Wildfire threatening the power grid that supplies San Francisco • Hacker News Board

Re: Wildfire threatening the power grid that supplies San Francisco

#61

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 4:31 PM UTC

hga wrote: post #38

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the materials be released? The reactors operate near 1 Atmosphere. If they are switched off, the molten salt cools and solidifies. There could be a risk of contamination from the cooling loop, but such contamination might even be less than the normal radioactive fallout from the flues of coal plants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_charge

I've been trying to imagine how blowing one of these things up with shaped charges, or anything else, is worse than blowing up other things like industrial plants, gas stations, etc.

The radioactive fuel is a molten salt, so it will cool and solidify soon after dispersal. It is certainly not good, but is it really worse than say, a chemical plant?

The radioactive stuff won't remain airborne after the initial blast, so that means a predictable and small area to remediate.

The fuel dispersed in an explosion can be collected, since it will solidify, so it won't poison the water table.

While not perfectly safe (nothing is), the disaster contingencies seem fundamentally different and better than those from a PWR + solid nuke waste disposal site.

There would be many more of them, which is both good and bad for various cases.

Re: Wildfire threatening the power grid that supplies San Francisco

#62

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 4:36 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #58

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did he say about drinking fish shit? And the effluent of every other critter in the park?

I think that it has more to do with the idea that humans moving through that area would do much more damage (than the local animal population) if they were not discouraged in some way.

Rangers should discourage people from fouling the area, but the comparison made by the Ranger is nonsensical on a number of levels. Anyone who heard it might disregard it after recognizing how silly an argument it was.

Re: Wildfire threatening the power grid that supplies San Francisco

#63

Post by mapt » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 9:09 PM UTC

hkmurakami wrote: post #3

001sky wrote: post #2

For anyone wondering what the relationship between wildfires in Yosemite and San Francisco proper, its worth a small comment. California's Sierra Nevada range is a couple hours east of SF. These mountains include the highest points in the continental US. Trapping most of the water from the east-west jet stream. The sierras hold massive amounts of high-quality water, which runs out of the non-porous terrain of the hig…

I remember talking to one of the rangers at Yosemite, near one of the natural lakes that eventually supply water to SF. I remember him saying that he tells visitors who go answer nature's call at the lake to think twice, since they're going to be drinking this very water soon.

Urination is a relatively low-impact activity on a water supply. Defecation, on the other hand, tends to cause a decent variety of diarrheal illnesses unless the water treatment facility is quite good - something that may not be accurate for something designed for sterile snow runoff. The water here is not just being drunk, but going on fresh produce as well, so you can't rely on purely municipal filtering.

Re: Wildfire threatening the power grid that supplies San Francisco

#64

Post by mapt » Sun, Aug 25, 2013, 9:32 PM UTC

nknighthb wrote: post #40

bavcyc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SF water supply has some interesting politics: https://www.baycitizen.org/news/water/raise-rent-hetch-hetch...

Water is intensely political pretty much everywhere but rainforests, and at all levels of government. However, unless you're directly involved, you don't hear about it because it can't normally be used as a political football. Your opinion on any particular water dispute will have nothing to do with your political views or party affiliation, it's mostly a product of geographic location or industry, and no politician…

We're not quite Mad Max yet. Perhaps 80% of the country lives in an area where water is not scarce enough to prompt water table depletion or aqueduct building. "Water politics" in these areas mostly consist of bureaucratic squabbles regarding the minor expense of water treatment facilities & pipe-building, or soft-science environmental debates about erosion, fish, and effluents - things which can be reliably consigned to the higher end of Maslow's Pyramid.

About half of the remainder of the problem could be solved easily by ending this stupid obsession for English Country Manor lawns well outside a climate zone where they're viable, and prohibitions on all but drip irrigation for agriculture. These could be mostly accomplished without legislatorial nitpicking by simply making prices reflect scarcity, permanently. We seem to have an innate resistance, politically, to pricing water to reflect its infrastructural and depletion-replacement cost, to admitting that some mechanism needs to scale back use.

Some issues are simply not solveable, it's true - isolated water tables that have been changed by taprooted invasives are probably never going to revert to grassland, and need total cessation of irrigation activities to avoid desertification. These cases are relatively rare though.