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#1
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GE pays no income tax
Higgs Boson wrote:
On Mar 29, 9:46 am, bob haller wrote: Once GE gewts hit with all the lawsuits over the japanese reactor there will be no profits to pay taxes on, GE will end up in bankruptcy. Their cheaper reactor the buyers got what they paid for I gotta say that, according to what's coming out now, the Japanese engineers/geologists/other specialists were using very, very, very old data when planning and siting these reactors. Nobody had properly studied the history of earthquakes going back over 1,000 years. This is just plain inexcusable. Not that GE isn't at fault too for their criminal greed, but the Japanese had a duty to study the geology and earthquake history of these areas before committing to the cheap-o GE product. What greed? What cheap-o product? The reactors performed exactly - or almost exactly - as they were designed. They shut themselves down properly and so forth. The genesis of the current problem, the root cause, the whole enchilada, lies at the foot on one horrendous mistake: The location of the reactors. Blaming GE for the site's vulnerability to a tsunami is like blaming Sunbeam for a toaster failure when the toaster gets submerged. |
#2
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GE pays no income tax
On 3/30/2011 7:49 AM, HeyBub wrote:
Higgs Boson wrote: On Mar 29, 9:46 am, bob wrote: Once GE gewts hit with all the lawsuits over the japanese reactor there will be no profits to pay taxes on, GE will end up in bankruptcy. Their cheaper reactor the buyers got what they paid for I gotta say that, according to what's coming out now, the Japanese engineers/geologists/other specialists were using very, very, very old data when planning and siting these reactors. Nobody had properly studied the history of earthquakes going back over 1,000 years. It was known. There was data that tsunamis had swept as far as 2 miles inland near that location. That data was discarded as being too old to be "reliable". This was revisited not too long ago and the Tsunami risk wasn't even looked into. This is just plain inexcusable. Not that GE isn't at fault too for their criminal greed, but the Japanese had a duty to study the geology and earthquake history of these areas before committing to the cheap-o GE product. What greed? What cheap-o product? The reactors performed exactly - or almost exactly - as they were designed. They shut themselves down properly and so forth. Actually they didn't shut down properly. Unit One ran into trouble early on and it was designed with a passive cooling loop to the condensor. It should have been fine for some time with no power. The rest of them also had troubles shutting down. The only thing that did function properly was the control rods. The genesis of the current problem, the root cause, the whole enchilada, lies at the foot on one horrendous mistake: The location of the reactors. Most reactors are located either near the sea or near a river. Blaming GE for the site's vulnerability to a tsunami is like blaming Sunbeam for a toaster failure when the toaster gets submerged. These are all Mark 1 designs, unit 1 being a BWR3 reactor and the rest BWR4. A design that was marketed as being cost effective. Top level engineers at GE had quit over the design. Unit 6 was either a Mark II or Mark III. If it had been online it wouldn't have had the same problems as the obvious flaws in the design had been corrected. No spent fuel pool sitting exposed on the top floor for one. And a much larger wet reservoir. It's going on 3 weeks out and they still haven't been able to drain the cooling pumps, a necessary step to keep them from blowing out the lines, before they can restart the cooling loops. Since this is first generation, I can't fault the design so much as the fact they have extended the service life. Apparently in the case of Fukushima without any of the mods to make them safer. They have a long history of problems. This is criminal. Jeff |
#3
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GE pays no income tax
Jeff Thies wrote:
The genesis of the current problem, the root cause, the whole enchilada, lies at the foot on one horrendous mistake: The location of the reactors. Most reactors are located either near the sea or near a river. But you don't get tsunamis on the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast, or 100 miles up the Mississippi. Lets look at a few: * There are three in Idaho * One in Fresno * One in New Mexico * One each is Iowa, Kansas, and Northern Alabama * There are two in Dallas and Illinois * One in Wisconsin and two in Massachusetts I suggest that planning for a tsunami for the above wasn't even on the list. |
#4
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GE pays no income tax
On Apr 2, 10:50*pm, "HeyBub" wrote:
Jeff Thies wrote: The genesis *of the current problem, the root cause, the whole enchilada, lies at the foot on one horrendous mistake: The location of the reactors. Most reactors are located either near the sea or near a river. But you don't get tsunamis on the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast, or 100 miles up the Mississippi. Lets look at a few: * There are three in Idaho * One in Fresno * One in New Mexico * One each is Iowa, Kansas, and Northern Alabama * There are two in Dallas and Illinois * One in Wisconsin and two in Massachusetts I suggest that planning for a tsunami for the above wasn't even on the list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunamis_in_lakes |
#5
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GE pays no income tax
harry wrote:
On Apr 2, 10:50 pm, "HeyBub" wrote: Jeff Thies wrote: The genesis of the current problem, the root cause, the whole enchilada, lies at the foot on one horrendous mistake: The location of the reactors. Most reactors are located either near the sea or near a river. But you don't get tsunamis on the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast, or 100 miles up the Mississippi. Lets look at a few: * There are three in Idaho * One in Fresno * One in New Mexico * One each is Iowa, Kansas, and Northern Alabama * There are two in Dallas and Illinois * One in Wisconsin and two in Massachusetts I suggest that planning for a tsunami for the above wasn't even on the list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunamis_in_lakes Thank you for the link. Notice the article reports NOT A SINGLE TSUNAMI involving a lake and is full of weasel-words: "Lake Tahoe is an example of a lake that is in danger of having a tsunami due to faulting processes." (Never had one, though.) "These could possibly cause sub-aerial mass flows that could generate tsunamis within the lakes [in New Zealand]..." And so on . . . |
#6
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GE pays no income tax
On Apr 2, 4:26*pm, Jeff Thies wrote:
On 3/30/2011 7:49 AM, HeyBub wrote: Higgs Boson wrote: On Mar 29, 9:46 am, bob *wrote: Once GE gewts hit with all the lawsuits over the japanese reactor there will be no profits to pay taxes on, GE will end up in bankruptcy. Their cheaper reactor the buyers got what they paid for I gotta say that, according to what's coming out now, *the Japanese engineers/geologists/other specialists were using very, very, very old data when planning and siting these reactors. *Nobody had properly studied the history of earthquakes going back over 1,000 years. It was known. There was data that tsunamis had swept as far as 2 miles inland near that location. That data was discarded as being too old to be "reliable". * *This was revisited not too long ago and the Tsunami risk wasn't even looked into. * *This is just plain inexcusable. *Not that GE isn't at fault too for their criminal greed, but the Japanese had a duty to study the geology and earthquake history of these areas before committing to the cheap-o GE product. What greed? What cheap-o product? The reactors performed exactly - or almost exactly - as they were designed. They shut themselves down properly and so forth. Actually they didn't shut down properly. Unit One ran into trouble early on and it was designed with a passive cooling loop to the condensor. It should have been fine for some time with no power. The rest of them also had troubles shutting down. The only thing that did function properly was the control rods. Here we go again. The information coming out of Japan has been sketchy at best and frequently wrong. Yet our resident armchair nulcear expert knows exactly what happened. Obviously totally ignorant and biased. Any reasonable person knows that only after a full investigation by experts will we know what happened, what the sequence of events were, and what went wrong. Apparently you are unfamiliar with what happens after a commercial airliner crashes that we've all seen repeated dozens of times. Usually there is all kinds of information flowing around in the days after the crash. Witnesses on the ground that say they saw smoke coming from the plane before it went down. Witnesses saying they heard the sound of engines. Others saying they didn't. People who say they saw plane parts falling off before it crashed. Yet, it's funny how so much of that turns out to be just plane WRONG and only after the official NTSB investigation do we learn the real story of what happened, which many times turns out to be completely different than what could be inferred from reports and guesses in the first weeks. But your way would be simpler. For example, instead of still spending millions looking for the black boxes from the Air France Airbus that went down in the ocean off Brazil two years ago, we could just use what we already have and tell everyone what happened. Thankfully, there are people that don't want to do that and make total asses out of themselves in the process. PS: Don't bother with some more links to crap about the reactor design. Per the above scenario, that makes about as much sense as starting to bitch about how some part of the Airbus was or wasn't designed and laying blame on it, BEFORE knowing the real facts. The genesis *of the current problem, the root cause, the whole enchilada, lies at the foot on one horrendous mistake: The location of the reactors. Most reactors are located either near the sea or near a river. Blaming GE for the site's vulnerability to a tsunami is like blaming Sunbeam for a toaster failure when the toaster gets submerged. These are all Mark 1 designs, unit 1 being a BWR3 reactor and the rest BWR4. A design that was marketed as being cost effective. Top level engineers at GE had quit over the design. Unit 6 was either a Mark II or Mark III. If it had been online it wouldn't have had the same problems as the obvious flaws in the design had been corrected. No spent fuel pool sitting exposed on the top floor for one. And a much larger wet reservoir. It's going on 3 weeks out and they still haven't been able to drain the cooling pumps, a necessary step to keep them from blowing out the lines, before they can restart the cooling loops. Since this is first generation, I can't fault the design so much as the fact they have extended the service life. Apparently in the case of Fukushima without any of the mods to make them safer. They have a long history of problems. This is criminal. * *Jeff - Hide quoted text - - Show quoted text - |
#7
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GE pays no income tax
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#8
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GE pays no income tax
On 4/2/2011 5:50 PM, HeyBub wrote:
Jeff Thies wrote: The genesis of the current problem, the root cause, the whole enchilada, lies at the foot on one horrendous mistake: The location of the reactors. Most reactors are located either near the sea or near a river. But you don't get tsunamis on the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast, or 100 miles up the Mississippi. Lets look at a few: * There are three in Idaho * One in Fresno * One in New Mexico * One each is Iowa, Kansas, and Northern Alabama * There are two in Dallas and Illinois * One in Wisconsin and two in Massachusetts I suggest that planning for a tsunami for the above wasn't even on the list. It certainly should have been for Japan. But the point is that if a single system fails (for whatever cause) it shouldn't lead to buildings blowing up. The hydrogen venting for GE Mark 1's is dependent on other systems (such as it is). There are too many co-dependent safety systems. Those should have been addressed. They have been addressed in other designs and in some Mark 1 mods. No place is perfectly safe: New Madrid quakes of 1811, 12: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquak.../1811-1812.php Reactors should be designed to withstand the unexpected without cascading out of control. Less co-dependent safety systems, large enough battery backups and on all critical systems. Note that there appears to have been no battery backup power for reactor monitors at Fukushima. As of a few days ago these were still down. http://allthingsnuclear.org/tagged/Japan_nuclear (scroll down to the control room pics at bottom) At present I don't see where the NRC has failed to address this in this country. But it needs a thorough review (which it appears to be getting), the stakes are too high. It may be that some Mark 1's will need to have their licenses lapse. It may be that other changes be mandated for other designs. Make no mistake, what is happening in Fukushima is nothing less than a cluster ****. It will set that countries recovery time back. It has taken a substantial amount of agriculture off the market and is blocking main coastal roads to the main tsunami/earthquake zone which lies much further north. This will be vastly time consuming and expensive to clean up. Jeff |
#9
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GE pays no income tax
On Sun, 03 Apr 2011 11:50:35 -0400, Jeff Thies
wrote: On 4/3/2011 9:14 AM, wrote: Any reasonable person knows that only after a full investigation by experts will we know what happened, what the sequence of events were, and what went wrong. I never said there wouldn't be, or shouldn't be. I don't think it even matters what went wrong. Things will always go wrong. What matters is the result of things going wrong. That's why the nuke industry has big problems. I've already said this, but my idea for nuke salvation is not trying to make it impossibly perfect so that nothing goes wrong, but to design the systems so it's not a huge disaster when things do go wrong. The policy should be to add a "contain and abandon" strategy to the current safety regimen. A rough analogy is car airbags. Car is totaled and abandoned, but nobody got killed. Airbags add expense, and don't always work. Doesn't keep many parents from making sure their kids' cars are airbag equipped. Similarly, the NIMBY sector has to be sold on safety. The nuclear power industry has to be able to say with conviction that when things go wrong "We can lock it up if it melts down, and leave it. Some "minor" venting, but no lasting harm done." There's 2 reactors on Hutchinson Island in Florida. Waiting for the right hurricane and surge. Or maybe a tidal wave when that Canary island breaks in half. I have a strong feeling that if the Japan disaster had happened before they built those reactors, their construction wouldn't have been approved. I still support nuke power, but unless they make radiation containment changes, I'm now a NIMBY. The Japan disaster is pretty much a "worst case" scenario. Maybe 6 reactors melting, all in one place. Maybe multiple spent rod pools also melting their rods. What transpires there in the coming months/years will hugely affect the future of nuke energy. If there's permanent contamination of hundreds of square miles, nobody will listen to nuke advocate claims of safety and "can't happen here." Human nature. They'll need a different safety strategy. Containment. That can sell. --Vic |
#10
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GE pays no income tax
On Apr 3, 11:50*am, Jeff Thies wrote:
On 4/3/2011 9:14 AM, wrote: On Apr 2, 4:26 pm, Jeff *wrote: On 3/30/2011 7:49 AM, HeyBub wrote: Higgs Boson wrote: On Mar 29, 9:46 am, bob * *wrote: Once GE gewts hit with all the lawsuits over the japanese reactor there will be no profits to pay taxes on, GE will end up in bankruptcy. Their cheaper reactor the buyers got what they paid for I gotta say that, according to what's coming out now, *the Japanese engineers/geologists/other specialists were using very, very, very old data when planning and siting these reactors. *Nobody had properly studied the history of earthquakes going back over 1,000 years. It was known. There was data that tsunamis had swept as far as 2 miles inland near that location. That data was discarded as being too old to be "reliable". * * This was revisited not too long ago and the Tsunami risk wasn't even looked into. * * This is just plain inexcusable. *Not that GE isn't at fault too for their criminal greed, but the Japanese had a duty to study the geology and earthquake history of these areas before committing to the cheap-o GE product. What greed? What cheap-o product? The reactors performed exactly - or almost exactly - as they were designed. They shut themselves down properly and so forth. Actually they didn't shut down properly. Unit One ran into trouble early on and it was designed with a passive cooling loop to the condensor. It should have been fine for some time with no power. The rest of them also had troubles shutting down. The only thing that did function properly was the control rods. Here we go again. * The information coming out of Japan has been sketchy at best and frequently wrong. *Yet our resident armchair nulcear expert knows exactly what happened. *Obviously totally ignorant and biased. And you aren't? That's right, I'm not the one jumping to conclusions, conjuring up every tidbit of crap off the internet as if it had direct bearing on the nuclear accident,] telling people the specifics of how the reactors didn't shudown properly. Every nuclear "expert" I've seen in the mainstream media freely admits that we really don't know much about the exact sequence of events. You on the other are a real sexual intellectual, if a f**g know it all. * *Any reasonable person knows that only after a full investigation by experts will we know what happened, what the sequence of events were, and what went wrong. I never said there wouldn't be, or shouldn't be. I can take you back to a post where you implied that. And you have yet to disprove anything I've said. Or even attempt to do anything but shoot the messenger. Why is your reasoning limited to that? My reasoning was laid out for you in my post above, which you edited away because you prefer it disapper. It goes like this. Reasonable, intelligent people know that just like with an aircraft accident investigation, it takes a long process that a year or more before experts can figure out what happened. But, the above sentence exclude people like you, ie armchair experts that know what happened right here and now. You focus on some eyewitness reports that claim the engines were on fire. Then you go find some crap on the internet from some hippy disgruntled employee that quit 30 yea ago and try desperately; to tie that back in to the accident. I've found a few tidbits here and there I haven't posted because of a lack of interest. Did you know that the spent fuel pools have a side door(s) sealed with an inflatable seal? Or that the control rods which come from under the reactor are sealed with graphite plugs? Why the hell would I or anyone else here care? Until we have expert analysis of what went wrong, the exact sequence of events, it matters not a wit. * *There, more information than you are comfortable dealing with. * *I have a great deal of respect for Thomas Edison's company, always have. They completely changed the design in the Mark 2. Who the hell cares. Intel has completely changed the design of the current generation of processors from the 8088. Does that make them bad or prove anything? * *Now, pop away with your insults. It does make you feel better. You're a stupid ass, does that help? |
#11
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GE pays no income tax
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#12
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GE pays no income tax
On 4/3/2011 2:43 PM, Vic Smith wrote:
On Sun, 03 Apr 2011 11:50:35 -0400, Jeff wrote: On 4/3/2011 9:14 AM, wrote: Any reasonable person knows that only after a full investigation by experts will we know what happened, what the sequence of events were, and what went wrong. I never said there wouldn't be, or shouldn't be. I don't think it even matters what went wrong. Things will always go wrong. What matters is the result of things going wrong. That's why the nuke industry has big problems. I've already said this, but my idea for nuke salvation is not trying to make it impossibly perfect so that nothing goes wrong, but to design the systems so it's not a huge disaster when things do go wrong. It's hard to argue with this. Spraying sticky "glue" and pumping in pampers mixed with sawdust and newsprint shouldn't be the containment strategy. And yet it is. The tsunami will get cleaned up, although a lot slower because of this, but this will linger for decades. To think about having a 20 mile exclusion zone around almost any of the reactors in the US, and some in particular, is almost unthinkable. The policy should be to add a "contain and abandon" strategy to the current safety regimen. A rough analogy is car airbags. Car is totaled and abandoned, but nobody got killed. Airbags add expense, and don't always work. Doesn't keep many parents from making sure their kids' cars are airbag equipped. Similarly, the NIMBY sector has to be sold on safety. The nuclear power industry has to be able to say with conviction that when things go wrong "We can lock it up if it melts down, and leave it. Some "minor" venting, but no lasting harm done." There's 2 reactors on Hutchinson Island in Florida. Waiting for the right hurricane and surge. Or maybe a tidal wave when that Canary island breaks in half. I have a strong feeling that if the Japan disaster had happened before they built those reactors, their construction wouldn't have been approved. Someone here in another thread was talking about the biannual hundred year floods. The right storm combination seems more and more likely. I still support nuke power, Same here. but unless they make radiation containment changes, I'm now a NIMBY. It's turning into a large back yard. 45 miles out from Fukushima Daiichi radiation exceeds the Chernoble exclusion standard. The Japan disaster is pretty much a "worst case" scenario. Maybe 6 reactors melting, all in one place. Maybe multiple spent rod pools also melting their rods. What transpires there in the coming months/years will hugely affect the future of nuke energy. Tepco is now worth less than what the likely cost of cleanup will be. This likely will be huge setback, with entire countries backing off. If there's permanent contamination of hundreds of square miles, nobody will listen to nuke advocate claims of safety and "can't happen here." Human nature. They'll need a different safety strategy. Containment. That can sell. We'll see. The enormous costs of cleaning up something like Fukushima, and knowing that the utility won't bear anything like the full cost argues strongly against nukes. Already to build new nukes here requires government backing. Jeff --Vic |
#13
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GE pays no income tax
On Apr 3, 10:02*pm, Jeff Thies wrote:
My reasoning was laid out for you in my post above, which you edited away because you prefer it disapper. It was completely irrelevant. Nukes != Airlines. It goes like this. *Reasonable, intelligent people know that just like with an aircraft accident investigation, it takes a long process that a year or more before experts can figure out what happened. A million widely scattered bits of airplane parts blown to hell is not easy to put together. Reactors != Airplanes. An analogy is exactly that, an analogy. Of course they aren't exactly the same, but speculating on the sequence of events, what went wrong, etc is equally foolish until there is an actual investigation. And so far, from everything I've seen, the investigation hasn't even started. With an airline crash, NTSB is typically on site within hours and has access to much of the wreckage within a day or two. Can you do that with the Japanese nukes? Yeah, they may not be airplane parts, blown to hell, but they are highly readioactive reactors and at least one building blown to hell that apparenlty only your fertile imagination has good access to. In fact there is a lot that can be told just by what nucleids are being formed, it's an ongoing story. It's rather well documented. It's all rather well documented. A little hard to find, but it's there. Everything from the Tepco bulletins on out. Yeah, Tepco has been a real wealth of accurate information. Not by some talking head on TV, but online. It's the new age of information. * * But, the above sentence exclude people like you, ie armchair experts that know what happened right here and now. *You focus on some eyewitness reports that claim the engines were on fire. I mentioned no such thing. You've done that right from the start. Take fragments of information and try to draw conclusions. Exactly like making an ass of yourself by speculating on what brought an airliner down before there is an investigation. It could very well turn out that the key intiating event was that the diesel generators were not protected from the sunami. And that reactors built 20 years ago, or even last week, have the exact same easily corrected faults that have nothing to do with the reactor core and/or GE. I've found a few tidbits here and there I haven't posted because of a lack of interest. Did you know that the spent fuel pools have a side door(s) sealed with an inflatable seal? Or that the control rods which come from under the reactor are sealed with graphite plugs? Why the hell would I or anyone else here care? You only seem to care about killing the spread of information. Why is that? That of course doesn't answer the question. It's like posting "Did you know that the fuel line in the Airbus 340 crash was made from nylon?" Then it turns out when the investigation is done it turns out the real failure problem was a structural failure. But by then the armchair experts like you are long gone, on to their next "fact" finding mission. * *Until we have expert * analysis of what went wrong, the exact sequence of events, it matters * not a wit. The sequence of events is a cluster ****. So is your mind. The fallback safety system is spraying sea water in the fire extinguisher lines. That is absurd. What would you suggest to cool down the reactors and fuel pools? **** on them? Tepco is trying to hire "runners" for $5k/day to run into a highly radioactive environment and do a small job. Sounds like a practical solution given the problem. Radiation is at a certain level allowing a reasonable exposure safety level giving say an hour of work in the area. So, they hire guys willing to do it for $5K a day. They pay them to do it for X days, whatever is within some safety margin and the workers are willing to do it. Would you like it better if they paid them $20K a day or $8 a day? Or should they just let the whole thing degenerate and spew more radiation so you can bitch and moan more? 4 weeks out they haven't been able to restart either cooling system. The number 4 spent fuel pool is obviously leaking. You, being the armchair expert, of course, would have the whole thing fixed by now. Why, it would be back online and generating power by now. * * There, more information than you are comfortable dealing with. * * I have a great deal of respect for Thomas Edison's company, always have. They completely changed the design in the Mark 2. Who the hell cares. Anyone with a Mark 1 reactor that hasn't been updated should. Germany has or is taking theirs offline. I live 30 miles from one. Do you? I'm not bitching. No one who lives here that I know of is bitching. So, why are you? * * Intel has completely changed the design of the current generation of processors from the 8088. *Does that make them bad or prove anything? It's not that the technology is so much better it's that lessons have been learned. From your own stupid example, would you want to fly on a Wright Flyer? Let's compare apples to oranges, OK? The Fukushima plants are 40 years old. Would I fly on a plane from the 70s that was well maintained and within it's service limits? Yes. Hell, I'd happily take a ride on that Wright Flyer, if offered. * * Now, pop away with your insults. It does make you feel better. You're a stupid ass, does that help? Did it help you? Do you work for GE? No, but it sounds like you work for Ralph Nader. |
#14
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#15
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GE pays no income tax
snip
You've done that right from the start. Take fragments of information and try to draw conclusions. Exactly like making an ass of yourself by speculating on what brought an airliner down before there is an investigation. It could very well turn out that the key intiating event was that the diesel generators were not protected from the sunami. One more bit. Neither were the diesel generators at the nearby Fukushima Daiini adequately protected from a tsunami. Tepco estimates the wave was more than twice the height of the wall. That took out the cooling pump rooms for all but the #3 reactor. Very similar circumstances as at Daiichi. No smoking ruins. Daiini (number 2) was built later and uses the Mark 2 containment (also stressed to higher G's). Something for you *not* to think about. You seem to only like analogies to airplanes rather than to something relevant. Jeff |
#16
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GE pays no income tax
"Jeff Thies" wrote in message
... stuff snipped Yes. Hell, I'd happily take a ride on that Wright Flyer, if offered. A very dangerous proposition, in it's day all the early flyers were hazardous and had more that their share of deaths. Orville escaped when his passenger was killed and that was the improved model. Not only that, but the materials are a century old. Bad things happen to stress-bearing materials if they aren't stored just right. The Flyer was made of "big spruce" and over time, original parts were loaned and never returned. It was restored in 1985, which is expected to last 75 years, but that's restoration to museum quality and not necessarily flight readiness. Maybe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer A nuclear reactor is not a plane. No, but they have a remarkable similarity. They are man-made objects that have caused some of the most spectacular disasters in human history. Both are the object of intense scrutiny by the public when there is a disaster. You can no more stop that process than you can stop Charlie Sheen's Ego, interest in Michael Jackson's death or Lindsay Lohan's probation. (-: The question seems to be "is it legitimate to "armchair analyze" either type of disaster? The answer is of course "yes." It's never a bad thing to analyze what it known AND unknown about a disaster serious enough to kill hundreds or thousands of people in a single incident. People learn by discussing things and trying to determine what needs to change to insure a better, safer world. Even if it's to make sure that if there's an Airbus crash that you select other types of plane when traveling. The French have filed preliminary manslaughter charges agains Airbus and Air France: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/wo...ef=todayspaper "Searchers are carrying out a fourth effort to find wreckage of the plane - and especially its flight recorders - in hopes of determining the cause of the crash, which has taken on a new urgency after a French judge filed preliminary manslaughter charges last month against Air France and the plane 's maker, Airbus. Experts say that without the flight data and voice recorders the authorities would be unlikely to determine the cause." So, what are we to do if the black box is never found? Stop asking questions why the Airbus crashed the strange way that it did? The question will center on how long Airbus took to decide that it's pitot tube air speed sensor design was prone to icing up. I saw a mockup by air accident experts on Nova that showed all the confusing error messages that are delivered when a basic sensor like the pitot tube fails. Anyone who's seen a Windows machine freeze knows that error messages can be quite obtuse and even misleading. "Your most recent data will be lost" OK? NO, NOT OKAY! There is one segment of society that generally does *not* benefit from monday morning quarterbacking, and that's people who own stock in a company like GE, whose liability may or may not affect its bottom line. Whenever there's a general "talking smack" about a company on the net or in the papers, that company's stock drops. For the faithful, it's just an opportunity to buy more shares, cheap. For the worried, it could be a significant loss of wealth as they fear a much further drop if they don't sell. When they sell, the price drops even more and a run can start. A nuclear reactor should not have to rely on a single backup diesel generator to keep from being turned into a smoking pile of rubble. That is a design flaw. A nuclear reactor should not have it's spent fuel pool in such a location as to be easily damaged and exposed, covered by little more than a sheet metal roof. Too clever by half. There were apparently quite serious problems at multiple levels in Japan. Watching them trying to fix a high pressure radioactive leak from the outside makes me want to scream "haven't you guys ever fixed a leaky tank, tire or basement?" Gotta do it from the *inside* if you want it to hold. Someone should have thought about what happens when a containment vessel cracks and what sort of boat and paddle would get you out of ****z Creek. What happens if a jetliner full of fuel hits one of these things? Will it burn like the WTC, heating the vessel until it fails? The accident in Japan certainly soured me on nuke power. It's clear that they don't have the waste issue under control - open pools, tin roofs? WTF? It's clear they are not equal to the greatest blow the Earth can hand out. The containment vessel crack was in all probability a result of the quake. So even without the tsunami, there has been serious trouble. That means redesign. Prolonged discussion needs to precede redesign so that all the potential problems are addressed. It's becoming clear that *lack* of thorough discussion contributed to designers overlooking the potential tsunami damage All I can say is "sorry for your loss" to the people who own GE stock or who work(ed) for them. The bottom line is "everybody gets their turn in the barrel." Today, it's GE. -- Bobby G. |
#17
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GE pays no income tax
"Jeff Thies" wrote in message
... On 4/3/2011 2:43 PM, Vic Smith wrote: On Sun, 03 Apr 2011 11:50:35 -0400, Jeff wrote: On 4/3/2011 9:14 AM, wrote: Any reasonable person knows that only after a full investigation by experts will we know what happened, what the sequence of events were, and what went wrong. I never said there wouldn't be, or shouldn't be. I don't think it even matters what went wrong. Things will always go wrong. What matters is the result of things going wrong. That's why the nuke industry has big problems. I've already said this, but my idea for nuke salvation is not trying to make it impossibly perfect so that nothing goes wrong, but to design the systems so it's not a huge disaster when things do go wrong. It's hard to argue with this. Spraying sticky "glue" and pumping in pampers mixed with sawdust and newsprint shouldn't be the containment strategy. And yet it is. The tsunami will get cleaned up, although a lot slower because of this, but this will linger for decades. To think about having a 20 mile exclusion zone around almost any of the reactors in the US, and some in particular, is almost unthinkable. The policy should be to add a "contain and abandon" strategy to the current safety regimen. A rough analogy is car airbags. Car is totaled and abandoned, but nobody got killed. Airbags add expense, and don't always work. Doesn't keep many parents from making sure their kids' cars are airbag equipped. Similarly, the NIMBY sector has to be sold on safety. The nuclear power industry has to be able to say with conviction that when things go wrong "We can lock it up if it melts down, and leave it. Some "minor" venting, but no lasting harm done." There's 2 reactors on Hutchinson Island in Florida. Waiting for the right hurricane and surge. Or maybe a tidal wave when that Canary island breaks in half. I have a strong feeling that if the Japan disaster had happened before they built those reactors, their construction wouldn't have been approved. Someone here in another thread was talking about the biannual hundred year floods. The right storm combination seems more and more likely. That was me! I still support nuke power, Same here. but unless they make radiation containment changes, I'm now a NIMBY. It's turning into a large back yard. 45 miles out from Fukushima Daiichi radiation exceeds the Chernoble exclusion standard. Chernobyl wasn't located near the ocean. If it had been, things there would have been far, far worse. The Japan disaster is pretty much a "worst case" scenario. Maybe 6 reactors melting, all in one place. Maybe multiple spent rod pools also melting their rods. What transpires there in the coming months/years will hugely affect the future of nuke energy. Tepco is now worth less than what the likely cost of cleanup will be. This likely will be huge setback, with entire countries backing off. If there's permanent contamination of hundreds of square miles, nobody will listen to nuke advocate claims of safety and "can't happen here." Human nature. They'll need a different safety strategy. Containment. That can sell. We'll see. The enormous costs of cleaning up something like Fukushima, and knowing that the utility won't bear anything like the full cost argues strongly against nukes. Already to build new nukes here requires government backing. Nuclear power certainly took a big hit in Japan and that will make siting any new reactors very, very hard because of the number of people who will come out to hearing to fight it. Is it a lethal blow? Probably not but it may be a wake-up call that we need to set pretty seriously high standards for reactors whose location could poison large amount of land or water or that are built in known disaster-prone areas. -- Bobby G. |
#18
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GE pays no income tax
On Apr 5, 3:13*am, "Robert Green" wrote:
"Jeff Thies" wrote in message ... stuff snipped * *Yes. * Hell, I'd happily take a ride on that Wright Flyer, if offered. * *A very dangerous proposition, in it's day all the early flyers were hazardous and had more that their share of deaths. Orville escaped when his passenger was killed and that was the improved model. Not only that, but the materials are a century old. *Bad things happen to stress-bearing materials if they aren't stored just right. *The Flyer was made of "big spruce" and over time, original parts were loaned and never returned. *It was restored in 1985, which is expected to last 75 years, but that's restoration to museum quality and not necessarily flight readiness.. Maybe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer A nuclear reactor is not a plane. No, but they have a remarkable similarity. *They are man-made objects that have caused some of the most spectacular disasters in human history. *Both are the object of intense scrutiny by the public when there is a disaster.. You can no more stop that process than you can stop Charlie Sheen's Ego, interest in Michael Jackson's death or Lindsay Lohan's probation. *(-: The question seems to be "is it legitimate to "armchair analyze" either type of disaster? The answer is of course "yes." *It's never a bad thing to analyze what it known AND unknown about a disaster serious enough to kill hundreds or thousands of people in a single incident. *People learn by discussing things and trying to determine what needs to change to insure a better, safer world. *Even if it's to make sure that if there's an Airbus crash that you select other types of plane when traveling. *The French have filed preliminary manslaughter charges agains Airbus and Air France: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/wo....html?ref=toda.... "Searchers are carrying out a fourth effort to find wreckage of the plane - and especially its flight recorders - in hopes of determining the cause of the crash, which has taken on a new urgency after a French judge filed preliminary manslaughter charges last month against Air France and the plane 's maker, Airbus. Experts say that without the flight data and voice recorders the authorities would be unlikely to determine the cause." So, what are we to do if the black box is never found? *Stop asking questions why the Airbus crashed the strange way that it did? *The question will center on how long Airbus took to decide that it's pitot tube air speed sensor design was prone to icing up. *I saw a mockup by air accident experts on Nova that showed all the confusing error messages that are delivered when a basic sensor like the pitot tube fails. *Anyone who's seen a Windows machine freeze knows that error messages can be quite obtuse and even misleading. *"Your most recent data will be lost" OK? *NO, NOT OKAY! There is one segment of society that generally does *not* benefit from monday morning quarterbacking, and that's people who own stock in a company like GE, whose liability may or may not affect its bottom line. *Whenever there's a general "talking smack" about a company on the net or in the papers, that company's stock drops. *For the faithful, it's just an opportunity to buy more shares, cheap. *For the worried, it could be a significant loss of wealth as they fear a much further drop if they don't sell. *When they sell, the price drops even more and a run can start. A nuclear reactor should not have to rely on a single backup diesel generator to keep from being turned into a smoking pile of rubble. That is a design flaw. A nuclear reactor should not have it's spent fuel pool in such a location as to be easily damaged and exposed, covered by little more than a sheet metal roof. Too clever by half. There were apparently quite serious problems at multiple levels in Japan. Watching them trying to fix a high pressure radioactive leak from the outside makes me want to scream "haven't you guys ever fixed a leaky tank, tire or basement?" *Gotta do it from the *inside* if you want it to hold. Someone should have thought about what happens when a containment vessel cracks and what sort of boat and paddle would get you out of ****z Creek. What happens if a jetliner full of fuel hits one of these things? *Will it burn like the WTC, heating the vessel until it fails? The accident in Japan certainly soured me on nuke power. *It's clear that they don't have the waste issue under control - open pools, tin roofs? *WTF? It's clear they are not equal to the greatest blow the Earth can hand out.. The containment vessel crack was in all probability a result of the quake.. So even without the tsunami, there has been serious trouble. *That means redesign. *Prolonged discussion needs to precede redesign so that all the potential problems are addressed. *It's becoming clear that *lack* of thorough discussion contributed to designers overlooking the potential tsunami damage All I can say is "sorry for your loss" to the people who own GE stock or who work(ed) for them. *The bottom line is "everybody gets their turn in the barrel." *Today, it's GE. -- Bobby G. Analysing rumours is called speculation over here. I would say lack of experience was the problem. But then who gets to experience the thousand year event? It leads to assumptions which is where things can go wrong. But sometimes there is no alternative. |
#19
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GE pays no income tax
On 4/4/2011 10:13 PM, Robert Green wrote:
"Jeff wrote in message ... stuff snipped Yes. Hell, I'd happily take a ride on that Wright Flyer, if offered. A very dangerous proposition, in it's day all the early flyers were hazardous and had more that their share of deaths. Orville escaped when his passenger was killed and that was the improved model. Not only that, but the materials are a century old. Bad things happen to stress-bearing materials if they aren't stored just right. The Flyer was made of "big spruce" and over time, original parts were loaned and never returned. It was restored in 1985, which is expected to last 75 years, but that's restoration to museum quality and not necessarily flight readiness. Maybe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Flyer A nuclear reactor is not a plane. No, but they have a remarkable similarity. They are man-made objects that have caused some of the most spectacular disasters in human history. Both are the object of intense scrutiny by the public when there is a disaster. You can no more stop that process than you can stop Charlie Sheen's Ego, interest in Michael Jackson's death or Lindsay Lohan's probation. (-: :-) The question seems to be "is it legitimate to "armchair analyze" either type of disaster? The answer is of course "yes." It's never a bad thing to analyze what it known AND unknown about a disaster serious enough to kill hundreds or thousands of people in a single incident. People learn by discussing things and trying to determine what needs to change to insure a better, safer world. I, of course, agree. I'm rather appalled that anyone would try to obstruct that. snip There is one segment of society that generally does *not* benefit from monday morning quarterbacking, and that's people who own stock in a company like GE, whose liability may or may not affect its bottom line. Whenever there's a general "talking smack" about a company on the net or in the papers, that company's stock drops. For the faithful, it's just an opportunity to buy more shares, cheap. For the worried, it could be a significant loss of wealth as they fear a much further drop if they don't sell. When they sell, the price drops even more and a run can start. A nuclear reactor should not have to rely on a single backup diesel generator to keep from being turned into a smoking pile of rubble. That is a design flaw. A nuclear reactor should not have it's spent fuel pool in such a location as to be easily damaged and exposed, covered by little more than a sheet metal roof. Too clever by half. There were apparently quite serious problems at multiple levels in Japan. Watching them trying to fix a high pressure radioactive leak from the outside makes me want to scream "haven't you guys ever fixed a leaky tank, tire or basement?" Gotta do it from the *inside* if you want it to hold. As it turns out the "diaper" mix never got in the water flow. Someone should have thought about what happens when a containment vessel cracks and what sort of boat and paddle would get you out of ****z Creek. What happens if a jetliner full of fuel hits one of these things? Will it burn like the WTC, heating the vessel until it fails? I don't know what simulations have been done, but this is a concrete structure with a "tin" roof. Anything that would cause the fuel rods to be uncovered would result in a fire in the zirconium coating, followed by massive spewing of radioactive smoke. That is why they were so desperate to pump water in. Since reactor 4 was in cold shut down, it would appear that the damage to it's spent fuel pool was caused by the *adjacent* building blowing it's top off. A dedicated terrorist could do a lot worse. The accident in Japan certainly soured me on nuke power. It's clear that they don't have the waste issue under control - open pools, tin roofs? WTF? They were obviously designed in a different world. The Mark 1 was designed more for convenience (and lower expense) than anything else. Too clever by half. It's clear they are not equal to the greatest blow the Earth can hand out. The containment vessel crack was in all probability a result of the quake. Possibly, the early containments aren't rated for the g forces that transpired. It would seem more likely any problems would be at one of the many holes in the structure that plumbing runs through. There is a lot of plumbing damage from the quake. Another issue is that these were designed to come apart. This probably is not a crack per say in the pressure vessel. Doubtless there are cracks galore elsewhere. So even without the tsunami, there has been serious trouble. That means redesign. Prolonged discussion needs to precede redesign so that all the potential problems are addressed. It's becoming clear that *lack* of thorough discussion contributed to designers overlooking the potential tsunami damage It's fairly clear that the Mark 1 does not recover gracefully. The nearby Fukushima II also suffered from a tsunami wave more than twice the height of it's sea wall which knocked out it's pump rooms. That recovered. These reactors have to be able to absorb worst case scenarios because the worst case is vast areas of earth scorched for a very long time. There is much in the news of the lingering fallout from Chernoble. Not only is a large around Chernoble uninhabitable, but wild boar in Germany are often too radioactive to eat. Even as far as Scotland the sheep "farmers" are just now all getting the clearance to sell. l I can say is "sorry for your loss" to the people who own GE stock or who work(ed) for them. The bottom line is "everybody gets their turn in the barrel." Today, it's GE. GE is pretty much off the hook for damages. This will likely kill reactor sales, but gas turbine sales will increase. And you know who makes those! If I still held GE I wouldn't sell, but I've thought that before and been wrong! Otherwise, like the losses in our own financial sector, it is the public that bears the much of the costs, not the corporate holders. There is something fundamentally wrong where large profits are made and when the risk catches up, their losses are absorbed by the public. Jeff -- Bobby G. |
#20
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In article ,
"Robert Green" wrote: Nuclear power certainly took a big hit in Japan and that will make siting any new reactors very, very hard because of the number of people who will come out to hearing to fight it. Is it a lethal blow? Probably not but it may be a wake-up call that we need to set pretty seriously high standards for reactors whose location could poison large amount of land or water or that are built in known disaster-prone areas. A lot of this discussion about siting, etc., is related to what I call the fallacy of the 100 year flood. You set out a line based on the last 100 years, then a couple of years later there is a higher flood and you have to reset the line. I think a lot of the siting and other issues (outside of the technical concerns discussed by others) were based on what they thought were good decisions at the times. This was the fourth largest recorded earthquake. From now on out, this will be the new baseline. -- "Even I realized that money was to politicians what the ecalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter and something to crap on." ---PJ O'Rourke |
#21
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On 4/5/2011 8:36 AM, Kurt Ullman wrote:
In , "Robert wrote: Nuclear power certainly took a big hit in Japan and that will make siting any new reactors very, very hard because of the number of people who will come out to hearing to fight it. Is it a lethal blow? Probably not but it may be a wake-up call that we need to set pretty seriously high standards for reactors whose location could poison large amount of land or water or that are built in known disaster-prone areas. A lot of this discussion about siting, etc., is related to what I call the fallacy of the 100 year flood. You set out a line based on the last 100 years, then a couple of years later there is a higher flood and you have to reset the line. I think a lot of the siting and other issues (outside of the technical concerns discussed by others) were based on what they thought were good decisions at the times. This was the fourth largest recorded earthquake. From now on out, this will be the new baseline. I agree. But, mind you that the earthquake epicenter was still 120 miles away. This is well away from the severest shaking. Jeff |
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