An old geezer late night musings

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allcat
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An old geezer late night musings

Post by allcat » Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:53 am

One thing our state is reliant on are fossil fuels. By this I mean jobs and tax revenue. These are going away. Tech produces a bunch of engineers to either mine there or process these products. I see 2 different types of energy in the future the renewables and nuclear. On the renewable front, I don't see many focusing on small production. What if you were to put small turbines on every bridge that goes over a river. You already have most of the structure, all you would need is to fit a turbine where the water flows around the pillars. I see a lot of opportunity for schools to become leaders in this type of technology. As far as nuclear, there are many types of reactors that are much safer and smaller than the current models. There are systems that actually run on uranium waste and the design is much safer. There are also molten salt, thorium reactors that just shut down if there is a problem. The nuclear may cost too much to get schools to start teaching our kids this stuff. I would like to see someone at at least one of our schools looking into something along there lines. Personally, I hate the current design of wind turbines, they are incredibly ugly to me. I just want to see us work on developing kids who will make a bazillion bucks and come back in 50 years and give the schools just a zillion of it.


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catatac
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Re: An old geezer late night musings

Post by catatac » Wed Sep 15, 2021 4:59 pm

allcat wrote:
Tue Sep 14, 2021 6:53 am
One thing our state is reliant on are fossil fuels. By this I mean jobs and tax revenue. These are going away. Tech produces a bunch of engineers to either mine there or process these products. I see 2 different types of energy in the future the renewables and nuclear. On the renewable front, I don't see many focusing on small production. What if you were to put small turbines on every bridge that goes over a river. You already have most of the structure, all you would need is to fit a turbine where the water flows around the pillars. I see a lot of opportunity for schools to become leaders in this type of technology. As far as nuclear, there are many types of reactors that are much safer and smaller than the current models. There are systems that actually run on uranium waste and the design is much safer. There are also molten salt, thorium reactors that just shut down if there is a problem. The nuclear may cost too much to get schools to start teaching our kids this stuff. I would like to see someone at at least one of our schools looking into something along there lines. Personally, I hate the current design of wind turbines, they are incredibly ugly to me. I just want to see us work on developing kids who will make a bazillion bucks and come back in 50 years and give the schools just a zillion of it.
I like your bridge idea. I'm not very smart when it comes to that stuff but I do know that you need to transfer that energy that's being created by the turbine attached to the pillars. So I assume the thought process here is that you would run power lines from the turbines to the nearest power lines, be it up and along the bridge structure, or perhaps underwater. Then I just flat out don't know how that works, if you can just plug into the existing power lines (I assume the wouldn't work in rural areas where there aren't existing power lines), and add that additional power to the grid?


Great time to be a BOBCAT!

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