A hole in the bottom of the pool, obviously. Only explanation that makes any sense. Those explosions must have cracked the bottom of the pools, or broken a pipe or a valve that is below the pool.
Let's face it - no matter how much armor you wrap around it, at the core of a nuclear plant is a fissioning mass producing gigawatts of heat and a stupendous amount of all 4 types of radiation. A SMALL piece of this core emits so much radiation that it will kill a human being with a few minutes of direct exposure. If any of these thousands of pounds of fissioning fuel do somehow escape, no matter how many layers of defense you have installed to prevent this, it can and will poison land for many miles in all directions. The radioactive iodine can give kids cancer dozens and hundreds of miles away. We know all of this, and have known this for a long time.
In order to prevent the core from escaping, it MUST be connected to a heat sink. The heat sink must be huge (a whole cooling tower), the pipes to it must be intact, the right valves have to be open or shut, and some kind of powered pump has to work.
Once you get a serious breach where the fuel escapes it's zirconium cladding, attempts to cool a mass of melted reactor core will just create clouds of highly radioactive steam that will carry the core fragments away and poison anyone fighting the fire.
On top of that, you also have less hot - but still very dangerous - spent fuel that comprise many reactor core's full of the stuff. Usually this stuff is sitting around, and it is so hot that it does still need active cooling.
These are real dangers. Pro-nuclear folks would have you believe that nothing ever can happen because there is so much safety equipment to prevent a final breach. However, all of the equipment is designed to work in theory - no one has ever melted down a reactor to see how well the containment really holds up. In Japan, just the weak little explosions from the hydrogen detonating may have fractured the containment to at least one of the reactors.
And let's not forget the specter of terrorism. How hard would it be to take over a nuclear plant with a team of armed commandos and to set charges on all that piping and wiring at the base of the reactor? Maybe blow a hole or two in the cooling ponds after moving some of the fuel assemblies closer together with the crane conveniently there? It would be a suicide mission for the terrorists, but they could cause a many billion dollar mess. And a live nuclear reactor is the best possible dirty bomb there could ever be in terms of the damage a full breach would cause.
No, many of the robots died from electronics failures, and the soviets were not willing to wait weeks for replacements to be built or jury-rigged. In Japan it sounds like they would rather contaminate a large area of land than to sacrifice workers, hence the reason the situation is not yet under control. I would assume that if a few people sacrificed their lives, they could go into the buildings, find the actual radiation leaks, and drag water hoses to the storage pools that need them.
I'm not suggesting this, and I would not volunteer - just that it is a possible solution, and one that the soviets would probably see as a fine way to solve the problem. They would get a few people ignorant of the true danger, reassure them that it was less dangerous than it really is, and get them to do it. The Soviets were nice enough by the time of Chernobyl to at least try to minimize the exposure of their 'liquidators' to radiation, but many of them still became seriously ill.
Indeed it must. You cannot calculate the probability of a cascading failure if it involves an unknown mechanism. As far as I know, merely losing power is not supposed to cause this kind of disaster - hence it's reasonable to assume that this event is completely un-accounted for in the statistics.
However, now that we know about it, you can go back and look at all of the other reactors in the world today, and I suspect many of them would have the same catastrophic failures if they lost power for a sustained period.
How could a reactor lose power? A couple of hand grenades in the right spot would do the trick. It appears that it would be pretty damn easy for terrorists to cause a nuclear catastrophe if they got in. I know there's been efforts to harden up the facilities, but are commercial power companies going to pay for a full team of heavily armed commandos at every nuclear plant in the U.S.? Or just a couple guards at the gate? What do you think.
No, but the pro nuclear people have said for decades that the chance of a meltdown is so low that it won't happen for millenia in a properly run plant. They trot out "statistics" based upon calculations performed by the engineers who design nuclear plants. The problem with said calculations is that they are usually wrong.
For example, if you applied the math to the Fukishima plant, you would say "what is the chance that an earthquake breaks all the piping for coolant?" You'd get some low number, as that plant has a lot of backup piping and it's all very well made.
You'd then say "what is the chance that all 3 backup generators, and the battery bank, and the power from other stations failed at the same time, and we can't get more power to the site within a few hours?" Again, these risks are small : each generator is made very well, and it's a series probability. Say one generator has a 1% chance of failure : then the chance of all 3 failing in a row is 0.01 * 0.01 * 0.01. A tiny number. And there's lots of backup generators elsewhere.
But these numbers are wrong. Empirically we now know that the real risk is far, far greater. ONLY a sustained loss of power has been enough to cause a disaster that could potentially rival Chernobyl in terms of radionucleotides released to the surrounding areas. There 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. And we also now know that once a disaster starts it creates lots of hydrogen gas, causing more explosions that destroy more equipment. A chain reaction almost like the nuclear reactions we are worried about. And finally once this accident gets bad enough, the workers can't even get near the equipment to fix it, putting the whole situation beyond recovery.
A lot of these things were unknowns. No one has actually had this kind of accident before quite this way. The risks published by the utility companies can't consider unknown failure modes, especially cascading failures like this one.
Solar and Wind could work, correct? If we covered a 100x100 square mile area of Arizona with photovoltaic panels, and lined the coasts with wind generators. We would have vast fields of underground caverns filled with compressed air.
A nuclear plant has to be guarded, it has to be repaired, it has to be maintained, it has to be worried about, and every now and then it has to be cleaned up after some kind of incident. Major incidents like the one in Japan are rare, but minor ones are common. All of the employees have to have educated backgrounds and clean backgrounds with respect to law enforcement. Every component used in a nuclear plant has to be inspected and approved for quality, and every waste component disposed of in special and expensive disposal areas.
While solar photovoltaic cells are a little bit expensive today, every cell on every panel is identical - a perfect case for automation. It isn't unreasonable to think that by the time we are covering 100x100 mile areas we would have the economic case to make completely automated factories for making the panels. Once the panels are in place, they keep making power for at least 25 years. Very close to zero maintenance needed. No chance of catastrophe for the finished panels.
I like photovoltaic for this reason : big mirror arrays are more efficient, but the mirrors have to move, and they have to be washed, and the plant can fail completely. Solar arrays fail more gracefully. I think in the long term that photovoltaic will dominate the economic side of the equation for this reason.
I think as an engineer, the future is as clear as it could possibly be now. Regardless of actual risk, nuclear power for civilian electricity production is over. It does not matter whether or not it could be made safe - it is not worth the money spent given that catastrophic failures are in fact probable even in fairly well engineered reactors maintained by people known to be reliable. The current reactors we have right now will be kept running for a few more decades, and the ones approved for new construction might be built, but other than that the western world is through with nuclear.
We might as well focus all the funds on a technology the public does accept, and does have the potential to power everything. We'll need to spend a lot of money on the storage, and to charge much more money for stored electricity at night, and no longer will electricity be guaranteed at any point in the day or night, because demand spikes will always be possible at the exact moment the wind and sun are not out. The logical solution would be to wire new construction and old with two levels of wiring : a lower priority circuit for HVACs and high draw machinery. And a higher priority circuit for lights, computers, food storage, etc. The power company would routinely cut the power to everyone's lower priority circuit throughout the day, and would meter each one separately so that those of us who cheated and connected the AC to the other circuit would pay expensive fees.
Yep. Like a broken clock, even an idiot can be wrong sometimes. Those eco-weenie idiots who are afraid of ALL heavy industry may just be right about this nuclear thing. Nuclear power is just one expensive mess after another - does anyone ever compute the average cost of cleanups and accidents into the "cheap" cost of nuclear generated electricity?
No, it's letting a wastepaper fire burn inside an "explosion proof" safe full of high explosives. Oh, and the safe has never been tested to see if it can take an explosion, and there's 30 year old criticisms saying it won't. And you have stacked up a bunch of other, weaker explosives in crates all around the "explosion proof" safe.
No one has ever tested the tertiary containment. The mountain of concrete around the core is SUPPOSED to contain a melted reactor core, but it's never been tested.
Also, at least one of the containment is thought to have a leak to outside somewhere because an explosion caused a pressure drop.
And finally, that containment on this particular reactor design is relatively weak and has known flaws. It might hold the core and it might not. This is why the workers aren't writing off the plant secure in their knowledge that it can take any disaster.
Yes, nuclear engineers thought of this at least 30 years ago. Many of the newer plants, including some ones that were retrofitted, have steam powered pumps for emergency cooling.
With all that said, these do in no way make nuclear power "perfectly safe". For the pumps to work, the right valves have to be open and so on. Undoubtedly there's a way for even the modern plants to catastrophically fail that is most likely far higher in likelihood than the ridiculously low estimates that the reactor designers publish. And each major design revision adds new failure modes.
How would you contain a liquid sodium fire if it's contaminated with fuel products?
There may be a bit of truth in what the man has to say.
Games were $50-$60 each in the 1980s on game consoles and the PCs of the time. Over a hundred bucks a game in today's money.
So games HAVE gotten cheaper over the years.
Moreover, there is a much larger market for games than there ever was. Many more people own some kind of game playing device, whether that be a console, a PC, or a smartphone.
And finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, games had to be delivered through a middleman - a publisher, then a retail store, and so on.
A larger market for games means that the per unit cost of a game can be lower for the same development budget for the game. No reason the Angry birds team could not have spent millions of dollars on the game, or at least the next game in the series.
And because the middlemen are mostly gone, the Angry birds teams gets a solid 70% of each sale. To some, that may sound like Apple gets a large cut - but in reality, that's a smaller piece of the pie eaten by the middle man (Apple) than there ever was before.
Isn't it cheaper to backup to 2 terrabyte hard drives? $1 for 25 gigs is 4 cents a gig, while they are selling 2 terrabyte hard drives for $70 on amazon today with free shipping. That's 2000 gigs for $70, or 3.5 cents a gig. Ok, ok, it's more like 1900 gigs but my point remains.
And the hard drives are ridiculously more convenient to back up to - just put in the drive in a hot - swap sata bay, and swap disks 76 times less often. And they are faster for recovery, and so on.
For very small orders, shipping and transaction costs are going to be much larger than for bigger orders. Sunelec would rather sell you $5200 worth of panels in one order than just over $100 in one order. Doesn't change facts, though : the cost per unit of capacity of solar is WAY down, enough so that it is practical for more and more applications.
And the recent disaster in Japan shows something : Nuclear power plants are very dangerous, and the cost to make them reasonably safe makes them so expensive that even photovoltaic solar + compressed air storage is probably cheaper.
Source? You can pick them up for $0.98 a watt right now, or $1.76/watt for a complete system. Go to sunelec.com for where I found some. Are you telling me these prices were lower 6 years ago? I doubt it.
A fire at a fossil fuel plant won't poison an area for decades and cost hundreds of lives from cancer decades later. Also, you can see a fire - you cannot see radioactive contamination without instruments.
Because if they do that, developers and users will EXPECT future intel processors to now support THAT instruction set. Which just make's Intel's problems worse if they change how the RISC instructions work internally.
Why did you use credit cards? 3% is huge with the margins you must have been under. Since you were an established business, and Amazon was, and the manufacturer was, surely you could have just done direct bank transfers or some other method.
And that's not even true! It's a one person perpetual license, not a rental. If you want it on a new device, typically that device is supported. Any ipad, mac, pc, or kindle, or android device can read amazon's ebooks.
According to the letter of the law, that violates several laws.
Acocrding to the actual circumstance - assuming you don't open the ebook when you don't have the paper book in your possession - it is no crime at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, some nuclear plants do have emergency cooling pumps that run off of this steam.
A hole in the bottom of the pool, obviously. Only explanation that makes any sense. Those explosions must have cracked the bottom of the pools, or broken a pipe or a valve that is below the pool.
You're absolutely correct.
Let's face it - no matter how much armor you wrap around it, at the core of a nuclear plant is a fissioning mass producing gigawatts of heat and a stupendous amount of all 4 types of radiation. A SMALL piece of this core emits so much radiation that it will kill a human being with a few minutes of direct exposure. If any of these thousands of pounds of fissioning fuel do somehow escape, no matter how many layers of defense you have installed to prevent this, it can and will poison land for many miles in all directions. The radioactive iodine can give kids cancer dozens and hundreds of miles away. We know all of this, and have known this for a long time.
In order to prevent the core from escaping, it MUST be connected to a heat sink. The heat sink must be huge (a whole cooling tower), the pipes to it must be intact, the right valves have to be open or shut, and some kind of powered pump has to work.
Once you get a serious breach where the fuel escapes it's zirconium cladding, attempts to cool a mass of melted reactor core will just create clouds of highly radioactive steam that will carry the core fragments away and poison anyone fighting the fire.
On top of that, you also have less hot - but still very dangerous - spent fuel that comprise many reactor core's full of the stuff. Usually this stuff is sitting around, and it is so hot that it does still need active cooling.
These are real dangers. Pro-nuclear folks would have you believe that nothing ever can happen because there is so much safety equipment to prevent a final breach. However, all of the equipment is designed to work in theory - no one has ever melted down a reactor to see how well the containment really holds up. In Japan, just the weak little explosions from the hydrogen detonating may have fractured the containment to at least one of the reactors.
And let's not forget the specter of terrorism. How hard would it be to take over a nuclear plant with a team of armed commandos and to set charges on all that piping and wiring at the base of the reactor? Maybe blow a hole or two in the cooling ponds after moving some of the fuel assemblies closer together with the crane conveniently there? It would be a suicide mission for the terrorists, but they could cause a many billion dollar mess. And a live nuclear reactor is the best possible dirty bomb there could ever be in terms of the damage a full breach would cause.
No, many of the robots died from electronics failures, and the soviets were not willing to wait weeks for replacements to be built or jury-rigged. In Japan it sounds like they would rather contaminate a large area of land than to sacrifice workers, hence the reason the situation is not yet under control. I would assume that if a few people sacrificed their lives, they could go into the buildings, find the actual radiation leaks, and drag water hoses to the storage pools that need them.
I'm not suggesting this, and I would not volunteer - just that it is a possible solution, and one that the soviets would probably see as a fine way to solve the problem. They would get a few people ignorant of the true danger, reassure them that it was less dangerous than it really is, and get them to do it. The Soviets were nice enough by the time of Chernobyl to at least try to minimize the exposure of their 'liquidators' to radiation, but many of them still became seriously ill.
Indeed it must. You cannot calculate the probability of a cascading failure if it involves an unknown mechanism. As far as I know, merely losing power is not supposed to cause this kind of disaster - hence it's reasonable to assume that this event is completely un-accounted for in the statistics.
However, now that we know about it, you can go back and look at all of the other reactors in the world today, and I suspect many of them would have the same catastrophic failures if they lost power for a sustained period.
How could a reactor lose power? A couple of hand grenades in the right spot would do the trick. It appears that it would be pretty damn easy for terrorists to cause a nuclear catastrophe if they got in. I know there's been efforts to harden up the facilities, but are commercial power companies going to pay for a full team of heavily armed commandos at every nuclear plant in the U.S.? Or just a couple guards at the gate? What do you think.
No, but the pro nuclear people have said for decades that the chance of a meltdown is so low that it won't happen for millenia in a properly run plant. They trot out "statistics" based upon calculations performed by the engineers who design nuclear plants. The problem with said calculations is that they are usually wrong.
For example, if you applied the math to the Fukishima plant, you would say "what is the chance that an earthquake breaks all the piping for coolant?" You'd get some low number, as that plant has a lot of backup piping and it's all very well made.
You'd then say "what is the chance that all 3 backup generators, and the battery bank, and the power from other stations failed at the same time, and we can't get more power to the site within a few hours?" Again, these risks are small : each generator is made very well, and it's a series probability. Say one generator has a 1% chance of failure : then the chance of all 3 failing in a row is 0.01 * 0.01 * 0.01. A tiny number. And there's lots of backup generators elsewhere.
But these numbers are wrong. Empirically we now know that the real risk is far, far greater. ONLY a sustained loss of power has been enough to cause a disaster that could potentially rival Chernobyl in terms of radionucleotides released to the surrounding areas. There 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. And we also now know that once a disaster starts it creates lots of hydrogen gas, causing more explosions that destroy more equipment. A chain reaction almost like the nuclear reactions we are worried about. And finally once this accident gets bad enough, the workers can't even get near the equipment to fix it, putting the whole situation beyond recovery.
A lot of these things were unknowns. No one has actually had this kind of accident before quite this way. The risks published by the utility companies can't consider unknown failure modes, especially cascading failures like this one.
Solar and Wind could work, correct? If we covered a 100x100 square mile area of Arizona with photovoltaic panels, and lined the coasts with wind generators. We would have vast fields of underground caverns filled with compressed air.
A nuclear plant has to be guarded, it has to be repaired, it has to be maintained, it has to be worried about, and every now and then it has to be cleaned up after some kind of incident. Major incidents like the one in Japan are rare, but minor ones are common. All of the employees have to have educated backgrounds and clean backgrounds with respect to law enforcement. Every component used in a nuclear plant has to be inspected and approved for quality, and every waste component disposed of in special and expensive disposal areas.
While solar photovoltaic cells are a little bit expensive today, every cell on every panel is identical - a perfect case for automation. It isn't unreasonable to think that by the time we are covering 100x100 mile areas we would have the economic case to make completely automated factories for making the panels. Once the panels are in place, they keep making power for at least 25 years. Very close to zero maintenance needed. No chance of catastrophe for the finished panels.
I like photovoltaic for this reason : big mirror arrays are more efficient, but the mirrors have to move, and they have to be washed, and the plant can fail completely. Solar arrays fail more gracefully. I think in the long term that photovoltaic will dominate the economic side of the equation for this reason.
I think as an engineer, the future is as clear as it could possibly be now. Regardless of actual risk, nuclear power for civilian electricity production is over. It does not matter whether or not it could be made safe - it is not worth the money spent given that catastrophic failures are in fact probable even in fairly well engineered reactors maintained by people known to be reliable. The current reactors we have right now will be kept running for a few more decades, and the ones approved for new construction might be built, but other than that the western world is through with nuclear.
We might as well focus all the funds on a technology the public does accept, and does have the potential to power everything. We'll need to spend a lot of money on the storage, and to charge much more money for stored electricity at night, and no longer will electricity be guaranteed at any point in the day or night, because demand spikes will always be possible at the exact moment the wind and sun are not out. The logical solution would be to wire new construction and old with two levels of wiring : a lower priority circuit for HVACs and high draw machinery. And a higher priority circuit for lights, computers, food storage, etc. The power company would routinely cut the power to everyone's lower priority circuit throughout the day, and would meter each one separately so that those of us who cheated and connected the AC to the other circuit would pay expensive fees.
Yep. Like a broken clock, even an idiot can be wrong sometimes. Those eco-weenie idiots who are afraid of ALL heavy industry may just be right about this nuclear thing. Nuclear power is just one expensive mess after another - does anyone ever compute the average cost of cleanups and accidents into the "cheap" cost of nuclear generated electricity?
No, it's letting a wastepaper fire burn inside an "explosion proof" safe full of high explosives. Oh, and the safe has never been tested to see if it can take an explosion, and there's 30 year old criticisms saying it won't. And you have stacked up a bunch of other, weaker explosives in crates all around the "explosion proof" safe.
No one has ever tested the tertiary containment. The mountain of concrete around the core is SUPPOSED to contain a melted reactor core, but it's never been tested.
Also, at least one of the containment is thought to have a leak to outside somewhere because an explosion caused a pressure drop.
And finally, that containment on this particular reactor design is relatively weak and has known flaws. It might hold the core and it might not. This is why the workers aren't writing off the plant secure in their knowledge that it can take any disaster.
Yes, nuclear engineers thought of this at least 30 years ago. Many of the newer plants, including some ones that were retrofitted, have steam powered pumps for emergency cooling.
With all that said, these do in no way make nuclear power "perfectly safe". For the pumps to work, the right valves have to be open and so on. Undoubtedly there's a way for even the modern plants to catastrophically fail that is most likely far higher in likelihood than the ridiculously low estimates that the reactor designers publish. And each major design revision adds new failure modes.
How would you contain a liquid sodium fire if it's contaminated with fuel products?
There may be a bit of truth in what the man has to say.
Games were $50-$60 each in the 1980s on game consoles and the PCs of the time. Over a hundred bucks a game in today's money.
So games HAVE gotten cheaper over the years.
Moreover, there is a much larger market for games than there ever was. Many more people own some kind of game playing device, whether that be a console, a PC, or a smartphone.
And finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, games had to be delivered through a middleman - a publisher, then a retail store, and so on.
A larger market for games means that the per unit cost of a game can be lower for the same development budget for the game. No reason the Angry birds team could not have spent millions of dollars on the game, or at least the next game in the series.
And because the middlemen are mostly gone, the Angry birds teams gets a solid 70% of each sale. To some, that may sound like Apple gets a large cut - but in reality, that's a smaller piece of the pie eaten by the middle man (Apple) than there ever was before.
Isn't it cheaper to backup to 2 terrabyte hard drives? $1 for 25 gigs is 4 cents a gig, while they are selling 2 terrabyte hard drives for $70 on amazon today with free shipping. That's 2000 gigs for $70, or 3.5 cents a gig. Ok, ok, it's more like 1900 gigs but my point remains.
And the hard drives are ridiculously more convenient to back up to - just put in the drive in a hot - swap sata bay, and swap disks 76 times less often. And they are faster for recovery, and so on.
For very small orders, shipping and transaction costs are going to be much larger than for bigger orders. Sunelec would rather sell you $5200 worth of panels in one order than just over $100 in one order. Doesn't change facts, though : the cost per unit of capacity of solar is WAY down, enough so that it is practical for more and more applications.
And the recent disaster in Japan shows something : Nuclear power plants are very dangerous, and the cost to make them reasonably safe makes them so expensive that even photovoltaic solar + compressed air storage is probably cheaper.
Source? You can pick them up for $0.98 a watt right now, or $1.76/watt for a complete system. Go to sunelec.com for where I found some. Are you telling me these prices were lower 6 years ago? I doubt it.
A truck bomb.
Eh? How much damage could a meltdown do? It's not going to destroy even as big an area as chernobyl did, and the soviets cleaned that up.
A fire at a fossil fuel plant won't poison an area for decades and cost hundreds of lives from cancer decades later. Also, you can see a fire - you cannot see radioactive contamination without instruments.
Because if they do that, developers and users will EXPECT future intel processors to now support THAT instruction set. Which just make's Intel's problems worse if they change how the RISC instructions work internally.
google harder. I actually read some of those links and the evidence is overwhelming that laser light obeys the inverse square law. Physics Fail.
Yes, it does apply. Laser light is subject to the inverse square law like any other light.
Why did you use credit cards? 3% is huge with the margins you must have been under. Since you were an established business, and Amazon was, and the manufacturer was, surely you could have just done direct bank transfers or some other method.
And that's not even true! It's a one person perpetual license, not a rental. If you want it on a new device, typically that device is supported. Any ipad, mac, pc, or kindle, or android device can read amazon's ebooks.
Actually, you can. Assuming your friend has a kindle compatible device (ipad, mac, pc, or a kindle) you can loan it to him.
According to the letter of the law, that violates several laws.
Acocrding to the actual circumstance - assuming you don't open the ebook when you don't have the paper book in your possession - it is no crime at all.