CaptainPanic

What worries me is that from this side of the ocean (Europe) I don't particularly care whether the USA gets a democrat or a republican. The most important thing to me as an outsider is that the most powerful country with the largest economy has fair elections. A democracy should have an electorate that is well-informed, and the elections should be based on facts. Instead, American elections are a very emotional affair where very minor issues can play a huge role. And slander is the preferred and tested method to gain votes. If you base your campaign on slander, rather than facts, then democracy is dead. How can the American democracy be cured from the worthless campaign methods that both parties use?

The water inside the reactor must indeed be ordinary water. It is meant to cool only, and as soon as it turned to steam, it must go out. It must evaporate, so it's pointless to turn it into a jelly. But radioactive water outside the reactor serves no purpose (not for cooling at least), and it should be contained. Turning it into a jelly might be an idea... although there are other materialsthat can absorb much more water. swansont, I disagree with your comment that professional plant operators have considered all the options. It is just not true that professionals always consider all the options, and it's not even true that all options even occur to them... The idea of Fukushimahelp seems like a typical 'out-of-the-box' thinking, and while some experts or professionals might have had the same idea, it's at least plausible that this idea hasn't penetrated to the decision-taking level at Fukushima (i.e. management). As for Fukushimahelp's last question: the operators and management in Japan are really too busy to read all the mail they get from all over the world. You cannot contact them directly. You might want to contact some local expert, or some other intermediate person. This forum is English and anonymous, so it won't do you much good to reach anyone. You need a real reference of some kind.

Why the hell would you be scared? That seems a completely unreasonable response to such a video. Maybe you've listened too much to FOX News or some other nutty source for information, and maybe you actually think in a "us" against "them" kinda way. Stop that, you fool.

The risks associated with any activity are limited, and an assessment does not aim at zero-risk. I completely agree with you that a risk assessment should not be subjectively, individually-judged. It is true that in some cases it seems like an industry doesn't take all risks into account. In such a case, the industry should take them into account, and that would result in a higher price of whatever product they make or whatever service they provide. Too bad for them. The market will take care of this... either by letting them go bankrupt, or by accepting the higher price. However, if poo hits the fan, someone will pay... and statistically poo will always hit the fan somewhere. The payment can be money, or damages of another kind, possibly even the ultimate price. And those costs are paid either by the industry itself, or government or society as a whole. So, if industry assesses a risk correctly, this would reduce costs somewhere else... and the costs associated to the activity will be paid (mostly) by the actors involved with it. So, if the risk assessment is an under-estimation, possible damages are paid by a wider public. If the risk assessment is correct, prevention is paid by industry themselves (and their customers). Possible damage is paid by industry and a wider public. And if a risk is over-estimated, money is wasted. This too is something to be wary of.

Cost effective risk assessment works fine... we just don't have enough hard data to get a realistic result from it. Risk assessment fails if you become "mega paranoid" for 1 situation, and more relaxed in another. What you are saying is not that we should be "mega paranoid", but that we must improve our estimates of the chance and effect of a disaster. In the case of nuclear technology, the bickering is always about 2 things: - The actual odds that something goes wrong. Specific, what timescale we should be looking at for those risks (next couple of decades, or the next 100 millenia). - The "costs" of a disaster. Since the time scale is very long (especially when it comes to the nuclear waste), and the lifetime of reactors is often quite a bit longer than anticipated, it's understandable that there is some uncertainty about this. The scale of a disaster, and the "costs" or damage associated with it is also uncertain... we just haven't had too many examples of nuclear disasters. So, a lot of uncertainty creates a lot of room for people to discuss endlessly. Lobbyists, both on the pro and con side, have probably deliberately pushed this room for discussion to both extreme ends. But the method itself is fine. Btw, I agree that we might want to re-evaluate previous risk assessments of nuclear technology, and I also have a feeling that previous risk assessments produced an under-estimation of the actual risk.

Isn't that what managers do? Lurk? You don't mean they actually do any useful work??

Only his anonymous online character. He might be lurking on the forums already!

Let me be the first to welcome our new Thetan overlords.

No, but I don't think they were widely used before WWII.

It needs to be the same voltage and you need to make it AC (instead of DC) too. But that's not rocketscience. A quick google search taught me that to go from DC to AC, the box you need is called a "Grid tie inverter"... Grid tie inverters may or may not have a transformer, so that may have to be included too to change the voltage. And you might want to contact your electricity provider for some paperwork too. They may even come to you and install the box for you. It's all a matter of searching Google with the right keywords, getting some result, learning some new vocabulary, searching Google again with the new words, and... result! Until 5 minutes ago, I never knew the name of such a box.

LOL That's quite a bit more specific! During WWII there were several designs of foldable bridges which were carried by tanks, and also strong enough to allow a tank to pass over them. Just search for [wwII bridge tank] and you'll find some pictures and websites. Whether it's possible to remain attached is another thing. I think it has some practical problems, and I don't see why it would be necessary.

I guess they will just have to scale it up now! Getting a small fire out isn't rocketscience... people have experience with that since prehistoric times. But putting out a huge fire, that's a different story. Actually, this idea might have different applications than firefighting. In industry, there are lots of fires being turned on and off... And depending on the fuel, it can be tricky to turn it off. But regardless of all that... bigger is better.

Why would time be a localized thing? UTC is just an agreement worldwide, why not the moon as well?

That is really a lot of new people. A lot of extra mouths to feed. A lot of extra educations to take care of. A lot of towns and cities to build. A lot of everything must be built! 181 million people... hard to imagine. According to wikipedia, India has an annual growth rate of 1.38%. Doesn't sound like much, but it means they will hit the 2 billion people in only 37 years! I wonder if the Indians themselves have any idea where they are going with their country. Is there a limit to growth? Although I have a lot more questions, I think I'll ask only that. In the specific case of India, is there any limit to their growth?

You need a very large surface area to get enough air in (there is no other way). That means you have 2 options: 1. A very large flat reactor (basically something like a pond). 2. A compressor. You have to pump air in, and the air then bubbles through the liquid. Alternatively, you can spray the liquid in the air. Main topic Regarding GM bacteria for our own digestive system: has it occurred to any of you that our stomach / intestins and the bacteria are in a system together? Change the bacteria, you have to change the stomach and the intestins too! I think it simply cannot, and should not, be done. Anyway, we don't have a food problem yet, and we will have an energy problem before the food problem.

Then I think you're fine. Too much water, and too little vinegar/bleach to cause any serious problems. Chlorine gas dissolves quite well in water, so even if some was formed, it stayed in solution in the water, and never came in the air.

Heat is indeed being conducted. You just overestimate how much energy can be transported that way. Heat transport increases with an increase in temperature difference between hot and cold. But it decreases with increasing distance between the hot and cold locations. And on a planet, that distance is the problem. Convection and radiation can transport energy across a distance much better than heat conduction through a material. That's why your central heating system transports water through a pipe to a radiator rather than just have a big iron cylinder in the house. And yes, energy can in fact radiate away on the sunny side. In fact, probably most energy is being radiated away directly from the sunny side, straight into space.

Anaerobic digesters can turn hydrocarbons into a fuel. You call it bio-gas, but it's essentially just methane (CH4), which is the same as natural gas. And indeed, some CO2 is also formed, just like you said, and this has to be separated. The separation is relatively easy. Such anaerobic digesters are found everywhere (there are thousands of these in Europe alone)... and the same occurs in nature too (swamp gas is created by the same reaction, and natural gas was created like that too). Actually, there is a decent chance that your local water treatment plant uses this technology to clean the water. Or there may be a farmer in your local area that has a bio-gas installation. And yes, methane is a good fuel. So, yes, it's all true. The thing is: it will work with pretty much every organic material (manure/feces and agricultural residues are most often used)... and therefore it's a bit of a waste to use nice carbohydrates from your soft drink for it. p.s. I was confused in the beginning... I hadn't realized you meant soda as the soft drink. I thought you meant the chemical soda: sodium carbonate

Lego? I'm afraid I don't understand the question. If you just carry a plank, you have a portable bridge, right?

Maybe a 'classification'? The thing is: in many cases, there is a specific word for it: With lemon trees, that would be a genus: With knives, forks and spoons, the word is cutlery. With shampoo, soap, deodorant, the word is toiletry. Bricks, beams, screws: construction materials. Etc, etc.

I think disinterest is often confused with docility or lack of creativity. Add some distrust of the government, and some necessary simplifications (in this case a simplified view of the influence of chemicals on human bodies), and you have a conspiracy theory. Some people get frustrated because other people just don't care, and are happy with their standard lives. There are lots of people who drink water directly from wells, and not from the main water grid. Those people should be frickin' revolutionaries compared to all of us... but yet, people in rural areas who aren't connected to the main water system are (if anything) perhaps more relaxed than the stressed out city people. Myth busted.

If you are on the moon anyway, I think we can assume you have some technology at your disposal. So, just Google it. (Why wouldn't you be able to have internet on the moon? Lots of signals travel by satellite, might as well beam some to and from the moon)? For almost all normal purposes UTC + a few seconds is accurate enough... the little delay that you get because the moon is so far away is negligible.

It's in fact the atmospheres that transport heat the most efficiently from hot to cold. (Convection almost always beats diffusion).

That's not what he said. That would be the normal crackpot who refuse to change their mind. You should quote the first sentence too if you want to be fair to jamiestem. As far as I understand, he just doesn't like the current theory of the Big Bang, or the theory of the solar system... and I don't blame him. He abandoned his own theory in its current form, but he questions the one put forward by popular science. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that! There are very weird things that are required to explain the observations we make sometimes - especially in astronomy. And it's alright to challenge that. jamie, there exists a good explanation why the solar system is all in a plane. Perhaps we should make a new thread for that? It wouldn't be the same topic anymore.

Not silly at all! Completely agree with imatfaal. Mechanical engineering students make bridges from spaghetti all over the world. In fact, I get 4 million hits for [spaghetti bridge university]... which shows that it's a very popular, and very scientific, thing to build a small model bridge from household materials. I think that universities actually send their best teams to a world championship spaghetti bridge building. Your first question must be what forces your material handle and in which directions (push, pull, sideways, etc). Then think about the bridge, and how you can use each straw most effectively. Because I don't know the straws, I cannot answer your questions.