I awoke this morning to the usual regurgitation of the usual self congratulatory press releases by utilities claiming another Earth Hour “success.” Toronto Hydro reported a 200-megawatt drop in consumption, the implication being that the annual conserve-fest was responsible. This was obligingly reported by CBC News. What nonsense. Check the consumption patterns on any Saturday…
The skilled worker shortage that plagues important trades in Ontario could be addressed at least in part if a new federal job skills measure—apparently introduced in today’s federal budget—works out the way it has been reported. Early reports indicate that the federal government will pay a third of the cost of training a worker, provided…
If you don’t like the tens of thousands of “superfluous” nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Russian arsenals, or any nuclear weapons for that matter, you should be encouraged to know that the U.S. and Russia agreed, in the years after the Cold War ended, to dismantle thousands of them and destroy the nuclear explosive.…
Helen Caldicott is a charming lady: passionate, pleasant, and engaging. She is also hopelessly wrong about her anti-nuclear cause, a fact which is so obvious that it is difficult to refrain from expressing frustration and even annoyance when speaking with her. I debated her once, on TVO, and thought I was being gentle in the…
On March 11, 2011, 803 days ago, Japan’s northeast coast was struck by a tsunami of unprecedented violence. The tsunami had been triggered by an earthquake so powerful that it shifted the earth’s mass and sped up its rotation about its axis, literally shortening the length of each day. Watch this video, filmed live from…
U.S. policy for preventing nuclear weapons proliferation is a two-pronged work in progress. Prong One is essentially intellectual property protection: blocking certain other countries from access to technologies and processes that can help make explosives and bombs. Prong Two is dissuasive diplomacy: using various forms of diplomatic pressure, up to and including military force, to…
Gamma rays, also known as gamma photons, are a shorter-wavelength version of visible light. Visible light, or photons that our eyes can detect, has a wavelength of 380 to 700 nanometers (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). Gamma photons have a much shorter wavelength: 0.3 to 0.003 nanometers. We cannot see them, and have…
The gas plant fiasco in Ontario is the direct outcome of the Green Energy Act (GEA). Natural gas is portrayed as “clean” by those who sell it, even though between midnight and nine a.m. this morning provincial gas plants had dumped more than 15,000 metric tons of pollution into our air (see Table 2 on…
On Family Day, I had a brief but pithy discussion with several family members about what was the greatest technological development of all time. One of my brothers offered cinema as Number One. Someone else said the internet. I won’t disagree that those were blockbuster inventions. But my vote was for the electricity grid. And…
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