If there was a large release of Radon days before the quake; is it possible that a certain proportion of the elevated radiation levels locally are due to this, rather than releases of radioactive material (iodine/caesium/etc) from the Fukushima power station? Was there anything detected on local radiation detectors prior to the nuclear incident?
This isn't a "there was no release from Fukushima it was all radon!!" post (because there quite clearly was), I'm just intrigued
Lowest bidder and profit: Capitalists win, Everyone else lose. Dangerous things should not let in the hands of capitalists.
There should be a law saying that if someone put some money in an industry with the objective of making a profit, he should live with his family next to the most dangerous installation he put money in.
That must be why the worst nuclear disaster ever took place at a power station built, owned and operated by the famously capitalist Soviet Union, right? Right?
Who mod this guy as "interesting"?
Noise reduction in this case is only part of the intriguing things in this helicopter. Never came across something that is probably something completely new and never wanted to know more about it?
I'm not saying that it isn't interesting or intriguing (because it is); I'm saying it's not an "OMG National Security" disaster. Because it probably isn't.
The fact that civilian aviation experts were able to look at the pictures and say "gee, that's a so-and-so modification to reduce noise" suggests to me that this is hardly top-secret technology. Also, the fact that special forces have relatively stealthy helicopters is hardly surprising.
What next; controversy about a crashed police car 'revealing' secret tuning and suspension modifications?
I don't get it. Why is it dastardly to use a source of data to determine where to setup speed traps? It actually makes a lot of sense to me. Why would I want the government wasting all kinds of money putting up speed traps in areas where speeding isn't a problem?
This sounds more like smart government to me.
The fact that people were speeding in those places without the government knowing, and without an unusual accident record suggests to me that speeding in those places isn't a problem.
As with the iPhone and Android messes, the data IS NOT CURRENTLY used to identify users. (but it could be at the flip of a switch, and by the way, the company says they have the right to do this if they want, because you agreed to the EULATOSetc.)
Agreed, 100%. Someone, somewhere will have a high-speed crash with tragic consequences, then the 'think of the children' folks will start demanding full speed monitoring of all vehicles, with instant prosecution for speeding. That is, if they don't demand 'Intelligent Speed Adaptation' (a GPS unit with a database of all speed limits that physically restricts a vehicle to the speed limit in force), which some are already.
I think the real problem is that in many cases laws have been passed with sporadic or discretionary enforcement in mind, and more and more new technology is coming along that enables 'total enforcement'. To take speed as an example, someone driving at 80mph in a 70mph limit would probably in 1970 have little to worry about from the police. In 2000 they might have to watch for speed cameras. Now, they hope that the stretch of road they're on doesn't have full-length ANPR enforcement. In 2020 their own car might report them, or physically stop them, lest they become a 'dangerous criminal' risking the lives of the millions of children who play on motorway shoulders.
The official speed limit hasn't changed, yet the effective speed limit has dropped (and there are opposing arguments about whether that is right, considering improvements in car handling/braking/safety vs increases in general road traffic). The same pattern is repeated for other laws too.
The story is that the data was used by Dutch police to determine where to set up speed traps. The data was NOT used to go after any TomTom users for speeding.
It's still a somewhat dastardly tactic, but not quite what people on here are seeing it to be.
I prefer taking the cover off and gently applying an oxy-acetylene torch, warming the platters to between the curie temperature and melting point (to taste). Melting point is FAR more fun.
You pay 0.25USD/kWh? owned (it's 0.07USD/kWh in california...)
Digs out electric bill... okay, starting rate £0.1662/kWh ($0.26)(first 182 kWh/quarter), then £0.1332/kWh ($0.21). nPower domestic 'standard' tariff as of Jan2011, Birmingham. YMMV.
For a real energy price giggle, the petrol station across the street has (right now) petrol (95RON, 91AKI) at £1.339/L ($8.03/USGal) and diesel at £1.399 ($8.39/USGal)....
Unfortunately, most laptops are not manufactured in Britain, but in countries with much cheaper (and dirtier) electricity.
The price of the electricity is still very significant; in China for instance the electricity is cheaper than in the UK, but then everything else is too.
A little light research gives a wholesale price of $0.07 (£0.043)/kWh - http://www.vneconomynews.com/2011/03/china-attempts-to-raise-electricity.html - so the retail price will be higher than that. Even at the wholesale price, using the calculation i used above that comes to some £30 of electricity, and £30 is a lot of money in China.
And of course if it requires less power to manufacture, then it is less expensive to produce. Thus the prices of consumer electronics would drop. Wait for it... wait for it.... Bwahahahahahahahaha! Oh I just cracked myself up. The only difference we'd see is a little green sticker on the box where the OEM is bragging about saving the environment or something.
You're right. The prices of consumer electronics never drop.
Apart from the weasely "as much as"; interesting that laptops are being compared, knowing that they have much lower power consumption (on average) than desktops while requiring almost the same amount of manufacturing.
As a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation; a 100W computer, used for 5 hours a day, 6 days a week for 5 years uses 780kWh of electricity. At current approximate UK prices that's £125 ($200 US). If computer manufacturing uses a significant fraction of that amount of power, then there is already a BIG incentive for the manufacturers to use less. If you tell them "you should use less of this thing that costs you money!" they will likely reply "well, duh", or if current trends continue they'll say "well, as part of our Greener World Of Tomorrow Plan, we're actively trying to reduce..."
Hydropower is our solution because we can, unlike e.g. solar energy which is (currently) infeasible for countries so far north. Other places the situation is reversed.
Energy can be stored in e.g. dams during low energy usage (use the excess power to pump water back up), which is perfect for countries that already have hydro power installations.
Scandinavia isn't going to solve the worlds energy problems, but we are actively trying to solve our own and we're setting an example in the process. We didn't have to go the renewable way, we could've gone all nuclear and coal and what not, but we chose renewable.
Attention should be focused on clean energy sources instead of living in a black and white world of "coal vs. nuclear", because it's possible to live in a world where the energy demand is met without using either.
Hydro is a very good resource, but you need the geography. There's plenty of places without the valleys for hydro or the sunshine for solar, like here in the UK.
It would be possible to have totally non-nuclear power, but in my opinion that itself would be unnecessarily black/white. I think that a mix of power sources is needed, and that on the whole nuclear should be part of that mix, at least for baseload; while peak demand can be shared out more in the future by increased interconnections between regions. This will help wind, but it still won't be possible to have a large % of reliable power from it.
In Norway nearly 100% of the electrical power used and produced is from renewable energy. The government of Sweden has started working on getting the country completely independent of oil (without building more nuclear power plants). Norway, England, Italy, the US and others have started to look into floating (deep water) offshore wind power as a future energy source.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Comparing nuclear to coal is fucking bullshit.
Perhaps after a few billion years the whole world might have plentiful fijords and geography suitable for large scale hydro, then we might all benefit from it in the same way that Norway and Sweden do. Until then they're a complete red herring.
As for offshire wind, great; we just need to crack the whole energy demand - windy period mismatch, or the epic civil engineering challenge and power losses from having an intercontinental supergrid to even things out, then we're all set.
Show me one incident of a refinery fire that required a decades-long evacuation of thousands of square kilometers, then we talk.
If refinery fires had the same evacuation criteria in terms of actual risk to people, they would all require extensive evacuation. Sooty oil smoke is plenty carcinogenic, and I would bet good money that the "statistically noticeable cancer risk area" would be at least as large for a refinery fire as it is for Fukushima right now.
The whole thing is a caution-outrage spiral; public concern creates the need for immensely cautious evacuation, which creates more public concern. People are always concerned about any risk from radiation, whereas some 20% of the population subject themselves to a quite large risk from intentionally inhaling smoke for a buzz. That's why a cloud of radioiodine that might give 20 extra people cancer creates global panic, while a cloud of oil smoke that might give 20 extra people cancer doesn't.
Are you a shill for the nuclear industry? An astroturfer? Because that's the only reason I can think for such a stupid comment.
I'm tired of all the pro-nuclear wankers on slashdot.
Fine, coal is bad and we should try to replace it ASAP.
But your relativism doesn't make nuclear desirable. It is another bad (and probably worse) energy source because it is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS!
I'd take a world powered by nuclear any day.
And if you replaced all of the coal-fired power plants around the world with nuclear, how many accidents do you think we would be having annually? How many major disasters would it take for you to admit it is a bad idea, because while it *can* be safe, it never *would* be safe.
At least the problems with nuclear are local-ish.
Fucking moron.
Ahem;
Are you a shill for the wind power industry? An astroturfer? Because that's the only reason I can think for such a stupid comment.
I'm tired of all the anti-nuclear wankers on Slashdot.
Your "INHERENTLY DANGEROUS!" nonsense doesen't mean a damn, because a 40 year old power station was hit by an enourmous earthquake, then an enourmous tsunami; no-one died, and the surrounding area is roughly as polluted as would be caused by the average oil refinery fire.
Hell, there WAS a big refinery fire nearby too; but that got ignored because the scary nuc-ular power plant is spitting out some radioisotopes that will at most present a tiny cancer risk for people locally, and has made the surrounding area roughly as radioactive as being on a goddamn aeroplane.
As someone else on here has already pointed out, there was an oil rig disaster last year which has actually killed people and has polluted a wider area more severely than Fukushima has. No-one said "oil is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS!" and called for all oil production worldwide to end. They said "Christ, they should be more careful with that stuff" which indeed they should. The same applies with this.
Everything in the world is inherently dangerous in some way or another. RIGHT NOW you're sitting mere inches from mains electricity that could kill you, and indeed kills hundreds of people every year in a country near you. You don't raise merry hell about that. Statistically, major incidents included, nuclear remains the safest form of electricity production known, including safe and cuddly solar, hydro, wind etc.
As facts get passed from source to newspaper to news site to commenter, things are going up a notch in severity each time.
The government says "we might need to evacuate X and are making plans, we are monitoring the situation", which becomes "X preparing for evacuation", then "X ordered to evacuate" until eventually people are convinced that "X will be uninhabitable for 99999 years!!!!!11one!"
You have republicans that will block any sort of infrastructure spending. I for one welcome high speed rail so traveling from a suburb 40 miles away into downtown Chicago will take 20 minutes.
So, the commuter train you're dreaming of will average 120mph, including stops?
Speaking as someone who generally likes and supports cars and road transport in general; I'd be pretty damn AMAZED if by 2050 there is still a significant number of cars powered by petroleum left to ban, regardless of any targets (and yes, I do consider that to be a good thing).
You might as well 'ban' broadband connections of less than 512kbps by 2050. This is just some politician making themselves look and feel important by legislating something that's going to happen anyway.
In my part of the world (in Britain) a 'bender' is something else entirely. You might see a 'bender' or two in a bar, but only in a certain type of bar, in a certain part of town....
Because it is the worst kind of bullshit scaremongering to report "Radioactive plume crossing towards USA" when the story is "Agency draws up probable route potential radioactive plume would take", in the same way it would be to report "Response plan drawn up to potential terrorist bombing" as "Terrorist bombing".
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.
Slashdot Mirror
If there was a large release of Radon days before the quake; is it possible that a certain proportion of the elevated radiation levels locally are due to this, rather than releases of radioactive material (iodine/caesium/etc) from the Fukushima power station? Was there anything detected on local radiation detectors prior to the nuclear incident?
This isn't a "there was no release from Fukushima it was all radon!!" post (because there quite clearly was), I'm just intrigued
Lowest bidder and profit: Capitalists win, Everyone else lose. Dangerous things should not let in the hands of capitalists.
There should be a law saying that if someone put some money in an industry with the objective of making a profit, he should live with his family next to the most dangerous installation he put money in.
That must be why the worst nuclear disaster ever took place at a power station built, owned and operated by the famously capitalist Soviet Union, right? Right?
Who mod this guy as "interesting"? Noise reduction in this case is only part of the intriguing things in this helicopter. Never came across something that is probably something completely new and never wanted to know more about it?
I'm not saying that it isn't interesting or intriguing (because it is); I'm saying it's not an "OMG National Security" disaster. Because it probably isn't.
The fact that civilian aviation experts were able to look at the pictures and say "gee, that's a so-and-so modification to reduce noise" suggests to me that this is hardly top-secret technology. Also, the fact that special forces have relatively stealthy helicopters is hardly surprising.
What next; controversy about a crashed police car 'revealing' secret tuning and suspension modifications?
Well, they know where they can stick that...
It's still a somewhat dastardly tactic
I don't get it. Why is it dastardly to use a source of data to determine where to setup speed traps? It actually makes a lot of sense to me. Why would I want the government wasting all kinds of money putting up speed traps in areas where speeding isn't a problem?
This sounds more like smart government to me.
The fact that people were speeding in those places without the government knowing, and without an unusual accident record suggests to me that speeding in those places isn't a problem.
As with the iPhone and Android messes, the data IS NOT CURRENTLY used to identify users. (but it could be at the flip of a switch, and by the way, the company says they have the right to do this if they want, because you agreed to the EULATOSetc.)
Agreed, 100%. Someone, somewhere will have a high-speed crash with tragic consequences, then the 'think of the children' folks will start demanding full speed monitoring of all vehicles, with instant prosecution for speeding. That is, if they don't demand 'Intelligent Speed Adaptation' (a GPS unit with a database of all speed limits that physically restricts a vehicle to the speed limit in force), which some are already.
I think the real problem is that in many cases laws have been passed with sporadic or discretionary enforcement in mind, and more and more new technology is coming along that enables 'total enforcement'. To take speed as an example, someone driving at 80mph in a 70mph limit would probably in 1970 have little to worry about from the police. In 2000 they might have to watch for speed cameras. Now, they hope that the stretch of road they're on doesn't have full-length ANPR enforcement. In 2020 their own car might report them, or physically stop them, lest they become a 'dangerous criminal' risking the lives of the millions of children who play on motorway shoulders.
The official speed limit hasn't changed, yet the effective speed limit has dropped (and there are opposing arguments about whether that is right, considering improvements in car handling/braking/safety vs increases in general road traffic). The same pattern is repeated for other laws too.
The story is that the data was used by Dutch police to determine where to set up speed traps. The data was NOT used to go after any TomTom users for speeding.
It's still a somewhat dastardly tactic, but not quite what people on here are seeing it to be.
I prefer taking the cover off and gently applying an oxy-acetylene torch, warming the platters to between the curie temperature and melting point (to taste). Melting point is FAR more fun.
You pay 0.25USD/kWh? owned (it's 0.07USD/kWh in california...)
Digs out electric bill... okay, starting rate £0.1662/kWh ($0.26)(first 182 kWh/quarter), then £0.1332/kWh ($0.21). nPower domestic 'standard' tariff as of Jan2011, Birmingham. YMMV.
For a real energy price giggle, the petrol station across the street has (right now) petrol (95RON, 91AKI) at £1.339/L ($8.03/USGal) and diesel at £1.399 ($8.39/USGal)....
Unfortunately, most laptops are not manufactured in Britain, but in countries with much cheaper (and dirtier) electricity.
The price of the electricity is still very significant; in China for instance the electricity is cheaper than in the UK, but then everything else is too.
A little light research gives a wholesale price of $0.07 (£0.043)/kWh - http://www.vneconomynews.com/2011/03/china-attempts-to-raise-electricity.html - so the retail price will be higher than that. Even at the wholesale price, using the calculation i used above that comes to some £30 of electricity, and £30 is a lot of money in China.
And of course if it requires less power to manufacture, then it is less expensive to produce. Thus the prices of consumer electronics would drop. Wait for it... wait for it.... Bwahahahahahahahaha! Oh I just cracked myself up. The only difference we'd see is a little green sticker on the box where the OEM is bragging about saving the environment or something.
You're right. The prices of consumer electronics never drop.
Apart from the weasely "as much as"; interesting that laptops are being compared, knowing that they have much lower power consumption (on average) than desktops while requiring almost the same amount of manufacturing.
As a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation; a 100W computer, used for 5 hours a day, 6 days a week for 5 years uses 780kWh of electricity. At current approximate UK prices that's £125 ($200 US). If computer manufacturing uses a significant fraction of that amount of power, then there is already a BIG incentive for the manufacturers to use less. If you tell them "you should use less of this thing that costs you money!" they will likely reply "well, duh", or if current trends continue they'll say "well, as part of our Greener World Of Tomorrow Plan, we're actively trying to reduce..."
Hydropower is our solution because we can, unlike e.g. solar energy which is (currently) infeasible for countries so far north. Other places the situation is reversed.
Energy can be stored in e.g. dams during low energy usage (use the excess power to pump water back up), which is perfect for countries that already have hydro power installations.
Scandinavia isn't going to solve the worlds energy problems, but we are actively trying to solve our own and we're setting an example in the process. We didn't have to go the renewable way, we could've gone all nuclear and coal and what not, but we chose renewable.
Attention should be focused on clean energy sources instead of living in a black and white world of "coal vs. nuclear", because it's possible to live in a world where the energy demand is met without using either.
Hydro is a very good resource, but you need the geography. There's plenty of places without the valleys for hydro or the sunshine for solar, like here in the UK.
It would be possible to have totally non-nuclear power, but in my opinion that itself would be unnecessarily black/white. I think that a mix of power sources is needed, and that on the whole nuclear should be part of that mix, at least for baseload; while peak demand can be shared out more in the future by increased interconnections between regions. This will help wind, but it still won't be possible to have a large % of reliable power from it.
In Norway nearly 100% of the electrical power used and produced is from renewable energy. The government of Sweden has started working on getting the country completely independent of oil (without building more nuclear power plants). Norway, England, Italy, the US and others have started to look into floating (deep water) offshore wind power as a future energy source.
Wake up and smell the coffee. Comparing nuclear to coal is fucking bullshit.
Perhaps after a few billion years the whole world might have plentiful fijords and geography suitable for large scale hydro, then we might all benefit from it in the same way that Norway and Sweden do. Until then they're a complete red herring.
As for offshire wind, great; we just need to crack the whole energy demand - windy period mismatch, or the epic civil engineering challenge and power losses from having an intercontinental supergrid to even things out, then we're all set.
Show me one incident of a refinery fire that required a decades-long evacuation of thousands of square kilometers, then we talk.
If refinery fires had the same evacuation criteria in terms of actual risk to people, they would all require extensive evacuation. Sooty oil smoke is plenty carcinogenic, and I would bet good money that the "statistically noticeable cancer risk area" would be at least as large for a refinery fire as it is for Fukushima right now.
The whole thing is a caution-outrage spiral; public concern creates the need for immensely cautious evacuation, which creates more public concern. People are always concerned about any risk from radiation, whereas some 20% of the population subject themselves to a quite large risk from intentionally inhaling smoke for a buzz. That's why a cloud of radioiodine that might give 20 extra people cancer creates global panic, while a cloud of oil smoke that might give 20 extra people cancer doesn't.
Are you a shill for the nuclear industry? An astroturfer? Because that's the only reason I can think for such a stupid comment. I'm tired of all the pro-nuclear wankers on slashdot. Fine, coal is bad and we should try to replace it ASAP. But your relativism doesn't make nuclear desirable. It is another bad (and probably worse) energy source because it is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS!
I'd take a world powered by nuclear any day.
And if you replaced all of the coal-fired power plants around the world with nuclear, how many accidents do you think we would be having annually? How many major disasters would it take for you to admit it is a bad idea, because while it *can* be safe, it never *would* be safe.
At least the problems with nuclear are local-ish.
Fucking moron.
Ahem;
Are you a shill for the wind power industry? An astroturfer? Because that's the only reason I can think for such a stupid comment.
I'm tired of all the anti-nuclear wankers on Slashdot.
Your "INHERENTLY DANGEROUS!" nonsense doesen't mean a damn, because a 40 year old power station was hit by an enourmous earthquake, then an enourmous tsunami; no-one died, and the surrounding area is roughly as polluted as would be caused by the average oil refinery fire.
Hell, there WAS a big refinery fire nearby too; but that got ignored because the scary nuc-ular power plant is spitting out some radioisotopes that will at most present a tiny cancer risk for people locally, and has made the surrounding area roughly as radioactive as being on a goddamn aeroplane.
As someone else on here has already pointed out, there was an oil rig disaster last year which has actually killed people and has polluted a wider area more severely than Fukushima has. No-one said "oil is INHERENTLY DANGEROUS!" and called for all oil production worldwide to end. They said "Christ, they should be more careful with that stuff" which indeed they should. The same applies with this.
Everything in the world is inherently dangerous in some way or another. RIGHT NOW you're sitting mere inches from mains electricity that could kill you, and indeed kills hundreds of people every year in a country near you. You don't raise merry hell about that. Statistically, major incidents included, nuclear remains the safest form of electricity production known, including safe and cuddly solar, hydro, wind etc.
As facts get passed from source to newspaper to news site to commenter, things are going up a notch in severity each time.
The government says "we might need to evacuate X and are making plans, we are monitoring the situation", which becomes "X preparing for evacuation", then "X ordered to evacuate" until eventually people are convinced that "X will be uninhabitable for 99999 years!!!!!11one!"
You have republicans that will block any sort of infrastructure spending. I for one welcome high speed rail so traveling from a suburb 40 miles away into downtown Chicago will take 20 minutes.
So, the commuter train you're dreaming of will average 120mph, including stops?
Speaking as someone who generally likes and supports cars and road transport in general; I'd be pretty damn AMAZED if by 2050 there is still a significant number of cars powered by petroleum left to ban, regardless of any targets (and yes, I do consider that to be a good thing).
You might as well 'ban' broadband connections of less than 512kbps by 2050. This is just some politician making themselves look and feel important by legislating something that's going to happen anyway.
"You might see a 'bender' or two in a bar, but only in a certain type of bar, in a certain part of town..."
Bender did seem a little too vehement when denying he was a robosexual. Maybe he is just AC/DC.
AC/DC/ethanol/mineral oil/nuclear pile; Bending Units bend all ways ;)
In my part of the world (in Britain) a 'bender' is something else entirely. You might see a 'bender' or two in a bar, but only in a certain type of bar, in a certain part of town....
The site at http://mitnse.com/ is directly linked from MIT at http://web.mit.edu/nse/newsandmedia/news.html .
Because it is the worst kind of bullshit scaremongering to report "Radioactive plume crossing towards USA" when the story is "Agency draws up probable route potential radioactive plume would take", in the same way it would be to report "Response plan drawn up to potential terrorist bombing" as "Terrorist bombing".
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.