science & technology
Japan Utilities Facing Supply Crunch As Mercury Drops
TOKYO Nikkei–The cold wave sweeping across Japan is pushing electricity companies close to the edge, with power demand surging to the danger zone of above 90% of capacity at six utilities.At Kyushu Electric Power Co. 9508, power demand on Friday peaked at 14.77 million kilowatts between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. The second-highest so far [...]
They’re back! (Well, will be soon) – the Fukushima robots
TOKYO Nikkei–The Chiba Institute of Technology has built two improved versions of a robot designed to help with the cleanup efforts at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the school announced Monday. The Quince No. 2 and No. 3 nuclear-cleanup robots are more rugged than their predecessor.Dubbed Quince No. 2 and No. 3, the [...]
GE-Hitachi Proposes to Burn U.K. Plutonium Stockpile | The Energy Collective
GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy has proposed to the U.K. government to build an advanced nuclear reactor that would consume the country’s stockpile of surplus plutonium. The technology is called PRISM, which stands for Power Reactor Innovative Small Module. If accepted, it would be very different than the other proposals to process plutonium, including those that [...]
New Take on Impacts of Low Dose Radiation « Berkeley Lab News Center
I first heard about the LNT (linear non-threshold theory) of the health effects of radiation exposure via Prof. Lenz’s blog (I couldn’t find a search function on the blog, but here are a couple of items that came up in a Yahoo search: Bernard Cohen on LNT junk science and Nobuo Ikeda on LNT and [...]
Effizienzhaus plus: German electric vehicle house | Lenz Blog
Prof. Lenz blogs indefatigably on the subject of solar energy production and other alternatives or emerging energy technologies. It’s all fascinating stuff, the stuff of dreams. Here’s just one recent extract. I learned that “inductive charging” means having your electric vehicle charge automatically, eliminating the need to mess around with cables. You just park it [...]
Global Village construction set – TED talk
Ivan Illich wrote Deschooling Society in 1971. In it, he suggested that the cars 90% of the people of the world really need, are not hi-tech, but lo-tech – cars, trucks, simple forms of transport that can handle the rough, unpaved roads (for example) and that are easily repaired with tools and parts that the [...]
a fifth of the cesium fell on Japan, most of rest fell into Pacific
Update: Lost the link to the original article, but here’s another one – Japan nuke radiation higher than estimated Well, that’s a bit of a relief, isn’t it? But read the headline if you want to raise your blood pressure a few degrees: The Fukushima nuclear disaster released twice as much of a radioactive substance [...]
What to Do if Your Ereader Is Lost or Stolen
Bought my Kindle3 a few months ago. Quite satisfied, although I prefer playing with my iPad2. Still, here’s some useful advice in case you ever lose your Kindle. If you lose your Kindle ereader, you’re mostly on your own. Amazon claims it is unable to locate the device via GPS, nor will the company remote-wipe [...]
Radiation in Tokyo’s Setagaya-ku due to radium, unconnected with Fukushima
As I was grabbing some breakfast this morning, I caught the following bit of news about a radiation hot-spot in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. Turns out, this may have nothing to do with Fukushima (and of course everyone assumed it did), which is funny because that blows out of the water the assumption that there ain’t no [...]
Evernote, Touchanote
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Evernote recently. Going paperless. And I’m subscribed to the Elephant channel, so this popped up. This could be very useful for some people I know. Not me, I’m never that absent-minded. Now, if only I knew what NFC was… Maybe there’s a tag for that?
