Quotulatiousness

March 12, 2011

Earthquake, tsunami, and worse

Filed under: Environment, Japan, Pacific — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

The earthquake by itself was one of the biggest ever recorded, and then the tsunami compounded the quake damage and will make relief and rescue efforts that much harder. Kevin Voigt has more:

The powerful earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami Friday appears to have moved the main island of Japan by 8 feet (2.4 meters) and shifted the Earth on its axis.

“At this point, we know that one GPS station moved (8 feet), and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass,” said Kenneth Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Reports from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy estimated the 8.9-magnitude quake shifted the planet on its axis by nearly 4 inches (10 centimeters).

The temblor, which struck Friday afternoon near the east coast of Japan, killed hundreds of people, caused the formation of 30-foot walls of water that swept across rice fields, engulfed entire towns, dragged houses onto highways, and tossed cars and boats like toys. Some waves reached six miles (10 kilometers) inland in Miyagi Prefecture on Japan’s east coast.

Another major concern is the ongoing struggle to regain control of one of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant:

An explosion at an earthquake-struck nuclear plant was not caused by damage to the nuclear reactor but by a pumping system that failed as crews tried to bring the reactor’s temperature down, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Saturday.

Workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant have begun flooding the reactor containment structure with sea water to bring the reactor’s temperature down to safe levels, he said. The effort is expected to take two days.

Radiation levels have fallen since the explosion and there is no immediate danger, Edano said. But authorities were nevertheless expanding the evacuation to include a radius of 20 kilometers (about 12.5 miles) around the plant. The evacuation previously reached out to 10 kilometers.

H/T to Chris Taylor for the link.

February 26, 2011

Views of a future that didn’t arrive

Filed under: History, Railways, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

The Future That Wasn’t: Failure to Perceive Hidden Costs and Risks

Two other entangled obstacles to technological inevitability must also be considered: unappreciated psychosocial reservations and genuine, but unappreciated hazards that either slow, or virtually inhibit the adoption of what would otherwise be hugely transforming technological advances.

As a child, I was told about what my future would be like and how much better it would be in almost every way, technologically, from the world I then inhabited. I was, literally, a child of the atomic age, and the molecules in the DNA of my brain still bear the 14Carbon isotope signature of the open-air nuclear testing era, just as surely as my bones, made radioactive in my infancy and childhood by the Strontium 90 (90Sr) in the milk I drank are still, ever so slightly, more radioactive today, than are those of people born before, or after, the era of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing.

But beyond these physical stigmata of the atomic age, my mind bears the stigmata of a world promised, but never delivered. Scientists and laymen alike were quick to understand the truly staggering potential benefits of what we now call nuclear power. Countless pronouncements were made that the arrival of an era of cheap, clean, safe, and virtually unlimited electric power was at hand. Electricity generated by ‘atomic power’ and nuclear fusion, we were told, would be so inexpensive to produce that it would not even be worth the expense of metering its use to bill the customer for. People would simply play a flat rate for the service, as is the case for long distance or computer telephony today. In a speech given by Lewis L. Strauss (1896-1974), Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to the National Association of Science Writers, in New York City on September 16th, 1954, Strauss commented on how scientific research then underway would transform life for the next generation of Americans, the generation that would be born in then and in the coming decade, my generation:

“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter…will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”

The Santa Fe Railroad, then as commercially important and as technologically credible as Apple or Microsoft are today, anticipated fission reactor powered trains within 20 years, and ran ads in national magazines featuring a youngster only a few years older than me, asking to buy a ticket on an atomic powered version of the Super Chief which was then the preeminent way to travel across the country from Chicago to Los Angeles, in both speed and comfort.

An excerpt from Cryonics and Technological Inevitability.

H/T to Andrew Coyne for the link.

February 10, 2011

The Netherlands go nuke, downplay wind power

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Of all the EU states, the last one you’d expect to give up on wind power would be the one that everyone associates with windmills:

In a radical change of policy, the Netherlands is reducing its targets for renewable energy and slashing the subsidies for wind and solar power. It’s also given the green light for the country’s first new nuclear power plants for almost 40 years.

Why the change? Wind and solar subsidies are too expensive, the Financial Times Deutschland, reports.

Holland thus becomes the first country to abandon the EU-wide target of producing 20 per cent of its domestic power from renewables. This is a remarkable turnaround from a state that took the Kyoto Agreement seriously and chivvied other EU members into adopting renewable energy strategies. The FT reports that instead of the €4bn annual subsidy, it will be slashed to €1.5bn.

I did a quick Google image search for a typical Dutch windmill image, and decided that this one was too amusing to pass up:

January 13, 2011

USN considers decommissioning USS Enterprise

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

In the new atmosphere of austerity, the US Navy is having to look at economies, including the possibility of retiring the USS Enterprise:

Meanwhile, the navy is facing budget cuts, and growing costs for new ships. The first of the new Ford-class (CVN-21) aircraft carriers will go for at least $14 billion (this includes R&D for the entire CVN-21 class). The current Nimitz-class carriers cost $4.5 billion each. Both classes also require an air wing (48-50 fighters, plus airborne early-warning planes, electronic warfare aircraft, and anti-submarine helicopters), which costs another $3.5 billion. Thus the thinking is that smaller carriers will be cheaper to build and operate (smaller crews) and carry the same number of warplanes (because most of them will be smaller UAVs).

Meanwhile, the cash crunch is getting serious. So the navy also wants to decommission its oldest aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) three years early, in 2012. Originally, the Enterprise was going to stay in service until the USS Ford was ready in 2015. But changes in aircraft weaponry, namely smart bombs and targeting pods, have reduced the need for eleven carriers. The navy believes ten will get the job done. Plus, the Enterprise, as the world’s first nuclear powered carrier, will also be the first to be decommissioned. That will mean removing eight nuclear reactors. Unlike later nuclear carriers, which had only two reactors, the Enterprise was designed so that one reactor replaced one of the steam boilers of a non-nuclear power plant. The navy has decommissioned nuclear powered surface ships before, having retired nine nuclear powered cruisers in the 1990s. This was done because these ships were more expensive to operate and upgrade. So the costs and savings are known.

The Enterprise was an expensive design, and only one was built (instead of a class of six). While a bit longer than the later Nimitz class, it was lighter (92,000 tons displacement, versus 100,000 tons). The Enterprise was commissioned in 1961, almost 40 years after the Langley entered service (1923).

November 27, 2010

Privatize Ontario’s power

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Lawrence Solomon savages the Ontario government’s recently announced $87 billion energy plans:

This week, the Ontario government published its Long-Term Energy Plan. Under it, the province and Ontario Hydro’s successors are committing to more uneconomic nuclear power projects and more uneconomic alternative energy generation contracts, but on a far bigger scale than the old Ontario Hydro ever undertook. The grave the government is digging this time is big enough to bury the province as well as the power sector.

Where the four reactors at Darlington cost $14-billion, the new long-range plan calls for $33-billion, more than double the previous price tag, and that’s to build just two new reactors and refurbish 10 old ones, including those at Darlington. That $33-billion estimate is more a wish than a firm projection. Nuclear reactors, notorious for their cost overruns, typically come in at two to three times their original estimates. Darlington, originally estimated at $3.5-billion, came in at four times its estimate. Refurbishments likewise run up the bills, as seen in the two Bruce reactors at Lake Huron. In 2005, the estimate was $2.75-billion. Today, the refurbishment is already three years behind schedule and $2-billion over budget. No one would be surprised to see the $33-billion estimate balloon to $99-billion or more by the time the plan is complete.

Amazingly, the nuclear boondoggle may not represent the biggest blowout. Where the original alternative energy contracts with private power producers cost $6-billion, the new round of alternate energy projects envisaged in the Long-Term Plan cost more like $27-billion — or more like $45-billion once the supporting infrastructure for these alternative projects is factored in. This $45-billion,like the $33-billion estimate for nuclear power, may itself be a gross underestimate, partly because the supporting infrastructure is subject to cost overruns, partly because the bulk of the new alternative energy projects — unreliable wind and solar — are likely to require expensive backups to avoid blackouts.

His suggested solution? Scrap the huge plan, which on past evidence will be far more expensive, slower, and less effective than they predict. The better solution? Privatize the grid. Allow market forces to set electricity rates.

November 17, 2010

Nuclear ghouls unmasked

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Tabloid headline is in this case completely justified:

Organs of nuclear workers secretly harvested for 40 years, report finds
The families of scores of nuclear power station workers whose hearts, lungs and other organs were secretly stored and tested over a period of almost 40 years were let down by the authorities, a report said yesterday.

Relatives were seldom told that their loved ones’ organs were to be removed, and as a result families buried or cremated incomplete bodies.

In many cases the truth that their organs had been illegally removed and then destroyed in the testing process emerged only many years later.

The three-and-a-half year investigation conducted by Michael Redfern, QC, covered events spread over almost four decades.

This is the sort of thing that retroactively justifies some of the weird paranoias of the last fifty years. It becomes more difficult to dismiss worries that “they” are doing shady and unethical stuff when it turns out that that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

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