Oceans Eyed As New Energy Source
February 14th, 2008 By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press Writer(AP) -- Just 15 miles off Florida's coast, the world's most powerful sustained ocean current - the mighty Gulf Stream - rushes by at nearly 8.5 billion gallons per second. And it never stops. To scientists, it represents a tantalizing possibility: a new, plentiful and uninterrupted source of clean energy.
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please. subsurface turbines aren't going to happen because it's hard to design machinery that doesn't break, and it's even harder to fix machinery when it's below the ocean surface.
I am very open to energy alternatives.
But tampering with the Gulf Stream is dangerous.
Basic Physics - Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
Visualize this - A ball that has a groove at its center with a ring that floats. As the ball spins the ring also spins freely. Now you stop the ring with your hand. This in turn applies resistance to the Ball which will also incur drag and begin to slow more due to the resistance.
If we take energy from the gulf stream we will essentially be using its momentum force. If we take away some of that momentum. what happens to the Earth which is creating the spin.
THIS IS NOT TO EVEN START TO CONSIDER THE EFFECTS TO MARINE LIFE IN GENERAL ... I will leave that to the environmentalists.
The questions I have are (I could probably find out with just a little research) where does the water come from? Where does it go? What is the effect of the turbines on waterfalls like Niagara Falls, or in rivers? Is there a correlation?
First of all,if they can send astronauts to the Moon,it should not be too difficult to design underwater turbines that are reliable and cheap to maintain.
Secondly,the Gulf Stream is so vast,you can generate the power of many large nuclear plants(without any radioactive waste),and still have no adverse effects.The most absurd and preposterous claim is that it will slow the rotation of the Earth.This is tantamount to the ignorant scaremongers of the 1960's who believed that the atmosphere was held in place by a huge bubble instead of gravity,and that space rockets would burst the bubble and let all the air out and we'd all die.