Silly Coal Burning Frogs Won't Be Fulfilling Their Zero Carbon Delusions...,

emeatribune |  The end of France’s coal era seemed so certain last year that the operator of one of the country’s last coal-burning plants posted an upbeat educational video on YouTube titled “Let’s visit a coal plant that’s going to be destroyed!”

The plant in the northeastern town of Saint-Avold indeed halted coal production as scheduled earlier this year — but not for long. This week, its workers were back at the controls, transporting coal from storage heaps and refiring furnaces, as part of emergency efforts to keep the heat and electricity on this winter.

The energy crisis across Europe unleashed by Russia’s war in Ukraine has paved the way for coal’s comeback in some regions, to the dismay of politicians and activists who warn this endangers climate goals, the climate itself and public health.

“Working here we know the negative impact of the coal plant, but nonetheless we see it as a necessary evil,” said shift supervisor Thomas About at the Emile-Huchet Power Plant in Saint-Avold.

“Given the current state of the electrical network, I nonetheless fear greatly that this production tool is necessary in the medium term,” he told The Associated Press.

Nearby, wheel loaders scooped mounds of coal and dumped it onto conveyor belts, and gray fumes rose from the plant’s smokestacks.

In France the return to coal is surprising because the country started phasing it out decades ago and relies heavily on nuclear power instead. But this year, on top of Russia largely cutting off natural gas to Europe, nearly half of France’s nuclear reactors shut down for maintenance or corrosion and other problems.

Facing a worst-case scenario of rolling power cuts to households, the government issued a decree in September to allow Saint-Avold to start again and continued activity at another coal plant in western France, citing the “exceptional” and “unforeseeable” context of energy supply challenges.

President Emmanuel Macron had initially vowed to close all coal-burning plants in the country by the end of this year due to climate-related concerns.

As an aside: France does not depend on Russia for uranium: everything comes from Niger (34.7%), Kazakhstan (28.9%), Uzbekistan (26.4%), and Australia (9.9%) and is then processed into actual fuel in France.

However, it is entirely dependent on Russia for reprocessing depleted uranium. The French can perform a first phase (separating plutonium from spent fuel), but their much-touted prowess in turning “nuclear waste” into usable fissile uranium is only possible thanks to the Rosatom reprocessing plant in Seversk.

The last transport with depleted uranium from France to Russia took place in October, and the French firm Orano, which supplies French atomic power plants, does not intend to renew the contract. Which means that spent fuel may soon start to accumulate as genuine waste on the premises of French power plants…

 

No Electricity = Not Enough Heat = Burst Pipes = Millions Of Refugees

Normally frozen pipes are a not-too-costly problem, but that's for a single site. Widespread burst pipes will put pressure on supplies and professionals. And remember Ukraine’s GDP contraction is depression-level, so it’s not as if there will be a lot of money around to fix things. Don’t think of frozen pipes on a per building level. Consider instead the effect of widespread leaks in a water supply system. As long as the pipes stay frozen, the system will continue to operate normally as the ice stops leakage. Once the ice melts from all of the small leaks, the water pressure of the system can plummet to the point where it runs dry, burns out pumping systems, draws non-potable fluids into the system, can render disinfecting systems inoperable, or makes fire suppression impossible. Further, rapid pressure changes in a piped system can create more breaks through water hammer.

Now imagine trying to fix multiple large pumps, motors, valves, etc. given existing supply chain issues, wartime conditions, and fuel problems. It’s a much bigger problem than it appears.

There is no warehouse full of large power transformers. Lead times for new builds is quite long. You can't manufacture transformers just anywhere - and - the skilled trades needed to do so are not abundant.  I speak from personal experience of no electricity due to total grid failure; It means that the most blasé is surprisingly effected

1. Sliding doors for shops cease to operate, you cannot even get inside; dheckouts no longer work
2. ATMs and credit card payments stop.
3. All cold/chilled/frozen food in shops has to be destroyed
4. Petrol pumps no longer work
5. Gas boilers no longer work
6. Central heating pumps no longer work
7. Domestic fridges and freezers need to emptied and the contents buried asap
8. Water pressure drops to zero
9. Toilets cannot be flushed
10. No internet, no Mobile phones once back-up power at the towers is exhausted
11. Special local facilities with generators are literally vital for those with certain medical conditions
12. Long dark, hungry evenings with nothing to do except burn wood, if you can get it.

13. The good news however; selfie sticks and smart phone cameras can no longer be recharged...

Winter is coming within mere weeks and no matter what else, surely the burden of finding warmth and power in Ukraine is soon to become intolerable. A human catastrophe is rising for certain. The question is, what does the West do now when Putin and Russia again offer to talk? 

Shutting off the power in the rump Ukrainian state will cause a mass exodus to flee for refuge to Poland and Germany, this will be a disaster unparalleled in recent European history. Just the attendant collapse in telecommunications will make the place a madhouse. You can well imagine the rest. Already there are queues for water in Nikolaev, and who knows where else. How does queueing for water, if there is any, in temperatures of minus-20C to minus-40C sound?

Poland and Germany absorbing the cold freezing hungry Ukraine refugees sounds like a non-starter despite their energetic support to date. Of course the Ukrainians will need to be told how to shower by the Germans so as to save fuel.

Lots of commentators believe the time for talking is over, at least until Odessa is taken. They may be right. But Putin has been steadily measured and deliberate throughout, ratcheting up the pain, and that ratcheting is going to rise very very fast with the cold weather and lack of power. What happens when millions of people are freezing to death at the Polish border as US citizens go to the polls in November? Will Biden and Blinken and Nuland try to bring an anti-Russia hysteria into the polling booth, nuclear war be damned? Or will people begin to see the huge risks facing us all and publicly demand a stop to further madness?

I'Oh'No What Your Prayer Circle Is Like, But This Is What I'm Talm'bout: La-ila ha-ill-allah !

wikipedia  |  The Tetris effect (also known as Tetris syndrome) occurs when people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams.^[1] It takes its name from the video game Tetris.^[1]

People who have played Tetris for a prolonged amount of time can find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street.^[1] They may see colored images of pieces falling into place on an invisible layout at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes.^[1] They may see such colored, moving images when they are falling asleep, a form of hypnagogic imagery.^[2]

Those experiencing the effect may feel they are unable to prevent the thoughts, images, or dreams from happening.^[3]

A more comprehensive understanding of the lingering effects of playing video games has been investigated empirically as game transfer phenomena (GTP).^[4]

The Tetris effect can occur with other video games.^[5] It has also been known to occur with non-video games, such as the illusion of curved lines after doing a jigsaw puzzle, the checker pattern of a chess board (or imagining chess pieces in unrelated objects or phenomena), or the involuntary mental visualisation of Rubik's Cube algorithms common among speedcubers.

The earliest example that relates to a computer game was created by the game Spacewar! As documented in Steven Levy's book Hackers: "Peter Samson, second only to Saunders in Spacewarring, realized this one night when he went home to Lowell. As he stepped out of the train, he stared upward into the crisp, clear sky. A meteor flew overhead. Where's the spaceship? Samson thought as he instantly swiveled back and grabbed the air for a control box that wasn’t there." (p. 52.)

Robert Stickgold reported on his own experiences of proprioceptive imagery from rock climbing.^[3] Another example, sea legs, are a kind of Tetris effect. A person newly on land after spending long periods at sea may sense illusory rocking motion, having become accustomed to the constant work of adjusting to the boat making such movements (see "Illusions of self-motion" and "Mal de debarquement"). The poem "Boots" by Rudyard Kipling describes the effect, resulting from repetitive visual experience during a route march:

'Tain't—so—bad—by—day because o' company,

But—night—brings—long—strings—o' forty thousand million
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up an' down again.

There's no discharge in the war!

— Rudyard Kipling, Boots

Mathematicians have reported dreaming of numbers or equations; for example Srinivasa Ramanujan, or Friedrich Engel, who remarked "last week in a dream I gave a chap my shirt-buttons to differentiate, and he ran off with them".^[6]

wikipedia | Klüver's form constants have appeared in other drug-induced and naturally occurring hallucinations, suggesting a similar physiological process underlying hallucinations with different triggers. Klüver's form constants also appear in near-death experiences and sensory experiences of those with synesthesia. Other triggers include psychological stress, threshold consciousness (hypnagogia), insulin hypoglycemia, the delirium of fever, epilepsy, psychotic episodes, advanced syphilis, sensory deprivation, photostimulation, electrical stimulation, crystal gazing, migraine headaches, dizziness and a variety of drug-induced intoxications.^[1] These shapes may appear on their own or with eyes shut in the form of phosphenes, especially when exerting pressure against the closed eyelid.^[2]

It is believed that the reason why these form constants appear has to do with the way the visual system is organized, and in particular in the mapping between patterns on the retina and the columnar organization of the primary visual cortex. Concentric circles in the retina are mapped into parallel lines in the visual cortex. Spirals, tunnels, lattices and cobwebs map into lines in different directions. This means that if activation spreads in straight lines within the visual cortex, the experience is equivalent to looking at actual form constants.^[1]

Author Michael Moorcock once observed in print that the shapes he had seen during his migraine headaches resembled exactly the form of fractals. The diversity of conditions that provoke such patterns suggests that form constants reflect some fundamental property of visual perception.

Cultural significance

Form constants have a relationship to some forms of abstract art, especially the visual music tradition, as William Wees noted in his book Light Moving in Time about research done by German psychologist Heinrich Klüver on the form constants resulting from mescaline intoxication. The visual and synaesthetic hallucinations this drug produced resembles, as Wees noted, a listing of visual forms employed in visual music:

[Klüver’s] analysis of hallucinatory phenomena appearing chiefly during the first stages of mescaline intoxication yielded the following form constants: [emphasis original] (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone or vessel; (d) spiral. Many phenomena are, on close examination, nothing but modifications and transformations of these basic forms. The tendency towards "geometrization," as expressed in these form constants, is also apparent in the following two ways: (a) the forms are frequently repeated, combined, or elaborated into ornamental designs and mosaics of various kinds; (b) the elements constituting these forms, such as squares in the chessboard design, often have boundaries consisting of geometric forms.^[3]

These form-constants provide links between abstraction, visual music and synaesthesia. The cultural significance of form constants, as Wees notes in Light Moving in Time is part of the history of abstract film and video.

The practice of the ancient art of divination may suggest a deliberate practice of cultivating form constant imagery and using intuition and/or imagination to derive some meaning from transient visual phenomena.

Psychedelic art, inspired at least in part by experiences with psychedelic substances, frequently includes repetitive abstract forms and patterns such as tessellation, Moiré patterns or patterns similar to those created by paper marbling, and, in later years, fractals. The op art genre of visual art created art using bold imagery very like that of form constants.

In electroacoustic music, Jon Weinel has explored the use of altered states of consciousness as a basis for the design of musical compositions. His work bases the design of sonic materials on typical features of hallucinatory states, and organises them according to hallucinatory narratives. As part of this work, form constants feature prominently as a basis for the design of psychedelic sonic and visual material.^[4]