General Electric

Wind Power Blades Get Bigger, Turbines Get Smarter.

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A look at tomorrow’s turbines

Wind Power Future
Metal inserts built into the carbon-fiber blade during manufacture mean the root end, bolted to the hub, can be slimmer, stronger, and more aerodynamically efficient. • Fabricating the carbon fiber in modular pieces, rather than one long blade, ensures the material’s consistency and reduces the risk of failure. • An erosion-protection material molded into the leading edge of the blade reduces wear and tear over the blade’s lifetime.
Graham Murdoch

In 2012, wind power added more new electricity production in the U.S. than any other single source. But even with 60 gigawatts powering 15 million homes, wind supplants just 1.8 percent of the nation’s carbon emissions. Tomorrow’s turbines will have to be more efficient, more affordable, and
in more places.

The Supersize Route

Bigger Blades

Big rotors generate more electricity, particularly from low winds, but oversize trucks hauling blades the length of an Olympic pool can’t reach many wind-energy sites. Blade Dynamics fabricates its 160-foot, carbon-fiber blade in multiple pieces, which can then be transported by standard trucks and assembled at a nearby location. It’s a stepping-stone for 295-foot and 328-foot blades now being designed for offshore turbines. (Currently, the world’s longest prototype is 274 feet.) The colossal size should enable 10- to 12-megawatt turbines, double the generation capacity of today’s biggest models.

Wind Power Scale
Graham Murdoch

The Networked Solution

Smarter Turbines

Reducing the variability of wind energy could position it to compete as a stable source of power. General Electric’s new 2.5-megawatt, 394-foot-diameter wind turbine has an optional integrated battery for short-term energy storage. It also connects to GE’s so-called Industrial Internet so it can share data with other turbines, wind farms, technicians, and operations managers. Algorithms analyze 150,000 data points per second to provide precise region-wide wind forecasts and enable turbines to react to changing conditions, even tilting blades to maximize power and minimize damage as a gust hits.

The Hybrid Hail Mary

Man-Made Thunderstorm Power

Solar Wind Energy’s downdraft tower is either ingenious or ludicrous. The proposed 2,250-foot-high concrete tower will suck hot desert air into its hollow core and infuse it with moisture, creating a pressure differential that spawns a howling downdraft. “You’re capturing the last 2,000 feet of a thunderstorm,” says CEO Ron Pickett. The man-made tempest would spin wind turbines that could generate up to 1.25 gigawatts (though it’s designed to operate at 60 percent capacity) on the driest, hottest summer days—more than some nuclear power plants. The Maryland-based company plans to break ground in Arizona as soon as 2015, provided it can secure $900 million in funding—a large sum but perhaps not outlandish when compared with a $14-billion nuclear reactor now under construction.

Children’s hospital installs pirate-themed CT-scanner to make medical test a little less scary.

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A New York children’s hospital recently purchased a a pirate-themed CT scanner to make the medical tests less of a ‘horrible, scary chore’. 

Child patients lay down on a mock plank which then slides into the scanner, a hoop in the shape of a ship’s wheel. Swash-buckling pirate animals decorate the walls to distract the children from the test.

GE provided the scanner to New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, and gave the hospital two choices for a child theme – fish or pirates – sparking a heated debate among the staff. 

An exam adventure: A new CT scanner at a New York City children's hospital helps distract patients from the stressful test

An exam adventure: A new CT scanner at a New York City children’s hospital helps distract patients from the stressful test

Tough choice: The hospital was given two choices for a children's scanner by manufacturer GE, either pirates or fish

Tough choice: The hospital was given two choices for a children’s scanner by manufacturer GE, either pirates or fish

Dr Carrie Ruzal-Shapiro, the hospital’s chief of pediatric radiology, said the pirates won out because they ‘were cute’ and the scanner was installed in August.

And so far the reaction has been positive. Registered nurse Naomi Hawkins told Buzzfeed that the best response she’s gotten is a patient saying: ‘Hurry up and get out so I can play’.

Although the test only lasts a minute, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes to get children prepared for the test, which can be stressful. 

‘It allows children to imagine all sorts of things,’ Dr Ruzal-Shapiro told the New York Daily News. ‘So it doesn’t seem like a horrible scary chore.’

Decision: Dr Carrie Ruzal-Shapiro, head of the pediatric radiology department, said they chose the pirates because they were cute

Decision: Dr Carrie Ruzal-Shapiro, head of the pediatric radiology department, said they chose the pirates because they were cute

Not so bad: Dr Ruzal Shapiro said the decor helps make the test a little less of a 'horrible, scary chore'

Not so bad: Dr Ruzal Shapiro said the decor helps make the test a little less of a ‘horrible, scary chore’

Prep: The test only takes a minute, but around 10 to 15 minutes to prepare patients for

Prep: The test only takes a minute, but around 10 to 15 minutes to prepare patients for

Procedure: Patients are set up on the table which resembles a plank and are then pushed into scanner in the shape of a ship's wheel

Procedure: Patients are set up on the table which resembles a plank and are then pushed into scanner in the shape of a ship’s wheel

Before the test, nurses get kids settled onto the table and hooked up to an IV. The room’s decor helps kids take their mind off the IV and the anxiety of the test.

The children being scanned could be dealing with something as serious as cancer to checking on bone fractures.

The hospital’s radiology department conducts about five to 10 scans in the room every day, on patients ranging from infants to 21-year-olds. 

‘The teens roll their eyes at the cat with the eye-patch and the hippo mermaid,’ Dr Ruzal-Shapiro said. ‘But they like it as much as the kids.’

Entertained: Imagery of swash-buckling animals like monkeys and tigers adorn the walls to give patients something to look at

Entertained: Imagery of swash-buckling animals like monkeys and tigers adorn the walls to give patients something to look at

Patients: The hospital performs between five and 10 scans a day on patients as young as infants and as old as 21

Patients: The hospital performs between five and 10 scans a day on patients as young as infants and as old as 21

Different issues: Those getting scanned could be dealing with something as serious as cancer or just a fractured bone

Different issues: Those getting scanned could be dealing with something as serious as cancer or just a fractured bone

Never too old: While teens roll their eyes at the decorations, Dr Ruzal-Shapiro says that they like it just as much as the younger ones

Never too old: While teens roll their eyes at the decorations, Dr Ruzal-Shapiro says that they like it just as much as the younger ones

Source: Daily Mail.

Japan declared “state of emergency” after radioactive leak is found.

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Japan’s nuclear watchdog has now declared the leak of radioactive water from Fukushima a “state of emergency.” Each day, 300 tons of radioactive water seeps into the ocean, and it’s now clear that TEPCO has engage in a two-and-a-half-year cover-up of immense magnitude. “I believe it’s been leaking into the ocean from the start of the crisis two-and-a-half years ago,” disclosed a 12-year TEPCO veteran named Suzuki-san (SOURCE) “There are still reactor buildings we haven’t gotten into yet,” said another worker named Fujimoto-san. “So there’s always the possibility of another explosion…” TEPCO workers sprayed with wildly radioactive water while waiting for a bus Just how out of control is the situation at Fukushima? It’s so out of control that TEPCO recently had to admit 10 of its workers were somehow — yeah, see if you can figure this out — sprayed with highly radioactive water while waiting for a bus. “The workers’ exposure above the neck was found to be as much as 10 becquerels per square centimeter,” reports Bloomberg.com How exactly did highly radioactive water manage to find its way to a bus stop in the first place? TEPCO isn’t sure. It’s confusing with all those radiation alarms going off all the time. In order to concentrate, the company has found it’s easier to just disable all the alarms and pretend nothing’s wrong.

 

fukushima-radius-343x300 (1)
The TEPCO cover-up:
To fully grasp the extent of the TEPCO denial, realize that only recently did the company finally admit that radioactive groundwater has been leaking into the ocean. This follows years of stark denials from the company, whose executes have exhibited a remarkable ability to deny reality even when their own workers are dying in droves from cancer. It’s no exaggeration to say that TEPCO’s downplaying of the full extent of the Fukushima disaster has put tens of millions of lives at risk — people who should have been warned about radiation but were denied that information due to the TEPCO cover-up. “At this current time in July of 2013, Fukushima is 80 to 100x more expansive and more intense — letting out about 100x more of the radiation of Chernobyl,” reports Dr. Simon Atkins Phoenix Rising Radio on a BlogTalkRadio interview. “The problem with Fukushima is that it’s not only continuing for 865 days… I mean, let’s wrap our minds around that for a second — it has been leaking out radiation in increasing volumes for 865 days.”

Japan is a society that shuns whistleblowers:
Why has TEPCO been able to cover up the truth about Fukushima for so long? Because Japan is a society of mass conformity. The idea of keeping your head down and not “rocking the boat” is deeply embedded in Japanese culture. Japan is not a nation of “rugged individualism” but of conformist acquiescence. As a result, whistleblowers are shunned, and there is immense peer pressure to defend the status quo… even when it’s a terrible lie. This culture of conformity at all costs is precisely what allows companies like TEPCO to continue operating extremely dangerous nuclear power plants with virtually no accountability. While Japan has entire museums dedicated to the horrifying history of two Japanese cities being bombed by the United States at the end of World War II, when Japan’s own power company is involved in a radiological disaster of similar magnitude, the entire incident gets swept under the rug. Radiation? What radiation? If the government says there’s no radiation, then there’s no radiation! After all, it’s invisible!

Why the U.S. government plays along with the cover-up:
The U.S. government, of course, plays along with the charade because its own top weapons manufacturer — General Electric — designed and built the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in the first place. And the design decisions made by GE, such as storing spent fuel rods in large pools high above the ground, now look not just incompetent but downright idiotic. It turns out there was never any long-term plan to dispose of the spent fuel rods. The idea was to just let them build up over time until someone else inherited the problem. So while Japan and the USA play this game of “let’s all pretend nothing happened,” citizens of both countries continue to be exposed to a relentless wave of deadly radiation that now dwarfs the total radiation release of Chernobyl (which the U.S. media played up in a huge way because the disaster made the Russians look incompetent). The only reason TEPCO is finally getting around to admitting the truth in all this is because you can’t rig all the Geiger counters forever. Radiation follows the laws of physics and atomic decay, not the whims of lying politicians and bureaucrats. As a result, the real story eventually comes out as we’re starting to see right now.

The Fukushima disaster is likely to get far worse, if you can believe that: 
The upshot is that the Fukushima disaster is not only far worse than you’ve been told; it’s very likely going to be worse than you could ever imagine. The radiation leak isn’t plugged, in other words, and another explosion — which many experts believe might be imminent — would release thousands of times more nuclear material into the open environment. Ultimately, the entire Northern hemisphere has been placed at risk by a bunch of corporate bureaucrats who thought building a nuclear facility in the path of a sure-to-happen tidal wave was a fantastic idea. Instead of acknowledging the problem and working to fix it like a responsible person would, our world’s top politicians and ass-coverers have decided it is in their best short-term interests to play along with the TEPCO fairy tale which ridiculously pretends that radioactive leaks can be controlled by wishful thinking.

Remember: Governments can lie about the national debt, health care costs, inflation and unemployment, but they cannot lie about radiation for very long. Sooner or later the physics of it all simply cannot be denied.

Source: Natural News

Supercomputers Can Save U.S. Manufacturing.

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The key to reviving manufacturing in the U.S. may lie in the nation’s supercomputers

The U.S. used to be a powerhouse in manufacturing. In the past quarter of a century we have relinquished this leadership position, in large part because we made a decision—consciously or unconsciously—that the service and financial sectors are sufficient to sustain our economy. But they are not. Service jobs pay little. The financial industry makes nothing of value and therefore cannot maintain, let alone raise, the nation’s standard of living.

The fate of manufacturing is in some ways linked to our prowess in the physical sciences. In the 1960s and 1970s high-performance computing (HPC) developed at the national labs made its way to the manufacturing sector, where it now powers much of the innovation behind our most successful commercial firms. Yet we are ceding leadership in the physical sciences, too. Canceling the Superconducting Super Collider in the 1990s ended U.S. dominance in particle physics. NASA’s decision to delay, and possibly eventually abandon, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope could do the same for cosmology.

Fortunately, the nation’s lead in high-performance computing still stands. HPC is the advanced computing physicists use to model the dynamics of black holes, meteorologists use to model weather and engineers use to simulate combustion. This expertise may also be our best chance to rescue U.S. manufacturing. If we can successfully deliver it to engineers at small firms, it might give the sector enough of a boost to compete with lower labor costs overseas.

We already know how useful HPC is for big firms. When Boeing made the 767 in the 1980s, it tested 77 wing prototypes in the wind tunnel. When it made the 787 in 2005, it tested only 11. In the future, Boeing plans to bring that number down to three. Instead of physical wind tunnels, it uses virtual ones—simulations run on supercomputers—saving much time and money and quickening the pace of new products development. HPC modeling and simulation has become an equally powerful tool in designing assembly lines and manufacturing processes in a broad range of fields—big manufacturers such as Caterpillar, General Electric, Goodyear and Procter & Gamble use it routinely. Small manufacturers could get similar benefits from these tools, if only they had access to them.

I first came to appreciate the potential of HPC to help small manufacturers in 2009 as part of the Obama transition team. Working with the Council on Competitiveness, we identified lack of software, cost of entry and shortages of expertise as the main obstacles to the use of HPC by small manufacturers and proposed a partnership among government, manufacturers and universities to help. The result is the National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium, or NDEMC, a pilot pro­gram created by the council and the federal government.

Recently NDEMC made HPC resources available to a handful of firms, including Jeco Plastic Products. This 25-employee firm in Plainfield, Ind., makes plastic pallets for packaging of auto parts. The plastic pallets are a less expensive alternative to steel pallets, which are heavier and prone to rusting. When Jeco makes a new product, its engineers build a prototype, test it in the lab to see how it bears up under the stress it is likely to encounter in the field and repeat the process until they arrive at the best design. Last December, however, Jeco engineers got a chance to tap expertise at Purdue University to develop simulations of a pallet designed for a German automotive company and ran them on hardware at the Ohio Supercomputing Center in Columbus. As a result, Jeco bypassed that trial-and-error process completely, arriving at a design in only a few hours of computer time.

Many other small firms could reap similar benefits. NDEMC’s goal is to find the best business models for getting HPC to these firms and eventually take the effort nationwide. Small manufacturers today are in some ways like farmers at the beginning of the 20th century, most of whom did not know what contour farming, crop rotation and fertilizers could do for productivity. When the U.S. agricultural extension service, in conjunction with land-grant universities, made the requisite expertise available, it triggered a revolution in agricultural productivity. A similar revolution could be in the cards for small manufacturers if we can get supercomputing technology into the hands of their engineers.

Source: Scientific American

 

FUKUSHIMA VICTIMS TO PAY BACK COMPENSATION.

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fukushima-checks

Two years after the nuclear accident at Fukushima plant, the nuclear industry is accused of evading its responsibilities.

The victims of the nuclear disaster in 2011 were almost forgotten after being placed in little, so-called temporary apartments spread across Japan. TEPCO, the operator of the Fukushima plant, paid “temporary compensation” to the victims, but now people have to pay back the money, the international press reports.

Yukiko Kameya, 68, is one of these victims. She used to live in the town of Futaba, close to the Fukushima nuclear plant, until the tsunami on March 11, 2011. After the nuclear accident, she was moved in a small public housing apartment in Tokyo and received initially $18,000 in compensation from TEPCO. However, she has to pay back $11,000 of the total sum.

“We were living just 1.2 kilometres from the plant, and we escaped with nothing but the clothes on our back,” she said. “We had that money deducted from our compensation. I was surprised, so I called TEPCO and said that they were using dirty tricks, that they were using fraud. Why did they give it to us to if we had to pay it back?”

Companies that were involved in designing and building the Fukushima reactors, such as General Electric, Toshiba and Hitachi, are not required to pay a cent in compensation, a Greenpeace report states.

Aslihan Tumer, Greenpeace’s international nuclear project leader, says some of the companies are still profiting from the reactor.

“Nuclear suppliers are completely protected from accepting any liability or being held accountable in case of an accident,” he said.”GE designed Fukushima Mark 1 reactor, and GE, Hitachi and Toshiba built and continued servicing the reactor, and they are also still making, in some cases, money out of the cleaning efforts, as well as the contamination.”

With the operator TEPCO nationalized, the Japanese taxpayer is now paying most of the compensation bill for the disaster.

Source: Tokyo Times