mr friendly guy wrote:Back to how the nuclear crisis will affect the development of nuclear power.
While China a few days ago stated it will continue to develop nuclear power while studying the safety standards, CNN has reported they have for now suspended approvals for new ones while doing it.
Since China was already planning to build shit loads, does this mean those ones being planned already had approval, and hence aren't being suspended? Or does this apply to ones being proposed?
Maybe this would give more impetus to pebble bed reactors, of which as of last year China had the only working prototype, since Germany abandoned the technology because of the nuclear is bad mmkay crowd.
Mark Hibbs at the Carnegie Endowment Institute for Peace doesn't think so. And neither does Straszheim at ISI Group.
"The Chinese have been building nuclear reactors like hot cakes for five to 10 years, and they're going to continue to do this," said Mark Hibbs, an expert on nuclear policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Projects in China currently represent 60% of all new nuclear power plant construction worldwide. In the wake of the Japanese disaster, the Chinese market is likely to become even more important for companies such as Westinghouse, which is designing many of China's new reactors.
"Most of the developed world is going to put a freeze, temporarily, on new nuclear projects at least until they can learn whatever lessons seem appropriate from Japan," said Donald Straszheim, a senior China analyst at ISI Group. "But in China, new demand needs to be satisfied. Vendors worldwide, watching the stutter-step in growth elsewhere, will be increasingly amenable to dealing with China because they know that is where the long-term growth will be."
Turns out that a five way cross over between It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the Ali G Show, Fargo, Idiocracy and Veep is a lot less funny when you're actually living in it.
So it should be possible to simply put them into a independant containment.
Serious containment buildings are pretty expensive, also rather heavy. A containment vessel doesn't prevent a melt down, but just contain it. That means you will pay a lot up front when you're making it and a lot afterwards when is time to clean up the mess. They have to make some profits over these reactors, remember? Broomstick has another good point.
Also it's safer and less error prone if you move the Hot Stuff™ to the cooling pond through the shortest route possible. Making the connection between the two containment buildings radiation shielded and disaster proof will make the whole setup more complex and costlier, for very little gain.
The thing to remember is: if the fuel pond is ever a problem... shit has hit the fan already. And in such circumstances the reactor core itself was/is seen as the bigger problem. And the main reason for this crisis was auxiliary power failure. No additional containment would have helped as much and as cost effectively as having another diesel generator and a barrel of fuel in a place the tsunami would not have incapacitated it - but hindsight is 20/20.
This is pre-WWII. You can sort of tell from the sketch style, from thee way it refers to Japan (Japan in the 1950s was still rebuilding from WWII), the spelling of Tokyo, lots of details. Nothing obvious... except that the upper right hand corner of the page reads "November 1931." --- Simon_Jester
Yes, except they're not automated, at least not all of them. Some in areas like sendai and minamisanriku died because they didn't abandon their posts and warned people, saving thousands of lives.
Duckie wrote:Yes, except they're not automated, at least not all of them. Some in areas like sendai and minamisanriku died because they didn't abandon their posts and warned people, saving thousands of lives.
It's really horrible that no one thought to implement something to automatically repeat a recorded message so that a human wouldn't have to suicidally remain there in person. Is there any legitimate reason to require these posts to remain manned after a warning has been issued, or is this purely the negligence of whoever thought up the system?
By the way, have anyone else noticed the complete absence of words like "looting" in the reporting from Japan? Quite a contrast to reporting from most other disaster-areas I'd dare to say.
^^^Mostly because there really isn't anything to loot. Yet there has been some minor looting mostly out of a need to survive. Ed Schultz tore that notion apart on his show.
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I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do." - David Cronenberg
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cosmicalstorm wrote:By the way, have anyone else noticed the complete absence of words like "looting" in the reporting from Japan? Quite a contrast to reporting from most other disaster-areas I'd dare to say.
There was an interesting piece in the local press from some people who were in Kobe for that earthquake in the nineties and talked about how despite the fact that people were hungry and thirsty, the local 7/11 and bottle shops etc which just had the front doors locked (no security screens, just glass frontages) were left untouched for the duration.
It seems to be more a cultural thing, at least, that was their implication.
I guess it might be camouflaged by translation difficulties. The explanations provided seems reasonable. Also, I honestly didn't know that Glenn Beck had been blubbering about this before I asked the question.
Duckie wrote:Yes, except they're not automated, at least not all of them. Some in areas like sendai and minamisanriku died because they didn't abandon their posts and warned people, saving thousands of lives.
That's horrible, wouldn't it make far more sense to have centralised and automated system that can be set off in case of tsunamis? I can't imagine the message would be all that complex. "Tsunami coming, run for high ground."
Japanese people generally and rarely indulge in looting in any disaster.
This is a society where social norms are pretty damn well respected, including basic courtesies.
STGOD: Byzantine Empire Your spirit, diseased as it is, refuses to allow you to give up, no matter what threats you face... and whatever wreckage you leave behind you.
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Pictoral Radiation Dose Chart. Yes, it's xkcd, a webcomic, but sources for the information are listed and it's clearly intended for general education purposes only. The information is in line with what I've found in other places. The chief virtue is that it is a visual aid, and being visual creatures that can help.
Note that eating a banana gives you a larger radiation dose than living within 50 miles/80 km of a nuclear plant for a year. Note that taking a transatlantic flight away from Japan exposes you to more than eight times the radiation of staying near Fukushima for one day. These things have all been mentioned before in this thread, but here they are again in graphic form.
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Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Japanese people generally and rarely indulge in looting in any disaster.
This is a society where social norms are pretty damn well respected, including basic courtesies.
Indeed. They have, literally, centuries of practice in dealing with this sort of disaster. They have also had centuries of practice in living in crowded conditions.
They're "looting" in the sense of scavenging resources for survival purposes. While I think most of us don't regard that as looting some people might.
What we don't seem to see is people looting in the sense of taking luxuries - possibly because in some areas there's very little left that's not smashed and water-soaked, but yes, I think there are some cultural norms at work here.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Another stunning video of the tsunami in action. This is very much what I imagine watching an atomic bomb explode over a city in slo-mo would look like.
cosmicalstorm wrote:By the way, have anyone else noticed the complete absence of words like "looting" in the reporting from Japan? Quite a contrast to reporting from most other disaster-areas I'd dare to say.
Some looting was reported; considering the total destruction of most affected areas, and near total lack of damage everywhere else its not really good looting conditions anyway. It also helps that the Yakuza use disasters as a recruiting tool, so they can just rob all the stores after beating the clerks onto the floor with wooden sticks later anyway.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Can anyone verify what the death statistic is at right now? I'm having trouble pinning it down. Most sources are reporting "dead and missing" or "unaccounted for" rather than official death statistics.
Todeswind wrote:Can anyone verify what the death statistic is at right now? I'm having trouble pinning it down. Most sources are reporting "dead and missing" or "unaccounted for" rather than official death statistics.
A best guess is the closest you'll get right now given how difficult it is to verify everyone's whereabouts. Until they have a body and can identify them it's a bit premature to count them as an official death, so there's going to be a lot of "missing and unaccounted for".
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
Yeah that's pretty certain; and even on land it will take a long time to find everyone considering that the debris are piled 8-10ft deep into many canals, rivers and in some places the whole landscape is like that. However a decent number of missing can still be expected to turn up alive as well, considering that the situation is still very confused and communications are still spotty. It was pointed out by some survivors how they'd lost cellphones and all the numbers and simply couldn't call up everyone they knew to check on them without that.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Out of curiosity regarding Fukushima and nuclear power: does anybody know how many power plants were too affected by the earthquake and tsunami? And out of those, how many suffered any malfunction?
I am just curious about these facts. I am certain that it wasn't only Fukushima that had to scrammed as a precaution.
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