>> ^charliem:

Its a substation....not a power plant, and its a transformer fire. They are full of mineral oil...so yeah....


Yeah. The electric arc is boiling the oil inside. When it gets hot enough to melt the steel outside, kaboom. Too bad the vid ended so soon.

>> ^charliem:

Its a substation....not a power plant, and its a transformer fire. They are full of mineral oil...so yeah....

Your video, Huge Power Plant Explosion in Ponca City, Oklahoma, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Its a substation....not a power plant, and its a transformer fire. They are full of mineral oil...so yeah....

Tags for this video have been changed from 'towers, nuclear, Oregon, demolition' to 'cooling tower, nuclear, power plant, Oregon, demolition' - edited by calvados

>> ^PancakeMaster:

So the land development, building and fueling/mining of a nuclear power plant is free of emissions? What about waste disposal and decommissioning? Bremnet speaks the truth, albeit in a markedly sarcastic way. Car emissions come from energy production. Electric cars simply have their energy production out-sourced. Things become interesting at a local level with electric transport because you can potentially choose how your energy is produced. But you'd better believe that coal and oil is still powering all things electric in the majority of households, including recharging batteries.
I am a huge proponent of nuclear power, though I really wish LFTR's would come into production especially considering it's organic safety features and relative fuel abundance.
Since we're on the subject of electric cars, don't forget that the production of batteries and electric motors is very expensive. I'm not necessarily talking about monetary costs, but rather cost in resources and energy. Again, I support the development and usage of electric vehicles but dare not ignore their true cost.
>It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits.
You have so much more power to control your resource usage than the government. Don't rely on them for a solution. You can choose what you eat (agriculture is a huge resource spender), how you travel (walk or take public transport), what and why you buy (industry is another big spender), and your home resource usage. Don't pass the buck and blindly empower the government when it's our responsibility.
Now if only the planet was run on pancake power. Then, surely, I would be the true master of Earth.
edit
BTW, great video and awesome car. Would love to give it a go (as with all Audi Rx cars
>> ^bcglorf:
Well, nuclear is there to make electricity and vehicles emission free. If the greens hadn't worked so hard to ensure that nuclear power was stopped the 41% for electricity and whatever chunk of transportation is vehicles would all be gone.
But fine, is you wanna be sarcastic how about you chime in with a better solution. You hear plenty of chicken little's running around crying it's time to panic. You hear plenty of talk about reducing our emissions. You don't hear nearly so much about how to do that. It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits. Without nuclear power for electricity production and switching large parts of transportation over to electricity, what is left? Are we just to stop using transportation and electricity all together I suppose?
>> ^bremnet:
Yes, so true. Just look at all of the countries signing up for new nuclear power plants. Oh, and of course, those who generate their electricity today with that peskily cheaper natural gas from shale gas will likely just shut that down. Forgot to ask, how do we generate the electricity to charge our batteries? If you say anything that involves rubbing balloons in ones hair, well that's just too clever! Let's see - in 2009, 41% of global CO2 emissions were from the generation of electricity and heat, and only 23% for transport per the IEA report (that's all transport - cars, trucks, buses, seagoing vessels, trains, planes) so let's call your 30% a rounding error. By 2015, it is estimated that the total CO2 emissions from seagoing vessels will surpass that for all land based automobiles, so can we get a video of an electric cargo ship instead of this car? Pretty sure they have those, right? If we have electric vehicles, and have to generate more electricity ummm... (head explodes). Top marks for enthusiasm, but I'm afraid we're going to have to keep you back for another year to re-teach math and energy balance.




But just how much can you realistically reduce your emissions by through changed behaviour? I doubt even 50% is realistic. Now, how about getting our entire society to do the same, are people gonna voluntarily give up everything they need to drop 50%? Not a chance.

If electric cars can be improved enough to be desirable over gas, then a switch over to nuclear for electricity production can drop emissions nearly 50%. More importantly, it happens by consumers buying something new because they simply want to, and government/corporations making money off selling nuclear energy to run everyone's new cars.

Short of putting guns to peoples heads and telling them what they can and can not eat, how far they are allowed to travel in a year, and enforcing that across the globe, emissions ARE NOT going to be lowered. Electric cars and nuclear power are the only viable options out there and they are either ready now(nuclear) or will be very, very soon(electric cars).

So the land development, building and fueling/mining of a nuclear power plant is free of emissions? What about waste disposal and decommissioning? Bremnet speaks the truth, albeit in a markedly sarcastic way. Car emissions come from energy production. Electric cars simply have their energy production out-sourced. Things become interesting at a local level with electric transport because you can potentially choose how your energy is produced. But you'd better believe that coal and oil is still powering all things electric in the majority of households, including recharging batteries.

I am a huge proponent of nuclear power, though I really wish LFTR's would come into production especially considering it's organic safety features and relative fuel abundance.

Since we're on the subject of electric cars, don't forget that the production of batteries and electric motors is very expensive. I'm not necessarily talking about monetary costs, but rather cost in resources and energy. Again, I support the development and usage of electric vehicles but dare not ignore their true cost.

>It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits.

You have so much more power to control your resource usage than the government. Don't rely on them for a solution. You can choose what you eat (agriculture is a huge resource spender), how you travel (walk or take public transport), what and why you buy (industry is another big spender), and your home resource usage. Don't pass the buck and blindly empower the government when it's our responsibility.

Now if only the planet was run on pancake power. Then, surely, I would be the true master of Earth.

*edit*

BTW, great video and awesome car. Would love to give it a go (as with all Audi Rx cars

>> ^bcglorf:

Well, nuclear is there to make electricity and vehicles emission free. If the greens hadn't worked so hard to ensure that nuclear power was stopped the 41% for electricity and whatever chunk of transportation is vehicles would all be gone.
But fine, is you wanna be sarcastic how about you chime in with a better solution. You hear plenty of chicken little's running around crying it's time to panic. You hear plenty of talk about reducing our emissions. You don't hear nearly so much about how to do that. It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits. Without nuclear power for electricity production and switching large parts of transportation over to electricity, what is left? Are we just to stop using transportation and electricity all together I suppose?

>> ^bremnet:
Yes, so true. Just look at all of the countries signing up for new nuclear power plants. Oh, and of course, those who generate their electricity today with that peskily cheaper natural gas from shale gas will likely just shut that down. Forgot to ask, how do we generate the electricity to charge our batteries? If you say anything that involves rubbing balloons in ones hair, well that's just too clever! Let's see - in 2009, 41% of global CO2 emissions were from the generation of electricity and heat, and only 23% for transport per the IEA report (that's all transport - cars, trucks, buses, seagoing vessels, trains, planes) so let's call your 30% a rounding error. By 2015, it is estimated that the total CO2 emissions from seagoing vessels will surpass that for all land based automobiles, so can we get a video of an electric cargo ship instead of this car? Pretty sure they have those, right? If we have electric vehicles, and have to generate more electricity ummm... (head explodes). Top marks for enthusiasm, but I'm afraid we're going to have to keep you back for another year to re-teach math and energy balance.

Well, nuclear is there to make electricity and vehicles emission free. If the greens hadn't worked so hard to ensure that nuclear power was stopped the 41% for electricity and whatever chunk of transportation is vehicles would all be gone.

But fine, is you wanna be sarcastic how about you chime in with a better solution. You hear plenty of chicken little's running around crying it's time to panic. You hear plenty of talk about reducing our emissions. You don't hear nearly so much about how to do that. It seems the only answer that comes up is carbon credits and absolute emission limits. Without nuclear power for electricity production and switching large parts of transportation over to electricity, what is left? Are we just to stop using transportation and electricity all together I suppose?


>> ^bremnet:

Yes, so true. Just look at all of the countries signing up for new nuclear power plants. Oh, and of course, those who generate their electricity today with that peskily cheaper natural gas from shale gas will likely just shut that down. Forgot to ask, how do we generate the electricity to charge our batteries? If you say anything that involves rubbing balloons in ones hair, well that's just too clever! Let's see - in 2009, 41% of global CO2 emissions were from the generation of electricity and heat, and only 23% for transport per the IEA report (that's all transport - cars, trucks, buses, seagoing vessels, trains, planes) so let's call your 30% a rounding error. By 2015, it is estimated that the total CO2 emissions from seagoing vessels will surpass that for all land based automobiles, so can we get a video of an electric cargo ship instead of this car? Pretty sure they have those, right? If we have electric vehicles, and have to generate more electricity ummm... (head explodes). Top marks for enthusiasm, but I'm afraid we're going to have to keep you back for another year to re-teach math and energy balance.

@bmacs27 Mostly the costs, TEGs aren't cheap, so I would wager the low end on the cost scale is about 50 bucks or so for the stove version give or take about 20 bucks. And indeed you are right, improving the state of being for billions is what the cry of energy is about. Costs are important as it dictates how many people we can help via our limited abilities. If we wanted to help ALL of them RIGHT NOW, it would cost 100 billion or so, which isn't a huge sum. But it is only access to 2 Watt/hours. This is very back of the envelope, so there are many other factors, but lets say we used that money instead to buy power plants. Let's even get something fancy, some high tech CCGT plants. They cost about .6 bucks per Watt hour. For 2 billion people consuming 2W/hs of electricity, that is about 4 gigiwatts/H which on our stoves cost us about 100 billion. Now a .5GW CCGT plan will run you about .3 billion per unit, but you only need 2.4 billion in funds to supply that level of electricity. If you spent the same kind of cash on CCGT plants, you would go from 4GW/H to 166GW/H. Basically, you can help 2 orders of magnitude more people if you invested in other technology, or help that same amount that much more. Now, that isn't completely accurate, power infrastructure costs money, but it is money well spent, even if you burn up an entire order of magnitude. It wouldn't hurt if a few thousand people had one of these, but if you wanted to help 2 billion, it would be a huge mistake. The only reason I keep harping on this is because they marketed themselves so heavily as some wide solution for the third world. A good third world solution doesn't always look like a first world solution, so I am not suggesting there is no merit here, but it would help very few people and to a relatively low level compared to other options. Perhaps small progress, though, is a good way to go about it, I can't say. I would guess they would be better off dropping off some steam system that burns wood and let them power their entire houses instead of a cellphone. There is an older paper about using rice husks in developing world in steam engines to generate electricity, and husks have a bit less energy density than wood fiber. They seemed to think it was pretty viable. There are some technical challenges, but I think those are easier to overcome than spending 100billion for 2W/Hs for 2 billion people. But I digress.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

@spawnflagger and @bmacs27
This wiki is one of the things I consult often.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Common_energy_densities


Regardless of how effective you make burning wood, it will NEVER be as energetic as the same volume of gas or petrol. And if gas/petrol/coal engines are out of reach financially, burning wood for electricity most likely will be as well. Though, spawn pointed out perhaps it supplying a regular stream of electricity of very little energy makes up for the lack of conductivity of poor communities. I don't tend to share that opinion and think that their standard of living will only be greatly improved with access to very large amounts of cheap energy; the difference between starting up a camp fire and an actual power plant. Helping a poor society charge connected devices isn't what catapults counties into the first world, having an infrastructure of energy is.
And ya, they are using a TEGs for electrical generation. It provides the lion share of energy to the fan that is helping aid complete combustion for the smoke reduction. This is why it is such a poor electrical device, TEGs are horrible in the efficiency department. You could get far more electrical output via some type of steam device burning wood than this; which would more than likely benefit an entire town via its considerable electrical output (for the third world). But it should be known before hand that wood burning is dirty business. Even if you engaged in catalytic conversion of carbon monoxide, burning wood on a large scale for electrical generation would have similar effects to the health of a community as a coal fire plant; perhaps worse because it would be located much closer to the population than coal fire plants usually are.
And to be fair to this thing, I think it is pretty cool...but for the first world. Unless they are literally handing these out in the third world, it will do them no benefit, and the money they spend handing these out...they could be installing a power distribution system with an actual power plant and improve their well being by orders of magnitude.


Now this I disagree with. They are right that most third world countries are using wood cooking fires anyway. So simply the smoke and emission savings over that are worthwhile. The electrical generation is a nice side benefit, and many of those countries are seeing the proliferation of small electrical devices, e.g. cell phones and leds. I think it's a device that could greatly improve the lives of people in less developed communities (especially the home stove version).

@spawnflagger and @bmacs27

This wiki is one of the things I consult often.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Common_energy_densities

Regardless of how effective you make burning wood, it will NEVER be as energetic as the same volume of gas or petrol. And if gas/petrol/coal engines are out of reach financially, burning wood for electricity most likely will be as well. Though, spawn pointed out perhaps it supplying a regular stream of electricity of very little energy makes up for the lack of conductivity of poor communities. I don't tend to share that opinion and think that their standard of living will only be greatly improved with access to very large amounts of cheap energy; the difference between starting up a camp fire and an actual power plant. Helping a poor society charge connected devices isn't what catapults counties into the first world, having an infrastructure of energy is.

And ya, they are using a TEGs for electrical generation. It provides the lion share of energy to the fan that is helping aid complete combustion for the smoke reduction. This is why it is such a poor electrical device, TEGs are horrible in the efficiency department. You could get far more electrical output via some type of steam device burning wood than this; which would more than likely benefit an entire town via its considerable electrical output (for the third world). But it should be known before hand that wood burning is dirty business. Even if you engaged in catalytic conversion of carbon monoxide, burning wood on a large scale for electrical generation would have similar effects to the health of a community as a coal fire plant; perhaps worse because it would be located much closer to the population than coal fire plants usually are.

And to be fair to this thing, I think it is pretty cool...but for the first world. Unless they are literally handing these out in the third world, it will do them no benefit, and the money they spend handing these out...they could be installing a power distribution system with an actual power plant and improve their well being by orders of magnitude.

@spoco2 The most dangerous kinds of mercury are compounds. Mercury in the raw can be easily handled in bare hands or light gloves. Short term use and exposures like this will not likely result in any toxification. More great is the risk of toxification by mercury compounds from coal fired power plants. Their methylmercury is far more toxic and very widely consecrated in food stuff now via bio accumulation.

Your childhood experience most likely didn't result in any serious contamination. Life is full of risk, driving a car is hugely risky, you just have to ask yourself what are the risks vs the payoff. Short of ingestion, the risks from this activity are very low. Greater your risks would be from sunburn which over time can cause skin cancer than mercury poisoning from this type of activity.

What would be nice, however, is an online guide of ways to handle chemicals safely. The problem is such things usually go kind of overboard and error on too much caution. Remember those "this is your brain on drugs" commercials? They were basically lies; cautionary tails that were overblown for the "don't risk it" mentality. I think a better strategy is full disclosure and personal responsibility. To much fear and dishonesty, and people just blow you off...and complete lack of guides and rules is about the same level of chaos. Some middle ground of rational behavior for dangerous substances should be the goal, but I haven't found a good mechanism for implementing such a system, and to that end, better safe than sorry like you advise is a good policy.

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
Agent Smith: Then we have a deal?
Cypher: I don't want to remember nothing. Nothing. You understand? And I want to be rich. You know, someone important, like an actor.
Agent Smith: Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan.
Cypher: Okay. I get my body back into a power plant, you insert me into the Matrix, I'll get you what you want.


Ahhhh the beauty of plugging back into the matrix!

*Pantoliano was born (September 12, 1951) in Hoboken, New Jersey, to first-generation Italian American parents Mary (née Centrella), a bookie and seamstress, and Dominic "Monk" Pantoliano, a hearse driver and factory foreman-

*wiki

...this is so so wrong on so many levels. Cenk is generally a pretty good guy when it comes to actual issues....this is not one of those times.

One nuclear power plant is propped up so that 2-5 coal power plants dont have to be propped up.
Coal power produces more radioactive waste material than nuclear power plants.
More disease and death has been attributed to coal power plants and coal mining than that of nuclear plants and associated industries.

All this, despite the meltdown scenarios that are well known....nuclear is safer, and in the long term cheaper than coal.

...oh theres also this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CO2%26NPPs.png


Nuclear plants are not evil, picking a few billion dollars a year when the defeceit is OVER 100$TRILLION including liabilities, is a JOKE, and a sick one at that.

Shutting down NPP research funding will potentially kill off the best chance humanity has of overcoming its thirst for energy - thorium salt reactor design / implementation.

Sorry Cenk...you are dead wrong on this one bud.