tug boats use tires a bumpers.
oil tankers use other boats as bumpers.

The thing with looking at the danger of nuclear power is you have to make a more complicated comparison. It's not just nuclear power or "safe."

For fossil fuels you have to consider every:

* Oil spill, Oil Rig Fire, other fossil fuel related disasters (tanker truck fires, gas station fires, CO poisoning in houses, etc.) Recall for instance, in New Orleans during the flood the contents of refinery storage tanks were spread all over the city, and the Deep Water Horizons disaster that killed more people than Fukishima and caused fantastic amounts of ecological damage.

* The broad diffuse pollution of fossil fuel power stations and refineries (including particulates, global warming from C02, other heavy metals and nastiness released). This is released not only from power stations, but every tailpipe of the millions of cars in the world.

* The damage caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground. Drilling, fracking, strip mining for coal, and the nastiness released from this.

* Wars. (ie. fossil fuels are running out, but we got enough fissile material to last a long, long time--not that there couldn't be wars over this too (lots of it is in unstable parts of Africa)).

In short, fossil fuels do a huge amount of damage, it's just not as acute and widely reported as when something goes wrong with nuclear, and doesn't carry the same, often irrational, fear that the media loves so much. For instance, some area of land infused with heavy metals is just as unlivable as an area of land infused with radioactive substances, but one we accept as normal pollution, and the other is worldwide, front page news.

The overall comparison is very complicated. My inclination is to think nuclear is better, but that's difficult because it involves mostly *potential* problems, not actual quantifiable problems as with fossil fuels. There will probably never be a good study comparing the two given how much irrational fear and corporate interest is involved.

Wind, solar, and geothermal are very nice and should always be part of the equation, but it's pretty well accepted that it can't actually come near to replacing fossil fuels or nuclear in terms of energy output at any cost.

>> ^marinara:

tanks (err apc's and armored tanker trucks) are the one thing we haven't outsourced to china.


Yet.

tanks (err apc's and armored tanker trucks) are the one thing we haven't outsourced to china.

I count 99 Bradley M2-type vehicles and 12 M977 HEMTT-type fuel tanker vehicles in the video. My guess is that there are at least an additional 20% that had already passed before the person started recording the video.

The $5.5-billion Enbridge pipeline project is all about sending Alberta bitumen in huge oil tankers to China. Beijing’s own state enterprises are among the project’s major backers, and Beijing has been buying up Alberta’s oilpatch at such a dizzying pace lately it’s hard to keep up. In the spring of 2010, China’s state-owned Sinopec Corp. took a $4.65-billion piece of Syncrude. Then the China Investment Corporation, which is run by the Chinese Communist Party, took possession of a $1.25-billon share of Penn West Petroleum. Last summer, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation gobbled up Opti Canada for $2.34 billion. And so on.

Then, last month, Sinopec spent $2.2-billion to take over Daylight Energy Ltd., and last week, Petro-China, with the final push of $1.9 billion, became the owner and manager of the MacKay River oilsands project. This is what Ottawa doesn’t want you noticing.

----

It turns out that two can play this sort of game. B.C.’s environmentalists are now making great sport of it, pointing out that Ottawa’s “ethical oil” branding exercise was begun by Conservative party gadfly Ezra Levant, who was succeeded at the Ethical Oil institute by none other than the otherwise intelligent Alykhan Velshi, who parked himself there between his term with Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and his new job in Stephen Harper’s office. Bonus points: Ethical Oil dial-a-quote Kathryn Marshall is married to Hamish Marshall, Harper’s former strategic planning manager.

While it’s all good fun to play Spot the Freemason, something very serious is going on here. Last summer, John Bruk, the Asia Pacific Foundation’s founding president, warned that Ottawa was ignoring the rapid emergence of Chinese government interests “in sheep’s clothing” taking over Canada’s natural resource industries. Bruk told B.C. Business magazine: “Are we jeopardizing prosperity for our children and grandchildren while putting at risk our economic independence? In my view, this is exactly what is happening.”

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/story_print.html?id=5981230&sponsor

>> ^garmachi:

>> ^packo:
there was a good car thriller... by lucas?/spielberg?... can't remember its name though
basically 1 guy driving, and this dirty old tanker truck chasing him in the desert

Duel.


Duel was one of my Dad's favorite movies.

>> ^packo:

there was a good car thriller... by lucas?/spielberg?... can't remember its name though
basically 1 guy driving, and this dirty old tanker truck chasing him in the desert


Duel.

there was a good car thriller... by lucas?/spielberg?... can't remember its name though
basically 1 guy driving, and this dirty old tanker truck chasing him in the desert

Sanitation issues

Currently, human waste is collected daily from thousands of septic tanks across the city and driven by tankers to the city's only sewage treatment plant at Al-Awir. Dubai's rapid growth means that it is stretching its limited sewage treatment infrastructure to its limits. Because of the long queues and delays, some tanker drivers resort to illegally dumping the effluent into storm drains or behind dunes in the desert. Sewage dumped into storm drains flows directly into the Persian Gulf, near the city's prime swimming beaches. Doctors have warned that tourists using the beaches run the risk of contracting serious illnesses like typhoid and hepatitis.

source:wiki/Dubai


somebody needs to make some carbon nano poop tubes or something

Very little. It was never built with that infrastructure originally. The older villas/buildings have cesspits built underneath with an access drain nearby. When it's full (which takes a long time!) you call up the municipality and they send one of these tankers (affectionately called "honey carts") to empty your cesspit.

Newer developments will have sewers and they will try and retrofit the infrastructure where they can. But yeah, it's a serious problem in Dubai right now.
>> ^EMPIRE:

they don't have sewers in dubai? wtf?
I hope at least the waste is somehow being used for energy production? you know, gas conversion and what not (I actually have no idea if human waste can be used for that).

House fires can reach pretty insane temperatures, I don't see why its so unbelievable that a building full of paper might also produce these temperatures.

You don't need the same heat as a tanker with 9000 gallons of fuel. That bridge collapsed in minutes, WT7 collapsed after 7 hours of fire...

As for one column failing...well its the straw that breaks the camels back. You'd expect multiple redundancy, but I imagine the trouble with building huge skyscrapers is the more load bearing structure you put in the more weight the structure beneath that has to hold. It doesn't really surprise me that it wouldn't take many things going wrong for gravity to have its way.

As for the fact the building went down like a controlled demolition...why is that surprising. If you want to bring down a building cleanly and efficiently with minimum explosives you look for the card that holds the rest of the house up. The fire did that job as well as any demo expert, it poked and prodded every single Jenga block in that building, it weakened every support and warped the whole structure and if you end up with just one Atlas of a crossbeam holding more than its fair share of weight and a fire goes through the building testing every single one then ya, its the one holding all the weight thats gonna fail.

Wow theorycraftin is ez.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

I think the main point of this video, which wasn't explained very clearly, is that the water resources would've been stretched to the max. Fighting so many fires in such a large area at the end of Manhattan could potentially have made the building's sprinkler/standpipe system practically worthless. I'm surprised they didn't stress that point. But I think that's what they mean by saying that no building like that ever burned "uncontrollably". That's what makes it a unique situation.
I'm not sure how old building seven was but I used to be a project manager for a major construction firm in NYC. And I can tell you that the fireproofing regs have changed a lot over the years. Not to mention, NYC's department of buildings is huge, and there's not a lot of checks and balances. If you know what you're doing, you can get an examiner to ignore just about anything. And people either make mistakes, or intentionally bypass the building code all the time. Especially the big companies who build the big buildings. The bigger and older your company is, the more you can get away with.
That's the first time I've ever heard of/seen that penthouse footage as well. I'm not an engineer but I think that was pretty compelling.


http://www.dykon-blasting.com/faqs.htm#implode
In a controlled demolition, the interior structures are removed first, in order to make the building fall inward. This video frames this fact as being against the theory of controlled demolition. How misleading.

Also this video compares a tanker truck fire to an office fire. Still need for someone to explain how a burning stack of coffee filters generates the same heat as a truck filled with 9000 gallons of fuel.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'car, crash, police, truck, people, lucky, skidding, fail, trailer, tanker' to 'car, crash, police, truck, semi, lucky, skid, fail, trailer, tanker, jack knife' - edited by BoneRemake

link is dead. Here is a new one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laGa_xGbRK8
also heli drops are nothing. Maybe 500 gallons at most. The real fun ones are when Tankers drop fire retardant. You hit the deck on those or you lose your head. It also stains everything and doesn't come out. Trust me.