new natural gas power plant design

The Ivanpah site is quite visible from the air.

on Google earth. There is also the molten salt solar power facility under construction further north.

That facility has all its mirror. The Google Earth photo is old. This facility is right under the major east-west jet flight path, so you can find photos of it on the internet.

I suspect you are right. The climate has been altered.

The trouble with global climate change is the modeling is tricky. You turn the desert into a sauna, then there is less heat than the model would have predicted. The atmospheric moisture increase doesn't have much debate.

My problem with the global climate change argument is the vast majority of the deniers are not in the field. It is like me trying to comment on some quantum effect. Yeah I studied it, but you are far better off asking me to predict the quiescent voltages of an analog circuit if you want a valid response.

I leave climate change to the scientists in the field, and they nearly all agree it is man made. Sure you can find 3 to 5 percent of scientists to disagree, but there are always people on the fringe.

What bugs me are these people that say that scientists can't even predict tomorrow's weather. Actually, they got damn good at that.

Nuclear power is very carbon intensive in the beginning phases. The ore is low grade, so you have to dig up a lot of it. That requires diesel powered excavation equipment. Then the mine is usually in some remote area, so there is diesel powered transportation. Then there is the refinement process, i.e. yellow cake and then centrifuges. The reactor itself needs much concrete and rebar.

In the US, nuclear power plant operators don't have a "get out of jail card" because they will never be arrested or sued if the plant melts down. The Price Anderson act gives them immunity.

You said that backward, they *do* have a get out of jail card. They also have an interesting insurance setup. They *are* liable for the extent of the insurance which they have to buy from a government set up company. But that only covers the first so many Billion in damages which is a pittance in the event of a real accident. Once that is exhausted the industry has to kick in to share the damage expenses.

But even that is just so much lip service. If there is a major accident like Fukushima or, God forbid, Chernobyl the real damages would be so large that no one could pay them. Will the insurance pay for property values depreciating? I expect many homes within 20 or 30 miles will be total losses even if there is very little radiation spread around.

The operators have limited liability, but I'm sure in the event a major accident happens some would go to jail. It is hard to say that the industry is so safe and then not find someone to blame if there is a major accident.

Science has a rich history of most everyone being very wrong before someone got it right. I'm guessing AGW will one day be another great example of mass delusion among "scientists." The models keep being wrong, and they keep getting "better."

The "people on the fringe" include loonies like Newton and Einstein.

To accurately predict tomorrow's weather, repeat today's weather. Next month's weather is a lot harder.

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ghts - two in fact, one dating from 1958 which is now in the process of bei ng decommissioned, while it's replacement started up in 2007.

r than I really like. But they are Australia's only nuclear reactors - nobo dy ever bothered to build any for power generation.

You suppose wrong. There's not a of of water in Australia as a whole, but b its are wet. When I was growing up there were two big hydroelectric schemes - one essentially reversed the flow of the Snowy River to flow west, into the Murry-Darling Basin (which can always use more water) and put the flow through hydroelectric turbines.

In Tasmania - which is small (about the same size as Ireland) but gets a lo t of rain - the rain falling on the centre of the island was diverted from old, low head hydroelectric plants to the south of the central lake to a hi gh head hydroelectric plant at Poatina

It has a 900-metre head - which is impressive - and generates 300 MW which makes it the biggest power station in Tasmania (which, with a population of 350,000 doesn't consume all that much electric power).

There are other potential hydroelectric sites in Tasmania, but the tourist industry gets priority - hydro-electric dams are less scenic than heavily-w ooded steep-sided valleys.

What was "on the fringe" about Einstein? When he wrote his original papers he was working a boring office job. It was only much later that he got an image of the absent minded professor. Even then that wasn't really on the fringe.

Yeah, ever hear of chaos theory? I think they do damn well considering that the difference between snow and rain is as little as one degree or the difference between rain and downpour is a small disturbance in the upper atmosphere when you are even just a couple of days out.

Is 70 to 80% accuracy over 1 to 3 days what you consider "damn good"? I don't think so: Plug in your zip code and see how well various crystal ball services are doing. See the FAQ for how it works and the blog for some long term statistics.

Computer simulation of wildly chaotic systems that you don't understand, with unmeasurable current state and unknown forcings, isn't "science".

No, it's simulation which is one of your favorite tools, no?

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In fact it doesn't. When you push John Larkin for examples, his examples co me from the pre-scientific period, and he turns out to be talking about a v ery few examples - no kind of majority.

John Larkin is right about his thought process being guessing. If he went t o the trouble of finding out a bit more about the science, he wouln't have to guess, but he would have to change his mind - which his narcissism rende rs impossible.

Newton was a loony, but nobody ever thought that his scientific contributio ns were anything but spot on. Einstein wasn't seen as any kind of loony - t he four papers he published in 1905 established his reputation. His lack of enthusiasm for "spooky action at a distance" did produce at least one inte resting paper which did move the field forward, and he was never "on the fr inge".

True. But predicting climate is a different task from predicting weather. T o predict weather you have to predict where how much rain will fall and whe n, pretty much to the minute.

To predict climate, you only need to predict how much rain will fall during the growing season. We've been doing that for as long as we have been prac tising agriculture, except in places like Australia, where the weather patt erns can flip for a couple of decades at a time and the Australian aborigin es consequently never made the step from Paleolithic to Neolithic culture.

Anthropogenic global warming is making the whole planet look more like Aust ralia. If we keep at it long enough, agriculture isn't going to work for us any more. We can probably develop new crops and grow them in the new areas where agriculture will work, but we'll be hard pushed to avoid a populatio n crash while we are making the transition.

The current state certainly isn't either unmeasured or unmeasurable. We don't know as much as we should about the deep ocean currents, but the Argo buoys are starting to fill us in

Nor are the forcings unknown. We don't know them as accurately as we'd like but we are learning more.

And climate isn't wildly chaotic. It may be chaotic, but so are the planetary orbits. There's a risk that we can flip the climate into a new - ostensibly stable - chaotic state. The Younger Dryas comes to mind

when the Gulf Stream turned off for 1300+/-70 years at the end of the last ice age. The flips from on to off, and back again, happened in less than a decade.

We don't have to be able to predict climate all that accurately to know that we don't want that happening again.

Getting the Greenland ice sheet warm enough that it will all slide off into the north Atlantic - as the Canadian ice sheet did at the end of the last ice age - might be a way of triggering that particular flip.

John Larkin seems to think that ignorance is bliss - and he's blissfully unaware of the extent of his own ignorance, or how foolish it makes him look.

You are apt to make many bad guesses and wild speculations.

Rubbish! They both developed mathematical models of the universe that were pretty much rapidly verified by experimental data and hold up pretty well in their respective domains even today. Newton's followers did their damndest to airbrush poor Hooke and Leibnitz out of the picture but to claim that they were loonies is entirely wrong.

Newton was the second Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University a post that was the highest in the land from 1642-1726 (a post today held by Professor Stephen Hawking until he retired) He went on to be president of the Royal Society and later still Master of the Royal Mint in his retirement (hardly a "loonie").

His ideas on alchemy and religious matters were pretty odd even by the standards of the day but his mathematical genius was never in doubt once he went into serious research in Natural Sciences.

Einstein was awarded his Nobel Prize in 1922 just 16 years after his explanation of the quantum mechanics of the photoelectric effect which is fairly quick recognition of his genius. Relativity remained more controversial because engineers could not get their heads around it. Relativity seems to be badly taught in electronics engineering courses.

But the average weather twelve months hence is also more predictable. Climate is a long term average of weather - which is why deniers always seek to blur the line and claim because weather forecasts are not perfect that no climate models can possibly be trusted.

It would be good enough to get a first in most public examinations (and university degrees for that matter). Only a tiny number of people each year get a near perfect score in subjects like mathematics or physics.

Demanding impossible levels of accuracy on weather forecasts and then announcing that because your exacting standards are not met that all climate science is bunkum is the last resort of a charlatan.

On a sunny day (Wed, 19 Nov 2014 12:30:24 +0000) it happened Martin Brown wrote in :

You know martin, I remember the Club Of Rome, many years ago, invented by the poly-ticsians of those days to play the masses. Their models running on the first IBM PC maybe. None of it was right or became true. Those were 'respected scientists' The best way to become a respected scientist is to dance to the tune of -, or write mass manipulation tunes for, them same poly-ticsians. And you Martin, are just a pawn in their game, making some money on the side with it. 'Those bread they eat those words they speak' is an old saying.

Climate has always changed, and is rather predictable at that: Climate warming ice age:

So, yes, we need all the nuculear power we can get online to arm ourselves for the coming ice-age.

Yes people will die, even 1 person died because of the F*chupShima event.

There is hardly anybody left in Europe after Tjernobyl....

That LongIsland thingy killed most of the US population. ' Every year thousands die mining coal and other stuff though. Hundreds see the side effects of drinking water polluted by fr[e]acking chemicals Not to worry, your mutant grandchildren will say grandpa was wrong.

Weather, sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong, sometimes they are 100% wrong, and it is a very local thing. I check the weather everyday, use rain radar, measure things, draw my own conclusions, its a minute to minute thing really.

I also check the glowball currents and winds, on an almost daily basis to find out more about safe routes for sailing cross the Atlantic, what happens where in what time of the year, there is much data on that. It is not easy. This is nice:

And there is the butterfly effect of course, and that naughty one here a year ago..

I have learned from that one so I am gonne flap my hands and make you wrong. (flap flap).

I'm a design engineer; that's part of the process. Once the solution space has been explored, I design things, and they almost always work, and sell, first try.

Unfortunately, science that cannot be verified by experiment tends to be wrong. Like climate dynamics. Lots of medical and biological stuff (remember margerine? Low fat, high carb diets?) We still can't explain

Newton's followers

What Newton and Einstein and Maxwell did was to overturn generally accepted dogma. AGW needs that sort of push, and will get it one of these days.

The atmosphere seems to be chaotic at all time scales. The IPCC-type models are nonsense, and demonstrably wrong.

Climate science is not all bunkum, but its predictive power is very poor. You can understand the dynamics of a chaotic oscillator to PPM accuracy, but you can't predict its state 1 second from now.

Weather forcasting accuracy is, as you correctly say, impossible.

Past predications that "your kids won't know what snow is" seem to have been a tad off.

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The book "Limits to Growth" was published in 1972, about the same time that Intel released the 4004 processor chip, and about a decade before you coul d buy an IBM PC. You clearly don't remember much about it.

The data processing hardware of the time wasn't up to job, and if it had be en there wouldn't have been a great deal of data around for it to work on. If I remember rightly, somebody ran the models backwards, and demonstrate t hat they showed that the world had been created from nothing around 1905. T he book may have been a popular success, but informed critics didn't exactl y take it seriously.

To avoid any further topic drift, permit me to point out that I'm talking about accuracy of the prediction of weather, in accordance to the limits set at: What does the percentage accuracy mean and how is it calculated? The overall accuracy percent is computed from the one- to three-day out accuracy percentages for high temperature, low temperature, icon forecast precipitation (both rain and snow), and text forecast precipitation (both rain and snow). Temperature accuracy is the percentage of forecasts within three degrees. Precipitation accuracy is the percentage of correct forecasts. The forecasts are collected in the evening. For the purpose of this discussion, climatology, long term predictions, global warming, climate change, and college test scores are not part of the problem.

Put yourself in the position of a typical weather report consumer, whos knowledge of atmospheric dynamics is near absolute zero. What level of accuracy would such a person expect? At 75% accuracy, the one to three day weather prediction is wrong one day out of every four days. Do you consider that "good enough"? It might be acceptable to someone knowledgeable in the problems involved in forecasting, but I suspect the general public expects better.

I read somewhere that some students checked the accuracy of the various almanacs, and did tolerably well at predicting major events. This isn't the article, but it's close: By simply assuming that weather patterns are repetitive, they claim about 80% accuracy. I vaguely recall the students found that it was more like 60% accuracy. Presumably, the weather forecasters are knowledgeable in such simplistic methods, and take advantage of these methods. Assuming 60% accuracy using a repetitive weather model, using satellites, super computers, and sophisticated atmospheric models to produce only a 15% improvement in accuracy does not seem particularly worthwhile. I'm not suggesting that we close down the NWS and have the weather forecasters simply rely on an almanac formula. I'm just disappointed with the accuracy of the technology.

I'm not demanding anything. It's not like I'm about to go on strike or boycott the weather report in protest. I'm just disappointed that the incremental improvements in accuracy provided by some of the most advanced and expensive technology, isn't a dozen percentage points better.

To be fair, I suspect the real problem is garbage real time weather data. I manage 5 local weather stations (soon to be 4) mostly located on various mountain tops. It's a constant battle to obtain accurate and meaningful numbers. The stations are members of CWOP (Citizens Weather Observer Corp): which tries to identify weather stations producing inaccurate numbers. Here's analysis of the station that's going away: Note that it fails the temperature tracking test. That's because the comparison is based on data from the surrounding WX stations, all of which are badly located. If you need additional entertainment value, go to the Weather Underground data pages for your area, and try to get a consensus of the temp, barometric pressure, and rainfall for your area with any degree of consistency.

Drifting back on topic, I'm a bit suspicious of the claim that clouds and such are the cause of low output power. Solar insolation data is commonly collected by solar power plants, which would highlight any drastic drop in available sunlight at the Ivanpah. However, I couldn't find any official data.

I blundered across this blog by a Las Vegas city councilman: The graph of total Calif solar output for the last year or so looks really odd. One thing is clear. The output is erratic and doesn't seem to follow much of a pattern (other than the seasons). It's almost like such systems come on and off line erratically. If this is the basis for the lack of output claim, then I suspect that there's more happening than just more clouds.

More: Daily Renewables Watch Network and resource modeling: Search CalISO for anything related to Ivanpah: Lots of other interesting reports and data, but nothing specific to Ivanpah or its output data.