Why all the failures to natural disasters?

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Unfortunately, in this case, they are not old enough. They ignored data that 9.0 quake happened 1000 years ago in the region. So. they built the reactors upto 8.0. Actually, they are better than our San Orofre reactors, which are built for 7.0. Recently, the max. possible quake has been upped to 8.0. However, no recorded history survived to verify the max. quake in Southern California. If the same size quake happen in this region, we could have the exact incident here.

PS: Japan and the US West Coast are in the same Ring of Fire.

Ah, nostalgia... the filter which romanticizes a lifestyle that even the poorest among us would rather not live.

Civil discourse? Hardly true in history--the 1850s say such incivility that a senator beat another senator on the Senate floor with a cane and stopped only when it broke. And was rewarded with several new canes by grateful constituents.

Incompetence? Probably half of the managers in the 1800s, if not more, would easily have been guilty under modern laws like reckless endangerment, gross negligence, etc. Instead of nuclear leaks with surprisingly little radiation release, you had constant horrific train crashes, unmaintained coal dams bursting and wiping out towns. BP had faith in the last resort of the blowout preventer... railroads quite actively avoided even putting pneumatic brakes on their trains, resulting in much greater losses of life than the oil spill claimed.

Face it, this era is no worse than the past in terms of the nastiness of humans.

How many people have died, or are likely to die, as a result of the problems at the nuclear plants?

In terms of human life lost, it is a pretty trivial accident.

The problem is the exact opposite of what you described. It is not that we are failing to build safe infrastructure; the problem is that ill-placed safety concerns are stopping development; we have a culture of cowardice.

You failed to mention the 1,500 Japanese people who died when a dam collapsed during the recent earthquake.

This shit happens all the time.

But even zero people dying from the nuclear accident makes it too dangerous for you.

You should stay inside. Cars are dangerous too.

There are tens of thousands of oil wells, around 450 nuclear reactors, maybe hundreds of thousands of levees. The numbers of failures are small but get a lot of publicity.

Things usually work pretty well. Would you rather live in a forest, foraging for food and shelter?

By most reasonable measurements, the lot of humanity keeps getting better. But a lot of people complain more. It's called "the progress paradox" and has its own book.

John

But inside is dangerous, too!

John

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One is enough, as it's happening in Japan, and will happen again elsewhere. All they had to do is to relocate the spent fuel rods to safer storage site. We should do the same to our reactors as well.

Is it simply incompetence, greed, or statistics? One would think that it would be relatively easy to design a nuclear reactor safety mechanism, blowout preventer, etc that does it's job.

I'm starting to think that mankind is getting too arrogant and too stupid to deal with these large scale problems. They no longer seem to be issues of technology but of money and arrogance. Nuclear energy should be safe and what happened at Fukushima is criminal. What's worse was the response afterwards. Just like the BP Oil spill, Katrina, and many others it seems when these things happen you get people totally incompetent that are in charge and have no real plan.

It's like we simply build our house of cards and when it comes crashing down everyone's clueless why. Because of our arrogance and greed we build the house of cards bigger and bigger believing that we have some innate right to do so.

It seems human incompetence and arrogance makes everything unsafe and there is plenty of it going around. Just look at the responses to this post and what goes on in these newsgroups now. Very little intelligent and civilized debate is going on any more. (specially if you've been around for a while and remember how it used to be)

Anyone else think humanity is in a downward spiral? Or maybe some of the older folk know that this has always been like this?

Say, maybe we could dig a big hole in, say, Nevada...

Then there was that little political dispute in the mid-1800s that led to 700,000 dead . . .

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Anywhere else is safer than on-site, at sea level, in populated area, near the Ring of Fire.

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Archie/GlimmerMan/Nymnonuts: When you got your PhD, didn't any of your textbooks cover fault tolerance or human factors engineering?

Did you major in electronics or bullshitology?

Your chafing about a discussion of engineering failures vs. natural disasters as being off topic in an electronics design forum is illogical and sociopathic.

Before getting into the global problems, ask yourself for how long could you survive without water, electricity, groceries, mobile phone and internet. Not for very long, isn't it? If you don't care about yourself, why should anyone else care?

VLV

Your chafing about a discussion of engineering failures vs. natural disasters as being off topic in an electronics design forum is illogical and sociopathic.

_________________________________ I think he is complaining about it being posted to sci.math. Is it on-topic in a maths forum? Do you consider that him saying this is off-topic in a maths group as "illogical and sociopathic"? Must be a lot of sociopaths out there, because as there is zero maths content in the post it looks off-topic in sci.math to me ... does that make me a sociopath as well?

And pick a place where if it leaked, it would contaminate, say, Death Valley.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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I know we've been looking and debating for the ideal storage site for decades. Meanwhile, they are kept in the most dangerous location, on site.

Don't relocate them, reprocess them.

John

There are proliferation worries about that, though. See the chequered history of fast breeder reactors and mixed-oxide fuel.

Also, reprocessing concentrates the nasties (e.g. caesium-137), and nobody wants to dispose of that either.

The real nightmare scenario is a nuclear attack on large reactors with large spent fuel pools.

A thousand feet of dirt and rock over top makes spent fuel pretty bomb-resistant.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Fuck off and die, you immature little bitch.