At MOHANADHASSAN….

StarTrader wrote:
If I were in control today, I would have fired “His Excellency” the Ambassador to Japan and his pathetic British staff - all of them. On the spot. And without repatriating them at public expense too. And I would see to it that they never worked in any public office again.

What an absolute disgrace to have the emergency teams return because the idiots refused to sponsor them in a time of emergency and rare human kindness. What the hell are they employed for? Origami lessons? Or just to sample local food on expenses?

If the team had been able to save one life it would have been a prestige to the UK. Their help would have been invaluable in any case. This return is a bureacratic disgrace.

Good job you’re not in control then isn’t it. IF the media is correct, then yes, it’s utterly ridiculous. However, if the media is not then it’d be a massive mistake. Even if the media are, your idea would be an utter disaster in it’s own right for the obvious reason and far eclipse a 12 man team that would have been returning the next day anyway.

The UK ISAR team, which arrived in Japan on Sunday, agreed not to extend its operations after discussions with the Japanese disaster authorities and their US counterparts.

The team - 59 search and rescue experts, four medics and two sniffer dogs - was made up of members from fire brigades across the UK and was put together by the Department for International Development.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12778022
Apparently they arrived with 11 tonnes of equipment.

shakes head

p.s the supposed reason the 12 man team weren’t given a form? Doesn’t say what they arrived with equipment wise shrugs

Foreign secretary William Hague said the charity was not properly equipped and that it was ‘convenient’ to blame British red tape.

‘The Japanese embassy advised them that they would have to be self-sufficient and that Japan would not be able to provide logistical support,’ he said.

‘They arrived there with no transport or logistical or language support in place so I think that gave rise to the difficulty.’

Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/858314-british-rescue-team-working-in-japan-stopped-because-of-red-tape#ixzz1GzoGjgg9

Whether that’s true I don’t know. Have to wait and find out…

Well, I saw some rumour in other forum, hey say Japanese use those reactor to bulid nuclear bomb, so that’s why they using old reactors.

So they’re a lot safer than these old designs then. I just can’t imagine that they can compensate for every possible outcome though, things like massive freak earthquakes and tidal waves, a paveway bomb or tomohawk from some psycho for instance, possibly even sabotage.

I’m all for nuclear energy, anything other than the fossil fuels that have us all bent over a barrel these days is good in my book, just gotta accept that there’s a risk and build the things in places where the least possible effect to public health could arrise from any insane event that might just happen upon the place.

Chips wrote:

… Good job you’re not in control then isn’t it. IF the media is correct, then yes, it’s utterly ridiculous. However, if the media is not then it’d be a massive mistake.

Full marks Chips, glad you’re the one who spotted my allegory here.

This is the basis of my arguments about Arab countries - since I am able to compare, I know that the media has made a lot of bad assumptions, particularly on the few opponents in every one of those countries, which are still a very small minority.

Today Mr Cameron mentioned Bahrain in the same sentence as Libya. Bahrain is a monarchy, as are Saudi, Oman, the Emirates and Kuwait. What right does a commoner have to go against his king? Every right of course, at risk of losing his head - literally. No external country has the right to intervene. The UK is driven by the US who fear no-one. Except China that is. My view? Let the Yanks sacrifice their own only, not our lads. But for a long time, UK leaders have been sheep, not sheepdogs.

Yesterday’s UN decision to enforce a no-fly zone is an act of war.

Let’s see how madman Ghaddafi reacts, never mind his words, let’s see his peoples’ actions from now on.

On “Good job I’m not in control”? On the contrary.

The main cause of the problems of today’s world is wimps and do-gooders in control, lack of knowledge, lack of discipline and lack of respect, from the top down.

Chips wrote:
… Even if the media are, your idea would be an utter disaster in it’s own right for the obvious reason and far eclipse a 12 man team that would have been returning the next day anyway.

There is no obvious reason. Now that the team was returning the next day? was not made clear in any news report that I heard. Does that mean they just went for a couple of nights out in Tokyo? Ridiculous. In fact it was glossed over very quickly with no details, the initial news release, which mentioned clearly the letter that was refused and the reason, was altered and did not mention again that the Embassy “would not be responsible” for the team.

I understand this view because of my own experiences of British Embassies. A chap who became a good friend later was Third Secretary for the Embassy in Kuwait. When we registered with the Embassy on our arrival there, he briefed us on respect for local laws, and explained that should we get ourselves into jail, the Embassy would only appoint a local lawyer to assist us (at our own cost) and would do no more, not even to repatriate us in case we got into debt. When several people asked why, he explained that British Embassies exist to promote commerce and facilitate visit and business visas to the UK, not to look after Brits. We could host business evenings for free at the Embassy and they would invite the local heads of business to listen to us, and they would provide alcohol if we wished, (at cost) but no more.

OK so for private citizens I can understand and accept that they would not wish to be responsible for every Tom, Dick and Harry who misbehaves, but for a mercy team? Sacrilege! - even the French, whom the Brits love to criticise, did better than that.

So why do you not wish to give out effective action in these cases, but let sleeping dogs lie, even though this will lead to more such instances, yet you arise against a lawful government? This is a double standard, and this is why I picked out these two subjects to get your reactions.

NeXoSE wrote:
Well, I saw some rumour in other forum, hey say Japanese use those reactor to bulid nuclear bomb, so that’s why they using old reactors.

Yes, certain designs could possibly be used, with a lot of work, to make weapons-grade plutonium. This is just about the sole reason, alongside the Chernobyl scare, that we’re not far more invested in nuclear. Politics and fear-mongering.

Ah the obvious reason was that you’d have no ambassadorial representation of the UK in Japan during a time of crisis - which also includes many UK nationals within Japan - and the existing government sanctioned rescue team, as well as the normal day to day role that the embassy renders to UK and Japanese citizens alike.

Unless you just meant fire the ambassador himself - but you mention the entire staff. It would be an unmitigated disaster, and decisions should be made on truth based on evidence, and not media reporting.

Since there’s been zero mention of paperwork since (and since it would be a huge political point scoring area for the opposition), I’m starting to assume the media mis-represented the situation.

The UK media is become crass in its mis-representation of events and facts to the public. Whether this event is one of those isn’t entirely clear at present.

As for nuclear reactor fuel being turned into weapons grade? It requires a lot of work. It isn’t so simple as taking the spent fuel rods, and sticking it in a bomb.

Is Mohammed Hassan backed?

This thread is full of stupidity.

First off, what we have in the west is democracy, but it’s not open, it’s representative. The western world is just as corrupt as the rest of the world is, we’re just better at hiding it.

Do you think ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) was an act of anti-terrorism? No, it’s an act of maximizing profit by literally trying to exterminate piracy which will never happen, it can’t happen.

Do you think DRD (Data Retention Directive) which was recently accepted in Norway was an act to catch “pedophiles and terrorists”? No, it’s again about maximizing profits or controlling the public, but I am not sure as to where they’re heading with logging where we are, who we speak to, when we call a phone or connect to the internet.

No government actually cares about it’s people, they only need them to keep the economy running. Today’s system has ended up with the government being a supercorporation above all the other corporations based in that country.

Over to nuclear power. It is safe. How many thermal powerplants light on fire the last 30 years? Many… Thermal powerplants is just a general category for coal, oil and gas powerplants… Compare the number to the number of nuclear reactors going down in 30 years. You don’t even read about them in the news due to how often thermal plants catch fire or has some dramasituation.

4 reactors has gone down in the last 30 years, where only 2 of them actually made the area around them unhabitable. Chernobyl was a russian design from 1960, which had no anti-meltdown system except the rods stopping the fissionprocess, the reactorbuilding itself was low quality and the roof was made in wood.

The second, somewhere in the US had no such thing as passively shutting down when too hot either.

The two others were research reactors and they were shut down, but are unusable today.

Fukushima has no such thing as passive shutdown either. I just feel like pointing out one single fissionreactor can generate up to 2 GW, with almost no waste generated. When the radioactive water have been disposed of after a certain amount of time the radioactive waste itself is at the size of a tennisball. Fukushima was built for 7 on richters scale, not 9.

Wind power is stupid. Our government wanted 3% of Norway’s powerusage to be from wind power, which actually requires 1500 of those powerplants…

Modern reactordesigns can’t melt down, they can heat up a lot but they can’t melt down.

Nuclear power is the future, you can’t argue with that, their efficency is too great and the risk and waste is too low. Fusion is the future, and it has no radioactive waste. What happens in fusion is fusioning two hydrogen atoms, and the output is helium.

The first fusionreactor designed for powergeneration will start construction next year in Europe, it’s called HiPER. The brits actually maintained their own “star” for a little while, although small, it was a product of fusion.

EDIT: Thorium reactors is possible today, they are even more efficent, there is more Thorium on earth than Uranium, it’s lower risk and it’s lower waste.

Win-win until fusion is usable.

You might want to check your meaning of “safe”. Also, in effect it doesnt really matter if a nuclear fission power plant is very safe, what matters most are the consequences in a “what-if” scenario. It baffles me how people can belittle the radioactive danger from fission power plants after all the incidents.
Fukushima shows us how “uncontrollable” nuclear power plants as of now can be.
These issues will be mostly gone with fusion power plants, but till these become available around the globe (2050+?), I foresee at least a few other nuclear power plants with critical incidents.
It’s really not a matter of how safe they are, its more a statistical issue. Humans make mistakes and we need to rely on technology that is relatively mistake-friendly. Fission reactors definately are not.

Dont get me started on nuclear waste. To this day, there is not a single final storage place for nuclear waste established on earth. Just recently, the US raised the requirements for such a place on their soil.

I dont understand why you are saying wind power is stupid?
Wind power could provide for the energy need worldwide times 3 (or something like that). Norway receives most of its power by water power plants.
Green energy is by far the most logical thing to exploit and I cannot understand why people keep bashing it. Maybe because its not “cool” or something like that.

Green power plants are relative non-green - either they need utterly big areas or they soil the landscape. Sure positive its a regenerative energy source and mostly we don’t waste resources of our planet. But there are also disadvantages if you ask me.
Nuclear power has its disadvantages - we all can recon that now on the Fukushima catastrophe. But i tend to believe the reaction against nuclear power is a bit tooo overreacted. Driving by car has as well its risks, we pollute the air. Driving by plane even more.

What should be done to evaluate all pros and cons is firstly to write them down. Weight them and consider the consequences. Every energy production may it be green or non-green has its risks as well as disadvantages. It must be weighted and evaluated to what extent they can or should be used…

It’s not because it’s “not cool” as you put it. It’s because wind powerplants generate 2MW each at most. Compare that to an almost 40 year old reactor over at Fukushima generating 750MW…

I know Norway runs on water powerplants, they generate 60% of our powerusage and I live here. Each of them generate 350MW at most, but there’s not enough waterfalls to supply whole Norway with them. 20% of our powerusage comes from fissionplants “imported” from the European network.

The Fukushima reactors were not upgraded in 15 years, and at that point we did not have the safe reactor designs we have today. Fissionpower is a a fully plausible way to go with our current safer designs. Most our fissionplants have not been upgraded in a long while and can be thought of as unsafe.

Fusion is even more dangerous, if one of them were to fail controlling the fusionprocess the amount of heat would be insane, and it would do much more damage than any fissionplant can possibly do today.

Don’t bring up solar powerplants. Their maintenance costs are way too high, the cells can’t use more than 20% of the energy, theoretical max of 30%…

Oil based solar powerplants are not “green-power”, as the oil has to come from somewhere, and extracting that oil is not a green process.

What about the literally tens of coal powerplants that went on fire the last 50 years? They’re not dangerous? The fires from those can be impossible to stop for a very long time, and by that time it may have killed much more people than a fissionplant can kill in the same timespan if the fissionplant fails.

Not only do coal powerplants pollute the air a lot even with filtering, but they pollute the air to what probably will be toxic for human beings if they go on fire or something.

Geothermic powerplants is a genious idea, the only problem about them is that they literally destroy every geyser out there.

EDIT: I feel like pointing out that in a liberal society you can’t trust fission or fusion to anyone running such a powerplant. Such powerplants require some extent of governmental control, for example forcing the corporation to shut down the plant if they do not upgrade when they are “ordered” to.

EDIT2: In fact, scratch that, all powerplants require some extent of governmental control. There’s no safe powerplant tech out there, not even wind can be considered safe.

Does this mean we have to cut off nuclear power for ever - because there is a risk that might happen?

In such cases i would ask myself - would you under such considerations do any step inside a plane and have a thousands of kilometers travel? Isnt there the risk to die too? I could name many more examples that you do each day - that have their risk as well.

Imo we all can talk that nuclear power is bad due to its risks and the radiation (that we have to bear thousands of years any further). We face several risks each that where we are not aware that much of any bad results. Its often kinda overreacted and discussed in affect. What are always bad conditions to constructive solve any problems.

(PS: I do not like the nuclear waste and the imagination something like Fukushima happening again anywhere on the world - but we should not act in a hurry. Lets calm down and weight each pro and cons with its connected financial aspects and everything that must be considered. And not only rely on the fact that nuclear power plant are not safe (they never will be).

Perhaps we should start building powerplants filled with bicycles driving dynamos, now that would create some jobs!

The irony is that the anti-nuclear proponents are shooting themselves in the foot.

Wait, what?

Well think about it for a second. Your electricity doesn’t come from magic. The only thing your protestation does is stop the construction of new plants. The old plants will keep running because they cost millions to safely dismantle and would not easily be replaced by another powerplant of the same capacity. Solar and wind are just a pipe dream, they cannot sustain baseload power generation. Only hydro, fossil and nuclear can. Hydro’s nice if you have the space and the money and don’t care too much about destroying the environment around the dam, but all those conditions are rather limiting. Fossil I think we can all agree is not the way to go; between pollution, scarcer resources and risks associated, they easily kill more people than all other sources combined.

So that leaves nuclear, but the thing is, yes, the plants we have right now are bad. You shouldn’t be basing yourself off designs from half a decade ago when thinking about nuclear! Do we still measure car security by what a 1950s American car had?

Modern nuclear designs, as I’ve repeated countless times, are passively safe, recycle burnt fuel to extract about 99% of fissile material and produce so little waste it’s not even funny. You couldn’t notice the waste if you weren’t looking for it.

We shouldn’t be discarding a technology based off the batshit insane USSR experiment that was Chernobyl or how a 40 year old plant didn’t fully resist a 9.0 earthquake followed by a 10m tsunami. Well dang, how surprising!

The problem is not the % likelihood of a nuke power station accident, but the number of people that can be wiped out and the number of more millions who will be affected by radiation from severe burns to nausea for the rest of their lives.

Yesterday the British media told us that above-normal radiation has been detected in this country and it originated from Fukushima. Is this just scare mongering, since there are so many miles between us, or has the radiation been also detected in Russia, China, Asia and the rest of Europe too, which are between us and Japan? If yes, then the range of the problem is so great that it may threaten all of the world. And the Japs can’t get close enough for long enough to plug the hole, it is killing their people who are trying to fix the problem!

Fukushima is not over yet.

And my suspicion is that all of the tremors and quakes and natural disasters that we are seeing around the world are leading up to a really big shift or jerk of the continental plates which will threaten all of us. And there is nothing we can do about it.

Maybe this old world has had enough of the human race. We need to look for the seven-headed monster that will destroy mankind - Fukushima may well be the first head.

Severe burns? Probably just those two who already got that. Rest will get on perfectly fine.

I think you’re not really understanding how this thing works. You can’t get burned from phantom magical particles or something. You get burned by something exceedingly energetic, like err fire. Not by small particles in the air.

There is absolutely nothing to fear about this outside of Japan. I hope you realize the magnitudes involved here. “Higher than normal” means what, 10-100x? That’s still many orders of magnitude below any possible danger to humans. Because of the nuclear arms race, we have developed exceedingly sensitive detectors for this kind of stuff.

If one year, 5 people get killed by lightning and the next year, 10 people do, that’s “higher than normal”. Doesn’t mean everybody will get toasted by lightning overnight, now does it?

Now please, stop with the dramatic “WE’RE ALL IN DANGER” lines, everyone. This is grave… for the immediate area next to the plant. If things get worse, it could be bad for the entire province. But it will not affect anything more than Japan in any meaningful way. Eating a banana everyday will get you more radiation than that.

FF is right, even about the banana-thing actually…

Speaking on purely medical terms here, since I just finished my MD, the severe burns that people who have received excess amounts of radiation are extremely similar to the ones that people get after radiation treatment, except are more systemic. The burns occur because radiation causes death to quickly growing cells; ones in your skin, GI tract and bone marrow. This causes the upper layers of the skin layers/GI layers to slough off causing the “burn appearance”. In terms of your GI tract, because the upper layers of tissue are critical for absorbing nutrients, not having them there causes certain chemicals to cause the body to have nausea, GI upset and diarrhea.

For the majority of people, they will be fine. Most of the leaked radioactive content is I 131 which has a half-life of approx 8 days. In a few months the radioactive content will be negligible. There definitely will be an increase risk of cancer amongst the population closest to the nuclear plant but no where near the levels we saw in Chernobyl.

The real concern comes from release of plutonium which has a half-life over over 40 years and could cause permanent effects to the Japanese food chain. But, they haven’t detected this in any great extent.

As for people outside of the country, you have nothing at all to be concerned about. And this scare mongering with radiation leaks is a bit absurd…