For long term survival, school children will need to learn in school that to build a workable mini-ecosystem capable to support a small colony on, say, the moon, is a very difficult and expensive problem.
With as the obvious conclusion following from this, that we as a species better not destroy our "Biosphere 1" which is up till now completely suitable for us to live on because we evolved in it.
At the moment I don't think it's obvious to all people on earth that our beautiful planet has limits. But if school kids see astronauts on the moon eating boiled, strained algae soup in their "Spome" *EVERY DAY*, they might get a bit more appreciation.
Well, maybe...
Congratulations on getting some kind of intangible aspects of building a discussion forum website exactly right (we wouldn't all be reading and commenting here if you hadn't succeeded). Beats me why Slashdot works, but it clearly does!
Many thanks, and good luck in your next career whatever it is!
For his own part, Zhirinovsky has done a great deal to foster a reputation as a loud and boisterous populist who speaks on behalf of the Russian nation and people, even when the things he says are precisely what many people, at home or abroad, do not want to hear. Zhirinovsky infamously promised voters in 1991 that if he were elected, free vodka would be distributed to all. Similarly, he once remarked, during a political rally inside a Moscow department store, that if he were made president, underwear would be freely available.
Now, if he got it to run X, I might consider that a reasonable hack...but just running Linux...lame.
X ran like shit on my 386DX until I bought 4 extra MB of memory for it; with 8 MB it was quite acceptable.
I think it was the "MCC Interim" distro; only 2 or 3 floppies as opposed to Slackware for which you needed to download whole boxes of floppies.
I'm not sure, but I think larger problems are nearly undetectable levels of PCBs and dioxins (from industry) and estrogens (from the anticonception pill) that build up in your fatty tissues. Because they're already low concentration, they are more expensive to filter out.
I heard once (I've no way to know if it's really true) that by the time Thames water reached London it had been through 7 people.
I heard that too as an anecdote, and from a Londoner, but if anybody considers it "good tasting" then they've never in their life drunk normal tap water.
London tap water is chlorinated a lot (not as bad as Florence though) and you'll breathe out the chlorine vapour after you've brushed your teeth with it. Yuk.
I understand they can't be choosy, but still... aren't there always a lot of floods in Britain because it rains so much? May be a better idea to make an overflow lake somewhere in flood zone land (Norwich?) and pipe it to London to dilute/improve the taste of their chlorinated "I can't believe it's not water". Can any Brit tell us why they haven't already done this.
Three of the four credit rating companies are *IN* that country (Standard & Poor's, Moody's, Fitch Ratings).
The fourth one, Dagong Global, is in the PR China.
Recently Barroso grumbled about needing a European credit rating agency, when Portugal (where he also comes from) was downgraded again just for the kicks.
You may think Dagong is probably a tool of the Chinese government. Yes, that's probably so. So what? I find it hard to believe that the three US credit rating agencies would be 100% independent if their government would lean on them.
Good question!
What do you people think of the following ones:
UTF-16 and UTF-32 instead of UTF-8 (N.B. UTF-8 plays nice with the NUL-terminated strings)
32-bit time_t (we're all going to be busy in 2037:-) )
(maybe off-topic) choosing MSOOXML instead of ODF 1.2
I don't think its the kind of raid you see before you.
I'm guessing they came by, knocked on the door and asked to see his experiment, then asked him to join them to the police station for questioning and took the equipment. Not exactly kicking down the door with a full swat team swarming into the apartment kind of raid.
No indeed, that kind of raid is reserved for more severe criminal cases, such as people harbouring hedgehogs in Hälsingland.
IANARocketScientist so please correct me if I say something foolish, but according to this picture (delta-v budget), it costs about half as much delta-V to move the ISS from LEO to lunar orbit as it cost in total putting its components from the surface to LEO.
I'm aware that it was put into space on board huge rockets, and that you'd need bigger rockets because they'd need to still have fuel left after reaching LEO. But what about the following scenario:
An Ariane 5 can launch something like a re-built ESA ATV, but where the cargo space has been converted to fuel space, to the ISS. If it carries 8 tonnes of Argon that should give enough fuel for a VASIMR (powered from the > 128 kW solar panels) to really sloooooooowly push it into lunar orbit. Who cares if it takes 100 years. The delta-V spent on carrying all that refined metal up to LEO shouldn't be wasted. I found it a waste when the Russians de-orbited Mir.
That reminds me to patent this new invention called the "personal excavator tool" which can be used to move quantities of this new material I invented called "Lunar regolith" which, whilst not as good as lead qua radiation shielding properties per meter thickness, can be piled on as thick as you need it, and is quite cheap on the moon. Unless Wallace and Gromit were right.. How is Wensleydale for blocking radiation, anyone know?
You're thinking too small. If we start populating other worlds the human race will start expanding exponentially.
Yes, but that is only possible for a small elite, I think: the costs of moving off-planet are largely fixed by the enormous energy necessary to overcome Earth's gravity in a small tin can suitable to transfer colonists to, say, geostationary orbit.
And currently we grow by approx 70 million people per year, how much does it cost (expressed in terms of renewable energy) to launch them all?
Earth is a thermodynamically open system in the sense only that it gets renewable energy from the Sun. We've got enough carbon (and to spare, see global warming) and water for the kerosene-oxygen fuel so we'd need to recycle the steel of the launchers (maybe import some from the asteroids).
But talking about thinking too small: I don't think 70 million people will *ever* be launched per year; much cheaper to just invent teleportation and construct their "receiver" bodies outside of a deep gravity well;-)
Ok!
Earth has a land surface of 148,940,000 km^2. That's 1.5 * 10^14 m^2.
Let's say we can fit 8 people on a surface a meter squared, if they are not too fat (obviously I'm ignoring buildings of more than 1 floor here).
That gives us a carrying capacity of 1.2 * 10^15 people on all the land surface on Earth. I'm ignoring for now that those people are composed of CHON + Calcium, Phosphorus, Iron, Sulphur etc. and if we have enough resources.
That number divided by the 7,000,000,000 we have now is approx 172000. Earth is full if we have 172000 times as many people as now (unless they can swim really well).
If the annual population growth rate were large such as 3%, we would stand belly-to-belly in 2419.
(That's exponentials for you)
If the annual population growth rate were 2%, like in the 1960s, we would have until 2620.
If the annual population growth rate stays at 1%, like now, we would have more than a thousand years until 3223.
There's a saying: if something can't go on forever, it won't.
I still have to see if I can buy John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" one day, no doubt I've made mistakes in my calculation.
I invite you fellow Slashdotters to do the calculation for yourself:
To calculate the number of years do the following: growth factor = (1 + growth rate % / 100 %) ^ number of years
where number of years is the unknown so rewrite it by taking the logarithm:
log(growth factor) = number of yeasr * log (1 + growth rate % / 100 %)
<=> number of years = log(growth factor) / log (1 + growth rate % / 100 %)
fill in for 2%: log (172000) / log (1 + 0.02) = 609 years (add 2011 to that)
It doesn't matter what you take as the base of your logarithm, 10 or e or whatever.
And how did you guess that I considered becoming a Roman catholic monk when I was a boy? The mind boggles...
For other fun catholic-monk-like activities aside from autoflagellation, visit http://www.pgdp.net/c/ (safe for work most of the time). Crowdsourcing projects benefit from increased population too!
Right:-) let me rephrase that fictional reference then..
You can't expect a nation half as big as a continent, which is totally addicted to petroleum influx, where it is anathema to talk about scaling things down and conserving power and switching to expensive renewables, to stay a coherent nation-state once that power source (the oil) becomes too expensive for the average Joe in the street to sustain their current income level. And after M. King Hubbert applied the Law of large numbers to add up a series of unrelated oil extraction graphs from various oil wells of various sizes, start years and production rates, for the USA, it becomes quite likely that the exact same maths is also valid when seen on a world scale instead of lower-49 states USA production fields, ergo there exists a Hubbert's peak, and with the terminal decline of oil going quite fast (maybe 40 years), you can expect USA to break up in 40 years as well. Then there is no federal government to force Nevada to accept the nuclear waste anymore. And it's not guaranteed that all of the states or whatever smaller-scale governments will exist will have the necessary level of cooperation to allow for transport of nuclear waste, especially if it's already a political problem now.
There is money to do it now, so you Americans should do it now, is what I think.
Well, think of this made-up example of doom & gloom:
The Shit Hits The Fan in USA. E.g. federal government defaults on its debt, the roller-coaster off of Hubbert's plateau starts, large scale society collapses like the Roman empire, or something like that.
Not many people die, but most people switch their attention from watching politics on TV to growing potatoes and carrying jerrycans of water or gasoline on their head.
Now imagine that the nuclear waste of all USA power plants is *NOT* yet in Yucca Mountain, to be reviewed and reprocessed in 300 years. It would be like Fukushima Unit 4 (mind I DIDN't say unit 1-3! I mean the pool), but then squared.
Do you seriously believe that in 100 years from now, god-emperor Nehemiah Scudder of East Utah will apportion a percentage of his precious tithes to transport the spent fuel rods in the leaking swimming pool of the abandoned nuke plant that nobody dares to get near to anymore, through enemy territory (the heretic separatists of West Utah, the communists of Arizona or the godless hedonists of Las Vegas), to that faraway Yucca Mountain site, in exchange for... nothing...?
Mind you, it might make a good script for a film.
That's a very good question and unfortunately I don't know. I am not a nuclear engineer but I've learnt a little bit of physics and chemistry. I want to point out a few misleading things I've read here on Slashdot:
The "pro-nuke" activists talk about reprocessing spent fuel (e.g. LFTR Thorium reactor, Fast Breeder reactors, etc.), and when they do they use the verb "burn",
as in "burn the waste so that it becomes harmless".
I am quite sure that this is false and misleading.
We're not talking about "burning"; "burning" is a well understood chemical reaction of stuff with oxygen, where we have ashes left, and we also know how to scrub the fly-ash etc. so that we have industrial plants called "waste incinerators" which is very high-tech, very clean and leaves only little dioxins and PCBs in the waste they produce. Waste incineration is an understood procedure and if the temperature is high enough we can burn practically anything, clean the gases, and be done.
But here instead, we're talking about irradiating spent nuclear fuel with lots of high-intensity neutrons from a hugely radioactive reactor (that's why Fast Breeder such as the Superphénix and Monju needs to be cooled with liquid Sodium; it's nasty but anything else gets too radioactive from the neutrons to approach). After irradiating this spent fuel it becomes much more radioactive, and part of the higher actinides that made the fuel "spent" in the first place, will have "transmuted" (*NOT* "burnt"!) to other actinides.
Then it is the hope, that the now even more radioactive stuff can be chemically separated into highly-active short-lived stuff (put in a mountain for 300 years and you're already done with it), the unspent part of the reactor fuel which can now be re-used, and lots of other waste products that vary in intensity, duration of radioactivity, etc.
The idea of this is, that the resulting products are less dangerous in the long term (300 years +).
Now what I'm concerned about is, how can we be sure that it's all transmuted "cleanly"? Any higher actinide such as Americium and Protactinium can itself fission into loads of stuff; I don't think there's a neutron flux that can be generated on earth that transmutes everything in a spent fission fuel cocktail to components that are either mostly harmless or have a well understood decay. What I mean is that I don't believe that we already know how to transmute things "cleanly".
And that's why I want people to call it "transmuting" instead of "burning" so that this difference is not forgotten in the discussion.
<anti-nuke-rant>
I know transmuting spent fuel will be bloody expensive, and the politicians will want to see results. That leads to a "moral hazard" for directors of processing plants to sweep things (literally, maybe?) under the carpet. There are no more experimental breeder reactors working in France AFAIK (Superphénix is closed) or in Germany where they had scandals with Thorium pebble bed reactors in the 70's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_Reactor). THAT's why they want to get rid of nuclear now, btw. It's not just scaremongering; it's their politicians saying "oh that reactor from the 70's? we thought you forgot.. yeah we'll approach the subject of clean-up costs again in 2060 when it's cooled down a bit".
Let's build out solar and wind, study and build out electricity grid storage, continue work on the ITER in Cadarache, and re-evaluate nuclear fission in 100 years when the costs of decommissioning have become more clear.
</anti-nuke-rant>
"No, in a real way, an earthquake plus resulting tsunami caused Fukushima."
I have read that A LOT on this Slashdot discussion.
And every time, I mentally substitute "an earthquake plus resulting tsunami" by "power to the cooling systems being down for more than 8 hours".
It puts things into clearer perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
For long term survival, school children will need to learn in school that to build a workable mini-ecosystem capable to support a small colony on, say, the moon, is a very difficult and expensive problem.
With as the obvious conclusion following from this, that we as a species better not destroy our "Biosphere 1" which is up till now completely suitable for us to live on because we evolved in it.
At the moment I don't think it's obvious to all people on earth that our beautiful planet has limits. But if school kids see astronauts on the moon eating boiled, strained algae soup in their "Spome" *EVERY DAY*, they might get a bit more appreciation.
Well, maybe...
Congratulations on getting some kind of intangible aspects of building a discussion forum website exactly right (we wouldn't all be reading and commenting here if you hadn't succeeded). Beats me why Slashdot works, but it clearly does! Many thanks, and good luck in your next career whatever it is!
Vladimir Zhirinovsky:
And more recently in the USA: Michele Bachmann:
I hope that Tytler is wrong about human nature :-)
U+FDFD codepoint is B'ismi'llah AFAIK. Learn something new every day.
You shouldn't <expect> all comments here on Slashdot to make real sense, probably ;-)
X ran like shit on my 386DX until I bought 4 extra MB of memory for it; with 8 MB it was quite acceptable.
I think it was the "MCC Interim" distro; only 2 or 3 floppies as opposed to Slackware for which you needed to download whole boxes of floppies.
I'm not sure, but I think larger problems are nearly undetectable levels of PCBs and dioxins (from industry) and estrogens (from the anticonception pill) that build up in your fatty tissues. Because they're already low concentration, they are more expensive to filter out.
I heard that too as an anecdote, and from a Londoner, but if anybody considers it "good tasting" then they've never in their life drunk normal tap water.
London tap water is chlorinated a lot (not as bad as Florence though) and you'll breathe out the chlorine vapour after you've brushed your teeth with it. Yuk.
I understand they can't be choosy, but still... aren't there always a lot of floods in Britain because it rains so much? May be a better idea to make an overflow lake somewhere in flood zone land (Norwich?) and pipe it to London to dilute/improve the taste of their chlorinated "I can't believe it's not water". Can any Brit tell us why they haven't already done this.
I haven't seen a GNAA pornographic story comment yet. Usually those only show up when it's about ODF vs MSOOXML.
Three of the four credit rating companies are *IN* that country (Standard & Poor's, Moody's, Fitch Ratings).
The fourth one, Dagong Global, is in the PR China.
Recently Barroso grumbled about needing a European credit rating agency, when Portugal (where he also comes from) was downgraded again just for the kicks.
In other news, Dagong downgraded USA from "A+" to "A" with a negative outlook; that's a bit between Poland and Spain on table 3 (p.4-5) of "Review summary at 1st anniversary of issuance of sovereign credit ratings for 50 countries and regions by Dagong" (PDF) .
You may think Dagong is probably a tool of the Chinese government. Yes, that's probably so. So what? I find it hard to believe that the three US credit rating agencies would be 100% independent if their government would lean on them.
that's only a costly mistake for the USA and Japan
Good question! :-) )
What do you people think of the following ones:
UTF-16 and UTF-32 instead of UTF-8 (N.B. UTF-8 plays nice with the NUL-terminated strings)
32-bit time_t (we're all going to be busy in 2037
(maybe off-topic) choosing MSOOXML instead of ODF 1.2
No indeed, that kind of raid is reserved for more severe criminal cases, such as people harbouring hedgehogs in Hälsingland.
Wait, are we still talking about Sweden?
Shiit..
IANARocketScientist so please correct me if I say something foolish, but according to this picture (delta-v budget), it costs about half as much delta-V to move the ISS from LEO to lunar orbit as it cost in total putting its components from the surface to LEO.
I'm aware that it was put into space on board huge rockets, and that you'd need bigger rockets because they'd need to still have fuel left after reaching LEO. But what about the following scenario:
An Ariane 5 can launch something like a re-built ESA ATV, but where the cargo space has been converted to fuel space, to the ISS. If it carries 8 tonnes of Argon that should give enough fuel for a VASIMR (powered from the > 128 kW solar panels) to really sloooooooowly push it into lunar orbit. Who cares if it takes 100 years. The delta-V spent on carrying all that refined metal up to LEO shouldn't be wasted. I found it a waste when the Russians de-orbited Mir.
That reminds me to patent this new invention called the "personal excavator tool" which can be used to move quantities of this new material I invented called "Lunar regolith" which, whilst not as good as lead qua radiation shielding properties per meter thickness, can be piled on as thick as you need it, and is quite cheap on the moon. Unless Wallace and Gromit were right.. How is Wensleydale for blocking radiation, anyone know?
Yes, but that is only possible for a small elite, I think: the costs of moving off-planet are largely fixed by the enormous energy necessary to overcome Earth's gravity in a small tin can suitable to transfer colonists to, say, geostationary orbit. ;-)
And currently we grow by approx 70 million people per year, how much does it cost (expressed in terms of renewable energy) to launch them all?
Earth is a thermodynamically open system in the sense only that it gets renewable energy from the Sun. We've got enough carbon (and to spare, see global warming) and water for the kerosene-oxygen fuel so we'd need to recycle the steel of the launchers (maybe import some from the asteroids).
But talking about thinking too small: I don't think 70 million people will *ever* be launched per year; much cheaper to just invent teleportation and construct their "receiver" bodies outside of a deep gravity well
Ok!
Earth has a land surface of 148,940,000 km^2. That's 1.5 * 10^14 m^2.
Let's say we can fit 8 people on a surface a meter squared, if they are not too fat (obviously I'm ignoring buildings of more than 1 floor here).
That gives us a carrying capacity of 1.2 * 10^15 people on all the land surface on Earth. I'm ignoring for now that those people are composed of CHON + Calcium, Phosphorus, Iron, Sulphur etc. and if we have enough resources.
That number divided by the 7,000,000,000 we have now is approx 172000. Earth is full if we have 172000 times as many people as now (unless they can swim really well).
If the annual population growth rate were large such as 3%, we would stand belly-to-belly in 2419.
(That's exponentials for you)
If the annual population growth rate were 2%, like in the 1960s, we would have until 2620.
If the annual population growth rate stays at 1%, like now, we would have more than a thousand years until 3223.
There's a saying: if something can't go on forever, it won't.
I still have to see if I can buy John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" one day, no doubt I've made mistakes in my calculation.
I invite you fellow Slashdotters to do the calculation for yourself:
To calculate the number of years do the following: growth factor = (1 + growth rate % / 100 %) ^ number of years
where number of years is the unknown so rewrite it by taking the logarithm: log(growth factor) = number of yeasr * log (1 + growth rate % / 100 %) <=> number of years = log(growth factor) / log (1 + growth rate % / 100 %)
fill in for 2%: log (172000) / log (1 + 0.02) = 609 years (add 2011 to that)
It doesn't matter what you take as the base of your logarithm, 10 or e or whatever.
And how did you guess that I considered becoming a Roman catholic monk when I was a boy? The mind boggles...
For other fun catholic-monk-like activities aside from autoflagellation, visit http://www.pgdp.net/c/ (safe for work most of the time). Crowdsourcing projects benefit from increased population too!
agree about the dry storage casks btw
Right :-) let me rephrase that fictional reference then..
You can't expect a nation half as big as a continent, which is totally addicted to petroleum influx, where it is anathema to talk about scaling things down and conserving power and switching to expensive renewables, to stay a coherent nation-state once that power source (the oil) becomes too expensive for the average Joe in the street to sustain their current income level. And after M. King Hubbert applied the Law of large numbers to add up a series of unrelated oil extraction graphs from various oil wells of various sizes, start years and production rates, for the USA, it becomes quite likely that the exact same maths is also valid when seen on a world scale instead of lower-49 states USA production fields, ergo there exists a Hubbert's peak, and with the terminal decline of oil going quite fast (maybe 40 years), you can expect USA to break up in 40 years as well. Then there is no federal government to force Nevada to accept the nuclear waste anymore. And it's not guaranteed that all of the states or whatever smaller-scale governments will exist will have the necessary level of cooperation to allow for transport of nuclear waste, especially if it's already a political problem now.
There is money to do it now, so you Americans should do it now, is what I think. ... nothing ...?
Well, think of this made-up example of doom & gloom:
The Shit Hits The Fan in USA. E.g. federal government defaults on its debt, the roller-coaster off of Hubbert's plateau starts, large scale society collapses like the Roman empire, or something like that.
Not many people die, but most people switch their attention from watching politics on TV to growing potatoes and carrying jerrycans of water or gasoline on their head.
Now imagine that the nuclear waste of all USA power plants is *NOT* yet in Yucca Mountain, to be reviewed and reprocessed in 300 years. It would be like Fukushima Unit 4 (mind I DIDN't say unit 1-3! I mean the pool), but then squared.
Do you seriously believe that in 100 years from now, god-emperor Nehemiah Scudder of East Utah will apportion a percentage of his precious tithes to transport the spent fuel rods in the leaking swimming pool of the abandoned nuke plant that nobody dares to get near to anymore, through enemy territory (the heretic separatists of West Utah, the communists of Arizona or the godless hedonists of Las Vegas), to that faraway Yucca Mountain site, in exchange for
Mind you, it might make a good script for a film.
That's a very good question and unfortunately I don't know. I am not a nuclear engineer but I've learnt a little bit of physics and chemistry. I want to point out a few misleading things I've read here on Slashdot:
The "pro-nuke" activists talk about reprocessing spent fuel (e.g. LFTR Thorium reactor, Fast Breeder reactors, etc.), and when they do they use the verb "burn", as in "burn the waste so that it becomes harmless".
I am quite sure that this is false and misleading.
We're not talking about "burning"; "burning" is a well understood chemical reaction of stuff with oxygen, where we have ashes left, and we also know how to scrub the fly-ash etc. so that we have industrial plants called "waste incinerators" which is very high-tech, very clean and leaves only little dioxins and PCBs in the waste they produce. Waste incineration is an understood procedure and if the temperature is high enough we can burn practically anything, clean the gases, and be done.
But here instead, we're talking about irradiating spent nuclear fuel with lots of high-intensity neutrons from a hugely radioactive reactor (that's why Fast Breeder such as the Superphénix and Monju needs to be cooled with liquid Sodium; it's nasty but anything else gets too radioactive from the neutrons to approach). After irradiating this spent fuel it becomes much more radioactive, and part of the higher actinides that made the fuel "spent" in the first place, will have "transmuted" (*NOT* "burnt"!) to other actinides.
Then it is the hope, that the now even more radioactive stuff can be chemically separated into highly-active short-lived stuff (put in a mountain for 300 years and you're already done with it), the unspent part of the reactor fuel which can now be re-used, and lots of other waste products that vary in intensity, duration of radioactivity, etc.
The idea of this is, that the resulting products are less dangerous in the long term (300 years +).
Now what I'm concerned about is, how can we be sure that it's all transmuted "cleanly"? Any higher actinide such as Americium and Protactinium can itself fission into loads of stuff; I don't think there's a neutron flux that can be generated on earth that transmutes everything in a spent fission fuel cocktail to components that are either mostly harmless or have a well understood decay. What I mean is that I don't believe that we already know how to transmute things "cleanly".
And that's why I want people to call it "transmuting" instead of "burning" so that this difference is not forgotten in the discussion.
<anti-nuke-rant>
I know transmuting spent fuel will be bloody expensive, and the politicians will want to see results. That leads to a "moral hazard" for directors of processing plants to sweep things (literally, maybe?) under the carpet. There are no more experimental breeder reactors working in France AFAIK (Superphénix is closed) or in Germany where they had scandals with Thorium pebble bed reactors in the 70's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_Reactor). THAT's why they want to get rid of nuclear now, btw. It's not just scaremongering; it's their politicians saying "oh that reactor from the 70's? we thought you forgot.. yeah we'll approach the subject of clean-up costs again in 2060 when it's cooled down a bit".
Let's build out solar and wind, study and build out electricity grid storage, continue work on the ITER in Cadarache, and re-evaluate nuclear fission in 100 years when the costs of decommissioning have become more clear.
</anti-nuke-rant>
I see what you did there!
Won't someone think of the poor Maxwell's demons working themselves into a sweat..
Zie ze es grijnzen op die foto.. waar staat die gast van BREIN eigenlijk? verstopt achter dhr. Teeven?
Oblig. Austin Powers GoldMember quote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ882QYzr-M
I have read that A LOT on this Slashdot discussion.
And every time, I mentally substitute "an earthquake plus resulting tsunami" by "power to the cooling systems being down for more than 8 hours".
It puts things into clearer perspective.