Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Plainly Difficult" channel.

Thanks for the compilation. I'm locked up in coronavirus prison. Even though I had seen these when they first came out, it was enjoyable watching all of them a second time.
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Good heavens. Radiological leukemia is nearly 100% fatal, especially with that poor worker's long time of exposure. India is just not a safe place for nuclear material. Rules are followed more in the breath than by the letter. The fact that they and Pakistan have nuclear weapons is really quite scary.
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@mavenmanion And neither are you. I rather doubt you have the education in climate science I do yet you're willing to rant and rave about climate change. Enjoy your dark life. It will probably last longer than mine, but it will seem way longer.
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@Zoomer30 A total of 55 people died in two major accidents involving the Titan. The first, and bar worst, was in 1965 when the Titan was first being placed in service in Arkansas. A welder's torch set off fumes from hydraulic fluid being transferred to the missile in violation of safety rules written to prevent exactly this kind of accident. One crewman died in an accident in the Rock, Kanas when am oxidizer transfer line ruptured and created a toxic orange cloud. The third, also cost one life, was the Damascus accident. It was yet another violation of safety rules rather than a general fault with the Titan family. Set this against a background of 368 missiles deployed at 54 missile sites from 1961 to 1987. After retirement from military service, LGM-25C Titan II missiles were used in 108 launches of satellites as well as the Gemini manned orbital missions, all with a perfect safety record. They remained in service as long as they did because no other US missile in inventory had the ability to lift the large MIRV warheads until the long delayed and overbudget MX "Peacekeeper" finally started coming online in the mid-80'. Obsolete and dangerous? Considering the job it had to do, it had an amazing record. Replacing it was a major engineering and technological development that only highlighted how well the technology of the 60's was made to work for 25 years, and for another 20 years carrying increasingly heavy payloads into space. While any loss of life is lamented, the Titan was probably the single major weapons system that prevented the world ending up in an all out nuclear war.
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Very cool and, yes, I'd love seeing more space videos, especially those early years, with all their technical challenges and human cost. I grew up during the whole space age, and I well remember all the those nail biting US and Soviet missions.
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@chrisplunkett2814 As I wrote, " HF radios on frequencies somewhat higher than AM commercial frequencies of today", not that they were higher than later VHF aviation frequencies. HF radio was used almost exclusively for comms in the Keys, firstly because it was good training for using HF radios for comms in real operations and secondly because the distances involved demanded longer range radios than the VHF radios of the day. VHF radios were used around airbases but otherwise it was generally HF radios.
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@PlainlyDifficult OTOH, I'm not unsubscribing, so it's not all bad news.
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All of us taking our geology coursework at colleges in the Los Angeles area would visit the Baldwin Hills site at least once and, in my case, several times, since we were part of the manpower doing a foot by foot inspection of the failure site and surrounding earthworks. We discovered small and apparently insignificant micro faults that crisscrossed the face of the dame site. The existing ravine was probably there because rainwater over many thousands of years was using microfaults to erode the toe of the ravine away from the surrounding surface. Los Angeles, and really most of California, is laced with these kinds of faults, and the vast majority just sit there and don't cause any problems. The difficulty for geologists is accurately predicting which ones may cause problems. It's just one of the risks we have to accept if there's going to be enough water to serve 10 million or so people.
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@tylercafe1260 I counted three sentences where you didn't use cursing or profanity. Why do you do things like this? Rather than show how smart and empathetic you are, it shows your lack of writing skills and limited vocabulary. It's really kind of disgusting.
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Same with people from Yugoslavia.
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@absalomdraconis I don't know for sure since Japanese census records I can find online only go back to 1964, and the first section of the plant was built in 1956. The plant had several additions, even as the population around the plant continued to grow. The section of the plant involved in the accident was constructed in 1988. It was considered a reasonably safe activity because the uranium oxide was dissolved in dissolution tanks, and that prevented criticality. Three years previous to the accident, an unauthorized change to the use of stainless steel buckets instead of the tanks to speed up fuel production was the cause of this accident. After some large fines and damages paid to the families of the two dead employees, the injured workers, and surrounding community, the dissolution tank method was reinstituted and new safety measures were put in place. The plant continues to operate, although at a much reduced production, since many of Japan's reactors were taken offline after the Fukushima accident.
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There were already atomic artillery rounds and tactical nuclear missiles available or in the late stage of development. They could be used to actually target enemy concentrations without having to hope the enemy would congregate around your nuclear bomb/chicken coop. This seems like the kind of thing developed in some defense establishment where the employees had no idea what was already available or on the drawing board for the army.
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One result of the disaster is firefighters now don't attempt to directly fight fires in in plants with explosive materials. They withdraw and set up a defensive perimeter at least twice the radius where an explosion could cause significant damage. Firefighting at the plant would only resume once experts arrive on scene to assess the situation and draw up a fire fighting plan.
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I used to live not far from Santa Susana in the 70's. In addition to dodgy nuke plants, it was the home to all kinds of weird cults, from Charles Manson to Krishna Venta. There was a movie ranch called Corriganville with hundreds of western movie sets. Many western moves and TC series in the 50's and 60's were filmed there with Rin Tin Tin being the most famous TV series and Gunfight at the OK Corral probably being the most famous movie. The more populated western half of Santa Susana voted in 1969 to merge with the city of Simi Valley while the eastern area, including the remnants of the nuke plants, remain sparsely populated. There are still some rocket motor tests being carried out in some deep canyons near the site of the Field Laboratory, and that has been the site of some pretty spectacular explosions. I was creeped out by the whole feeling of the area and left by 1970. Simi Valley is now a sprawling LA suburb of 125,000 and contains the Ronald Reagan Library.
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No, it wasn't, but your welcome to be ignorant if you chose.
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@johnandrews586 Do you have a link to that data? Considering I'm old enough to be your father if you're less than about fifty, I'm a little doubtful about that "fact" According to the the Federal Reserve Bank, average hours worked over the pas ten years have been just about 34 hours. Average in 1988 was 42.4 hours.
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This is a good example of what can happen when what was essentially a rubble dam was built and grew like Topsy in an area subject to prolonged torrential rainfall. To make matters worse, it was a dam too small for federal inspection, and the state of Georgia had no dam safety program for state jurisdiction dams. One of the positive things that happened as a result of the disaster is Georgia established a dam safety program in 1978.
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Interesting video. I'm quite late, but It really depends on the type of combat proposed. If it was pistols at 20 paces, I'd probably take that since i can hold my own against most pistol shooters. If it was swords and armor, I'd probably decline the honour.
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Silently Sceptical This episode was fine, just different. I just prefer his somewhat more excited sounding, pre-Baby Plainly narration. :-)
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The whole history of North Korean infiltration into the south would make a good episode.
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It seems unlikely that all nine of them were in one tent. What happened to the rest of the tents?
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@jwenting Possibly, but I wasn't answering that contention, only that the plant was there first and the town grew up around it. However, the population of Tokai in 1995, four years before the accident, was 32,727, compared to 37,885 in 2015. It obviously was nearly as large then as it is today. Continuing to guess doesn't help your case.
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