Re: OT Proven Alternative Energy

Some things can be engineered to BE fail safe. If a bunch of large, heavy rocks (from an avalanche) are placed at the bottom of a valley, they CANNOT fall any further; an avalanche from them is NOT possible. Crude example, but you should get the idea.

:Ross Herbert wrote: :> On Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:44:17 -0500, technomaNge wrote: :> :> :Richard The Dreaded Libertarian wrote: :> :> Op-Ed piece in the local paper, the Orange County [CA] Register, lower :> :> left 20 or so column-inches, page "Local 14", Fri, Oct. 24, 2008: :> :> :> :>

:>

:> :> :> :> Pass it on! :> :> :> :> Cheers! :> :> Rich :> :> :> : :> :Best idea of all the alternatives, if you ask me. :> :Even the French {spit} are smart enough to run them :> :without blowing everything up or radiation poisoning :> :everyone. :> : :> :> well, up until now, anyway..... :> :> It just takes one tiny little mistake by someone or some "fail-safe" becoming :> un-fail-safe. BTW, is there any 100% fail-safe? And just how do you test a :> fail-safe to check that it is indeed fail-safe? :> :> It's gotta fail sometime, and then... "Oh, sorry about that but if we wait :> another 250,000 years things will start to clear up by themselves." : Some things can be engineered to BE fail safe. : If a bunch of large, heavy rocks (from an avalanche) are placed at :the bottom of a valley, they CANNOT fall any further; an avalanche from :them is NOT possible. : Crude example, but you should get the idea.

Obviously, using your pile of rocks at the bottom of a valley analogy, a nuclear power generator will be inherently fail-safe if it is not built in the first place. However, it doesn't take much "engineering" to NOT build a nuclear power station does it? The trick is to engineer a nuclear power station such that all fail-safes are guaranteed to be 100% effective 100% of the time.

To my knowledge the only guaranteed method of testing a fail-safe is to deliberately push it to its design limits for 100% of its operational lifetime to see if it will fail, and this is simply not possible. And, even if you could, what happens after that 1 in a billion chance that it actually does fail during testing? After all, no man made system I know of is 100% guaranteed to work 100% of the time. In the case of nuclear power stations, 1 stuff-up is all that is required to cause a catastrophe lasting 10's of thousands of years. And the greater the number of nuclear power stations, the greater the chance there will be a stuff-up sometime.

Of course nuclear power stations have many inter-dependant warning systems which are supposed to provide sufficient warning to enable an orderly shut-down in a timely manner before a fail-safe (which is a just last ditch safety mechanism) is initiated. I'm sure that Chernobyl had such systems too, but they don't appear to have worked, do they?

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Well, i understand that at Chernobyl, there was "experimenting" going on (to develop and/or improve a-bombs) and there was the inevetiable cover-up that was reported. Russia is a better liar than the US.

Chernobyl was not a fail-safe design, nor did it have safety interlock control systems and procedures that were at the levels recommended and being used by pretty much all of the western world at the time. (See wikipedia for lots more details...)

Nothing is ever 100% safe, but at some point it really does come down to balancing risk vs. reward... and nukes look quite good these days compared to burning fossil fuels.

There are currently two designs claiming just that. How about thoroughly investigating them before making up your mind.

You clearly do not know much about medical instrument design either. Ask Jeorg politely and he may bother to try to enlighten you.

They were not done correctly and much of it was turned off to keep operating when there was not enough money for scheduled maintenance for something like 6 years running.

Your way overrun attempt at a point on the poor design of Chernobyl cannot be directly applied to all nuclear power everywhere. Moreso, the design of Chernobyl was based on correct maintenance, which has been thus proven to be a bad design.

Really good "fail safe" design is all about seeing to it every perceivable (including many incredible paths) compound failure paths results in a safe outcome. And that is real engineering and is doable. This is where the engineering failure was at Three Mile Island, long sustained failure to do proper scheduled maintenance and not doing the maintenance in the prescribed way.

BTW this information is not secret, it is available on the 'net. Finding it is hard.