“If you refuse to consider uranium as a means of saving humanity because it is yucky then you have no right to be taken seriously. You are merely posing on a stage, waving at an adoring crowd of the vacuous and self-righteous. ”
This is about the best the right have got. A vacuous twat with a poor understanding of basic geography.
“so effective have these charlatans been in demonising atomic power”
People like Damian should be given a quiet ward somewhere so they can live out their pathetic lives discussing monocultural race fantasies and nuclear paradise without bothering the rest of us.
I’m not going to link to the article. It’s rubbish.
Onto red neck rant radio and the other provided soapboxes from his backers on the right.
DP v2.0 folks as slater and the others are a little overexposed currently due to prior indiscretions. I see the TPU not using Jordy to front their spin lately also.
Germany has had one of the most aggressive energy production shifts for over 30 years.
All of Germany’s nuclear generators will be down by 2022. Cheers to Angela Merkel.
Germany has also started to close down the last of its coal mines.
Back in the day, the favored place for a nuclear power plant was on the Kaipara Harbour. There are still good stories to be told of National Ministers personally buying land up there in anticipation.
By 1965 planning was under way for a 1000-megawatt (MW) station in Northland, with a site on the Kaipara Harbour being favoured. Engineering staff of the NZED were enrolled on overseas training courses, and an undergraduate course in reactor engineering was established at the University of Canterbury. During the 1960s and early 70s, several staff of the National Radiation Laboratory undertook training in reactor safety and licensing.
I guess that means we will have to go for Nuclear power in a few years as Maui runs out.
After all our rather foolish PM has made a “captain’s call” to ban any further exploration for or development of natural gas fields.
I await with interest the Green Party coming out for the building of a Nuclear Power station.
Yeah fuck global warming and the detrimental effects upon communities and nature – get a life alwyn – the exploitation of fossil fuels and their derivatives is OVER save for last gasps and desperate liars. Be a coward if you want cos that shows the best contrast with our hero PM.
My, my. You really have been hitting the juice pretty hard this morning haven’t you? Or something equally powerful but probably illegal.
Do you actually have anything rational to say or should we wait until you sober up?
I don’t know why you would call the ban on further permits for oil exploration a “captain’s call”. That is not how coalition governments work. The ban is the result of some hard work by the Greens in negotiating their contribution to the coalition.
I can only suggest that you have a word with Ms Ardern.
She is the one who makes “captain’s calls” as she labels them. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11908838
And I really think you are getting a little carried away when you credit it to the Green Party.
The only party other than Labour to have any real influence on this Government is the de facto PM Tsar Winston the First.
That is a call not to rule something out before there was even a coalition. To rule something definitely in when in the coalition requires agreement of all three coalition parties.
The Greens have had to eat some dead rats and Winston First have had to eat some dead rats. That the Greens got this past Winston shows that they are playing a very active part in the coalition.
in corroboration Ad : yes this planning of nuclear power stations under Think Big policy of Muldoon was a reality. I was shown a plan by one NZED participant of the era.
Your dates are wrong I think.
Nuclear Power in New Zealand was proposed, and being designed in the latter part of the 1960’s and possibly into the early 70’s. I did a bit of work on the proposal myself in the late 60s and I know people who went to Britain to prepare for the station being built. Nothing to do with reactors or such-like though.
It was scrapped when the Maui deal was done with the Government in the early 70s. The only practical use for the amount of gas that would be produced was in Electricity Generation and a Nuclear Station was no longer required.
That was long before Muldoon had significant power and long before “Think Big” which was at the beginning of the 80s.
I have never heard of any intention of including Nuclear Power in the Think Big Agenda and I think I would have if it had been proposed at that time.
To Alwyn at 2.2.2 Guy who showed plans to me had gone to UK to work on it…don’t want to name him but he was an NZED manager. He showed me plans (blueprints) about end of ’70’s. Maybe the idea was being revived at that time, which was definitely the Think Big era.
Did he say when he was in the UK? It may have been much earlier than he showed you plans. I am sure that people who were involved in the 60’s would have kept drawings as souvenirs.
Also, if they revived the idea in the Think Big era they wouldn’t have got as far as having new drawings by 1979.
Too long ago for me to remember …just think Helensville area was the intended venue which guess equates with the Kaipara Harbour mentioned elsewhere. Incidentally this guy seemed against the proposition.
James Lovelock advocated using nuclear power to bridge the gap between our fossil fuel based economy and one that was fossil free. It would have provided breathing space which we don’t appear to have at present. However, it’s probably a bit late now given that nuclear power stations apparently take a long time to design and build.
It’s a bit late for new land-based nuclear because wind and solar power have become so much lower in price that it’s outright economic madness to try to build a new nuke to supply utility electricity.
But it’s a slightly different consideration when it comes to shutting down existing operational plants. Germany has committed to shutting its nukes by 2022 and its coal plants by 2038. It would be a lot better for the German and world environments if those timelines were swapped.
The environmental costs of nukes are massively front-loaded in the construction and irradiation of their guts on initial startup, the ongoing marginal environmental costs of continued operation are relatively small. Whereas continued coal operation is massively environmentally damaging, from the CO2 emissions, fly ash which is either emitted and widely dispersed or concentrated into toxic dumping sites (and is also radioactive), and the ongoing environmental damage of mining and transporting the coal.
The only industry I see the glimmerings of a possible future for nuclear fission power is in shipping. They’re an industry where there’s many more obstacles in the way of converting to zero-GHG operation, and have needs for compact power sources in the range of 5MW to 50MW – which can be easily provided by nukes. The smaller size means exponentially smaller risks of catastrophe from colossal cockups like Chernobyl or Fukushima, while the continuous availability of seawater coolant further reduces the risk. But there’s going to need to be a really hefty price put on carbon emissions before the idea of investing in nukes becomes remotely attractive to general shipping companies.
That article really doesn’t explain much at all. It just notes that Germans (and that really just seems to mean West Germans) haven’t much liked nukes since the 70s, and that dislike got a major boost from Fukushima. No discussion at all of the reasons for the genesis of that anti-nuke sentiment.
It doesn’t even mention coal, which has to be a major part of any rational discussion of Germany’s energy mix.
It’s my sense that the nuclear power industry was always had an element of sham about it; in reality they got stuck on technologies whose hidden purpose was more about weapons than power.
Their insistence of sticking with designs that essentially date from the 50’s and 60’s, their obdurate refusal to properly research, much less prototype or license, much safer cleaner fourth generation designs has not only marginalised nuclear power, but closed the door on a good option to transition away from coal sooner.
That’s also more or less the opinion of a cousin of mine who started his career in the operations side of nuclear plants and finished up working on the Rocky Flats site cleanup.
My first paragraph was just a brief summary of the DW article Ad linked to at 2.2. Which surprisingly didn’t mention Chernobyl at all, even though fallout from Chernobyl did in fact affect Germany.
Nevertheless, it appears that Chernobyl had surprisingly little actual effect in changing German government and industry direction on using nuclear power. Maybe it was a case of German engineers and pollies looking at the badly flawed designs, implementation and lack of safety features at Chernobyl and concluding it couldn’t happen with better engineered German reactors. In contrast, within days of Fukushima, Merkel’s government reversed course and accelerated the shutdown of German nukes.
I don’t get giggles from contemplating nuclear shit going bad. But the point I keep trying to make is the shit we’re getting from fossil fuels is actually objectively much worse, but because it’s more dispersed and harder to see and has been an accepted part of life for a lot longer, it doesn’t get anywhere near the same opposition.
If you advocated Geothermal energy production I might agree with you.
The trouble with wind power is deciding what you are going to do when the wind doesn’t blow.
I happened to look at New Zealand’s power production yesterday. For most of the day wind power was running at about 2.5% of its plated capacity (that was 14 MW out of about 660 MW capacity) and producing about 0.3% of the power being used overall.
Now what do you suggest we do? Crank up the Huntly station perhaps?
The single biggest barrier to understanding that you are perpetuating here is that arguments like the one you outline above invariably omit the opportunity to integrate energy storage with renewables in order to smooth out the inevitable gaps between production and consumption.
The simplistic answer to your question is that on the days when wind is running at close to it’s 660MW you reduce hydro to a minimum and fill the lake reservoirs behind the dams, and on the days when there is no wind, you let the hydro rip. No Huntly needed.
In practice there will be more complex engineering considerations, but that is the basic idea. And there are plenty of good storage options other than hydro available these days.
That is pretty much the way they operate at the moment. The only power source that seems to operate at full capacity all the time is Geothermal.
It is difficult to start and stop production from Geothermal or Gas fields because it apparently severely disrupts the field and production is badly affected. At least that is what I was told by some Geothermal, and later Petroleum Engineers I worked with for a while.
It was way beyond me as to why that was the case. When a PhD carrying Petroleum Engineer who specialized in Reservoir engineering told me such things I certainly didn’t feel qualified to argue.
Your Petroleum Engineer is almost certainly correct. I’m not familiar with the details, but I can broadly guess the reasons why; because there is little buffering of the steam flow from the reservoir to the turbine, any throttling of the flow to match rapid changes of power demand will impose substantial changes in temperature and pressure in the reservoir.
Also steam is remarkably complex stuff to work with at high pressures and temperatures. While we’ve used it for centuries and sort of take it for granted, the reality is that whenever I’ve had to deal with it there has always been a steep learning curve involved. Take a quick look at this and don’t see if your eyes glaze over as mine do these days 🙂
But all this remains tangential to my core point; that any discussion about renewables cannot omit a parallel consideration of storage technologies. And they come in many different forms these days.
Primary investments like Geothermal works in places where you can have secondary and tertiary investments like having an aluminium manufacturer nerby by or use excess hot water as a tourist attraction and turn it into a hot pools. But now adays architects want there monuments. Little consideration is given to prestinct developments.
Your analysis is ass. 7 acres of solar panels is enough to harvest 4GWh that can be stored so if there’s no sunlight then there’s 3 days worth of stored solar energy. Anything less than 7 acres then it’s worth doing more solar at 5c per kWh. Anything over that then it’s worth doing wind turbines at 7c per kWh because when it’s not sunny, it’s usually windy.
“when it’s not sunny, it’s usually windy.”
Well that is a very bold comment. Anything to back it up?
You may, or may not, have noticed that it was raining in a very big chunk of the Country yesterday. Certainly the North Island was wet.
Well I doubt if we would have got any Solar power all day and we didn’t get any Wind Power, as the Transpower numbers show.
The only reason I would suggest is that a little bit of knowledge might penetrate that fevered mind.
Of course if we wish to remain an ignorant fool all your life that is your right.
By the way. In spite of what the things you may think about HIV you really can’t get infected just by reading things written about topics where you are ignorant.
HIV ridden statements indeed.
alwyn made a valid point. Your statement: when it’s not sunny. it’s usually windy is a sweeping statement. If the cloud is preceding an incoming front then the wind speed will likely increase, but if it’s stratocumulous cloud associated with anti-cyclonic conditions then there is not likely to be any increase in the speed of the wind. In relatively weak low pressure systems where the isobars are not close together there will not be much wind but plenty of cloud and almost always rain.
If I read you correctly Sam… you are being your usual supercilious, contemptuous self. This is not a site where we play games of intellectual prowess. So suggest you go play your childish games elsewhere.
Why should I wast my time on normies who are just projecting how sad and empty their lives are before you started acting like you have something to put you on some intellectual pedestal because you never had anything going for yourself. Wana get it in and throw some studies around then let’s go.
Some estimates put solar along the East Coast as able to meet 51%+ of all power needs, and from the cape, to the Bluff generate enough wind to meet something like 40% of all power generation. So we’d only need about one or maybe two hydro electric dams for peak or off peak use. Hydro electric can stay dormant for its entire 100 year shelf life and still be restarted in less than a minute, so when ever you’d like.
Designing a decent set up is no difficulty. The issue is getting the capital and the infrastructure in the right places because renewable energy is harvested in places where there aren’t many high voltage power lines and the current energy grid is designed to send power, not receive so with out a price on carbon or pollution that prices everything correctly, we’ll always be on the wrong tram.
We will get smarter with how we consume energy. Make minor alterations to our lifestyle in order to iron out the peaks and valleys of our current energy production/consumption.
eg: A tiny icon on my phone that tells me when I can charge my car for half the price than if I plugged it in when demand peaks.
As Red Logix says, we’ll get better at making unreliable generation useful. eg: Pumping water up to a mountain top reservoir. It doesn’t matter if the wind/solar pumps are only running half the time, we’ll just put in twice as many.
Yep, it was very cloudy with intermittent rain all day in the Waikato. Despite this, our 10-panel solar rack started churning out power at 6.30am and continued until 7 pm last evening albeit at a reduced rate.
My comment was related much more to a German and worldwide context, not specific to New Zealand. So yes, I neglected to mention a renewable that’s particularly important in New Zealand. Bite me.
As RL mentions, we’ve already got lots of hydro that can be powered down and saved for when wind doesn’t blow. Looking ahead, pumped hydro storage is particularly suited to New Zealand’s geography and is a very low-loss means of storing energy.
We’d have even more hydro if we told Rio Tinto to take a hike. Then they may well find it’s better economically for them to build a solar plant and potlines right next to where they mine their bauxite, rather than shipping it to faraway places and paying others for electricity.
Alwyn starts out by saying Nuclear is better than gas then half way through modifies his premiss to allow geothermal and then at the end changes his premiss to cranking up Huntley which means his whole analysis is worth less than toilet paper.
I made a number of comments in reply to things other people have said.
I don’t really see the need for every comment I make to include all the things I consider significant, and I certainly don’t accept that I am changing my opinions.
For example in a discussion about energy supply I see no need to repeat my views on the stuffed up Census. Doesn’t mean that I no longer think Mr Shaw did well and shouldn’t be fired.
Well there’s a difference between “teaching” and “explaining.”
I could train you by saying look at my finger and yelling look at it over and over so that the students get tunnel vision and they can stick there minds to something so it doesn’t move.
Or I can hold up a finger and explain that it is thin at the top and wide at the bottom and it’s a little lighter in colour on one side and it has segments and so on.
If you are a trained up educator then fine. How ever it is a falasy to say explaining is losing when one also claims they are not a professional educator.
Looking ahead, pumped hydro storage is particularly suited to New Zealand’s geography and is a very low-loss means of storing energy.
I’ve linked to this before, but it’s worth a repeat. Even Australia has a remarkable opportunity around all the enormous holes in the ground the mining industry has left behind:
I always got a bit sceptical about the hands off’ nature of managing pumped hydro that some try and sell it as. In my experience it’s a full time job having a pond. Made a few settling ponds myself and I’d say settling ponds would keep me up more at night than anything else.
Nothing is ‘hands off’ as some people may imagine; there is always a lot more engineering going on around all sorts of structures and facilities than most people are aware of.
“I’ve linked to this before, but it’s worth a repeat. Even Australia has a remarkable opportunity around all the enormous holes in the ground the mining industry has left behind:”.
They may be useful for storing water for an irrigation project but I can’t think of any I have seen that would be useful for pumped hydro.
The water has to be stored above the turbines and the holes from mining are all well below ground level.
The Kalgoorlie Superpit for example has a bottom that is about 150 metres below sea level.
Are there some that are well above the surrounding terrain?
Check out the links above alwyn. The concept is real and works. The idea is that you create a pond above the pit level, or in the case of Kidston you have two existing pits at different heights. All standard stuff, nothing special needed.
I read it as being water running down from the actual pit. Now I see what you mean. I was misinterpreting where the water ran from and to.
Actually in you used the bottom 300 metres or so of the Superpit would would get a pretty good head. Now I understand what you meant.
Nice. I’d tweak that system by placing the bank between the upper and lower ponds north facing, then run the solar on that face. In that way the winter sun will reflect off the lower pond up onto the solar array providing more light than without such placing. Plantings of light reflective trees might further enhance the site.
I’ve never been directly involved in the industry, closest I’ve come is a cousin and a family friend in the industry. The last time I talked with the family friend was a few years back, and she mentioned a big talking point in the industry was their really bad public perception and how the industry wouldn’t survive another high-profile fuckup. That was before Fukushima.
I’ve always kinda had an interest in where our power comes from, and what a zero-GHG future might look like. As part of that, it’s long seemed to me nukes have been unfairly demonised.
Part of that is the industry’s own mistakes and association with weapons, part of it is activist groups overhyping issues to generate publicity (which is particularly easy to do when there is a little kernel of truth at the core), part of it is a similar problem to airliner crashes in that when things go bad they go very publicly and spectacularly bad even though the overall safety record is very very good and much better than most of the alternatives.
By a standalone examination, generating electricity using nukes is an awful idea. But nukes shouldn’t be considered in isolation, they should be considered relative to alternative methods of satisfying our electricity wants and needs. In that context, efficiency improvements and conservation are the standouts, there’s no downside.
When it comes to actually generating electricity, there’s all kinds of factors to consider. Injury and mortality rates per unit of electricity generated, land used and damaged, pollution. By those metrics, nuclear energy actually stands out as being a very low harm means of electricity generation (even including the harms done by Chernobyl and Fukushima), way better than any fossil fuel, better than hydro, not much worse than wind and solar. Add climate change and it furthers reinforces the picture.
part of it is a similar problem to airliner crashes in that when things go bad they go very publicly and spectacularly bad even though the overall safety record is very very good and much better than most of the alternatives.
True. Not many people know that in 2017 the commercial airline industry achieve zero … yes zero … deaths. A remarkable engineering and technical outcome.
And on an annual basis the nuclear industry looks pretty good too, yet over the years there have been far too many incidents.
In particular the classic PWR design that depends on actively managed moderation AND a continuous flow of cooling water represents an unacceptable hazard in modern terms. All of these reactors need to be taken out of service in the foreseeable future.
Incidentally back in the early 2000’s I found an open ftp site that had a report on an incident that is not mentioned in the above list, and I’ve seen no other reference to. It related IIRC to the 2003 East Coast blackout
This had an immediate impact on one of the major nuclear sites in Oklahoma, forcing all four reactors to scram shut immediately. However these reactors also demand at least 3 days of cooling water flow after shutdown to avoid irreversible damage of the type seen at Fukushima. To keep the pumps running there were eight large diesel gen sets that should have automatically kicked in.
Here is the thing; of the 8 generators … all 8 refused to start. On reading the reports details on why each on failed I came to the conclusion that Homer Simpson really did work there. Fortunately they got one of them going reasonably quickly and this was enough to boot them up without damage and prevented a catastrophic meltdown of the entire plant.
A very close shave that almost no-one seems to know about. Sadly I lost the pdf file over the years.
Yeah, the need for active control systems to be functioning correctly and external power needed for cooling after shutdown is a seriously dumb way to operate something that can fail as catastrophically as a big nuke. Especially since there’s alternatives that don’t require active control and external power to shut down safely, they just use simple physics.
From a safety and perception perspective, I think it’s a mistake how fkn enormous the reactors are. The risks of shit going bad and how bad the shit gets don’t scale linearly, it’s exponential. Kinda like how things change from 1 match head to 30,000 to 1,000,000 match heads (see Mythbusters if you don’t get the reference).
Of course, the reason they do it is the regulatory burden and other fixed costs scale at quite a lot less than linearly so it’s cheaper per unit output to build huge reactors. The Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors were all around 3000MW thermal/1000MW electrical each. For comparison, Huntly’s original four generators were a quarter that for a total of 1000MW total plant capacity.
BTW, coupla reasons you might have had trouble digging up reports about that nuke plant in Oklahoma affected by the Northeast blackout is there aren’t any nuke power plants in Oklahoma (just nuke fuels processing facilities made famous by Silkwood), nor is Oklahoma on the same grid that the Northeast Blackout happened on. Might have been Ohio or Ontario …
Yeah … I may well have gotten some details wrong. I recall reading the report quite clearly and some details stick firmly in my memory, but do you think I can accurately recall the actual plant?
A quick search suggests Indian Point as the most likely one:
Geo-engineering technology, or a least a lower risk examples of it like marine cloud brightening, might be safer and quicker bridging options now. They potentially allow a slightly longer transition time to renewables.
I suggest you look at my comment at 2.3.1.2 just above.
It is generating a bit more at the moment. Wind is running at about 20% of the plated capacity and is producing about 3% of our consumption. That is about one sixth of what Geothermal always produces.
See https://www.transpower.co.nz/power-system-live-data
We have only just started down the wind road. There are options for storing wind power such as pumped hydro and mass batteries. With battery backed solar going into homes there is room there also to store power.
The most recent example of technological sound pollution comes from wind turbines. However, he is quick to stress that this is only one source of modern environmental sound pollution
there are many others.
Yet with the rapid expansion of wind turbines across the globe, this new technology is presenting us with increasing evidence of a serious threat to human health
That certain types of sound can produce a cascade of hormones that result in the “fight or flight” response is a critical step forward in understanding the importance of sound as a pollutant as well as a health hazard.
This conclusion is the result of 20 years of research
by Dr. Rapley and his international research team,
New Zealander Dr. Bruce Rapley is an applied biologist with a specialist interest and expertise in the area of environmental health, acoustics and cognition
They are not “my” figures. They are the current numbers being reported by TransPower, who of course are distributing electricity around the country.
If anyone knows what is going on right now I would suggest they do.
If you think the numbers they are publishing are bullshit I suggest you take it up with them.
I’m sure they will be happy to explain it to you.
I’ll repeat the link for your benefit. https://www.transpower.co.nz/power-system-live-data
As of 3.28 pm today Wind was 152 MW out of a total of 4310 MW, or about 3.5%
Well, miracles will never cease.
I have mentioned this website several times. Every single time I said that it was live data.
The first time (@2.3.1.2) I said
“I happened to look at New Zealand’s power production yesterday. For most of the day wind power was running at about 2.5% of its plated capacity (that was 14 MW out of about 660 MW capacity) and producing about 0.3% of the power being used overall.”
The second time I said
“You may, or may not, have noticed that it was raining in a very big chunk of the Country yesterday. Certainly the North Island was wet.
Well I doubt if we would have got any Solar power all day and we didn’t get any Wind Power, as the Transpower numbers show.”
The next time I said
“It is generating a bit more at the moment. Wind is running at about 20% of the plated capacity and is producing about 3% of our consumption. That is about one sixth of what Geothermal always produces.”
Then I said
“They are not “my” figures. They are the current numbers being reported by TransPower, who of course are distributing electricity around the country.”
If anyone can read all of those remarks, and the repeated link to the website they came from and only now discover that they were real time numbers and not an annual average seems to be someone who is a bit thick or someone who simply bursts into song without even reading the comments they are replying to. You seem to qualify on both counts.
Well that statement is probably truthful. It isn’t intellectually honest but then that is pretty typical of a Green supporter.
I have learn’t in the past that when a Green Party member says something like,
“I have never seen any evidence that GM is safe”
or
“I have never read anything that shows 1080 is effective and safe”
It doesn’t mean that such evidence doesn’t exist. It just means that they haven’t read it because it will show their prejudices have no scientific backing.
I guess it is not worth my replying to any of your comments in the future. After they are merely the meaningless flapping of your gums and have no connection at all to the matter you are supposedly commenting on.
By the way, I wouldn’t place to much trust in your link from the Wind Organisation.
They claim that in 2015 there was already 690 MW installed and lots planned
Even in 2019 Transpower can only count an extant 658 MW
Support 1080?
Well no, their attitude seems to be akin to opinions from the God Shiva.
On the one hand this, on the other that. On the third hand something else and on the fourth something different again.
I read the party policy from the last election and their attitude is impossible to decipher.
“The Green Party Environment policy aims to minimise the use of all persistent, environmentally damaging, or nonsustainably produced poisons, especially when using aerial distribution, and we strongly support research and promotion of other pest control methods. 1080 poison is widely used to control pest species as it degrades relatively rapidly and is not bioaccumulative. Nonetheless it is acutely toxic to a number of non-target animals including dogs and native wildlife, is considered inhumane by many, and there may be as yet undiscovered long-term toxicological effects arising from its widespread use.”
The Greens dogmatic rejection of nuclear energy begs the question, do they really believe in climate change?
How’s that for an excerpt on the one of the landing pages of Stuff?
It is obviously written by another ‘friend’ of the Greens who is almightily concerned about their credentials and whether they have lost their ‘faith’ in Climate Change and the environment. Since the green-Greens appeared on the firmament, coming from seemingly nowhere, the not-so-green-Greens should have embarked on a soul-searching quest to justify their existence (in Parliament). Or so the narrative from the Right goes. The only answer so far seems to lower the election threshold as an act of self-preservation. Or so the narrative on the Right goes, completely ignoring that this was a recommendation made by the Electoral Commission in its final report on 29 October 2012.
It isn’t Dirty Politics and I’d call it Disingenuous Politics. I can’t wait till Simon Bridges and Vernon Tava come out in support of nuclear energy as a core election policy of National to combat CC. Tiwai Point, Simon and Vernon, the infrastructure and location are ideal. Alternatively, Taranaki, to offset the billions lost by banning oil exploration off the coast. I’m sure the locals will support you in every way they can.
My reading is the global Greens became stuck in an anti-US, anti-warship, anti-weapons mindset that while commendable on it’s own terms; has closed them off from promoting new generations of nuclear power systems that would have been very useful in ramping down coal much sooner.
True, but the NZ Greens are not quite like the global ones in that they have enjoyed a nation that (still?) is largely aligned with their anti-nuclear stance. In Europe, for example, nuclear power serviced a significant part of energy needs (and served a few other purposes as well).
My somewhat limited understanding is that there are at least three major issues they and others object too: 1) waste; 2) health & safety; 3) weapons-grade by-products. The last issue may be a red herring if you were to believe the latest Mission Impossible instalment (Fallout).
The tourist tour through the Forsmark reactor on the Baltic in Sweden, I studied a large cut away model and said to the guide. “It appears the reaction heats water.” The guide said “Yes, that is correct.” I was anticipating a huge complex process that I wouldn’t have a hope of wrapping my brain around. The reaction makes heat, they make steam, run the steam through turbines, just like at Wairakei. Simple as.
The process is conceptually simple; but as with all things engineering the devil is in the details.
The ‘core’ problems with Pressurised Water Reactors are:
1. These rods are essential to the operation of the reactor, slowing down neutrons in order to increase the chance they will participate in the chain reaction. The reactor is actively controlled at all times by how much these rods are inserted into the core. In order to stop the reaction these rods have to be actively and fully inserted into the reactor; if anything prevents this you have lost control.
2. Even when the moderating rods are inserted to stop the chain reaction, there remains a residual generation of ‘decay heat’ (initially around 6% of the rated power of the reactor) that will take at least 3 days to drop to a level that no longer requires active cooling. This is still more than enough ‘hot potato’ to melt the core if cooling is lost.
3. The other clue is in the word ‘pressurised’. If the cooling water circuit loses pressure the water turns instantly from water to steam, and stops cooling the reactor. Also the huge pumps that do the circulating also stop working.
4. The steam reacts with the zirconium cladding that is used to encapsulate and protect the fuel rods, to produce hydrogen gas. Either this causes a rapid rise of internal pressure that will rupture the containment dome (as happened at Fukushima) and/or it will be released and present a massive explosion hazard.
5. And even if nothing goes wrong, the sheer intensity of the neutron flux just buggers up pretty much all the materials exposed to it over time.
Again still grossly simplified from memory. It’s a tribute to how good modern engineering is that these things are as safe as they are; but there is no question they are fundamentally risky things, especially as Andre points out, at the scale of a 3000MW power plant.
Ha, oh yes, there is a whole lot going on, this huge plant was doing much more than housing a fancy electric jug…. but….it’s the fancy heating of water hey.
I assume you mean the Three Mile Island event. That incident had some interesting engineering outcomes. The root of the problem was a valve that should have been closed but was not.
In those days it was common for control systems to have no status feedback from actuated valves. In other words the control system would command a valve to open or close, and the physical state of the valve was assumed to the same.
One of the pressure release valves had stuck open even though the control system had commanded it closed and all the operators thought it was closed.
The wiki page makes for compelling reading, and the whole incident now a classic case study. Crucially the problem was not correctly diagnosed until a fresh shift came in who did not have the mindset of the first shift of operators. By this time major damage had occurred.
As someone who has spent much of my working life in control rooms just reading this gives me the chills. It all happened so very easily; and I can well imagine the feelings of the guy who did spot the problem and saved the day.
The other big outcome of this event was that across all industries it became almost standard practice to have physical sensors on all valves to independently confirm the open/close state of the valve.
I rather liked the story about the final “safety” feature for the first man-made nuclear reactor built in a squash court at the University of Chicago in December 1942.
One person there had a bucket of cadmium nitride solution, which is a neutron absorber He was to throw it over the pile in an emergency if the standard cadmium rods inserted in the pile didn’t stop the chain reaction.
Apparently you can see him standing on top of the pile in photographs of the occasion.
I’m glad I wasn’t on the streets of Chicago that day, even if one wouldn’t have known what was going on.
@Joe90
I knew about the first one but I had never heard of the Japanese accident. I’m not really sure I wanted to after having read about it.
Here is a painting of the pile going critical. The people with the buckets are on a platform behind the pile from which they were meant to jump onto its top and dump the solution. It looks as if there were 3 rather than the one I remembered hearing about.
The details of my story may be a bit sketchy, although the general thrust of it appears to be accurate.
I thought it was Cadmium Nitride. While looking for this photo I found references to Cadmium Nitride, Cadmium Nitrate, Cadmium Sulphate and plain Cadmium solution. God knows what it really was.
@Marty.
I hadn’t heard that one. I assume that when you say “the explosion” you mean the Trinity test of the bomb. I have a friend who saw a nuclear test. From what he says I am not surprised by the reaction, particularly since it was the very first and there had been nothing like it before.
There is a similar quote, supposedly by General Groves to a group at Los Alamos when it was operating that
“At a meeting of the military personnel there, Groves reported, “At great expense we have gathered on this mesa the largest collection of crackpots ever seen.”.
@marty.
So it is. I actually just tried to google something that had a clear picture of the painting that showed the people around the pile when it first went critical. Of the ones I found this was simply the first that had a clear reproduction of the picture so I chose it. I wasn’t really looking for, or at, the rest of the article.
I have just read it right through for the first time.
I’m glad you pointed out the quote. It is a good read isn’t it?
Yes, dammit, I was trying to be Mr Witty Guy and got the numbers wrong. Yes, The Three Inch Island Incident.
It’s unfortunate the incident you had a record of appears to have been swept under the carpet. There appears to be much to be learned when it does go all pear-shaped. Real life calamities to study rather than equations.
The Forsmark plant in Sweden, the guide said ‘Every person could drop dead and the plant would quietly go into idle mode all by itself’. The most fascinating part was the bus trip down a spiraling tunnel cut from solid granite to where they kept the hot bits, deep inside a massive subterranean lump of granite. It’s minimal fractures had a lot to do with why they chose the site.
Taking out the garbage is such a mission with that method of generation.
“Kevin Anderson, a senior research fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said claims that nuclear power was the only way for Britain to meet demanding greenhouse gas targets were fundamentally wrong. He said: “That argument is way too simplistic. We can easily deal with climate change without nuclear power.”
“Kevin also discusses various options, like nuclear; showing that even though nuclear would be a very low carbon solution, we would need – if we want nuclear to provide a significant fraction of our future energy needs – to be building many more reactors than we currently are. Kevin’s talk also illustrates – I think – why many are very reluctant to accept the basic situation. Given our current understanding, it seems as though it will be very difficult – if not impossible – to address this without making significant changes to our lifestyles and standards of living”
Nuclear provides a fraction of our energy requirements and we quite simply cannot build enough nuclear generation to replace existing even if we ignore any other arguments about its suitability.
There is no question that building enough PWR power plants of the current behemoth design was never going to be possible. That was always obvious and as I’ve made it clear above, I’m totally opposed to this kind of design.
Especially in a country like NZ with it’s intrinsically high geo-technical hazards, tsunami, flood, earthquake and volcano. As the Japanese discovered to their terrible cost.
But there are some good alternate designs (and I’m not a nuclear engineer so I’m not going to tout one over the other) that would be a lot more appropriate to NZ’s environment and safer than PWR’s:
Having said that, I still think an intelligent mix of renewables, hydro, geothermal and storage would easily get our electricity to 100% carbon free if we put some political will to the matter.
Renewable energy not the issue in NZ as it is the the bulk of the rest of the world…the real question is why everyone promotes the most difficult and unrealistic solutions when the most obvious and easiest remains untested?
If he will allow us to store all the waste produced and set up the reactors next to him and the rest of his mates that are advocating for this we will consider it.
But they will be all NIMBYs and demand that the reactors and waste stay as far away from them as possible as they know how dangerous the reactors and waste storage is, especially is a country prone to earthquakes.
Peters was never going to go with ‘James’ lot’. That’s what makes the concessions Labour made to NZF such a joke. Labour were royally screwed, and ultimately the taxpayer with them.
If Shane Jones can’t get to be leader of a small party having been gifted $3 billion to vote-purchase for three years from every tiny town he rolls through, then he really doesn’t deserve to be in either Parliament or business full stop.
I more and more agree with National that the job-yield-per-dollar of this fund is an egregious rort of my taxes.
Not all the projects are bad, but all the projects on average are not delivering anywhere near enough for this country.
Yeah, he’s a man with a billion dollars in his pocket and 125,000 relatives.
What a great idea for Opononi. Hopefully such an enterprise would be part of an eventual Ngapuhi settlement. Maori is what makes NZ unique, we should be celebrating our heritage. Jones should be involved in the establishment of such a venture because of his conflicted interest, he has emotional skin in the game.
I think Robertson was wise to indicate ‘I’m watching the money!’
Far North Holdings are the commercial arm of the local council. If they run a transparent tender process independent of Jones and Bros and there is no $ angle for Jones, directorships etc, I think he should be involved. Of course he has a conflict of interest, unlike shares or property, we can’t sell our ancestors.
A first for me today: a spam email in te reo. Though apparently there’s no translation for ‘risk free’, which may be a subtle commentary on te Tiriti.
E aroha ana a te reo putake
Kua tukinohia te ipurangi e nga kaitoro me nga kainoro o te hunga e hiahia ana ki te whara. I te mea ko tetahi o Vanoosten, ko taua wa kaore tatou e tuku i te kino ki te patu i te kaha o te pakihi i roto i te pakihi pono, tena koa koa kia 100% Risk-free.
[…..]
Ko koe I runga i te pono,
Dr.Richard Graves.
cb*****@****.com
Yesterday James called OWT out on some homophobiac comments. I hadn’t read once were Tim’s comments because it was long and I tend to scroll past long comments.
I went back very late last night and read them. I agree with James they are homophobic imho. Please don’t do this stuff (request to those that do).
You need to get out more . I’ve got card carrying nat who appears to hate those below him gay surgeon as a Facebook friend who’s favorite thing is to show off his and his wealth.
Quite obviously, I should have ended the whole comment with a /sarc – as if it wasn’t already bleeding bloody obvious.
And of course we could get into discussions about misogyny in the gay (male) community, or how WITHIN the gay community various terms such as faggot, queen and nancy boy etc are used (in jest or solidarity or otherwise) when referring to one another.
I’m offended you are offended (not), but you’re making assumptions about my disposition.
It’s all become a little precious but the point being I think many of us know what Jame’s motivations are.
I do however appreciate that political correctness evolves over time.
I’ve already reclaimed gay, queen, cunt and various other words (including ‘straight’ and ‘fluid’).
Quite telling that you tend to just scroll past long comments.
I’ll try to use bullet points in future and just give you the facts man
Another Meth Murder in South Auckland, the Meth Capital of NZ ?
Joke of the Day
Question – What does a Meth Addict become when he dies ?
Answer – Methylated Spirits.
When are Government and the NZ Police going to tidy up the Illicit Drug Trade in NZ it has flourished ever since Mr Asia Terry Clarke made a name for himself here and in Australia. Drugs and Gangs here in NZ are not taken seriously by the Government and NZ Police IMHO.
It doesn’t help that successive government have run down addiction treatment services over the past 30 years or so (not to mention mental health services).
It is at the point now that people bascially have to go to prison to get the help they need (as is the case for someone I personally know).
Cannabis – can we keep the profits in NZ? Do we dare give Maori the option of growing it? The gangs would get involved. Could they conquer their law-breaking habit? Things that have occurred to me. Here is something about it at the present that i haven’t listened to yet.
Regarding the nuclear power debate up-thread — building such a power plant in NZ would be prohibitively expensive and would probably double power bills across the board.
It probably wouldn’t get past the consent process anyway.
And that is not mentioning the 1981-style unrest and divisions that it would cause.
If it wasn’t electricity market uncertainty or lack of political will that killed them off, unco-operative power companies, councils and local communities get the blame.
Other unknowns, Hopkins says, are the long-term impact of the Government’s partial privatisation of generators Mighty River Power, Meridian Energy and Genesis Energy, and the possibility that a change of government could see Labour and the Greens creating a single wholesale electricity buying body.
Adding insult to injury is the relatively sudden diversion of investment from renewables into the likes of shale oil and gas made available by fracking, which has turned the US into a net energy exporter. “World carbon markets and world energy markets have been turned on their heads by fracking,” says Hopkins, who spent more than three years getting resource consent for the Kaipara project.
McKinsey was mentioned in the post by Advantage and last night I happened to come across this very long but also very good and insightful piece on McKinsey.
McKinsey seems to find favour with our politicians, public servants and many commentators……..odd when you consider you are judged by the company you keep….but then these are the same people who procure the services of Thompson and Clark
Ernest Quintana, 78, was at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont when a doctor – appearing on the robot’s screen – informed him that he would die within a few days. Mr Quintana died the next day.
A family friend wrote on social media that it was “not the way to show value and compassion to a patient”.
The hospital said it “regrets falling short” of the family’s expectations.
That answer is what a corporate that makes a business out of processing people would say in a PR release. The business is a hospital but all business management is generic, the business grads are apparently told or led to believe. I wonder if they class sentient beings as different from curtain-rails of the same length.
The flipside to that is you have dr consultations over the video link as things go downhill, then the doctor walks in the room and you know you’re done for. Like soldiers’ families getting telegrams. So then the nurses have to prepare you for the shock of seeing the doctor. But then the nurses get replaced by robots.
We’re going to need an expanded chaplains’ / social worker service in hospitals just so patients don’t have a heart attack if they see another human.
Shane Jones being got at. The Opposition doing such a good job of holding the government to account so they can’t spend any money just like National. Seymour being righteous and some other coffee stirrer, Paul Goldsmith.
Test comment. The TS raid is displaying as “auto-read-only” in a startup message.
Nope it is ok. It was updating on a different RAID array (replaced a 56yo drive that was starting to show SMART errors) . The notification about the recovery happened before it started up the TS array.
Mind you back in about 1991 when I was doing a contract and was rather affluent on very extended hours, I brought a 1GB SCSI full height drive for an exorbitant price. Can’t remember but I think it was a Seagate. After about 5 years the intense whining ceased and it made a handy doorstop. No wind could move it.
Check out Walk The World (Digital Finance Analytics) Yt channel if you are interested in what is really happening in the property market. Best avoid msm for this topic in particular.
Here Martin North answers the question for Australia, “Just how much trouble are we in”?
He believes the most likely scenario is 20-30% falls in Sydney/Melbourne (assuming no international crisis) over the next two years.
Fascinating. John Podesta says that GE 2020 is at risk from foreign interference. I can definitely see people the National Party associates with not shy of going down this road.
America spends more on defence than literally everyone else so for other nations projecting they just can’t project enough force to get what they want so everyone is resorting to soft power and influence. Our side would do well to develope there own soft power tools and responses.
That’s obviously not true. National might like to indulge in knifing their friends when it suits but I think Labour is a lot more supportive of friendly voices.
If you love the shifty reptilians of National, anything even vaguely mammalian is going to seem pretty disturbing – but it’s the future. Evolve or be left behind.
“In 1990, small and medium-sized farms accounted for nearly half of all agricultural production in the US. Now it is less than a quarter.
As the medium-sized family farms retreated, the businesses they helped support disappeared. Local seed and equipment suppliers shut up shop because corporations went straight to wholesalers or manufacturers. Demand for local vets collapsed. As those businesses packed up and left, communities shrank. Shops, restaurants and doctors’ surgeries closed. People found they had to drive for an hour or more for medical treatment. Towns and counties began to share ambulances.”
They’ve done exactly the same in NZ only it happens slow so the impact is not readily apparent till you look around. All the abandoned rail stations, schools closed, hell, half the village I grew up in has just gone, bulldozed and not replaced. The clothes factory went and the mechanics and the grocers…
Kia The AM Show
Orange sky is a cool charity that helps homeless people wash their clothes and give homeless people a shower Ka pai.
You know what came over him that football fan who hit a player he was sucking on a bottle of ALCOHOL in the stands ((that’s what came over him))?
I Back GREEN PEACE 100 % you can not burn carbon and try a talk about our future and talk about wellbeing of our future. It’s much better to have a clean environment than a shit one and a big pile of cash you can not breath in cash.
There is a huge GREEN energy revolution that our superfund could invest in the climate change denier say holy smoke we have to invest 3 % of the Papatuanukue gross revenue to fight climate change thats nothing.
The doctor strikes are a national party attack on our government peas in a pod I say .
I say the negative talk about our relationship with China is payed for from someone who wants to damage our relationship with China.
Its a fine balanceing act one has to balance our trade as well we have a lot in common with China. Ka kite ano
Climate change is a real threat to the 99.9 % of peoples haveing a happy healthy life .
Eco Maori Backs The New Green Deal and School Students Striking for OUR Climate 100% Kia kaha
Climate change will make a walk in the woods a much rarer pleasure
CNN)If you like to take a walk in the woods in the United States or you prefer to decorate a Douglas fir at Christmas, you should know that climate change is making both of those activities a lot harder.
Looking at two ecologically and economically important species — the Douglas fir and the Ponderosa pine — scientists found that fires and drought exacerbated by climate change make new growth difficult, especially in low-elevation forests, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The 2000 Canyon Ferry Complex Fire site in the Helena National Forest, Montana, 17 years later.
Some forests in four regions in California, Colorado, the Northern Rockies and the southwestern part of the United States have crossed “a critical climate threshold for postfire tree generation,” the study says.
Climate conditions over the past 20 years have accelerated changes that would have otherwise taken decades or even centuries to play out across broad regions of the country. This is leading to the abrupt decline of trees and making these lands increasingly unsuitable for tree regeneration.
Climate change is endangering our forests now, not just in some distant future.
“Maybe in areas where there are really abundant seed sources, there could be some trees, but it is becoming really hard to get these trees back due to climate change,” said study co-author Kim Davis, a postdoctoral research associate in the W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation at the University of Montana.
Global climate targets will be missed as deforestation rises, study says
The scientists figured this out by examining tree rings to determine when nearly 3,000 trees were established in these regions, which saw 33 wildfires between 1988 and 2015.
Seedlings and juvenile trees are vulnerable to climate change. “Seedlings are really sensitive,” Davis said.
Adult trees have better survival mechanisms to deal with poor climate conditions, but intense wildfires are wiping out these Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. The trees have thick bark that make them typically good at surviving surface level fires, but they can’t survive the more intense fires that move through the canopy, like this region has seen. Had there not been such intense fires, these trees may have lived for centuries.
On Capitol Hill, new calls for rapid action on climate change
The problem probably won’t get any better, as climate change is making intense wildfires much more common, studies show. Western foresters say there used to be a fire season, but devastating and costly fires have become a reality all year long. In 2018, fires cost California more than $9.05 billion, according to the state insurance commissioner, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season in state history.
Ka kite ano Links below.
Kia ora Newshub This is what happens when a shonky government national puts up doctors visits charges a virus outbreak. I don’t think the anti vaxers had much to do with the mesal virus outbreak.
Wow the sniffer dogs are out there finding a fart and trying to turn it into the shits national have the money to pay for the sniffers. Kia kaha to our Coalition Government.
There you go Paddy PEE is the biggest problem drug in New Zealand.
Of course a company is never going to say they have done wrong and Forestry companies are the same protect themselves. They should just settle and pay the bills for the clean up mess in Tolaga Bay I like swimming in Tangaroa there they would rather waste money and time in COURT.
Wow another Boeing air craft crash condolences to the people who lost there love you know Eco Maori doesn’t fly know more German wasp nest did you know that Bees and ants ansestor are wasp it good this nest has been found and destroyed . Ka kite ano
Kia ora Te ao Maori News Those forestry companies don’t realise the damage that is caused by there slash left over from harvesting the trees being washed down te awa into Tangaroa it ruins the beaches and fishing kina paua ect they should just pay the bills for the clean up.
simon that’s what happens when you turn on your closest m8s they bit you on the ass Ana to kai .
I seen that story on Radio NZ website that man driving a ute abusing our Wahine see eco Maori is not pissing in the wind when I write about racial racist discrimination in NZ that guy is like the ones hounding me I smelt something going down today Kia Kaha Mana Wahine you handled that fool very well. Paina Kia kaha yes protest for the loss of your land and it being developed before the issues is settled in tamiki makaru and make your tipuna proud of yous Ka kite ano
Te ao Maori News I agree that NZ people should be educated about NZ wars so they can see the reason we are so downtrodden and broke but not broken. Kia kaha Ka kite ano P.S they cannot go 2 days with out playing with their flute lol
Kia ora The AM Show The wave scooter are onto it they let lime scooter test the water and now have speed limits on them in certain areas and have learnt lessons with no cost to them is the speed set at 25 km,s and 15 kms .
That doesn’t sound good for Boeing Eco nolonger flys 2 reason why They should have invested in green energy hybrid planes . Big businesses lead the pollies buy the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
Thats how the business world works heaps of conflict of interest chemicals company’s all the multi ational companies make up their own rules that’s why the Papatuanukue is in such a big mess look at brexit may is going to FAIL Miserably its only in the best interests of the multi ational business to leave Europe the 99.9% get a kick in the ASS from leaving Europe.
I don’t think that our tourism will suffer in Aotearoa. judy is that it light bulb that’s a dumb attack on our government it would only cost $100 bucks to kit out a house with led bulbs why did you not ban incandescent light bulbs when you were in Government??????????????????.
I no my grandmother made sure I was vaccinated we had Indian doctors as friends.
Dick their you go Maori health reviews are need so that the system can changes our Mokopunas needed there Kau Matua to live longer so they can guide them up there ladders of life.
simon got caught with his pants down lol.
judys m8 whale oil has been held accountable for his trashing the privacy rights??????? of someone who he disagree with Ana to kai I looked at his site when I first started Eco Maori Post on Thestandard I just about lost my kai NOT for I.
((Brexit is a turd may is trying to sell it to the people as being gold)) the old saying KEEP Selling a lies long enough and MOST PEOPLE BELIEVES IT IS THE TRUTH Stay in Europe PEOPLE ITS Best for the MANY. Ka kite ano
Get stuffed 20 % of people hog all the money 80 %are struggling so to be fair the 20 %, should pay more tax so that the 80% of people in NZ can have a good life you neoliberals neanderthal you can see logic through your cash mark you fool Ana to kai. If a poor person did that you would say throw them in jail puppets neanderthal Ka kite ano P.S your sandflys m8s number 1 tool intrapment they love setting people up and reel them in and get them to become a ASSET puppet actor’s
ECO MAORI CAN SEE The OIL Barrons$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ have a huge hold on the media in New Zealand TWO day,s till the STUDENT STRIKE FOR CLIMATE
and no online media platforms have the story on there front PAGE so much for (((((newzealand being the least CORRUPT CONTRY in the world YEA RIGHT)))))).
Eco Maori will keep CHAMPIONING this Good cause of saving MY Mokopunas Futures
NSW teacher loses shifts after urging students to join climate strike
Greens’ Bega candidate Will Douglas being investigated by education department after complaint about his comments
A relief teacher at a New South Wales high school, who is also a Greens candidate, is being investigated by the Department of Education over remarks made at a candidates’ forum about the upcoming student climate strike.
Will Douglas, who has worked casually at Moruya high school on the state’s south coast since 2006, has been told he will not be offered any more shifts at the school while the investigation takes place.
It comes as the principal of a Victorian Catholic school warned students that striking was an “unapproved” absence that could lead to a zero if they missed any official tests on the day.
Inspired by Swedish student Greta Thunberg, the movement calls on students to partially strike from school to protest government inaction on fighting climate change. More than 50 rallies, in Australian capital cities and regional towns, are planned for 15 March.
Greta Thunberg, schoolgirl climate change warrior: ‘Some people can let things go. I can’t’
Read more
Douglas, who is contesting the seat of Bega in the upcoming state election, appeared at a lunchtime candidates’ forum organised by Youth Action at the Moruya golf club last Thursday, alongside local Liberal MP Andrew Constance and Labor candidate Leanne Atkinson.
Douglas said he attended the forum with the knowledge of his superiors at the school.
During the forum, which was attended by students from a range of high schools, Douglas said “please don’t forget March 15 the climate strike … if there’s something happening at your school will you please get online and register because there’s a whole community out there wanting to support you guys, young people, in that strike”.
The remarks were published in News Corp’s Daily Telegraph on Monday, in an article that also revealed a complaint had been made to the department and that an investigation was under way.
Douglas told Guardian Australia he had no knowledge of any investigation until contacted by the newspaper and he did not know who had made the complaint.
He said the principal told him this week he would not be working any more shifts at the school until the investigation was complete.
“I was speaking on my own time in my lunch break as a Greens candidate at a youth forum,” he said. “Now I don’t have any work. It shouldn’t be this hard to speak up for climate action.”
Douglas said Moruya high was a wonderful school, and that he had been treated with nothing but respect by the principal. However he believed the complaint itself was “politically motivated”.
A spokeswoman for the department said they were making inquiries into the matter but that it would be inappropriate to comment on the employment status of an individual teacher.
“While the department understands students may be passionate about a range of issues, all students who are enrolled at school are expected to attend
Ka kite ano links below.
Whanau These rental agents and Real Estatate agents under estamated Eco Maori O and the sandflys yesterday they had a team of actor people looking to by YEA RIGHT I show them my flat sweet no hasles one lady said I could keep the flat yesterday ka pai I thought today O no I did not say that she has a close relashionship to the owner of the flat . Yesterday they knocked on the door of the other flat it was locked.?????????????????.
Today they only took photos of my flat and not next door .
So Eco Maori TX them about that fact of no photos nextdoor SNAPPED she lied and said they took photos yesterday I pointed that FACT OUT that nextdoor was locked and they could not have taken photos scilence is what I got after I told them of that fact.
Ka kite ano P.S I will let you know who the rental agints and real eastate is later whanau ANA TO KAI
Some more people to get subpoenaed for my Waitangi claimed for suppresion of Eco Maori and breaching my human rights I have bankers farmers lawyers judges sandflys doctors there are many is going to cost them millions ma te wa
Whanau about 2 years ago I noticed things going missing in this flat I asked the landlord to put a dead lock in nothing happened so I paid a locksmith to put a deadlock in when I went away I put a peace of paper in the door so as to know if someone had entered the flat when I came back it had moved so I went to the locksmith and got a new lock and put it in myself but to know avail the paper had moved again I came to the conclusion that the sandflys go straight to the locksmith and get a key. I asked the landlord to put lacthes on the windows whanau no nothing . One can tell if some one has jumped through a wooden window as I had figered a way to use a fork and the key to make the lock not open from the outside with a key things still went missing and I noticed that the wooden window frames developed cracks in the paint that is a tell tail sign that someone was climbing in through the window Thats is why I asked the landlord for the safe window latches but no conclusion he is mates with the sandflys
Ka kite an P.S A wahine noticed her nickers going missing to Eco Maori Has the whole rotoura police force on my ASS. bring it on muppets
Kia ora Newshub Ana to kai pal.
That’s the safe way to handle the Boeing safety issues.
That’s a cool auto self driving car I put my post out with Eco Maoris Huawei Phone.
The elderly staff care shortage is all the previous Government fault I remember when I was young most of the anties were nurses now because of suppression of Maori there are hardly any Maori nurses??????????????.
Cutting imagration needs to be balanced quite finely.
Lloyd I had backed Britain staying in the European Union I have a sore face now.
Yes Mike one must drive with the utmost care I practically taught my self how to drive when I brought my first car at 16 driving from Te tairawhiti to Ahurri I a excellent driver now.
Ka kite ano
Kia ora Te ao Maori News
Houseing NZ needs to pick its socks up I feel for the kuia who is wheelchair bound and blind she deserves dignity. My daughter has been robbed 4 times in a housing Corp house in Auckland I thought she would have been given another house but no she is stuck with the house she has.
I’m waiting to see who gets vaccination first I say that Maori will get a 2 to 3 week wait compared to the European people.????????????????????.
seenothing it just a pakiha who is trying to float his political toilet sorry Eco Maori will sink it ma te wa.
Give him a Pukana Shane. I will do that and flip the titi have been doing that quite a bit as of late
Kia ora thats the way get Asia investors to invest in Maori business to.
Yes it a big mess that our Maori school children are in at the minute I will be living in a waka soon the European that are forceing this situation on me think its a big joke the landlord turned up ight on 600 pm why to interfair in my post and to rub salt into my wounds He knocked on the door I politely dismissed him as no written notice He is a sandflys puppet Ma te wa puppets. I did not even open the door
Ka kite ano
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Kia ora! As I've watched nearly all my remaining work vanish over the past couple of days, it has occured to me that one good way to keep me away from arguing with fools on Twitter all the time (in the knowledge that all we're really doing is processing our ...
Aotearoa New Zealand has committed to trying to extirpate the virus that causes COVID-19 from its shores. To do that, as a society we’ve moved to “Level 4”. That means adapting to unprecedented restrictions on our personal freedoms, particularly to our rights to move freely and associate with friends and ...
When the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency last week, she handed the police powers to enforce it. And almost immediately, we started hearing about heavy-handed, arbitrary "enforcement" by police who (at best) cared more about order than law, or (more likely) had no idea what the rules were ...
. . Lock Down: Day 4 – A photo essay with observations . March 29: Usual wake up routine as RNZ snaps on my radio-clock. Jim Mora’s voice slowly enters my conciousness; there’s talk of a second wave of covid19 taking hold in South Korea; the week in Parliament – ...
Yesterday, New Zealand recorded its first Covid-19 related death on the West Coast. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be the only fatality, with the virus now being found in every region of the country.However despite the significant danger, people are still unfortunately breaching lockdown rules.There’s really only one main very ...
The kids did surprisingly well today – meltdown count was about 3, and mostly fairly short ones. (And a fourth while I was writing.) Game-wise I had a go at Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark. It’s a fairly standard RPG with turn-based combat and what they call a “mature storyline” (it ...
by Don Franks Hi David, Nice hearing from you, I’m glad to hear you’re getting by okay in these grim times. You asked how’s it going for us back here in New Zealand. You would have heard that the whole country is locked down and with breaks for exercise and ...
. . Lock Down: Day 3 – A photo essay with observations . March 28: First day of the first weekend in Lock Down. It feels like it’s been weeks since only Level 3 was declared last Tuesday, only four days ago. Woke up this morning to RNZ; coffee; toast, ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Mar 22, 2020 through Sat, Mar 28, 2020Articles Linked to on FacebookSun, Mar 22, 2020In Just 10 Years, Warming Has Increased the Odds of Disasters by Chelsea Harvey, ...
I’m here in lockdown with my flatmate and her two girls (6 and 2) and it. is. a time. They’re usually really active so to start with the only boardgame in the house is the copy of Guess Who that the 6 year old got for her birthday. Flatmate commented ...
The CV-19 (COVID) pandemic has seen the imposition of a government ordered national quarantine and the promulgation of a series of measures designed to spread the burden of pain and soften the economic blow on the most strategically important and most vulnerable sectors of society. The national narrative is framed ...
. . Lock Down: Day 2 – A photo essay with observations . March 27 – Day 2 of our Strange New World. The Park and Ride near my suburb, usually filled with hundreds of vehicles, had just… four; . . Another drive into Wellington City on a highway nearly ...
Fortune's Children: Under extraordinary pressure, the leader of the Government and the leader of the Opposition will each show us what they are made of. Have they been blessed with intelligence, grace, wit, poise, toughness, empathy and humour – and in what measure? More importantly, to what extent have they ...
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to rent a property on the open market in New Zealand, which is one of the most expensive in the entire world, you’ll likely be keenly aware of just how arrogant and entitled landlords and their real estate agents can be.Unfortunately for ...
Society-wise, aside from the specific morbidity shall we say of the medically-oriented aspects of this COVID-19 crisis, what is unfolding before the world is in more than one way an instructive study of humanity and reactions to a high intensity, high stress environment in real time. Friends, we are at ...
Right now low waged and insecure workers are feeling the economic brunt of the looming #Covid19 Recession. In response legal advocate Toby Cooper* and hospitality and worker’s rights advocate Chloe Ann-King, are putting together a series of legal blogs about your employment rights:In this legal blog we outline some ...
by Equipo Jurídico Pueblos and Gearóid Ó Loingsigh (25/03/2020) An escape plan in question On the night of March 21st and the early morning of the 22nd, the forces of the Colombian state stormed into the Modelo prison in Bogotá, murdering 23 prisoners and injuring 83, in response to the ...
When the government banned semi-automatic weapons in response to a terrorist atrocity, gun-nuts were outraged. Mired in toxic American gun culture, they thought owning weapons whose sole purpose was killing people was some sort of "constitutional right", a necessity for "defending themselves" against the government. Now, the Court of Appeal ...
Just before midnight on Wednesday March 25, Aotearoa New Zealand entered a countrywide alert level four lockdown. For at least the next four weeks, everyone who isn’t an essential worker is confined to their bubble. We are doing this to stop the explosive growth in people contracting and dying from ...
. . Lock Down: Day 1 – A photo essay with observations . Day one of the Level 4 nationwide lock-down (or, DefCon 4 as I sometimes cheekily call it) started at 11.59PM on 25 March. For a moment, most of the nation held it’s collective breath. In that brief ...
Broad, Sunlit Uplands: How those words fired my young imagination! Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say: how those words fused, in my young mind, with the image printed on every packet of Fielder’s Cornflour. Always fascinated by history, especially modern history, I cannot hear Churchill’s wonderfully evocative words, even ...
. . 24 March 2020 9.46AM Number of covid19 cases in Aotearoa New Zealand: 102 . As of 11.59 on Thursday, most of New Zealand will go into “lock down”. People will be expected not to travel to work; not to socialise; and to stay home. I will not be ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections A respected research group, Project Drawdown, finds that deploying solutions consistent with meeting the Paris climate targets would cost tens of trillions of dollars globally. But crucially, those outlays would also yield long-term savings many times larger than the up-front costs. The new 2020 Drawdown ...
It will pass. What happens next? Not immediately, but longer term. There are many opinions, fewer certainties. Will it “change everything!” as many confidently, and contradictorily predict? In this post I look at how foresight can help bound some of the uncertainties so you can more objectively consider the future. ...
We’ve been meaning t write something on Cuba and the coronavirus but have just discovered a very good article on the subject in the US left publication Jacobin. The article looks at how Cuba, a poor country but one where capitalism has been done away with, is leading the way ...
In 2018, El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey - two British citizens who had purportedly been stripped of their citizenship by the British government - were captured while fighting for Isis in Syria. The British government then conspired to hand them over to the US, and agreed to provide evidence ...
Transformers: The disaster of the Great Depression was transformed into a new and fairer society by the democratic socialism of the First Labour Government. The disaster of the Covid-19 Pandemic offers a similar transformative possibility to the Labour-NZ First-Green Government. Seize the time, Jacinda! You will never have a better ...
Tamper with The System? Well, we already are. But there's a difference between accidentally trickling sand into a precision gearbox versus formulating a plan to alter it on the fly with improvements in mind. One action is more or less innocently unscrupulous, the other amenable to earning an easy ...
Associate Prof George Thomson, Louise Delany, Prof Nick WilsonWhile it is possible that New Zealand can use intense public health controls to eradicate COVID-19 from the country – we must also plan for other scenarios where thousands of New Zealanders are sick – including many urgently hospitalised.1 Better resilience ...
Kia ora my name is Chloe Ann-King* and I am the founder of Raise the Bar, a campaign and non-profit that gives free legal aid, advocacy and tautoko to hospitality workers in Aotearoa. Right now all over our country hospo workers are being fired at will, having shifts cut or being ...
We're about to do something unprecedented as a nation. We hope that by taking this extraordinary action before a single life in New Zealand has been lost to the deadly novel virus we will save tens of thousands of lives. Our lives. We'll do it together, in households, in isolation ...
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”So writes the author of Ecclesiastes, a book in the Old Testament that’s counted as a ‘wisdom’ book and written as if by an unnamed king of Jerusalem. But who would have thought there would be a time ...
I was surprised when the prime minister described the Economic Response to Covid-19 package as the ‘largest peacetime government spend in New Zealand's history’. Reflecting – checking through history – I realised that the term ‘spend’ was crucial and the package had no income tax cuts. Even so, it has ...
Years ago the Argentine sociologist Carlos Weisman wrote a book titled “Living within our Means.” It was a critique of Argentine society that focused on the paradoxical question of why, in a land of plenty, there was so much economic instability, inequality, corruption and political turmoil. His conclusion was basically ...
Parliament will be leading by example and adjourning tomorrow after a special sitting to consider an epidemic notice and state of emergency. Day-to-day oversight of the government will be delegated to a select committee. But that's not the only overight mechanism. The OIA will still be law, and (so far) ...
Michael Baker, University of OtagoOverjoyed. That’s not a word epidemiologists normally use, but that’s how I felt after hearing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s announcement about New Zealand’s COVID-19 shutdown of everything except essential services for at least four weeks from midnight on Wednesday. More than anything, I just ...
How much homelessness is caused by house hoarding? We're about to find out. The pandemic has destroyed tourism, which means that house hoarders who put their hoarded properties up as short-term tourist rentals are now offering them on the ordinary rental market:Property investors are pulling properties from Airbnb to offer ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Bruce Lieberman It seems like such a simple, straightforward, empowering idea: plant trees – a lot of trees – all over the world, and watch the planet’s temperature fall. Who doesn’t love a tree or two, even far more – the right ...
According to Newshub, Simon Bridges is open to joining a “grand coalition” with Labour as we hunker down to go into a month long lockdown. The idea is sound. Before now, the role of the opposition was to scrutinise and oppose. In the context of what almost amounts to a ...
Kia ora my name is Chloe Ann-King* and I am the founder of Raise the Bar, a campaign and non-profit that gives free legal aid, advocacy and tautoko to hospitality workers in Aotearoa. Right now all over our country hospo workers are being fired at will, having shifts cut or ...
We need to be lifting our game against COVID-19. You and I need to help those working to prevent the spread of COVID-19 while they’re trying to lift the testing and treatment efforts. We don’t want to be playing this game running backwards. Best to play it solidly forward, from ...
Prof Tony Blakely, Prof Michael Baker, and Prof Nick WilsonThe NZ Government must do more to clearly articulate its COVID-19 strategy: eradication or ‘flattening the curve’ mitigation. But to do so means understanding the maths and ethics of both these strategies. In this blog, we adapt our work for ...
A few days ago I was starting to write something about the pandemic, which now seems unconscionable. It took the form of a letter to an agony aunt:“Dear Deidre, I have an ugly confession. I am quite excited by Covid-19.”This is how the piece went:“I’m not a psychopath, honest. Although the ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Climate Feedback Article Review... Coming Soon on SkS... Climate Feedback Claim Reviews... SkS Week in Review... Poster of the Week... Story of the Week... In Just 10 Years, Warming Has Increased the Odds of DisastersThe likelihood of extreme events ...
Last week, the government announced a $12 billion initial package to support people during the pandemic. Today, the Reserve Bank is buying government bonds - effectively printing money - to keep up the money supply during the crisis. Normally such moves would have the right apoplectic. Instead, the National Party ...
I am a pundit, somebody who opines and comments on the news. There are no real qualifications to punditry though having a rudimentary way with words and good general knowledge helps. That is one reason there is a constant oversupply of would-be pundits and why it is quite hard to ...
I recently encountered the following prescription from a Faculty of Education at a leading New Zealand University. At first I wondered if it was another product of the postmodern generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/), designed to create gibberish in the postmodern form, but I’m told it is real: The “schooled” society: Towards the ...
The coronavirus pandemic has of course had a major impact on individual lives and on societies as a whole. But, long after the crisis has passed (assuming it does), we will begin to realise that its real and lasting significance lies in the lessons it has taught us, if only ...
COVID-19 has plunged Aotearoa New Zealand (indeed, the world) into territory that, while maybe not totally unprecedented, certainly hasn’t been seen during the lifetimes of most of us here today. Our borders are closed to non-citizens, we’re being told not to gather in groups of more than 500 outside/100 inside, ...
For the last few weeks, I’ve been urging you to prepare yourself, your family, business, and community for Covid-19. Now it’s time for real action. Yesterday the director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield announced another 13 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand, bringing our total to date to 52. ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Mar 15, 2020 through Sat, Mar 21, 2020 Editor's Pick Now Isn’t the Time to Forget About Our Climate Change EffortsTasha Tilberg, Lindsey Wixson, and Liu Wen photographed ...
by Jan Rivers The article has been corrected to show that it was Ewen MacAskill, former Guardian journalist and not Luke Harding who travelled to meet Edward Snowden with journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras. Some of the Guardian’s well-known journalists who did not sign the protest letter are ...
by Cultural Worker Late March 2020 amidst the virus. With gigs crashing and burning all around it was without much hope that I called a long standing rest home booking: “ Hi, I’m supposed to be entertaining at your place this afternoon – is it still on?” “”If you don’t ...
Whenever people demand real change from their politicians, we're told that "politics is the art of the possible". The implication is that change isn't possible, so we'd better just get used to the sucky status quo. But now that there's a pandemic, a lot of things we were previously told ...
Together: In leading New Zealand through the Covid-19 Pandemic, the Prime Minister could do a lot worse than allow herself to be guided by the spirit of collective sacrifice and co-operation that animated the New Zealanders of 80 years ago. Most Kiwis alive today have had no opportunity to prove their ...
It is said that generals fight the last war. In the case of the early stages of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) they had learned from the Great Depression of the 1930s and they fought intelligently and successfully. Later their advice would be ignored in favour of the Austerians who ...
Solidarity Forever: All over the world, the arrival of the Covid-19 virus has exposed the fragility of the walls we erect around ourselves and our loved ones. It has shattered our illusions of autonomy and revealed to us how utterly dependent we all are on other human-beings. Finally, we see ...
Looking across the various arguments for/against the leading candidates to take the Democratic Nomination, you might honestly be very hard pressed to tell. There are a number of things that have now started happening since Amy Klobuchar and “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg both threw the towel in and immediately (and ...
by Daphna Whitmore Abortion is no longer in the Crimes Act in New Zealand. The law reform passed yesterday and now abortion is a medical matter between a woman and her doctor. Many women’s groups and progressive people have campaigned for reform for decades. The women’s liberation movement and some ...
Doug Specht, University of Westminster and Julio Gimenez, University of Westminster When fake news, misreporting and alternative facts are everywhere, reading the news can be a challenge. Not only is there plenty of misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, climate change and other scientific topics floating around social media, you also ...
Michael Baker, University of Otago and Nick Wilson, University of OtagoWith some of the toughest border restrictions and a newly-announced NZ$500 million boost to health services, New Zealand is among a small number of countries with a strategy to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. New Zealand is also fortunate in ...
As expected, the government has introduced a sessional order to allow Parliament to operate during the pandemic. You can read it on the Order Paper here, but the short version is that questions and motions can be filed electronicly, select committees can work remotely, and the the Business Committee can ...
Axel Bruns, Queensland University of Technology; Daniel Angus, Queensland University of Technology; Timothy Graham, Queensland University of Technology, and Tobias R. Keller, Queensland University of Technology News and views about coronavirus has spread via social media in a way that no health emergency has done before. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, ...
So you’ve recently returned from overseas, come into contact with someone who tested positive, got a bit of a dry cough yourself or perhaps just want to self isolate for 14 days to avoid other people who might have COVID-19. Here are a few tips and tricks to help get ...
Our Good Fortune: Precisely because she has never been an ideologue (she calls herself a “pragmatic idealist”) Jacinda Ardern has a political nimbleness and spontaneity which, when infused with her exceptional emotional intelligence, produces spectacular demonstrations of leadership. Jacinda's empathic political personality contrasts sharply with the less-than-sunny ways of her ...
The Abortion Legislation Bill has just passed its third reading, 68-51. NZ First MPs bailed because their referendum amendment didn't pass, but there were plenty of MPs to provide a majority without them. The bill is a long way from perfect - most significantly, it subjects pregnant people who need ...
As most of the world tries to suppress the coronavirus spread, some countries are going it alone – trying to manage the pandemic through so-called “herd immunity”. Herd immunity means letting a large number of people catch a disease, and hence develop immunity to it, to stop the virus spreading. ...
So, as I sit at home with a very, very slight headache (i.e. not at work when I would otherwise be so), the now familiar figure of Ashley Bloomfield reports eight new confirmed cases of COVID-19 including two in Waikato. A surprise, given that we had just twelve yesterday? No. ...
Many who advocated for, and voted for, the current Coalition – particularly those who voted Labour and the Green Party – expected to see a sea change in the reality of social services. A real, deep change of attitude, approach of process through which the system negotiates the difficult and ...
All 45 New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) personnel are either on their way back to New Zealand, or already in the country, according to Defence Minister Ron Mark."Twenty-eight personnel arrived back in New Zealand last week and are in isolation at the Royal New Zealand Air Force base in ...
The COVID-19 situation in New Zealand is moving fast - and to avoid what we've seen overseas - the Government's response must be to move fast too. We're committed to keeping New Zealanders safe and well-informed every step of the way. ...
Foreign Minister Winston Peters is encouraging New Zealanders overseas to stay where they are amid the COVID-19 pandemic. "We are reaching a point where the best option for most New Zealanders offshore is to shelter in place, by preparing to safely stay where they are.” "This includes following the instructions ...
Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs Foreign Minister Winston Peters is encouraging the tens of thousands of New Zealanders travelling overseas to consider sheltering in place, in light of COVID-19. “Since 18 March, we have been warning New Zealanders offshore that the window for flying ...
Ground-breaking law has passed that will decriminalise abortion and ensure women and pregnant people seeking abortions have compassionate healthcare. ...
The Green Party says that the measures announced by the Government today will help families and businesses to prioritise our collective health and wellbeing in the response to COVID-19. ...
As New Zealanders brace for a global downturn due to Covid-19, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says his Coalition Government’s rescue package "more significant" than any other he's seen around the world. The Coalition is to reveal a multi-billion-dollar stimulus plan on Tuesday afternoon designed to cushion the economic blow ...
We know some people are feeling anxious about COVID-19. While the situation is serious, New Zealand has a world-class health system and we’re well-prepared to keep New Zealanders safe. ...
Darroch Ball MP, Spokesperson for Law and Order A New Zealand First member’s bill drawn from the ballot today seeks to overhaul the youth justice system by instigating a system of demerit points for offences committed by young offenders. “The ‘Youth Justice Demerit Point System’ will put an end to ...
Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Foreign AffairsHonourable Ministers, Members of Parliament, members of the diplomatic corps, distinguished guests and official delegates, ladies and gentlemen – Welcome to you all.We are also privileged to have with us here today Ms Izumi Nakamitsu, the United Nations ...
Fletcher Tabuteau MP, Under-Secretary for Disarmament and Arms ControlThe Public Advisory Committee for Disarmament and Arms Control (PACDAC) is holding a Parliamentary Symposium on Tuesday to mark the 50th Anniversary of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) hosted by PACDAC Chair and Under-Secretary for Disarmament and ...
Hon. Shane Jones, Minister for Regional Economic DevelopmentThe Provincial Growth Fund is investing $6 million in a land-based aquaculture pilot to see whether yellowtail kingfish can be commercially farmed in Northland, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today.A recirculating land-based aquaculture system will be built and operated ...
Hon. Shane Jones, Minister for ForestryForestry Minister Shane Jones has announced two One Billion Trees programme grants of more than $1.18 million to help hapu and iwi in Northland restore whenua and moana.“Many communities around Aotearoa have benefited from One Billion Trees funding since the programme was launched ...
Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign AffairsAhead of the start of the criminal trial in the Netherlands on 9 March, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has reaffirmed the need to establish truth, accountability and justice for the downing of Flight MH17 ...
Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Deputy Prime MinisterThe Government is investing $19.9 million through the Provincial Growth Fund in a game-changing hydrogen energy facility in South Taranaki, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters announced today.“The development of alternative energy initiatives like this one is vital for the Taranaki region’s economy. ...
Rt. Hon. Winston Peters, Minister for Foreign AffairsForeign Affairs Minister Winston Peters says New Zealand is partnering with countries in the Pacific to ensure they are prepared for, and able to respond to the global threat of Coronavirus (COVID-19).“There are currently no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the ...
The Government has fast-tracked up to $1 million to help Air New Zealand move urgent freight to and from New Zealand, with the first flight to Shanghai leaving tonight, Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced today. Phil Twyford says it’s crucial that trade in vital goods such as medical supplies and ...
New Zealand will temporarily remove tariffs on all medical and hygiene imports needed for the COVID-19 response. Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker and Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Kris Faafoi said today that the New Zealand Customs Service will apply tariff concessions to all diagnostic reagents and testing ...
Minister of Finance Grant Robertson has clarified that the changes to the wage subsidy scheme announced yesterday mean that employers should be passing on the full subsidy to workers, except in the case where the person’s normal income is less than the level of the subsidy. “We still want employers ...
Medical face masks from the national reserve supply are now being distributed to District Health Boards, while at the same time local production is being ramped up. Yesterday more than 640,000 masks were sent to DHBS – that is an immediate two week supply, with more to follow in coming ...
The Government has made modifications to the wage subsidy scheme to ensure people don’t lose their jobs during the national lockdown. These changes will soften the impact of COVID-19 on workers, families and businesses, and position them to exit the lockdown and look to recovery, Finance Minister Grant Robertson says. ...
Farmers whose herds were culled in response to the outbreak of Mycoplasma bovis will be able to minimise the tax treatment of their income in some circumstances. Revenue Minister Stuart Nash says Cabinet has agreed to change the law. It means farmers may be eligible to spread their income over ...
A $27 million dollar package, effective immediately, is being provided to social sector services and community groups to ensure they can continue to provide essential support to communities as we stay at home as a nation to stop the spread of COVID-19, Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni announced. “At ...
“The guilty plea today will provide some relief to the many people whose lives were shattered by what happened on March 15,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. “These guilty pleas and conviction bring accountability for what happened and also save the families who lost loved ones, those who were injured, ...
The Prime Minister is holding daily press conferences to update New Zealanders on the Government's response to COVID-19. Links to videos and transcripts of these updates below. These transcripts also include All of Government press conferences led by Director Ministry of Health's Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield. 25 March: Live update from the Prime ...
Frontline Police numbers have broken through the 10,000 mark for the first time in history as officers step forward to keep the community safe during the COVID19 lockdown. “Two Police graduations in Auckland and Wellington in the past week have been conducted in unprecedented circumstances,” Police Minister Stuart Nash said. ...
Urgent legislation has been passed to support the package of economic and social measures needed to recover from the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. “The COVID-19 Response (Taxation and Social Assistance Urgent Measures) Bill will cushion New Zealanders from the worst economic impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak,” said Revenue Minister ...
From tomorrow, Government support for farmers and growers affected by drought will be expanded and extended across the country, with access to Rural Assistance Payments (RAPS) available throughout the North Island, parts of the South Island and the Chatham Islands, Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni announced. “These challenging conditions have ...
Parliament has passed amendments to legislation that give the Secretary of Education stronger powers to act in the fight to limit the spread of COVID-19, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “They are part of a suite of changes passed under the COVID-19 Response (Urgent Management Measures) Legislation Bill,” Chris ...
Canada, Australia, Chile, Brunei and Myanmar have joined forces with New Zealand and Singapore by committing to keep supply chains open and remove any existing trade restrictive measures on essential goods, especially medical supplies, in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker today welcomed ...
Immediate freeze on rent increases Tenancies will not be terminated during the lock-down period, unless the parties agree, or in limited circumstances Tenants who had previously given notice can stay in their if they need to stay in the tenancy during the lock-down period Tenants will still be able to ...
As New Zealand unites to lock-down in the fight against COVID-19, the Finance Minister is urging all businesses and workers to stay connected over the next four weeks. “We understand the extreme pressure many businesses are under right now. I know most business owners think of their workers as family ...
A State of National Emergency has been declared across the country as the Government pulls out all the stops to curtail the spread of COVID-19. “Today we put in place our country’s second ever State of National Emergency as we fight a global pandemic, save New Zealanders’ lives and prevent ...
Mr Speaker I wish to make a Ministerial Statement under Standing Order 347 in relation to the recent declaration of a State of National Emergency. Having considered the advice of the Director Civil Defence Emergency Management, the Minister of Civil Defence declared a State of National Emergency for the whole of ...
People needing to travel on domestic flights, trains and Cook Strait ferries to get home before the country moves into level 4 lock-down tomorrow night will be able to continue using the passenger services until midnight on Friday, Transport Minister Phil Twyford said today. Domestic passenger services, particularly ferries, have ...
The Government, retail banks and the Reserve Bank are today announcing a major financial support package for home owners and businesses affected by the economic impacts of COVID-19. The package will include a six month principal and interest payment holiday for mortgage holders and SME customers whose incomes have been ...
Minister of Transport Phil Twyford has today announced details of the Government’s support package to keep key air freight moving and ensure New Zealanders retain access to essential goods during the four-week level 4 lockdown. “The Government is working with airlines and air freight operators to ensure New Zealand’s key ...
New Zealand moved up to COVID-19 Alert Level 3 – Restrict New Zealand to move up to COVID-19 Alert Level 4 – Eliminate, in 48 hours Two-staged approach to give people and businesses time to prepare Level 3, from tomorrow Non-essential businesses must close All events and gatherings must be ...
Good afternoon The Cabinet met this morning to discuss our next actions in the fight against COVID-19. Like the rest of the world, we are facing the potential for devastating impacts from this virus. But, through decisive action, and through working together, do we have a small window to get ...
The Government is announcing significant further support for the economy, workers and businesses as the country unites to prepare for Alert Level 4 in the fight against COVID-19. Cabinet today agreed to remove the cap on the Government’s wage subsidy scheme, which will inject a further $4 billion into the ...
The Government is backing the Reserve Bank’s latest action to support the economy by reducing longer-term interest rates, meaning lower costs for businesses and mortgage holders, and a lower currency to help our exporters. The Minister of Finance has signed a memorandum of understanding and a letter of indemnity with ...
The Government has asked the Commerce Commission to take account of the exceptional circumstances created by COVID-19 when monitoring business behaviour in coming weeks. “The purpose of my request to the Commerce Commission is to make sure businesses can work together in ways that will allow them to provide ...
The New Zealand Government has temporarily closed its High Commission in Bridgetown, Barbados and its Embassy in Yangon, Myanmar due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Foreign Minister Winston Peters says. “Due to the increasing scarcity of air links in and out of Bridgetown and Yangon, and the pressure COVID-19 is placing ...
Associate Health and Whānau Ora Minister Peeni Henare has today announced the Government’s plan to support Māori communities and businesses in the face of COVID-19. “Our Government’s $12.1 billion economic package will help many Māori whānau, workers and businesses, whether it’s through wage subsidies, income support and worker redeployment, or ...
The Government and the hospitality industry have worked together to produce guidelines to assist with managing and reducing transmission of COVID-19, Health Minister David Clark announced today. The guidelines developed between the Government, Hospitality New Zealand and SkyCity Entertainment Group, set out how the new restrictions on physical distancing and ...
Four stage Alert System for COVID-19 announced New Zealand moved up to COVID-19 Alert Level 2 – Reduce Contact New Zealanders over 70 and those with certain medical conditions told to stay at home as much as they can to reduce risk of contact with the virus Workplaces to implement ...
Kia ora koutou katoa I’m speaking directly to all New Zealanders today to give you as much certainty and clarity as we can as we fight Covid-19. Over the past few weeks, the world has changed. And it has changed very quickly. In February it would have seemed unimaginable to ...
New Zealand and Singapore have jointly committed to keep supply chains open and to remove any existing trade restrictive measures on essential goods, especially medical supplies, in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. Trade and Export Growth Minister David Parker welcomed the commitment. “This is an important collective response, and ...
JOINT MINISTERIAL STATEMENT BY SINGAPORE AND NEW ZEALAND AFFIRMING COMMITMENT TO ENSURING SUPPLY CHAIN CONNECTIVITY AMIDST THE COVID-19 SITUATION The COVID-19 pandemic is a serious global crisis. As part of our collective response to combat COVID-19, Singapore and New Zealand are committed to maintaining open and connected supply chains. We ...
Travel restrictions, closing our border to almost all travelers came into force from 23:59 on Thursday 19 March 2020 (NZDT). All airlines were informed of these restrictions before they came into force. Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says “The transit of passengers between Australia and New Zealand has been agreed upon and ...
The Government has allocated $100 million to help redeploy workers affected by the economic impact of COVID-19, with the hard-hit region of Gisborne-Tairāwhiti to be the first helped, Economic Development Minister Phil Twyford, Forestry and Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones and Employment Minister Willie Jackson announced today. Phil Twyford ...
The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) is ramping up support for Tairāwhiti’s wood processing sector to bolster the region’s economy at a time of heightened uncertainty, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today. Following earlier announcements today of a regional support package for Tairāwhiti, Minister Jones has also announced a ...
The Coalition Government has stepped in to protect Air New Zealand with a significant financial deal that protects essential routes and allows the company to keep operating. The Government and Air New Zealand have agreed a debt funding agreement through commercial 24-month loan facilities of up to $900 million*. The ...
The Government has taken further measures to protect New Zealanders from the COVID-19 virus, effectively stopping all people from boarding a plane to New Zealand from 11:59pm today, except for returning New Zealanders, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced today. New Zealanders’ partners, legal guardians or any dependent children travelling with ...
The Government has reinforced its commitment to protecting the health of New Zealanders from COVID-19 through the cancellation of indoor events with more than 100 people. “Protecting the health of New Zealanders is our number one priority, and that means we need to reduce the risks associated with large gatherings,” ...
The New Zealand Government is advising New Zealanders not to travel overseas due to COVID-19, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has announced. “We are raising our travel advice to the highest level: do not travel,” Mr Peters said. “This is the first time the New Zealand Government has advised New Zealanders ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Irving, Adjunct Professor, University of Technology Sydney Blood is like milk, not toilet paper. You can’t just buy a lot of it and save it for later – you need to have a regular, fresh supply for patients who need it. ...
Newsroom Pro’s Bernard Hickey and Kiwibank Chief Economist Jarrod Kerr zoom out to lunch to talk about the Reserve Bank’s latest move to help banks lend to corporates. The Reserve Bank announced on Monday it would lend to banks dealing with distressed corporate borrowers, opening a new weekly Open ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacinta Carroll, Senior Research Fellow, Counter Terrorism and Social Cohesion, National Security College, Australian National University There are now nearly 300 cases of COVID-19 linked to passengers who disembarked from the Ruby Princess cruise ship without any health checks from authorities. Amid ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Brayshaw, Lecturer, Fashion and Design History, Theory, and Thinking, University of Technology Sydney Once again, global crafting communities are stepping up to help in a crisis, sewing face masks desperately needed in American hospitals to help stop the spread of COVID-19. ...
Retailer Smiths City has reached an agreement with ASB Bank to delay a $1.5 million dollar repayment of a loan due tomorrow. It also said it is starting talks with potential investors to support the business. The company said Covid-19 has caused an unforeseen and unprecedented shock to the business, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Quentin Grafton, Director of the Centre for Water Economics, Environment and Policy, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University In 1997, a bestselling book by Jared Diamond purported to explain how the West “won” world dominance based on the good luck ...
Figures from around the world show that Covid-19, while vicious and contagious, does behave like other infections, rampaging quickly through a community, hospitalising a small percentage and causing death in an even smaller percentage. The World Health ...
Video of PM Ardern’s Post Cabinet Press Conference is available here: New Zealand Labour Party - #LIVE: Post-Cabinet Press Conference 2 March 2020 Today Cabinet was focused on the response to protect NZers from COVID-19. Ardern outlined ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin To get a correct picture, we need regional data – indeed sub-regional statistics – because the virus does not respect political boundaries. Unfortunately, it is very hard to get regional data from European countries. The Johns Hopkins data – most widely used by the media (and ...
An extract from Jacinda Ardern: A New Kind of Leader, the brand new biography of the prime minister by Madeleine Chapman, formerly of this parish.Out today, Madeleine’s biography of the prime minister is magnificent. We cracked up. We had a wee cry. We’ve never read a political biography like it. Tomorrow ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Misha Ketchell, Editor & Executive Director, The Conversation You might have seen recent mediareports in various outlets of a paper, commissioned by the federal government, reporting the coronavirus advice of a group of experts from Group Of Eight universities. Dated March ...
Analysis: On the face of it, New Zealand's epidemic curve is going exponential. But are case numbers really rising for the same reasons as overseas? If you've been following any news about Covid-19 over the past three months, you've heard of The Curve. It looks, variously, like a sky-high pillar ...
MediaRoom column: A decision to block publication of community newspapers under the State of Emergency could be changed tomorrow. Tim Murphy reports. A decision to stop community newspapers from circulating in the country's suburbs, towns and settlements appears to have been an example of officials scratching their regulatory itch. On Friday, ...
A Waikato berry grower has been ordered to pay over $76,000 for employment law breaches. Olde Berry Farm has been fined $50,000 and forced to pay over $16,000 in unpaid wages and holiday pay. Its managing director, Andrew Molly, has been made personally responsible fo an additional $10,000 in penalties. ...
The Government has set up a dedicated service for reporting fears of price gouging, as Jacinda Ardern flags the expansion of "essential services" Kiwis concerned about potential price gouging at supermarkets during the coronavirus lockdown can now report the issue directly to government officials, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced. Ardern ...
A new report by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment into the ban on new petroleum exploration permits outside onshore Taranaki has been welcomed by the Petroleum Exploration and Production Association of New Zealand (PEPANZ). "This ...
The takeover offer for Abano Healthcare is off the table - a casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic. The company said the $150-million takeover scheme agreement with Adams NZ Bidco Ltd. was terminated, with no fees payable by either party, as a result as the material adverse change to the company's ...
The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) contribution to the successful mission to train members of the Iraqi Security Forces to combat ISIS is at an end and the first troops from the final contingent have arrived home. Since December the NZDF has had 45 personnel ...
On Sunday it was reported there is a high demand for New Zealand Police's online form to report lockdown breaches. This news should act as a red flag, signalling the potentially corrosive effects on public trust within Aotearoa that may occur in these troubled times. Concerns have already been expressed ...
The Prime Minister is giving the latest updates on the government's fight against the impact of Covid-19 at her weekly post-Cabinet media conference. Watch live here. ...
Watch the replay of our fourth live Q&A session with Dr Ayesha Verrall, a senior lecturer at Otago University who specialises in infectious diseases. Ayesha Verrall is an infectious diseases physician and senior lecturer at Otago University's Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine (Wellington). Dr Verrall has been monitoring the spread and impact ...
Recognising how much of the burden women are carrying in this crisis - and how much they always carry - may take us closer to a society in which caring work is seen and valued for the essential work it is, writes Jess Berentson-Shaw COVID-19 has thrown a window wide ...
You’ve lost your job and your income has reduced due to the Covid-19 crisis, so how do you hold onto your home? Mortgage adviser Cameron Marcroft talks to Bonnie Sumner.Tell us about the changes you’ve seen since the lockdown began. We’ve had many enquiries coming through from both existing ...
When officials – including police themselves – don’t seem clear on the rules around movement, it makes it harder for everyone to do the right thing, writes Andrew Geddis.Aotearoa New Zealand has committed to trying to eradicate the virus that causes Covid-19 from its shores. To do that, as a ...
The EMA is urging the Government to postpone the planned significant increase to the minimum wage on Wednesday, as employers grapple with keeping their doors open amid COVID-19. Chief Executive Brett O’Riley says that while it may be politically ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Wark, Conjoint Professor, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle As the number of COVID-19 cases around the world continues to climb, hospitals are under increased pressure to provide emergency care for the most severely ill patients. What does ...
Philanthropy New Zealand will release a weekly update to share philanthropic and grantmaking activity and insight as the sector seeks to support communities in the wake of COVID-19. This update is a general public document, provided to Ministers, ...
By Elias Nanau in Port Moresby Indonesia has issued a stern warning over illegal border crossers from Papua New Guinea. This follows Indonesia stepping up its security measures at the border in response to the global Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. The First Secretary to the governor for West Sepik, Adam ...
As two staff members test positive for Covid-19, police are grappling with ways to keep their workforce safe while still enforcing the rules of the lockdown, Marc Daalder reports Two police staff have tested positive for Covid-19, Police Commissioner Mike Bush said Monday, while nearly 400 others are now in self-isolation ...
The Covid-19 crisis in media has claimed New Zealand’s last surviving radio station solely dedicated to sport. Amid a wider crisis in media funding right now, the first outlet has been forced to close the doors – and it isn’t likely to return.Staff at Radio Sport have been told that the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Program Director, Household Finances, Grattan Institute New Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates paint a grim picture of the direct economic costs of public health measures to contain the spread of COVID-19, and the need for more government support ...
Tips on how television can help educate your kids, for parents who have to keep working.It feels as if a great many parents are simply flourishing during this lockdown with fairy gardens, bird song and mason jars, daily bongo drum dancing and essays written by three-year-old prodigies about how satisfying ...
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening. There were 76 new cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand, up from the previous day's 63 new cases. Details of how many tests have been completed are now being ...
Supermarkets and some publishers are favoured by the government’s imposition of severe restrictions on what we can do and from whom we can buy during the Covid-19 lock-down. But one consumer watchdog is challenging the legality of an edict by Commerce Minister Kris Faafoi which favours supermarkets while Act leader ...
Robyn Hunt writes on the challenges facing disabled people and what needs to be done to support them as we go into lockdown, and beyond.Disabled people at higher risk need more help. Many of the almost one quarter of New Zealanders who are disabled are doing it hard as the ...
An online focus is coming back to bite newspaper companies, the Otago Daily Times’ editor says. David Williams reports. Despite advertising falling off a cliff, and its community papers dormant, the group editor of the country’s third-biggest publisher says there haven’t been layoffs and it’s unlikely any of its newspapers ...
Cabinet ministers will patch into a video conference this afternoon to discuss the Covid-19 lockdown, including complaints about high prices at supermarkets. ...
Talks will be ongoing between local leaders and Government in an effort to have them deploy both personnel and other resources to Tairāwhiti to support regional measures to contain COVID-19. Mayor Rehette Stoltz, Gisborne District Council ...
The New Zealand Taxpayers' Union is joining calls for the Government to extend submission deadlines for Select Committees during the immediate fallout of the COVID-19 crisis. New Zealand Taxpayers' Union spokesman Louis Houlbrooke says, "Old political ...
FIRST Union welcomes the announcements made by supermarket chains Foodstuffs and Progressive Enterprises that workers will receive lockdown pay increases but is cautioning that the details of these promises matter and all essential workers should be earning ...
By Imelda V. Abano in Manila The novel coronavirus now sweeping the globe has left many countries struggling to cope with rising numbers of infections and journalists grappling with how to best cover this evolving public health crisis. In addition to questions about how governments, health care systems and ...
The government has fast-tracked up to $1 million to help Air New Zealand move urgent freight in and out of the country - with the first flight to Shanghai leaving tonight. ...
Join Leonie Hayden as she works through the first four weeks of Scotty Morrison’s Māori Made Easy.Kia ora e te whānau, welcome to MME with me! I know a lot of us have this little green book on our shelves. Maybe you bought it and never got round to opening ...
The Free Speech Coalition is preparing to launch an urgent judicial review of the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s decision to deem non-daily newspapers and publications not an essential service for the purposes of the COVID-19 Level-4 nationwide shutdown. ...
Increasingly concerned home support workers are worried that without adequate personal protective equipment and mandatory protocols for risk assessments, they may end up spreading COVID-19 around the homes and communities they work in. The news that 21 ...
The kiwifruit industry is fighting for survival as it tries to pick and pack the season's crop while enforcing Covid-19 restrictions. The apple industry is also predicting problems with at least 10 percent of the crop not likely to be picked. The nationwide lockdown has come right in the middle ...
The Reserve Bank is ramping up support for businesses and banks by accepting corporate debt and other assets as security for loans to banks. The latest measure is designed to pump more money into the economy through the banking system. Assistant governor Christian Hawkesby said the aim is to encourage ...
The first days of national lockdown have truly brought out the best in our social media stars. Alex Casey counts down the classics. Yesterday I got served with the Instagram notification that normally only pops up around Christmas-time. “You’re all caught up!” it chirps, “you’ve seen every post from the last ...
In our new series The Lockdown Letters, some of New Zealand’s best writers tell us what they’ve been up to in the days of Covid-19 alert level four. Today, writer and doctor Glenn Colquhoun goes full epistolary, with a letter to Hone Tūwhare – and his Travelling Band of Constant Companions.Kia ...
By John Gerritsen of RNZ News The $5 billion foreign student industry is facing a massive downturn with as many as half of this year’s enrolments now in doubt. Immigration New Zealand figures show that of 76,203 valid study visas at 15 March, 60,348 were in New Zealand, and ...
As New Zealand looks toward an uncertain future in all areas of life, Auckland school principal Claire Amos sees an opportunity to change high school education for the better. The last week has been an interesting one for school leaders. Monday arrived, it was all on – schools were closing the ...
The Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told Morning Report, she’s expecting the country to be restricted to visitors for some time after the lockdown period ends. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Albert Van Dijk, Professor, Water and Landscape Dynamics, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University 2019 was the year Australians confronted the fact that a healthy environment is more than just a pretty waterfall in a national park; a nice ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yale Z Wong, Research Associate, Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, University of Sydney ZMinimising health risks has rightly been the focus of discussion during the coronavirus outbreak. This includes efforts to protect both frontline public transport employees and the travelling public. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tyler Riordan, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland Along with home delivery of groceries, pharmaceuticals and alcohol, demand for food delivery is booming. Services such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo have become essential to cafes and restaurants that can now only sell ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nishanathe Dahanayake, PhD Candidate, Ethics/Philosophy, University of New England The coronavirus pandemic is challenging our health, work, family, food and fun. It’s also disturbing our peace of mind and forcing us to question our own existence. We are each asking our own ...
ASB sees 6 percent GDP fall in 2020; Chorus, King Salmon and Stride reassure their profits are still on track; Augusta withdraws fund on rent relief fears; US stocks slide again; US jobs data looms ...
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Conditions for leaving lockdown explored, nation’s first death from Covid-19 reported, and Australian govt continues to discriminate against NZers.When will the Covid-19 lockdown across New Zealand end? Short answer – when it’s actually safe to do so. Officially, the current state ...
For all The Spinoff’s latest coverage of Covid-19 see here. Read Siouxsie Wiles’s work here. New Zealand is currently in alert level four. The country is shut down, apart from essential services. For updated official government advice, see here.The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is funded by The Spinoff Members. To support this work, join The ...
People over 70 and those with underlying health conditions faced the lockdown four days before the rest of the country - but some of the elderly still aren't taking any notice. ...
Steve Braunias presents a photo essay of the one thing that New Zealanders are holding close to their hearts during the Lockdown: their bookshelves. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's bookcase at Premier House in Wellington. The photograph which she posted this weekend on her Instagram page reveals two novels by Elizabeth ...
Police start “initial” investigation into abuse at a notorious psychiatric hospital. David Williams reports The Government has missed a 90-day deadline for responding to a United Nations committee over torture at Lake Alice’s child and adolescent unit in the 1970s. However, in a move that might represent a glimmer of ...
Emma Espiner makes a slow and deliberate trip to the supermarket yesterday, where she finds we are approaching social distancing in a very New Zealand way It took me three attempts to go to the supermarket. Two days ago I saw the cheerless conga line snaking around the car park ...
Dr Neal Curtis looks at all the points of implicit trust within society, and how Covid-19 is revealing how important this trust is As I stood in the queue to get into our local supermarket it was encouraging to see how carefully people were engaging in social distancing to minimise ...
From growing up on the remote East Cape to becoming a Black Fern and a lawyer, Ruahei Demant wants to show young Māori that anything is possible. In the long run, Ruahei Demant wants to be a sports lawyer. But in the short term, the Black Ferns first-five is juggling her ...
Having toughed it out alone with Covid-19 and survived, one Kiwi man learned the hard way how self-isolation really can save lives, writes Jill Herron Choosing to self-isolate early with only Sophie the spaniel as company led to a lonesome, rough ride through Covid-19 for a Christchurch asthmatic – but ...
As we begin what could become a long period of self-isolation, we encounter a dilemma. On the one hand, epidemiological research and recent global events show us the dangers of not responding swiftly to Covid-19. With community spread now within our shores, it is critical that we follow government orders ...
Community health and care workers talk of their fear of infection - for themselves, their vulnerable clients and New Zealand Over the last few days, Newsroom has written several articles about the fact that thousands of home and community health care workers, who care for elderly, disabled and sick people, have ...
Calls are growing for extra payment for those who continue to head out to work every day, including many on very low wages.The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is funded by The Spinoff Members. To support this work, join The Spinoff Members here.Two petitions have been circulating over the weekend ...
Covid-19 will transform society, just as the plague and smallpox transformed nations centuries ago. This time, however, we have something they didn’t, writes historian Ayelet Zoran-Rosen.Throughout history, epidemics and pandemics have been a threat to people and states. They strike societies with little or no notice, upend their social and ...
Open mike 10/03/2019 
by Phil Duncan For Marxists, a key concern about social trends is their context – not just their causes, but why they happen when they do. Events and phenomena have causes, but they also are time or period-specific. While much of the left have capitulated recently to postmodernism, most notably ...3 hours ago
Since the lockdown began, we've all suddenly been reminded who the actually essential workers in our society are: not the people at the top who pay themselves the big bucks and rort the perks, but the people at the bottom they screw over and squeeze: cleaners, warehouse staff, truck drivers ...4 hours ago
Kia ora! As I've watched nearly all my remaining work vanish over the past couple of days, it has occured to me that one good way to keep me away from arguing with fools on Twitter all the time (in the knowledge that all we're really doing is processing our ...5 hours ago
Aotearoa New Zealand has committed to trying to extirpate the virus that causes COVID-19 from its shores. To do that, as a society we’ve moved to “Level 4”. That means adapting to unprecedented restrictions on our personal freedoms, particularly to our rights to move freely and associate with friends and ...6 hours ago
. . Lock Down: Day 4 – A photo essay with observations . March 29: Usual wake up routine as RNZ snaps on my radio-clock. Jim Mora’s voice slowly enters my conciousness; there’s talk of a second wave of covid19 taking hold in South Korea; the week in Parliament – ...8 hours ago
Yesterday, New Zealand recorded its first Covid-19 related death on the West Coast. Unfortunately this is unlikely to be the only fatality, with the virus now being found in every region of the country.However despite the significant danger, people are still unfortunately breaching lockdown rules.There’s really only one main very ...8 hours ago
The kids did surprisingly well today – meltdown count was about 3, and mostly fairly short ones. (And a fourth while I was writing.) Game-wise I had a go at Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark. It’s a fairly standard RPG with turn-based combat and what they call a “mature storyline” (it ...22 hours ago
by Don Franks Hi David, Nice hearing from you, I’m glad to hear you’re getting by okay in these grim times. You asked how’s it going for us back here in New Zealand. You would have heard that the whole country is locked down and with breaks for exercise and ...23 hours ago
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week, i.e., Sun, Mar 22, 2020 through Sat, Mar 28, 2020 Articles Linked to on Facebook Sun, Mar 22, 2020 In Just 10 Years, Warming Has Increased the Odds of Disasters by Chelsea Harvey, ...2 days ago
The CV-19 (COVID) pandemic has seen the imposition of a government ordered national quarantine and the promulgation of a series of measures designed to spread the burden of pain and soften the economic blow on the most strategically important and most vulnerable sectors of society. The national narrative is framed ...2 days ago
Fortune's Children: Under extraordinary pressure, the leader of the Government and the leader of the Opposition will each show us what they are made of. Have they been blessed with intelligence, grace, wit, poise, toughness, empathy and humour – and in what measure? More importantly, to what extent have they ...2 days ago
Society-wise, aside from the specific morbidity shall we say of the medically-oriented aspects of this COVID-19 crisis, what is unfolding before the world is in more than one way an instructive study of humanity and reactions to a high intensity, high stress environment in real time. Friends, we are at ...3 days ago
Right now low waged and insecure workers are feeling the economic brunt of the looming #Covid19 Recession. In response legal advocate Toby Cooper* and hospitality and worker’s rights advocate Chloe Ann-King, are putting together a series of legal blogs about your employment rights: In this legal blog we outline some ...3 days ago
Just before midnight on Wednesday March 25, Aotearoa New Zealand entered a countrywide alert level four lockdown. For at least the next four weeks, everyone who isn’t an essential worker is confined to their bubble. We are doing this to stop the explosive growth in people contracting and dying from ...3 days ago
Kia ora my name is Chloe Ann-King* and I am the founder of Raise the Bar, a campaign and non-profit that gives free legal aid, advocacy and tautoko to hospitality workers in Aotearoa. Right now all over our country hospo workers are being fired at will, having shifts cut or being ...5 days ago
According to Newshub, Simon Bridges is open to joining a “grand coalition” with Labour as we hunker down to go into a month long lockdown. The idea is sound. Before now, the role of the opposition was to scrutinise and oppose. In the context of what almost amounts to a ...1 week ago
Kia ora my name is Chloe Ann-King* and I am the founder of Raise the Bar, a campaign and non-profit that gives free legal aid, advocacy and tautoko to hospitality workers in Aotearoa. Right now all over our country hospo workers are being fired at will, having shifts cut or ...1 week ago
A few days ago I was starting to write something about the pandemic, which now seems unconscionable. It took the form of a letter to an agony aunt:“Dear Deidre, I have an ugly confession. I am quite excited by Covid-19.”This is how the piece went:“I’m not a psychopath, honest. Although the ...1 week ago
I am a pundit, somebody who opines and comments on the news. There are no real qualifications to punditry though having a rudimentary way with words and good general knowledge helps. That is one reason there is a constant oversupply of would-be pundits and why it is quite hard to ...1 week ago
The coronavirus pandemic has of course had a major impact on individual lives and on societies as a whole. But, long after the crisis has passed (assuming it does), we will begin to realise that its real and lasting significance lies in the lessons it has taught us, if only ...1 week ago
COVID-19 has plunged Aotearoa New Zealand (indeed, the world) into territory that, while maybe not totally unprecedented, certainly hasn’t been seen during the lifetimes of most of us here today. Our borders are closed to non-citizens, we’re being told not to gather in groups of more than 500 outside/100 inside, ...1 week ago
Looking across the various arguments for/against the leading candidates to take the Democratic Nomination, you might honestly be very hard pressed to tell. There are a number of things that have now started happening since Amy Klobuchar and “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg both threw the towel in and immediately (and ...2 weeks ago
Some fave speeches: ...2 weeks ago
Many who advocated for, and voted for, the current Coalition – particularly those who voted Labour and the Green Party – expected to see a sea change in the reality of social services. A real, deep change of attitude, approach of process through which the system negotiates the difficult and ...2 weeks ago
All 45 New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) personnel are either on their way back to New Zealand, or already in the country, according to Defence Minister Ron Mark. "Twenty-eight personnel arrived back in New Zealand last week and are in isolation at the Royal New Zealand Air Force base in ...3 hours ago
The COVID-19 situation in New Zealand is moving fast - and to avoid what we've seen overseas - the Government's response must be to move fast too. We're committed to keeping New Zealanders safe and well-informed every step of the way. ...2 days ago
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The scale of what we face right now is unlike anything we have ever seen before. Overcoming it is our common purpose. ...5 days ago
The Government has fast-tracked up to $1 million to help Air New Zealand move urgent freight to and from New Zealand, with the first flight to Shanghai leaving tonight, Transport Minister Phil Twyford announced today. Phil Twyford says it’s crucial that trade in vital goods such as medical supplies and ...10 hours ago
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Irving, Adjunct Professor, University of Technology Sydney Blood is like milk, not toilet paper. You can’t just buy a lot of it and save it for later – you need to have a regular, fresh supply for patients who need it. ...49 mins ago
Newsroom Pro’s Bernard Hickey and Kiwibank Chief Economist Jarrod Kerr zoom out to lunch to talk about the Reserve Bank’s latest move to help banks lend to corporates. The Reserve Bank announced on Monday it would lend to banks dealing with distressed corporate borrowers, opening a new weekly Open ...2 hours ago
Retailer Smiths City has reached an agreement with ASB Bank to delay a $1.5 million dollar repayment of a loan due tomorrow. It also said it is starting talks with potential investors to support the business. The company said Covid-19 has caused an unforeseen and unprecedented shock to the business, ...2 hours ago
Figures from around the world show that Covid-19, while vicious and contagious, does behave like other infections, rampaging quickly through a community, hospitalising a small percentage and causing death in an even smaller percentage. The World Health ...2 hours ago
An extract from Jacinda Ardern: A New Kind of Leader, the brand new biography of the prime minister by Madeleine Chapman, formerly of this parish.Out today, Madeleine’s biography of the prime minister is magnificent. We cracked up. We had a wee cry. We’ve never read a political biography like it. Tomorrow ...3 hours ago
Analysis: On the face of it, New Zealand's epidemic curve is going exponential. But are case numbers really rising for the same reasons as overseas? If you've been following any news about Covid-19 over the past three months, you've heard of The Curve. It looks, variously, like a sky-high pillar ...3 hours ago
MediaRoom column: A decision to block publication of community newspapers under the State of Emergency could be changed tomorrow. Tim Murphy reports. A decision to stop community newspapers from circulating in the country's suburbs, towns and settlements appears to have been an example of officials scratching their regulatory itch. On Friday, ...3 hours ago
A Waikato berry grower has been ordered to pay over $76,000 for employment law breaches. Olde Berry Farm has been fined $50,000 and forced to pay over $16,000 in unpaid wages and holiday pay. Its managing director, Andrew Molly, has been made personally responsible fo an additional $10,000 in penalties. ...3 hours ago
The Government has set up a dedicated service for reporting fears of price gouging, as Jacinda Ardern flags the expansion of "essential services" Kiwis concerned about potential price gouging at supermarkets during the coronavirus lockdown can now report the issue directly to government officials, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced. Ardern ...3 hours ago
The takeover offer for Abano Healthcare is off the table - a casualty of the Covid-19 pandemic. The company said the $150-million takeover scheme agreement with Adams NZ Bidco Ltd. was terminated, with no fees payable by either party, as a result as the material adverse change to the company's ...3 hours ago
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says while she has found no evidence of price gouging, the public will be able to to report any they see. ...3 hours ago
On Sunday it was reported there is a high demand for New Zealand Police's online form to report lockdown breaches. This news should act as a red flag, signalling the potentially corrosive effects on public trust within Aotearoa that may occur in these troubled times. Concerns have already been expressed ...3 hours ago
Watch the replay of our fourth live Q&A session with Dr Ayesha Verrall, a senior lecturer at Otago University who specialises in infectious diseases. Ayesha Verrall is an infectious diseases physician and senior lecturer at Otago University's Department of Pathology and Molecular Medicine (Wellington). Dr Verrall has been monitoring the spread and impact ...4 hours ago
Recognising how much of the burden women are carrying in this crisis - and how much they always carry - may take us closer to a society in which caring work is seen and valued for the essential work it is, writes Jess Berentson-Shaw COVID-19 has thrown a window wide ...4 hours ago
You’ve lost your job and your income has reduced due to the Covid-19 crisis, so how do you hold onto your home? Mortgage adviser Cameron Marcroft talks to Bonnie Sumner. Tell us about the changes you’ve seen since the lockdown began. We’ve had many enquiries coming through from both existing ...4 hours ago
As two staff members test positive for Covid-19, police are grappling with ways to keep their workforce safe while still enforcing the rules of the lockdown, Marc Daalder reports Two police staff have tested positive for Covid-19, Police Commissioner Mike Bush said Monday, while nearly 400 others are now in self-isolation ...5 hours ago
How is Covid-19 spreading within the country? Newsroom is collating information as it's available to paint a picture of what's happening. There were 76 new cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand, up from the previous day's 63 new cases. Details of how many tests have been completed are now being ...6 hours ago
Supermarkets and some publishers are favoured by the government’s imposition of severe restrictions on what we can do and from whom we can buy during the Covid-19 lock-down. But one consumer watchdog is challenging the legality of an edict by Commerce Minister Kris Faafoi which favours supermarkets while Act leader ...6 hours ago
An online focus is coming back to bite newspaper companies, the Otago Daily Times’ editor says. David Williams reports. Despite advertising falling off a cliff, and its community papers dormant, the group editor of the country’s third-biggest publisher says there haven’t been layoffs and it’s unlikely any of its newspapers ...7 hours ago
Cabinet ministers will patch into a video conference this afternoon to discuss the Covid-19 lockdown, including complaints about high prices at supermarkets. ...7 hours ago
The kiwifruit industry is fighting for survival as it tries to pick and pack the season's crop while enforcing Covid-19 restrictions. The apple industry is also predicting problems with at least 10 percent of the crop not likely to be picked. The nationwide lockdown has come right in the middle ...8 hours ago
The Reserve Bank is ramping up support for businesses and banks by accepting corporate debt and other assets as security for loans to banks. The latest measure is designed to pump more money into the economy through the banking system. Assistant governor Christian Hawkesby said the aim is to encourage ...8 hours ago
Supermarkets are set to open on Good Friday and Easter Sunday as the Government places extra scrutiny on their behaviour and pricing. ...11 hours ago
The Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told Morning Report, she’s expecting the country to be restricted to visitors for some time after the lockdown period ends. ...11 hours ago
ASB sees 6 percent GDP fall in 2020; Chorus, King Salmon and Stride reassure their profits are still on track; Augusta withdraws fund on rent relief fears; US stocks slide again; US jobs data looms ...12 hours ago
Steve Braunias presents a photo essay of the one thing that New Zealanders are holding close to their hearts during the Lockdown: their bookshelves. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's bookcase at Premier House in Wellington. The photograph which she posted this weekend on her Instagram page reveals two novels by Elizabeth ...13 hours ago
Police start “initial” investigation into abuse at a notorious psychiatric hospital. David Williams reports The Government has missed a 90-day deadline for responding to a United Nations committee over torture at Lake Alice’s child and adolescent unit in the 1970s. However, in a move that might represent a glimmer of ...14 hours ago
Emma Espiner makes a slow and deliberate trip to the supermarket yesterday, where she finds we are approaching social distancing in a very New Zealand way It took me three attempts to go to the supermarket. Two days ago I saw the cheerless conga line snaking around the car park ...14 hours ago
Dr Neal Curtis looks at all the points of implicit trust within society, and how Covid-19 is revealing how important this trust is As I stood in the queue to get into our local supermarket it was encouraging to see how carefully people were engaging in social distancing to minimise ...14 hours ago
From growing up on the remote East Cape to becoming a Black Fern and a lawyer, Ruahei Demant wants to show young Māori that anything is possible. In the long run, Ruahei Demant wants to be a sports lawyer. But in the short term, the Black Ferns first-five is juggling her ...14 hours ago
Having toughed it out alone with Covid-19 and survived, one Kiwi man learned the hard way how self-isolation really can save lives, writes Jill Herron Choosing to self-isolate early with only Sophie the spaniel as company led to a lonesome, rough ride through Covid-19 for a Christchurch asthmatic – but ...14 hours ago
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https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12210513
Something smells.
Woman gets job . Woman complains about boss .
Woman gets $100k and leaves to set up own business
Boss still has job .
Bullies can be very sensitive to being bullied themselves.
Damien Grant, columnist:
“If you refuse to consider uranium as a means of saving humanity because it is yucky then you have no right to be taken seriously. You are merely posing on a stage, waving at an adoring crowd of the vacuous and self-righteous. ”
This is about the best the right have got. A vacuous twat with a poor understanding of basic geography.
“so effective have these charlatans been in demonising atomic power”
https://www.chernobyl-international.com/about-chernobyl/
People like Damian should be given a quiet ward somewhere so they can live out their pathetic lives discussing monocultural race fantasies and nuclear paradise without bothering the rest of us.
I’m not going to link to the article. It’s rubbish.
He was given a ward somewhere. But they let him out.
Onto red neck rant radio and the other provided soapboxes from his backers on the right.
DP v2.0 folks as slater and the others are a little overexposed currently due to prior indiscretions. I see the TPU not using Jordy to front their spin lately also.
He might want to have a more thorough look at why Germany phased out of nuclear energy generation. There’s an outline here:
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-nuclear-phase-out-explained/a-39171204
Germany has had one of the most aggressive energy production shifts for over 30 years.
All of Germany’s nuclear generators will be down by 2022. Cheers to Angela Merkel.
Germany has also started to close down the last of its coal mines.
Back in the day, the favored place for a nuclear power plant was on the Kaipara Harbour. There are still good stories to be told of National Ministers personally buying land up there in anticipation.
By 1965 planning was under way for a 1000-megawatt (MW) station in Northland, with a site on the Kaipara Harbour being favoured. Engineering staff of the NZED were enrolled on overseas training courses, and an undergraduate course in reactor engineering was established at the University of Canterbury. During the 1960s and early 70s, several staff of the National Radiation Laboratory undertook training in reactor safety and licensing.
https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/nuclear-new-zealand/
The discovery of Kapuni and Maui fields pretty much killed the idea here.
I guess that means we will have to go for Nuclear power in a few years as Maui runs out.
After all our rather foolish PM has made a “captain’s call” to ban any further exploration for or development of natural gas fields.
I await with interest the Green Party coming out for the building of a Nuclear Power station.
Yeah fuck global warming and the detrimental effects upon communities and nature – get a life alwyn – the exploitation of fossil fuels and their derivatives is OVER save for last gasps and desperate liars. Be a coward if you want cos that shows the best contrast with our hero PM.
My, my. You really have been hitting the juice pretty hard this morning haven’t you? Or something equally powerful but probably illegal.
Do you actually have anything rational to say or should we wait until you sober up?
The captain’s call was correct. Get used to it and stop picking, like a crab, at our PM. Got that?
How chivalrous of you. Arise Sir Galahad, protector of the fair sex.
Do people need protection from you alwyn?
Please don’t call it a “captain’s call”. You are buying into alwyn’s spin.
Thanks for clarifying.
Marty
Just who is the person who is wanting to build Nuclear Power Plants in Aotearoa. Do you happen to know ?
Has Simon Bridges and his caucus authorised him to proceed? it sounds like the sort of thing David Farrar would encourage. The Herald too.
Nuclear Power Plants are unbelievably expensive and could destroy vast areas of our productive land.
Whoever he is – he says he has Plans and has discussed them in the Uk.
.
Dunno but I oppose it 100%. Would be too stupid for words so actions would have to do.
I don’t know why you would call the ban on further permits for oil exploration a “captain’s call”. That is not how coalition governments work. The ban is the result of some hard work by the Greens in negotiating their contribution to the coalition.
I can only suggest that you have a word with Ms Ardern.
She is the one who makes “captain’s calls” as she labels them.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11908838
And I really think you are getting a little carried away when you credit it to the Green Party.
The only party other than Labour to have any real influence on this Government is the de facto PM Tsar Winston the First.
That is a call not to rule something out before there was even a coalition. To rule something definitely in when in the coalition requires agreement of all three coalition parties.
The Greens have had to eat some dead rats and Winston First have had to eat some dead rats. That the Greens got this past Winston shows that they are playing a very active part in the coalition.
So you condone this kind of exploration?
16000 times louder!! Poor bloody whales.
Because we have the same generation technology as we had in the 1960s?
We don’t need nuclear.
in corroboration Ad : yes this planning of nuclear power stations under Think Big policy of Muldoon was a reality. I was shown a plan by one NZED participant of the era.
Your dates are wrong I think.
Nuclear Power in New Zealand was proposed, and being designed in the latter part of the 1960’s and possibly into the early 70’s. I did a bit of work on the proposal myself in the late 60s and I know people who went to Britain to prepare for the station being built. Nothing to do with reactors or such-like though.
It was scrapped when the Maui deal was done with the Government in the early 70s. The only practical use for the amount of gas that would be produced was in Electricity Generation and a Nuclear Station was no longer required.
That was long before Muldoon had significant power and long before “Think Big” which was at the beginning of the 80s.
I have never heard of any intention of including Nuclear Power in the Think Big Agenda and I think I would have if it had been proposed at that time.
To Alwyn at 2.2.2 Guy who showed plans to me had gone to UK to work on it…don’t want to name him but he was an NZED manager. He showed me plans (blueprints) about end of ’70’s. Maybe the idea was being revived at that time, which was definitely the Think Big era.
Did he say when he was in the UK? It may have been much earlier than he showed you plans. I am sure that people who were involved in the 60’s would have kept drawings as souvenirs.
Also, if they revived the idea in the Think Big era they wouldn’t have got as far as having new drawings by 1979.
Too long ago for me to remember …just think Helensville area was the intended venue which guess equates with the Kaipara Harbour mentioned elsewhere. Incidentally this guy seemed against the proposition.
They’d put hydro stations on all the fault lines so there was no room left.
James Lovelock advocated using nuclear power to bridge the gap between our fossil fuel based economy and one that was fossil free. It would have provided breathing space which we don’t appear to have at present. However, it’s probably a bit late now given that nuclear power stations apparently take a long time to design and build.
It’s a bit late for new land-based nuclear because wind and solar power have become so much lower in price that it’s outright economic madness to try to build a new nuke to supply utility electricity.
But it’s a slightly different consideration when it comes to shutting down existing operational plants. Germany has committed to shutting its nukes by 2022 and its coal plants by 2038. It would be a lot better for the German and world environments if those timelines were swapped.
The environmental costs of nukes are massively front-loaded in the construction and irradiation of their guts on initial startup, the ongoing marginal environmental costs of continued operation are relatively small. Whereas continued coal operation is massively environmentally damaging, from the CO2 emissions, fly ash which is either emitted and widely dispersed or concentrated into toxic dumping sites (and is also radioactive), and the ongoing environmental damage of mining and transporting the coal.
The only industry I see the glimmerings of a possible future for nuclear fission power is in shipping. They’re an industry where there’s many more obstacles in the way of converting to zero-GHG operation, and have needs for compact power sources in the range of 5MW to 50MW – which can be easily provided by nukes. The smaller size means exponentially smaller risks of catastrophe from colossal cockups like Chernobyl or Fukushima, while the continuous availability of seawater coolant further reduces the risk. But there’s going to need to be a really hefty price put on carbon emissions before the idea of investing in nukes becomes remotely attractive to general shipping companies.
There’s an outline of the German context at 2.2
That article really doesn’t explain much at all. It just notes that Germans (and that really just seems to mean West Germans) haven’t much liked nukes since the 70s, and that dislike got a major boost from Fukushima. No discussion at all of the reasons for the genesis of that anti-nuke sentiment.
It doesn’t even mention coal, which has to be a major part of any rational discussion of Germany’s energy mix.
It’s my sense that the nuclear power industry was always had an element of sham about it; in reality they got stuck on technologies whose hidden purpose was more about weapons than power.
Their insistence of sticking with designs that essentially date from the 50’s and 60’s, their obdurate refusal to properly research, much less prototype or license, much safer cleaner fourth generation designs has not only marginalised nuclear power, but closed the door on a good option to transition away from coal sooner.
Yup.
That’s also more or less the opinion of a cousin of mine who started his career in the operations side of nuclear plants and finished up working on the Rocky Flats site cleanup.
you might want to try Tschernobyl before jumping to Fukushima.
and no there are a lot in europe that don’t like nukes, nuclear weapons and nuclear energy for that matter.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/videoplayer/vi2922822169?ref_=tt_ov_vi
you might want to watch this one here for giggles.
My first paragraph was just a brief summary of the DW article Ad linked to at 2.2. Which surprisingly didn’t mention Chernobyl at all, even though fallout from Chernobyl did in fact affect Germany.
Nevertheless, it appears that Chernobyl had surprisingly little actual effect in changing German government and industry direction on using nuclear power. Maybe it was a case of German engineers and pollies looking at the badly flawed designs, implementation and lack of safety features at Chernobyl and concluding it couldn’t happen with better engineered German reactors. In contrast, within days of Fukushima, Merkel’s government reversed course and accelerated the shutdown of German nukes.
I don’t get giggles from contemplating nuclear shit going bad. But the point I keep trying to make is the shit we’re getting from fossil fuels is actually objectively much worse, but because it’s more dispersed and harder to see and has been an accepted part of life for a lot longer, it doesn’t get anywhere near the same opposition.
If you advocated Geothermal energy production I might agree with you.
The trouble with wind power is deciding what you are going to do when the wind doesn’t blow.
I happened to look at New Zealand’s power production yesterday. For most of the day wind power was running at about 2.5% of its plated capacity (that was 14 MW out of about 660 MW capacity) and producing about 0.3% of the power being used overall.
Now what do you suggest we do? Crank up the Huntly station perhaps?
alwyn
The single biggest barrier to understanding that you are perpetuating here is that arguments like the one you outline above invariably omit the opportunity to integrate energy storage with renewables in order to smooth out the inevitable gaps between production and consumption.
The simplistic answer to your question is that on the days when wind is running at close to it’s 660MW you reduce hydro to a minimum and fill the lake reservoirs behind the dams, and on the days when there is no wind, you let the hydro rip. No Huntly needed.
In practice there will be more complex engineering considerations, but that is the basic idea. And there are plenty of good storage options other than hydro available these days.
That is pretty much the way they operate at the moment. The only power source that seems to operate at full capacity all the time is Geothermal.
It is difficult to start and stop production from Geothermal or Gas fields because it apparently severely disrupts the field and production is badly affected. At least that is what I was told by some Geothermal, and later Petroleum Engineers I worked with for a while.
It was way beyond me as to why that was the case. When a PhD carrying Petroleum Engineer who specialized in Reservoir engineering told me such things I certainly didn’t feel qualified to argue.
Your Petroleum Engineer is almost certainly correct. I’m not familiar with the details, but I can broadly guess the reasons why; because there is little buffering of the steam flow from the reservoir to the turbine, any throttling of the flow to match rapid changes of power demand will impose substantial changes in temperature and pressure in the reservoir.
Also steam is remarkably complex stuff to work with at high pressures and temperatures. While we’ve used it for centuries and sort of take it for granted, the reality is that whenever I’ve had to deal with it there has always been a steep learning curve involved. Take a quick look at this and don’t see if your eyes glaze over as mine do these days 🙂
http://www.thermopedia.com/content/1150/
But all this remains tangential to my core point; that any discussion about renewables cannot omit a parallel consideration of storage technologies. And they come in many different forms these days.
Primary investments like Geothermal works in places where you can have secondary and tertiary investments like having an aluminium manufacturer nerby by or use excess hot water as a tourist attraction and turn it into a hot pools. But now adays architects want there monuments. Little consideration is given to prestinct developments.
Your analysis is ass. 7 acres of solar panels is enough to harvest 4GWh that can be stored so if there’s no sunlight then there’s 3 days worth of stored solar energy. Anything less than 7 acres then it’s worth doing more solar at 5c per kWh. Anything over that then it’s worth doing wind turbines at 7c per kWh because when it’s not sunny, it’s usually windy.
“when it’s not sunny, it’s usually windy.”
Well that is a very bold comment. Anything to back it up?
You may, or may not, have noticed that it was raining in a very big chunk of the Country yesterday. Certainly the North Island was wet.
Well I doubt if we would have got any Solar power all day and we didn’t get any Wind Power, as the Transpower numbers show.
Explain to me why I should even read your HIV ridden statements?
The only reason I would suggest is that a little bit of knowledge might penetrate that fevered mind.
Of course if we wish to remain an ignorant fool all your life that is your right.
By the way. In spite of what the things you may think about HIV you really can’t get infected just by reading things written about topics where you are ignorant.
HIV ridden statements indeed.
I’ll debate you on what ever you want, and you want to get slapped again on the same topic? Thermal vs renewables. That’s fine with me.
Maybe after I beat you again you can choose to debate me on Fission vs Fusion instead.
What, slap him with the HIV comment ?
Sounds like you get a bit off track when you come up against someone with more knowledge.
Do you debate? Or do you just get infected by memes by talking about HIV…
[Enough. Watch your language and tone down your comments. TRP]
I know when I am out of my depth unlike you.
Everyday, Barry?
Your comment Sam to alwyn was uncalled for.
alwyn made a valid point. Your statement: when it’s not sunny. it’s usually windy is a sweeping statement. If the cloud is preceding an incoming front then the wind speed will likely increase, but if it’s stratocumulous cloud associated with anti-cyclonic conditions then there is not likely to be any increase in the speed of the wind. In relatively weak low pressure systems where the isobars are not close together there will not be much wind but plenty of cloud and almost always rain.
That’s wonderful Anne.
[Last chance. TRP]
If I read you correctly Sam… you are being your usual supercilious, contemptuous self. This is not a site where we play games of intellectual prowess. So suggest you go play your childish games elsewhere.
Why should I wast my time on normies who are just projecting how sad and empty their lives are before you started acting like you have something to put you on some intellectual pedestal because you never had anything going for yourself. Wana get it in and throw some studies around then let’s go.
Some estimates put solar along the East Coast as able to meet 51%+ of all power needs, and from the cape, to the Bluff generate enough wind to meet something like 40% of all power generation. So we’d only need about one or maybe two hydro electric dams for peak or off peak use. Hydro electric can stay dormant for its entire 100 year shelf life and still be restarted in less than a minute, so when ever you’d like.
Designing a decent set up is no difficulty. The issue is getting the capital and the infrastructure in the right places because renewable energy is harvested in places where there aren’t many high voltage power lines and the current energy grid is designed to send power, not receive so with out a price on carbon or pollution that prices everything correctly, we’ll always be on the wrong tram.
We will get smarter with how we consume energy. Make minor alterations to our lifestyle in order to iron out the peaks and valleys of our current energy production/consumption.
eg: A tiny icon on my phone that tells me when I can charge my car for half the price than if I plugged it in when demand peaks.
As Red Logix says, we’ll get better at making unreliable generation useful. eg: Pumping water up to a mountain top reservoir. It doesn’t matter if the wind/solar pumps are only running half the time, we’ll just put in twice as many.
better hurry May ,June looks like when the apps will start disappearing off your phone.
https://nzgb.redspider.co.nz/
Yep, it was very cloudy with intermittent rain all day in the Waikato. Despite this, our 10-panel solar rack started churning out power at 6.30am and continued until 7 pm last evening albeit at a reduced rate.
My comment was related much more to a German and worldwide context, not specific to New Zealand. So yes, I neglected to mention a renewable that’s particularly important in New Zealand. Bite me.
As RL mentions, we’ve already got lots of hydro that can be powered down and saved for when wind doesn’t blow. Looking ahead, pumped hydro storage is particularly suited to New Zealand’s geography and is a very low-loss means of storing energy.
We’d have even more hydro if we told Rio Tinto to take a hike. Then they may well find it’s better economically for them to build a solar plant and potlines right next to where they mine their bauxite, rather than shipping it to faraway places and paying others for electricity.
Alwyn starts out by saying Nuclear is better than gas then half way through modifies his premiss to allow geothermal and then at the end changes his premiss to cranking up Huntley which means his whole analysis is worth less than toilet paper.
I made a number of comments in reply to things other people have said.
I don’t really see the need for every comment I make to include all the things I consider significant, and I certainly don’t accept that I am changing my opinions.
For example in a discussion about energy supply I see no need to repeat my views on the stuffed up Census. Doesn’t mean that I no longer think Mr Shaw did well and shouldn’t be fired.
Well there’s a difference between “teaching” and “explaining.”
I could train you by saying look at my finger and yelling look at it over and over so that the students get tunnel vision and they can stick there minds to something so it doesn’t move.
Or I can hold up a finger and explain that it is thin at the top and wide at the bottom and it’s a little lighter in colour on one side and it has segments and so on.
If you are a trained up educator then fine. How ever it is a falasy to say explaining is losing when one also claims they are not a professional educator.
Looking ahead, pumped hydro storage is particularly suited to New Zealand’s geography and is a very low-loss means of storing energy.
I’ve linked to this before, but it’s worth a repeat. Even Australia has a remarkable opportunity around all the enormous holes in the ground the mining industry has left behind:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-20/solar-farm-integrate-pumped-hydro-storage-$500m-loan-aus-first/9890466
https://www.genexpower.com.au/
Evaporation says hi pumped hydro 🙂
Well its something I have a particular affinity with having identified and implemented are rather successful project of this type some years back.
(OK it was a tiny 250kW, but had a remarkable 7 month ROI)
I always got a bit sceptical about the hands off’ nature of managing pumped hydro that some try and sell it as. In my experience it’s a full time job having a pond. Made a few settling ponds myself and I’d say settling ponds would keep me up more at night than anything else.
Nothing is ‘hands off’ as some people may imagine; there is always a lot more engineering going on around all sorts of structures and facilities than most people are aware of.
“I’ve linked to this before, but it’s worth a repeat. Even Australia has a remarkable opportunity around all the enormous holes in the ground the mining industry has left behind:”.
They may be useful for storing water for an irrigation project but I can’t think of any I have seen that would be useful for pumped hydro.
The water has to be stored above the turbines and the holes from mining are all well below ground level.
The Kalgoorlie Superpit for example has a bottom that is about 150 metres below sea level.
Are there some that are well above the surrounding terrain?
Check out the links above alwyn. The concept is real and works. The idea is that you create a pond above the pit level, or in the case of Kidston you have two existing pits at different heights. All standard stuff, nothing special needed.
I read it as being water running down from the actual pit. Now I see what you mean. I was misinterpreting where the water ran from and to.
Actually in you used the bottom 300 metres or so of the Superpit would would get a pretty good head. Now I understand what you meant.
The really cool thing is Australia has hundreds if not thousands of these things. Here another longer more detailed version:
Nice. I’d tweak that system by placing the bank between the upper and lower ponds north facing, then run the solar on that face. In that way the winter sun will reflect off the lower pond up onto the solar array providing more light than without such placing. Plantings of light reflective trees might further enhance the site.
old question, well and truly solved, posted this last year, there is always a solution for those prepared to look.
That’s interesting Andre. You sound as if you know what you are talking about with nuclear as most of us wouldn’t.
I’ve never been directly involved in the industry, closest I’ve come is a cousin and a family friend in the industry. The last time I talked with the family friend was a few years back, and she mentioned a big talking point in the industry was their really bad public perception and how the industry wouldn’t survive another high-profile fuckup. That was before Fukushima.
I’ve always kinda had an interest in where our power comes from, and what a zero-GHG future might look like. As part of that, it’s long seemed to me nukes have been unfairly demonised.
Part of that is the industry’s own mistakes and association with weapons, part of it is activist groups overhyping issues to generate publicity (which is particularly easy to do when there is a little kernel of truth at the core), part of it is a similar problem to airliner crashes in that when things go bad they go very publicly and spectacularly bad even though the overall safety record is very very good and much better than most of the alternatives.
By a standalone examination, generating electricity using nukes is an awful idea. But nukes shouldn’t be considered in isolation, they should be considered relative to alternative methods of satisfying our electricity wants and needs. In that context, efficiency improvements and conservation are the standouts, there’s no downside.
When it comes to actually generating electricity, there’s all kinds of factors to consider. Injury and mortality rates per unit of electricity generated, land used and damaged, pollution. By those metrics, nuclear energy actually stands out as being a very low harm means of electricity generation (even including the harms done by Chernobyl and Fukushima), way better than any fossil fuel, better than hydro, not much worse than wind and solar. Add climate change and it furthers reinforces the picture.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/#4c248c25709b
part of it is a similar problem to airliner crashes in that when things go bad they go very publicly and spectacularly bad even though the overall safety record is very very good and much better than most of the alternatives.
True. Not many people know that in 2017 the commercial airline industry achieve zero … yes zero … deaths. A remarkable engineering and technical outcome.
And on an annual basis the nuclear industry looks pretty good too, yet over the years there have been far too many incidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
In particular the classic PWR design that depends on actively managed moderation AND a continuous flow of cooling water represents an unacceptable hazard in modern terms. All of these reactors need to be taken out of service in the foreseeable future.
Incidentally back in the early 2000’s I found an open ftp site that had a report on an incident that is not mentioned in the above list, and I’ve seen no other reference to. It related IIRC to the 2003 East Coast blackout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
This had an immediate impact on one of the major nuclear sites in Oklahoma, forcing all four reactors to scram shut immediately. However these reactors also demand at least 3 days of cooling water flow after shutdown to avoid irreversible damage of the type seen at Fukushima. To keep the pumps running there were eight large diesel gen sets that should have automatically kicked in.
Here is the thing; of the 8 generators … all 8 refused to start. On reading the reports details on why each on failed I came to the conclusion that Homer Simpson really did work there. Fortunately they got one of them going reasonably quickly and this was enough to boot them up without damage and prevented a catastrophic meltdown of the entire plant.
A very close shave that almost no-one seems to know about. Sadly I lost the pdf file over the years.
Yeah, the need for active control systems to be functioning correctly and external power needed for cooling after shutdown is a seriously dumb way to operate something that can fail as catastrophically as a big nuke. Especially since there’s alternatives that don’t require active control and external power to shut down safely, they just use simple physics.
From a safety and perception perspective, I think it’s a mistake how fkn enormous the reactors are. The risks of shit going bad and how bad the shit gets don’t scale linearly, it’s exponential. Kinda like how things change from 1 match head to 30,000 to 1,000,000 match heads (see Mythbusters if you don’t get the reference).
Of course, the reason they do it is the regulatory burden and other fixed costs scale at quite a lot less than linearly so it’s cheaper per unit output to build huge reactors. The Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors were all around 3000MW thermal/1000MW electrical each. For comparison, Huntly’s original four generators were a quarter that for a total of 1000MW total plant capacity.
BTW, coupla reasons you might have had trouble digging up reports about that nuke plant in Oklahoma affected by the Northeast blackout is there aren’t any nuke power plants in Oklahoma (just nuke fuels processing facilities made famous by Silkwood), nor is Oklahoma on the same grid that the Northeast Blackout happened on. Might have been Ohio or Ontario …
Yeah … I may well have gotten some details wrong. I recall reading the report quite clearly and some details stick firmly in my memory, but do you think I can accurately recall the actual plant?
A quick search suggests Indian Point as the most likely one:
http://www.safesecurevital.com/
Geo-engineering technology, or a least a lower risk examples of it like marine cloud brightening, might be safer and quicker bridging options now. They potentially allow a slightly longer transition time to renewables.
The problem is so severe and urgent I’m in favour of the “all of the above plus a few more” option.
Is the guy an idiot? He says “Windmills are mainly decorative” and he doesn’t even mention solar. Perhaps the article was meant as satire.
I suggest you look at my comment at 2.3.1.2 just above.
It is generating a bit more at the moment. Wind is running at about 20% of the plated capacity and is producing about 3% of our consumption. That is about one sixth of what Geothermal always produces.
See
https://www.transpower.co.nz/power-system-live-data
We have only just started down the wind road. There are options for storing wind power such as pumped hydro and mass batteries. With battery backed solar going into homes there is room there also to store power.
http://www.smart-technologies.co.nz/books.html
The most recent example of technological sound pollution comes from wind turbines. However, he is quick to stress that this is only one source of modern environmental sound pollution
there are many others.
Yet with the rapid expansion of wind turbines across the globe, this new technology is presenting us with increasing evidence of a serious threat to human health
That certain types of sound can produce a cascade of hormones that result in the “fight or flight” response is a critical step forward in understanding the importance of sound as a pollutant as well as a health hazard.
This conclusion is the result of 20 years of research
by Dr. Rapley and his international research team,
New Zealander Dr. Bruce Rapley is an applied biologist with a specialist interest and expertise in the area of environmental health, acoustics and cognition
Also your figures look like bullshit:
They [wind generators] supply around 6% of New Zealand’s annual electricity generation,
http://www.windenergy.org.nz/wind-energy/nz-windfarms
In the 2016 calendar year, wind power produced 2,303 GWh of electricity, 5.4 percent of the country’s electricity generation that year.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_New_Zealand#cite_note-EnergyQtr-1
Why doesn’t this thread now go over to the end of oil exploration that Ad has put up? It would fit there.
They are not “my” figures. They are the current numbers being reported by TransPower, who of course are distributing electricity around the country.
If anyone knows what is going on right now I would suggest they do.
If you think the numbers they are publishing are bullshit I suggest you take it up with them.
I’m sure they will be happy to explain it to you.
I’ll repeat the link for your benefit.
https://www.transpower.co.nz/power-system-live-data
As of 3.28 pm today Wind was 152 MW out of a total of 4310 MW, or about 3.5%
That is in real time and not an annual average. You are such a try-hard.
Well, miracles will never cease.
I have mentioned this website several times. Every single time I said that it was live data.
The first time (@2.3.1.2) I said
“I happened to look at New Zealand’s power production yesterday. For most of the day wind power was running at about 2.5% of its plated capacity (that was 14 MW out of about 660 MW capacity) and producing about 0.3% of the power being used overall.”
The second time I said
“You may, or may not, have noticed that it was raining in a very big chunk of the Country yesterday. Certainly the North Island was wet.
Well I doubt if we would have got any Solar power all day and we didn’t get any Wind Power, as the Transpower numbers show.”
The next time I said
“It is generating a bit more at the moment. Wind is running at about 20% of the plated capacity and is producing about 3% of our consumption. That is about one sixth of what Geothermal always produces.”
Then I said
“They are not “my” figures. They are the current numbers being reported by TransPower, who of course are distributing electricity around the country.”
If anyone can read all of those remarks, and the repeated link to the website they came from and only now discover that they were real time numbers and not an annual average seems to be someone who is a bit thick or someone who simply bursts into song without even reading the comments they are replying to. You seem to qualify on both counts.
Yes i admit it, i don’t usual pay much attention to the shit you write.
Well that statement is probably truthful. It isn’t intellectually honest but then that is pretty typical of a Green supporter.
I have learn’t in the past that when a Green Party member says something like,
“I have never seen any evidence that GM is safe”
or
“I have never read anything that shows 1080 is effective and safe”
It doesn’t mean that such evidence doesn’t exist. It just means that they haven’t read it because it will show their prejudices have no scientific backing.
I guess it is not worth my replying to any of your comments in the future. After they are merely the meaningless flapping of your gums and have no connection at all to the matter you are supposedly commenting on.
By the way, I wouldn’t place to much trust in your link from the Wind Organisation.
They claim that in 2015 there was already 690 MW installed and lots planned
Even in 2019 Transpower can only count an extant 658 MW
Hey fucktard, you do know that the Greens support the use of 1080 eh?
“I have never seen any evidence that GM is safe”
I’ve read claims/evidence that it is, and claims/evidence that it isn’t.
What’s your point, Alwyn?
Support 1080?
Well no, their attitude seems to be akin to opinions from the God Shiva.
On the one hand this, on the other that. On the third hand something else and on the fourth something different again.
I read the party policy from the last election and their attitude is impossible to decipher.
“The Green Party Environment policy aims to minimise the use of all persistent, environmentally damaging, or nonsustainably produced poisons, especially when using aerial distribution, and we strongly support research and promotion of other pest control methods. 1080 poison is widely used to control pest species as it degrades relatively rapidly and is not bioaccumulative. Nonetheless it is acutely toxic to a number of non-target animals including dogs and native wildlife, is considered inhumane by many, and there may be as yet undiscovered long-term toxicological effects arising from its widespread use.”
What on earth is that really saying?
https://www.greens.org.nz/sites/default/files/conservation_20170621_0.pdf
What can’t you understand in that, Alwyn?
It’s clear to me.
How’s that for an excerpt on the one of the landing pages of Stuff?
It is obviously written by another ‘friend’ of the Greens who is almightily concerned about their credentials and whether they have lost their ‘faith’ in Climate Change and the environment. Since the green-Greens appeared on the firmament, coming from seemingly nowhere, the not-so-green-Greens should have embarked on a soul-searching quest to justify their existence (in Parliament). Or so the narrative from the Right goes. The only answer so far seems to lower the election threshold as an act of self-preservation. Or so the narrative on the Right goes, completely ignoring that this was a recommendation made by the Electoral Commission in its final report on 29 October 2012.
It isn’t Dirty Politics and I’d call it Disingenuous Politics. I can’t wait till Simon Bridges and Vernon Tava come out in support of nuclear energy as a core election policy of National to combat CC. Tiwai Point, Simon and Vernon, the infrastructure and location are ideal. Alternatively, Taranaki, to offset the billions lost by banning oil exploration off the coast. I’m sure the locals will support you in every way they can.
My reading is the global Greens became stuck in an anti-US, anti-warship, anti-weapons mindset that while commendable on it’s own terms; has closed them off from promoting new generations of nuclear power systems that would have been very useful in ramping down coal much sooner.
True, but the NZ Greens are not quite like the global ones in that they have enjoyed a nation that (still?) is largely aligned with their anti-nuclear stance. In Europe, for example, nuclear power serviced a significant part of energy needs (and served a few other purposes as well).
My somewhat limited understanding is that there are at least three major issues they and others object too: 1) waste; 2) health & safety; 3) weapons-grade by-products. The last issue may be a red herring if you were to believe the latest Mission Impossible instalment (Fallout).
The tourist tour through the Forsmark reactor on the Baltic in Sweden, I studied a large cut away model and said to the guide. “It appears the reaction heats water.” The guide said “Yes, that is correct.” I was anticipating a huge complex process that I wouldn’t have a hope of wrapping my brain around. The reaction makes heat, they make steam, run the steam through turbines, just like at Wairakei. Simple as.
Ancient safe process with a hot potato fuel.
The process is conceptually simple; but as with all things engineering the devil is in the details.
The ‘core’ problems with Pressurised Water Reactors are:
1. These rods are essential to the operation of the reactor, slowing down neutrons in order to increase the chance they will participate in the chain reaction. The reactor is actively controlled at all times by how much these rods are inserted into the core. In order to stop the reaction these rods have to be actively and fully inserted into the reactor; if anything prevents this you have lost control.
2. Even when the moderating rods are inserted to stop the chain reaction, there remains a residual generation of ‘decay heat’ (initially around 6% of the rated power of the reactor) that will take at least 3 days to drop to a level that no longer requires active cooling. This is still more than enough ‘hot potato’ to melt the core if cooling is lost.
3. The other clue is in the word ‘pressurised’. If the cooling water circuit loses pressure the water turns instantly from water to steam, and stops cooling the reactor. Also the huge pumps that do the circulating also stop working.
4. The steam reacts with the zirconium cladding that is used to encapsulate and protect the fuel rods, to produce hydrogen gas. Either this causes a rapid rise of internal pressure that will rupture the containment dome (as happened at Fukushima) and/or it will be released and present a massive explosion hazard.
5. And even if nothing goes wrong, the sheer intensity of the neutron flux just buggers up pretty much all the materials exposed to it over time.
Again still grossly simplified from memory. It’s a tribute to how good modern engineering is that these things are as safe as they are; but there is no question they are fundamentally risky things, especially as Andre points out, at the scale of a 3000MW power plant.
Ha, oh yes, there is a whole lot going on, this huge plant was doing much more than housing a fancy electric jug…. but….it’s the fancy heating of water hey.
It’s when the kettle runs out of water and the element burns through the bottom that you have a problem.
The 8 Inch Island incident.
I assume you mean the Three Mile Island event. That incident had some interesting engineering outcomes. The root of the problem was a valve that should have been closed but was not.
In those days it was common for control systems to have no status feedback from actuated valves. In other words the control system would command a valve to open or close, and the physical state of the valve was assumed to the same.
One of the pressure release valves had stuck open even though the control system had commanded it closed and all the operators thought it was closed.
https://blog.thinkreliability.com/root-cause-analysis-case-study-three-mile-island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
The wiki page makes for compelling reading, and the whole incident now a classic case study. Crucially the problem was not correctly diagnosed until a fresh shift came in who did not have the mindset of the first shift of operators. By this time major damage had occurred.
As someone who has spent much of my working life in control rooms just reading this gives me the chills. It all happened so very easily; and I can well imagine the feelings of the guy who did spot the problem and saved the day.
The other big outcome of this event was that across all industries it became almost standard practice to have physical sensors on all valves to independently confirm the open/close state of the valve.
I rather liked the story about the final “safety” feature for the first man-made nuclear reactor built in a squash court at the University of Chicago in December 1942.
One person there had a bucket of cadmium nitride solution, which is a neutron absorber He was to throw it over the pile in an emergency if the standard cadmium rods inserted in the pile didn’t stop the chain reaction.
Apparently you can see him standing on top of the pile in photographs of the occasion.
I’m glad I wasn’t on the streets of Chicago that day, even if one wouldn’t have known what was going on.
Yikes … that really was astonishingly ‘agricultural’ by modern standards.
Louis Slotin and Hisashi Ouchi come to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Criticality_accident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident#In_1999
@Joe90
I knew about the first one but I had never heard of the Japanese accident. I’m not really sure I wanted to after having read about it.
Here is a painting of the pile going critical. The people with the buckets are on a platform behind the pile from which they were meant to jump onto its top and dump the solution. It looks as if there were 3 rather than the one I remembered hearing about.
The details of my story may be a bit sketchy, although the general thrust of it appears to be accurate.
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/anniversary-first-controlled-nuclear-chain-reaction
I thought it was Cadmium Nitride. While looking for this photo I found references to Cadmium Nitride, Cadmium Nitrate, Cadmium Sulphate and plain Cadmium solution. God knows what it really was.
@ alwyn – good stuff and this sounds accurate too.
@Marty.
I hadn’t heard that one. I assume that when you say “the explosion” you mean the Trinity test of the bomb. I have a friend who saw a nuclear test. From what he says I am not surprised by the reaction, particularly since it was the very first and there had been nothing like it before.
There is a similar quote, supposedly by General Groves to a group at Los Alamos when it was operating that
“At a meeting of the military personnel there, Groves reported, “At great expense we have gathered on this mesa the largest collection of crackpots ever seen.”.
@ alwyn – it was the last sentence of the article you linked to. A good read indeed.
Chernobyl too.
http://time.com/5255663/chernobyl-disaster-book-anniversary/
@marty.
So it is. I actually just tried to google something that had a clear picture of the painting that showed the people around the pile when it first went critical. Of the ones I found this was simply the first that had a clear reproduction of the picture so I chose it. I wasn’t really looking for, or at, the rest of the article.
I have just read it right through for the first time.
I’m glad you pointed out the quote. It is a good read isn’t it?
Yes, dammit, I was trying to be Mr Witty Guy and got the numbers wrong. Yes, The Three Inch Island Incident.
It’s unfortunate the incident you had a record of appears to have been swept under the carpet. There appears to be much to be learned when it does go all pear-shaped. Real life calamities to study rather than equations.
The Forsmark plant in Sweden, the guide said ‘Every person could drop dead and the plant would quietly go into idle mode all by itself’. The most fascinating part was the bus trip down a spiraling tunnel cut from solid granite to where they kept the hot bits, deep inside a massive subterranean lump of granite. It’s minimal fractures had a lot to do with why they chose the site.
Taking out the garbage is such a mission with that method of generation.
Indeed it is rubbish.
“Kevin Anderson, a senior research fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said claims that nuclear power was the only way for Britain to meet demanding greenhouse gas targets were fundamentally wrong. He said: “That argument is way too simplistic. We can easily deal with climate change without nuclear power.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/jan/17/nuclearindustry.energy
“Kevin also discusses various options, like nuclear; showing that even though nuclear would be a very low carbon solution, we would need – if we want nuclear to provide a significant fraction of our future energy needs – to be building many more reactors than we currently are. Kevin’s talk also illustrates – I think – why many are very reluctant to accept the basic situation. Given our current understanding, it seems as though it will be very difficult – if not impossible – to address this without making significant changes to our lifestyles and standards of living”
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/kevin-anderson-the-ostrich-or-the-phoenix/
Nuclear provides a fraction of our energy requirements and we quite simply cannot build enough nuclear generation to replace existing even if we ignore any other arguments about its suitability.
There is no question that building enough PWR power plants of the current behemoth design was never going to be possible. That was always obvious and as I’ve made it clear above, I’m totally opposed to this kind of design.
Especially in a country like NZ with it’s intrinsically high geo-technical hazards, tsunami, flood, earthquake and volcano. As the Japanese discovered to their terrible cost.
But there are some good alternate designs (and I’m not a nuclear engineer so I’m not going to tout one over the other) that would be a lot more appropriate to NZ’s environment and safer than PWR’s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
Having said that, I still think an intelligent mix of renewables, hydro, geothermal and storage would easily get our electricity to 100% carbon free if we put some political will to the matter.
Renewable energy not the issue in NZ as it is the the bulk of the rest of the world…the real question is why everyone promotes the most difficult and unrealistic solutions when the most obvious and easiest remains untested?
If he will allow us to store all the waste produced and set up the reactors next to him and the rest of his mates that are advocating for this we will consider it.
But they will be all NIMBYs and demand that the reactors and waste stay as far away from them as possible as they know how dangerous the reactors and waste storage is, especially is a country prone to earthquakes.
Jones and his free money is the weak link for this government… watch out …
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/111154992/shane-jones-provided-reassurance-to-ministers-despite-declaring-conflict
In any other government he would be sacked or at least stood down – but whinny won’t allow that.
Most transparent government ever huh? Unless it means Shane Jones answering questions honestly.
James is a TROLL who pretends not to be a TROLL.
Any one else of the same opinion ?
He is an irritating little weasel IMHO ?
I agree skunkweed James is a troll.
Wanna try to debate the point being discussed?
Yep skunk weed raised the point that you are a troll and I agreed
If NZF went with your lot, you can bet anything that you would be defending him,
Peters was never going to go with ‘James’ lot’. That’s what makes the concessions Labour made to NZF such a joke. Labour were royally screwed, and ultimately the taxpayer with them.
I’m happy we didn’t get him. I’ve been consistent with that.
If Shane Jones can’t get to be leader of a small party having been gifted $3 billion to vote-purchase for three years from every tiny town he rolls through, then he really doesn’t deserve to be in either Parliament or business full stop.
I more and more agree with National that the job-yield-per-dollar of this fund is an egregious rort of my taxes.
Not all the projects are bad, but all the projects on average are not delivering anywhere near enough for this country.
Yeah, he’s a man with a billion dollars in his pocket and 125,000 relatives.
What a great idea for Opononi. Hopefully such an enterprise would be part of an eventual Ngapuhi settlement. Maori is what makes NZ unique, we should be celebrating our heritage. Jones should be involved in the establishment of such a venture because of his conflicted interest, he has emotional skin in the game.
I think Robertson was wise to indicate ‘I’m watching the money!’
Far North Holdings are the commercial arm of the local council. If they run a transparent tender process independent of Jones and Bros and there is no $ angle for Jones, directorships etc, I think he should be involved. Of course he has a conflict of interest, unlike shares or property, we can’t sell our ancestors.
A first for me today: a spam email in te reo. Though apparently there’s no translation for ‘risk free’, which may be a subtle commentary on te Tiriti.
E aroha ana a te reo putake
Kua tukinohia te ipurangi e nga kaitoro me nga kainoro o te hunga e hiahia ana ki te whara. I te mea ko tetahi o Vanoosten, ko taua wa kaore tatou e tuku i te kino ki te patu i te kaha o te pakihi i roto i te pakihi pono, tena koa koa kia 100% Risk-free.
[…..]
Ko koe I runga i te pono,
Dr.Richard Graves.
cb*****@****.com
Yesterday James called OWT out on some homophobiac comments. I hadn’t read once were Tim’s comments because it was long and I tend to scroll past long comments.
I went back very late last night and read them. I agree with James they are homophobic imho. Please don’t do this stuff (request to those that do).
Maybe James is homosexual or bisexual ?
Maybe you shouldn’t speculate on this, OK?
Skunk weed whether James is gay or not is completely irrelevant
Doubt it. Almost all the gay people I know are caring and empathetic.
You need to get out more . I’ve got card carrying nat who appears to hate those below him gay surgeon as a Facebook friend who’s favorite thing is to show off his and his wealth.
Then there is Peter Thiel.
Exceptions that prove the rule?
And what would that have to do with anything.
Speculation on someone being gay or bisexual is none of your business. What makes you think this is ok?
Why do we allow talk like this (appreciate the mods may not have seen this as yet)
Thanks to others comments below / above
Do alien reptiles have sex?
Yes. I agree. What consenting adults do in private is entirely their own business.
But sorry, couldn’t resist the humour.
I think righties mostly reproduce asexually by budding, a bit like convolvulus. Some can regrow from severed tentacles.
Quite obviously, I should have ended the whole comment with a /sarc – as if it wasn’t already bleeding bloody obvious.
And of course we could get into discussions about misogyny in the gay (male) community, or how WITHIN the gay community various terms such as faggot, queen and nancy boy etc are used (in jest or solidarity or otherwise) when referring to one another.
I’m offended you are offended (not), but you’re making assumptions about my disposition.
It’s all become a little precious but the point being I think many of us know what Jame’s motivations are.
I do however appreciate that political correctness evolves over time.
I’ve already reclaimed gay, queen, cunt and various other words (including ‘straight’ and ‘fluid’).
Quite telling that you tend to just scroll past long comments.
I’ll try to use bullet points in future and just give you the facts man
Another Meth Murder in South Auckland, the Meth Capital of NZ ?
Joke of the Day
Question – What does a Meth Addict become when he dies ?
Answer – Methylated Spirits.
When are Government and the NZ Police going to tidy up the Illicit Drug Trade in NZ it has flourished ever since Mr Asia Terry Clarke made a name for himself here and in Australia. Drugs and Gangs here in NZ are not taken seriously by the Government and NZ Police IMHO.
It doesn’t help that successive government have run down addiction treatment services over the past 30 years or so (not to mention mental health services).
It is at the point now that people bascially have to go to prison to get the help they need (as is the case for someone I personally know).
My favorite P joke is from Mike King. Paraphrased:
What’s the best thing about meth?
Only three sleeps till Christmas.
I’ve always thought the Meth Capital of NZ was up the road a bit?
How to get a free press? Let the USA to pay for it and help put bias towards the possibly friendly Middle Americans.
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018685516/journalism-courtesy-of-foreign-taxpayers
Cannabis – can we keep the profits in NZ? Do we dare give Maori the option of growing it? The gangs would get involved. Could they conquer their law-breaking habit? Things that have occurred to me. Here is something about it at the present that i haven’t listened to yet.
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/insight/audio/2018685566/growing-demand-nz-s-budding-cannabis-businesses
Regarding the nuclear power debate up-thread — building such a power plant in NZ would be prohibitively expensive and would probably double power bills across the board.
It probably wouldn’t get past the consent process anyway.
And that is not mentioning the 1981-style unrest and divisions that it would cause.
What happened to the trial tidal generation schemes proposed in 2009?
Probably simpler and safer than nuclear.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/397106/Trial-approved-for-Strait-tidal-power
Cook Strait tides had the potential to generate 7000 megawatts of electricity – almost equal to New Zealand’s annual production
Ha found it
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sustainable-business/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503533&objectid=11148072
If it wasn’t electricity market uncertainty or lack of political will that killed them off, unco-operative power companies, councils and local communities get the blame.
Other unknowns, Hopkins says, are the long-term impact of the Government’s partial privatisation of generators Mighty River Power, Meridian Energy and Genesis Energy, and the possibility that a change of government could see Labour and the Greens creating a single wholesale electricity buying body.
Adding insult to injury is the relatively sudden diversion of investment from renewables into the likes of shale oil and gas made available by fracking, which has turned the US into a net energy exporter. “World carbon markets and world energy markets have been turned on their heads by fracking,” says Hopkins, who spent more than three years getting resource consent for the Kaipara project.
Oops That last reference to the Herald was in 2013.!!!
thanks dv for those links – the inception and the second one that updated the down thumbs.
There’s also recent geothermal discoveries on the West Coast associated with the Alpine Fault.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/the-country/news/article.cfm?c_id=16&objectid=11858291
McKinsey was mentioned in the post by Advantage and last night I happened to come across this very long but also very good and insightful piece on McKinsey.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/mckinsey-company-capitals-willing-executioners
McKinsey seems to find favour with our politicians, public servants and many commentators……..odd when you consider you are judged by the company you keep….but then these are the same people who procure the services of Thompson and Clark
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/13/insurance-claim-delays-industry-profits-allstate-mckinsey-company_n_1139102.html
https://thechristchurchfiasco.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/the-mckinsey-influence/
For the Christians amongst us.
This is the way of the world – the present one, not future. In California – very rich state of the USA.
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/world/384375/robot-video-link-death-diagnosis-we-fell-short-hospital
Ernest Quintana, 78, was at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont when a doctor – appearing on the robot’s screen – informed him that he would die within a few days. Mr Quintana died the next day.
A family friend wrote on social media that it was “not the way to show value and compassion to a patient”.
The hospital said it “regrets falling short” of the family’s expectations.
That answer is what a corporate that makes a business out of processing people would say in a PR release. The business is a hospital but all business management is generic, the business grads are apparently told or led to believe. I wonder if they class sentient beings as different from curtain-rails of the same length.
The flipside to that is you have dr consultations over the video link as things go downhill, then the doctor walks in the room and you know you’re done for. Like soldiers’ families getting telegrams. So then the nurses have to prepare you for the shock of seeing the doctor. But then the nurses get replaced by robots.
We’re going to need an expanded chaplains’ / social worker service in hospitals just so patients don’t have a heart attack if they see another human.
Shane Jones being got at. The Opposition doing such a good job of holding the government to account so they can’t spend any money just like National. Seymour being righteous and some other coffee stirrer, Paul Goldsmith.
Shane doing his job for the regions. But the Nats interest is for the money to be spent in their electorates, or in Auckland or both.
https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/political/384367/shane-jones-denies-conflict-of-interest-in-funding-decision
Test comment. The TS raid is displaying as “auto-read-only” in a startup message.
Nope it is ok. It was updating on a different RAID array (replaced a 56yo drive that was starting to show SMART errors) . The notification about the recovery happened before it started up the TS array.
Old drive being delivered: https://static.businessinsider.com/image/4dfb8533ccd1d5cb200d0000-1200/image.jpg
How is lprent going to get that out of his apartment? 😆
Gravity? After all I have a balcony.
It’ll end up in China (well, Spain)!
🙂
5-6 yo drive.
Mind you back in about 1991 when I was doing a contract and was rather affluent on very extended hours, I brought a 1GB SCSI full height drive for an exorbitant price. Can’t remember but I think it was a Seagate. After about 5 years the intense whining ceased and it made a handy doorstop. No wind could move it.
Check out Walk The World (Digital Finance Analytics) Yt channel if you are interested in what is really happening in the property market. Best avoid msm for this topic in particular.
Here Martin North answers the question for Australia, “Just how much trouble are we in”?
He believes the most likely scenario is 20-30% falls in Sydney/Melbourne (assuming no international crisis) over the next two years.
As long as people can service their mortgages there will be no crash.
20 – 30% value fall and 90 + % mortgages.
Excreta meet air circulating device.
Fascinating. John Podesta says that GE 2020 is at risk from foreign interference. I can definitely see people the National Party associates with not shy of going down this road.
We need to be really watchful.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/03/2020-new-zealand-election-a-juicy-target-for-major-hack-john-podesta.html
America spends more on defence than literally everyone else so for other nations projecting they just can’t project enough force to get what they want so everyone is resorting to soft power and influence. Our side would do well to develope there own soft power tools and responses.
USA spends more on attack than defence ?
In truth they spend more on $1200 hammers and $5000 toilet seats.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is on 60 Minutes tonight. There is also a story about turning plants into fuel. Prime TV at 9.30pm.
I reckon Labour would be quite happy if the Greens don’t make 5% in 2020.
There’s a reason NZ First has always been Labours first choice
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/111168958/capital-gains-tax-should-be-just-the-start-says-green-coleader-marama-davidson
That’s obviously not true. National might like to indulge in knifing their friends when it suits but I think Labour is a lot more supportive of friendly voices.
Helen Clark, Greens last cab off the rank.
Greens making up the numbers in this current government.
I’m not really seeing the love, not that I blame Labour, The Greens are such delusional dorks, constantly airing their fuckwittery and weirdness.
It must really grind your corn to see The Greens in Government, BM!
They’re so…in there!
If you love the shifty reptilians of National, anything even vaguely mammalian is going to seem pretty disturbing – but it’s the future. Evolve or be left behind.
Somehow I doubt they are chasing your vote.
Jeez you talk through your arse. The Greens and Labour had an MOU through the election. Times have changed since the days of Helen.
Big is better???….
“In 1990, small and medium-sized farms accounted for nearly half of all agricultural production in the US. Now it is less than a quarter.
As the medium-sized family farms retreated, the businesses they helped support disappeared. Local seed and equipment suppliers shut up shop because corporations went straight to wholesalers or manufacturers. Demand for local vets collapsed. As those businesses packed up and left, communities shrank. Shops, restaurants and doctors’ surgeries closed. People found they had to drive for an hour or more for medical treatment. Towns and counties began to share ambulances.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american-food-giants-swallow-the-family-farms-iowa
And its not just farming, corporatisation is occurring in every sector…the inevitable result of unrestrained capitalism.
They’ve done exactly the same in NZ only it happens slow so the impact is not readily apparent till you look around. All the abandoned rail stations, schools closed, hell, half the village I grew up in has just gone, bulldozed and not replaced. The clothes factory went and the mechanics and the grocers…
But the dairy factory and meat works grew.
The new naked imperialism
“We will build a wall and the Mexicans will pay for it” Donald
We will all pay for it.
Trump invokes new demand for extracting billions of dollars from U.S. allies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-invokes-new-de
Read, ….from U.S. colonies
Thank God we haven’t got any here.
Subscriber drive?
Kia The AM Show
Orange sky is a cool charity that helps homeless people wash their clothes and give homeless people a shower Ka pai.
You know what came over him that football fan who hit a player he was sucking on a bottle of ALCOHOL in the stands ((that’s what came over him))?
I Back GREEN PEACE 100 % you can not burn carbon and try a talk about our future and talk about wellbeing of our future. It’s much better to have a clean environment than a shit one and a big pile of cash you can not breath in cash.
There is a huge GREEN energy revolution that our superfund could invest in the climate change denier say holy smoke we have to invest 3 % of the Papatuanukue gross revenue to fight climate change thats nothing.
The doctor strikes are a national party attack on our government peas in a pod I say .
I say the negative talk about our relationship with China is payed for from someone who wants to damage our relationship with China.
Its a fine balanceing act one has to balance our trade as well we have a lot in common with China. Ka kite ano
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
Climate change is a real threat to the 99.9 % of peoples haveing a happy healthy life .
Eco Maori Backs The New Green Deal and School Students Striking for OUR Climate 100% Kia kaha
Climate change will make a walk in the woods a much rarer pleasure
CNN)If you like to take a walk in the woods in the United States or you prefer to decorate a Douglas fir at Christmas, you should know that climate change is making both of those activities a lot harder.
Looking at two ecologically and economically important species — the Douglas fir and the Ponderosa pine — scientists found that fires and drought exacerbated by climate change make new growth difficult, especially in low-elevation forests, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The 2000 Canyon Ferry Complex Fire site in the Helena National Forest, Montana, 17 years later.
Some forests in four regions in California, Colorado, the Northern Rockies and the southwestern part of the United States have crossed “a critical climate threshold for postfire tree generation,” the study says.
Climate conditions over the past 20 years have accelerated changes that would have otherwise taken decades or even centuries to play out across broad regions of the country. This is leading to the abrupt decline of trees and making these lands increasingly unsuitable for tree regeneration.
Climate change is endangering our forests now, not just in some distant future.
“Maybe in areas where there are really abundant seed sources, there could be some trees, but it is becoming really hard to get these trees back due to climate change,” said study co-author Kim Davis, a postdoctoral research associate in the W.A. Franke College of Forestry & Conservation at the University of Montana.
Global climate targets will be missed as deforestation rises, study says
The scientists figured this out by examining tree rings to determine when nearly 3,000 trees were established in these regions, which saw 33 wildfires between 1988 and 2015.
Seedlings and juvenile trees are vulnerable to climate change. “Seedlings are really sensitive,” Davis said.
Adult trees have better survival mechanisms to deal with poor climate conditions, but intense wildfires are wiping out these Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs. The trees have thick bark that make them typically good at surviving surface level fires, but they can’t survive the more intense fires that move through the canopy, like this region has seen. Had there not been such intense fires, these trees may have lived for centuries.
On Capitol Hill, new calls for rapid action on climate change
The problem probably won’t get any better, as climate change is making intense wildfires much more common, studies show. Western foresters say there used to be a fire season, but devastating and costly fires have become a reality all year long. In 2018, fires cost California more than $9.05 billion, according to the state insurance commissioner, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season in state history.
Ka kite ano Links below.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/11/health/climate-change-hurts-forests-scn/index.html
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
Eco Maori has one M8 I would like to catch up with Red
Kia ora Newshub This is what happens when a shonky government national puts up doctors visits charges a virus outbreak. I don’t think the anti vaxers had much to do with the mesal virus outbreak.
Wow the sniffer dogs are out there finding a fart and trying to turn it into the shits national have the money to pay for the sniffers. Kia kaha to our Coalition Government.
There you go Paddy PEE is the biggest problem drug in New Zealand.
Of course a company is never going to say they have done wrong and Forestry companies are the same protect themselves. They should just settle and pay the bills for the clean up mess in Tolaga Bay I like swimming in Tangaroa there they would rather waste money and time in COURT.
Wow another Boeing air craft crash condolences to the people who lost there love you know Eco Maori doesn’t fly know more German wasp nest did you know that Bees and ants ansestor are wasp it good this nest has been found and destroyed . Ka kite ano
Kia ora Te ao Maori News Those forestry companies don’t realise the damage that is caused by there slash left over from harvesting the trees being washed down te awa into Tangaroa it ruins the beaches and fishing kina paua ect they should just pay the bills for the clean up.
simon that’s what happens when you turn on your closest m8s they bit you on the ass Ana to kai .
I seen that story on Radio NZ website that man driving a ute abusing our Wahine see eco Maori is not pissing in the wind when I write about racial racist discrimination in NZ that guy is like the ones hounding me I smelt something going down today Kia Kaha Mana Wahine you handled that fool very well. Paina Kia kaha yes protest for the loss of your land and it being developed before the issues is settled in tamiki makaru and make your tipuna proud of yous Ka kite ano
Te ao Maori News I agree that NZ people should be educated about NZ wars so they can see the reason we are so downtrodden and broke but not broken. Kia kaha Ka kite ano P.S they cannot go 2 days with out playing with their flute lol
Kia ora The AM Show The wave scooter are onto it they let lime scooter test the water and now have speed limits on them in certain areas and have learnt lessons with no cost to them is the speed set at 25 km,s and 15 kms .
That doesn’t sound good for Boeing Eco nolonger flys 2 reason why They should have invested in green energy hybrid planes . Big businesses lead the pollies buy the $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
Thats how the business world works heaps of conflict of interest chemicals company’s all the multi ational companies make up their own rules that’s why the Papatuanukue is in such a big mess look at brexit may is going to FAIL Miserably its only in the best interests of the multi ational business to leave Europe the 99.9% get a kick in the ASS from leaving Europe.
I don’t think that our tourism will suffer in Aotearoa. judy is that it light bulb that’s a dumb attack on our government it would only cost $100 bucks to kit out a house with led bulbs why did you not ban incandescent light bulbs when you were in Government??????????????????.
I no my grandmother made sure I was vaccinated we had Indian doctors as friends.
Dick their you go Maori health reviews are need so that the system can changes our Mokopunas needed there Kau Matua to live longer so they can guide them up there ladders of life.
simon got caught with his pants down lol.
judys m8 whale oil has been held accountable for his trashing the privacy rights??????? of someone who he disagree with Ana to kai I looked at his site when I first started Eco Maori Post on Thestandard I just about lost my kai NOT for I.
((Brexit is a turd may is trying to sell it to the people as being gold)) the old saying KEEP Selling a lies long enough and MOST PEOPLE BELIEVES IT IS THE TRUTH Stay in Europe PEOPLE ITS Best for the MANY. Ka kite ano
Get stuffed 20 % of people hog all the money 80 %are struggling so to be fair the 20 %, should pay more tax so that the 80% of people in NZ can have a good life you neoliberals neanderthal you can see logic through your cash mark you fool Ana to kai. If a poor person did that you would say throw them in jail puppets neanderthal Ka kite ano P.S your sandflys m8s number 1 tool intrapment they love setting people up and reel them in and get them to become a ASSET puppet actor’s
Kia ora The AM Show mark did someone just teach you about the 80/20 princerpal I learnt that 20 years ago puppet Ana to kai
ECO MAORI CAN SEE The OIL Barrons$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ have a huge hold on the media in New Zealand TWO day,s till the STUDENT STRIKE FOR CLIMATE
and no online media platforms have the story on there front PAGE so much for (((((newzealand being the least CORRUPT CONTRY in the world YEA RIGHT)))))).
Eco Maori will keep CHAMPIONING this Good cause of saving MY Mokopunas Futures
NSW teacher loses shifts after urging students to join climate strike
Greens’ Bega candidate Will Douglas being investigated by education department after complaint about his comments
A relief teacher at a New South Wales high school, who is also a Greens candidate, is being investigated by the Department of Education over remarks made at a candidates’ forum about the upcoming student climate strike.
Will Douglas, who has worked casually at Moruya high school on the state’s south coast since 2006, has been told he will not be offered any more shifts at the school while the investigation takes place.
It comes as the principal of a Victorian Catholic school warned students that striking was an “unapproved” absence that could lead to a zero if they missed any official tests on the day.
Inspired by Swedish student Greta Thunberg, the movement calls on students to partially strike from school to protest government inaction on fighting climate change. More than 50 rallies, in Australian capital cities and regional towns, are planned for 15 March.
Greta Thunberg, schoolgirl climate change warrior: ‘Some people can let things go. I can’t’
Read more
Douglas, who is contesting the seat of Bega in the upcoming state election, appeared at a lunchtime candidates’ forum organised by Youth Action at the Moruya golf club last Thursday, alongside local Liberal MP Andrew Constance and Labor candidate Leanne Atkinson.
Douglas said he attended the forum with the knowledge of his superiors at the school.
During the forum, which was attended by students from a range of high schools, Douglas said “please don’t forget March 15 the climate strike … if there’s something happening at your school will you please get online and register because there’s a whole community out there wanting to support you guys, young people, in that strike”.
The remarks were published in News Corp’s Daily Telegraph on Monday, in an article that also revealed a complaint had been made to the department and that an investigation was under way.
Douglas told Guardian Australia he had no knowledge of any investigation until contacted by the newspaper and he did not know who had made the complaint.
He said the principal told him this week he would not be working any more shifts at the school until the investigation was complete.
“I was speaking on my own time in my lunch break as a Greens candidate at a youth forum,” he said. “Now I don’t have any work. It shouldn’t be this hard to speak up for climate action.”
Douglas said Moruya high was a wonderful school, and that he had been treated with nothing but respect by the principal. However he believed the complaint itself was “politically motivated”.
A spokeswoman for the department said they were making inquiries into the matter but that it would be inappropriate to comment on the employment status of an individual teacher.
“While the department understands students may be passionate about a range of issues, all students who are enrolled at school are expected to attend
Ka kite ano links below.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/13/nsw-teacher-loses-shifts-after-urging-students-to-join-climate-strike
Some Eco Maori Musci for the minute .
Whanau the are playing heaps games to day they even got my landlord to sell the flat I live in in 3 weeks I will be living in a car
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute
Whanau These rental agents and Real Estatate agents under estamated Eco Maori O and the sandflys yesterday they had a team of actor people looking to by YEA RIGHT I show them my flat sweet no hasles one lady said I could keep the flat yesterday ka pai I thought today O no I did not say that she has a close relashionship to the owner of the flat . Yesterday they knocked on the door of the other flat it was locked.?????????????????.
Today they only took photos of my flat and not next door .
So Eco Maori TX them about that fact of no photos nextdoor SNAPPED she lied and said they took photos yesterday I pointed that FACT OUT that nextdoor was locked and they could not have taken photos scilence is what I got after I told them of that fact.
Ka kite ano P.S I will let you know who the rental agints and real eastate is later whanau ANA TO KAI
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute
Ma te wa Kiore
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
The sandflys will have smoke coming out there ASS.s AT THE MINUTE
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
Some more people to get subpoenaed for my Waitangi claimed for suppresion of Eco Maori and breaching my human rights I have bankers farmers lawyers judges sandflys doctors there are many is going to cost them millions ma te wa
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
I was going to visit the Mokopunas and smell something STINK so I changed my mind half way there
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
Whanau about 2 years ago I noticed things going missing in this flat I asked the landlord to put a dead lock in nothing happened so I paid a locksmith to put a deadlock in when I went away I put a peace of paper in the door so as to know if someone had entered the flat when I came back it had moved so I went to the locksmith and got a new lock and put it in myself but to know avail the paper had moved again I came to the conclusion that the sandflys go straight to the locksmith and get a key. I asked the landlord to put lacthes on the windows whanau no nothing . One can tell if some one has jumped through a wooden window as I had figered a way to use a fork and the key to make the lock not open from the outside with a key things still went missing and I noticed that the wooden window frames developed cracks in the paint that is a tell tail sign that someone was climbing in through the window Thats is why I asked the landlord for the safe window latches but no conclusion he is mates with the sandflys
Ka kite an P.S A wahine noticed her nickers going missing to Eco Maori Has the whole rotoura police force on my ASS. bring it on muppets
Eco Maoris favourite HAKA
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute.
Don,t worry to much WHANAU Eco Maori Has the MANA and Wairua TO keep the good fight going for many years
Kia ora Newshub Ana to kai pal.
That’s the safe way to handle the Boeing safety issues.
That’s a cool auto self driving car I put my post out with Eco Maoris Huawei Phone.
The elderly staff care shortage is all the previous Government fault I remember when I was young most of the anties were nurses now because of suppression of Maori there are hardly any Maori nurses??????????????.
Cutting imagration needs to be balanced quite finely.
Lloyd I had backed Britain staying in the European Union I have a sore face now.
Yes Mike one must drive with the utmost care I practically taught my self how to drive when I brought my first car at 16 driving from Te tairawhiti to Ahurri I a excellent driver now.
Ka kite ano
Kia ora Te ao Maori News
Houseing NZ needs to pick its socks up I feel for the kuia who is wheelchair bound and blind she deserves dignity. My daughter has been robbed 4 times in a housing Corp house in Auckland I thought she would have been given another house but no she is stuck with the house she has.
I’m waiting to see who gets vaccination first I say that Maori will get a 2 to 3 week wait compared to the European people.????????????????????.
seenothing it just a pakiha who is trying to float his political toilet sorry Eco Maori will sink it ma te wa.
Give him a Pukana Shane. I will do that and flip the titi have been doing that quite a bit as of late
Kia ora thats the way get Asia investors to invest in Maori business to.
Yes it a big mess that our Maori school children are in at the minute I will be living in a waka soon the European that are forceing this situation on me think its a big joke the landlord turned up ight on 600 pm why to interfair in my post and to rub salt into my wounds He knocked on the door I politely dismissed him as no written notice He is a sandflys puppet Ma te wa puppets. I did not even open the door
Ka kite ano