This should actually be a Science Friday story but hey, that’s the breaks;
- Cajun describes his latest project, a 9.000 horsepower pump station (one of many) that sends natural gas from Louisiana to our frozen region. Among other fascinating aspects of the project is the reason you shouldn’t take flash pictures inside a pump house. A hint: “no spectrographic analysis” And while the CPU chip in your computer has a few million very small transistors, imagine the circuit regulated by a single transistor the size of a paperback book. Also, while you might think industrial equipment from big German companies would be uber-reliable, well…
- Calling Moses, or at least Charlton Heston: Science Daily reports we could Dam The Red Sea And Release Gigawatts. I didn’t realize there was a suitable hydro site there. But if it can be done, power output might be in the range of 50 gigawatts. (That’s really quite a lot) This isn’t like just damming some river; on this scale it requires a different ethical frame than a normal dam – it really is big enough to raise global effects and global questions. For one thing, it might offset enough greenhouse gas production to make countries weigh it against the massive local environmental damage it would do. Could part of the cost be covered by selling carbon offsets? A similar project is under study in the Strait of Hormuz.
- 1.21 gigawatts, Dr. Brown? Noooo problem. It looks like the huge wind energy resource off the Mid-Atlantic Coast might be worth exploiting. “…the wind over the Middle Atlantic Bight, the aquatic region from Cape Cod, Mass., to Cape Hatteras, N.C., could produce 330 gigawatts (GW) of average electrical power if thousands of wind turbines were installed off the coast.” That’s about double the region’s total energy use now. No word on how much energy would be produced if a single gigantic turbine were set up in front of Ted Kennedy, however.
I’m still workin’ on that story about bionic limbs. Major new development this week from (of all places) a video game company.