Now add in 90 minutes at the airport before and after which don't exist on trains.
But will exist once there is a terrorist attack on a US train. The solution here is to greatly streamline the security screening at airports, not make more trains.
In fact, the contracts awarded so far have cost lass than expected, so the project is actually under budget at this time.
I guess you don't understand how these games are played. There's been very little spending to date so of course, contractors can afford to appear under budget. To get the real money flowing, the contractors and such need to bait the trap and get California to commit a lot more funding.
When there's a lot of commitment, then they'll suddenly have huge cost overruns. My view is that the 50% cost overrun is not a "worst case", but rather an unrealistically low cost estimate just like most other public projects in the US and California in particular.
If California continues to commit, it'll be educational just how many costly problems the project will run into.
Unless you have some bad luck, in which case you're financially wiped out and likely unable to pay for health care you need.
That's one outcome. Here's two more:
2) You get some bad luck, but have time to get insurance before the bills kick in.
3) You don't have enough bad luck to justify insurance and pick up insurance when your age justifies the cost of the insurance.
Anyway, one of the big things that people often missed in their replies to me is the pool of sick people that your insurance is paying for. Young, healthy people are paying a significant premium due to these other people. But when people become unhealthy, suddenly insurance makes sense. This is the fundamental problem of insurance. It only works when enough people get it who don't immediately need it.
There is a value to not losing everything you own and/or going through bankruptcy. But it's not infinite value. And if the premium on insurance is above that value, then it's not in the would-be insuree's interests to get costly insurance. I believe we're seeing that with some of the Obamacare markets these days.
It all comes down to priorities - landing on land is dramatically safer and cheaper *for the rocket*.
As you imply in your next paragraph, safer != riskier.
As for not landing in someone's backyard, that's an unavoidable risk even while they're going up. And while coming down, Falcon 9 landings are already vectored so that they will land at sea if anything goes wrong, it's only during the last minutes of final approach that they change that vector to hit the launchpad instead.
So I see two things here. First, the rocket has to go up so that's the same unavoidable risk no matter where you land the booster. And second, you can vector the rocket so it does land in someone's backyard. Admittedly, they would self-destruct the rocket, if it veered from the desired trajectory, so that's not as much a risk as I made it out to be.
It's easy to be a carefree grasshopper in summer, but winter always comes
In about 50 years. "Carefree grasshopper" also has on average more money for retirement (or self-insuring against bad health for that matter) when they're not paying for older peoples' health care.
Did that other AC say SpaceX has to acknowledge problems to him specifically? I don't see it.
The thing is, SpaceX has been real open about what they're doing. As a result, I believe that the AC would have those concerns, if the AC had been paying even a little attention.
(and landing on land is both cheaper and safer if you can do it.)
It might be cheaper, but it's not safer. There's more stuff to hit on land. I think you might be a bit concerned if a Falcon booster tried to land in your backyard.
Notice that the linked story doesn't actually provide a reason the example is supposed to be bad. It was a misused example in a court case that was overturned decades ago. That doesn't make it a bad example any more than attacking someone with a hammer makes hammers bad tools.
i thinkz you all will have a hard time justifying sicko crap in name a free speech
Not at all. Once it becomes ok to break the law because there's sicko crap out there, then it becomes ok to break the law for other reasons. Can't have the benefits of laws without the costs.
I'd say it's fair to count the thousands who died and will still die as a result of this wholly unnecessary disaster.
Unless, of course, they're not going to die as a result of this disaster. Then I suppose it's not "fair".
Let's not be pedantic about the far lower number attributed directly to just death by radiation, thanks.
No, let's be pedantic for good reason. We need to remember that the "tens of thousands" is a number pulled out of someone's ass. It has no connection to reality.
I refuse to accept the we will be as ignorant in 100 years as we are today. We've already learnt that nuclear power plants are a stupid idea. Why would we build more?
Because we aren't as ignorant in 100 years as we are today. I note here the spectacle of people claiming that reliably burying nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years is going to be better than burning that waste in a reactor.
And how much are you paying for debts/housing/health care/school loans, Old Economy Steve?
Something like $4k a year for the whole list. Sounds like you need to go "old economy" too.
Is Leonard Nemoy still alive and walking around with a beard in your reality? One where those idle trillions have been invested in mass transit, nationwide highspeed rail? Even their investments with create a pitiful handful of jobs tend to be in "emerging markets" and do jack to employ people in the United States.
If you're spending trillions for high speed rail, you're vastly overpaying. You need to understand the significance of those zeroes first.
Because it would rather have low tax rates for the rich (which have high costs for the rest of society) while spending over a trillion a year on the imperial budget. Does it ever embarrass you that China, which has a GDP less than half that of the United States, is kicking its ass on high speed rail?
What exactly is the point of being concerned about the absence of high speed rail in the US? We already have airports which do the same thing (high speed mass transit), only faster.
To regain their own sovereignty, currency, and be free of their monetary obligations to NATO. Should have been a clue when neolibs were scolding Greece that they needed to cut all spending to the bone and beyond - except for their payments to NATO, those are sacrosanct.
Or maybe they just identify with sovereignty, currency, etc at the EU level.
What's hard to understand about a flip-flop. Imagine that Ron Paul had won in 2012 - and the first thing he did was ram through legislation to abolish private property and flat-out confiscate all assets over $500,000. That would be the equivalent of a "radical left" party winning an election and then passing even more extreme capitalist austerity. Party labels and campaign promises are irrelevant - it's actions that count.
What's hard to figure out about a coerced flip-flop? Besides, I'm not surprised that a radical left party flip-flopped. They tend to be quite flexible when they get into power.
You assume that "getting worked on for longer" correlates with a higher probability of recovery.
We already know the patient has harvestable organs. Right there is a considerable threshold for good health prior to whatever event made them a potential organ donor. So yes, I don't consider it a stretch that being worked on longer would correspond to a higher probability of recovery.
Disincentivize catching one of those by having required testing And assigning a more painful method of execution and expediting the executions of prisoners found to have them.
Or jaywalking. Those walking bags of life-sustaining and profitable organs are just flouting their disrespect for everyone!
Also, this is going to create a perverse incentive to immunize yourself against organ harvesting by picking up the latest incurable disease being spread through the prison population like AIDS or Hepatitis C currently.
OK, if YOU want to play semantics and make the wall part of the "plant", then you must describe the event and the design for the event appropriately. In this case, the event is a massive tsunami breaching the wall. The design basis of the plant did not consider a massive tsunami breach of the wall a credible event. The "reactor building and associated structures" were not properly designed to handle this event. The entire "plant" was sited in place where this event could happen.
The massive tsunami didn't breach the wall, it overtopped it. Words have meaning.
And since the designers didn't consider overtopping the seawall to be a credible event, then by your logic, why should they design for it?
Had the entire plant properly considered the event, and designed for it using common nuclear safety practices, they would have hardened the "reactor and associated structures", flood proofed, raised generators and fuel supplies, added contingency fuel supplies to extend emergency diesel run time to account for lack of accessibility, added sealed doors in other locations and procedural requirements to keep flood doors closed, and a ton of other things. Then THAT would have resulted in certainly of not only nuclear safety but also generally saving the asset from tremendous remediation costs. That would have been quite acceptable.
And that's something that we can do now that we know that overtopping is a problem. That's the difference between learning from experience and merely deciding never to do something at a location because something preventable happened there.
Had they designed the plant to withstand a tsunami instead of depending on a wall to prevent one from hitting the plant,
Not even wrong. The wall was how they designed the plant to withstand a tsunami. The emergency generators were the backup.
Unless you have high enough confidence that you know a wall height that will cover any future tsunami
I don't have to. "Credible events" remember? We're not speaking of nearby asteroid impacts or other sources of vastly bigger tsunami which might have frequencies of once every few million years. There's a limit to how big the tsunami that an earthquake can generate.
and have considered every possible failure of that wall to function properly
So your theory is that the few scientists who have sold out their names and reputations to work for oil companies issuing "skeptical" reports are the poor impoverished underfunded ones...and the 99.9% of scientists who recognize climate change are rolling in cash?
Who again is funding the 99.9% of "scientists" who as you claim aren't being funded by oil companies? And why do you think it would take a lot of money "rolling in cash" to bribe scientists? I think it's more "Don't rock the boat and you get to play climate researcher."
First you should distinguish the plant from the siting characteristics. GE designed the plant, not the site. GE will tell you plants of that design are not intended to withstand such a tsunami.
Here's what I think is particularly inane about this argument:
1) If a "credible" risk isn't explicitly anticipated in the plant design or ruled out by "siting characteristics", then the plant shouldn't be built there.
2) You decide a seawall is neither part of a plant design nor a siting characteristic and thus, can be outright ignored.
3) Thus, a plant shouldn't be built anywhere a seawall would be required.
The obvious problem with this chain of argument is that a good seawall can greatly reduce the risk of putting a nuclear plant on the coast (which incidentally is one of the best places in the world to put nuclear plants) so that it has comparable flooding risk to any other water-side location. And it does that, no matter how you choose to classify seawalls.
So your argument is a huge fallacy of semantics with sole dependence on your classification of seawalls as something you can ignore. You can see the effects of the fallacy if you were to reclassify seawalls as part of the plant rather than not. It doesn't change the operation of the plant, its risks, or any real world stuff. But suddenly, the site of the nuclear plant goes from inappropriate to appropriate.
A trivial semantics shift like this should not result in a non-trivial change in the outcome of the argument. That is how we can see that this is a fallacy of semantics.
No, the seawall is not part of the plant. The plant was designed by GE and there was no sea wall in the design.
There is confusion here that shouldn't be. The nuclear plant is the overall local system, not merely the reactors themselves. So it naturally includes things like a seawall. The seawall is on plant property and solely present to further the needs of the plant. That makes it just as much a part of the plant as other routine elements like an access road, security fence, or grid access which aren't part of the reactor structures themselves.
Further, GE designed the reactors and as I recall oversaw construction of them. But the plant was designed by TEPCO (including of course, the seawall). You will find a number of stories that are quite clear on this design responsibility distinction.
Yes, a higher wall preventing the tsunami from hitting the plant could have averted things, and yes, higher generators could have helped in the response, but that doesn't mean either is good enough.
That sentence speaks for itself. Sure, these fairly simple changes could have completely eliminated the accident and its huge consequences, "but that doesn't mean either is good enough". Write something different, if you don't want to be accused of dismissing the difference between a huge accident and a non-accident as not "good enough".
No, the wall was designed to stop 5 meter tsunamis from hitting the plant, the reason was that the plant was not capable of withstanding it. Why is that so hard to understand?
Because it's an inane point to make. The seawall is part of the plant.
And I never said "the stark difference between a non-accident and multiple reactor meltdowns isn't "good enough"",
Slashdot Mirror
Now add in 90 minutes at the airport before and after which don't exist on trains.
But will exist once there is a terrorist attack on a US train. The solution here is to greatly streamline the security screening at airports, not make more trains.
In fact, the contracts awarded so far have cost lass than expected, so the project is actually under budget at this time.
I guess you don't understand how these games are played. There's been very little spending to date so of course, contractors can afford to appear under budget. To get the real money flowing, the contractors and such need to bait the trap and get California to commit a lot more funding.
When there's a lot of commitment, then they'll suddenly have huge cost overruns. My view is that the 50% cost overrun is not a "worst case", but rather an unrealistically low cost estimate just like most other public projects in the US and California in particular.
If California continues to commit, it'll be educational just how many costly problems the project will run into.
Unless you have some bad luck, in which case you're financially wiped out and likely unable to pay for health care you need.
That's one outcome. Here's two more:
2) You get some bad luck, but have time to get insurance before the bills kick in.
3) You don't have enough bad luck to justify insurance and pick up insurance when your age justifies the cost of the insurance.
Anyway, one of the big things that people often missed in their replies to me is the pool of sick people that your insurance is paying for. Young, healthy people are paying a significant premium due to these other people. But when people become unhealthy, suddenly insurance makes sense. This is the fundamental problem of insurance. It only works when enough people get it who don't immediately need it.
There is a value to not losing everything you own and/or going through bankruptcy. But it's not infinite value. And if the premium on insurance is above that value, then it's not in the would-be insuree's interests to get costly insurance. I believe we're seeing that with some of the Obamacare markets these days.
It all comes down to priorities - landing on land is dramatically safer and cheaper *for the rocket*.
As you imply in your next paragraph, safer != riskier.
As for not landing in someone's backyard, that's an unavoidable risk even while they're going up. And while coming down, Falcon 9 landings are already vectored so that they will land at sea if anything goes wrong, it's only during the last minutes of final approach that they change that vector to hit the launchpad instead.
So I see two things here. First, the rocket has to go up so that's the same unavoidable risk no matter where you land the booster. And second, you can vector the rocket so it does land in someone's backyard. Admittedly, they would self-destruct the rocket, if it veered from the desired trajectory, so that's not as much a risk as I made it out to be.
It's easy to be a carefree grasshopper in summer, but winter always comes
In about 50 years. "Carefree grasshopper" also has on average more money for retirement (or self-insuring against bad health for that matter) when they're not paying for older peoples' health care.
Did that other AC say SpaceX has to acknowledge problems to him specifically? I don't see it.
The thing is, SpaceX has been real open about what they're doing. As a result, I believe that the AC would have those concerns, if the AC had been paying even a little attention.
Point is with a sea landing, you can make it physically impossible for the booster to land in someone's backyard.
Not one single Falcon has landed without mayor damage today.
But that's still five landings right?
They refuse to acknowledge their problems.
So? They don't have to acknowledge problems to you. And really what use would you be, if they did do that?
(and landing on land is both cheaper and safer if you can do it.)
It might be cheaper, but it's not safer. There's more stuff to hit on land. I think you might be a bit concerned if a Falcon booster tried to land in your backyard.
Notice that the linked story doesn't actually provide a reason the example is supposed to be bad. It was a misused example in a court case that was overturned decades ago. That doesn't make it a bad example any more than attacking someone with a hammer makes hammers bad tools.
i thinkz you all will have a hard time justifying sicko crap in name a free speech
Not at all. Once it becomes ok to break the law because there's sicko crap out there, then it becomes ok to break the law for other reasons. Can't have the benefits of laws without the costs.
I'd say it's fair to count the thousands who died and will still die as a result of this wholly unnecessary disaster.
Unless, of course, they're not going to die as a result of this disaster. Then I suppose it's not "fair".
Let's not be pedantic about the far lower number attributed directly to just death by radiation, thanks.
No, let's be pedantic for good reason. We need to remember that the "tens of thousands" is a number pulled out of someone's ass. It has no connection to reality.
2) Fire fighting, containment, and cleanup exposed some 500k workers to the site. And the actual death toll is probably underestimated:
And the answer is:
Weâ(TM)ll probably never know.
Hooray for stories that don't actually say or mean anything.
If you watch the documentary there are a number of people who worked on the project who were in bad health.
It's been 27 years. Of course there's people in bad health.
Which could be radiation, heavy metal poisoning, or a host of many other nasty things found in industrial sites e.g. PCBs, Dioxin, asbestos, etc.
Sounds real definitive.
10's of thousands died fighting the fire
Yea, 49 is a big number.
Score one for safe and clean nuclear energy.
Because everyone runs their power plants like cold war Soviet technocrats?
I refuse to accept the we will be as ignorant in 100 years as we are today. We've already learnt that nuclear power plants are a stupid idea. Why would we build more?
Because we aren't as ignorant in 100 years as we are today. I note here the spectacle of people claiming that reliably burying nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years is going to be better than burning that waste in a reactor.
And how much are you paying for debts/housing/health care/school loans, Old Economy Steve?
Something like $4k a year for the whole list. Sounds like you need to go "old economy" too.
Is Leonard Nemoy still alive and walking around with a beard in your reality? One where those idle trillions have been invested in mass transit, nationwide highspeed rail? Even their investments with create a pitiful handful of jobs tend to be in "emerging markets" and do jack to employ people in the United States.
If you're spending trillions for high speed rail, you're vastly overpaying. You need to understand the significance of those zeroes first.
Because it would rather have low tax rates for the rich (which have high costs for the rest of society) while spending over a trillion a year on the imperial budget. Does it ever embarrass you that China, which has a GDP less than half that of the United States, is kicking its ass on high speed rail?
What exactly is the point of being concerned about the absence of high speed rail in the US? We already have airports which do the same thing (high speed mass transit), only faster.
To regain their own sovereignty, currency, and be free of their monetary obligations to NATO. Should have been a clue when neolibs were scolding Greece that they needed to cut all spending to the bone and beyond - except for their payments to NATO, those are sacrosanct.
Or maybe they just identify with sovereignty, currency, etc at the EU level.
What's hard to understand about a flip-flop. Imagine that Ron Paul had won in 2012 - and the first thing he did was ram through legislation to abolish private property and flat-out confiscate all assets over $500,000. That would be the equivalent of a "radical left" party winning an election and then passing even more extreme capitalist austerity. Party labels and campaign promises are irrelevant - it's actions that count.
What's hard to figure out about a coerced flip-flop? Besides, I'm not surprised that a radical left party flip-flopped. They tend to be quite flexible when they get into power.
You assume that "getting worked on for longer" correlates with a higher probability of recovery.
We already know the patient has harvestable organs. Right there is a considerable threshold for good health prior to whatever event made them a potential organ donor. So yes, I don't consider it a stretch that being worked on longer would correspond to a higher probability of recovery.
Disincentivize catching one of those by having required testing And assigning a more painful method of execution and expediting the executions of prisoners found to have them.
Well, another serious problem solved by Slashdot.
Or jaywalking. Those walking bags of life-sustaining and profitable organs are just flouting their disrespect for everyone!
Also, this is going to create a perverse incentive to immunize yourself against organ harvesting by picking up the latest incurable disease being spread through the prison population like AIDS or Hepatitis C currently.
OK, if YOU want to play semantics and make the wall part of the "plant", then you must describe the event and the design for the event appropriately. In this case, the event is a massive tsunami breaching the wall. The design basis of the plant did not consider a massive tsunami breach of the wall a credible event. The "reactor building and associated structures" were not properly designed to handle this event. The entire "plant" was sited in place where this event could happen.
The massive tsunami didn't breach the wall, it overtopped it. Words have meaning.
And since the designers didn't consider overtopping the seawall to be a credible event, then by your logic, why should they design for it?
Had the entire plant properly considered the event, and designed for it using common nuclear safety practices, they would have hardened the "reactor and associated structures", flood proofed, raised generators and fuel supplies, added contingency fuel supplies to extend emergency diesel run time to account for lack of accessibility, added sealed doors in other locations and procedural requirements to keep flood doors closed, and a ton of other things. Then THAT would have resulted in certainly of not only nuclear safety but also generally saving the asset from tremendous remediation costs. That would have been quite acceptable.
And that's something that we can do now that we know that overtopping is a problem. That's the difference between learning from experience and merely deciding never to do something at a location because something preventable happened there.
Had they designed the plant to withstand a tsunami instead of depending on a wall to prevent one from hitting the plant,
Not even wrong. The wall was how they designed the plant to withstand a tsunami. The emergency generators were the backup.
Unless you have high enough confidence that you know a wall height that will cover any future tsunami
I don't have to. "Credible events" remember? We're not speaking of nearby asteroid impacts or other sources of vastly bigger tsunami which might have frequencies of once every few million years. There's a limit to how big the tsunami that an earthquake can generate.
and have considered every possible failure of that wall to function properly
Same.
So your theory is that the few scientists who have sold out their names and reputations to work for oil companies issuing "skeptical" reports are the poor impoverished underfunded ones ...and the 99.9% of scientists who recognize climate change are rolling in cash?
Who again is funding the 99.9% of "scientists" who as you claim aren't being funded by oil companies? And why do you think it would take a lot of money "rolling in cash" to bribe scientists? I think it's more "Don't rock the boat and you get to play climate researcher."
First you should distinguish the plant from the siting characteristics. GE designed the plant, not the site. GE will tell you plants of that design are not intended to withstand such a tsunami.
Here's what I think is particularly inane about this argument:
1) If a "credible" risk isn't explicitly anticipated in the plant design or ruled out by "siting characteristics", then the plant shouldn't be built there.
2) You decide a seawall is neither part of a plant design nor a siting characteristic and thus, can be outright ignored.
3) Thus, a plant shouldn't be built anywhere a seawall would be required.
The obvious problem with this chain of argument is that a good seawall can greatly reduce the risk of putting a nuclear plant on the coast (which incidentally is one of the best places in the world to put nuclear plants) so that it has comparable flooding risk to any other water-side location. And it does that, no matter how you choose to classify seawalls.
So your argument is a huge fallacy of semantics with sole dependence on your classification of seawalls as something you can ignore. You can see the effects of the fallacy if you were to reclassify seawalls as part of the plant rather than not. It doesn't change the operation of the plant, its risks, or any real world stuff. But suddenly, the site of the nuclear plant goes from inappropriate to appropriate.
A trivial semantics shift like this should not result in a non-trivial change in the outcome of the argument. That is how we can see that this is a fallacy of semantics.
No, the seawall is not part of the plant. The plant was designed by GE and there was no sea wall in the design.
There is confusion here that shouldn't be. The nuclear plant is the overall local system, not merely the reactors themselves. So it naturally includes things like a seawall. The seawall is on plant property and solely present to further the needs of the plant. That makes it just as much a part of the plant as other routine elements like an access road, security fence, or grid access which aren't part of the reactor structures themselves.
Further, GE designed the reactors and as I recall oversaw construction of them. But the plant was designed by TEPCO (including of course, the seawall). You will find a number of stories that are quite clear on this design responsibility distinction.
I should not have written what I never wrote? OK.
The quote in question:
Yes, a higher wall preventing the tsunami from hitting the plant could have averted things, and yes, higher generators could have helped in the response, but that doesn't mean either is good enough.
That sentence speaks for itself. Sure, these fairly simple changes could have completely eliminated the accident and its huge consequences, "but that doesn't mean either is good enough". Write something different, if you don't want to be accused of dismissing the difference between a huge accident and a non-accident as not "good enough".
No, the wall was designed to stop 5 meter tsunamis from hitting the plant, the reason was that the plant was not capable of withstanding it. Why is that so hard to understand?
Because it's an inane point to make. The seawall is part of the plant.
And I never said "the stark difference between a non-accident and multiple reactor meltdowns isn't "good enough"",
You should have written something else then.