and which country will volunteer to shut down their steelmills for a year until more can be made?
Japan?
(not to be facetious or anything, but if any country has the industrial capacity to move on this with a viable solution, it's Japan)
They're the last people who should volunteer to shut down, because they need that steel real bad. I do some metal work and the best exotic steel comes from the nordic countries (I cannot afford it, this is the stuff for spaceships) the next best is probably some of the last remaining US mills. Then comes India which used to be absolute junk just a decade or two ago but the modern stuff is actually usable. China steel is... well its cheap, thats about all thats going for it.
I was astounded to google and discover that Japan is second to only China in steel production. I would never have guessed. Every piece of bar stock I have ever purchased has identifiers spray painted or ink jetted on it and I have handled thousands of pieces of bar stock labeled "7075-T73-USA" (well thats "stress proof" aluminum, but you get the idea..) or "O-1 Product of India" oil hardening tool steel or whatever but I've never even seen a piece of raw bar stock labeled as "Product of Japan". Must be some kind of tax / tariff thing that keeps them completely out of the us market, or the demand inside Japan is so high (cars, etc) that they don't export at all.
All I could remember was that they sold generic electronics at brand-name prices was.
Yeah they did have that, but they also had really weird stuff. As far as I know, the first mass marketed bread maker machine sold in the USA. Crazy as it sounds, my grandparents breadmaker is sitting in my kitchen and still works perfectly. That was well before they got good at engineering them to break right after the warranty expires, somebody probably got fired because in 25 years I probably should have purchased about 25 breadmakers instead of 1. I also recall saving my pennies to buy the "gorilla banana printer" which was by far the worst print quality I had ever seen, but it had the virtue of being about one third the price of the cheapest competition.. Was an easy choice for a kid, a poor printer does printing a lot better than $100 in the bank account does printing. I do remember seeing pages of "generic stereo" and "generic speaker" in the catalog but I generally skipped over those pages.
Another reason is you can mentally partition areas of the theater. So, "the movie" is way over there and the annoying kids texting on their cellphones in aisle 3 kind of get filtered out... until the 3-d effect merges with the annoying kids in aisle 3 and now you can't ignore the annoying kids anymore.
In an empty theater, or at home, it would probably work much better.
I'm not interested in meaningless answers like deference to authority "because they said so" or simplified to moron-ness like "it hurts them" or pointless fearmongering like "think of the children".
I'm looking for a medical condition I can google for. Or at least a semi-technical explanation so I can behave appropriately.
For example, if my 5 yr old relative glances over my shoulder at a DS, will he turn to stone like medusa? Or is it indirect like it won't hurt them but the odds of projectile vomiting due to motion sickness approach 100% below age 7, so you don't technically have to keep it away from them, if you don't mind a major cleanup job, or maybe as long as they haven't eaten an entire bag of gummi worms within the last hour. Etc etc etc.
You'd think after all the fuss made about Gary McKinnon accessing the system 10 years ago - they'd have done something about it by now
Maybe Gary was right all along, they're too busy covering up the UFO conspiracy to bother with simple stuff like periodic "apt-get upgrade" or whatever it is that windows people have to suffer thru.
What would that look like exactly? To the best of my knowledge NASA is kind of a management consultant group... They contract EVERYTHING out. All capital, all operations, all services. So its not like the space station will fall out of the sky, or space probe data will be lost, because thats all done by contractors, whom presumably do a better job, since its their money on the line not the taxpayers.
Most of their contractors are large, therefore politically well connected, which in a circular way explains why they are NASA contractors, duh. So if accounts payable takes a couple extra days to restore the backups and cut the checks for services rendered, eh, the contractors will be OK.
I'm envisioning a vast array of power points and TPS reports being lost... would that necessarily be all that bad?
They say there's no danger of a Chernobyl style catastrophe, but what credibility do they have? These people--and quite a few nuclear proponents around here--told us all that there was "no danger" of any major leak in the days after the tsunami hit. Three weeks later the reactor is a molten puddle on a concrete floor,
They don't need any credibility at all. BWRs are not a zillion ton charcoal briquette like Chernobyl. You can't light the worlds largest charcoal briquette on fire and vaporize the works... if there is no charcoal briquette. From a credibility standpoint, sure with security theater you could sneak out the BWR and sneak in a RBMK and no one would notice (snicker) but lets be realistic here...
If the reactor is puddle on the floor, thats good, compared to Chernobyl where the briquette vaporized it for us to breathe... I'd much prefer it melted in a containment structure there, than vaporized here in my air.
You do realize that if they just "shut off all plants" when the crisis started Japan would be essentially without power permanently, right?
In a cold winter like this, where it snowed on some of the victims, it would literally be a genocide to shut off the electricity. Not the handwaving hype from TV but real genocide, as in rapidly no heat, no food, no (clean) water, no (treated) sewage systems on the entire island. Its already like that in the worst of the areas, but the rest of the nation is more or less unharmed... Until you pull the plug on them.
Concrete is a mixture that's water-based. Start with some dry concrete powder (or some Jell-O Instant Pudding), and your radioactive water becomes radioactive concrete. Then, put more concrete on the outside of that to put as much mass between fish and isotopes, and you're golden.
The part the grandparent post is making fun with is "if you have a material science background". One thing I do know about, is ceramic linings for metal melting furnaces as I've built some. I have in fact poured my own aluminum castings and machined them on my own lathe and milling machine. This necessitates considerable research and book reading about melting furnaces, etc.
First of all, heat plus solid concrete = powered concrete ready to add water. Red hot and concrete do not go together. Red heat breaks down cement. Cement plus heat equals dust. Concrete plus heat equals dust and gravel. Industrially at (relatively) low temperatures it takes hours to break limestone into cement, so at reactor temperatures it'll likely literally never "set up" into a solid. Plain ole cement aka burned lime quicklime whatever is limestone with the water of crystallization burned out of it. Then you add the water back in and it sets up into artificial limestone. Did you know the pyramids in Egypt are made of "limestone" or is it cured cement? There is a pretty interesting book on that topic. Plain ole cement is pretty cool technology. But it is beyond an epic fail at high temps.
Now you can buy ultra high temp ceramic coatings for furnaces, kilns, etc.
Problem 1) very low strength. Like puddle under their own weight. You're likely to end up with a white hot reactor surrounded by a glass puddle.
Problem 2) explodes and fractures on contact with water and thats everywhere down there in the reactor and on the coasts.
Problem 3) as generations of steel mills have learned even the best ceramic coatings turn back to dust after at most a year or two of use. So you've bought a year at best, now you have the same problem plus a megaton of mid level contaminated concrete. Ugh.
Problem 4) It would take an epic amount of high temp ceramic coating to cover the plant. Not in stock, the harbor is wrecked, its too heavy to airlift, and which country will volunteer to shut down their steelmills for a year until more can be made? This is the stuff where a little "salt bag" sized bag weighs about 100 pounds. And you need like a million of those bags. Hmm.
Problem 5) Cements in general are porous at a like ionic level. Right now, say, 1 percent of whats in the reactor has leaked out. Lets think about this logically, if 100% had leaked out into the sea, the plant would not be an issue anymore... Anyway, if you concrete it, that guarantees that 100% of the reactor core will end up in the ocean (eventually) and it 100% guarantees they will not be able to get at it to stop it (because its buried under concrete).
Problem 6) Learn what distillation and vapor pressure are. Right now, at least some isotopes are solid and can't fly away. Encapsulate it in a great insulator like cement, it'll get hot enough all right to make an even bigger more dangerous mess.
So in the short term it doesn't really do anything other than blow a lot of money and look very busy. Once the reactions cease and it cools, slapping some concrete on it might isolate it from the environment, for at most a couple decades, at most. Sooner or later you'll have to clean it up and the concrete will just get in the way.
1) The story is being pimped as the reckless part is doing something fun with a helicopter.
2) At least locally, the FAA has a different definition of reckless. Such as he could have been buzzing the powerlines near his hotel, maybe he terrified the ATC controller by not explaining what he was doing, etc. I can't find the actual citation just journalist babble.
3) Another option is he "recklessly" supported a powerful political opponent, or the noise of his fooling around offended someone important. Reckless in not kissing the correct butts. Even a guy who owns a helicopter has to do that.
4) Apparently the guy is a TV actor publicity hound, so someone with political power might be doing this as a marketing favor to him. Pay a $500 fee for $5M worth of publicity, etc.
The wikipedia article carefully avoids discussing the demise of DAK, but as I recall the problem was he was quite talented at profitably selling "last years stereo" but he bought heavily, and tried to sell "last years computer" and went bankrupt.
Anybody possessing one could reverse engineer the command and control system for the drone and come up with a way of jamming it, rendering all the other drones still in possession of the military useless. So yes, it IS a big fucking deal.
The problem is foreign enemy governments have been entirely unsuccessful given both multiple samples and human intelligence. So using the word "anybody" is a little inaccurate, when you take "the world" and subtract out everything 3rd world that leaves some friendly nations and china / russia. And there is no guarantee they would succeed, just guarantee that multiple less capable groups have failed.
What you call "waste" the politicians in charge call "buying votes". That was the only purpose. If they could have found a more expensive way to do it, they'd have done it.
I think Feynman's real talent, the talent shared by many of the physicists I know who make real fundamental breakthroughs, is the ability to _understand_ physical problems in terms that even a 12 year old could understand. That is to say, to pare away the unnecessary complexities and reduce the problem to the simplest form that encapsulates the essence of the question. Once you can do that, you can explain what's happening in terms even a 12 year old can understand, because that's how you understood it in the first place.
Sounds like a good engineer. Emphasis on good. You'd probably like Dr Robert Pease formerly of national semidestructor, he writes a nice column in electronic design called "Pease Porridge"
Feynman real talent was the ability to explain complex physics in terms even a 12 year old could understand. Looks like this kid has that same talent.
I think you're getting all confused here. "Feynman's real talent" was in physics. He got a Nobel prize in physics for his work in QED. Not for writing books. I don't think any 12 year olds understand Feynman diagrams.
The weirdest part about Feynman's legacy is he did some pretty good lectures against cargo cult science, yet he's been embraced by those same people! Kind of like the situation of Nietzsche and antisemitism.
You want a dead scientist whom was a great writer, try Asimov and check out his non-fiction.
This is all just a minor accident that could have been avoided if it weren't for the hippies who won't let us build completely safe reactors to replace the existing completely safe reactors. Right?
I know you're trying to be sarcastic but unfortunately you're correct. The ones that melted down had sorta-crappy Mark I containment structures. They were planning on building replacements on site with much better containment structures... To some extent its just bad luck, but note how they blew up almost in order of construction and the newest ones pretty much shrugged it all off.
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and which country will volunteer to shut down their steelmills for a year until more can be made?
Japan?
(not to be facetious or anything, but if any country has the industrial capacity to move on this with a viable solution, it's Japan)
They're the last people who should volunteer to shut down, because they need that steel real bad. I do some metal work and the best exotic steel comes from the nordic countries (I cannot afford it, this is the stuff for spaceships) the next best is probably some of the last remaining US mills. Then comes India which used to be absolute junk just a decade or two ago but the modern stuff is actually usable. China steel is ... well its cheap, thats about all thats going for it.
I was astounded to google and discover that Japan is second to only China in steel production. I would never have guessed. Every piece of bar stock I have ever purchased has identifiers spray painted or ink jetted on it and I have handled thousands of pieces of bar stock labeled "7075-T73-USA" (well thats "stress proof" aluminum, but you get the idea ..) or "O-1 Product of India" oil hardening tool steel or whatever but I've never even seen a piece of raw bar stock labeled as "Product of Japan". Must be some kind of tax / tariff thing that keeps them completely out of the us market, or the demand inside Japan is so high (cars, etc) that they don't export at all.
Here. You can read it again.
http://www.dak2000.com/
OMG its even the same font and typographical layout. I haven't seen that since Reagan was president. Talk about a nostalgia rush.
All I could remember was that they sold generic electronics at brand-name prices was.
Yeah they did have that, but they also had really weird stuff. As far as I know, the first mass marketed bread maker machine sold in the USA. Crazy as it sounds, my grandparents breadmaker is sitting in my kitchen and still works perfectly. That was well before they got good at engineering them to break right after the warranty expires, somebody probably got fired because in 25 years I probably should have purchased about 25 breadmakers instead of 1. I also recall saving my pennies to buy the "gorilla banana printer" which was by far the worst print quality I had ever seen, but it had the virtue of being about one third the price of the cheapest competition.. Was an easy choice for a kid, a poor printer does printing a lot better than $100 in the bank account does printing. I do remember seeing pages of "generic stereo" and "generic speaker" in the catalog but I generally skipped over those pages.
Another reason is you can mentally partition areas of the theater. So, "the movie" is way over there and the annoying kids texting on their cellphones in aisle 3 kind of get filtered out... until the 3-d effect merges with the annoying kids in aisle 3 and now you can't ignore the annoying kids anymore.
In an empty theater, or at home, it would probably work much better.
should not be used by children under 7
Why?
I'm not interested in meaningless answers like deference to authority "because they said so" or simplified to moron-ness like "it hurts them" or pointless fearmongering like "think of the children".
I'm looking for a medical condition I can google for. Or at least a semi-technical explanation so I can behave appropriately.
For example, if my 5 yr old relative glances over my shoulder at a DS, will he turn to stone like medusa? Or is it indirect like it won't hurt them but the odds of projectile vomiting due to motion sickness approach 100% below age 7, so you don't technically have to keep it away from them, if you don't mind a major cleanup job, or maybe as long as they haven't eaten an entire bag of gummi worms within the last hour. Etc etc etc.
The internet and the mission critical stuff are far separated. That's more specific than I probably should have gotten,
Yeah, whatever you do, don't use the top secret phrase "air gap firewall".. Come on, enough security theater.
You'd think after all the fuss made about Gary McKinnon accessing the system 10 years ago - they'd have done something about it by now
Maybe Gary was right all along, they're too busy covering up the UFO conspiracy to bother with simple stuff like periodic "apt-get upgrade" or whatever it is that windows people have to suffer thru.
enable a cyberattack to cripple the entire agency
What would that look like exactly? To the best of my knowledge NASA is kind of a management consultant group... They contract EVERYTHING out. All capital, all operations, all services. So its not like the space station will fall out of the sky, or space probe data will be lost, because thats all done by contractors, whom presumably do a better job, since its their money on the line not the taxpayers.
Most of their contractors are large, therefore politically well connected, which in a circular way explains why they are NASA contractors, duh. So if accounts payable takes a couple extra days to restore the backups and cut the checks for services rendered, eh, the contractors will be OK.
I'm envisioning a vast array of power points and TPS reports being lost... would that necessarily be all that bad?
I'll never be a proponent for something that has a good chance of causing horrible diseases and mutations and birth defects
Talking about coal, correct? Not sure which side you're on.
They say there's no danger of a Chernobyl style catastrophe, but what credibility do they have? These people--and quite a few nuclear proponents around here--told us all that there was "no danger" of any major leak in the days after the tsunami hit. Three weeks later the reactor is a molten puddle on a concrete floor,
They don't need any credibility at all. BWRs are not a zillion ton charcoal briquette like Chernobyl. You can't light the worlds largest charcoal briquette on fire and vaporize the works... if there is no charcoal briquette. From a credibility standpoint, sure with security theater you could sneak out the BWR and sneak in a RBMK and no one would notice (snicker) but lets be realistic here...
If the reactor is puddle on the floor, thats good, compared to Chernobyl where the briquette vaporized it for us to breathe... I'd much prefer it melted in a containment structure there, than vaporized here in my air.
You do realize that if they just "shut off all plants" when the crisis started Japan would be essentially without power permanently, right?
In a cold winter like this, where it snowed on some of the victims, it would literally be a genocide to shut off the electricity. Not the handwaving hype from TV but real genocide, as in rapidly no heat, no food, no (clean) water, no (treated) sewage systems on the entire island. Its already like that in the worst of the areas, but the rest of the nation is more or less unharmed... Until you pull the plug on them.
Concrete is a mixture that's water-based. Start with some dry concrete powder (or some Jell-O Instant Pudding), and your radioactive water becomes radioactive concrete. Then, put more concrete on the outside of that to put as much mass between fish and isotopes, and you're golden.
The part the grandparent post is making fun with is "if you have a material science background". One thing I do know about, is ceramic linings for metal melting furnaces as I've built some. I have in fact poured my own aluminum castings and machined them on my own lathe and milling machine. This necessitates considerable research and book reading about melting furnaces, etc.
First of all, heat plus solid concrete = powered concrete ready to add water. Red hot and concrete do not go together. Red heat breaks down cement. Cement plus heat equals dust. Concrete plus heat equals dust and gravel. Industrially at (relatively) low temperatures it takes hours to break limestone into cement, so at reactor temperatures it'll likely literally never "set up" into a solid. Plain ole cement aka burned lime quicklime whatever is limestone with the water of crystallization burned out of it. Then you add the water back in and it sets up into artificial limestone. Did you know the pyramids in Egypt are made of "limestone" or is it cured cement? There is a pretty interesting book on that topic. Plain ole cement is pretty cool technology. But it is beyond an epic fail at high temps.
Now you can buy ultra high temp ceramic coatings for furnaces, kilns, etc.
Problem 1) very low strength. Like puddle under their own weight. You're likely to end up with a white hot reactor surrounded by a glass puddle.
Problem 2) explodes and fractures on contact with water and thats everywhere down there in the reactor and on the coasts.
Problem 3) as generations of steel mills have learned even the best ceramic coatings turn back to dust after at most a year or two of use. So you've bought a year at best, now you have the same problem plus a megaton of mid level contaminated concrete. Ugh.
Problem 4) It would take an epic amount of high temp ceramic coating to cover the plant. Not in stock, the harbor is wrecked, its too heavy to airlift, and which country will volunteer to shut down their steelmills for a year until more can be made? This is the stuff where a little "salt bag" sized bag weighs about 100 pounds. And you need like a million of those bags. Hmm.
Problem 5) Cements in general are porous at a like ionic level. Right now, say, 1 percent of whats in the reactor has leaked out. Lets think about this logically, if 100% had leaked out into the sea, the plant would not be an issue anymore... Anyway, if you concrete it, that guarantees that 100% of the reactor core will end up in the ocean (eventually) and it 100% guarantees they will not be able to get at it to stop it (because its buried under concrete).
Problem 6) Learn what distillation and vapor pressure are. Right now, at least some isotopes are solid and can't fly away. Encapsulate it in a great insulator like cement, it'll get hot enough all right to make an even bigger more dangerous mess.
So in the short term it doesn't really do anything other than blow a lot of money and look very busy. Once the reactions cease and it cools, slapping some concrete on it might isolate it from the environment, for at most a couple decades, at most. Sooner or later you'll have to clean it up and the concrete will just get in the way.
What exactly is he doing that is reckless?
1) The story is being pimped as the reckless part is doing something fun with a helicopter.
2) At least locally, the FAA has a different definition of reckless. Such as he could have been buzzing the powerlines near his hotel, maybe he terrified the ATC controller by not explaining what he was doing, etc. I can't find the actual citation just journalist babble.
3) Another option is he "recklessly" supported a powerful political opponent, or the noise of his fooling around offended someone important. Reckless in not kissing the correct butts. Even a guy who owns a helicopter has to do that.
4) Apparently the guy is a TV actor publicity hound, so someone with political power might be doing this as a marketing favor to him. Pay a $500 fee for $5M worth of publicity, etc.
scaring old people and giving them sound bite answers to complex problems
Isn't that the business model of myspace / facebook / twitter?
Has there ever been a successful tech company run by a marketing person? This is an honest question.
DAK is as close as I can think of. I enjoyed reading his catalog. Of course they went bankrupt but for many years they were somewhat successful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAK_Industries
The wikipedia article carefully avoids discussing the demise of DAK, but as I recall the problem was he was quite talented at profitably selling "last years stereo" but he bought heavily, and tried to sell "last years computer" and went bankrupt.
Anybody possessing one could reverse engineer the command and control system for the drone and come up with a way of jamming it, rendering all the other drones still in possession of the military useless. So yes, it IS a big fucking deal.
The problem is foreign enemy governments have been entirely unsuccessful given both multiple samples and human intelligence. So using the word "anybody" is a little inaccurate, when you take "the world" and subtract out everything 3rd world that leaves some friendly nations and china / russia. And there is no guarantee they would succeed, just guarantee that multiple less capable groups have failed.
Its not really a big deal at all.
And for my users at work, for me, for my family it really is a thing of the past, because
All non-corporate communication is done via facebook wall posts now?
We are rapidly nearing the point where no email will flow unless:
1) One side is a spammer.
or
2) One side is a corporation or an individual acting on the behalf of a corporation.
I could see a point in a year or two where "email spam" is about as relevant to the general population as "usenet spam".
Hell, many cultures never discovered the wheel, or would have developed much later if they hadn't been introduced to it by their neighbors.
Group one's distant descendents should be paying group two's distant descendents for the patent rights to put wheels on their new space shuttle.
30 years of waste
What you call "waste" the politicians in charge call "buying votes". That was the only purpose. If they could have found a more expensive way to do it, they'd have done it.
being ready and interested in being educated is not uncommon, it is normal
Now there I started laughing. Thanks for brightening my day!
Uh, since when was "1971" "shortly after a world war"?
Initial decision... They didn't buy their first BWR in 71. They might have bought their first BWR at that particular plant site, yeah, I don't care.
The point is industry wide you don't switch horses... Otherwise people can't move around, harder to regulate, etc.
I think Feynman's real talent, the talent shared by many of the physicists I know who make real fundamental breakthroughs, is the ability to _understand_ physical problems in terms that even a 12 year old could understand. That is to say, to pare away the unnecessary complexities and reduce the problem to the simplest form that encapsulates the essence of the question. Once you can do that, you can explain what's happening in terms even a 12 year old can understand, because that's how you understood it in the first place.
Sounds like a good engineer. Emphasis on good. You'd probably like Dr Robert Pease formerly of national semidestructor, he writes a nice column in electronic design called "Pease Porridge"
"Whom", if you should want to use it, is used for accusative and dative cases.
I was using it completely wrong then. I exclusively use it to troll grammar trolls on /.. Its fun, trust me.
I did get a good laugh out of your post and I feel bad you posted as AC or I'd quote you in my sig file.
Have a bright and cheerful day of unicorns and balloons!
Feynman real talent was the ability to explain complex physics in terms even a 12 year old could understand. Looks like this kid has that same talent.
I think you're getting all confused here. "Feynman's real talent" was in physics. He got a Nobel prize in physics for his work in QED. Not for writing books. I don't think any 12 year olds understand Feynman diagrams.
The weirdest part about Feynman's legacy is he did some pretty good lectures against cargo cult science, yet he's been embraced by those same people! Kind of like the situation of Nietzsche and antisemitism.
You want a dead scientist whom was a great writer, try Asimov and check out his non-fiction.
This is all just a minor accident that could have been avoided if it weren't for the hippies who won't let us build completely safe reactors to replace the existing completely safe reactors. Right?
I know you're trying to be sarcastic but unfortunately you're correct. The ones that melted down had sorta-crappy Mark I containment structures. They were planning on building replacements on site with much better containment structures... To some extent its just bad luck, but note how they blew up almost in order of construction and the newest ones pretty much shrugged it all off.