openspaceman

Which is why they can pass through a mucous membrane and into the blood

I suspect you were still in primary school at the time @Mick Dempsey

You would not have been happy watching me sequentially pull a line of dead elms into a vacant carpark with the wife's MGB then 😉, it saved a lot of effort banging wedges in.

It is an interesting question as currently I do not think they are exempted under the waste regulations. They can identify whether particulates come from combustion of biomass or hydrocarbon and differentiate them from non combustion particulates but I wonder how they allocate the various size classes, as someone said earlier in the thread it has only been fairly recently that the technology has existed for differentiating PM 2.5 from PM 10, and remember there are 64 times as many PM 2.5 per microgram as PM 10. It amuses me when I collect kids from a forest school there is always a fire pit burning with blue smoke wafting around and a long while back my particulate detector minding its own business sniffing for fugitive particulates from my stove went wild when I lit a joss stick to identify draughts. Not that I would under state the problem of particulates, products of incomplete combustion, their effects are insidious, think how long it took to link lung cancer with smouldering biomass, but it is difficult to quantify how life limiting they are, After all it is only recently the median age of death has fallen yet there is less air pollution now than in the 40s during which the current cohort of people of that age were growing up.

Yes it is the new root growth you are trying to support and the stem will put on optimum growth for support as it flexes

The spike in temperature that precipitated the combustion of the aluminium containment was due in large part to the release of Wigner energy, this was energy stored in the distortion of the graphite core and had built up from the neutron absorption to the extent it suddenly released like an earthquake does. The reason it happened was because the joint research that had discovered this was in america and their fear of the "communist" labour government resulted in them not allowing the british researchers who had returned home access to it. The core should have been heated up periodically to "anneal" the graphite back to its resting state.

That later technology is too recent for my understanding but yes the idea is you have a reaction that has a negative temperature coefficient, as the temperature goes up the neutrons that are released by the earlier fission are not moderated so continue out of the core too fast to strike another fuel molecule.

It was an air cooled graphite core, I cannot remember what the fuel rods and control were but probably uranium and boron. Because the core was just air cooled and the hot air was vented to atmosphere there was no scope for raising steam and producing power. Calder Hall was the world's first reactor to produce commercial power by steam turbines but the primary reason for building it was to produce plutonium for bombs by bombarding the aluminium cased raw materials with neutrons. It was the aluminium that burned to release radio isotopes, iodine being a prime one that contaminated dairy cows in the Wiscale disaster, not the graphite core as claimed IIRC.

Adiabatic flame temperature of wood is 1600C, allowing for excess air and 1200C is about all you can achieve, which is why charcoal was necessary for smelting iron and later coke and hydrocarbons were used for the 2000C plus.

I do have as it was my conceptual design, perfected by a colleague that supplied the first kiln to the county's biggest log supplier.

Wood will always dry down to it's equilibrium water content (below 17% wwb in England) given time and once this dry as long as it is not re wetted it will not degrade further by microbes eating it. Yes bark is largely waterproof and yest a big round log will not dry in a summer, which is why crosscut and split so you can pick them up on and end one handed they will dry in a summer if there is enough air flow. I have filled the log store I used between October and December 22 and half filled the January february one and they will dry out easily. The ash I am burning (or was as I let the stove out as it is warm) is showing at 12% on my meter and burns with a very lively flame.

I'm sorry Neil I was confusing you with @nepia. Yes the only reason the post war labour government went down the magnox route was to produce plutonium (because the air cooled core at windscale overheated due to the graphite core suddenly releasing its stress and burning the uranium being bombarded with neutrons. It is doubtful that any of these and the later Dounreay fast breeder ever covered their build and operating costs let alone their decommissioning.

Funny you should say that as I have turned my thoughts to a simple electrostatic filter that you switch on when you light the fire and it switches off when the flue temperature drops to show the fire is out. Servicing it at the chimney pot is the biggest problem plus the only firm that sells them wanted £1800 some years ago. The thing is the percentage of particulates in the air due to wood fires was bound to go up as other sources of combustion derived particulates were reduced. Think back to 1990 (if you are old enough) when straw burning filled the air with smoke in late summer, now not done, garden green waste collections have cut bonfires and then we have diesel particulate filters, adblue and catalytic converters reducing pollution from transport plus EVs becoming popular. I am adding insulation to my house, mostly because I may not be able to collect logs and when I am gone my partner definitely won't. I have left it too late really as it has been amazing how much my gas and electricity consumption has dropped.

Good post with some interesting thoughts but you don't qualify as an urban dweller. I do and have received comments from locals about how bad I am to burn wood, so I am paranoid about emitting smoke. Luckily I supply both near neighbours with illicit logs.

I don't believe so, the faster you dry the log the less dry matter is respired by bugs and the more energy is available for combustion. Wood essentially burns to carbon dioxide and water as long as the three Ts are catered for Time for the combustion to complete (in the order of a second for a flame) Turbulence to allow for better mixing to increase the chance of a fuel molecule meeting an oxygen molecule (within the time above). Temperature in the combustion zone which every molecule is subject to (in the time above) and its 850C. Plus supplying enough air to do the job (about 200% of stoichiometric for a simple stove).

Nooo. Now we have gone down the renewables route the cost and time delay of new nuclear is not worthwhile even before you consider the moral dilemma of leaving the radioactive waste for later generations to sort out. Wind power is proving cheap, even if the profits are all going to foreign companies so storage is where we need to be investing.

Vast majority of Londoners support ban on wood burners | Air pollution | The Guardian WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM Exclusive: Poll shows national support for ban in urban areas, where burners have worst impact Picture seems to show someone burning wet wood and doesn't look like it is in Britain. This is something I seldom see now near me and generally only notice white smoke for a short while as the stove warms up.

If the cracks are caused because the outside is drying faster than the core then put it somewhere colder with a higher humidity. You need to dry it evenly so water is leaving the surface at the same rate it is migrating out of the core. OTOH the chances are it is the difference between tangential and radial shrinkage that is causing the cracks and there is not much can be done about that.

We retrieved my mate's dad's pimp clamp from the bonfire his sister threw it on. All the wood parts gone but the ironwork still exists. He used to do it with his dad as a Saturday job but it was basically a vertical vice which squeezed the bundle and then a wire tie was wrapped round. If I were to try it I think I would go with two sticks with a chain between then, lay the wood on the chain, fold the sitcks over and tie the bundle.

Doesn't Brinsbury do stuff anymore?

Just think it used to be tulip bulbs, then stamps... It highlights the difference in wealth that we have

And don't try and work wet clay, even when dry you can overwork it into too fine a tilth.

There are others: This clearly shows the taper but the alternating advancing mechanism is a bit hard for me to follow still

Marvelous machine. I noted the larch shingles I recently saw were parallel and this machine made proper tapered ones. I liked the way it advanced the billet in alternate steps but wondered how it managed to clamp at the same time. Someone previously posted their machine to do taper cuts on a woodmizer and I could see much the same thing being done to cut shingles from multiple billets.

A long time ago much was made of tomato growing using waste heat from Tolimore (spelling?) distillery. My guess is cheap air transport put paid to growing vegetables under glass. Back in the 70s New Scientist proposed converting redundant supertankers to grow tomatoes with a constantly rotating rack system, planting up here then cruising to the equator till ripening started and returning home.