Less than a year after a major coal ash pond ruptured causing a very large area to be contaminated with millions of tons of toxic coal ash slurry, the EPA has released its findings on the state of coal ash dumps in the United States.
Via the New York Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency has released a list of 44 “high hazard potential” coal ash waste dumps across the country. The “high hazard” rating applied to sites where a dam failure would most likely result in a loss of human life, the environmental agency advisory said, but did not assess the structural integrity of the dam or its likelihood of failure.

The list, released late on Monday, was compiled as part of the agency’s inventory of coal ash sites after more than a billion gallons of ash broke through a dam at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant west of Knoxville last December. An engineering analysis of the failure, released last week, cited design problems like the height of the ash, among other factors.

Coal ash contains toxic materials like lead, arsenic, selenium and thallium, and such sites have been known to contaminate drinking and surface water.

The list identifies disposal sites in 10 states, including 12 in North Carolina, 9 in Arizona and 7 in Kentucky. There were no Tennessee Valley Authority sites on the list.

Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, received the list earlier this month and wanted to release it, but the Department of Homeland Security and the Army Corps of Engineers objected, citing security concerns.

The agency released the list after reviewing those concerns, a spokeswoman said.

The E.P.A. list was based on responses to a questionnaire that the agency sent to utilities and power plants. Environmentalists said they did not believe the list was complete because it was based on self-assessment.

“T.V.A. ranked its own dams, and it didn’t rank any of its dams ‘high hazard,’ ” said Lisa Evans, a lawyer for Earthjustice. A spokeswoman for the authority, Barbara Martocci, said she did not know who had classified the sites on the list. The classification system was developed by the National Dam Safety Program.

Ms. Evans said dam integrity was not the only or even the central problem with coal ash dump sites. In 2007, an E.P.A. report identified 63 sites in 26 states where the water was contaminated by heavy metals from such dumps, including three other Tennessee Valley Authority dumps. Experts say coal ash should be stored in lined landfills to prevent contamination, but the agency questionnaire did not ask whether the sites were lined.

David Merryman of the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation in Charlotte, N.C., said two of the sites on the “high hazard potential” list discharge into Mountain Island Lake, the primary source of drinking water for 750,000 people in the Charlotte area. Those sites, which belong to Duke Energy, are unlined ponds.

Jason Walls, a Duke Energy spokesman, said the company’s two newest coal ash ponds were lined.

Ten of the sites on the high hazard list belong to Duke Energy. But Mr. Walls said those sites were sound. For years, the E.P.A. has failed to regulate the disposal of coal ash despite promises to do so. Under the Obama administration, agency officials have pledged to issue regulations by the end of 2009.

Well, this is certainly an important issue and one that gets nowhere near the attention it should.   (In general, most enviornmental groups are too busy trying to stop nuke plants from being built to notice the mountains of coal ash.)   That being said, I’m not entirely sure that there is an answer to this other than to phase out coal.

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An recent entry on Slashdot stated the following:

“To estimate the earth’s capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding ‘areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,’ according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world’s energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world’s current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs.”

This based on a study which was presented to the National Acadamny of Sciences. Technically, they are correct in so far as there is enough energy there, but damn is it defuse.  Hell, I’m surprised it could only provide 40 times the energy needs of man.    Note that they use all the area that is not classified as forested, not covered year round by ice or snow and does not quality as “urban” in terms of population density and development.   Note also that they would like wind farms to be located within 50 nautical miles of shore, except where water depths exceed 200 meters.   In general, you won’t find water that deep right off the coasts except in cases where there is a very steep drop.

Thus, I took a map of what are generally considered “urban areas” and placed it ontop of a map of forested areas and ice-covered areas.   Finally I transposed the remaining land area to this map.  It might not be perfect, but this is a pretty good approximation of what is suggested:

(Click to Enlarge)

Yes, that’s right.  Imagine wind turbines stacked on a grid with one every four to eight acres, covering most of the Western United States, up through the Rockies into Canada and down into Mexico.  Indeed a large portion of North America is covered as is much of South America.  But that’s nothing compared to Australia.  Damn near all of that country is covered, save a few forested areas and the urban areas around Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and such.   Africa also gets a lot of area covered, with most of that country qualifying as neither forest or urban.   As does most of the Middle East and Central Asia, from Southern Russia through the Gobi desert and into Central India.

Not to mention, of course, the fact that wind turbines will be off the coasts for as far as the eye can see.    A few islands in an area with a shallow reef topography can make for a surprising area covered as well.

All I can say about this plan:  I really hope you don’t live in a “rural” area, because if it is not fully developed, you could look forward to some misery.

How would this be buffered anyway?   Does it even matter?   Obviously this is not going to happen.   Hell, even 1/40 of this are is still absurdly large - even 1% is absurdly large.    So why is this crap put out anyway?   Oh I know the answer to that:  it clouds the issue and makes unsophisticated readers think that there is a prayer of a chance this will happen.

NEWSFLASH:  There is more than enough energy to power all human needs in the orbital motion of Jupiter.  It’s roughly as likely we’ll recover that as this ridiculous idea.

Big bummer.

I received word from those involved in the preservation of records of the Apollo 11 broadcasts from tracking stations in Australia (Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek) which indicates that the story about the tapes being found is false.   According to a source involved in the archiving of data in Australia:

The UK journalist was engaged in a piece of “creative writing”

More info debunking this has appeared on the Twitter account of one of the officials at the NASA office of public affairs:   http://twitter.com/bnjacobs/

On a somewhat related note:  There is an ongoing effort to preserve the memories, photographs, film and other information on the efforts made in Australia and elsewhere to make the reception of Apollo-11 television transmissions possible.  I suggest checking out this website for volumes of fascinating information on the topic.

While it’s impossible to be absolutely sure that some other party has found the tapes, all indications from those involved at the moment are that the report was false.

There is a “World Exclusive” report in the Sunday Express which suggests that NASA recently discovered the original telemetry data tapes from the Apollo-11 mission, which contain the raw television images before scan conversion.

ECSTATIC space officials at Nasa could be about to unveil one of their most stunning discoveries for 40 years — new and amazingly clear footage of the first moon landing.

The release of the new images next month could be one of the most talked about events of the summer.

The television images the world has been used to seeing of the historic moment when Neil Armstrong descended down a ladder onto the moon’s surface in 1969 is grainy, blurry and dark.

The following scenes, in which the astronauts move around the lunar lander, are so murky it is difficult to make out exactly what is going on, causing conspiracy theorists to claim the entire Apollo 11 mission was an elaborate fraud.

However, viewers have only ever seen such poor quality footage because the original analogue tapes containing the pictures beamed direct from the lunar surface were lost almost as soon as they were recorded.

Instead, a poor quality copy made from a 16mm camera pointing at a heavily compressed image on a black and white TV screen has been the only record of the event.

The Sunday Express can now reveal that the missing tapes containing the original high quality images have been found.

If the visual data can be retrieved, Nasa is set to reveal them to the world as a key plank of celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of the landings next month.

The tapes show in much more detail than almost anyone has previously seen the surface of the moon beneath the patriotic symbol of the US flag.

Crucially, they could once and for all dispel 40 years of wild conspiracy theories.

The low grade, dark and grainy television pictures that were beamed around the world on July 21 1969 were intended to give Americans just a glimpse of their country’s greatest exploratory achievement.

If this is true, it could be great news as the pictures would be far superior to the existing video that was recorder post scan-conversion.   The original transmission was converted from 10fps to the NTSC frame rate of 30fps (or more accurately 29.97 fps) using a relatively simple and lossy scan converter.  Today, however, it is possible to convert the frame rate from 10fps to a higher rate using digital algorithms that can track motion and result in a final video that is very close to a naively recorded 30fps video, especially in circumstances where there is not very much fast motion.   It should also be possible to scale the video without as much loss of quality using modern algorithms.   Finally, the noise and degradation which is common to retransmitted analog video will not be present.

The final result therefore may be very close to standard definition television broadcasts, with improved detail and clarity.  It will still, however, be in black and white.

More details on the system for conversion and retransmission can be found on this previous post.

The article is a little inaccurate about the current archive recording, however, when it states that “a poor quality copy made from a 16mm camera pointing at a heavily compressed image on a black and white TV screen has been the only record of the event.”   This is not the case.  In fact, the copy was made using a kinescope system, which does record television pictures onto film, but is a bit less crude than just pointing a camera at a TV screen.  Instead, it synchronizes the film with the video and uses a special high-contrast rendering tube and optics designed for this purpose.   The kinescope was used for the final recording because,  at the time, it was considered superior to available video tape systems.

I’m a little skeptical of the report, however: Read the rest of this entry »

Pirates have been a problem for hundreds, if not thousands of years.   In general piracy becomes a major problem in areas that lack the presence of organized navies or coastal defense forces but do have large amounts of merchant ship traffic.   As most cargo vessels are completely unarmed, they can be vulnerable to attack by even lightly armed bands of thieves.   The problem is worse in near-coastal areas where the ships do not have the large area of the ocean on their side and where land can be used as a base of operations.

In Somolia the problem has become quite severe in recent years.  Although many of the incidents occur within the country’s Territorial waters, Somalia has been in a state of near-anarchy for some time and has no ability to enforce laws on land, much less on the seas.   Thus in this area, where cargo and passenger ships travel on their way to or from the Middle East or the Suez Canal, there is a rampant problem with pirates.

Historically, there’s really only one thing pirates will respond to:  overwhelming deadly force.   It might seem crude or barbaric to some, but the fact of the matter is you just can’t negotiate with pirates because they’re not a unified force.  They are simply are bands of individuals who are only interested in their own bottom line.   Many are war-hardened from the continuous conflict in the areas.    They may make alliances if it is to their benefit, but they will just as soon break them.

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And I mean nutty in an endearing, kind of way, as opposed to actually insane.   And by Buzz, I don’t mean myself, but the other Buzz, the one actually named Buzz.   Yes, that is his name - he had it legally changed from Edwin in 1988.

Neil Armstrong is generally the private type, granting interviews occasionally but not really seeking any attention.  Buzz… not so much.    Still, I have no explanation for this.  Do I file under “humor” or “Not even wrong”?    Bah!  I’ll file it under both.

We live in a society where there is a great deal of fear or rather PANIC over certain things.    People seem to spend their time looking out for something to panic over and generally the best things are the ones which people have only the most vague understanding of.    Perhaps it’s the media, perhaps it’s the fact that people live sheltered lives or perhaps it’s just plain ignorance, but we live in a world where a broken thermometer can lead to a large high school being evacuated while hazmat-wearing officials go in to contain the deadly metal.  (Note:  It is deadly if eaten.   This fact tends to be left out.)

And what could possibly be more terrifying than radiation?   After all, radiation is… well most people don’t even know what it is.    “It’s that thing associated with atomic bombs, the thing that is invisible and can kill people.  It’s that magic energy that causes cancer and that is so deadly that materials which emit it are so dangerous nobody can figure out what to do with them, right? “  The fear of radiation has reached a level where it is almost religious in its fanaticism.

And it just reached a new level of idiotic:

Via ABC News:

Police clear street over kids’ ‘nuclear reactor’

Two six-year-old boys pretending to have built a mini nuclear power plant has prompted German police and the fire brigade to clear their street, authorities said.

The school children in the western town of Oelde had built the nuclear reactor mock-up out of a computer casing and taped a “radioactivity warning” they had printed out from the internet on its side.

“When the boys returned to their ‘nuclear power plant’ from a brief stop at home they were sent away again as the area and a wide radius around it had been cleared and blocked off,” police said in a statement.

Residents were ordered not to leave their homes and firefighters tested for a radioactive leak.

The boys’ parents thought the fire department was conducting a drill until they read about the operation online and what led to it.

They reported to the police station and explained their six-year-olds had not managed to build an actual nuclear reactor.

Come On, GERMANY, I don’t mean to single you out so damn much, but you make it so hard not to!

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If you’ve visited this site in the past day and seen some very annoying “infolinks” in the text it’s because I was trying to find a non-invasive method of generating some return through advertisement placement and had no idea that when it was fully implemented it would be so goddamned annoying.   I thought I’d be able to choose which links it put and where but once I put in the code in the page header it apparently started serving ads I did not expect it to.

It’s gone now and that service won’t be considered again.

In case you were not aware, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched just a few days ago and is presently on its way to the moon.   The unmanned spacecraft is expected to reach lunar orbit tomorrow (Tuesday) at which point it will begin sending back live video and pictures of the moon.   There have been other probes sent to orbit the moon in the past few years, including the Japanese SELENE, the Indian Moon Impact Probe and the 1998 Lunar Prospector probe.   However, what makes the LRO unique is that it will take the first high resolution images of the lunar surface since the Apollo Program.

The probe will come within 50 km of the lunar surface, a very low orbital altitude and is expected to return images with a resolution of aproximately .5 meters per pixel. This kind of imagry will rival the high resolution images avaliable of the earth from services like Google Earth.   With such high resolution images, objects like the descent stages from Apollo missions as well as other objects such as the Lunar Rovers, used on later missions should be plainly visible and recognizable.

One NASA website posted this photo to give an aproximate idea of how detailed the images are expected to be:

NASA has stated that they do plan on imaging the sites of the Apollo landings and hope to have some high quality images available in time for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo-11 landing, which is just a month away!   This should make for some very interesting viewing, not only of the Apollo-11 landing site, but also of later Apollo landings, which left more hardware behind and produced several miles of rover tracks.   It will also be interesting to see if there is anything recognizable left of the S-IVB upper stages that were intentionally crashed into the lunar surface to produce seismic data.

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Are you aware of greenhouse gas emissions?    Are you aware that human civilization is currently producing large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses?   Are you aware that this is considered a potential problem?   Are you aware that this can contribute to global climate change?   Are you aware that emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels go hand-in-hand with other pollution that can cause health problems, smog and other ecologically undesirable effects?  Are you aware that fossil fuels are becoming more and more problematic as a foundational energy source?

You are?   Really?   Are you sure?

Well a number of groups still seem to think you’re not, because the biggest thing that environmental organizations seem to do is “raising awareness” of the issue.  They’ve been at it for some time, but they seem to think that the population is just not aware enough.   A considerable amount of effort has gone into raising awareness and a tremendous amount of money has as well.

The latest effort:  An enormous electronic sign in the most expensive advertising space in the world.

That’s right, Times Square New York, and not just any location in Times Square, but right smack in the middle of Madison Square Garden a new 70-foot high tech sign has been erected to make sure everyone in the city is aware of the amount of CO2 being produced by mankind.   The main corporate sponsor of the sign is Deutsche Bank, but it is part of a larger effort at spending as much money as possible on advertisements to “raise awareness.” Plans are that this big electronic sign will remain for at least three years.

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