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Tesla Turns Power Back On At Children's Hospital In Puerto Rico (npr.org)
Elon Musk took to Instagram yesterday to announce the "first of many solar+battery Tesla projects going live in Puerto Rico." Tesla has used its solar panels and batteries to restore reliable electricity at San Juan's Hospital del Nino (Children's Hospital) after the country was devastated by two powerful hurricanes in September. NPR reports: Musk's company announced its success in getting the hospital's power working again less than three weeks after Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello tweeted on Oct. 6, "Great initial conversation with @elonmusk tonight. Teams are now talking; exploring opportunities." Tesla's image of the project's solar array, in a parking lot next to the hospital, has been liked more than 84,000 times since it was posted to Instagram Tuesday. The hospital's new system allows it to generate all the energy it needs, according to El Nuevo Dia. The facility has 35 permanent residents with chronic conditions; it also offers services to some 3,000 young patients, the newspaper says. As for who is paying for the power system, the head of the hospital tells Nuevo Dia that for now, it's a donation -- and that after the energy crisis is over, a deal could make it permanent. Both Rossello and the tech company tweeted about the project this week, with Tesla saying in a post, "Grateful to support the recovery of Puerto Rico with @ricardorossello" -- and Rossello stating, "A major contribution of @Tesla to the Hospital del Nino."
Chosen, seriously chosen. You people are so gullible buying into any bullshit. Why the big strangle on Puerto Rico, to drive the population out, to force them to sell on the cheap, so developers can buy it up on cents on the dollar, demolish the homes, redevelop everything to sell for maximum profits. You want to know why others countries do not, absolutely do no want to join the US, who the fuck wants to become another Puerto Rico. Bankrupted on purpose by the US Congress and Senate and then blamed for the bankruptcy and now being driven out of their homes to favour corporate developers. What a piece of shit the US government has become, actively preying on it's citizens to feed the greed of it's corporations all in full public view, don't even pretend to hide it, just smear a layer of bullshit propaganda over it and pretend it isn't there (yeah I know it Russia's fault, they were the ones who mishandled Puerto Rico's finances, there's proof it just can't be released for national security reasons).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Not true, the hurricanes are caused by Trump's unnatural love of coal.
In the long run yes, but in line with your own climate hypothesis today's hurricanes are being caused by Carter not allowing nuclear fuel to be reprocessed and Obama killing off Yucca Mountain.
Of course it was done for PR-reasons
Yeah. PR as in Puerto Rico >.>
Shocking that 2 man company that won a $300 no-bid contract to restore the power to Peurto Rico didn't get there first. Especially when those 2 men had connections to a Trump donor. Strange that. It's almost as if Trump is incredibly corrupt and giving massive amounts of money to his friends and supporters for doing nothing.
Monstar L
>"the project's solar array, in a parking lot next to the hospital, has been liked more than 84,000 times since it was posted to Instagram"
While that is neat looking, is it temporary? It appears to fill almost the entire parking lot, leaving no place to park... Are there other lots? Looks like maybe 150 spots gone. Power is important, but parking is kinda important too, isn't it?
https://www.instagram.com/p/Ba...
This is true, but in the absence of reprocessing the flat-earth lobby insists that spent fuel is some sort of massive unsolved problem that threatens our very existance. Even though reprocessing will cost more than dry storage for years to come, we have to implement it just to kill off this stupid argument.
I love thinking about the long term, and I wish more people did. I'm in the middle of a house construction project, trying to design it for a many-hundred to couple-thousand year lifespan (just the basic structure, not everything in it).... and it touches on everything that you do. And I know the exact same things would apply to repository design.
Example: first off, let's assume that like me they're building out of concrete. Well, unless your wall thickness is dam-thick, what's going to happen is CO2 will slowly dissolve into the concrete, converting the cement to limestone and lowering its pH. When the lowered pH zone reaches the rebar, it'll suddenly begin to rust and increase in size (as it's no longer protected by a highly basic environment); within a few years, the concrete is spalling out, and if not repaired, the structure will soon be unsafe.
What do you do? Well, one answer is, like dams, extreme thickness. This keeps the CO2 from ever reaching the rebar, although it also means a very expensive build. The answer of "no rebar", like the Romans did, may seem tempting, but beyond how that means that you can no longer have any shear or tensile stress (shear = loads that aren't in perfectly balanced arches; tensile = loads for example in the foundation, meaning you have to have a crazy-overbuilt foundation), it also means no safety factor against shifting loads. What's the balance?
Stainless steel has excellent (although somewhat uncertain in the long-term) lifespan. It's a bit unpredictable... you may find not the slightest bit of corrosion on 99% of the stainless but then heavy pitting on 1%, with no obvious rhyme or reason as to why. In general, though, it's quite good, but very expensive - 5x more than mild steel.
Loose plastic fibres again appear to have extremely long lifespans in concrete, and play a role akin to the horsehair that Romans added to concrete - helping resist the formation of microcracks. But while they can add some limited tensile strength to concrete, the structural benefits are limited.
Fibre-reinforced plastic rebar has superb tensile strength and can can resist shear loads. Carbon fibre is best, but very expensive; basalt fibre looks best for my needs. Unfortunately, FRP has inelastic stress-strain behavior which means that it can't directly substitute for steel in all roles. Also, tensile strength of FRP rebar does drop with time, but mainly early on; the rate of decline slows and slows with time (unlike basalt and glass, degradation in carbon fibre rebar is minimal with time... it shrugs off almost anything. But again, crazy expensive).
In my case, the house is being shaped to try to - as much as is realistic - avoid shear stress. Which is challenging when it comes to price because, for example, have you ever gone out and shopped for curved windows? ;) So we're doing the windows as big arches, setting a frame inside them (not matching the wall's bend, just flat), and deviating slightly from a perfect arch so that most of the panes inside can be rectangular, with only a couple requiring a curved cut. Where reinforcement in the concrete is required it'll be a mix of FRP and stainless rebar, with a pozzolanic / loose fibre concrete. I'm also pushing for the use of very thick pumice crete walls, acting as their own insulation. "Thick" and "pore space" are two factors in concrete that have demonstrable very long term survivability - stress from a shear force is inversely proportional to the thickness squared, and pore space tends to mean that it "crushes into itself" over time rather than shearing / spalling off. But in addition to that not being traditional in modern construction, it can cause problems, say, when you're concreting a wall to a foundation and the wall shrinks as it hardens, putting stress (and thus cracking) at the connection point. A pozzolanic mix should reduce but not eliminate this (it also produces a stronger concrete in the end, and the CSH gel tends to self-seal cracks - although pozzolanic concrete
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.