from ???????

[autocoupler]

:good: you may be connected to Phil. Just wondering if his dial ever made it's way onto a coin like wifies did? Well I had to inject some numismatic content back into the thread :biggrin:

[trout]

:good: you may be connected to Phil. Just wondering if his dial ever made it's way onto a coin like wifies did? Well I had to inject some numismatic content back into the thread :biggrin:

Here you Go

[autocoupler]

That's a nice looking coin trout. 1972 aye, my last year of freedom :angel: nah, it's been great :yahoo:

[Fulvio]

Subject:: Australia's Hottest Day on Record 1828

The trouble with the people who write this sort of drivel (which is from at least 5 years ago, BTW) is that they don't comprehend the difference between weather and climate. And then of course the thousands who spread the manure far and wide either also don't comprehend or, worse, have their own or their masters' agendas to push.

Do you remember when it snowed in the Melbourne CBD on Xmas Day? Or when Elizabeth St turned into a river? Those were weather events. They do not mean you need to wear a parka and a snorkel during Melbourne summers.

OTOH, the average temperature rising by even a couple of degrees can absolutely be catastrophic, and kill millions. That's climate for you.

Back when I was a kid, one of our customers was a Japanese glaciologist, and he invited me to his lab at Melbourne Uni. There he showed me ice cores he took from the Antarctic ice sheet, and explained how the tiny bubbles hold air trapped at the time when the snow fell. This gas can be analysed, and he showed me a graph with an absolutely massive Methane spike some 15,000 years ago. It wasn't just the height of the peak, but the extremely short time frame, on the order of a couple of years which was startling.

What happened was that at the end of the last glacial period, as the temperatures rose, massive volumes of fresh water ran into the oceans, reducing its salinity, particularly in the North Atlantic. Reduced salinity means reduced density. The weight of the column of water decreased to a trigger point where the vast quantities of Methane locked up in river outflows at the base of the continental shelf, particularly at the Amazon River, were suddenly released. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, and the feedback loop resulted in a temperature rise of some 10°C.

The worry is that we're now seeing signs, in the Arctic permafrost, that we're on the verge of a repetition of this event. If we are, the trigger will be unstoppable, and the effects catastrophic, because unlike the last time, we now have coastal cities which would all be inundated. The death toll would be huge. Think of the Tsunami toll, and apply that rate globally. We might be able to escape by moving to higher ground here, but even if that were possible in poor countries, how would the refugees be fed? And given the insanity of the current policies here and in the US (and elsewhere) regarding refugees, can you imagine the political and social effects of migrations an order of magnitude greater?

It beggars belief that the alt-right is so determined to disregard all this. Its as if they deliberately want to see the chaos. Could they be so stupid? Or is this some twisted kind of genocide plot? Either way, its a mindset which is not doing anyone any favours.

[ausjack]

:good: you may be connected to Phil. Just wondering if his dial ever made it's way onto a coin like wifies did? Well I had to inject some numismatic content back into the thread :biggrin:

It's not my fault that I'm easily influenced and distracted and lead off the beaten track so I take no responsibility for my own actions :angel:

I could be related to lucky phil auto, who knows, but I haven't heard of any incest in the family so probably not so just a commoner mate.
Yes Fulvio, remember not long ago when morrison, abbott and mr potato head dutton didn't realise there was a boom mic turned on just above their heads and their comments :dodgy:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-11/dutton-overheard-joking-about-sea-levels-in-pacific-islands/6768324
:scratch_one-s_head: is it just me or does the profile on the cayman island coin look very much like the profile we have on our KGVI coins except facing the opposite direction.
I think they could pass as twins :shock:

[trout]

Going back a few decades when I was just a Lad in the UK we were living not far out of London in what was called the  greater London area.
At that time the UK government were taking pollution very seriously indeed they had something that was called the clean air act.
It became illegal to burn coal or wood fires and a product called coke (not the cool drink guys) was available and this was permissible to burn, Thank God for that because the UK in winter is a bloody miserable cold place to be.
There were other things put in place to stop pollution and within only a few years the air and the waterways were pretty much as good as gold, even the Trout had returned to the Thames.
So it shows that if controls are put in place not only can the damage to the environment be slowed down, It can actually be reversed.

[ausjack]

Yes some things can be fixed but then others the damage is just too great and can't be fixed or will take a thousand yeas (so they think) like some of the damage from mining and nuclear melt downs etc but while ever the mighty dollar rules I can't see the environment winning and battles.

Up this way we haven't been able to have a back yard incinerator for many years and up the mountain they wanted to ban all wood heaters because of the smoke but like the UK in winter you need something to keep warm or people will die.

[Fulvio]

nuclear melt downs

Don't believe the hype. Our only future salvation lies with nuclear energy in one form or another. Yes, core meltdowns are a bad thing. But they have only happened in Light Water reactors, and even then due to shoddy design or contruction. Light Water is just one of many options, pushed by companies light Westinghouse and GE who follow the Gillette model (Give the razor away, and make a killing on the blades) and make squillions on all those fuel rods that end up in piles of waste.

Breeder reactors of various types (especially the promising LFTR, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) burn such materials and produce almost no waste. Since there's no way to make money off them, the industry hasn't been interested in developing them since the 1950's. This needs to change, and probably will.. in China.

[autocoupler]

Back when I was a kid, one of our customers was a Japanese glaciologist, and he invited me to his lab at Melbourne Uni. There he showed me ice cores he took from the Antarctic ice sheet, and explained how the tiny bubbles hold air trapped at the time when the snow fell. This gas can be analysed, and he showed me a graph with an absolutely massive Methane spike some 15,000 years ago.

I remember seeing a doco a few years ago that was based on similar research in the Antarctic I think. The graph, which represented hundreds of thousand of years in total, peaked consistently like a piece of corrugated iron with the high points preceding a following ice age. The interesting thing was that the most recent readings were at the peak :shock:        

It became illegal to burn coal or wood fires and a product called coke (not the cool drink guys) was available and this was permissible to burn,

I remember seeing pictures of the smog on TV. Interestingly, coke is a product of coal, so I assume it has to be burnt at some stage, some where, to reach this state :scratch_one-s_head:  

Up this way we haven't been able to have a back yard incinerator for many years

Growing up in a country town we had a fairly large block, Dad would rake the lawn clippings into many mounds, then after a few days he would set them alight as would everyone else in town. I can smell that semi green grass burning right now :yahoo:

[robbiegal]

Going back a few decades when I was just a Lad in the UK we were living not far out of London in what was called the  greater London area.
At that time the UK government were taking pollution very seriously indeed they had something that was called the clean air act.
It became illegal to burn coal or wood fires and a product called coke (not the cool drink guys) was available and this was permissible to burn, Thank God for that because the UK in winter is a bloody miserable cold place to be.
There were other things put in place to stop pollution and within only a few years the air and the waterways were pretty much as good as gold, even the Trout had returned to the Thames.
So it shows that if controls are put in place not only can the damage to the environment be slowed down, It can actually be reversed.

agree
China should be doing the same and many other Asian countries
if we all do something then collectively the combined outcomes would be fantastic  for the planet
i think they stopped the big can farm burn offs in recent years as well
i also remember the home incinerators where we burnt our paper rubbish - all pretty well illegal these days
Fulvio - I very much agree with you as well

[ausjack]

:dodgy: you gotta stay off that grass auto, can do funny things to ya mate :laugh2:

I don't care what you say about nuc Fulvio it's just something I don't want a bar of because of bombs and melt downs etc and I don't want a nuc dump anywhere near me so lets put it in your back yard and then I'll be able to see you glowing and know exactly where you are :mocking: It's bad enough having to use it for medical treatments but we're more interested in making bombs or other weapons of mass destruction. This is another case of there's not enough evidence either way for me so think we're better off to just leave it alone. They say the waste can be stored in copper containers that will last 150 years, but then who here will be around to monitor and change the containers so I figure eventually all that waste will end up in the water.
The cane farmers still burn off around here RG, we still get ash everywhere as it gets blown around in the wind. Next time it happens I'll try and remember to take some pic's for ya :good:

[autocoupler]

:dodgy: you gotta stay off that grass auto, can do funny things to ya mate :laugh2:

:laugh2: so that's what happened, But I remember all those student protesters who filled the streets back in the 60's - 70's, many of whom were definitely on the happy baccy, and just look at the state of things now :dodgy:

[ausjack]

Yes look at it :dash1:

[Fulvio]

They say the waste can be stored in copper containers

WHAT waste? That's the whole point. A LFTR would use existing waste as fuel.

How about a little basic physics here?

Elements are made up of subatomic particles in precise groupings. If you change the number of protons, neutrons and electrons, you change what the element IS!

"Using the LBNL's Bevalac particle accelerator, Morrissey and his colleagues boosted beams of carbon and neon nuclei nearly to light speed and then slammed them into foils of bismuth. When a high-speed nucleus in the beam collided with a bismuth atom, it sheared off part of the bismuth nucleus, leaving a slightly diminished atom behind. By sifting through the particulate wreckage, the team found a number of transmuted atoms in which four protons had been removed from a bismuth atom to produce gold. Along with the four protons, the collision-induced reactions had removed anywhere from six to 15 neutrons, producing a range of gold isotopes from gold 190 (79 protons and 111 neutrons) to gold 199 (79 protons, 120 neutrons), the researchers reported in the March 1981 issue of Physical Review C."

So yeah, you CAN turn Lead into Gold! Its just not financially viable.

Anyway, All radioactive elements decay. They give off radiation in the process. That's kinda why we call them RadioACTIVE, innit? The thing is though, different elements decay at different speeds. Some of the heaviest ones can only be created in particle accelerators for tiny fractions of a second, whereas others have half-lives in the millennia. A half-life of course is the amount of time for the quantity of the material to halve. If element X has a half life of an hour, and you start with a Kilo of it, you'll have 500g in an hour, 250g in 2 hours, 125g in 3 hours, and so on until you can't detect it anymore.

The idea of building reactors which use long-lived elements as fuel is to 'burn' them up, producing products which are either stable (non-radioactive) or have much shorter half-lives. As such, they're a solution, not part of the problem.

Oh, and as for safety, the inherent design flaw in current commercial reactors is that they rely on water for cooling. If anything happens to stop the flow of coolant, and the fuel rods become exposed, the heat build-up will melt the fuel which is after all a metal, and it will burn its way through everything under it. This is colloquially known as "The China Syndrome" (Also a movie with Jack Lemmon) because nothing could stop it burning its way through to China like in the cartoons. This simply can't happen in other reactor designs. In the event of a failure, they would just stop working, that's all.

Trouble is, reactions like yours are exactly what we can expect from the majority of the population. I just about started a riot at an environmental forum when I told a politician that we needed Nuclear power to avoid looming environmental disasters! Not one of the rabid ferals who attacked me had any clue other than that I'd used the dreaded 'N'-word. These people don't know that they are in fact radioactive themselves (try waving a geiger counter over yourself), as is pretty much everything around us. Not to mention that ALL energy and the food and everything else we grow are the direct product of Nuclear reactions.

[ausjack]

So why have they been saying that we should become a dump for all the waste from the crap we sell the rest of the world. SA seems to be the preferred site ATM and they were talking about these copper containers to put the waste in that would last 150 years but no idea on how long the waste will last and could be 1000 years or more. I don't like the idea and would prefer to get power from other means, and no not coal.
If I'm so radioactive why can't I blow myself up :angel: Maybe if we all concentrate really really hard we can blow up the planet, so at midnight tomorrow lets all do it and see what happens got nothin to lose right