randform

This post is for commemorating the Chernobyl disaster which happened 25 years ago.
Unfortunately since then other nuclear tragedies happened – most notable of course the Fukushima tragedy, where even today we may eventually still hear bad news.

The company Siemens, which initially thought about a cooperation in nuclear technology with Rosatom (according to the article Le départ de Siemens relance les spéculations sur le capital d’Areva by jdf.com, mentioned in this randform post ) seems – according to the agency reuters: “Siemens could exit Rosatom nuclear venture” – to think about changing their plans.

Here an article on a website which is sponsored by Siemens by Akira T. Tokuhiro who lists 14 points as an “Initial Look at Lessons Learned From Fukushima”.

Here a link to photos from Chernobyl and other sites of nuclear tragedies.

I decided to put newer drafts of the article “New economic schemes in games” (where among others the dangers of future nuclear power generation are outlined) into that blogpost. The newest version is from today.
There are also parts of the article at the Azimuth project. I plan to put more parts there.

The above counter is not a Geiger counter but a money counter in a game area in a shopping center in Japan.

This blog post is a comment on how fast the replacement of fossil and nuclear power with renewable power generation may happen.

In the article draft at the randform post “New economic schemes in games” it was illustrated by a quick calculation that alone solar power can in principle replace fossil and nuclear power. However apart from the technological feasibility a major obstacle is of course the economical feasibility.

There is a new study (277 pages 5.5. MByte) by the german ministry of economy with the title: “Vorraussetzungen einer optimalen Integration erneuerbarer Energien in das Stromversorgungssystem”
(I couldn’t find the link path of the study from the front webpage of the ministry…its seems to be a little hidden…)

This study displays how economical considerations play a role in Germanys development of renewable energies; from page 134 of the study:

“Die darauf aufbauende Analyse der Auswirkungen auf das Stromerzeugungssystem zeigt, dass die Auswirkungen eines EE-Anteils von bis zu 40% für den konventionellen Kraftwerkspark technisch realisierbar und wirtschaftlich vertretbar sind. Ab einem EE-Anteil von 40% sind ohne Veränderungen der rechtlichen und regulatorische Rahmenbedingungen sowie technischer Regelwerke zum einen erhebliche ökonomische Verwerfungen auf den Märkten zu erwarten. Zum anderen ist ein solcher EE-Ausbaupfad mit einer erheblichen Kosten- und Preissteigerung verbunden. So steigen bspw. die Kosten für Systemdienstleistungen und damit auch die Netznutzungsentgelte im Vergleich zur 30%-Variante deutlich. Zusammen mit der enormen Erhöhung der EEG-Umlage liegen die Strompreise für Haushalte im Jahr 2020 in der 50%- Variante rund 20% höher im Vergleich zur 30%-Variante. Die Mehrkosten die von den Verbrauchern im Jahr 2020 in der 50 %-Varianten gegenüber der 30 %-Variante zu tragen sind, belaufen sich auf rund 20 Mrd. €2009. Grundsätzlich ist aber in keiner der untersuchten EE- Ausbauvarianten die Versorgungssicherheit in Form von ausreichender installierter Kraftwerksleistung oder die Versorgungszuverlässigkeit in Form ausreichender Erbringung von Systemdienstleistungen bis 2020 gefährdet. “

Rough translation without guarantee:
The depending analysis of the effects on the electric-current-generation-systems displays that the implications of a 40% share of renewable energies [comment: for electricity generation until the year 2020] are fully realizable and economically justifyable for conventional powerplant configurations. Without a change in the juridicial and regulatory framings, as well as without a change in technical regulatory regimes there would be however above a 40% share considerable economical warpages. So for example the costs for system services as well as the costs for the usage of electric grids are clearly higher than for the 30% variant. The additional costs for consumers for the year 2020 for the 50% variant versus the 30% variant are about 20 billion Euros (2009). In principle however for all considered variants there is no danger for the security of energy supplies in form of installed power plant power or service reliability until 2020.

So according to this study making Germany get half of their electric energy from non-fossil and non-nuclear power by 2020 would have an additional cost of about:

20 billion Euros

As a comparision:

the bank HRE got sofar about 100 billion Euros in help and guarantees.

(According to Wikipedia of this sum 87 billion Euros are state money (?), Bloomberg sais in the article “Hypo Real Estate Receives Extension of Financial Aid (Update1)” that “the rescue package includes alone 52 billion euros in Soffin guarantees.”)

It currently looks as if this Hypo Real Estate bank has really no future (see e.g. the german article “Experten empfehlen Abwicklung der HRE”).

This was somewhat forseeable already two years ago and I wonder now and I wondered back then what this does imply for the german state obligations. May be this information is again hidden somewhere on the webpage of german ministry for economy and I just can’t find it.

->see also randform post About the “Concept for an integrated energy-research program for Germany”

The discussion about an eventual criticality accident in Fukushima which started in the comment section of the blog post about the Fukushima plant continued partially on Azimuth within this comment.

Last weekend there was a demonstration against nuclear power generation in Berlin, which had about 70.000 participants.
Images of the demonstration after the click.

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In the blogpost on the return of investments I proposed to use games for testing new economical scenarious. I currently try to make an article out of that.
In the draft I sofar have given an overview about games and roughly motivated why I think that it may be a good idea to introduce new economical schemes. In particular I talk about the limitations of this planet, design and in particular about something that I dubbed “recycling-run-away effect”.

Amongst others I also try to line out why I think that the nuclear waste problem may be a worse problem than the safety of reactors (see also the first post on Fukushima).

Comments are appreciated, here is the draft:
update (06072015) :
It currently looks as if an article format is rather not suited for the writings and findings made within the context of the game draft article. It is also still not clear wether this project will ever be finished and if in which form. You may though still find on and off some informations in this context, likethis blog post is an example.

update (06072011) : This blog post is now used as a referrer URL for the game scheme article, thus newer versions of the article and comments will be uploaded more or less regularily. Please note that this offer to our randform readers costs our private money. Since randform is currently purely financed by Tim Hoffmanns income as a math professor, we may eventually be forced to reduce or close this offer, depending on download rate, inflation, etc. Most of the content of the article is also spread on the Azimuth project like the section about the Game environment. The Azimuth updates are usually more current.

->version July 06, 2011

The most essential content article of the article was presented on July 1st at the open knowledge conference 2011 in Berlin:

Talk: “Testing new toy economies/political structures in MMOGs” at slideshare.net

older versions of the article:

->version May 25, 2011

->version april 26, 2011

-> New economical schemes in games, version march 25, 2011

The german Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit (GRS) (which is owned by the state of Germany to about one half ) has regularily updated information (in english) about the Fukushima plant and other plants at trouble at:
http://www.grs.de/en/news/information-updates-japanese-nuclear-power-plants

A german version is at
http://www.grs.de/informationen-zur-lage-den-japanischen-kernkraftwerken-fukushima-onagawa-und-tokai

The report is by order of the german ministry for the environment.

The japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology has a japanese website on the Readings at Monitoring Post out of 20 Km Zone of Fukushima Dai-ichi NPP at:
http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1303726.htm

and of Readings of environmental radioactivity level by prefecture at:
http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1303723.htm

A partial translation of the pdf’s is possible via google translate
update 19.3.2011: there are now also english pdf’s of the measurements

update 20.3.2011: The above mentioned grs has also a website about the potential dangers of radiation however the old one, which is still in the Google cache was currently a bit more informative. There they say as a “rule of thumb” that

Als Faustregel gilt, dass die Aufnahme von etwa 80 000 Bq Cs-137 bei Erwachsenen einer Strahlenexposition von etwa 1 mSv entspricht.

translation without guarantee: 80 000 Bq of Cs-137 for an adult equates to about 1 mSv.

further translations:
The limit of import into Germany for caesium is 600 Bq/kg. For milk, milkproducts and kids nutrition is 370 Bq/kg. For the beginning of May 1986 (shortly after Chernobyl) the Commission for radiation safety recommended to eat and drink only milk with less than 500 Bq/l of Iodine 131 and green vegetables with less then 250 Bq/kg of Iodine 131 .

On sunday the 7 th fleet reported:

The U.S. 7th Fleet has temporarily repositioned its ships and aircraft away from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant after detecting low level contamination in the air and on its aircraft operating in the area.

The source of this airborne radioactivity is a radioactive plume released from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant. For perspective, the maximum potential radiation dose received by any ship’s force personnel aboard the ship when it passed through the area was less than the radiation exposure received from about one month of exposure to natural background radiation from sources such as rocks, soil, and the sun.

The ship was operating at sea about 100 miles northeast of the power plant at the time.

24*30 = 720

So this means the boat received a 720 fold radiation at a distance of about 160 kms of the troubled Fukushima nuclear plant from what’s supposed to be normal.

Even if one assumes that the density of such a plume disperses quadratically one would have 720*(160^2/270^2) = approx. 250 times higher dose then normal, or in other words in one hour one would perceive about a third of a months radiation dose above normal being in such a plume at a distance of 270 kms (which is the approximate distance between Fukushima and Tokyo). Luckily the ship could get out fast of the hazardous zone.

Unfortunately the possibilities to alter weather are very small. In fact there were experiments in Abu Dhabi and it seems China is also doing a lot of research in that direction, seen critical by some others. The latest research item in cloud seeding seems to have been laser shots into the air over the sky of Berlin (see also this article ).

The information about what’s really going on at the plant is fuzzy. It is understandable that some people would like to avoid a panic and thus would not make all information available to a broad uninformed public, who might draw false conclusions. But some people would like to appease people by making unscientific claims about certain likelyhoods (while at the same time claiming that nothing can be measured!). But one should think about how such an approach may impair credibility…this holds especially true for some certain news agencies, who’s reports are less based on facts but on biased commentaries disguised as “facts”.

So here a bit of information taken together:
An interactive map from the New York times of the Fukushima plant with a BWR design which (if I understood correctly) is by General Electric. An illustration by Hitachi of the concrete Fukushima plant seems to be in this pdf. The design looks a bit differently than the General electrics one…
A rather matter of fact and informative blog post about what happened at Fukushima by what seems to be a pro-nuclear writer (at least he cites pro-nuclear sources). What one got to hear sofar is that the reactor vessels and the containment of the troubled plants are still intact.

Our thoughts are with the japanese people and their grief.

Moreover we hope that the brave workers at the Fukushima power plants will succeed with their plans to avoid the worst. We hope that it will be possible to supply more and better equipment (see e.g. Kyodo news about the 5 fire pumps) to the dangerous Fukushima area and that with international help the results of the earthquake, Tsunami and nuclear disaster can be mitigated and that the worst possible nuclear scenarios won’t happen at Fukushima.

update 16.3.2011: I forgot to include a link to the

->overview on nuclear energy on randform

In this overview I actually saw the probability of a terrible accident with currently exisiting reactors as rather small. So in this overview I focused on problems with future types of nuclear energy generation (which include even more dangerous nuclear technology) and with the waste problem. I am asking myself now if I should give nuclear energy even more critical scrutiny.

our little postbox in munich two years ago

The last days there had been a big public discussion in Germany about scientific publishing. The reason for that discussion was that the former german minister for defense Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had included texts into his Ph. D. thesis, which were not by himself, but which were on the other hand not appropriately marked as a citation. The number of these plagiarized texts in his dissertation was so big that this “secretely pasting in” of texts by other authors had to be called systematic. As of march first, 2011 the site GuttenPlag had found plagiarized texts on 324 of 393 pages of his dissertation. After a longer process which included strong protests especially from the academic community, which included the revocation of his degree and a declaration of his doctoral advisor Peter Häberle Mr. Guttenberg finally resigned from his post as a minister for defense. Among others the declaration of his doctoral advisor Peter Häberle contained the sentence:

Die in der Promotionsschrift von Herrn zu Guttenberg entdeckten, mir unvorstellbaren Mängel sind schwerwiegend und nicht akzeptabel.

(translation without guarantee: The – to me unexplicable – found shortcomings in Mr. zu Guttenbergs dissertation are severe and not acceptable.)

The investigations into this case haven’t been finished, in particular the University of Bayreuth (which was in charge for the thesis) seems still to be investigating and e.g. checking wether the plagiarism was intentional fraud. There seems also to be the possibility of juridicial consequences (see e.g. here and here.)

In short the damage that had been done with this affair is quite big and thus a sensible question is “how could that happen and how could one prevent further cases like this?”

I hope that the future will bring more clearness into the case and will give an answer to the first question. Whatever the result will be it is already clear by now, that something went utterly wrong in how the dissertation was made and in how it was supervised.

In the randform post Alexandre Grothendieck writes a letter I had promised to speak about the proposal of a “closed pre-preprint section for the arxive for timestamping works” i.e. a kind of “safe” for work in progress. I think that such a section in an open access preprint archive could in particular be useful in the supervision process of a doctoral thesis and thus eventually help preventing similar cases as the above. It would also have other benefits. Let’s explain this.

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Unfortunately I am again without my laptop. This time it seemed to me that the hard disk was anffected – just in case you wonder about the retarded blogging.

In a randform comment section there is currently a little discussion about parenting, Amy Chua, education and self directed learning. This goes together with something which Tim called a “crazy plan”. That is he is currently voluntarily forcing himself to produce one music track per day for a whole month!

-> Tims tracks

Just a little supplement to the last post. It may be interesting to think about the following:

Imagine there are three people on a boat being in an emergency situation. One person has lost all his food, the other two still have all their food. The two who still have their food are in a quarrel about which route to take. Donating a quarter of the food would impair your strength and power to a great amount. Regardless which of the two proposed routes one takes – for either route it is assumed that by donating one half of your food you could in principle survive, but only if everything goes all right.

Imagine the same situation but instead of two quarreling competitors with food you have just one person with food.

Do you think the actions taken with regard to sharing food would be the same in both cases?