Prevention of hydrogen explosion inside the primary containment vessel (hereafter, PCV) (Units 1 to 3.)
ãf Cooling the reactor by injecting fresh water into the reactor increases the chance of steam condensation, leading to a concern of potentially triggering a hydrogen explosion.
â'Nitrogen gas will be injected into the PCV of each unit to keep the concentration of hydrogen and oxygen below flammability limit.
Several comments I've seen and heard have said that nitrogen injection was being used to COOL the reactors. This it seems, is not the case.
(110417e13.pdf)
Current Status [7]: Walls of the building supporting the pool have been damaged.
â'Tolerance evaluation is especially needed for Unit 4.
â'A certain level of seismic tolerance has been confirmed.
Why do I feel a terrible sense of impending doom when I read things like that?
(110417e13.pdf)
Current Status [11]: High likelihood of underground water around the building (sub-drainage water) to be contaminated.
Countermeasure [36]: Preparing to decontaminate sub-drainage water after being pumped up.
Hmmm, hadn't heard that one mentioned in the news. Not surprising, but it's another thing to be done.
(110417e13.pdf)
Countermeasure [45]: Reuse of processed water as reactor coolant.
That makes sense. No point in using clean water to clean up shit if you've got shitty water around. At least, to start with.
(110417e13.pdf)
Countermeasure [55]: Complete installing reactor building covers (Units 1, 3, 4.)
Risk [9]: Possibility of cover being damaged by a huge typhoon.
Uh oh! When does typhoon season start there? Summer / Early Autumn according to Wikipedia.
Uh oh!
(110417e14.pdf)
[As an aim for the future.]Remote control of water injection
So, to control injection at the moment, someone physically has to go and turn on pumps. In the contamination zone. Yeuch!
Fancy swapping your daily commute and life in the cubicle farm for that sort of day job?
I thought there must be some cunning strategy behind the Creationists. What heroes they are, for providing the rest of the world with such a pool of, err, talent.
Most people in our times, as well as past times, can think. Whether or not they choose to do so is a different question, and I would agree with a proposition that "most people do not think". But that is because they choose to not-think, rather than because of inability to think.
Over to you ; defend your proposition (and in the process, clarify what your actual proposition is.
I know exactly what pestilence means ; I just had a brain fade trying to remember the names of the 4 Horsemen. And trying to find a clear listing later showed there's more murkiness than I expected. Mind you, it's religion ; clarity of thought and precise definition of terms should not be expected.
That sort of thing is very uncommon, and if it recurs the dam manager is going to get lynched. Literally.
The fat fool I was ranting at has got flooded three times in one year because he's brought a house in a fucking stupid place.
Example 1
My home town has spent most of the last thousand years being built along a road on a hillside ; the road then cuts straight across the flood plain of the river, over the river several hundred metres from where the Romans had a ford 2 millennia ago, and straight up the hillside on the other side of the valley (where the Romans built their fort, to defend/ monitor the crossing point).
For two millennia, people have been not-building on the flood plain because it's a plain and it floods. DOH!
In the last 20-odd years, people have started building and selling houses on the flood plain. And then they complain about getting flooded. DOH!
Stupid idiots.
Bad shit for the poor people down in the river valley when the dam bursts. But economically, you've always got a choice. Even in pretty tough times (and I was a poor student once too ; I do remember), you can choose whether to rent a ground floor apartment, or an upper floor apartment. And that can make enough difference. My personal logic, from bitterly learned lessons, is to avoid ground floor flats (because they're relatively easy to burgle), and to avoid top floor flats (because cheap landlords don't fix leaking roofs with any degree of urgency, but the people in the flat upstairs are pretty conscientious about putting buckets under leaks).
Example 2
I'm house hunting at the moment. On this afternoon's walk with the wife we saw a very nice development of apartments backing onto the Ythan estuary. Then I did the sums : maximum high tide was 1m higher than the state of tide at the time (I read the tide tables ; I'm like that) ; allow 1~2m for storm surge (low pressure) and 1m for storm waves (the mouth of the estuary is quite narrow). So, the door steps of the apartments should be 3-4m above the water level of that moment.
This is not rocket science.
The doorsteps were about 2m above river/ sea level. OK, the apartments were all built with a garage at ground level and the accommodation perched on top of the garages. So someone has thought about it. but you won't find me living there.
I might go to watch the flooding there though. Take a flask of whisky, a rain coat and some clothes to change into after I piss myself laughing.
[/self] Adds "elevation!" to my written list of explicit requirements for the house hunting ; I know the area well enough to know where to avoid though.
It's a simple fact that Chinese salaries for things like industrial production are much lower than in the US.
So, you're saying that building rockets (or for that matter, any other life-critical equipment) is on a par industrially with making an iSomething? Right.
Remind me to not fly in any planes that you've had a hand in designing or making ; I don't trust your engineering or your ethics.
Optimist. (That's not a compliment. And you contradict yourself later.)
War the likely start- possibly driven by resource conflict.
Reasonable ; quite likely even. Want to put money on oil or water being the resource trigger? Or hedge your bets on it being a bit of both? (Naturally the politicians will lie that it's about flange sprockets, widgets or national self-importance, or something equally important. It's unlikely to be about the fouls in Sunday's football.)
Famine would be the largest cause of death.
Safe bet. You'll not be wanting to buy this bridge then?
disease will be opportunistic- cholera especially (and there is a new incurable form getting going in india now).
Oh, another new one. I'd better get my jabs up to date before I go to work there.
I don't think we'll die form poor nutrients- we would get smaller and adapt to the new diet over time.
The appropriate unit of time for such calculations is the generation, which is around 20 years at the moment for humans, but is variable.
Right now, if we just went to a net birth rate of 75% (1.5 children per family) we could mostly fix this in 40 years.
Within the lifetime of the children I choose not to have. Possibly within my lifetime. But planning like that is implausible in a democracy with a 4-5 year generation length for politicians.
>Which of the 4 Horsemen do you think is going to be the big winner in this charnel house? War, Famine, Disease or Pestilence?
Nitpicking time.
The identification of the various numbers of apocalyptic horesmen gets murky as soon as you get away from John's drug-fuelled (?, well, that's how it reads to me) "gospel". Popular culture varies greatly over who they are, and almost no one actually reads the bible these generations. Some people even dispute that the pale horse is called "Binky", shocking though that may seem.
Hmm, that's not an unreasonable request - if they (your current employers) are worried about competition, then they sure-as-fuck know who their competitors are. So they should be able to put their names onto a list (they're not libelling these companies ; if anything, they're giving a compliment by considering X, Y, and Z as competition). Even a list that's reviewed (multi-)annually.
People seem to have missed the point: I was trying to make a point about the insane philosophy of apathy that some posters here seem to have, ie that since temperature or CO2 has been high before we should just ignore it and keep making the problem worse completely ignoring the fact that such changes often coincide with major extinction events.
I wonder why popular culture fixates on "ostrich syndrome" ; ostriches aren't extinct. "Moa syndrome" would be as well-based in fact, but moas are extinct and so can't contradict one.
[References] Sulphur compounds are added by meteorites ; that's not in dispute. As I recall, you implied that the concentrations of sulphur compounds in the air have been significantly different in the past, both higher and lower. But what is in the air is the difference between what is added by impact (safely modelled as a constant flux), what is released by weathering (may or may not be constant), what is sedimented out by physical processes (likely varies greatly, with the presence of large evaporite basins. IAAGeologist ; I think like that.), and what is extracted from the sulphur cycle by organisms (almost certainly variable). There is every reason to expect there to have been variations in atmospheric sulphur concentrations in the past ; but evidence of it... IAAGeologist, and I don't know of any evidence.
(This is meant to be a news site for nerds ; evidence matters. The average idiot on the street may be happy with unsupported assertions, but they're idiots who may even be stupid enough to buy houses on flood-plains. See rant below.)
Same comments for the nitrogen compound reference ; there are good reasons to expect nitrogen compound concentrations to have varied in the past, but demonstrating it and quantifying it are different matters. It may be significant for climate models to be able to put numbers on the likely range of atmospheric nitrogen compounds, so the desire for quantification is not purely academic.
[BARELY-CONNECTED RANT]
I'm listening to one of last night's TV programmes with a vox pop. of some fat fool complaining that "my house has been flooded 3 times this year, and someone has got to do something about it"
Listen, you fat fucking fool, you brought a house on a fucking flood plain, and the fucking flood plain is fucking well getting flooded because it's a fucking flood plain, not a hillside.DOH! And you chose to buy it because you are a fucking idiot. Shut the fuck up with your complaining, sell your kids or kidneys to Indians to buy out the mortgage, find some other idiot to buy the wrecked, unsellable house, then fuck off and die because you fucked up.
China should be embarrassed that with their cheap labor costs,
Are you implying that rocket scientists, machinists, programmers etc deserve to be paid less because of their ethnic origin. That's racist, and you know it, you filthy Louisiana redneck sarcastic stereotype.
You've got a perfectly good argument available if you claim that rocket scientists, machinists, etc deserve to be paid less if they're subject to lower living costs, but that is a much more complex argument to make, and also much more time-variable (what are the actual living costs in the few hundred km around the major Chinese launch complex(-es)? ; and compared to Houston / Florida / California / Guyana / India / Kazakstan?).
All it takes is about 15 years of zero birthrate and you're not going to get it back, ever.
By implication, you believe that the reproductive lifespan of humans is 15 years. That is not correct. The period of prime reproductivity might be that short (an obstetrics specialist may challenge you on that point though), but the duration of some reproductive capability is in excess of 30 years.
In practice, it would have to be a a sustained discouragement of child-bearing - enough to achieve a 90% drop in birth rates. A range of measures would need to be applied, until a sufficient cut-back had been achieved, at which point relatively small changes in policy should adjust the birth rates to maintain the desired population.
If you don't take these measures now- you STILL have take them when we hit 9 billion (10 billion... 11 billion)
This is why I encourage the use of the term GIGADEATH - meaning an excess of a billion deaths over births, and a consequent decline in global population.
Which puts a perspective on things :
PolPot ~ 0.002 GDe ;
Hitler ~ 0.007 GDe (and an automatic Godwin Law citation);
World War 2 as a whole ~0.035 GDe ;
Iraq invasion ~ 0.0005 GDe;
UN expected population growth 2050-2100 : 2 to 3 GDe;
my estimate to achieve something like stability : 5 to 7 GDe
I think that we're in pretty close agreement about what will happen. Which of the 4 Horsemen do you think is going to be the big winner in this charnel house? War, Famine, Disease or Pestilence? Do you have children that need to be pitied? Of course you don't.
That reminds me to organise a VA party for this year - 18 years and not old yet.
Work has some IT people to worry about crap like this and other Windows issues. So, let them worry. For machines that I actually care about (as in "It's fucked. YOU fix it." is not an option), it's a non-issue.
I propose we continue onwards to HTML5, since it is better suited for the internet as we know it.
Is "the Internet as we know it" actually a good solution to the problem? And perhaps more importantly, what is the "problem" in the first place?
If the present problem (NB : not necessarily the original problem that DARPA, UMIST, etc developed the Internet for) is one of making diverse information accessible and manageable through a uniform interface, then questions about what is information, and how can different types of information be interrelated become of vital importance.
Which is not "Amazon", "eBay" or dial-a-wank porn sites. But frankly, they're just business ; you're welcome to them.
That raises interesting questions of how you automatically keep your documents up to date so that if you express an opinion on a topic at one time, and later change your opinion on that topic, then your previous expressions of opinions on that topic don't get changed, but do receive annotation to point to the changed opinion. So you need to have some agreed (universally agreed?, consensus?, disputed consensus?) way of describing "topics" (is this what the "semantic web" calls an "ontogeny"). And you need some way of cross-linking these topics in the same way that your brain does. And it needs to operate without much manual input that would otherwise disrupt your chain of thought.
This is an interesting set of topics.
Hell, assuming they are up.
This is an uninteresting administrative issue. Engineering and secretarial staff get hired to do such housekeeping, allowing time to work on the interesting problems.
The gap between the "semantic" storage and communication of ideas and "document-based" storage and communication of ideas is... "wide" is not enough, "gaping" or "yawning" (as in "abyss") might be better. Your great-great-grand-children might speak and write "semantically", if they exist at all..
BTW, if you don't like it, feel free to propose something better yourself.
How can you tell when a Microsoft spokesman is lying?
His lips are moving!
I'd say it's on those days that she (or he, let's not be restrictive) isn't buried in a grave with a stake through their thoracic cavity (where their heart used to be), their heads cut off and their mouth stuffed with garlic.
Perhaps we should nuke Redmond from orbit, just to be sure.
This (and other similar) balloons got to around 29000m (translated from the archaic units in TFA) ; definitions of the "border of space" vary, but cluster around the 100000 to 122000m range (where atmospheric drag and lift at orbital velocity become comparable). While this is undeniably a high-altitude balloon, it's hardly "near space".
OK, I'm a pedant. I'll get the phone book so you can call someone who cares.
The original version of this story - which I saw and dismissed from consideration a couple of days ago, even if my memory betrayed me - it was pointed out that the ASBO was actually issued to a child of similar family name and the same given name planned for the foetus. So it's a simple "bureaucrat spells name wrong" story.
Is there anything interesting on the telly tonight?
You could put (say) blood in at one end and get potable water out at the other end, along with a plugged and useless filter and a significant quantity of "blood concentrate". This is generally true for all filtering systems, and the more effective the filter, the faster it happens.
SOME (not all) filtering systems can be reverse-flushed to regenerate them, but for that, you need a supply of potable water to do the flushing with (otherwise you'fe got a filter contaminated on both sides.
Things get more complicated with chemically active filtering systems - ion exchange resins, semi-permeable membranes, etc. - but for simple systems, filtering is a thermodynamic problem, and the first and second Laws apply
First Law : you can't win.
Second Law : you can't even break even.
Which is not to say that filtering is useless ; sometimes you have energy available, but need to convert it to uncontaminated solvent ; other times, you're not obligated to "close the cycle" by regenerating your original uncontaminated filter.
Children aren't stupid, they're just ignorant; if you teach them critical thinking skills they will use them.
And then they'll burn in hell.
And in the process, they'll be on the receiving end of all sorts of shit from their contemporaries - literally shit if they go to some of the less gentle schools of the world - which will make their lives feel like hell before they die. So you'd better have kids with pretty strong characters.
Slashdot Mirror
A few comments : (110417e12.pdf)
Several comments I've seen and heard have said that nitrogen injection was being used to COOL the reactors. This it seems, is not the case.
(110417e13.pdf)
Why do I feel a terrible sense of impending doom when I read things like that?
(110417e13.pdf)
Hmmm, hadn't heard that one mentioned in the news. Not surprising, but it's another thing to be done.
(110417e13.pdf)
That makes sense. No point in using clean water to clean up shit if you've got shitty water around. At least, to start with.
(110417e13.pdf)
Uh oh! When does typhoon season start there? Summer / Early Autumn according to Wikipedia.
Uh oh!
(110417e14.pdf)
So, to control injection at the moment, someone physically has to go and turn on pumps. In the contamination zone. Yeuch!
Fancy swapping your daily commute and life in the cubicle farm for that sort of day job?
Lots of work there. Good steady career.
I thought there must be some cunning strategy behind the Creationists. What heroes they are, for providing the rest of the world with such a pool of, err, talent.
I disagree.
Most people in our times, as well as past times, can think. Whether or not they choose to do so is a different question, and I would agree with a proposition that "most people do not think". But that is because they choose to not-think, rather than because of inability to think.
Over to you ; defend your proposition (and in the process, clarify what your actual proposition is.
I know exactly what pestilence means ; I just had a brain fade trying to remember the names of the 4 Horsemen. And trying to find a clear listing later showed there's more murkiness than I expected. Mind you, it's religion ; clarity of thought and precise definition of terms should not be expected.
The fat fool I was ranting at has got flooded three times in one year because he's brought a house in a fucking stupid place.
Example 1
My home town has spent most of the last thousand years being built along a road on a hillside ; the road then cuts straight across the flood plain of the river, over the river several hundred metres from where the Romans had a ford 2 millennia ago, and straight up the hillside on the other side of the valley (where the Romans built their fort, to defend/ monitor the crossing point).
For two millennia, people have been not-building on the flood plain because it's a plain and it floods. DOH!
In the last 20-odd years, people have started building and selling houses on the flood plain. And then they complain about getting flooded. DOH!
Stupid idiots.
Bad shit for the poor people down in the river valley when the dam bursts. But economically, you've always got a choice. Even in pretty tough times (and I was a poor student once too ; I do remember), you can choose whether to rent a ground floor apartment, or an upper floor apartment. And that can make enough difference.
My personal logic, from bitterly learned lessons, is to avoid ground floor flats (because they're relatively easy to burgle), and to avoid top floor flats (because cheap landlords don't fix leaking roofs with any degree of urgency, but the people in the flat upstairs are pretty conscientious about putting buckets under leaks).
Example 2
I'm house hunting at the moment. On this afternoon's walk with the wife we saw a very nice development of apartments backing onto the Ythan estuary. Then I did the sums : maximum high tide was 1m higher than the state of tide at the time (I read the tide tables ; I'm like that) ; allow 1~2m for storm surge (low pressure) and 1m for storm waves (the mouth of the estuary is quite narrow). So, the door steps of the apartments should be 3-4m above the water level of that moment.
This is not rocket science.
The doorsteps were about 2m above river/ sea level. OK, the apartments were all built with a garage at ground level and the accommodation perched on top of the garages. So someone has thought about it. but you won't find me living there.
I might go to watch the flooding there though. Take a flask of whisky, a rain coat and some clothes to change into after I piss myself laughing.
[/self] Adds "elevation!" to my written list of explicit requirements for the house hunting ; I know the area well enough to know where to avoid though.
So, you're saying that building rockets (or for that matter, any other life-critical equipment) is on a par industrially with making an iSomething? Right.
Remind me to not fly in any planes that you've had a hand in designing or making ; I don't trust your engineering or your ethics.
Optimist. (That's not a compliment. And you contradict yourself later.)
Reasonable ; quite likely even. Want to put money on oil or water being the resource trigger? Or hedge your bets on it being a bit of both? (Naturally the politicians will lie that it's about flange sprockets, widgets or national self-importance, or something equally important. It's unlikely to be about the fouls in Sunday's football.)
Safe bet. You'll not be wanting to buy this bridge then?
Oh, another new one. I'd better get my jabs up to date before I go to work there.
The appropriate unit of time for such calculations is the generation, which is around 20 years at the moment for humans, but is variable.
Within the lifetime of the children I choose not to have. Possibly within my lifetime. But planning like that is implausible in a democracy with a 4-5 year generation length for politicians.
The identification of the various numbers of apocalyptic horesmen gets murky as soon as you get away from John's drug-fuelled (?, well, that's how it reads to me) "gospel". Popular culture varies greatly over who they are, and almost no one actually reads the bible these generations. Some people even dispute that the pale horse is called "Binky", shocking though that may seem.
Eschatology on Slashdot. Whatever next?
Hmm, that's not an unreasonable request - if they (your current employers) are worried about competition, then they sure-as-fuck know who their competitors are. So they should be able to put their names onto a list (they're not libelling these companies ; if anything, they're giving a compliment by considering X, Y, and Z as competition). Even a list that's reviewed (multi-)annually.
I wonder why popular culture fixates on "ostrich syndrome" ; ostriches aren't extinct. "Moa syndrome" would be as well-based in fact, but moas are extinct and so can't contradict one.
[References] Sulphur compounds are added by meteorites ; that's not in dispute. As I recall, you implied that the concentrations of sulphur compounds in the air have been significantly different in the past, both higher and lower. But what is in the air is the difference between what is added by impact (safely modelled as a constant flux), what is released by weathering (may or may not be constant), what is sedimented out by physical processes (likely varies greatly, with the presence of large evaporite basins. IAAGeologist ; I think like that.), and what is extracted from the sulphur cycle by organisms (almost certainly variable). There is every reason to expect there to have been variations in atmospheric sulphur concentrations in the past ; but evidence of it ... IAAGeologist, and I don't know of any evidence.
(This is meant to be a news site for nerds ; evidence matters. The average idiot on the street may be happy with unsupported assertions, but they're idiots who may even be stupid enough to buy houses on flood-plains. See rant below.)
Same comments for the nitrogen compound reference ; there are good reasons to expect nitrogen compound concentrations to have varied in the past, but demonstrating it and quantifying it are different matters. It may be significant for climate models to be able to put numbers on the likely range of atmospheric nitrogen compounds, so the desire for quantification is not purely academic.
[BARELY-CONNECTED RANT]
I'm listening to one of last night's TV programmes with a vox pop. of some fat fool complaining that "my house has been flooded 3 times this year, and someone has got to do something about it"
Listen, you fat fucking fool, you brought a house on a fucking flood plain, and the fucking flood plain is fucking well getting flooded because it's a fucking flood plain, not a hillside.DOH! And you chose to buy it because you are a fucking idiot. Shut the fuck up with your complaining, sell your kids or kidneys to Indians to buy out the mortgage, find some other idiot to buy the wrecked, unsellable house, then fuck off and die because you fucked up.
Are you implying that rocket scientists, machinists, programmers etc deserve to be paid less because of their ethnic origin. That's racist, and you know it, you filthy Louisiana redneck sarcastic stereotype.
You've got a perfectly good argument available if you claim that rocket scientists, machinists, etc deserve to be paid less if they're subject to lower living costs, but that is a much more complex argument to make, and also much more time-variable (what are the actual living costs in the few hundred km around the major Chinese launch complex(-es)? ; and compared to Houston / Florida / California / Guyana / India / Kazakstan?).
By implication, you believe that the reproductive lifespan of humans is 15 years. That is not correct. The period of prime reproductivity might be that short (an obstetrics specialist may challenge you on that point though), but the duration of some reproductive capability is in excess of 30 years.
In practice, it would have to be a a sustained discouragement of child-bearing - enough to achieve a 90% drop in birth rates. A range of measures would need to be applied, until a sufficient cut-back had been achieved, at which point relatively small changes in policy should adjust the birth rates to maintain the desired population.
This is why I encourage the use of the term GIGADEATH - meaning an excess of a billion deaths over births, and a consequent decline in global population.
Which puts a perspective on things :
I think that we're in pretty close agreement about what will happen. Which of the 4 Horsemen do you think is going to be the big winner in this charnel house? War, Famine, Disease or Pestilence? Do you have children that need to be pitied? Of course you don't.
That reminds me to organise a VA party for this year - 18 years and not old yet.
Well established.
Plausible, but please cite your sources (and make them worth reading - peer-reviewed journal articles or better).
I don't recall having heard this assertion before. Your evidence is?
[Hint : I am a geologist, and can understand complex arguments and data.)
And the drawer is inside a building ON the Moon.
(OK, it's an equipment drawer on one of the lunar landers. Happy now?)
Work has some IT people to worry about crap like this and other Windows issues. So, let them worry. For machines that I actually care about (as in "It's fucked. YOU fix it." is not an option), it's a non-issue.
Is "the Internet as we know it" actually a good solution to the problem? And perhaps more importantly, what is the "problem" in the first place?
If the present problem (NB : not necessarily the original problem that DARPA, UMIST, etc developed the Internet for) is one of making diverse information accessible and manageable through a uniform interface, then questions about what is information, and how can different types of information be interrelated become of vital importance.
Which is not "Amazon", "eBay" or dial-a-wank porn sites. But frankly, they're just business ; you're welcome to them.
I have showed this article to friends, who are now planning to move to Pakistan, not pay their taxes, and have a really FUN time!
That raises interesting questions of how you automatically keep your documents up to date so that if you express an opinion on a topic at one time, and later change your opinion on that topic, then your previous expressions of opinions on that topic don't get changed, but do receive annotation to point to the changed opinion. So you need to have some agreed (universally agreed?, consensus?, disputed consensus?) way of describing "topics" (is this what the "semantic web" calls an "ontogeny"). And you need some way of cross-linking these topics in the same way that your brain does. And it needs to operate without much manual input that would otherwise disrupt your chain of thought.
This is an interesting set of topics.
This is an uninteresting administrative issue. Engineering and secretarial staff get hired to do such housekeeping, allowing time to work on the interesting problems.
The gap between the "semantic" storage and communication of ideas and "document-based" storage and communication of ideas is ... "wide" is not enough, "gaping" or "yawning" (as in "abyss") might be better. Your great-great-grand-children might speak and write "semantically", if they exist at all..
BTW, if you don't like it, feel free to propose something better yourself.
I'd say it's on those days that she (or he, let's not be restrictive) isn't buried in a grave with a stake through their thoracic cavity (where their heart used to be), their heads cut off and their mouth stuffed with garlic.
Perhaps we should nuke Redmond from orbit, just to be sure.
OK, I'm a pedant. I'll get the phone book so you can call someone who cares.
Is there anything interesting on the telly tonight?
DUMB question!
SOME (not all) filtering systems can be reverse-flushed to regenerate them, but for that, you need a supply of potable water to do the flushing with (otherwise you'fe got a filter contaminated on both sides.
Things get more complicated with chemically active filtering systems - ion exchange resins, semi-permeable membranes, etc. - but for simple systems, filtering is a thermodynamic problem, and the first and second Laws apply
Which is not to say that filtering is useless ; sometimes you have energy available, but need to convert it to uncontaminated solvent ; other times, you're not obligated to "close the cycle" by regenerating your original uncontaminated filter.
And then they'll burn in hell.
And in the process, they'll be on the receiving end of all sorts of shit from their contemporaries - literally shit if they go to some of the less gentle schools of the world - which will make their lives feel like hell before they die. So you'd better have kids with pretty strong characters.
Let's come to a reasonable agreement ... you use slashdot.us, and the rest of the world will stick to slashdot.org.
Which begs a question :
Domain Name: . . . SLASHDOT.US
[SNIP]
Registrant Name: . . . Host Master
Registrant Organization: . . . Geeknet, Inc.
Which begs another question ... and it redirects to slashdot.org. Unsurprising.
[bloody "lameness" filter!]