Balta1701

Perhaps I should post more. Or less.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 11:13 AM) I read before that someone thought the New Madrid was where the North American plate was trying to break apart. The North American plate tried to break apart 1.2 billion years ago. That originally set up these fault lines and a bunch of interesting geology. These lines were then covered with sediment once that rift failed and the continent went back to being a settling, accumulation space. Over time, those faults were buried quite deeply under sedimentary rock cover. When you start changing the stress regime though...by continual burial of sediments, and by moving ice sheets onto and off of those faults, you re-stress them and potentially reactivate them.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 01:05 PM) Then again, unless the ground opened up, would anybody be hurt by an enormous earthquake if they were standing in the middle of a plain or something? You can come up with lots of mechanisms. If that plain happened to undergo liquefaction, you could literally drown.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 09:43 AM) Manifestos usually include a proposed (and usually crazy/bordering on insane) solution. Where is yours? I don't really have one. Ignoring nuclear power is a bad option, because it is carbon free, and it takes several chernobyls to do the kind of damage we're looking at from Climate Change. Shuttering nuclear plants is a bad option, because there's huge investment already in them, and we don't have infrastructure to replace them. Pretending they're safe right now only works until they become unsafe. I guess I kinda feel the right response is to deal with them how NASA dealt with its shuttle program after 2003. You can't completely shutter the program for years, but you can't expand it, and you have to fight like Hell every step of the way against institutional complacency...the "it hasn't happened for x years" effect. Of course, for that to work, we still need a replacement energy source. It's possible that Japan may wake people up a bit on inspections, but what's more likely, IMO, is that we're going to continue to see inspection cutbacks, lobbying in favor of inspection cutbacks, lobbying in favor of building new plants and expanding current plants, until eventually some set of engineering issues or natural disasters combines to produce a radiation release in the U.S., because that's just how it goes. All of that of course ignores the 2 elephants in the room...the fact that the program is "too big to fail", in the sense that if a plant were to melt down, the plant itself couldn't handle the claims without bankruptcy, so there's a tacit government insurance whether we admit it or not...and second, the fact that the U.S. government is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to plant operators because the government promised to build a facility to store the waste and has yet to do so.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 09:39 AM) I might not know all the details about Japan, but it seems as if the tsunami caused most of the worst damage/deaths, not the earthquake. If somewhere like St. Louis faces an 8.0 earthquake, if there was no tsunami, you think it would still be more damaging overall? I do realize Japan is more prepared for an earthquake in general. Yes. The damage from an earthquake is a function of many variables. First, there's the distance to the quake; in the Japanese case, the quake was well offshore, which limited maximum ground movement on the islands themselves. Second, there's building codes and enforcement. The earthquake in China a couple years ago killed tens of thousands, and did so because of a lack of earthquake-ready building codes and a lack of enforcement. Building codes in the U.S., particularly in the Midwest and South, are not nearly up to par for this level of shaking. Partly because of the anti-government sentiment in the U.S., partly because events in the Midwest are much less common than events in Japan, partly because all of Japan is under regular Earthquake threat so those standards exist at the national level (as the Japanese government can't afford to pay for a Haiti-level of devastation every 20 years). Finally, there's the local geology. The seismic engineering community has begun to realize, post 1989-Loma Prieta (San Francisco) that the worst possible material you can build on is unconsolidated sediment/fill. The kind of stuff deposited by rivers on their floodplains, or the kind of stuff the Marina district is built on in San Francisco. That material takes the energy of the shaking, stores it, and magnifies it. As NSS noted, the clay-materials often simply turn to liquid and sink. The ground supporting private structures will effectively melt away, and the structures using that ground for support collapse and explode. Japan has some of that to deal with, but not a whole lot. The Midwest...every one of those cities is built on fill, usually from the Miss. or Ohio rivers.

I have a little more time now, so it's manifesto time. When I look at the nuclear industry, my biggest critique is that its an industry that only works when communism works. For a nation to have a functioning nuclear industry, you need the nuclear industry to be perfectly willing to accept criticism and, to first order, never ever fight against a charge/complaint from the government. Nuclear plants are highly complex engineered systems. If history has taught us anything about engineering, it's that eventually, things always go wrong in ways we can't anticipate. If its taught us one more thing, every time there's a critical failure, its because some rule wasn't enforced correctly, and that lack of enforcement combined with an unexpected event to produce a disaster. Put a nuclear energy system into an ideal political environment and it might work, but you need scenarios that are fundamentally impossible in our system. You need operators who never push systems farther than they should go. Plants that hit their designed age can't continue to be used; they should be shuttered. If something goes wrong unexpectedly, you don't patch it, you shut the plant down. If you're operating a nuclear plant and you discover an offshore fault, rather than continuing operation until you determine if there is any chance of motion, you shut the thing down and spend the money it takes to learn everything possible about that fault (san onofre). On top of that, you have constant, skeptical inspectors whose job it is to make sure that unexpected things don't happen. They need to be as well trained as the people working for the plants, as well paid as them (if not better), and certainly not overworked or overwhelmed. You need at least 1 outside group to avoid the type of groupthink that is common in engineering disasters - NASA has struggled with this problem more than any other, it's cost them 2 shuttles. Problem is, none of those scenarios will ever be met in a for-profit, lobbying based industry with cost constraints. If a reactor is operating normally and is close to the end of its life, it will continue operating until serious issues crop up that force shutdowns. If it is realized that the section of the subduction zone offshore is actually seismogenic and the reason no one knows this is that it hasn't ruptured since 800 a.d. (Japan), then you need to consider shuttering the reactors. If the government starts running a deficit or wants to cut taxes, it can't look at inspection cutbacks as an option, and we've seen again and again that it always happens. It's happening right now. You can criticize the anti-nuclear folks all you want, you can deservedly ridicule statements from Greenpeace...but I would counter that statements from the nuclear industry deserve exactly as much skepticism, because that's how engineering problems happen. They always happen, they happen in unexpected ways, and they're not going to stop because we have a better system.

It may be months/years before radioactive emissions cease from these plants and the inhabitants are able to return home.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 09:07 AM) I can tell you from living in Memphis for a few years, they are sooooo not ready. Few of the large buildings are even up to the code level the city has asked for. Most of the local residents are sort of vaguely aware of New Madrid's existence, but none seem to know what to do if it happens, and NO one I asked down there had earthquake rider on their insurance (or, in many cases, insurance at all on their home). TDOT had been working to retrofit bridges, but they were only some small % of the way done in the area. Then there is the problem that Memphis sits on a soft bluff surrounded by silty soil that is part of a liquefaction zone. Things would be ugly in Memphis if New Madrid goes big. Yeah, that's pretty much my logic on why I said a magnitude 8 event on New Madrid would be more damaging than this magnitude 9 event in Japan. I had a friend who's parent was in the Evansville Mayor's office, after Katrina I passed along a few casual tips about what your emergency services should have on file somewhere as a plan for what to do in the event that it were to go. No idea if they followed anything I suggested (one suggestion was to spend the money on a study/planning scenario, at least as a Cover-your-tail move).

Who is Shane Lindsay?

Link

Link

QUOTE (Felix @ Mar 13, 2011 -> 11:27 PM) Well, the double-double streak (53 games!!!1) is over. Love finishes tonight's game with 6 points, 12 rebounds. He got benched with four minutes left. Time to drink a glass of scotch to that streak. It was amazing to watch night in and out. They went 13-40 over that streak.

QUOTE (chisoxfan09 @ Mar 14, 2011 -> 08:12 AM) Not to hurry him at all but it would be great if he can make the jump of High A to AA in the middle of the season. That could put him on track for the Majors (Sep 2012 call up) next year. Remember...this is a guy who everyone thought still had some work to do on his approach at the plate. There's risk associated with pushing him up too rapidly.

In an article seemingly placed so that both no one and everyone would find a way to notice it, some guy with a muslim-name has an op-ed piece in the Arizona Star on gun control.

QUOTE (YASNY @ Mar 13, 2011 -> 04:07 PM) I hear it all the time .... "It's Bush's fault."

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 13, 2011 -> 02:49 PM) FWIW the latest I read said the diesel generators ran for a short time after the quake as expected but were damaged in the ensuing tsunami. Something to consider for coastal US plants, but not something that Braidwood (closest plant to Chicago) would have to worry about. Not sure how safety design for something like a tornado comes in. The response of a midwestern reactor relating to the ground itself would be different though, because the ground behavior and response will be different. The quake itself, while powerful, was quite a way offshore, and was hitting a different type of ground than the sedimentary fill in the midwestern U.S. For example, the shakemap shows that the peak ground acceleration was in the moderate to moderate-strong range for the actual area in the damaged plant, but could have been worse if it were actually closer to the rupture itself. It's also worth noting that the Japanese system was an older design, which probably contributed.

NYT before and after satellite photos.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Mar 13, 2011 -> 02:21 PM) I actually wouldn't have a problem with that. It may sound stupid, but I don't want another Brian Anderson situation on our hands where the guy is just handed the job and has done nothing to earn it. Even if it's just a week or two in the minors, at least it will show him that he can't just get away with not performing. A week in the minors is hard to pull off since the Knights don't immediately start games, he'd be in minor league camp for a bit before the first game. I don't think Morel's mind is in the same boat as Anderson, he's actually overcome struggling and adapted to every level. I just don't think that right now, the difference between Morel not hitting and Teahen not fielding is that big. If Morel can hit a little, he'll be worth something, if Teahen could somehow field a little bit then he'd be worth something.

QUOTE (Milkman delivers @ Mar 13, 2011 -> 02:22 PM) I don't know, as I've watched almost nothing this spring. I'm guessing from this post and your post about Morel and Teahen in the other thread that, no, he has not out-pitched Infante. Actually, no, I really have no idea. All I'm asking for in any of these threads is for decisions that really shouldn't inspire passion by anyone to be based on what people are actually doing.

Has he outpitched Infante?

QUOTE (lostfan @ Mar 13, 2011 -> 12:14 AM) I was 9 years old in the summer of 1991 but I VIVIDLY recall EVERY SINGLE ONE of those players from that team. Cliff Levingston, Craig Hodges, etc. I mis-guessed on some of the names based on how they were introduced (they called Levingston instant offense and I figured they were talking about Hodges)...but yeah...

QUOTE (Leonard Zelig @ Mar 13, 2011 -> 02:11 PM) That depends, is a .250 OBP good enough? In other words, no, Morel hasn't hit good enough. That was my rule for him. He needs to earn the spot. If he struggles through the whole spring, he needs to have a few weeks of hitting well at AAA.

Wow, the things you miss when there are multiple nuclear meltdowns.

Simple question; has Brent hit well enough to earn the job?

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 13, 2011 -> 01:38 PM) Worse simply because of building codes, the existence of a lot of older masonry-style construction and the general lack of preparedness and awareness of Americans when compared to the Japanese? All 3 play into it...plus a couple of different points. Notably; the competence level of the Federal government response, which I'd say is somewhat questionable after this country's last disaster, and secondly, the relationship between the geology and the actual infrastructure, which Japan has thought a lot more about than we have. (although, I may have to exempt nuclear plants from that point)