Yeah and it's not like anyone is going to repeat Hitler's mistake and go for the civilian applications first. Debts? What debts? Our DEBTS are now backed by ANTIMATTER WEAPONS!
Speaking from personal experience: Yes, they do, and they're damn serious about them since before 9/11. Thing is, they do profiling. You get pulled out and groped because something in your passport or your ticket or your looks doesn't quite jive or because the metal detector thing pinged.
TEPCO doesn't think it's fine they have to do tests and repairs well into the summer instead of running Dai-ni at full power, at a time when the loss of Dai-ichi left them hurting for every kilowatt. Why do you?
Your stupid is showing, "defender of humanity". I'm done talking to you.
The other nuclear plants did just fine by the current standards.
The tsunami also flooded Fukushima Dai-ni cooling pumps, ultimately resulting in LLOCA at units 1 3 and 4. Cold shutdown was only reached on March 15. Is this what you call fine?
5.5 meters is a reasonable height for a typhoon wave break. It's ridiculously inadequate for tsunamis.
According to Wikipedia, the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 produced a 12-meter wave. The 1964 Niigata earthquake produced a more reasonable 6 (six, not five point five) metre one. These are 20th century incidents, well documented, with even photographic evidence available.
TEPCO played fast and loose with the statistics and lost. Why are you defending them?
One does not go outside operating parameters if one has a choice, period. You want to keep the plant in such a state that the answers to all your problems are still inside the operating manual. Once you're out of the book, all bets are off and BAD THINGS (tm) tend to happen.
The pressure inside the RPV was allowed to rise to twice the design limit before something broke, H2 was vented into the building and the first explosion ensued.
That's either a huge operator error or indicative of a lack of options.
Interestingly enough, US-based nuclear power plants of the same design and similar vintage have been retro-fitted with piping to allow operators to vent hydrogen out the high stacks as well as devices to recombine generated hydrogen into water.
There are numerous other known design issues with the GE Mk 1 design . US operators have been adding all sorts of bits and pieces to their plants and changing operating procedures to hedge against these known risks. TEPCO apparently felt comfortable doing nothing.
My personal take-away lesson from all this is "never install version 1.0 of ANYTHING".
Oohh. Mistakes were made. I see. Well that makes it all better, then, doesn't it?
The tsunami defences which failed were based on government projections of the most severe waves that would ever be encountered, and they were inadequate.
There are no tsunami defenses at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Nothing failed because nothing was there. The plants were built too low, the dike which protects against typhoon-generated waves was obviously not enough, but it did not fail, it's still there, as useless against tsunamis as it ever was. Oh, it may have added a bit to the height of the wall of water that struck the NPP.
Had the plant been built above the historical high water mark for tsunamis in that area, nothing would have happened. It was not, because adding elevation means bigger, more expensive pumps for an idiotic design which uses open-circuit seawater cooling for the primary (and only) core coolant loop.
I work for my money. If you steal it, you are actually stealing the time of my life that I have spent earning it. That's a violent crime, just short of murder in my book. Sure, you, the law and trust-fund babies are free to disagree with my outlook:).
Yes, you are correct, for a very short-lived first phase.
Afterwards, most of the acts that used to be legal (or indeed, overlooked) cease to be performed by law-abiding citizens, who outsource them to professionals, who do crime wholesale, not retail and are less readily caught. Thus the number of detected crimes decreases and the gov't can finally claim limited success and ask for more money to stamp out the evil once and for all.
To your other point, having lived in a dictatorship, I can tell you that the overall level of physical violence in society (not counting the gulag) was very low and what there was, was very very stealthy and low-level (that includes, believe it or not, the violence perpetrated by various "law enforcement" bodies, school bullying, domestic violence and so on).
Policemen patrolled the streets solo or in twos, on foot, armed with only a baton most of the time. Snitching on troublemakers was usual, routine, a praised and rewarded action. Most everyone was an informant.
In such a society one tries very hard not to cause a disturbance, lest the regime have an excuse to throw one into the gulag, from which there is no escape.
Zero tolerance for repeat offenders coupled with lack of re-integration programs meant that once a zek, always a zek, maybe with a couple months "vacation" on the outside once in a while. This, for anything from chanting political slogans (not that anyone was stupid enough to do that, just saying that if they did) to murder, to shoplifting.
It all ended in an orgy of violence, to be sure. Yet now, twenty-something years after the fall of the dictatorship, even hard-core criminals still rarely possess guns. The "keep the peace or else" meme is _very_ well implanted.
I don't see the link to Somalia, but I can assure you (as do the international orgs brave enough to still have people there) that it is not in a state of constant war-of-all-against-all, nor is it even in a high-intensity tribal conflict anymore.
The "people" are not going to do anything. Yes, we are well into the regulation phase that follows the colonization of any frontier.
Think of it as the not-so-wild turn of the century West.
Will the liberty decrease? Surely. Will crime decrease? Yes, most certainly, especially the violent kind (outright theft etc). Will there be a lot more commerce, more money being made and lots more poverty? Hell yea.
It's a great time to be a black hat hacker. You thought the lawless nineties were good? Just you wait, 'cause the golden years of the Internet Mafia are still ahead, boys! There'll be prohibitions and trade barriers enough for everyone to get rich! Movies, music, software, even (or rather, especially) raw data storage and secure communications channels.
'course, there'll be a few european comissioners and europol bigwigs to grease up but then... when was that not true?
40 that were counted. Anyone who has ever read the Pravda knows that figures emanating from Soviet officialdom must be taken with a very large dose of (iodized) salt.
There is about 1% plutonium in regular fuel rods after a long-ish period spent in the reactor (years, I can't be bothered to check). By contrast, fresh MOX has around 7% plutonium in it.
The heat profile does nothing much out of the ordinary. It takes hours (afaicr) to go down to manageable temps If you have cooling for the period it takes, all is fine and dandy. If not... as you note, oxidation temp is way below operating temp.
As for waste containment: why do we contain it when we can burn it further? Why more CANDU reactors aren't being built to at least partly deal with "spent" fuel from PWRs?
One other pet source of amazement for me is why the don't we take all this "spent" fuel we are currently assiduously not dealing with and arrange it, in small bundles, around some efficient neutron sources (fusors, maybe?) and then power Stirlings with the resulting heat.
I'm quite aware it wouldn't be thermodynamically very efficient. However, just cooling them down as we currently do has negative efficiency.
Maybe you know more about why dealing with the waste in these ways isn't feasible?
Shut-down temperatures are exactly equal to the operating temperature, i.e. about 1270 K, at least immediately after a scram (or maybe I am misunderstanding your comment).
Frankly, I think graphite should have been abandoned for good after Chernobyl. I see some promise in modern molten lead reactors, although the Russian sub models from which they are derived don't exactly have a stellar safety record.
As for molten salt designs, especially the MOX-burning kind, they give me the nuclear heebie-jeebies. The piping corrosion issues are constantly downplayed, even after Superphenix and Dounreay PFR.
The TRISO particle is mostly a lump of charcoal. With the pebble bed design, you can get one of two major issues: a. oxygen (i.e. outside air) incursion - obviously, results in a fire b. water (i.e. secondary coolant) incursion -results in at least a steam explosion, if not explosion+fire, if not even a (localized?) power excursion from the temperature drop and additional moderation.
This, for a design that proposed doing away with containment vessels.
Smaller issues include: pebble cracking from thermal stress, pebble erosion, densification of the pebble bed above design density resulting in localized hotspots, lack of control over cycle length for a given pebble, impossibility to recycle pebbles.
Compare and contrast with, for instance, the CANDU design, where each rod can be manipulated separately and breach of the primary coolant loop results in your heavy water leaking into, well, heavy water.
Why, yes, I was impersonating a lapping-dog lackey of the morally corrupt Jihadist mullahs! I congratulate you for your sagacity, citizen! No need to report for voluntary relocation, for now.
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Yeah and it's not like anyone is going to repeat Hitler's mistake and go for the civilian applications first. Debts? What debts? Our DEBTS are now backed by ANTIMATTER WEAPONS!
You'd be in jail, stupid. Fighting for your life, not fighting the gov't.
Nothing admirable about letting this happen, not in the "land of the free".
Speaking from personal experience: Yes, they do, and they're damn serious about them since before 9/11. Thing is, they do profiling. You get pulled out and groped because something in your passport or your ticket or your looks doesn't quite jive or because the metal detector thing pinged.
TEPCO doesn't think it's fine they have to do tests and repairs well into the summer instead of running Dai-ni at full power, at a time when the loss of Dai-ichi left them hurting for every kilowatt. Why do you?
Your stupid is showing, "defender of humanity". I'm done talking to you.
The other nuclear plants did just fine by the current standards.
The tsunami also flooded Fukushima Dai-ni cooling pumps, ultimately resulting in LLOCA at units 1 3 and 4. Cold shutdown was only reached on March 15. Is this what you call fine?
5.5 meters is a reasonable height for a typhoon wave break. It's ridiculously inadequate for tsunamis.
According to Wikipedia, the great Kanto earthquake of 1923 produced a 12-meter wave. The 1964 Niigata earthquake produced a more reasonable 6 (six, not five point five) metre one. These are 20th century incidents, well documented, with even photographic evidence available.
TEPCO played fast and loose with the statistics and lost. Why are you defending them?
TEPCO is proposing to build dikes because they want to distract attention and avoid being told to shut down the unsafe plants.
There is no path or sequence of actions to allow the operators to vent hydrogen into the buildings. Stuff must break first for that to happen at all.
One does not go outside operating parameters if one has a choice, period. You want to keep the plant in such a state that the answers to all your problems are still inside the operating manual. Once you're out of the book, all bets are off and BAD THINGS (tm) tend to happen.
The pressure inside the RPV was allowed to rise to twice the design limit before something broke, H2 was vented into the building and the first explosion ensued.
That's either a huge operator error or indicative of a lack of options.
Interestingly enough, US-based nuclear power plants of the same design and similar vintage have been retro-fitted with piping to allow operators to vent hydrogen out the high stacks as well as devices to recombine generated hydrogen into water.
There are numerous other known design issues with the GE Mk 1 design . US operators have been adding all sorts of bits and pieces to their plants and changing operating procedures to hedge against these known risks. TEPCO apparently felt comfortable doing nothing.
My personal take-away lesson from all this is "never install version 1.0 of ANYTHING".
Oohh. Mistakes were made. I see. Well that makes it all better, then, doesn't it?
The tsunami defences which failed were based on government projections of the most severe waves that would ever be encountered, and they were inadequate.
There are no tsunami defenses at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Nothing failed because nothing was there. The plants were built too low, the dike which protects against typhoon-generated waves was obviously not enough, but it did not fail, it's still there, as useless against tsunamis as it ever was. Oh, it may have added a bit to the height of the wall of water that struck the NPP.
Had the plant been built above the historical high water mark for tsunamis in that area, nothing would have happened. It was not, because adding elevation means bigger, more expensive pumps for an idiotic design which uses open-circuit seawater cooling for the primary (and only) core coolant loop.
Umm. No. But if that is a fair description of what's happening where you live, my utterly serious advice to you is to either
a. leave while you still can or
b. join the ruling party or junta or whatever it's called.
Make sure you do not advance too much in the ranks of the nomenklatura, though. The purges are the most violent at the top.
I work for my money. If you steal it, you are actually stealing the time of my life that I have spent earning it. That's a violent crime, just short of murder in my book. Sure, you, the law and trust-fund babies are free to disagree with my outlook :).
Yes, you are correct, for a very short-lived first phase.
Afterwards, most of the acts that used to be legal (or indeed, overlooked) cease to be performed by law-abiding citizens, who outsource them to professionals, who do crime wholesale, not retail and are less readily caught. Thus the number of detected crimes decreases and the gov't can finally claim limited success and ask for more money to stamp out the evil once and for all.
To your other point, having lived in a dictatorship, I can tell you that the overall level of physical violence in society (not counting the gulag) was very low and what there was, was very very stealthy and low-level (that includes, believe it or not, the violence perpetrated by various "law enforcement" bodies, school bullying, domestic violence and so on).
Policemen patrolled the streets solo or in twos, on foot, armed with only a baton most of the time. Snitching on troublemakers was usual, routine, a praised and rewarded action. Most everyone was an informant.
In such a society one tries very hard not to cause a disturbance, lest the regime have an excuse to throw one into the gulag, from which there is no escape.
Zero tolerance for repeat offenders coupled with lack of re-integration programs meant that once a zek, always a zek, maybe with a couple months "vacation" on the outside once in a while. This, for anything from chanting political slogans (not that anyone was stupid enough to do that, just saying that if they did) to murder, to shoplifting.
It all ended in an orgy of violence, to be sure. Yet now, twenty-something years after the fall of the dictatorship, even hard-core criminals still rarely possess guns. The "keep the peace or else" meme is _very_ well implanted.
I don't see the link to Somalia, but I can assure you (as do the international orgs brave enough to still have people there) that it is not in a state of constant war-of-all-against-all, nor is it even in a high-intensity tribal conflict anymore.
The "people" are not going to do anything. Yes, we are well into the regulation phase that follows the colonization of any frontier.
Think of it as the not-so-wild turn of the century West.
Will the liberty decrease? Surely. Will crime decrease? Yes, most certainly, especially the violent kind (outright theft etc). Will there be a lot more commerce, more money being made and lots more poverty? Hell yea.
It's a great time to be a black hat hacker. You thought the lawless nineties were good? Just you wait, 'cause the golden years of the Internet Mafia are still ahead, boys! There'll be prohibitions and trade barriers enough for everyone to get rich! Movies, music, software, even (or rather, especially) raw data storage and secure communications channels.
'course, there'll be a few european comissioners and europol bigwigs to grease up but then... when was that not true?
It would be IBM. They have had much more time to work on the problem. Moreover, they have been involved with .mil projects since forever.
It's a car that runs on ring pulls ffs! What's /. coming to?
Well Slashdot does not pretend to be a bastion of journalistic truth.
40 that were counted. Anyone who has ever read the Pravda knows that figures emanating from Soviet officialdom must be taken with a very large dose of (iodized) salt.
There is about 1% plutonium in regular fuel rods after a long-ish period spent in the reactor (years, I can't be bothered to check). By contrast, fresh MOX has around 7% plutonium in it.
The heat profile does nothing much out of the ordinary. It takes hours (afaicr) to go down to manageable temps If you have cooling for the period it takes, all is fine and dandy. If not... as you note, oxidation temp is way below operating temp.
As for waste containment: why do we contain it when we can burn it further? Why more CANDU reactors aren't being built to at least partly deal with "spent" fuel from PWRs?
One other pet source of amazement for me is why the don't we take all this "spent" fuel we are currently assiduously not dealing with and arrange it, in small bundles, around some efficient neutron sources (fusors, maybe?) and then power Stirlings with the resulting heat.
I'm quite aware it wouldn't be thermodynamically very efficient. However, just cooling them down as we currently do has negative efficiency.
Maybe you know more about why dealing with the waste in these ways isn't feasible?
How do you deal with ~ 2000 tons of radioactive molten metal, currently bubbling on top of your spent fuel elements, when it's de-fueling time?
Shut-down temperatures are exactly equal to the operating temperature, i.e. about 1270 K, at least immediately after a scram (or maybe I am misunderstanding your comment).
Frankly, I think graphite should have been abandoned for good after Chernobyl. I see some promise in modern molten lead reactors, although the Russian sub models from which they are derived don't exactly have a stellar safety record.
As for molten salt designs, especially the MOX-burning kind, they give me the nuclear heebie-jeebies. The piping corrosion issues are constantly downplayed, even after Superphenix and Dounreay PFR.
The TRISO particle is mostly a lump of charcoal. With the pebble bed design, you can get one of two major issues:
a. oxygen (i.e. outside air) incursion - obviously, results in a fire
b. water (i.e. secondary coolant) incursion -results in at least a steam explosion, if not explosion+fire, if not even a (localized?) power excursion from the temperature drop and additional moderation.
This, for a design that proposed doing away with containment vessels.
Smaller issues include: pebble cracking from thermal stress, pebble erosion, densification of the pebble bed above design density resulting in localized hotspots, lack of control over cycle length for a given pebble, impossibility to recycle pebbles.
Compare and contrast with, for instance, the CANDU design, where each rod can be manipulated separately and breach of the primary coolant loop results in your heavy water leaking into, well, heavy water.
Why, yes, I was impersonating a lapping-dog lackey of the morally corrupt Jihadist mullahs! I congratulate you for your sagacity, citizen! No need to report for voluntary relocation, for now.