Slashdot Mirror
Legacy From the 1800s Leaves Tokyo In the Dark
itwbennett writes "East Japan entered its fifth day of power rationing on Friday, with no end to the planned blackouts in sight. The local electrical utility can't make up the shortfall by importing power from another region, though, because Japan lacks a national power grid, a consequence of a decision made in the late 1800s."
Dark (and hopefully) clear skies...
Half of Japan used 50Hz and the other side uses 60Hz. They have three conversion stations with a combined capacity of just 1GW, so power from one side can't power the other.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
TV's don't sync to the power line. They convert incoming power to DC then work from that.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
They do, but they don't have the capacity to convert the amounts of power that the Kanto side suddenly needs. It's unfortunate that they didn't invest in more conversion capacity before this disaster, but then again, it probably would have been viewed as a waste of money, as few people could have imagined a power shortage of this scale before.
A few years ago the government began urging offices to keep their indoor temperatures at 28 degrees C (82 F) to save energy; there are doubts as to its efficacy as the increased sweat and lethargy bring greater water usage (more laundry) and lowered productivity.
I despised this program but could certainly endure it this year when there are so many people suffering from a lot more than an overheated working environment, but the silver lining is that when power capacity does finally get back up -- the Fukushima reactors were nearing end-of-life and new ones were already scheduled for 2013 -- regular folks might be able to work in air-conditioned offices again. After what we've been through, it sure will feel like a luxury.
They can't really change it now, can they?
The wire doesn't care very much. In the areas that are destroyed, they have to buy all new equipment anyway. Seems like a good time to standardize.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Tachi Station sells power converters.
Anywhere you need to transmit power a long distance - you get less power loss over the distance. In Canada a decent portion of our power generation is from hydroelectric dams in the north - 1000 km from the main demands for that power. We have 450,000-volt DC lines running that distance. Any tech that makes that transmission more efficient, or reduces maintenance costs at either end would be snapped up quickly.
If the USS Ronald Reagan had a couple Mighty Pumps in its inventory, these could be attached to the catapult steam lines. An electrical generator could be attached to the pump's drive shaft, generating power. Then they'd just run a cable to the shore to power the cities affected by the disaster.
The USS Enterprise has 310 megawatts of thermal power. I don't know how much of this could be sent to the catapult lines... Nimitz-class carriers have 2 reactors instead of 8, and generate ~190 MW of thermal power.
There is some historical legacy for using an aircraft carrier to power a city:
Lots of people have found my site this week (/. post on Sunday, google, etc), and the link about the MYT engine was one of the more-commonly followed links. This page has better information about the MYT pump/engine:
When Disaster Strikes, Send the Enterprise. I just did my first newspaper interview this morning. :)
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
>>>TV's don't sync to the power line. They convert incoming power to DC then work from that.
That is so horribly wrong. "The NTSC field refresh frequency in the black-and-white system originally exactly matched the nominal 60 Hz frequency of alternating current power used in the United States. Matching the field refresh rate to the power source avoided intermodulation (also called beating), which produces rolling bars on the screen......
"Synchronization of the refresh rate to the power incidentally helped kinescope cameras record early live television broadcasts, as it was very simple to synchronize a film camera to capture one frame of video on each film frame by using the alternating current frequency to set the speed of the synchronous AC motor-drive camera.....
"The actual figure of 525 lines was chosen as a consequence of the limitations of the vacuum-tube-based technologies of the day. In early TV systems, a master voltage-controlled oscillator was run at twice the horizontal line frequency, and this frequency was divided down by the number of lines used (in this case 525) to give the field frequency (60 Hz in this case). This frequency was then compared with the 60 Hz power-line frequency and any discrepancy corrected by adjusting the frequency of the master oscillator." - wiki
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
However east and west Japan were still relatively independent even in the 1890s. It wasn't really until after the Russo-Japanese war that the country really started to become just that, a unified country. Humans have this odd way of thinking about countries, namely that the government/political structures and geographical boundaries of countries today are the same as they were over 100 years ago, they are often much different. Japan was very much like Germany, essentially a very loosely affiliated set of states bound by geographical, linguistic, and cultural ties but often separated by bitter political and military rivalries. I doubt that even if someone had the foresight to force both sides to use the same standards they would have had the political capital to make it a reality. That sort of political capital didn't really exist until after the Russo-Japanese war towards the end of the Meiji era.
Monstar L
Looks like the invisible hand of the free market really dropped the ball that time....