soubriquet
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Posts posted by soubriquet
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From Narita, find the Ken-O Expressway.
Turn north on the Jo Ban expressway
Turn west on the Ban Etsu Expressway
Turn north on the Tohoku Expressway
Turn west on the Yamagata expressway
@moderator. Love your snip (technical not Anglo-Saxon).
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@tokoyo's first link is correct. That is the Narita->Zao route.
It's missing the Expressway names. Any suggetions?
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Solid snow now. Everything will be open.
To get to Zao by train from Tokyo. Take the Yamagata Shinkansen (Tsubasa) to Kaminoyama Onsen, then take a taxi or bus. It's less than 3 hours from Tokyo, and about 20 minutes to get up the mountain.
I'll put up a route map for cars from Narita to Zao tomorrow.
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Interesting weekend. Norwich not doing too badly
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Don't bother coming. Appi is boring. December grass and rock boarding in yurrup is a much better waste of money.
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Letter to The Times.
"Sir, Despite the caveats expressed by some Liberal Democrats over nuclear power (“Nuclear power ‘unsellable’ after Japan crisis, warns Ashdownâ€, Mar 26), the question of safety can be assessed only by scientists and nuclear engineers, not by politicians. Recent calculations indicate new nuclear power costs of £59/MWh including development, construction and decommissioning, reducing to £50/MWh later. Levelised offshore wind costs are estimated at £203/MWh, including marine transmission and grid restructuring; onshore wind, £118/MWh. All renewables suffer from a low density of energy collection. Replacing one nuclear power plant (1.2 GW) by onshore wind would require about 300 square miles of countryside carpeted by 1,500x100-metre high turbines assuming 30 per cent efficiency. UK electricity use is about 100 GW. No generating system can be decarbonised without nuclear power and in our densely populated country unspoilt wilderness is at a premium. Stable and cheap electricity underpins all advanced economies. Present renewables are not a serious future option.
Professor Anthony Trewavas
Penicuik, Midlothian"
So. The solution is this. Equip (at what cost?) every home in Japan with solar panels. Who will pay for or maintain the system? When the sun doesn't shine, we need wind power. A second system, which doesn't work when the wind doesn't blow. Who pays for this, and at what cost? Finally, as backup, we need a fully installed thermal and nuclear power system.
The "low paid grunt work harvesting fruit, packing fish, working on production lines etc.," workers aren't going to grunting on the production lines when energy costs shut down production. That leaves middle class liberal arts graduates and bankers a real vacuum. Without people working for a living, where is the money going to come from?
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What a waste of talent.
Rehab by the Jolly Boys.
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Originally Posted By: pie-eaterOriginally Posted By: soubriquetPie eater: You do know that that white stuff coming from the stack is water vapour, don't you?
Nope.
Still smelly dirty factories though. The one in the photo is Stanlow. And smelly and dirty it most certainly is!
It's water. That's why the vapour is dispersing, rather than creating a plume.
Close refineries down. How's your summer trip back to the UK going? Is your aircraft going to be solar or wind powered? -
My numbers
"In 2008, Japan ranked third in the world in electricity production, after the United States and China, with 1.025×10^12 kWh produced during that year."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan
"Estimating Solar Electric (PV) System Size: Area of Solar Panels
On average (as a general "rule of thumb") modern photovoltaics (PV) solar panels will produce 8 - 10 watts per square foot of solar panel area. For example, a roof area of 20 feet by 10 feet is 200 square-feet (20 ft x 10 ft). This would produce, roughly, 9 watts per sq-foot, or 200 sq-ft x 9 watts/sq-ft = 1,800 watts (1.8 kW) of electric power.
Converting Power (watts or kW) to Energy (kWh)
One kilowatt-hour (1 kWh) means an energy source supplies 1,000 watts (1 kW) of energy for one hour. Generally, a solar energy system will provide output for about 5 hours per day. So, if you have a 1.8 kW system size and it produces
for 5 hours a day, 365 days a year: This solar energy system will produce 3,285 kWh in a year (1.8 kW x 5 hours x 365 days)."
http://www.solar-estimate.org/?page=solar-calculations
My numbers look like this:
electricity required: 1.025×10^12 kWh
typical installation (USA): 3,285 kWh per 200 square feet
(1.025×10^12) kWh / (3,285 kWh / 200)
= 62.4x10^9 ft^2 (area to generate required electricity in feet squared)
62.4x10^9 * (0.0929 / 10^6) (Convert to km squared)
= 5,797.4 km^2 (area to generate required electricity in km squared)
Kanto plain is approximately 17,000 sq km (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant%C5%8D_Plain)
So, about 1/3 of Kanto should do the trick, as long as we accept electricity for about 5 hours per day. I'm glad it's not going to happen here, because everyone's roof is covered in snow for 3 months of the year. Who's going to climb on to every roof every month to clean them?
Pie eater: You do know that that white stuff coming from the stack is water vapour, don't you?
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Originally Posted By: ooWell done.
But here is the question no-one is asking.... why do almost all of them look like blokes?
Try again. The 'blokes' are the ones with perfect grooming, to die for haircuts, and tattoos.
The ladies are there to play sport and never give up. -
Nice one
I'll run through them again tomorrow.
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The colour is all in my head
The first time I saw TV was when I was about 8yo. We got our first TV when I was about 10. Incredible isn't it, that there are people are still alive who remember life without TV. I'm 59.
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Quote:Start putting solar panels on everyone's house (a stand-alone house in Japan can just about generate its own needs from solar panels on the roof, from numbers I have been looking at), and then one can start tapering off on the fossil fuel plants as well. And that is before ramping up other sources like geothermal, and developing energy storage for load-leveling.
Not at night or in winter. Not economically. Read the full piece and look at Brook's numbers. Bear in mind he's a Green, so he's a renewable optimist. Each house generating its own needs (except at night time, when you are sitting in the dark with no heat) won't build Toyotas or Playstations. Exiting nuclear and fossil fuel power will simply export Japan's economy to China. That isn't going to happen.
Sitting in a cold house by candle light, and having to carry meltwater upstairs to flush the dunny is no fun. From personal experience. Renewable enthusiasts should try it.
I'll do some numbers, but that may take a couple of days. -
There is a very informative piece on nuclear energy by Professor Barry Brook here.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/07/17/nuclear-climate-necessity/
"Professor Barry Brook holds the Foundation Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change and is Director of Climate Science at The Environment Institute, University of Adelaide."
Warning: Professor Barry Brook uses arithmetic.
Excerpt:
"If we aim for society to be nearly completely powered by zero carbon sources by mid century, what is the size of the task? This might require 8 to 10 thousand gigawatts of electrical capacity, worldwide. Let’s say we were to do it all with wind and solar. Even if we ignore the substantial issue of energy storage and backup, this would still require building 1,200 huge wind turbines and/or carpeting 45 square kilometres of desert with mirror fields, every day, for forty years. For wind, this would consume 1.25 million tonnes of concrete and 335,000 tonnes of steel. For solar, it would be 2.2 million tonnes of concrete and 690,000 tonnes of steel. That’s what’s required to be built every single day, for decades and decades. What if we did it with nuclear power? Using the AP1000 design currently being deployed in China, we’d have to build two reactors every three days, using 160,000 tonnes of concrete and 10,000 tonnes of steel per day. Once again, a massive task, but one that is substantially less material- and land-intensive than the wind and solar options. When large-scale energy storage and its required peak-capacity overbuilding is considered, the numbers blow out ever further in favour of nuclear."
My bold.
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Bo Diddley of the rectangular guitar (not here). Road runner live performance. Rock and roll's finest in action. Check out the lady on guitar, woot woot.
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We are still at the point where an outbreak of disease from an organic farm in Germany caused 35 more deaths than radiation from Fukushima. Lets close down organic farming.
I note that following (yet again) the financial meltdown from sub-prime mortgages in the USA, we are now entering another (yet again) period of financial meltdown in europe. How many people are out of work? How many people have lost their homes? How much money has the incompetence cost?
I propose that we abandon organic farming and the finance sector.
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Excellent result. Never give up. Sorry TB, but I thought the Womens' final a better game than watching Holland kicking the crap out of Spain.
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Do you have electricity? Yes. Do you have water? Yes.
Nothing to see here, move along.
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Yes. That's the history of engineering. Steam boilers exploding. Railway bridges collapsing. Ships sinking. Aircraft falling from the sky. Thousands of dead.
We continue to travel by rail, ship and aircraft, because the lessons have been (and continue to be) learned, and we do it better next time. Life (and progress) are not without risk.
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Onagawa is operated by Tohoku Power, not TEPCO. We have no power shortage in Tohoku. Everything is running normally. Tohoku Power's engineering and management decisions have withstood the test.
TEPCO has failed. The issue is not nuclear safety. Nuclear power plants can be safe. The failure is at management level.
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It's not just the sea wall that is important. What is behind it is more so. Standard reinforced concrete buildings withstood both the earthquake and the tsunami. If TEPCO had installed their generators and the fuel supply in appropriate buildings, their system would have been able to cope.
Onagawa is much closer to the epicentre, and received a bigger tsunami than southern Fukushima. They (and we) were back on line within two days. Locals were using the power station visitor centre as an emergency shelter.
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Things were actually pretty busy. There were heaps of trucks rolling in and out and plenty of backhoes sorting stuff and loading them up. There were linesmen everywhere running new power cables, and lots of activity with roads being re-built where thay had been completely washed away in the towns.
Here's the Onagawa nuclear power plant. I could see no sign of any damage. I was snorkelling around the rocky headland in the right of the photo.
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Japan, Korea, China squabbles
in General off-topic discussions
Posted
A lot of my Japanese friends like Ishihara. They (and I) like Ishihara because he simply won't won't be bullied. Ishihara gets re-elected because he ignores western bet-wetters who would gladly sign a pluralist democracy over to a dictatorship for some reason or another.