“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.
Some Eco Maori Musci for the minute . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgVVG5EknuI
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94dBVPpymac
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
Some Eco Maori Music for the minute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWoDSGfSu6o
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
The Treasury forecasts suggest the economy is doing better than expected after the Covid Shock. John Kenneth Galbraith was wont to say that economic forecasting was designed to make astrology look good. Unfair, but it raises the question of the purpose of economic forecasts. Certainly the public may treat them ...
Q: Will the COVID-19 vaccines prevent the transmission of the coronavirus and bring about community immunity (aka herd immunity)? A: Jury not in yet but vaccines do not have to be perfect to thwart the spread of infection. While vaccines induce protection against illness, they do not always stop actual ...
Joe Biden seems to be everything that Donald Trump was not – decent, straightforward, considerate of others, mindful of his responsibilities – but none of that means that he has an easy path ahead of him. The pandemic still rages, American standing in the world is grievously low, and the ...
Keana VirmaniFrom healthcare robots to data privacy, to sea level rise and Antarctica under the ice: in the four years since its establishment, the Aotearoa New Zealand Science Journalism Fund has supported over 30 projects.Rebecca Priestley, receiving the PM Science Communication Prize (Photo by Mark Tantrum) Associate Professor ...
Nothing more from me today - I'm off to Wellington, to participate in the city's annual roleplaying convention (which has also eaten my time for the whole week, limiting blogging despite there being interesting things happening). Normal bloggage will resume Tuesday. ...
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weaponscame into force today, making the development, possession, use or threat of use of nuclear weapons illegal in international law. Every nuclear-armed state is now a criminal regime. The corporations and scientists who design, build and maintain their illegal weapons are now ...
"Come The Revolution!" The key objective of Bernard Hickey’s revolutionary solution to the housing crisis is a 50 percent reduction in the price of the average family home. This will be achieved by the introduction of Capital Gains, Land, and Wealth taxes, and by the opening up of currently RMA-protected ...
by Daphna Whitmore Twitter and Facebook shutting down Trump’s accounts after his supporters stormed Capitol Hill is old news now but the debates continue over whether the actions against Trump are a good thing or not. Those in favour of banning Trump say Twitter and Facebook are private companies and ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Democrats now control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives for the first time in a decade, albeit with razor thin Congressional majorities. The last time, in the 111th Congress (2009-2011), House Democrats passed a carbon cap and trade bill, but it died ...
Session thirty-three was highly abbreviated, via having to move house in a short space of time. Oh well. The party decided to ignore the tree-monster and continue the attack on the Giant Troll. Tarsin – flying on a giant summoned bat – dumped some high-grade oil over the ...
Last night I stayed up till 3am just to see then-President Donald Trump leave the White House, get on a plane, and fly off to Florida, hopefully never to return. And when I woke up this morning, America was different. Not perfect, because it never was. Probably not even good, ...
Watching today’s inauguration of Joe Biden as the United States’ 46th president, there’s not a lot in common with the inauguration of Donald Trump just four destructive years ago. Where Trump warned of carnage, Biden dared to hope for unity and decency. But the one place they converge is that ...
Dan FalkBritons who switched on their TVs to “Good Morning Britain” on the morning of Sept. 15, 2020, were greeted by news not from our own troubled world, but from neighboring Venus. Piers Morgan, one of the hosts, was talking about a major science story that had surfaced the ...
Sara LutermanGrowing up autistic in a non-autistic world can be very isolating. We are often strange and out of sync with peers, despite our best efforts. Autistic adults have, until very recently, been largely absent from media and the public sphere. Finding role models is difficult. Finding useful advice ...
Doug JohnsonThe alien-like blooms and putrid stench of Amorphophallus titanum, better known as the corpse flower, draw big crowds and media coverage to botanical gardens each year. In 2015, for instance, around 75,000 people visited the Chicago Botanic Garden to see one of their corpse flowers bloom. More than ...
Getting to Browser Tab Zero so I can reboot the computer is awfully hard when the one open tab is a Table of Contents for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and every issue has more stuff I want to read. A few highlights: Gugler et al demonstrating ...
Timothy Ford, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Charles M. Schweik, University of Massachusetts AmherstTo mitigate health inequities and promote social justice, coronavirus vaccines need to get to underserved populations and hard-to-reach communities. There are few places in the U.S. that are unreachable by road, but other factors – many ...
Israel chose to pay a bit over the odds for the Pfizer vaccine to get earlier access. Here’s The Times of Israel from 16 November. American government will be charged $39 for each two-shot dose, and the European bloc even less, but Jerusalem said to agree to pay $56. Israel ...
Orla is a gender critical Marxist in Ireland. She gave a presentation on 15 January 2021 on the connection between postmodern/transgender identity politics and the current attacks on democratic and free speech rights. Orla has been active previously in the Irish Socialist Workers Party and the People Before Profit electoral ...
. . America: The Empire Strikes Back (at itself) Further to my comments in the first part of 2020: The History That Was, the following should be considered regarding the current state of the US. They most likely will be by future historians pondering the critical decades of ...
Nathaniel ScharpingIn March, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to shut down major cities in the U.S., researchers were thinking about blood. In particular, they were worried about the U.S. blood supply — the millions of donations every year that help keep hospital patients alive when they need a transfusion. ...
Sarah L Caddy, University of CambridgeVaccines are a marvel of medicine. Few interventions can claim to have saved as many lives. But it may surprise you to know that not all vaccines provide the same level of protection. Some vaccines stop you getting symptomatic disease, but others stop you ...
Back in 2016, the Portuguese government announced plans to stop burning coal by 2030. But progress has come much quicker, and they're now scheduled to close their last coal plant by the end of this year: The Sines coal plant in Portugal went offline at midnight yesterday evening (14 ...
The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: As anybody with the intestinal fortitude to brave the commentary threads of local news-sites, large and small, will attest, the number of Trump-supporting New Zealanders is really quite astounding. IT’S SO DIFFICULT to resist the temptation to be smug. From the distant perspective of New Zealand, ...
RNZ reports on continued arbitrariness on decisions at the border. British comedian Russell Howard is about to tour New Zealand and other acts allowed in through managed isolation this summer include drag queen RuPaul and musicians at Northern Bass in Mangawhai and the Bay Dreams festival. The vice-president of the ...
As families around the world mourn more than two million people dead from Covid-19, the Plan B academics and their PR industry collaborator continue to argue that the New Zealand government should stop focusing on our managed isolation and quarantine system and instead protect the elderly so that they can ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 10, 2021 through Sat, Jan 16, 2021Editor's ChoiceNASA says 2020 tied for hottest year on record — here’s what you can do to helpPhoto by Michael Held on Unsplash ...
Health authorities in Norway are reporting some concerns about deaths in frail elderly after receiving their COVID-19 vaccine. Is this causally related to the vaccine? Probably not but here are the things to consider. According to the news there have been 23 deaths in Norway shortly after vaccine administration and ...
Happy New Year! No, experts are not concerned that “…one of New Zealand’s COIVD-1( vaccines will fail to protect the country” Here is why. But first I wish to issue an expletive about this journalism (First in Australia and then in NZ). It exhibits utter failure to actually truly consult ...
All nations have shadows; some acknowledge them. For others they shape their image in uncomfortable ways.The staunch Labour supporter was in despair at what her Rogernomics Government was doing. But she finished ‘at least, we got rid of Muldoon’, a response which tells us that then, and today, one’s views ...
Grigori GuitchountsIn November, Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific journals, made an attention-grabbing announcement: More than 30 of its most prestigious journals, including the flagship Nature, will now allow authors to pay a fee of US$11,390 to make their papers freely available for anyone to read ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Gary Yohe, Henry Jacoby, Richard Richels, and Benjamin Santer Imagine a major climate change law passing the U.S. Congress unanimously? Don’t bother. It turns out that you don’t need to imagine it. Get this: The Global Change Research Act of 1990 was passed ...
“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”WHO CAN FORGET the penultimate scene of the 1956 movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The wild-eyed doctor, stumbling down the highway, trying desperately to warn his fellow citizens: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”Ostensibly science-fiction, the movie ...
TheOneRing.Net has got its paws on the official synopsis of the upcoming Amazon Tolkien TV series. It’s a development that brings to mind the line about Sauron deliberately releasing Gollum from the dungeons of Barad-dûr. Amazon knew exactly what they were doing here, in terms of drumming up publicity: ...
Since Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration in 1953, US presidents have joined an informal club intended to provide support - and occasionally rivalry - between those few who have been ‘leaders of the free world’. Donald Trump, elected on a promise to ‘drain the swamp’ and a constant mocker of his predecessors, ...
For over a decade commentators have noted the rise of a new brand of explicitly ideological politics throughout the world. By this they usually refer to the re-emergence of national populism and avowedly illiberal approaches to governance throughout the “advanced” democratic community, but they also extend the thought to the ...
The US House of Representatives has just impeached Donald Trump, giving him the dubious honour of being the only US President to be impeached twice. Ten Republicans voted for impeachement, making it the most bipartisan impeachment ever. The question now is whether the Senate will rise to the occasion, and ...
Kieren Mitchell; Alice Mouton, Université de Liège; Angela Perri, Durham University, and Laurent Frantz, Ludwig Maximilian University of MunichThanks to the hit television series Game of Thrones, the dire wolf has gained a near-mythical status. But it was a real animal that roamed the Americas for at least 250,000 ...
Tide of tidal data rises Having cast our own fate to include rising sea level, there's a degree of urgency in learning the history of mean sea level in any given spot, beyond idle curiosity. Sea level rise (SLR) isn't equal from one place to another and even at a particular ...
Well, some of those chickens sure came home bigly, didn’t they… and proceeded to shit all over the nice carpet in the Capitol. What we were seeing here are societal forces that have long had difficulty trying to reconcile people to the “idea” of America and the reality of ...
In the wake of Donald Trump's incitement of an assault on the US capitol, Twitter finally enforced its terms of service and suspended his account. They've since followed that up with action against prominent QAnon accounts and Trumpers, including in New Zealand. I'm not unhappy with this: Trump regularly violated ...
Peter S. Ross, University of British ColumbiaThe Arctic has long proven to be a barometer of the health of our planet. This remote part of the world faces unprecedented environmental assaults, as climate change and industrial chemicals threaten a way of life for Inuit and other Indigenous and northern ...
Susan St John makes the case for taxing a deemed rate of return on excessive real estate holdings (after a family home exemption), to redirect scarce housing resources to where they are needed most. Read the full article here ...
I’m less than convinced by arguments that platforms like Twitter should be subject to common carrier regulation preventing them from being able to decide who to keep on as clients of their free services, and who they would not like to serve. It’s much easier to create competition for the ...
The hypocritical actions of political leaders throughout the global Covid pandemic have damaged public faith in institutions and governance. Liam Hehir chronicles the way in which contemporary politicians have let down the public, and explains how real leadership means walking the talk. During the Blitz, when German bombs were ...
Over the years, we've published many rebuttals, blog posts and graphics which came about due to direct interactions with the scientists actually carrying out the underlying research or being knowledgable about a topic in general. We'll highlight some of these interactions in this blog post. We'll start with two memorable ...
Yesterday we had the unseemly sight of a landleech threatening to keep his houses empty in response to better tenancy laws. Meanwhile in Catalonia they have a solution for that: nationalisation: Barcelona is deploying a new weapon in its quest to increase the city’s available rental housing: the power ...
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters, PhD The 2020 global wildfire season brought extreme fire activity to the western U.S., Australia, the Arctic, and Brazil, making it the fifth most expensive year for wildfire losses on record. The year began with an unprecedented fire event ...
NOTE: This is an excerpt from a digital story – read the full story here.Tess TuxfordKo te Kauri Ko Au, Ko te Au ko Kauri I am the kauri, the kauri is me Te Roroa proverb In Waipoua Forest, at the top of the North Island, New ...
Story of the Week... Toon of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... Story of the Week... Coming attraction: IPCC's upcoming major climate assessmentLook for more emphasis on 'solutions,' efforts by cities, climate equity ... and outlook for emissions cuts in ...
Ringing A Clear Historical Bell: The extraordinary images captured in and around the US Capitol Building on 6 January 2021 mirror some of the worst images of America's past.THERE IS A SCENE in the 1982 movie Missing which has remained with me for nearly 40 years. Directed by the Greek-French ...
To impact or not to impeach? I understand why some of those who are justifiably aghast at Trump’s behaviour over recent days might still counsel against impeaching him for a second time. To impeach him, they argue, would run the risk of making him a martyr in the eyes of ...
The Capitol Building, Washington DC, Wednesday, 6 January 2021. Oh come, my little one, come.The day is almost done.Be at my side, behold the sightOf evening on the land.The life, my love, is hardAnd heavy is my heart.How should I live if you should leaveAnd we should be apart?Come, let me ...
A chronological listing of news articles linked to on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Jan 3, 2021 through Sat, Jan 9, 2021Editor's ChoiceAfter the Insurrection: Accountability, Reform, and the Science of Democracy The poisonous lies and enablers of sedition--including Senator Hawley, pictured ...
This article, guest authored by Prof. Angela Gallego-Sala & Dr. Julie Loisel, was originally published on the Carbon Brief website on Dec 21, 2020. It is reposted below in its entirety. Click here to access the original article and comments. Peatlands Peatlands are ecosystems unlike any other. Perpetually saturated, their ...
The assault on the US Capitol and constitutional crisis that it has caused was telegraphed, predictable and yet unexpected and confusing. There are several subplots involved: whether the occupation of the Michigan State House in May was a trial run for the attacks on Congress; whether people involved in the ...
On Christmas Eve, child number 1 spotted a crack in a window. It’s a double-glazed window, and inspection showed that the small, horizontal crack was in the outermost pane. It was perpendicular to the frame, about three-quarters of the way up one side. The origins are a mystery. It MIGHT ...
Anne-Marie Broudehoux, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)Will the COVID-19 pandemic prompt a shift to healthier cities that focus on wellness rather than functional and economic concerns? This is a hypothesis that seems to be supported by several researchers around the world. In many ways, containment and physical distancing ...
Does the US need to strike a grand bargain with like-minded countries to pool their efforts? What does this tell us about today’s global politics? Perhaps the most remarkable editorial of last year was the cover leader of the London Economist on 19 November 2020. Shortly after Joe Biden was ...
Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato and Valmaine Toki, University of WaikatoAotearoa New Zealand likes to think it punches above its weight internationally, but there is one area where we are conspicuously falling behind — the number of sites recognised by the UNESCO World Heritage Convention. Globally, there are 1,121 ...
A growing public housing waiting list and continued increase of house prices must be urgently addressed by Government, Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson said today. ...
[Opening comments, welcome and thank you to Auckland University etc] It is a great pleasure to be here this afternoon to celebrate such an historic occasion - the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This is a moment many feared would never come, but ...
The Government is providing $3 million in one-off seed funding to help disabled people around New Zealand stay connected and access support in their communities, Minister for Disability Issues, Carmel Sepuloni announced today. The funding will allow disability service providers to develop digital and community-based solutions over the next two ...
Border workers in quarantine facilities will be offered voluntary daily COVID-19 saliva tests in addition to their regular weekly testing, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. This additional option will be rolled out at the Jet Park Quarantine facility in Auckland starting on Monday 25 January, and then to ...
The next steps in the Government’s ambitious firearms reform programme to include a three-month buy-back have been announced by Police Minister Poto Williams today. “The last buy-back and amnesty was unprecedented for New Zealand and was successful in collecting 60,297 firearms, modifying a further 5,630 firearms, and collecting 299,837 prohibited ...
The Government has released its Public Housing Plan 2021-2024 which outlines the intention of where 8,000 additional public and transitional housing places announced in Budget 2020, will go. “The Government is committed to continuing its public house build programme at pace and scale. The extra 8,000 homes – 6000 public ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has congratulated President Joe Biden on his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States of America. “I look forward to building a close relationship with President Biden and working with him on issues that matter to both our countries,” Jacinda Ardern said. “New Zealand ...
A major investment to tackle wilding pines in Mt Richmond will create jobs and help protect the area’s unique ecosystems, Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor says. The Mt Richmond Forest Park has unique ecosystems developed on mineral-rich geology, including taonga plant species found nowhere else in the country. “These special plant ...
To further protect New Zealand from COVID-19, the Government is extending pre-departure testing to all passengers to New Zealand except from Australia, Antarctica and most Pacific Islands, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “The change will come into force for all flights arriving in New Zealand after 11:59pm (NZT) on Monday ...
Bay Conservation Cadets launched with first intake Supported with $3.5 million grant Part of $1.245b Jobs for Nature programme to accelerate recover from Covid Cadets will learn skills to protect and enhance environment Environment Minister David Parker today welcomed the first intake of cadets at the launch of the Bay ...
The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Mark Brown have announced passengers from the Cook Islands can resume quarantine-free travel into New Zealand from 21 January, enabling access to essential services such as health. “Following confirmation of the Cook Islands’ COVID ...
Jobs for Nature funding is being made available to conservation groups and landowners to employ staff and contractors in a move aimed at boosting local biodiversity-focused projects, Conservation Minister Kiritapu Allan has announced. It is estimated some 400-plus jobs will be created with employment opportunities in ecology, restoration, trapping, ...
The Government has approved an exception class for 1000 international tertiary students, degree level and above, who began their study in New Zealand but were caught offshore when border restrictions began. The exception will allow students to return to New Zealand in stages from April 2021. “Our top priority continues ...
Today’s deal between Meridian and Rio Tinto for the Tiwai smelter to remain open another four years provides time for a managed transition for Southland. “The deal provides welcome certainty to the Southland community by protecting jobs and incomes as the region plans for the future. The Government is committed ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has appointed Anna Curzon to the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). The leader of each APEC economy appoints three private sector representatives to ABAC. ABAC provides advice to leaders annually on business priorities. “ABAC helps ensure that APEC’s work programme is informed by business community perspectives ...
The Government’s prudent fiscal management and strong policy programme in the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic have been acknowledged by the credit rating agency Fitch. Fitch has today affirmed New Zealand’s local currency rating at AA+ with a stable outlook and foreign currency rating at AA with a positive ...
The Government is putting in place a suite of additional actions to protect New Zealand from COVID-19, including new emerging variants, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said today. “Given the high rates of infection in many countries and evidence of the global spread of more transmissible variants, it’s clear that ...
$36 million of Government funding alongside councils and others for 19 projects Investment will clean up and protect waterways and create local jobs Boots on the ground expected in Q2 of 2021 Funding part of the Jobs for Nature policy package A package of 19 projects will help clean up ...
The commemoration of the 175th anniversary of the Battle of Ruapekapeka represents an opportunity for all New Zealanders to reflect on the role these conflicts have had in creating our modern nation, says Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Kiri Allan. “The Battle at Te Ruapekapeka Pā, which took ...
Babies born with tongue-tie will be assessed and treated consistently under new guidelines released by the Ministry of Health, Associate Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall announced today. Around 5% to 10% of babies are born with a tongue-tie, or ankyloglossia, in New Zealand each year. At least half can ...
The prisoner disorder event at Waikeria Prison is over, with all remaining prisoners now safely and securely detained, Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis says. The majority of those involved in the event are members of the Mongols and Comancheros. Five of the men are deportees from Australia, with three subject to ...
Travellers from the United Kingdom or the United States bound for New Zealand will be required to get a negative test result for COVID-19 before departing, and work is underway to extend the requirement to other long haul flights to New Zealand, COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins confirmed today. “The new PCR test requirement, foreshadowed last ...
Summer reissue: Join Michèle A’Court, Alex Casey and Leonie Hayden in the latest episode of On the Rag as they examine the topic of boobs from every possible angle. First published November 16, 2020.Independent journalism depends on you. Help us stay curious in 2021. The Spinoff’s journalism is funded by its ...
Seventy-five years after the US detonated the first nuclear tests in the Pacific, New Zealand pledges its support to Joe Biden's first tentative step towards disarmament. Today, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons comes into effect, making it illegal for New Zealand and the 50 other ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Terry, Professor of Psychology, University of Southern Queensland The challenge of bringing the world’s best tennis players and support staff, about 1,200 people in all, from COVID-ravaged parts of the world to our almost pandemic-free shores was always going to be ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoffrey Browne, Research Fellow in International Urban Development, University of Melbourne The Victorian government has committed to removing 75 road/rail level crossings across Melbourne by 2025. That’s the fastest rate of removal in the city’s history. The scale of the investment — ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW In an age of hyperpartisan politics, the Biden presidency offers a welcome centrism that might help bridge the divides. But it is also Biden’s economic centrism that offers a chance to cut through what has become ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Stevens, Lecturer in History, University of Waikato In a year of surprises, one of the more pleasant was the recent runaway viral popularity of 19th century sea shanties on TikTok. A collaborative global response to pandemic isolation, it saw singers and ...
The sudden departure of Graine Moss from her Chief Executive role at Oranga Tamariki is a vital first step in a sequence of changes that must take place at the Ministry according to a group of wahine Māori leaders. Dame Naida Glavish, Dame Tariana Turia, ...
A new poem from Dunedin poet Jenny Powell.Her uncle’s eyeShe introduced us to her uncle’s eye floating in a jar.Lost in an accident, he hadn’t wanted to lose it again. He left it to her in his will.We must have looked shocked. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I turn him to ...
The chief executive of Oranga Tamariki is quitting, leaving behind an agency she’s admitted suffers from structural racism. Justin Giovannetti looks at the future of Oranga Tamariki.Grainne Moss’s tenure as head of Oranga Tamariki has been untenable since November when the government’s senior Māori minister wouldn’t express any confidence in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Sainsbury, Senior Lecturer Composition, Australian National University Despite having different cultural backgrounds and experiences — Indigenous composers with an Indigenous mentor, and a pianist descended from Anglo-colonial history — it is nevertheless possible to create a project that can serve as ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Plank, Professor in Applied Mathematics, University of Canterbury With new, more infectious variants of COVID-19 detected around the world, and at New Zealand’s border, the risk of further level 3 or 4 lockdowns is increased if those viruses get into the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Hogg, Lecturer in Psychology, Charles Sturt University Horse racing is an ethical hotbed in Australia. The Melbourne Cup alone has seen seven horses die after racing since 2013, and animal cruelty protesters have become a common feature at carnivals. The latest ...
Right now, our most fiery national debate is over whether New Zealanders were nice to the singer Amanda Palmer in a café. Desperate to restore peace in our nation, Hayden Donnell went in search of the truth.Joe Biden had barely finished calling for unity when Amanda Palmer posted a tweet ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (Pushkin Press, $37)Maths, cyanide, suicide, gardening; ye ...
Wellington artist Estère isn’t just breaking boundaries, she’s dissecting them. Maddi Rowe spoke to her about her new album, Archetypes.“That’s the story of pelicans, they’ll stab themselves in the heart to feed their young.”Despite the somewhat dark subject matter, Estère Dalton’s eyes sparkle with fascination. We’ve met to discuss Archetypes, ...
Cycling advocates are welcoming new advice from the Transport Agency on safe cycling. "Cyclists hate it when drivers pass too close. That's scary and dangerous," said Patrick Morgan from Cycling Action Network. "So it's encouraging to see ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tilman Ruff, Honorary Principal Fellow, School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne Today, many around the world will celebrate the first multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty to enter into force in 50 years. The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear ...
The Public Service Association welcomes the creation of a Chief Executive role to lead the public service’s pay equity work, and the appointment of Grainne Moss to this position. "Unions and public service employers are currently working ...
The Council of Trade Unions is warning that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) figures out today illustrate that the cost of living is increasing disproportionately for those on lower incomes; resulting in the poor getting poorer. CTU Economist Craig ...
Why are there so many offensive comments on the New Zealand Police Facebook page and are they breaking the law? Janaye Henry investigates. New Zealand Police Facebook pages – there are a number of them, for different regional police districts around the country – are an interesting place to spend ...
Our guide to stopping procrastinating and actually (finally) getting on top of investing. Because there’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you don’t know a single thing about it.In part one, we covered some of the basic things you need to know about investing – why do it? ...
Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft acknowledges the huge effort and commitment of departing Oranga Tamariki Chief Executive Grainne Moss and says her decision to resign today was principled. “The issues facing Oranga Tamariki are beyond individual ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin. Two Large Waves versus One Tsunami. Chart by Keith Rankin. Two Large Waves versus One Tsunami. Chart by Keith Rankin. With Covid19, Italy shows the classic European pattern, with its early outbreak, substantial recovery thanks to lockdowns and other public health measures, and resurgence thanks to complacency ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gabrielle Appleby, Professor, UNSW Law School, UNSW This year has already seen significant progress in the government’s commitment to establish a body – a “Voice” – that would allow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to have a say when the government ...
Northland farmer Derek Robinson was sentenced earlier today by the District Court in Whangarei for two offences of ill-treating animals at rodeo events. Mr Robinson was found guilty in November last year, following a defended hearing. The charges ...
Under fire Oranga Tamariki chief executive Grainne Moss has announced she will resign, effective February 28, Marc Daalder reports After four and a half years at the helm of child protection agency Oranga Tamariki, chief executive Grainne Moss has announced she will be leaving the position at the end of ...
The Department of Internal Affairs and New Zealand Police acknowledge the sentencing of 36-year-old Aaron Joseph Hutton on charges relating to the possession of child sexual exploitation material, and entering into a dealing involving the sexual exploitation ...
Ngā Tāngata Microfinance (NTM) is calling for tougher penalties for those caught promoting pyramid schemes. Such business models are illegal under the Fair Trading Act 1986. This call comes after the Commerce Commission issued a ‘stop now’ notice ...
British High Commissioner to New Zealand Laura Clarke is calling on young women aged 17 to 25 to apply for the annual ‘Be British High Commissioner for the Day’ competition. The winner will have the opportunity to become an ‘honorary High Commissioner’, ...
The Māori Party is welcoming the resignation of Oranga Tamariki chief executive Grainne Moss after sustained pressure from leading figures within the Māori Party. This resignation is the result of the continued strong pressure of the Māori Party ...
In a historic corner of Dunedin, startup culture is thriving. Catherine McGregor visited the city’s Warehouse Precinct to meet the people driving the movement. When Jason and Kate Lindsey bought the four storey building now known as Petridish, it was an absolute wreck. Once home to a thriving hat and textiles ...
Summer reissue: The Fold’s very first guest is back to tell Duncan Greive how she pulled off the media deal of the year.The chaotic couple of weeks which finally saw the end of the Stuff-NZME saga were riveting and strange, replete with stock exchange announcements, legal challenges and finally the ...
Chris Liddell has dropped his candidacy to become director-general of the Paris-based OECD. Without support from the Ardern government and vilified in the media as somehow being involved in the encouragement by Donald Trump of the Washington riots, he plainly saw he had little chance of crowning his stellar career ...
Tara Ward hands out her first impression roses as she dives deep into the sea of single men vying to win The Bachelorette NZ’s heart. While the world burns in a searing fireball of unpredictability, we can take comfort in the fact that some things never change. The heart still yearns, ...
People from all around New Zealand will be converging on the super-secret Waihopai satellite interception spybase, in Marlborough, on Saturday January 30th. ...
In its Thursday editorial the NZ Herald speaks an important truth: “Investment important to stay on track”. This won’t have startled its more literate readers but in its text it notes the strong result in the latest Global Dairy Trade auction, which prompted Westpac to raise its forecast for dairy ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Craig Mark, Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Kyoritsu Women’s University With the spread of COVID-19 steadily worsening in Japan since the onset of winter — daily records for infections and deaths continue to be broken — the fate of the Tokyo Summer ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Taylor, Early Career Research Leader, Emerging Viruses, Inflammation and Therapeutics Group, Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Griffith University All eyes are on COVID-19 vaccines, with Australia’s first expected to be approved for use shortly. But their development in record time, without compromising ...
Yesterday’s government announcement on new state housing is a pathetic response to the biggest housing crisis in New Zealand since the 1940s. At a time when the country needs an industrial-scale state house building programme, the government ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Obadiah Mulder, PhD Candidate in Computational Biology, University of Southern California Australia is in the midst of tropical cyclone season. As we write, a cyclone is forming off Western Australia’s Pilbara coast, and earlier in the week Queenslanders were bracing for a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lynette Vernon, School of Education – VC Research Fellow, Edith Cowan University When the holidays end, barring a fresh outbreak of COVID-19, teenagers across Australia will head back to school. Some will bounce out of bed well before the alarm goes off, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW In an age of hyperpartisan politics, the Biden presidency offers a welcome centrism that might help bridge the divides. But it is also Biden’s economic centrism that offers a chance to cut through what has become ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology Twenty years ago, on January 25 2001, a virtually unknown German supermarket chain quietly opened its first stores in Australia. The two stores – one in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liz Giuffre, Senior Lecturer in Communication, University of Technology Sydney Bluey is easily the most successful Australian television show of the last decade. A record-breaking success for its local broadcaster the ABC, as well as production partners BBC Studios and Screen Australia, ...
*This article first appeared on RNZ and is republished with permissionIt will take $3 million to clean up 1 million litres of abandoned toxic waste from a property in Ruakaka - three times more than the last big chemical clean-up undertaken by government agencies A two-year mission to clean up 1 million ...
*This article first appeared on RNZ and is republished with permission. The action Biden took on just his first afternoon in office demonstrates a radical shift in priority for the US when it comes to its efforts to combat the climate crisis. It could put more pressure on New Zealand to step up. ...
Ban Bomb Day event at the New Brighton Pier, 9am, on January 22nd, 2021 January 22nd, 2021, marks the first day the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) Enters into Force and becomes international law. Aotearoa NZ is one of the ...
This week's biggest-selling New Zealand books, as recorded by the Nielsen BookScan New Zealand bestseller list and described by Steve BrauniasFICTION 1 Tell Me Lies by J.P. Pomare (Hachette, $29.99) Every January, there's a new best-selling crime thriller by the New Zealand-born author who lives in Melbourne. Pomare is ...
Our approach so far in trying to end what Dr Collin Tukuitonga describes as a 'racist' disease - rheumatic fever - has not worked. It's time we try something new, he writes. Acute rheumatic fever and the rheumatic heart disease it causes, long-known as a disease of poverty, is a blight on ...
New Zealand triple-code star, Anna Harrison, can't stop returning to the courts - whether it's netball or beach volleyball. She tells Ashley Stanley what keeps drawing her back. The day before Anna Harrison leaps back into netball, she will have one more hit-out at another of her favourite old sports ...
The lights are burning into the night at the New York Yacht Club's America's Cup base as they race to fix their damaged boat. And Suzanne McFadden discovers something surprising may emerge. Out of American Magic’s calamity may come opportunity - for even more speed. While the lights burn bright ...
New to sailing? With the Prada Cup resuming this weekend, here’s how to bluff your way into sounding like a pro. When I was 10, my mum made my brother and I join the local sailing club. It was a favourite pastime of families in Kerikeri, and my brother was actually ...
A formal complaint to the UN, signed by a NZ Muslim group, says France’s Islamophobic laws and policies are entrenching discrimination and breaching human rights laws. The Khadija Leadership Network has joined a global coalition of Muslim organisations to formally complain about the French government’s systemic entrenchment of Islamophobia and discrimination against ...
Summer reissue: Join Michèle A’Court, Alex Casey, Leonie Hayden and a lineup of incredibly successful New Zealand women as they confront their imposter syndrome once and for all. First published 20 October, 2020. Independent journalism depends on you. Help us stay curious in 2021. The Spinoff’s journalism is funded by its members ...
With criticism from National piling on over the property market, the prime minister has detailed when the government will make housing announcements. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marco Rizzi, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Western Australia Some Australians could be receiving a COVID-19 vaccine within weeks. Amid the continued spread of the virus and emergence of highly contagious variants, the federal government has accelerated the start of the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University Australia’s Threatened Species Strategy — a five-year plan for protecting our imperilled species and ecosystems — fizzled to an end last year. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Arosha Weerakoon, Lecturer, General Dentist & PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland Baby teeth, or milk teeth, act like lighthouses to guide the adult ones to their correct destination. A baby tooth will become wobbly and fall out because the adult tooth ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he’s joined by Simon Coley, co-founder of All Good and Karma Drinks.Bananas are one of the ...
Tackling topics such as rugby and body image, Stuff’s latest podcast shines a much-needed light on Aotearoa’s complex relationship with masculinity, writes Trevor McKewen, author of the book Real Men Wear Black.I wasn’t sure what to think when two episodes of the new local podcast He’ll Be Right landed in ...
The Rainforest Alliance reveals that 68%* of Kiwis say the COVID-19 pandemic has made them more conscious about environmental and social sustainability issues. Seventy two percent* state that they have been trying to make more sustainable purchasing ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has raised concerns that Australia’s proposed News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code could fundamentally break the internet as we know it. His concerns ...
ANALYSIS:By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path Two weeks after the storming of the US Capitol by the followers of his predecessor, in the middle of an out-of-control pandemic that has killed more than 400,000 ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Cantrell, Lecturer, Creative Writing & English Literature, University of Southern Queensland Described as “the world’s greatest storyteller”, Roald Dahl is frequently ranked as the best children’s author of all time by teachers, authors and librarians. However, the new film adaptation of ...
Peak housing body, Community Housing Aotearoa (CHA) welcomes the updated Public Housing Plan announced today by Minister Woods, and the commitment by this Government to fix New Zealand’s housing crisis. The 8,000 additional homes are a significant ...
Having recently walked much of the South Island stretch of Te Araroa, Kirsten O’Regan reflects on the magnificent landscapes and interesting characters she encountered along the way.On our 36th day of walking, we climb through the fire-blackened hills above Ohau, stopping to examine heat-disfigured trail markers. Fresh green shoots have ...
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 .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgVVG5EknuI
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94dBVPpymac
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWoDSGfSu6o
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