Burning Man in Synthetic Aperture Radar

I downloaded the Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar data of the Black Rock area taken on August 19, and the start of Burning Man work is apparent. The colors represent different polarizations of the returns. This is a very small subset of the original 25000x16000 pixel image.

Also found this one from the 24th (horizontally flipped to correct)

small earthquake swarm just north of Death Valley and Scotty's Castle

This in an interesting swarm of earthquakes just to the north of Scotty's Castle in Death Valley.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/FaultMaps/117-37.html

Floyd Dominy

http://www.hcn.org/hcn/wotr/floyd-dominy-the-colossus-of-dams-dies-at-100

Walker Lake, Nevada

Will we have the political fortitude to solve the problem of a oversubscribed watershed before all native fish die in the second largest natural lake fully in Nevada?

The cost of mitigating the health issues of a completely dry lake bed must be more expensive than a few water rights purchases, yes?

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2008/jul/08/lakefront-homes-while-lake-lasts/

Southwest solar meets the New York Times

Turning Glare into Watts.

If large numbers of plants are built, they will eventually pose some problems, even in the desert. They could take up immense amounts of land and damage the environment. Already, building a plant in California requires hiring a licensed tortoise wrangler to capture and relocate endangered desert tortoises.

Often in desert construction the entire lot is bulldozed for convenience and it doesn't have to be. This applies to one acre lots (from personal experience) to larger plots as mentioned. The compressed surface often only allows the invasive non-native Russian thistle (aka tumbleweed) to grow. I've never seen the dominant native vegetation in the Mojave, the creosote bush, grow back in disturbed plots.

Radiation doses from above ground nuclear testing

Estimated gamma-ray radiation doses from above-ground nuclear testing in Nevada, as of 1957. Above-ground testing continued, at a higher pace, until 1962.

This doesn't include radiation from non-gamma sources, including iodine-131, as shown here.

I personally spent a lot of time in the 2-4 Roentgen range as a kid.

Philosophia Naturalis #11

My post on the opening of Nevada Solar One got mentioned in Philosophia Naturalis #11, hosted at Highly Allochthonous. Philosophia Naturalis is a collection of blog posts about the physical sciences, hosted each month at a different site.

Nevada Solar One

image from Solargenix

A large solar thermal energy plant is now online in the Eldorado Valley, just south of Las Vegas, creating up to 64MW of power from a 400 acre site covered with reflective troughs and tubes filled with brine (I was tempted to write "a series of tubes"). Molten salt is used to retain excess energy for later release when it freezes back into a solid. A view of the under construction site is here. The site is located conveniently next to a very large power distribution network hub.

The heated tubes are interesting in their own right. Schott makes them--a vacuum insulated glass tube with a blackened steel tube in the center. The outside has an anti-reflection coating, and the steel coating is made to reduce IR thermal emission: visible and near-IR go in, steel heats up, but it can't radiate thermal IR out. The result is 95% of light is absorbed; but only 14% of the IR is emitted. Keeping everything sealed at temperatures between freezing and 750F is difficult, and one of things Schott did was make a special glass with a coefficient of expansion the same as steel.

The second major solar energy project in southern Nevada is a 15MW plant at Nellis Air Force Base, using photovoltaic cells directly creating electricity. The system will track the sun, and it sits conveniently on an old landfill, land previously unusable.

In addition to these two major projects, there is a little over 3MW of solar energy projects in southern Nevada, with most of the total from the Las Vegas Valley Water District. See the status of Nevada energy projects in this 2007 report

Renewable decentralized solar energy continues to have arbitrary limits placed on it by law, keeping power companies monopolies in place. How requiring power companies to produce 15% of their power from renewables in eight years while disallowing much locally-produced power sources works together is beyond me.

From Friday's Las Vegas Review-Journal:

A lobbyist for the Clark County School District said she was pleased that the proposal increased the maximum amount of solar power the district can generate to 2 megawatts compared to 570 kilowatts. ...

But per school limits are 50 kilowatts.

Conklin liked that limitation, because it encourages the district to install solar plants at more schools, giving more students an opportunity to see how solar power works.

... Under the bill, customers may qualify for net metering if they generate as much as 100 kilowatts on their site, up from 30 kilowatts.

Nevada Solar One is static--a cheap low-maintenance support structure that resists wind damage very well (EDIT: someone corrected me: it's a one-axis tracker). The Nellis project uses tracking systems to maximize the solar gain. What is that gain? It depends a lot: on how much Sun you get, how long your days are, and how cloudy it is over the year. In Las Vegas, for instance, the overall solar energy received with a tracking system is about 7.1kWh per square meter per day averaged over the year. A static mount would get 6-6.5kWh. It doesn't sound like a lot of difference, but that's a per day number for only a square meter: multiply by 365 and for the size of the project, and it adds up. For single sunny months, tracking wins by far--over 9kWh per day in June in Vegas compared with 7 for a static system. It's interesting to note the incredible values created on the North Slope of Alaska--nearly as much as the desert Southwest--merely from having the Sun around for 24 hours a day.

Why aren't we doing more to power the cities of the Southwest with solar? Even just using solar water heaters in the warm months and smart skylights for daytime lighting would change energy use forever there.

A video describing Nevada Solar One, including some interviews, is available here.

And finally,
click here for a more amusing video about the 360MW of solar energy projects in California.

Groom Lake aka Area 51 aka The Ranch

Be amused that a 1989 report on the containment of radiation from underground nuclear tests from the Office of Technology Assessment, a moribund Congressional office, casually mentioned that there was a monitoring station for accidental radioactive releases from the Nevada Test Site at a classified non-existent location. They also mention the sensitive Tonopah Test Range on the map. Those wacky Congressional Reports!

The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions (PDF)
It's on page 69.

You can visit any of the community monitoring stations, and I recommend it if you are ever in any of the towns. In Las Vegas it's located in the parking lot of the Atomic Testing Museum, at Flamingo and Swenson.