Windmills as far as the eye can see. . . and then much farther

What with congress and President Obama trying to pass the cap and trade legislation that will add over $1,000 per year in energy cost to your household budget there is again a lot of hot air being generated about wind power.

So I got to thinking about what our everyday world would look like if powered by the wind. It would take about 1,500 big windmills to replace the power generated by the Limerick nuclear plant. When I say big windmills I mean that each of them would be about 600 feet tall, about as tall as the 60 story buildings down in Philadelphia. Those windmills would have droning rotors 400 feet in diameter; and to be efficient they would need to be spaced about a half mile apart (6 times the diameter of the rotors).

So, just to replace one large power plant, we're talking about a line of windmills 750 miles long, or else a square grid of colossal windmills almost 28 miles on a side - 750 square miles of windmills.

If the windmills were built in a single line heading south down the median strip of I-95 you could drive all the way to Florida without being more than 1,200 feet from one of them.

If the windmills were built in a grid pattern they would cover all of Montgomery County, and there would still be about 300 square miles of windmills slopping over the edges into Chester, Berks, Delaware, Bucks, Lancaster and Philadelphia counties. The luckiest people in this area would live in the middle of a grid square, 1,700 feet in each direction from four constantly whooshing windmills, each one mounted on a tower twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty's torch. Most people would get to live much closer to a windmill. Some would get to live right under the whirling blades; but not to worry, even a major league pitcher probably wouldn't be able to throw a baseball high enough to hit the tip of a blade as it whizzed through the air overhead at 200 miles per hour.

On the plus side, I imagine there would be some really neat graffiti on the towers after a while.

whoosh. . . whoosh. . . whoosh. . . whoosh. . . whoosh

Nuclear or bust - I fear we will bust

The way to think about your fears of nuclear power is by asking, "Compared to what?"

Linda and I live about seven miles from the limerick nuclear power plant. As a result we get a scary evacuation mailer once a year so we're sure to be aware of how to escape in the event one of the engineers comes running out of the plant yelling "She's gonna blow." Well, the plant hasn't blown yet; and it's been producing 2,400 megawatts of electricity for twenty years.

If we lived seven miles from a coal powered plant producing the same amount of electricity we wouldn't get that scary mailer. That's because nobody is scared of coal plants even though a coal burning plant the size of Limerick would be getting and burning up a big trainload of coal every day. And there is no way you can burn that much coal without putting some serious crap into the air.

T. Boone Pickens says we should use windmills to make our electricity. Well, the biggest windmills around produce about 5 megawatts when the wind is blowing strongly. So even if the wind blew strongly all the time it would take about 500 windmills to generate as much power as the Limerick nuclear plant. Oh, and each of those windmills would be about 600 feet tall, almost as tall as the tall buildings down in Philadelphia. And, before I forget, the wind doesn't blow strongly all the time, so it would really take about 1,500 windmills to generate as much power as the Limerick nuclear plant.

Windmills as far as the eye can see, all of them droning and droning and droning. And did I mention that windmills kill bats even though the bats are smart and agile enough to avoid the spinning blades. That's because the lungs of the bats can't handle the pressure differential that they encounter when they fly near the blades. Not that I really give too much of a damn about bats - I don't even like bats. But that doesn't mean I want all the bats coughing their lungs out even though they're also smart enough not to smoke.

How about solar power, you're probably saying. Well, the biggest solar power plant produces about 50 megawatts when the sun is shining. That sounds pretty good because it would seem that you could replace the nuclear plant with only about 50 solar power plants. But alas, the sun is not always shining, so it would really take about about 250 solar power plants to replace the Limerick nuclear power plant. Each one of those 250 solar power plants would cover about about 450 acres of land.

There are other issues with nuclear power, like waste disposal; but I think the insane worry over nuclear waste disposal is one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated. Yes, spent nuclear reactor fuel is very worthy of respectful and careful handling. But the French have been handling spent reactor fuel for decades while they have generated 80% of their electricity from nuclear. They reprocess the fuel so they can use most of it to fuel reactors again, and then they dispose of only a small portion of it.

And then there's the matter of relative risk. The folks who scream bloody murder about nuclear power don't tell you how many people are dying from steadily breathing the pollution that coal power plants put into the air. And if you're risk averse you had best stop driving your car. There is nothing in the energy field that comes near to the risk you will take tomorrow or next week or next year when you have a couple drinks and then pass a tractor trailer loaded with gasoline on the Schuylkill expressway going 70 miles an hour.

The link below leads to an article by a guy who seems to make sense to me. I think he minimizes the problems and issues a bit; but anyone who thinks we can continue living anything like our current lifestyles without nuclear power is fooling themselves. There simply is no alternative.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDIwMjVjMTIyZTQ1NTJhNjM1YzFmZmFmNWVkNDA4ZjE=

Electrorheology Leads to Efficient Combustion

I find it amazing that I just read this at sciencedaily.com and haven't heard of it before. If this is workable on standard production cars and trucks at reasonable cost and with reasonable reliability it's amazing news. Yet it hasn't leaked to the popular press despite the fact that it was sent to the American Chemical Society on June 12th. The Temple professor who did the research must be very closemouthed indeed given the significant implications. For one thing it has the potential to reduce U.S. oil usage by something like ten percent and reduce oil imports by something like twenty percent. That's a greater impact than all the windmills and solar energy plants Al Gore envisions being built in the next ten years in his wildest dreams. For another thing the patent on it is probably worth more than Temple University spends on it's entire science program in a decade.

I'll be interested to see what Alex thinks of the original paper on which the science daily article is based. Given what this paper claims this may be totally bogus, or else it may be hugely expensive or impossible to manufacture on a large scale. It's claims are not quite like claims to be able to run a car on water, but they are almost as remarkable given the maturity of internal combustion engine technology and the huge efforts automotive engineers put into improving fuel efficiency by one or two percent.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080925111836.htm