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1,570 thoughts on “Nuclear Nightmare”

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  • Ben Franklin -Machine Gun Preacher (unleaded version)

    Fred;

    “They need replacing every few years as well and they are not cheap, thousands of pounds.”

    Indeed. I was looking at a used electric truck with a missing bank requiring 10 batteries. If you take care of them, they might last 10 years for the !200 dollar cost.

    That’s something we haven’t discussed….storage efficiencies. Batt tech is way behind the curve.

  • crab

    “a charged battery is like a bomb that will explode if short circuited”
    They need replacing every few years as well and they are not cheap, thousands of pounds.

    Depends. Legacy Lion batteries actually burst into flames when they are undercharged or too old, so they try to shut down in that event.
    LiPos can be similar but if within safe charging levels can be punctured safely with no reaction.
    NiMhs are rather safe, if short circuited the potentially exploding thing will be material doing the short circuiting – vapourising.
    If kept within conservative charging range, NiMhs can also last pretty much indefinetly, but you might need a a couple of hundred kilos of them to provide useful range used like that.

    I dont expect there are many reports of exploding car batteries, expect there to be less in relation to exploding petrol tanks.

    Battery technology is improving steadily too, with many improvements in the works.

    Domestically by the way, cheap long life Nimh rechargeables are available now which eclipse the performance of disposables. Expensive brands like ‘eneloop’ are cheap and serviceable versions just declare “precharged” on the packet. (This means they hold charge unlike historical NiMhs)

  • crab

    I probably shouldn’t go there but… boats have the capacity for built in long lasting ballast batteries, and sail sized wind turbines, electric motors, small backup generators. Seems impractical to have a wind turbine powered boat, because it is imagined the boat will be too swayed, but torque doesn’t act on the turbines as expected. You can have slightly slower but diesel free shipping with big wind turbines and batteries on boats…

  • English Knight

    WTC7 – ONE HUNDRED YARDS LONG, fell UNIFORMLY IN FREE FALL along its ENTIRE 100 YARD LENGTH. WTF, unless the steel columns were soluble in kedem first ! (sewage satanyahu was israeli PM then with Ehud Borg as the mastermind)

  • Clark

    Good one Dave Lawton. Check out the others; you can also do Italics, Bold (“b” works as well “strong”) and this one (which they don’t tell you about) with “strike”.

    You can make clickable links, too, but I don’t because it’s polite to show people where your link is pointing at, and it’s easy to mess it up and then the link won’t work.

  • karel

    Halibabacus (la vita in culo)

    I have noticed that you can no longer control your emotions. How about your bowels and bladder? Perhaps it is time to have a delicious pizza delivered to your home that can shorten any further suffering of your tortured mind. Would you please send me your address via Craig. He will certainly show some understanding and be helpful. Please hurry up as we have five other, rather urgent cases, to be dispatched during next week.

  • Fred

    “Battery technology is improving steadily too, with many improvements in the works. ”

    But by the time they’ve mined the materials in Canada, taken them on an oil burning ship to Holland to be made into batteries, taken them on an oil burning ship to Japan to be put in cars which are shipped on an oil burning ship to Britain where they will be charged with electricity produced at a coal burning power station one has to wonder just how green they are.

  • Ben Franklin -Machine Gun Preacher (unleaded version)

    ‘But by the time they’ve mined the materials in Canada”

    It seems there is a dichotomy going on here. WTF is it with the attitude, ‘batteries are fine’?

  • Fred

    “I probably shouldn’t go there but… boats have the capacity for built in long lasting ballast batteries, and sail sized wind turbines, electric motors, small backup generators. Seems impractical to have a wind turbine powered boat, because it is imagined the boat will be too swayed, but torque doesn’t act on the turbines as expected. You can have slightly slower but diesel free shipping with big wind turbines and batteries on boats…”

    I know how a sailing boat works, they have a big sail and the wind pushes the boat along from behind.

    If you have a turbine then as the boat goes faster then the power produced will decrease rapidly. go into the wind and you are pushing against it’s force.

    It’s been tried with vertical axis but without much success.

  • Fred

    “It seems there is a dichotomy going on here. WTF is it with the attitude, ‘batteries are fine’?”

    They have their uses, they’re not going to save the planet.

    Even if we could survive without oil for power we couldn’t survive without the by products.

  • crab

    This is an impossible arrangement, batteries are criticised because they cost proposedly similar materials and activities as fossil combustion systems, and if the creation work is done by fossil combustion systems, we may as well just we have made more of those – except we know they are dirtier and more damaging. Else you wouldnt even argue that their involvement in creation of greener tech, is a bad thing.

    Almost everything can be redesigned as electrically based and it will be alot more efficient.

    Fred i am also confident you are wrong ;p about the dynamics of a wind turbine on a boat. Its very different from sailing. You can readily press into the wind and turbine power will paradoxically increase. The vector of resisting pressure on a wind turbine is not in front it, it is aerodynamic force on the blades circulating the turbines axel, tilting the boat a little if resisted, its much less force than sails can produce to push boats over.

    If you hold a large windmill into the wind, you are not blown backwards by it as you would if was just a board of material. You experience the torque required for power generation (or a sticky axel) as moment of rotation quite well held by the length of the lever. The boats drag in the water far out weights what a turbine or even most configurations of a sail could contribute.

    I mixed up some units earlier Tera and Giga should have been giga and mega, anyway:
    The biggest US nuke power station is rated 4 Gigawatts. UK electricity consumption is rated around 40 Gigawatts ~ 60 Gigawatt peak.
    Where would we would like to place 5 – 10 big nuke processing plants around the UK, in return for not using half of available onshore and offshore wind turbine sites?

  • Jemand - Evolutionary Religion 101

    Wayyyy off topic, but a continuation of a previous comment …

    I followed Mary’s link to a video of a woman who described herself as a writer about food. She goes on to equate food with love, god with love, therefore food with god. And she throws in the holocaust for good measure seemingly because Jewish meals wouldn’t be complete without a dash of wholesale persecution. The thought that immediately springs to mind is WTF?

    Georgie Tarn –
    1. “When you think Jewish, you think food.” (Not me)
    2. “.. We’ve gone through the holocaust and .. we are still making those foods and ..” (Apparently she also went through the holocaust because other people did, and Jewish recipes are holocaust survivors too)
    3. “Every time I sit down to Friday night dinner, I think of those people who laid down their lives for their religion .. Now I’ve passed this on to my daughter ..” (Warning – avoid Friday night dinners at this woman’s house.. unless you like being depressed in a celebratory kind of way)

    Food = Love = God; Friday nights is Holocaust night –
    http://www.4thought.tv/themes/does-god-really-care-what-we-eat/georgie-tarn?autoplay=true

    BUT then I found this video, on the same page, of an Orthodox Jewish fellow who made Georgie Tarn look like the imbecile that she surely is. It’s interesting to observe that many (ultra) Orthodox Jews are among the most vocal critics of Zionism, the State of Israel and the persecution of Palestinians.

    A peace-loving man’s thoughts about Zionism –
    http://www.4thought.tv/themes/are-jews-still-persecuted-in-britain-today/ahron-cohen

    . . . .
    Some related stuff –

    “Everything you need for a Perfect Princess lifestyle” – Georgie Tarns website
    http://thejewishprincess.com/blog3/?p=338

    Which links to …

    “The Holocaust Survivor Cookbook” – this is not a joke!
    http://survivorcookbook.org/

    Frank Zappa wants a Jewish Princess and he’s very specific –
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fql3Nm9Q414

  • Villager

    Good post Jemand to start the morning with–thank you. Good blend of much-needed weekend relief and profundity. God bless Aaron Cohen.

  • Jay

    Energy consumption is proportional to Usury.(Interest based money lending)

    My interest bill €100,000.00

    There for I have to run around for 10 years doing stuff (consuming energy)

    We have never beem more mechanised yet we all work.

    Give me cake baking and tree planting any day.

    Security eh. Warm enough.

  • Mary

    I was asked to sign this petition asking the new chairman of the Charity Commission to remove the JNF’s charitable status.
    http://coordin8.org.uk/app/index.php/generic/ind/ind60

    I declined seeing no point and little chance of success. Shawcross who replaced Dame Suzy Leather, is a board member of the Anglo-Israel Society and has affiliations to the Henry Jackson Society who support the Zionist Israel concept.

    ‘From 1997 to 2003 he was a member of the BBC World Service Advisory Council. In 2008 he became a Patron of the Wiener Library and in 2011 he joined the board of the Anglo-Israel Society and was appointed to the board of the Henry Jackson Society.’
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shawcross

    The JNF itself Motto ‘Supporting Israel for Life’
    Spending >£10million
    http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/CharityWithPartB.aspx?RegisteredCharityNumber=225910&SubsidiaryNumber=0

    There is also a small sister charity with some of the same trustees, the JNF Educational Trust which is not required to produce accounts.
    http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/CharityWithoutPartB.aspx?RegisteredCharityNumber=290267&SubsidiaryNumber=0

    Shawcross’s third wife is Olga Polizzi, Forte’s daughter. He counts Richard Perle amongst his friends. Enough said.

    William the conqueror
    As a radical young writer, he took on the US establishment over Vietnam. Now he counts American hawks as friends and has been appointed biographer to the Queen Mother. What will he do with the House of Windsor’s secrets?
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jul/13/monarchy.biography

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/my-secret-life-olga-polizzi-designer–hotelier-806739.html

  • james c

    Please explain where we will get our energy from if we do not replace the old nuclear power stations.

  • Clark

    Mary, I can’t play YouTube on the system I’m currently using; did you just link to Zappa’s Jewish Princess? Ha! That’s filthy! But not as filthy as Dinah Moe Humm, which would have been on-topic. You’ve linked to the wrong Frank Zappa track, Mary; something has to be done about it, and I know just the man – where’s Habbabkuk?!?

  • Fred

    “Give me cake baking and tree planting any day.”

    It’s the sensible solution to the problem. For millions of years mankind had a system which was sustainable and worked. Just go back to it or rather go forward to it. Man just can’t make a solar energy collector and storer more efficient than a tree. Instead of producing solar panels, putting up windmills and developing new batteries just plant trees. Simple.

    Not only is wood a good source of fuel but you can make things with it as well.

    The down side is that a lot of very rich people won’t get even richer but then that has been the real problem all along. Was a time greed was seen as a sin but somewhere along the line it got changed into a virtue.

  • Mary

    ‘Such coarse language would never be countenanced by someone so virtuous.’

    Jemand You would be surprised how much I f and blind audibly! I am not at all virtuous. Just because I kept being referred to as ‘St’ by UKnowWho it ain’t necessarily so! 😉

    ~~~
    The Cypriot President and the party leaders are off to Brussels for corrective treatment, ie a sharp blow to their heads with the big stick.
    ~~~
    Obomber concudes his trip to the ME which turned out to be just a tourist trip ending at Petra. God knows how much fossil fuel was consumed by Air Force One transporting him and his vast entourage and cargo planes conveying the limos from Washington to Tel Aviv.

    I noticed that King Abdullah, who is somewhat vertically challenged, mounted a box behind the lectern so that he appeared to be on the same level as Obomber at a press conference.
    ~~~~
    Pope Francis visits old Benedict at Castle Gandolfo to give a progress report and to get new instructions.
    Q Was Gandalf in the Hobbit and The Lords of the Rings named after the Papal residence?
    ~~~
    There was a big farewell to the old Television Centre last night by ex DG Michael Grade and all the old has-beens like Forsyth and Parkie. It was quite funny that throughout there was no mention of Savile as I said earlier! I saw David Mitchell there in the line up (of Craig’s earlier post on the dramatization of his book) and his new wife Victoria Cohen who was one of the presenters. How incestuous the BBC is. I suppose they all got appearance fees too and limo transport.
    ~~~

    Wogan. http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-1711915/How-rich-Terry-Wogan.html
    …his first job was as a bank clerk with the Royal Bank of Ireland handling wads of cash and coins. That was 50 years ago, when Sir Terry routinely lugged bag loads of banknotes and coins in a bus across Dublin to the bank’s headquarters. Today he would struggle to carry his own vast stash, which reports suggest is now worth well over £20m. !!

  • N_

    So will the gas run out first, or will a 2nd or 3rd ratings downgrade trigger a flight of capital and the collapse of banks, which will lead to power cuts anyway. Same difference.

    Those with positive money left in their bank accounts who don’t draw some out and keep a few thousand under their mattress must be mad!

    And it’s not something that people should go ‘wait and see’ about. People should get off their armchairs from in front of the TV news about Cyprus, go down their bank as soon as possible, and draw money out in cash.

    @Mary – mortgage guarantee scheme for second home buyers! Talk about the Titanic!!

  • guano

    I know a lady who decided to escape from here and settle in Cyprus. Fukushima. The best made plans of mice and men ….
    Politicians are like half-drowned creatures clinging onto the piece of driftwood of their best idea.

    For this reason I try to anchor my mind on my religion. Maybe the anchor’s chain has to be a long one not to pull you down under the tide. I remembered Milton’s On his blindness when I woke up this morning.

    ‘And that one talent which is death to hide’ refers to the Gospel parable of the servants who were left gold talents to invest, i.e. what did they do with their knowledge after they had received the understanding of Islam.

    Milton had understood the Oneness of God and was prevented not by his own blindness but by the blindness of others from speaking. Like Heebijeeb constantly trying to disrupt here or the old Liar from St Louis.

    Witness to truth has to sometimes be silent. In the gap between the play-dumb silence of the criminal like Straw and the moderated reticence of his victim like Belhadj, there is an overwhelming message of truth.

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