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1,570 thoughts on “Nuclear Nightmare

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  • crab

    3 days after the Spring Equinox – and Spring hasnt arrived in Ireland yet, weeks of frost and now 2 foot of snow has instead!

    Climate chaos is upon us, get putting up Renewables and Polytunnels!

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    “Thought I would give a news round up!earlier, expecting a riposte but it took nearly six hours for the ball to be kicked back into play and that is mostly ad hominem stuff. Pathetic.”

    Yes sure, Mary, it was just a cunning ploy to draw me out, wasn’t it. 🙂

    You ‘ve been picked up on that one before by another commenter, I believe.

    **************

    La vita è bella, life is good!

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    “Oh fuck, look who’s arrived.”

    Yes, someone with as much right to be here as you, Clark. And somewhat saner than you as well by the sound of it.

    ***********

    La vita è bella, life is good!

  • Mary

    Berezovsky’s death will be yet another problem for Surrey Police to solve. They still have the unsolved death of Mr Al Hilli and his family on their files and that of a Russian who was found dead when jogging, also unsolved.

    Are Russian killers on the streets of Britain?
    A jogger who collapsed and died in leafy Weybridge turns out to have been blowing the whistle on one of Russia’s biggest tax frauds. Mark Townsend reports on a crisis that has pitted the Kremlin against the US Senate and British police
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/17/russian-killers-on-streets-of-britain

  • Mary

    To make that clear, that post was not addressed to Clark. It was addressed to the Resident Invigilator/Interrogator.

  • tom

    Looks as though after the recent high-level UK-Russian meeting in London, MI6 and FSR have cooperated to whack a couple of annoyances.

    I wonder how long the list is.

    ‘Russia Today’ is reporting that Berezovsky committed suicide. (Hung on a post to some website called ‘Facebook’ by his son-in-law Egor Schuppe) Like yeah, right. ‘Course he did. And the first anyone knew about it was when they read Schuppe’s post.

    Except in Vauxhall Cross, Herefordshire, and Poole maybe??

  • Anon

    I should add that we sold gas relatively cheaply to Europe which should have remained in our storage reserves for an emergency. Now we are paying far higher prices to buy it back again from Europe. I’m sure someone is making a lot of money out of this nonsense.

    Every year traders gamble with our storage and take us closer to the edge on a seemingly regular basis. Legislation seems to allow our storage to be sold off virtually completely with little or no regard to the national interest. Crazy.

  • Fred

    “Fred, hi again. Sadly (?no) Plants and trees are relatively inefficient photosynthesizers in respect to technical power generation. They reflect and convert to local heat 98-99% of the light energy which falls on them. They only convert to fuel some visible red and blue wavelengths (which is why they are mostly green) and do not capture any invisible wavelengths. Overall plants appear to photosynthesize at a surprisingly uncompetitive rate. ”

    How many years before your solar panels have generated the energy it took to build and transport them?

    How many years before they’ve generated the money it took to pay for them?

  • Anon

    In fact, If I right now offered more money for UK gas than was being offered by UK traders to buy it in, the operators of the Bacton pipeline would actually be legally obliged to switch direction and start exporting gas from the UK again. Can’t over-rule the free market it seems until they actually do put the lights out.

  • crab

    “Can’t over-rule the free market it seems until they actually do put the lights out.”

    Crazy but true Anon.

    Fred Wrote:
    “How many years before your solar panels have generated the energy it took to build and transport them?
    How many years before they’ve generated the money it took to pay for them?”

    These are throw around questions as though the answer is obviously damming, but i would be amazed. I believe these renewable energy technologies cleanly capture dozens if not hundreds of times as much energy as they require to make. There is not more resource or manufacture involved in creating a big windturbine, or an array of reflective panels in an arid plain, than there is involved in creating a single truck or a boat.

    4 Gigawatts electric production represents the maximum output of one of the largest existing Nuke plants, several thousand 1GW windturbines capture the same quantity of energy delivered by the air in the sky -no storage mining transport etc of fuels/dangerous material, little security, routine outdoors maintenance tasks, equivalent cost of several thousand medium to large lorries, which will never need fueled or roaded or driven, just the occassional windscreen wiper replaced.

    There is a misconception that renewables produce paltry amounts of energy – it is completely untrue, we’ll appreciate this if we have the foresight to have many when gas runs out and nukes go critical. Renewable energy capture goes far beyond recovering their setup cost, which is somethng which is very dependant on engineering and economic efficiency also.

  • crab

    Also Fred, burning wood and old pallets domestically is not a great wrong, but to do it industrially is unsound, because we havent enough wood, we’ll end up with none besides expensively protected feilds of closely planted and industrially fertilised GM trees.

    Most old pallets are chucked and burned well before their useful lifespan, and also watch out for the fumes from treated ones (particularly difficult to smash up).

  • Anon

    Current wind generation in the UK as metered by National Grid 5.2 Gigawatts.

    National Grid does not meter all turbines and the total generation right now is likely above 7GW. That’s 7GW of gas fired stations offline right now thanks to the turbines.

    Officially wind has supplied 13% of UK electrical power over the last 24 hours and gas 17% (coal 43%, nuclear 20%). Taking into account the turbines not monitored directly by National Grid it is likely that wind has actually produced more electricity for the UK than gas fired stations over the last day. Of course there is plenty of wind today but that’s a lot of gas we are saving.

  • Mary

    This is an amazing young woman called Lucy Reynolds who is articulate and knows the full history of NHS privatisation and the implications to all of us of its full implementation. She even knows what is happening to the Dutch, Spanish and Scandinavian health systems, all privatised. If only her voice could have been heard by the sleeping and trusting public years back.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkTnCtg_Omk&feature=player_embedded#!

    Published on 9 Mar 2013
    Lucy Reynolds is an academic who has studied the background of the NHS in detail, learning in the process what the appalling consequences of privatisation will be. Here she answers questions put by Jill Mountfield, a member of the steering committee on the “Save Lewisham Hospital” campaign. March 2013

    Found it on medialens where there is a link to an edited transcript.

    Good in-depth analysis of what 1st April means for NHS
    http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1364030668.html

    “This woman would be a great Prime Minister in a future English democracy – if it ever happens. Great clear, intelligent, ferociously well-informed layout of the wilful destruction of our public health service, by its implacable enemies, in preference for the spectacularly-disastrous USAmerican gangster-capitalist model of profits for the super-rich before all else, and effectively no health care at all for a big chunk of the populace below a certain income level, and inferior and over-expensive care for all the rest — except the super-rich.

    The only place I’ve found to disagree with her so far is where she says that people need to wake up, get seriously active, and resist this criminal racket forcefully (my paraphrase) but that she’s “not suggesting an uprising”. Shame about that, because that’s what England – specifically England — needs urgently: a full-bore popular uprising.

    But otherwise, this woman is just splendid. Give her real PM power in a genuinely democratic England, and probably she and like-minded comrades would achieve all the humane, socialistic, egalitarian basic reforms that Ken Livingstone was never allowed to accomplish in his time of flourishing. An exceptional spirit, I think.”

  • karel

    Crab,

    like many others you are obsessed with outputs and throw gigawats and terrawats around like rotten tomatos. from what you write, I get the impression that you believe (and correct me if I am wrong) that we get the same amount of juice from one GW of photovoltaic installed capacity as you would do from one GW of nuclear power. Well you might be surprised that you do not as nuclear power plants run all the time but photovoltaics give you probably not more than ten percent on cloudy days in the winter and fuck all when covered with snow or sand after a sand storm (not yet seen in England but who knows what it will be like in twenty years). The main problem is that phovoltaics gets you most power output when not needed and these plants have to be cut off from the grid, which makes photovoltaic scroungers sad and angry because they expect to be paid irrespective of whether their expensive juice is wanted or not. On the other hand when one needs lot of electricity like on the winter afternoon you get nothing from the scammers and have to back the photovoltaic capacity up with gasfired plants that can be tirned on relatively fast, but it is not like turning on you tv. Forget batteries and other exotic storage schemes as every energy transduction brings you just more losses.

  • crab

    “I get the impression that you believe (and correct me if I am wrong) that we get the same amount of juice from one GW of photovoltaic installed capacity as you would do from one GW of nuclear power.”

    Hey I have not been throwing Gigawatts around! I have been attaching my observations to verifiable facts and measures. You on the other hand offer a list of insinuations and generalities with no measure at all, tales of inadequacy and redundancy based on what you expect is unavoidable but have no measure or calculation of –that might do for your own judgement and a few others but it is buff.

    I have only enthused about solar capture’s amazing opportunity to capture energy and desalinate sea water for fertile productive installations in arid zones.

    Photovotaics are the easiest renewable to criticise for UK application because can be expensive to produce, and with our latitudes reduced sunlight and current cost of fossil fuel pricing, their economy is currently still questionable.

    But PVs on the well to dos tax happy UK rooftop, still a represent a enviable resource -which will keep that lucky houses lights and computers on regardless of the mess going on around them, for many years.

    Small wind turbines offer a much better potential for UK domestic renewable/backup. A 1.5 m diameter rooftop turbine can supply over 10 Kwhrs hot water and battery backup, per cold windy day, and about 1Kwhr per calm day to a household.
    The equipment need not cost more than the old satelite dish and decoder set up used to! It just needs developed to be cheap, lightweight, quiet repairable. You can currently buy more powerful and advanced toy helicopters for similar money.

  • Anon

    BBC Our World today running on News Channel

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rmnt2
    >blockquote>
    Born Under a Bad Sign

    Yalda Hakim travels to Iraq to investigate the staggering rise in the numbers of babies born with birth defects and cancer since the start of the war ten years ago.

    Also available on iplayer via above link.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    @ Tom :

    “Russia Today’ is reporting that Berezovsky committed suicide. (Hung on a post to some website called ‘Facebook’ by his son-in-law Egor Schuppe) Like yeah, right. ‘Course he did. And the first anyone knew about it was when they read Schuppe’s post.”

    Tom, you don’t appear to believe that Berezovsky killed himself. Any well-founded reason for that doubt which you’d care to share with us?

    BTW, since you’re posting, perhaps you could spare a second to answer my other question to you, which was to ask what you meant by saying about Berezovsky
    “And what’s that crap about him being ‘Russian’?”.

    Thanks in advance!

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    Mary excused herself as follows :

    “The BBC got their story wrong on Berezovsky’s death. The first report said he died in Surrey, hence my esrlier comment about it being added to Surrey Police’s caseload.”

    Don’t worry, Mary, this was a minor error, compounded only slightly by your endearing eagerness to bring the news to our attention without delay.

    Perhaps a case where “festina lente” might apply? 🙂

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella!)

    Karel burbles to Crab : ”

    I get the impression that you believe (and correct me if I am wrong)……etc”

    You usually are, Carlos, but people are too polite to tell you (when they can actually understand what you’re going on about, that is).

    *************

    La vit è bella, life is good! (the jackal comes out at night…)

  • crab

    Actually you should just ask stupid questions once Habbabkuk. If you insist on abusing the right include them occasionally, by doing so as often as you do, then at least allow others the right to scroll past them, just once per willful idiots interest.

  • karel

    Hallibabacus (la vita in culo)
    you still owe me an answer concerning the pizza delivery. You seem to jump like a crazed monkey from one topic to another. As I suspected all along, you confuse me with Carlos Castaneda. may I point out to you that he is already dead. The jackal, being a laweyer, has too many clients to have any time to respond to your marvelous contributions. I would prefer not to ask about the state of your mind but how are your bowels tonight?

  • karel

    Crab,

    well the wind is a fickle customer and does not always blow when you want it to blow. Apart from few windy places, usually offshore, you might get a problem on windless days. Not everybody can follow your advise of erecting a windmill on top of his house. If I tried that the council bastards would screw me so much that could at least start emitting more wind from my arse to activate the table fan, which I converted to an energy generator. But those who believe in salvation would be saved, amen

  • Mary

    I have been watching Project Nim, a terrible case of cruelty to a chimp brought up in the 70s from infancy in an experiment to live with humans and to communicate via sign language which he was taught. This was carried out by Cornell University in New York who abandoned him when the experiment could go no further. He ended up living a solitary life imprisoned a cage at a ranch in Texas called the Black Beauty Ranch.

    There was very little comprehension throughout by these experimenters on how much damage they were doing. Some of them even visited him and seemed impervious to the horror of the whole thing. Two other captive chimpanzees were housed with him for the last five years of his life. He died of a heart attack in 2000 aged 26.

    Torment. This was in the ‘Land of the Free’. No wonder Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo followed.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p0gtf

  • Jives

    Habbabkuk,

    What a thoroughly crass,insensitive and compassionless little dig about Clark’s sanity.

    You really are slime.

    I imagine you to be the sort who,when confronted by someone in a wheelchair,lambasts them for not being as fit as you eh?

    People like you crawl on the surface of this planet.

    You are a deeply ugly individual.

    Its good that youre here though.It lets all the readers clearly see what an odious litte shit you are.

  • Mary

    So Israel ‘allows’ Turkey to build a large hospital in Gaza which, when Israel attacks Gaza next time, will be full of dead and injured Palestinians. No irony.

    Israel to grant Turkey access to Gaza for construction of hospital

    Turkey reportedly sees permit as hint of Israel’s willingness to patch up countries’ bruised relations since Mavi Marmara incident; hospital set to be largest in Palestinian territories.

    After months of lengthy negotiation that involved American intervention, Israel has agreed to allow Turkish trucks to bring building materials into Gaza for the construction of a hospital there.

    http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-to-grant-turkey-access-to-gaza-for-construction-of-hospital.premium-1.502931

  • karel

    Mary,

    I admire you and I am not sarcastic this time. Where do you find the time and energy?

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