OT: BP - The tip of the iceberg

[Lobby Dosser]

This is a human centric view of the first casualties of the blowout. There will likely be many more and it's good that this is recorded before the deluge:

[GROVER]

Chandler novel. We probably wont see the end of this calamity for more than a generation. Man is the only creature which fouls his own nest. I hope this horrible event may cause us to do something about generating our energy needs with cleaner technology.

Joe G

[Josepi]

The world will be watching as you demonstrate the first source of absolutely green energy.

Nobody else can find one.

Joe G

[e-mail]... > This is a human centric view of the first casualties of the blowout. There

[Robatoy]

Do you even READ the posts you reply to?

Joe wrote: "I hope this horrible event may cause us to do something about generating our energy needs with cleaner technology. "

WhereTF does Joe claim he can demonstrate anything like that?

[GROVER]

I didn't claim I personaly knew the answers to the problems caused by the current mix of our energy generating technologies but rather hoped that this tragedy would spur people to accept newer and cleaner ways than we are presently employing. Robatoy understood what I was trying to say. Joe G

[Keith Nuttle]

The only solution to change energy production from fossil fuels to other means is to push for all nuclear generation.

Solar energy is will never be available more than have of the time. Suns only shines for about 12 hours per day unless you are in Alaska. No energy when it gets dark.

As any sailor known the wind is fluky, and cannot be depended on for a constant source of energy. Most of the time it will be blowing too hard for the system to use, or not hard enough. If it was dependable, all of our ocean travel would still be done under sail, and the Dutch windmill would not have disappeared.

At some point we are going to have to accept facts and build nuclear power generation facilities, or give up anything that uses energy directly or indirectly. Also you cannot change the laws of chemistry or physics just because the will not allow what you think should be. Batteries are limited by physics and chemistry obama and the social democrats cannot change that.

[Robatoy]

Problem with nukes, is that they're great at base-load generation, but don't deal with peak loads very well. To be able to meet peak demands, you need a level of rapid response generation. Natural Gas co- gen seems to be justabout perfect for that, although not cheap. Mind mills and solar are okay to help out in regions where that works, but as you can only generate what is being used, no more, no less, makes that management difficult. Once one accepts nukes for base-load, it is pretty cheap to run from a fuel perspective but maintenance is expensive.

Windmills also swat the odd spotted owl out of the sky upsetting all the tofu-sucking, Birkenstock wearing, Prius driving, Tilly-shorts crowd.

[Josepi]

The best solution is when you stop using this fuel source you seem to dislike, so much.

When you start using another one, let us know how you did it and how no petroleum was used to produce it or maintain it.

The greenwashing get a little sickening with the eco-guessing crowd. They don't like nuclear waste or hydro-electric dam dangers or the site of wind turbines or solar panels using our our land areas or petroleum spills or the high CO2 emmisions and food stealing of biofuels.

Back to my 102" plasma display TV in my 68 degree living room, under my electric blanket in my massaging recliner...LOL

Most of us agree with you but solutions are already been being worked on for

30-40 years. Well at least some of us have. Shit happens as result of our greed and laziness.

[HeyBub]

Not true. You're exaggerating and making false claims.

The Harpy Eagle BUILDS its nest out of harpy eagle shit.

And, as an aside, we can't run this country off of sunbeams. Or California from Moonbeams.

[Larry Blanchard]

Agreed on the above. But a few options you didn't mention are hydropower, tides and geothermal. They are pretty reliable :-).

But all of the above are regional in nature and would require long distance transmission lines, just as much of our power does today.

OTOH, I was strongly in favor of nuclear power until I did some software work for one of them. The best argument against nuclear power is the average nuclear plant worker - made me shudder. And there's still no politically palatable answer to waste sorage.

What's the conclusion? Mine is that the days of cheap power are ending.

[Scott Lurndal]

Were you aware that all the Hydro in California are peakers, not baseload? There are two reasons for that:

1) Hydro can crank up and shut down quickly. That's not the case for thermal plants (gas, coal, nuclear). 2) Due to seasonal fluctuations and limited storage capacity (Shasta's 4.5m acre-feet wouldn't last the dry season at full 24x7 drawdown and it generates about a 1000 Mwatt running full-out, assuming it had enough rain during the wet season to fill it, which happened this year, but is quite unusual).

Any sane energy policy would include nuclear[*], natural gas, coal with carbon sequestration and river-based hydro for baseload augmented by wind and solar (both of which are unpredictable sources); with gas and hydro peakers.

scott

[*] the idea that one must store waste for 10,000 years is quite silly. Anything that highly radioactive is a fuel source itself, and reprocessing is perfectly viable. Not to mention thorium fuel cycles which don't create high-level waste with long half-lives.

[Josepi]

Our current electricity demands will take 2.5 systems and it is gonna' cost big bucks!

The Harpy Eagle BUILDS its nest out of harpy eagle shit.

And, as an aside, we can't run this country off of sunbeams. Or California from Moonbeams.

news:ULadnZAaQcHWrITRnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthl>> This is a human centric view of the first casualties of the blowout.

[Josepi]

I agree with you there except Ontario Hydro, with all their coal smokestack scrubbers is removing them all. I am not sure how much of this is failure to meet emmision problems / standards or political pressure.

I know there is some political pressure, as it is part of every election's political platform for one candidate or the other, for the last 30 years.

scott

[*] the idea that one must store waste for 10,000 years is quite silly. Anything that highly radioactive is a fuel source itself, and reprocessing is perfectly viable. Not to mention thorium fuel cycles which don't create high-level waste with long half-lives.

[Keith Nuttle]

I have only one objection to what you said, and would agree with you if you can answer one question. Once you capture the CO2, what are you going to do with it?

As a chemist and per government papers I received from Senator Lugar there are a couple of solutions:

1. Put it into the depths of the ocean which per the greenhousers is already increasing in acid.
2. Store it as a compressed liquid, which is an ecological disaster in itself. Remember the lake in Africa that turned over releasing CO2. The

100% kill zone for that event was hundreds of square miles around the lake.

1. Store it as a salt, (Sodium, Calcium, other metal) per our environmental laws these are hazardous waste and must be treated as such. Which would required to be monitoring for hundreds of years in the future.

For every 12 ton of carbon burned, 44 tons of CO2 will be produced, or if captured as a salt, for every 12 tons of carbon burned over 100 tons of salts will be produced (if it is run through a drying process, if it leaves the plant wet or as a liquid the numbers go up significantly)

To put it another way for every 12 rail cars of carbon going into the plant, 100 rail cars of waste will be coming out.

As I remember a couple of years ago National Geographics said there was about 8 billion tons of coal burned ever year.

That will require one mammoth hazardous waste storage site.

[Zz Yzx]

Swallows do too.

-Zz

[Lew Hodgett]

------------------------------------- All of which demonstrates the necessity of getting off fossil based fuels.

And if we don't get off our collective rear ends and get busy developing renewable energy sources, the Chinese are going to eat our lunch.

To illustrate the point, anybody catch the ABC evening news?

Guy from Jersey couldn't get funding in the USA to build his manufacturing facility.

The Chinese welcomed him with open arms and MONEY.

Lew

[J. Clarke]

Uh, how is the development of "renewable energy sources" going to prevent China from "eating our lunch"?

[CW]

Closer to home. dogs shit in their own back yard, where they run and play.

[Josepi]

Man is one of the only animal that tends to it's wounded instead of clensing the flock by assassination.

The Harpy Eagle BUILDS its nest out of harpy eagle shit.

And, as an aside, we can't run this country off of sunbeams. Or California from Moonbeams

GROVER wrote: Man is the only creature which fouls his own nest.

.

[Steve]

Having family members who worked in constructing these plants introduced me to one of the contractors who proudly described his "in-field modification" of some piece of piping that wouldn't fit. Seems it involved a large wrench being used as a hammer to bend something... you know, precision engineering.