A "minor" release (and don't state it like it's a fact just yet) from an earthquake more powerful than design criteria does not make me think "Nuclear Power is Safe" nor even "Nuclear Power is Unsafe." It makes me question the design assumptions. Never mind what was known at the time. With benefit of hindsight, the design assumptions were clearly wrong.
So. Given what we know now, is it a correct assumption to pay the extra required, such that at-risk plants be designed to tolerate common-cause failures devolving from a magnitude 9.0 quake and related tsunami? That's really one for risk analysis economists to decide, but the consequences of failure are so unbelievably expensive, that my knee-jerk assumption suggests that it is not. The big problem is that the consequences are so expensive that they cannot be other than mostly externalized.
Regards, Evilad 5-digit/.er, professional engineer, hobby economist, and ex-employee of the nuclear power industry.
Seems like the real solution is a bluetooth keyboard and a hi-res HMD. One finally exists; the ITG-PCX3D has 1024x768 resolution... but nobody seems to be making a phone that can drive it.
You're being unnecessarily adversarial, and I wonder what your agenda is. It seems important to you to dismiss the idea of low-consumption off-grid living. In any case, I'm not advocating living like this in the 2000s. Just commenting on my amusement at the article conclusions, given that it is and was possible to run a minimalist household with a single wind generator with inefficient 1970-era technology.
Yes, the propane fridge sucks, but food refrigeration is pretty important. I'd be curious if you can back up your implied claim that a small, well-insulated propane fridge generates a lot more carbon than the huge, inefficient electrical monster most city-dwellers own.
As far as the rest of your questions go... The propane/electricity carbon balance was not significant in the 1970s, as a high proportion of power generation in Ontario was from coal and gas. The batteries were telco discards, rescued from the landfill. Those lights provided entirely enough illumination -- a 12v 100w incandescent bulb provides 100w of illumination, same as a 120v one -- and this was a home, not an art gallery. The building was a 1200 sqft 2 story detached house with (ineffective!) passive and active solar heating features. Cooling was provided with open windows.
Heating was provided with a high-efficiency woodstove. And before you start on your chemical-of-the-week schtick again (still carbon, yes?), the growing bushlot made the property a net carbon *sink*.
Sure, if you'll make an effort to restrain your incredulity and be a little more polite.
Propane stove and fridge. 1500 kg lead-acid battery bank. About 15 12v incandescent bulbs ranging from 40w to 100w. Computer on an antique and inefficient square-wave inverter, small b&w TV, two stereos, and occasional power-tool usage. The only hard part is the fridge. Propane fridges really suck, or they did in the 70s.
Apart from that, it's pretty easy if you're willing to live small. Not everyone wants to live like a USian with a strong urge to max out their credit cards on electronics and appliances.
Having grown up in a household whose total electrical needs were powered by a single 3m wind generator, I'm finding this article summary awfully amusing.
Your peak load is irrelevant, unless you're planning to try to do this without a battery system. You really just need to meet your average load, and have enough storage capacity to last the rest of the day.
You might not get as much heat conducted into that pipe as you'd hope. Magma has a finite thermal conductivity. More so after it's cooled to the point of solidification.
Imagine that most of the time, the "failure" isn't catastrophic (ie, patient death), but rather a failure of the test itself, merely requiring the engine to spend more time (ie, prolonged ICU stay) in retesting. The reduction in failures due to checklists will obviously cause a reduction in total time spent testing, causing a *reduction* in workload.
The question of which checklists are useful could then be reduced to a very simple economics problem, involving initial failure rate, time spent per checklist, failures prevented, and time saved per avoided failure. It might also be worthwhile to assign a bonus of five or ten minutes per catastrophic failure averted. Under some circumstances, saved lives do have a non-zero value.
Thanks for that. Apparently I skimmed the article a little too quickly. Imagining myself in both positions in the cockpit, I'm inclined to agree. Steps would rarely get missed or performed incorrectly. A far superior system to what I've been doing.
I wonder if delegating checklist-reading to a non-pilot passenger would fall under "good crew-resource management" or "gross negligence".
Aviation checklist users suffer from a condition that I'll call "known-data blindness" for lack of a better term.
I've run the C-172M checklist several hundred times, and let me tell you, it's *very* easy to lose track of your place in the list, and forget whether your memory of having completed a given item is from this evening's flight, or from the one you did this morning.
This is almost never deadly in a beast as simple as a fixed-prop, fixed-gear Cessna 172. Come to think of it, I've *never* caught a condition with my checklist that would have killed me, had I missed that item.
My personal experience leaves me wondering if it's possible that checklists could cause obvious things to be *missed*.
The problem could be easily fixed with dynamically generated checklists that cannot be answered without having read and comprehended the question... but that would slow things down so much that I bet it would cost more lives than it would save.
Do you have a reference for this? The Diesel cycle's inherent thermodynamic efficiency is no better than that of the Otto cycle used in a normal gasoline engine. In practice, it's actually slightly *less* efficient, except at idle, where it wins hands-down.
There is an easily comprehensible reason that diesels go 15% further per unit volume of fuel. It is because diesel is 15% denser than gasoline.
You got it. Supposedly at those temperatures, no molecule complex enough to be harmful will survive.
Of course, that doesn't much help with any metals that happen to get vaporized in there with it... but everyone needs a little more zinc in their diet anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
A "minor" release (and don't state it like it's a fact just yet) from an earthquake more powerful than design criteria does not make me think "Nuclear Power is Safe" nor even "Nuclear Power is Unsafe." It makes me question the design assumptions. Never mind what was known at the time. With benefit of hindsight, the design assumptions were clearly wrong.
So. Given what we know now, is it a correct assumption to pay the extra required, such that at-risk plants be designed to tolerate common-cause failures devolving from a magnitude 9.0 quake and related tsunami? That's really one for risk analysis economists to decide, but the consequences of failure are so unbelievably expensive, that my knee-jerk assumption suggests that it is not. The big problem is that the consequences are so expensive that they cannot be other than mostly externalized.
Regards, /.er, professional engineer, hobby economist, and ex-employee of the nuclear power industry.
Evilad
5-digit
Seems like the real solution is a bluetooth keyboard and a hi-res HMD. One finally exists; the ITG-PCX3D has 1024x768 resolution... but nobody seems to be making a phone that can drive it.
No mod points, sorry. But you deserve one in every category plus a few that they don't have yet.
http://www.lexcycle.com/
You're missing one important vector.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html
Seconded. I use Unison between Linux and OSX with no trouble, and used Win32 in the past as well. It isn't perfect, but it's closest by a wide margin.
6/10. Lost me at "shound't".
Psst! You're flaming him/her/it. Gently, but nevertheless. The bolded "you" is the tip-off.
You're being unnecessarily adversarial, and I wonder what your agenda is. It seems important to you to dismiss the idea of low-consumption off-grid living. In any case, I'm not advocating living like this in the 2000s. Just commenting on my amusement at the article conclusions, given that it is and was possible to run a minimalist household with a single wind generator with inefficient 1970-era technology.
Yes, the propane fridge sucks, but food refrigeration is pretty important. I'd be curious if you can back up your implied claim that a small, well-insulated propane fridge generates a lot more carbon than the huge, inefficient electrical monster most city-dwellers own.
As far as the rest of your questions go... The propane/electricity carbon balance was not significant in the 1970s, as a high proportion of power generation in Ontario was from coal and gas. The batteries were telco discards, rescued from the landfill. Those lights provided entirely enough illumination -- a 12v 100w incandescent bulb provides 100w of illumination, same as a 120v one -- and this was a home, not an art gallery. The building was a 1200 sqft 2 story detached house with (ineffective!) passive and active solar heating features. Cooling was provided with open windows.
Heating was provided with a high-efficiency woodstove. And before you start on your chemical-of-the-week schtick again (still carbon, yes?), the growing bushlot made the property a net carbon *sink*.
Sure, if you'll make an effort to restrain your incredulity and be a little more polite.
Propane stove and fridge. 1500 kg lead-acid battery bank. About 15 12v incandescent bulbs ranging from 40w to 100w. Computer on an antique and inefficient square-wave inverter, small b&w TV, two stereos, and occasional power-tool usage. The only hard part is the fridge. Propane fridges really suck, or they did in the 70s.
Apart from that, it's pretty easy if you're willing to live small. Not everyone wants to live like a USian with a strong urge to max out their credit cards on electronics and appliances.
Having grown up in a household whose total electrical needs were powered by a single 3m wind generator, I'm finding this article summary awfully amusing.
Try a stand-up workstation. I improvised one out of some metro shelving and it did wonders for my back.
For extra points and core-strength exercises, stand on a balance cushion while using it.
Excellent description, thank-you.
Your peak load is irrelevant, unless you're planning to try to do this without a battery system. You really just need to meet your average load, and have enough storage capacity to last the rest of the day.
Ach hysg.
Spelling error: I think you meant moonson season.
Wish I had the mod points.
You might not get as much heat conducted into that pipe as you'd hope. Magma has a finite thermal conductivity. More so after it's cooled to the point of solidification.
Imagine that most of the time, the "failure" isn't catastrophic (ie, patient death), but rather a failure of the test itself, merely requiring the engine to spend more time (ie, prolonged ICU stay) in retesting. The reduction in failures due to checklists will obviously cause a reduction in total time spent testing, causing a *reduction* in workload.
The question of which checklists are useful could then be reduced to a very simple economics problem, involving initial failure rate, time spent per checklist, failures prevented, and time saved per avoided failure. It might also be worthwhile to assign a bonus of five or ten minutes per catastrophic failure averted. Under some circumstances, saved lives do have a non-zero value.
Thanks for that. Apparently I skimmed the article a little too quickly. Imagining myself in both positions in the cockpit, I'm inclined to agree. Steps would rarely get missed or performed incorrectly. A far superior system to what I've been doing.
I wonder if delegating checklist-reading to a non-pilot passenger would fall under "good crew-resource management" or "gross negligence".
Aviation checklist users suffer from a condition that I'll call "known-data blindness" for lack of a better term.
I've run the C-172M checklist several hundred times, and let me tell you, it's *very* easy to lose track of your place in the list, and forget whether your memory of having completed a given item is from this evening's flight, or from the one you did this morning.
This is almost never deadly in a beast as simple as a fixed-prop, fixed-gear Cessna 172. Come to think of it, I've *never* caught a condition with my checklist that would have killed me, had I missed that item.
My personal experience leaves me wondering if it's possible that checklists could cause obvious things to be *missed*.
The problem could be easily fixed with dynamically generated checklists that cannot be answered without having read and comprehended the question... but that would slow things down so much that I bet it would cost more lives than it would save.
Do you have a reference for this? The Diesel cycle's inherent thermodynamic efficiency is no better than that of the Otto cycle used in a normal gasoline engine. In practice, it's actually slightly *less* efficient, except at idle, where it wins hands-down.
There is an easily comprehensible reason that diesels go 15% further per unit volume of fuel. It is because diesel is 15% denser than gasoline.
You got it. Supposedly at those temperatures, no molecule complex enough to be harmful will survive.
Of course, that doesn't much help with any metals that happen to get vaporized in there with it... but everyone needs a little more zinc in their diet anyhow.
I had good luck cycling with a 4-cell solar AA charger and an iPhone "emergency power" battery pack which coincidentally took AA batteries.
The typical portable/handheld solar panel lifespan is measured in the number of minutes it takes me to break it.
Typically about twenty.