Haven't I said that the main problem with coal is the mining? Strip mines cover more than twice the area of the Fukushima evacuation zone in Germany alone. That's damage. And importing coal won't make the damage go away, just go to another country.
The German storage facility that is meant to hold all the nuclear waste, until a permanent solution can be found, has an area of less than 1 hectare (or about 2 acre). A reasonable solution would be to build a better storage facility (instead of an underground one) with thick concrete walls that will last for centuries - Germany has hundreds of thousands of structures that are over a century old, still hundreds that are on the order of a thousand years old. The pyramids in Egypt are over 4000 years old. The buildings around the Forum Romanum in Rome are about 2000 years old. Our societies haven't forgotten how do such things. We just need to do it. And it can be done for an expense no greater than a hydro dam and a footprint that is dwarfed by any football stadium.
See, here is the problem. You are assuming and you are wrong. That's nothing against you, it is a very general phenomenon. People are put into categories that have nothing to do with each other.
When I say I'm pro nuclear, everybody thinks I'm against wind and solar. (And pro coal+oil.) When I say that solar is incredibly expensive and barely useful these days (especially when it comes to storage), I'm hit immediately with allegations that I deny global warming and that I'm against wind as well (because it also needs storage to do any good). When I start to even mention fast breeder reactors or transmutation of nuclear waste (really just splitting the plutonium and some other heavy stuff that is left in spent fuel), lots of people say I'm a lunatic and wishing for a pie in the sky, even though they have no clue about nuclear reactors or nature in general.
And I'm not even getting started!
Use whatever is there and try to do as little damage as possible is all that I'm saying.
But these days, the only relevant reason to reduce the use of coal, oil and gas that is being talked about is CO2. That's nonsense. Go to a strip mine and you know a much better reason to burn less coal. Weren't there enough oil spills, haven't there been enough wars for oil (most recently in South Sudan) to convince anyone that oil consumption should be reduced?
What is it that the warmist are telling us? Use less oil, use less coal. There are enough reasons to do that without even mentioning CO2 and so it should be done. You can't do more than this anyway, whether you believe in global warming or not.
Hence, there is enough time to wait for proper science to be done - something that I can't see any evidence of in term of global climate.
Let's see how long it takes you to realize, that the maize is specific for biogas. You basically need maize for biogas to maximize gas-yielt. But that you plant any other food (e.g. wheat) on the same fields you plant your maize for biogas (or bio ethanol for that matter).
How long will it take, until they don't get enough waste and will turn to that "green" alternative of turning maize into gas, which is even more effective than their current plans. That's at least what the greenies in Germany do. Who cares about feeding the world, if you can be green?
6 years into Al Gore's campaign of mass persuation not only do people grow weary, science itself has suffered major damage from a quasi religious, cargo cult sect, outwardly pretending to do science.
Using the same criteria as the climate "scientists" of the IPCC, seeing someone throw a die 4 times in a row is enough to shout out that the die is "very likely" loaded - no matter what the actual numbers were. Say, they all were even-numbered - gotcha. The chance for that less than 10%. thus, in climate-speak the die is 'very likely' fake. Say, they all were odd-numbered - gotcha. All 3 or smaller - gotcha. All 4 or larger - gotcha. All fibrionacci numbers - gotcha. None - gotcha. etc.
In the end, they simply only mention those data-mining results that happen to coincide with their preconceived notions of what climate change is supposed to look like. Climate-speak is giving them all the libeterties they need for this to still be "very likely" (90%) or even "virtually certain" (99%).
A recent result in particle physics was rejected outright, even though the associated statistical likelihood of the result was:
Despite all that confidence, neutrinos are still not faster than light, as any phycisist with a bit of basic understanding of fundamental physics could (and did) tell you. In the end, statistics means nothing. All that matters is the physics and the physics of climate change is shoddy.
Any target, anywhere on earth, within less than an hour, without condemning the attack missle to a predictable and easily observable flight path in orbit. (Compare that to the pathetic "threat" of a North Korean satellite launch.)
While everybody is talking about the minor squabble in the USA, during the same time there was the Taiping Rebellion in China. A mere 20 million dead followed by another 10million who died in the Dungan revolt that started during the same time.
When it comes to fMRI studies, I always remember the story of a dead salmon in an fMRI scanner, that was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.
Of course, it was a resounding success! And now SCIENCE knows where in the brain of a dead salmon, the mental process to evaluate human emotions occurs.
The technology of the Space Shuttle is ancient today, to say the least. It goes back all the way to the 1970ies, a time incomparable to the state of America today. Only those who can't imagine a better future, glorify the past.
I'm sure that the technicians working at Fukushima Daiichi on the 11th of march would have been glad to fix a powerline, which they could have done in a few hours while the emergency systems were running, to reestablish all the cooling needed to prevent a meltdown.
Also, with "longer distances" I simply meant a bit more than the 30cm or so between the 7 generators you can see on the picture I linked to. Certainly not miles and miles.
Fukushima had nothing to do with probability theory being wrong. Ask google scholar for "common cause failure nuclear" and the oldest citation on the very first page is from 1976. This is age old stuff.
Those are 7 of the 13 diesel generators about to be flooded. Besides those, there was just one generator in the basement of each turbine building. Only one generator survived (in reactor building #5 - providing power for decay heat removal there and for reactor #6) and this is not surprising. Put all your eggs in one basket and you're in trouble when the basket drops.
The problem was a simple matter of not having enough generators and not putting enough distance between them. Following the most stupid and simple-minded rule imaginable - that of having a distance of 50m or 100m between each emergency generator and having at least 3 generators per reactor (in Germany there are at least 4 for each reactor), you would have ended up with generators on the hills behind the reactors, because there is no room for them anywhere else.
I have no problem with having emergency generators next to the coast or in a basement. Both are potentially sheltered positions from some sort of accident - just not from a tsunami. That's why you should have a diverse set of several emergency generators, if possible based on different designs. (What if you run out of diesel or your most recent diesel delivery was spoiled?)
All the better if you have a modern reactor, like the Russian AES-92 or AES-2006 designs (from 1992 and 2006 respectively) that can remove decay heat without any active systems. (That's right, the Russians a ahead of the game, thanks to not treating research in nuclear power as a waste of money, as it is in the US and EU.)
In Europe, we mostly get our knowledge about Go from old japanese books that were translated to English in the 1970ies or so. When you compare the whole joseki and fuseki theory of that age and the professional games that resulted from it, with professional games today, or games of the Showa Era (when Go Seigen was in his prime and invented the shinfuseki) or games of the Meiji Restoration (when Honinbo Shusaku lived and basically created formal fuseki theory) you'll be hard pressed to conclude that there is anything static about the opening in go.
They are ever changing. There are 50 years between each of those eras and non resembles the other.
On smaller boards for beginners (9x9), the computers are much better than at the usual ones (19x19) - though I wouldn't put a number on it (I'm not sure about the very recent program/computer pairings.)
Other board sizes are hard to compare, as a) human players are unfamiliar with those and b) generally just don't play them. There is the intermediate beginners board with 13x13 that is commonly used, as well as the Tibetan 17x17. On larger boards the games become impractically long. They already last 200-300 moves (with outlieres between 100 and 400) on a 19x19. There's little use in making the board so big, that a game of reasonable quality literally takes all day. Professional games on the 19x19 already used to take several days until the middle of the 20th century. (It is generally agreed though, that the quality didn't suffer when thinking times were reduced to about 3 hours each plus 1min per move after that.)
In the end, Go is a game played by humans for fun and competition.:)
... so long as you still have a chance. The computers haven't reached professional level yet and certainly won't be able to compute the whole of the game in advance, even after a given opening, in the next decades.
I know that most cities were protected by seawalls after the 1896/1933 tsunamies and I had also heard about Fudai on the longnow blog, but not about other villages/towns/cities (I realize those terms have very differnt meanings throughout the world).
Since I guess that you are Japanese (brilliant guess, I know), can you say something about the general Japanese perception of the earthquake? Here in Germany it has become perfectly acceptable to refer to the earthquake and tsunami simply by saying Fukushima, without even mentioning that whole cities were destroyed. A recent talk show on TV (admittedly about nuclear power) introduced the topic by stating there was an earthquake and a "heavy tsunami" in Japan, while showing the exploding reactor buildings - not even mentioning or showing the destruction and casualties of the tsunami or the fact that a coastline as long as the distance from Hamburg to Munich was devastated (basically all the way from north to south of Germany).
I stopped reading a popular German online magazine (Telepolis) altogether after one of their articles on march 13th 2011 compared the then-official death toll of about 1000 people to the (inflated) figure of 200,000 in the Haiti earthquake. Talking down the severity of the earthquake and tsunami. I was shouted down in the forum for daring to mention that several cities had basically vanished, saying that I was merely "trying to distract from the nuclear power plant".
It is certainly much more environmentally sound than letting 20 million tons of debris be washed into the sea. Feasibility is not an issue at all. Just look at the piles of debris still on land that were piled up in a matter of months to make any sense of the chaos at all. Those are much larger in their volume than the walls that are needed.
Or compare it to large hydro dams - the material used in a single dam like the Itaipu is enough to protect dozens of cities. (This dam is 8km long and 200m high. It's more than ten times higher and thicker than a seawall would need to be.)
While I'm far from disagreeing that nuclear power stations should be as safe as conceivably possible, what about the cities?
18 Cities were largely or completely destroyed by the tsunami (others merely to some small part). This is where people lived, this is where people died. Where is the scandal, where is the outrage about exposing some 500,000 to the risk of the on-rushing water? Where is the investigation why it could be that almost 20,000 people died?
There has been so much supposedly outraged talk about Fukushima Daiichi, about how anybody could expose the people to such risks, that it is grotesque that nobody is talking about the risk that was there, that was obvious, that killed people.
Whoever submitted this story didn't even read the content of the link s/he provided. There is enough water, although less than thought and it is sufficient to cool the reactor. It is certainly a deliberate lie to claim there was no water.
I also cannot imagine anybody thought that standing right next to the core of a nuclear reactor within the containment was anything less than deadly or that anybody should be concerned about this, the area being, as it was, on the inside of an over 1m thick concrete shell.
Sixty years later, the US military decided to keep using B-52 bombers (build in 1952) until 2044 or something absurd like that. The west today is where China was at the end of the 17th century. The richest country in the world, but perfectly stagnant and predictably on the way to ruin.
JET almost broke even in 1997 - they got Q=0.7. Theoretically, they could achieve Q=1, but what's the point in that? The turbine has an efficiency of about 33% (give or take), so you'd need Q=3 just for steady state operation without further losses. Economical power generation will need more than this, on the order of q=20. However it's not as bad as it sounds. The plan is to try to achieve plasma ignition at ITER (which is Q hitting infinity - the fusion reaction sustaining itself, needing no outside heating, just magnetic confinement). So, it's not a linear scale at all.
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Haven't I said that the main problem with coal is the mining? Strip mines cover more than twice the area of the Fukushima evacuation zone in Germany alone. That's damage. And importing coal won't make the damage go away, just go to another country.
The German storage facility that is meant to hold all the nuclear waste, until a permanent solution can be found, has an area of less than 1 hectare (or about 2 acre). A reasonable solution would be to build a better storage facility (instead of an underground one) with thick concrete walls that will last for centuries - Germany has hundreds of thousands of structures that are over a century old, still hundreds that are on the order of a thousand years old. The pyramids in Egypt are over 4000 years old. The buildings around the Forum Romanum in Rome are about 2000 years old. Our societies haven't forgotten how do such things. We just need to do it. And it can be done for an expense no greater than a hydro dam and a footprint that is dwarfed by any football stadium.
"I'm assuming you have a problem with nuclear?"
See, here is the problem. You are assuming and you are wrong. That's nothing against you, it is a very general phenomenon. People are put into categories that have nothing to do with each other.
When I say I'm pro nuclear, everybody thinks I'm against wind and solar. (And pro coal+oil.) When I say that solar is incredibly expensive and barely useful these days (especially when it comes to storage), I'm hit immediately with allegations that I deny global warming and that I'm against wind as well (because it also needs storage to do any good). When I start to even mention fast breeder reactors or transmutation of nuclear waste (really just splitting the plutonium and some other heavy stuff that is left in spent fuel), lots of people say I'm a lunatic and wishing for a pie in the sky, even though they have no clue about nuclear reactors or nature in general.
And I'm not even getting started!
Use whatever is there and try to do as little damage as possible is all that I'm saying.
But these days, the only relevant reason to reduce the use of coal, oil and gas that is being talked about is CO2. That's nonsense. Go to a strip mine and you know a much better reason to burn less coal. Weren't there enough oil spills, haven't there been enough wars for oil (most recently in South Sudan) to convince anyone that oil consumption should be reduced?
What is it that the warmist are telling us? Use less oil, use less coal. There are enough reasons to do that without even mentioning CO2 and so it should be done. You can't do more than this anyway, whether you believe in global warming or not.
Hence, there is enough time to wait for proper science to be done - something that I can't see any evidence of in term of global climate.
Let's see how long it takes you to realize, that the maize is specific for biogas. You basically need maize for biogas to maximize gas-yielt. But that you plant any other food (e.g. wheat) on the same fields you plant your maize for biogas (or bio ethanol for that matter).
How long will it take, until they don't get enough waste and will turn to that "green" alternative of turning maize into gas, which is even more effective than their current plans. That's at least what the greenies in Germany do. Who cares about feeding the world, if you can be green?
6 years into Al Gore's campaign of mass persuation not only do people grow weary, science itself has suffered major damage from a quasi religious, cargo cult sect, outwardly pretending to do science.
Using the same criteria as the climate "scientists" of the IPCC, seeing someone throw a die 4 times in a row is enough to shout out that the die is "very likely" loaded - no matter what the actual numbers were. Say, they all were even-numbered - gotcha. The chance for that less than 10%. thus, in climate-speak the die is 'very likely' fake. Say, they all were odd-numbered - gotcha. All 3 or smaller - gotcha. All 4 or larger - gotcha. All fibrionacci numbers - gotcha. None - gotcha. etc.
In the end, they simply only mention those data-mining results that happen to coincide with their preconceived notions of what climate change is supposed to look like. Climate-speak is giving them all the libeterties they need for this to still be "very likely" (90%) or even "virtually certain" (99%).
A recent result in particle physics was rejected outright, even though the associated statistical likelihood of the result was:
99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999%
Despite all that confidence, neutrinos are still not faster than light, as any phycisist with a bit of basic understanding of fundamental physics could (and did) tell you. In the end, statistics means nothing. All that matters is the physics and the physics of climate change is shoddy.
Any target, anywhere on earth, within less than an hour, without condemning the attack missle to a predictable and easily observable flight path in orbit. (Compare that to the pathetic "threat" of a North Korean satellite launch.)
Science it ain't.
ITER: $20bn
Some people call it famine when you surround a city with military troops without letting any food in.
While everybody is talking about the minor squabble in the USA, during the same time there was the Taiping Rebellion in China. A mere 20 million dead followed by another 10million who died in the Dungan revolt that started during the same time.
Just because I always remember the story doesn't mean I discard all fMRI studies outright. But I still think you should be on your toes.
I can't help it:
http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
When it comes to fMRI studies, I always remember the story of a dead salmon in an fMRI scanner, that was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.
Of course, it was a resounding success! And now SCIENCE knows where in the brain of a dead salmon, the mental process to evaluate human emotions occurs.
The technology of the Space Shuttle is ancient today, to say the least. It goes back all the way to the 1970ies, a time incomparable to the state of America today. Only those who can't imagine a better future, glorify the past.
I'm sure that the technicians working at Fukushima Daiichi on the 11th of march would have been glad to fix a powerline, which they could have done in a few hours while the emergency systems were running, to reestablish all the cooling needed to prevent a meltdown.
Also, with "longer distances" I simply meant a bit more than the 30cm or so between the 7 generators you can see on the picture I linked to. Certainly not miles and miles.
Fukushima had nothing to do with probability theory being wrong. Ask google scholar for "common cause failure nuclear" and the oldest citation on the very first page is from 1976. This is age old stuff.
Now look at the greenish boxes on this picture:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/news/110311/images/110519_2_2.jpg
Those are 7 of the 13 diesel generators about to be flooded. Besides those, there was just one generator in the basement of each turbine building. Only one generator survived (in reactor building #5 - providing power for decay heat removal there and for reactor #6) and this is not surprising. Put all your eggs in one basket and you're in trouble when the basket drops.
The problem was a simple matter of not having enough generators and not putting enough distance between them. Following the most stupid and simple-minded rule imaginable - that of having a distance of 50m or 100m between each emergency generator and having at least 3 generators per reactor (in Germany there are at least 4 for each reactor), you would have ended up with generators on the hills behind the reactors, because there is no room for them anywhere else.
I have no problem with having emergency generators next to the coast or in a basement. Both are potentially sheltered positions from some sort of accident - just not from a tsunami. That's why you should have a diverse set of several emergency generators, if possible based on different designs. (What if you run out of diesel or your most recent diesel delivery was spoiled?)
All the better if you have a modern reactor, like the Russian AES-92 or AES-2006 designs (from 1992 and 2006 respectively) that can remove decay heat without any active systems. (That's right, the Russians a ahead of the game, thanks to not treating research in nuclear power as a waste of money, as it is in the US and EU.)
In Europe, we mostly get our knowledge about Go from old japanese books that were translated to English in the 1970ies or so. When you compare the whole joseki and fuseki theory of that age and the professional games that resulted from it, with professional games today, or games of the Showa Era (when Go Seigen was in his prime and invented the shinfuseki) or games of the Meiji Restoration (when Honinbo Shusaku lived and basically created formal fuseki theory) you'll be hard pressed to conclude that there is anything static about the opening in go.
They are ever changing. There are 50 years between each of those eras and non resembles the other.
On smaller boards for beginners (9x9), the computers are much better than at the usual ones (19x19) - though I wouldn't put a number on it (I'm not sure about the very recent program/computer pairings.)
Other board sizes are hard to compare, as a) human players are unfamiliar with those and b) generally just don't play them. There is the intermediate beginners board with 13x13 that is commonly used, as well as the Tibetan 17x17. On larger boards the games become impractically long. They already last 200-300 moves (with outlieres between 100 and 400) on a 19x19. There's little use in making the board so big, that a game of reasonable quality literally takes all day. Professional games on the 19x19 already used to take several days until the middle of the 20th century. (It is generally agreed though, that the quality didn't suffer when thinking times were reduced to about 3 hours each plus 1min per move after that.)
In the end, Go is a game played by humans for fun and competition. :)
... so long as you still have a chance. The computers haven't reached professional level yet and certainly won't be able to compute the whole of the game in advance, even after a given opening, in the next decades.
I know that most cities were protected by seawalls after the 1896/1933 tsunamies and I had also heard about Fudai on the longnow blog, but not about other villages/towns/cities (I realize those terms have very differnt meanings throughout the world).
Since I guess that you are Japanese (brilliant guess, I know), can you say something about the general Japanese perception of the earthquake? Here in Germany it has become perfectly acceptable to refer to the earthquake and tsunami simply by saying Fukushima, without even mentioning that whole cities were destroyed. A recent talk show on TV (admittedly about nuclear power) introduced the topic by stating there was an earthquake and a "heavy tsunami" in Japan, while showing the exploding reactor buildings - not even mentioning or showing the destruction and casualties of the tsunami or the fact that a coastline as long as the distance from Hamburg to Munich was devastated (basically all the way from north to south of Germany).
I stopped reading a popular German online magazine (Telepolis) altogether after one of their articles on march 13th 2011 compared the then-official death toll of about 1000 people to the (inflated) figure of 200,000 in the Haiti earthquake. Talking down the severity of the earthquake and tsunami. I was shouted down in the forum for daring to mention that several cities had basically vanished, saying that I was merely "trying to distract from the nuclear power plant".
It is certainly much more environmentally sound than letting 20 million tons of debris be washed into the sea. Feasibility is not an issue at all. Just look at the piles of debris still on land that were piled up in a matter of months to make any sense of the chaos at all. Those are much larger in their volume than the walls that are needed.
Or compare it to large hydro dams - the material used in a single dam like the Itaipu is enough to protect dozens of cities. (This dam is 8km long and 200m high. It's more than ten times higher and thicker than a seawall would need to be.)
While I'm far from disagreeing that nuclear power stations should be as safe as conceivably possible, what about the cities?
18 Cities were largely or completely destroyed by the tsunami (others merely to some small part). This is where people lived, this is where people died. Where is the scandal, where is the outrage about exposing some 500,000 to the risk of the on-rushing water? Where is the investigation why it could be that almost 20,000 people died?
There has been so much supposedly outraged talk about Fukushima Daiichi, about how anybody could expose the people to such risks, that it is grotesque that nobody is talking about the risk that was there, that was obvious, that killed people.
Whoever submitted this story didn't even read the content of the link s/he provided. There is enough water, although less than thought and it is sufficient to cool the reactor. It is certainly a deliberate lie to claim there was no water.
I also cannot imagine anybody thought that standing right next to the core of a nuclear reactor within the containment was anything less than deadly or that anybody should be concerned about this, the area being, as it was, on the inside of an over 1m thick concrete shell.
Sixty years later, the US military decided to keep using B-52 bombers (build in 1952) until 2044 or something absurd like that. The west today is where China was at the end of the 17th century. The richest country in the world, but perfectly stagnant and predictably on the way to ruin.
.. and replaces said rants by "this-is-never-going-to-work" rants.
JET almost broke even in 1997 - they got Q=0.7. Theoretically, they could achieve Q=1, but what's the point in that? The turbine has an efficiency of about 33% (give or take), so you'd need Q=3 just for steady state operation without further losses. Economical power generation will need more than this, on the order of q=20. However it's not as bad as it sounds. The plan is to try to achieve plasma ignition at ITER (which is Q hitting infinity - the fusion reaction sustaining itself, needing no outside heating, just magnetic confinement). So, it's not a linear scale at all.