TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| The Heat Is On When It Comes to Building Coal-Fired Power Plants HOLCOMB, Kans.--Kyle Nelson points upward to show off the six-story-high main boiler of Holcomb Station. The 370-megawatt coal-fired power plant sits on the rolling prairie of southwestern Kansas just a few miles from the small town of Holcomb, population 2,100, roughly 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of the Colorado border. Enormous metal pipes crisscross far overhead in a facility where the temperature is a little too hot to ignore, and the machinery's din is deafening.Nelson, a senior vice president and chief operating officer at Sunflower Electric Power Corp. unhooks a heavy latch and swings opens a large metal hatch to reveal the 26-year-old plant's fiery heart: a furnace where coal-fueled flames burning nonstop at about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 degrees Celsius) heat a 55,000-gallon (208,200-liter) boiler to produce 2,400 pounds per square inch (170 kilograms per square centimeter) of high-pressure steam. The hulking gray metal turbine that converts the steam into electricity, which will energize the aging high-power transmission lines of western Kansas, recalls the size and streamlined form of a 1930 steam locomotive. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Sweet smell of success follows reintroduction of stinking hawk's-beard to U.K. After going extinct 30 years ago in the U.K, a rare plant called the stinking hawk's-beard (Crepis foetida) has returned its former homelands. The successful reintroduction could offer lessons for the reintroduction of other extant species. [More] rss.sciam.com |
National Ignition Facility Prepares for Fusion Test Federal researchers are slowly testing 192 lasers that they hope will set off the world's first controlled nuclear fusion reaction.The lasers are housed at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a $4 billion complex the size of three football fields that is part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. [More] rss.sciam.com |
The albedo effect Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here . Someone commenting on one of my recent posts posed an interesting question: [More] rss.sciam.com |
Where on Earth will we store all that captured CO2? Try the U.S. east coast Carbon capture and storage --sucking the CO2 from power plant or industrial smokestack emissions--has been cited by everyone from the Bush administration to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a key technology in any effort to combat climate change. That's because the world--particularly China, India and the U.S.--burns a lot of coal . [More] rss.sciam.com |