Posts by James Butler
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Having said that, Fukushima 4 is now on fire. That's bad.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Ross Mason,
One day after an oil refinery fire I could walk in and start cleaning it up. One day after a nuclear meltdown would mean how many years before I can grow rice???
Not necessarily that long, because a meltdown is not the same as a catastrophic release of radioactive materials. There have been (prior to this earthquake) three of the former - Fermi 1, 3 Mile Island, and Chernobyl - but only Chernobyl resulted in the latter.
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Richard Aston,
I know you’re being ironic James ( I hope so) – it does have a terrible surface logic to it – I noticed today the top read article on the SST site is of course Law’s lynch mob rant.
Damn I was one of those readers!I was.
But I also have an embarrassing admission to make - I paid money for the SST yesterday. My wife asked me to go out and buy one, and I mentioned that advance reports suggested that it was a bad idea, but I let myself be convinced. I walked home in fear that I would be seen carrying it.
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to Richard Aston,
What on earth are the SST doing ditching Finlay Macdonald’s intelligent column, turfing the eloquent Steve Braunias while elevating Michael Laws?
I'm sure that what Michael Laws writes gets much more exposure than anything Finlay Macdonald or Steve Braunias ever wrote (example: this blog post). After all, any publicity is good publicity, right? Right? Anyone?
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to James W,
When you're losing sales to a competitor you know what always works? Copying the competitor.
See also Phil Goff. /threadmerge
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to BenWilson,
True, although I don’t know if this will continue to be the case. NZ is going to grow. Who knows how much demand there will be for power in the future?
After all, there's only a limited supply of river valleys one can conveniently flood for hydro generation.
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Also, an interesting article on Salon. All things considered, I'm very glad to live in a country where nuclear power can reasonably be avoided - but I'm not going to condemn countries in which it is (now) one of the safer and greener options.
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I remember doing a 2-week block on Nuclear Power back in stage-3 nuclear physics; the lecturer's rationale was that although a) it was not very relevant to the bits of physics they wanted us to learn, and b) we were most likely never going to see nuclear power in New Zealand, it was important to have someone in the country who understood the science - because every time the issue came up, everyone else would get it totally wrong.
I'm starting to see his point.
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While any meltdown in a nuclear reactor is a very serious problem, I would be surprised if there is any loss of life or health effects from the incidents being reported from nuclear stations in the area. I wish I could say the same about oil.
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Re. Steampunk coffee machines, I coincidentally came across this today.