"Pression" occurs to me on account of the analogy with (e.g.) "expression". One may say, for instance, that a performance's expression of such and such was skillful, while one wouldn't (I wouldn't) be very inclined except if I wanted to be stilted to say that its expressing of such such and such was skillful.
I thought you were always trying to sound stilted.
"The true Proto-Indo-European name of the bear is H₂RTḰOS, probably meaning "destroyer": bad ass
Then there's this bear. And Knut, pbuh.
Pression! Pushing down on me!
||Another thing that NYT is good for. As nice as the two older maps fading into current are, the street opening map and the historical census (hover over the map) are probably the best.
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I like how the etymologies show how the referents of spice names are more variable over time than other words - for example, the word "pepper" is ultimately derived from a Sanskrit word that actually meant "long pepper", not "black pepper", for which there was another Sanskrit word, but the modern-day Indian-language descendants of that word now usually mean "chile".
The Vedas had a hundred names for pepper.
9: R.I.P., Knut. Man is the true destroyer, in this fallen world.
Also, I don't particularly like garlic.
Wait, so Knut and Knut's trainer died young? Is this the curse of the cute polar bear? LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN DOROTHY.
16: I don't think anybody associated with less-known but still adorable polar bears like Flocke has died in non-actuarial fashion.
14: Monier-Williams' and Leuman's Dictionary of the Sanskrit language (1920) gives just two possibly relevant roots: qanik, meaning 'pepper in the air', and aput, meaning 'pepper on the ground'. Can you cite others?
(I could not bring myself to attempt to fabricate Sanskrit roots for the sake of an already idiotic joke, so I left in the West Greenlandic words for snow.)
could not bring myself to attempt to fabricate Sanskrit roots
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
16: Maybe they suffered from die-polar disorder.
At least they provided us some magnetic moments to remember.
The article on capers not only contains a table of spice names derived from Arabic terms and which incorporate the Arabic article but also a rare appearance of "stamina" as the plural for "stamen"!
20, 21: Racists. On behalf of the world's dwindling population of unstoppable Arctic killing machines,* I am appalled by your levity.
* National Geographic claims that the largest polar bear on record was 12 feet tall and weighed 2000 pounds. I think I have driven smaller automobiles.
New candidate for the mouseover text:
Unless you mean that the "or else" stick is the fact that he will lose all credibility with me and that I will regard him as someone whose opinion is negligible.
Please, please, please, please. Oh please can we? It's from the No Nuclear Renaissance thread at CT: commenter ScentofViolets had a meltdown.
New candidate for the mouseover text:
Unless you mean that the "or else" stick is the fact that he will lose all credibility with me and that I will regard him as someone whose opinion is negligible.
Please, please, please, please. Oh please can we? It's from the No Nuclear Renaissance thread at CT: commenter ScentofViolets had a meltdown.
Isn't he always melting down? I don't think I've ever noticed him other than in the midst of a full-scale hissyfit over who has the burden of proof.
People actually read 200 comments deep in CT threads? I thought by that point they were taken over by automatons programmed to mimic human outrage.
I'm a shut in, and what's more, often in immense pain. D2 had a theory about this a while back.
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The thing that got to Ernesto, the thing that really drove him crazy, was the little stuff. The big shit, yeah, that was fucked up, the way it seemed like no one ever asked what all of it meant, where the money came from, or where it went, or who this was all supposed to benefit. Sure, you could drive yourself crazy asking those questions, ask them all day and you'd never get a straight answer, at least not here on the Street. No, it was the little shit that was intolerable. Sometimes he just felt like screaming. And the worst part was, he knew that his role in it all was key. The way it started, it had just been a gag. Another way to get through a day on the Street, where the numbers ruled everything, and it seemed like it was the same day, over and over and over again. Did anyone age here? Sure, some died, and some just disappeared, but for Ernesto and the other regulars, you couldn't tell one decade from the next, never mind the years. But back to the Act. That was how he thought of himself now. Sure, maybe one time, way back in the day, he'd been something else. Something different, something without that quality of whatever it was, the way that every time he showed up, it would be the same jokes, the same stupid fucking laugh. But it was hard to remember. Nowadays he was the Act, and the Act was him. Even a child, a little crumb-crusher who could barely talk could recognize him when he showed up. The same stupid laugh, every time. How long could he keep it up? He'd done it this long, and maybe he'd just keep doing it forever, long past the time that any normal person would have become someone else. And then there was Big. Big. That's all the name he'd ever had. Ernesto had a suspicion that somehow everything on the Street, everything you could see or hear or taste or touch or smell was ultimately in the service of Big. Like he was there, in the background (although, Christ, could he ever be in the background of anything? The way he dominated every scene, was at the center of every plot?) Yeah, it was like everything they did was all about playing to Big's ego. God forbid that anyone ever told him the real truth, the unvarnished reality of what was and is and would be. You always had to dumb it down to the level of a small child, and still you could never depend on him not to freak out. The mendacity of it all was amazing. Did the others even get it? You could never tell. Ernesto suspected that even the ones who seemed hip. The cynical ones, like Gordon or Oscar, were just as bought out and paid up as any of the rest of them. How to get, how to get away, Ernesto thought, how to get from Sesame Street.
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Ooh, he's just come very close to a neatly executed 'the lurkers support me in email'. Not quite -- he's talking about what most people believe, not what they've actually emailed him about -- but close.
24: LB gets it right; he's always already been melting down. (It's really impressive and/or depressing how many crank commenters made their bones on Usenet. Search for "Dw/ight Thi/eme" if you want to see his history.)
Funny thing is that is he's often (I would guess more often than not) on what I'd think of as generally the sane side of whatever the issue is. Just not in a way that advances it much.
33: weird. I feel like I know that name.
Includes comments beginning with:
- Huh!?!?!?
- Sigh.
- Sigh.
- Shrug.
- Simon, bite me.
- Sigh.
Includes the sentences "This is where I get to accuse you of poor reading comprehension, right?", "Do you wish to amend your statement?", "You _really_ didn't understand this?", an accusations that someone else has a "thin skin", and an accusation that someone ELSE is "combative".
And the thing is, he's right, and the people he's arguing against are weaseling like a Cato Institute-sponsored Toon Patrol. Just an incredible waste of time, all this arguing on the internet.
Just an incredible waste of time, all this arguing on the internet.
That's a damned lie, you simpering, in-the-tank coward.
Sigh is another mouseover possible.
Arguing on the internet is no more pointless than a game of darts, say, so there's that.
40.2: Darts perhaps not the best game to set the standard for pointlessness.
It's all going a bit quiet. Must be leaving the office time in America.
I'm sorry, I want more Sesame Street noir. How am I not supported in this? I am on my second glass of wine and commenting via blackberry bc somehow this place sucks you in, and I demand more Sesame Street noir!
I am on my second glass of wine and commenting via blackberry bc somehow this place sucks you in, and I demand more Sesame Street noir!
Herein lies great truth.
(Also, really glad you got sucked in, dq.)
I can usually only manage one cri de couer of that nature per day. I have to do work now, so if I can provide anything else, it's going to be long after that bottle is finished.
41 cont'd: that's Abuse--office on the next corridor over.
I could see where 29 was going about halfway through, but that didn't make it any less awesome (the level of such awesomeness being "extremely").
I can't make thing from 29.
That website is a great resources though.
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Spartanburg Police: Crack Found In Man's Buttocks
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Natilo, that was awesome.
dq, sometimes, if we're lucky, Cryptic Ned will do some city planning speechifying. Not Sesame Street noir, but fantastic in its own right.
54: Obviously the headline's the joke there, but related: I noticed this story circling 'round the FB, with several people asking the obvious question, "Wait. Twenty-two cents?"
56.1: Thanks for making that explicit.
Now I've read a big chunk of that CT thread. Like most discussions of nuclear power I've read lately, it makes me want to take the "pox on both your houses" approach.
can't somebody just get cold fusion working for us? also, w00t 29.
commenter ScentofViolets had a meltdown
a nice, controlled meltdown, or the dangerous kind that bad people used to have but which is literally impossible! in the modern nuclear industree!
I have been having great fun reading nukeman punditry over the last week, in particular with respect to the phrase "a reasonable worst case scenario", used in a context where the word "reasonable" should clearly have been replaced by the word "not".
Somewhere I saw a description by a nuclear power engineer of the actual worst case scenario in Japan as at about a week ago. It was far worse than I had imagined and far worse than the most vociferous ignorant doomsayers on the internet could imagine. But, as the guy pointed out, the odds against it were astronomical, not least because there were very robust systems in place to minimise the risks. And, as we notice, it didn't happen.
yes, although the word "robust" could usefully be replaced with the phrase "amazingly, unbelievably, economic-viability-destroyingly expensive".
Like most discussions of nuclear power I've read lately, it makes me want to take the "pox on both your houses" approach.
I agree. We should neither have nuclear power, nor not have it.
True, and of course a far cheaper option: "Do not place your reactors in the path of potential tsunamis" had not been taken. I know you don't do financial advice, but my feeling is that if I had fifty quid to spare I could do worse than to punt it on Japanese wind/water/solar power, not because the nuclear option is any more dangerous than it was last month but because people are people.
not because the nuclear option is any more dangerous than it was last month
Some people would think it a bit strange if you didn't revise your view of the risks, even if just a teeny weeny bit, in light of new evidence. I suppose a Bayesian approach to these things isn't compulsory, though.
That was me. That 'remember personal info?' check box gets unchecked sometimes.
Yeah, you need to look at what happened and work out how to do better next time, such as not fighting with your land army on the mainland of Asia building your reactors on the sea shore a hundred miles from an active submarine fault (note that Fukushima came through the actual quake with flying colours - it was the tsunami that did for it).
But in terms of recalibrating the intrinsic dangers of nuclear power, I doubt if there have been enough major accidents in the history of the industry to make up a significant sample. So I'm not sure what risks you'd be revising, other than the overriding: "There is a risk that somebody will make a stupid decision with bad consequences (Probability - Low/Medium; Impact - Very High)".
Well, statistics are something I know next to nothing about, but the word 'sample' suggests a situation where you're not monitoring the whole population (so you're having to sample it). This isn't obviously the case with nuclear reactors. That is, I think we could probably manage to write out a full, detailed, line by line status report for all of them. This suggests to me that worries about 'significance' don't get much traction: or to put it another way, I don't see how to make sense of the idea that the news from Fukushima-Daiichi might be a false positive.
The risk that'd get revised, I think, is the risk of core meltdown. This now moves from 'low risk' to something slightly higher than 'low risk', no?
True, and of course a far cheaper option: "Do not place your reactors in the path of potential tsunamis" had not been taken.
You kind of have to put reactors in the path of potential tsunami, though, because they have to go on the coast or beside a large river or lake that you don't mind pumping a lot of warm water into, and Japan isn't rich in large rivers and lakes.
See map:
http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2011/03/16/the-nuclear-world-interactive-map/
Note how the reactors are along the coast pretty much everywhere.
In fact, "Located in the Arizona desert, Palo Verde is the only nuclear generating facility in the world that is not situated adjacent to a large body of above-ground water. The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station
The risk that'd get revised, I think, is the risk of core meltdown. This now moves from 'low risk' to something slightly higher than 'low risk', no?
I'm not sure that any of the reactors have actually undergone full core meltdown, so the proper Bayesian thing to do is actually revise that risk down, because you know now that even a hugely excessive insult is not going to cause a full core meltdown.
It seems to me that the value of this is reduced by the people who assembled the data deciding not to count the USSR as a developed country, but it's moderately interesting anyway. Shorter: Fossils can cause moderately high mortality and repeatedly do; nuke and hydro can cause very high mortality but generally don't. Take your pick.
Semi-OT, this is the guy I would pick for back up if I ever had to go head to head with a Tyrannosaurus.
I'm not sure that any of the reactors have actually undergone full core meltdown, so the proper Bayesian thing to do is actually revise that risk down, because you know now that even a hugely excessive insult is not going to cause a full core meltdown.
I will happily trade you 'lower risk of full core meltdown' for 'higher risk of core meltdown to a degree such that the plant has to be demolished'.
The latter is merely a financial and operational risk, not a safety hazard. (Actually even a full meltdown needn't be a safety hazard but it probably would be.)
Safety risk can be redefined as financial risk, of course. I'd bet that TEPCO ends up compensating the 'Fukushima 50' for the unsafe things they're doing right now. But I quibble.
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I have to look into whether I need to file for guardianship for my Mom. This sucks so bad that I just want to cry and retreat to my room forever.
My sister listens to my Dad despite the chaotic way her runs and has run hsi life and his dreadful history of alcoholism. I don't think he's drinking now, but he never talks about it and isn't involved in any kind of treatment. Combine with with a very mild sort of bipolar, mostly depressive, poor attention (ADHD maybe) and poor executive functioning. My sister just can't see that my Dad's way of doing things is problematic.
I've known (despite promises from my Dad that my Mom's family resources would be enough) since I was 5 that I would have to deal with this sooner or later, and I wish that it were later.
There are no good choices, and I don't make a good enough salary to pay for a decent place to live. Plus, assisted living places won't tale anyone with mental illness.
Why do people who are totally unsuited to and incapable of raising children continue to have them? All they manage to do is burden their offspring.
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That's rough, BG, you have all my sympathy. Unfortunately I know nothing about the legal position in MA so I can't say anything remotely helpful. But good luck to both you and your mother.
They live in Maine, sl the law is different. There a state agency can be a guardian, and I don't know whether that's good or not. They recommend that family members do it, but I think that the conflicts of interest could be too great.
In MA, it's family or mostly sort of low-rent lawyers who make a chunk of their living out of being mostly absentee guardians.
It's all a mess. This is why I would like to win the lottery.
Sorry, BG. That is rough.
Having a mentally ill relative whohas been institutionalized all her life, I will say that the value of a relative acting as patient advocate cannot be understated. Nor can the burden of being that advocate.
My Mom is unlikely to be hospitalized at this point. he'd dookay w/ medications, a maid and people to pay her bills for her.
And what happens if a guardian recommends one thing, but the trustees whose duty it is to look out for her and her siblings financial benefit equally disagree, and then there's the mess of medicaid.
My Mom is in the hospital right now, but is being discharged today. They feel that they can't offer her the services she needs in that small community. Their discharge plan is to send her to the Riverview State Hospital which looks mixed but not horrible as these things go, but they're never good.
I'm quite sure that she won't accept it. So, she'll probably be offered a prescription by her PCP with loose supervision from a psychiatrist (covered by a grant), and she's unlikely to take it. She can't care for herself completely once my Dad dies (heart disease, diabetes, hep C and heart failure).
I'd really hate to see her in a group home or even aboard and care, because those places are full of smokers, and my Mom doesn't like to be around them at all.
I'm alienating people left and right which is no good. At times like these I really regret that I was ever born. (Don't worry, Mineshaft, I'm not about to off myself.)
Guardianship and conservatorship involve much more than acting as an advocate.
72
I'm not sure that any of the reactors have actually undergone full core meltdown, so the proper Bayesian thing to do is actually revise that risk down, because you know now that even a hugely excessive insult is not going to cause a full core meltdown.
Generally speaking when you are trying to estimate the chance of a rare event and you observe a near miss you would increase your estimate of the chance of the rare event upwards.
83: No question about that! Your mom is lucky to have a daughter who cares enough to invest the kind of emotional and intellectual energy you are investing to sort out all these details. I wish I had advice, but all I can offer is sympathy.
84 and previous: yeah, given that the probability that one of the reactors has already undergone a full meltdown has presumably increased dramatically (although we don't know if that has actually happened) it seems silly to argue that the posterior probability that a full meltdown will ever occur would have decreased.
#84 perfectly exemplifies why Bayesianism isn't the silver bullet that people often believe it to be; you would actually have to revise upward both your posterior probability of a full core meltdown and your posterior estimate of the containment system's ability to prevent a full core meltdown.
82: You've probably thought of this, and I have no reason to think it's practical or sensible, but have you talked to her trustees, to see if perhaps that might be an option for a guardian? That'd be someone with a longterm sense of her history and family. I have no idea how compensation would work, or if there'd be a conflict of interest problem, but it seems like at least it might be a source of advice.
69: I doubt if there have been enough major accidents in the history of the industry to make up a significant sample.
Since most accidents involving big complex systems involve not just a single point of failure, but multiple failures compounding one another, there probably is a sufficient amount of information out there to make a statistically useful analysis. It's a matter of calculating the probabilities of events that are one step away from disaster, two steps, and so on, and then extrapolating to events that are zero steps from disaster. Not easy, but it's certainly possible.
The problem is that the incentives to cover up or minimize near-misses are very strong, so the information is scattered, deliberately corrupted, and in some cases may exist only in the minds of the people who actually witnessed the event. This is a serious and common problem with technical hazards - punishing people for providing data that is needed to minimize the danger is tempting but stupid. The assumption that there will be some witness to the incident who is not subject to disincentives to report is also stupid. The only sure witness is the person who caused the problem in the first place, so there has to be either an anonymous reporting process or some kind other form of insulation from negative consequences for the person who made the mistake.
#87: assume a partial meltdown pre-empts a full meltdown. That is, the energy has one shot at dissipating, and it either dissipates into a partial meltdown, or into a full meltdown, and the former never progresses into the latter. Why couldn't we then say that evidence of a partial meltdown lowers the probability of a full meltdown? Contrast with the scenario where the world has no history of partial meltdowns and has n reactors operating at full power.
One might feel this is cooked up (pun honestly not intended) but so it goes with Bayesian probability management. Which is what you're saying.
That is, the energy has one shot at dissipating, and it either dissipates into a partial meltdown, or into a full meltdown, and the former never progresses into the latter.
This seems like an odd way of describing it. Wouldn't it make more sense to say that every instance of a full meltdown includes a prior partial meltdown: alternatively, that a partial meltdown is a step on the path to a full meltdown?
assume a partial meltdown pre-empts a full meltdown. That is, the energy has one shot at dissipating, and it either dissipates into a partial meltdown, or into a full meltdown, and the former never progresses into the latter.
Why would you assume this?
89: Health and safety professionals spot this right away by reference to an "accident pyramid". Statistically, you expect to see a certain number of non-fatal injuries for every fatality, a certain number accidents without injury for every non-fatal injury, a certain number of near-misses for every accident, etc.
IIRC a thorough reporting of near misses will generate several thousand reports for every fatal accident. That might vary empirically by industry, I suppose.
Odd, yes. But note that the 'step on the path' option is explicitly ruled out by my power of stipulation. Think of seatbelts and car crashes, or something like that. Accelerating out of your seat is part of both a car crash where your motion is arrested by your seatbelt, and part of a car crash where it isn't. The former isn't necessarily a step on the path to the latter.
Odd, yes. But note that the 'step on the path' option is explicitly ruled out by my power of stipulation.
What?
That's what stipulation is like, Sifu. I'm not trying to make a point about power plant design per se. I'd leave it to a power plant designer to take on the complicated issue of whether or not partial meltdowns actually do pre-empt full meltdowns, through proposing a plausible mechanism for that.
Except that if one doesn't accept your stipulation -- and, based on the tremendous expertise on nuclear power I've gained reading about it in the non-specialist press for a week or so, I have no reason to think it should be accepted -- then I don't really see the point of your argument. I mean, sure, if what you stipulated is true, then proper application of Bayesian principles (as well as plain intuition) would lead us to believe that a partial meltdown in this circumstance reduced the likelihood of a full meltdown in the future. On the other hand, if what you stipulate is false, then Bayesian principles (as well as plain intuition) would lead us to suspect the opposite. So?
93: This is connected to the checklist conversation of a a while back. I strongly suspect that the effect of a checklist is to change the scaling law of near misses to actual accidents, steepening it so that the fuckup cascade is broken before the incident progresses to a fatality (or meltdown, explosion, loss of Orbiter, etc). Also most likely it reduces the total number of incidents, though not necessarily - the safety procedures we use at work occasionally lead to taking increased risks of minor problems because of the onerousness of stepping through the entire checklist. It takes fifteen minutes simply to enter the experimental bay under certain circumstances.
98: and, of course, you could also stipulate that the event of a full meltdown is independent of the event of a full meltdown, in which case your posterior wouldn't change at all. But, again, so what?
So some scepticism as to the changes in probabilities regarding meltdowns is warranted? I don't see that that's a totally trivial point. What's more, I think the same line of argument shows - in very broad brush terms - how and why certain sorts of things (containment, emergency cooling) should be investigated by people whose job it is to do that. They will be doing it anyway, no doubt, but I think it's useful to understand why they should, with at least minimal precision.
And I wonder if perhaps you're taking this a little too seriously? I'm not trying to stir disagreement here.
I'm really ignorant of nuclear power, and discussions of it annoy me, so I don't know why I'm about to write another comment about it. But here's an attempt to state one thing that's really bugging me about the nuclear advocacy side, because I feel like either I'm wrong about something important or they're all using weird rhetorical moves instead of making a real argument:
The thing that I can't figure out is the environmental argument that some advocates try to make, that more nuclear plants are a key step in moving away from fossil fuels. Because, as far as I'm able to tell, what they mean by "nuclear plant" here has to be totally unlike anything that we currently have. There just isn't enough uranium in the world, as I understand it, to completely replace all coal-fueled power generation for more than fifty years or so, even if we assume our rate of power consumption doesn't increase. (I could be wrong on this, I suppose, but I've heard it from a number of people.)
So one could say "fine, just use nuclear to supply part of our power; it doesn't have to fully replace fossil fuels". Which is reasonable. Except that the very same people advocating for nuclear as a way to move away from fossil fuels also usually seem inclined to viciously attack wind and solar by saying there's no way that they can feasibly replace all of our fossil fuel generation; at best they can replace some fraction of it. And then I get confused and decide that everyone in the discussion is being disingenuous.
And I wonder if perhaps you're taking this a little too seriously? I'm not trying to stir disagreement here.
I just don't really get what you're saying; clearly none of us has the relevant expertise or knowledge to accurately assess probabilities, and clearly different assessments of both the situation and its relationship to other situations will change the way this accident informs future judgments, and clearly people should look into that. Is that what you're saying?
102: Fission plants are supposed to be a bridge to fusion? Maybe? I honestly don't know.
And then I get confused and decide that everyone in the discussion is being disingenuous.
Indeed. I wish there was a "heterogeneous and distributed power production NOW!" faction I could sign on to.
104: Well, or people talk about thorium reactors and breeder reactors and all sorts of other things. But I think all of those fall under my "totally unlike anything that we currently have"; they don't sound like arguments for building more of the plants whose safety record people are debating in such detail.
So one could say "fine, just use nuclear to supply part of our power; it doesn't have to fully replace fossil fuels". Which is reasonable. Except that the very same people advocating for nuclear as a way to move away from fossil fuels also usually seem inclined to viciously attack wind and solar by saying there's no way that they can feasibly replace all of our fossil fuel generation; at best they can replace some fraction of it.
I don't recognise the people you describe. My position is that nuclear can play a useful bridging role in allowing us to wind down fossils and ramp up the various renewable technologies over a realistic timescale. It's true: wind and solar can't replace all our fossil fuel generation yet. It's in everybody's interest to make sure they can eventually, but while the necessary investment is being made we still need to do something about the fossils. Part of the interim solution more or less has to be nuclear as far as I can see. But certainly it's an interim solution.
102: It's very simple, essear. Nuclear power is awesome, but the environmental side-effect is that it turns ordinary people into supervillains. To cover this up, the nuclear power industry gives the supervillains make-work jobs as industry spokespeople. That's why they all sound like Magneto explaining why he needs to enslave the human race.
107: Oh what a blessed isle Albion must be, to lack such disingenuous hacks. (I agree with your substantive position, but the kind of people essear describe are real.)
105: I'd sign on to that platform.
106: I'm also an advocate of a "totally unlike anything we currently have" approach to managing power plants, especially nuclear ones. You can't use the same management paradigm for a nuclear power plant as for a automobile production line. I'm reluctantly anti-nuke not due to inherent problems with the technology but due to the inherent problems with people, management and operations approaches, and most importantly the problem of getting from where we are to where we need to be in terms of thinking about how to handle complex and risky technologies. Given the reality of the actually existing state of affairs, I'd rather go with wind, solar, wave, geothermal, and all the other types of energy approaches where a maximally catastrophic fuckup doesn't run the risk of something worse than Chernobyl.
On the one hand lots of pro nuclear power people are just hippy-haters being disengenuous.
That said, it's not unreasonable to think that we'll eventually have a big breakthrough and get cheap solar energy. So "bridging the gap for 50 years" isn't totally useless.
109. Oh we've got them, but they've long lost all credibility and are simply dismissed as industry shills.
One interesting side effect of Cameregg's efforts to dismantle the United Kingdom is that they're meant to be stopping subsidies to the nuclear power industry, which will (if they actually do it, which remains to be seen) render it economically unviable. I don't think this would be an unalloyed blessing.
The thing with the pro-nuke side's arguments is that they are all compromised by the Dsquared Principle. I.e., we've been lied to over and over again by these same people, and every time they tell us a new lie, they preface it by saying "But now, this time, we're really, really telling you the truth!" So more fool us if we deign to accept their lies once again.
Here in MN, we've got a nuclear plant that was built on a sandbar, in the Mississippi River, next to an Indian Reservation, where they are storing many barrels of "low-level" radioactive waste in relatively flimsy containment areas. And when they got the approval to store the waste 20 years ago, they swore up and down that it would only be temporary, that they'd never ask to do it again, and that the anti-nuclear side were just scare-mongers if they disputed that. And here it is all these years later and the barrels are still there, they've kept adding more of them, and there's no transfer date in sight. So, yeah, pro-nukes? Virtually always disingenuous at best, actively deceitful usually.
88: You have to go to probate court. Plus, she won't apply for disability, because nothing's wrong.
If she got SSI, she'd need to make sure that she never got more than $2k at a time, unless it went to me, and I "gave it" to her. SSDI is much better.
The lawyer trustees should have done a lot more 20 or 30 years ago, and they didn't, so...you know.
She has a competency trial next week. She's not at baseline now (which is not ever good). If the judge says she's not competent, it's off to the State hospital.
Generally speaking when you are trying to estimate the chance of a rare event and you observe a near miss you would increase your estimate of the chance of the rare event upwards.
Not always. If the question (sorry, analogy) is "how likely is this vase to break over the next ten years?" you might have a prior estimate of 1 in 100.
What we've just seen is the equivalent of apostropher smacking the vase with a sledgehammer and the vase not breaking. Now, in a sense, that was a near-miss event - and maybe you should revise up a bit because you hadn't factored in the possibility of apo hitting your vase with a sledgehammer.
But don't you think that you'd revise your overall estimate down, rather than up, now that you know the vase can survive a blow from a sledgehammer?
Charlie, I think you're misunderstanding the word "meltdown.". Typically the fuel in the reactor is a solid (uranium oxide in little rabbit food style pellets) encased in metal tubes. This is relatively safe because in the event of an explosion, fire, or venting steam the fuel won't travel too far.
A "meltdown" just means that the fuel has melted. A "partial meltdown" means that some of the fuel has melted.
These are dangerous for three reasons:
1)liquid fuel spreads further in the event of something bad happening.
2)you only get meltdowns if the reactor is really really hot, which also increases risk of fires or explosions
3)in bad enough situations the molten fuel can melt through the bottom of the reactor and end up in groundwater.
Anyway a partial meltdown is just part of the way to a meltdown. I think you're imagining something like a meltdown meaning an explosion.
107, 111: Sure, I think nuclear power has an important role to play in reducing our fossil fuel use over the next several decades, at least. But I think it's important to realize that it's probably only one part of a suite of important changes in how we use energy, and might be only 10% of the solution.
As for the existence of these people, here's an extract from comment 55 on that CT thread:
The fantasy that America's entire energy infrastructure can be replaced with wind power or solar power represents a delusion so absurd it requires little discussion. ... Nuclear power remains the only viable alternative to coal and oil power generation.
There's more in the same spirit in that thread.
And right now I'm skipping a talk by this guy about why he thinks climate change is caused by the sun, which I'm sure I'm going to hear about soon enough from the local people who like to needle me about these things.
OK, let me rephrase. 'Partial meltdown', in my toy example argument, means a contained meltdown: the fuel is all over the bottom of the containment, zirconium cladding and all, but hasn't melted through it. It won't melt through it, either, because it's not hot enough. Neither is it getting hotter, since whatever heat is produced by further decay of fission products is being fully and completely transferred to the environment beyond the intact containment. 'Full meltdown', again, in my example argument, means that the fuel has melted through the reactor vessel and is on its way to do doing bad things elsewhere. The difference between the two scenarios is the thickness of the material of the containment, the quantity of fuel, the radioactivity of the fuel; things like that. Define containment how you like, anywhere short of 'the ground'.
Again, I think you're taking this far too seriously, although the Fukushima-Daiichi accident is a serious event, I grant you. Perhaps it would be better to stick with seatbelts? I didn't intend a detailed discussion of reactor design.
But don't you think that you'd revise your overall estimate down, rather than up, now that you know the vase can survive a blow from a sledgehammer?
Nah, the blow introduced a lot of subtle structural damage, softening the vase up significantly. It'll break at the drop of a feather from here on out.
If you meant "vases constructed like this one", then sure.
Everything in my life is constructed just the way I've stipulated to avoid exactly this sort of nonsense.
I think it would be hard to assess how that would affect my posterior probabilities without knowing further details. If the detailed analysis came back saying something like "in a matter of hours after they got cooling restarted in a complicated way there would have been a complete disaster, but they just made it" that would be quite different than "it turns out the containment devices work quite well and even in the case of lots of bad things happening there was never serious danger of catastrophe."
In the current situation the moral I've been taking is that spent fuel storage is irrationally ignored, and for whatever reason nuclear engineers have not put in any backup safety systems for spent fuel (e.g. there's no containment device, a crack in the floor combined with loss of power can cause a huge disaster, etc.). So personally I think nuclear power is much less safe now than I did a couple weeks ago, but that's almost entirely because of spent fuel issues and not because of reactor meltdown.
126: Yeah, that bit surprised me. Not, again, that I know anything about safe fuel storage design, but putting the storage pool on the roof over the currently operating reaction seems strange, considering that hydrogen explosions were apparently a perfectly normal, no big thing, you expect when stuff starts going wrong. Wouldn't you worry that the pool would spring a leak?
Also clustering the plants seems like a way to magnify any danger.
I think what's going on is that all the engineers were told "make a temporary thing for holding fuel until it's taken off-site" and then for political reasons the fuel is not actually removed. And so you end up way outside the design specs.
129: and then for political reasons the fuel is not actually removed
The worldwide aggregate of this phenomenon (for a wide interpretation of "this phenomenon") is one of the most worrying aspects of nuclear power for me.
But don't you think that you'd revise your overall estimate down, rather than up, now that you know the vase can survive a blow from a sledgehammer?
Not if the takeaway is that there might be a lot more sledgehammer-wielders (or sledgehammer-wielder equivalents) in the world than I had heretofore thought.
131: That being more "external conditions either beyond spec or not anticipated in the spec" not earthquakes or tsunamis per se.
Here's a powerpoint about how they were running out of space at this reactor and needed to push their storage capacities beyond the original design: http://www.scribd.com/doc/51060557/Integrity-Inspection-of-Dry-Storage-Casksand-Spent-Fuels-at-Fukushima-DaiichiNuclear-Power-Station
102
The thing that I can't figure out is the environmental argument that some advocates try to make, that more nuclear plants are a key step in moving away from fossil fuels. Because, as far as I'm able to tell, what they mean by "nuclear plant" here has to be totally unlike anything that we currently have. There just isn't enough uranium in the world, as I understand it, to completely replace all coal-fueled power generation for more than fifty years or so, even if we assume our rate of power consumption doesn't increase. (I could be wrong on this, I suppose, but I've heard it from a number of people.)
I'm too lazy to look any of this stuff up but as I recall if you have have reactors that burn U238 or Thorium then there is plenty of fuel. Alternatively if you can economically extract Uranium (and hence U235) from sea water there is plenty of fuel.
106
Well, or people talk about thorium reactors and breeder reactors and all sorts of other things. But I think all of those fall under my "totally unlike anything that we currently have"; they don't sound like arguments for building more of the plants whose safety record people are debating in such detail.
I believe there are designs for burning U238 or Thorium (or at least stretching the U235 much further) that aren't totally unlike anything we currently have.
117
Not always. ...
Which is why I said "generally speaking" meaning usually not always.
... If the question (sorry, analogy) is "how likely is this vase to break over the next ten years?" you might have a prior estimate of 1 in 100. What we've just seen is the equivalent of apostropher smacking the vase with a sledgehammer and the vase not breaking. Now, in a sense, that was a near-miss event - and maybe you should revise up a bit because you hadn't factored in the possibility of apo hitting your vase with a sledgehammer. But don't you think that you'd revise your overall estimate down, rather than up, now that you know the vase can survive a blow from a sledgehammer?
I don't think the case at hand is exceptional, I am pretty pro-nuclear myself but I think trying to spin this as a positive event for nuclear power is just silly and credibility damaging. In particular I don't accept your characterization ("smacking the vase with a sledge hammer") of what happened. It appears to me the plants should have survived with little damage but due to various stupidities suboptimal decisions didn't.
Also clustering the plants seems like a way to magnify any danger.
Well, yes and no. This is convoy theory really. Yes, if you cluster them it's more likely that several will be affected at once; but if you spread them out it's more likely that one of them will be affected. And clustering means that you can keep your emergency equipment clustered as well, and (for example) run emergency power lines from one reactor's genset to the next one in the event of a partial loss of power.
I think it would be hard to assess how that would affect my posterior probabilities without knowing further details
exactly. Or to put it pedantically, in order to have prior probabilities to update you need to have a model, and different models will update very differently in response to the same events, and the data itself will not tell you what you need to know about whether your model is the correct one until it is too late.
And by the way, there is no need for scare quotes around "low level" - in general it really is low level. If stuff is being stored in normal barrels, usually it might as well have been sent to landfill already (source of mammoth confusion - this low level waste also "stays radioactive for thousands of years" - ie it doesn't decay very much because it isn't very radioactive). The only stuff you have to worry about is the two or three spoonfuls of "Very Very Not Safe" stuff which is generally stored in lead-lined swimming pools and other things in the category "Large Built Objects Which Cost At Least Four Times As Much As Expected".
which is generally stored in lead-lined swimming pools ...
... which are generally placed on top of failing nuclear reactors leaking large clouds of hydrogen, which explode from time to time.
Well, Charlie, it's not as though the explosions actually ruptured the spent fuel pools and the water all drained out. The problem was the loss of cooling power and water supply, which meant that the water in the pools started to boil off from the heat produced by the spent fuel - that would have happened even if the pools had been at ground level. It wouldn't have happened if the pools had been a long way away from the reactors with their own independent power supplies, but then you have the problem of regularly transporting extremely hot spent fuel from reactor to pool.
Engineering point: if you've got this pond full of very hot water near the sea, an obvious application for it is an OTEC plant, so you're still cooling it, but instead of spending power to do so, you're generating power.
TEPCO even builds OTEC plants. I wonder whether this has been considered? Engineers, tell me why this doesn't make sense.
Well, Charlie, it's not as though the explosions actually ruptured the spent fuel pools and the water all drained out.
OK, again, I was being a bit facetious. Most likely not all spent fuel storage is similarly at risk. But on the issue of whether or not the FD fuel pools are intact, I'd say that the jury isn't just out, the jury members haven't even received their jury service letters in the post. Take a look at this thermal image and take a guess as to whether or not there's any water in any of those pools. Perhaps someone somewhere knows: we, sitting here, have absolutely no idea.
Fair enough. I've read no reports anywhere that suggest damage to the pools themselves that would cause water to drain out, but I suppose it's possible.
Apparently, some of the water in the pond "sloshed" out of it during the earthquake, because it was such an earthquake. I presume that after they'd said "Fuck, an earthquake!" and started the "Reactor Scram" checklist, and the power had gone out and they'd done the "Station-Service Power Failure" checklist, somebody would have probably said "hmm, we might need to top up the pond" had it not been for the tsunami showing up and the diesel generators AND the reactor core isolation cooling system quitting and getting everyone's attention (and among other things causing the loss of the "Spent Fuel Pond Water Level" gauges).
