How times change

In 1962, we used to go to Woolworths and buy two meters of rubber gas tube (orange rubber)
stick one end on a Gas tap (Gas pipes had copper taps along them with a tapered outlet), and the other to a metal tube with holes along it, it was known as a gas poker, we used it to light the coal fire (If you were posh) instead of kindling wood or as we did newspaper rolled up round a knitting needle

Move on to 1980 and we found gas central heating, the old coal chimney that took everything burned into the sky was fine for gas, coal, wood, and anything else you might burn for heat

1990 Oh no this brick chimney is not allowed you have to have an Aluminium liner at X
pounds

2013 sorry this Aluminium is not allowed, the gas produces Acid that has to be drained off via new plastic pipes at only £360 each into an Earth sink (available at Megaland £199) and a Plastic chimney liner at £400

Now I am burning the same gas (I know it is no longer coal gas but some gas) yet since 2005 it has started producing this killer acid, Oh and in the winter when you use it, it will freeze and shut your heating down

Now as an aside, Nuclear power, for eighteen months I slept on top of a Nuclear reactor well a mattress thickness above it,
All my kids are fine, now aged 40 with kids of their own and my bits are still working, bugger they do not glow green to find it at night

Onward and upward in the 21st Centuary

Jack McH

 

Nuclear energy is the cleanest we currently have. I remember clearly a lesson in physics at school one day. The teacher removed a small piece of uranium from a locked cupboard and point a geiger counter at it. Needless to say it went a bit mad. Then once we (his class) were suitably worried, he pointed the same geiger counter straight at the sky. It went even more crazy. The gist of it was that cosmic background radiation that bombards us all 24/7 is considerably more intense than the radiation from this piece of uranium. He then put a single piece of paper between the uranium and the instrument, and the reading dropped significantly. Then he put a sheet of lead in between, and the reading then hardly registered at all.

Ok, so nuclear is nasty when it goes wrong, but engineers know that, and that's why the walls of typical reactor consist of several metres of reinforced concrete, and reactors with a newer design that that of the infamous Chernobyl one have a failsafe meachanism such that it requires power to keep them reacting. Chernobyl was a disaster because once the reactor overheated, the mechanism that should have inserted the boron rods seized. In newer reactors (the vast majority of them) have the boron rods suspended, so that if power fails they automatically drop under gravity to bring the reaction under control.

The biggest risk is not the reactor, but the spent material that somehow has to be disposed of, which is no more radioactive that the uranium 238 that occurs in abundance, naturally, in the bedrock around Cornwall.

Of course none of this matters to some people, who see headlines about Chernobyl (a primitive reactor with a long outdated design) and more recently Fukishima (a reactor build right on the coast in one of the most geological active parts of the world), and just assume that the headlines are more informative than a bit of basic research. Using coal as fuel has killed and continues to kill many, many more people than any nuclear reactor, not to mention churning up the countryside as it was mined, yet that's ok, just as long as its not nuclear.

 

Then you get the wind turbines blotting the landscape that produce enough power to switch on your kettle! Your right clueless about nuclear power, it is the future.
3/4 of France's power comes from nuclear and you don't hear them moaning. They usually moan about anything

I think it's not the gas producing acid it's the boiler. New condensing boilers heat the heat exchanger using the hot condensation produced from heating the water in the heat exchanger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensing_boiler

 

I worked on the British Coal miners compensation scheme. I asked when I was being made redundant how much I was allowed to say in public, and was told most of it is in the public domain now, so here goes.

We had 750,000 claimants on the system. About 500,000 were for COPD. Of those, 60% had already died prematurely of COPD and associated illnesses like pneumoconiosis, but their records showed their illness had, beyond reasonable doubt, been caused by their work in the pits. Of the 40% that were still alive, about half had very short term prognosis, and I had the misfortune of seeing some of them when they had misread their letter asking them to come for a medical, and they turned up at our office instead of the medical centre. Doesn't matter how many times you see it, its still quite upsetting seeing somebody in a wheel chair with breathing apparatus on.

The majority of cases were found to be genuine, and they could only claim if they had worked in the pit after the date that it was officially confirmed that coal dust was harmful, which if I remember right was some time as recent as the 1970s. Lets also remember that these were ONLY the British Coal miners, not UK Coal or other independents, only from British mines, only those that had worked down there within the last about 40 years, and of those, it was only those that had made a claim (or their family had). And it was only one possible cause of death or terminal illness.

So in effect, in the last approx 40 years in Britain alone, coal mining has claimed about half a million lives from COPD.

In my time on that contract I had to meet and speak to a lot of people who had been involved in the mining industry. I learned that even relatively recently, death by explosion, asphyxiation, and other industrial accidents were also common. In fact the pit heads even featured a "one way" emergency room, with a door to outside that was concealed behind a wall such that an ambulance or the coroner could take people away without the rest of the lads seeing, so as not to upset them.

All this on a tiny island like Britain. Extrapolate that across the world, and then I wonder how on earth the anti-nuclear brigade dare suggest that nuclear energy is more dangerous than other energy sources.

 

They just need to build the Nuclear power stations out of Japanese Oak LIKE the arches

Nagasaki 1945


Osutchi 2011


Jack McH