The link about the Enterprise's recent maintenance period gave a number of reasons why it cost 50% more than planned - completely rusted pipes, only ship of it's class, etc. But all that stuff's been taken care of now... I do wonder when the reactors were last replaced. How many trips around the world could it take on the remaining fuel?
All of *that* stuff has been taken care of, but by now there'll be more. Her reactors have never been replaced - and never will be. It's cheaper to buy three new carriers than to replace her reactors. As far as refuelling goes, it looks like she was last refueled in 1990 - so those cores are going to be getting pretty near to end of life.
For another, your friend talks of sailors being 'parked'. Nothing could be further from the truth, sailors on shore duty aren't 'parked' - they're assigned to a job (teaching school, working at a shoreside maintenance facility, whatever).
I understand that there's a Navy Reserve - I'd staff my disaster relief ship with semi-retired sailors first.
The Navy Reserve are civilians who can be called to active duty in an emergency - and even worse than sailors on shore duty, they're skills are rusty and the qualifications out of date. Damm few of them are retired or even semi-retired.
Even accepting the massive disruptions of pulling them from those jobs - they aren't qualified to go to sea. Their qualifications are expired and their skills rusty. Figure on weeks or months to spin up a crew to reasonable proficiency
While you're quite correct that I don't have much practical experience with the Navy, I don't think most of the jobs on the repurposed Enterprise would compare to the USS Enterprise that needs to be ready to launch fighters and bomb shit 24/7. Catapulting and catching airplanes is a big deal. Loading and launching Helicopters, not so much.
You have got to be kidding me.
First off, you have the massive job of loading and prepping those helicopters. (Which means all the load handlers and maintenance personnel and fuel handlers and all the rest of the hanger and deck crews. All you do is trade load handlers for ordinance techs.) Then you have the job of coordinating launches and landing. (Which means the Air Boss and his crew.) Then you have the job of controlling the airspace around the carrier. (Air Traffic Control.) Then you have the job of planning and coordinating all the ops, afloat and ashore. (The air operations department.) All of this damm near as complicated as doing so with jet fighters - and also happening 24/7 while in action assisting at a disaster.
It's only easier in the sense that an 900 piece jigsaw puzzle is 'easier' than a 1000 piece one.
And I haven't even mentioned the aviation maintenance shops yet.
Then you have all the engineers - doing the same job whether fighting a war or providing humanitarian assistance. Ditto for the navigators, quartermasters, etc... operating and steering the ship. Ditto for the machinists and electricians keeping the ships equipment running. Ditto for the damage control techs. Ditto for the cooks and others supporting all the above.
All of these require training and experience. Almost none of them can be done by a scratch crew hastily thrown together.
No offense, but it's not lack of practical experience that's the problem here - it's a complete lack of understanding of the issues at all.
I've heard from a couple of Enterprise veterans who like the idea. The pilot-veteran wasn't especially enthusiastic, but his concerns were mostly about 'cost' and manpower.
Don't ever ask sailors what they think of ludicrous ideas that will keep their ship alive - almost to a man they'll sign on. Sailors
Ye gods is that site full of errors and ignorance, the author of which knows roughly nothing about supercarriers...
Specific criticisms would be helpful.
There's really no way to provide specific criticisms - the idea is ludicrous from top to bottom.
For one thing, you fail to realize those ships are taken out of service because they're worn out and because it would be too expensive to overhaul them and make them safe and reliable to continue operations. Not to mention the ongoing (and considerable) expense of maintaining them 'ready to go' once you've invested in overhauling them.
For another, your friend talks of sailors being 'parked'. Nothing could be further from the truth, sailors on shore duty aren't 'parked' - they're assigned to a job (teaching school, working at a shoreside maintenance facility, whatever). Even accepting the massive disruptions of pulling them from those jobs - they aren't qualified to go to sea. Their qualifications are expired and their skills rusty. Figure on weeks or months to spin up a crew to reasonable proficiency.
Etc... etc...
Your email address - 'fairwater' - leads me to believe that you know something about submarines. Veteran? Active duty?
Good eye... Veteran. And student of matters naval for the better part of three decades.
However east and west Japan were still relatively independent even in the 1890s. It wasn't really until after the Russo-Japanese war that the country really started to become just that, a unified country.
Huh? Japan has been a more-or-less unified county since the Battle of Sekigahara paved the way for the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Japan was very much like Germany, essentially a very loosely affiliated set of states bound by geographical, linguistic, and cultural ties but often separated by bitter political and military rivalries.
It was - until the Tokogawa Shoguns. After that, while there were regional rivalries and factions (which were not really worse than the same found in the US today), but political and military power was firmly in the hands of the Shogunate and after that the Imperial Goverment.
How is a company with a $1.5 billion all-time turnover worth $25 billion?
Because it's standard business practice to value a company at some multiple of it's annual gross income. The multiple varies by industry, with the economy, with the prospects of the company, etc... etc...
A multiple of 16 for a young company (basically 2 years and change) with a massive cash flow, low overhead, and lots of headroom to grow doesn't seem excessive to me.
We need a quick and low cost way to record votes done by the students in large committees. There will be two or three committees with about 200 students in each.
Paper ballots have worked just fine years - why are they not suitable here?
They said they are rotating out workers once they reach "maximum lifetime exposure" of 100-250 mili-servients. Most workers are only staying for 24 hours before they are "retired" out and a fresh person brought in to replace them.
My impression was finding the nearby Wal-Mart having power and providing a charging station for people's cell phones and giving away bannanas (while throwing out massive amounts of perishables) and doing their best to stock shelves.
A few years back my local Safeway was out of power for a day and they were tossing out the meat. I asked the butcher why I couldn't have any for free (since they were tossing it out) and he told me that once it's gotten warmer than a certain temperature health regulations forbade them providing it for human consumption.
Now - that experience pales in comparison to what has to be going on in some parts of Japan. But I think there's been trials-by-fire in various parts of the US that demonstrate that everything does not "run amok"; at least, not in every region.
Same here. The posters claiming that it does happen are mostly just exaggerating because they don't know any better. They love to blame the media, but really they just do it themselves.
If nothing else, business cards can be stuck to the refrigator with a magnet, serve to write a quick note on, etc... etc... I suspect the ordinary business card is far from dead.
Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense?
It would - if it weren't for the fact that moving them is expensive and difficult and introduces hazards of it's own, and the storage system would be considerably expensive as well. Even so, you'd *still* need storage at the plant because the rods are too dangerous to move at all for a year or so after they are removed from the reactor and to store the rods removed during maintenance.
Just like any engineering task, there's tradeoffs.
Empirically we now know that the real risk is far, far greater.
Wrong again. You believe you know numbers, but in fact, you're nearly innumerate. Just because the chance of rolling snake eyes is low doesn't mean it can't come up on the first throw.
here are a great many things that could cause the plant to lose power : an explosion in the room containing the main switchboards is all it would take.
In a universe where engineers were a stupid as you and they put all the switchboards in a single room, true.
And we also now know that once a disaster starts it creates lots of hydrogen gas, causing more explosions that destroy more equipment.
Wrong again. Hydrogen gas is produced when the core is exposed or loses cooling - but even so it doesn't always explode. (Read up on Three Mile Island, where hydrogen was generated - but didn't explode.)
I gotta ask however, does it hurt to be as stupid and ignorant as you are?
We can call it a turmoil with everyone wondering how to get home faced by severe traffic congestion and paralyzed railroad system, but my personal view is that this earthquake is not that devastating, and Kanto area will be back to normal by Monday if there aren't any more earthquakes.
That was pretty close to my response from my armchair before we got news of the extent of the nuclear plant failures. I felt pretty low about it at the time, and although I came to terms with it and got to just feeling dumb already this made me feel even better.
Well, you may feel eager to feel better from hearing 'good' news - but really, you're just fooling yourself. The OP may 'feel' the earthquake was not devastating and he may 'think' the Kanto area will be back to normal, but his views are from a worms eye point of view outside of the area where the quake hit. The relatives of the thousands of dead and the tens of thousands without homes or jobs would probably disagree with his estimation that the quake was 'not devastating'. The Kanto area may be back to normal by Monday, but the Kanto area wasn't hit by the full force of quake - the Tohoku area was. *They* aren't going to be back to normal by Monday. They aren't going to be back to normal next year.
This whole report is infuriatingly meaningless. It's like hearing from residents of St. Louis a week after Katrina - "yeah, we got a couple of inches of rain, but we're cool now". It's insulting as hell to the dead and the homeless and those whose livelihoods were destroyed.
That said, I can't understand why the spend fuel pool is not inside any containment structure and not at ground level. This is not a "First generation product" issue. This is a cost savings issue.
It is a cost saving issue - it's very freaking expensive to build a separate containment system for the pool and contained and secure method of moving the fuel between the two. Not to mention that increasing the handling of the fuel and moving it longer distances increases the chance of an accident during that handling. (The Brits had a fuel bundle catch fire because the truck moving it from the reactor to the pool broke down.)
I know we'd all like everything to be perfectly safe and 110% secure - but in the real world of engineering, that's just not possible. There isn't infinite cash, nor is there always a 'perfectly safe and secure' sweet spot on the trade-off matrix.
What a 'once in a thousand year event' means is that it happens once every thousand years at a given location, not once in a thousand years, period. Just because I got a hundred-year rainstorm here (near Seattle) two years ago, doesn't mean Portland can't get their own next winter.
And you could at least try and comprehend the list, rather than just cutting-and-pasting under the mistaken impression that 'proves' something. For example the Lituya Bay mega-Tsunami was caused because an entire freaking mountainside collapsed into a fairly small bay - akin to dropping a bowling ball onto a soda can.
A few days ago the radiation hazard from this plant was being compared to that from the K-40 in a bunch of bananas (and who would be afraid of bananas?), and the next thing people hear is that it's too dangerous to fly helicopters overhead.
You do know several days passed between the 'banana comparison' and the 'overflight restrictions'? You do know that in that period the conditions changed? (Explosions, fire, changing water levels, etc...)
This accident isn't like Chernobyl, where the accident was essentially over in a few hundred milliseconds and everything else was recovery and stability. Nor is it like Three Mile Island where it was essentially over in three days. And neither took place in the full glare of the 24 hour news cycle, let alone the propensity of the 'net to spread panic and bad information.
The problem the nuclear industry and its PR vendors will face after this won't be about the details of nuclear reactor engineering or radiation health; it will be about credibility. Better to look back on this afterwards as "less serious than we thought" than to show the public that the industry can't be trusted to anticipate, prevent, contain, or even be truthful about its accidents.
You make the mistaken assumption that this is a static situation and the players have perfect information - only they aren't sharing it with us. Neither is true.
But seriously, does this have an effect on GPS? [...] Does 1.8 microsecond difference in our day cause error to accumulate in GPS at the rate of 0.5km/day if not fixed?
A very small and temporary one. When effects like this are discovered, the ground stations uplink corrections to the birds which then downlink them to your GPSr.
Horsecrap. Neither the Congress or the people has or had any idea of the exact location of the ship or that it was possibly in the path of the plume. Thus they could not have complained or made it an issue.
How many times do we have to go over this? With theft, you're removing something from the owner so he/she no longer has that item - that's never an issue with copyright infringement.
Yes, how many times do we have to go over this? 'Theft' is a term long used for exactly this situation and it's meaning is well understood by all.
They are two entirely different violations of the law, just as arson and cannibalism are two entirely different violations of the law. You can try and tie yourself up in a pretzel trying to say that oranges are just like apples, but it just doesn't work.
The only people trying to tie themselves up into pretzels are those trying to explain away a term used long before they were born and well understood by all as to it's meaning.
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All of *that* stuff has been taken care of, but by now there'll be more. Her reactors have never been replaced - and never will be. It's cheaper to buy three new carriers than to replace her reactors. As far as refuelling goes, it looks like she was last refueled in 1990 - so those cores are going to be getting pretty near to end of life.
The Navy Reserve are civilians who can be called to active duty in an emergency - and even worse than sailors on shore duty, they're skills are rusty and the qualifications out of date. Damm few of them are retired or even semi-retired.
You have got to be kidding me.
First off, you have the massive job of loading and prepping those helicopters. (Which means all the load handlers and maintenance personnel and fuel handlers and all the rest of the hanger and deck crews. All you do is trade load handlers for ordinance techs.) Then you have the job of coordinating launches and landing. (Which means the Air Boss and his crew.) Then you have the job of controlling the airspace around the carrier. (Air Traffic Control.) Then you have the job of planning and coordinating all the ops, afloat and ashore. (The air operations department.) All of this damm near as complicated as doing so with jet fighters - and also happening 24/7 while in action assisting at a disaster.
It's only easier in the sense that an 900 piece jigsaw puzzle is 'easier' than a 1000 piece one.
And I haven't even mentioned the aviation maintenance shops yet.
Then you have all the engineers - doing the same job whether fighting a war or providing humanitarian assistance. Ditto for the navigators, quartermasters, etc... operating and steering the ship. Ditto for the machinists and electricians keeping the ships equipment running. Ditto for the damage control techs. Ditto for the cooks and others supporting all the above.
All of these require training and experience. Almost none of them can be done by a scratch crew hastily thrown together.
No offense, but it's not lack of practical experience that's the problem here - it's a complete lack of understanding of the issues at all.
Don't ever ask sailors what they think of ludicrous ideas that will keep their ship alive - almost to a man they'll sign on. Sailors
Had I said it was, you'd have a point. As it is, you're just an ignorant shithead.
There's really no way to provide specific criticisms - the idea is ludicrous from top to bottom.
For one thing, you fail to realize those ships are taken out of service because they're worn out and because it would be too expensive to overhaul them and make them safe and reliable to continue operations. Not to mention the ongoing (and considerable) expense of maintaining them 'ready to go' once you've invested in overhauling them.
For another, your friend talks of sailors being 'parked'. Nothing could be further from the truth, sailors on shore duty aren't 'parked' - they're assigned to a job (teaching school, working at a shoreside maintenance facility, whatever). Even accepting the massive disruptions of pulling them from those jobs - they aren't qualified to go to sea. Their qualifications are expired and their skills rusty. Figure on weeks or months to spin up a crew to reasonable proficiency.
Etc... etc...
Good eye... Veteran. And student of matters naval for the better part of three decades.
Ye gods is that site full of errors and ignorance, the author of which knows roughly nothing about supercarriers...
I'm off to post it on sci.military.naval - where the experts will have a field day. After they stop laughing.
Huh? Japan has been a more-or-less unified county since the Battle of Sekigahara paved the way for the Tokugawa Shogunate.
It was - until the Tokogawa Shoguns. After that, while there were regional rivalries and factions (which were not really worse than the same found in the US today), but political and military power was firmly in the hands of the Shogunate and after that the Imperial Goverment.
I suspect we're seeing typical journalistic mangling, and that the device actually detects the sonic booms that accompany the rounds.
Only in fiction where a silencer actually silences the weapon. Not so much in the real world where a silencer only reduces it from a BANG to a BANg.
Because it's standard business practice to value a company at some multiple of it's annual gross income. The multiple varies by industry, with the economy, with the prospects of the company, etc... etc...
A multiple of 16 for a young company (basically 2 years and change) with a massive cash flow, low overhead, and lots of headroom to grow doesn't seem excessive to me.
Paper ballots have worked just fine years - why are they not suitable here?
That's pretty much SOP in the nuclear industry.
A few years back my local Safeway was out of power for a day and they were tossing out the meat. I asked the butcher why I couldn't have any for free (since they were tossing it out) and he told me that once it's gotten warmer than a certain temperature health regulations forbade them providing it for human consumption.
Same here. The posters claiming that it does happen are mostly just exaggerating because they don't know any better. They love to blame the media, but really they just do it themselves.
If nothing else, business cards can be stuck to the refrigator with a magnet, serve to write a quick note on, etc... etc... I suspect the ordinary business card is far from dead.
I had no problem looking at it, so why would I want to alter it?
It would - if it weren't for the fact that moving them is expensive and difficult and introduces hazards of it's own, and the storage system would be considerably expensive as well. Even so, you'd *still* need storage at the plant because the rods are too dangerous to move at all for a year or so after they are removed from the reactor and to store the rods removed during maintenance.
Just like any engineering task, there's tradeoffs.
Something you have failed to show.
Wrong again. You believe you know numbers, but in fact, you're nearly innumerate. Just because the chance of rolling snake eyes is low doesn't mean it can't come up on the first throw.
In a universe where engineers were a stupid as you and they put all the switchboards in a single room, true.
Wrong again. Hydrogen gas is produced when the core is exposed or loses cooling - but even so it doesn't always explode. (Read up on Three Mile Island, where hydrogen was generated - but didn't explode.)
I gotta ask however, does it hurt to be as stupid and ignorant as you are?
Well, you may feel eager to feel better from hearing 'good' news - but really, you're just fooling yourself. The OP may 'feel' the earthquake was not devastating and he may 'think' the Kanto area will be back to normal, but his views are from a worms eye point of view outside of the area where the quake hit. The relatives of the thousands of dead and the tens of thousands without homes or jobs would probably disagree with his estimation that the quake was 'not devastating'. The Kanto area may be back to normal by Monday, but the Kanto area wasn't hit by the full force of quake - the Tohoku area was. *They* aren't going to be back to normal by Monday. They aren't going to be back to normal next year.
This whole report is infuriatingly meaningless. It's like hearing from residents of St. Louis a week after Katrina - "yeah, we got a couple of inches of rain, but we're cool now". It's insulting as hell to the dead and the homeless and those whose livelihoods were destroyed.
Since roughly .023 microseconds after the genre was created. Seriously, it's always been this way - a very few gems floating in a sea of utter drek.
It is a cost saving issue - it's very freaking expensive to build a separate containment system for the pool and contained and secure method of moving the fuel between the two. Not to mention that increasing the handling of the fuel and moving it longer distances increases the chance of an accident during that handling. (The Brits had a fuel bundle catch fire because the truck moving it from the reactor to the pool broke down.)
I know we'd all like everything to be perfectly safe and 110% secure - but in the real world of engineering, that's just not possible. There isn't infinite cash, nor is there always a 'perfectly safe and secure' sweet spot on the trade-off matrix.
What a 'once in a thousand year event' means is that it happens once every thousand years at a given location, not once in a thousand years, period. Just because I got a hundred-year rainstorm here (near Seattle) two years ago, doesn't mean Portland can't get their own next winter.
And you could at least try and comprehend the list, rather than just cutting-and-pasting under the mistaken impression that 'proves' something. For example the Lituya Bay mega-Tsunami was caused because an entire freaking mountainside collapsed into a fairly small bay - akin to dropping a bowling ball onto a soda can.
You do know several days passed between the 'banana comparison' and the 'overflight restrictions'? You do know that in that period the conditions changed? (Explosions, fire, changing water levels, etc...)
This accident isn't like Chernobyl, where the accident was essentially over in a few hundred milliseconds and everything else was recovery and stability. Nor is it like Three Mile Island where it was essentially over in three days. And neither took place in the full glare of the 24 hour news cycle, let alone the propensity of the 'net to spread panic and bad information.
You make the mistaken assumption that this is a static situation and the players have perfect information - only they aren't sharing it with us. Neither is true.
A very small and temporary one. When effects like this are discovered, the ground stations uplink corrections to the birds which then downlink them to your GPSr.
The entire island of Honshu? [[Citation needed]]
Seriously, if the entire island was moved 8ft, then I suspect the damage would be far greater and more widespread than it is.
Horsecrap. Neither the Congress or the people has or had any idea of the exact location of the ship or that it was possibly in the path of the plume. Thus they could not have complained or made it an issue.
Doesn't matter. They aren't forcing the OP to pirate, he's choosing to pirate.
Yes, how many times do we have to go over this? 'Theft' is a term long used for exactly this situation and it's meaning is well understood by all.
The only people trying to tie themselves up into pretzels are those trying to explain away a term used long before they were born and well understood by all as to it's meaning.