Why not organic kitty litter?
Got to have something to do with all the newspapers and Weetabix byproducts...
Actually, come to think of byproducts in food production... what DO they do with all the caffeine from decaffeinated coffee?
There's a rather dry but absolutely fascinating document out from the US Department of Energy, which you can download in all its couple of hundred page glory here [PDF]. It's about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad in New Mexico. This is where the Yanks send off all those barrels of radioactive nasties to …
Organic kitty litter will rot and become soil again eventually so one can dump the contents of the cat-tray in the compost or bury it; The in-organic stuff is basically clay which is dried and "popped" like pop-corn.
This stuff just sits there, one cannot dump it, it has to go into the bin.
There is I.O.W. no requirement for cat-shit to last forever - we want it to be GONE, hence the organic cat-litter is the better product.
If one is covering cat litter with radioactive waste, then, probably, the ecological aspects are less relevant.
Not sure I'd recommend flushing that down the bog. In fact definitely NOT.
Lots of marketing droids say their stuff is flushable. It helps sales to idiots ('most everyone out there) you know.
"Got a blockage - your'e flushing it wrong." - Also works for fruity firms apparently.
Talk to any sewer worker about blockages and what causes them. You have a system - usually 4 inch pipes - designed to cope with s**t + some small pieces of paper designed break up easily. You feed it a s**tload of lawncrapper s**t PLUS a tray of soggy, sticky (to a sewer) gubbins plus a mere 6 litres of water. Hmmm....
Top tip - don't mention wet wipes, sanitary towels, food waste etc to a sewer worker if you don't want a colourful reply.
And don't get me started on those so called disinfectant blocks that people clip onto the rim of the pan - presumabably to give little boys something to aim at. Accidently tip one of them in and flush and you have a blockage complete with anchor going down. Very effective (and expensive).
"It helps sales to idiots ('most everyone out there) you know."
High opinion of your self I see. Do you really think most people are idiots. What is the threshold above which one becomes a person deserving respect in your eyes? I ask as it would give me something to aim for - rather like those disinfectant blocks you mentioned. Oh sorry, did I get you started? Do have a lie down.
JetSetJim typed > Organic cat litter I get can be flushed down the loo
Can some cat* lover explain to us all why they don't fit pet karzies in their houses? Why not cut out the middleman^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcat litter and go directly into the sewerage?
*also apples to dog lovers. Why interpose a pavement beween the dog's arse and the drains?
Flame, for obvious reasons.
Oh, I don't know responsible dog owners do and most cats prefer to bury their output in your petunias as a surprise for you later.
Anyway soil based kitty litter, will break down in landfill, and helps landfill sites to generate gas for the grid. It just becomes biologically richer in the process, although perhaps not in the way the soil cycle usually works. Ask any geologist.
You don't want to use organic kitty litter if the only use for it on site is as a collection agent for spills in a chemical lab.
Regular clay based cat litter is somewhat basic and would tend to neutralize and absorb weak acids and other chemicals or spills.
Organic litter would react with the chemicals and likely offgas. Or decompose and and offgas.
One would hope that animal testing labs would not use organic litter if they were doing anything radioactive. The animal excrement would be fairly radioactive as it tends to concentrate the testing substances.
So basically I just read a two-page rant by Worstall about "hippies" (which appears to mean anyone who buys organic to Worstall) and how they are in some vague but implied way responsible for someone in the US not knowing how to do their job -- all because Worstall doesn't know that organic cat litter actually has a convenient purpose to it and wants to blame a nuclear accident on a "pro-organic push".
I really should learn to check the author before reading in future.
just because some marketing w*nker put's organic on the packet, does not mean it's better either at the job it's supposed to do, or for the enviroment!
Damn eco-nutters, will happily fuck everything up through being stupid, as they believe they are saving the fucking planet. (planets do not need saving, it's a huge ball of fucking elements orbiting a star!)
>>"just because some marketing w*nker put's organic on the packet, does not mean it's better either at the job it's supposed to do, or for the enviroment!"
Organic cat litter is organic material such as pine chips and decomposes. Inorganic cat litter is typically clay and does not. Worstall basically went on wild goose chase because he apparently doesn't own a cat and can't use Wikipedia. Or even ask a friend who does own a cat!
And you have taken up his ignorance and run with it.
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'Stop burying nuclear material'
I'm quite suprised no-one has thought of storing nuclear waste on the moon. Let's hope that such a strategy wouldn't cause the accumulated waste to eventually reach critical mass and cause a massive thermonuclear explosion, which would act like a giant rocket, pinging the moon out into space. If this were to ever happen, I'm sure the inhabitants of the first moonbase (let's call it 'alpha' for the sake of argument) would have approximately 2 seasons worth of adventures, while they ride the moon through outer space.
It could be man's way to the starts, after all, it must have been going at one hell of a speed for them to have all those adventures. I wonder how much energy you would need, and for that matter, an older and wiser me wonders why the inhabitants didn't end up as amusing smears on the floor when the moon accelerated.
As a story-teller and realiser on the small screen, Gerry Anderson was pretty good. As a scientist, not so hot.
There were plenty of plot holes. Like why was the moon able to avoid being captured by the stars/planets it passed close to. And where did they get their energy, especially in a form suitable for the Eagles. And how about the seemingly unending supply of Eagles when they were destroyed. And how come they could cross interstellar space so fast, but still slow enough to allow planetary exploration missions. And why the moon was not torn apart by tidal forces when it passed within the Roche limit to planets and even the black hole it went through. And how come so many Earth spaceships found the moon. And how they managed to get enough Sinclair Pocket TVs to make their communicators 10 years after most of them had broken.
And, to cap it all, why was there so little furniture in the Control Centre that everybody had to stand around, punching buttons on the walls!
Still, the first season was a good romp, although I thought widening the plot in the second season to include metamorpths and the like was going a bit too far.
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And the first, as you pointed out, is Science.
There was lots of bad science in all of the Gerry Anderson works, and they were all set in the near future, so they could not really play the radical new technology card.
Dose it detract from the tremendous stories, strong characters (even though most were plastic or plasticine), or the fantastic achievements of AP Films and Century 21 Productions in the field of special effects? No it doesn't.
I am a huge fan of all of Gerry Anderson's work (well, Dick Spanner was a bit strange, and Terrahawks was below par IMHO), but that never stopped me cringing sometimes at the "Science", even when I was a child (My formative years were during the original runs of the "classics'" in the 1960's and 70's; I am of the Century 21 Productions generation, and am almost exactly the same age as Joe 90 would be).
(P.S. Answer me this. Why do Thunderbird 1 and 2 come to a dead-stop in the air, and only fire their landing jets when they want to decend?)