I’ve eaten worse.
DG…
1 Like
I’ve been following this incident just after the news became public, and here is a piece of good news:
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, chosen by NASA to carry astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore back to Earth after their Starliner spacecraft was deemed too risky for crew, is approaching the space station. The vehicle, on a mission called Crew-9, is expected to dock at about 5:30 p.m. ET Sunday.
On board the SpaceX vehicle are NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Alongside them are two empty seats, saved for Williams and Wilmore to occupy when the group returns to Earth next year.
1 Like
Still got to be better than those rare French and Italian cheese made using decayed bugs that they let into the cheese. I’ll take prehistoric cheese over those any day.
2 Likes
The last Coal Fired power Station in UK has stopped generating today
4 Likes
Not before time, but this covers up a huge fudge. Drax was converted from coal to ‘biomass’ which produces 7% of the UK’s entire electricity supply. Somehow cutting down and burning live plants is better than burning plants that are already dead. They receive substantial sums from the taxpayer to do this, despite cutting down virgin forest and transporting it thousands of miles to burn it.
8 Likes
The old Drax conundrum.
Let’s stop burning coal … … … of which there is enough to see us through to the next century, and was the reason Drax was built atop the Yorkshire coalfields in the first place.
Let’s, instead, burn Biomass, … … … no, wait, that means chopping down entire forests in Canada, transporting the wood to a factory where it can be magically turned into “Biomass”, which has lovely Green sounding ring to it, and which is obviously much more environmentally friendly than burning that nasty black stuff.
Let’s then employ a fleet of wagons to transport the biomass to a port on the Eastern seaboard, load it onto a diesel driven bulk carrier and cruise across the Atlantic until we reach a port in the West of England, where we once again load it onto a fleet of lorries to drive it East across to the power station in Yorkshire.
The managing director at Drax was interviewed by the BBC, and claimed that only scrap and dead wood was used to provide Biomass, in spite of the filmed evidence of whole bare hillsides, and wagons transporting the wood to the processing plant.
Why would he so blatantly lie about things?
Well, the billions in green subsidies received by Drax so far, might explain a lot.
Environmentally friendly?
You couldn’t make it up. 
21 Likes
Yep, in the mean time we can make tens of thousands of those pesky coal miners redundant that cost us about £30m a year. Never mind we can invest £1b a year to burn an even more polluting solution but they will all think it’s a better solution and pollute less. Problem solved…move on nothing to see here.
5 Likes
Biomass can be “green” in terms of CO2 emissions when grown locally and replanted, with the same amount planted each year as burnt, whether an annual crop or with a longer term crop like trees. I can see thatworking on a small scale, such as for personal space heating if you have the land, or maybe a small power station serving a community with sufficient land, but hard to see that fitting the fuel needs of a major power station…
1 Like
Except that burning Biomass on the scale of Drax is reportedly less “Green” than burning coal.
“Wood is less energy dense than coal, so you have to put more into burning it to get the amount of energy that you want - therefore you release, generally, more carbon dioxide.”
Drax receives about 17 deliveries of wood pellets a day, operating 24 hours a day, six days a week.
In 2020, the company received £832m in UK government subsidies.
If something appears to fly in the face of all logic, just “follow the money” and everything usually then falls into place.
As I said earlier, “You couldn’t make it up”. 
8 Likes
While there are pros and cons to burning wood vs coal as commonly judged by levels of greenhouse gas emissions, additional ill effects of burning wood and other biomass include habitat loss and biodiversity collapse, and use of land that could otherwise be valuable for food or timber production.
7 Likes
Surely Chelsea remain Cole fired?
7 Likes
Surely Palm (er) ) oil fired ??
1 Like
Seems a bit of a shame…
2 Likes
Not so much news, but this morning’s weather forecast for the area here in Kent from the BBC website. 5654 knots sounds pretty gusty to me!
4 Likes
Just a breeze we got 6089 down here in Cornwall.
Was going to cut the hedges today that will have to wait.
3 Likes
Yes i saw that…….then looked at met office and its gusts of 39km h.
2 Likes
Yes, I just showed my wife that! Told her to put her tin hat on.
1 Like
Slighty higher down the coast from here at 16309 !
Hopefully this is a data fault.
Apologies to anyone who is in the USA, who is suffering from real bad weather.
3 Likes
Yes, levity aside, I hope any fellow forum members down in Florida are all OK.
10 Likes