101–110 of 127 posts
https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-Large/d...
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> ... which for Fukashima was apparently 150,000 To put it in perspective, the prediction for the number of climate refugees vary, but papers seem to put the number somewhere between 150 and 300 million by 2050.[1] That's about one Fukushima every five to eleven days , starting from now and continuing until 2050. Think about it. [1] https://orbi.uliege.be//bitstream/2268/136972/1/11-1188-mr7-... (Table 1, page 5) - D…
To put that into perspective, about 120,000 people are displaced every day in the middle east because of a mess ultimately created in the pursuit of oil interests. That's one Fukoshima every day . Apparently the US felt that hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, and democratic governments overthrown was an acceptable price for slightly cheaper oil. I fully expect that calculation to come out the same when c…
What I still don't understand is why the pressure regulators and over pressure valves on the house gas meters didn't kick in? Were the homes involved so old that the meter protections failed or weren't there in the first place? It seems that ultimately you've got to have failsafes at the homes themselves. Without such failsafes, what would stop a bad actor from purposely over pressurizing a residential branch?
Supposedly, old lines like these are low pressure lines to the house. Thus nobody has a pressure regulator in their home. It seems crazy today but these lines are antique, from the days when electrical wire was run by knob-and-tube.
The real determining factor is not age but whether the installer was lazy and hand tightened it all (which you can get away with at 1/2psi, but not much more).
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I'm curious: within which field are you doing this PhD? I could see you as a computer scientist, systems designer, political theorist, perhaps an economist or philosopher. Is any of your work available to read online?
I'm technically in neuroscience, neuroinformatics more specifically, but was raised by a political theorist. Unfortunately I have a bad habit of writing code rather than prose, and don't keep a blog or similar, so the first thing that I could point you to would be my thesis, which is still months away.
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I wish we could just separate technology and human factors like this. In reality, each system is designed to prevent neither technological malfunction nor miscommunication or errors in process. Unfortunately, programmers seem often to be isolated from this really complex part of engineering, so this interplay might not be appreciated properly.
Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things helped cure my technophilia, maybe even turning me into a humanist. http://a.co/d/dSsOfxJ Aha, looks like there's a new version (dated 2013).
I realise this is beside the point of the article, but gas distribution seems like an obsolete and dangerous technology to me. For cooking, induction, for heating, heat pumps.
Compared to heating oil, which is the other viable option in the Northeast US, natural gas is cheaper, generally more efficient, and largely idiot-proof. With heating oil, a big, very common problem is people not scheduling deliveries appropriately, so the tank runs dry, and sucks up sludge that has settled to the bottom, and then you have to do expensive maintenance to clean the system, bleed the lines, etc. Worse,…
What I still don't understand is why the pressure regulators and over pressure valves on the house gas meters didn't kick in? Were the homes involved so old that the meter protections failed or weren't there in the first place? It seems that ultimately you've got to have failsafes at the homes themselves. Without such failsafes, what would stop a bad actor from purposely over pressurizing a residential branch?
Those regulators work within a set range of input pressures, and need a certain delta to work properly. Over-pressure them severely and they will simply fail, and most such failures will lead to gas escaping from the regulator body. That is why you will usually find them outside of the premises they protect so they vent into the outdoors rather than into some enclosed space. As for your bad actor: what would he press…
On the gas meter on my house anyway, the underground pipe mates at a valve. It doesn't seem hard or particularly dangerous to shut that valve off, disconnect the meter, connect whatever, then open the valve again.
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Those regulators work within a set range of input pressures, and need a certain delta to work properly. Over-pressure them severely and they will simply fail, and most such failures will lead to gas escaping from the regulator body. That is why you will usually find them outside of the premises they protect so they vent into the outdoors rather than into some enclosed space. As for your bad actor: what would he press…
>What would he pressurize your lines with? An air compressor? He'd have to dig up the lines or disconnect them first and gas from the line would likely escape in quantities large enough to discourage such tricks. On the gas meter on my house anyway, the underground pipe mates at a valve. It doesn't seem hard or particularly dangerous to shut that valve off, disconnect the meter, connect whatever, then open the valve…
Anyway, if you want to destroy someone's house there are much quicker, less obvious and easier ways to do so.
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To put that into perspective, about 120,000 people are displaced every day in the middle east because of a mess ultimately created in the pursuit of oil interests. That's one Fukoshima every day . Apparently the US felt that hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, and democratic governments overthrown was an acceptable price for slightly cheaper oil. I fully expect that calculation to come out the same when c…
Do you have a source for that number? UNHCR lists 44,400 displacements per day worldwide in 2017 [0]. [0] http://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2017/
Since I can't find it anymore I'll say that my number is very likely wrong and your's is right.
Sadly can't edit my post anymore though.
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The usualy idea of the valves is for them to open before the overpressure exceeds their design capacity. A blow-out disk isn't going to fail to operate. My pressure-cooker has one. It's just a piece of material that will catastrophically open the vessel to the atmosphere before massive overpressurization.
Well...that's a very unfortunate example. Pressure cookers' blowout disks can get clogged by whatever you're cooking (beans specifically) and the whole lid blows out (embedding itself in the ceiling and painting the kitchen). Scary stuff.
Its design hasn't changed since 1977.
It's not a tube that a bean could get into. Maybe you're thinking of the vent pipe? When that gets clogged, the overpressure plug is what blows away to release all the pressure.