For real? How to get the steam above the waterline? You do realize this is high pressure steam (~1200 psi), and that traditional catapults use steam in the first place. Besides, steam rises!
Oh sorry, my bad, I guess they just need to open some hatches and let the steam waft out of the boilers to the surface.
I was under the impression that 300MW worth of high pressure steam would take a sizeable pipe (or pipes), and running that pipe from the reactor boiler to someplace where you could put a generator would require cutting holes in many decks of the aircraft carrier or cutting a hole in the side of the boat.
The reactors at Fukushima generate over 3,000MW of power, and that's not the only plant that's offline. Maybe if you had 10 aircraft carriers, 3GW of generators and these magic MYT Engines (or at least conventional turbines) *and* some place to plug them in that would be a viable solution. Oh, and the vast majority of an aircraft carrier's steam output goes to the turbines that drive the props - how will you get that steam up above the water line to your generators? Maybe you can just jack up the back of the carrier out of the water and connect the generators to the prop shafts. Then you "only" need to find a generator that runs at prop shaft speed or a gearbox to convert the speed.
Those of us in IT don't have particularly risky jobs (aside from carpal tunnel and other injuries....
Even IT guys can have risky jobs if common safety precautions aren't followed - I've heard of a guy that got his arm trapped under a couple hundred pounds of storage array shelves when he was trying to self-move an ethernet switch. He loosened the switch rack mount tab with his hand beneath the switch to support it, not realizing that the switch was also supporting the back half of several disk shelves above it. The weight of the equipment trapped his arm and no one outside of the data center could hear his shouts for help. Fortunately, one of the FC connectors got yanked out when the shelves dropped (thanks to neat cable cable management - no 5 foot coil of slack cable on top of the array), and someone in the NOC eventually came in to check on it when he saw the alarm. Had that not happened it could have been hours or even days before he was discovered.
Just like most safety failures, including the one in Japan, it took more than one failure to cause this safety problem:
1. He broke the "never move equipment by yourself" rule 2. Whoever secured the disk shelves didn't use the correct screws, they pulled right out of the rack once the support of the ethernet switch was removed.
It's self regulating since as the fuel temperature increases, the reactor power decreases. In the event of no active cooling, it reaches a steady state temperature and will stay there indefinitely.
Or you could have cards that fit in your wallet with your phone number written on them, which you could swap with people who had the same
No thanks, I don't need a wallet full of cards - the people I play soccer with aren't the same people I go to Friday night bars with, and aren't the same people I carpool with. I don't want to carry a dozen cards with me when my phone can already store thousands of contacts without adding any extra weight or bulk. Plus, I'd have to carry a pile of my own personal cards to hand out. Further, if I lose my wallet then I've lost those cards, while if I lose my phone, my contacts are still safe and secure on a server.
I do disagree. Corporations will try to price their products and services to make the most profit. If passing on the extra costs to consumers causes them to lose too many sales to their competitors, they will not pass the costs on. As long as they are still making a reasonable profit, they will stay in the business.
Right, that's my point -- if the plant cost 3 times more to build and they had to charge 3 times higher for electricity the plant wouldn't have gotten built at all until scarcity drove the price of power up to where the plant became profitable. So Consumers would pay higher prices either way -- they pay more if the plant has superior safety measures, and they pay more if those safety measures are so expensive that the plant doesn't get built at all.
I do. Pipes expand and contract all the time due to stress and temperature changes. It's not unusual for pipes to experience changes in length on the order of 0.1% to 0.5%. Copper going from freezing (0C) to boiling (100C) would be around 0.17%. For a 2kM pipe, that's about 3.3 meters, or about 11 feet. Steel pipe would expand and contract somewhat less, plastic piping much more.
I'm no structural engineer, but it seems like a localized shear force is a lot different than heat expansion along a 2km pipe.
Anyway, the pipe wouldn't have gone over the fault line in this case, so one section of the pipe would not have moved 8 feet relative to another.
What do you mean "in this case" - this was a made-up case by me, and now I say that in this case the earthquake caused a mudslide down the hillside where my coolant water pipe was located. something like this:
(note that this picture is not from the current quake, it was caused by a previous quake a few years ago)
What I'm saying is that no matter where you locate the plant there are risks -- put it too close to the water and you risk Tsunami, put it too far away and you risk not having emergency cooling water when you need it most.
What bullshit. Why do some people claim that when corporations cut corners, they pass the savings on to the consumer? You KNOW that isn't true.
Well, look at the converse -- whenever corporations incur additional expense, they pass the expense onto consumers. Do you disagree? So if design A costs $5B, and design B is twice as safe but costs $15B, do you think the corporation will just absorb the additional cost?
I'm not taking about corruption and safety violations, I'm talking about design safety factors.
As for putting things away from the ocean, if they can engineer a containment unit to withstand an earthquake, they can engineer a pipe
The earthquake shifted parts of the country by 2.4 meters -- not just buildings, not just a hillside, but the land itself - how do you design a 2km pipe to handle that? If half of your pipe moves 8 feet to the left (or up, or down, or it's stretched longer, or compressed shorter), I don't see how to account for that in design. I can believe it's possible to design a small building or reactor housing to handle local shaking, but when the ground beneath you moves dramatically, how do you account for that?
The coastline there is very steep, had they situated it a couple kilometers inland and built a big pipe to the ocean,
Or maybe the earthquake (which was much more powerful than the plant was designed to withstand) would have cracked and damaged the 2km long pipes and on-site water storage tanks, leaving no easy way to bring in water a couple kilometers from the ocean. Then everyone could have pointed fingers and said "What idiots! Why did they locate the plant so far away from the ocean, if they were next to the ocean, fire engines with water cannons could have cooled the plant!"
Just like it's easy to say "If only they'd done *this* and the disaster would have been averted", it's easy to point out potential flaws in the alternative solution - there is never a perfect, risk-free solution.
Shareholders wouldn't have made as much of a profit. And we wouldn't be having this conversation because this never would have happened.
Cost cutting doesn't just benefit the shareholders, it also benefits the consumers. Modern economies depend on cheap, plentiful power - there is always a trade-off between cost and safety, very few people are willing to pay for absolute safety.. Even your car is a tradeoff (and you are much *much* more likely to die in a car accident than a nuclear accident). Do you think all cars should be designed like tanks, be limited to 5mph, and have redundant power sources and built-in air supplies providing a week of life support to occupants just in case the car drives into a lake? If those cheap-ass car companies didn't cut corners when building cars, we could save 40,000 lives/year.
Why don't the smartphone manufacturers build this into every phone, then there's no need to hand someone a card? I know there's the Bump app, but why should I have to count on someone having installed the same app as me just to transfer contact information?
I hate when I'm going out with a group of friends and we want to exchange cell phone numbers, we have to do the old "Call m number so I can get your number" routine and add contacts for everyone. It'd be much better if there was a standard protocol across all friends to allow this data sharing. You can make it reasonably secure by requiring confirmation on both phones. I hit the "Send personal contact" button, and everyone close to me sees "Incoming contact from Joe Blow, do you accept?", and when Jane accepts, I see "Jane Plane wants to accept your contact, ok to send it?" then my contact goes to Jane and only to Jane, not her creepy roomate standing nearby. It's not airtight security since someone could have their phone impersonate Jane Plane's phone, but it's only my phone number (and whatever else I choose to share) - it's not much less secure than saying out loud "Jane, call 510-555-1212 so I can get your phone number".
I know enough not to build a nuclear plant on a tsunami prone coast that can't be protected by walls.
If only you were there 40 years ago when this reactor was installed to warn them of the dangers... maybe you could have told them to use a more modern design that doesn't require active cooling to remain safe. Maybe you already have a map showing them exactly where to site the reactors? Or do you have a viable alternative to nuclear in your back pocket?
Lots of people can use hindsight to show exactly what went wrong in *this* particular incident, but who can tell where the next natural disaster will strike and how it will manifest itself? Did you already tell California to shut down its two coastal nukes? And it's not like nukes are the only power generating hazard out there - TVA was lucky that the billions of gallons of fly ash discharge didn't kill anyone.
USA officials seem to have a lot of criticism for the Japanese and how they handled this incident, but truth be told, this reactor survived a quake 30 times larger than it was designed for and so far hasn't spun out of control into a large scale disaster. If they hadn't lost power it's likely that this would have been a very minor incident. If the USA wants to criticize, then they need look no further than their own backyard. In California their 2 coastal nuclear plants are designed for a 7.0 or 7.5 earthquake but there's a very good chance that California will have a larger quake in the next 30 years. Oh, and at one of them, they installed the seismic reinforcements backwards and at the other, the entire reactor was installed backwards. Oops.
Even if I have to register, I can just use multiple email addresses - gmail makes that trivial, I can have "myname+nytimes1@gmail.com, myname+nytimes2@gmail.com, etc. and they all go to my inbox.
Ya know, there might be *someone* in the IT dept there who could figure out how to ignore everything after the + on a gmail address.
First, it's not even clear that I *have* to register with a valid email address, but even if they caught on to my gmail plus sign scheme, then I can just sign up for multiple gmail accounts and I can forward them all into a single account. Or use one of the remailing services mentioned by other another poster.
Good question - are Slashdot moderators *that* ignorant about geography? When I look at my map of North America, I see the country of Canada up on the northern part of the continent -- doesn't that make Canadians Americans the same way that people from Nigeria and Zimbabwe are both Africans even if they are from different countries?
Just because the people of the USA call themselves "American" doesn't mean that Canadians, Mexicans, Brazillians, etc are not Americans.
Yes, NYTimes.com visitors can enjoy 20 free articles each calendar month as well as unrestricted access to browse the home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds
Unless they make visitors register (which doesn't seem to be the case, I just read a few articles without registering), then if I just delete my nytimes.com cookies can't I keep going back for unlimited free articles? Even if I have to register, I can just use multiple email addresses - gmail makes that trivial, I can have "myname+nytimes1@gmail.com, myname+nytimes2@gmail.com, etc. and they all go to my inbox.
And by "Citing fears over a lack of an industry standard", they mean that they don't want to follow Google's lead with their NFC enabled phone, so instead they are working secretely with Nokia to come out with a competing standard, screwing over consumers who just want something that works -- much like the DVD-RAM/Blu-Ray debacle where no one could decide on a standard so early adopters had to pick one and hope they picked the industry leader.
No, different drives, they are both 5 platter 7200 RPM drives, but the one in the enclosure only has a 32MB cache and comes with a 2 year warranty versus 5 years for the bare drive. There may be other differences like SATA speed, I'm not sure.
The idea is good... Get some kind of semi-industrial UPS with suitable batteries and charge it while the power is on, and use the stored energy while it's off. This way, the blackouts won't affect you and you'll use that much more charging the thing while the power is on, effectively (if enough people used them) canceling the 'saving' of energy that was the purpose of the blackout.
Sounds like a lot of money to spend for little gain The per-capita energy use in Japan is 8000KWh/year, so figure in a 2 person household, the average energy use is:
16000KWh/year * (1 year / 365 days) * (1 day / 24 hours) = 1.8 KWh/hour
If a rolling blackout lasts 8 hours, then you need to have 14.4KWh in your batteries. Assuming 12V batteries:
14400 W-hour / 12 volts = 1200 amp hours
So lets go online and buy some batteries. If we get some nice SLA deepcycle batteries here:
You might think it would only take 10 of them to power this hypothetical household (1200 Ah), but if they want to get more than a 100 or so cycles out of them, they can't go below 50% discharge, so they actually need 20 batteries so that's $4200 for the batteries alone, plus a couple thousand $$ for the inverters, charge controllers, transfer switches, and they need to find someplace to store 1500 lbs of batteries in their small Japanese apartment. And during an earthquake instead of just worrying about a bookshelf tipping over, they'll have to worry about a 1500 lb battery rack falling, and possibly spilling acid gel across the apartment. Or, if you were thinking that the building management would build this huge battery pack in the basement or parking area, a generator would be more cost effective.
Tell me again why this is a good idea?
But if the plant can run and everything works (all pumps, all control and monitor functions works and don't set off alarms), the rest is minor and can wait. Trust your monitoring. If it's worth the money spent on developing and installing it, it has to be good enough to use to determine whether the plant can be started or not.
Unless, of course, the problem is a microscopic crack in a turbine blade that isn't found until the blade ejects itself through the turbine housing. Then instead of a 2 week inspection you have a 6 month shutdown to install a new turbine.
Now, what I don't understand is this. Japan sits on the edge of a continental plate, like Iceland, but while Iceland gets a lot of their energy from geothermal plants, Japan is almost entirely nuclear. Isn't this just plain stupid? - Nuclear power in a major earthquake zone with endless and limitless geothermal energy readily available?
Except that Iceland only gets 24% of their power from geothermal and they use 1/100th of the electrical power of Japan. Japan has almost the same geothermal generating capacity as Iceland (500MW vs 600MW) and more is on the way, but rather than being stupid, maybe it's not trivial to scale to 100 times more geothermal power generation? Just like there's limitless wind energy, solar energy, wave energy, it's a mater of scale.
Transmission is easy; convert the interior hold of an old container ship as a capacitor. I bet it could carry enough power to run Tokyo all week.
I don't get it - is this some geek reference to a movie or video game? Or are you seriously suggesting that a container ship has enough volume to hold a capacitor large enough to power a large city for a week?
Several nuclear powered warships from allies could temporarily provide a significant portion of the lost power. And at reasonable rates, too
I can't find generating capacities for their nuclear power plans, but a Nimitz class aircraft carrier can deliver 190MW of power from the reactors to the shafts (via steam), so even if you could convert all of that steam to electricity that would account for a tiny fraction of the power that the nuclear power plants can generate.
Fukushima Dai-ichi has 4.7GW of generating capacity.
And there's the problem of figuring out where to plug it in even if you could find enough ships to generate even 1GW of power. It's not like there's a big extension cord laying out by some dock that they could just plug in to. It would likely take months if not years to engineer a solution and construct the appropriate facilities.
I think the issue is more that most of the nukes are off-line and a good percentage of the transmission lines and facilities are just not there any more.
I haven't seen any reports claiming that most of Japan's nukes are offline, most of the nukes are in the southern part of the country that mostly escaped damage from the quake and subsequent tsumani.
I know that the Fukushima Daiichi (and Daini?) reactors are offline and they are working feverishly to try to prevent more serious problems there. I thought Tokai was offline, but they say they still have cooling power, so I'm not sure they are shut down. Are others also offline?
But still, Tokyo escaped most of the damage along with the rest of the country further south where they use 60Hz power, so my question remains: does the 60/50Hz split make it harder to balance power across Japan's grid?
I'd think everyone would just use their portable devices during the outages and then recharge the devices once power is restored, effectively shifting the load to the on-grid period.
Even in japan with all of its cool electronic devices, mobile devices account for a tiny portion of the overall grid load.
Think refrigerators, washer/dryers, cooking appliances, electric heating, lighting, plus all of the industrial users.
My Android cell phone battery holds around 5 watt-hours of power (double it if you want to account for charging and other efficiency losses). My (American) refrigerator uses around 1600 watt-hours of power per day. So charging my phone uses a fraction of the power used by my refrigerator.
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For real? How to get the steam above the waterline? You do realize this is high pressure steam (~1200 psi), and that traditional catapults use steam in the first place. Besides, steam rises!
Oh sorry, my bad, I guess they just need to open some hatches and let the steam waft out of the boilers to the surface.
I was under the impression that 300MW worth of high pressure steam would take a sizeable pipe (or pipes), and running that pipe from the reactor boiler to someplace where you could put a generator would require cutting holes in many decks of the aircraft carrier or cutting a hole in the side of the boat.
The reactors at Fukushima generate over 3,000MW of power, and that's not the only plant that's offline. Maybe if you had 10 aircraft carriers, 3GW of generators and these magic MYT Engines (or at least conventional turbines) *and* some place to plug them in that would be a viable solution. Oh, and the vast majority of an aircraft carrier's steam output goes to the turbines that drive the props - how will you get that steam up above the water line to your generators? Maybe you can just jack up the back of the carrier out of the water and connect the generators to the prop shafts. Then you "only" need to find a generator that runs at prop shaft speed or a gearbox to convert the speed.
Those of us in IT don't have particularly risky jobs (aside from carpal tunnel and other injuries....
Even IT guys can have risky jobs if common safety precautions aren't followed - I've heard of a guy that got his arm trapped under a couple hundred pounds of storage array shelves when he was trying to self-move an ethernet switch. He loosened the switch rack mount tab with his hand beneath the switch to support it, not realizing that the switch was also supporting the back half of several disk shelves above it. The weight of the equipment trapped his arm and no one outside of the data center could hear his shouts for help. Fortunately, one of the FC connectors got yanked out when the shelves dropped (thanks to neat cable cable management - no 5 foot coil of slack cable on top of the array), and someone in the NOC eventually came in to check on it when he saw the alarm. Had that not happened it could have been hours or even days before he was discovered.
Just like most safety failures, including the one in Japan, it took more than one failure to cause this safety problem:
1. He broke the "never move equipment by yourself" rule
2. Whoever secured the disk shelves didn't use the correct screws, they pulled right out of the rack once the support of the ethernet switch was removed.
People seem to be pointing to the Pebble Bed Reactor as the gold standard in passive safety:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor#Safety_features
It's self regulating since as the fuel temperature increases, the reactor power decreases. In the event of no active cooling, it reaches a steady state temperature and will stay there indefinitely.
Or you could have cards that fit in your wallet with your phone number written on them, which you could swap with people who had the same
No thanks, I don't need a wallet full of cards - the people I play soccer with aren't the same people I go to Friday night bars with, and aren't the same people I carpool with. I don't want to carry a dozen cards with me when my phone can already store thousands of contacts without adding any extra weight or bulk. Plus, I'd have to carry a pile of my own personal cards to hand out. Further, if I lose my wallet then I've lost those cards, while if I lose my phone, my contacts are still safe and secure on a server.
I do disagree. Corporations will try to price their products and services to make the most profit. If passing on the extra costs to consumers causes them to lose too many sales to their competitors, they will not pass the costs on. As long as they are still making a reasonable profit, they will stay in the business.
Right, that's my point -- if the plant cost 3 times more to build and they had to charge 3 times higher for electricity the plant wouldn't have gotten built at all until scarcity drove the price of power up to where the plant became profitable. So Consumers would pay higher prices either way -- they pay more if the plant has superior safety measures, and they pay more if those safety measures are so expensive that the plant doesn't get built at all.
I do. Pipes expand and contract all the time due to stress and temperature changes. It's not unusual for pipes to experience changes in length on the order of 0.1% to 0.5%. Copper going from freezing (0C) to boiling (100C) would be around 0.17%. For a 2kM pipe, that's about 3.3 meters, or about 11 feet. Steel pipe would expand and contract somewhat less, plastic piping much more.
I'm no structural engineer, but it seems like a localized shear force is a lot different than heat expansion along a 2km pipe.
Anyway, the pipe wouldn't have gone over the fault line in this case, so one section of the pipe would not have moved 8 feet relative to another.
What do you mean "in this case" - this was a made-up case by me, and now I say that in this case the earthquake caused a mudslide down the hillside where my coolant water pipe was located. something like this:
http://www.life.com/image/51554665
(note that this picture is not from the current quake, it was caused by a previous quake a few years ago)
What I'm saying is that no matter where you locate the plant there are risks -- put it too close to the water and you risk Tsunami, put it too far away and you risk not having emergency cooling water when you need it most.
What bullshit. Why do some people claim that when corporations cut corners, they pass the savings on to the consumer? You KNOW that isn't true.
Well, look at the converse -- whenever corporations incur additional expense, they pass the expense onto consumers. Do you disagree? So if design A costs $5B, and design B is twice as safe but costs $15B, do you think the corporation will just absorb the additional cost?
I'm not taking about corruption and safety violations, I'm talking about design safety factors.
As for putting things away from the ocean, if they can engineer a containment unit to withstand an earthquake, they can engineer a pipe
The earthquake shifted parts of the country by 2.4 meters -- not just buildings, not just a hillside, but the land itself - how do you design a 2km pipe to handle that? If half of your pipe moves 8 feet to the left (or up, or down, or it's stretched longer, or compressed shorter), I don't see how to account for that in design. I can believe it's possible to design a small building or reactor housing to handle local shaking, but when the ground beneath you moves dramatically, how do you account for that?
The coastline there is very steep, had they situated it a couple kilometers inland and built a big pipe to the ocean,
Or maybe the earthquake (which was much more powerful than the plant was designed to withstand) would have cracked and damaged the 2km long pipes and on-site water storage tanks, leaving no easy way to bring in water a couple kilometers from the ocean. Then everyone could have pointed fingers and said "What idiots! Why did they locate the plant so far away from the ocean, if they were next to the ocean, fire engines with water cannons could have cooled the plant!"
Just like it's easy to say "If only they'd done *this* and the disaster would have been averted", it's easy to point out potential flaws in the alternative solution - there is never a perfect, risk-free solution.
Shareholders wouldn't have made as much of a profit. And we wouldn't be having this conversation because this never would have happened.
Cost cutting doesn't just benefit the shareholders, it also benefits the consumers. Modern economies depend on cheap, plentiful power - there is always a trade-off between cost and safety, very few people are willing to pay for absolute safety.. Even your car is a tradeoff (and you are much *much* more likely to die in a car accident than a nuclear accident). Do you think all cars should be designed like tanks, be limited to 5mph, and have redundant power sources and built-in air supplies providing a week of life support to occupants just in case the car drives into a lake? If those cheap-ass car companies didn't cut corners when building cars, we could save 40,000 lives/year.
Why don't the smartphone manufacturers build this into every phone, then there's no need to hand someone a card? I know there's the Bump app, but why should I have to count on someone having installed the same app as me just to transfer contact information?
I hate when I'm going out with a group of friends and we want to exchange cell phone numbers, we have to do the old "Call m number so I can get your number" routine and add contacts for everyone. It'd be much better if there was a standard protocol across all friends to allow this data sharing. You can make it reasonably secure by requiring confirmation on both phones. I hit the "Send personal contact" button, and everyone close to me sees "Incoming contact from Joe Blow, do you accept?", and when Jane accepts, I see "Jane Plane wants to accept your contact, ok to send it?" then my contact goes to Jane and only to Jane, not her creepy roomate standing nearby. It's not airtight security since someone could have their phone impersonate Jane Plane's phone, but it's only my phone number (and whatever else I choose to share) - it's not much less secure than saying out loud "Jane, call 510-555-1212 so I can get your phone number".
I know enough not to build a nuclear plant on a tsunami prone coast that can't be protected by walls.
If only you were there 40 years ago when this reactor was installed to warn them of the dangers... maybe you could have told them to use a more modern design that doesn't require active cooling to remain safe. Maybe you already have a map showing them exactly where to site the reactors? Or do you have a viable alternative to nuclear in your back pocket?
Lots of people can use hindsight to show exactly what went wrong in *this* particular incident, but who can tell where the next natural disaster will strike and how it will manifest itself? Did you already tell California to shut down its two coastal nukes? And it's not like nukes are the only power generating hazard out there - TVA was lucky that the billions of gallons of fly ash discharge didn't kill anyone.
USA officials seem to have a lot of criticism for the Japanese and how they handled this incident, but truth be told, this reactor survived a quake 30 times larger than it was designed for and so far hasn't spun out of control into a large scale disaster. If they hadn't lost power it's likely that this would have been a very minor incident. If the USA wants to criticize, then they need look no further than their own backyard. In California their 2 coastal nuclear plants are designed for a 7.0 or 7.5 earthquake but there's a very good chance that California will have a larger quake in the next 30 years. Oh, and at one of them, they installed the seismic reinforcements backwards and at the other, the entire reactor was installed backwards. Oops.
Even if I have to register, I can just use multiple email addresses - gmail makes that trivial, I can have "myname+nytimes1@gmail.com, myname+nytimes2@gmail.com, etc. and they all go to my inbox.
Ya know, there might be *someone* in the IT dept there who could figure out how to ignore everything after the + on a gmail address.
First, it's not even clear that I *have* to register with a valid email address, but even if they caught on to my gmail plus sign scheme, then I can just sign up for multiple gmail accounts and I can forward them all into a single account. Or use one of the remailing services mentioned by other another poster.
But Canadians are Americans also
how can a fact be a troll?
Good question - are Slashdot moderators *that* ignorant about geography? When I look at my map of North America, I see the country of Canada up on the northern part of the continent -- doesn't that make Canadians Americans the same way that people from Nigeria and Zimbabwe are both Africans even if they are from different countries?
Just because the people of the USA call themselves "American" doesn't mean that Canadians, Mexicans, Brazillians, etc are not Americans.
Their site says:
Yes, NYTimes.com visitors can enjoy 20 free articles each calendar month as well as unrestricted access to browse the home page, section fronts, blog fronts and classifieds
Unless they make visitors register (which doesn't seem to be the case, I just read a few articles without registering), then if I just delete my nytimes.com cookies can't I keep going back for unlimited free articles? Even if I have to register, I can just use multiple email addresses - gmail makes that trivial, I can have "myname+nytimes1@gmail.com, myname+nytimes2@gmail.com, etc. and they all go to my inbox.
Whooops, you are right! Thanks for the correction!
Thousands of people work at Kenned Space Center - wouldn't it be more surprising if no drugs were ever found there?
And by "Citing fears over a lack of an industry standard", they mean that they don't want to follow Google's lead with their NFC enabled phone, so instead they are working secretely with Nokia to come out with a competing standard, screwing over consumers who just want something that works -- much like the DVD-RAM/Blu-Ray debacle where no one could decide on a standard so early adopters had to pick one and hope they picked the industry leader.
No, different drives, they are both 5 platter 7200 RPM drives, but the one in the enclosure only has a 32MB cache and comes with a 2 year warranty versus 5 years for the bare drive. There may be other differences like SATA speed, I'm not sure.
If you want the bare drive, you can pre-order it here:
http://www.provantage.com/seagate-st33000651as~7SEGS27K.htm
If you want it in the special packaging that doubles as a USB harddrive enclosure, you can get it here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148580&cm_re=3tb_seagate_usb-_-22-148-580-_-Product
If you think that's bad, check out the poster below who said they use piss for power! Piss is not a unit of power *or* energy!
The idea is good... Get some kind of semi-industrial UPS with suitable batteries and charge it while the power is on, and use the stored energy while it's off. This way, the blackouts won't affect you and you'll use that much more charging the thing while the power is on, effectively (if enough people used them) canceling the 'saving' of energy that was the purpose of the blackout.
Sounds like a lot of money to spend for little gain The per-capita energy use in Japan is 8000KWh/year, so figure in a 2 person household, the average energy use is:
16000KWh/year * (1 year / 365 days) * (1 day / 24 hours) = 1.8 KWh/hour
If a rolling blackout lasts 8 hours, then you need to have 14.4KWh in your batteries. Assuming 12V batteries:
14400 W-hour / 12 volts = 1200 amp hours
So lets go online and buy some batteries. If we get some nice SLA deepcycle batteries here:
http://www.batteryspec.com/cgi-bin/cart.cgi?action=link&product=83
You might think it would only take 10 of them to power this hypothetical household (1200 Ah), but if they want to get more than a 100 or so cycles out of them, they can't go below 50% discharge, so they actually need 20 batteries so that's $4200 for the batteries alone, plus a couple thousand $$ for the inverters, charge controllers, transfer switches, and they need to find someplace to store 1500 lbs of batteries in their small Japanese apartment. And during an earthquake instead of just worrying about a bookshelf tipping over, they'll have to worry about a 1500 lb battery rack falling, and possibly spilling acid gel across the apartment. Or, if you were thinking that the building management would build this huge battery pack in the basement or parking area, a generator would be more cost effective.
Tell me again why this is a good idea?
But if the plant can run and everything works (all pumps, all control and monitor functions works and don't set off alarms), the rest is minor and can wait. Trust your monitoring. If it's worth the money spent on developing and installing it, it has to be good enough to use to determine whether the plant can be started or not.
Unless, of course, the problem is a microscopic crack in a turbine blade that isn't found until the blade ejects itself through the turbine housing. Then instead of a 2 week inspection you have a 6 month shutdown to install a new turbine.
Now, what I don't understand is this. Japan sits on the edge of a continental plate, like Iceland, but while Iceland gets a lot of their energy from geothermal plants, Japan is almost entirely nuclear. Isn't this just plain stupid? - Nuclear power in a major earthquake zone with endless and limitless geothermal energy readily available?
Except that Iceland only gets 24% of their power from geothermal and they use 1/100th of the electrical power of Japan. Japan has almost the same geothermal generating capacity as Iceland (500MW vs 600MW) and more is on the way, but rather than being stupid, maybe it's not trivial to scale to 100 times more geothermal power generation? Just like there's limitless wind energy, solar energy, wave energy, it's a mater of scale.
Thanks for that link - I was wondering what the capacity of the 50/60hz grid interties was. 1GW is not much capacity.
Transmission is easy; convert the interior hold of an old container ship as a capacitor. I bet it could carry enough power to run Tokyo all week.
I don't get it - is this some geek reference to a movie or video game? Or are you seriously suggesting that a container ship has enough volume to hold a capacitor large enough to power a large city for a week?
Several nuclear powered warships from allies could temporarily provide a significant portion of the lost power. And at reasonable rates, too
I can't find generating capacities for their nuclear power plans, but a Nimitz class aircraft carrier can deliver 190MW of power from the reactors to the shafts (via steam), so even if you could convert all of that steam to electricity that would account for a tiny fraction of the power that the nuclear power plants can generate.
Fukushima Dai-ichi has 4.7GW of generating capacity.
And there's the problem of figuring out where to plug it in even if you could find enough ships to generate even 1GW of power. It's not like there's a big extension cord laying out by some dock that they could just plug in to. It would likely take months if not years to engineer a solution and construct the appropriate facilities.
I think the issue is more that most of the nukes are off-line and a good percentage of the transmission lines and facilities are just not there any more.
I haven't seen any reports claiming that most of Japan's nukes are offline, most of the nukes are in the southern part of the country that mostly escaped damage from the quake and subsequent tsumani.
I know that the Fukushima Daiichi (and Daini?) reactors are offline and they are working feverishly to try to prevent more serious problems there. I thought Tokai was offline, but they say they still have cooling power, so I'm not sure they are shut down. Are others also offline?
But still, Tokyo escaped most of the damage along with the rest of the country further south where they use 60Hz power, so my question remains: does the 60/50Hz split make it harder to balance power across Japan's grid?
I'd think everyone would just use their portable devices during the outages and then recharge the devices once power is restored, effectively shifting the load to the on-grid period.
Even in japan with all of its cool electronic devices, mobile devices account for a tiny portion of the overall grid load.
Think refrigerators, washer/dryers, cooking appliances, electric heating, lighting, plus all of the industrial users.
My Android cell phone battery holds around 5 watt-hours of power (double it if you want to account for charging and other efficiency losses). My (American) refrigerator uses around 1600 watt-hours of power per day. So charging my phone uses a fraction of the power used by my refrigerator.