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soubriquet

SnowJapan Member
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Everything posted by soubriquet

  1. A lot of my Japanese friends like Ishihara. They (and I) like Ishihara because he simply won't won't be bullied. Ishihara gets re-elected because he ignores western bet-wetters who would gladly sign a pluralist democracy over to a dictatorship for some reason or another.
  2. From Narita, find the Ken-O Expressway. Turn north on the Jo Ban expressway Turn west on the Ban Etsu Expressway Turn north on the Tohoku Expressway Turn west on the Yamagata expressway @moderator. Love your snip (technical not Anglo-Saxon).
  3. @tokoyo's first link is correct. That is the Narita->Zao route. It's missing the Expressway names. Any suggetions?
  4. Solid snow now. Everything will be open. To get to Zao by train from Tokyo. Take the Yamagata Shinkansen (Tsubasa) to Kaminoyama Onsen, then take a taxi or bus. It's less than 3 hours from Tokyo, and about 20 minutes to get up the mountain. I'll put up a route map for cars from Narita to Zao tomorrow.
  5. Don't bother coming. Appi is boring. December grass and rock boarding in yurrup is a much better waste of money.
  6. Letter to The Times. "Sir, Despite the caveats expressed by some Liberal Democrats over nuclear power (“Nuclear power ‘unsellable’ after Japan crisis, warns Ashdownâ€, Mar 26), the question of safety can be assessed only by scientists and nuclear engineers, not by politicians. Recent calculations indicate new nuclear power costs of £59/MWh including development, construction and decommissioning, reducing to £50/MWh later. Levelised offshore wind costs are estimated at £203/MWh, including marine transmission and grid restructuring; onshore wind, £118/MWh. All renewables suffer fr
  7. What a waste of talent. Rehab by the Jolly Boys.
  8. Originally Posted By: pie-eater Originally Posted By: soubriquet Pie eater: You do know that that white stuff coming from the stack is water vapour, don't you? Nope. Still smelly dirty factories though. The one in the photo is Stanlow. And smelly and dirty it most certainly is! It's water. That's why the vapour is dispersing, rather than creating a plume. Close refineries down. How's your summer trip back to the UK going? Is your aircraft going to be solar or wind powered?
  9. My numbers "In 2008, Japan ranked third in the world in electricity production, after the United States and China, with 1.025×10^12 kWh produced during that year." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan "Estimating Solar Electric (PV) System Size: Area of Solar Panels On average (as a general "rule of thumb") modern photovoltaics (PV) solar panels will produce 8 - 10 watts per square foot of solar panel area. For example, a roof area of 20 feet by 10 feet is 200 square-feet (20 ft x 10 ft). This would produce, roughly, 9 watts per sq-foot, or 200 sq-ft x 9 watts/sq-f
  10. Originally Posted By: oo Well done. But here is the question no-one is asking.... why do almost all of them look like blokes? Try again. The 'blokes' are the ones with perfect grooming, to die for haircuts, and tattoos. The ladies are there to play sport and never give up.
  11. The colour is all in my head The first time I saw TV was when I was about 8yo. We got our first TV when I was about 10. Incredible isn't it, that there are people are still alive who remember life without TV. I'm 59.
  12. Quote: Start putting solar panels on everyone's house (a stand-alone house in Japan can just about generate its own needs from solar panels on the roof, from numbers I have been looking at), and then one can start tapering off on the fossil fuel plants as well. And that is before ramping up other sources like geothermal, and developing energy storage for load-leveling. Not at night or in winter. Not economically. Read the full piece and look at Brook's numbers. Bear in mind he's a Green, so he's a renewable optimist. Each house generating its own needs (except at night time, when you are
  13. There is a very informative piece on nuclear energy by Professor Barry Brook here. http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/07/17/nuclear-climate-necessity/ "Professor Barry Brook holds the Foundation Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change and is Director of Climate Science at The Environment Institute, University of Adelaide." Warning: Professor Barry Brook uses arithmetic. Excerpt: "If we aim for society to be nearly completely powered by zero carbon sources by mid century, what is the size of the task? This might require 8 to 10 thousand gigawatts of electrical capaci
  14. Bo Diddley of the rectangular guitar (not here). Road runner live performance. Rock and roll's finest in action. Check out the lady on guitar, woot woot.
  15. We are still at the point where an outbreak of disease from an organic farm in Germany caused 35 more deaths than radiation from Fukushima. Lets close down organic farming. I note that following (yet again) the financial meltdown from sub-prime mortgages in the USA, we are now entering another (yet again) period of financial meltdown in europe. How many people are out of work? How many people have lost their homes? How much money has the incompetence cost? I propose that we abandon organic farming and the finance sector.
  16. Excellent result. Never give up. Sorry TB, but I thought the Womens' final a better game than watching Holland kicking the crap out of Spain.
  17. Do you have electricity? Yes. Do you have water? Yes. Nothing to see here, move along.
  18. Yes. That's the history of engineering. Steam boilers exploding. Railway bridges collapsing. Ships sinking. Aircraft falling from the sky. Thousands of dead. We continue to travel by rail, ship and aircraft, because the lessons have been (and continue to be) learned, and we do it better next time. Life (and progress) are not without risk.
  19. Japan 3-1 Sweden http://asia.eurosport.com/football/fifa-...771/story.shtml Have you seen this?
  20. Onagawa is operated by Tohoku Power, not TEPCO. We have no power shortage in Tohoku. Everything is running normally. Tohoku Power's engineering and management decisions have withstood the test. TEPCO has failed. The issue is not nuclear safety. Nuclear power plants can be safe. The failure is at management level.
  21. It's not just the sea wall that is important. What is behind it is more so. Standard reinforced concrete buildings withstood both the earthquake and the tsunami. If TEPCO had installed their generators and the fuel supply in appropriate buildings, their system would have been able to cope. Onagawa is much closer to the epicentre, and received a bigger tsunami than southern Fukushima. They (and we) were back on line within two days. Locals were using the power station visitor centre as an emergency shelter.
  22. Things were actually pretty busy. There were heaps of trucks rolling in and out and plenty of backhoes sorting stuff and loading them up. There were linesmen everywhere running new power cables, and lots of activity with roads being re-built where thay had been completely washed away in the towns. Here's the Onagawa nuclear power plant. I could see no sign of any damage. I was snorkelling around the rocky headland in the right of the photo.
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