Exactly what secrecy are you talking about in the case of TEPCO? So far they have released all information as soon as it could be verified.
Even if the Soviet Union had indeed been more open than TEPCO (which it wasn't), there are still those little matters like evacuating people 40 hours after the content of a reactor had been blown all over them vs. evacuating them 80 hours before any significant amount of radioactivity was released at all.
Then there is stuff like complaining about some 30 people being exposed to more than 100mSv in Fukushima, but ignoring 53 people dieing immediately from acute radiation poisoning in Chernobyl (after receiving on the order of 5000-10.000 mSv). Or exposing half a million people to an average of 170mSv during the clean-up and building of the sarcophagus (obviously, at least tens of thousands must have been exposed to much more than 200mSv to get that kind of average).
It would be nice if we could push energy technologies that would not pollute the entire Northern and Souther Hemisphere every time they are switched on.
The problem I have with Fukushima is that the only criticisms of the safety mechanisms of the plant referred to two things: namely the lack of tsunami protection and the how people dealt with the aftermath. Otherwise it was stressed that Japan is a modern country with state-of-the-art technology. But those were literally the least of the problems. The whole Japanese coast in the area had tsunami protection after the devastating tsunamis of 1933 and 1896... which was overwhelmed, wiping a dozen towns off the coast. Either you criticize all of Japan in that regard, or none of it. And the way people are dealing with the aftermath is of much less concern than they dealt with safety before the accident.
In fact, Fukushima Daiichi could be found on the third last position in a world wide safety ranking of nuclear power plants in 2010. (Mostly concerned with on-site radioactivity that was pretty high due to leaks.) It lacked emergency generators (13 generators for 6 reactors - I've seen 12 generators in place for one reactor. At least 4 per reactor is common). It lacked redundancy in those generators. They were all the same kind of sea-water cooled diesel generators. And because of the latter, they lacked protection against common cause failure, which demands that you distribute emergency equipment over as wide an area as possible... which is obviously very limited if you have fixed installations dependent on sea water.
It also lacked filtered containment vents. Those filters can filter out at least 99% of the Caesium and Iodine (I remember a figure of 99.99% but don't know if it was Cs-137 or I-131). It's somewhat expensive (although just a fraction of the cost of the whole plant), but was adopted in Europe in the 1980ies. Further, safety protocols didn't take account of the finding that the Mark I containment didn't properly seal in a test at a prototype plant at a pressure of about 70 bar. (In emergencies it is supposed to be tight up to 72 bar, but regular testing is only done up to 62 bar.) Which was what allowed the massive quantities of hydrogen to get into the buildings in the first place.
Finally, because hydrogen getting into the buildings couldn't be ruled out in 100% of the cases during simulations, at least European plants were equipped with passive autocatalytic recombiners in all closed rooms of the reactor building. Those are catalytic converters that burn hydrogen with oxygen in the air before it can reach concentrations in the buildings, where it can ignite and either burn or (as we've seen) explode. Those are pretty cheap (about $5 mio per reactor bulding) and were installed in the 1990ies.
None of what happened was a surprise to anyone who dug out the freely available descriptions and research on the safety of the Mark I containment after the earthquake. But of course, that is something that the media couldn't be bothered with. Because they are "reporters" and as such doing research or actually understanding what they are reporting is clearly beneath them. All that reporters are there for, is to "report" (that is: parrot) the statements of politicians and whatever "experts" they feel will give them the answers they want.
Overall, the containments used in Fukushima are a great demonstration of what engineers of the 1960ies could do. They did a remarkable job in preventing a major disaster like Chernobyl. But it also shows what happens when you ignore all further developments. There were flaws in the models of what happens during a meltdown that became obvious only years or decades after the development of those containments. In engineering on the one hand and in radiology on the other - namely, that the dangers of I-131 were under-appreciated until about that time. (Exposure limits were cut down to about one thousands of the previous limits some time in the late 1960ies.)
But given the way reporting was and is being done, nothing of that will ever be known to a wide audience - because it doesn't square with the scare
In alphabetical order: Afrika, America, Asia, Australia, Europe? (Antarctica deliberately omitted.) Which parts of those (wherever the distinction is meaningful): North, South, East, West, Central?
Given what we have today in terms of food and water that's no problem - unless people start to copy cities like Las Vegas and demand even more golf courses in deserts... hopefully both will start to rot in their own decadence in the next decades.
We aren't going to run out of space either. There is room for at least another billion people in North America alone. Look at a map, compare it with China (pop. 1.3bn) and "South Asia" (India + Pakistan + Bangladesh; pop. 1.5bn) and you'll get the idea that the USA is just barely inhabited.
Resources won't pose much of a problem. We can live a long time on recycling what we have already dug out of the earth and stuff like iron or aluminum is practically unlimited on this planet. The only problem is energy resources like oil, gas and coal that are overused by industrialized countries - the USA in particular - and rising prices on world markets will lead to quite a lot of pain in those countries that are most dependent upon them. And yes, again the USA prefers not to endure any pain at all, so long as it can painlessly deal out a whole lot of pain to avoid it (be it through military, political or economic interference).
Developing countries, on the other hand will not care all that much. They lack the necessary infrastructure and investments to even use a lot of oil, gas or coal - which are their primary concern. The price of those resources is a secondary consideration - but the demand will still be high, because a whole lot of people using small amounts will still use a lot all told.
So the stagnating (aka developed) countries will face the problem of using less resources with their established infrastructure and resources, while developing countries can build it from the start to accommodate scarcer resources in some areas and will become much more affluent than some people tend to believe.
"As the case presents itself now, the [peer review] editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors"
That would be actually be a good argument, if it wasn't for the case that the opposite (all reviewers sharing pro-AGW notions of the authors) is true on a very regular basis without this fact being considered grounds for criticism.
Actually, reforestation has a much more direct impact on temperatures than sequestering CO2 could ever have. It also prevents water from directly running off in rivers - with helps with mitigating all the floods that are occurring these days after people have sealed too many surfaces that would usually have held back the rain. (Which people ignore and instead blame all floods on climate change.)
But forests also increase evaporation, because water running off in rivers has a much lower surface area and doesn't evaporate for the most part - quite unlike water clinging to needles and leaves or being temporarily stored in the plants themselves. Increased evaporation also cools down the lower atmosphere, because it sequesters latent heat in vaporized water which will go on to form clouds higher up in the atmosphere - which increases temperatures there, by releasing its latent heat through condensation. But this is ok, because we are complaining about higher temperatures lower down in the atmosphere (that is, on the ground) and not higher up. More clouds also increase albedo, thereby reducing solar forcing.
Air is heated up by the ground surface. Light falls on the ground, heats the ground up, the ground emits far-IR radiation which gets absorbed by the air - which is otherwise mostly transparent to the light of the sun - and heats the air up. If you ignore the properties of the surface, you are ignoring a key part of the system. And we did change the properties of the surface a lot in the last 100-150 years by deforestation and expanding agriculture in large areas of the earths landmass. That is, turning areas that were forests throughout the year into savannas for one half of the year, and deserts for the other half of the year.
Hurricanes have been known to occur in the Caribbean Sea by Europeans since the year 1500 - and paleotempestology has shown those to have been hitting on ocean shores of the USA basically for ever. That includes both of the spots where New Orleans and New York have been founded. If you don't prepare for things that have been happening for centuries, it's your own damn fault.
Don't blame climate change for things that never needed any change at all to occur in the past.
The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.
And stopped doing so after finding out the hard way, that breathing in floating pieces of broken-off pencil cores is not the most pleasant experience. Gravity is a lovely feature we have here on earth, trust me on that.
As far as I know, the issue with the Proton was entirely software related and relatively simple to correct once it was found. Mostly because the software isn't destroyed during an accident.
The issue with the Soyuz is hardware related and doesn't have that benefit. There is something wrong with the gas generator of the turbo pumps, that pump oxygen and rocket fuel into the burning cambers. (Which is using hydrogen peroxide and potassium permanganate to drive them, just like the old German V2 rocket IIRC.) Without having any leftovers to inspect after the failure, it's going to be much harder to ascertain whether its origin has been found or not. But they should be able to find it.
First, cut down all those huge areas of forests all over the earth, in order to decrease vegetative respiration and general evaporation of water. This gets you a double benefit. It means that you decrease the formation of those pesky clouds with their high albedo, which should increase surface temperature through additional sunshine.
But actually, the temperature increases because less water is evaporated through sunlight, which takes up a lot of energy and severely decreases surface temperatures. (That's why rain forests are cooler than the deserts despite more receiving more sunlight.)
Unfortunately, there are not many forests left to do that - it seems like the next ice age will be unavoidable.
Those bacteria don't use photosynthesis. They don't use any external source of energy, except for what they are feeding on - the newspapers. In photosynthesis a small part of the energy of the sunlight is used to rearrange chemical bonds in a way that allows the plant to more easily release energy from them in a way that is useful for the processes in the plant. The bacteria wouldn't waste all that effort and energy, if it was already in a form useful for the bacteria.
Old paper, however, is already in a form that can be easily and efficiently used to supply energy to human beings. There is also enough capacity to use it that way - it's not like you can't burn it fast enough to keep up with the printing presses. There is no need to turn paper into butanol and waste energy for that process. It is useful as it is.
Using bacteria (or any other process) to rearrange the chemical bonds of a substance doesn't come free. It consumes energy.
From an environmental point of view, they should simply send the newspapers to coal power plants and burn them along with the coal. Those power plants have conversion rates of heat to electricity on the order of 40%, instead of about 25% that internal combustion engines of cars have. But of course, this is not about the environment, or even CO2.
Instead there seems to be some despair about the cheap oil reserves slipping out of US control, especially after the failure of the Iraq war to secure US supplies. Otherwise nobody would pursue such follies as butanol from paper scraps or ethanol from corn. All this is made worse by the inability of US politicians to comprehend that it is perfectly possible to have a standard of living superior to that of the US while using just about half the amount of energy per capita.
Sure, it would be the end of the American way of life as the world knew it - but that one is over anyway. These days resources have to be shared with the rest of the world. That is, the other 6 billion people outside of the OECD. And that rest of the world is growing with little signs of halting or even slowing down.
Why? Of course it's an exact science. It has very exact language and as such I'm sure that the history of hurricanes in New York will lead them to the conclusion, that whatever changes happened to the climate in the 20th century, they prevented large hurricanes in New York.
There were four major Hurricanes cat 2-3 in the 19th century vs. just one major Hurricane in the 20th century (1938). The weaker storms like Irene are barely worth mentioning from an historic perspective.
When a storm is rotating counter-clockwise, the strongest wind will be on the right side of the storm. Because the storm as a whole is moving forward and on the right side, the forward-motion of the storm as a whole coincides with the direction of the rotation of the storm.
Now, as the storm was on the east-coast of the USA and moving north, the highest wind speed would be on the east of the eye of the storm - over the sea.
However, CNN mentioned at some point when the storm was over New York, that it was downgraded. I'm not sure where exactly the eye was at that point. So, it may or may not have been a hurricane. In any case, however it was nowhere near a historic storm. I mentioned as much in one of my blog posts.
The third stage shut down cleanly. There would have been no problem separating the spaceship from the rocket, then separating the service module and habitation module from the capsule... and the rest is standard maneuvers.
The capsule is aerodynamically stable, so they'd only have to wait for it to come back down and open the parachute. It would have been cold in Siberia, true - but they wouldn't be dead. Unlike people in a fragile Space Shuttle with no means to escape or airport to land.
Heroic efforts for marginal improvements in graphics don't help polishing the turd that computer games have become. They barely changed, AI is still crap despite a gazillion fold increase in computing power budgets of games companies.
Your thinking is perfectly representative of the way how games ended up being they crap they are these days.
And people barely notice. This computer is as powerful than anything I had 10 years ago. It can do almost anything you could need - and what it can't do is mostly down to bloated software. Sometimes I have a hard time shaking off the feeling that we've almost stood still for the last decade - but then again, that's a good thing, because it allows the rest of the world to catch up to the high-income countries, by benefiting from ever lower prices.
The real question, as after any dream that has become true, is: what's next? And I have no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Environmentalists beg to differ.
Exactly what secrecy are you talking about in the case of TEPCO? So far they have released all information as soon as it could be verified.
Even if the Soviet Union had indeed been more open than TEPCO (which it wasn't), there are still those little matters like evacuating people 40 hours after the content of a reactor had been blown all over them vs. evacuating them 80 hours before any significant amount of radioactivity was released at all.
Then there is stuff like complaining about some 30 people being exposed to more than 100mSv in Fukushima, but ignoring 53 people dieing immediately from acute radiation poisoning in Chernobyl (after receiving on the order of 5000-10.000 mSv). Or exposing half a million people to an average of 170mSv during the clean-up and building of the sarcophagus (obviously, at least tens of thousands must have been exposed to much more than 200mSv to get that kind of average).
Or in short: shut up.
It would be nice if we could push energy technologies that would not pollute the entire Northern and Souther Hemisphere every time they are switched on.
The problem I have with Fukushima is that the only criticisms of the safety mechanisms of the plant referred to two things: namely the lack of tsunami protection and the how people dealt with the aftermath. Otherwise it was stressed that Japan is a modern country with state-of-the-art technology. But those were literally the least of the problems. The whole Japanese coast in the area had tsunami protection after the devastating tsunamis of 1933 and 1896 ... which was overwhelmed, wiping a dozen towns off the coast. Either you criticize all of Japan in that regard, or none of it. And the way people are dealing with the aftermath is of much less concern than they dealt with safety before the accident.
... which is obviously very limited if you have fixed installations dependent on sea water.
In fact, Fukushima Daiichi could be found on the third last position in a world wide safety ranking of nuclear power plants in 2010. (Mostly concerned with on-site radioactivity that was pretty high due to leaks.) It lacked emergency generators (13 generators for 6 reactors - I've seen 12 generators in place for one reactor. At least 4 per reactor is common). It lacked redundancy in those generators. They were all the same kind of sea-water cooled diesel generators. And because of the latter, they lacked protection against common cause failure, which demands that you distribute emergency equipment over as wide an area as possible
It also lacked filtered containment vents. Those filters can filter out at least 99% of the Caesium and Iodine (I remember a figure of 99.99% but don't know if it was Cs-137 or I-131). It's somewhat expensive (although just a fraction of the cost of the whole plant), but was adopted in Europe in the 1980ies. Further, safety protocols didn't take account of the finding that the Mark I containment didn't properly seal in a test at a prototype plant at a pressure of about 70 bar. (In emergencies it is supposed to be tight up to 72 bar, but regular testing is only done up to 62 bar.) Which was what allowed the massive quantities of hydrogen to get into the buildings in the first place.
Finally, because hydrogen getting into the buildings couldn't be ruled out in 100% of the cases during simulations, at least European plants were equipped with passive autocatalytic recombiners in all closed rooms of the reactor building. Those are catalytic converters that burn hydrogen with oxygen in the air before it can reach concentrations in the buildings, where it can ignite and either burn or (as we've seen) explode. Those are pretty cheap (about $5 mio per reactor bulding) and were installed in the 1990ies.
None of what happened was a surprise to anyone who dug out the freely available descriptions and research on the safety of the Mark I containment after the earthquake. But of course, that is something that the media couldn't be bothered with. Because they are "reporters" and as such doing research or actually understanding what they are reporting is clearly beneath them. All that reporters are there for, is to "report" (that is: parrot) the statements of politicians and whatever "experts" they feel will give them the answers they want.
Overall, the containments used in Fukushima are a great demonstration of what engineers of the 1960ies could do. They did a remarkable job in preventing a major disaster like Chernobyl. But it also shows what happens when you ignore all further developments. There were flaws in the models of what happens during a meltdown that became obvious only years or decades after the development of those containments. In engineering on the one hand and in radiology on the other - namely, that the dangers of I-131 were under-appreciated until about that time. (Exposure limits were cut down to about one thousands of the previous limits some time in the late 1960ies.)
But given the way reporting was and is being done, nothing of that will ever be known to a wide audience - because it doesn't square with the scare
In alphabetical order: Afrika, America, Asia, Australia, Europe? (Antarctica deliberately omitted.) Which parts of those (wherever the distinction is meaningful): North, South, East, West, Central?
Prices are high because production is limited.
Given what we have today in terms of food and water that's no problem - unless people start to copy cities like Las Vegas and demand even more golf courses in deserts ... hopefully both will start to rot in their own decadence in the next decades.
We aren't going to run out of space either. There is room for at least another billion people in North America alone. Look at a map, compare it with China (pop. 1.3bn) and "South Asia" (India + Pakistan + Bangladesh; pop. 1.5bn) and you'll get the idea that the USA is just barely inhabited.
Resources won't pose much of a problem. We can live a long time on recycling what we have already dug out of the earth and stuff like iron or aluminum is practically unlimited on this planet. The only problem is energy resources like oil, gas and coal that are overused by industrialized countries - the USA in particular - and rising prices on world markets will lead to quite a lot of pain in those countries that are most dependent upon them. And yes, again the USA prefers not to endure any pain at all, so long as it can painlessly deal out a whole lot of pain to avoid it (be it through military, political or economic interference).
Developing countries, on the other hand will not care all that much. They lack the necessary infrastructure and investments to even use a lot of oil, gas or coal - which are their primary concern. The price of those resources is a secondary consideration - but the demand will still be high, because a whole lot of people using small amounts will still use a lot all told.
So the stagnating (aka developed) countries will face the problem of using less resources with their established infrastructure and resources, while developing countries can build it from the start to accommodate scarcer resources in some areas and will become much more affluent than some people tend to believe.
"As the case presents itself now, the [peer review] editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors"
That would be actually be a good argument, if it wasn't for the case that the opposite (all reviewers sharing pro-AGW notions of the authors) is true on a very regular basis without this fact being considered grounds for criticism.
I guess that must be the reason.
Thanks. That's why I wrote IIRC - If I Recall Correctly ... and I didn't.
Actually, reforestation has a much more direct impact on temperatures than sequestering CO2 could ever have. It also prevents water from directly running off in rivers - with helps with mitigating all the floods that are occurring these days after people have sealed too many surfaces that would usually have held back the rain. (Which people ignore and instead blame all floods on climate change.)
But forests also increase evaporation, because water running off in rivers has a much lower surface area and doesn't evaporate for the most part - quite unlike water clinging to needles and leaves or being temporarily stored in the plants themselves. Increased evaporation also cools down the lower atmosphere, because it sequesters latent heat in vaporized water which will go on to form clouds higher up in the atmosphere - which increases temperatures there, by releasing its latent heat through condensation. But this is ok, because we are complaining about higher temperatures lower down in the atmosphere (that is, on the ground) and not higher up. More clouds also increase albedo, thereby reducing solar forcing.
Air is heated up by the ground surface. Light falls on the ground, heats the ground up, the ground emits far-IR radiation which gets absorbed by the air - which is otherwise mostly transparent to the light of the sun - and heats the air up. If you ignore the properties of the surface, you are ignoring a key part of the system. And we did change the properties of the surface a lot in the last 100-150 years by deforestation and expanding agriculture in large areas of the earths landmass. That is, turning areas that were forests throughout the year into savannas for one half of the year, and deserts for the other half of the year.
Hurricanes have been known to occur in the Caribbean Sea by Europeans since the year 1500 - and paleotempestology has shown those to have been hitting on ocean shores of the USA basically for ever. That includes both of the spots where New Orleans and New York have been founded. If you don't prepare for things that have been happening for centuries, it's your own damn fault.
Don't blame climate change for things that never needed any change at all to occur in the past.
The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.
And stopped doing so after finding out the hard way, that breathing in floating pieces of broken-off pencil cores is not the most pleasant experience. Gravity is a lovely feature we have here on earth, trust me on that.
As far as I know, the issue with the Proton was entirely software related and relatively simple to correct once it was found. Mostly because the software isn't destroyed during an accident.
The issue with the Soyuz is hardware related and doesn't have that benefit. There is something wrong with the gas generator of the turbo pumps, that pump oxygen and rocket fuel into the burning cambers. (Which is using hydrogen peroxide and potassium permanganate to drive them, just like the old German V2 rocket IIRC.) Without having any leftovers to inspect after the failure, it's going to be much harder to ascertain whether its origin has been found or not. But they should be able to find it.
Works the following way:
First, cut down all those huge areas of forests all over the earth, in order to decrease vegetative respiration and general evaporation of water. This gets you a double benefit. It means that you decrease the formation of those pesky clouds with their high albedo, which should increase surface temperature through additional sunshine.
But actually, the temperature increases because less water is evaporated through sunlight, which takes up a lot of energy and severely decreases surface temperatures. (That's why rain forests are cooler than the deserts despite more receiving more sunlight.)
Unfortunately, there are not many forests left to do that - it seems like the next ice age will be unavoidable.
If, for a change, you could continue your lifestyle without killing people in Asia, Afrika and central America that would be much appreciated.
Truly yours,
The Rest of the World.(TM)
Those bacteria don't use photosynthesis. They don't use any external source of energy, except for what they are feeding on - the newspapers. In photosynthesis a small part of the energy of the sunlight is used to rearrange chemical bonds in a way that allows the plant to more easily release energy from them in a way that is useful for the processes in the plant. The bacteria wouldn't waste all that effort and energy, if it was already in a form useful for the bacteria.
Old paper, however, is already in a form that can be easily and efficiently used to supply energy to human beings. There is also enough capacity to use it that way - it's not like you can't burn it fast enough to keep up with the printing presses. There is no need to turn paper into butanol and waste energy for that process. It is useful as it is.
Using bacteria (or any other process) to rearrange the chemical bonds of a substance doesn't come free. It consumes energy.
From an environmental point of view, they should simply send the newspapers to coal power plants and burn them along with the coal. Those power plants have conversion rates of heat to electricity on the order of 40%, instead of about 25% that internal combustion engines of cars have. But of course, this is not about the environment, or even CO2.
Instead there seems to be some despair about the cheap oil reserves slipping out of US control, especially after the failure of the Iraq war to secure US supplies. Otherwise nobody would pursue such follies as butanol from paper scraps or ethanol from corn. All this is made worse by the inability of US politicians to comprehend that it is perfectly possible to have a standard of living superior to that of the US while using just about half the amount of energy per capita.
Sure, it would be the end of the American way of life as the world knew it - but that one is over anyway. These days resources have to be shared with the rest of the world. That is, the other 6 billion people outside of the OECD. And that rest of the world is growing with little signs of halting or even slowing down.
Why? Of course it's an exact science. It has very exact language and as such I'm sure that the history of hurricanes in New York will lead them to the conclusion, that whatever changes happened to the climate in the 20th century, they prevented large hurricanes in New York.
There were four major Hurricanes cat 2-3 in the 19th century vs. just one major Hurricane in the 20th century (1938). The weaker storms like Irene are barely worth mentioning from an historic perspective.
When a storm is rotating counter-clockwise, the strongest wind will be on the right side of the storm. Because the storm as a whole is moving forward and on the right side, the forward-motion of the storm as a whole coincides with the direction of the rotation of the storm.
Now, as the storm was on the east-coast of the USA and moving north, the highest wind speed would be on the east of the eye of the storm - over the sea.
However, CNN mentioned at some point when the storm was over New York, that it was downgraded. I'm not sure where exactly the eye was at that point. So, it may or may not have been a hurricane. In any case, however it was nowhere near a historic storm. I mentioned as much in one of my blog posts.
The third stage shut down cleanly. There would have been no problem separating the spaceship from the rocket, then separating the service module and habitation module from the capsule ... and the rest is standard maneuvers.
The capsule is aerodynamically stable, so they'd only have to wait for it to come back down and open the parachute. It would have been cold in Siberia, true - but they wouldn't be dead. Unlike people in a fragile Space Shuttle with no means to escape or airport to land.
... in computing power and budgets of games companies.
Heroic efforts for marginal improvements in graphics don't help polishing the turd that computer games have become. They barely changed, AI is still crap despite a gazillion fold increase in computing power budgets of games companies.
Your thinking is perfectly representative of the way how games ended up being they crap they are these days.
But it has neither the software support nor the peripherals to be a computer, rather than just another media player.
And people barely notice. This computer is as powerful than anything I had 10 years ago. It can do almost anything you could need - and what it can't do is mostly down to bloated software. Sometimes I have a hard time shaking off the feeling that we've almost stood still for the last decade - but then again, that's a good thing, because it allows the rest of the world to catch up to the high-income countries, by benefiting from ever lower prices.
The real question, as after any dream that has become true, is: what's next? And I have no idea.