Rising Fuel Prices
 

Hello y'al
Just telling you guys and gals that your rising fuel prices is nothing compared with the fuel prices here in New Zealand where they have gone up to $9.46 per US Gallon NZ money, or 2.499 per liter, so i dont think your price for petrol/gas is that bad.
Greetings Eddie.

I was going to do a similar post about finnish prices but guess i'll just sit quiet in the corner with 8.70$/gallon (2€/litre)prices:o

I drive electric so I don't care.

Fuel Pricing
 

Around Springfield Mo it has gone up almost $2.00/gal in the last 19 months

I saw the electricity prices from other countries as well. I was flabbergasted when they were bragging about Germany having a lot of renewables and that their electricity price was $0.32/kWh. Locally ours is $0.08/kWh so that means my ~$200/mo bill would be $800. JEEZ. I see why they have so many renewables. lol

The price of renewables is part of the price problem. I'd suspect coal is significantly cheaper.

I see that there may be a push in some places in Europe to reopen coal plants that haven't already been demolished if there is a cold winter this year. Otherwise, there may be some problems getting warm.

And Russia is grinning now that the US administration has approved of its new gas pipeline into Germany. I wonder how kind Putin will be in terms of price and supply vs NATO complaining about his potential aggression in Ukraine.

I read that wood is being stockpiled in some areas of the US as a counter to the rising price of natural gas and fuel oil. That's not good news for the environment.

I'm convinced the world has lost its mind.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe...ow-2021-09-20/

I would expect high prices this winter and spring. Probably peak. Locally they are starting to talk about how democrats are screwed going into midterms if they don't lower energy prices back to normal. Warms my heart that they care enough about our votes to possibly lower prices. They care about us. <3

Also, I don't mean to make it political. The majority of both sides are completely bribed by businesses. *yikes*

Price for a 'gallon' of electrons
 

During all the price volatility for crude oil, Diesel, gasoline, and propane, my electric rate hasn't varied a penny.
And since I have the option to drive on it, I'm going to exercise that option.
Use the fossil-fuel for something useful, like filling up the Pacific with plastic refuse, so I can drive from L.A., to Honolulu.

IIRC my electricity has gone up 7 cents (18 instead of 11) since the last time I looked at it. Colorado and my county and city are threatening that it will continue to rise. This is due to a plan to go zero emissions and rely entirely on renewables.

Edit:

Never mind. I did the math myself from my bill and didn't realize there was a monthly base charge. If you include the base charge I'm paying about 11 cents per kWh. Obviously if I used more that "price" would go down. But dividing it into categories, I pay $16.25 base rate and almost 9 cents per kWh on top of that. So not bad at all.

bribed
 

The object is to 'own' them ( a look at the motion picture 'The AVIATOR' is instructive ).
And once you've bought them, they're to remain 'bought.'
The only remedy would be the Supreme Court re-ruling on the 'Due Process' clause of the 14th-Amendment. Otherwise, the people who do the buying give a louder voice to the legal fictions they speak for, which pass for 'persons.' And with a much louder voice than actual 'persons.'
'Follow the money' ( DEEP THROAT )

Quote: "During all the price volatility for crude oil, Diesel, gasoline, and propane, my electric rate hasn't varied a penny...."

While this may be true today for your particular case, be patient.

The times they are a'changin', just like Dylan predicted.

true today
 

It should be interesting.
I'm on a 'wind' option. Technically, the Sun would have to send an invoice to the CO-OP for a fuel overcharge adjustment for the photons which ultimately generated the winds to the turbines.
I'd like to see how the public liaison officer handles that one.;)

All I can say is I won't go to Bagé so soon. That's the city where fuel prices are always the highest in my country.

Wind has its pros and cons. I saw this recently:

https://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/202...t-to-wildlife/

The long-term results of our modern windmills will indeed be interesting.
:-)

It's not the price per gallon which is so bad in the US, it's the percentage of increase in just a short period of time that is concerning. If that trend continued for any length of time, like say a Biden 2nd term, we will be over $10/gallon too. At least it will seem normal with milk at $15/gallon as well.

Eight bullet points, none are new. I did learn this: "Wind turbines require a massive amount of minerals to produce, for example four times as much copper as nuclear energy. "

I would guess that's just the initial construction as well. Then consider the nuclear plant will go for decades without major overhaul where the windmills will have to be rebuilt much sooner.

Somebody cut this man's tongue out.

Wind turbines have tended to last less than 20 years and need constant maintenance.

Wind turbines became some sort of touristic attraction at some places in my country, which I don't believe could be said about a nuke (even though the Chernobyl exclusion zone has attracted some tourists).

That's a good point, there should be public tours through nuclear power sites so people can learn something and get used to how safe they are.

When I was in 4th grade I went on tours to a hydro and a thermal powerplant, yet I'm not sure most Brazilian parents would be OK with their kids visiting a nuke. Who knows how long would it take to revert the ecoterrorist brainwashing to the extent of making most people at least look at nukes from a non-biased perspective...

How do you give a tour of something that fits in a shipping container [if done properly]?

You walk around the shipping container look at the knobs and meters and show your geiger detector not making much more noise than background.

I believe they stopped giving tours because of nutcases doing stupid things inside the tour. Unless you're japanese tourist in a satellite assembly area, most people respond negatively to wearing bunny suits and booties.

There should be an exhibit where one can hold radioactive uranium to show how relatively harmless it is. All this fear of "waste" with long half-lifes is silly.

At minimum science classes should be teaching the facts about the relative safety of these materials when they cover radioactive decay in class so that children aren't manipulated by anti-nuke groups and rhetoric. Maybe they can even have 1 more tool to spot when corrupt media is lying to them (which is whenever their lips are moving).

"How much radiation is that in bananas?"

Quite boring compared to the tour at the coal powerplant that I went.

I mean, they give tours in the Chernobyl control room. The worst nuclear accident in history, and it's safe enough to visit.

As far as Chernobyl goes, I'm sure most people are attracted to the tragic aspects than to the place or the tech itself.

That would be the issue with this type of reactor, they are boring

The wind turbines are quite boring to simply look at. A hydro powerplant and a coal-fired one have much more things to look at, including the scenic view at the lake in a hydro (and eventually some leisure activities such as fishing, eating fried fish, boating, whatever makes some good use of the lake), or the less strict access to most parts of a coal-fired plant compared to a nuke. Let's suppose a nuke and a coal powerplant have the same size on the outside, one would be able to see more of the coal powerplant than the nuke, as it's supposed to have less hazards.

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AH9e2-YU7...0/IMG_2927.JPG
http://www.citygirlgoeswest.com/2017...oulee-dam.html

A big room full of big stuff.

Big stuff with lots of moving parts, to give a much more visual experience than a tightly-sealed container and a few pipes.

I've been there. It hums like the a Starwars spaceship.

There is a pretty good little nuclear power museum in Arco Idaho. Arco was the first town powered by nuclear although just for an hour or so in 1955. The museum had radiation detectors and radioactive sources you could learn about distance and shielding. That along with time are the 3 factors that can make radiation safe. They even had a air force prototype power plant sitting in the parking lot that was to see if a flying nuclear reactor would be possible. Spoiler alert, it didn't seem feasible at least in the 60s.

Also near Arco is Craters of the Moon national monument. The real reason we went there. Very cool landscape of lava flows and tubes from the Yellowstone supervolcano. Even when it's 110 degrees out in August the lava tube caves still have ice floors because of the amazing insulation of volcanic rock.

Now there's a power source to tap, a supervolcano. And if we could drain the energy off so it never erupted again then that's a real humanity saving effort.

Found a video of the museum
https://youtu.be/YPxAxBul1BI

I used to think the earth's molten core was due to residual heat from the insulation of thousands of miles of matter and tidal forces from the moon, but recently learned it's mostly heated by thorium decay. Apparently core heat is quasi renewable (considering we call the sun renewable).

[QUOTE=Hersbird;659296]

"Now there's a power source to tap, a supervolcano. And if we could drain the energy off so it never erupted again then that's a real humanity saving effort."



That thought occurred to me as well: How great it would be to have constant, reliable and massive heat source to make steam for power generation forever and save the planet while doing it.

There have been thermal plants that utilize heat from beneath in the past, but I guess the technical obstacles involving a monster volcano are too much to handle?

I dunno: how does one process the steam from dumping a major great lake into such a volcano? Firstly you have this conflagration which is in the mega tonnage, then all the ejecta that remains airborne causes global cooling, then the massive reformation of the local earth crust tending to mess up any structural thing.

Volcanoes are dynamic. Maybe not the best location for expensive infrastructure.

Geothermal heat is pervasive. Some locations deeper than others.

Well just like any other steam power plant, the turbine generator side is always similar. It's the source of the heat that changes. Nuclear, natural gas, coal, that's the difference on the heat side, that heat boils water in boilers the steam is ran through a turbine that is connected to a generator and then through a condenser to turn it back into water that can be pumped back into the boiler to make steam again. The water is never "used", just recycled over and over. What changes is what is that heat source to boil the water. In nuclear's case it is just other water in a separate loop that is kept at a high pressure so it's very hot but won't flash to steam. With coal or natural gas it's a fire directly under the boiler. With molten rock I would think you would do something like the nuclear but run the primary high pressure, high temperature loop down into the lava pool and then use that superheated water to make steam. You might even be able to use a liquid metal in the primary loop like sodium for even more power. The USSR did that with some of their best submarines but the danger there is sodium will react badly with all the ocean surrounding them if there was ever a leak. Sort of a glass jaw for something designed for battle.