Month: November 2015

The Keystone XL Pipeline is actually a proposed expansion. What already exists is actually just the Keystone Pipeline. This is a pipeline that runs from Alberta, Canada and ends in the U.S, specifically in Cushing, Oklahoma.

The “XL” addition to the Keystone Pipeline would add 1,700 new miles and have two sections of expansion.

One section would connect in Cushing with the Gulf Coast of Texas. This would be due to the current bottleneck of oil that is in Cushing, Oklahoma and in the Gulf Coast of Texas is where a lot of oil refineries abound. This part of the leg started in January 2014. This section would help bring  up up to 700,000 barrels of oil to refineries in Texas. It is also expected to carry more heavy Canadian oil.

The second part of the leg would go from Alberta to Kansas. It would go through Bakkan Shale region of Montana to western North Dakota. It is designed this way because it will pass through a region where oil extraction is currently booming and it will take on some of this crude for transport.

Pros:

• May increase energy security for Gulf Coast
• Is safer than other transport options
• Economic benefits
• Jobs*

 

Cons:

• Negatively impacts national and local economies
• The same fossil fuel interests pushing the Keystone pipeline have been cutting, not creating, jobs*
• Unemployment will rise
• Poor and working people will be disproportionately affected
• It could contribute to Global Warming

 

*In my research I found that jobs would be both a pro and a con*

 

Refences:

• https://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/tag/keystone-xl-pipeline/
• http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/us/politics/what-does-the-proposed-keystone-xl-pipeline-entail.html?_r=0
• http://www.labor4sustainability.org/articles/5-reasons-why-the-keystone-pipeline-is-bad-for-the-economy/

During this week’s class we paired up with our group for the final project. I was very excited to be able to pick our group because I have worked in this class with both of my group members before and we all work very well together and are used to each other’s working style and schedules.

After we had picked our team the brain storming began. We decided that we wanted to do something along the lines of something that we had touched based on in class. We searched up different things on websites and YouTube to get some ideas.

As a group we decided it was best to select a bunch of ideas while we were in class and send it in an  email and look over them again and decide what we would do.

We worked very well and productively during this week’s class. We were all pretty much on the same page on what we wanted to do but were all also very open minded, which is also appreciated. Like mentioned before we narrowed it down to a couple that we were really interested in and within this week we will narrow it down to one.

 

Pandora’s Promise is documentary and it was very much set up like a documentary, which I enjoy very much. In documentaries they usually have old footages and images of events that are being talked about with a voice over explaining the situation or what they thought.

In Pandora’s Promise it introduced 5 people that are very knowledgable in this field, and if I understood correctly in their introductions, they talked about a position they felt before hand and hinting that they had later changed how they viewed it and became pro-nuclear.

The beginning was very fitting. It talked about the Fukushima Daiichi, which we had learned about and had done a blog on. It was nice to hear people talk about it and not read articles and the images in this documentary were out of this world. Reading about it when I had done my blog post I was shocked but seeing the live footages and the exposing live were really something else.

I thought it was really interesting to see Japan a year later, and having someone there and basically experience what they experienced.

(I very much enjoyed the whole Fukushima Daiichi part of Pandora’s Promise, I was VERY interested by the footage!)

Another thing I really enjoyed about Pandora’s Promise was the relation we could make from things in outr class, like the Fukushima Daiichi, but also when _____ was speaking of how he worked at Argon National Laboratory (might have incorrect spelling) and they showed the room and I had flashbacks to the MIT lab trip it was very similar and so I related. Later on in the documentary they showed more of Argon National Laboratory and again flashbacks of MIT, but this time we had a view of the outside and inside and it was so similar to the one I had just previously visited. Then they talked about the “IFR” which we saw one at MIT and in Pandora’s Promise we got to see one being used, and it was very nice to understand it better and actually see how it worked.

Every speaker, although being very accomplished in this field spoke in a language that didn’t make me feel lost and I really enjoyed this as I watched it because science is not my forte and I could actually learned a lot because much of it was broken down.

But along with being very through their language was also very raw and real. You could tell when they were angry or when they were stunned at something. It made their reactions seem real and not acted.

Overall I really enjoyed this documentary. From the language, images and the message that it sent. I would recommend it in the future!

Last week we had the trip to the MIT nuclear reactor lab. Walking over I couldn’t believe I drove by so many times and never knew what was right there. I think that is the biggest shock I had from the entire trip. Once we got there, we had signed in and I was impressed to see how tight security is there. It was good to see how seriously they take it.

The first part of the trip was a power point presentation that was delivered by Tom. He did a wonderful job. it was very thorough, so thorough that the time went over a bit. Our class also had plenty questions to ask which were all appropriately answered by Tom. The presentation did go a little long which made me, at least, a little anxious to see what it looked like in there since we talked about it in the power point presentation.

The next part of the trip was the tour which was kind of exciting. The tour was given by Sarah who, if I’m not mistaken, is the superintendent and was described as the “smartest person to give the tour”. She was very very through with entire tour and always checked in and asked if we had any questions. We walked through the entire lab including a “bird’s eye-view” from the top and going down to the basement.

Things I found amusing in the tour:

• how often radiation is tracked, appropriately so. They had “thermometers” that measured it throughout the lab, checking our hands and feet twice as we left the tour, and the instrument that was handed to us in the beginning of the entire trip.
• how big the lab really is!
• how involved MIT students can be with this lab.
• I was really interested on the chemo that was talked about in class and how MIT is involved in such interesting project.

Within my research I found a list of the top ten countries using solar power:

(this article was written in September 2014)

1. Germany 35.5 GW
2. China 18.3 GW
3. Italy 17.6 GW
4. Japan 13.6 GW
5. U.S 12 GW
6. Spain 5.6 GW
7. France 4.6 GW
8. Australia 3.3 GW
9. Belgium 3 GW
10. United Kingdom 2.9 GW

 

Germany was titles at number one. It actually has been in the past couple years as well. As a matter of fact, it is not expected for Germany to loose its number one spot,  and it “still boasts a quarter of the world’s installed PV capacity 26 percent”. Germany’s goal is to produce 35% of its electricity from renewable sources by 202 and 100% by 2050, but on June 2014 Germany succeed on producing 50% if its energy from solar. The internal costs of generating PV electricity is more expensive in electricity made from conventional power plants in Germany.

More towards the middle of the list we have Spain. Spain has a solar farm built to encourage more production of energy from renewable source. This farm is built by the company Abengoa and is locates 20 miles west of Seville. This farm is trailblazing technologies that are being done in other countries, including the United States such as CPS also known as concentrated solar power. This solar farm is shut down when it rain and it has two concrete towers. that collect light reflected by 1,879 large glass mirrors. The mirrors follow the sun.

Last on the list is the United Kingdom. The UK made records when on a sunny day 15% of its energy was from solar power this summer. As of July 2015, there are around 700,00 small- acre installations on the grid. This is enough to power 655,00 households. ” Britain is currently installing solar capacity more quickly than any other European country.” In Wadebridge, a town in the UK, has around 500 houses have solar panels on their roof, which is nearly 10% of homes in the area.

 

 

 

References:

• http://pureenergies.com/us/blog/top-10-countries-using-solar-power/
• http://theweek.com/speedreads/451299/germany-gets-50-percent-electricity-from-solar-first-time
• http://www.smithsonianmag.com/40th-anniversary/a-spanish-breakthrough-in-harnessing-solar-power-1106582/?no-ist
• http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/02/solar-power-provide-record-15-uk-power

This week’s Lab was the solar cell lab. This lab was broken down into two parts; the first part was 5 trails which consisted of us flashing a light at a solar panel (no light and light shined directed were mandatory). The second was four trials, one for each color filter, shining the light directly at the solar panel at 0 cm. With this lab we were to understand the connection between light and voltage output and how they connect.

For this experiment we had assumed that the 0 cm, with no light, would be the least and the 0 cm where the light was flashing directly at the panel would the highest. With the filter I thought that the green, because it was the darkest of the filters.

Here is the data for the first part:

1 No light

Average: -0.05

 

2.  0 cm

Average: 0.41

 

3. 2 cm

0.39

 

4. 5 cm

Average: 0.36

 

5. 10 cm

Average: 0.35

 

 

 

Heres the second part of the data (with filters):

*All of the trials with filters had the light measured at 0 cm*

1. Clear filter

Average: 0.40

 

2. Pink filter

Average: 0.34

 

3. Green filter

Average: 0.28

 

4. Blue filter

Average: 0.31

 

 

For the first time, we did not have any problem while working on the lab. We got through the whole thing without a single malfunction and that was really exciting! It felt really good to not stress and put 100% into this lab.