OT: Electric cars actually burn fossil fuels

[invalid unparseable]

Yes, that had surprised me too when I first read it.

[Commander Kinsey]

Just how much was Russia exporting? How can one country cause the entire world to be short?

[Commander Kinsey]

Depends what sort of decisions you're talking about.

[T]

1+++++++++++++++

[T]

And good luck getting it serviced

[Commander Kinsey]

In the USA maybe. In the UK right at this very minute (Friday mid afternoon) it's:

52% gas 18% nuclear 12% wind 11% solar

I thought you were one of those people.

I thought you were a lib? You used to moan about Trump all the time.

[Commander Kinsey]

They built houses near me on marshland! I did laugh when I drove along there and they were re-building a whole street.

[T]

He is an extremist leftist. It is a common technique for Leftists to call themselves conservatives or moderates to try and make their extremism sound mainstream. It is totally disingenuous. Ed does the same thing.

Joel, on the other hand, makes no bones about what he is and I can respect that. BobF just name calls.

[Commander Kinsey]

I read wind power is only 5p a unit, while we're paying 25p a unit in the UK. So I guess wind is actually cheap.

[Commander Kinsey]

My neighbour had that in the UK, a very large hot water cylinder which heated electrically on demand by radio signal. It had a lot of heating elements, about 6 instead of the usual 1. This was for his hot water and central heating.

[hgt]

No, Trader4 has never been that.

He quite seriously believes that Reagan is the greatest president that the USA has ever had and that Reagan personally ended the Cold War.

We aren't discussing what he calls himself.

No, he doesn't call himself a conservative at all.

[invalid unparseable]

Biden's beach house:

Lot of houses like this where you will notice house is essentially on stilts in case ground level parking gets flooded.

[Max Demian]

Some "houses" near the coast were originally holiday chalets perched on sand dunes. Hired out in the summer to holidaymakers. The owners would remove appliances and board them up at the end of the season, and see whether they were still there the next year.

Then people would buy them to live in, become worth £100,000s and be surprised when they disappeared into the sea.

[Commander Kinsey]

That reminds me of the (nudist) beach in the south of France where caravans get left there to use at weekends. I went there during a galeforce wind and found everyone's caravan upside down. Another time the tide had come in unusually high and everyone with a 4x4 was trying to tow them all off the beach.

[Commander Kinsey]

Just how strong are those stilts?

And what is it with Americans and white picket fences?

[invalid unparseable]

Friend in North Carolina drove me out to see one of these houses on washed out sand dune and it about to tip over to the ocean side. It was a huge house and he said they were now banning them from building there.

Friend had a bay side cottage on stilts but bought another lot further from the water that would not need stilts. Still a hurricane a while back had water lapping to his door front.

[Commander Kinsey]

Couldn't they just move the house?

[Commander Kinsey]

Are you exaggerating or are you saying they can blow up if someone makes a minor mistake?

[rbowman]

The rivers here are shallow so during flood season there's a lot of volume and a swift current that redesigns them. Most people don't build too close to the banks. They built a paved handicapped accessible trail at a wildlife refuge down the road. The river carved out a big chunk one tear. They were smart enough to build the picnic shelter a lot further back

[Paul]

They don't blow up.

But you can damage components in the reactor, by inattention.

Some reactors are very safe (by design), others, not so much.

If you dump the moderator in ours, the reaction stops. The moderator is necessary to slow the neutrons, to react with the materials in the reactor. When the moderator is dumped, the neutrons in the core are fast neutrons, which do not capture well in the other fuel rods.

Reactor control elements are different types. Some are reflectors. Some are absorbers (nothing comes out the other side). Some are moderators.

One thing you don't want, is for a runaway behavior when say, the reactor gets "hot" and stuff boils more than expected.

We had one reactor here, it wasn't a power reactor. It was a reactor used to make isotopes (Technetium99 and so on). On paper, the design looked great. They built it. And determined that the design had a positive void coefficient (during some test). It was shut down immediately and taken apart. End of project. You would think they could fix that, but apparently not.

There are reactors operating, where that problem is present, only when a control rod is raised to a certain height. A little higher or a little lower, the problem goes away. And that design continues to operate and provide power to people. Now, imagine the control rod jams, at exactly the wrong position.

The materials in reactors "swell" from irradiation damage, which is why stuff jams. That was more of a problem with the first reactors. And that's part of the nature of being a reactor operator, is monitoring for unexpected stuff, which hints at some sort of slow degradation. Which is why half of Frances nukes are offline at the moment. Safety first.

Paul