Why does Icelandic seem so weird to so many people here? It's more closely related to English than, say, Spanish. Norse branched off from the west Germanic languages (from which English mostly descended) around 200 AD (although the split started a few thousand years earlier). Icelandic is very similar to Old Norse.
Vatnajökull is (in typical Icelandic fashion) the not-very-creatively-named "Water Glacier". Is it really that hard to see how "Vatn" and "Water" are related words? It's even easier to see the connections between Icelandic and German. For example, "Goðan dag" is a common Icelandic greeting.
As for that sentence: I'm just a beginner at Icelandic, but here's my best:
Hjörleifur: (A man's name) Sagði: Says að: That búið : Finished væri: Would have að virkja: Utilizing viðbúnaðarkerfi: Contingency system (literally, "preparedness system")
* Hjörleifur says that they would have finished utilizing the contingency system
að: That er: Is allt: Everything farið: Going gang: Running eins og: Like, in the manner of um: About gos: Eruption sé: See að ræða: At issue, under discussion
* Everything is all going and running concerning the eruption being discussed
að: That er: Is búið: Finished að senda: Sending *viðvörun: Warning út: Out til: To Englands: England (genitive) annig: So að: That flugrekendur: Flight operators geti: Can breytt: Change flugi: Flights
* They've finished sending out a warning to England so that flight operators can change flights.
Any native speakers, feel free to correct my translation;) But the main point is, I'm sure you can see the connection to English in a number of those words. What is it about Icelandic that scares off people -- is it the eth (ð) and thorn ()? They're just a voiced and unvoiced "th" (as in "this" and "thin", respectively). We used to have them in English. æ is pronounced "aye", just like in Latin, ö is like the "eux" in the French "deux", au is like the French "oui", ll is like "tl", á is "ow", é and ý are "yeh", non-leading "g"s are usually more of a stop, "rn" is like "rdn", and beyond that, you'll probably guess pretty close to the right pronunciation.
IMHO, the hardest parts about Icelandic are the rolled 'R's and the crazy-elaborate declension/conjugation system with all the exceptions;)
Zirconium cladding in the spent fuel ponds does not occur as part of a core meltdown. This would mean a spent fuel pond meltdown, which would be a huge disaster in its own right (no containment at all)
From the cooling pond which they've been pouring water all over. And from the small amounts that were airborne in the hydrogen when it detonated.
If you have *airborne* plutonium, you have *huge* problems. The boiling point of plutonium is nearly 6000 degrees Fahrenheit. And even if you're getting plutonium from water, it inherently means that the zirconium cladding has melted off the rods. Arguing that that this happened in the cooling ponds isn't exactly going to win you any brownie points in the "Nuclear power is safe" front.
And all of that said? Your claim is simply wrong. Again.Again.. Why on Earth do you think they reduced the rate of water flow into the core? Whatever they inject ends up in the basement after getting a hefty load of radionuclides. Not only is the water from the core, the evidence shows that it's from a core which has had re-criticality (multiple spikes in iodine production; iodine is a short-lived radionuclide)
Though, the only reason I'm defending this nuclear plant at all - despite the fact that everyone knew beforehand was a horribly outdated design and was due to be decommissioned
No -- only one reactor was (#1), and as usual with aging nuclear power plants (including our own), they got an extension to for ten years.
When what we really need to do is put the NIMBY and enviroweenies together on an island and let them starve because nothing ever gets done.
Right, because anyone who disagrees with you is someone who's only good as a target for name calling and has no proposed solutions of their own, correct? You realize you're talking about the same people who were accurately describing how serious this situation was while people like you were out there describing the plant's reaction to the earthquake and tsunami as a triumph of nuclear safety engineering.
I'm sorry, what exactly is the objection you're making to requesting rationality in our criminal code? That there's already irrationality, so more is welcome?
But that limit should not be "What we've already seen happen, plus a couple feet". When the disaster potential is on such a great scale, you need to assume "we ain't seen nothing yet." And if that assumption is too expensive? Then you don't do it.
As though earthquakes and tsunamis are the only kind of natural or manmade disasters, though. I'm sure there are nuclear reactors that would turn into scuba diving sites in the event of a levee failure or during a historic flood event. I'm sure an F5 tornado would have done just as good of a job taking out the generators and smashed up the spent fuel buildings quite adeptly. Heck, I wouldn't be shocked to learn that there's a reactor in a potential avalanche zone or in an area that could be destroyed by a volcano. Etc.
To me this does seem like a major design defect. The reactors were designed to withstand large amounts of lateral acceleration, but not as much as the earthquake cause. It is somewhat understandable that such a large tsunami was not anticipated but this is not the first magnitude 9 earthquake since accurate record keeping began.
But you see, that's not acceptable. You can't just account for known unknowns. You also have to factor in the risk of unknown unknowns. It's simply not good enough to say, "We've never seen a tsunami that big, so we'll just assume that one won't happen" when you're dealing with something with such huge consequences in the event of a failure.
A couple years ago, in the city just to the north of me, the Cedar River flooded. Floods happen, right? Yes, but it was something like *ten feet* over its previous record stage, with records dating back to the mid-1800s. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season broke half the records in the book for a hurricane season, some by huge margins. Same with the tornado outbreaks in April (two massive tornado outbreaks in a single month, each record-setting). And on and on. We have more than ample evidence that previously standing records, especially localized records, can get blown away. If you can't build with this realization in mind, and if a failure has such severe economic consequences, you shouldn't be building.
If the containment vessel isn't leaking, how is all of the highly-radioactive, plutonium-bearing water accumulating outside of the containment vessel?
Lots of very respected sources are reporting that there was damage to the containment vessel in reactors 1 through 3, quoting multiple figures in the government and TEPCO. I'm going to trust their ability to cross-check their reporting more than your "linked report" which is just a second-hand summary of news reported by one source, not some official document.
Chernobyl also had a fraction as much nuclear material on-hand, and had no plutonium-burning reactors. Also, the spent fuel ponds had no containment structure around them at Fukushima, only the core.
Anyway, I think it's way too soon to make any calls as to how bad this is going to be in the long run. The real question is how much cesium is working its way into the soil, houses, water, etc around the plant. All that can be done for now is to try to minimize it.
That's because the input to an electric motor is low entropy (electricity), while the input to a heat engine is high entropy (heat). But here's the issue: the input to your total system is heat (the fuel for your engine). It doesn't matter how many "stages" or what kind of stages you add (aka, photovoltaic + electric, etc), you can't break Carnot's law for the closed system.
I can't help but wonder about the entropy aspect. I mean, you're taking away blackbody radiation and turning it into power at extreme efficiency so that you can get work done all over again. Doesn't that strike anyone else as odd? I mean, let's say that you've got an engine near the Carnot limit and you wrapped it in these IR solar cells, which take 90% of the radiated waste heat and turn it into electricity, when you then use to power an electric motor to boost your engine's output. Would you not have just surpassed the Carnot limit?
That Youtube video clearly had gunpowder involved. That's how movie "explosions" are done -- a gunpowder charge plus gasoline.
Inside of a cylinder, vaporized and pressurized, is hardly the same conditions gasoline is in at rest. And it's still just a conflagration, not a detonation.
Your link does not talk about explosions at all. You need to learn the difference between a deflagration and a detonation, then look up DDT transition requirements for different fuels. Hydrogen very readily undergoes DDT, even without compression. That means a supersonic flame front, not "8 feet per second" like your (obviously unreferenced) article claims.
Lol, you should tell him it's back in vogue again and have him watch a few episodes of Whale Wars. Then get him mad at Iceland for whaling. Then get him interested in geothermal power, and then show him how Iceland gets 99% of their electricity from renewables, to see if you can get him to do yet another about-face;)
The world can be complicated, and little is truly black or white, that's for sure.
Not to mention, its more explosive than dynamite!!!
How is "not explosive at all" equal to "more explosive than dynamite"? Why are you confusing energy density with explosive capacity? Being explosive means that you can release energy very quickly (aka, it's more akin to power density than energy density).
I'm having trouble figuring out how the least-dense substance known can "pool" anywhere.
Hint: Think upside down.
Still haven't figured it out?:) Beneath an overhang (such as the rain shelters fueling stations typically provide so you don't get soaked filling up your vehicle), inside a garage (anything from a small home garage to a large industrial garage), in any building that a H2 pipeline passes beneath, in any building that a pipe that a H2 pipe has leaked into leads to, and so forth
You do realize that water vapor has an average atmospheric residency of under two weeks, right?
The real problem is that hydrogen vehicles have a grossly inefficient fuel cycle. Also, leaked hydrogen destroys ozone. But your water vapor argument is one of the dumbest anti-hydrogen claims you could have made.
And, FYI, most of the environmental community wants *battery-electric* vehicles, not hydrogen. Hydrogen vehicles are a "solution" being pushed on the "GreenTards" that they do not want.
Indeed they were. Despite being engineered in all regards to try to avoid precisely that sort of event. Hydrogen pools and detonates just so damned easily.
Here's what the detonation of an amount of hydrogen perhaps 1/10th of what you'd find in a typical mass-market hydrogen car (or a hundredth of a hydrogen semi) looks like. Now, thats an H2/O2 mixture; to get that force with H2/air would require about twice as much. But it gives you a good idea of what we're talking about here (and why such a low-density gas could do so much damage to those heavy concrete reactor buildings).
This graph does not deal with cost of energy at all -- purely energy in, motion out. NG plants are very efficient, and getting even more efficient (the latest generation are about 60%, not counting the potential reuse of waste heat). NG power is expensive per MWHr compared to coal because NG is more expensive than coal per joule, even after the power plant efficiency difference is taken into account. Both NG and coal power are primarily marginal cost driven (aka, fuel), not capital cost driven like nuclear and most renewables.
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Given the Cod Wars, I hardly pity the UK being inconvenienced from Icelandic volcanic activity. Which is hardly something they can control anyway.
Why does Icelandic seem so weird to so many people here? It's more closely related to English than, say, Spanish. Norse branched off from the west Germanic languages (from which English mostly descended) around 200 AD (although the split started a few thousand years earlier). Icelandic is very similar to Old Norse.
Vatnajökull is (in typical Icelandic fashion) the not-very-creatively-named "Water Glacier". Is it really that hard to see how "Vatn" and "Water" are related words? It's even easier to see the connections between Icelandic and German. For example, "Goðan dag" is a common Icelandic greeting.
As for that sentence: I'm just a beginner at Icelandic, but here's my best:
Hjörleifur: (A man's name)
Sagði: Says
að: That
búið : Finished
væri: Would have
að virkja: Utilizing
viðbúnaðarkerfi: Contingency system (literally, "preparedness system")
* Hjörleifur says that they would have finished utilizing the contingency system
að: That
er: Is
allt: Everything
farið: Going
gang: Running
eins og: Like, in the manner of
um: About
gos: Eruption
sé: See
að ræða: At issue, under discussion
* Everything is all going and running concerning the eruption being discussed
að: That
er: Is
búið: Finished
að senda: Sending
*viðvörun: Warning
út: Out
til: To
Englands: England (genitive)
annig: So
að: That
flugrekendur: Flight operators
geti: Can
breytt: Change
flugi: Flights
* They've finished sending out a warning to England so that flight operators can change flights.
Any native speakers, feel free to correct my translation ;) But the main point is, I'm sure you can see the connection to English in a number of those words. What is it about Icelandic that scares off people -- is it the eth (ð) and thorn ()? They're just a voiced and unvoiced "th" (as in "this" and "thin", respectively). We used to have them in English. æ is pronounced "aye", just like in Latin, ö is like the "eux" in the French "deux", au is like the French "oui", ll is like "tl", á is "ow", é and ý are "yeh", non-leading "g"s are usually more of a stop, "rn" is like "rdn", and beyond that, you'll probably guess pretty close to the right pronunciation.
IMHO, the hardest parts about Icelandic are the rolled 'R's and the crazy-elaborate declension/conjugation system with all the exceptions ;)
They'd hate it there. Remember, we're talking about a country that voted in same-sex marriage 49 to *zero*, and has a lesbian prime minister.
Zirconium cladding in the spent fuel ponds does not occur as part of a core meltdown. This would mean a spent fuel pond meltdown, which would be a huge disaster in its own right (no containment at all)
If you have *airborne* plutonium, you have *huge* problems. The boiling point of plutonium is nearly 6000 degrees Fahrenheit. And even if you're getting plutonium from water, it inherently means that the zirconium cladding has melted off the rods. Arguing that that this happened in the cooling ponds isn't exactly going to win you any brownie points in the "Nuclear power is safe" front.
And all of that said? Your claim is simply wrong. Again. Again.. Why on Earth do you think they reduced the rate of water flow into the core? Whatever they inject ends up in the basement after getting a hefty load of radionuclides. Not only is the water from the core, the evidence shows that it's from a core which has had re-criticality (multiple spikes in iodine production; iodine is a short-lived radionuclide)
No -- only one reactor was (#1), and as usual with aging nuclear power plants (including our own), they got an extension to for ten years.
Right, because anyone who disagrees with you is someone who's only good as a target for name calling and has no proposed solutions of their own, correct? You realize you're talking about the same people who were accurately describing how serious this situation was while people like you were out there describing the plant's reaction to the earthquake and tsunami as a triumph of nuclear safety engineering.
I'm sorry, what exactly is the objection you're making to requesting rationality in our criminal code? That there's already irrationality, so more is welcome?
Felony? Seriously?
"Yes, ma'am, I know you were raped, but it's not like your attacker posed a couple episodes of Scrubs on YouTube..."
But that limit should not be "What we've already seen happen, plus a couple feet". When the disaster potential is on such a great scale, you need to assume "we ain't seen nothing yet." And if that assumption is too expensive? Then you don't do it.
Always responding to the last disaster...
And, FYI, primary coolant *does* become radioactive in normal circumstances. That's why you need a secondary coolant loop.
As though earthquakes and tsunamis are the only kind of natural or manmade disasters, though. I'm sure there are nuclear reactors that would turn into scuba diving sites in the event of a levee failure or during a historic flood event. I'm sure an F5 tornado would have done just as good of a job taking out the generators and smashed up the spent fuel buildings quite adeptly. Heck, I wouldn't be shocked to learn that there's a reactor in a potential avalanche zone or in an area that could be destroyed by a volcano. Etc.
But you see, that's not acceptable. You can't just account for known unknowns. You also have to factor in the risk of unknown unknowns. It's simply not good enough to say, "We've never seen a tsunami that big, so we'll just assume that one won't happen" when you're dealing with something with such huge consequences in the event of a failure.
A couple years ago, in the city just to the north of me, the Cedar River flooded. Floods happen, right? Yes, but it was something like *ten feet* over its previous record stage, with records dating back to the mid-1800s. The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season broke half the records in the book for a hurricane season, some by huge margins. Same with the tornado outbreaks in April (two massive tornado outbreaks in a single month, each record-setting). And on and on. We have more than ample evidence that previously standing records, especially localized records, can get blown away. If you can't build with this realization in mind, and if a failure has such severe economic consequences, you shouldn't be building.
If the containment vessel isn't leaking, how is all of the highly-radioactive, plutonium-bearing water accumulating outside of the containment vessel?
Lots of very respected sources are reporting that there was damage to the containment vessel in reactors 1 through 3, quoting multiple figures in the government and TEPCO. I'm going to trust their ability to cross-check their reporting more than your "linked report" which is just a second-hand summary of news reported by one source, not some official document.
Chernobyl also had a fraction as much nuclear material on-hand, and had no plutonium-burning reactors. Also, the spent fuel ponds had no containment structure around them at Fukushima, only the core.
Anyway, I think it's way too soon to make any calls as to how bad this is going to be in the long run. The real question is how much cesium is working its way into the soil, houses, water, etc around the plant. All that can be done for now is to try to minimize it.
That's because the input to an electric motor is low entropy (electricity), while the input to a heat engine is high entropy (heat). But here's the issue: the input to your total system is heat (the fuel for your engine). It doesn't matter how many "stages" or what kind of stages you add (aka, photovoltaic + electric, etc), you can't break Carnot's law for the closed system.
I can't help but wonder about the entropy aspect. I mean, you're taking away blackbody radiation and turning it into power at extreme efficiency so that you can get work done all over again. Doesn't that strike anyone else as odd? I mean, let's say that you've got an engine near the Carnot limit and you wrapped it in these IR solar cells, which take 90% of the radiated waste heat and turn it into electricity, when you then use to power an electric motor to boost your engine's output. Would you not have just surpassed the Carnot limit?
As mentioned elsewhere, you're confusing "hydropower" and "hydrogen".
You misread the graph. 74% is hydroPOWER, not hydroGEN. Hydropower, as in "a dam on a river with turbines".
That Youtube video clearly had gunpowder involved. That's how movie "explosions" are done -- a gunpowder charge plus gasoline.
Inside of a cylinder, vaporized and pressurized, is hardly the same conditions gasoline is in at rest. And it's still just a conflagration, not a detonation.
Your link does not talk about explosions at all. You need to learn the difference between a deflagration and a detonation, then look up DDT transition requirements for different fuels. Hydrogen very readily undergoes DDT, even without compression. That means a supersonic flame front, not "8 feet per second" like your (obviously unreferenced) article claims.
Lol, you should tell him it's back in vogue again and have him watch a few episodes of Whale Wars. Then get him mad at Iceland for whaling. Then get him interested in geothermal power, and then show him how Iceland gets 99% of their electricity from renewables, to see if you can get him to do yet another about-face ;)
The world can be complicated, and little is truly black or white, that's for sure.
Wow, great to know that your single idiot friend is the bellweather for both the science behind a technology and the opinions of an entire movement.
How is "not explosive at all" equal to "more explosive than dynamite"? Why are you confusing energy density with explosive capacity? Being explosive means that you can release energy very quickly (aka, it's more akin to power density than energy density).
Hint: Think upside down.
Still haven't figured it out? :) Beneath an overhang (such as the rain shelters fueling stations typically provide so you don't get soaked filling up your vehicle), inside a garage (anything from a small home garage to a large industrial garage), in any building that a H2 pipeline passes beneath, in any building that a pipe that a H2 pipe has leaked into leads to, and so forth
You do realize that water vapor has an average atmospheric residency of under two weeks, right?
The real problem is that hydrogen vehicles have a grossly inefficient fuel cycle. Also, leaked hydrogen destroys ozone. But your water vapor argument is one of the dumbest anti-hydrogen claims you could have made.
And, FYI, most of the environmental community wants *battery-electric* vehicles, not hydrogen. Hydrogen vehicles are a "solution" being pushed on the "GreenTards" that they do not want.
Indeed they were. Despite being engineered in all regards to try to avoid precisely that sort of event. Hydrogen pools and detonates just so damned easily.
Here's what the detonation of an amount of hydrogen perhaps 1/10th of what you'd find in a typical mass-market hydrogen car (or a hundredth of a hydrogen semi) looks like. Now, thats an H2/O2 mixture; to get that force with H2/air would require about twice as much. But it gives you a good idea of what we're talking about here (and why such a low-density gas could do so much damage to those heavy concrete reactor buildings).
This graph does not deal with cost of energy at all -- purely energy in, motion out. NG plants are very efficient, and getting even more efficient (the latest generation are about 60%, not counting the potential reuse of waste heat). NG power is expensive per MWHr compared to coal because NG is more expensive than coal per joule, even after the power plant efficiency difference is taken into account. Both NG and coal power are primarily marginal cost driven (aka, fuel), not capital cost driven like nuclear and most renewables.