South Bruce Peninsular - I'm Surprised - Comments

OPG with a grain of salt ... literally

garym — Tue, 29 May 2007 20:04:37 -0400

Well, the operative suffix was '-er', as in thorium being dramatically improved over the existing situation, the effluence situation, the terrorist situation and the public acceptance situation. But that all may be moot anyway, because something else energy-convertable which Canada has in spades is salt water...

Did I say salt water? Yes, energy from salt water, and before you set your Missouri meter to weighing this one, you might want to view the media reports amassing under a simple google search for the inventor's name. It all started with an experiment to tag cancer cells with heavy metals to then enable doing the microwave-pieplate thing to zap them out while leaving the rest of the body only slightly warmed over ...

"John Kanzius, 63, invented a machine that emits radio waves in an attempt to kill cancerous cells while leaving normal cells intact. While testing his machine, he noticed that his invention had other unexpected abilities.

Filling a test tube with salt water from a canal in his back yard, Kanzius placed the tube and a paper towel in the machine and turned it on. Suddenly, the paper towel ignited, lighting up the tube like it was a wax candle.

Kanzius performed the experiment without the paper towel and got the same result -- the saltwater was actually burning.

[ Turning Salt Water Into Fuel? ]

Self-basting taffy -- there has to be a market for that one! -- seriously, in the video John passes a flourescent bulb through the beam and it lights, probably from microwave heating of the mercury inside the glass then emiting the UV needed to light the phosphors, and then he waves his hand across; no word on the net energy of the system, but radio waves in the 21 cm hydrogen scale are pretty easy to coax out of pretty cheap and ready-made parts.

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

We're well supplied

Dan O. — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:01:29 -0400

Canada is ranked #5 on the list of nations with Thorium reserves. If you read the rest of the article it contradicts the total greenness of Thorium.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html

It does sound promising but I'm from Missouri.

Dan O.

Green nuclear. This time for sure ...

garym — Mon, 28 May 2007 13:52:37 -0400

No, really. There's a new kid on the Nuclear block, the Thorium Fuel Reactor, and its bringing some pretty substantial promises for a new and actually factually safer greener and more secure atomic energy ...

Besides their inability to go critical and their low generation of waste, thorium-fuelled reactors don't suffer from the same proliferation risks as uranium reactors. This is because the thorium by-products cannot be re-processed into weapons-grade material.

Thorium also doesn't require enrichment before use as a nuclear fuel, and thorium is an abundant natural resource, with vast deposits in Australia, the United States, India and Norway.
[ Green nuclear power coming to Norway ]

and the Thorium-way may even solve our old-school gung-ho frick-the-future plants ...

Another advantage of thorium-powered reactors is they can be used to 'burn' highly radioactive waste by-products from conventional uranium-fuelled power plants.

Wait, there's more, because we wouldn't want to attract more noises about any lack of actionable sense in spreading this green meme if there was no hope of gaining any traction with the OPG, but here again, good news on the Norwegian front because they find the public acceptance for the positives of Thorium are making the cry for change spread like a meltdown:

Over the past eight months, there has been a substantial rise in public support for thorium reactors in Norway. In June 2006, polls showed 80 per cent of the population were completely opposed to any form of nuclear technology. Then in February 2007, the same percentage were in favour of investigating thorium reactors as a potential energy source.

"It is an absolutely incredible surprise that it has been possible to turn around the population in a country, just by quietly campaigning and explaining the benefits of the technology,"

[ COSMOS magazine ]

With all the OPG's reading our lines here, surely there's one or two who can put a bee in someone's bonnet and let us know if there are any plans for a Thorium Bruce Power -- I wouldn't want to start thinking that we'd over look this option from any geologically geographic political silliness like all the Thorium being in Norway and Australia while the Uranium is all in Canada and Rwanda ...

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

Radiovores in the Bruce

garym — Thu, 24 May 2007 08:28:37 -0400

Then again, maybe there's hope, and this hope was handed to us, given freely by Nature, funny enough, the last thing to escape from the bottom of the Pandora's Box of Chernobyl: in the wake of the disaster, there at ground zero, all over the place, and thriving, an ugly black mould like the stuff that infests your shower curtain, blackened by the melanin it cunningly uses to consume not the radioactive material, but the actual radiation itself ...

Dadachova, Casadevall and their colleagues tested how three different species of fungus respond to beta-radiation from caesium-137, which is produced during nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium. They found that all three, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, Cryptococcus neoformans and Wangiella dermatitidis, grow faster in the isotope's presence. ...
Some fungi can decompose radioactive material such as the hot graphite in the remains of the Chernobyl reactor. Previous studies have shown that most fungi found in contaminated regions grow towards various different radiation sources, as if trying to reach these compounds
[ Hungry fungi chomp on radiation ]

Of course, we kai-ju fans have known about 'radiovores' for a long time; giant monster creatures that feed directly on high-energy light sources, especially the gamma-rays and other energetic photons endemic to nuclear plants and test sites, have been the bane of the Japanese people for over 50 years, and have spelled boom-time for the developers and construction companies who labour long hours continually rebuilding the Tokyo television tower so that tourists will not notice the most recent devestation.

But it is maybe worth a lesson learned there how while the radiovore moulds may save the skin of OPG decontaminating their little oopsies before the geology gives out, the Japanese would be the first to tell us that maybe its not such a good idea to be standing in the cosmic jungle and screaming out for a hungry radiovore ...

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

A tick from the Minutes ...

garym — Wed, 23 May 2007 23:04:23 -0400

I actually had to read my de-RTF'd decoding of the javascript-guarded minutes twice to find this, and even then had to use my search function to locate it because it zipped by so fast. Also, to be fair, I don't think it constitutes any official active council endorsement ... yet. Does it? At this point, it rates only as a 'recommendation' arrived at after a short fist fight, or something slipped over as not too worthy of elaboration like that:

10. OPG/MAYOR GILBERT
Subsequent to discussion, Committee recommended as follows:
Recommendation: THAT the Town support the deep geological repository project which is being proposed by Ontario Power Generation.
[ Council Minutes: May 17, 2007 ]

Heck, why keep it so far away? Why not bury it under the stone tile bulls-eyes outside our fancy new Sixth Street washrooms? That way we can encourage plant growth, irradiate the cigarette butts and cash in on encouraging nuclear proliferation all at the same time!

bet it would be a real tourist draw too. we could go with a cool retro Bikini-Atoll motif!

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

I'm not ...

garym — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:09:46 -0400

actually, considering the climate of blanket acceptance and the spectre of sociopathic luddism lobbed at any who'd, as you do, dare point at incontrovertible geo-logical facts, I have been taking Myx's advice to heart, and through isotope teleportation transmolecularzation plan to get us off this planet at the earliest opportunity. If we have seats available, I'll let you know.

While the decision itself does seem a little like a post-dated cheque drawn on a failing bank, the Bible does say this Earth is cursed, so I guess its no real surprise after all. The Tibetian Bardo Thodol too tells us that of all the purgatoric options available for our reincarnations, at all costs and by any means you can muster do not get yourself born in the 'West'!

Slowly, we begin to see why.

A reporter asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of 'Western Civilization'.
"I think it would be a good idea," he said.

garym: ict evangelist - musician - whatever

I'm Surprised

Dan O. — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:02:41 -0400

I'm surprised that no one picked up from the council meeting minutes on the SBP website that they're suporting the Kincardine deep well disposal for radioactive waste. It would be one thing if this was an area of igneous precambrian shield but our bedrock is sedimentary limestone with fissures. On a timescale the 300 year window that they aim for storage sounds long but it's less than the period of european exploration and settlement of Ontario. I assume that jobs at the plant which support our bedroom community status are more important at this time.