The shit that does merit its own thread

When I worked in the Med years ago we got out there early for pre season maintenance etc and we had an 18yr old lad from Newcastle turn up who was shocked at how cold the Med was in April. He thought it was going to be like a bath I think.
He sent home for his wetsuit and this bloody heavy package arrived.
He had a 10mm full steamer!
I had never seen anything like it and asked what on earth he wanted a suit like that for.
Surfing off the Tyne in January was his answer.
Of course we got to May and he never wore it again and had to lug it home at the end of the season :grinning:

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I once surfed Cayton Bay when it was -18c. The sea looked like it had steam coming off it, the guy in the surf shop said he’d only ever seen it happen once and it was because the sea was 20c warmer than the air. It was so cold on the beach that running into the sea was almost like getting in a warm bath! Sitting on the board was surreal because only our heads were poking out of the “steam”.

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Used to winter swim (never learned to surf) in the sea off Bournemouth with my dad when I was a LOT younger - absolutely loved it, and the best days were the ones when the air was below zero, because - exactly as you describe - the sea feels like a warm bath. You will never, ever dry and change faster than when you get back out, too!

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Got to admit that at 48 my enthusiasm for surfing in winter is just about zero, or rather my enthusiasm for getting out of my wetsuit. After a few hours in the sea it used to take ages to get the sodding thing over my feet. I once had a bus drive past me on Scarborough sea front, completely naked apart from my feet which were still stubbornly stuck in the suit. If someone had taken a photo of me at that point, skulking behind my car, the OED could’ve used it next to the definition of resignation.

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Ha!

I’m a decade older, and just no.

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70? :thinking:

I wouldn’t want a molten salt reactor anywhere near me, and that goes for liquid sodium cooled ones too. An obvious problem the article doesn’t mention is that in the event of the reactor having to be shut down in a hurry the heat it generates will disappear and the coolant (salt or sodium) will freeze solid. Then how do you restart the thing ? You need a whole bunch of heating technology which has to be able to unfreeze the coolant in every single pipe (or, better still, stop it from freezing in the first place) which needs to be maintained and checked every so often. Far from trivial.

Water. Water works well enough.

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Don’t Russia have an entire fleet of subs with exactly this issue rotting away in the Arctic circle?

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Wiki reckons almost all of the Russian nuclear subs used PWRs, but it does list two or three classes which are (or were) cooled by lead-bismuth. Pb-Bi has quite a few nice properties, including the fact that it melts at temperatures as low as 125C. So while you can’t quite re-liquefy it by emptying the samovar over it, you don’t need to get it much hotter than that. It’s also a good radiation shield. One of its downsides is that exposing it to the reactor’s neutron flux tends to transmute the bismuth into polonium 210. Dontcha just love nuclear alchemy ? (No, no you don’t.)

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Yes :grin:

Used for power density reasons. Very fast boats, incredible depth capabilities, just don’t let the reactors cool.

Oooops.

Should add it was the 7 boat Alfa class and the one off Papa class. They gave no thought at all to decommissioning of the reactors and EU and US funding has been used to help with this issue.

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No way I could put this on the doggos thread.

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Is that real Mick, or some faecesbook nonsense?

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Dunno, but forwarded from a friend who’s a manager in social services locally.

I suspect a con though.

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There’s a US TV series… not exploitative at all, no. I suspect the sisters make a few quid out it though.

depends how the money is split, I suspect the one on the right may get the most as a majority shareholder of the show title.

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Would bang