corsec67 – you okay?

[olavf]

Glad to hear you, your family, and friends are okay LeicaLens.

[EdenLiesObscured]

LeicaLens: another internet shout, glad to hear you and your family are okay.

I’m still trying to track down one of my Japanese teachers…….

[LeicaLens]

LeicaLens: another internet shout, glad to hear you and your family are okay.

I’m still trying to track down one of my Japanese teachers…….

Thanks!
As for your teacher, I hope he/she is alright. Communications still aren’t great, and there are a lot of houses around the Tohoku area without a telephone connnection right now. If your teacher lives elsewhere, then he/she should be okay. There have not been many casualties reported in other prefectures besides Miyagi, Fukushima, and Iwate–I only hope it stays that way.

[Kestrana]

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/15/fukushima-15-march-summary/

orionid linked this article on his Facebook but I think it is worth reposting for as many people to read as possible. In particular the last section is the most important. There is a lot of hysteria in the news about nuclear power right now – because it’s powerful and complicated and that inspires fear. But nuclear power is one of the safest and cleanest power sources we have discovered and we should hope that the damage to the plant due to a natural disaster will educate us on what we should prepare for in the future, not cause us to reject the technology as unsafe.

[orionid]

I also posted this as a note on FB, and am sharing it here for anyone who doesn’t see it there. Please feel free to cut-and-pate, copy, or otherwise share.

There’s a lot of information, misinformation, and downright unfounded hype being thrown around about the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and I’m hoping to clear up a good deal of that, using simple analogies. For those that don’t know me (as I hope this will get shared and passed on), I am a nuclear reactor operator. I am not a self procalimed expert because I have a degree in disaster management or some other, non-technical BA, I am an operator. I have literally years of cumulative time sitting in front of a reactor control panel, operating in both transient and steady state conditions, as well as thousands of hours instructing future nuclear reactor operators, and I have grown tired of shaking my head at the wild stories and conjecture I see populating Facebook, The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News (yes, in efforts to gain ratings, they’re all guilty – left, right, and other).

I am also not going to teach you “nuclear power for dummies” (although I could if you ask real nice). I am simply translating the facts at hand, in a method that even your kid brother could understand.

I’ve heard alot of mentioning of the accidents at Three Mile Island unit 2 and Chernobyl-4, being used as benchmarks. This is a difficult comparison as they are entirely different forms of accidents. But I will continue to use these as benchmarks after a brief explination of both.

Three mile island was a combination of material failure and operator error that resulted in a slight amount of potentially contaminated steam to be released to the environment. The valley that TMI happens to sit in routinely releases more natural contamination in the form of radon than was released by the plant that day. The reason it stands out in our minds as being so terrible is because, since the core was irreperably damaged, it ranks as the worst nuclear accident on US soil outside of a small handful of military experiments in the 40’s and 50’s. The fact is that zero people died as a result of the accident at Three Mile Island, zero people recieved any radiation greater than they would have from the sun had they spent the day at the beach instead, and zero people have suffered any long term effects from the accident (unless you count being fired as a long-term effect).

Chernobyl, on the other hand, was a worst case scenario. The plant was poorly designed to begin with: it operated under a set of phyics that is akin to driving a car with a front-end wobble, pulling this way and that, and requiring continuous operator effort to stay on the road. Then they turned off some safety systems, started maintenence, and ran casualty drills all at the same time. When control was lost, power spiked, and they initiated an emergency shutdown. Going back to the poor plant design, the emergency shutdown caused power to go up further before it went down. This last spike of power caused the water in the core to flash to steam at nearly 1000 F and 10,000 psi, thus rupturing the containment vessel and the building that house it, literally blowing radioactive materials thousand of feet into the air.

Given this, now picture the Three Mile Island accident as driving your car down the road. One of the guages on your dashboard starts behaving funny, so you take a closer look at it. While doing so, you veer off the road and collide with a telephone pole. Your seatbelt holds you in place, your airbag goes off, and your crumple-zones absorb the majority of the energy. You get out of your car, unscathed, and survey the damage. No one got hurt, but your car is beyond repair and must be junked for a new one.

Chernobyl would be more like driving a bus full of school children and deciding that the highway is too crowded, and that you could travel more effectively by moving over to the railroad. Once there, you find yourself playing chicken with a Conrail 12-engine, 450-car freight train moving at 60 mph. You try to stop by turning off the key, but find out that someone has rewired your key so that “off” slams the accelerator to the floor. Not only is there mass carnage from your bus slamming into the train, but the train then derails, sending tons of cargo through the surrounding urban areas and destroying everything in the damage path.

The accident at Fukushima Daiichi is like driving your car down the road when a strong, unforseen wind pushes you off the road into a railroad crossing sign. Your seatbelt again, does what it’s supposed to do, your airbag deploys, and your crumple zones again absorb the majority of the impact. You get out of your car, again unscathed and survey the damage. Again, no one got hurt, but your car is totaled. You also notice that it’s laying across the railroad tracks and realize that things could be far worse, but you get the 1-800-number from the crossing sign, call the dispatcher, and he informs you that the train only comes through once a week, and it just passed yesterday, so they only way to make it worse is by taking a complete lack of action, abandoning your car on the tracks rather than calling a tow truck sometime in the next six days.

Now, for perspective, in the grander scheme of the disaster in Northern Japan, your accident with the railroad crossing sign happened in downtown Manhattan (bear with me, it’s hypothetical) during the 9/11 attacks (lets pretend for a moment that the planes were blown off course by the wind, rather than piloted by terrorists), and the wind that blew you off course was actually the debris from the collapsing buildings. In all of that tradgedy, your car accident seems quite insignificant, but it still makes for a sensational story when people keep asking how long until the train comes through to derail over your car.

[sleeping]

Wait, you mean the world isn’t really coming to an end like Ken Rockwell said? (http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/00-new-today.htm) Damn, I better see if I can return all of these MREs…..

[EdenLiesObscured]

thanks, oroinid. much appreciated, and easy to understand.

[orionid]

Wait, you mean the world isn’t really coming to an end like Ken Rockwell said? (http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/00-new-today.htm) Damn, I better see if I can return all of these MREs…..

/Well, save the MRE’s until we see how bad the trinkle-down economic collapse is. The northern prefecture includes a significant portion of their tech industry. Even the cheapo hong kong and mainland china crap still buys their microchips from Japan.

the “Unit 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is on fire and radioactivity is being released directly into the atmosphere.

I facepalmed.

as a member of news media, I’m getting my reports directly from the power companies and Japanese and international regulatory agencies who issue the information…. As we relax here under way to Cabo sipping drinks, (I’m at sea)

How nice of them to send the latest wires to his yacht.

Read up on the Chernobyl timeline, and it’s identical

I lulzed

Add nuclear power plants actively spewing lethal radiation, and that’s beyond anything we had back in good old Biblical times.

Nikon and Canon have each shut down their plants, with no idea when they may ever restart. (Canon’s press release and Nikon’s.)

I cried. For two completely different reasons.

we also must realize that Japan isn’t a primitive place like where the last big tsunami or nuclear accidents have hit.

Ummm….. Jakarta’s the sixth largest city in the world, I’ll give him Arco, Idaho, but I’m fairly certain that Pennsylvania and The Ukraine (especially under the Soviet Union) are far from primitive.

I wish I could do something to help, but my skills don’t extend to nuclear engineering.

I fell out of my chair laughing at the obvious.

[Plamadude30k]

Orionid, you just made all the points I’ve been making to everybody I know, but way better than I’ve been doing. I guess actual knowledge instead of wild speculation pays off sometimes.

//just reading through the car analogy again-it’s so appropriate to the situation, it’s almost unnerving.

[olavf]

FWIW the overall impact on Japanese electronics seems to be overplayed in the media as well.

http://circuitsassembly.com/cms/news/10946-analyst-earthquake-likely-to-shake-up-supply-chain

My read on it is that transportation is the major issue for most manufacturers right now. *Note: iSuppli primarily concentrates on semi manufacturing and related equipment. They don’t discuss consumer or other end-user manufacturing.

Gizmotastic has the full press releases from Canon and Nikon. From the releases, it sounds like the damage appears relatively minor but that they are still assessing the situation. The unreliable power in the area is also a factor.
http://www.gizmotastic.com/2011/03/14/nikon-and-canon-issue-advisories-on-factory-shutdowns-following-eartquake-damage/

[zincprincess]

But nuclear power is one of the safest and cleanest power sources we have discovered and we should hope that the damage to the plant due to a natural disaster will educate us on what we should prepare for in the future, not cause us to reject the technology as unsafe.

Keep repeating that to anyone who will listen. I fear that the talking heads and wackjobs will kill any future development of nuclear power in this country which would be disastrous for our economy and our national security.

[Elsinore]

Oh geez, Ken Rockwell is a freaking douchebag. And since when is he even a member of the “news media”? What a maroon.

[linguine]

But nuclear power is one of the safest and cleanest power sources we have discovered and we should hope that the damage to the plant due to a natural disaster will educate us on what we should prepare for in the future, not cause us to reject the technology as unsafe.

Keep repeating that to anyone who will listen. I fear that the talking heads and wackjobs will kill any future development of nuclear power in this country which would be disastrous for our economy and our national security.

A couple of years ago I met a guy whos job was to design disaster scenarios and see how many people he could kill and he was saying how much safer nuclear energy was than so many other more common things. I believe the most deadly disaster he came up with was a chlorine spill. How many people who don’t wear tinfoil hats go around worried about chlorine?

[Curious]

i’m saving for a D7000. it’s difficult enough without a price surge due to lowered output.

the magnitude of this just boggles my mind. even living within 30 miles of new orelans and the MS coast i can’t get my head around it. katrina is dwarfed by this and it was pretty damned bad.

[ravnostic]

Orionid; as a long-time proponent of nuclear (or nucular, as it sometimes is) energy, I thank you for that, and I will share it. TYVM.

[Author]

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