All I know is I've about grown tired of the leeches who are already jumping on this as a reason to why we should ban nuclear power.

The reality is that the reactor is older than Chernobyl, held up against an earthquake it wasn't designed to hold up against, held up against the many aftershocks, AND a tsunami yet still isn't into a meltdown. If anything this should be a testament to how safe the reactors are or at least how far we've come in handling them.

Meanwhile the news isn't mentioning the oil refineries over there that are going up in completely uncontrollable columns of fire.

In fact, if we had approved some of this 3rd generation reactors (which those guys are opposing), none of these problems would be happening in the first place.

Problem happens because the electric pumps pumping the coolant into the thing got knocked out.

Hey, let's oppose the designs that would make those pumps unnecessary!

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Can someone explain why we should have power plants and stuff like this in the first place?

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Because people need energy

it's not like having a ton of natural gas or oil would be any safer as Sentios said, unless you go pure solar or wind perhaps (which is still very impractical for large-scale needs). Due to the constant media frenzy over anything nuclear, modern nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You can't really say the same for oil. An accident almost happens in Japan, due to events completely out of its control that it somehow still withstood, and everyone says that's why we shouldn't use it. BP has a well blow up for basically it's own fault (the disaster being outside the influence of nature) and the resulting oil screws up millions of things (without even catching on fire) and the ban on offshore drilling is lifted in less than a year. I think that's pretty telling about how ingrained the automatic suspicion of nuclear is. It could be warranted in the right perspective, but then that perspective should also view other sources of energy with equal suspicion otherwise you simply aren't being consistent.

people can't see radiation and nuclear power has a sort of odd fear set in people. It can be scary but honestly it's our best power source available with the ultra compact breeder designs. If japan had used that the cores would have fused solid after the quake. On the flip side when they rebuild thei reactors they will prolly use the new design.

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Radiation is scary because you can't see it but it kills you. That and we invested a lot of our ideas into nuclear power during the Nuclear Age(strange coincidence eh?!), and that was just shattered with Chernobyl which killed thousands, and 3 Mile Island, which injured... 0. :|

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Thirded. Humor is at it's most powerful in the face of disaster or controversial topics.

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Well it appears the earthquake's been updated to be a 9.0.

Rugged. .1 on the richter scale is pretty large when the energy released is looked at.

_________________
Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

Yeah, if my history/language addled brain still remembers right, 9.0 is like, 11.1~% times stronger than 8.9, right?

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Yeah since it's a logarithmic scale each point up is increasingly worth more. Like an 8.7 is 168 megatons but a 9.0 is 474 megatons. 9.0 being 10x stronger than an 8.0 so it'd be about 10% stronger I think if it was just moved up a point.

wouldn't it be a %100 stronger, because 10x is %1000 increase.

_________________
Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

Lol, I'm rough on logs, but on a logical level, if each decimal point were only 10%, 8 going onto 9 would only be double, not 10x.

Rather, it's more like 10^x, where x is magnitude. I haven't done decimal exponents in a while, so nothing comes to mind how you actually deal with it.

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You get a calculator. I don't know what factors they use to calculate the richter scale, but I think 8.9 to 9.0 is a 26% increase.

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Assuming the energy release for 1 is 1.

1
10
100
1,000
10,000
100,000
1,000,000
10,000,000
100,000,000
1,000,000,000

So then 8.9 is 900% stronger than 8.0 but only has 90% of the energy of a 9.0.

At least that's what I would think and that's purely on the Richter scale... however according to wikipedia there is a newer scale out there which is more accurate for these large quakes. I'm not sure how that effects the scaling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale

Imagine an Asian guy suddenly getting fed up with math, throwing his hands up in the air, and giving away all his scientific and graphing calculators away for either free or chump change.

That is me.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sakN2hSVxA

what.
what what
what
what whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat

Oh good god...

_________________
Tuor: Stuff is our resident, hot mess, alcoholic.
Senel: Stuff is the patron saint of getting shitfaced. You replaced your organs with an engine that runs solely on alcohol.
RIP Lucky. I love you so much.

I am just seeing oh good god come out of the mouth of your pony avatar.

_________________
Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

Oh well. I'm waiting to get screwed myself. Every area on the Ring of Fire has been hit except my area..New Zealand, Chile, Japan.. all within the last year have had major earthquakes. My area shouldn't be that bad.. but no one really knows much about earthquakes (as in predicting them to any degree of reliable accuracy at all).

EM: San Andreas is a strike-slip, not a subduction. We shouldn't get an earthquake on the same magnitude as say Japan or Chile. I'd say maybe a 7 at best.

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Escape will make me God.

I know (well not the technical terms but that it wouldn't be the same magnitude). Still, infrastructure is very poor in the U.S. The earthquake would also likely be centered near directly by Los Angeles which increases the destruction that much. Like what happened in Haiti for instance. A lot of places could withstand that magnitude but because of how close it was (and their excessively poor 3rd world infrastructure) they were devastated. It'd still be pretty bad here even though the magnitude will be less.

It's probably using the modern moment magnitude scale, which is where Mw is the number and Mo is the energy. So 8.9 to 9.0 ideally represents about a 41% increase in energy, but in this case it's probably the other way around, where the energy estimate was revised upward such that 9.0 is a closer approximation than 8.9, with the difference in the estimates not necessarily corresponding to the ideal case.

The earthquake happened the first night we (USS Abraham Lincoln) were in Hawaii. For a moment there we thought we would have to do disaster relief, if the tsunami had caused damage in Hawaii that is. All in all, the only thing that happened was the zoo not opening for business, I think they had to move the animals to higher ground or something.

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"An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced"
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