From a reactor operator’s perspective, my understanding was that
the problem with MOX is the cleanup burden if there’s a fuel pin failure. So more the question would be: is anyone going to actually take it?

Then having PhD funding basically become CDTs or industry or overseas self-fund or bust has massively distorted opportunities in the EPSRc domain. And longer larger grants hasn’t been great for the postdoc landscape either…

Nurse and the biosciences people wanted to fund people not projects, and all these senior people thought that was splendid. I never thought canning PhD and postdoc funding in favour of having UKRI take over junior faculty recruitment looked all that great, myself.

At IC, with Engineering now covering 9 Depts, it’s all pretty far removed now. Last time it came and went with barely a murmur…

In terms of the narrow point, wasn’t the link mostly broken in the last REF anyway? It’s now averaging to 2.5/FTE and counting everyone, so this sounds like re-fighting yesterday’s battle? Haven’t we all moved on…?

Did they mean ‘balkanisation,’ aka decentralisation or fragmentation? The term always seemed to be casually offensive to the peoples of the region, to me. But presumably not meaning ‘like the species in Star Trek?’ And certainly not the polymer process in tyre rubber 50y ago? Tee hee.

Oh No!

The drop in footfall on a huge amount of retail is just huge. The big winners, the destination stores / streets, and the biggest of big box supermarkets, are winning. Online is winning. The mid market isn’t just shrinking, it’s disappearing completely.

Mothercare had a dominant brand but stopped innovating and got eaten up by Big Box out of town stores eg Tesco Extra on one hand and online on the other. Parents stopped going into town centres for this stuff - they didn’t stay where their target market was. It’s a time and attention thing.

What’s going on on wind, solar and EVs in the US just looks stupid from Europe. You’re writing yourselves out of the future. It’s a real shame.

Offshore wind in the North Sea is changing Northern Europe at pace. It’s getting seriously cheap, and, since we lack winter solar, is now our cheapest power option. Yes, they are huge. No, they aren’t externality-free. But they’re better than pretty much all the alternatives.

I love this ad…

bsky.app/profile/davi...

I think of hydro dams as like a version 1.0 of renewables. Solar and wind + batteries seem to be more human-scale, more modular and with less externalities, so should bring less risk of exploitation. And yet. At least we are more aware now, unlike 50y ago.

Yes, mining and extraction have a terrible track record of exploitation and misappropriation. But, eg the Cahorra Bassa dam. Built by the Portuguese to power Johannesburg 1000km away, through to the end of apartheid nearly zero benefit accrued to Mozambique. Exploitation happens with renewables too.

That reinvestment was left so late and the blast furnaces were losing so much money that sadly, Tata closed down most of the works for the rebuild, and so there were a lot of job losses. But the alternative wasn’t to carry on, it was complete closure. But that had nothing to do with climate targets.

All the people I meet from Tata who are rebuilding the steelworks are happier and doing better than I’ve ever seen them. The EAF conversion going on there is inspirational. So the headline is dishonest: the steelworks didn’t close; over £1.25bn is being invested in recapitalising the works.

2/2 numbers: say 5kW of heater plus 1kW for the battery, with a COP=2 heat pump. That’s 3kW. For an 80kWh EV, the battery has enough juice to heat the car for more than 24h.