I kind of know what you are saying, risk management and all, but... the fact that this event is occurring (and TMI's accident) showed that supposedly reliable risk models were flawed. It comes down to this -- in the initial risk calculations what was the allowable probability that an event of this magnitude (vague here because we don't yet know how it will come out) would occur? By allowable probability, I mean what did the proponents publish to the public that the risk was?, not their own internal number that they were willing to accept. I'll bet it was some crazy small number like 1 in a 1,000,000 over the life of the facility (otherwise you get too much public pushback). The problem is that it is very difficult to honestly get the risk of anything down to numbers that low. Can you really get to 1:1,000,000 that a catastrophic quake/tsumani won't hit based on records from geological surveys? (certainly you can't from historical records).
The basic problem here is that for risk probabilities as low as are advertised for nuclear power, you have to include the risk that something will happen which you can't anticipate, thus the numerical models go out the window. So the best you can do is put an upper limit on the risk based only on events which are reliably included in your models. I maintain that you cannot honestly get the calculated risk probability down far enough that way such that your nuclear project will get built, given the perceived cost of a really bad case event (real or not). Why else do the nuclear plants in the US require government liability backing -- because the private insurers either can't calculate the risk or already have and won't accept it.
I am a big proponent of nuclear power, but am bothered by the apparent flaws in the risk models. One way out is to recognize that nuclear power as currently generated is riskier than we would like but all other ways to generate base load electricity are just as flawed or worse. Also we should be moving toward better designed nuclear plants which are more inherently failure-proof.
"Taxes are simply a cost of doing business and that gets built into the sale prices of the goods or services they offer." -- maybe true for an ideal economic model with elastic supplies and demands and no barriers to entry, but in the real world, not so much. In the real world there are explicit cartels (DeBeers for diamonds) or defacto monopolies (any product which is patent protected). In these cases the seller can charge more than a simple supply and demand law would dictate (since they can artificially restrict demand). Thus they are selling for more than their cost of production, including taxes, would normally require, and have likely picked a selling price which is as high as they can get without a big falloff in sales -- they are making a big profit. If their taxes go up they can't raise prices much if at all, but they can afford the increase in production costs since their profit was so big in the first place. The seller just has to give up some of the profit into the taxes. Granted, you can make the argument that they now cannot go out and buy their third yacht (or Congressman) with the forgone profit, but that is a model more complex than you first proposed.
Hey dude, take an economic course. AC beat me to it, but since his might not get read -- this meme that consumers pay all of a company's taxes is highly misleading and for practical purposes, a lie. The consumer pays what supply and demand sets for the price of the good (let's assume for a minute an ideal competitive market here, not the distorted corporatocracy/kleptocracy we have in the US). The price paid for the good goes to three places -- cost of production, taxes, and profit for the seller. Assume that the cost of production is fixed, then the split between the taxes and the profit for the seller can vary. If taxes go up incrementally then the seller can probably not pass this full increase to the buyer, he has to pay some of the taxes from his profit. Thus the consumer does not pay the full amount of taxes in the transaction. The cost of the taxes is split between seller and buyer. It looks to me like the corporations today can afford to pay more of that split.
I see your point in a legal and idealized way. However at least from a 'moral' (I know that is totally unenforceable) and perhaps a practical point of view, when the industry has "captured" their regulators (and given the scandals at the Mineral Management Service I can safely say that the oil industry had captured their regulators) then the industry again assumes full responsibility for their actions and screw-ups. Hiding behind regulations which the industry mostly wrote and then probably skirted when the regulators weren't looking doesn't cut it when the disaster occurs.
As citizens we have an issue with the regulators who were our representatives on site, but under-resourced, incompetent and/or corrupt regulators and even inadequate regulations themselves do not absolve the industry one bit from their actions. They can't cry, "You didn't make us do it right!"
Look at the law which legally limited liability to $75 million as an example that the industry controlled the regulations.
I think there is a fundamental fault in the discussion about whether a hunter-gatherer, agricultural, or industrial-technocratic society is "better" for the inhabitants as if they had a choice. In the big scheme of things the concept of "better for the inhabitants" doesn't matter. The society which can better exploit the resources available and produce larger populations, bigger economies, and more effective military forces will end up dominating the region and times in which it exists. The desires of the inhabitants and philosophical observations have very little to do with it. It is almost a thermodynamic argument with technology serving as a sort of unstoppable entropy. It is a coincidence that improved technology which brought us from subsistence agriculture to industrial living has tended to improve the well-being of the average inhabitant. From my very limited knowledge, I would say that the technological change from hunter-gatherer to subsistence agriculture had the opposite effect.
The AC's reply before mine is much better, so read that one, but the Shuttle never put a payload into polar orbit (at least not any big ones, and none at all that I'm aware of) -- that would have required a launch from Vandenberg which never happened after some billion+ $$ was put into a launch facility there. And the Shuttle certainly never exercised a 1200 mile crossrange capability. Given its lack of meeting any other operational requirements, who knows if it ever could? The customer for those requirements (USAF) abandoned the system as soon as it could. NASA didn't have that option.
Without knowing the exact heat balances in play there, I'll take a stab at it. In a vacuum (assuming no out-gassing or other mass exchanges) there is only one way to change temperature -- absorb electromagnetic radiation (visible light, infrared, microwaves, etc.) to heat up and emit similar radiation to cool down. In the case of Apollo 13, the spacecraft absorbed solar radiation, although being painted white and bright aluminum it must not have been an efficient absorber. And it emitted radiation, peaking in the infrared due to its temperature, which would cool it down. So the equilibrium between absorption and radiation was trending toward an uncomfortably cold spacecraft.
I agree with you but "respect" in the labor force is primarily spelled "P A Y". There are lots of blue collar jobs which I would rather being doing. I installed tires on cars one summer and worked construction two summers in college -- either one of those I would rather do now if they offered the same pay and job security that white collar work does. The economy has changed and the blue collar jobs were the first to go or be downgraded. Most white collar jobs are next but not there yet. It is not a matter of "respect" so much as market forces, which I admit are somewhat under the control of political forces but there has been no intent, I think, to disrespect noble blue collar work.
Alternatively, civilizations, with the help of some intermediate technology, reach a point where they overload the local environment's ability to handle their unsustainable exploitation. As more and more competing groups gain that ability they quickly use up all the easily available resources; no one wants to share or throttle their own lifestyles (to buy time for more advanced technology to deliver more for everyone) so the inevitable resource wars break out involving civilization-destroying weapons, and they all die off never having achieved their potential (or, sadly, perhaps they did). I call this the "I've got mine, screw everyone else, including the future" effect.
(P.S. I apologize in advance if the parent really was meant to be funny.)
Not to downplay their reentry feat here but the article says they will enter at about 7.5 miles/sec (11.3 km/sec by my math)which is just a bit over escape velocity. The Apollo spacecraft were almost as fast, about 7 miles/sec on their reentries. In contrast, meteors from some annual meteor showers arrive from near parabolic solar orbits and enter at over 40 miles/sec (44 miles/sec, 71km/sec for Leonid meteors).
Sorry to differ here, but "using anything over the minimal amount of fuel you need to move will necessarily result in decreased efficiency" -- is not accurate. Aside from the parasitic ("wind resistance") drag which increases non-linearly with airspeed, all aircraft suffer another drag, "induced drag" which is a direct effect of generating lift. Induced drag is greater at low airspeeds and decreases with increasing airspeed. So for any given aircraft weight and configuration there is a compromise ("max range") airspeed which gives the best fuel economy per mile traveled. It is not even true that the airspeed which gives the best endurance (least fuel per minute) is the slowest speed at which the aircraft will stay airborne. Again this is a compromise between parasitic and induced drags. Max range airspeed is pretty fast in jet aircraft -- I'm not an airline pilot but I suspect that they fly near max range airspeed a lot.
I've heard that argument before and it can't be dismissed out of hand (see the reply of Daniel Dvorkin below), however:
1) Air launched vehicles like the X-15 were not going to get a human into orbit anytime soon, the propulsion technology wasn't (and isn't) available. The best we can do now in 2010 is the Pegasus vehicle with its 1000 lb payload into LEO.
2) The X-20 was a small, winged vehicle on top of a big, expendable, vertically launched booster, so other than the ability to land horizontally (and the payload weight lost to the wings), what did it offer beyond Apollo?
3) The X-30 project showed that 1990's technology was insufficient to produce a workable SSTO spaceplane.
None of the spaceplane technologies had the ability to put the tonnage into orbit required for a space station or to go out of LEO so you would need a big (probably "dumb") booster for anything beyond quick trips to orbit, anyway. The limitations of chemical fuels and the Earth's gravity well seem to make practical spaceplanes just out of reach, in the 1960's and for the foreseeable future. I respect the engineers working on them at the time, but while getting to LEO with the X-20 would have been a big deal then, I don't see how it would have gotten us much further by now had we pursued it. Apollo-Saturn went to the moon and orbited a space station within 15 years after the first Saturn 1 launch.
"For someone my age, the shuttle really *IS* space travel. I'm going to be really sad to see STS-133 land." --
Well for someone MY age, the Shuttle with its false promises of cheap access to space is what destroyed the Apollo-Saturn progression of vehicles and stagnated real manned space exploration for 30 years. Good riddance; it is time to get back to business with Constellation or some other Apollo type vehicles which will take us beyond LEO.
I haven't seen a really suitable answer to your question so I'll give it a try -- I'll use the analogy of protons, neutrons and helium nuclei since they are more familiar. The sum of the masses of two free protons and two free neutrons is larger than the mass of a helium nucleus. The bound combination of the four particles as helium has a lower energy state than the four free particles (due to the attraction they have for each other by the nuclear Strong Force and quantum effects). The difference in the energy states is the "binding energy" of the nucleus, and the nucleus is lighter than the sum of the free particles by the mass-energy equivalence of that binding energy. For composite "particles" such as the proton and this new particle the effect is the same -- the free quarks weigh more than the the composite particle they form with the difference being the mass equivalent of the energy freed up when they bond. In the case of atomic nuclei the mass difference is on the order of a few percent and in the case of the baryons (protons, neutrons, etc.) the mass difference is much, much greater but the basic principle is the same.
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I kind of know what you are saying, risk management and all, but ... the fact that this event is occurring (and TMI's accident) showed that supposedly reliable risk models were flawed. It comes down to this -- in the initial risk calculations what was the allowable probability that an event of this magnitude (vague here because we don't yet know how it will come out) would occur? By allowable probability, I mean what did the proponents publish to the public that the risk was?, not their own internal number that they were willing to accept. I'll bet it was some crazy small number like 1 in a 1,000,000 over the life of the facility (otherwise you get too much public pushback). The problem is that it is very difficult to honestly get the risk of anything down to numbers that low. Can you really get to 1:1,000,000 that a catastrophic quake/tsumani won't hit based on records from geological surveys? (certainly you can't from historical records).
The basic problem here is that for risk probabilities as low as are advertised for nuclear power, you have to include the risk that something will happen which you can't anticipate, thus the numerical models go out the window. So the best you can do is put an upper limit on the risk based only on events which are reliably included in your models. I maintain that you cannot honestly get the calculated risk probability down far enough that way such that your nuclear project will get built, given the perceived cost of a really bad case event (real or not). Why else do the nuclear plants in the US require government liability backing -- because the private insurers either can't calculate the risk or already have and won't accept it.
I am a big proponent of nuclear power, but am bothered by the apparent flaws in the risk models. One way out is to recognize that nuclear power as currently generated is riskier than we would like but all other ways to generate base load electricity are just as flawed or worse. Also we should be moving toward better designed nuclear plants which are more inherently failure-proof.
"Taxes are simply a cost of doing business and that gets built into the sale prices of the goods or services they offer." -- maybe true for an ideal economic model with elastic supplies and demands and no barriers to entry, but in the real world, not so much. In the real world there are explicit cartels (DeBeers for diamonds) or defacto monopolies (any product which is patent protected). In these cases the seller can charge more than a simple supply and demand law would dictate (since they can artificially restrict demand). Thus they are selling for more than their cost of production, including taxes, would normally require, and have likely picked a selling price which is as high as they can get without a big falloff in sales -- they are making a big profit. If their taxes go up they can't raise prices much if at all, but they can afford the increase in production costs since their profit was so big in the first place. The seller just has to give up some of the profit into the taxes. Granted, you can make the argument that they now cannot go out and buy their third yacht (or Congressman) with the forgone profit, but that is a model more complex than you first proposed.
Hey dude, take an economic course. AC beat me to it, but since his might not get read -- this meme that consumers pay all of a company's taxes is highly misleading and for practical purposes, a lie. The consumer pays what supply and demand sets for the price of the good (let's assume for a minute an ideal competitive market here, not the distorted corporatocracy/kleptocracy we have in the US). The price paid for the good goes to three places -- cost of production, taxes, and profit for the seller. Assume that the cost of production is fixed, then the split between the taxes and the profit for the seller can vary. If taxes go up incrementally then the seller can probably not pass this full increase to the buyer, he has to pay some of the taxes from his profit. Thus the consumer does not pay the full amount of taxes in the transaction. The cost of the taxes is split between seller and buyer. It looks to me like the corporations today can afford to pay more of that split.
I see your point in a legal and idealized way. However at least from a 'moral' (I know that is totally unenforceable) and perhaps a practical point of view, when the industry has "captured" their regulators (and given the scandals at the Mineral Management Service I can safely say that the oil industry had captured their regulators) then the industry again assumes full responsibility for their actions and screw-ups. Hiding behind regulations which the industry mostly wrote and then probably skirted when the regulators weren't looking doesn't cut it when the disaster occurs. As citizens we have an issue with the regulators who were our representatives on site, but under-resourced, incompetent and/or corrupt regulators and even inadequate regulations themselves do not absolve the industry one bit from their actions. They can't cry, "You didn't make us do it right!" Look at the law which legally limited liability to $75 million as an example that the industry controlled the regulations.
I think there is a fundamental fault in the discussion about whether a hunter-gatherer, agricultural, or industrial-technocratic society is "better" for the inhabitants as if they had a choice. In the big scheme of things the concept of "better for the inhabitants" doesn't matter. The society which can better exploit the resources available and produce larger populations, bigger economies, and more effective military forces will end up dominating the region and times in which it exists. The desires of the inhabitants and philosophical observations have very little to do with it. It is almost a thermodynamic argument with technology serving as a sort of unstoppable entropy. It is a coincidence that improved technology which brought us from subsistence agriculture to industrial living has tended to improve the well-being of the average inhabitant. From my very limited knowledge, I would say that the technological change from hunter-gatherer to subsistence agriculture had the opposite effect.
The AC's reply before mine is much better, so read that one, but the Shuttle never put a payload into polar orbit (at least not any big ones, and none at all that I'm aware of) -- that would have required a launch from Vandenberg which never happened after some billion+ $$ was put into a launch facility there. And the Shuttle certainly never exercised a 1200 mile crossrange capability. Given its lack of meeting any other operational requirements, who knows if it ever could? The customer for those requirements (USAF) abandoned the system as soon as it could. NASA didn't have that option.
Without knowing the exact heat balances in play there, I'll take a stab at it. In a vacuum (assuming no out-gassing or other mass exchanges) there is only one way to change temperature -- absorb electromagnetic radiation (visible light, infrared, microwaves, etc.) to heat up and emit similar radiation to cool down. In the case of Apollo 13, the spacecraft absorbed solar radiation, although being painted white and bright aluminum it must not have been an efficient absorber. And it emitted radiation, peaking in the infrared due to its temperature, which would cool it down. So the equilibrium between absorption and radiation was trending toward an uncomfortably cold spacecraft.
I agree with you but "respect" in the labor force is primarily spelled "P A Y". There are lots of blue collar jobs which I would rather being doing. I installed tires on cars one summer and worked construction two summers in college -- either one of those I would rather do now if they offered the same pay and job security that white collar work does. The economy has changed and the blue collar jobs were the first to go or be downgraded. Most white collar jobs are next but not there yet. It is not a matter of "respect" so much as market forces, which I admit are somewhat under the control of political forces but there has been no intent, I think, to disrespect noble blue collar work.
Alternatively, civilizations, with the help of some intermediate technology, reach a point where they overload the local environment's ability to handle their unsustainable exploitation. As more and more competing groups gain that ability they quickly use up all the easily available resources; no one wants to share or throttle their own lifestyles (to buy time for more advanced technology to deliver more for everyone) so the inevitable resource wars break out involving civilization-destroying weapons, and they all die off never having achieved their potential (or, sadly, perhaps they did). I call this the "I've got mine, screw everyone else, including the future" effect. (P.S. I apologize in advance if the parent really was meant to be funny.)
Not to downplay their reentry feat here but the article says they will enter at about 7.5 miles/sec (11.3 km/sec by my math)which is just a bit over escape velocity. The Apollo spacecraft were almost as fast, about 7 miles/sec on their reentries. In contrast, meteors from some annual meteor showers arrive from near parabolic solar orbits and enter at over 40 miles/sec (44 miles/sec, 71km/sec for Leonid meteors).
Sorry to differ here, but "using anything over the minimal amount of fuel you need to move will necessarily result in decreased efficiency" -- is not accurate. Aside from the parasitic ("wind resistance") drag which increases non-linearly with airspeed, all aircraft suffer another drag, "induced drag" which is a direct effect of generating lift. Induced drag is greater at low airspeeds and decreases with increasing airspeed. So for any given aircraft weight and configuration there is a compromise ("max range") airspeed which gives the best fuel economy per mile traveled. It is not even true that the airspeed which gives the best endurance (least fuel per minute) is the slowest speed at which the aircraft will stay airborne. Again this is a compromise between parasitic and induced drags. Max range airspeed is pretty fast in jet aircraft -- I'm not an airline pilot but I suspect that they fly near max range airspeed a lot.
I've heard that argument before and it can't be dismissed out of hand (see the reply of Daniel Dvorkin below), however: 1) Air launched vehicles like the X-15 were not going to get a human into orbit anytime soon, the propulsion technology wasn't (and isn't) available. The best we can do now in 2010 is the Pegasus vehicle with its 1000 lb payload into LEO. 2) The X-20 was a small, winged vehicle on top of a big, expendable, vertically launched booster, so other than the ability to land horizontally (and the payload weight lost to the wings), what did it offer beyond Apollo? 3) The X-30 project showed that 1990's technology was insufficient to produce a workable SSTO spaceplane. None of the spaceplane technologies had the ability to put the tonnage into orbit required for a space station or to go out of LEO so you would need a big (probably "dumb") booster for anything beyond quick trips to orbit, anyway. The limitations of chemical fuels and the Earth's gravity well seem to make practical spaceplanes just out of reach, in the 1960's and for the foreseeable future. I respect the engineers working on them at the time, but while getting to LEO with the X-20 would have been a big deal then, I don't see how it would have gotten us much further by now had we pursued it. Apollo-Saturn went to the moon and orbited a space station within 15 years after the first Saturn 1 launch.
"For someone my age, the shuttle really *IS* space travel. I'm going to be really sad to see STS-133 land." -- Well for someone MY age, the Shuttle with its false promises of cheap access to space is what destroyed the Apollo-Saturn progression of vehicles and stagnated real manned space exploration for 30 years. Good riddance; it is time to get back to business with Constellation or some other Apollo type vehicles which will take us beyond LEO.
Oops, not to say that everyone else's replies weren't excellent and "suitable". Not quite the right choice of words. Sorry about that.
I haven't seen a really suitable answer to your question so I'll give it a try -- I'll use the analogy of protons, neutrons and helium nuclei since they are more familiar. The sum of the masses of two free protons and two free neutrons is larger than the mass of a helium nucleus. The bound combination of the four particles as helium has a lower energy state than the four free particles (due to the attraction they have for each other by the nuclear Strong Force and quantum effects). The difference in the energy states is the "binding energy" of the nucleus, and the nucleus is lighter than the sum of the free particles by the mass-energy equivalence of that binding energy. For composite "particles" such as the proton and this new particle the effect is the same -- the free quarks weigh more than the the composite particle they form with the difference being the mass equivalent of the energy freed up when they bond. In the case of atomic nuclei the mass difference is on the order of a few percent and in the case of the baryons (protons, neutrons, etc.) the mass difference is much, much greater but the basic principle is the same.