Because The United Kingdom?

[rmgill]

Strange place for a Nazi to go to willingly don't you think? 

[DB]

He could don the hair shirt and squat in Gaza. You decide if I'm talking about Corbyn or Trump at this point.

Edited November 19, 2020 by DB

[Stuart Galbraith]

Once again, ive never called him a Nazi.

[bojan]

You have just implied that he has supported them despite all the evidence to the contrary.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Balls. Ive been very specific what ive accused him of, and not I have not once accused him of being a Nazi or or allied to Nazis. I had a relative who was locked up by Nazi's, hence why I reject the current fetish among the left to claim everyone is a Nazi they dont like. Or indeed among the right, whom assume every one who disagrees with them casts them as a Nazi.

Do I think he is a clueless fuckwit who doesn't know what he is doing, and damaging American political institutions as he flails about in his political death throes? Yes. Any other interpretation that its an implication he is a closet Nazi is yours, and yours alone. 

Go put words in someone else's mouth. Im always specific what I mean and never afraid to say it, and I dont need your assistance Bojan, thank you so very much.

 

Edited November 19, 2020 by Stuart Galbraith

[Adam Peter]

Operation Tracer: The Secret Plan To Bury Soldiers Alive Inside The Rock Of Gibraltar

Quote

Six men were selected to be sealed inside the cave, and while there were enough supplies to last one year, there was to be no way out of the chamber, and if any men were to die they were to be embalmed and cemented into the brick floor. Only if Germany was defeated within the first year would they be released.

Of those chosen for the suicide mission, two were doctors, three signalmen and one executive officer leader.

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

They showed the facilities to do the OP role on a recent TV documentary. Probably not unwarranted to compare it to the stay behind role of the British resistance teams in the UK.

[DB]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-55144148

[Stuart Galbraith]

Wanted: UK site for prototype nuclear fusion power plant (msn.com)

 

Communities in the UK are being asked to bid to host a prototype nuclear fusion power plant, which a government-backed programme plans to build by 2040.

The site does not need to be near existing nuclear power stations but will need 100 hectares of land and a plentiful water supply. Ministers say the project would bring thousands of skilled jobs and be part of its planned “green industrial revolution” to tackle the climate crisis.

Nuclear fusion replicates the intense atomic reactions that power the sun and uses a hydrogen isotope found in seawater as fuel. It cannot produce a runaway chain reaction like conventional nuclear fission, which involves splitting atoms rather than fusing them together. The level of radioactive waste is also far lower. No exclusion zone will be needed around the site, officials said.

However, the technical challenges are enormous and the programme’s leaders acknowledge it is “hugely ambitious”. This is because fuel heated to 10 times the temperature of the sun has to be magnetically levitated to stop it melting the reactor vessel. Scientists and engineers have pursued the dream of limitless and clean fusion energy for more than half a century, but the first power stations remain decades away.

The UK programme is called Step – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production – and has been granted £222m to date by the government. Communities have until March 2021 to submit their nominations, with the successful site chosen by the end of 2022.

“We want the UK to be a trailblazer in developing fusion energy,” said Alok Sharma, the business and energy secretary. He said communities had an “incredible opportunity to secure their place in the history books” by potentially helping the UK to be the first country in the world to commercialise fusion power.

 

So let me think about it, do I REALLY want to live down the road from a facility that heats up to about 10 times the surface of the sun and is completely experimental? This is how every single episode of 'Thundersbirds' started.

 

[Ssnake]

The amount of thermal energy stored in that thing is very small. The plasma would be very hot, yes, but it's a gas at near-vacuum pressures. The failure of magnetic containment would

a) immediately break the fusion process

b) not release enough thermal energy to melt the reactor walls

So if it works - and Tokamak designs don't have the best reputation here - it'll be inherently safe. You can't have a runaway chain reaction like in a fission reactor. Even the amount of radioactivity released is near-negligible in practice.

[Stuart Galbraith]

 

Seriously though, Im in favour of new technology, im practically Victorian in that respect. im deeply in favour of GB PLC investing in new technology and building it here. The problem is that a lot of these arguments sounds suspiciously like those made at the time of the setting up of the first nuclear reactors in the UK. That it would be safe, that it would be inexpensive, that it would be inexhaustible. We were actually told in the late 1950's that we would be living in a society of free energy!

Living in a post truth world as we increasingly now are, its going to be a difficult cell, particulary in memory of how much they have been bullshitting in the past. I dont doubt remotely what you say. I mere doubt the Governments ability to sell it.

I hope it works out for them I really do. We could do with some kind of lead that would give the country some pride. That and annoy the French.

Edited December 2, 2020 by Stuart Galbraith

[Ssnake]

Well, there's first order principles to rely on. Physical principles aren't much subject to "opinion", at least not relevant opinion. Fission reactors are walking the razor's edge between reaction starvation and runaway neutron avalanche, so they are inherently unsafe (and yes, the engineers were lying, at the time; also they underestimated the problems of radioactive contamination and long-term disposal).

WIth fusion, all these problems won't be an issue. It's ridiculously hard to set up fusion outside the core of a star; the slightest disturbance and it fails. That's why the scientists have been on it for about six decades now, and might another two to four to get it working. So it's even more unstable than fission, but in a good way, and with several orders of magnitude less radioactive residue (basically just the neutron-activated reactor vessel materials).

[sunday]

Aerodynamically speaking, rockets are inherently unstable, but some control measures makes them stable enough to reach interstellar space.

One of the differences between the Chernobyl-like RBMK design and every Western reactor (and Russian VVER) is a thing called reactivity coefficient. It was positive in Chernobyl, but negative in the rest of designs. Some modifications on the RBMK reactors made them safe in that sense.

Easy fusion requires the use of Tritium, and then fusion is not "clean" anymore. Deuterium-Deuterium fusion is quite hard to achieve. Helium-3 improves things a bit, but still is hard, and one needs to find sources of that isotope.

[Ssnake]

The reactivity coefficient is a minor footnote in the context of what I was trying to say (even if it proved to be a critical flaw in the RBMK). The very nature of a fission chain reaction is that it needs to balance exactly between two processes with exponential characteristics, inflating the number of slow neutrons produced and the number of neutrons captured, so that neutron flux is in an equilibrium. Get it wrong in the good way, and it costs you a lot of money because the reactor output is below what it's supposed to be. Get it wrong the bad way, and you're on a very rapid trip to a meltdown. The margin of error is small in both cases, and in order to operate the whole contraption profitably you need to push it right to the boundary before a runaway neutron avalanche ruins your day.

There's unstable equilibriums, and then there's dangerously unstable equilibriums. Fission reactors fall into the second category. You can with computer-controlled moderation rods increase the margin of error a bit but at the end of the day there isn't much room for error, precious little time to detect them, and substantial damage if you get it wrong. There's a lot of good reasons why a lot of people think that fission reactors are a dangerous folly; not the least because they are being operated by people, injecting people issues into a finely tuned, difficult engineering task.

[rmgill]

One of the things about the 3rd and 4th generation designs is that the water is there to slow down and moderate things, remove the water and the reactivity drops through the floor. They're inherently safe designs, if the conditions get outside of a set of conditions needed to sustain reactivity and energy production they stop. They're like IC engines, you need Fuel, Air and spark, remove one, and it don't work any more. 

Passively safe is the key term. 

 

Edited December 2, 2020 by rmgill

[sunday]

8 hours ago, Ssnake said:

The very nature of a fission chain reaction is that it needs to balance exactly between two processes with exponential characteristics, inflating the number of slow neutrons produced and the number of neutrons captured, so that neutron flux is in an equilibrium. Get it wrong in the good way, and it costs you a lot of money because the reactor output is below what it's supposed to be. Get it wrong the bad way, and you're on a very rapid trip to a meltdown. The margin of error is small in both cases, and in order to operate the whole contraption profitably you need to push it right to the boundary before a runaway neutron avalanche ruins your day.

Not really. A reactor is controlled by means of delayed neutrons, just to avoid that scenario.
 

Quote

If a nuclear reactor happened to be prompt critical - even very slightly - the number of neutrons would increase exponentially at a high rate, and very quickly the reactor would become uncontrollable by means of external mechanisms. The control of the power rise would then be left to its intrinsic physical stability factors, like the thermal dilatation of the core, or the increased resonance absorptions of neutrons, that usually tend to decrease the reactor's reactivity when temperature rises; but the reactor would run the risk of being damaged or destroyed by heat.

However, thanks to the delayed neutrons, it is possible to leave the reactor in a subcritical state as far as only prompt neutrons are concerned: the delayed neutrons come a moment later, just in time to sustain the chain reaction when it is going to die out. In that regime, neutron production overall still grows exponentially, but on a time scale that is governed by the delayed neutron production, which is slow enough to be controlled (just as an otherwise unstable bicycle can be balanced because human reflexes are quick enough on the time scale of its instability). Thus, by widening the margins of non-operation and supercriticality and allowing more time to regulate the reactor, the delayed neutrons are essential to inherent reactor safety and even in reactors requiring active control.

The lower percentage^[7] of delayed neutrons makes the use of large percentage of plutonium in nuclear reactors more challenging.

There is a more academic, non wikipedia, example of how that is done here.

Also, there is no need of computers to make a rocket, or a plane, to fly straight. There are plenty of unstable phenomenons in nature that could be harnessed with only a few, simple elements.

Edited December 2, 2020 by sunday

[Adam Peter]

20 hours ago, rmgill said:

They're like IC engines, you need Fuel, Air and spark, remove one, and it don't work any more.

Nitpicking, but for gasoline engines, it is true. Diesel engines are happy with air through previously burned through EGR ducting and engine oil sucked up through a broken turbocharger, as quite a few older BMW car's owner learned. Luckily, AFAIK everyone was able to leave the car while the engine revved itself into a fireball.

[rmgill]

1 hour ago, Adam Peter said:

Nitpicking, but for gasoline engines, it is true. Diesel engines are happy with air through previously burned through EGR ducting and engine oil sucked up through a broken turbocharger, as quite a few older BMW car's owner learned. Luckily, AFAIK everyone was able to leave the car while the engine revved itself into a fireball.

Yep. That's why I didn't mention those. Broken turbo seals OR over-full oil getting past the rings can make all sorts of hair raising experiences. 

The trick being that you do have the 3 needed things, fuel, air and compression. Take one of those away and it stops. It's just that with busted turbo seal, you have a large supply of fuel allowing it to go past redline and cause all sorts of 'fun' and you can't limit that fuel easily. Best trick is to stop the air flow, which means knocking the intake off an putting something over that opening to restrict the air flow. A board is ideal. 
 

 

[JWB]

Housing estate plagued by 'rats the size of cats' giving residents sleepless nights

Rates the size of small cats are wreaking havoc on a housing estate in Greater Manchester. Local residents claim they have been told to contact pest control at £80 a go

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/housing-estate-plagued-rats-size-23063251

[BillB]

1 hour ago, JWB said:

Housing estate plagued by 'rats the size of cats' giving residents sleepless nights

Rates the size of small cats are wreaking havoc on a housing estate in Greater Manchester. Local residents claim they have been told to contact pest control at £80 a go

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/housing-estate-plagued-rats-size-23063251

Leaving aside I've never seen a rate, cat sized or otherwise, it's Manchester so pretty much anything is possible. On the other hand it's the Daily Star, so is prolly totally made up by some bored third-rate journalist on his lunch break. 🙂

BillB 

[rmgill]

 

[BillB]

4 hours ago, rmgill said:

 

Yup, that looks like Manchester all right. Mebbe the Daily Star were telling de troot after all 🙂

BillB 

[Ivanhoe]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-04/u-k-grants-hongkongers-five-passports-a-minute-as-exodus-looms

Quote

In October alone, the office issued 59,798 Hongkongers with BNOs, or 52% higher than in the same period last year, and the highest monthly figure since the Passport Office began readily compiling them in 2015. That translates to more than five every minute, based on an average eight-hour working day.

Thank you Great Britain, for doing the right thing. Thankless though it will likely prove to be.

 

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

Simon Schama about 20 years ago said that Empire, rather than ending, just kind of followed us home. 

I suspect many of these people are not jumping ship and coming here right now, but putting it on the shelf ready for the day when it becomes intolerable. I hope when that day comes we aren't going to start getting all precious about it.

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by Stuart Galbraith

[Stuart Galbraith]

https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/uk-news/2020/12/03/tory-mps-press-ministers-to-back-uk-industry-rather-than-send-pounds-to-putin/

A key British industry is being forced to “send pounds to Putin” rather than support the domestic coal market, ministers have been warned.

Conservative MPs pressed the Government to use UK coal to support the country’s steel industry instead of relying on imports from Russia and elsewhere.

Richard Holden, Tory MP for North West Durham, also detailed how the UK imports between five and 10 million tonnes of coal a year – adding this represents more than £1 billion of net imports annually.

He warned this money is not going into UK jobs as part of the transition to new methods of fuelling industry, and highlighted how steelmaking in south Wales is using coal from around the world.

Coal has played an increasingly small role in Britain’s power mix in recent years, with a Government target to phase it out altogether by 2024, and saw its share of generation fall to just 2% in 2019.

Leading a Commons debate, Mr Holden said: “Of our net imports, approximately 40% of our coal comes from Russia and 20% Colombia.

 

“The blast furnaces at Port Talbot could have been burning with British coal, but now they’re going to be burning with Russian coal.

“We are literally forcing one of our key strategic industries to send pounds to (Vladimir) Putin rather than supporting good jobs as we bridge to future technology that will see our strategic heavy industry decarbonise further.”

Mr Holden said the argument against domestic coal production “collapses entirely” when environmental factors are considered, as he questioned the standards adhered to in Russia, Colombia or the United States compared to the UK.

 

Oh God, the absolute hilarity of it.