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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 18, 2011 - 02:56pm PT
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klimmer, and everyone else, the idea of a thread like this is not to make it into a competition of who is "right" and who is "wrong," we have been trying to explore what might be happening and how that affects the people of Japan, and us... there is a lot of misinformation, a lot of wisdom, and some puzzling through of the event, no one knows what the "truth" is, it's as simple as that, and part of the process of understanding is dealing with a lot of contradictory information.
I always get the impression from you that you believe that someone knows "the truth" and is hiding it from the rest of us, it is a mission of your's to reveal the conspiracy and proclaim that you knew it all along. That's my impression...
You bring it upon your self because of your world view, a view in which there are conspiracies to hold back important information and perhaps to control us through the release of misinformation. That is not my experience at all, my experience is that people make all sorts of decisions based on no information at all because there is none, or they have grossly misunderstood what information they have. Never attribute maliciousness where incompetence is more likely.
By the way, you should worry about the calibration of your radiation monitor, and what, exactly, it is measuring... very easy to get incorrect readings due to the detailed inner workings and then draw erroneous conclusions based on instrumental effects... happens all the time.
I don't care if you are right or wrong as long as you are being intelligent and respectful in this discussion, at least if you think you are trying to inject information. rrrADAM has been that all along, if you can't deal with being told you might have misrepresented, misunderstood or mis-stated some bits of information than your apparent need to be infallible gets in the way of the central point of the thread...
...it seems that you are never wrong, and especially when someone questions you.
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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Mar 18, 2011 - 02:56pm PT
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Sorry Rick James.
Mybad.
Too much truth.
Ed,
Not true. I can admit to being wrong many times. I've been shown to be wrong and I will admit it, no problem. I just don't like being called wrong, nutjob, crazy, bat-poop crazy like so many ad hominem labels. I say prove it.
I understand that there is much that others can dissagree with me on. No problem. I do try and stay on topic though. Who should care if I believe in Santa Claus? Just stick to the current arguement. Just because someone has a different belief system than you, does that make them wrong on everything and an opportunity to bring it up whenever they feel they are losing an arguement. (Dang it all I'm losing the arguement, I'll just mention that he believes in Santa Claus again, and that he is bat-poop crazy and nuts. Yea, that works. Right out of the GOP playbook. Cool.)
I would like this thread to eventually start talking about solutions to the problem and what we can do to help the people of Japan. I'm thinking we have many sins as a nation to atone for (Hiroshima and Nakasaki, and the internment camps during WW2). We can help in a tremendous way and we are I know. But we can do more. Maybe it is time to take in families that have lost everything and give them a safe new start here in America if they so desire. Many other countries could do the same. We are all gonna have to step-up big time.
"If you do it unto the least of these you have done it unto me."
Thanks for the advice. My CD V-700 seems to be in calibration. It has a source mounted on the side and takes you through the steps and what the geiger counter should be reading and it does.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Mar 18, 2011 - 03:27pm PT
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Hahaha...
Not true. I can admit to being wrong many times. I've been shown to be wrong and I will admit it, no problem.
Moment of truth:
Can a 12VDC car battery electrocute you if you press its terminals with your fingertips, even if you licked them first?
yes or no?
In the famous retort of Dr. F,
yes or no?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Mar 18, 2011 - 03:27pm PT
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Mike - Thank you !!! Finally some facts. If only the Japanese government could be so forthcoming.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Mar 18, 2011 - 03:32pm PT
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i'd like to maintain a clear distinction between:
1. things i've personally observed and report as such
2. personal opinions based upon my experience and information sources
3. unusual things people have told me; often without my having a means to make a definitive analysis. Sometimes I pass on such information for two reasons:
a. to see if anyone else has information either to support or refute the information; and b. to see what sort of reaction people have to the idea
people sometimes tell me really interesting information that doesn't fit very well with common knowledge; probably because i am safe to talk to and don't just come back with knee-jerk ridicule
i sometimes discuss such information sources with friends who are old retired insiders with deep knowledge
some such information then stays in my category for unverified unusual reports
some goes in my category for partially evaluated unusual phenomena
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i certainly don't claim to know it all; and ST is certainly not the best place to build or defend one's professional reputation...
i believe there have been orders of magnitude more deaths in japan as a result of the quake and tsunami than the reported body count; based upon personally seeing the results on-the-ground of several other major disaster events; and extrapolating to what has been made known about this one
and concerns about the nukes are serving to block out the aftermath stories of both the quake and the tsunami
the mention i made above came from a very interesting source about 20 years ago and included a long list of supposed program plans that seemed highly improbable to me at the time. however almost everything on that list has now happened; to my great chagrin. i really don't like thinking about the additional list items that have not happened (yet?)
and yes, he described in some detail how such a quake and tsunami could be induced.
and i don't yet know how to evaluate the veracity or practicality of what he told me
perhaps i should just defend my reputation by keeping quiet about it...
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Bargainhunter
climber
Central California
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Mar 18, 2011 - 03:35pm PT
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Thank Mike Bolte for that update link.
While I was reading about the Chernobyl catastrophe, I was shocked to discover how much water was necessary to cool the fuel rods during an emergency shut down:
"The reactor that exploded in Chernobyl consisted of about 1,600 individual fuel channels, and each operational channel required a flow of 28 metric tons (28,000 liters (7,400 USgal)) of water per hour." [Medvedev, Zhores A. (1990). The Legacy of Chernobyl, W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393308143.]...
Yes that's 7400 gallons per hour per channel. If all channels were simultaneously operational (I'm not sure if that is possible), that water demand would be 11.84 million gallons per hour for mere cooling when the reactor is shutdown. Adam, how much water does your reactor need?
Due to the need for this enormous volume of water to keep things cool, I can understand the logistical difficulties of placing huge diesel backup pumps more than 25' in the air to avoid a once in a century tsunami.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Mar 18, 2011 - 03:48pm PT
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The solution to the use of nukes is arrays of self-shutdown, mini-nukes each installed in an entombable container outfitted with:
a) manual, gate-valved, external water flooding ports with various types of connectors (on-site pumps, pumper trucks, etc.)
b) adjacent elevated floodplain about the size of a football field with a topology that feeds to drains connected to the flooding ports above so a maximum of airdropped or cannoned water would actually hit the flooding drains.
c) manual, gate-valved, external concrete pumping ports for entombment
d) Much better engineered spent fuel containment than are currently used today (though in Japan's case the storage of spent fuel above the nukes was probably driven by urban space concerns endemic in their culture and was probably thought to be 'clever' at the time.).
e) Follow the French lead on vitrification of waste with onsite or regional vitrification facilities and temporary onsite vitrified waste storage.
But if true full [fuel and reactor] life cycle costs were factored into the above deployments I question whether they'd really be commercially viable.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Mar 18, 2011 - 03:50pm PT
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This is along the lines I was thinking... toying with... when I asked rrrAdam yesterday if there had been any step change advances in design in the last 30 years that he knew of that he could tell us about.
Seems to me, there could be lots of improvements gleaned from this disaster in Japan that would render any next gen systems (which we might call true 21st century) many step changes higher in improvement safety-wise.
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Seamstress
Trad climber
Yacolt, WA
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Mar 18, 2011 - 03:51pm PT
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Mike,
That was an intersting link. Thanks.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Mar 18, 2011 - 04:00pm PT
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and yes, he described in some detail how such a quake and tsunami could be induced.
and i don't yet know how to evaluate the veracity or practicality of what he told me
There are certainly lots of substantial underwater slopes around the world at places like the Canaries that could probably be triggered to artificially create a Tsunami with a sufficient application of energy (think nuclear), but such triggering events would have undeniable human fingerprints. Quakes are another matter altogether, however. Yeah, I think we've proven at this point you can trigger small ones with the appropriate amount of liquid injection at just the right point - but 19.9 miles deep? Gettaoutahere! Total fantasy compounded by hubris and god-like species arrogance!
The Klimmer-effect is strictly about a lack of ability to discriminate between what can be imagined (scifi/fantasy), what is plausible, and what one 'needs' to believe for whatever reason. Ed hits it on the head when he states this is all about an insistent child-like belief there MUST be one or more master god/parent authorities to whom we can blame for our lives and lot. That we might be self-directed, self-fulfilling orphans of the universe with no other guide than probability is simply either too unpalatable, unthinkable, or frightening.
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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Mar 18, 2011 - 04:02pm PT
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If you go back and find the plot of the output of one of the reactors after they shut off the fission reaction, you can see the output immediately drops to around 7%, then over timescales of a few weeks only drops to 3% of the running output. The two large reactors are 800MW reactors so you still are producing megawatts of power weeks after they are shut down.
Our friend Klimmer can have his class calculate the volume of water per day required to keep the cooling bath at temperatures below boiling. Good example of science and mathematics at work.
Hint for the kids: it is alot of water.
This "waste" heat from reactors is another significant environmental effect of nuclear reactors that has been discussed alot in the last 30 years.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Mar 18, 2011 - 04:07pm PT
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I wouldn't doubt for a minute that there's some secret program in the US military where some crackpots have sold their superiors on researching the concept of human-triggered earthquakes and/or tsunamis. (Neither of which would have been of likely application against the former Soviet Union. Nor would it be a very aimable weapon.) There are think tanks paid to think up wacky ideas, and no end of public money for such things. So perhaps someone researched the idea, stringing along the funders for a while. Maybe even is still looking at it, in a Spy v Spy routine. After all, would you want to be the one who cancelled such a program, if even one US citizen got a hangnail as a result? Or a tiny bit of the funding spigot got turned off? Once such nonsense is entrenched, it's very hard to get rid of.
Another example being Freeman Dyson's idea of a spacecraft propelled by fusion explosions.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 18, 2011 - 04:20pm PT
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I think that most everyone would agree to let Ann Coulter go to Japan and test out her theories on radiation and human health on herself...
...go for it girl!
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Mar 18, 2011 - 04:37pm PT
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Another example being Freeman Dyson's idea of a spacecraft propelled by fusion explosions.
this was actually an idea espoused by Ted Turner, the inventor and developer of micro-nukes (fission, not fusion).
you can read about it in John McPhee's 'The Curve of Binding Energy'; a book very relevant to this whole discussion about nuclear power plants
my recollection is that he demonstrated the practicality of the pulsed explosion propulsion method, using a coke machine to drop propulsion grenades through a blast shield; and my understanding is that he actually flew the thing. his idea was to build a whole operating base on a big blast shield and launch it from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. the idea was under continuing development until scrapped by the nuclear test ban treaty
A project to explore the feasibility of building a nuclear-pulse rocket powered by nuclear fission. It was carried out by physicist Theodore Taylor and others over a seven-year period, beginning in 1958, with United States Air Force support. The propulsion system advocated for the Orion spacecraft was based on an idea first put forward by Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett in a classified paper in 1955. Ulam and Everett suggested releasing atomic bombs behind a spacecraft, followed by disks made of solid propellant. The bombs would explode, vaporizing the material of the disks and converting it into hot plasma. As this plasma rushed out in all directions, some of it would catch up with the spacecraft, impinge upon a pusher plate, and so drive the vehicle forward.
Project Orion originated at General Atomics in San Diego, a company (later a subsidiary of General Dynamics) founded by Frederick de Hoffman to develop commercial nuclear reactors. It was de Hoffman who persuaded Freeman Dyson to join Taylor in San Diego to work on Orion during the 1958-59 academic year.
http://www.century-of-flight.net/Aviation%20history/space/orion.htm
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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Mar 18, 2011 - 04:50pm PT
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b) adjacent elevated floodplain about the size of a football field with a topology that feeds to drains connected to the flooding ports above so a maximum of airdropped or cannoned water would actually hit the flooding drains.
healyje,
in the world of nukes every component that is important to safety must meet minimum design basis event (DBE) criteria. in other words your floodplain must be shown to survive an earthquake DBE. that is difficult to do.
in japan, they clearly erred on the heigth of the Tsunami and the location of the EDG's.
edit:
The Klimmer-effect is strictly about a lack of ability to discriminate between what can be imagined (scifi/fantasy), what is plausible, and what one 'needs' to believe for whatever reason. Ed hits it on the head when he states this is all about an insistent child-like belief there MUST be one or more master god/parent authorities to whom we can blame for our lives and lot.
the KLIMMER EFFECT, thats too good not to repeat! i wonder what the klimmer effect is on his kids in his class?
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Mike Bolte
Trad climber
Planet Earth
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Mar 18, 2011 - 04:59pm PT
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Tom has pointed out a really outstanding book. The Curve of Binding Energy is one of McPhee's best and he wrote a lot of excellent books.
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lostinshanghai
Social climber
someplace
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Mar 18, 2011 - 05:04pm PT
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As for Japan problem is bad communication and is undermining the crisis response more. For a country that has been changing prime ministers yearly and consuming its own with nasty political infighting, making it a dreary milepost on a road to apparent ungovernability.
Asians are proud people; they just like us feel "we" "who" know what is best.
The other problem is another country culture something the US needs to understand, we do know this about Japan that is why it is taking time to let it all sink in. Trust is another issue. But as for other countries as well. Hence the State Dept. that sometimes knows more what to do since US companies know [lessons learned] best on a current situation and resolution of a problem and knowing the culture by living there.
The military and Pentagon never understood this. Go, pack, get there, set up command and start shooting. When they get there they had no clue on communicating with local people. When we were in Viet Nam the local men would hold hands in jester of friendship, while all the GI’s thought they were gay.
In our current wars it took some understanding till the US military: "Oh! I get it now" since we did not understand or miscommunicaton. Example when GIs would use hand jesters to communicate it meant the opposite. We killed a lot of innocent people from that mistake.
Translation or language is another issue. That is why recruitment for the CIA wants people that understand the language or has lived in a particular country that someone posted for jobs with the agency.
Sorry Klimmer: Ed is right, I have mention this as well in several of your posts.
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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Mar 18, 2011 - 05:05pm PT
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A project to explore the feasibility of building a nuclear-pulse rocket powered by nuclear fission. It was carried out by physicist Theodore Taylor and others over a seven-year period, beginning in 1958, with United States Air Force support. The propulsion system advocated for the Orion spacecraft was based on an idea first put forward by Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett in a classified paper in 1955. Ulam and Everett suggested releasing atomic bombs behind a spacecraft, followed by disks made of solid propellant. The bombs would explode, vaporizing the material of the disks and converting it into hot plasma. As this plasma rushed out in all directions, some of it would catch up with the spacecraft, impinge upon a pusher plate, and so drive the vehicle forward.
There is no way that this would have been allowed to be done. We could have attempted, but ET would have put a stop to it. Don't we all know about ET's fascination with anything Nuclear here on Earth and shutting down at will our nuclear warheads? ET is trying to save us from ourselves. Right?
;-)
Oh boy, "The Klimmer Effect." Glad I can amuse you all. Eyes rolling . . .
Now how about this from before . . .
I would like this thread to eventually start talking about solutions to the problem and what we can do to help the people of Japan. I'm thinking we have many sins as a nation to atone for (Hiroshima and Nakasaki, and the internment camps during WW2). We can help in a tremendous way and we are I know. But we can do more. Maybe it is time to take in families that have lost everything and give them a safe new start here in America if they so desire. Many other countries could do the same. We are all gonna have to step-up big time.
"If you do it unto the least of these you have done it unto me."
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