Actually the tsunami defences along the Tohoku coast were a lot lower than the 5-metre high seawalls at Fukushima Daiichi, where defences existed at all of course. Lots of towns still don't have that much in the way of sea walls in place, Itami for instance.
Onomichi, a little seaside town in Japan I visit regularly has tsunami defence walls about a metre high with access gates through them to the piers and quays oceanside. The only change I've seen there since the 2011 tsunami are notices telling people not to park blocking the seagates so they can be closed in an emergency. Life goes on, Nihon.
Once you actually look, you find out the UN does a lot of productive stuff like peacekeeping and conflict monitoring, elections, health and welfare, education etc. It's just that sometimes the UN doesn't do as the American government tells it to do so it is by definition ineffective and unproductive.
There are plenty of places to bury waste, even spent fuel if the owners don't want to reprocess it. The fact is there isn't really a lot of spent fuel or reprocessed fuel waste around at the moment to dispose of. France, which has run forty power reactors for thirty years and more has a few hundred cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste and that's all. It's not a Hollywood movie scenario where this waste will start roaming the countryside destroying everything in its path with its fiery breath or converting mild-mannered Dr. Bruce Banner into the Hulk, it just sits there in large blocks of glass. It doesn't even glow in the dark.
Finland of all places is actually in the process of digging a deep hole, 500 metres down into shield bedrock, to put their spent fuel into. They expect this deep repository to handle about 400 reactor-years worth of spent fuel in the end and it will cost about a billion dollars US over a century or so before they cap it off. They've already got the money to pay for building it in the bank from a levy on electricity generated by their existing reactors over the past couple of decades.
Dry storage of spent fuel on the surface will suffice for most places for a few more decades before actually digging pricey holes to bury the stuff in. If nothing else it allows for generating levies to make paying for the excavations more effective. In the intervening time there might be breakthroughs in affordable reprocessing, economical waste-burning reactor designs get built, winged monkeys might fly out of my butt, whatever.
The problem is that any waste-burning reactors will still have to pay their way by generating electricity at an affordable price even with an offset for the value of destroying some waste. The BN-series reactors the Russians are building and operating and the Chinese are considering buying can burn waste but not a lot of it and they require highly-enriched uranium and plutonium to generate the neutron flux needed. The financial details of how much the existing BN-series reactors cost to run are not transparent.
There's a lot of Powerpoint Warriors in the waste-burning business, not many folks pouring concrete and bending metal. It's the same with proponents of small modular and thorium molten-salt reactors. The financial costs of licencing, building, operating and eventaully decommissioning such paper designs tend not to be emphasised in the flashy slide presentations.
True enough. If only nuclear waste facilities were held to the same regulatory standards as, say, fertiliser plants in Texas which are totally innocuous since they don't store any nuclear waste on their premises.
Ummm, no. That's a bit like saying the contents of a kebab shop's grease trap is organic so it will work perfectly well as fuel in your car engine, just pour it in and turn the key and away you go. The nuclear equivalent of the AAA is just a phonecall away after all.
Some transuranics aren't fertile, they produce less than one neutron per fission event on average so they damp out the chain reaction needed to keep a reactor operating. Some have a low cross-section, they're difficult to hit with a moderated neutron in the first place. Some eat neutrons and don't fission at all, so-called fission poisons. Most of them start off radioactive as hell with short half-lifes unlike regular enriched uranium which can be handled wearing gloves and a Tyvek overall so they're more difficult to use in fuel rods. There's also the radiochemistry and high-temperature performance of the materials, how do they expand as they heat up, do they disassociate from their oxide forms etc. etc.
Designing fuel elements using these materials, assuming you're willing to spend the billions needed to separate them out from one another and then reformulate them appropriately, is a complicated process which, given the currently ridiculously low cost of fresh enriched uranium fuel for power reactors, no-one is really interested in investigating. The only transuranic used in reactors anywhere today is plutonium in mixed-oxide fuel. It's being used only after years of experimental tests and commercial operation of such fuel elements. It's still a wash financially speaking given the pricetag for a reprocessing plant to make MOX -- the US has half-funded a plant to make MOX (probably to use up surplus military plutonium to begin with) but there are no customers signed up to use MOX fuel in the States, no guarantee the NRC would license its use in American reactors and Congress just zeroed the budget needed to continue construction of the MOX plant which is, needless to say, way over budget and behind schedule.
Translated from the Chinese: "Oh, look, the hardstand at the tropical Diego Garcia airfield has just sprouted a large rectangular patch of shrubbery usually native only to the West German plain but the really weird thing is that in near IR it's got the shape of a 777 underneath it. How odd, as Confucius might say."
If a Russian (or Chinese or French or Indian or any other nation's) LEO observation satellite crossed over Diego Garcia in the past two weeks then anyone attempting to hide a 65 metre long aircraft on that billiard ball of an island is going to be SOL.
A 777 doesn't do well on soft ground, it needs to roll on tarmac and concrete so if MH370 is on Diego Garcia island it's either on a hardstand off the runway or in a building attached to the hardstand areas. The only building even close to big enough to take it is a hangar which is, as I said before, only 40 metres deep. I suspect the hangar entrance isn't big enough vertically to even accept the nose of a 777 but I can't make that detail out from the Google Earth pictures.
Is Tracy Island in the neighbourhood? It could swallow a 777 no problem.
There isn't anywhere on Diego Garcia to hide MH 370 if it did land there. The only hangar at the airbase is 40 metres front to back and a 777-200ER is over 60 metres nose to tail so it would have to be parked in plain (so to speak) sight of everyone from janitors through pilots and aircrew working there.
Have a look at the island sometime on Google Earth, search for the Diego Garcia postcode which is BBND 1ZZ. The current image has a number of B-52s and (I think) KC-135 tankers parked on hardsstands; I've seen a B-1B there too in previous images. A 777 is significantly larger than a B-52.
Dispersants are designed to make the heavier oils in spills more available to microorganisms by turning large blobs of oil into small droplets and thus increasing the surface area exposed. The light fractions like kerosene in crude oil spills evaporate quite quickly, the heavier fractions can polymerise in sunlight to form tarry blobs with a lifetime of years or even decades if not dispersed promptly.
There are different formulations of dispersant nowadays. The version of Corexit available twenty years ago at the time of the Exxon-Valdez incident is now not recommended for inshore use especially in rocky places as it can adversely affect the ability of shellfish to cling to rocks. Alternatives are now available after those lessons were learned.
Nuclear energy's worst enemy IS cost, the upfront cost of building a unitary reactor structure that will only return its investment over a period of decades in a world where MBA-driven financial returns in the next quarter-year make or break an industry and its decision-makers. Cost is a drum the anti-nuclear religionists beat continually, possibly with the encouragement of the coal and gas interests.
Gas is currently cheap thanks to ever-improving production technologies including fracking. It kills people, a lot more than nuclear power ever did (six dead, I think, from that gas explosion in Manhattan last week which is already old news compared to Fukushima Daiichi which killed nobody from radiation releases). There's also the CO2 emissions it engenders but nobody cares about those.
The molten-salt reactors boosters tend to handwave away many severe problems with their assorted designs, things like the existing light-water reactor designs have already overcome or just don't have problems with such as how to decommission an obsolete molten-salt reactor at end-of-life where much of its structure has been in direct contact with highly radioactive isotopes at very high temperatures for decades. With "normal" reactors the fuel and its waste products stay in the fuel rods and when they're removed the reactor vessel structure is only slightly radioactive and just leaving it for a few decades in Safestore makes it trivial to take apart.
As for proliferation risks all molten-salt reactor concepts I've ever seen require a continuous-processing facility next to the reactor to continuously remove problematic isotopes from the fuel stream that would disrupt its operation by absorbing neutrons. In the case of the thorium-breeder designs the neutron economy is quite precarious since they need to breed Th-232 into fissile U-233 to work at all which is not a problem existing light-water reactors face.
Given that the molten salt stream has to be processed on-site then it is not impossible that an unscrupulous operator could tweak the processor to, say, remove and collect U-233 in small amounts over a given period and that is quite acceptable bomb-making material.
Efficiency in fuel burnup is not a factor in deciding which kind of reactors to build today since uranium is cheap at the moment and will not be rare and expensive for at least sixty years and probably longer (the bottom-line cost is thought to be about $300 per kilo of uranium metal extracted from seawater). The uranium mining industry is currently closing and mothballing mines around the world due to lack of ongoing demand for their product.
The most efficient power reactors running today are the British gas-cooled carbon-moderated AGRs but they're white elephants, as cheap to run as new-design LWRs but more expensive to build in the first place. No more will be built anywhere. CANDUs are also expensive in terms of capital cost per kWh of electricity generated even though they can run on unenriched uranium but the cost savings don't really make them that attractive in the commercial market. They also have proliferation risks due to their ability to be refuelled "on the run" by unscrupulous parties.
The Malaysian Airlines 777 in question didn't have satellite ACARS capability, only VHF (and maybe HF too) radios carrying ACARS data. I'm not even sure it had any SATCOM equipment fitted at all. There was a recent airworthiness directive for 777-series aircraft about hull skin problems where SATCOM antennas are mounted on the top of the fuselage but it didn't apply to the Malaysian Airlines 777s since apparently they didn't have those antennas fitted.
If the HF and VHF radios on board were shut down for any reason then there would be no more ACARS data received by ground stations.
That's great, consumers buy their own phones with their own OS on them. Who are the consumers going to call if none of the network providers will handshake with their RMS-OS phone? The network providers might well claim that unless the radio and network connection stacks are well-tested and not likely to cripple their towers by DDoSing them then they don't get to play in their sandbox and for that the stacks have to be "blobs" under their control.
The ACARS only transmits in bursts while the plane is in flight, usually when there's been a change to the engine settings or operating conditions. Data transmission to satellites necessary for trans-oceanic flights costs money on a per-packet basis so there's no continuous data streaming. I think they log more data and dump it at the end of the flight once the plane's on the ground.
Tornadoes kill people and destroy townships in central US pretty much every year -- 2011 had an exceptionally high body count, driven in part by a single tornado that wiped out a town and killed over 150 people, but it's usually 20 or 30 minimum even in a quiet year. The Great Tohoku earthquake of 2011 actually killed very few, probably under a hundred people and they were the first substantial deaths from an earthquake in Japan for over a decade. The tsunami that followed killed about 20,000 people but it was the first really serious tsunami for a long time and from the records the biggest to hit Japan in a millennium.
The second biggest death toll in 2011 in japan was from a couple of typhoons that his the south of Honshu in the autumn, killing over 90 people. Japan is just a dangerous place. Then again the annual death toll in the US from firearms balances things out somewhat.
"areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen"
That describes the entire nation of Japan pretty much. The earthquake and tsunami of 2011 isn't even the biggest natural disaster in Japan in the last hundred years, the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 killed more than 100,000 people in Tokyo. The Kobe earthquake in 1995 killed about 5,000. The Japanese write books with titles like "Japan sinks!" and make animes like "Tokyo Magnitude 8.0" but they love their country even if it is actively trying to kill them.
Next time you've got a half-day in Tokyo go over to the Metropolitan Towers, the city's local government building near Shinjiku. There's a free observation gallery you can visit on the 36th floor and on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji to the south-west. That's an active volcano, by the way, less than 100km from where 30-odd million people live and work. It's at the corner of three active tectonic plates, the source of the 1923 earthquake I mentioned.
As for "areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen" why do people live in the Mississippi valley with its killer tornadoes (550 dead in 2011 alone)? Do Americans like taking risks that much?
It was only a couple of years ago someone found a significant bug in Unix that had been around since 1986, a 32-bit x 32-bit multiply routine that returned a 32-bit answer. It had been in Linux since the start in the early 90s and nobody had noticed it.
No, the four new reactors are being built right now, bending rebar and pouring concrete on site as I type this. The legal challenges and other distractions are done and dusted, the financial instruments are arranged with Government guarantees for the commercial-market loans (not financial payments, just guarantees) that are paying for the builds.
I don't think there are many if any new starts going to happen this year, on the other hand about 75% of the existing nuclear fleet in the US has received licence extensions past the original forty year mark and most in that age bracket are in train for mid-life upgrades and replacement of parts that are wearing out, like steam generators etc.
Right now gas is cheap, coal is cheaper, nobody cares that much about flue gases and pollution from coal and gas generators and wind and solar are still getting lots of financial and legislative support from the government. Nuclear is the Cinderella of the US electricity market, unloved and untrusted but working away day after day generating about 20% of the US total requirement without emitting CO2, mercury, nitrous oxides, sulphur compounds, dioxins, cadmium, radium, radon gas etc.
The Japanese did restart a couple of reactors at Ohi about a year after 3/11 happened. Due to the way nuclear power is licenced and regulated in Japan they ran for 13 months before they were shut down for refuelling and inspection. Those two particular reactors have not yet restarted in part because the restart requires the agreement of the local government; in US terms that would be the county seat that hosts the reactors. The locals agreed to the first restart, they have hesitated allowing a second restart. A lot of the existing reactors in Japan (38 of them, I think) have been through a test and prep exercise over safety from earthquakes, tsunami, kaiju attacks etc. and the operators have applied for restarts. Nothing will happen quickly though.
On the other hand the US broke ground on four GenIII AP1000 reactors in 2013 as well as restarting the construction of another reactor in Tennessee (Watts Bar 2) that was left half-built a couple of decades ago. This one should be online next year, tabun.
Actually wealthy plantation slaveholders and their allies in the American colonies (Washington, Jefferson, even Franklin profited from slaves) broke away when it became obvious the British government was going to abolish slavery in the near future. I understand American history books take a different view but since they were written by the slaveholders, for the slaveholders that's not surprising.
Their constant harping on the British crown and George III as the Bad Guy because he wanted to abolish slavery is further evidence of their propagandistic efforts since the Crown had possessed little or no political power in Britain since the mid-1600s when Parliament explained the facts of life to Charles I with the edge of an axe. It was Parliament that sent troops to put down the treasonous rebellion of the slaveholders, not George.
The entire nation of Japan is an earthquake zone, a bit like the Mississippi valley is a killer tornado zone (55 fatalities last year with major destruction of homes and businesses compared to zero deaths from radiation releases in Japan over the same year). If we were really concerned about safety above all else we'd evacuate both locations completely and bar them from human habitation forever. Not going to happen though.
Back in the 60s when the reactors were being planned our understanding of earthquakes and plate tectonics was very limited. We've done SCIENCE! on the subject over the past half-century and learned many things. The Japanese, knowing that their nation was prone to earthquakes (over 140,000 dead in the Great Kanto earthquake in Tokyo in 1923, for example) built their reactors to survive quite extreme ground shocks which they did. The effects of a millennial tsunami killed 20,000 people in ill-prepared coastal towns and cities, the earthquake itself killed fewer than a hundred (numbers are imprecise because of the tsunami that followed) because the Japanese building codes are based on the fact that earthquakes WILL happen.
Just keeping track of the circular loops of fairy stories, fantasy physics, delusions and "make shit up" that passes for citizen science and knowledgeable discourse on the subject of the radiation releases from Fukushima would be a full-time job and it wouldn't do any good anyway as the stories are self-reinforcing, passed from blog to blog and repeated in the comments with addenda and shifting decimal points among the Dark Conspiracy theories.
At least when you see enenews or globalresearch in the link or you find Arne Gunderson or Chris Busby headlining the DOOM! DOOM! and THRICE DOOM! story the link ends up at you know you've reached the bullshit zero energy point and you can stop there but the perpetual notion machine is still churning away in the background -- did you know that if a fuel rod is dropped while being moved from the SFP in reactor 4 it will trigger a flash-fission event resulting in a flux of neutrons so intense it will make the reactors in the Daini plant ten kilometres south of Fukushima Daiichi explode? I read that on the globalresearch website a few days ago, written by a Japanese guy who's been going into the exclusion zone to offer herbal therapy to folks living there, so it must be true/snark.
As for U and Pu being detected in soil samples at Fukushima, uranium is quite a common constituent of soil. The samples tested don't show any enrichment from natural levels whereas pollution due to fuel pellets would be at least 2% U-235 and maybe more. As for plutonium there's about the same amount of Pu-239 and Pu-240 as was present before the reactors were built courtesy of Fat Man, Castle Bravo and its sisters (amounting to about 150 megatonnes of Instant Sunshine in the Pacific) and even the Tsarbomba made its presence felt in the isotopic record. Some more was added in 1986 when Chernobyl let rip and its core burned to atmosphere. As long as the TEPCO engineers keep cooling the core remnants in the three reactors that's where the non-volatile elements like U and Pu will stay until they can be properly safed.
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Actually the tsunami defences along the Tohoku coast were a lot lower than the 5-metre high seawalls at Fukushima Daiichi, where defences existed at all of course. Lots of towns still don't have that much in the way of sea walls in place, Itami for instance.
Onomichi, a little seaside town in Japan I visit regularly has tsunami defence walls about a metre high with access gates through them to the piers and quays oceanside. The only change I've seen there since the 2011 tsunami are notices telling people not to park blocking the seagates so they can be closed in an emergency. Life goes on, Nihon.
Once you actually look, you find out the UN does a lot of productive stuff like peacekeeping and conflict monitoring, elections, health and welfare, education etc. It's just that sometimes the UN doesn't do as the American government tells it to do so it is by definition ineffective and unproductive.
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
There are plenty of places to bury waste, even spent fuel if the owners don't want to reprocess it. The fact is there isn't really a lot of spent fuel or reprocessed fuel waste around at the moment to dispose of. France, which has run forty power reactors for thirty years and more has a few hundred cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste and that's all. It's not a Hollywood movie scenario where this waste will start roaming the countryside destroying everything in its path with its fiery breath or converting mild-mannered Dr. Bruce Banner into the Hulk, it just sits there in large blocks of glass. It doesn't even glow in the dark.
Finland of all places is actually in the process of digging a deep hole, 500 metres down into shield bedrock, to put their spent fuel into. They expect this deep repository to handle about 400 reactor-years worth of spent fuel in the end and it will cost about a billion dollars US over a century or so before they cap it off. They've already got the money to pay for building it in the bank from a levy on electricity generated by their existing reactors over the past couple of decades.
Dry storage of spent fuel on the surface will suffice for most places for a few more decades before actually digging pricey holes to bury the stuff in. If nothing else it allows for generating levies to make paying for the excavations more effective. In the intervening time there might be breakthroughs in affordable reprocessing, economical waste-burning reactor designs get built, winged monkeys might fly out of my butt, whatever.
The problem is that any waste-burning reactors will still have to pay their way by generating electricity at an affordable price even with an offset for the value of destroying some waste. The BN-series reactors the Russians are building and operating and the Chinese are considering buying can burn waste but not a lot of it and they require highly-enriched uranium and plutonium to generate the neutron flux needed. The financial details of how much the existing BN-series reactors cost to run are not transparent.
There's a lot of Powerpoint Warriors in the waste-burning business, not many folks pouring concrete and bending metal. It's the same with proponents of small modular and thorium molten-salt reactors. The financial costs of licencing, building, operating and eventaully decommissioning such paper designs tend not to be emphasised in the flashy slide presentations.
True enough. If only nuclear waste facilities were held to the same regulatory standards as, say, fertiliser plants in Texas which are totally innocuous since they don't store any nuclear waste on their premises.
Ummm, no. That's a bit like saying the contents of a kebab shop's grease trap is organic so it will work perfectly well as fuel in your car engine, just pour it in and turn the key and away you go. The nuclear equivalent of the AAA is just a phonecall away after all.
Some transuranics aren't fertile, they produce less than one neutron per fission event on average so they damp out the chain reaction needed to keep a reactor operating. Some have a low cross-section, they're difficult to hit with a moderated neutron in the first place. Some eat neutrons and don't fission at all, so-called fission poisons. Most of them start off radioactive as hell with short half-lifes unlike regular enriched uranium which can be handled wearing gloves and a Tyvek overall so they're more difficult to use in fuel rods. There's also the radiochemistry and high-temperature performance of the materials, how do they expand as they heat up, do they disassociate from their oxide forms etc. etc.
Designing fuel elements using these materials, assuming you're willing to spend the billions needed to separate them out from one another and then reformulate them appropriately, is a complicated process which, given the currently ridiculously low cost of fresh enriched uranium fuel for power reactors, no-one is really interested in investigating. The only transuranic used in reactors anywhere today is plutonium in mixed-oxide fuel. It's being used only after years of experimental tests and commercial operation of such fuel elements. It's still a wash financially speaking given the pricetag for a reprocessing plant to make MOX -- the US has half-funded a plant to make MOX (probably to use up surplus military plutonium to begin with) but there are no customers signed up to use MOX fuel in the States, no guarantee the NRC would license its use in American reactors and Congress just zeroed the budget needed to continue construction of the MOX plant which is, needless to say, way over budget and behind schedule.
Translated from the Chinese: "Oh, look, the hardstand at the tropical Diego Garcia airfield has just sprouted a large rectangular patch of shrubbery usually native only to the West German plain but the really weird thing is that in near IR it's got the shape of a 777 underneath it. How odd, as Confucius might say."
If a Russian (or Chinese or French or Indian or any other nation's) LEO observation satellite crossed over Diego Garcia in the past two weeks then anyone attempting to hide a 65 metre long aircraft on that billiard ball of an island is going to be SOL.
A 777 doesn't do well on soft ground, it needs to roll on tarmac and concrete so if MH370 is on Diego Garcia island it's either on a hardstand off the runway or in a building attached to the hardstand areas. The only building even close to big enough to take it is a hangar which is, as I said before, only 40 metres deep. I suspect the hangar entrance isn't big enough vertically to even accept the nose of a 777 but I can't make that detail out from the Google Earth pictures.
Is Tracy Island in the neighbourhood? It could swallow a 777 no problem.
There isn't anywhere on Diego Garcia to hide MH 370 if it did land there. The only hangar at the airbase is 40 metres front to back and a 777-200ER is over 60 metres nose to tail so it would have to be parked in plain (so to speak) sight of everyone from janitors through pilots and aircrew working there.
Have a look at the island sometime on Google Earth, search for the Diego Garcia postcode which is BBND 1ZZ. The current image has a number of B-52s and (I think) KC-135 tankers parked on hardsstands; I've seen a B-1B there too in previous images. A 777 is significantly larger than a B-52.
Dispersants are designed to make the heavier oils in spills more available to microorganisms by turning large blobs of oil into small droplets and thus increasing the surface area exposed. The light fractions like kerosene in crude oil spills evaporate quite quickly, the heavier fractions can polymerise in sunlight to form tarry blobs with a lifetime of years or even decades if not dispersed promptly.
There are different formulations of dispersant nowadays. The version of Corexit available twenty years ago at the time of the Exxon-Valdez incident is now not recommended for inshore use especially in rocky places as it can adversely affect the ability of shellfish to cling to rocks. Alternatives are now available after those lessons were learned.
Nuclear energy's worst enemy IS cost, the upfront cost of building a unitary reactor structure that will only return its investment over a period of decades in a world where MBA-driven financial returns in the next quarter-year make or break an industry and its decision-makers. Cost is a drum the anti-nuclear religionists beat continually, possibly with the encouragement of the coal and gas interests.
Gas is currently cheap thanks to ever-improving production technologies including fracking. It kills people, a lot more than nuclear power ever did (six dead, I think, from that gas explosion in Manhattan last week which is already old news compared to Fukushima Daiichi which killed nobody from radiation releases). There's also the CO2 emissions it engenders but nobody cares about those.
The molten-salt reactors boosters tend to handwave away many severe problems with their assorted designs, things like the existing light-water reactor designs have already overcome or just don't have problems with such as how to decommission an obsolete molten-salt reactor at end-of-life where much of its structure has been in direct contact with highly radioactive isotopes at very high temperatures for decades. With "normal" reactors the fuel and its waste products stay in the fuel rods and when they're removed the reactor vessel structure is only slightly radioactive and just leaving it for a few decades in Safestore makes it trivial to take apart.
As for proliferation risks all molten-salt reactor concepts I've ever seen require a continuous-processing facility next to the reactor to continuously remove problematic isotopes from the fuel stream that would disrupt its operation by absorbing neutrons. In the case of the thorium-breeder designs the neutron economy is quite precarious since they need to breed Th-232 into fissile U-233 to work at all which is not a problem existing light-water reactors face.
Given that the molten salt stream has to be processed on-site then it is not impossible that an unscrupulous operator could tweak the processor to, say, remove and collect U-233 in small amounts over a given period and that is quite acceptable bomb-making material.
Efficiency in fuel burnup is not a factor in deciding which kind of reactors to build today since uranium is cheap at the moment and will not be rare and expensive for at least sixty years and probably longer (the bottom-line cost is thought to be about $300 per kilo of uranium metal extracted from seawater). The uranium mining industry is currently closing and mothballing mines around the world due to lack of ongoing demand for their product.
The most efficient power reactors running today are the British gas-cooled carbon-moderated AGRs but they're white elephants, as cheap to run as new-design LWRs but more expensive to build in the first place. No more will be built anywhere. CANDUs are also expensive in terms of capital cost per kWh of electricity generated even though they can run on unenriched uranium but the cost savings don't really make them that attractive in the commercial market. They also have proliferation risks due to their ability to be refuelled "on the run" by unscrupulous parties.
The Malaysian Airlines 777 in question didn't have satellite ACARS capability, only VHF (and maybe HF too) radios carrying ACARS data. I'm not even sure it had any SATCOM equipment fitted at all. There was a recent airworthiness directive for 777-series aircraft about hull skin problems where SATCOM antennas are mounted on the top of the fuselage but it didn't apply to the Malaysian Airlines 777s since apparently they didn't have those antennas fitted.
If the HF and VHF radios on board were shut down for any reason then there would be no more ACARS data received by ground stations.
That's great, consumers buy their own phones with their own OS on them. Who are the consumers going to call if none of the network providers will handshake with their RMS-OS phone? The network providers might well claim that unless the radio and network connection stacks are well-tested and not likely to cripple their towers by DDoSing them then they don't get to play in their sandbox and for that the stacks have to be "blobs" under their control.
The ACARS only transmits in bursts while the plane is in flight, usually when there's been a change to the engine settings or operating conditions. Data transmission to satellites necessary for trans-oceanic flights costs money on a per-packet basis so there's no continuous data streaming. I think they log more data and dump it at the end of the flight once the plane's on the ground.
Tornadoes kill people and destroy townships in central US pretty much every year -- 2011 had an exceptionally high body count, driven in part by a single tornado that wiped out a town and killed over 150 people, but it's usually 20 or 30 minimum even in a quiet year. The Great Tohoku earthquake of 2011 actually killed very few, probably under a hundred people and they were the first substantial deaths from an earthquake in Japan for over a decade. The tsunami that followed killed about 20,000 people but it was the first really serious tsunami for a long time and from the records the biggest to hit Japan in a millennium.
The second biggest death toll in 2011 in japan was from a couple of typhoons that his the south of Honshu in the autumn, killing over 90 people. Japan is just a dangerous place. Then again the annual death toll in the US from firearms balances things out somewhat.
"areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen"
That describes the entire nation of Japan pretty much. The earthquake and tsunami of 2011 isn't even the biggest natural disaster in Japan in the last hundred years, the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 killed more than 100,000 people in Tokyo. The Kobe earthquake in 1995 killed about 5,000. The Japanese write books with titles like "Japan sinks!" and make animes like "Tokyo Magnitude 8.0" but they love their country even if it is actively trying to kill them.
Next time you've got a half-day in Tokyo go over to the Metropolitan Towers, the city's local government building near Shinjiku. There's a free observation gallery you can visit on the 36th floor and on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji to the south-west. That's an active volcano, by the way, less than 100km from where 30-odd million people live and work. It's at the corner of three active tectonic plates, the source of the 1923 earthquake I mentioned.
As for "areas where very destructive natural disasters are know to happen" why do people live in the Mississippi valley with its killer tornadoes (550 dead in 2011 alone)? Do Americans like taking risks that much?
"It is not a coincidence that some of the world's most odious governments are major petroleum producers. "
The USA is currently no. 3 in terms of oil production at about 10% of the world's total. North Korea is 110th, according to Wikipedia. Just sayin'.
It was only a couple of years ago someone found a significant bug in Unix that had been around since 1986, a 32-bit x 32-bit multiply routine that returned a 32-bit answer. It had been in Linux since the start in the early 90s and nobody had noticed it.
No, the four new reactors are being built right now, bending rebar and pouring concrete on site as I type this. The legal challenges and other distractions are done and dusted, the financial instruments are arranged with Government guarantees for the commercial-market loans (not financial payments, just guarantees) that are paying for the builds.
I don't think there are many if any new starts going to happen this year, on the other hand about 75% of the existing nuclear fleet in the US has received licence extensions past the original forty year mark and most in that age bracket are in train for mid-life upgrades and replacement of parts that are wearing out, like steam generators etc.
Right now gas is cheap, coal is cheaper, nobody cares that much about flue gases and pollution from coal and gas generators and wind and solar are still getting lots of financial and legislative support from the government. Nuclear is the Cinderella of the US electricity market, unloved and untrusted but working away day after day generating about 20% of the US total requirement without emitting CO2, mercury, nitrous oxides, sulphur compounds, dioxins, cadmium, radium, radon gas etc.
The Japanese did restart a couple of reactors at Ohi about a year after 3/11 happened. Due to the way nuclear power is licenced and regulated in Japan they ran for 13 months before they were shut down for refuelling and inspection. Those two particular reactors have not yet restarted in part because the restart requires the agreement of the local government; in US terms that would be the county seat that hosts the reactors. The locals agreed to the first restart, they have hesitated allowing a second restart. A lot of the existing reactors in Japan (38 of them, I think) have been through a test and prep exercise over safety from earthquakes, tsunami, kaiju attacks etc. and the operators have applied for restarts. Nothing will happen quickly though.
On the other hand the US broke ground on four GenIII AP1000 reactors in 2013 as well as restarting the construction of another reactor in Tennessee (Watts Bar 2) that was left half-built a couple of decades ago. This one should be online next year, tabun.
Actually wealthy plantation slaveholders and their allies in the American colonies (Washington, Jefferson, even Franklin profited from slaves) broke away when it became obvious the British government was going to abolish slavery in the near future. I understand American history books take a different view but since they were written by the slaveholders, for the slaveholders that's not surprising.
Their constant harping on the British crown and George III as the Bad Guy because he wanted to abolish slavery is further evidence of their propagandistic efforts since the Crown had possessed little or no political power in Britain since the mid-1600s when Parliament explained the facts of life to Charles I with the edge of an axe. It was Parliament that sent troops to put down the treasonous rebellion of the slaveholders, not George.
The entire nation of Japan is an earthquake zone, a bit like the Mississippi valley is a killer tornado zone (55 fatalities last year with major destruction of homes and businesses compared to zero deaths from radiation releases in Japan over the same year). If we were really concerned about safety above all else we'd evacuate both locations completely and bar them from human habitation forever. Not going to happen though.
Back in the 60s when the reactors were being planned our understanding of earthquakes and plate tectonics was very limited. We've done SCIENCE! on the subject over the past half-century and learned many things. The Japanese, knowing that their nation was prone to earthquakes (over 140,000 dead in the Great Kanto earthquake in Tokyo in 1923, for example) built their reactors to survive quite extreme ground shocks which they did. The effects of a millennial tsunami killed 20,000 people in ill-prepared coastal towns and cities, the earthquake itself killed fewer than a hundred (numbers are imprecise because of the tsunami that followed) because the Japanese building codes are based on the fact that earthquakes WILL happen.
Just keeping track of the circular loops of fairy stories, fantasy physics, delusions and "make shit up" that passes for citizen science and knowledgeable discourse on the subject of the radiation releases from Fukushima would be a full-time job and it wouldn't do any good anyway as the stories are self-reinforcing, passed from blog to blog and repeated in the comments with addenda and shifting decimal points among the Dark Conspiracy theories.
At least when you see enenews or globalresearch in the link or you find Arne Gunderson or Chris Busby headlining the DOOM! DOOM! and THRICE DOOM! story the link ends up at you know you've reached the bullshit zero energy point and you can stop there but the perpetual notion machine is still churning away in the background -- did you know that if a fuel rod is dropped while being moved from the SFP in reactor 4 it will trigger a flash-fission event resulting in a flux of neutrons so intense it will make the reactors in the Daini plant ten kilometres south of Fukushima Daiichi explode? I read that on the globalresearch website a few days ago, written by a Japanese guy who's been going into the exclusion zone to offer herbal therapy to folks living there, so it must be true /snark.
As for U and Pu being detected in soil samples at Fukushima, uranium is quite a common constituent of soil. The samples tested don't show any enrichment from natural levels whereas pollution due to fuel pellets would be at least 2% U-235 and maybe more. As for plutonium there's about the same amount of Pu-239 and Pu-240 as was present before the reactors were built courtesy of Fat Man, Castle Bravo and its sisters (amounting to about 150 megatonnes of Instant Sunshine in the Pacific) and even the Tsarbomba made its presence felt in the isotopic record. Some more was added in 1986 when Chernobyl let rip and its core burned to atmosphere. As long as the TEPCO engineers keep cooling the core remnants in the three reactors that's where the non-volatile elements like U and Pu will stay until they can be properly safed.
Damn you, you made me click on a Chris Busby link without telling me. Why didn't you warn me?