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Re-Purposing the Netherlands' Dike System For Power Generation
vikingpower writes "Built in reaction to a major flood that killed 1,800 in the '50s, the Dutch system of dikes, sluices, surge barriers, and dams has been dubbed 'one of the seven wonders of the modern world' by the American Society of Engineers. Now there are proposals to use the system differently, e.g. as tidal power plants, by punching holes in them. Any civil engineer's mouth will probably be watering when thinking of the mega-projects this could give rise to."
This is a great idea! All of the dykes I know are very powerful women indeed! Genious!
(Yeah, yeah, I know, bad taste, but c'mon someone had to go there.)
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let's be serious, if we're talking about power generation it all depends on the types of dykes being used. and there are trade offs... while butch dykes certainly generate more power, girly ones are more pleasing overall. i think the dutch should go with a combination of the latter combined with nuclear power.
Salt water engineering is expensive and more bad jokes coming -
extracting energy from dykes with a low head is inefficient.
Get 10m or so height difference and it's all good, 1 or 2 m which is all this looks like holding is
just an expensive world of pain. The energy needed for maintenance (corrosion/weed/lifeform clearing)
will probably be more than is ever generated.
This is a great idea. Sure, it seems like a waste of all the resources and energy put into building those dikes and keeping that land dry, but the madness can't go on forever. Natural selection will eventually take care of a land based species that prefers to live below sea level.
The Netherlands are the most environmentally unfriendly country in the world. Do you have any idea how much water the country displaces? And how much fossil fuel is burned to fuel the pumps needed to keep the sea from flowing back. Giving this country back to the sea would cancel out decades of sea level rise. It would also save the more than 80 gigaton oil equivalent per year in energy that country uses. Inundating the place and turning the entire country into an alternative energy source seems like a nice way to give something back to mother nature.
Those civils aren't salivating because they're thinking of an amazing project – they're just drooling like always. There should be spit-wipes in their fanny-packs. Make sure not to mess with the chinstraps on their helmets or they get agitated.
while they "generate power"?!
It sounds like a good idea.. but might get really hot... how do they propose to cool that?
As a Dutch citizen, I'd like to give this Dyke plan the finger ;-)
(Well, at least until someone can assure me the cost/benefit analysis plays out well.)
It's an obvious joke and it isn't funny. Great job on showing that reading anything on Slashdot is pointless for anybody more emotionally-developed than Comic Book Store Guy, though.
Does NOT leaving a drool trail disqualify one from Slashdot employment?
I thought being a dyke was not a choice. I don't think the dykes are likely to go along with being re-purposed.
Just in case I'm wrong though, you can send me a couple of the lipstick ones and I promise to generate a lot energy with them.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If we got hundreds of civil engineers together and told them about this, just think what we could power with their watering mouths!
Oh I've set them off again...
Who else read this as "Re-Purposing the Netherlands: Dyke System For Power Generation"?
Would you kindly look at a dictionary?
dike: an embankment for controlling or holding back the sea
dyke: disparaging term for a lesbian
New low in ignorance and carelessness for Slashdot.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
I knew we had a dike system. But a dyke system sounds really interesting, how does it work?
So some 'civil' engineers think that dykes can generate all that power?
Maybe the same should be suggested to the mayor of Toronto, imagine all the power they could generate there during a pride week!
You can't handle the truth.
And it has been "forked" multiple times. Spelling inconsistencies and semantic ambiguity are unavoidable. People speaking English outside their native countries need to be aware of this.
I like to think of it as having a big set of #ifdef's in my head. Like code that runs on multiple platforms.
When someone in an international arena says something that is unintentionally amusing, I check my #ifdef's. That usually clears everything up.
One example off the top of my head: A British chick walks into a hotel in the US, and asks the clerk, "Can you knock me up in the morning?"
Being that is a pleasant day here in central Europe, I'm going to go out for a bike ride, and like little Dutch kids, stick my fingers in some dijken. (I used the Dutch word to avoid any puerile associations).
Of course, the big joke here is that the story of the Dutch boy, is a fictional account by an American author.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Some years ago, I saw a news item on a proposal to flood the sahara by digging a canal through Libya, and powering pretty much all of North Africa and Southern Europe with electricity generated by turbines in the canals. As I recall, it was supposed to drop the world sea level by about a foot or so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
... not dyke system... dam!
in order for them to fill and drain every tide cycle...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
nice news , Guess what.
Trust me, I am dutch.
Otherwise you are right.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I wasn't sure myself, so I decided to check it out:
- According to the Meriam Webster Dyke is the British spelling of Dike: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dyke .
- The Oxford Dictionary agrees: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/dyke_1?view=uk , though the same spelling can also mean lesbian: http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/dyke_2?view=uk
So, depending where you are either spelling will do.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yeah, I'm sure re-purposing dykes will generate cash flow via porn, etc., but that's not the same as generating power, your just generating money for buying power.
...Vikingpower means the 850s. There was major construction in the 1950s but development started over 1100 years ago and there has been a continous line since about 1250.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Tidal power plants are not new. See La Rance in France, an old project that stayed experimental because of numerous problems.
Basically, you get a very low efficiency because you have to generate power with low-pressure water due tu a small height difference; Also, salt water is not easy on turbines. This means you have a sizable investment and high maintenance costs that have to be amortized on a pitiful amount of power. A bad idea.
This is a bounty for whoever sold this pie-in-the-sky idea to the Dutch. For every one else, a disaster. It'll end up with the taxpayers sponging off the red ink, as usual.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
I was thinking about flooding some Dutch Dykes when someone corrected the spelling in the article's title.
DANG!!
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I'm sorry, we were barely able to complete the Chunnel project recently. I can't believe that Netherlands can manage public opinion better than in the US - which means that when people find out what a "megaproject" really means they will shut it down.
You see, it is a pretty well known fact that large engineering projects end up costing lives. You can pretty much talk to anyone with experence and they can give you a figure of how many people are going to die. For example, 1 death per mile of tunnel is pretty common.
You don't really think that sort of thing is acceptable, do you? Certainly in the US this has pretty much ended the idea of the "megaproject".
Obviously, the solution is to find a way to make things much safer so nobody dies, right? Well, that may not be wildly impractical, but it is very, very difficult. Things have gotten a lot better - I suspect the building of the pyramids in Egypt cost a lot of lives, far more than building Boulder Dam or the Chunnel. But we aren't talking about "improvement" anymore - the standard seems to be zero or non-zero with non-zero being an abject failure. Possible? Maybe, but first you have to make people mistake-proof because one mistake on projects like this can kill you. And unfortunately, the mistake-proof human in large numbers doesn't exist, and may never.
I guess mega-engineering projects will just have to wait in the US until you can hire just mistake-proof people. And I still say I can't believe the situation is much better in Europe.
I think seeing as they are already adding a system into the dam for generating power, they could also add a filtration system and keep some of the massive amounts of water and bottle it for bottled water....seems like it might be goo enough to drink after being treated (look a haiti...) and to let all that water go to waste down the river seems like you could kill 2 birds with one stone ....or at least give them something to drink
There is no American Society of Engineers.
Obama made them up to put words in their mouths.
There are many American societies of engineers, but none of them is named "American Society of Engineers."