h a l f b a k e r yTrying to contain nuts.
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Dotted around these sceptred isles are a good number of
lighthouses, often in coastal locations.
Many of these lighthouses have stood for centuries, having
been first conceived as evil eyes to scare off the French
and other undesirables. Most of them continued to be
maintained well into the
20th century, acting as warning
and navigational beacons for ships. Many are, in fact, still
operable, but nowadays use electric lighting.
Given that lighthouse keeping is no longer a job, it is clear
that the only useful part of the lighthouse is the very top,
which often quite some distance from the bottom. The
intervening structure is now redundant.
At the same time, it is clear that nuclear power is the only
sane way to produce electricity, at least until we stop
panicking over global warming.
Some of the characteristics of nuclear reactors are as
follows:
(a) Most people do not want to live near one.
(b) They need reliable access to coolant
(c) They are best built in areas not known for being
earthquakey.
The inescapable conclusion, therefore, is that England's
collection of sturdy, remote coastal lighthouses should be
adapted to provide nuclear power.
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But where will you then hide all the ICBMs ? The "disused" mineshafts are already full to the brim with little green aliens ... |
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I suppose I could've done a better write-up with mine if I
had put more than a minute of thought in it. |
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//But where will you then hide all the ICBMs ? // |
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Haven't you heard? In the event of a nuclear war,
Wales slides back to reveal the launch tubes. |
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Abandoned Lighthouse Nudie Rectors:
Quite often members of the priesthood are convicted of
various sex crimes and need to be housed somewhere
where they are being punished, but at the same time safe
from attack from other inmates. What better than to
maroon them in abandoned lighthouses? |
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'You are the light of the world...' |
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Here's me thinking this would be a new stretched reactor
with telescoping control rods. All across the country
converted lighthouses everywhere will be rising to need of
the power grid. |
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// Wales slides back to reveal the launch tubes. // |
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Can that be done now ? How credible does the threat need to be ? It does slide into the sea, doesn't it ? |
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It will of course be necessary to carefully preserve those portions containing narrow-gauge steam railways. The rest can be dumped. |
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I've always had difficulty reconciling your passion for
steam engines with your role as part of a
hegemonizing swarm, [8th]. Do Hornby sets work OK
under microgravity in the cube? Do the other
borgeois know about this, or is it a secret vice? |
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The locos with Magnadhesion do, but the rolling stock can be problematic. However, it's just a matter of adjusting the local synthetic gravity field, and making sure the track is properly pinned to the baseboard. |
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Decades ago, we assimilated a model train enthusiast. Just one, and only for a few minutes, until all the alarms went off ... but it was too late. We're only obsessive about dominating all other life forms in the galaxy, that doesn't even come close to the fanatical single-mindedness of an anorak-wearing train nerd who has just noticed that the porter's barrow in tonight's episode of Poirot was a GWR model only produced after 1933, and was allegedly on the platform of an LMS station in 1926. And the station master's hat only had two bands of braid, not three. And the "Way Out" sign was in the wrong font. And that type of composite carriage was only ever run at the back of the train, not behind the loco ... which had the wrong headlights for a stopping local passenger ... and the driver had the wrong colour of overalls ... and the fireman's shovel should have three rivets, not two, and the haft should be oiled elm, not varnished pine ... |
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Synthetic gravity? How vulgar. |
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I think that Max, bless him, has made three small errors:
1. Although I am no expert on England (more of a rubbernecker), round my nape of the woods the lighthouses are yes unmanned but they are not actually abandoned. Whether Max cared about this distinction, I do not and will never know, but it does seem that it was important enough to lead him to make it the first word of the title.
2. The intervening structure between the ground and the top is not, as Max posits, redundant, unless the height of the lighthouse is immaterial. My position is that the height of the lighthouse is not immaterial. If it was at ground level the light would blind nearby mammals.
3. The location of lighthouses is generally driven by proximity to the sea and to sea-rocks that hole boats. Many lighthouses (again, in this nape) are accordingly quite hard to get to and are in terrain quite unsuited to grid connection and high voltage lines. |
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Well, in my opinion this addresses the biggest hurdle 4th generation nuclear power faces, perception of the public. It's been pointed out that if the public's first experience with crude oil based products was napalm the idea of putting gasoline, a related product, in everybody's car and driving around in them at 70 miles per hour would probably run into some promotion issues. This keeps them some distance from population centers but not so much that running the undersea power lines from them is impractical. |
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You've also got issues like the communists blew up a badly engineered, badly run plant in the Chernobyl but this is the same group that "liberated" over a hundred million workers by starving them to death. |
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Try it with one first. Leave the light on too. "See that pretty light out there on the ocean? That's where the electricity keeping our society working comes from." |
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//You've also got issues like the communists blew up a badly engineered, badly run plant in the Chernobyl// |
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The secret to running nuclear reactors could be quite simple: give it to a small team of young military trained men. After all, the U.S. Navy has run hundreds of the things for 70 years without incident*. They're doing it on hard mode too, not just quietly monitoring a reactor generating a stable baseload of energy, they're turning it up and down while charging around at 40mph in a steel box full of many other dangerous things. |
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YES! Exactly! A young coworker of mine a few years ago had just come off of working the nuclear reactor on an aircraft carrier. In Waikiki you’re surfing a few miles away from not only a bunch a nuclear reactors, your sitting in the Sun sipping a mai tai in view of enough nuclear weapons to wipe out a significant portion of humankind. Never mind there are plenty of ICBMs with nukes aimed at Pearl Harbor as well. I’d say the risk / reward ratio of just having a couple of offshore reactors is a lot better than that. |
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