Meeting for September 29, 2009

First of all…
We’d all like to pass on our best wishes to Peter C. Last week was Pete’s last meeting for the next while until he’s recovered from the surgery for his prostate cancer. Here’s to a speedy recovery, mate.

September dates to note...
The 42nd wedding anniversary of Bob and Jenny is on the 30th.
Jack and Ruth Aubin have their 58th wedding anniversary on November 3.

Last week’s meeting (September 22)…
Rob B reports that he’s being in touch with Peter F regarding the food services training course that supposed to be happening for the August 29th meeting. Reports are, first of all, that it will probably be the road control training course instead. Secondly, this plan was supposed to be confirmed but as of yet I still haven’t heard. So the best I can suggest is that we’ll all show up at the RSL as usual, we’ll all have dinner there and see what Peter has planned. I’ll also suggest that those of us who have laptop computers to bring them.

We also got an update from Anthony J about the district conference. Unfortunately, Anthony was mostly asleep at the meeting with Daybreak and missed most of the details. Furthermore, he seemed to have forgotten he had fallen asleep until he stood up to give us his report. However, if you’re looking for details on some of the activities happening at the conference then give Anthony a call.

After Andrew C won the H&T and I won the draw (thanks to Neville for bringing a whisky cake so I didn’t have to take the white wine), Peter C proposed a fund raising idea for 2010. There was a general consensus that Pete’s idea to raffle a Holden / Ford ute, a $25,000 holiday voucher, and $10,000 cash as prizes was a good one. We’d print 30,000 tickets to be sold for $10 a pop. We’d recruit the other two clubs to help us sell them for an equal share in the takings. We’d need to sell 10,000 to break even with a potential profit of $200,000 (i.e. $66,000 per club). We’d obviously target as a major selling time during the 2010 races. There was a lot of discussion about details that were, in fact, never going to get ironed out that night so I called a halt to the discussion, but there was widespread support in principle for the idea.

We then heard from Bob P for his presentation on nuclear power. Bob certainly did not disappoint, marvelling us all not just with his scientific knowledge but also with his ability to explain the extremely complex world of particle physics.

Bob started off just explaining the idea of a nuclear power station. To me, it doesn’t seem much more than a giant tea kettle: it uses the heat generated by nuclear fission to boil water. The steam from the water then spins an alternator which then generates electricity. Most power plants use something to spin a turbine: wind, hydro, coal, or nuclear… the only one that doesn’t is solar. The big advantage of nuclear power over coal-fired is how clean the emissions are; nuclear power emits only steam as opposed to the ash that comes from coal. Bob tells us that 25% of the total coal burned results in ash, so Mount Piper that burns 2 million tonnes of coal dumps 500,000 tonnes of ash into the atmosphere per year!

Bob then gave us some background into what makes up an atom: protons and neutrons that reside in the nucleus of the atom, and electrons that spin around the nucleus. As small as a neutron is, by applying Einstein’s E=MC2 (where e=energy, m=mass, and c=the speed of light), a neutron flying off at the speed of light still generates a huge amount of energy.

Nuclear power will use a fissile atom called uranium 235. The reactor fires a single neutron at a single atom of U235 to get a chain reaction started. The collision of this neutron and U235 splits the U235 into Barium141, Krypton92, 3 neutrons, and a bunch of energy that was used to hold the U235 atom together (called “binding energy”). The binding energy gets transferred into thermal (heat) energy to boil the tea kettle, while the three neutrons go on to split apart more U235; the more U235 split, the more neutrons that get generated to split apart more U235. So one neutron fired at one atom of U235 at the start results in a chain reaction that, if uncontrolled can flatten a city! Fortunately, the whole thing can be controlled by using carbon rods to absorb excessive neutrons. For comparison, per volume you get (literally) a million times more energy out of a kilogram of U235 than coal.

The big disadvantage of nuclear power is the initial set up cost of about $5bil. One it’s going, it’s as cheap as chips being 33% of the price of wind and 20% the price of solar. Many think that the safety is a disadvantage too, but there have only been two incidents worldwide since people started using nuclear power in the 1970’s. Of the two incidents (Three Mile Island in the U.S. and Chernobyl in Russia) only Chernobyl resulted in any emissions being released. 14% of the world’s total electrical power comes from nuclear power stations without incident. So it’s safe, it’s cleaner than coal (even the pipe-dream of so called “clean coal”), and it’s economical so why not use it?

This week’s meeting (September 29)…
Again, all I can suggest is that we show up at the RSL for dinner and we’ll take direction from Peter F from there. Also, if you can, please bring your laptop computer if you have one just in case we’re all trying to do the on-line training program.

Also, can somebody please remember to ask Adam at the meeting if he's heard anything more about us doing the fencing for the Riding For The Disabled group this Saturday?

In the coming weeks…
The October 6th meeting was in the hands of David N, but that has become the second event in the interclub challenge. Remember that the family bowling will kick off at 6 p.m. while Rotarians will have a usual start time of 6:15 for 6:30 p.m. at the bowling lanes. Presumably we'll need some sort of RSVP from the other clubs to know how much food we need to prepare?

The October 13th meeting is in the hands of David W. How go the arrangements David?

On October 20th we have our Club AGM. This is where we discuss club business in an open forum as well as elect the club's BOD for next year gets elected too so, to have your say, it's important to attend.

For October 27th, Arthur C is in charge of the program. Arthur, can you let me know your plans?

And on Nov 3rd, new comer Andrew C has a night to plan.