Dont know much about thoriated mantles, but they are still made and a fella who used to work for me used them to help calibrate a home made Geiger counter. This was part of an instrument pack which he then launched from Morecambe using a helium balloon, recovered from West Yorks, CAA approval granted etc.. Needles to say he no longer works on Submarines, now involved in satellite engineering.
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And quite by chance there’s a discussion of sewage and developments on BBC News today, which covers some of the details
It focuses on a case in Bucks but mentions Oxford too. Central government wants a bazillion houses built. People want them where the jobs are. Everyone understands that at least some of them need to be affordable, if communities are going to have teachers and health/care workers and supermarket staff etc etc. Infrastructure costs money. Shareholders and CEO’s will move from developers making smaller profits to those making larger ones. That’s the problem, in a nutshell (easy). All we need now is a solution (hard).
Volume on
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Post of the month 
. WTF and brilliant all in one.
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*up to £70…
You obviously know nothing about advertising.
NOTHING!
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I went into Oxford yesterday tea-time to listen to Steve Cowley talk about fusion-based electricity generation
It’s impossible to do any kind of useful job on the prospects for this in an hour and he had to gloss over some really critical things (e.g. ‘Sure Steve, reliable 24-hour or even 4-week capacity is needed to cover night-time and cloudy spells in the winter. But wouldn’t it be cheaper/easier just to build some kind of energy storage ?’).
It was understandable but still disappointing that he went into any detail at all about his specialist area (instability and turbulence in magnetically-confined plasmas) but given his job and the current US administration’s attitude towards anything except fossil fuels perhaps he had to keep his head down rather than get into a completely open discussion.
Long story short: I left thinking it’s still (at least) 30 years away.
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So in that theoretical 30 years time (at least) is fusion likely to be base load running at a constant output or is it more controllable?
He didn’t go into that. I suspect it depends on technological detail. In principle fusion schemes can be more flexible than fission ones because there’s more ‘separation’ (my word) between the fuel and the reaction volume. A machine like JET, for example, runs for just a few seconds at a time, so few-second bursts are clearly viable. But the secondary stage, needed to reclaim the tritium, might well involve a liquid lithium blanket running at maybe 600C and you can’t let that go cold, or it solidifies. So you have to keep running the fusion stage to keep it hot. Or you have to come up with a different lithium scheme.
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It’s an incredible rally but an exhibition rather than a competitive match as there’s a foul shot quite early on.
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Ha I sent that to my kids yesterday just brilliant
I follow a lot of the dance choreography stuff , I love the interpretation to music and the dance offs
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Pubic cube
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Should be paywall free
I guess that’s the flip side of the US saying “Europe can sort out it’s own defence”. China’s now telling the US it can sort out its own rare earths. They do exist in the US and they could set up refining plants if they were prepared to spend the money. Maybe they’re just going to have to.
Or just invade Greenland
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More expensive than California (cold much of the time and dark half the year and with little infrastructure) although they do probably have a load more tonnage in the ground. On the upside the place is a long way from most US voters so if you end up cutting environmental corners in the refining (see exploitation of arctic fossil fuels) only the locals will be upset.
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