Cancer rates in the USA (for both genders! Standard display in this app is male-only) vary between about 40% (Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Alaska etc.) and 52% (Delaware, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Maine etc.)
For the record: New England should be evacuated immediately and nobody allowed back in, except for brief periods in protective clothing.
I haven't read it all yet, but page 23 shows the problem:
The emission peaks on 12, 13, and 14 March are associated with venting events at units 1, 3 and 2, respectively. It is interesting to notice that in all three cases our a posteriori emissions start increasing
earlier than our first guess emissions and drop more strongly at the end of the venting. This seems to indicate that contaminated air was leaking from the containment as pressure was building up, even before active venting started.
If they had really understood what happened during the accident, they would have made a very different "first guess" for the emissions. In fact, their first guess would have been that contaminated air was leaking from the reactor buildings before active venting started. Why?
Because of the hydrogen explosions. Containments are vented through the "smoke" stacks. If there had been no leak of the containment prior, during or after the venting, no hydrogen could have accumulated in the reactor buildings, because it would have left through the stacks. It didn't. Some of the hydrogen accumulated in the reactor buildings or they could not have exploded. This hydrogen came straight from the reactors and was as inextricably mixed with Xenon-133 as the proverbial piss in the water of the swimming pool.
No surprise there at all. It is astonishing that the authors of the paper didn't come to that simple conclusion, namely, that their first guess was naive and their "discovery" was not all that interesting to begin with and hardly worth mentioning.
You will find that the first page contains only results between 1979 and 2003. This has nothing to do with hindsight. In fact, lots of people had the foresight to implement such measures. TEPCO was not among them.
The isolation condenser (IC) automatically shut down after the temperature of the reactor core was dropping too fast. This was before anybody knew how big the tsunami was that was headed for them, which is why the employee didn't override the automatic shutdown. He would probably have decided otherwise, had he known that the tsunami was big enough to destroy the pneumatics necessary to open the valve to the IC again.
There is one simple way that would have prevented the tsunami from taking out all emergency generators.
To comply with international standards and have at least four emergency generators per reactor placed around the reactors with adequate spacing between each of them to prevent common cause failure. For purely geometric reasons (to keep the distance between each other) at least one per reactor would have to have been behind the reactor buildings on higher ground. Which exactly how spacing alone mitigates common cause failure.
It would also have been helpful had TEPCO installed Passive Autocatalytic Recombiners in their reactor buildings to catalytically "burn" the hydrogen before it can reach combustible or explosive concentrations. (Those do their job by hanging on the wall. No power required.) Or if they had hardened and filtered containment vents.
Both of those measures were implemented in Sweden, Germany and France some time after the analysis of the Three Mile Island accident, which quite accurately predicted how Fukushima Daiichi turned out, which was deemed unacceptable. Hence the additional safety features. I'm not saying that those are the only countries that implemented such measures, but with those I'm sure. And I stopped making assumptions about those things seven months and two weeks ago.
Depends on your point of view. There is no difference from a purely environmentalist point of view. (Which doesn't care about jobs, unless it is environmentalists trying to defend their position and claim that environmentalism creates jobs. Which is part of their propaganda but not part of their point of view. Similar things can be said about NASA and others.)
This is basically what is going on and not just in solar cells but also in rare earth minerals. Similar problem. Low concentrations demand leaching with rather aggressive and toxic chemicals, that are expensive to capture and recycle. Importing them from China in the name of Free Markets has no different result as producing them in the USA and dumping the waste on China.
The whole "buy Chinese stuff and blame them for their CO2 emissions" business is yet another example.
Price dumping is selling stuff below the price it took to manufacture. But that's not the case. The price is that low - though only because the Chinese are not capturing and recycling their toxic waste and dump it into the environment instead.
The higher price in Europe is not down to "excessive" environmental regulation, but a matter of basic environmental protection. Of course, this doesn't stop European greenies from feeling smug for having Chinese solar cells on their roofs - so long as the pollution is not in their backyards. (Never mind that their cells would have been a lot more expensive had they been produced in a more reasonable way.)
I do know that all reactor fuel is made from U-235
No, it's not. It is a small fraction - depending on the reactor it makes up 0.7% to 4% in commercial power stations. About half the energy is derived from U-238 (Again, this depends on the reactor. The figure is about one third for old BWRs and about two thirds for the EPR. This assumes that no fuel reprocessing takes place, a so-called once-through cycle. Otherwise, the figure would be higher.) U-235 is barely radioactive, as implied by the half life. Half life tells you how many atoms decay in a given time span. If you have one thousand times the half life, you have one thousandth of the radioactivity. U-235 is over a billion times less radioactive than such common isotopes as Polonium-210, thirty million times less radioactive than Lead-210 ( a decay product of Radon-222, which is about a hundred billion times as radioactive as U-235) and thirty thousand times less radioactive than Plutonium-239.
perhaps
you are talking about U-238 which is 99.99 % percent of the form of uranium (apologies to uni lecturers out there but its close enough)
No, it's not close enough. U-235 makes up 0.71% of natural Uranium. Almost a hundred times more than you want to make people believe.
It's my idea. Don't you dare to use MY idea. No, I don't care if somebody just came up with it. It was MY idea.
No, it's not your idea. It's everybody's idea.
Standing on the shoulders of giants - where there is room for everyone - people decided to knock everybody down to the ground who dares to scale them, because they think that only they are entitled to make use of the work of earlier generations.
The opposite of a developing country, is a stagnating country. And stagnation is what we are seeing.
The way things look, is that there will be funding for the rocket, but no mission to go with it. There is no concerted effort to make a manned mission to anywhere. There is neither a moon, nor a mars nor an asteroid lander in the work. There is no plan for a new space station that require regular launches of 100ton+ payloads. There are no plans to build satellites that mass 100ton+ in LEO or 50ton+ in GTO/GSO.
In other words, we're talking about another white elephant like the Space Shuttle - made for the singular purpose to finance ATK and a slew of other corporations. And of course to "provide jobs" (at a cost of over $1mio per job per year).
It has nothing to do with utilitarianism to demand that before you make a decision you must know what it is, that you are making decisions about. Period.
You cannot use 100 year old moral judgments on kidney or heart transplantations, simply because 100 years ago this was not possible and all such judgments were made by people whose decisions were not based on our reality today, but on the fact that giving a living person the heart or kidney of a dead person in order to save that persons life was literally unthinkable. There was nothing to be done with a dead body other than burn or bury it.
This has changed and so must our moral judgments. No matter if those judgments are based on utilitarian, eudaemonian or any other principles for moral judgments you may come up with. It is, by the way, the existence of this new cause-and-effect relationship that is the cause for this change of judgments. If your particular "philosophically-grounded moral judgment" does not account for this change of the facts, then your philosophy is stupid and you are de-facto committing to an ignorance-grounded moral judgment.
From someone that makes a plea to use facts as a basis for policy, stating that turbines
will be developed that burn only the hydrogen from coal is a bit strange.
But entirely plausible. Coal is a biological product, made from hydrocarbons. (Keep in mind that chemical notation hides A LOT of hydrogen atoms in all those benzene rings in this picture.)
However, it will require a lot more coal to be dug out as not burning the carbon reduces the potential energy density of coal and of course increases the cost of the energy derived from it. So, in the end it is a bad idea not because it doesn't work, but because we're already ruining too much of our world with coal mining.
In order to make any moral decision at all, you need to know the consequences of those decisions. People who don't know science or are not properly informed about the results of scientific studies, cannot make reliable moral judgments and should refrain from doing so. (The latter being obviously problematic, because most people don't know about their ignorance or delude themselves about their knowledge - and there is a selection bias in politics that favors those who are overconfident about their knowledge and judgment.)
Imaging a simple moral dilemma. Choice A: Ten people will die. Choice B: 5 people will die.
The decision is simple - you take B.
The problem? Well, you're wrong. Choice B was based on a popular myth that three of the people involved would not be in any danger - but actually they would die. B would cause the death of 8 people. Choice A on the other hand has only been represented by the media as being extremely dangerous, but a sober scientific assessment would have led you to the conclusion, that only 2 people will die.
Yes, there can be science - even successful science - without moral judgment. Which is a problem and it is highly visible. But there can be no true moral judgment without science. Moral judgment is entirely derivative of our knowledge of the world, of the cause and effect relationships involved.
Unfortunately, pomp and circumstance can easily hide a lack of knowledge about the consequences of decisions made by those claiming (or claimed) to be moral authorities. That includes, unfortunately, the whole debate of climate science that usually sees a lot of discussions among people who hold a claim to moral authority but don't know the least bit about the science. Instead, they rely on biased reporting of the science to make and justify their "moral" decisions.
Fuel cells - an incredibly expensive way to waste two thirds of the energy you're putting into "charging" up your car. With batteries you lose less than one tenth. That's what always gets lost when people talk starry-eyed about fuel cells.
Wow. In one out of ten trips you take with you car, you are driving over 300 miles? Even if it were 100 miles, I doubt that it would not satisfy 98% of your needs.
The availability of a low-cost EV has already taken more than its reasonable share of time. Actually, they should have been around for at least a decade.
The Chinese have them. In fact, Daimler sued a Chinese car maker in 2006 for making a copy-cat Smart car with an electric engine and battery. And the Chinese had already been using electric cars for real since the mid 90ies. - Not that anybody cared or noticed back in the stagnated (that is, not developing) countries.
The key is to understand, that electric cars have no market as luxury items unless and until they have been established as cars for everyday users. Before that, there just won't be the infrastructure it takes to make proper use of them. But in order to get to this point, they need a price point that makes it possible for people to use them as single-purpose vehicles, alongside the traditional ones. (E.g. getting one person and a suitcase to work and back)
$3000-4000 for a light-weight two-person car with limited range (80km/50miles) and speed (below 80km/h or 50mph) is entirely possible to achieve. Weight, range, acceleration and speed are the main determinants of the size of the battery (and its weight!), which determines the price of the battery and thus the price of an electric car. Such a car could actually have reasonable charging times (One tenth the total capacity means one tenth the time to charge) and such a car could do some 90% of the driving for a lot of people. But because of the limited performance nobody is going to bother buying such a car unless it's really cheap. (Meaning: unless it has a price that makes it reasonable to buy without being an eco-freak.)
But then again, you don't get to pay gas prices of $8/gal (as in Europe) until you realize that the USA will collapse if it continues to pretend that cheap oil is only a matter of military power.
None of the latter four are meaningful in this case. Unskilled wage? There isn't much of that left in automobile production. There are not even a lot of skilled workers in modern car factories. GDP per capita is not a good base for comparison either, because there are now a lot more things being done in the USA than in 1925, which are now also part of GDP.
Slashdot Mirror
Cancer rates in the USA (for both genders! Standard display in this app is male-only) vary between about 40% (Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Alaska etc.) and 52% (Delaware, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Maine etc.)
For the record: New England should be evacuated immediately and nobody allowed back in, except for brief periods in protective clothing.
If they had really understood what happened during the accident, they would have made a very different "first guess" for the emissions. In fact, their first guess would have been that contaminated air was leaking from the reactor buildings before active venting started. Why?
Because of the hydrogen explosions. Containments are vented through the "smoke" stacks. If there had been no leak of the containment prior, during or after the venting, no hydrogen could have accumulated in the reactor buildings, because it would have left through the stacks. It didn't. Some of the hydrogen accumulated in the reactor buildings or they could not have exploded. This hydrogen came straight from the reactors and was as inextricably mixed with Xenon-133 as the proverbial piss in the water of the swimming pool.
No surprise there at all. It is astonishing that the authors of the paper didn't come to that simple conclusion, namely, that their first guess was naive and their "discovery" was not all that interesting to begin with and hardly worth mentioning.
Try Google Scholar:
http://scholar.google.de/scholar?q=Containment+Hydrogen+Control+and+Filtered+Venting+Design+and+Implementation&hl=de&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
You will find that the first page contains only results between 1979 and 2003. This has nothing to do with hindsight. In fact, lots of people had the foresight to implement such measures. TEPCO was not among them.
The isolation condenser (IC) automatically shut down after the temperature of the reactor core was dropping too fast. This was before anybody knew how big the tsunami was that was headed for them, which is why the employee didn't override the automatic shutdown. He would probably have decided otherwise, had he known that the tsunami was big enough to destroy the pneumatics necessary to open the valve to the IC again.
There is one simple way that would have prevented the tsunami from taking out all emergency generators.
To comply with international standards and have at least four emergency generators per reactor placed around the reactors with adequate spacing between each of them to prevent common cause failure. For purely geometric reasons (to keep the distance between each other) at least one per reactor would have to have been behind the reactor buildings on higher ground. Which exactly how spacing alone mitigates common cause failure.
It would also have been helpful had TEPCO installed Passive Autocatalytic Recombiners in their reactor buildings to catalytically "burn" the hydrogen before it can reach combustible or explosive concentrations. (Those do their job by hanging on the wall. No power required.) Or if they had hardened and filtered containment vents.
Both of those measures were implemented in Sweden, Germany and France some time after the analysis of the Three Mile Island accident, which quite accurately predicted how Fukushima Daiichi turned out, which was deemed unacceptable. Hence the additional safety features. I'm not saying that those are the only countries that implemented such measures, but with those I'm sure. And I stopped making assumptions about those things seven months and two weeks ago.
Depends on your point of view. There is no difference from a purely environmentalist point of view. (Which doesn't care about jobs, unless it is environmentalists trying to defend their position and claim that environmentalism creates jobs. Which is part of their propaganda but not part of their point of view. Similar things can be said about NASA and others.)
This is basically what is going on and not just in solar cells but also in rare earth minerals. Similar problem. Low concentrations demand leaching with rather aggressive and toxic chemicals, that are expensive to capture and recycle. Importing them from China in the name of Free Markets has no different result as producing them in the USA and dumping the waste on China.
The whole "buy Chinese stuff and blame them for their CO2 emissions" business is yet another example.
Price dumping is selling stuff below the price it took to manufacture. But that's not the case. The price is that low - though only because the Chinese are not capturing and recycling their toxic waste and dump it into the environment instead.
The higher price in Europe is not down to "excessive" environmental regulation, but a matter of basic environmental protection. Of course, this doesn't stop European greenies from feeling smug for having Chinese solar cells on their roofs - so long as the pollution is not in their backyards. (Never mind that their cells would have been a lot more expensive had they been produced in a more reasonable way.)
You forgot that part.
I do know that all reactor fuel is made from U-235
No, it's not. It is a small fraction - depending on the reactor it makes up 0.7% to 4% in commercial power stations. About half the energy is derived from U-238 (Again, this depends on the reactor. The figure is about one third for old BWRs and about two thirds for the EPR. This assumes that no fuel reprocessing takes place, a so-called once-through cycle. Otherwise, the figure would be higher.)
U-235 is barely radioactive, as implied by the half life. Half life tells you how many atoms decay in a given time span. If you have one thousand times the half life, you have one thousandth of the radioactivity. U-235 is over a billion times less radioactive than such common isotopes as Polonium-210, thirty million times less radioactive than Lead-210 ( a decay product of Radon-222, which is about a hundred billion times as radioactive as U-235) and thirty thousand times less radioactive than Plutonium-239.
perhaps you are talking about U-238 which is 99.99 % percent of the form of uranium (apologies to uni lecturers out there but its close enough)
No, it's not close enough. U-235 makes up 0.71% of natural Uranium. Almost a hundred times more than you want to make people believe.
It's just that I wasn't merely writing about Jobs.
It's my idea. Don't you dare to use MY idea. No, I don't care if somebody just came up with it. It was MY idea.
No, it's not your idea. It's everybody's idea.
Standing on the shoulders of giants - where there is room for everyone - people decided to knock everybody down to the ground who dares to scale them, because they think that only they are entitled to make use of the work of earlier generations.
The opposite of a developing country, is a stagnating country. And stagnation is what we are seeing.
The way things look, is that there will be funding for the rocket, but no mission to go with it. There is no concerted effort to make a manned mission to anywhere. There is neither a moon, nor a mars nor an asteroid lander in the work. There is no plan for a new space station that require regular launches of 100ton+ payloads. There are no plans to build satellites that mass 100ton+ in LEO or 50ton+ in GTO/GSO.
In other words, we're talking about another white elephant like the Space Shuttle - made for the singular purpose to finance ATK and a slew of other corporations. And of course to "provide jobs" (at a cost of over $1mio per job per year).
Come down from what level? No price is mentioned. No date is mentioned when the product will be delivered.
To keep a short story short: Come back once the vapor has desublimated.
It has nothing to do with utilitarianism to demand that before you make a decision you must know what it is, that you are making decisions about. Period.
You cannot use 100 year old moral judgments on kidney or heart transplantations, simply because 100 years ago this was not possible and all such judgments were made by people whose decisions were not based on our reality today, but on the fact that giving a living person the heart or kidney of a dead person in order to save that persons life was literally unthinkable. There was nothing to be done with a dead body other than burn or bury it.
This has changed and so must our moral judgments. No matter if those judgments are based on utilitarian, eudaemonian or any other principles for moral judgments you may come up with. It is, by the way, the existence of this new cause-and-effect relationship that is the cause for this change of judgments. If your particular "philosophically-grounded moral judgment" does not account for this change of the facts, then your philosophy is stupid and you are de-facto committing to an ignorance-grounded moral judgment.
Aristoteles understood this, why don't you?
From someone that makes a plea to use facts as a basis for policy, stating that turbines will be developed that burn only the hydrogen from coal is a bit strange.
But entirely plausible. Coal is a biological product, made from hydrocarbons. (Keep in mind that chemical notation hides A LOT of hydrogen atoms in all those benzene rings in this picture.)
However, it will require a lot more coal to be dug out as not burning the carbon reduces the potential energy density of coal and of course increases the cost of the energy derived from it. So, in the end it is a bad idea not because it doesn't work, but because we're already ruining too much of our world with coal mining.
In order to make any moral decision at all, you need to know the consequences of those decisions. People who don't know science or are not properly informed about the results of scientific studies, cannot make reliable moral judgments and should refrain from doing so. (The latter being obviously problematic, because most people don't know about their ignorance or delude themselves about their knowledge - and there is a selection bias in politics that favors those who are overconfident about their knowledge and judgment.)
Imaging a simple moral dilemma. Choice A: Ten people will die. Choice B: 5 people will die.
The decision is simple - you take B.
The problem? Well, you're wrong. Choice B was based on a popular myth that three of the people involved would not be in any danger - but actually they would die. B would cause the death of 8 people. Choice A on the other hand has only been represented by the media as being extremely dangerous, but a sober scientific assessment would have led you to the conclusion, that only 2 people will die.
Yes, there can be science - even successful science - without moral judgment. Which is a problem and it is highly visible. But there can be no true moral judgment without science. Moral judgment is entirely derivative of our knowledge of the world, of the cause and effect relationships involved.
Unfortunately, pomp and circumstance can easily hide a lack of knowledge about the consequences of decisions made by those claiming (or claimed) to be moral authorities. That includes, unfortunately, the whole debate of climate science that usually sees a lot of discussions among people who hold a claim to moral authority but don't know the least bit about the science. Instead, they rely on biased reporting of the science to make and justify their "moral" decisions.
Could you provide a link to your website? Thanks.
Neither electric nor available. It's over $3000 and Tata has a lot of trouble actually building them. http://www.nanostats.info/tata-nano-what-went-wrong/
Fuel cells - an incredibly expensive way to waste two thirds of the energy you're putting into "charging" up your car. With batteries you lose less than one tenth. That's what always gets lost when people talk starry-eyed about fuel cells.
Try:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24240+in+1925+dollars
Inflation has been far from steady.
Wow. In one out of ten trips you take with you car, you are driving over 300 miles? Even if it were 100 miles, I doubt that it would not satisfy 98% of your needs.
Which is exactly what people argued 100 years ago. Try:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213
(My Life and Work by Henry Ford)
The availability of a low-cost EV has already taken more than its reasonable share of time. Actually, they should have been around for at least a decade.
The Chinese have them. In fact, Daimler sued a Chinese car maker in 2006 for making a copy-cat Smart car with an electric engine and battery. And the Chinese had already been using electric cars for real since the mid 90ies. - Not that anybody cared or noticed back in the stagnated (that is, not developing) countries.
The key is to understand, that electric cars have no market as luxury items unless and until they have been established as cars for everyday users. Before that, there just won't be the infrastructure it takes to make proper use of them. But in order to get to this point, they need a price point that makes it possible for people to use them as single-purpose vehicles, alongside the traditional ones. (E.g. getting one person and a suitcase to work and back)
$3000-4000 for a light-weight two-person car with limited range (80km/50miles) and speed (below 80km/h or 50mph) is entirely possible to achieve. Weight, range, acceleration and speed are the main determinants of the size of the battery (and its weight!), which determines the price of the battery and thus the price of an electric car. Such a car could actually have reasonable charging times (One tenth the total capacity means one tenth the time to charge) and such a car could do some 90% of the driving for a lot of people. But because of the limited performance nobody is going to bother buying such a car unless it's really cheap. (Meaning: unless it has a price that makes it reasonable to buy without being an eco-freak.)
But then again, you don't get to pay gas prices of $8/gal (as in Europe) until you realize that the USA will collapse if it continues to pretend that cheap oil is only a matter of military power.
None of the latter four are meaningful in this case. Unskilled wage? There isn't much of that left in automobile production. There are not even a lot of skilled workers in modern car factories. GDP per capita is not a good base for comparison either, because there are now a lot more things being done in the USA than in 1925, which are now also part of GDP.