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Global Warming debunked by environmentalists? How can this be? Water Research Group Meeting Monday Uranium testing. Hmmm! The thing the public isn't told! Karen Hadden, please go home! Revised and revisited! The importance of Gore-bal Warming! Solutions to Lower Basin flooding! It doesn't take a PhD! speakupvictoria.com, Hey, I'm still speaking up! Dear speakupvictoria.com, I'm speaking up! Global Warming and computer modeling! October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 February 08 March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 August 08 
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Some years ago a madman in the Middle East decided he was the Messiah Islam was looking for and had himself photographed on a white horse! He saw himself as the ruler of a combined Arab world! Like Hitler he hid in a hole in the ground and like Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein was hung!
Is oil the reason we are still in Iraq? Probably so. All the more reason, I feel, that America should become more energy independent!
"Oil being the most important of our fuels today, the term "alternative energy" is commonly taken to mean all other energy sources and is used here in that context. Realizing that oil is finite in practical terms, there is increasing attention given to what alternative energy sources are available to replace oil. The imperative to pursue alternative energy sources is clearly established by two simple facts. The world now uses more than 26 billion barrels of oil a year, but new discoveries (not existing field additions) in recent years have been averaging less than 7 billion barrels yearly! The peak of world oil discoveries was in the 1960s! Inevitably the peak of world oil production will follow, with most current estimates ranging from 2003 to 2020. Significantly, all estimates of production peak dates are within the lifetimes of most people living today!" Consulting Geologist Walter Youngquist, October 2000
So within the lifetime of most of those reading this today we will see a dramatic change in the way we live our lives. I think it's up to us, this generation, whether that change will be for the better or the worse!
Will we invest in our children and grandchildren and leave them clean water to drink and shower with? Will we demand investment in new cleaner, safer ways to explore for and mine uranium? Will we install scrubbers on our coal plants and invest in new Generation III+ nuclear power plants? Will we move forward with wind farm expansion and new battery storage systems for generated power? Will we see new cars and trucks that charge in half an hour and drive 300 miles? Will we become more energy independent and thumb our noses at the ingrates in the Middle East? Will we some day tell them where to stick their oil?
On thing is for sure! If we listen to the nay-sayers who find fault with every form of alternative energy and power production we will never come to an end to the need for our men and women of the armed forces to go to some far off land to protect our national interests!
Much has been said about the need to abandon nuclear power and use all the alternatives at hand.
I find it interesting that those who bemoan taxpayer grants for nuclear power producers are strangely silent concerning the huge subsidies doled out over the past 30 years by the Department of Energy(DOE) to alternative power producers.
According to the ASME.org* website, "...DOE granted $40 million in seed money to private companies to develop low cost, utility-scale wind turbines. This despite the fact that according to the article, "...many experts in the power business are dubious about the future of wind energy in the United States." When you add all the other subsidies over the years the numbers are staggering.
Now I personally believe wind power will come into it's own soon and will be invaluable to American power consumers. I also support photovoltaic, solar and ocean wave generation of power. In fact France, China and Russia are among those already using ocean wave generators.
We must realize, however, that there is no generation of power without a cost-a human footprint! Some of the talk is serious and should concern us and some of it is silly and should be largely ignored.
Dr. Carey King and Dr. Michael Webber of the Environmental Science and Technology Department at the University of Texas did a study recently and drew the conclusion that electric cars use too much water! According to King and Webber a lot of water will be used to generate the electricity needed to charge the car's batteries. The articles written about the study inferred electric cars were a bad idea. Ah, excuse me! That water, turned to steam in the generation process comes right back into the eco-system as rain! It doesn't disappear from the earth!
Everywhere you turn there is someone pointing out something wrong with just about every way we generate power or power our transportation! Bio-diesel plants are spilling cooking oil, albeit bio-degradable, into various waterways. Many of those who complain so loudly about various power generation methods then drive home and buzz open their garage door and walk in their home and drop the thermostat and start their electric oven for the meatloaf while they use an electric can opener for the green beans and let the shower run until the water is hot and turn the TV on, while the robot is cleaning the pool and every light in the house is on and...
Nuclear power has been reliable and the new Generation III+ plants will be safer, greener and more efficient.
Yes, let's increase our use of alternative power generation but let's not destroy the bridge we're on before we get there!
Despite global warming claims the north east suffered a brutal winter this year. Can you imagine the cost of heating oil hitting the elderly, retired and the average working people? Our reliance on foreign imports is including more natural gas every year. We must use a source of power that produces a great amounts of electricity and produces no greenhouse gases. That power is nuclear power!
*ASME International is a 125,000-member organization focused on technical, educational and research issues. ASME conducts one of the world's largest technical publishing operations, holds numerous technical conferences worldwide, and offers hundreds of professional development courses each year. ASME sets internationally recognized industrial and manufacturing codes and standards that enhance public welfare and safety.
Safety is always a concern when you hear there's going to be a nuclear plant right down the road. Images of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are usually the first to come to mind. Allow me please to discuss process safety with nuclear power.
Some of the new Generation III+ reactor designs are dependent on natural occurrences for their safety, rather than upon mechanical devices and human operators. They are sometimes referred to as "inherently safe" reactors, although the label is subject to debate.
One such design is the Process-Inherent Ultimately Safe Reactor (PIUS) from Sweden. It is a pressurized light water reactor that is, itself, immersed in borated water and contained in thick, steel reinforced concrete walls. If the primary cooling system fails, the borated water automatically floods the core, which shuts down the reactor without operator intervention.
This type of reactor is much like the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) by GE-Hitachi, proposed for southern Victoria County. The cooling water for this light-water reactor is stored above the reactor core so that in case of a problem the cooling water drops down to drown the heat. This is accomplished with less piping and pumps. It also more efficient using less nuclear energy to produce electricity.
This is good for both profitability and the environment. It's also another reason this project will be good for the entire Lower Basin!
Gee whiz! Two huge pages on drugs in our drinking water! I was talking about this at Water Research Group meetings over five, YES, OVER FIVE, years ago! The local response? The movers and shakers in Victoria ignored me, sneered at me and started nasty rumors about me! Now it tickles me that someone finally woke up! If a huge amount of the Guadalupe River is sewer effluent and that effluent has all the drugs that come through the human body... need I continue? When you eat that hamburger meat from Cargill and IBP and it's full of antibiotics and steroids from the feed lot, what do you think happens to those drugs? When you take those Z-Pack super antibiotics and go to the potty don't you think the body gets rid of what it doesn't need? Not to mention all the other drugs Americans consume! Then add a healthy dose of mercury from Canyon Lake, the effluent from every city on the river and now consider that we take our drinking water out of that same river! Then add 20 tons per year of toxic polluted water dumped into the river every year by a local plant under a TCEQ permit and you've got a serious drug problem! Then those poor folks from Port Lavaca take their water from the river south of the dumping spot and well...need I go on? Drugs in the water! You heard it first at a Water Research Group meeting years ago! Snicker at that! How many of the Advocate's readers have been to the U.S. Capitol Building or the Library of Congress? Did you know that there's a higher risk of radiation exposure there than living next to a nuclear plant?
According to the Environmental Protection Agency and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation(UNSCEAR) there is a problem with gamma radiation in some Washington, DC public buildings.
According to a study by Steven J. Milloy, M.H.S.,J.D. and Dr. Michael Gough, PhD., "A qualified radiation surveyor used a Bicron MicroRem meter for the measuring. Dose rates inside the Capitol Building and outside the Thomas Jefferson Building were measured at 30 microrem per hour. This dose rate: is up to 550 percent greater than the typical dose rate 'at the fence line' around nuclear power plants..."
Since I decided to support the proposed Exelon nuclear project in Victoria I have received quite a bit of emails from those opposed to the project. Most had and still have valid concerns that should be addressed.
However, interspersed with those valid concerns were the, all too often, typical pile-on "facts" about the nuclear subject. One of those incredible claims, debunked many times before, is that U.S. military forces are poisoning Iraqi children with depleted uranium artillery ammunition.
"Depleted Uranium(DU) is considerably less radioactive than natural uranium because not only does it have less U-234 and U-235 per unit mass than does natural uranium, but in addition, essentially all traces of decay products beyond U-234 and TH-231 have been removed during extraction and chemical processing of the uranium prior to enrichment. The specific activity of uranium alone in DU is 14.8 Bq. per mg compared to 25.4 Bq. per mg for natural uranium. It takes a long time for uranium decay products to reach (radioactive) equilibrium with the uranium isotopes. For example it takes almost a million years for TH-230 to reach equilibrium with U-234." This is according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Now, according to me, the 120mm Armor Piercing, Fin Stabilized, Discarding Sabot, M829E3 round used in Iraq is a later model than the ones I loaded into the 105mm main gun of the M-60 tank I drove and loaded for when I was in the 49th Armored Division. The Sabot is a tank round. Used almost exclusively against other tanks and armored targets.
It is almost never used against fixed targets, bunkers or other soft targets and is most certainly never used against personnel! Now please listen closely and read carefully; Saddam's tanks are all dead! His armor was wiped out during the first weeks of the war! Other projectiles were most certainly used, such as the HEAT round-a shaped charge projectile.
The idea that we're running around Iraq using these highly sophisticated, very expensive rounds on other than armor is silly! May I please repeat that Iraqi armor has been history for a while now?
I. too, have been guilty of passing on emails without checking out the facts so I can't crow too loudly but this frenzy to jump aboard the anti-nuke train should be done with a little more care!
I'm trying to say this with the utmost respect for those with legitimate concerns about nuclear power. Mixing silly items in with serious concerns just hurts the discussion.
The rumor still persists that Exelon Energy will be drilling a bunch of water wells in the Lower Guadalupe Basin and using up all our groundwater.
Allow me please to set the record straight one more time. Exelon Energy operates 17 nuclear reactors and is a multi-billion dollar corporation serving 5.2 million customers. There is no possible way they would build a nuclear plant in the Lower Basin and say they have no need for groundwater if that were not true.
In fact, all they will need will be river water and they have a willing provider in GBRA. In Exelon's presentation to the Victoria County Groundwater Conservation District, they acknowledge that the 75,000 acre/feet per year they will get from GBRA is "a function of climate conditions." In other words they realize there will be dry times and have planned for it. They have factored in seepage from the cooling pond back into the aquifer and evaporation rates. The fact remains that due to the seepage there will probably be a small replenishment of the aquifer.
According to their presentation to the District, "Some storage of surface water will be necessary to firm up the water supply during drought. Additional storage will be incorporated into the plant cooling pond."
Since they're risking a billion dollars their studies have been exhaustive, thorough and complete. Their presentation to the District said they expect;
So there will indeed be some replenishment of the aquifer from the plant's cooling pond!
In drought conditions, Exelon expects to "rely on water storage in a 4,800 acre on-site cooling pond" holding approximately "105,000 a/f" of water. An acre foot of water is 125,851 gallons. 125,851X105,000 is the gallons to be stored in the cooling pond. Do the math.
Exelon expects to drill three on-site water wells. Three only! Two for regular use and one for back up. During the four year construction phase they expect to use 2000 a/f per year and once in operation that will drop to 1,050 a/f per year, mostly for employee potable drinking and sanitary water. They will also need a very small amount of that for plant make-up water.
I would ask the public to understand that Exelon intends to build an Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) that is designed with less piping and pumps. Coolant water is stored above the reactor core and is gravity fed eliminating the need for a lot of the piping and pumps used on pressure tube-type reactors.
This light-water reactor-ESBWR- has been defined as a "Generation III+... passively safe" nuclear reactor by Energy Publisher Magazine who also described it as "more fuel efficient and inherently safer."
Light-water (highly purified H20) is used as make-up water for the reactor and never mixes with condenser cooling water. (Note: Heavy-water (D20) reactors use deuterium as reactor make up water.)
"Passively safe" is described by Wikipedia as a "strategy used in maintaining a degree of safety." "Whether a reactor employing passive safety systems is to be considered safe will depend on the criteria used to evaluate the safety level."
The General Electric ESBWR, with it's simplified design, doing away with piping and pumps in favor of a gravity fed system is, safer and more fuel efficient.
With the huge 105,000 acre foot storage there will be no need to use Victoria County's groundwater. The reactor design is far and above the quality of 30 to 50 year old designs and will be better for the environment with ZERO greenhouse gas emissions.
I'm for this project and I support it 100%.
Why is it that the Palestinians lob rockets into Israel not knowing where they might land and the media is mostly silent about it but Israel responds with super accurate counter strikes and immediately there is a loud uproar over the body count? Israel forceably removed the residents of Gaza settlements like Gush Kativ in a bid for pease and the Palestinians responded with more rockets! Now George Bush wants them to give up land in Judah(The West Bank) in another bid for peace that will only fail! Mr. Bush, leave Israel alone if all you want them to do is give what is theirs by inheritance away! Shalom! Shalom! |
