Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2012

Researching how to stop asteroids from “just dropping in”

Filed under: Europe, Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

Brid-Aine Parnell in The Register on some of the technologies being explored to reduce or eliminate the chance of unpleasantly close encounters with celestial objects:

A new international consortium has been set up to figure out what Earthlings could do if an asteroid came hurtling towards the planet on a path of imminent destruction.

The project will look at three methods of averting disaster: the Hollywood-sanctioned solutions of sending up a crack team of deep drillers with a nuclear bomb to sort it out, or frantically hurling of all our nukes at it; dragging it to safety with a Star Trek-inspired tractor beam; or hitting it with something we have more control over, like a spaceship.

Sporting the cool moniker NEOShield, the project will explore the possibilities for kinetic impactors, gravity tractors and blast deflection as ways to save our planet from oblivion.

[. . .]

“In the light of results arising from our research into the feasibility of the various mitigation approaches and the mission design work, we aim to formulate for the first time a global response campaign roadmap that may be implemented when an actual significant impact threat arises,” NEOShield boldly stated.

November 14, 2011

New wargame “ripped from the headlines”

Filed under: Gaming, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Clash of Arms games is releasing a new wargame based on a possible Israeli airstrike against Iranian nuclear facilities:

Speculation regarding a possible Israeli air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities has been rife for years — a pair of MIT students wrote an analysis on the subject back in 2007, and countless articles have appeared before then and since. Now, however, it’s possible to do more than simply talk about such a battle: should you wish to, you can set aside the Monopoly or the chess set in favour of a rousing boardgame pitting one player as Iran against another as Israel, with preservation or destruction of Tehran’s nuclear capability as the prize.

The game is called — perhaps inevitably — Persian Incursion, and is the brainchild of technothriller writer Larry Bond, formerly well known as a designer of tactical combat games (Bond has collaborated with Tom Clancy, and it’s said that his games were used extensively in development of such seminal Cold War works as The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising).

The CoA webpage for Persian Incursion is here.

November 7, 2011

The likely result of a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:48

Ralph Peters paints a grim picture of the immediate results of any US or Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear weapon program:

How would Iran respond to strikes on its nuke facilities? Inevitably missiles would be launched toward Israeli cities — some with chemical warheads — but these tit-for-tat attacks would be the least part of Tehran’s counterattack strategy. The Iranians would “do what’s doable,” and that means hitting Arab oil-production infrastructure on the other side of the narrow Persian Gulf. Employing it mid-range missiles, aircraft and naval forces, Tehran would launch both conventional and suicide attacks on Arab oil fields, refineries, storage areas, ports and loading facilities, on tankers in transit, and on the Straits of Hormuz, the great chokepoint for the world’s core oil supplies. The price of a barrel of crude would soar geometrically on world exchanges, paralyzing economies — exactly as Iran’s leaders intend. Ten-dollar-a-gallon gas would be a brief bargain on the way to truly prohibitive prices. And, in the way of the world, Tehran would not get the blame. We would.

And we would be in one hell of a war, with the Middle East literally aflame and our Navy able to conduct only limited operations (if any) within the Persian Gulf, given that the body of water would become a shooting gallery: Even our finest surface-warfare ships can’t fight or maneuver effectively in a bathtub. The flow of oil would not resume, and we would have no idea how to end the war (not least, since we’re unwilling to inflict serious pain on our enemies anymore).

So . . . if we are forced to attack Iran’s nuclear-weapons facilities at some point, what would it take to do it right and limit Tehran’s ability to respond with such devastating asymmetrical attacks?

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

November 5, 2011

On the other hand, that may be a feature rather than a bug

Filed under: Asia, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:18

Pakistan is trying to conceal the location of its nuclear weapons from US spy satellites, and the concern voiced in this article is that they’re using low-security techniques to do it. On the other hand, if you’re actually trying to get nuclear warheads into the hands of terrorists with a certain degree of deniability, this is certainly a way to do it:

Pakistan has begun moving its nuclear weapons in low-security vans on congested roads to hide them from US spy agencies, making the weapons more vulnerable to theft by Islamist militants, two US magazines reported Friday.

The Atlantic and the National Journal, in a joint report citing unnamed sources, wrote that the US raid that killed Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in May at his Pakistani compound reinforced Islamabad’s longstanding fears that Washington could try to dismantle the country’s nuclear arsenal.

As a result, the head of the Strategic Plans Divisions (SPD), which is charged with safeguarding Pakistan’s atomic weapons, was ordered to take action to keep the location of nuclear weapons and components hidden from the United States, the report said.

Khalid Kidwai, the retired general who leads the SPD, expanded his agency’s efforts to disperse components and sensitive materials to different facilities, it said.

But instead of transporting the nuclear parts in armored, well-defended convoys, the atomic bombs “capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads,” according to the report.

May 21, 2011

President of TEPCO falls on his sword a few months late

Filed under: Environment, Health, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

The president of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has resigned:

In a business practice that recalled the ritual seppuku suicides of samurai warriors, the president of Japan’s largest power company resigned Friday to assume responsibility for the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

At a nationally televised news conference, Masataka Shimizu bowed deeply in an exhibition of remorse and declared, “I am resigning for having shattered public trust about nuclear power and for having caused so many problems and fears for the people.

“I want to take managerial responsibility and bring a symbolic close.”

Whether it’s a hearkening-back to Samurai ethos or not, he should have resigned long ago, as soon as it became clear that the company he headed was doing everything it could to conceal the extent of the actual damage both from the media and from the government.

There is a widespread feeling the government and TEPCO officials did not disclose all they knew during the early days of the crisis and have been less than forthcoming since.

In the first weeks after the earthquake, TEPCO officials received 40,000 complaints a day about the lack of information. Police had to be assigned to guard the company’s offices from anti-nuclear protesters.

This week, TEPCO released documents showing it was dealing with three simultaneous nuclear meltdowns, while reassuring people the fuel rods were safely intact in all the reactors.

“Why did it take two months to get to this point?” demanded a Wednesday editorial in the Nikkei business newspaper.

“Even a rough calculation of conditions inside the reactors would have helped in choosing the best response.”

Public confidence was shaken further when it emerged engineers at Fukushima were so unprepared for the disaster, they had to scavenge flashlights from nearby homes and used car batteries to try to reactivate damaged reactor gauges.

Nobody with an ounce of sense is criticizing the workers at the plant for their reaction to an earthquake that was far in excess of the design for the reactors, or a tsunami that was much higher than anything the designers had foreseen. Shit happens, and it was the daily double of fantastically unlikely natural disasters that struck the plant.

The company, however, deserves more than just a light dusting of shame for the way they appear to have been actively preventing the real state of the plant becoming known to the international nuclear community and the national government. A nuclear disaster is everyone’s business, and there were resources available to TEPCO that they signally failed to draw upon. Saving face is not an acceptable reaction to this kind of catastrophe.

April 5, 2011

Monbiot: the anti-nuclear lobby has mislead us all

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:50

George Monbiot has had an uncomfortable year of revelations. Full credit to him for being willing to admit in public that he was wrong:

Over the last fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.

I began to see the extent of the problem after a debate last week with Helen Caldicott. Dr Caldicott is the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner. She has received 21 honorary degrees and scores of awards, and was nominated for a Nobel peace prize. Like other greens, I was in awe of her. In the debate she made some striking statements about the dangers of radiation. So I did what anyone faced with questionable scientific claims should do: I asked for the sources. Caldicott’s response has profoundly shaken me.

First she sent me nine documents: newspaper articles, press releases and an advertisement. None were scientific publications; none contained sources for the claims she had made. But one of the press releases referred to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so — all 423 pages. It supports none of the statements I questioned; in fact it strongly contradicts her claims about the health effects of radiation.

I pressed her further and she gave me a series of answers that made my heart sink — in most cases they referred to publications which had little or no scientific standing, which did not support her claims or which contradicted them. (I have posted our correspondence, and my sources, on my website.) I have just read her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. The scarcity of references to scientific papers and the abundance of unsourced claims it contains amaze me.

H/T to Chris Greaves for the link.

Update: Here’s wormme with a remarkably timely example of the sort of thing that George Monbiot encountered:

And Rana included this report, subtitled “Experts warn that any detectable level of radiation is “too much”.”

The only “experts” who would say that are political activists who are either ignorant of science or traitors to it.

“The U.S. Department of Energy has testified that there is no level of radiation that is so low that it is without health risks,” Jacqueline Cabasso, the Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation,

There’s only three possibilities here: 1) whoever testified for the DOE did a truly awful job (doubtful), 2) Ms. Cabasso misunderstood the testimony and paraphrased it according to her liking (quite likely), or 3) Ms. Cabasso is a dirty little liar (don’t rule it out).

For chronic (long-term) concerns, the DOE (and NRC) use the linear no-threshold model.

“But what does that mean,” our non-geeks cry. It means it’s assumed that any increase in dose is an increase in long-term risk. No threshold, see?

So is this model true? No. Anyone expert in radiation knows it isn’t true, because we have the whole wide world to look at. And natural doses vary greatly. People pick up between 200 and 2000 mrem/year (2-20 mSv). With absolutely no harm observed at higher doses, so how is there heightened risk? And thousands of Taiwanese picked up 5000-6000 mrem/year (50-60 mSv) for years and years and had a much lower incidence of cancer than usual.

Then why do the DOE and NRC assume risk? Because they couldn’t prove there isn’t. Still can’t, despite the real world examples above.

But that is also true about everything. Marshmallows have killed in the past, and they will in the future. Dihydrogen oxide is the greatest mass murderer of all time.

Ionizing radiation is held to standards that would basically outlaw every other activity and material on earth. Fukushima is proof of that. No one has been killed by radiation, but we’re staring at maybe 25,000 dead. And how much have we heard about non-nuke carcinogens, no doubt swirling around by the ton?

April 2, 2011

Cultural bias and bad reporting

Filed under: Japan, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:01

Jon sent me this link, which discusses the media coverage of the Fukushima workers:

We hear of Fukushima workers “fleeing” the plant, when what happened is they left for a few hours.

We hear about the appearance of tiny amounts of radioactive iodine in Tokyo tap water — but nothing the next day, when it returns to safe levels.

We hear a thousand commentators mention one measurement that was ten million times normal — but nothing when that turns out to have been a measurement error, made by someone who had little sleep and the weight of the world on his shoulders.

We hear people spinning tales of “worst case scenarios” ten thousand times worse than anything that could plausibly happen — and almost nothing about the fact that the Fukushima reactors endured an earthquake 32 times as forceful as they had been designed for, followed by a tsunami twice as high, and still largely survived.

We hear about “plutonium in the soil” — but not that it’s an amount so tiny that pound for pound, bananas in the grocery store are five thousand times more radioactive.

The London Daily Mail reports that the workers “expect to die,” but not that the worst radiation exposure among all the workers amounts to about as much as 15 CT scans, a dose that not only isn’t fatal, but that has no observable health effects.

A lot of bad reporting seems to come from mere scientific illiteracy.

Not only scientific illiteracy, but willful illiteracy. Combine the need to file a story — the more sensational, the better — with the anti-scientific bias that’s been “baked in” to journalism students for two generations, and this is what you get.

Some of it may be simply that fear sells papers, and a headline that says “Catastrophe imminent” sells more papers than “Catastrophe averted.”

But a lot of it appears to be purposeful — it’s no coincidence that the people spinning the wildest tales of catastrophe have also turned out to be associated with vehemently anti-nuclear think tanks and political pressure groups.

Whether it’s because of ignorance or on purpose, the effect of this misreporting it to keep people afraid.

March 31, 2011

Real world influence of bad science reporting

Filed under: Health, Japan, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

If I seem to be linking to wormme’s blog a lot lately, it’s because he is a great source of practical information . . . and he hates sensationalist media reports even more than I do. Normally, the effect of junk science sensationalism is pretty small: people worry a bit more about stupid things, but generally get on with their lives.

Sensational — and badly mistaken — reporting on radiation is a big exception to that:

Hundreds of people evacuated from towns and villages close to the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant are being turned away by medical institutions and emergency shelters as fears of radioactive contagion catch on.

Medical personnel turning them away.

Hospitals and temporary refuges are demanding that evacuees provide them with certificates confirming that they have not been exposed to radiation before they are admitted.

Do you readers see the error here? If not, this blog is failing you.

When trained, professional medical staff are confusing radiation with contamination, things are really, really bad.

The article goes on to quote some medical experts — i.e., non-insane people.

“If someone has been contaminated externally, such as on their shoes or clothes, then precautions can be taken, such as by removing those garments to stop the contamination from getting into a hospital,”

But what if it’s on the person?!

In my trade, we have a secret special decontamination technique. I’m violating all kinds of unwritten laws by sharing it, but this is an emergency, right? When a person needs general decontamination we always do this first, and it almost always works. Are you ready?

Soap and warm water.

I’ll probably be drummed out of the National Registry of Radiological Protection Technicians for revealing that.

“Free neutrons don’t beam, homie”

Filed under: Japan, Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:33

The ever-informative wormme has another good post up, this one is about misunderestimating neutrons:

We can’t say for sure TEPCO was monitoring for neutrons there — they’ve made some pretty big mistakes so far — but they’d be hard to miss. All those emergency responders sprawled lifelessly on the ground would have been a clue. From that absolute godawfully unimaginable flux of ground-zero neutrons, doncha know. Because despite “reporting” like this:

…observed a neutron beam…(snip snip)…when a beam of neutrons…

Free neutrons don’t beam, homie. (emphasis added, obviously) Apart from neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, nothing’s harder to beam than neutrons. They like to spread, not bunch. (Okay, Leopold, maybe muons and the like are worse.)

A neutron walks into a bar and says, “how much for a drink?”. Bartender says, “for you…no charge.” The neutron beamed…

March 29, 2011

The evolution of news to sensational entertainment is complete

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:27

Andrew Orlowski gives the media a damn good whacking over their deliberate panic-mongering:

Sensationalism has always been part of the popular media — but Fukushima is a telling and troubling sign of how much the media has changed in fifty years: from an era of scientific optimism to one where it inhabits a world of fantasy — creating a real-time Hollywood disaster movie with a moralising, chivvying message.

Not so long ago, the professionals showed all the deferential, forelock-tugging paternalism of the dept of “Keep Calm And Carry On”. That era lasted into the 1960s. Now the driving force is the notion that “We’re all DOOMED — and it’s ALL OUR FAULT” that marks almost every news bulletin. Health and environment correspondents will rarely be found debunking the claims they receive in press releases from lobby groups — the drama of catastrophe is too alluring. Fukushima has been the big one.

The Fukushima situation has yet to cause any measurable radiological health effects, and workers at the site were far less hard hit by the quake, tsunami and related events than just about anyone in the disaster zone, but nonetheless the nuclear story rapidly eclipsed the tens of thousands killed directly by the quake. TV’s reaction to the crisis shows how at odds it is with a more rational audience, those who know something about radiation, its consequences, and the human body’s capacity to absorb it and recover from it. The crisis for the media is that thanks to the internet, we can now all bypass these conduits for superstition and stupidity.

Thousands of people died in the earthquake and tsunami (28,000 at last report), yet the media coverage has been unrelentingly focused on Fukushima (where there have been no radiation-linked deaths so far). Surely things like this are scary enough to get equal coverage:

H/T to wormme for the link.

Update: Brendan O’Neill finds a perfect example of journalism:

In a post on the Channel 4 News website, Jon Snow, newsreader, Twitterer, cyclist and “pinko liberal” (his words), unwittingly captures the narcissism and ignorance that are fuelling Western fears over the Fukushima nuclear plant. Never mind the 20,000 who have died and the 200,000 who have been made homeless as a result of the tsunami — what Snow wants to know is what will become of the “dumping of radioactive material in sea water off Japan”.

“When will it pitch up off Cornwall?,” he asks. “Never? Do we know? Will it cause cancers? Will it kill eventually?” Perhaps he has a holiday home in Cornwall, in which case he might possibly be forgiven for thinking that the burning issue of Japan’s monumental tragedy is what impact it will have in St Ives.

Snow’s attempt to justify his navel-gazing obsession with the troubles at Fukushima (apparently he can’t get it out of his mind) is telling. Media coverage of the damaged nuclear plant has understandably “overwhelmed the continuing awfulness of the consequences of the natural disaster itself”, he says, because the natural disaster is “somehow more determinable than the unseen, unknown quantity of danger residing in the reactors, or outside them, in Fukushima”. In short, the natural disaster is too much of a done deal, a proven fact, whereas something far more tantalising lurks within Fukushima: dark, mysterious dangers, uncertainties, swirling unknowns that could unleash their fury at any moment against the unsuspecting Japanese and even us Brits.

March 28, 2011

TEPCO still seems to be more a hindrance than a help over Fukushima

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Japan, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

A report from Kyodo News shows that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) is still not fully co-operating or providing all the information needed to clean up the Fukushima reactor sites:

While efforts at containing troubled reactors have not been making rapid progress at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, signs were emerging that Tokyo Electric Power Co., in the absence of a top officer, is losing its grip on accurately informing the public about risks from radiation.

On Sunday, the utility, known as TEPCO, announced in the morning that the concentration of radioactive materials of water found inside a turbine building adjacent to a rector housing was ”around 10 million times (that of) water in a normal reactor core” but later corrected the information, saying it ”made a wrong estimation.”

[. . .]

On March 20, TEPCO said, ”There were no increases in radiation levels in adjacent areas.” But increases were logged in various parts of adjacent areas, prompting skeptical reporters to raise a series of questions at a news conference but TEPCO officials remained mum.

TEPCO has been giving a series of news conferences since Fukushima Daiichi got into trouble after the March 11 quake. Attending officials have not been able to provide satisfactory answers to a majority of questions raised, only repeating words of apology and, ”We will check it.” It has left the impression they are unable to reply to questions because they are not given enough information.

[. . .]

But on Saturday, it was disclosed that the company had not informed workers who suffered high levels of radiation at the No. 3 reactor unit about radiation levels of the place where they would be working. The government was also found to have not been informed.

Top government spokesman Yukio Edano expressed his displeasure, telling a news conference, ”We cannot give appropriate instructions unless accurate information is provided swiftly.”

TEPCO is allowed to monopolize the power utility market in Tokyo and surrounding regions by law. As the nation’s biggest utility, it has also been the key promoter of the nuclear power policy and one of the main employers of retiring bureaucrats.

Critics say the company lacks cost consciousness and apparently has no idea about what competition is. It is more like a bureaucracy rather than a business being run, they said.

Radiation: the “Banana Equivalent Dose”

Filed under: Health, Science, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:29

A link from wormme leads to this interesting article providing some basic information on radiation:

There is an interesting way of comparing different amounts of radiation, and we’ve now built up all the pieces to understand it. Nuclear physicists and safety engineers sometimes use a unit called the “banana equivalent dose.” This is basically how it’s calculated.

First you take a banana.

Like pretty well everything in nature, bananas are slightly radioactive. Because bananas concentrate potassium, they are more radioactive than a lot of other foods — natural potassium includes some part that is the radioactive isotope potassium-40. That means eating a banana, and thereby ingesting the potassium, adds a measurable radiation dose from the radioactive potassium-40.

Now, before you change to kumquats or something, it’s not much, and bananas aren’t the only source. Potatoes are another food that concentrates potassium. But it does mean we can usefully compare the total dose we get from a banana with other small amounts of radiation. The somewhat-joking term for this is the “banana equivalent dose,” or BED.

Okay, that’s the amusing part, but read the whole thing: it’s informative and non-sensationalized.

Part of the reason I’m posting links to articles like this is that there is a lot of misinformation on all things nuclear and the mainstream media is doing a flat-out terrible job of reporting.

I’ve lived within 10-20 km of nuclear power stations for more than a decade, and I’m not particularly worried day-to-day about the risks due to that proximity. I used to joke with visitors that we didn’t pay for electricity — the walls glowed after dark from the radioactivity. I stopped doing that when I realized people were taking me a bit more seriously than I expected.

March 27, 2011

Panic-mongers still hard at work over Fukushima

Filed under: Health, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:58

Lewis Page is less than impressed with the media’s ongoing coverage of the Fukushima reactor clean-up:

The situation at the quake- and tsunami-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear powerplant in Japan was brought under control days ago. It remains the case as this is written that there have been no measurable radiological health consequences among workers at the plant or anybody else, and all indications are that this will remain the case. And yet media outlets around the world continue with desperate, increasingly hysterical and unscrupulous attempts to frame the situation as a crisis.

[. . .]

Nonetheless, in the hyper-cautious nuclear industry, any dose over 100 millisievert is likely to cause bosses to pull people out at least temporarily. Furthermore, the three workers had sustained slight burns to their legs as a result of standing in the radioactive water – much as one will burn one’s skin by exposing it to the rays of the sun (a tremendously powerful nuclear furnace). They didn’t even notice these burns until after completing their work. Just to be sure, however, the three were sent for medical checks.

So — basically nothing happened. Three people sustained injuries equivalent to a mild case of sunburn. But this was reported around the globe as front-page news under headlines such as “Japanese Workers Hospitalized for Excessive Radiation Exposure”. Just to reiterate: it was not excessive.

Reporters clamoured to know more — in particular how could the water in the basement of the reactor building have become so radioactive — no less than “10,000 times normal”. One might note that in general radiation levels 10,000 times normal mean that you could achieve a tiny fraction of an extra percentage point of cancer risk by being exposed for a fortnight or so.

[. . .]

Then there’s the matter of the tapwater in Tokyo. Two days ago, levels of radioactive iodine-131 were found in the city’s water which were above the safety limit for baby milk calculated on the basis of a year’s consumption: in other words, if babies drank such water for a year constantly they would have a tiny, minuscule extra risk of thyroid cancer.

[. . .]

There was never any chance whatsoever that levels of iodine-131 in the tapwater would remain noticeable for a year, which is what would be necessary for any effects at all on the city’s babies. It was really quite irresponsible of the authorities to recommend that infants shouldn’t drink it. (One can’t help noticing that the first such recommendation reportedly came from the city authorities, belatedly followed by the national government. The Tokyo city governor is from the national opposition party and is facing a tough re-election battle. He had previously sought to use the Fukushima situation to cast his political rivals in a bad light over the deployment of Tokyo’s elite Hyper Rescue firefighters.)

I’d also recommend that you keep an eye on the World’s Only Rational Man for his professional take on what the media is currently panicking over at any given moment:

If modern “journalism” wasn’t the single most incompetent industry in human history we wouldn’t be pulling our hair out over this. Where’s the followup to the reports of Cl-38?

How freakin’ incompetent is the entirety of Big Media?!

You’ve had two weeks to learn a minimum about this subject you obsessively “cover”.

“But…but math is hard!” you whine? Then find some dad-gum folks who do this crap for a living rather than cultivate ivory tower media-hounds.

Sorry. Forgive the venting. Tired and P.O.ed.

Apparently going beddy-bye to the thought of runaway nuclear excursions isn’t warm milk and happy stories. Monsters Inc. could have stayed in the scaring business if they’d taken lessons from The Media.

This blogging day began with concern about neutrons. And so it ends.

I wish we still had reporters.

Because I hate journalism.

Once again, wormme is a radiological control technician, so he actually knows what the hell he’s talking about, unlike just about everyone “covering” the news.

March 21, 2011

Japan’s bifurcated power grid

Filed under: Health, History, Japan, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Charles Stross points out something I was completely unaware of:

Western Japan and Eastern Japan do not share an electricity grid; because of an historical accident, in the 1890s when they were first getting electric lighting, Osaka, in the west, chose to run at 60Hz and Tokyo, in the east, picked 50Hz. Consequently there’s no grid interconnect between the two halves of the Japanese electricity supply system.

Eastern Japan has had 15 nuclear reactors scrammed by an an earthquake. Some of them may be checked out and approved to start delivering base load again over the coming months, but they all need a thorough inspection at this point — and we know for sure that at least three of them will never work again (not after they’ve had seawater pumped through their primary coolant circuit).

We are now heading into summer. And Tokyo doesn’t have enough electricity to maintain power everywhere even in spring.

Summer in Tokyo is savage: temperatures routinely top 35 celsius with 100% humidity. In a heat wave, it can top 40 degrees for days on end. Back when I visited in late August of 2008, the heat wave had broken and daytime temperatures were down under 37 degrees again — the week before it had been over 42, and joggers had been dropping dead in the street.

Greater Tokyo also has 30-million-odd people, of whom a large proportion — maybe 20% — are 75 years or older.

Elderly folks do not handle heat waves well; they get dehydrated easily and if they don’t have air conditioning they die in droves. Normally it’s not a problem in Tokyo because 80% of households have air conditioning, but with rolling blackouts and insufficient power it’s another matter.

It was bad in France, but the death toll among the elderly in Japan may be much higher.

The nuclear power industry’s technological lock-in

Filed under: Economics, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Leon Neyfakh looks at how light water reactors became the “default” choice of the nuclear power industry:

Japan’s reactors are “light water” reactors, whose safety depends on an uninterrupted power supply to circulate water quickly around the hot core. A light water system is not the only way to design a nuclear reactor. But because of the way the commercial nuclear power industry developed in its early years, it’s virtually the only type of reactor used in nuclear power plants today. Even though there might be better technologies out there, light water is the one that utility companies know how to build, and that governments have historically been willing to fund.

Economists call this problem “technological lock-in”: The term refers to the process by which one new technology can prevail over another for no good reason other than circumstance and inertia. The best-known example of technological lock-in comes from the 1970s, when VHS and Betamax, two different kinds of videotape, competed in the market until VHS gained a slight lead and then leveraged it to total domination. Whether the VHS format was actually superior to Betamax didn’t matter. After the lock-in, consumers no longer had a choice.

Much more is at stake in nuclear power. Some reactor designs are safer than others in an accident; some are more efficient than others in their use of fuel and produce less nuclear waste. The fact that the industry settled on light water over any number of alternatives was determined in the years after World War II, when the US Atomic Energy Commission and Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover made a series of hasty decisions that irreversibly set the course for how nuclear power plants around the world are built today.

“There were lots and lots of ideas floating around, and they essentially lost when light water came to dominate,” said Robin Cowan, a professor at the University of Strasbourg and the University of Maastricht who wrote a 1990 paper in The Journal of Economic History about the nuclear industry’s technological stagnation. “The market tends to choose a dominant design before it’s optimal, and it tends to under-explore.”

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