And then the stories are legion about prime fisheries being destroyed by warmer water-pacific anchovies, for instance. That's because the cold-water fisheries are cold because they are fed nutrients by upwelling of nutrient-rich deep (and cold) water. If that upwelling is choked off by warm, nutrient-depleted water, the fishery collapses.
Not quite.
That's a factor with anchovies. That's decidedly not a factor with North American freshwater fish. Warm freshwater tends to be nutrient-rich, far more so than cold. Higher temperatures means a greater solubility for dissolved solids which in turn means increased plant life which means increased zooplankton which means more aquatic insects and so on.
Upwelling-hell, thermal stratification in general is pretty much nonexistent in rivers most likely to receive power plant discharges. ISTR that was the original topic of the thread.
The problem with that, is most 3rd world people don't WANT westerners telling them what to do or how to live, they just want food and perhaps a little help with medicine and education.
"Give us your money. We don't want to hear your opinions about how we spend it."
Would you want cops from, say , somalia or afghanistan pointing guns around you and telling you what to do?
Try a country with actual competent cops. Being one myself, I like to keep up with what the rest of my professional world is doing. I wouldn't want Israeli or Japanese cops running around the US. However, the Swiss/German/UK police, the Spanish Guardia Civil, and the Italian Carabinieri have a great deal of my respect. If were were fucked enough to need foreign cops here, those countries wouldn't bother me so much.
Besides, the two that you named don't actually have police. They don't even have armed thugs claiming to be police. All they have are warlords and their household troops, and Afghanistan barely has even that.
Ok , granted that it's a pretty wierd concept whacking a computer in a village that possibly doesnt have a phone, there are ways that information and grass-roots McGyvering can be usefull.
Yeah, but you need to lose the computer entirely. I've done such programs. Screw computers and information, these places didn't have electricity. The typical community I worked in had MAYBE a diesel engine driving a generator or pump, which ran about eight hours out of the week and was used almost entirely for irrigation. A high-school shop class project would have done wonders for that village: Hell, a central drinking-water well with SOME effort at treatment would have been a beautiful thing. All it takes is the right size of container and some goddamn sand! (but it has to be exactly the right kind of sand, and with no organic matter mixed in, etc...)
I'm thinking of one specific town. Pit toilets were a substantial improvement in this town's public health. So were vegetable gardens-they grew all of the corn they could have ever wanted, but the micronutrient (vitamin & mineral) deficiencies were problematic. Having some farming background helped me a LOT.
And then there was the issue of education-there was a "doctor" in the next town, who treated colds with vitamin shots and prescribed injected allergy medicine to people without allergies. Some education would have been good, and forcing that "doctor" to practice on himself would have been an acceptable compromise.
Naturally, there was a Peace Corps drone in the area. His mission? To teach computer usage, to people who would spend six months' income on an old 286 without even solving the problem of no power. Also naturally, and typical IME of Peace Corps types-in Latin America, he didn't speak much Spanish.
Anyway, I highly recommend a group called Amigos de las Americas. They have their share of idiots, and especially in supervision/leadership/management, but it can still be a worthwhile program if you bring your own skills and your own initiative. All you need is a chunk of change, some Spanish proficiency, and be age 16.
Well, large amounts of heat (say, from power plants) can be transported reasonably well and are used for heating in many countries around the world.
Small amounts of heat from domestic use can be stored and used when they are needed
How?
You could try running ductwork from some power plant to some customer, but the air will be cooled enough to be useless by the time it gets there.
On the small scale, I can see using a large tank of water inside the house to collect during the day and re-radiate at night, but that would, at best, work inside a single building.
You might try harvesting waste heat from a fireplace. I don't recommend it. If you bend or constrict the chimney, it'll go one of two ways: Either you choke off the fire, or you create a nasty fire hazard inside the house.
The farmhouse I grew up in had a large cast-iron wood-burning stove mounted on an awful lot of brick. Even if the fire went dead, heat was stored and re-radiated from the iron itself and from the brick, and that did wonders to keep the house warm (since we couldn't afford much gas, and that was limited to cooking. OTOH, wood is cheap when 1280 acres of farmland includes 120 acres of woodlot plus some greenbelt)
I can see using interior brickwork near windows to achieve a similar effect. Use sunlight during the day to warm the brick, which re-radiates. If you limit the effect to south-facing windows and make sure that there are no skylights involved at all, you can even limit the warming effect to winter. However, double-glazed (dead-air insulating) windows are expensive, and I'd be willing to bet that a 2x6 stud-framed wall with fiberglass batting and no windows would be better-insulated. Granted, I refuse to live in a windowless cave...
the warm water is a waste product - not a big deal if it is going into the pacific, but when it goes into a river it can change things enough to alter the ecosystem
That depends on a lot of factors.
How hot is the water being discharged? How big and how fast is the river receiving the discharge? And what ecosystem is already present?
Raising a stream temperature two degrees farenheit won't make a huge difference. Maybe a slight increase in plant productivity and a slight decrease in dissolved oxygen. That increases biological oxygen demand and at the same time decreases the available oxygen to meet that demand. I know what you're saying-increased plant productivity should increase dO2, but the oxygen tends to outgas once the water is saturated or close to it. And gases are less soluble in warmer water than cold. That's why trout don't live in warm water.
Anyway, two degrees isn't likely to be a huge whammy. Ten degrees would probably be very significant.
FWIW, a slight increase can often improve fisheries. Wolf Creek Reservoir in Kansas is the cooling pond for a nuclear power plant. The slight warming effect from the plant has done wonders for the fishery present. And then the stories are legion about prime fisheries being destroyed by warmer water-pacific anchovies, for instance. You really can't generalize too much when it comes to ecology.
And yes, I am a fisheries biologist/acquatic ecologist. Either I have some experience or I've managed to fool a lot of professors and the hiring officer at the state DNR:-)
Now this new technology can be used to make engines much more efficient. As you add more of these devices, the less you'll have to cool the engine by means of the water cooling system. Smaller radiators, maybe even get rid of the radiator fan. I don't know how much this device will actually cool the engine, but I suppose you add enough and you can get rid of the radiator altogether.
That's going to take more engineering than the Big Three are going to want to do.
Car engines are fairly temperature-sensitive, and generally are most efficient at about 150 Farenheit. They also crap out if they get too hot-usually around 250-270 Farenheit[1]. Wild swings can screw up power and efficiency.
Also, the electrical system is dependent on staying fairly close to 12VDC. Too much or too little can screw up computers. I don't know what kind of regulation it would take to make this work alongside a conventional alternator, but I don't see a peltier device replacing the alternator entirely.
[1] At least on my truck-Chevy 4.3L V6, but those figures are fairly typical for large V-6's. Smaller engines in passenger cars tend to run faster and hotter, which is how a 1.4L four-cylinder can give 150 horses when my truck engine is rated for 190. The implications for engine life for hot-and-fast engines should be obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite.
That's a factor with anchovies. That's decidedly not a factor with North American freshwater fish. Warm freshwater tends to be nutrient-rich, far more so than cold. Higher temperatures means a greater solubility for dissolved solids which in turn means increased plant life which means increased zooplankton which means more aquatic insects and so on.
Upwelling-hell, thermal stratification in general is pretty much nonexistent in rivers most likely to receive power plant discharges. ISTR that was the original topic of the thread.
"Give us your money. We don't want to hear your opinions about how we spend it."
Would you want cops from, say , somalia or afghanistan pointing guns around you and telling you what to do?
Try a country with actual competent cops. Being one myself, I like to keep up with what the rest of my professional world is doing. I wouldn't want Israeli or Japanese cops running around the US. However, the Swiss/German/UK police, the Spanish Guardia Civil, and the Italian Carabinieri have a great deal of my respect. If were were fucked enough to need foreign cops here, those countries wouldn't bother me so much.
Besides, the two that you named don't actually have police. They don't even have armed thugs claiming to be police. All they have are warlords and their household troops, and Afghanistan barely has even that.
Yeah, but you need to lose the computer entirely. I've done such programs. Screw computers and information, these places didn't have electricity. The typical community I worked in had MAYBE a diesel engine driving a generator or pump, which ran about eight hours out of the week and was used almost entirely for irrigation. A high-school shop class project would have done wonders for that village: Hell, a central drinking-water well with SOME effort at treatment would have been a beautiful thing. All it takes is the right size of container and some goddamn sand! (but it has to be exactly the right kind of sand, and with no organic matter mixed in, etc...)
I'm thinking of one specific town. Pit toilets were a substantial improvement in this town's public health. So were vegetable gardens-they grew all of the corn they could have ever wanted, but the micronutrient (vitamin & mineral) deficiencies were problematic. Having some farming background helped me a LOT.
And then there was the issue of education-there was a "doctor" in the next town, who treated colds with vitamin shots and prescribed injected allergy medicine to people without allergies. Some education would have been good, and forcing that "doctor" to practice on himself would have been an acceptable compromise.
Naturally, there was a Peace Corps drone in the area. His mission? To teach computer usage, to people who would spend six months' income on an old 286 without even solving the problem of no power. Also naturally, and typical IME of Peace Corps types-in Latin America, he didn't speak much Spanish.
Anyway, I highly recommend a group called Amigos de las Americas. They have their share of idiots, and especially in supervision/leadership/management, but it can still be a worthwhile program if you bring your own skills and your own initiative. All you need is a chunk of change, some Spanish proficiency, and be age 16.
How?
You could try running ductwork from some power plant to some customer, but the air will be cooled enough to be useless by the time it gets there.
On the small scale, I can see using a large tank of water inside the house to collect during the day and re-radiate at night, but that would, at best, work inside a single building.
You might try harvesting waste heat from a fireplace. I don't recommend it. If you bend or constrict the chimney, it'll go one of two ways: Either you choke off the fire, or you create a nasty fire hazard inside the house.
The farmhouse I grew up in had a large cast-iron wood-burning stove mounted on an awful lot of brick. Even if the fire went dead, heat was stored and re-radiated from the iron itself and from the brick, and that did wonders to keep the house warm (since we couldn't afford much gas, and that was limited to cooking. OTOH, wood is cheap when 1280 acres of farmland includes 120 acres of woodlot plus some greenbelt)
I can see using interior brickwork near windows to achieve a similar effect. Use sunlight during the day to warm the brick, which re-radiates. If you limit the effect to south-facing windows and make sure that there are no skylights involved at all, you can even limit the warming effect to winter. However, double-glazed (dead-air insulating) windows are expensive, and I'd be willing to bet that a 2x6 stud-framed wall with fiberglass batting and no windows would be better-insulated. Granted, I refuse to live in a windowless cave...
That depends on a lot of factors.
How hot is the water being discharged? How big and how fast is the river receiving the discharge? And what ecosystem is already present?
Raising a stream temperature two degrees farenheit won't make a huge difference. Maybe a slight increase in plant productivity and a slight decrease in dissolved oxygen. That increases biological oxygen demand and at the same time decreases the available oxygen to meet that demand. I know what you're saying-increased plant productivity should increase dO2, but the oxygen tends to outgas once the water is saturated or close to it. And gases are less soluble in warmer water than cold. That's why trout don't live in warm water.
Anyway, two degrees isn't likely to be a huge whammy. Ten degrees would probably be very significant.
FWIW, a slight increase can often improve fisheries. Wolf Creek Reservoir in Kansas is the cooling pond for a nuclear power plant. The slight warming effect from the plant has done wonders for the fishery present. And then the stories are legion about prime fisheries being destroyed by warmer water-pacific anchovies, for instance. You really can't generalize too much when it comes to ecology.
And yes, I am a fisheries biologist/acquatic ecologist. Either I have some experience or I've managed to fool a lot of professors and the hiring officer at the state DNR :-)
That's going to take more engineering than the Big Three are going to want to do.
Car engines are fairly temperature-sensitive, and generally are most efficient at about 150 Farenheit. They also crap out if they get too hot-usually around 250-270 Farenheit[1]. Wild swings can screw up power and efficiency.
Also, the electrical system is dependent on staying fairly close to 12VDC. Too much or too little can screw up computers. I don't know what kind of regulation it would take to make this work alongside a conventional alternator, but I don't see a peltier device replacing the alternator entirely.
[1] At least on my truck-Chevy 4.3L V6, but those figures are fairly typical for large V-6's. Smaller engines in passenger cars tend to run faster and hotter, which is how a 1.4L four-cylinder can give 150 horses when my truck engine is rated for 190. The implications for engine life for hot-and-fast engines should be obvious.