No1:
The Arctic National Wildlife refuge.
In the Words of the Fish + Wildlife service:
But thats pretty boring.Basically, its a big national park in Northern Alaska. There are a bunch of endangered Animals in it, and supposedly a bunch of Oil.
No2:
Oil and the US.
According to Source 2 (s2), the US used ~19.7 million barrels of oil each day in 2002. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this adds up to 7.1905 Billion barrels of oil consumed in 2002.
according to s3, the ANWR, has 16 Bil barrels of Oil. Cool, 2 years of all the US's oil, without imports, right?
Maybe, but most likely not. Oil drilling is a lot of luck. You have to hit the well, or you just dug a big hole. A big hole, that destroys the area.
Even if they have the luck of the Irish, they still are going to destroy 2000 acres of land!
No3:
Oil and the ANWR.
This is the sticky part.
Okay, so lets assume Congress gives the OK, because our oil friend in the big White bulding is gonna say OK, they start to drill.
2000 acres of Oil drills are set up in a wildlife park. How would the public react if Yellowstone was opened for Logging?
2000 acres where The Moose and caribou can no longer roam freely. THey have to worry about the big Oil drills. And the workers. And the Workers housing.
2000 acres where, if they are by the Ocean, the Walrus(s?) can no longer swim, becuase of the noise. The Seals have to fish elsewhere.
2000 acres where something is going to go wrong.
A river Otter is moved out, becuase of the good of the US.
No4:
Oil Drilling and transportation.
How do you transport 1 million barrels of Oil? not in barrels. You are going to use:
An Oil Rigger!
Unfortunately, when transporting these 16 Billion barels of Oil, Something is going to go wrong. Maybe a careless worker leaves empty barrels in a field. Nw something is going to get inquisitive, and probably die.
Or, a shipwreck. Lets assume it is going light. 1 million barrels of Oil spill across a pristine Ocean, and beach. Animals cannot deal with this. Whales coming up to breath are poisoned by Oil entering their lungs. Gulls are trapped by the Oil, thus losing their ablity to fly. Countless fish are killed, thus creating an imbalace of food for the animals. Predators starve. If you are feeling patritic, worry about the Bald Eagles trapped like flies in a Spider's web.
All for Energy! So you can miserably drive to your miserable job, and feed your miserable kids in a miserable household.
No5:
Nuclear Energy and You.
Most likely you have never been near a nuclear power plant. The closest is in Oak Harbor Ohio, ( near Toledo).
The fact about Nuclear power in the US is it is extremely safe. You can literally crash a full speed F16 into the containment building wthout leakage. 10-20ft thick concrete does marvels.
Most people worry about a Chernobyl-type incident occuring, but the chances of that are close to nil. At Chernobyl, the reactor was contained in a GARAGE! Not only that, but the coolant (Graphite) was shut down by the moronic personell, who have conveniently removed themselvs from the gene pool.
For an explosion of that type to happen in the US, you would have to purposefully build a bomb. Then again, you might be foiled by rods of Graphite sticking into the reactor, thus shutting it down completely.
If you know hoe the coolant works, once again there is the fact that there are three interlocking loops (at least) of water. To show this, loop your fingers into two rings.
If there was water flowing through the pipes (fingers), the water would not interchange between them.
+--------+
| w2 |
| +---+ |
| | w1 | |
| +---+ |
+--------+
See? the contaminated water from the reactor is in w1. The water never enters w2! Unless, there is a break. In this case, w2 becomes contaminated. Also, the control room knows almost immideately. There is a second loop like this before the turbine, which provides power. The water for the turbine is from a lake, river or other resivour, and after the turbine is released as the huge clouds of steam near any power plant. This water never becomes contaminated, because after the break in w1, the sysstem is shut down before another break occurs.
Another fear is Nuclear weapons. It is true that some power plants allow the creation of Nuclear bombs, but why not outlaw those types of plants?
The most pressing problem is then, Nuclear waste.
Why not just bury it in a lead-lined concrete bunker .5 miles down that is monitored by the government?
Or a volcanoe? n the middle of nowhere? It was buried way under the earth anyway...
Anyway.. Now I'm bored.
-Motor.On
12 comments:
nice tree hugger rant. how about we stop even worrying about oil and start working on a new energy source! LIKE NOW!!!!! or find some way to create a synthetic oil that can be mass produced. something.
Well to create a synthetic oil, we'd need raw materials. Whatever. Now, Alan, I think we should drill like hell. Let's drill and get all the oil we can, while at the same time working on alternative energy. The Caribou will just have to deal. ANWR is 19 MILLION acres. The oil drillers want 2000 acres. That's less than 0.02%. Also, only about 35% of oil can be pulled from a field. And that's if we do REALLY good. Anyway, I agree about the nuclear plants, although we need to think about where the waste will go. Just putting it underground (out of sight, out of mind) isn't a good idea. There's nothing to stop somebody from digging it up in 600 years, when we've probably forgotten about it, but it'll still be dangerous. We need a good plan for how to depose of it. So I suggest that we drill AND build new nuclear plants.
Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. Graphite isn't a COOLENT. It's a SOLID. Graphite is used to soak up neutrons and slow down the reaction. The crazy Russians shut down both the primary and backup cooling systems AND withdrew the graphite control rods from the reactor. Thus, it got really really really hot. And bad stuff happened.
launch the waste into space... as long as that doesnt blow up in out atmosphere we're good :)
It would cost a ton to send it into space. Each shuttle launch costs around $700 million (I think I read that somewhere), and probably more after Columbia. Also, what about terrorists? They would love the chance to blow a shuttle out of the sky and spread a few tons of radioactive waste around the southern U.S.
For energy, I'm all for renewable sources/nuclear power. Frankly, I think the U.S. and other already-nuclear countries should be allowed to use breeder reactors to cut the waste and get more energy. I mean, let's say the world O.K.s traditional reactors for everyone. What happens when the uranium runs out? Eventually, you're going to have to use breeders, and sooner rather than later. Nuclear energy can't be all that bad... France gets 78% of its energy from it.
Also, I think wind turbines are a good idea. I especially like the idea of wind 'kites' that ride int eh jetstream (that was in PopSci).
That's cool, for sure. The shuttle's a pretty crappy way of getting stuff into space, it's only used because it's a reasonably good lab and a (mostly) reusable vehicle. It costs about $10,000 per POUND to send something into space. And Asif's right, what about terrorists or plain old launch failures?
The Only problem with Wind is, you need so much space for any wind power plants. I think that in order to power the US w/ wind, we would need to cover the North Atlantic, or something like that.
Asimov has a few stories about space stations that beam power down, but what about plain old batteries? It is pretty cheap (relatively) to send up a sattalite, why not a big set of batteries, charge them up in space (solar), and send em down? not practical for Earth but it might work in small amounts...
Once again, It s true that we need something else, if not only because of Global Warming (its happening, whether you like it or not).
Syntheti oil might be interesting... maybe we can get a new plaything out of it... LOL (Silly Putty=Synthetic Rubber?)
One other thing. Hydrogen Does NOT WORK! You use more power than you get.
I think wind will work if you figure out the right way to do it. Right now, wind turbines need massive amounts of space, which would be bad, and if the wind goes bye-bye... no power. But there was a PopSci thing about sending up wind turbines into the jetstream, like kites. It's always windy (like 200 mph or something) up there, and you have less space issues. Just watch out for planes.
If we could get enough renewable energy, we COULD use hydrogen extraction methods to power cars and stuff, but not until then.
Who's this idiot? Random Pooo. Oh! It's Tricia!! Elena's friend I mean. Well Alan, I suggest you delete the eight "FILIBUSTER!!!!!" messages.
huh?
What the heck Annie?
Correcting Trisha's spelling, probably. Anyway, one more thing: hydrogen is not a way to PRODUCE energy; it's a way to TRANSPORT energy, like batteries but much more dense.
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