Harry Reid Pushes Nevada As "Saudi Arabia of Geothermal Energy" 369
An anonymous reader writes "Of all the 'mainstream' forms of renewable energy, it seems that geothermal power is always left in the shadows compared to solar and wind power. However, that looks set to change with news that the US Department of Energy will fund geothermal projects in northwestern Nevada and southeast Oregon. With funds from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, the DOE has stated a 'conditional commitment' to provide a partial guarantee for a rumored $98.5 million loan to the Nevada Geothermal Power Company (NGP). According to US Senator Harry Reid, 'Northern Nevada is the Saudi Arabia of geothermal energy.'"
Re:Geothermal energy ignored? (Score:3, Informative)
Some More Sources: (Score:4, Informative)
DOE Press Release with Media Contact Number [energy.gov]
Sustainable Business Blog, apparently the initial plant will produce 49.5 MW in capacity [sustainablebusiness.com]
Home website of NGP, the contract winner [nevadageothermal.com]
Write up from EON, with quite a bit more info, including contact info. for various parties involved. [businesswire.com]
Re:Geothermal (Score:5, Informative)
Once we suck all the heat out of the Earth's core, the mantle will solidify: fusing all the tectonic plates and ending earthquakes and volcanoes once and for all.
Win/win.
Assuming that were possible (don't worry, it's not), you end up losing the dynamo effect of a liquid mantle, the Earth's magnetic field vanishes, and the solar wind blows the atmosphere off into space. Yeah, really win.
Nerd card revoked.
Re:The problem with geothermal (Score:4, Informative)
it takes time for the surrounding rock to heat up the cool spot you've created. This places a natural limit on the rate you can extract heat energy from a geothermal well
While I'm no expert in the field I daresay that there's a "natural limit" to anything, including the energy produced from an oil burning plant. Surely the output of the plant is an engineering issue, and it's simply a matter of design.
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:2, Informative)
You *really*
Really
Really
Don't know about Reid's opponents this time around do you?
Sharron Angle is fucking crazy. [huffingtonpost.com]
Opposes fluoridation, the UN and the Department of Education.
She's got a lot of tough questions ahead of her.
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:5, Informative)
How about having her describe her opinions instead instead: http://www.sharronangle.com/issues/ [sharronangle.com]
Or how about the opinion of the people of Nevada: Angle: 50% Reid: 39% [rasmussenreports.com]
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:3, Informative)
As for the social security, it's an unsustainable system that will have to be reformed soon anyway. She is just being honest about it. And no she does not want to abolish it over night, she wants to phase it out for people entering the workforce now (anybody who paid into the system will still receive the benefits) and replaced with an actual interest bearing retirement savings account which will provide MUCH higher income in retirement for the same payment (12.5% of income) than social security does.
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:3, Informative)
Some bacteria can survive quite high levels of radiation, in fact, thrive even.
Oh really [foodtechservice.com]?
Not at the doses I am thinking about...
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:1, Informative)
The US Department of Education is not all that old, a couple generations now. We existed just fine without it. There is NO credible evidence that having it has improved public education at all. On the contrary, on global measuring standards, the records show a drop almost across the board since its inception. We have hundreds of thousands of almost complete illiterates "graduating" high school now. Colleges and universities have to offer remedial courses just to get a lot of freshmen up to what were junior high standards in the 40s and 50s.
Social security is a ponzi scheme, basic econo 101 will show you that, it started at 35 inputting to one withdrawing, and in a few years will be less than 2 inputting to one withdrawing. It's broken, do the math, it's a ponzi scheme that is unsustainable. And there is no separate social security fund, that is long gone, looted by other bloated Federal schemes and boondoggles. It is a failure and it will not work for the boomer generation and beyond. The only way it and other entitlement programs are working today is the power of the printing press, and the rest of the planet is getting wise to the US just printing up money. In all the papers the last two years, perhaps you might have noticed a headline or two...
Fluoridation is not needed if you eat healthy foods and brush. If you disagree, please cite an academic reference that shows fluoride and what the minimum daily recommended levels for intake should be for a normal adult, similar to the levels they have for other minerals and vitamins. Go ahead, I dare you to provide one single reference showing fluoride is a nutritional requirement.
If you stay away from soda, junk food, etc, over processed and over packaged and adulterated foods and eat just a lot more normal vegetables and fruits, including a lot more raw vegetables and fruits, you won't have many problems with your teeth at all. You go look at some third world nations where they don't eat as much junk food at all and just eat a lot of local grown simple basic foods, and just get normal well water. You'll see better teeth than in most rich western "developed" nations, with no fluoride intake at all. You can see it when aboriginal peoples switch from traditional diets to "modern" diets. They get huge health problems, especially with their teeth because it shows up so fast.
Go back and look at the earliest uses of fluoride in the water. You simply won't believe where it was used first, and for what purpose. hint: used at ww2 death camps. Go do your own research to find out why they used it.
I have one recommendation for people who parrot government and big corporate propaganda..you are being used and abused and have been brainwashed. Stop drinking their kool aid and think and research for yourself for a change. Approach each controversial subject with a neutral stance, and you'll find you have been programmed to believe a certain way, especially in the federally controlled public schools.
As to the UN..mixed bag, some good, a lot bad, going way way back. Perhaps-just for one point, there are hundreds really showing how corrupt and incompetent they are- revisit the H1N1 scare and how the scare promoters at the UN abused their scientific positions of authority and profited handsomely by pushing it as a hyper dangerous emergency epidemic, when it wasn't. Yes, it killed people, but not as much as the "normal" flu, and their shots didn't work very well anyway. They keep that part hidden, try to find real stats anyplace showing follow up studies that included people who received the vaccine, compared to the vaccinated. There is almost no difference at all in infection or mortality rates. It was a multi billion dollar conjob. Run and pushed by the UN.
The planet needs something like the UN..but the current incarnation is broken beyond repair. For every success they have a dozen expensive failures. When some nation like the Sudan can lecture western nations on human rights, or Zimbabwe..that's prima facie evidence that it is broken beyond repair.
Re:Geothermal (Score:1, Informative)
For what it's worth, the Earth's magnetic field is generated by a self-exciting dynamo driven by circulation of the liquid outer core, not the mantle. The mantle is generally a solid that circulates, very slowly, through plastic deformation, except for a few parts that contain a small percent of melted rock.
Although unrelated to those facts, the upper mantle is generally pistachio green with some black and emerald green specks. Old subducted plates that haven't made it too far down are green with blood red lumps.
The ban changed nothing (Score:3, Informative)
Upcoming technologies such as accelerated thorium on the other hand are reported in the press as breeders but are completely different to dead ends like superphoenix (the French extended a middle digit in the direction of the ban as they can be depended on to do).
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:4, Informative)
Why should I want more democracy? There's nothing particularly sacred about democracy. That's the point of the Senate, the founders recognized that mobs can get carried away by stupid ideas, and that's why the Senate was intended to act as a buffer to the House of Representatives. Now, we effectively have two Houses of Representatives, and what's the point of that?
Further, consider the priorities of an elected official. He gets into office by whoring for votes. His priority is the next election, not how his actions will affect the country decades into the future.
The point is, elected officials and unelected officials have different incentives. That's why the government was designed to have components of both.
I actually think it was a mistake to allow direct election of the president. It causes people to concentrate on the election of one politician on whom they have little influence, rather than their local representatives where the views of a relatively few people actually can have significant influence.
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:4, Informative)
Ya really. [usuhs.mil]
Deinococcus radioduransshrugs of acute doses of 10000 Gy and thrives under a constant 60 Gy/h. That's way beyond what your puny machine will offer...
Re:Naturally (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, Nevada does have the highest average geothermal gradient [energy.gov] of any state, so, pork or not, Nevada is one of the best places to do geothermal power in the United States. There are also substantial areas of elevated geothermal gradient in Oregon (already mentioned in the article), Idaho, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, but Nevada is arguably the best of them. Even on a global scale the southwestern parts of the USA are fairly good because this is an area of the Earth's crust that is being tectonically stretched and thinned. There are certainly other parts of the world that might be better overall (e.g., Iceland), but the area still rates highly.
Re:The problem with geothermal (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with geothermal is that after you extract the heat from the rocks, it takes time for the surrounding rock to heat up the cool spot you've created.
The problem with geothermal power is cleaning up the toxic waste.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: geothermal power is a total failure on all levels. I live within shootin' distance of The Geysers, the most geothermally active region known to exist on Earth. We have a geothermal plant here which is continually over budget and under-producing. The turbine blades are built by Halliburton, which is a disaster in itself. After they have been in service for a certain period of time, they must be cleaned of buildup of toxics like Arsenic which are released from the vent along with the steam. Most of the hot springs in town have measurable Arsenic content. This is simply pressure-washed off, and the slurry stored in open pits for evaporation. After this process has been repeated a sufficient number of times the pit is covered over and the walls raised. They used to put it in drums and bury them in a field on one of the roads out of town [google.com] but the drums started leaking and cows were being born with two heads and that sort of thing, so they "cleaned it up". Oh, sorry, THEY didn't clean it up, we did. It was a superfund site; we still have one of those [epa.gov] operating in town, for similar compounds. The "solution" was to dig it all up, put in a rubber liner, and bury it again.
There are other types of geothermal power options, like heat pipes, but all you have to know about them is that they are terribly inefficient (not that any geothermal plant in the world is producing any amazing amount of power) and they don't last, just like the turbine blades in our example. You're always digging things up and replacing them, which is terribly impractical. The simple truth is that solar panels could repay the energy cost of production in under seven years back in the 1970s and if all the money spent on geothermal plants was spent on even PV solar plants we would have produced a lot more power for the same amount of money.
Anyone promoting Geothermal power for low environmental impact is either ignorant or trolling.
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:3, Informative)
That, and considering how the vast majority of states are financially in the red these days
A small minority of states are in the red. Most states are fiscally responsible and live within their means. Some states even have constitutional requirements to maintain balanced budgets.
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm pretty sure she never made such a stupidly worded statement. Why do you have to make up a straw man? She's simply stated she's against it, and there's scientific evidence that ingesting fluoride is bad for one's overall health. Is it really that difficult for people to brush their teeth in the 21st century USA?
[citation needed] BTW, so did Thomas Jefferson.
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:2, Informative)
Poisoning the well fallacy, AC. Just because you don't like the organization (or man) doesn't mean they're invalid. If Rasmussen polls were garbage, they wouldn't be used much because, frankly, some people depend on the numbers.
[citation needed]
Or, they're a legitimate organization with accurate numbers. If they were Republican-controlled, wouldn't they want to give her a slightly bigger lead?
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:According to US Senator Harry Reid ... (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't mean the link is bad. You just need to check references.
in fact, Angle said she believed most fluoride used in water supplies could contain "lead, arsenic, [or] mercury." All of which is crazy talk.
She supports making alcohol consumoption illegal.
She thinks it's her job to 'protect' people. which from my reading means 'make them behave the way my belief dictates.:
“I would tell you that I have the same feelings about legalizing marijuana, not medical marijuana, but just legalizing marijuana,” Angle offered. “I feel the same about legalizing alcohol.
“The effect on society is so great that I’m just not a real proponent of legalizing any drug or encouraging any drug abuse,” she continued. “I’m elected by the people to protect, and I think that law should protect.”
http://rmcpac.com/viewpoints/new-angle-giving-harry-reid-boot-sharon-angle [rmcpac.com]
So she doesn't want people to be able to choose to drink alcohol, or ANY drug.She want's her faith determine other peoples behavior. How Anti American is that?
Yeah, the Huffpo is questionable in many areas, and down write stupid in science. But follow the links, and rad up. That SPECIFIC article is an accurate one.
She thinks BP
s disaster is a good reason to deregulate the oil industry. Crazy, ignorant and stupid.