Heat the grill to high. Toss the pitta pieces with 1 tbsp oil and spread out onto a baking sheet. Grill for 3-4 mins, turning halfway, until golden and crisp. Set aside to cool.
Step 2
Meanwhile, whisk together the remaining oil with the lemon juice and garlic, then season. Heat a large griddle pan or non-stick frying pan over a high heat and cook the halloumi for 1-2 mins on each side or until lightly charred.
Step 3
Cook the quinoa following pack instructions, leave to cool, then toss with the tomatoes, cucumber, spring onion, most of the fresh herbs and the dressing. Season to taste. Tip onto a serving plate and top with the halloumi, pitta and remaining herbs.
Beat the batter ingredients together in a bowl using an electric mixer
Line a cake tin with baking paper
Lay diced tomatoes and the spinach in the bottom of the cake tin
Mix the other filling ingredients (grated cheddar, feta, spring onions, capsicum) with the batter, and pour the batter into the cake tin over the spinach and tomatoes
500ml Passata (tomato puree, found near the pasta sauces in supermarket)
Other
salt and pepper
Method
Heat the oil to a low temperature in a medium to large saucepan or pot
Add the onion and cook for 2-3 minutes.
Add the garlic and carrots. Cook for a further 3 minutes.
Increase the cooking temperature
Add the mince, oregano, thyme and bay leaves to the pot and cook, stirring frequently until the meat is brown and all broken up
Add the beef stock and passata to the pot and stir it all in until mixed. Add salt and pepper if needed
Turn the heat down to medium-low (simmer) and cook for about 30 minutes, allowing the sauce to reduce (meaning some of the liquid evaporates)
Remove the bay leaves, and serve with pasta
Other suggestions
To make it even more healthy and nutritious, add 120g of finely chopped mushrooms
Want to make it spicy? Maybe add some chilli flakes, or a bit of tabasco sauce
If you want to simplify your heat-and-eat meal for hiking, consider cooking some pasta ahead of time and mixidng it in with the final sauce before packaging
In a hurry? You can speed up step 7 (reducing the sauce) by making the beef stock with only 250 ml of water
Crisp, soft, savoury full of all the yummy flavours of potatoes, bacon eggs – you get the vibe. And it’s all made in one pan!
Ingredients
new potatoes
mushrooms
bacon
peas
a touch of garlic
eggs
Other options: sausages, chilli
Method
Boil your halved new potatoes and then fry off in a large sauce pan
Add your mushrooms and sliced bacon medallions
Pop in your peas
make a space for your eggs, crack into the space and let them cook for 3 minutes until cooked to your liking (pop a top on your pan to cook the top of the egg if you like)
I write about science and international development (broadly defined).Follow
Nov 26, 2019,05:57pm EST
This article is more than 4 years old.
High-level nuclear waste consists largely of spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Though it makes up a small proportion of overall waste volumes, it accounts for the majority of radioactivity. This most potent form of nuclear waste, according to some, needs to be safely stored for up to a million years. Yes, 1 million years – in other words, a far longer stretch of time than the period since Neanderthals cropped up. This is an estimate of the length of time needed to ensure radioactive decay.
Yet existing and planned nuclear waste sites operate on much shorter timeframes: often 10,000 or 100,000 years. These are still such unimaginably vast lengths of time that regulatory authorities decide on them, in part, based on how long ice ages are expected to last. To some extent all of these figures are little better than educated guesses.
They’re also such mind-bogglingly long periods that in 1981, the US Department of Energy established the Human Interference Task Force to devise ways to warn future generations of the dangerous contents of nuclear repositories. This was a challenging task then, and nuclear semiotics remains the stuff of science fiction. Written language has only existed for about 5,500 years, so there’s no guarantee that Earth’s inhabitants, tens of thousands of years from now, would understand any of the writing systems currently in use. The meanings of visual signs also drift over time. The more whimsical “ray cat solution,” of genetically engineering cats to glow in the presence of radioactive material, is even less reliable.
A worker blows away salt in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico (Photo by Joe Raedle)GETTY IMAGES
After brief flirtations with amusingly bad ideas including shooting nuclear waste into space, the consensus among nuclear scientists is that the best option for dealing with high-level nuclear waste is deep geological disposal. One of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s conditions for such a geological site is low groundwater content, which has been stable for at least tens of thousands of years, and geological stability, over millions of years. Thus, Japan, with its seismic instability, is unlikely to have any suitable candidates for deep geological disposal.
Like many countries, Japan is relying on interim storage of high-level waste while hoping that longer-term solutions will present themselves eventually. In fact, no country even has an operational deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel. (The US has a deep disposal site in New Mexico for “transuranic” waste from nuclear weapons, which is long-lived and intermediate-level waste whose elements have higher numbers than uranium in the periodic table.)
It’s challenging to find a site that ticks all of the geological boxes (including relatively impermeable material with little risk of water infiltration), and thatisn’t politically controversial. To take two notable examples, communities in Nevada, US and Bure, France have hotly opposed plans to establish repositories. Given the history of environmental justice globally, it’s likely that any future locations approved for nuclear waste dumps will be found in poor areas.
Only one country, Finland, is even building a permanent spent-fuel repository. Even in Finland, however, it’s estimated that a license won’t be issued until 2024. Similar licenses for other European countries scouting out possible locations likely wouldn’t be available until 2050 in Germany and 2065 in the Czech Republic. And these countries are outnumbered by those that don’t even have an estimated timeframe for licensing, as they’re so far back in the process of searching for a site.
Preparing to move Chernobyl’s destroyed reactor no. 4 from its old sarcophagus (Photo by Brendan … [+]GETTY IMAGES
Strategies remain worryingly short-term, on a nuclear timescale. Chernobyl’s destroyed reactor no. 4, for instance, was encased in July 2019 in a massive steel “sarcophagus” that will only last 100 years. Not only will containers like this one fall short of the timescales needed for sufficient storage, but no country has allotted enough funds to cover nuclear waste disposal. In France and the US, according to the recently published World Nuclear Waste Report, the funding allocation only covers a third of the estimated costs. And the cost estimates that do exist rarely extend beyond several decades.
Essentially, we’re hoping that things will work out once future generations develop better technologies and find more funds to manage nuclear waste. It’s one of the most striking examples of the dangers of short-term thinking.
In a large bowl combine flour, sugar, and bicarbonate of soda
In a separate bowl combine all wet ingredients and stir to combine
Pour wet ingredients into dry and whisk until smooth
Heat frypan on setting 9. Melt butter in the pan. Add 1/4 cup cupfuls of mixture into the pan. Cook for 2-3 minutes on each side or until golden brown and cooked. Serve.
