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In the US, like most other places, nuclear power has been made artificially expensive by governments, mostly in reaction to the media scaring people off nuclear power. Force a pipeline to undergo an infinite number of impact studies and gas would become expensive too. Some countries did better...

The Candu design was a bit of an accident. At the time they lacked the tech to make the large pressure vessels required for the standard designs of the day, so they opted for a large low pressure hiigh volume calandria design. As you say they used unenriched fuel, so less danger of nuclear...

Modern reactors are capable of load following, although I suppose that comes with some wear and tear, as with any process. So it is always going to be better to run them full tilt and covert the excess to hydrogen. In the 60s a reactor called the SLOWPOKE was developed in Canada by AECL. I...

Maybe because if you look at the end of a piece of wood, it looks like a bunch of little grains?

I have found that higher can give a cleaner cut on the top side. It can also slightly extend the capacity of a sliding miter table. And of course if you are notching something or making a partial cut, you can't have it too high. Also for thinner materials higher seems to work better, especially...

Great article, although just convinces me even more that I need a thickness planar with a spiral cutterhead. In Canada I had a 15" Delta, one of the 4 poster types that is thicknesser only. I bought carbide knives for it, and they stayed sharp so much longer. They were expensive, but it really...

Thanks for the kind words. I am getting older, and I take my time, do a lot of stuff the hard way, so it tends to take me a long time to get anything finished.

The windows were framed but boarded over for the winter, since I need the workshop to make them. This window will let some light in from the back.

I am now working on the roof, if it would ever stop raining. The tiles are almost an exact match for the house, it is too bad they didn't use the same on the kitchen roof they added on the back of the house.

Here is a pic from the house after it was framed and covered in tarps for the winter.

The ceiling joists are thicker than they need to be, because I want to use the loft for storage. It is a bit of a trade off between shop height and loft height because the council limits you to 4m total, so the loft is 1.2 from floor to the bottom of the collar ties. The roof is covered in the...

It is framed in 45x150 pressure treated wood, with 45x150 rafters and 45x200 ceiling joists. The bolts tying the rafters to the joists were the leftover cutoffs from the form work.

In Canada (where I am from), I would have just poured a slab, but here I wanted it to be a bit off the ground as I was worried otherwise the bottom of the framing might rot. Here is the finished foundation. I embedded stainless rod in the walls to bolt the sill plates to, and it worked way...

I did the ground work with a shovel, and used a small mixer to pour the footing. Here is a picture as the forms are going up for the wall. The rubble is from a small shed that I demolished because the previous owners had let the roof rot and it was full of mold.

The foundation plan was a concrete grade beam sitting on a concrete footing.

I moved to Norwich last year and bought a 1930s detached house that is a bit of a wreck and the first thing I needed was a workshop. We have a deep yard about 9 meters wide, so I thought to use the workshop to divide the yard. I had in mind something that would look like this when viewed from...

Looks reasonably cheap, and it says moisture resistant. Has it worked out well? and is your shop heated?

The rough doorway space is a meter wide, and I was planning a 90cm door. If I make it much wider, then it will start to eat into the windows I have planned, and spoil the aesthetic of the front of the workshop. More practically, the access by the side of our house is limited in width, so...

The stuff I have used before is made of metal, comes in 4 foot wide rolls, and looks like this: You can see it has little folds to keep it away from the wall a bit, although you usually pull it out some as you are going so it sits in the middle of the base coat.

The walls are framed in 2x6, with 18mm structural ply on the outside. It is covered with a breathable membrane material, something like tyvek. I plan to screw wire mesh to that, and then stucco it. Come to think of it, I am still looking for the wire mesh, it is a square mesh about 1 inch, with...