onetrack

The land occupied by the nuke plant is the least of anyones worries. It's the mind-boggling cost of constructing a nuke power station, and the time taken to build one, is what matters. Many nuke power stations still aren't finished after construction started 20 or 25 years ago. The cost overruns are notorious on nuke plants. Every single thing in the construction has to be radiation-proof, so thousands of tonnes of concrete and hundreds of tonnes of lead shielding. Then there's the safety codes to be met, with a huge number of stringent requirements, that all triple the cost of everything. Every component has to be manufactured from costly exotic steels that are corrosion resistant, and many other components are exotic materials as well. Coolant systems are exceptionally complex, they have to have triple redundancy - and then the protection systems still fail, and reactors overheat. And at the end of the day, the nuke power plant still produces nuclear waste that is dangerous for thousands of years - and no secure place to store it on this planet has been found yet. No-one wants nuclear waste stored anywhere near them, and the number of sites that are suitable geologically, are few and far between. Overall, the nuclear power plant industry is one that has a poor safety record, and it's an industry that isn't expanding - unlike renewables.

The name comes from Buffalo, N.Y., where the spice-infused chicken wings originated.

Hydrogen refuelling infrastructure, and the cost and origin of the hydrogen source, are the two biggest problems facing hydrogen. The Japanese Govt is pouring mega-billions into hydrogen to ensure they have multiple sources of energy. But no-one has yet found a cheap and plentiful hydrogen supply. The dream is "green" hydrogen, made from the electrolysis of water via solar electrical power, but that setup is far from low cost and far from being plentiful. Current hydrogen is sourced from natural gas, and known as "blue" hydrogen. The process uses steam to "crack" the natural gas into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The CO2 is captured. It's far from cheap, and not ideal. Then there's "grey" hydrogen, the same process as above, but the CO2 is released into the atmosphere. Also a less-than-ideal arrangement, and also not cheap. "Brown" and "black" hydrogen are produced from brown and black coal. Once again, a costly and polluting process. "Turquoise" hydrogen is produced by methane pyrolysis - using natural gas. Nothing about this process has any advantage over the above processes. The bottom line is the sheer volume of hydrogen gas needed to sustain the massive demand that is already being met by fossil fuels supply and infrastructure. Battery development and improvements will more than likely keep H2 as a fuel on the back foot for a long time to come. The distribution infrastructure for H2 will need a massive allocation of funds, which no-one is prepared to stump up, at this stage.

Spacey, the problem is, many phones are locked to a carrier when purchased and the purchase price and payments are a combination of phone plan monthly fees, and a monthly payment, that is part of the purchase price of the phone. You can't sell a phone that hasn't been paid for.

Before you purchase any phone, go to the GSMArena site, and look up the brand and model number, to check if it's a model compatible with the bandwidths used in Australia. Many manufacturers have up to a dozen different models, all look the same, but the model number gives you the country it's built for - and a lot of countries use a lot of different frequencies to us. When you find the right phone model on GSMArena that you're looking to purchase, put your mouse on the end of the "Network" line, where it says "expand", and clicking on "expand" produces all the frequencies that that particular model is set for, or is capable of operating on. https://www.gsmarena.com/ Australia uses the following mobile frequencies and channels - https://www.whistleout.com.au/MobilePhones/Guides/Will-my-phone-work-in-Australia-carrier-network-frequencies Note that frequencies used can vary from carrier to carrier, and rural frequencies are nearly always different to city frequencies.

The "climate" disasters were Cyclones/Hurricanes, heat waves, a drought and a flood. Cyclone Sidr, Bangladesh, 2007 - 3,400+ deaths Cyclone Nargis, Myanmar, 2008 - 138,366 deaths Super Typhoon Naiya, Phillipines, 2013 - 6,300 deaths Severe storm, Libya, 2023 - 4300 deaths, 8,500 missing Severe flooding in Uttarakhand, India, 2013 - 6054 deaths Drought in Somalia 2011 - an estimated 260,000 deaths Heat wave, Russia, 2010 - 55,736 deaths Heat wave, France, 2015 - 3,200+ deaths Heat wave, Europe, 2022 - 53,542 deaths Heat wave Europe, 2023 - 37,129 deaths They all made the local news in most cases - but we take little notice of disasters that are far away, and which don't directly affect us. Maybe a few minutes of bewilderment at the scale of destruction and death, and then it's back to the immediate pressing (for us) jobs, money-earning, and local disputes.

Worm. The completed sentence reads the same forwards or backwards. A very clever brain teaser.

You'd think deerhide would be a lot cheaper than it is, given the number of deer regularly slaughtered. Or is that the Americans just shoot deer for the venison and discard the skins? Or don't they kill as many deer when hunting, as they make out? I can recall someone producing a fact that the Americans expended 50,000 rounds for every enemy death in Vietnam. Firing accuracy doesn't seem to loom large in American historical records, as noted by the regular shootouts by American police, where they expend 100's of rounds, and still don't hit any of their target, or targets.

One of the interesting parts of Jone's forecasting was forecasting repeated cycles in the weather extremes. Droughts and heatwaves feature large in the weather cycles, and the 80 year cycle is the most pronounced. We endured the worst drought in living memory in W.A. in 1980, and it coincided with the Federation drought, with the worst drought year during the Federation drought, being in 1900, in W.A. There was another bad drought in 1944-1945, that struck both W.A. and the Eastern States, and the current drought in W.A. earlier this season, and in S.A. and Victoria this year, coincides with the 80 year cycle.

Nev, his name was actually Inigo Jones. My father followed his long-range weather forecasts with something approaching obsessiveness.

The U.S. has organised to give around 2000 "obsolete" Humvees to the Ukrainians. Even though the U.S. deems the Humvees as obsolete, they're still very capable, and battle-proven. Plus the fact they are not high-tech, are highly mobile and easily operated, and can be turned into many types of weapons-carriers, makes them a real asset to the Ukrainians. https://www.forbes.com/sites/vikrammittal/2024/10/29/why-the-recent-us-aid-package-to-ukraine-included-2000-humvees/

Apparently ROYGBIV is dead, and the experts have decided that Indigo doesn't actually exist. It seems that Isaac Newton settled on 7 colours for the spectrum, because he was a great believer in Pythagoreanism, and Pythagoras believed the number 7 was crucial to every scientific, mathematical and physics discovery. https://www.scientificminds.com/blog/whatever-happened-to-roy-g-biv-kathy-reeves-115.aspx#:~:text=Indigo is omitted because few,it as a separate color.

That question is far beyond my pay scale and training, Marty! There's plenty our puny minds cannot grasp, when it come to what's on the other side of the curtain.

Interesting little box you found there, Willie. I was surprised to learn from the box, that the Engineers ran A.A. Companies in WW2. What I find even more interesting is that the box has a serving soldiers name on it, indicating it was deemed property under his personal care - and I'm puzzled as to what that item may have been. Obviously, it was valuable and of great importance. The name R. Reed and the 56 A.A. Coy RAE, leads me to dig up the blokes history. It appears he was Q50102 Sgt Major R.E. Reed (Warrant Officer Class 2 or simply WO2 or WOII) in 56 A.A. Coy, which was based in Brisbane. I found him listed in the Coy's War Diaries for 1942, which are the only ones I've examined so far. On that date, he marched out of HQ's at Lytton, to go to Amberley. According to the Roll of Honour, WO2 R.E. Reed transferred across to the Artillery later on in the War, and was still serving in the R.A.A. when he was demobbed - but he'd gained a commission to Lieutenant by that time. See the company War Diary record for 26-5-1942 in the link, where he's listed at the top of the page - https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/awm-media/collection/AWM2019.366.2651/bundled/AWM2019.366.2651.pdf Robert Reed's service history - https://nominal-rolls.dva.gov.au/veteran?id=43992&c=WW2#R

So, this is their last Czech-out??

Trump keeps playing the "fear of illegal immigrants that will kill all your family" card - and the Dems are too dumb to realise that's a critical factor in U.S. elections. They all live in fear of being killed by a random murderous stranger, carrying potent firearms. Trump will win, I reckon, exactly as Willie has postulated, helped by the Electoral College gerrymander.

I see where the Katter Party vote halved in this election. What happened, to bring that about?

I couldn't imagine that Putin would be particularly reliant on Iranian rocket fuel, this attack would be designed to degrade Iran's ability to lob ballistic missiles into Israel. But Putin's military is obviously reliant on Iranian military support, and the Iranians appear to have supplied plenty of the Shaheed 136 drones - which are powered by a copy of the German Limbach 550 2 stroke, 4 cyl engine, and which engine simply uses a 2 stroke petrol mix for fuel. However, anything that degrades Irans military manufacturing capabilities is good news for Ukraine.

Klingons, of course!!

Well, that makes you a proper social outcast then, doesn't it? How do you live a full life without FB??

My personal preference is towards some of the intellectual films of the 1960's - such as, "Nude on the Moon". The Plot: A rich rocket scientist organizes an expedition to the moon, which they discover is inhabited by nude women. Classic stuff! 😄 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056293/

He'd be better off naming it, the Ministry of Trump Alternative Reality. He wouldn't know what Truth was, if it smacked him in the face.

No-ones forcing anything onto you, Nev. I just make it clear I believe there's an omnipotent God who made the Earth liveable for us as it is today, and he also made the Adamic creation. I have no problem with science continually proving that Gods Laws of Nature exist, and I believe that science reinforces the Biblical story - which is largely the story of the Adamic creation. There are other life forms on this Earth that weren't made by God, I'm convinced of that - even human tribes. But trying to convince me that a theory of an evolutionary process led to our exceptionally complex human bodies, and our life support systems from primordial ooze - all devised by an amateur scientist in an era where no major scientific instruments existed, and in an era when they didn't even understand the existence and propagation of germs and bacteria and diseases - is not something I can accept, because it is total fallacy. I've mentioned this previously, and I'll repeat it. There are in excess of 200 life support systems in the human body. They are all necessary to sustain human life. If just one of those systems fails, we will die - not necessarily immediately, but we will certainly die. For evolution to produce all 200 life support systems of the human body, in the correct order to sustain human life, is about as likely as me pulling 200 cards, numbered 1 to 200, blindly out of my pocket, in the correct numerical order. Yet, supposedly intelligent and highly educated people continue to promote evolution as the basis for all science. It's simply not true. Evolutionary development may appear in some species, whereby they change to adapt to new conditions and circumstances - but nowhere can evolutionary science show us new life being formed from primordial ooze. It's all supposition. The fact there are 100 religions all promoting different views of different Gods is simply testament to human failings, and all trying to fill a need that vast numbers of people have, to worship an omnipotent being, who supposedly controls many things. I believe God controls very little on this Earth, he set the ball rolling, and if it wobbles or runs into an obstruction, then that's the Laws of Nature and Physics and Science at work. The bottom line is that science has no answer for what lies beyond the grave, and has no answer, when someone who is recorded as clinically dead, comes back to life, and gives detailed and accurate descriptions of their lifeless body lying in a hospital bed, and clearly describing the actions the doctors and nurses carried out on them, while they were recorded as dead. This is described in Dr Moodys book - and Moody was no "God-botherer", he was somewhat agnostic until he started regularly coming across patients with amazing stories of things that they saw when they were dead - and those stories contained repeated similar events, from people who had been brought up in a relatively wide range of religious belief systems. I don't have a problem with people who don't believe in any kind of deity, but when I'm offered a potential free reward in the afterlife (of which I know little), simply by acknowledging and believing in the Biblical God and Jesus Christ and the Biblical story, then I'm not going to knock it back!

Of course there's NOTHING THERE, for a bloke who didn't believe in God, and who worshipped money and enormous power instead. I'd be disappointed if Kerry Packer actually got into Heaven. Dr Moodys book, Life after Life is a worthy read, it was written by a Doc who saw many patients return from clinical death with a wide range of experiences from "beyond the curtain". He wrote that the part that impressed him was the children experiences during clinical death, because of their simple honesty and lack of life experiences, and the fact that they reported experiences that could not have been hallucinations or repressed memories.

Workers pi$$ing and shXXing in the crops is more like it. Too lazy to go to the toilet - and besides, don't the Chinese use human faeces for fertiliser? Just one reason I won't buy Chinese vegies, no matter how much the sellers tell us how good their product is.