One Turbine Turning, Six Burning, Three Dead Turkey Vultures
The article below end of a scam: destruction of a coal-to-gas plant that is/was one of the biggest scams ever inflicted on the public.
When this utter nonsense ends about how dangerous nuclear power is and how wind/solar crap is so much better (maybe when a blizzard hits and the power and heat shut off in the homes of the green idiots and the snooty jerks, as it did last winter in Texas) , we will likely get back to building new nuke plants and the nonsense will stop. Speaking of Texas, my relatives down there told me that they were not happy having to deal with a power grid that was unable to handle bad weather and an increased demand by users, and I know that Texas can be quite cold and non-friendly when it wants to.
I personally prefer gas heat and gas for cooking over using electricity for those needs, because of a lifetime of being exposed to the reliability of gas. Steam heat from a gas-fired boiler into a radiator in my apartment in my home town was more reliable than electricity for heat, especially in really bad winter weather.
Frankly, I would rather have a house with a wood-burning fireplace where I can cook if needed, instead of knuckling under to the idiots who think the planet is being destroyed by using carbon-based fuels. If using wood and/or coal to cook is so destructive, then someone needs to explain just how all those old settlements that have the remains of kitchens in them, with charred wood in what was likely a cooking/heating area, did not destroy the planet over a period of 15,000 years.
As the late, great George Carlin said: “The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are [not so much].” The idiocy of the Greenies and ecohippies is aimed at putting the entire world’s population back in the equivalent of the 12th century, or worse.
And this article below comes from National Review, in regard to how 15 states are refusing to follow so-called “woke capitalism” by threatening to cut off banks that refuse to service coal and oil industries. I find it sad that my own state is not part of this, but the current “governor” is “woke” about daydreams. If the power goes out again this winter, I may send him a nasty letter about it and blame him for it.
This is a genuinely big deal. From the article: A coalition of financial officers from 15 states sent a letter to the U.S. banking industry on Monday warning they plan to take “collective action” against banks that adopt corporate policies to cut off financing for the coal, oil, and natural gas industries.
The group threatens to scrutinize or potentially curtail future business with banks that adopt an “economic boycott” of those industries, in a letter obtained exclusively by National Review.
“Just as each state represented in this letter is unique in its governing laws and economy, our actions will take different forms,” writes the group, led by West Virginia treasurer Riley Moore. “However, the overarching objective of our actions will be the same — to protect our states’ economies, jobs, and energy independence from these unwarranted attacks on our critical industries.”
The group of state treasurers, auditors and comptrollers from West Virginia, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Alabama, Texas and Kentucky say they have a “compelling government interest” to eleven major financial institutions that “are not engaged in tactics to harm the very people whose money they are handling.”
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs were among the recipients. – end of quote
I will leave the reactions to this (IMHO) sensible attitude to your discretion. I can only say “It’s about damned time.”
While natural gas and oil are finite resources, as is coal (a product of the Silurian and Carboniferous epochs), nuclear energy is far more reliable than wind and solar, and does not trash the environment when a plant is taken offline. Remember that if there is no wind, there is no turbine turnin’, and cloudy days, night skies and storms impede the vaunted production capacity of solar panels.
If you’re wondering about the title, it refers to the dead birds in my area that were whacked this year by wind turbines because they were caught in the vortex created by the blades. Turkey vultures are predator birds, as are hawks and eagles, and they are necessary for a healthy environment because they hunt and kill rodents, among other things. Rodents damage crops and carry diseases that you don’t want near you.
The planet is fine. As George Carlin says, the people are screwed up. And Mother Nature will get the Greenies for their foolishness.
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", 2020 Election, Economy
Annnnnnnnndddddd
Our lil bat’s are getting chopped up also.
We need bats!!!! They eat mosquitoes that carry nasty diseases (among other things).
The natural gas lines in Texas froze last year as well. While the gas evaporates quickly in open air, it’s in liquid form inside the delivery lines.
I know, but I never found out why. I live in the upper Midwest where winters are very harsh and have never, ever lost my gas supply, even when the power went out.
I’m trying to understand why it happened down there but never happens up here, when our winters really are quite harsh.
I have no knowledge of the system in Texas, but I know where you and I live the gas lines are buried under the frost line (~48″). It’s always 55 degrees where they put them. Since Texas rarely gets below freezing, I would think that if they do bury them, they don’t go that deep.
That makes a lot of sense, Mason. Thanks for the tip!
The term “Now you’re cooking with gas…” came about for a very good reason. Very efficient way of getting the job done. Lubs my gas stove. Lubs my gas furnace too. When I rehabbed the 1830s farmhouse that is known as Firebase Magnolia, I sealed off the fireplaces, but left the chimneys. Would be fairly simple to put some flex pipe in there to use a wood burner heater. Them 1830s bricks wouldn’t handle a roaring fire. Little too old and decrepit to keep a coupla cords of hardwood handy though. Been there, done that…it’s a heap of work.
IIRC, read a few years back that the US had several hundred years worth of good coal still in the ground. We might as well use it to make ‘lectricity, we shorely aren’t using it to make steel any more. GA Power spent a bloody fortune putting scrubbers on the big coal plants and have made them nearly zero emissions, tore several other plants down. They also spent several bloody fortunes expanding (trying to) the Savannah River Nuke Plant til they pulled the plug on that one.
Who put these stoopid mofos in charge anyhow? My folks out in Nebraska talk about the boondoggle that the turbines have become out there. And I’ve yet to figure out how me paying more taxes and fees is going to clean up the air that China, India, Russia, et al are polluting way yonder more than we are. What say ye, former German Coal Miners? How’s that coding job training going for you?
“wood burner heater” = Pellet stove fireplace insert. 80 pound hopper, thermostat controlled, easy clean-up, electronic ignition. Best brand is by the Quadra-Fire Company. Had two of them in our old 2700 sq ft home in Powell, WY, Douglas Fir pellets came in 40 pound bags, cost was $70.00 a ton, Basically used one and a half tons for the fall/winter/spring season. Gas furnace never had to kick on all winter. If worse got to worse, you could always burn shelled corn if you ran out of pellets.
Just something to look into./smile
Looked at them long and hard, Claw Daddy. My Brother from the same Mother uses one at his place up in Dakota. Works like a champ. His place is a nice, open floor plan, split level that lets the warm air flow all thru-out. Firebase Magnolia was built out in stages as the original family grew and is spread out all over hell and half an acre, one side being two (2) story, the far end being an original share cropper two (2) room cabin that was brought in from seven (7) miles away on log rollers and mule team in the early 1870s (that part is a kitchen from hell on one (1) side (big with all kinds of cabinets) and the other side is a right good sized dining room. The original (separate from the main house) kitchen is a master bath with the dog trot being enclosed to make a walkin closet and laundry area. Lots of walls, halls, and stairways to break up air flow. I’d have to have several, three (3), or four (4) small ones to make it work. Chimneys four (4) of them, with eight (8) fireplaces are all interiors. Killer place and one day Imma gonna sell it to a rich snowbird carpetbagger for a dump truck load of USDs and go to ground, forted up at COP CRC Timber Ranch. That one is a more open space layout with basement fireplace and upper level fireplace more conducive to a free standing or insert pellet unit. GA power has torn down a number of older hydro plants in the last few years, banking on the expanded SR Nuke plant coming on line. They fornicated Fido with those decisions and it’s coming back to bite them on the azz now. Most of the juice from the big coal plant in Juliet is sent out on the grid to Flur-ruh-duh. That plant gets in three hundred (300) car loads of coal from the Montana Mines every day. With all the coal we got here, you’d think they’d start making gas out of it again.… Read more »
Depending on what coal you could (how accessible is it) and how much the energy demand is predicted to grow, we have anywhere from two hundred to two -thousand- years of mineable coal within the territory of the USA.
And we have evolved greatly our mining skills, both in terms of cost reduction and of impact reduction. Ditto scrubber technology. The ability to precipitate and sell reagent-grade sulfur from burning coal smokestacks did more to clean up our air than all the hippies combined.
One of my duties in Germany was to occasionally rake the coals in the boiler
and add more as needed. The boiler looked similar to a pizza oven with the
wide door that hinged down. One night I noticed a frog on the concrete floor
so I picked it up and tossed it onto the red hot coals. It just sat there
motionless for a few seconds then “poof”…it disappeared.
I recall thinking gee, coal burns really clean.
Those turbines are a blight on the land.
They really do ruin the nice flat farmland we got out in the Great Plains. They’re so big you can see them for miles and miles and miles.
It bothers me to no end that they don’t march in time.
Well, if I were king, nat. gas would be used for heat and cooking but only as a fill-in for electrical generation. There’s something to be said for a power plant having weeks of fuel sitting in a big pile just outside, as opposed to one that’s connected to a pipeline delivering just-in-time fuel.
You think there might be a problem relying on these unreliable energy sources now, wait about ten years when the Progs have convinced half the population to own electric cars draining the power grid constantly. In addition, every time we turn around there is another tool or appliance to plug into a wall socket to charge its batteries. We will be hosed if we don’t start building nuclear power plants again. France had one quarter of its electricity coming from nuclear plants. Anyone ever hear of a nuke accident there?
*cough*
The United States Navy has been operating nuke plants since 1954. The Navy has steamed some 140-million miles around the world on various nuclear-powered vessels, and has amassed over 5700 reactor-years of safe operation.
Currently, there are 83 nuclear-powered ships: 72 submarines, 10 aircraft carriers and one research vessel.
All this and never a release of radioactivity, or an accident which has had an adverse effect on human health or the environment.
That doesn’t count. It’s at sea, not in my backyard. And nobody cares if Sailors glow anyway.*
*This post is pure sarcasm. However… there may be some truth in it. Consult your local tree hugger for more info. Thank you for your support.
FTFY
IMHO electric cars are glorified golf carts, somebody try to change my mind.
I have baseboard electric resistance heat. Heh, the guy just read
the meter five minutes ago and I waved to him.
At 10.8 cents per kwh bottom line, under contract with Canader for
the next three years I am happy as a clam offshore a nuke plant.
Electric heat is 100% efficient. Installation is cheap.
Maintenance is zero.
My neighbor works at the local windfarm. He knows it’s a scam but
the money is great and as long as it is he will continue to work
there and heat his house with the cheap Canaderian power like me.
The local windfarm power is sold to NYC for .24 per kwh subsidized by
all the fools that believe the scam and vote accordingly.
I will put my EE up against anyones climate change bullcrap nonesense
any day anywhere with nothing more than a blackboard and chalk.
The answer is nuke power and everyone knows it.
There will be nuke power everywhere eventually after all the lying,
corrupt politicians are gone and the climate change clowns are
exposed for what they are. Maybe they can start teaching physics again.
Hey remember arithmetic and those big flash cards?
Yes, I learned my times tables with a set of those flash cards.
I think I read that China is bringing more nuke power plants online ASAP. India may be doing the same, but I will have to look that up.
Meantime, in the UK, BoJo and his ecohippie Greenie girlfriend are mandating that wind turbines offshore (which do not work half the time) are going to be the UK’s primary source of power for heat, cooking and transportation. Period. I will keep an eye open for the DBBoJo results come spring. Germany is not much better off under Merkel’s thumb.
India has committed Bigly to thorium-cycle (breeder) reactors as their plan to power society for one billion people.
Thorium, when bombarded by neutrons, makes U233, a fissile isotope of Uranium. Properly built, a reactor breeds more uranium than it consumes. U233 can be used in a bomb, but it is so strongly radioactive (lots of hard gamma) that it will fry the sensitive electronics of the weapon, and the idiots trying to use U233. It is quite manageable in a reactor situation, however.
And modern reactor designs can be tweaked for maximum burn-up, so not all the reactors are breeders, and most of the high-level waste gets consumed in situ.
One nifty type is the CANDU. Essentially a multi-fuel flexible design with high safety. There are others.
Yep. Them CANDU reactors sure can do, eh. It’s a beauty way to go.
https://www.opg.com/powering-ontario/our-generation/nuclear/darlington-nuclear/
Guess the simple reasoning of the day was, if Canada wasn’t going have a nuclear weapons program, there was no real reason to develop and maintain a supporting Breeder reactor program.
The Hatchet bunker runs on natural gas, bought and paid for, once-a-month, from our local provider-Consumers Gas. Applied to Water and household heating as well as kitchen. For the time being, rates are relatively sane-approx $1,800-2000/yr. My next door neighbour and I are researching Solar for electrical/water and household heating, as there are provincial and federal subsidies available for them. Got to admit, I was absolutely amazed at the gas and power failures that Texas endured this past February.
Everybody’s building nuke plants (and working on fusion) while our proggies want only wind/solar-powered electricity to power everything.
“If you’re wondering about the title, it refers to the dead birds in my area that were whacked this year by wind turbines because they were caught in the vortex created by the blades.”
I’m betting that by now wind turbines have killed more birds than DDT did.
Wind turbines and solar are still very inefficient, I read somewhere that some thirty-odd windmills only put out around 2.3 megawatts while one Steam Turbine Generator I once worked on made in 1948 put out 4 Megawatts and it’s about the size of a small pickup with a camper shell on it, let’s talk about size versus output! Windmills also require plenty of maintenance and the remoteness of many of their locations prohibits a rapid response in the event of failure which kinda guarantees a catastrophic failure. OH, and the expense of major repairs such as needing a new blade? Just the cost of hiring a Crane and its crew would eat you alive and negate any income from said turbine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjnXpOMu09I
The ones here are 3.0 MW and 112m dia.
I saw one get hit by lightning last May and just stop.
There used to be lots of Bald Eagles and Ospreys but I
have not seen any in years. I’m told they hang around the bait
pile of a rendering shop a few towns over but I don’t buy that.
And steam turbine is the most efficient way to produce electric power.
Solar is the least efficient and most stupid followed by wind.
Hydro is the most elegant.
And speaking of wind…the spinning machines are DC generators, not AC alternators.
The approx 8 rpm blade is up geared to drive the “permanent magnet” field,
brush type DC generator. The low voltage output is then fed through a DC to HVDC
converter and then to a DC to AC inverter before it can be placed on the grid.
Pretty damn stupid.
AC, DC, electrons… you’re just a polarity bigot! Ohms Law is white-male, heteronormative, Christian supremacy!
RRREeeeeEEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEEEEE!
Hydroelectric Power gives off ZERO EMISSIONS, but it works, thus the libtards hate it because they JUST HAVE TO pimp whatever they’re told is the newest and greatest thing plus they have tree-huggers telling them “Hydro bad too…”
Hydro dams harness gravity.
Liberals hate that. Drives them nuts.
Guys, check this out-definitely a very good argument for infrastructure maintenance –
Hoover Dam was completed in 1935, still generates power to this day. 88 years old and still kicking.
“And steam turbine is the most efficient way to produce electric power.”
The biggest Steam Turbine Generator I’ve worked with was a 20MW Model built by GE in the 1950’s about the size of a U-Haul truck that I was told could easily be upgraded to put out 35-50 MW because of how Steam Turbines were “overbuilt” in that day.
I really like Natural Gas for heat and hot water. Cooking its a toss up.
When I moved from Okla to Virgina PCS I rented an apartment. Virginia is a bit to far nort for heat pumps in winter. Heat pumps efficiency take a major nose dive at about 40 degrees F, that why they have the energy hog Emergency Heat function and there were too many winter days with temps below 40.
I did buy stock in my local electric company so the dividends did offset some of the increased cost.
When we were house hunting here we specifically looked for a house with either natural gas or wood fireplace so we could have an option should we have a long term power failure.
Turkey buzzards don’t hunt. They only eat dead stuff.
We had a saying in Arizona, “Don’t park under the buzzard tree.” Park under a buzzard roost if you want to know what they eat.
OK, but up here, they do hunt for live prey as well as going after carrion. I have some photos of one being chased by two redwinged blackbirds because the MUCH larger bird had snagged one of their chicks right out of the nest.
Hopefully this reply shows! It is my first time “caller”, long time “listener”. I have been working in the Navy nuke program for >15 years, on subs so I will argue I am better because I have to, and agree nuclear is the way to go. Right now the restrictions on civilian nuclear are insanely overbearing, to the tune of a hundred million or so for an “emergency and health fund” of any side effects/damage to local population or environment. I have also written and submitted papers going against the push for solar and wind. Wind does kill high numbers of birds and solar, well somebody tell me how to recycle a solar cell, don’t worry I will wait.
Wow, it is like someone took a bunch of crazy misinformation internet blogs, strung them all together and posted them here. There are so many ways to go and so many things to say that the best course is to let it simply stand as a monument.
A monument to what you will have to decide on your own.
BTW I love NG. Between the stove, the logs and the water heater I can actually run the house without power in the winter. It’s nice to have that reassurance and reliability.
Oh the stories I could tell ya.
There is a small plant in Huntsville AL near Red Stone Arsenal that burns trash. It works the same way that a coal fired power plant works, but uses garbage rather than coal. This particular plant generates steam that is used at the Arsenal (for something). Seems like a great idea. Generates power, gets rid of garbage. Power and no land fills. If energy were put into developing these for communities, two birds, one stone!