In spite of all of the junior high kids that make apps in the language, there is a strong adult community there as well... usually talking about educational applications of the language but sometimes getting into more serious programming discussions too. Some modding goes on, but if you have been out of the loop for 20 years from doing much programming, it will give you a fresh perspective in terms of newer programming paradigms and allow you to have some fun at the same time. Don't dismiss the power of this language as it has done some pretty amazing things, including emulating an operating system, doing finite state machines, and almost anything else you can imagine. Its power is more with multimedia development (rendering graphics, sprite manipulation, and audio integration into projects is like breathing air and foundational to the language), but it has pointers, arrays, and some nifty I/O controls as well. Some strong limits, but I presume by your restriction on language choices that you want a high level language.
If you want to get real retro though, I would strongly recommend that you check out the DCPU-16. This is going to be the base "computer" used for a really cool science fiction game. If you want to have automated drones frying opponents on other continents, this is an environment you might want to check out. There are some compilers already written for this "computer within a computer" and even a couple of operating systems, but it has a real retro feel for what computers were like 20 years ago. For more information, see also the 0x10^c Wiki. Full all out cyber warfare is encouraged in this game too. Viruses, trojans, social exploiits, buffer overflows, and every trick in the book you can think of is going to play a part in this game. I don't know about the legality of those actions within the game, but if you really want to get into true hacking, this is a game for you.
That post (on Reddit) is one of the most insightful posts I have read in a long, long time.
If that is the current state of the nuclear power industry for Japan, that would certainly make sense why they are shutting down all of their nuclear plants pending a full safety review. It sure as hell makes much more sense than most of the tripe that I see from the anti-nuclear activists that have been posting here on Slashdot.
My only concern is that such a massive full smash of all plants would also warrant a Manhattan Project style engineering effort to get as many of those reactors back on line ASAP... something that doesn't seem to be indicated in the article. I have to presume that Japan and its government has at least a tiny portion of intelligence in terms of putting something like that together if necessary. The disaster that they are facing right now to deal with the shortfall of energy production from this shut down is more than I can possibly understand other than I see it even here in America as a political disaster waiting to happen. This is the kind of crap that usually gets a major party shift to happen in most countries.
My concern is mainly with the anti-nuclear nuts using this for their own political advantage and using it to shut down what new nuclear power plants are currently being built in America (there are currently a few of them) where the largest issues involved are legal costs and not engineering costs. When you need a dozen lawyers to protect each engineer, you know your project is screwed from the beginning.
State of the art engineering at the time the plant was built did not fully understand all the possible failure modes. You are just arguing semantics.
That is a failure of engineering management when specifications are ignored or not considered, not engineering. Any engineer worthy of the title has planned for and considered every possible corner case and doomsday scenario. What happens is that the engineering management (or the MBAs in charge of them) hear the concerns and then throw out possible remediation for those concerns due to cost and other non-engineering reasons. The same thing is what sank the Titanic, killed the astronauts on the Columbia and Challenger, caused several dams to fail, and led to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrow Bridge. Crappy engineering management is what led to the disaster at the Denver Colorado airport with their luggage system (if you want to see even software engineering management fit a disaster almost on a similar scale).
The engineers certainly understood everything that was going on and likely even sent memos (in the case of Fukushima they did send memos, as well as each of the specific examples I gave above) complaing that people were going to die if their recommendations were not taken seriously. Perhaps some of the engineers could have been more forceful about the situation, but that is where engineers sometimes get fired when management doesn't care about those recommendations. If you get fired for being forceful, I guess you can leave a project with a clean conscience that you did everything it took to get the job done, but then you get to see some junior engineer get promoted into your position having to face the same issues when you left but with considerably less experience to get the job done and being told they have to sign off on the rejection of your ideas or face the same consequence. It really sucks to be that junior engineer having to face management when people you know were better than you quit or were fired for making a stand.
Fukushima was a massive screwup of management refusing to take the critical issues seriously that were already pointed out to them by the very people they were paying to tell them about critical issues. Very simple and relatively cheap "fixes" could have been done and simply were in a penny wise pound foolish attitude... and those engineers weren't protected by upper management from vindictive middle management when those same engineers stuck their necks on the line. The government regulators also had some issues.... pointed out in earlier replies.
This is not just arguing semantics but pointing out how political pressures can impact real engineering in a negative way.
It also isn't too hard of a concept to grasp that you need a whole bunch of 500 kW wind farms (a typical size) to come up with the 5-10 GW that a single nuclear power plant produces like the Fukushima plant.
What is really necessary to shut down ALL of the current nuclear power plants in Japan?
As a part of the mix so Japan doesn't need to rely completely upon nuclear power, having other options is a good thing, so I'd agree that wind, geothermal, solar, and other technologies certainly ought to be tried and used. There isn't any reason to be stuck on just one possible solution. The sad thing is that the only realistic alternative to nuclear is not wind or solar, but rather coal or oil... at least in the short to near term, meaning the next six months to about ten years. As a longer term prospect, perhaps wind and solar can be used, but why rule out nuclear power completely?
I do like the idea of a "laboratory of states", where governmental policies applied in one state can be tried for awhile to see if a particular political concept works or not, and to allow those ideas to "spread" to other states if they seem successful. The idea of imposing policies on the federal level is the notion that if the idea is flawed, that you have no way to compare the flawed idea to other ideas to see if there might have been something better.
I don't mind the "California Air Quality Board" setting policy for California where Nevada, Idaho, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina would have a similar kind of authority for their own respective citizens. Perhaps other "solutions" or priorities might work better in other states, where some states might encourage "green energy", others to do fossil fuel production, some might go to biofuels, and others might even decide to invest into nuclear fusion or some other technology that hasn't even been invented yet.
There is no "silver bullet" in terms of what kind of energy we should or for that matter other kinds of political ideas as well (choose your favorite topic, but since this is a thread about energy production, energy policy certainly seems to be good to mention here).
There is a point to be made here. I would agree that the mega structure nuclear power plants that concentrate dozens of reactors in a small space that are each built to produce gigawatts of power are a part of the problem.
If instead of a 5 GW plant (such as the Fukushima plant before the disaster) you had a hundred 50 MW plants (still fairly big in terms of economically capable of hiring full-time nuclear engineers to run them), you could not only get to the point that the safety issues learned at one plant could be transferred over to the other plants, but that a disaster at one of those plants wouldn't do nearly so much damage. The issue of concentrating power production of nearly all forms of energy is a huge issue. Indeed it could be argued that all forms of energy production seem to cause ecological damage when they are done in such a way to concentrate their energy production capacity.
To use another example, a bunch of small wind farms of relatively small windmills will kill fewer birds and do far less damage than a bunch of huge wind turbines in a small concentrated area. This is not just isolated to nuclear power production. The same could be said about hydroelectric power plants (big dams are incredibly destructive), geothermal, and even coal power plants. The town I live in uses a series of several very small dams for hydroelectric power, and the environmental damage is considerably less... to the point you need to go out of your way to even know where the dams are located at even if you drive by them or even on top of them.
Thinking small about electricity generation is perhaps a good thing to consider, where the power should be potentially generated much more on a local basis and small enough that ordinary people can raise legitimate concerns about how that power is being made... and that ordinary people can learn about how that power is made.
I certainly wouldn't object to a smallish 1 MW power plant being built literally in my back yard, but I would be a bit more concerned about a 10 GW plant. The scale of problems that happen at those higher energy densities much less trying to distribute that power are very complex.
There are also some very good nuclear power plant designs that work on the MegaWatt scale that don't suffer from meltdown problems of some of the older designs.
Geothermal plants are so few and produce such low amounts of power that it really can't be used as a legitimate comparison. Besides, there aren't enough sources of geothermal power to be able to produce the energy of even a single nuclear power plant.
You might be surprised though about industrial accidents in geothermal plants, and certainly on a per kilowatt-hour of power generated it would at least be comparable to nuclear power plants, if not a bit higher because nuclear plants have much higher training standards for their workers.
Also look at the environmental impacts of these kind of plants, that aren't insignificant. If that article is correct, world-wide electricity production from geothermal sources is about 10 Gigawatts, which is about twice the amount that the Fukushima plant provided on its own. Sure, the potential is there for increased capacity, but it is a valid comparison and you shouldn't presume there have been zero deaths from that form of energy production.
Don't even get me started on dams like the Three Gorges Dam and severalotherdams. In fact huge dams seem be be done in part because governments can point to them as something they have accomplished which brings economic prosperity to the region. Regardless, make sure you look at the articles I've linked to and see the widespread and devastating environmental consequences to those projects. Of course dam failures also happen from time to time including one such disaster close to my home that resulted in widespread damage and several deaths.
If Fukushima had been a large off-shore wind farm, there may not have been as many deaths right away, but for the same power production you would likely have had by far and away many more deaths from construction workers and technicians trying to build that farm. I don't think you could find a geothermal source anywhere near Fukushima that would even remotely produce that much power, so your comparison here is completely off.
A series of coal powered plants producing the same amount of power would likely have produced even more radioactive debris fallout (from the mined coal itself), not to mention the deaths of the workers in those plants from "industrial accidents" as well as simply mining that much coal to keep those plants in operation. That doesn't even deal with the deaths caused from increased pollution in the air near Fukushima if they had been coal plants. The environmental consequences for building that many coal plants not to mention the widespread environmental damage from mining that much coal more than easily offsets any damage this nuclear power plant caused... even if you think meltdowns like what happened at Fukushima is merely normal operation (which it wasn't).
Fukushima happened because of dual disasters (the earthquake plus the tsusami) and then some simply inept planning that put the back-up generators that could have prevented the plant from dying in perhaps the worst possible location. It was almost like installing a screen door on a submarine.
I would expect that a proper engineering review board would be convened over the incident at Fukushima, and it would likely include the top nuclear engineers from around the world with several academic conferences going over the safety issues and how to prevent similar accidents like that in the future. That still doesn't justify why you need to have a knee jerk reaction like is happening here.
There may be some similar kind of ineptitude at the other nuclear power plants, and if a rational review shows a systemic safety issue that compares those other plants to Fukushima, the concerns for another meltdown might be legitimate. I don't know enough about the specifics of the Japanese nuclear power industry to make an objective decision here, but these "activists" I'm sure are just as ignorant as I am over those issue, and perhaps more so because they also have an irrational fear of nuclear power.
Comparing coal to nuclear power is legitimate and not a straw man because it will be (and is) coal-powered plants that are taking up the slack. It is a perfectly valid approach to suggest that you need to look at how many people you kill when you flip on a light switch in your house, and to suggest real safety concerns ought to be addressed at reducing that number to as low as reasonably possible. People die in the quest for producing energy, a sad fact of life that should be addressed when you are talking about safety issue.
I won't bother, but at least try to look up the statistics with a search engine if you dare try. If anything, because of the locations where solar power devices are installed (typically roof tops), there are a number of deaths each year. In terms of deaths per kilowatt-hour produced, solar power farms are likely one of the most dangerous ways to generate electricity.
You may say they qualify for a Darwin Award, and that may be true. But you are asking for the same standards which apply to the nuclear power generation industry to be applied to solar production and there is hardly a comparison. Nuclear power is by far and away much safer and has much better trained technicians performing the installation and operation of these facilities than anything being done with solar power at the moment.
Do you see coal plants or even solar power farms being rebuilt every ten years?
*FACEPALM*
An accident at a coal or solar plant just can't be as bad as Fukushima. It couldn't spread radioactive material over a wide area, making that area uninhabitable. There is no comparison.
You are correct. There is no comparison to the widespread contamination of nuclear material that a coal powered electricity generation plant makes compared to nuclear power plants. It is far worse for coal plants. Not only that, but deaths directly attributable to coal being used as a power source are by far and away much, much higher for coal plants both in terms of the number of plants in operation and "industrial accidents" at those plants, the deaths from miners who are extracting that coal from the ground, and the deaths from ordinary people who die from the air pollution these plants produce. China is a very good case study on that point where hundreds of miners die each year (on average) from coal mines collapsing... much less coal mines elsewhere.
I can point to specific people who have died recently from the production of coal powered electricity. Can you do the same thing for nuclear power production?
At current typical launch prices, space solar power satellites simply are uneconomical. I could go over the math here, but unless you are obtaining the resources to build these satellites using resources from a company like Planetary Resources (aka from asteroids or from the Moon), you simply can't get them built. Certainly it is foolish to try to ship all of the materials out of the deepest gravity well in the Solar System besides the Sun and the gas giants. That doesn't even touch the issues of the rectenna.
For long-term planning, you can only presume $10,000 per kilogram for launch, and over the past two decades that price has been going up faster than inflation. There is some hope with commercial launchers like SpaceX, but with only seven flights and four of them being "successful", they still need to prove themselves and certainly shouldn't be relied upon for long-term planning for a system that will take dozens if not hundreds of launches in order to build one of these satellites. Don't even get me started about Planetary Resources.... they are about as new of a company as it gets and have a lot to prove. Perhaps in 30-50 years, they may be somebody to look at but at the moment they are still just getting their feet wet.
As for the Japanese being successful in putting up a solar power sat, I would have to say good luck with that. JAXA (the Japanese Space Agency) has launch prices more comparable to Lockheed-Martin and Boeing (aka about $10k/kg) and has not been very competitive in terms of landing contracts from other countries. That could change, and I'll admit that Japan should be considered a spacefaring nation that is a peer to America, Russia, Europe, China, and India. There are technicians smart enough to pull this off that are patriotic Japanese citizens and live in Japan, but the economics of the whole endeavor is something that just doesn't make sense at the moment.
If launch prices get below about $500/kg and very lightweight but strong materials could be found to make an efficient space solar power satellite, it might happen. I just don't see it happening within this decade from any country and is at best a futuristic dream. I generally am a huge commercial spaceflight fan, and I think Japan is going to get into that game in a huge way once some companies in America make some bold moves in that direction first (that is even a historical pattern for Japan I might add), but it seems like almost anything which needs to be done in space takes about 5-10 times as long to get done as anybody even knowledgeable about the concept seems to predict. The only exception to that was landing on the Moon in the 1960's, and that was done with an attitude of "waste anything but time"... not exactly something to inspire confidence of economic feasibility.
The problem with conservation is that you can't conserve or recycle your way out of a shortage. It can be something to be done as a temporary measure, but it shouldn't be viewed as a long term solution. I'm all for wise use of our resources, so don't take this as being against higher efficiency devices, but you also must take a more pragmatic way of thinking about this stuff. BTW, Obama was justifiably ridiculed over his comment of inflating tires while doing things like shutting down oil pipeline construction and killing oil leases and permits on a widespread basis.
As for the irrational fear that the Japanese people have over nuclear energy, I don't understand the concern. I still insist that the nuclear bombs ended up saving more Japanese lives in the long run and ended a bloody war that could have dragged on for many more years and left Japan as a complete ruin. That the bombs were shocking is true, although in the end I think Japan still prospered in a way that wouldn't have happened had the Japanese Imperial Army succeeded with all of their plans.
My hope is that this misguided attitude towards nuclear energy simply ends in Japan. If it does, they can try their experiments in environmental disaster as they see fit, and perhaps they will show the rest of the world how it should be done. Perhaps they will fail as well, so I'm glad that I'm not either a leader or citizen of that country. I just don't want to have it be said that pattern must be repeated elsewhere in the world too, certainly without seeing what the long term impacts of that experiment in Japan actually do. I believe it will be a disaster for Japan, but one that only time will tell.
As for nuclear fusion, I think we are much closer to getting it to work out than you may realize. I would put it in the range of something working in the next decade or so. It used to be said that fusion was something about 30-50 years in the future, but that was also 50 years ago when that was said. It still is a future technology, but advances of things like Focus Fusion, Polywell, and other kinds of technology that has seriously been studied may prove to be fruitful in the next few years. I have no hope for the Tokamak concept, which is sadly getting most of the financial support at the moment. If you want to follow an interesting blog put together by somebody who is making some real interesting progress in this area, I'd suggest you read this one: http://prometheusfusionperfection.com/
About the only significant natural resource Japan ever had was coal.... which is one of the reasons why it industrialized in the first place. Much of that coal has already been extracted though, so Japan generally does need to look elsewhere for their energy needs.
It is a good point to make though that oil prices are going to skyrocket due to this action in Japan. That will have some interesting impacts on other parts of the world.
Do you see coal plants or even solar power farms being rebuilt every ten years?
It takes time to phase in changes in engineering and design, where certainly nuclear energy plants built in the early 1960's perhaps ought to be phased out and shut down. Then again that was over 50 years ago. I would agree that 50 year old nuclear power plants should be decommissioned and perhaps even rebuilt. Sadly too many of plants that age are still being used because the new plants aren't being built to replace them.
There are also a number of factors that drive up costs for nuclear power plants. I think they can be made cost effective, and even safe enough that you don't ever need to worry about a disaster like Fukushima happening in the future. The largest driver of nuclear power plant cost in America has been largely due to the one-off nature of the plants. Most of them were experiments in engineering design where each plant was essentially a prototype incorporating the newest technology known at the time. Other countries (notably France) have gone beyond that and standardized designs which made it much cheaper to build those facilities... and because France built their reactors more recently they have higher standards as well.
Nuclear power isn't perfect, but it can certainly be something that should be in the mix and not ruled out.
It sort of looks like these environmentalists are celebrating the fact that ALL nuclear power plants have been shut down in Japan. While I will admit there might be some bad plants that needed to be shut down and that some changes needed to happen, was it necessary to shut all of them down at the same time?
Keep in mind that the celebration is over the last of the nuclear power plants being shut down. They are celebrating the death of even the concept of nuclear energy.
If there was a real concern about the environment, they would be far more worried about increasing dependence on coal and oil for electrical power. Heck, just by restarting some of these older coal power plants they are going to be introducing more radioactive debris into the environment than had they simply left the nuclear power plants running. These environmentalists are in that way celebrating a nuclear future AND the destruction of the environment on a massive scale, where many more people will die because these plants are being shut down.
If you were genuinely concerned about safety, you would be insisting that these nuclear power plants be restarted ASAP. If you look strictly at deaths directly caused from mining coal to replace these nuclear power plants, I think that would more than offset any potential deaths caused from even casual handling of spent nuclear rods, much less the risk of having another Fukushima-type disaster happening in the next few years.
That is why nobody listens to anti-nuke people. How is someone outside Japan affected? The rods won't go critical if the building comes down, so there'll be no fallout. So "humanity" isn't under any threat at all. It can't hurt most of the world. So humanity won't care.
Considering that debris and radioactive waste from Fukushima landed in my back yard, it does become somewhat of an issue. And no, I don't live in Japan... but I do live downwind from Japan. At least the Pacific Ocean offered a little bit of protection so the bulk of the cloud from that disaster didn't hit my house. There are some large scale issues with nuclear engineering, and sometimes you do need to consider the effects outside of the immediate area where the reactors are built.
This said, I do think the GP post was way over the top and exaggerating things a bit. The storage of the rods isn't all that difficult to deal with, but it does take some creative solutions.
The point being made is that the passengers took charge and made sure that their plane wasn't going to be a bomb crashing into a building killing thousands of people. Crashing into an abandoned mine was better than crashing into a daycare center.
Had those passengers thought instead that they were going to get a "free" vacation trip to Cuba, they likely wouldn't have acted in that manner and the "hijackers" might have even lived to see the next day or even gone home.
Airplanes that took off between 1931 and 2001 and then had a terrorist on board merely made a unplanned stop in Havana. Pilots were given formal instructions to cooperate with a terrorist (called a "hijacker") and do any reasonable thing they asked for until police could deal with them.
It was the realization that some of those "terrorists" had a death wish and didn't care if the plane landed at a gentle speed or if they even survived the landing that resulted in some changes toward how they were treated. I really don't think the TSA needed to take over the security in all of the airports just to deal with this one change in attitude toward the terrorists. Flight 93 on 9/11/2001 proved that point.
Some people speak languages of mathematics that are different than the C programming language. At least you understood what he was saying, even if you were a grammar Nazi insisting upon a coding convention that doesn't apply when using English in an informal grammar rather than a formal grammar that you are insisting to be used here.
Yeah right. You don't think that the first thing they do when the privatize the security is grant the immunity?
Private security forces ran the security of airports prior to 9/11/2001. Why would it be necessarily different if the TSA was no longer around?
I assume that the reason you think the 4th amendment won't apply is because you think that applies only to a government agency? Why do you think that is the case?
And no, I don't think it will be the "first thing they do" to grant any kind of immunity.
No, it isn't necessarily "privatizing" the security, but turning the responsibility back to individual states and local police departments to worry about the security of the airports in their jurisdiction. If you don't like a private security force doing that kind of thing, complain to your mayor, city council, or state legislature and get a government much more responsive to your needs and to your community to deal with the problems which are in your community.
If anything, this will increase accountability and allow you as an ordinary citizen to be able to complain to people who find your individual vote and your input as a citizen bot be much more valuable than some faceless federal bureaucracy headquartered in some distant capital that likely has never even heard of your town and quite possibly couldn't even find your state on a map if they tried.
Prior to September 11th, 2001, how many bombs were detonated in security lines? Also, who is "they"?
There were certainly problems with some security checkpoints prior to 9/11/2001, but bringing in the TSA didn't really solve that many of the problems.
Slashdot Mirror
And you complain about environmental damange.....
If you really want to try something cutting edge but still want to stay high level with your programming, I'd strongly suggest Scratch:
http://scratch.mit.edu/
In spite of all of the junior high kids that make apps in the language, there is a strong adult community there as well... usually talking about educational applications of the language but sometimes getting into more serious programming discussions too. Some modding goes on, but if you have been out of the loop for 20 years from doing much programming, it will give you a fresh perspective in terms of newer programming paradigms and allow you to have some fun at the same time. Don't dismiss the power of this language as it has done some pretty amazing things, including emulating an operating system, doing finite state machines, and almost anything else you can imagine. Its power is more with multimedia development (rendering graphics, sprite manipulation, and audio integration into projects is like breathing air and foundational to the language), but it has pointers, arrays, and some nifty I/O controls as well. Some strong limits, but I presume by your restriction on language choices that you want a high level language.
If you want to get real retro though, I would strongly recommend that you check out the DCPU-16. This is going to be the base "computer" used for a really cool science fiction game. If you want to have automated drones frying opponents on other continents, this is an environment you might want to check out. There are some compilers already written for this "computer within a computer" and even a couple of operating systems, but it has a real retro feel for what computers were like 20 years ago. For more information, see also the 0x10^c Wiki. Full all out cyber warfare is encouraged in this game too. Viruses, trojans, social exploiits, buffer overflows, and every trick in the book you can think of is going to play a part in this game. I don't know about the legality of those actions within the game, but if you really want to get into true hacking, this is a game for you.
That post (on Reddit) is one of the most insightful posts I have read in a long, long time.
If that is the current state of the nuclear power industry for Japan, that would certainly make sense why they are shutting down all of their nuclear plants pending a full safety review. It sure as hell makes much more sense than most of the tripe that I see from the anti-nuclear activists that have been posting here on Slashdot.
My only concern is that such a massive full smash of all plants would also warrant a Manhattan Project style engineering effort to get as many of those reactors back on line ASAP... something that doesn't seem to be indicated in the article. I have to presume that Japan and its government has at least a tiny portion of intelligence in terms of putting something like that together if necessary. The disaster that they are facing right now to deal with the shortfall of energy production from this shut down is more than I can possibly understand other than I see it even here in America as a political disaster waiting to happen. This is the kind of crap that usually gets a major party shift to happen in most countries.
My concern is mainly with the anti-nuclear nuts using this for their own political advantage and using it to shut down what new nuclear power plants are currently being built in America (there are currently a few of them) where the largest issues involved are legal costs and not engineering costs. When you need a dozen lawyers to protect each engineer, you know your project is screwed from the beginning.
State of the art engineering at the time the plant was built did not fully understand all the possible failure modes. You are just arguing semantics.
That is a failure of engineering management when specifications are ignored or not considered, not engineering. Any engineer worthy of the title has planned for and considered every possible corner case and doomsday scenario. What happens is that the engineering management (or the MBAs in charge of them) hear the concerns and then throw out possible remediation for those concerns due to cost and other non-engineering reasons. The same thing is what sank the Titanic, killed the astronauts on the Columbia and Challenger, caused several dams to fail, and led to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrow Bridge. Crappy engineering management is what led to the disaster at the Denver Colorado airport with their luggage system (if you want to see even software engineering management fit a disaster almost on a similar scale).
The engineers certainly understood everything that was going on and likely even sent memos (in the case of Fukushima they did send memos, as well as each of the specific examples I gave above) complaing that people were going to die if their recommendations were not taken seriously. Perhaps some of the engineers could have been more forceful about the situation, but that is where engineers sometimes get fired when management doesn't care about those recommendations. If you get fired for being forceful, I guess you can leave a project with a clean conscience that you did everything it took to get the job done, but then you get to see some junior engineer get promoted into your position having to face the same issues when you left but with considerably less experience to get the job done and being told they have to sign off on the rejection of your ideas or face the same consequence. It really sucks to be that junior engineer having to face management when people you know were better than you quit or were fired for making a stand.
Fukushima was a massive screwup of management refusing to take the critical issues seriously that were already pointed out to them by the very people they were paying to tell them about critical issues. Very simple and relatively cheap "fixes" could have been done and simply were in a penny wise pound foolish attitude... and those engineers weren't protected by upper management from vindictive middle management when those same engineers stuck their necks on the line. The government regulators also had some issues.... pointed out in earlier replies.
This is not just arguing semantics but pointing out how political pressures can impact real engineering in a negative way.
It also isn't too hard of a concept to grasp that you need a whole bunch of 500 kW wind farms (a typical size) to come up with the 5-10 GW that a single nuclear power plant produces like the Fukushima plant.
What is really necessary to shut down ALL of the current nuclear power plants in Japan?
As a part of the mix so Japan doesn't need to rely completely upon nuclear power, having other options is a good thing, so I'd agree that wind, geothermal, solar, and other technologies certainly ought to be tried and used. There isn't any reason to be stuck on just one possible solution. The sad thing is that the only realistic alternative to nuclear is not wind or solar, but rather coal or oil... at least in the short to near term, meaning the next six months to about ten years. As a longer term prospect, perhaps wind and solar can be used, but why rule out nuclear power completely?
It was a loan they didn't repay though, so it became a subsidy as the loan was guaranteed by the U.S. federal government.
I do like the idea of a "laboratory of states", where governmental policies applied in one state can be tried for awhile to see if a particular political concept works or not, and to allow those ideas to "spread" to other states if they seem successful. The idea of imposing policies on the federal level is the notion that if the idea is flawed, that you have no way to compare the flawed idea to other ideas to see if there might have been something better.
I don't mind the "California Air Quality Board" setting policy for California where Nevada, Idaho, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina would have a similar kind of authority for their own respective citizens. Perhaps other "solutions" or priorities might work better in other states, where some states might encourage "green energy", others to do fossil fuel production, some might go to biofuels, and others might even decide to invest into nuclear fusion or some other technology that hasn't even been invented yet.
There is no "silver bullet" in terms of what kind of energy we should or for that matter other kinds of political ideas as well (choose your favorite topic, but since this is a thread about energy production, energy policy certainly seems to be good to mention here).
There is a point to be made here. I would agree that the mega structure nuclear power plants that concentrate dozens of reactors in a small space that are each built to produce gigawatts of power are a part of the problem.
If instead of a 5 GW plant (such as the Fukushima plant before the disaster) you had a hundred 50 MW plants (still fairly big in terms of economically capable of hiring full-time nuclear engineers to run them), you could not only get to the point that the safety issues learned at one plant could be transferred over to the other plants, but that a disaster at one of those plants wouldn't do nearly so much damage. The issue of concentrating power production of nearly all forms of energy is a huge issue. Indeed it could be argued that all forms of energy production seem to cause ecological damage when they are done in such a way to concentrate their energy production capacity.
To use another example, a bunch of small wind farms of relatively small windmills will kill fewer birds and do far less damage than a bunch of huge wind turbines in a small concentrated area. This is not just isolated to nuclear power production. The same could be said about hydroelectric power plants (big dams are incredibly destructive), geothermal, and even coal power plants. The town I live in uses a series of several very small dams for hydroelectric power, and the environmental damage is considerably less... to the point you need to go out of your way to even know where the dams are located at even if you drive by them or even on top of them.
Thinking small about electricity generation is perhaps a good thing to consider, where the power should be potentially generated much more on a local basis and small enough that ordinary people can raise legitimate concerns about how that power is being made... and that ordinary people can learn about how that power is made.
I certainly wouldn't object to a smallish 1 MW power plant being built literally in my back yard, but I would be a bit more concerned about a 10 GW plant. The scale of problems that happen at those higher energy densities much less trying to distribute that power are very complex.
There are also some very good nuclear power plant designs that work on the MegaWatt scale that don't suffer from meltdown problems of some of the older designs.
Geothermal plants are so few and produce such low amounts of power that it really can't be used as a legitimate comparison. Besides, there aren't enough sources of geothermal power to be able to produce the energy of even a single nuclear power plant.
You might be surprised though about industrial accidents in geothermal plants, and certainly on a per kilowatt-hour of power generated it would at least be comparable to nuclear power plants, if not a bit higher because nuclear plants have much higher training standards for their workers.
Also look at the environmental impacts of these kind of plants, that aren't insignificant. If that article is correct, world-wide electricity production from geothermal sources is about 10 Gigawatts, which is about twice the amount that the Fukushima plant provided on its own. Sure, the potential is there for increased capacity, but it is a valid comparison and you shouldn't presume there have been zero deaths from that form of energy production.
If you are comparing economic and environmental costs of nuclear power compared to coal, at least please read this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal_mining
Don't even get me started on dams like the Three Gorges Dam and several other dams. In fact huge dams seem be be done in part because governments can point to them as something they have accomplished which brings economic prosperity to the region. Regardless, make sure you look at the articles I've linked to and see the widespread and devastating environmental consequences to those projects. Of course dam failures also happen from time to time including one such disaster close to my home that resulted in widespread damage and several deaths.
If Fukushima had been a large off-shore wind farm, there may not have been as many deaths right away, but for the same power production you would likely have had by far and away many more deaths from construction workers and technicians trying to build that farm. I don't think you could find a geothermal source anywhere near Fukushima that would even remotely produce that much power, so your comparison here is completely off.
A series of coal powered plants producing the same amount of power would likely have produced even more radioactive debris fallout (from the mined coal itself), not to mention the deaths of the workers in those plants from "industrial accidents" as well as simply mining that much coal to keep those plants in operation. That doesn't even deal with the deaths caused from increased pollution in the air near Fukushima if they had been coal plants. The environmental consequences for building that many coal plants not to mention the widespread environmental damage from mining that much coal more than easily offsets any damage this nuclear power plant caused... even if you think meltdowns like what happened at Fukushima is merely normal operation (which it wasn't).
Fukushima happened because of dual disasters (the earthquake plus the tsusami) and then some simply inept planning that put the back-up generators that could have prevented the plant from dying in perhaps the worst possible location. It was almost like installing a screen door on a submarine.
I would expect that a proper engineering review board would be convened over the incident at Fukushima, and it would likely include the top nuclear engineers from around the world with several academic conferences going over the safety issues and how to prevent similar accidents like that in the future. That still doesn't justify why you need to have a knee jerk reaction like is happening here.
There may be some similar kind of ineptitude at the other nuclear power plants, and if a rational review shows a systemic safety issue that compares those other plants to Fukushima, the concerns for another meltdown might be legitimate. I don't know enough about the specifics of the Japanese nuclear power industry to make an objective decision here, but these "activists" I'm sure are just as ignorant as I am over those issue, and perhaps more so because they also have an irrational fear of nuclear power.
Comparing coal to nuclear power is legitimate and not a straw man because it will be (and is) coal-powered plants that are taking up the slack. It is a perfectly valid approach to suggest that you need to look at how many people you kill when you flip on a light switch in your house, and to suggest real safety concerns ought to be addressed at reducing that number to as low as reasonably possible. People die in the quest for producing energy, a sad fact of life that should be addressed when you are talking about safety issue.
I won't bother, but at least try to look up the statistics with a search engine if you dare try. If anything, because of the locations where solar power devices are installed (typically roof tops), there are a number of deaths each year. In terms of deaths per kilowatt-hour produced, solar power farms are likely one of the most dangerous ways to generate electricity.
You may say they qualify for a Darwin Award, and that may be true. But you are asking for the same standards which apply to the nuclear power generation industry to be applied to solar production and there is hardly a comparison. Nuclear power is by far and away much safer and has much better trained technicians performing the installation and operation of these facilities than anything being done with solar power at the moment.
Do you see coal plants or even solar power farms being rebuilt every ten years?
*FACEPALM*
An accident at a coal or solar plant just can't be as bad as Fukushima. It couldn't spread radioactive material over a wide area, making that area uninhabitable. There is no comparison.
You are correct. There is no comparison to the widespread contamination of nuclear material that a coal powered electricity generation plant makes compared to nuclear power plants. It is far worse for coal plants. Not only that, but deaths directly attributable to coal being used as a power source are by far and away much, much higher for coal plants both in terms of the number of plants in operation and "industrial accidents" at those plants, the deaths from miners who are extracting that coal from the ground, and the deaths from ordinary people who die from the air pollution these plants produce. China is a very good case study on that point where hundreds of miners die each year (on average) from coal mines collapsing... much less coal mines elsewhere.
I can point to specific people who have died recently from the production of coal powered electricity. Can you do the same thing for nuclear power production?
At current typical launch prices, space solar power satellites simply are uneconomical. I could go over the math here, but unless you are obtaining the resources to build these satellites using resources from a company like Planetary Resources (aka from asteroids or from the Moon), you simply can't get them built. Certainly it is foolish to try to ship all of the materials out of the deepest gravity well in the Solar System besides the Sun and the gas giants. That doesn't even touch the issues of the rectenna.
For long-term planning, you can only presume $10,000 per kilogram for launch, and over the past two decades that price has been going up faster than inflation. There is some hope with commercial launchers like SpaceX, but with only seven flights and four of them being "successful", they still need to prove themselves and certainly shouldn't be relied upon for long-term planning for a system that will take dozens if not hundreds of launches in order to build one of these satellites. Don't even get me started about Planetary Resources.... they are about as new of a company as it gets and have a lot to prove. Perhaps in 30-50 years, they may be somebody to look at but at the moment they are still just getting their feet wet.
As for the Japanese being successful in putting up a solar power sat, I would have to say good luck with that. JAXA (the Japanese Space Agency) has launch prices more comparable to Lockheed-Martin and Boeing (aka about $10k/kg) and has not been very competitive in terms of landing contracts from other countries. That could change, and I'll admit that Japan should be considered a spacefaring nation that is a peer to America, Russia, Europe, China, and India. There are technicians smart enough to pull this off that are patriotic Japanese citizens and live in Japan, but the economics of the whole endeavor is something that just doesn't make sense at the moment.
If launch prices get below about $500/kg and very lightweight but strong materials could be found to make an efficient space solar power satellite, it might happen. I just don't see it happening within this decade from any country and is at best a futuristic dream. I generally am a huge commercial spaceflight fan, and I think Japan is going to get into that game in a huge way once some companies in America make some bold moves in that direction first (that is even a historical pattern for Japan I might add), but it seems like almost anything which needs to be done in space takes about 5-10 times as long to get done as anybody even knowledgeable about the concept seems to predict. The only exception to that was landing on the Moon in the 1960's, and that was done with an attitude of "waste anything but time"... not exactly something to inspire confidence of economic feasibility.
The problem with conservation is that you can't conserve or recycle your way out of a shortage. It can be something to be done as a temporary measure, but it shouldn't be viewed as a long term solution. I'm all for wise use of our resources, so don't take this as being against higher efficiency devices, but you also must take a more pragmatic way of thinking about this stuff. BTW, Obama was justifiably ridiculed over his comment of inflating tires while doing things like shutting down oil pipeline construction and killing oil leases and permits on a widespread basis.
As for the irrational fear that the Japanese people have over nuclear energy, I don't understand the concern. I still insist that the nuclear bombs ended up saving more Japanese lives in the long run and ended a bloody war that could have dragged on for many more years and left Japan as a complete ruin. That the bombs were shocking is true, although in the end I think Japan still prospered in a way that wouldn't have happened had the Japanese Imperial Army succeeded with all of their plans.
My hope is that this misguided attitude towards nuclear energy simply ends in Japan. If it does, they can try their experiments in environmental disaster as they see fit, and perhaps they will show the rest of the world how it should be done. Perhaps they will fail as well, so I'm glad that I'm not either a leader or citizen of that country. I just don't want to have it be said that pattern must be repeated elsewhere in the world too, certainly without seeing what the long term impacts of that experiment in Japan actually do. I believe it will be a disaster for Japan, but one that only time will tell.
As for nuclear fusion, I think we are much closer to getting it to work out than you may realize. I would put it in the range of something working in the next decade or so. It used to be said that fusion was something about 30-50 years in the future, but that was also 50 years ago when that was said. It still is a future technology, but advances of things like Focus Fusion, Polywell, and other kinds of technology that has seriously been studied may prove to be fruitful in the next few years. I have no hope for the Tokamak concept, which is sadly getting most of the financial support at the moment. If you want to follow an interesting blog put together by somebody who is making some real interesting progress in this area, I'd suggest you read this one: http://prometheusfusionperfection.com/
About the only significant natural resource Japan ever had was coal.... which is one of the reasons why it industrialized in the first place. Much of that coal has already been extracted though, so Japan generally does need to look elsewhere for their energy needs.
It is a good point to make though that oil prices are going to skyrocket due to this action in Japan. That will have some interesting impacts on other parts of the world.
Do you see coal plants or even solar power farms being rebuilt every ten years?
It takes time to phase in changes in engineering and design, where certainly nuclear energy plants built in the early 1960's perhaps ought to be phased out and shut down. Then again that was over 50 years ago. I would agree that 50 year old nuclear power plants should be decommissioned and perhaps even rebuilt. Sadly too many of plants that age are still being used because the new plants aren't being built to replace them.
There are also a number of factors that drive up costs for nuclear power plants. I think they can be made cost effective, and even safe enough that you don't ever need to worry about a disaster like Fukushima happening in the future. The largest driver of nuclear power plant cost in America has been largely due to the one-off nature of the plants. Most of them were experiments in engineering design where each plant was essentially a prototype incorporating the newest technology known at the time. Other countries (notably France) have gone beyond that and standardized designs which made it much cheaper to build those facilities... and because France built their reactors more recently they have higher standards as well.
Nuclear power isn't perfect, but it can certainly be something that should be in the mix and not ruled out.
It sort of looks like these environmentalists are celebrating the fact that ALL nuclear power plants have been shut down in Japan. While I will admit there might be some bad plants that needed to be shut down and that some changes needed to happen, was it necessary to shut all of them down at the same time?
Keep in mind that the celebration is over the last of the nuclear power plants being shut down. They are celebrating the death of even the concept of nuclear energy.
If there was a real concern about the environment, they would be far more worried about increasing dependence on coal and oil for electrical power. Heck, just by restarting some of these older coal power plants they are going to be introducing more radioactive debris into the environment than had they simply left the nuclear power plants running. These environmentalists are in that way celebrating a nuclear future AND the destruction of the environment on a massive scale, where many more people will die because these plants are being shut down.
If you were genuinely concerned about safety, you would be insisting that these nuclear power plants be restarted ASAP. If you look strictly at deaths directly caused from mining coal to replace these nuclear power plants, I think that would more than offset any potential deaths caused from even casual handling of spent nuclear rods, much less the risk of having another Fukushima-type disaster happening in the next few years.
That is why nobody listens to anti-nuke people. How is someone outside Japan affected? The rods won't go critical if the building comes down, so there'll be no fallout. So "humanity" isn't under any threat at all. It can't hurt most of the world. So humanity won't care.
Considering that debris and radioactive waste from Fukushima landed in my back yard, it does become somewhat of an issue. And no, I don't live in Japan... but I do live downwind from Japan. At least the Pacific Ocean offered a little bit of protection so the bulk of the cloud from that disaster didn't hit my house. There are some large scale issues with nuclear engineering, and sometimes you do need to consider the effects outside of the immediate area where the reactors are built.
This said, I do think the GP post was way over the top and exaggerating things a bit. The storage of the rods isn't all that difficult to deal with, but it does take some creative solutions.
The point being made is that the passengers took charge and made sure that their plane wasn't going to be a bomb crashing into a building killing thousands of people. Crashing into an abandoned mine was better than crashing into a daycare center.
Had those passengers thought instead that they were going to get a "free" vacation trip to Cuba, they likely wouldn't have acted in that manner and the "hijackers" might have even lived to see the next day or even gone home.
Airplanes that took off between 1931 and 2001 and then had a terrorist on board merely made a unplanned stop in Havana. Pilots were given formal instructions to cooperate with a terrorist (called a "hijacker") and do any reasonable thing they asked for until police could deal with them.
It was the realization that some of those "terrorists" had a death wish and didn't care if the plane landed at a gentle speed or if they even survived the landing that resulted in some changes toward how they were treated. I really don't think the TSA needed to take over the security in all of the airports just to deal with this one change in attitude toward the terrorists. Flight 93 on 9/11/2001 proved that point.
Some people speak languages of mathematics that are different than the C programming language. At least you understood what he was saying, even if you were a grammar Nazi insisting upon a coding convention that doesn't apply when using English in an informal grammar rather than a formal grammar that you are insisting to be used here.
Yeah right. You don't think that the first thing they do when the privatize the security is grant the immunity?
Private security forces ran the security of airports prior to 9/11/2001. Why would it be necessarily different if the TSA was no longer around?
I assume that the reason you think the 4th amendment won't apply is because you think that applies only to a government agency? Why do you think that is the case?
And no, I don't think it will be the "first thing they do" to grant any kind of immunity.
No, it isn't necessarily "privatizing" the security, but turning the responsibility back to individual states and local police departments to worry about the security of the airports in their jurisdiction. If you don't like a private security force doing that kind of thing, complain to your mayor, city council, or state legislature and get a government much more responsive to your needs and to your community to deal with the problems which are in your community.
If anything, this will increase accountability and allow you as an ordinary citizen to be able to complain to people who find your individual vote and your input as a citizen bot be much more valuable than some faceless federal bureaucracy headquartered in some distant capital that likely has never even heard of your town and quite possibly couldn't even find your state on a map if they tried.
Prior to September 11th, 2001, how many bombs were detonated in security lines? Also, who is "they"?
There were certainly problems with some security checkpoints prior to 9/11/2001, but bringing in the TSA didn't really solve that many of the problems.