Archive for the 'Energy' Category
The Doomer Congressman Who Went Off Grid
January 5th, 2014Via: Politico: Roscoe Bartlett spent 20 years on Capitol Hill. Now he lives in a remote cabin in the woods, prepping for doomsday. When Roscoe Bartlett was in Congress, he latched onto a particularly apocalyptic issue, one almost no one else ever seemed to talk about: America’s dangerously vulnerable power grid. In speech after late-night […]
Ex-BP Engineer Found Guilty in Oil Spill Cover Up
January 3rd, 2014Via: Reuters: An engineer charged in connection with the 2010 BP oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico was found guilty of one count of obstructing justice by a federal jury on Wednesday, officials said. Kurt Mix, 52, now a former BP Plc employee, had faced two counts of obstruction for deleting hundreds of […]
Mercury Levels Rising in Expanse Around Alberta Oilsands
January 3rd, 2014Via: Postmedia News: Mercury wafting out of oilsands operations is impacting an area – or “bull’s-eye” — that extends for about 19,000 square kilometres in northeast Alberta, according to federal scientists. Levels of the potent neurotoxin found near the massive industrial operation have been found to be up to 16 times higher than “background” levels […]
U.S. Dumped Tens of Thousands of Steel Drums Containing Atomic Waste Off Coastlines
January 2nd, 2014Via: Wall Street Journal (Mirror): More than four decades after the U.S. halted a controversial ocean dumping program, the country is facing a mostly forgotten Cold War legacy in its waters: tens of thousands of steel drums of atomic waste. From 1946 to 1970, federal records show, 55-gallon drums and other containers of nuclear waste […]
Japan’s Homeless Recruited for Murky Fukushima Clean-Up
December 30th, 2013Via: Reuters: Seiji Sasa hits the train station in this northern Japanese city before dawn most mornings to prowl for homeless men. He isn’t a social worker. He’s a recruiter. The men in Sendai Station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan’s nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a […]
Velkess: New Residential Scale Flywheel Design
December 21st, 2013Via: Scientific American: Renewables could be the world’s primary source of energy if only someone could solve the storage problem—how to store lots of electricity cheaply on a wide scale? Batteries are too expensive and don’t last long enough. Pumped hydro is cheap but not feasible for most locations. Thermal storage is promising but still […]
A Solar Boom So Successful, It’s Been Halted
December 21st, 2013Greed and incompetence at power companies are running up against the unstoppable force of distributed power generation. Not long to go now. Germans laugh at this, by the way. Flashback 2011: Residential Energy Storage with Underground Flywheels — Update 2013: Velkess: New Residential Scale Flywheel Design Via: Scientific American: William Walker and his wife, Mi […]
Algae to Crude Oil: Million-Year Natural Process Takes Minutes in the Lab
December 19th, 2013Via: U.S. Department of Energy / Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup. The research by engineers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was reported […]
This Week in Acidic Radioactive Slurry
December 10th, 2013Via: Sydney Morning Herald: The chemical spill at Ranger Uranium Mine last weekend was the second such incident in a week for the mine’s parent company, Rio Tinto, placing further scrutiny on the company’s uranium mining operations. Processing at the Ranger site, in Kakadu National Park, was suspended by the federal government on Tuesday. Environment […]
Fukushima: Outdoor Radiation Reading 25 Sieverts Per Hour
December 9th, 2013Via: news.com.au: WELCOME to Fukushima, where the radiation’s so bad it can be fatal within 20 minutes. The tsunami may have happened some 33 months ago, but the fallout just keeps getting worse. Japanese media is reporting that the intensity of radiation levels in the nuclear powerplant devastated by the earthquake – and subsequent tidal […]
