ataremove’s Recent Comments

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  A name

  From one whom watches ice melt on line,
  and with no apologies to John Waters,
  I suggest that the opera be named ...

  CRY, O Sphere

  .................

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  On Inconvenient Truth gives an encore -- as an opera posted 1 year, 5 months ago 4 Responses

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  KMP - Cucumbers

  KMP
  Go vertical with the cucumbers.  I started growing them more than 15 years ago, and I have always used a trellis or two or three of some sort.  Nothing fancy, just somethings I put together from scavanged material, ornamental metal wire fencing stapled/nailed to a scrap lumber frame 5-6 feet tall.  For a few years, my sister used a simple string net hanging from a privacy fence.  I like mine to be free standing so I can get around behind.  Makes for easy pickings.  You have to pay attention to the vines when they are young to get them to start climbing.  I also move them as they are growing to get them to spread out.  Kind of an art form.
  A warning that probably doesn't apply to you:  One year I helped a friend trellis her cucumbers.  One morning after the vines has just reached the top of the 6-foot trellis, she looked out to see the top three feet gone.  During the night, deer ate the vines thru the back of the trellis.  A wire-mesh fence around the garden kept them from getting the lower three feet.  
  One of the simple pleasures I get from gardening is the aroma of fresh green bell peppers.  A few of them sitting in the kitchen will shortly fill the room with their aroma.  
  Oh, yeah.  When growing peppers, don't grow habanero.  One small plant produces 20-40 little yellow peppers, and you got to wear gloves to work with them.  I didn't and my hands tingled for two days.

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  On A bright trend for dark times: kitchen gardening posted 1 year, 7 months ago 26 Responses

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  Land use and wildfires

  Buenos Aires, Argentina, is choking from the smoke coming from fires on nearby islands set by farmers to clear pasture lands so they can grow more soybeans.  One article I read also included the displaced cattle raisers as setting fires to clear "unused" land to make new pastures for cattle.  
  One type of people displace another type of people that displace something else.  Etcetera.
  By the way, I read some where that soybean production is down by 15% in Brazil and Argentina for this past growing season (Southern Hemisphere).  This in turn affects the price of soybeans in the USA.  
  If more USA farm acres are shifted to maize corn this year (like last year?), then upward price pressure will continue on all agricultural products: corn, wheat, barley, oats, sunflowers, soybeans, rice, etc.  
  I view that commodity broker you mentioned above as trying to get others to feed his addiction to playing the commodities trading game.
  Mr. Philpott, thank you for your reporting on agricultural issues.  I would like to see you write more on the effects of the  interconnectedness of what crops are planted.
  More and more, I think that the first big hit our species is going to take is going to come from the reduction in food production.  Due to internal political pressure, India will soon stop exporting rice.  Vietnam and Thailand are also considering doing the same.  Those are the top three exporters of rice.  
  And in Africa, Mugabe has started another wave of reducing agricultural production in Zimbabwe.  
  

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  On Three million more acres of industrial corn? posted 1 year, 7 months ago 6 Responses

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  Lab-Meat?

  Sounds like the beginnings of Chicken Little from the scifi novel "Space Merchants".

  And whose to say that this proposed method is not going to concentrate contaminants faster than self-grown meat on the plains? On Meat of the future may be grown in a lab posted 1 year, 7 months ago 14 Responses

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  Nuke reactor shutdown

  What I remember from Navy Nuc days is that at right at shutdown, very short-lived fission products would generate almost 7% of the power at the moment of shutdown.  Within 10 seconds, heat energy from the decay of these isotopes would drop to well below 1% of full power.  So overall this "artifact" is trivial in terms of overall energy waste/inefficiency.  
  The thing about pressurized water reactors is that you always have to keep the reactor pumps running to circulate the reactor water to keep the heat content of the reactor plant balanced for any short-term (less than a month or so) shutdown.  This alone subsumes any issue/problem with post-shutdown decay heat generation.  
  Yes, during shutdown there is heat generation from long-lived fission products and some naturally occuring fission.  But this is more than offset by heat loss to the air surrounding the reactor vessel.  
  Non-trivial is the fact that there are energy-using shutdown, and startup, activities which are necessary to control the stresses from heat and pressure differentials, primarily on the reactor vessel.  That would also hold true for a coal-fired steam-driven plant, although not to the extent that is needed in a similar nuclear plant.
  The point about Rankine cycle from the initial comment is huge compared to startup/shutdown energy needs.  From my Navy days, steam-driven plants transfer at best 33% of the energy into usable work.  The rest is waste heat.  Regardless of the heat source: nuclear or fossil fuel.  That's the harsh reality of the Mollier diagram.

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  On Severe drought in the Southeast impacts nuclear power production posted 1 year, 10 months ago 38 Responses