More carbon dioxide may be good for plants, but it's a greenhouse gas, and so the plants will also have to cope with higher temperatures, different rainfall and more energetic weather.
Lauding the benefits of extra CO2 in the air as a sort of fertiliser while ignoring the effects of the climate changes that the extra CO2 would produce is more than a little disingenuous.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
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Michael Terrell doesn't appreciate that you can make better electrolytic capacitors with tantalum than aluminium. Why should he? Technicians don't have to worry about the tricky stuff.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
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So far, so good.
This is an interesting - if implausible - revelation, and would explain why trees wouldn't bother trying to grow higher than their neighbours, if it were true.
In fact plants need water, minerals, sunlight and CO2 in order to grow. Their rate of growth is going to be limited by whichever of these components is hardest to get hold of, and it usually isn't CO2.
When sunlight is the limiting factor - as it often is - you get tall trees competing with one another for sunlight ...
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
If that was a "simple control theory" concept, the Russians wouldn't have got it wrong when they designed the reactor. Seventeen RBMK reactors were built and twelve of them are still running, so the "dangerous instability" seems to be tolerably hard to provoke.
Once a device has managed to fail catastrophically, it is usually possible to work out the failure mechanism, and any number of Saturday night quarter-backs will tell you how it should have been designed.
Both British and US reactors seem have had their own weak points
and if we build and operate enough of them we'll probably find a few more. On the whole, I'd prefer that we tested our capacity to get things wrong with slightly less dangerous toys.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson outdoes himself. The people in charge of the U.S. government are politicians, and I'm no politician. Furthermore, they are US politicians, and probably share John Larkin's delusion that US engineers don't screw up, whereas I've seen enough crappy US engineering to be aware that US engineers are just as fallible as the rest of us.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
It was a bad design, but it wasn't a bomb. Realize that many other RBMKs operated smoothly for years. Only one exploded.
All big disasters have multiple contributing factors. Some have a more-or-less dangerous basis (like overall reactor stability), but one which, under normal operation, will never fail because other factors are in place. "Control theory concepts" end up having very little to do with it.
Tim
-- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms
I'm ashamed to see you've missed the point. I hope it is due to my lacking skill of explanation, because you are a quite capable mind. I shall try harder.
But even then, I don't see how you interpret "average power consumption" as "that which is used for satisfying basic human needs". As you stated before, that amounts to little more than 100W (maybe 1 or 10kW counting total system losses like photosynthesis). Surely it should be obvious that this power is consumed by the support (heating, lighting, transportation) and industry (fabrication, and more and more nowadays, computation) which those humans have invented? I mean, wouldn't it be immediately obvious on writing your post that you wouldn't directly ingest four kilowatts? That's obviously not what I said, so what made you think it was?
Um? Since when were illumination, heating, pumping or ventilation subsets of "fabrication and computation"? Clearly I said nothing of the sort. In fact, I specified exactly what kinds of activities can be reduced that much. So why did you decide to ignore that statement?
Tim
-- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms
In commercial BWRs, loss of water coolant stops the fission reaction. And core meltdown also stops the fission. Now only latent isotopes are generating heat, presumably in a puddle of molten gunk in the botton of the containment vessel. These are hot but have short half-lives so cool off a lot in hours and days. If it melts through, it's going down, not up. There's no graphite to catch fire and spread isotopes over millions of square km. There's a huge difference from dynamically unstable graphite reactors that are safe only when thay are carefully managed.
Control theory has nothing to do with the safety of a high-energy dynamic system? Do you even own a car?
John
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And Three Mile Island, which was just barely safe when it was carelessly managed.
I'm sure that even America's infallible engineers will eventually manage to find some way of beating the superior design of US boiling water reactors, and create their own Chernobyl-sized disaster if we give them enough time and enough reactors.
in
it.
My experience with engineers who have claimed to understand control theory suggests that it is a poor substitute for common sense.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
That's the trouble with noisy signals. Southern Australia seems to be in the middle of the worst drought for a thousand years, but that too could just be coincidence.
The onset of the Younger Dryas probably looked like just a particularly bad winter when it started. Temperatures in Europe and North America dropped 5 degrees Celcius over a decade, and stayed low for 1300 years before recovering just as fast.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
-- I don\'t think that\'s a valid extrapolation since all he claimed was that you don\'t understand simple aluminum electrolytics. JF
True. I do know the difference, and where not to use a tantalum. Its just his usual half assed attempt to cover the fact that he's incompetent.
He still can't remember that I have both of his .ieee and Google accounts filtered so he's becoming senile, as well. That is probably why he's 30 or more years out of date.
-- http://improve-usenet.org/index.html Goggle Groups, and Web TV users must request to be white listed, or I will not see your messages. If you have broadband, your ISP may have a NNTP news server included in your account: http://www.usenettools.net/ISP.htm
That's why I say SHUN Slowman.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
How severe can senility be? Just check out Slowman.
He should be used to it, by now. People have shunned the loser his whole life. He makes Rodney Dangerfield look like the life of the party.
-- http://improve-usenet.org/index.html Goggle Groups, and Web TV users must request to be white listed, or I will not see your messages. If you have broadband, your ISP may have a NNTP news server included in your account: http://www.usenettools.net/ISP.htm
Exactly. A good reactor design won't blow up even if the operators try to blow it up. When the stakes are this high, that's simply an engineering requirement.
The TMI meltdown cost a lot of money but injured nobody. For the reasons I've noted: dynamic stability, containment.
What an ass you are. The newer designs are even safer than the old ones, which have killed zero people so far. Reactor management, training, and culture are also far better than in the days of TMI.
When common sense is used to evaluate complex system dynamics, it rarely works. And it never bestows confidence that a system is safe.
I am increasingly convinced, based on numerous examples, that you are not among the engineers who actually *do* understand control theory.
John
[snip]
Please do not sully the profession by denoting Slowman as "engineer". He can't even find his own asshole with a flashlight and a mirror.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
How severe can senility be? Just check out Slowman.
While there are big enough mirrors, no flashlight is up to that task.
-- http://improve-usenet.org/index.html Goggle Groups, and Web TV users must request to be white listed, or I will not see your messages. If you have broadband, your ISP may have a NNTP news server included in your account: http://www.usenettools.net/ISP.htm
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All you can say about Three Mile Island is that it didn't blow up. You - and the designers - would like to think that it couldn't blow up, no matter how ingenious the human errors it is subjected to, but that's just wishful thinking.
And a certain amount of luck.
Right, and your designs are all insanely good. All you are saying is that nothing has gone wrong recently, and you have gotten complacent again.
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ith it.
Neither does control theory. It just offers a more complicated scheme for failing to understand what is actually going on.
You haven't got enough evidence on the subject to come to any rational conclusion, and - as usual - are indulging in wishful thinking.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
EXACTLY,
therefore there is NO unambiguous measurement of global climate change and climate change is therefore an UNVERIFIED THEORY.
Mark
Just whwn I conclude, once again, that you are a bad-tempered, useless old geezer whose posts aren't worth reading, you come up with a gem like this. A classic!
John
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