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On the 17th February 2020 Wendy and I set sail on Queen Elizabeth on a two week cruise up to Papua New Guinea, returning to Sydney on 2nd March.
On the morning of May1st 2016 I jumped, or rather slid, out of a plane over Wollongong at 14,000 feet.
It was a tandem jump, meaning that I had an instructor strapped to my back.
Striding Confidently Before Going Up
At that height the curvature of the earth is quite evident. There was an air-show underway at the airport we took off from and we were soon looking down on the planes of the RAAF Roulette aerobatic display team. They looked like little model aircraft flying in perfect formation.
Japan has 55 nuclear reactors at 19 sites. Two more are under construction and another twelve are in the advanced planning stage. Net Generating capacity is around 50 GW providing around 30% of the country's electricity (more here).
As a result of Japan’s largest earthquake in history on March 11 and subsequent tsunami all reactors shut down automatically as they were designed to do but cooling systems associated with two sites had been damaged.
Three reactor sites are adjacent to the earthquake epicentre and two were in the direct path of the tsunami. The Fukushima-Daiichi plant belonging to Tokyo Electric Power Company was particularly hard hit. It lost all grid connections, providing electricity, and its backup power plant was seriously damaged.