On 4/16/2011 15:47, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> That oxidation will react with the water that's left,
> producing highly explosive hydrogen gas."

OK. That's what I guessed. Cracking the water to release hydrogen.

> All in all, a bad design,

Certainly not the best design, yeah. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 4/16/2011 12:02 PM, Alain wrote:

>> On 4/15/2011 5:26 AM, Bill Pragnell wrote:
>>> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>>> Nuclear power works in theory. In practise, if you make even the
>>>> tiniest
>>>> mistake, just once, everything is ruined forever. (Or at least, for
>>>> several centuries.) And there's nothing you can do to fix it.
>>>
>>> That's not really true. Chernobyl was caused by a very long chain of
>>> mistakes,
>>> all committed with a reactor design which was already itself a long
>>> chain of
>>> mistakes. It should be noted that most other countries have never
>>> built a
>>> reactor that could fail as catastrophically as this, even through wilful
>>> sabotage.
>>>
>>> TMI was also long chain of mistakes, which resulted in only the
>>> reactor being
>>> ruined, and they did fix it.
>>>
>>> I suppose you could say that Fukushima was really only one very big
>>> mistake,
>>> i.e. how big a tsunami was ever likely to be. However, they show every
>>> sign of
>>> being able to fix it eventually.
>>>
>> No, the "big" mistakes where:
>>
>> 1. Having no way to cool it, or certainty that the power systems would
>> still work, to do so, if enough failures happened. And, no, battery
>> backup doesn't work, if it lasts less than 24 hours.
>>
>> 2. Placing the old, spent, fuel in something that was ever *less*
>> effectively cooled.
>>
>> And, I would add 3. Presuming that a *big* reactor, which produces
>> massive amounts of power, but where it would be nearly impossible to
>> either make it less hazardous, or run battery backup long enough, or
>> otherwise create a system that *could* compensate for major problems,
>> remains bloody stupid.
>>
>
> Some more gross mistakes at Fukushima:
>
> a. Need *EXTERIOR* power source to run the cooling system when you
> produce that power localy.
> The pumps failed when the power lines TO the reactor got damaged by the
> tsunami. That's a humongously huge mistake!
>
> b. NO passive shutdown mechanism. Sanity *demands* that there are
> several controll rods suspended by electro magnets powered by the
> reactor itself over the core. If the cooling system fails, the turbines
> stop, they no longer produce current, shutting down the magnets whitch
> let the controll rods fall into the core, stoping the nuclear reaction
> and thus the heat generation. Those rods are usualy made of cadmium
> because that metal can absorbs huge amounts of neutrons.
> Those rods must be set and designed so that gravity alone will make them
> fall completely into position.
> There where obviously none! Totaly insane!
>
> c. NO passive cooling mesures. A passive cooling mesure should be enough
> to evecuate the residual heat from the shut down reactor.
>
> d. Severly skipping on maintenance for over 10 years.
> The director of the station said so himself...
>
>
>
> Alain
Yeah. Those would have been a damn good idea too.

a) makes no damn sense to me at all (even if it was some minimal system, 
enough to just keep pumps going), unless the tsunami took out 
lines/systems in the actual turbine part of the system. I would have 
thought those would be internal to the reactor, but.. Then again, their 
systems reuse a lot of waste heat/energy, so its hard to say how complex 
the whole thing was, and thus "where" those systems where, and thus 
whether it was even feasible to have the turbines in the reactor 
buildings. Its a definite WTF for me, but may go towards the whole, "If 
you make the thing so damn big you can't do *basic* shit to keep it 
working, you may be building them too big." If I where to guess... They 
probably have "internal systems that funnel water to and from the 
reactor, then a "heat exchange" point, with and entirely separate 
system, which is external to the reactors themselves. This would then 
run out to their actual turbine systems, where the heated water produces 
the actual power, is cooled, then pumped back into the exchanger. You 
don't want to run radioactive water through the turbines, or use a 
system where water from one might get into the other. This means that, 
for practical purposes, power isn't generated "in" the reactor itself, 
at all. So...

b) not sure any of them have this. Its not enough to just drop in a few, 
in most cases, and.. well, if you can bend the damn things to shit in a 
system that runs them in slowly, you can imagine what sort of mess you 
end up with if some of them jam being "gravity dropped" into place. 
Again, the whole design seems a problem, and most of it due to scale, 
not just this one issue.

c) Hmm.. This is an interesting problem. How do you make a passive 
cooling system which doesn't move contaminated air, or water, or 
something else, and exchange it often/fast/effective enough to do that? 
We are talking about something heating to temperatures on massive 
scales, pretty damn fast, with a *major* exchange requirement. Again, 
size here matters. Think of it like trying to cool a high end CPU, using 
only a bit of foil taped to the top, because someone had to build the 
case so an actual radiator grill and electric fan wouldn't fit in there. 
You can get by with it if you are using low power, a lower end chip, 
etc., but... scale up to a PC, or, in the case of power plants, a full 
size nuclear reactor... and you "passive" systems are just not going to 
cut it in any practical sense.

So.. Again, seems to me, once you get past the basics of, "make sure the 
damn thing can run the active systems long enough to matter", everything 
else is, "scale, scale, scale", and the impracticality of doing jack to 
solve such problems at the scales being talked about. And, short of 
building the damn things in Antarctica, and somehow getting the power 
from there to every place else, I don't see "passive" being too viable...

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On 4/16/2011 3:11 AM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> I *would* be surprised if you can make a car that can withstand a 100MPH
>>> crash. :-P
>>
>> Yet again, reading comprehension is low. ;-) I didn't say anything about
>> the *car* surviving the crash.
>
> Designing it so the car doesn't survive the crash but the people inside
> do would be even more miraculous...
>
>> It's pretty commonly understood, and really not at all difficult to
>> prove, considering you can go out and buy one of those cars and plug it
>> in to see. It's hard to have controversial statements about things like
>> "how much does gasoline cost?" or "how much electricity does this
>> commercially-available consumer product use?"
>
> It's news to me that anybody is producing electric cars yet. I'm aware
> that they've been producing proof-of-concept designs for decades. But I
> didn't think any of this stuff had reached the shops yet.
>
A fair percentage of the stuff ending up on the road recently is in this 
category, at least in "new" cars, in places where there are credits for 
hybred/electric vehicles. It was giving some of the Regressives fits, at 
least the full electric ones, at least until they got the message that 
we would still, for now, need oil to run the power plants, to charge the 
cars. Then they all scrambled to buy power company stocks, while 
simultaneously whining at a lower volume anyway.

Part of the lack of whining has also been do to most being "hybred". 
But, that is just a way of saying an "electric", which has a generator, 
for when you don't have a way to charge the batteries. It adds range, 
which hasn't been so good for all electrics, but all the 
power/speed/etc. is still in the same motors and electronics for both 
types. They also tend to cost more.

I can't find clear statistics on the matter of them though, since they 
tend to lump hybred in with pure electric, but..

Chevy Volt - Hybred, 40 miles electric, ???
Coda - 90-120 miles/full electric
Fisker Karma - Hybred 50 miles electric, 300 total, 125mph max speed, 
0-60 in 6 seconds.
Tesla Roadster - 245 miles on a charge, full electric?, 0-60 in 3.7 
seconds. Top speed = 168.56km/h/104.79 mph - From a drag test done with it.
Think City - 75-100 miles full electric.

So, yeah, they are out there, and some of them, if you can afford them, 
are getting insane, like the Tesla.

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On 4/16/2011 10:30 AM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/16/2011 6:14, Warp wrote:
>> Not so in Finland. The heating of homes in cities is centralized
>
> This works when things are planned out in advance. In the USA, most
> college campuses, apartment complexes, business parks, etc work this
> way. (And use chilled water for cooling.) When you build things a little
> at a time (like, a few hundred houses in an area every year for 15
> years), I imagine making this work out would be more difficult,
> planning-wise.
>
>> Automobiles can be made less polluting via legislation
>
> I'm pretty sure that California was the leader in this to the point
> where everyone else (at least in the USA) adopted the same standards,
> just because it was easier.
>
Try smog testing a car from Arizona in California, to re-license it, 
then tell me how "everyone else in the use adopted their standards". lol

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On 4/16/2011 10:42 AM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> On 16/04/2011 02:14 PM, Warp wrote:
>
>> Improving public transportation to reduce the need for private cars is
>> another efficient way to reduce pollution.
>
> See, now, where I live, the government thinks that making private
> transport too expensive will make everybody use public transport.
>
> This is absurd, of course. The way to make people use public transport
> is to make it ACTUALLY FRICKING WORK.
>
> I still remember visiting my sister in Manchester one time. I was amazed
> when we just wandered up to the nearest bus stop, stood there for about
> 2 minutes, and a bus arrived. If you did that in my town, you might
> stand there for *days* and never see a bus!
>
Well, the "government" theory, at least among randian regressives is, 
"If we make driving your car expensive, companies will, for some 
unspecified reason, invest money in more public transportation, instead 
of just adding more and more cost to the already overly costly driving 
of cars." These people have stripped so many gears in their heads that 
they can't even work out that "public", means, "things not in the 
interest of big corporations, who already proved that they would, if 
given the task of doing this, pave a road between their warehouse and 
their store, while leaving ***every other street*** in the city, or 
between cities, dirt." They have no incentive to improve something that 
doesn't help their business, and they would have a bus service too and 
from work, only for their own employees mind, and not for free, if they 
could help it, and then only if they couldn't be sure you would show up 
on time if you walked, or they issued you a bicycle. They damn well are 
not going to start a light rail system, if they can pay someone half as 
much to drive a truck 18 hours a day, for the same distance, even if 
building it would mean making money off passengers at the same time 
(hell, having to load unload those might delay delivery!).

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On 4/16/2011 6:22 AM, Warp wrote:
> Darren New<dne### [at] sanrrcom>  wrote:
>> On 4/14/2011 11:55, Warp wrote:
>>>     I don't understand how it can be legal to expel someone for the sole
>>> reason of wearing a t-shirt that says you're an atheist.
>
>> The authorities treated it the same as someone wearing a shirt that said
>> "nigger" on it or something. Basically, it was insulting and harassing the
>> people who aren't atheists. They treated it the same way as they would have
>> treated someone religious preaching at you during class.
>
>    Seems that the authorities there have a rather poor understanding of
> their own constitution. (Perhaps it's a case of tl;dr.)
>
You think? Nah.. I am sure its just a fluke that most of them, when 
asked, think that the Declaration of Independence is part of it, can't 
name the first 4 amendments without getting them wrong, or, when asked 
about SCOTUS, or anything else the government does, can't name one damn 
program, decision, or law in "any" of it, other than, of course, the 
ones they want to get rid of (and then, more often than not, they can't 
describe what they hell it is, or why they actually appose it).

Its not a case of tl;dr. For way too many of them its more a case of 
nib;dr, "Not in Bible, don't read", or nmpp;dr, "Not my parties policy, 
do not read". That this leads to idiot things like them apposing their 
own, or their own party member's, own state laws/policies, while 
attacking federal ones, is just a bonus for the people watching the 
circus. It gets a little less fun though, when the elephant shits on 
you, on the way out the door of the tent.

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> On 4/16/2011 5:44, Warp wrote:
> >    The problem is that if poor countries started increasing their burning
> > of fossil fuels significantly, *the entire world* would suffer from it,
> > not just them.

> This is true. What's the alternative?

  You are basically asking me how to remove hunger and poverty from the
world. If I knew the answer, do you think I would be just sitting here
writing to this newsgroup?

  What I am saying is that burning fossil fuels is *not* a good solution
to the problem in the long term (or the short term, for that matter).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >    If every country in the world used the same ecologic techniques as the
> > best ones, the amount of pollution in the world would be significantly
> > lowered.

> And it still wouldn't matter, because in 50 years we'll have 3x the population.

  Lowering birth rates was kind of also implied in my statement above.
(Most of the first-world countries have pretty low birth rates.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>> Designing it so the car doesn't survive the crash but the people inside
>> do would be even more miraculous...
>
> You've never seen a car crash (or the results of one), have you?  Most of
> them are *designed* to crumple in order to protect the passengers.

Yes, I know what a crumple zone is. But at 100MPH, there are going to be 
fatalities, no matter which way you design a car.

>> It's news to me that anybody is producing electric cars yet.
>
> Most of them are hybrid petrol/electric vehicles, but there are a few
> production models.

OK, fair enough.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 4/17/2011 2:57, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Yes, I know what a crumple zone is. But at 100MPH, there are going to be
> fatalities, no matter which way you design a car.

I take it the UK doesn't have any Formula-1 races?

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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