I remember it being shut down a couple times over the smell, but they got that fixed.
However, they did apparently go bankrupt due to oil prices dropping and not being able to get the turkey parts as cheaply as expected(a market developed for them, I think it involved China), meant they weren't able to pay off capital costs like they had expected to.
As a vegetarian, it really disgusts me... (I wonder, though, if this smell is better than regular diesel).
As an omnivore who's also a hunter, I'm glad that they're finding a green use for what would otherwise be a waste product.
This is a kind-of 'old tech' come back in a new form. Animal fat used to be used to produce candles and lantern oil; so the idea of using it for power isn't a new one.
BTW, this is old news; I first heard about this factory several years ago.
MUCH better article - Hmm... Looks like a new plant, and it'll also produce fuel for the B-52. Sweet.
Ah, here's what I was remembering - light crude from turkey fats and other waste via thermal-depolymerization.Article dates from 2003.
He, sidewalk-crime. As mentioned, you have 'hate-crimes', 'white collar crime', 'gang crime', 'drug crime', and 'gun crime', just to name a few.
I think a person's motivations should be considered when they commit a crime, but there's far more reasons to jack up punishment simply because a victim was chosen on the basis of the color of their skin, sex, religion, or orientation.
The thing is, you could have the vehicle plugged in at night which would make the plant generating the electricity lots happier.
Why do you think I proposed building nukes? Solar isn't going to help that much to charge vehicles at night. Wind is okay, but still more expensive than nuclear.
To get to the point - the government gets involved in any disaster of a large enough magnitude, and it doesn't have the greatest record of charging for it. Superfund, for example.
That level, due to price-anderson, is actually a bit higher for nuclear power disasters than it would be for bad chemical spills.
In conclusion, price-anderson isn't even that big of a subsidy, and nuclear power remains one of the safest power sources going.
Yeah, cancer prevention gets lots of money. Still, I don't think Cellulostic Ethanol has gotten $100B put into it yet. Battery tech, probably, but we still have a ways to go. Thorium power is another one that with $100B of funding I'd expect to see 10-50 Gigawatts of generating capacity up and running.
Not sure if $100B could have replaced the shuttles, but we'd be a heck of a lot closer.
All of this is dependent on my idea that we didn't actually fund the ISS enough. We did the equivalent of delaying construction on a building so much that we're having to conduct repairs on the building before we can even finish it. Or the guy who buys a classic car to restore; only he's working on it so slowly that it's rotting faster than he's fixing it.
We spent more maintaining the ISS than we did doing research with it. Most of our R&D in association with it ended up being in how to maintain the ISS. Some useful knowledge on living in space, but not as much as if we'd properly funded it.
Thanks for your reply. Oddly, it appears my post got cut off on submission, as it was complete in preview. WTH?
Still, most of it got in there.
The ISS would indeed have been a valid stepping stone. Problem is that we never met a bunch of design goals due to funding difficulties. Modules were hitting their end of life before any research was done in them because the station didn't have full manning or construction.
We can't really build manufacturing up there until we have the tech to simply LIVE up there. That would have been the primary goal of the ISS. Your idea would have been more the replacement for ISS, which we'd have been considering right now if we'd stuck to the schedule.
I like the railgun idea, it'd certainly save some money. My other though would have been to have the station in a better(higher) orbit, then you don't bring materials down. Design some sort of solar furnace/forge and start recycling material, even if only into shielding material at first.
You bring up price-anderson as though you think I don't already know about it. I do.
Fact is, the government has never had to pay out under Price-Anderson. EVERY energy source gets subsidies, the question is how much. Natural gas gets the least amount of subsidization, followed by coal and nuclear. Then comes wind, solar. Sadly enough, 'Clean Coal' gets the most.
Another thing I'll point out is that there are actually plenty of other industries that can have similar levels of harm, it's only for nuclear power that they're properly controlled for.
Bhopal - 4k-15k deaths, 500k injuries, 38k disabilities Hungarian chemical sludge spill Coal just keeps giving... Let's not forget Deepwater Horizon Airline industry - If we're going to look at the probability levels of a properly built reactor having complete containment failure, we gotta look at airplanes accidentally flying into buildings. As 9/11 has shown us, this can lead to massive loss of life, and lingering illness from chemical pollution released from a burning, collapsing building.
Compared to all this, the worst US nuclear power accident* to date, TMI, statistically killed nobody. Of my listed examples, only the slurry spill didn't kill anybody.
Another way to look at it is 'opportunity cost'. What if we'd thrown the $100B into wind technology research? Solar Cells*? Cellulostic Ethanol? Battery tech? Cancer prevention? A replacement for the shuttle? Thorium nuclear power?
Personally, I think the ISS is what happens when you go at something but don't go in ENOUGH. We'd have had a lot more actual research for the buck if we'd payed the extra money to get the thing assembled and working on schedule, rather than have modules go end of life without real use because you didn't have the full crew up there, because you don't have the necessary equipment up there to do research, because of delay, delay, delay.
*I'm sure at least some of that $100B ended up towards solar research, but eh...
The second factsheet linked tells me nothing I don't already know.
Whatever the truth is : MASSIVE investments in windpower is being done by big energy companies, so it can't THAT expensive methinks.
Because they're also getting massive subsidies, up to 50% of the build cost in many cases and often including sweetheart deals for buying the electricity.
Personally, my non-hyrocarbon electricity generation 'mix' tends to be around 20% wind, 20% solar(day peaks), 40% nuclear, 20% 'other' which includes hydro, geothermal, etc...
By preference the Nuke plants would be cogenerating types - desalinating water, producing hydrogen, heating a town, providing industrial heat to produce ethanol or even refine oil sand/shale if we're not completely to using other sources yet. The options are pretty widespread, actually. Plus let's get to reprocessing, building breeders and thorium reactors, plants that can burn up our current nuclear waste safely.
Heck, have a process that you can ramp up/down elegantly and you can use nuclear plants as peakers even more efficiently. The CANDU already has the ability to scale in power production over 50%, so it's not like the ability isn't there, it's just not often used.
I never said Solar/wind can't serve as baseload, I just said that they're still MORE EXPENSIVE than the sources typically used for baseload - coal, nuclear, and hydro, basically.
no-fuel.org link - depends on the size of your grid to actually make 'wind's always blowing somewhere' true. Doesn't change that a 1 GW max output windfarm is more likely to average 30-40% of what a 1 GW nuclear plant would produce over time. You need near perfect wind for the windfarm to reach max production, too fast or too slow and production drops.
Interconnecting wind farms through the transmission grid is a simple and effective way of reducing deliverable wind power swings caused by wind intermittency.
Additional interconnects cost money. A power source that costs $1/watt of maximum capacity costs more per kwh than a power source that costs $2/watt if the first only produces, on average, 30% of it's capacity while the second averages 90%.
Getting back to EVs vs Gasoline engines, the biggest problem with EVs is the battery. They're simply not good enough, not cheap enough. Often the cost of battery depreciation exceeds the cost of the electricity used as fuel over the life of the pack.
You think that the EV's are being powered by unicorn tears? No. It is coal.
Depends on where you live. Still, ironically environmentalism has pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity - as nice as it is, solar and wind are still far more expensive than then their baseload counterparts.
I'd be building nuclear plants, but you can get EVs that are 'powered' by solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc...
EVs are one of the reasons I think that 'conservation' isn't going to save us from having to build nuclear power plants. EVs get around 3 miles to the kwh. People tend to drive 12-15k miles a year. That's 4-5k kwh/year. Take a 'standard' 2 car household, that's 8-10k kwh, 667-833kwh a month. Or around 2/3rds the standard electric bill. We could save 1/3rd the electricity we currently use by using energy efficient appliances and turning off the lights and such, only to turn around and double our usage by plugging our cars in.
EVs aren't, can't be the 'only' solution for replacing oil based fuels. But they have their spot, I can say that.
You're a bit confused---Classical Chinese had the 'one word one character' thing, and Japanese has three character sets (five if you include Arabic numerals and the extensive use of the Roman alphabet).
Less confused than imprecise, I think. Both have a 'one word one character' set, with the confusion that in China you also had multiple spoken languages all using the same written language. China also ended up with phonetic characters as well, so there's a different character set. Thus my use of 'like 3 character sets', because how many sets they have depends on how you or your school defines them.
Book sales are amongst the highest in the world, and Japanese newspapers have the highest circulations in the world. The extra time spent reading in school must be paying off for the Japanese.
You have a point there. I used to be a book a day guy. Eyes can't take that anymore, unfortuantly, I actually find a monitor easier to read off from these days, but so many e-books are so annoying with the software I prefer (free) fanfiction. Sure, there's a lot of dreck out there, but there's enough that the best 1% rivals commercial books.
True, but I remember reading that it was complex enough that many reporters preferred to dictate to a voice recognition system than to try to type their story in.
It seemed to work a lot like predictive keystrokes on a cellphone.
I have no real problems with allowing Unicode in programming, but I'd see it mostly being used in defining strings and naming variables, and even then you'd probably want to restrict the character set simply because so many of the symbols look so similar, yet are so different code wise.
Sure, with Unicode you could probably make every function a single character, but human minds aren't really written to recognize that. Sure, Chinese and Japanese do the 'one word one character' thing, but they also end up with like 3 character sets and a substantial additional amount of work learning said additional characters.
Algebra - the basis of everything else, plus "life economics" covers pretty much everything everybody needs. A basic understanding of geometry is useful too - allows them to do estimates on material needs for household goods and such.
In the meantime, there are basic and critical skills that people don't graduate with.
I call it preparing people to go to college who will never go. You shouldn't be trying to teach calculus to somebody who's 80% likely to drop out of high school, much less attend college.
My basic list: Addition, Subtraction, multiplication, and division. Counting(as in change), and some geometry(figure out how many square feet of wall you have so you can buy the correct amount of paint). How to keep track of a checkbook/budget. Familiarity with 'cost of capital' so they at least understand the different costs of lower payments now vs fewer payments.
Use the time saved to make sure they know how to do things like cook, clean, take care of basic maintenance, understand why messing with electricity can be bad, etc... Preferably get them started with a trade.
If they're shaping up to be good at math, have the drive to attend college, THEN worry about teaching them the advanced stuff. Germany has/had a three tier system, why shouldn't we?
From what I've heard MJ was under the personal care of what was essentially his full time doctor.
He shouldn't have needed to got to multiple doctors, hell he shouldn't have been taking what he was taking to sleep. They were essentially putting him under anesthesia every night.
Not to be a pain, but doesn't this situation also describe Elvis and Michael Jackson?
Ozzy, for all his wealth, came out of it with being able to get decently clean*, decently healthy, decently sane, etc... That's actually a fair bit of luck and probably good genes.
*I'm not about to suggest that he doesn't still use recreational drugs, whether they be legal, illegal, or prescribed.
Should have perhaps stated this earlier, but one massive difference between the Earth's moon and the others around rocky planets is that current theory is that it was created by a body around the size of mars slamming into the proto-earth with a good chunk ending up as a ring around earth that eventually coalesced into the moon.
That sort of thing is going to have an impact on rotational period, magnetic orientation, tidal forces, composition of the planet, etc... Thus my usage of 'second stirring', because it basically turned the Earth back into a molten mass.
Oh, and my 'more than a thousand ly apart' should be 'on average'. Given the size of the milky way that still means around 8k habitable plants, so I suppose I'm a pessimist compared to this article's writer.
Maybe I should draw a line between 'habitable' and 'life bearing'?
Slashdot Mirror
I want to know if gang-bangers and illegal carriers were included.
I remember it being shut down a couple times over the smell, but they got that fixed.
However, they did apparently go bankrupt due to oil prices dropping and not being able to get the turkey parts as cheaply as expected(a market developed for them, I think it involved China), meant they weren't able to pay off capital costs like they had expected to.
As a vegetarian, it really disgusts me... (I wonder, though, if this smell is better than regular diesel).
As an omnivore who's also a hunter, I'm glad that they're finding a green use for what would otherwise be a waste product.
This is a kind-of 'old tech' come back in a new form. Animal fat used to be used to produce candles and lantern oil; so the idea of using it for power isn't a new one.
BTW, this is old news; I first heard about this factory several years ago.
MUCH better article
- Hmm... Looks like a new plant, and it'll also produce fuel for the B-52. Sweet.
Ah, here's what I was remembering - light crude from turkey fats and other waste via thermal-depolymerization .Article dates from 2003.
Bah, coats are for when it hits 0F. ;)
I am a self admitted Polar Bear. I wear shorts when there's snow on the ground.
In the middle of winder I will be wearing so many layers it's not even funny. Gloves? I wear mittons because they're warmer.
When they talk about it being so cold that exposed skin will freeze in less than 5 minutes, they mean it.
Ability to use the phone even with gloves would help occasionally.
Oh, and for the operating temperature thing - you keep the phone close to your body to keep it's temperature up.
He, sidewalk-crime. As mentioned, you have 'hate-crimes', 'white collar crime', 'gang crime', 'drug crime', and 'gun crime', just to name a few.
I think a person's motivations should be considered when they commit a crime, but there's far more reasons to jack up punishment simply because a victim was chosen on the basis of the color of their skin, sex, religion, or orientation.
The thing is, you could have the vehicle plugged in at night which would make the
plant generating the electricity lots happier.
Why do you think I proposed building nukes? Solar isn't going to help that much to charge vehicles at night. Wind is okay, but still more expensive than nuclear.
Darn it, hit submit accidentally.
To get to the point - the government gets involved in any disaster of a large enough magnitude, and it doesn't have the greatest record of charging for it. Superfund, for example.
That level, due to price-anderson, is actually a bit higher for nuclear power disasters than it would be for bad chemical spills.
In conclusion, price-anderson isn't even that big of a subsidy, and nuclear power remains one of the safest power sources going.
Yeah, cancer prevention gets lots of money. Still, I don't think Cellulostic Ethanol has gotten $100B put into it yet. Battery tech, probably, but we still have a ways to go. Thorium power is another one that with $100B of funding I'd expect to see 10-50 Gigawatts of generating capacity up and running.
Not sure if $100B could have replaced the shuttles, but we'd be a heck of a lot closer.
All of this is dependent on my idea that we didn't actually fund the ISS enough. We did the equivalent of delaying construction on a building so much that we're having to conduct repairs on the building before we can even finish it. Or the guy who buys a classic car to restore; only he's working on it so slowly that it's rotting faster than he's fixing it.
We spent more maintaining the ISS than we did doing research with it. Most of our R&D in association with it ended up being in how to maintain the ISS. Some useful knowledge on living in space, but not as much as if we'd properly funded it.
Thanks for your reply. Oddly, it appears my post got cut off on submission, as it was complete in preview. WTH?
Still, most of it got in there.
The ISS would indeed have been a valid stepping stone. Problem is that we never met a bunch of design goals due to funding difficulties. Modules were hitting their end of life before any research was done in them because the station didn't have full manning or construction.
We can't really build manufacturing up there until we have the tech to simply LIVE up there. That would have been the primary goal of the ISS. Your idea would have been more the replacement for ISS, which we'd have been considering right now if we'd stuck to the schedule.
I like the railgun idea, it'd certainly save some money. My other though would have been to have the station in a better(higher) orbit, then you don't bring materials down. Design some sort of solar furnace/forge and start recycling material, even if only into shielding material at first.
You bring up price-anderson as though you think I don't already know about it. I do.
Fact is, the government has never had to pay out under Price-Anderson. EVERY energy source gets subsidies, the question is how much. Natural gas gets the least amount of subsidization, followed by coal and nuclear. Then comes wind, solar. Sadly enough, 'Clean Coal' gets the most.
Another thing I'll point out is that there are actually plenty of other industries that can have similar levels of harm, it's only for nuclear power that they're properly controlled for.
Bhopal - 4k-15k deaths, 500k injuries, 38k disabilities
Hungarian chemical sludge spill
Coal just keeps giving...
Let's not forget Deepwater Horizon
Airline industry - If we're going to look at the probability levels of a properly built reactor having complete containment failure, we gotta look at airplanes accidentally flying into buildings. As 9/11 has shown us, this can lead to massive loss of life, and lingering illness from chemical pollution released from a burning, collapsing building.
Compared to all this, the worst US nuclear power accident* to date, TMI, statistically killed nobody. Of my listed examples, only the slurry spill didn't kill anybody.
*I'm excluding military and research reactors
Another way to look at it is 'opportunity cost'. What if we'd thrown the $100B into wind technology research? Solar Cells*? Cellulostic Ethanol? Battery tech? Cancer prevention? A replacement for the shuttle? Thorium nuclear power?
Personally, I think the ISS is what happens when you go at something but don't go in ENOUGH. We'd have had a lot more actual research for the buck if we'd payed the extra money to get the thing assembled and working on schedule, rather than have modules go end of life without real use because you didn't have the full crew up there, because you don't have the necessary equipment up there to do research, because of delay, delay, delay.
*I'm sure at least some of that $100B ended up towards solar research, but eh...
Cost? Excuse me if I don't trust peswiki's cents per kwh figures.
I mean, US nuclear plants are closer to 4.9 cents a kwh, not 12.
The second factsheet linked tells me nothing I don't already know.
Whatever the truth is : MASSIVE investments in windpower is being done by big energy companies, so it can't THAT expensive methinks.
Because they're also getting massive subsidies, up to 50% of the build cost in many cases and often including sweetheart deals for buying the electricity.
Personally, my non-hyrocarbon electricity generation 'mix' tends to be around 20% wind, 20% solar(day peaks), 40% nuclear, 20% 'other' which includes hydro, geothermal, etc...
By preference the Nuke plants would be cogenerating types - desalinating water, producing hydrogen, heating a town, providing industrial heat to produce ethanol or even refine oil sand/shale if we're not completely to using other sources yet. The options are pretty widespread, actually. Plus let's get to reprocessing, building breeders and thorium reactors, plants that can burn up our current nuclear waste safely.
Heck, have a process that you can ramp up/down elegantly and you can use nuclear plants as peakers even more efficiently. The CANDU already has the ability to scale in power production over 50%, so it's not like the ability isn't there, it's just not often used.
All true. I just felt going this far in would be getting excessively off topic, and I didn't want to write a multipage manifesto.
I think you read into my post way too much.
I never said Solar/wind can't serve as baseload, I just said that they're still MORE EXPENSIVE than the sources typically used for baseload - coal, nuclear, and hydro, basically.
no-fuel.org link - depends on the size of your grid to actually make 'wind's always blowing somewhere' true. Doesn't change that a 1 GW max output windfarm is more likely to average 30-40% of what a 1 GW nuclear plant would produce over time. You need near perfect wind for the windfarm to reach max production, too fast or too slow and production drops.
for the stanford link -
Interconnecting wind farms through the transmission grid is a simple and effective way of reducing deliverable wind power swings caused by wind intermittency.
Additional interconnects cost money. A power source that costs $1/watt of maximum capacity costs more per kwh than a power source that costs $2/watt if the first only produces, on average, 30% of it's capacity while the second averages 90%.
Getting back to EVs vs Gasoline engines, the biggest problem with EVs is the battery. They're simply not good enough, not cheap enough. Often the cost of battery depreciation exceeds the cost of the electricity used as fuel over the life of the pack.
You think that the EV's are being powered by unicorn tears? No. It is coal.
Depends on where you live. Still, ironically environmentalism has pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity - as nice as it is, solar and wind are still far more expensive than then their baseload counterparts.
I'd be building nuclear plants, but you can get EVs that are 'powered' by solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc...
EVs are one of the reasons I think that 'conservation' isn't going to save us from having to build nuclear power plants. EVs get around 3 miles to the kwh. People tend to drive 12-15k miles a year. That's 4-5k kwh/year. Take a 'standard' 2 car household, that's 8-10k kwh, 667-833kwh a month. Or around 2/3rds the standard electric bill. We could save 1/3rd the electricity we currently use by using energy efficient appliances and turning off the lights and such, only to turn around and double our usage by plugging our cars in.
EVs aren't, can't be the 'only' solution for replacing oil based fuels. But they have their spot, I can say that.
I've never heard of anybody capable of using a keyboard using voice recognition because they found the act of entering in words laborious.
It was on the news quite some time ago, and I think it was in reference to how things worked BEFORE cellphones became common.
US Universities are arguably in better shape than many of our high schools.
Then you also have the 'grass is greener' problem. I've just always thought that the German system of different 'classes' of high school made sense.
Heck, you don't even need different schools, just different programs within the school.
You're a bit confused---Classical Chinese had the 'one word one character' thing, and Japanese has three character sets (five if you include Arabic numerals and the extensive use of the Roman alphabet).
Less confused than imprecise, I think. Both have a 'one word one character' set, with the confusion that in China you also had multiple spoken languages all using the same written language. China also ended up with phonetic characters as well, so there's a different character set. Thus my use of 'like 3 character sets', because how many sets they have depends on how you or your school defines them.
Book sales are amongst the highest in the world, and Japanese newspapers have the highest circulations in the world. The extra time spent reading in school must be paying off for the Japanese.
You have a point there. I used to be a book a day guy. Eyes can't take that anymore, unfortuantly, I actually find a monitor easier to read off from these days, but so many e-books are so annoying with the software I prefer (free) fanfiction. Sure, there's a lot of dreck out there, but there's enough that the best 1% rivals commercial books.
True, but I remember reading that it was complex enough that many reporters preferred to dictate to a voice recognition system than to try to type their story in.
It seemed to work a lot like predictive keystrokes on a cellphone.
I have no real problems with allowing Unicode in programming, but I'd see it mostly being used in defining strings and naming variables, and even then you'd probably want to restrict the character set simply because so many of the symbols look so similar, yet are so different code wise.
Sure, with Unicode you could probably make every function a single character, but human minds aren't really written to recognize that. Sure, Chinese and Japanese do the 'one word one character' thing, but they also end up with like 3 character sets and a substantial additional amount of work learning said additional characters.
I think you make a very good listing here.
Algebra - the basis of everything else, plus "life economics" covers pretty much everything everybody needs. A basic understanding of geometry is useful too - allows them to do estimates on material needs for household goods and such.
Pretty much what I was thinking.
In the meantime, there are basic and critical skills that people don't graduate with.
I call it preparing people to go to college who will never go. You shouldn't be trying to teach calculus to somebody who's 80% likely to drop out of high school, much less attend college.
My basic list:
Addition, Subtraction, multiplication, and division. Counting(as in change), and some geometry(figure out how many square feet of wall you have so you can buy the correct amount of paint). How to keep track of a checkbook/budget. Familiarity with 'cost of capital' so they at least understand the different costs of lower payments now vs fewer payments.
Use the time saved to make sure they know how to do things like cook, clean, take care of basic maintenance, understand why messing with electricity can be bad, etc... Preferably get them started with a trade.
If they're shaping up to be good at math, have the drive to attend college, THEN worry about teaching them the advanced stuff. Germany has/had a three tier system, why shouldn't we?
From what I've heard MJ was under the personal care of what was essentially his full time doctor.
He shouldn't have needed to got to multiple doctors, hell he shouldn't have been taking what he was taking to sleep. They were essentially putting him under anesthesia every night.
Not to be a pain, but doesn't this situation also describe Elvis and Michael Jackson?
Ozzy, for all his wealth, came out of it with being able to get decently clean*, decently healthy, decently sane, etc... That's actually a fair bit of luck and probably good genes.
*I'm not about to suggest that he doesn't still use recreational drugs, whether they be legal, illegal, or prescribed.
Should have perhaps stated this earlier, but one massive difference between the Earth's moon and the others around rocky planets is that current theory is that it was created by a body around the size of mars slamming into the proto-earth with a good chunk ending up as a ring around earth that eventually coalesced into the moon.
That sort of thing is going to have an impact on rotational period, magnetic orientation, tidal forces, composition of the planet, etc... Thus my usage of 'second stirring', because it basically turned the Earth back into a molten mass.
Oh, and my 'more than a thousand ly apart' should be 'on average'. Given the size of the milky way that still means around 8k habitable plants, so I suppose I'm a pessimist compared to this article's writer.
Maybe I should draw a line between 'habitable' and 'life bearing'?