Post anything that doesn't belong in any other forum, including gaming and topics unrelated to motorsport. Site specific discussions should go in the site feedback forum.
The United States is the world's most powerful economy, but much of that power is derived from rather old-fashioned sources.
More than half of the country's electricity is produced by burning coal, and as demand for energy increases, so does the pressure on those who supply it.
Mention to the average American that you're going to Wyoming, and they are as likely as anything to ask you why.
It is a fair question. Wyoming consists mostly of scrubby grassland or arid, tan-coloured mountains, and with just 500,000 people, it is the least populous state in the US.
But the people of America should be thankful to Wyoming, because its colossal treasure trove of natural resources is helping - literally - to power the US economy.
Mineral rich
Wyoming's minerals include crude oil, natural gas, uranium, methane and something called trona.
Don't worry if you haven't heard of it - few have. Trona is used in the manufacture of glass, and Wyoming has more of the stuff than anywhere else in the world.
But most of all, Wyoming has coal. Huge, thick, multi-layered seams of coal lie just a few metres below the surface.
Most of it lies in the Powder River Coal Basin, that spans the border with Montana.
And the Powder River Basin is providing America with a staggering one million tonnes of coal each day - about a quarter of all US coal production.
"It all boils down to what's cheap and reliable," says Lee Terry, Republican congressman for the town of Omaha, in neighbouring Nebraska.
"That reliability means cost. Coal is very cheap, and so you're going to see a continued reliance."
Power shortages
Wyoming's mineral-rich landscape is anything but empty
Cheap it is, no doubt about that. Cheaper than natural gas, which is why coal is used to generate 52% of America's electricity.
It is also plentiful. The United States contains the largest coal reserves in the world, enough to last for 250 years or more.
But the energy utilities that burn the coal take issue with the reliability.
They complain that supplies are not meeting demand, leaving them low on reserves and Americans potentially exposed to power shortages.
In a country where most homes, offices and restaurants are heavily air-conditioned, this is clearly a problem.
So who is at fault?
Mile-long trains
The railroads - in this case US's largest, Union Pacific - play a crucial role in the coal supply chain.
Union Pacific moves huge quantities of coal from the Powder River Basin to the power stations of the east. The task is approached with steely determination by men and women who clearly take deep pride in their jobs.
Locomotives move huge quantities of coal to US power stations
"It's the 1,000lb gorilla that you have to watch day in day out," says Cameron Scott, Union Pacific's general superintendent of railway operations, in North Platte, Nebraska - a crucial transport hub for US rail freight.
"The coal trains represent about 75% of everything that runs in and out of this yard."
And coal trains are no ordinary trains.
They typically consist of up to 135 cars - making them about a mile and half long.
Getting the coal to its destination is therefore a massive logistical challenge.
Union Pacific's space-age Harriman Dispatching Center, in Omaha, uses satellite-based GPS and other state-of-the-art technology to keep track of its trains every minute of the day.
Some, however, are beginning to question the wisdom of such heavy reliance on coal.
Finding alternatives
Powder River Coal is described as "clean" coal - that is, low in sulphur.
But critics believe it will never be feasible to burn coal on such a large scale without doing some damage to the environment.
The answer, they say, is a proper commitment to finding alternatives to fossil fuels. Burning coal is essentially a 19th-Century solution to a 21st-Century problem.
"What people forget is in the 1960s, in order to win the space race, the US government put about 5% of the federal budget towards the space programme," says Jim Esch, the Democrat candidate standing against Lee Terry in Omaha.
"I think we can do whatever we want with energy. If we want to come up with brand new forms of energy, I'm pretty confident we can do that too."
Last edited by wazojugs on 02 Nov 2006, 00:08, edited 1 time in total.
as far as nuclear reactors go, the limited research i've conducted on pebble bed reactors indicates that it is an inherently "safe" reactor design.
essentially, the radioactive fuel is embedded into carbon spheres. as the reactor temperature increases, the spheres expand and increase the distance between the fuel particles thus decreasing the density. the reaction will stop until the temperature drops and allows the spheres to contract and the density increase.
the draw back to this design is that the water/steam used to turn the turbines is not in a separate system from the water/steam used to exchange heat with the "pebbles" and is thus, contaminated.
apparently this design has been around for awhile but due to it's relative size, the U.S. Navy decided to develop the uranium rod type reactor and that's why it is most prevalent today. recently, china has been developing/researching the pebble bed reactor.
tomislavp4 wrote:I´m afraid I can´t agree [-X . Nuclear energy is far too risky! Think if another "chernobyl" happens
The happy side effect of Chernobyl is that it's now a teeming wildlife reserve. You'd think the place is dead but no, only the first generation of animals died from thyroid cancer and stuff. The later generations seem to adapt and not be bothered by the background radiation. Nice to know that after we humans nuke ourselves off the planet, she'll heal herself.
As for coal, I had a conversation very similar to this thread with a powerplant engineer earlier this year. He said that coal power plant produces more radioactive waste than its nuclear counterpart. This is because coal contains quite some amount of Thorium and Uranium, and the concentration is even higher in coal ash. He also argues that instead of burning the coal we should be refining the Thorium out and use THAT for nuclear fuel.
And this guy went on, that Thorium power plants are actually politically correct, since it produces non-fissile Uranium as waste, and hence won't result in another Iran dilemma.
Yeah, sure coal is plentiful and cheap in the U.S. But it's absolutely pointless in any discussion of bettering the environment.
Mining for coal destroys the environment from which it is taken. I've seen photos of massive, toxic holes in the ground where once beautiful mountains used to be. I don't think anyone wants to see more of those.
And burning coal to create power is the leading source in the world of the harmful carbon dioxide and methane gas emissions that cause global warming. The sulfur dioxide emissions from burning coal is particularly nasty in that it eventually turns to sulfuric acid and falls to the ground as acid rain.
I can't imaging the ecological devastation that would result if the world tried to make more us of coal rather than less. Besides, what's the point of making the costly switchover to coal from petroleum-based fuels when coal is just as harmful, if not more so?
The idea is not just to find a cheap source of energy. We have to find something that's renewable and environmentally friendly.
As I've said before, once people resign themselves to the fact that any change in primary power generation is going to be expensive, it opens up the door for countless technologies to be explored and exploited.
For me, I think that means we have to look beyond any form of nuclear energy for the answer. There are simply too many negatives surrounding the use of nuclear power to make it a viable, sustainable option.
I like the idea of nuclear, The last real disaster was a long time ago and as long as we keep working on safety (like F1) I'm confident we'll carry on fine. That said if something did happen the consequences don't bear thinking about, remember chernobyl could have been so much worse, there could have been an explosion large enough to wipe out Ukraine (an area bigger than an American state i think) It is safer that way though than burning coal etc?
Would it be possibble to build a hydroelectric machine of some kind in the middle of the Atlantic? The way I see it there is so much energy out there that if we could harness it we could power almost anything?
Murphy's 9th Law of Technology:
Tell a man there are 300 million stars in the universe and he'll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and he'll have to touch to be sure.
After the USA, you have Australia and Norway as the worst per capita polluters. Australia is particularly hot, much of its electricity comes from cheap opencast coal. Norway is contrastingly cold, but also once had an extensive coal industry.
I have a problem with the term "worst polluters" particular how it is determined. If most of Norway's electricity comes from Hydro power, how can they be placed in the list of worst polluters simply because it 'once had' an extensive coal industry?
I also have a problem with how the term Global warming is used or its meaning. Nobody knows for example how much of the current warming trend is attributable to humans. In fact I doubt there is even data to support the fact that increases in co2 (or co emissions) equates to increased global temps.
Yes we should be concerned our environment and do more to promote clean energy and try to enviro friendly lives or what have you.
We are told the US is the worst polluter. I do not disagree per se but I do have a problem with models used to extrapolate and determine this. My Problem is that field research has been replaced with simulations and models. Models which can vary by as much as 400%.
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regards to matters requiring thought. The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgement upon anything new. - Galileo..
The noblest of dogs is the hot dog. It feeds the hand that bites it.
Couple of things; I wonder why people debate whether global warming is real or imagined. I think we should all be able to see that it would be better all round if renewable energy was used. Nuclear? On a good day I think it sounds like a good idea, then you think of the consequences if someone makes a mistake.......
So, here's a question.........if you take an energy "system" - like wind or waves. Does the act of taking energy out of that system have consequences elsewhere? I.e. will it affect weather patterns/wave patterns? Or is our total energy drain too small a proportion to affect it?
Yeah, I know that wind farms extract energy from the wind really close to the ground, so I would imagine that winds moving higher in the atmosphere won't be affected.
It's probably such a daft question it didn't need answering, but I know we have enough brains around here to give a considered view.
I wonder why people debate whether global warming is real or imagined
The question is what is global warming? people doubt what whether its real or imagined because they dont know what it is or are given differing or conflicting definitions/explanations. So to have reasonable debate about global warming perhaps we should first define what it is.
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regards to matters requiring thought. The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgement upon anything new. - Galileo..
The noblest of dogs is the hot dog. It feeds the hand that bites it.
i don't think we need loads of information about that, one thing is asking for information and the other one is listening it. Here in spain we're having a clear example this year, with very high temperatures, low precipitations and if it rains it's very strong in a short gap of time causing floods so what else people want?
I think people are not seeing things realistically - if one nuclear power plant in the middle of Europe would explode, but really explode throwing out all of its radiation it could make wasteland out of Europe. People seam to be forgetting that only small amount of nuclear material from Chernobyl went into atmosphere and it was enough to kill over 200.000 people. Imagine would would happen if explosion had blown away all radioactive material that is still laying active under concrete sarcophagus.
manchild wrote:I think people are not seeing things realistically - if one nuclear power plant in the middle of Europe would explode, but really explode throwing out all of its radiation it could make wasteland out of Europe. People seam to be forgetting that only small amount of nuclear material from Chernobyl went into atmosphere and it was enough to kill over 200.000 people. Imagine would would happen if explosion had blown away all radioactive material that is still laying active under concrete sarcophagus.
I think that things today are slightly different than they were in Russia in 1986. I mean, that power plant was housed in a warehouse with no way to contain the problem!
Nuclear energy might be the only realistic alternative (i.e. cost vs. output), although I'm not sure what is it that they plan to do with waste. If I remember correctly, some of those elements have a half-life of 250 years. If they could solve that problem, I would be all for it!
P.S. I was in Europe when Chernobyl took place, and was exposed to the radiation within 2-3 days of the explosion. Today, aside from the fact that my girlfriend calls me a retard (every now and then), I don't think that there is anything wrong with me! (btw, I'm not stating that radiation is not a problem...just a side remark, meant to poke fun at me!).
