Environmental awareness is an essential quality for civilizations fit enough to survive.
A TED talk discusses how economies and cities could work if that were to be accomplished with global implementation:
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Resource Based Economy
Environmental awareness is an essential quality for civilizations fit enough to survive.
A TED talk discusses how economies and cities could work if that were to be accomplished with global implementation:
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Later Than We Think?
They are multinational corporations that use their money to control the energy policy of the United States in order to suit their corporate mania, regardless of the damage it is certain to do to society.
They have, in effect, dissolved the political parties into a bipartisan toxic mix of words and actions that work against the efforts to avoid catastrophe, as explained in some comments made by Noam Chomsky, on the issues facing those of us in The United States:
I’ve kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we’ve discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.
One has been hanging around since 1945. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped it. That’s the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn’t being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble.
The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat. It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.
And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”
We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke. And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted -- and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.
(Huffington Post, emphasis added). A scientific paper just released (5/9/12), backs up Dr. Chomsky's statement, indicating that parts of the Antarctic, once thought to be solid, in fact are vulnerable to melt.
Statements by Dr. Hansen say that if Canadian dirty oil is used we can forget it, there will be no turning back:
If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate … Civilization would be at risk … If this sounds apocalyptic, it is … The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.
(NY Times, 5/9/12, emphasis added). It really is much later than we think, and the clock keeps ticking in the direction we are not diverting from.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Solar Power Even At Night
Today, lets look at two methods that use liquid salt.
The first one is a solar thermal power plant in Spain, a power plant that gets around one weakness of solar power, which is, that the Sun is not always visible due to weather, and it is not available at night.
There is a salty solution to that problem:
"It is the first station in the world that works 24 hours a day, a solar power station that works day and night!" said Santago Arias, technical director of Torresol Energy, which runs the station.
The mechanism is "very easy to explain," he said: the panels reflect the suns rays on to the tower, transmitting energy at an intensity 1,000 times higher than that of the sun's rays reaching the earth.
Energy is stored in a vat filled with molten salts at a temperature of more than 500 degrees C (930 F). Those salts are used to produce steam to turn the turbines and produce electricity.
It is the station's capacity to store energy that makes Gemasolar so different because it allows the plant to transmit power during the night, relying on energy it has accumulated during the day.
"I use that energy as I see fit, and not as the sun dictates," Arias explained.
(Solar Power Even At Night).Imagine a smart power grid built with these liquid salt storage facilities all along it.
As power needs fluctuate downward, energy going into the grid, whether solar thermal, solar photo-voltaic, wind, and other methods, is stored for later use when the fluctuation goes upward again.
Another place liquid salt is used for power generation has been around for quite a while.
The administrator of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, top physicist Alvin M. Weinberg, wanted a Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor (MSR), but was fired by Nixon for advocating MSR.
The following video describes MSR:
update:
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