In the news

Amazing

Halfon forgets The Lion King was torn from his mother and forced to work in a circus.

And that his father was trampled to death by a stampede in the toilet roll aisle of his local Waitrose.

(possibly too far, sorry)

I think it all means Stanley Johnson is going to be murdered by Jeremy Irons. As I predicted.

Well with Alan Rickman gone, there are no other classic English baddies left. So it had to be him.

Just got an email from The Telegraph (Why? How?) offering 6 months free subscription for NHS workers.

Really? After all the stuff that their columnists have pumped out over the last few years? Hypocrisy doesn’t even come close (and even worse, they don’t even have the spine to stick with courage of their convictions).

Biggest shock of all though? My surprise

probably hoping the can rinse them if they forget to cancel after the 6 months.

it's okay, though, we'll clap hard tomorrow...

It’s a horrible paper, the editorials are bad but Oliver Holt and Alison Pearson are way out there

Telegraph became outright propaganda a while ago now.

Seven men and three women arrived on the chartered aircraft to Marseille-Provence airport, where helicopters were waiting to fly them on to Cannes, where they had rented a luxury villa.
The men, aged 40-50, and women, aged 23-25, were refused permission to enter France and ordered by police to fly back to the UK.

Nothing looks at all dodgy about that.

In a couple of years it will be the opening of a Guy Ritchie film.

Chernobyl could be about to go up in smoke again according to this:

https://twitter.com/abandonedameric/status/1249726065012019207?s=19

You’d kinda hope that there’s enough of a fire break between the woods and the plant proper, and that there wouldn’t be too much flammable stuff left lying around.

If the plant, and in particular the reactors that were still in use until relatively recently still needs ample power to remain in a safe state and that power comes from elsewhere...then yeah this could pose a problem.

The woods are full of radioactive particles

2020 strikes again :(

Very sad for those that lost their homes.

Hah, as was a whole swathe of the atmosphere above Northern Europe that day.

It's interesting that the IAEA don't have a story or statement on this yet - or at least one that's easy to find. Maybe when they are back from hols.

There’s no fuel left in reactors 1-3, and the containment on reactor 4 is hopefully pretty solid. So I believe that it’s mainly it’s the release of radiation stored in the local flora that’s the issue. But I am not a nuclear engineer etc.

Another environmental disaster that might happen in 2020 would be spills caused by the decision to reduce oil production. Easier said than done. Once oil starts gushing out you can’t just plug the hole again. Nor is there a lot of spare storage capacity so oil producers will be relying on increasingly ramshackle interim solutions.

My wife is in charge of oil spill response for a region of her company's operations. I'll let her know!

Once oil starts gushing out you can’t just plug the hole again.

How much oil gushes out? I got the impression a lot was pumped out. All those nodding donkeys with the sun setting behind them in movies must be doing something.

It depends on dozens if not hundreds of factors. Its extremely complicated.

The ability to turn off production has been a mandatory requirement for new wells a long time (decades I think) but accidents happen. Like Deepwater Horizon.

Theres a well in the gulf of Mexico that has been leaking for over twenty years apparently....the company that owned it went into administration and the US never managed to get them to cap it. Still being argued in the courts....still pumping into the ocean all day every day...

Yeah, I would imagine those nodding donkeys are fairly easy to switch off. Deep sea wells less so.
And in any case the spills have been predicted to happen at storage sites. I can’t find the source right now, but the gulf states have already started commissioning oil tankers just to sit around as extra storage, not transport. My understanding is that we’ll use up all the good tankers, then start using the rusty ones, then put back into use the ones that should have gone to scrap already etc etc.
Somewhere in that chain there will be eventually be a fuck up.

Presumably because switching the pumps off now is two months too late - you still need somewhere to put all the stuff that’s rolling down the production line.

And there’s a lot of it

I think I read that this is particularly bad timing for the USA, who were renovating a significant percentage of their bunkering facilities when this all kicked off. The middle east still has plenty of storage left for now from what I read in the same article.

Either way, situations like this arising requiring rapid changes to processes always run the risk of mishaps.