Stuff I learned at the lily society meeting
December 8, 2012
Fireplace ashes from urban trees are not a good idea for vegetable gardens. Trees, especially street trees, especially older trees (predating unleaded gasoline), picked up a lot of heavy metals, and burning the wood concentrates the metals in the ash.
And we may be mothballing a lot of nuclear plants in the coming years, and that might not be a good thing. Reaction to the Fukishima disaster has resulted in lots of new safety requirements (probably a good thing, but it is possible to waste money on excess safety, or misallocate it away from larger risks to further reduce tiny risks), and the low price of fracked natural gas means that nuclear plants have a harder time earning the money to pay for those improvements. That’s all fine, till the natural gas runs out.
