Yeah. The comment moderation message I got for this one was... shall we say... epic.
Btw. at some point it was rated Insightful +5, after that essentially all mods were were of the troll and flamebait variety. At the same time, there was the usual lack of any coherent argument. Well, I guess that's when you know you're dealing with a political movement that's about to fall apart.
> That said, the satellite data isn't actually bad, it just falls way short of historical norms of scientific prudence.
That is WHY it is actually bad. Scientific prudence is no joke, but results from hard-earned experience of heads hitting desks at significant velocities, when it turned out that "scientific discoveries" of confident scientists turned out to be figments of illusion and statistical artifacts.
>> If we assume that CO2 was the sole cause of warming in the last 130 years and nothing else was going on
> No one is claiming this. There's a reason why these models take very large compute clusters to run: they have a huge number of variables and input data from a very large number of experimental inputs.
You do not seem to realize that this assumption was entirely in favor of the hypothesis that CO2 causes global warming.
If it is true, as you say (and I also assume), that CO2 was not the sole cause of global warming, then the effect of CO2 must have been even weaker. On the order of 1K rise after a doubling of CO2 or less. But people who say that are usually called "denialists" or "lukewarmer".
If your claim was serious, you should seriously consider how a 42% rise in CO2 concentration could possibly result in less than 0.8K warming - if a 100% rise of CO2 is supposed to result in 3K warming or more.
It does remind me of the EARLY phase of the discussion of evolution.
Do you remember those days? When people pushed policians to immediately impose drastic measures on the population to prevent genetic decline? Do you remember that this was an undeniable fact shared by a broad scientific consensus?
You may now proceed to delude yourself into thinking that Germans would have spend over $500bn on "renewable" energy (that will be a large heap of trash after 20years, when state-mandated funding runs out), if it hadn't been for the frantic claims of climate disaster that saturated media for the last decades. And that noboby benefits at all from any of this. Least of all farmers who managed to convince the public that food should be burned as "bio"-ethanol and "bio"-diesel, while at the same time being cheered and applauded.
> No. Climate is the mean value of a long series of datapoints observed over a long period of time.
Oh. Would you care to point me to the hoards of level headed climate activists who say this about Hurricane Katrina or Sandy? I seem to have missed them. For what you say implies that they should be out there on the streets, shouting at the top of their lungs that hurricane activity is a mean value in a long series of datapoints observed over a long time and that "Any one datapoint can vary up to several standard deviations from the mean, without affecting whether climate change is occuring or not."
> Furthermore; we know that climate change naturally occurs --- that is, there are natural cycles such as Milankovitch cycles; precession of earth's orbit, variation of Earth's tilt naturally effect climate over long periods of time. There may be numerous things that contribute to natural climate changes.
Of course, there have never been variations over the course of 100 years. Such as the last 100 years. The climate has always been stable and people have always been able to easily adapt to anything nature threw at them, because it happened over a much longer time frame. Archeology begs to differ.
> The whole global warming argument; is there is some non-natural, or human created factors perturbing the natural climate changes that have and are occuring; because some correlation might have been observed with rising temperatures over time, and human development: measured from ice core samples.
Well no. The whole global warming argument, as put forward by the IPCC and the rest of the climate change community, is that human created factors far outstrip any natural causes. In fact the IPCC argues that there is a strong natural tendency of climate cooling at work.
If we assume that CO2 was the sole cause of warming in the last 130 years and nothing else was going on, this would imply that a doubling of CO2 would cause a rise of 1.6K. Temperatures rose by 0.8K while CO2 rose by 42% (Which is one half of 100% in a logarithmic relationship. If CO2 concentrations rise by another 42% you have more than doubled the concentration). The climate models of the IPCC claim that a doubling of CO2 will result in a rise between 2 and 4.5K, with the most likely value being 3K.
Taking this at face value, this means that the IPCC claims that there is a natural process at work that would have cooled the world by about 0.6... 1.2K in last 130 years, if it wasn't for CO2 emissions, which counteracted this trend. Then again, all climate models and predicitons the IPCC put forth failed to predict the stagnating temperatures of the last 15 years.
If climate models are incapable of predicting short term developments, then certainly the predictions in the IPCC reports should have as many scenarios predicting that global temperatures cool down over the next 10 years as there should have been scenarios showing a rising trend over the next 10 years. None of the former exist. If the claim that climate models can't predict short term changes is true, then climate scientists certainly don't act as if they believe this claim. Because in this case, they should have had many scenarios included in the first, second and third IPCC assessment report predicting a stagnation or decline in temperatures in the first decades after their respective release.
Whatever those "scientists" in the inter GOVERNMENTAL panel on climate change claim (for those are politicians or people who act as politicians, certainly not as scientists), has been in bad faith. They use their claims of uncertainty to hide their mistakes and to defend inflated claims of the capacity of CO2 to cause global warming.
> 1) these measurements start when humanity invented the satellites to measure it - can't change that,
Exactly. This means that the data is bad and you can't change that. Period.
The absence of a possibility to improve upon the quality of data is NOT a redeeming quality, if you want to find out the truth about something. It is only a redeeming quality if you want to do politics.
For all they care, the ice cap could return to the extent of 1980 wthin a couple of years and all they'd say would be:
See, an extreme weather event! This proves climate change is true!
So, to answer the question: Of course it doesn't matter. The whole language of the climate change has been geared to make it impossible for absolutely anything to happen that could make the true believers doubt their creed. Be it warm or cold or average. Be there storms or a lack of them. Be there rain or drought in contradiction to forecasts - they will merely say that the "climate has become unpredictable" - which is yet another proof that the climate is changing, because as we know from historical records, the climate has always been predictable in all the thousands of years of recorded history.
Absolutely nothing matters when the object of science is politics, except for money and rhethorics.
That's because things that aren't supposed to happen, happen everywhere all the time. That includes Fukushima Daiichi. No matter what you do or where you go, if you can always report things that aren't supposed to happen. But if you limit reporting to those things, that is a much worse disconnect from reality, than not expecting the unexpected.
You can minimize how often unexpected things happen, by having realistic expectations of the things that are supposed to happen. Currently, people are doing a lot of things that they should not need to do, given the limited time and workforce. When people have to do more work than you can reasonably expect them to do properly - or if you simply push them to their limits - you should not be surprised that mistakes happen more often and faults or leaks are discovered much later than you would prefer.
It is just as unrealistic to expect perfect performance by human beings in Fukushima Daiichi as it is everywhere else. But the reporting doesn't reflect that at all.
What TEPCO money are you talking about? They are broke. The goverment owns TEPCO because they are broke. The government has effectively taken the whole thing out of their hands and is making a mess of it. But it is not a total mess.
The main reason why you only keep hearing about new problems, is that nothing else is being reported in the media at large. When a problem is solved and there is a problem with the solution to the problem they had, you get two news stories:
1) PROBLEM AT FUKUSHIMA 2) ANOTHER PROBLEM AT FUKUSHIMA
You hear about the initial problem and the second problem. But you don't hear about the problem being solved or the fact that the second problem is much smaller is scope and scale than the first problem that has been solved. You don't hear about the work being done by the people there.
You don't hear about any progress that is actually being made at the site, because everybody is shooting any reporting on any kind of progress down as "industry shills" trying to "cover up" problems. Any news that constitutes anything positive at all is reported as highly suspect if it is reported at all. And usually it doesn't get reported not even with caveats attached. While any new problems, including rumors of new problems and speculation about problems, is being printed right away without checking of sources, affiliations or heaven-forbid factual content.
In the US? Well, no new permissions to build nuclear reactors have been issued between 1979 and 2012. (Some of those that had already received permissions by that point had been finished in the meantime.) That has been a bit of a hindrance for building better designs. In 2012 permission has been granted to build two AP1000, which - while not perfect - go a long way to being inherently safe.
So, yes they are being build, if you can somehow obtain permission to do so. Hence, as far as actually completed power plants go, the Russians and Chinese have some of the best and they get them first. Note: That doesn't mean they are all great or even that the average is great - it just means that a few of them are very good indeed. That's a result of not being technologically stuck with power plants in the late 1970ies and being able to build new power plants.
Russian power plants like the AES-92 (from 1992) are pretty good, in that it can be completely passively cooled in a power outage for 3 days. After that, all you need is to refill a tank of water, which requires a working water pump but not electricity). It does lack a core catcher to cool a molten core in a controlled and predictable way - but all other power plants don't have those either. But it does have a filtered containment vent and hydrogen catalyzers (both of which could have prevented Fukushima from becoming what it is today... and that was in 1992). You could argue with some justification that Iran has the best average technological level of any fleet of nuclear power plants... consisting of exactly one AES-92. The first power plant of an improved version (AES-2006), including core catcher, is scheduled to start operation at the end of the year.
They are developing several lead-cooled reactors as power plants (SVBR-100) - improved versions of the reactors that were used in the Alfa class submarines. You can do quite a lot more for the safety of a reactor, if you don't have to put it in a submarine and they did.
If you want to see any other new power plants - you must go to China. They have them all, including Russian ones. They will have the first AP1000 running and the first EPR. They got a license to use the technology of the AP1000 to make their own scaled-up versions. They dropped all plans of building more CPR-1000 (a derivative of late 1970ies french power plants) in favour of those "CAP-1400" power plants. They are building two Russian BN-800 sodium cooled fast reactors. (Also passively cooled and having a negative void coefficient unlike older breeder reactors.) They have build yet another prototype of a pebble-bed reactor (the third, fourth or fifth worldwide now - I lost count), but plan to build it as a power plant now.
The safety of pepple-bed reactors and lead-cooled reactors goes quite a bit beyond that of water cooled reactors - simply because they don't lose their coolant by boiling it off, when they get hot. Higher temperatures do two things. First, the higher the temperature the lower the reactivity of the reactor. The chain reaction breaks down when the temperature rises above a certain level, at the same time, higher temperatures make it much easier to cool something - even without specialized equipment and coolant pumps. When you do it properly, you can build such reactors to be inherently safe - they will default into a stable and controlable state no matter what happens, without operator intervention. Lead and sodium are also good solvents for Caesium and will react chemically with Iodine - even when fuel melts or gets damaged, only xenon and krypton can get out of the core, and those will not create any kind of fallout, even taking a containment failure as a given.
They will not withstand a meteorite impact or sustained, concentrated artillery fire. But they are safe enough to protect the public in almost any reasonable scenario that doesn't involve destroying the whole country along with the reactor. But arguably that's exactly what happened in Japan and nobody cares how much was destroyed or how many people were killed by the tsunami.
Exactly how is TEPCO supposed to make such a statement, as long as everybody else demands the exact opposite - namely that absolutely no contamination must take place? TEPCO would probably be the first people to make such a statement, if there was any way at all to do so without defying the demands of the government (which owns TEPCO) or that of the public (which elects the government). There isn't and so they won't.
Let me repeat, TEPCO is forced to say whatever the government is saying, in the same way that a puppet is forced to do whatever the puppeteer wants it to do, because the government owns TEPCO.
So what does the government do? Whatever it takes to stay in power. To stay in power, it must appeal to the public.That's one of the problems of democracy. This does not immediately lead to unreasonable or impossible demands. The government will only follow such policies, once a significant part of the public is making such demands (or at least appears to do so), because the government wants to stay in power.
That's the problem when there are political activists trolling all through the media making misleading and impossible demands, without anybody within the media rising to their actual task of checking their statements and providing explanatory background - instead of resorting to cheap substitute of reporting limited to "who said what" and running with the implication that it must be right because somebody held in high esteem by a lot of people said it.
Democracy breaks down when the public is ill-informed and Fukushima Daiichi is a prime example for that process.
If I got a dollar every time some anonymous coward blamed me for being "an industry shill" or, quoted me out of context as you did, I certainly would do a lot better.
Since you seem to know a lot of "industry shills", why don't you forward some of your contacts? Unlike what you seem to imply this "industry shill" here certainly doesn't get paid a nickel, much less a dime, for what he does.
The only reason there are so many water tanks to begin with is the perfunctionary insistence that "no radiation must be released into nature". The problem is: It's too late. Any of the releases that are reported as if it were a disaster completely pale in comparison to what happened in the days after March 11th 2011.
The water from the reactor is being filtered and cleaned of Caesium and Strontium. The process is good, but not perfect. But since absolute perfection is being demanded, none of the water is allowed to be released into the environment. Hence it must be stored in thousands of tanks, safely, which is as impossible a task as the ludicrous targets for radioactivity in the water.
Those tanks are necessarily makeshift in nature. The tanks cannot be individually monitored 24/7 by a limited number of people on the ground whose time in the contaminated area around the nuclear power plant is further limited by the maximum radiation dose of 20mSv per year. Yet, the government, the media and of course the usual activist groups demand the impossible. Each for their own petty reasons.
How about asking people in Fukushima Daiichi to do the possible instead of the impossible? Clean up the water as much as possible and release it into the sea. Yes, there will be some Tritium and trace amount of residual Cs and Sr - it will be a very small fraction to what was released into the sea in 2011. This would allow the people there to concentrate on actually making sure that the core equipment is running and the site as a whole is making progress to being in a better more workable state - instead of setting up new water tanks every day and worrying about leaks.
It is a marvel all of its own that workers there were at all able to keep up with setting up all those water tanks. But you should keep in mind that this isn't actually what they should be doing. They should have concentrated to bringing the plant back into a stable stead state. This will include allowing for some minor emissions of radioactive water. Provided that this is done in a controlled and closely monitored manner, this does not pose any problem that even approaches the scale of rainwater washing Caesium from the countryside into the sea (thus being part of natural decontamination processes). It will be diluted to levels that will not be harmful to the population.
Dilution is a temporary solution to pollution. And I'm not saying this should be anything more than a temporary emergency measure. I'm very surely not advocating this to be a general way to dispose of radioactive waste. But given the circumstances, it is the most reasonable solution. You should remember that the old way of diluting pollutants was not in itself false. It was just the case that it done by everyone in ever increasing scale, to the point where dilution was perfectly meaningless. But as a temporary, local, emergency measure - instead of a permanent, global and general way of doing things - it is perfectly viable.
Nobody demanded that no oil must leak from the Cosmo Oil Refinery either and for some reason nobody demands that water below that refinery conforms to drinking water standards either, nobody asks wether any of the oil that contaminated the ground there will seep into the sea (it did and it will continue to do so) - while they do demand that the water below Fukushima Daiichi must not exceed limits for driniking water safety.
Ok fine. A racecar won't go full throttle all the time on the racetrack. But still at least 50%. That roughly enough energy for a grant total of THREE laps... on a really short racetrack.
Sorry, but this is a stunt and in no way practical whatsoever. That's because it runs on batteries and batteries have crappy energy density. It's just the wrong kind of technology for this purpose. Stop kidding yourselves.
This may work with fuelcells - but those require much more electricity to make and store the hydrogen and generate electricity from hydrogen than simply charging a battery, which you can do with some 95% efficiency, rather than about 33% for hydrogen/fuelcells. So the hydrogen gambit may work, but it's an even greater and more idiotic waste of energy, which isn't exactly what the purpose of this whole thing was in the first place.
How deprived of all faculity of thinking must a movement become to come up with the idea of "solutionism" as a critique? There is a problem and people think about solutions. Any solution would, of course, be reason for existential difficulties of the problem. But the problem is the basis of power of said movements. When the problem goes away, so does the power that came with it, when the movement came into existence and so does the only solution the movement sanctioned: complete austerity and refraining from any use of technology and any interaction with nature as much as in any way possible.
"Solutionism" is the latest, most ludicrous and hopefully last, attempt at defending the only solution "environmentalism" ever came up - by denying the adequancy of any solution of their problem whatsoever. Thus perpetuating their claim to power indefinitely - you know, the UNSOLVED PROBLEMS of technology.
This article is about one scientist and it is definitely fair to demand this from him, as he obviously did the very opposite.
As for the rest of climatologists, who are a large bunch of individuals, of course it is fair to demand the same from them. There are those among them who see this as natural and do inform people about both the contents and the limits of their knowledge.
Unfortunately, those are few and far between in the public debate and especially in the media, who dislike true scientists exactly for their habit (or should I say second nature?) of making very careful statments with lots of background to make sure their statments can be understood at all and a litany of ifs and buts, necessary to make it clear on what assumptions and which conditions their statements rest.
Hence, the media are filled with so-called-scientists willing to dispense with all scientific standards to the point of leaving the realm of anything resembling nature and giving the press a nice-to-read story instead. Do I think it is fair to extrapolate from TFA to those "scientists"?
Also, I don't even have a problem with saying that CO2 is the primary driver of increased temperatures - but I do have a problem with
a) anything that goes beyond CO2 (that is 1.3K for a doubling) that is pure speculation, consists of poorly researched feedback mechanisms, with the poor state of research in cloud formation being among the worst offenders and most important negative feedbacks that are currently being ignored due to the poor state of knowledge and
b) I do have a problem with the constant one-sided discussion of the effects of increased temperatures. They are always held in the tone of horoscopes and greek oracles to avoid any clear statements that could be easily contradicted. "Extreme weather events" being the worst offender. That's says nothing and is obviously taylored to feed a constant media frenzy. This is combined with a complete lack of reporting on past "extreme weather events". Thus even decidetly average events like hurricanes Katrina or Sandy (in their historical and geographical context!) become "unprecedented monster storms", which is just laughable for anyone who bothered to look into the history of hurricanes on the US south and east coast.
I'll quote Feynman on this one, because I couldn't say it any better:
"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist. . . . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."
You won't need a helicopter. There is a water pipe at the bottom, where you only need to plug in a fire pump to pump water up to the roof of the building and you're done. No high-pressure shenganians required to cool this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. The comment moderation message I got for this one was ... shall we say ... epic.
Btw. at some point it was rated Insightful +5, after that essentially all mods were were of the troll and flamebait variety. At the same time, there was the usual lack of any coherent argument. Well, I guess that's when you know you're dealing with a political movement that's about to fall apart.
> That said, the satellite data isn't actually bad, it just falls way short of historical norms of scientific prudence.
That is WHY it is actually bad. Scientific prudence is no joke, but results from hard-earned experience of heads hitting desks at significant velocities, when it turned out that "scientific discoveries" of confident scientists turned out to be figments of illusion and statistical artifacts.
>> If we assume that CO2 was the sole cause of warming in the last 130 years and nothing else was going on
> No one is claiming this. There's a reason why these models take very large compute clusters to run: they have a huge number of variables and input data from a very large number of experimental inputs.
You do not seem to realize that this assumption was entirely in favor of the hypothesis that CO2 causes global warming.
If it is true, as you say (and I also assume), that CO2 was not the sole cause of global warming, then the effect of CO2 must have been even weaker. On the order of 1K rise after a doubling of CO2 or less. But people who say that are usually called "denialists" or "lukewarmer".
If your claim was serious, you should seriously consider how a 42% rise in CO2 concentration could possibly result in less than 0.8K warming - if a 100% rise of CO2 is supposed to result in 3K warming or more.
If that is all you can muster, the argument must have been a good one.
It does remind me of the EARLY phase of the discussion of evolution.
Do you remember those days? When people pushed policians to immediately impose drastic measures on the population to prevent genetic decline? Do you remember that this was an undeniable fact shared by a broad scientific consensus?
Do you remember Eugenics?
How about this guy:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Asbeck
And the austere little hut he calls his home:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Remagen,_Schloss_Marienfels.jpg
You may now proceed to delude yourself into thinking that Germans would have spend over $500bn on "renewable" energy (that will be a large heap of trash after 20years, when state-mandated funding runs out), if it hadn't been for the frantic claims of climate disaster that saturated media for the last decades. And that noboby benefits at all from any of this. Least of all farmers who managed to convince the public that food should be burned as "bio"-ethanol and "bio"-diesel, while at the same time being cheered and applauded.
> No. Climate is the mean value of a long series of datapoints observed over a long period of time.
Oh. Would you care to point me to the hoards of level headed climate activists who say this about Hurricane Katrina or Sandy? I seem to have missed them. For what you say implies that they should be out there on the streets, shouting at the top of their lungs that hurricane activity is a mean value in a long series of datapoints observed over a long time and that "Any one datapoint can vary up to several standard deviations from the mean, without affecting whether climate change is occuring or not."
> Furthermore; we know that climate change naturally occurs --- that is, there are natural cycles such as Milankovitch cycles; precession of earth's orbit, variation of Earth's tilt naturally effect climate over long periods of time. There may be numerous things that contribute to natural climate changes.
Of course, there have never been variations over the course of 100 years. Such as the last 100 years. The climate has always been stable and people have always been able to easily adapt to anything nature threw at them, because it happened over a much longer time frame. Archeology begs to differ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture
> The whole global warming argument; is there is some non-natural, or human created factors perturbing the natural climate changes that have and are occuring; because some correlation might have been observed with rising temperatures over time, and human development: measured from ice core samples.
Well no. The whole global warming argument, as put forward by the IPCC and the rest of the climate change community, is that human created factors far outstrip any natural causes. In fact the IPCC argues that there is a strong natural tendency of climate cooling at work.
If we assume that CO2 was the sole cause of warming in the last 130 years and nothing else was going on, this would imply that a doubling of CO2 would cause a rise of 1.6K. Temperatures rose by 0.8K while CO2 rose by 42% (Which is one half of 100% in a logarithmic relationship. If CO2 concentrations rise by another 42% you have more than doubled the concentration). The climate models of the IPCC claim that a doubling of CO2 will result in a rise between 2 and 4.5K, with the most likely value being 3K.
Taking this at face value, this means that the IPCC claims that there is a natural process at work that would have cooled the world by about 0.6 ... 1.2K in last 130 years, if it wasn't for CO2 emissions, which counteracted this trend. Then again, all climate models and predicitons the IPCC put forth failed to predict the stagnating temperatures of the last 15 years.
If climate models are incapable of predicting short term developments, then certainly the predictions in the IPCC reports should have as many scenarios predicting that global temperatures cool down over the next 10 years as there should have been scenarios showing a rising trend over the next 10 years. None of the former exist. If the claim that climate models can't predict short term changes is true, then climate scientists certainly don't act as if they believe this claim. Because in this case, they should have had many scenarios included in the first, second and third IPCC assessment report predicting a stagnation or decline in temperatures in the first decades after their respective release.
Whatever those "scientists" in the inter GOVERNMENTAL panel on climate change claim (for those are politicians or people who act as politicians, certainly not as scientists), has been in bad faith. They use their claims of uncertainty to hide their mistakes and to defend inflated claims of the capacity of CO2 to cause global warming.
> 1) these measurements start when humanity invented the satellites to measure it - can't change that,
Exactly. This means that the data is bad and you can't change that. Period.
The absence of a possibility to improve upon the quality of data is NOT a redeeming quality, if you want to find out the truth about something. It is only a redeeming quality if you want to do politics.
For all they care, the ice cap could return to the extent of 1980 wthin a couple of years and all they'd say would be:
See, an extreme weather event! This proves climate change is true!
So, to answer the question: Of course it doesn't matter. The whole language of the climate change has been geared to make it impossible for absolutely anything to happen that could make the true believers doubt their creed. Be it warm or cold or average. Be there storms or a lack of them. Be there rain or drought in contradiction to forecasts - they will merely say that the "climate has become unpredictable" - which is yet another proof that the climate is changing, because as we know from historical records, the climate has always been predictable in all the thousands of years of recorded history.
Absolutely nothing matters when the object of science is politics, except for money and rhethorics.
Now you slowly get to a point where we might start to agree.
(If you can read this, the internet didn't implode.)
That's because things that aren't supposed to happen, happen everywhere all the time. That includes Fukushima Daiichi. No matter what you do or where you go, if you can always report things that aren't supposed to happen. But if you limit reporting to those things, that is a much worse disconnect from reality, than not expecting the unexpected.
You can minimize how often unexpected things happen, by having realistic expectations of the things that are supposed to happen. Currently, people are doing a lot of things that they should not need to do, given the limited time and workforce. When people have to do more work than you can reasonably expect them to do properly - or if you simply push them to their limits - you should not be surprised that mistakes happen more often and faults or leaks are discovered much later than you would prefer.
It is just as unrealistic to expect perfect performance by human beings in Fukushima Daiichi as it is everywhere else. But the reporting doesn't reflect that at all.
What TEPCO money are you talking about? They are broke. The goverment owns TEPCO because they are broke. The government has effectively taken the whole thing out of their hands and is making a mess of it. But it is not a total mess.
The main reason why you only keep hearing about new problems, is that nothing else is being reported in the media at large. When a problem is solved and there is a problem with the solution to the problem they had, you get two news stories:
1) PROBLEM AT FUKUSHIMA
2) ANOTHER PROBLEM AT FUKUSHIMA
You hear about the initial problem and the second problem. But you don't hear about the problem being solved or the fact that the second problem is much smaller is scope and scale than the first problem that has been solved. You don't hear about the work being done by the people there.
You don't hear about any progress that is actually being made at the site, because everybody is shooting any reporting on any kind of progress down as "industry shills" trying to "cover up" problems. Any news that constitutes anything positive at all is reported as highly suspect if it is reported at all. And usually it doesn't get reported not even with caveats attached. While any new problems, including rumors of new problems and speculation about problems, is being printed right away without checking of sources, affiliations or heaven-forbid factual content.
In the US? Well, no new permissions to build nuclear reactors have been issued between 1979 and 2012. (Some of those that had already received permissions by that point had been finished in the meantime.) That has been a bit of a hindrance for building better designs. In 2012 permission has been granted to build two AP1000, which - while not perfect - go a long way to being inherently safe.
So, yes they are being build, if you can somehow obtain permission to do so. Hence, as far as actually completed power plants go, the Russians and Chinese have some of the best and they get them first. Note: That doesn't mean they are all great or even that the average is great - it just means that a few of them are very good indeed. That's a result of not being technologically stuck with power plants in the late 1970ies and being able to build new power plants.
Russian power plants like the AES-92 (from 1992) are pretty good, in that it can be completely passively cooled in a power outage for 3 days. After that, all you need is to refill a tank of water, which requires a working water pump but not electricity). It does lack a core catcher to cool a molten core in a controlled and predictable way - but all other power plants don't have those either. But it does have a filtered containment vent and hydrogen catalyzers (both of which could have prevented Fukushima from becoming what it is today ... and that was in 1992). You could argue with some justification that Iran has the best average technological level of any fleet of nuclear power plants ... consisting of exactly one AES-92. The first power plant of an improved version (AES-2006), including core catcher, is scheduled to start operation at the end of the year.
They are developing several lead-cooled reactors as power plants (SVBR-100) - improved versions of the reactors that were used in the Alfa class submarines. You can do quite a lot more for the safety of a reactor, if you don't have to put it in a submarine and they did.
If you want to see any other new power plants - you must go to China. They have them all, including Russian ones. They will have the first AP1000 running and the first EPR. They got a license to use the technology of the AP1000 to make their own scaled-up versions. They dropped all plans of building more CPR-1000 (a derivative of late 1970ies french power plants) in favour of those "CAP-1400" power plants. They are building two Russian BN-800 sodium cooled fast reactors. (Also passively cooled and having a negative void coefficient unlike older breeder reactors.) They have build yet another prototype of a pebble-bed reactor (the third, fourth or fifth worldwide now - I lost count), but plan to build it as a power plant now.
The safety of pepple-bed reactors and lead-cooled reactors goes quite a bit beyond that of water cooled reactors - simply because they don't lose their coolant by boiling it off, when they get hot. Higher temperatures do two things. First, the higher the temperature the lower the reactivity of the reactor. The chain reaction breaks down when the temperature rises above a certain level, at the same time, higher temperatures make it much easier to cool something - even without specialized equipment and coolant pumps. When you do it properly, you can build such reactors to be inherently safe - they will default into a stable and controlable state no matter what happens, without operator intervention. Lead and sodium are also good solvents for Caesium and will react chemically with Iodine - even when fuel melts or gets damaged, only xenon and krypton can get out of the core, and those will not create any kind of fallout, even taking a containment failure as a given.
They will not withstand a meteorite impact or sustained, concentrated artillery fire. But they are safe enough to protect the public in almost any reasonable scenario that doesn't involve destroying the whole country along with the reactor. But arguably that's exactly what happened in Japan and nobody cares how much was destroyed or how many people were killed by the tsunami.
Exactly how is TEPCO supposed to make such a statement, as long as everybody else demands the exact opposite - namely that absolutely no contamination must take place? TEPCO would probably be the first people to make such a statement, if there was any way at all to do so without defying the demands of the government (which owns TEPCO) or that of the public (which elects the government). There isn't and so they won't.
Let me repeat, TEPCO is forced to say whatever the government is saying, in the same way that a puppet is forced to do whatever the puppeteer wants it to do, because the government owns TEPCO.
So what does the government do? Whatever it takes to stay in power. To stay in power, it must appeal to the public.That's one of the problems of democracy. This does not immediately lead to unreasonable or impossible demands. The government will only follow such policies, once a significant part of the public is making such demands (or at least appears to do so), because the government wants to stay in power.
That's the problem when there are political activists trolling all through the media making misleading and impossible demands, without anybody within the media rising to their actual task of checking their statements and providing explanatory background - instead of resorting to cheap substitute of reporting limited to "who said what" and running with the implication that it must be right because somebody held in high esteem by a lot of people said it.
Democracy breaks down when the public is ill-informed and Fukushima Daiichi is a prime example for that process.
If I got a dollar every time some anonymous coward blamed me for being "an industry shill" or, quoted me out of context as you did, I certainly would do a lot better.
Since you seem to know a lot of "industry shills", why don't you forward some of your contacts? Unlike what you seem to imply this "industry shill" here certainly doesn't get paid a nickel, much less a dime, for what he does.
The only reason there are so many water tanks to begin with is the perfunctionary insistence that "no radiation must be released into nature". The problem is: It's too late. Any of the releases that are reported as if it were a disaster completely pale in comparison to what happened in the days after March 11th 2011.
The water from the reactor is being filtered and cleaned of Caesium and Strontium. The process is good, but not perfect. But since absolute perfection is being demanded, none of the water is allowed to be released into the environment. Hence it must be stored in thousands of tanks, safely, which is as impossible a task as the ludicrous targets for radioactivity in the water.
Those tanks are necessarily makeshift in nature. The tanks cannot be individually monitored 24/7 by a limited number of people on the ground whose time in the contaminated area around the nuclear power plant is further limited by the maximum radiation dose of 20mSv per year. Yet, the government, the media and of course the usual activist groups demand the impossible. Each for their own petty reasons.
How about asking people in Fukushima Daiichi to do the possible instead of the impossible? Clean up the water as much as possible and release it into the sea. Yes, there will be some Tritium and trace amount of residual Cs and Sr - it will be a very small fraction to what was released into the sea in 2011. This would allow the people there to concentrate on actually making sure that the core equipment is running and the site as a whole is making progress to being in a better more workable state - instead of setting up new water tanks every day and worrying about leaks.
It is a marvel all of its own that workers there were at all able to keep up with setting up all those water tanks. But you should keep in mind that this isn't actually what they should be doing. They should have concentrated to bringing the plant back into a stable stead state. This will include allowing for some minor emissions of radioactive water. Provided that this is done in a controlled and closely monitored manner, this does not pose any problem that even approaches the scale of rainwater washing Caesium from the countryside into the sea (thus being part of natural decontamination processes). It will be diluted to levels that will not be harmful to the population.
Dilution is a temporary solution to pollution. And I'm not saying this should be anything more than a temporary emergency measure. I'm very surely not advocating this to be a general way to dispose of radioactive waste. But given the circumstances, it is the most reasonable solution. You should remember that the old way of diluting pollutants was not in itself false. It was just the case that it done by everyone in ever increasing scale, to the point where dilution was perfectly meaningless. But as a temporary, local, emergency measure - instead of a permanent, global and general way of doing things - it is perfectly viable.
Nobody demanded that no oil must leak from the Cosmo Oil Refinery either and for some reason nobody demands that water below that refinery conforms to drinking water standards either, nobody asks wether any of the oil that contaminated the ground there will seep into the sea (it did and it will continue to do so) - while they do demand that the water below Fukushima Daiichi must not exceed limits for driniking water safety.
Ok fine. A racecar won't go full throttle all the time on the racetrack. But still at least 50%. That roughly enough energy for a grant total of THREE laps ... on a really short racetrack.
Sorry, but this is a stunt and in no way practical whatsoever. That's because it runs on batteries and batteries have crappy energy density. It's just the wrong kind of technology for this purpose. Stop kidding yourselves.
This may work with fuelcells - but those require much more electricity to make and store the hydrogen and generate electricity from hydrogen than simply charging a battery, which you can do with some 95% efficiency, rather than about 33% for hydrogen/fuelcells. So the hydrogen gambit may work, but it's an even greater and more idiotic waste of energy, which isn't exactly what the purpose of this whole thing was in the first place.
From the top of my hat: EBR-2, Phenix, BN-350, BN-600 each operated for 20+ years. There are probably several more.
Either you can do it, or you can't. My laptop runs on electricity, not theory.
Solutionism?
Seriously?
How deprived of all faculity of thinking must a movement become to come up with the idea of "solutionism" as a critique? There is a problem and people think about solutions. Any solution would, of course, be reason for existential difficulties of the problem. But the problem is the basis of power of said movements. When the problem goes away, so does the power that came with it, when the movement came into existence and so does the only solution the movement sanctioned: complete austerity and refraining from any use of technology and any interaction with nature as much as in any way possible.
"Solutionism" is the latest, most ludicrous and hopefully last, attempt at defending the only solution "environmentalism" ever came up - by denying the adequancy of any solution of their problem whatsoever. Thus perpetuating their claim to power indefinitely - you know, the UNSOLVED PROBLEMS of technology.
Go and rot in hell.
This article is about one scientist and it is definitely fair to demand this from him, as he obviously did the very opposite.
As for the rest of climatologists, who are a large bunch of individuals, of course it is fair to demand the same from them. There are those among them who see this as natural and do inform people about both the contents and the limits of their knowledge.
Unfortunately, those are few and far between in the public debate and especially in the media, who dislike true scientists exactly for their habit (or should I say second nature?) of making very careful statments with lots of background to make sure their statments can be understood at all and a litany of ifs and buts, necessary to make it clear on what assumptions and which conditions their statements rest.
Hence, the media are filled with so-called-scientists willing to dispense with all scientific standards to the point of leaving the realm of anything resembling nature and giving the press a nice-to-read story instead. Do I think it is fair to extrapolate from TFA to those "scientists"?
Hell yes.
Also, I don't even have a problem with saying that CO2 is the primary driver of increased temperatures - but I do have a problem with
a) anything that goes beyond CO2 (that is 1.3K for a doubling) that is pure speculation, consists of poorly researched feedback mechanisms, with the poor state of research in cloud formation being among the worst offenders and most important negative feedbacks that are currently being ignored due to the poor state of knowledge and
b) I do have a problem with the constant one-sided discussion of the effects of increased temperatures. They are always held in the tone of horoscopes and greek oracles to avoid any clear statements that could be easily contradicted. "Extreme weather events" being the worst offender. That's says nothing and is obviously taylored to feed a constant media frenzy. This is combined with a complete lack of reporting on past "extreme weather events". Thus even decidetly average events like hurricanes Katrina or Sandy (in their historical and geographical context!) become "unprecedented monster storms", which is just laughable for anyone who bothered to look into the history of hurricanes on the US south and east coast.
Unfortunately, nothing of what you said stops people from rating my comment -1 troll ... as expected.
I'll quote Feynman on this one, because I couldn't say it any better:
"I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist. . . . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."
You won't need a helicopter. There is a water pipe at the bottom, where you only need to plug in a fire pump to pump water up to the roof of the building and you're done. No high-pressure shenganians required to cool this one.