Category: Stuff

Lignite, sometimes called ‘brown coal’, is a soft, brown sedimentary rock that is essentially compressed peat.

It is a poor fuel compared to other types of coal. It produces less heat and more carbon dioxide and sulphur. And some brown coal contains toxic heavy metals that get burned off or remain in the fly ash after burning.

It is used almost exclusively as a fuel in steam-electric power stations.

Lignite Or Bust

If lignite is all you’ve got then that’s what you burn, up and until someone points out what a bad idea it is environmentally.

The Garzweiler surface mine in Germany is an opencast lignite mine. It’s huge, a long scar stretching north west to south east covering 48 square km.

And now for the bad news. It’s going to get bigger.

Because Russia turned off the gas tap, RWE who own the mine need more space to strip out more brown coal. So an array of eight wind turbines near the Garzweiler mine are being removed to increase the opencast area so it can mine more lignite.

Under its licence, Energiekontor, which owns the wind turbines, has to dismantle the turbines by the end of 2023. Why, I don’t know.

Three turbines have gone, already.

I guess that if the lignite mine did not need the space, then eight new wind turbines could have gone up. But that’s not what’s happening.

So no Russian gas, but dirty brown lignite.

What is the overall balance of environmental cost? It’s worse, that’s clear. How much worse, I don’t know. But lobbyists at COP27 are promoting gas as a clean fuel…

Britain?

What is the effect on decisions made in Britain?

You know how people are influenced by their environment?

Well, when the British Government wants to open a new coal mine, and someone in the EU wants to say that’s bad, the Minister (Michale Gove MP) can say ‘Look who’s talking – look what you have done at Garzweiler 

Report in the Guardian 7 December 2022
The UK will build its first new coalmine for three decades at Whitehaven in Cumbria, despite objections locally, across the UK and from around the world.
Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, gave the green light for the project on Wednesday, paving the way for an estimated investment of £165m that will create about 500 new jobs in the region and produce 2.8m tonnes of coking coal a year, largely for steelmaking.
The mine will also produce an estimated 400,000 tones of greenhouse gas emissions a year, increasing the UK’s emissions by the equivalent of putting 200,000 cars on the road.
The vast majority of the coal produced will be for export, as most UK steel producers have rejected the use of the coal, which is high in sulphur and surplus to their needs.

Some problems are overwhelming, the problem of energy escaping from shops with open doors is easily solved. Shops (with few exceptions) put fear of missing out on potential customers above the desire to conserve energy – whether heating or air conditioning,

No shop would feel disadvantaged if all shops were required by law to close their doors so as not to leak their energy to the outside world.

I have started a petition to UK Government to ask them to debate legislation to push this win-win solution along.

The petition:

To save energy, require shops to keep their doors closed during opening hours.

What I want Government to do:

Introduce legislation requiring all shops to close their doors (that is, not open wide) during opening hours. This proposal is not solely about the current high cost of energy, but about wasting precious energy and the costs of producing it on a planet that is warming uncontrollably.

Why I want Government to do it: 

We all understand that shops need to be welcoming to customers, but customers should quickly realise that a closed door does not mean a closed shop. Shops (with few exceptions) put fear of missing out on potential customers above the desire to conserve energy – whether heating or air conditioning, No shop should feel disadvantaged if all shops were required by law to close their doors so as not to leak their energy to the outside world.

Note that you have to be a UK citizen to sign the petition.

Click this link to sign the petition:

The Impetus For This

For years my wife, Tamara, has been speaking to managers in shops and supermarkets talking to them about the heat they let escape through the doors they leave open wide. By keeping at it, she has seen the attitude of shop managers change over the years from ‘who is this person coming to make my life difficult?’ to be more positive and understanding.

And who wouldn’t change their attitude once they see the bigger picture about the risks to Earth’s environment.

They say that if you want to sell something to a customer you have to bring it to their attention eight times before it penetrates the layers of consciousness.

So this is me acknowledging that Tamara has kept on and on, and not been dissuaded. 

We know there is legislation on closed doors in other countries. How hard can it be for Government to legislate on this? So I made a start with a petition. 

In December 2021 the Speaker of the House of Commons called in the police to investigate drug use in the House of Commons – cannabis and cocaine.

One could imagine different scenes:

It could be politicians taking drugs to get through the day, taking them openly because they know they are among friends

It could be politicians surreptitiously smoking near open windows, even in the depths of winter, blowing away the telltale smells. Or snorting in the toilets.

It could be politicians gathered in groups to delve deeply into how to help the populace, taking drugs in a shamanistic way to increase their ability to be responsive to novel ideas

It could be politicians in drunken, drug-fueled orgies like the last days of the Third Reich, when everyone knew they were going to hell.

And what came of it? Nothing, as far I can tell.

Then in May this year, the ex-Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten told Andrew Marr on TV that drugs so common that MPs have been known to snort cocaine from their desks.

But now in December 2022, swab tests showed cocaine at a residence of former Prime Minister Liz Truss.

Ah well, it’s only drugs. I mean, what is the penalty in British law for possessing those?

Possession of cocaine is a criminal offence which can lead to imprisonment for up to seven years, or an unlimited fine.

Fission is nuclear reactors and atom bombs. Take a heavy element that has a radioactive variant and smush a lot of it together, As each atom gives off radioactive particles, they either zip off into space or they hit another radioactive atom and trigger it to send out a radioactive particle. Smush enough of it together and it will be certain that most particles will hit other atoms. That will cause a chain reaction. Control that by carefully maintaining the distance between the bits, and you have a nuclear reactor. Smush them all together, and you have a bomb.

There are two problems to overcome when making a bomb. One – the reaction blows apart the material, which stops the reaction. Two – how to get the bits smushed together at the right time, over the target and not before?

The solution is to put the radioactive material in a heavy casing to prevent it blowing apart before the reaction can really take hold. We are talking millionths of a second here. And to get the material together in the right place over the target, put most of the material in a case at one end of a tube with a cavity in it.

Put the remaining material at the other end of the tube. When you get to the target, set off a conventional explosion that drives the remaining material at high speed into the cavity in the rest of the material.

That’s fission. It is predictable, and all it needs are the right materials – like Uranium and Plutonium – elements at the dense end of the Periodic Table, with atoms packed closely together just itching to give off their particles.

Fusion

Fusion uses elements at the light end of the Periodic Table, materials that are very abundant but more difficult to trigger. Hydrogen is the lightest element, and it has two radioactive variants. You get them by sifting seawater.

Smush all the radioactive hydrogen together and nothing will happen. You have to encourage it with energy, exciting the material with temperatures more than three million degrees Celsius. That’s the level of energy needed to get the radioactive hydrogen to fuse to start a chain reaction, make a helium nuclei and give off energy. The trick is to get the reaction to give off more energy that is pumped into it. and that is what has been in the news, with scientists at the Livermore Laboratory getting a tiny bit of radioactive hydrogen to give off more energy that was pumped into it.

If it works at scale it is worth it because one kilo of radioactive hydrogen is equal to ten million kilos of fossil fuel.

The Downside

A cheap source of energy might encourage mankind to can carry on as before – look Ma, no pollutants. But we are using up the materials – land use – raw materials for making things – etc – that make that future possible, and we are running out of road. And cheap, clean, energy sources don’t solve that problem.

What’s the chance of a plane falling out of the sky and falling onto a town? Pretty slim. It’s a big world and a lot of empty space, and empty ocean.

Lockerbie is a small town with a population of about 4,000, in the south west of Scotland, about 25km, (16miles) from the border with England.

Although it is tucked away, Scotland’s largest lamb market is held there.

What else does it have that makes it stand out?

After the Second World War the Hallmuir Prisoner of War Camp just a couple of kilometres (one and a half miles) from the town housed Ukrainian soldiers from the Galician Division of the Waffen SS.

That’s a bit weird isn’t it. A small town in rural Scotland, with nothing memorable about it except it’s Scotland’s largest lamb market and it’s next door to a prison camp that housed SS prisoners in World War II.

Oh yes, and it is under a flight path.

In 1988, Pan Am flight 103 blew apart as it flew over the town. A bomb on the plane blew a hole in the side of the fuselage and the decompression blew the entire nose off the plane as well.

Wreckage landed over a huge area – over 2,200 square kilometres (845 square miles).

All 243 passengers and 16 crew died.

And eleven people in Lockerbie died.

Because the plane had only taken off half an hour before, it was full of fuel. A pilot in another plane reported a huge fire on the ground.

So those eleven people died from being hit with the remains of the plane when it fell on the town, or from being burned to death from jet fuel.

Why Lockerbie?

The plane set off on time, and was on course. Some reports said the bombers made a mistake and had intended to time the explosion to happen when the plane was over the Atlantic.

That would have been to their advantage because it would have lessened the chance of investigators recovering clues from the wreckage.

As it was, the bombing was linked to Libyan operatives on the orders of General Gaddafi.

Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi was tried and convicted. Another accused was acquitted.

Now fast forward to December 2020, when a man named Abu Agila Mohammad Masud was charged in the US with building the bomb. He was in Libya when he was charged, so the charge was largely symbolic, until now.

Masud was abducted in December of 2022 by one of the Governments in Libya. There are two Governments because the country is split and arguing about who is in charge.

So now the Scottish authorities have announced that Masud is in US custody.

Who Were The Eleven In Lockerbie Who Died?

I tried to find the names of the people from Lockerbie who were killed, but I didn’t come up with anything. And then my mind wandered and I wondered whether any of the dead had a Ukranian-sounding name.

The chapel that the prisoners built at Hallmuir Prisoner of War Camp is still used today. There are Ukrainian services on the first Sunday of every alternate month. It seems likely that there must be some Ukrainians who stayed on at the town.

If a Ukrainian man was 25 at the end of the war, then in 1988 he would be 68 years old. So it is entirely possible that one or more of the Ukrainian prisoners of war was hit by a piece of fuselage or burned to death from the jet fuel that burned on the ground.

The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) was formed in 1943 with Ukrainian volunteers from Galicia, and then later also with some Slovaks. They fought on the Eastern Front, and in civilian ‘reprisals’.

So I am imagining the bizarre life story of a Ukrainian man who joined the German Waffen SS and saw action on the Eastern Front. He also took part in actions against civilians that were war crimes.

He fought at the Battle of Brody, when his Division was annihilated with eighty percent of his fellow soldiers killed in the battle.

He retreated westward and was taken prisoner and transported to Scotland at the end of the war. After his denazification and release, he married a Scottish woman and took up sheep farming, selling his lambs in the lamb market.

Then in 1988, a plane flying over the town was blown up and he was killed when a piece of fuselage hit him as he sat watching TV at home in Lockerbie.

It could have happened, it could have.

The Chapel

The Canmore National Record of the Historic Environment lists the Lockerbie, Hallmuir Prisoner Of War Camp, Ukrainian Chapel And War Memorial. It describes

a single storey prefabricated hut with pitched roof converted by Ukrainian Prisoner’s of War during 1942. Painted corrugated iron walls with an asbestos roof and timber frame set on a concrete base. Interior painted and wallpapered with iconography at one end and wooden pews.

Something is wrong somewhere, because the Galician Division wasn’t formed until 1943.

Still more curious, the Heritage and History web site describes

The Hallmuir Prisoner of War Camp was built in 1942 to accommodate 450 German and Italian prisoners of war. After the end of World War II, the Italians and Germans were repatriated and by 1947 the camp stood empty.
Later in that year, it became home to over 400 Ukrainian conscripts. One of the huts which had once been used by the Italians as a place of worship, was transformed by the displaced Ukrainian men, into a colourful chapel, to allow them to continue to celebrate their Greek Catholic faith.

The Plane

Investigators painstakingly put together the broken Pan Am plane that exploded, and the plane is still locked away in a huge hanger – retained as evidence that might still be called upon.

Pan Am

Pan American was heavily criticised for its poor security that allowed the bomb onto the plane.

Then the first Gulf War in 1990-1991 reduced air traffic globally. That made the airline unviable, and Pan American Airways filed for bankruptcy protection in 1991 and ceased operations in December of that year.

Pan Am was started in 1927 by two United States Army Air Corps officers who were concerned about the influence of the German-owned Colombian air carrier SCADTA in Central America.

The Second World War forced the end of the German ownership, and SCADTA ceased operations after Pearl Harbour.

The Colombian government merged the airline’s assets into its national airline SACO, that became the airline Avianca, with more than 125 routes worldwide.

World War One started in July 1914 when the Germans set out to make a rapid advance through neutral Belgium and take France quickly. It didn’t happen because the Beligians refused to move aside, and the delay resulted in four years of grinding trench warfare.

In the confrontation at sea, the German High Seas fleet was outnumbered and outgunned by the British Fleet. But the ocean is big, and the Germans took advantage of gaps in the British patrols to break out on raids from their safe harbour in north Germany.

In December 1914 the German fleet sailed to the North East coast of Britain and shelled the coast.

The German ships fired 1,150 shells into the town of Hartlepool, hitting the steelworks, the gasworks, the railways, and killing 86 civilians and injuring 424 more. Seven soldiers died and 14 injured.

If the raid had any lasting effect it was to harden the attitude of the British population against Germany, outraged that the Germans had targeted civilians.

They also blamed the British fleet for letting the Germans slip past them.

Four years later, at the end of the war, the German High Seas Fleet was interned at Scapa Flow. Then, through a misunderstanding over dates, the German fleet commander ordered the fleet to be scuttled.

In the years after the war, some of the ships were raised and salvaged. But three heavy battleships and four light cruisers were too deep to be raised.

The three battleships, SMS König, SMS Kronprinz, and SMS Markgraf, are still there on the sea bed at Scapa Flow.