Bad bad things are going on in Norway these days. Please spread the word.

[Janne]

I had a bit of Latin in secondary school. Extra tuition on fathers insistence, as ‘all educated people know a but if Latin’.
Hated it....

Was no good in my Mil job, but once I had to quit that onr I started in Medicine/ dentistry Uni and it helped tremendously.

I guess as the Greeks were the predominant culture before the emergence of the Roman culture, and had lots of colonies around the Med, specially on the Italian peninsula, no doubt much if the language stayed and enriched Latin?

I wonder why they have not introduced the Visent in Scandinavia?

They introduced the Muskox in some places, but I remember there were problems with inbreeding or something.

They tried to retrobreed the wild cow several times independetly, achieved visually semi authentic ones, but geneticalky not correct.
Also all the re-creations did not have the ‘wild and ferocious’ streak the original one had.
Read a couple of books about than some years ago.

The Poles and Germans did a lot of that work.
Maybe the modern DNA tech can help, but I doubt there is much interest beyond the Russian and Korean work.

Maybe better to save what we have first?

 

[Tengu]

Bison unknown in GB.

But we did have Aurochs.

 

[GuestD]

 

[Janne]

Must have been there when Doggerland connected todays Britain to the mainland.
Did they not reintroduce a few in England some years back?

Note: I write about the Euopean Bison or Visent.

Problem is, a large wild animal needs a large area of habitat. Not easy in UK!

 

[Tengu]

We have several herds of `wild` cattle in this country.

(The Chillinghan are famous but there are others)

 

[Robson Valley]

Biological nomenclature. Taxonomy. Systematics. Both Latin and Greek are and were used.
The concept supposes that there is little risk of the classical languages being altered by usage.
And, that has turned out to be factually the case.

We are at the end of an 800 km power line. Anything goes off and we take the hit.
BUT
We have a 5(?)MW biodeisel gen set in the village with a 15 second start time to full power.
We have a run of the river 5MW hydro power station on Castle River.
We have switches!!!!! 10 km from the village in all directions.
We can isolate from the grid in seconds.
I can go downstairs and push 1 button for 8+ hrs of 500W VAC.

Be careful what you wish for. There's room up some side valleys for 3 or 4 more run-of-the-river
hydro plants. That's just fine. However it means that the great open expanses of mountains and glaciers
will be festooned with towers and HV power lines. I'd rather not see that.

 

[demographic]

I'd imagine that being seen as a dumping ground for the UK's windfarms will be a particularly knotty problem for Scottish politicians, especially given Scotlands tourist economy, and especially if the wind farms are just privately owned ventures that only a relative few benefit from.

Seems that Scotland just has less Nimbys as its generally quite popular.

 

[petrochemicals]

Biological nomenclature. Taxonomy. Systematics. Both Latin and Greek are and were used.
The concept supposes that there is little risk of the classical languages being altered by usage.
And, that has turned out to be factually the case.

We are at the end of an 800 km power line. Anything goes off and we take the hit.
BUT
We have a 5(?)MW biodeisel gen set in the village with a 15 second start time to full power.
We have a run of the river 5MW hydro power station on Castle River.
We have switches!!!!! 10 km from the village in all directions.
We can isolate from the grid in seconds.
I can go downstairs and push 1 button for 8+ hrs of 500W VAC.

Be careful what you wish for. There's room up some side valleys for 3 or 4 more run-of-the-river
hydro plants. That's just fine. However it means that the great open expanses of mountains and glaciers
will be festooned with towers and HV power lines. I'd rather not see that.

Few people find power grids attractive. I certainly don't. Norwegians are pro-electricity, but against power lines. That won't work in the long run. Norway has trolls, so more power lines are needed. That's just the way it is.

Plus get a flywheel put on the village generator, you'll have no lag then.

 

[Robson Valley]

Rumor has it that the village gen set consists of 2 diesel locomotives (4,000Hp each) with no wheels.
Auto start after grid circuit checks are made. Nice and quiet when compared with the 5kW home gen sets.

 

[Janne]

Diesel generators are a superb back up.
Here our electricity is produced by 4 or 5 Värtsilä marine diesels running on bunker oil.
But Solar is slowly coming.

 

[santaman2000]

Wind turbines? Before the age of fossil fuels we were a lot fewer and our footprint were a lot smaller, when the oil etc "runs out" we will return to that state. The world seems to be powered by technology but technology depends on cheap energy and fossil fuels are the cheapest large scale energy source mankind has ever been able to utilize. Unfortunately the Earth is a finite planet and fossil fuels are getting harder and harder to get hold of, at some point the stuff will become too expensive and we're in for very different times. Grim prospect for us humans but I bet many of our coinhabitants are hoping for this next age to hurry up and arrive.

Oh I don’t know about that. It would appear that nuclear energy is substantially cheaper.

“"[T]he cost of producing nuclear-generated electricity in 2007 was 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 2.4 cents for coal, 6.7 cents for natural gas and 10.2 cents for oil. In other words, the cost of nuclear-generated electricity was nearly one-third less than power produced at a natural gas plant.Feb 24, 2009”

Here’s the full article: https://alternativeenergy.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=001269

 

[Paul_B]

Did they factor in decommissioning, monitoring and long term storage of the various grades of radioactive material? IIRC factoring in these costs hasn't been a skill nuclear lobby is any good at. In fact one could say they've been highly misleading about. Initially it would have been because they hadn't considered that but I bet by 2007 it was more because that would have bumped the price up more than the others.

Perhaps someone could find an honest and unbiased assessment of the cost for each electricity generation method.

 

[santaman2000]

Did they factor in decommissioning, monitoring and long term storage .....Perhaps someone could find an honest and unbiased assessment of the cost for each electricity generation method.

Personally I think the cost of long term storage is largely due to a NIMBY attitude. Not entirely, but largely. In any case an economy of scale will lower costs in whatever form of electricity production proliferates.

It appears they also didn’t factor in start up costs in the above article either. The closest I can find to an unbiased article was this one from Stanford University http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/murphy2/

 

[Janne]

I checked online how the storage of excess electricity is done, and one of the methods is to use 'old vehicle batteries'.
Weird. When I have to change my vehicle batteries, they are unusable?
Or can they be revived to a healthy state?

If so, why is it not done as standard on our vehicles, that would save a lot of acids, lead and other crap top be recycled ( hopefully) ???

 

[demographic]

I checked online how the storage of excess electricity is done, and one of the methods is to use 'old vehicle batteries'.
Weird. When I have to change my vehicle batteries, they are unusable?
Or can they be revived to a healthy state?

If so, why is it not done as standard on our vehicles, that would save a lot of acids, lead and other crap top be recycled ( hopefully) ???

Batteries can store usable amounts of energy after they degrade to the point where they cant give enough cranking amps to start a car.

 

[Janne]

OK. So would it be beneficial for Nature ( and my wallet) to buy a battery that has the highest possible Amps/

Quality batteries here are exceptionally expensive, and we are lucky if they last more than 2-3 years. Nobody has explained why the short time, every place blames the Temperature and the high salt content in the air.

 

[Robson Valley]

Batteries have different designs, depending on the application.
"Cold Cranking Amps" defines the sudden high-power jolt needed to turn over my 454 truck engine at -20C.
AHr (Amp-Hour) defines the long slow current delivery from a deep cycle marine battery ( or even a AA dry cell)
Such as would fir the application in a solar energy-driven power system.

To see 117VAC (pure sine wave) from my inverter, the battery bank must have a voltage level above 11.7 VDC.
Below that, the inverter can't see a big enough difference to ground to make AC.
Maybe I could still get a dim light from a 12VDC light bulb but I've never bothered to try.
-25C and off the grid leads to more important issues.

Lead acid batteries die because of a reverse reaction which coats the pure lead plates with sulfate.

Recycle? The plant here in Trail, BC smashes 5,000 lead acid batteries per 24 hours.
The entire NW quadrant of North America. Train loads of them.
1. Dump the acid and that goes to a fertilizer plant
2. Smash the batteries in a ball mill and rinse with water (washings to the fertilizer plant. too)
3. All the plastic is remelted into beads used for molding tool boxes, truck bed liners and so on.
4. Battery lead is very high purity. That goes to a Lead/Zinc smelter to be addedto their stock output.

 

[Janne]

I do not know where our dead batteries go. Dump I guess.

The only battery that I have had installed is now 6 years old.
I had to import it from Germany.

 

[Broch]

And there you go ….

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48870920

 

[Janne]

I have said that for decades. First because as we cut down forests, we are lessening the Oxygen production. then to bio lock in Carbon.
Now it is big news.
But, there is one problem: Plant trees in most Third World countries - turns to firewood as soon as they can.
You in UK need to plant more trees , cover those unused fields with beautiful, mixed forests.
That Danish guy is showing you how it should be done!