Energy
What Happens When a Green Comes Out Of The Woods and Meets Reality
Michael Moore, of all people, released a movie about the downsides of green energy. The film is a rather amazing look into how somebody loses their environmental innocence bit by bit as the realities of industrial scale wind and solar energy hit home. Here’s the film:
Is This The Future We Have To Look Forward To?
“In the future, we’ll all live in “Live Cubes,” tiny homes that restrict your energy and water use.”
On The Wonderful Inability To Prove A Negative
A while back the EPA produced a draft report that said that fracking a well doesn’t pollute ground water. So the final report has come out and surprise, the wording has been changed to say that fracking could harm water supplies even in the absence of data. Here’s how the Wall St. Journal wrote about the report.
The Cloud People Beating The Ground People Into The Dirt.
I hate writing about this stuff. Yet It seems that I keep getting my nose rubbed into it. The cloud people are determined to pound the rest of us into the ground by making what was once cheap and available into something that is expensive and unreliable.
There Is No Idea So Bad That It Will Not Attract Avid Believers
This time it’s solar roadways. Like just about any hokum that you stick “solar” or “green” in front of the whatever and people just line up to hand out the cash. I’ve seen this for forty years now, since I was fifteen and I’ve never understood it. I suppose it’s the idea that you get something for “free.” The problem, as I figured out very quickly with a quick little bit of math after my dad and I went to an early green house show back in the 1970’s the costs of a typical solar installation are not covered by the electricity generated.
What’s It Really Like Working At A DOE National Lab.
I don’t have Netflix or even a TV, so I haven’t seen Stranger Things other than some ads on You Tube. This post turned up and I thought that I would share my experiences working at a DOE National lab. The author of the post is a little retrained so I thought that I would liven things up.
The Law Of Unintended Consequences Hits Biofuels
This should be a shock to nobody but the Greens.
Ever since the beginning of the ethanol mandate it was obvious to anybody with eyes to see that the whole thing was a boondoggle and a huge waste for everybody except ADM. What the Greens failed to understand is that if you prop up corn prices by buying, distilling and burning massive amounts of corn whisky in cars, two things are going to happen. One the price is going to go up, making things like cow feed and other uses of corn more expensive and 2. farmer are going to, without restraints, plant ever larger amounts of corn, which will 1. push out other crops like wheat and 2. require more land use to plant even more corn. Which is why you can now go from Eastern Colorado to Western NY and essentially see nothing but corn. Millions of acres of corn, across the country, grown to burn. Somehow this was supposed to be environmentally friendly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_ethanol
There’s something insane about using food crops for fuel. Especially since growing the food crops and getting the product takes more fuel than you get back as heating value energy in vehicles.
The fact is that grain alcohol has a low heating value and lower flame temperatures than most of the other carbon fuels. It’s not really a good fuel. In fact, the only reason it’s used at all is it’s green stamp of renewability. Is a fuel renewable though if, as more than likely, the system to grow, harvest, process and transport the fuel would collapse if energy could not be drawn from other sources. Of course the other energy uses are typically invisible to the average Green who only sees the E10 sign at the gas pump and feels better about it. I tend to look at that E10 symbol differently. I see 100 car train loaded with corn in covered hoppers the same size as houses, pulled by locomotives, trains that go to huge grain elevators to be transferred to barges that stop at refining plants that distill the corn. Then I see yet more trains of huge tank cars, rolling across the country to oil refineries with the ethanol ration because you can’t ship ethanol in a pipeline. All that to get my 10 gallons of gas diluted and make my car have higher gas usage due to the decrease in gas mileage. When you see that E10 symbol, think of trains like these.
And of course some of the other unintended consequences, like a lot more burning cars on the road thanks to ethanol’s other bad habits
First Electric Truck? Not Really
Mercedes Benz should check the history files before making claims.
Mercedes-Benz shows off the first fully electric heavy urban transport truck
Electric trucks were quite common back at the turn of the last century. For the exact service that Daimler and Tesla are planning to sell them for.
A Fusion Update, A Tech Stuff Special
Here’s an interesting piece from Time magazine:
http://time.com/4013745/fusion-engine-before-2020/
The funny thing is that getting fusion isn’t really that hard. The Farnsworth Fusor which almost guarantees that you get some fusion neutrons isn’t that hard to fabricate.
http://makezine.com/projects/make-36-boards/nuclear-fusor/
Kids as young as 13 have built fusors and frankly I think that they are a good way to learn about vacuum, useful even if you don’t get useful energy out of your gadget. And they are cool.
I’ve posted before about fusion energy before. Especially about Robert Bussard’s polywell. Not perhaps as much as I should have. Especially about the polywell. I became interested in the polywell when I watched this talk from Robert Bussard back in 2007.
The Arts Mechanical 