Proof that engineering and magic do not mix

Found via Scienceblogs:

Yes, but bad news for Australia's gas emissions

According to the ABC:

The lentil is commonly associated with the Indian dish dhal, flatulence and Neil the Hippy from the BBC comedy The Young Ones almost 30 years ago.

More recently though, the relatively cheap pulse has also emerged as one of the most lucrative crops to grow in Australia.

Last weekend, my wife tried a new recipe for braised lamb shanks, which featured mostly Indian curry-ish spices and lentils. The effects the next day were pretty dire.

Solar stuff up

At least in Victoria, putting solar on your roof top has not been going smoothly:

The Victorian Energy and Water Ombudsman, Fiona McLeod, said that six months ago there were 17 complaints a month but they had now reached 141 a month....

There are issues with the safety of some of the installations, but apart from that, there is the economic issue:

In November the state government lifted the rate Victorian households are paid for power they put back into the grid to 66 cents a kilowatt. But in switching to solar, many households have lost the discount rates they had for using off-peak power to run hot-water systems, reverse-cycle air-conditioners and in-floor heating.

The loss of those discounts has resulted in thousands of Victorian households being hit with higher power bills after switching to solar.

Yes, I would be mighty annoyed too if spending $5000 or more on solar resulted in higher electricity bills.

Apart from the link above, here's a longer article detailing the practical problems with installing solar. It includes this bit concerning the size of solar systems, about which I had been curious, because it seems that many companies lately have been advertising smaller systems, many just barely over one kilowatt:

Consumer Affairs Victoria and Energy Safe Victoria have been made aware of supposedly dodgy private operators who are either bringing in inferior panels from countries such as China, or installing the panels without adhering to the AS3000 standard for wiring.

These systems are not capable of generating the claimed one-kilowatt output.

A source at one power distributor told The Age homes with a standard one-kilowatt solar system, as recommended under Canberra's scheme, would ''very rarely'' contribute any power back to the grid and earn money for a household.

''Unless it's a sunny day, and a good quality panel, and not one of the cheap imports, a one-kilowatt system can barely power the fridge and hot water system, let alone feed any meaningful power back.''

Lots of problems yet to be sorted out.

Nuclear debate

Nuclear Power Plants Cost Too Much To Build

This article, and the comments that follow in rebuttal, makes for an interesting read on the issue of the economic cost of developing nuclear power.

Of course, it is only dealing with large power plants. It seems that virtually no one has looked at the costs of rolling out small scale nuclear (of the Hyperion type) on a large scale. (Yes I know, it seems only to be an option just starting to be available, although it also seems to me that small scale pebble bed may be a future option as well, if anyone will work on developing it.)

A long explanation

BBC News - Why is the car giant Toyota not Toyoda?

It takes a long time for them to explain, but it comes down to this:

"In 1936, the company held a competition for a new name. Toyota was a popular choice among many. "

According to the company, it received some 27,000 entries.

It says the winning design led to a change in the name of the automobiles and plants from "Toyoda" to "Toyota."

The name was chosen "because the number of strokes to write Toyota in Japanese (eight) was thought to bring luck and prosperity," it goes on.

The past remembered

Greeks mention the war in bitter German attack

Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos said Germany had no right to reproach Greece for anything after it devastated the country under the Nazi occupation, which left 300,000 dead.

''They took away the gold that was in the Bank of Greece, and they never gave it back,'' he said. ''They shouldn't complain so much about stealing and not being very specific about economic dealings.''

Heh.

Yet another coming disaster

Disaster Awaits Cities in Earthquake Zones - NYTimes.com

Andrew Revkin is writing on more than just climate change now, it seems, with a long and interesting article here on what a disaster a major earthquake in Istanbul will be.

He notes, for example:

Some of Turkey’s biggest builders have readily admitted to using shoddy materials and bad practices in the urban construction boom. In an interview last year with the Turkish publication Referans, Ali Agaoglu, a Turkish developer ranked 468th last year on the Forbes list of billionaires, described how in the 1970s, salty sea sand and scrap iron were routinely used in buildings made of reinforced concrete.

“At that time, this was the best material,” he said, according to a translation of the interview. “Not just us, but all companies were doing the same thing. If an earthquake occurs in Istanbul, not even the army will be able to get in.”

And this:

One prediction about a potent quake concluded that 30,000 natural gas lines were likely to rupture. “If just 10 percent catch fire, that’s 3,000 fires,” he said, adding that the city’s fire stations are able to handle at most 30 to 40 fires in one day.

As for the status of engineers there:

Dr. Bilham at the University of Colorado has estimated that an engineer is involved in just 3 percent of the construction under way around the world.

Peter Yanev, who has advised the World Bank and the insurance industry on earthquake engineering and is the author of “Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country,” noted that in Turkey and other developing countries, even when someone with an engineering degree was involved, that was no guarantee of safe construction because there was little specialized training or licensing.

I also didn't realise that Tehran was in such danger too:

In Tehran, Iran’s capital, Dr. Bilham has calculated that one million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti, which the Haitian government estimates killed 230,000. (Some Iranian geologists have pressed their government for decades to move the capital because of the nest of surrounding geologic faults.)

Pity God can't arrange for one just big and localised enough to take out some uranium centrifuges.

Agreed

Why Clint Eastwood Is Ridiculously Overrated - The Daily Beast

I feel the same about Eastwood as I do about Mel Gibson: nothing they have ever done (that I have seen) strikes me as especially good. In fact, most of it I positively dislike.

Even if you don't agree with my assessment, I think the article is well argued and perhaps more generous than me, despite its title.

Local research news

Rising carbon snuffs coral

In a large experiment on Australia’s Heron Island, the team simulated CO2 and temperature conditions predicted for the middle and end of this century, based on current forecasts of the world’s likely emission levels and warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The results of their analyses of the bleaching, growth and survival of a number of organisms including corals indicates that a number of very important reef builders may be completely lost in near future.

“We found that coralline algae, which glue the reef together and help coral larvae settle successfully, were highly sensitive to increased CO2. These may die on reefs such as those in the southern Great Barrier Reef (GBR) before year 2050,” says Dr Anthony.

As Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is one of the researchers involved, Andrew Bolt will no doubt dismiss this. And, I have to admit, I think Ove does tend to the most pessimistic interpretation of anything that affects coral.

However, I am still concerned that he is right on the long term prospects.

Just wondering

BBC News - Whale kills SeaWorld trainer during Orlando show

The first report of this I saw this morning said it wasn't during a show. This more detailed report seems to confirm it was, and will presumably affect some of the witnesses for some time:

Park guest Victoria Biniak told a local TV channel that the trainer had just finished explaining to the audience what they were about to see.

At that point, she said, the whale "took off really fast, and then he came back around to the glass, jumped up, grabbed the trainer by the waist and started shaking her violently. The last thing we saw was her shoe floating."

However, officials say the trainer apparently fell into the tank whilst addressing an audience of guests, and was killed accidentally by the killer whale.

I am curious as to how much money a killer whale trainer is paid. Surely it would be worth a hell of a lot in danger money.

And for that matter, will they finally give up on training these animals at all? Sound like they are too dangerous to bother with.

Update: go to the Orlando Sentinel for more confusion over exactly how it happened, as well as a line which I think they should change to avoid very black humour jokes:

Other eyewitnesses who were in the park for the Dining with Shamu told the Sentinel that a female trainer was petting a whale when it grabbed her and plunged back into the water. The whale reappeared on the other side of the tank.

There's also a photo of the deceased trainer, doing something you wouldn't get me to do for a million bucks.

An ever so slightly controversial teaching

A new religious opinion from Saudi Arabia:

Saudi religious figure Shaikh Abdul Rahman Al Barrak on Tuesday said that the mixing of genders at the workplace or in educational institutions was religiously prohibited on the grounds that it allowed seeing what must not be seen and engaging in forbidden conversations.

Those who refuse to abide by strict segregation between men and women should be put to death, he said.

This is, fortunately, not showing signs of being widely accepted:

However, Kuwaiti scholars said that such an edict could come only from "a senile person or someone who wants to sow sedition in the nation by allowing the killing of innocent people."

I didn't know that...(a long continuing series)

The mystery of the 100-tonne whale | Environment | The Guardian

From the above article talking about a stranded whale in England:

The carcasses can communicate zoonotic, or inter-species disease (as can live whales, a warning for anyone within spouting distance of a cetacean), or worse. The buildup of gases in an ­animal's stomach can cause a whale to expand to bursting point – in 1617, a sperm whale beached at Scheveningen in the Netherlands exploded, fatally infecting bystanders.

Brave new world indeed

Ministers admit failure over cutting ‘shameful’ teenage pregnancies - Times Online

Ministers accept that they cannot meet Tony Blair’s target, set in 1999, of halving pregnancies among under-18s by 2012. Figures today will show that Britain still has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe.

About 40,000 such girls, or 40 per 1,000, become pregnant each year — a modest fall from the 1998 tally of 46.6 per 1,000. Back then Mr Blair called Britain’s record shameful.

So what great new ideas does the government have to reduce teenage pregnancies?:

Among plans to be announced today will be more access to long-acting contraception, such as implants and injections, and phone texts to remind girls to use contraceptives.

I reckon if Huxley had put this in his novel Brave New World, people would have thought it an appropriate part of his satire.

Some people in Britain have a better idea:

But critics say far more needs to be done to deter young people from having sex, rather than providing them with ever more free condoms and access to the contraceptive pill. The average age at which young people first have sex is 16, compared with almost 18 in the Netherlands, which has the lowest rate of teenage pregnancy.

I am surprised that no one is looking at the entire culture, where TV popular with teenagers features sex regularly. According to this report a couple of years ago, Sex and the City can be linked to higher rates of teenage pregnancy. However, I reckon it is the Channel 4 shows like Shameless, and that teenage soap featuring a lot of sex (the name of which escapes me for the moment) have as much to do with it as any American sitcom marketed for adults.

The sad story of the pebble bed reactor

Pebble-bed nuclear reactor gets pulled : Nature News

South Africa has stopped funding for the development of its own pebble bed reactor. (Actually, I thought there was a recent announcement of some energy funding to SA from Obama, and that it might have been going to help with the pebble bed demonstration reactor. But maybe that was just my guess.)

Anyhow, Nature explains what went wrong with the project in South Africa:

Runaway costs and technical problems helped to doom the project, says Thomas. "In 1998, they were saying that they would have the demo plant online in 2003" at a cost of 2 billion rands, he says. "The final estimate was that the demo plant would be online in 2018 and it would cost 30 billion rands." Furthermore, he adds, the PBMR has never been held to account for why costs rose every year, why the completion date was continually pushed back or the nature of its design problems.

In a final twist, the PBMR announced last year that it was indefinitely shelving plans to build a demonstration plant. The programme's demise will not help South Africa's goal of doubling its 35,000-megawatt power-generating capacity by 2025.

One problem was that the design became too ambitious, says John Walmsley, past president of the South African branch of the Nuclear Institute, a professional society for nuclear engineers. The PBMR hoped to push the reactor's operating temperature as high as possible to enable not just electricity generation, but also 'process heat' applications such as turning coal into liquid fuels, he says. It also aimed to boost the power output to the very limits of the design to make the reactor more economical. "They tried to build a BMW when they maybe should have started with a Morris Minor," he says.

Even the passive safety feature of the design may have been overstated, it appears:

Although many scientists had hoped that the safety system of the pebble-bed design would win over opponents of nuclear power, a 2008 report from the Jülich Research Centre cast doubt on those claims, suggesting that core temperatures could rise even higher than the safe threshold.

Tsinghua University in Beijing now hosts the only operational prototype pebble-bed reactor, although similar reactors are being developed in the United States and the Netherlands. But the PBMR's problems are not unique, says Thomas. "Every nuclear nation in the world has had a programme to commercialize this type of reactor, and they all got nowhere."

Well, I'm not giving up yet, as long as some company somewhere is still looking at them.

Too good to be true?

Will Bloom box replace power grid? Details on Wednesday

A bit of a publicity splash is starting for a fuel cell that (allegedly) has already been used by some companies and works well.

It is said to run on natural gas, bio-gas and solar energy (?).

However, as I've noted before, Japan has been quietly deploying natural gas fuel cells for houses for a couple of years. I assume this American version is meant to be significantly better. This part sounds a bit optimistic:

Sridhar said the chemical reaction is efficient and clean, creating energy without burning or combustion. He said that two Bloom boxes - each the size of a grapefruit - could wirelessly power a US home, fully replacing the power grid; one box could power a European home, and two or three Asian homes could share a single box. Although currently a commercial unit costs $700,000-$800,000 each, Sridhar hopes to manufacture home units that cost less than $3,000 in five to 10 years.

Elsewhere, the article indicates that the amount of gas used by one of the commercially trialled one is half that which would be used if the gas was used in a normal power station. Interesting, but we will see.

Laptop, textbook, pistol

Colorado students fight for gun rights - Americas, World - The Independent

What seemed like common sense to some is nothing less than an assault on the US Constitution to others, which is why a governors meeting at Colorado State University today to approve a ban on students bearing concealed weapons on its main campus in Fort Collins is likely to be rowdy.

Preventing bloodshed is the first thing on the board's mind. It is three years since the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech that took the lives of 32 students and staff and just under two weeks since Amy Bishop, a professor at the University of Alabama, allegedly shot six of her colleagues, killing three of them.

Yet there has been such a push-back against the plan that the board may defer a decision today to await further public comment.

According to the article, "the student's governing body voted overwhelmingly to resist the gun ban." Sounds like student unionism in the US is a very different creature from student unionism here.

This part is also surprising:

Since the Virginia shootings, state legislatures across the US have debated a variety of laws concerning guns in lecture halls, but few have taken significant action. The most recent big change came in Utah in 2004, which voted to lift a decades-old gun ban for the 44,000-strong University of Utah.

Even if you allow any student with a gun licence to bring it to campus, just how many would do it as a precautionary measure for the next student/lecturer massacre? How many times have we ever read of individual with their own concealed weapon taking decisive action against a workplace/school/university shooting?

Dubious at best

Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man's best friend

According to the article, dogs have a very high "carbon footprint", but don't think your other pets get off lightly:

Cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares, slightly less than driving a Volkswagen Golf for a year, while two hamsters equates to a plasma television and even the humble goldfish burns energy equivalent to two mobile telephones.

I can imagine someone somewhere telling the kids "it's the plasma, or the hamsters; one of them has to go." The trauma that could cause...

Cultural issues (cont.)

I didn't catch all of Four Corners last night about the tradition of "boy play" of Afghanistan, but it certainly was a remarkable show, painting a picture of pretty routine paedophilia between older men and young teenage boys in the north of the country. (My post yesterday mentioned the Pashtans and their routine homosexuality in the south. Seems there is little escaping it.)

There seems to be virtually none of the secrecy that men with such interests in the West keep. Who knew that Ancient Greece was alive and well just down the road and around the corner? I had thought that talk of Arab/Muslim countries where interest in boys was high had probably been exaggerated; now that generous view seems wrong.

The overall impression was not so much shock; more that this was a really weird culture. I mean, it would appear that the standard wedding feast entertainment for men is to sit in a room and watch a 15 year old boy dance; although fully clothed, this appears to hold much erotic interest for the men. (The younger boys watching just look rather puzzled.) Is this what happens as a result of centuries of the subjugation of, and separation from, women?

The height of modernity is apparently to ask your wife if you can have a boy to live in the house in the spare room. Of course, traditionalists couldn' t care less about the wife's views.

I also can't help feeling how good this must make the young, conservative Marines from mid-West America feel when they are trying to save the country from the bad guys. A greater cultural divide would be harder to imagine.

More on dealing with waste

Technology Review: GE Hitachi's Answer to Nuclear Waste

Rather than update my previous post on the topic, I'll just park this here. They are still talking reactors with sodium: an idea even I feel nervous about.

Burning the forests by proxy

Yet another depressing story about forests and palm oil noted in this blog post from the AAAS meeting:

Holly Gibbs, a researcher at Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, also showed data that attempts to help clarify one aspect of the climate debate. Two papers published last year suggested that clearing tropical forests to plant biofuel crops might actually worsen climate change, but that planting biofuels crops on "degraded" land - such as abandoned agricultural land - offers a net benefit to climate. Gibbs analyzed satellite images taken from 1980 to 2000 to try to answer the question of whether tropical crops are largely being planted on deforested or degraded land. She found that the majority of new crops were planted on freshly deforested rather than degraded land.

Gibbs said she could not tell from her data whether the new crops were planted for food or fuel. But she added, "What we know is that biofuell use is definitely fueling deforestation." She said when biofuel prices increase, the amount of deforestation increases as well. She said she would personally estimate that between one-third to two-thirds of deforestation over the past couple of years has been due to the planting of biofuel crops.

I guess that in the argument about the role the market should play in plans to reduce CO2, this example would indicate that direct action is better in some cases.