thought of every possible risk.
Three Mile Island was a great object lesson in the importance of usability to design (the staff did exactly the wronng thing at every decision point), but also a lesson in how safe non-communist reactors are (the staff did exactly the wronng thing at every decision point -and still no one died).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What the hell are you burning without air to run this Stirling engine?
What do you plan on using as your source of cold?
The delta between the hot side and the cold is going to need to be fairly high to make that practical.
That's not quite right. According to your math a 1 in 1000 year event affects a reactor every 3 years and leads to a meltdown. A 1 in 1000 year event could be a magnitude 6 earthquake depending on where the reactor is built so it might have no effect.
thanks for the numbers.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
And yet, in a region known for frequent ten meter tsunamis, the last one in 1993, they built the backup generator directly at sea level, on the coast, and designed it to withstand a five meter tsunami. Maybe because it was cheaper to do it that way. If you are the CEO who decides to do something like this, and people die, you will not face prosecution. But if you don't make your shareholders rich next quarter, you WILL be out of a job. It doesn't take genius insight into human nature to tell what will happen, given those incentives.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
GE did the designs. Lots of companies were involved in the construction, with GE, Toshiba and Hitachi supplying the reactors.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Oops. Maybe posting such an important link on /. wasn't a good idea.
Proverbs 21:19
The inside of a run away reactor and the outside should provide sufficient heat difference to run a sterling engine.
Okay, so the plant was designed by GE, and some of the reactors were built by GE. Are you disputing the claims of the GE three? Are you saying these reactors were as safe as they could have been? Not that I am excluding anyone from blame, ten meter tsunamis hit Japan all the freaking time. They should never have built this thing on the coast. They did so to increase profits, and the people responsible for that decision will never face censure, let alone prosecution. Welcome to our world of two tier justice. If you kill a man, you go to jail, but if they kill a thousand, they get a bonus.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
An, additionally, not have then all in the same place. Have some up in the hills where they are protected from tsunamis, have some in a different location where they are protected if a quake in the hills causes landslides.
Um, Nuclear reactors need lots and lots of water readily available, and will warm up small enough lakes over time. They also have to be generally pretty close to the point of consumption. Since electricity can't be stored, and due to resistance loses amps to heat over distances.
The great lakes have something like 30 nuclear reactors built around them as they are large bodies of water, near population centers.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Yeah, sure, most of the problems were financial or political, not engineering. But we can fix those, too.
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them.
It sank into the swamp.
So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.
So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well a 1 in 1000 year event that may affect all the reactors in Japan. There's some geographic information you have to include in this analysis. Also, like i said somewhere else a 1 in 1000 year event could be something insignificant depending where your reactor is located...
Did anything in most post look like I was disputing their claims? I found your post a little over simplified, so I posted slightly more information.
And of course the plants were not as safe as they could have been, that is always true about everything.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Exactly my point, thank you. They cut corners. The coastline there is very steep, had they situated it a couple kilometers inland and built a big pipe to the ocean, built a bigger cooling pond for spent fuel, and put the backup generator above the known average tsunami height, this all would have cost more. Shareholders wouldn't have made as much of a profit. And we wouldn't be having this conversation because this never would have happened.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Face it: you couldn't build a wall out of lego.
That would explain why my lego castle roof kept falling down.
Why are we hoisting in a bucket at a time by helicopter when we could use the same flight to lift in an drop a weighted firehose which would provide a stream of water? Would require less exposure to radiation by the flight crews. Also drop one on each of the reactors now while you still have access, don't wait till they blow.
Port Royal, Jamaica had a huge earthquake in 1692 pretty much dropping a fair portion of that city under the ocean. It is still there, flooded and under water. Protected as a historical site, divers frequently dive on it. In some places entire buildings are still there, intact as if they were built under the water.. The reason I'm asking is, has the land that is flooded in Japan actually subsided to below sea level due to the earthquake, or is it simply still flooded? It looks to me as if most of the land in Japan that was affected is still at the same height above sea level as pre-quake, however there may be areas that are now below the ocean... in any event Port Royal was pretty much destroyed again in 1909, and has been hit and hit hard by Hurricanes and probably is due for another temblor in 200 odd years.... I sure hope they don't build a nuke plant there, and I hope that Japan and every other country planning a new nuclear plant try their hardest to site them in areas that
(A): Don't have a history of earthquakes.
and
(B) don't have a history of storm surges from Hurricanes/Cyclones/Tsunami's...
But it's not "Japanese culture" that's building the nuclear plants. It's corporate culture. And "cutting corners" is part of the corporate DNA. They can't help themselves.
The people who are getting off planes from Japan in Dallas Fort Worth and Chicago's O'Hare airport and setting off the radiation detectors might disagree.
There are those who have decided that nothing will change their minds about nuclear energy. Everything will be taken as evidence of their point of view. You don't want those people making decisions.
I'm agnostic about nuclear energy. I think it's a necessary, if transitional energy source that should be used. But under no circumstances should private industry be in charge. Energy is just too important for the private sector to run.
You are welcome on my lawn.
if they could use the reactor they would be using the steam turbine.
If the reactor is running and the cooling fails Bad Things occur. Remember, after the scram the secondary reactions produce about 1% of the heat/energy of the main reaction before scram. What they're struggling with now is a hundred times less than what they'd be facing if the reactors had been online.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
In other words, GE tried to sweeten the price and TEPCO bought into it. It's OK to disparage TEPCO too btw.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/955468--japanese-power-companies-hid-nuclear-safety-problems-wikileaks?bn=1
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110317/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_earthquake_nuclear_scandals
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The thing makes power -- why can't it use its own power to run the pumps to keep it cool enough to work?
I can see the need for outside power in a start-up mode. But after that you should be able to cut the umbilical cord.
Would we be having this conversation (or this nuclear disaster) if it was self-powered?
What am I missing or don't know?
I'm agnostic about nuclear energy. I think it's a necessary, if transitional energy source that should be used. But under no circumstances should private industry be in charge. Energy is just too important for the private sector to run.
yeah lets allow the department of homeland security run it, i wanna see what color they use for nuclear fallout on their color charts.
Hang on, I'm sure there's a reason against this, but the Fukushima Daini complex is RIGHT THERE:
The main problem at the moment is loss of power to the cooling pumps without fully functional backup systems. Restoring power requires reconnecting the Fukushima Daiichi complex back to the grid, a connection that has been severed by the quake and tsunami. Instead of attempting to link to the grid as a source of power, why not restart one of the shut down but functional reactors at the Fusushima Daini complex and use it to power the cooling pumps for the rest of the reactors at the Daini and Daiichi complexes?
The "radioactive crap" will be 90% gone within a few months.
Look at Chernobyl.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
TEPCO's corporate culture has for years been about as bad as they come: Bungling, cover-ups define Japanese nuclear power
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
How exactly do you think this failure mode is a desirable one? There are spent fuel ponds containing more fuel than in the core itself which are in various states of overheating, half of the buildings have been gutted of sensors, pumps, cranes, etc by hydrogen explosions, the core is cracked on the #2, god only knows what's happening in the common fuel pool, the radiation level has been high enough to drive away *helicopters flying high overhead* some days, etc. You call that "reasonably safe"? God forbid we get a recriticality in a spent fuel pool. The explosions left half of them sitting exposed to the air and full of debris.
This is an INES level 6 disaster, same as the Kyshtym disaster that caused the Soviets to quietly have to remove 30 towns from their maps. The US has ordered a 50 mile exclusion zone for Americans around Fukushima Daiichi -- and the disaster is still unfolding. For comparison, it's under 40 miles from the reactors of Indian Point to Times Square, and far less to the outer reaches of NYC.
And, FYI, you're applying an observation bias to your "wrong thing at every decision point" argument. if they had done the right thing, you wouldn't have heard about it. There are nuclear accidents all the time. Nearly every reactor has had accidents of varying severity. Only the bigger ones (generally INES-5 and above) make the news. Naturally those are going to be the ones where more than one thing went wrong. And, FYI, both in Chernobyl and TMI, there were many *right* decisions made also. They simply didn't outweigh all of the wrong decisions. And many "wrong decisions" occur during the engineering stage, not the operation stage, but aren't known about until they reveal themselves many years later.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
You have just demonstrated that you do not understand the difference between a sterling engine and a steam turbine, so I will point you to Wikipedia, where you can remedy your lack of education.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine
Or perhaps you do not understand just how hot things remain when a reactor is shut down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat
Hopefully that should be enough for you to understand why a sterling engine sized to run the emergency cooling pumps will work off the decay heat, while a full sized steam turbine designed to produce electricity would not.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm pretty sure this is how the conversation went:
E1: why not run the cooling pumps off the electricity we're generating?
E2: well, what happens when you have to scram it? it stops generating. then your cooling pumps stop and you get cascading failure.
E1: oh. no shit. so we need an external source of power for the pumps.
E2: and a backup in case that external source has a blackout, which happens a lot in less-developed countries like 1960s Japan.
E1: well, we also sell diesel generators, how about a few of those at each reactor?
E2: sure. now we've got double backups and nothing can go wrong.
E1: so we're done with the safety design?
E2: ayup. as long as we have a double-backup system, the cooling water will keep flowing, so the rods will never be exposed to air, so they'll never melt, never release hydrogen gas, never catch on fire. if it weren't for those stupid regulations we wouldn't even need to build the containment vessel thick enough to contain a meltdown...
Their Nth mistake was wiring the generators in a nonstandard way, so that when the Fukushima guys got replacements delivered for the ones the tsunami damaged, they'd be ready to run.
Chernobyl, an area where over 90% of children born have serious birth defects.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Wow, you really got schooled here, didn't you? Did you read all those replies pointing out how very wrong you are? Did you read the two posts pointing out how bad TEPCO really is? I wonder because you seem very certain of your position in this post, but you quite obviously are not working with full information. Personally, when I learn new information that exposes my own ignorance or incorrectness, I update my position to reflect my new understanding of reality. But you haven't responded to any of the people who responded to you. Which leads me to believe you haven't learned anything from your schooling here. Which is kinda sad.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Generally speaking, power plant generators don't generate at voltages usable by the control systems in the plant itself. They need to feed power to the grid, which is designed to distribute power at voltage that is usable by the control systems. If they had a purpose built transformer on site to take generator output and convert it to the proper voltage for pumps, computers, etc. it would work like you expected. However, those kinds of transformers are costly and built to order. It is much cheaper to tap the distribution grid (which would have to be extended to the plant during construction anyway) for the lights, pumps, and such, then back up that power with generators.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The coastline there is very steep, had they situated it a couple kilometers inland and built a big pipe to the ocean,
Or maybe the earthquake (which was much more powerful than the plant was designed to withstand) would have cracked and damaged the 2km long pipes and on-site water storage tanks, leaving no easy way to bring in water a couple kilometers from the ocean. Then everyone could have pointed fingers and said "What idiots! Why did they locate the plant so far away from the ocean, if they were next to the ocean, fire engines with water cannons could have cooled the plant!"
Just like it's easy to say "If only they'd done *this* and the disaster would have been averted", it's easy to point out potential flaws in the alternative solution - there is never a perfect, risk-free solution.
Shareholders wouldn't have made as much of a profit. And we wouldn't be having this conversation because this never would have happened.
Cost cutting doesn't just benefit the shareholders, it also benefits the consumers. Modern economies depend on cheap, plentiful power - there is always a trade-off between cost and safety, very few people are willing to pay for absolute safety.. Even your car is a tradeoff (and you are much *much* more likely to die in a car accident than a nuclear accident). Do you think all cars should be designed like tanks, be limited to 5mph, and have redundant power sources and built-in air supplies providing a week of life support to occupants just in case the car drives into a lake? If those cheap-ass car companies didn't cut corners when building cars, we could save 40,000 lives/year.
What bullshit. Why do some people claim that when corporations cut corners, they pass the savings on to the consumer? You KNOW that isn't true. As for putting things away from the ocean, if they can engineer a containment unit to withstand an earthquake, they can engineer a pipe. If they can engineer a spent fuel holding tank to withstand an earthquake, they can engineer a spare water tank. And if they HAVE to put things next to the ocean, they can still put the backup generator up a hill, out of reach of the tsunami. Engineers were telling them this was unsafe. The bean counters ignored them.
Nobody expects a risk free solution. What we do expect is for them to follow safety regulations, and to refrain from cutting corners on safety, and then lying about it. Keep reading the other posts here. There is a lot of good information explaining, in detail, just how the corporate sociopaths earned their huge bonuses.
You see, I want nuclear power. We can make it cheaper and safer than anything else we know of right now. Except the corporate fuckwads ruined that dream by cutting corners and putting profits (not consumer costs) over safety, giving the environmentalists ammunition in their misguided quest to destroy nuclear power. And you, you clever little cheerleader, are bending over and hiking up your pretty little skirt for them. Thanks for helping destroy nuclear power, asshole.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Chernobyl, an area where over 90% of children born have serious birth defects.
[citation fucking needed]
In a 2005 report, the UN said there were "no evidence of an increased risk of birth defects or other reproductive effects in areas contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl accident". A recent study claims there does exist a slightly elevated risk of birth defects in some of the areas (up to 27 in 100.000 births as compared to EU average 9 in 100.000), but even that study says it's findings are "not definitive" and lacks information about pregnant mothers exposure to radiation as well as their diet and alcohol habits. The same effects can be attributed to overconsumption of alcohol:
This is important because the birth defects that were elevated in Rivne can also result from fetal alcohol exposure or, in the case of neural tube defects, a deficiency in the B vitamin folate early in pregnancy.
"In the Ukraine," Wertelecki said, "alcohol is also a problem. Malnutrition is also a problem."
It is not clear to what extent alcohol, folate deficiency and low-dose radiation exposure may each explain the findings. It's also quite possible, Wertelecki said, that all three factors work in combination to raise the odds of congenital defects.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Sorry, It's in dutch
http://www.deredactie.be/permalink/1.984013
especially time-index 10:00 - 10:30 is interesting.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
I have noticed that there are no large planes at the flooded Sendai airport. Was there just none there, or did they get them all off the ground before the tsunami hit?
Depends on how thick it is, how it is anchored etc.
In any case, it wouldn't work as long as the water flowed around it, I'm guessing, because it wasn't the impact of the wave that did the damage to the diesel generators, it's the fact that they were *underwater*. They do put snorkels on submarines to provide air to the diesel engine for operating the diesel while submerged close to the surface (it's called 'snorkeling'), but I don't think they did that on land.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
The plans to "rewire" the power plants were from yesterday and, at the moment, they are just that, plans. This morning Toden announced that the construction of the electric cable that was supposed to be complete yesterday will be delayed until at least tomorrow. At the very end, they said also, in a markedly small voice, that they hope restoring the electricity will go smoothly, but there are worries that the equipment on the ground - pumps and transformers - may be out of order (maybe - after those explosions and all that water dumped on them from the air?), and that could probably hamper the effort.
In reality, there is no staff (except the firefighters, Chernobyl style) on the ground since Saturday - a relative and a former colleague worked at the plant and are already in Osaka since Tuesday - all measurements are taking place from the helos and from an observation points 30km away, and radiation in excess of 150 microgreys is being reported 30-40 km away upwind from the reactor by the local authorities.
So, there is only stalling, spinning, and no information.
Incidentally, here are the radiation reports by the ministry of science and bullshit (japanese, sorry, all data is in microsieverts, and if the last column is without dates, it has the long-term averages) : http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1303723.htm
What bullshit. Why do some people claim that when corporations cut corners, they pass the savings on to the consumer? You KNOW that isn't true.
Well, look at the converse -- whenever corporations incur additional expense, they pass the expense onto consumers. Do you disagree? So if design A costs $5B, and design B is twice as safe but costs $15B, do you think the corporation will just absorb the additional cost?
I'm not taking about corruption and safety violations, I'm talking about design safety factors.
As for putting things away from the ocean, if they can engineer a containment unit to withstand an earthquake, they can engineer a pipe
The earthquake shifted parts of the country by 2.4 meters -- not just buildings, not just a hillside, but the land itself - how do you design a 2km pipe to handle that? If half of your pipe moves 8 feet to the left (or up, or down, or it's stretched longer, or compressed shorter), I don't see how to account for that in design. I can believe it's possible to design a small building or reactor housing to handle local shaking, but when the ground beneath you moves dramatically, how do you account for that?
Actually, I *HAVE* told the state to shut down those plants. I also told them not to build there in the first place. They ignored my advice. A couple of the plants that they built in especially bad places had to be shut down before starting up. We're still paying for them, even though we campaigned against them being built.
So, no, I don't think that the US is doing a very good job. California probably isn't even the worst. A map I saw recently seemed to show that the area around New York, NY was much more endangered. By obsolete plants past their designer specified lifespan which are being licensed to generate more power than their designers specified as the intended maximum. It may not be the same kind of disaster, but one should expect one just as bad. And there may well not even be the excuse of "a natural catastrophe of a magnitude it was unreasonable to expect". It's likely to just be a combination of greed and political expediency.
Nuclear power can probably be done safely. But I'm not sure that people can do it safely. Because they make stupid decisions for short-range profit.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Did they really mis-spell 'Stirling' in the wikipedia article? Wow.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I feel very strongly that the press have behaved very irresponsibly throughout this and gov'ts around the world should take them to task.
Liquid oxygen on a submarine? That's insane-- where'd you hear that? Subs have a snorkel mast they use to draw air in from above the sea surface when operating the diesel submerged. It's called snorkeling. It's either that or run on the surface. I was a nuclear trained machinist's mate on an SSBN so I stood watch in the Auxiliary Machinery Room 2 Lower Level and ran the diesel when it was needed (usually for reactor scram drills).
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Everyone is panicking now and buying iodine tablets.
What a pack of pussies the world has become.
In the 1950s, people used to watch above ground atom bomb tests in between shows and gambling in Vegas while sipping martinis.
Our current president had to be roused from his busy schedule of vacation or golf or whatever to make a comment. Former President Teddy Roosevelt once killed a Kodiak bear with his mind, and personally dug the final mile of the Panama Canal.
Send in Chuck Norris in a lead apron. He'll kill the fuel rods with one punch.
Sorry, that doesn't cut it against a UN report.
Even the published report that contradicts the UN reports have the maximum number at 27 birth defects in 100.000 births - a far cry from your tv-show's unknown Ukranian doctor's claim of 90%.
I thought we'd agreed not to base our view of reality on what we see on tv?
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
No, it's a redirect page for a common misspelling. It shows the page for the Stirling engine.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
They have the transformers needed, but they are in the switchyard that connects the plant to the power grid. The combination of the quake and tsunami damaged that. (Think. They both have to be able to change generated power to grid form to deliver it, and to take power from the grid to convert to the voltages and phase used by the plant when they are shut down but not on backup generators.)
In any case, they have to close the reactor steam connections to the turbines when they SCRAM the reactor as they often don't know yet just what sort of malfunction it is. There are quite a number of possibilities that could damage the turbines or piping and release steam that is contaminated with radioisotopes into area of the plant not made to handle it.
In California their 2 coastal nuclear plants are designed for a 7.0 or 7.5 earthquake but there's a very good chance that California will have a larger quake in the next 30 years.
Not with our horizontal slip faults. The biggies come from the subduction zones, and the nearest stretches from Northern California up to British Columbia. And the plants were designed for 7.0 quakes *directly* underneath, and there's no faults directly under them.
You have just shown that you fail to understand reality. They blew the top off the building, no one wants to go near it, stuff is in ruins. A sterling engine would not change any of this.
Ok. You've got heat. Now what are you going to use for cooling? You've got to have both.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Liquid oxygen on a submarine? That's insane-- where'd you hear that? Subs have a snorkel mast they use to draw air in from above the sea surface when operating the diesel submerged. It's called snorkeling. It's either that or run on the surface. I was a nuclear trained machinist's mate on an SSBN so I stood watch in the Auxiliary Machinery Room 2 Lower Level and ran the diesel when it was needed (usually for reactor scram drills).
For a submariner you seem awfully ignorant of submarines. The Swedish Navy has been running their diesel-electric subs on Stirling engines powered by liquid oxygen for over 20 years now. See Gotland Class Submarine, Södermanland Class Submarine, and Näcken Class Submarine..
Snorkeling, while easy and cheap, has the disadvantage of only being useful at periscope depth. Using a Stirling engine gives a diesel-electric sub almost the same submerged endurance as a nuke. Add to that the fact that the diesel-electric one is quieter than the nuke and you'll start to see why the Swedes (and the Aussies in their Swedish-built subs) keep sinking US carriers in wargames.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
I believe it can do it. Normally. That's what's called house load operation. Where the reactor is producing power just for itself when it's disconnected from the grid for some reason. It may be very temporary while it syncs itself back to the grid so it can reconnect.
The problem is, that the transformers needed to do that are in the switchyard of the plant (big oil coiled transformers). The quake and tsunami damaged that as well as the backup generators and took out the power lines to the plant as well. So, no self powering, no power from the grid, and no power from the emergency generators.
That left them with the steam powered RCIC cooling system that needs batteries for the controls. That failed. (I'm not clear if they failed due to batteries running down, malfunction or combinations. There are separate ones for each reactor so it could be any of them. There was word they were flying in batteries to power them at one point.)
Nuclear reactors need lots of water. it is an obvious choice to put it on the coast of an island!
Well, I was last on a submarine 20 years ago. That is news to me.
The articles mention the submerged endurance as being a few weeks which is definitely less than a nuclear sub, and since they are quite a bit smaller, their armaments are limited, but the technology certainly does seem to have some strong points.
Learned something new today.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
because the problem isn't a sustained lack of power for the pumps, the problem was a brief interruption of power which was long enough for the plant to go into melt down. i doubt they would have had the time.
You might find this interesting http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iU29-CtBza8xA01r9IzPwksyP1WQ?docId=9e518d4998224fd8b705cc3fe9903eb6
Purple, obviously.
Too bad, then, that they didn't aim to put the emergency generators on the roof rather than down below the level of the (underestimated) tsunami for which they planned.
I dunno about that. Seriously, I do my best to ignore alarmist headlines and stories. But, the fact is, "it ain't over til the fat lady sings". There are so many possibilities, and things COULD get a whole lot worse before they start to get better. That damned spent-fuel cooling pond that is low on water is troubling, for one thing. The other ponds that are overheated are less troubling, but they merit serious consideration.
The last news story I read quoted some official, who suggested that some of the engineers and workers at the plant may have to make "heroic efforts" to save the situation.
And, I can't help thinking of the workers at Chernobyl who gave their lives to keep things there from getting worse.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Couple of problems
- The generators/switch gear are designed to produce transmission voltages. Industrial voltages for the plant are probably taken from a normal power substation, not directly from the high voltage transmission lines. It's likely the sub-station servicing the plant was wiped out.
- Strangely enough, generators don't work properly if there isn't *enough* load. It's unlikely that the needs of the plant are high enough to keep the generators online.
That is very much typical now in power generation so we are seeing a lot more equipment failures. Extending it to nuclear is a bit much but that's the way industry goes until a major failure wakes up the current batch of management. That's why engineering disasters go in cycles from extreme care for a few years after burning the astronauts in a test on the pad to ignoring the engineers warnings about the o-rings and launching anyway.
I do disagree. Corporations will try to price their products and services to make the most profit. If passing on the extra costs to consumers causes them to lose too many sales to their competitors, they will not pass the costs on. As long as they are still making a reasonable profit, they will stay in the business.
I do. Pipes expand and contract all the time due to stress and temperature changes. It's not unusual for pipes to experience changes in length on the order of 0.1% to 0.5%. Copper going from freezing (0C) to boiling (100C) would be around 0.17%. For a 2kM pipe, that's about 3.3 meters, or about 11 feet. Steel pipe would expand and contract somewhat less, plastic piping much more.
Anyway, the pipe wouldn't have gone over the fault line in this case, so one section of the pipe would not have moved 8 feet relative to another.
I have worked on projects where pipes were braced for earthquakes and flexible joints were built in to withstand shaking and relative motion of several inches between sections of the building. Though I must admit the designs I have been involved in would not have survived near a 9.0 magnitude quake, neither were they as important as nuclear safety.
I've already seen the 1986 bullshit come out again. The USA is the master race so nothing that happens to a commie or jap reactor will happen there - that's the line some are stating to push and learning NOTHING from what is going on now.
TMI should have shocked everyone out of that smugness long before Chernobyl happened - good planning in the early stages and sheer dumb luck saved everyone's bacon but some people were too stupid to learn the lessons. A feature put in to protect against aircraft strike doubled as better containment and turned a potential disaster into an incident. The lesson learnt then led to shutting down some of the old stuff that was WORSE than the "communist reactors" and to improve everything else.
My other nitpick is that it is still in progress so "the failure mode was reasonably safe" may not hold next week - let's all hope it does.
It's good you brought up pebble bed. Pebble bed etc is from people that did learn the lesson from TMI. Nuclear is all about getting vast amounts of steam but you can still get that from a lot of little reactors in a plant (eg. pebble bed) instead of enormous individual reactors such as the four we are talking about. With smaller reactors the whole potential disaster would have been over by now and everything cooled down.
I do disagree. Corporations will try to price their products and services to make the most profit. If passing on the extra costs to consumers causes them to lose too many sales to their competitors, they will not pass the costs on. As long as they are still making a reasonable profit, they will stay in the business.
Right, that's my point -- if the plant cost 3 times more to build and they had to charge 3 times higher for electricity the plant wouldn't have gotten built at all until scarcity drove the price of power up to where the plant became profitable. So Consumers would pay higher prices either way -- they pay more if the plant has superior safety measures, and they pay more if those safety measures are so expensive that the plant doesn't get built at all.
I do. Pipes expand and contract all the time due to stress and temperature changes. It's not unusual for pipes to experience changes in length on the order of 0.1% to 0.5%. Copper going from freezing (0C) to boiling (100C) would be around 0.17%. For a 2kM pipe, that's about 3.3 meters, or about 11 feet. Steel pipe would expand and contract somewhat less, plastic piping much more.
I'm no structural engineer, but it seems like a localized shear force is a lot different than heat expansion along a 2km pipe.
Anyway, the pipe wouldn't have gone over the fault line in this case, so one section of the pipe would not have moved 8 feet relative to another.
What do you mean "in this case" - this was a made-up case by me, and now I say that in this case the earthquake caused a mudslide down the hillside where my coolant water pipe was located. something like this:
http://www.life.com/image/51554665
(note that this picture is not from the current quake, it was caused by a previous quake a few years ago)
What I'm saying is that no matter where you locate the plant there are risks -- put it too close to the water and you risk Tsunami, put it too far away and you risk not having emergency cooling water when you need it most.
Just a quick note - Japan was the world's 5th biggest economy in 1960 by GDP and 2nd biggest by 1970. They were hardly less-developed. They made their money the same way the States did - off war (Korean War in this case). :)
I'm sure the rest of your conversation went the same though.
You've never worked with diesel generators, have you? You're essentially talking about putting several locomotive engines on the roof of a building.
People getting off planes from Japan to America got a higher dose of radiation from the plane ride than the reactor. The radiation level in Tokyo never exeeded the radiation level in Denver, though the level did spike briefly to 80% of Denver (about double the normal level). But of course "ooh, scary, scary, nukular, scary" will always dominate the news, regardless of facts.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Communist nuclear reactors are built nothing like real nuclear reactors (not to take anything away from the heroism of the guys at Chernobyl). But here's the analysis from an MIT professor of this stuff; don't take my word for it. The MIT profs in this field have been doing their best to spread actual information, but sadly it's just not newsworthy.
The Japanses guy who went into the dark reactors in suits to carry the hoses in to flood the hot cores with seawater were also pretty heroic - it must have been a heck of a scary situation, and those suits are claustrophobic enough without crawling through tunnels in the dark - but they weren't like the Russian guys who were basically throwing their lives away.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I doubt editors will correct this, given they didn't even notice they misspelled "Tsunami" (as "Tsumami") in the headline.
This probably does not include the extensive amount of fossil fuel used to excavate and process nuclear fuel, build the actual plants, nor to deal with the resulting waste.
Of course, you'd have to factor similar considerations in when comparing nuclear to other power sources.
Are you fucking kidding? They're the ones who taught us!
They only focus on (relative) quality now because China has gobbled up the "cheapest one available please" market.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Then why don't people getting off the plane from London set off the radiation detectors?
Bloomberg reported yesterday that radiation levels in parts of Tokyo are twenty times normal..
Oh, I notice from your sig that you're one of those that calls himself "conservative". That means you have to repeat the mantra of nuclear energy being "clean, safe and cheap" although it's never been any one of those three.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You do realize that the reactors scrammed the instant the earthquake hit, right? What they're dealing with is the secondary reaction and how to cool that in the aftermath of a 30ft tsunami knocking out all power.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
A Coleman lantern mantel will sett off most radiation detectors (and certainly those inside nuclear reactors - there are stories). They detect environmental contamination that is itself radioactive, not how much radiation you've reveived - and they're very sensitive. But to be fair those right next door to the plant did get a dosage spike of 3x an alantic plane flight, per the MIT prof.
Oh, I notice from your sig that you're one of those that calls himself "conservative". That means you have to repeat the mantra of nuclear energy being "clean, safe and cheap" although it's never been any one of those three.
This is why it's has become nearly impossible to have rational discourse in this country. People are so quick to slap a label on the other guy, ignore the argument he's actually making, and instead attribute the argument that a guy with that label would stereotypically make. It's very hard to have an actual discussion when people insist on talking past one another.
On the topic of my sig: politiclly liberal, politically conservative, it doesn't matter what programs are a good idea when you're broke. Sometime this yeat mandatory entitlement speding at the federal level is expected to be larger than federal revenues. When that happens, failure of the status-quo system is a mathematical certainty not a political opinion.
Whether you're talking about a nuclear reactor or a social progam, the first concern any engineer should have is "if it fails, will it fail safe?" And "it doesn't matter, it can't possibly fail" is always the wrong answer for any complex system.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Are you thinking that we were both suggesting they go put a sterling engine in there NOW?!? How dumb do you think we are? Don't answer that... we were asking why nobody thought to use a sterling engine to power emergency pumps in the first place. Sheesh.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
so I had a bad source of information. I can still quote another report saying that 'Chernobyl disaster still hurting millions'
http://www.un.org/ha/chernobyl/docs/dev2373.htm
In any case, I would like to see at least the same amount of money is being spent on windpower as on nuclear energy for the forseeable future, and it not being actively being sabotaged like in my country (Belgium).
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
so I had a bad source of information. I can still quote another report saying that 'Chernobyl disaster still hurting millions'
http://www.un.org/ha/chernobyl/docs/dev2373.htm
Yeah, did you even read that report you linked to? It's about how they think "[r]esources should be concentrated on mainstream services which have the greatest effect on life expectancy and general well-being, including primary health care, health education, clean water and economic development."
It's goal is to promote "[i]mprovement of environmental policy planning, implementation and management at the local, national and transnational levels to build on lessons learned and develop innovative approaches to land use as the radiation threat diminishes over time"
In any case, I would like to see at least the same amount of money is being spent on windpower as on nuclear energy for the forseeable future, and it not being actively being sabotaged like in my country (Belgium).
Google for "liquid thorium reactor" and see what real sabotage action looks like. There ARE safer, cheaper, more environmentally friendly alternative reactor designs out there, but the reactor fuel companies don't want anything to do with these - it would put them out of business. Thorium is more abundant by a few orders of magnitude than uranium/plutonium, doesn't need to be refined, can be utilized almost 100% as compared to 5% for uranium/plutonium, and is a sideproduct of mining for rare earth metals. It's so cheap you can't even give it away. And best of all - a single year's production of thorium from a single rare earth mine is enough to cover the whole earth's energy needs for one year - if only there were enough reactors to use it.
Furthermore, a liquid salt reactor is passively cooled, has safety blowout valves that depend on the laws of physics and nothing else, can be run at atmospheric pressure and can be refueled without stopping the reactor. Did I mention it burns almost 100% of the fuel? - which means a lot less dangerous waste.
Really, go google it. It's the future of our energy needs.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
I know about fission and radioactive decay: i know about the science, AND I know about the technology BUT I also know about politics and business, and it's those 2 latter things that worry me. So: Nuclear power NO THANX. Give me solar panels on my roof, tidal power stations and a coast line lined with wind turbines.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
And who's "broke"?
Entitlements are not government spending. Social Security is a multi-generational insurance program that is solvent to pay off 100% of its obligations to nearly 2040. After that, it's solvent enough to pay 80% of its obligations for about forty years after that, if nothing at all is done to plug holes.
The fact that you bought into these two myths says a lot about you political leaning, because "conservatives" tend to buy into both.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because in this kind of emergency you need power to come from outside the reactor, as in these kinds of emergencies it would nice to be able to access the generator if it needs work.
And who's "broke"?
If your brother-in-law made 50K take-home, but you knew he was spending 80K a year, and knew he was $128K in debt already, whould you lend him more money? I try to be generous with family, but you have to set limits.
The federal government is spending 1.6 times what it takes in, and each of us who pays taxes already has a $128k share of debt because of that. If that isn't "broke", what is? I was $50k in the hole before I learned how money worked, and that was one Hell of a hill to climb. $128K is - well face it, it's going to be shoved off on our grandkids, and when I look at it that way the generosity of any government program vanishes (but that's veering into politics and away form the math).
Entitlements are not government spending.
Wait, what? Maybe I'm using the word a different way - I didn't mean to cause any confusion. A part of the government budget is mandatory and inflation-adjusted, and a part is discretionary. The mandatory part is about to exceed revenues, and since it's (almost entirely) inflation adjusted, we can't inflate our way out of it. How can that end well?
Social Security is a multi-generational insurance program that is solvent to pay off 100% of its obligations to nearly 2040. After that, it's solvent enough to pay 80% of its obligations for about forty years after that, if nothing at all is done to plug holes
Social Security is neither solvent nor insolvent, it's part of the general fund now, since the "trust fund" was emptied in the 80s and early 90s. (The debt I mention above doesn't include any "trust fund" obligations, BTW, there are no government bonds or anything in the "trust fund", that money is just gone). If you compare Social Security taxes to Social Security outflow, it's already cashflow negative - but that hardly matters as, again, it will be paid from the general fund.
We can certainly keep any one program going at the expense of all the others. Which one we should prioritize is a matter of values and politics, not math. But here's some math: the total expected cost of everyone currently participating in Social Security, Medicare, and related programs exceeds the total expected revenues (over the lifetime of everyone we've made promises to) by over $1 million per taxpayer (about $363K per citizen). There's just no way - there's no such money to be taxed. Heck, the total worth of all personal, small business, and corporate assets in America is about $247K per citizen, and even if we siezed them all to pay for medicare, who would buy them? How can that end well?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
. . .and declare that nuclear-is-never-dangerous skeptics hate us for our freedoms(tm).
Now why would I do that AC? There is a large part of the environmental and anti-nuke groups that strongly support driving humanity back into the dark ages, along with removing humanity altogether to ensure a 'pure and blue earth'.
Time to realize exactly how far out in left field some environmentalists are.
Om, nomnomnom...
When someone uses family finances as a metaphor for national economics, you know it's not worth the effort, but here goes...
Can your "brother-in-law" print his own money? Can your "brother-in-law" sell bonds? Does your "brother-in-law" have the power to levy taxes? Does your stupid fucking brother-in-law have his own Federal Reserve?
That is simply not true. It was never "part of the general fund". It was used as collateral to sell bonds which are still bringing in a profit. It was never, ever part of the general fund. You are listening to Fox News and taking what they say as the truth.
And by the way, every thing you said in your last paragraph is factually incorrect. You got the entire thing from some chain-letter email that's being sent around to the teabaggers. It is entirely, every word, even the punctuation, a lie.
Social Security currently, as in today, right now, has over a TWO TRILLION DOLLAR SURPLUS, and that SURPLUS is in a savings account (though not the kind you get at your corner Chase Bank) collecting interest. In fact, it could be factually said that without that SURPLUS, the government's situation would be even worse than it is. There is no danger of Social Security having to reduce any benefits until at least 2039. And even then, a very simple set of fixes could make it sufficient for a century more.
Dwight Eisenhower first borrowed against (that doesn't mean "borrowed from") Social Security in order to build the interstate highway system. That was a great investment that paid dividends for the fund. Ronald Reagan, though, was the first president to borrow against Social Security in order to give a tax cut to the richest few percent of Americans. Reagan started the program of trying to make it look like Social Security was "broken" so all those trillions in the Social Security SURPLUS could be handed over to the big investment banks.
You are running around, lgw, believing stuff that is not only not true, but is not true in order to make you think a certain way. You are being fooled, flim-flammed, conned, and bullshitted. All the truth about this is available, but it requires you not to just buy whatever that mass email you got or Fox News tells you, and go look it up yourself. Spend an hour. Get a calculator. Don't get sucked in, and don't spread the BS even further.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hmm, you missed my point with the brother-in-law metaphor - maybe I should have gone with a car metaphor. The US is like that broke brother-in-law: who will lend us money? Sure we can try to borrow more by issuing bonds, but there have to be buyers. Sure, we can print more money, but that directly drives up the cost we'll pay to borrow money (and nearly all the mandatory spending is inflation-indexed, so we can't actually win that way).
As you point out, raiding the Social Security trust fund started with Reagan - and there's nothing there now, just "special issue bonds" that are no more than IOUs. BTW, Reagan's "tax cuts to the richest few percent of Americans" raised more federal revenue. More, not less, so that wasn't the reason he was raiding the trust. You may have heard of voodoo economics and the Laffer curve.
I know the current meme you're blindly parroting without any knowledge or research is "there is no crisis". Keep telling yourself that, but look at Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain in the coming years - that's our future, we're right in the middle of that pack Debt/GDP-wise.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Let me answer you in someone else's words:
"The government issuance of debt securities is well beyond the capacity for the United States to pay all of its debt obligations internally or externally." This is gibberish (= orthodox economics). Money is a debt security. The US government pays its obligations by replacing one debt security it created out of thin air, a bond, with another one, a dollar bill. Governments are never solvent in their own liabilities/debt/IOUs/money. Government debt is what the private sector uses for money. If governments became "solvent" - ceased to be debtors, then there would be no money at all in the private sector."
Oh, and what do Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain all have in common? They cannot print their own money.
And please, Debt/GDP is a false and misleading metric. I'm not saying "there is no crisis" but the crisis is not from government spending. It's not from deficits, except for the fact that deficits are the result of the real problem, which is increasing concentration of wealth in capital.
And Reagan did not "raise federal revenue" by cutting taxes. He actually presided over the biggest tax increase in US history, but it was on wages, on working and middle class families. He transferred wealth from the group at the bottom to the slice at the top. And yes, it was "voodoo economics" as GHW Bush claimed before Reagan asked him to become his running mate.
If you won't check for yourself on any of these "facts" maybe you will do this much: Go read some of the recent writings of Ronald Reagan's man in the OSB, David Stockman. He's got some very interesting things to say about what was going on in the US economy during the Reagan Administration, and what the end result was.
Seriously, friend, those facts and figures you throw around? Check them out for yourself. All the information is publicly available. Don't trust what you hear on the AM radio and cable news. You're smart enough to get your own information. Then get back to me when you're fully informed and we can have this talk. As long as you're just going to quote Rush Limbaugh to me, we won't make any progress.
You are welcome on my lawn.