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There have been documentaries about harbor security (since 9/11, of course) and the NG tankers used as targets. Seems they discussed the explosive force in terms of a large proportion of whatever city it was. Domino effect, as well, I believe.
Oh, yeah. A number of years ago our local power company proposed a new generating station. Part of the plan called for a cooling pond and a discharge canal into a neighboring bay - about a mile away.
The environmentalists went nuts. This heated water (about 4-5 degrees above ambient) would surely kill every aquatic thing from Houston to Mexico!
After much litigation, the facility was finally built.
Turns out shrimp LIKE the warmer water and congregate at the outlet of the canal as well as IN the canal all the way back to the several-acre cooling pond. Further, fish that eat shrimp (and don't mind the warmer water) also gather in the same locations. Sometimes it looks like piranhas eating a cow!
Bottom line, fishermen are lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on the canal and its environs!
Presumably the fish that DON'T like the warmer water go elsewhere. If there are any. For sure, the environmentalists went elsewhere.
16g2000yql.googlegroups.com:
If only it were so.... In fact, NJ teachers are the third highest paid in the country, averaging $56,600.
"The state with the highest average teacher salary was Connecticut, at $57,760. California was a very close second, where the average teacher salary is $57,604. New Jersey teachers make approximately $56,635 per year. "
To find teachers making $35K, you'd have to go to Miami. And do you think there is a big difference in the quality of education in NJ versus Miami?
That's the big mistake some people make, which the politicians feed on and how govt grows and spending goes out of control. They think that money is the solution to every problem. In NJ, the districts where we've poured huge amounts of money, eg Camden, Newark, Asbury Park, still have the worst track records and little or no improvement. Those districts are gettting
2X per student what the average district in NJ spends to educate their children. And I don't know about you, but $57K a year for a job where you have 2 1/2 months off every summer, plus more holidays than any other job isn't a bad deal.I agree the bloated pensions are a problem, but it's a difficult one that isn't going to be easy. You can change it moving forward, but the real problem is you can't just change pensions that were granted over the last couple decades. GM managed to do it through bankruptcy, which apparently states cannot.
IMO, Christie is the first governor to have the guts to start to take on these issues. He'd be doing a lot more, but with the Dems still in control of the legislature and senate, there is only so much he can do. So far he's reduced spending, balanced the budget, and killed the rail tunnel to nowhere that would have cost us billions.
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Gray County is operated by NextEra Energy (renamed Florida P&L subsidiary formerly FPL Energy LLC) which is a generation-only outfit. So, they're not buying power elsewhere; their objective would be to sell everything they can make.
I'm pretty heavily involved w/ our local electric co-op; Dad was founding member and on board 50 years; we've kept on since returned to farm after previous career in engineering mostly w/ the electric utilities (starting in nukes w/ B&W then going into consulting ending up mostly in support of fossil).
Anyway, Sunflower, the generation co-op for western distribution co-ops in the state has agreement to buy 50 MW from Gray County but it's in fulfillment of requirement to have "green" power percentages as decreed by legislation (and to a lesser extent for the publicity) but otherwise wouldn't on a purely economic evaluation of best value to members. It costs us a minimum of 25% more/kW to buy it than does equivalent power from the shares from conventional generation and nearly double what our share from Wolf Creek Nuclear does.
It isn't a logical choice other than for reasons other than economic (unless, of course, one is one of those _very_ few landowners getting royalties or the generating companies getting the tax incentives that subsidize the construction and the subsequent revenue that's mandated they have a market for).
Who knows, _eventually_ somebody may figure out how to both make the wind blow 24/7 and also increase the energy density but until then for "clean" power and to have a notable effect on reduction of C emissions, nuclear baseload generation has all current alternatives beat hands down. (I've a comparative graph of the Wolf Creek availability over the same time frame also on the above-mentioned spreadsheet).
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snipped-for-privacy@optonline.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@k9g2000yqi.googlegroups.com:
Well, NJ may be 3rd highest in teacher salary, but both my daghter and my son-in-law, despite master's degrees don't make that much. Which means they are lucky (they know it) that grandma can babysit. And part of the high cost is that teachers get easily promoted away, since the seniority system does not take teacher success into account.
those are wind turbines, not windmills...
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I looked again at the possibilities of finding some correlate-able wind data...wunderground.com has modified their history pages some since last time and now it's at feasible to get something that has at least some usefulness w/o _too_ much effort...
So far I've downloaded two years of data from the NWS DDC (Dodge City, KS) archives and computed monthly averages of the daily average windspeeds and added those to the plots of monthly production for the two years. As I suspected, there's a fair similarity in the overall shape of the data during the year reflecting the cyclic nature of the wind speed during the year and the overall output is definitely positively correlated with the average wind speed.
To do this really well one would need the actual wind speed at the site and be able to do weighted averages over the shorter intervals reflecting the dynamics of the rotor response to variations in speed, but even at this bulk level it's pretty obvious that months with lower average wind speeds tend to have lower net generation. (One interesting thing to note is how low average wind speeds are even here owing to the diurnal cycle that when sun goes down, often so does the wind...)
It'll take a couple more days to actually do the full 8 years of data I've already tabulated for generation and I've not done 2010 yet, either. Not sure if that data is yet available at the EIA site; takes them a while to correlate and publish.
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