Seismic Assessment for Ottawa

Article

This is nice. Ottawa and Montreal are way up on the list. Since I went nuts writing recently, readership is way up, clicks are at nothing, and I'm in a neutral mood, so my writing is now blocked.

Iron Man

Article

So, add a dash of iron to the nuclear waste and it's sealed forever. I never thought of that, but the iron rusting takes out all the free oxygen, and puts out hydrogen, which clogs all the pores. However, none of the 'recipes' for Canadian high-level waste had good old rusty iron. That stuff is reserved for Obama Barrels on rivers, where iron is not so good.

As I've said before, the only good geological repository is one that is stable, and only has diffusion to worry about. Put in some iron, and you're good for another 10.000 years. The practical end of 'worry' is at the natural uranium ore level (or coal ash!), not every last Plutonium atom at a few million years. If the politics can be left out, then this is a simple problem.

But, we're not going to have this nice solution! Oh, no, we're going to have something horrible, on top of the biggest fault in North America, in fractured rock with fluid flow. Sure, you can say the fluid down there is 10,000 years old, but start pumping for an excavation! I shudder to think...

Fox and the Hound

This is a good story. The past week or so, Cindy the Wonder Dog and I have been walking in our Queenston Shale Valley. This is a beautiful slice of Nature in the middle of the city, precisely due to a change in the characteristics of the shale, from large-slab limestone interbeds, to pure shale. In the pure shale sequences it cuts down fast, and in the slab sequences it becomes flat.

So, every day we saunter along, Cindy snuffling along and running up and down the valley sides. She has the world's worst dog-nose, and only see things when they are moving. So every day she has zoomed right by this vixen without seeing it. And the darn fox comes down from the hill and starts fox-barking at her! I don't know if you ever heard a fox bark, but it sounds like somebody strangling a raven! Then Cindy trundles along after it, and the fox goes through a narrow fence. Ha, ha, fun fox games! Or so I thought.

Today Cindy caught her in the den, and she was not happy. Luckily, it's a big pile of sticks, and Cindy is above that sort of thing. So we pretend to leave, and she pops out for the photo. I had hoped to get a video of the bark and games, but that will have to wait. I guess she was just leading Cindy away from the den.