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Rocky Flats

Posted on July 27, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Rocky Flats

What is now is the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge once was the Rocky Flats Plant where triggers for nuclear weapons were manufactured. The main raw ingredient for the triggers was plutonium, one of the most toxic and radioactive substances known, with a half-life of over 4000 years. During the forty years the plant operated, there were two major fires in glove boxes where plutonium discs were handled. In this and other incidents, many pounds of plutonium were released. The Wikipedia article has an excellent summary and bibliography.

I was talking to a woman recently about Rocky Flats. Her father worked there for several years when the plant was in full operation. He had to deal with a glove box where the plutonium had started to burn. The gloves were so hot he had to wear other gloves before he could put his hands into the glove box gloves to stop the reaction. He probably saved some lives. He died of cancer.

I became more interested in Rocky Flats after reading Full Body Burden, by Kristin Iverson, an English Professor who grew up in the area. The book is controversial, disagreeing with the environmental assessments by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Given all I have read, I am skeptical of the official lint that the area is safe, and exposure to the public was and is minimal. Decide for yourself.

Iverson writes that a large area of contaminated topsoil was covered with more topsoil and pronounced safe. Rocky Flats is aptly named, as millions of tons of glacial erosion products have covered the area with gravel. The surface is called ground armor, mostly rock, as the high winds in the area have blown much of the finer material away. That continues, and rodents burrowing bring buried soil to the surface where it blows into the Denver Metro area..

The nearby Standley Lake, a large irrigation reservoir that provides water to Westminster and Broomfield, allows boating and water skiing but bans swimming because the lake bottom is contaminated with plutonium. Many experts have advocated banning development in the area, but houses are going up.

I got interested again recently because the NOAA National Weather Radar website is my go-to means of weather monitoring. The TV weather people are either warning the apocalypse is imminent or it is fine, no rain, just before a major hailstorm. Over a period of months I noticed a nearly constant radar image indicating precipitation over the NWR. Day or night, weekends or weekdays, the image is there. If it really is rain, the refuge would be a major swamp at the base of the Rocky Mountains.

Many years ago I was a radar repairman in the Army. One of the radars we maintained put out so much radio frequency energy it would kill birds flying in front. We had quite a bit of training about ionizing radiation. Radars emit radiation, so does decaying plutonium. I could not come up with any explanation for the radar image other than radioactive decay. This would be disastrous, as much of the Denver metro area is downwind of Rocky Flats.

I sent a number of emails to the NWS, TV stations, and the CDPHE. I guess I stirred things up a bit, because I got a long, thoughtful letter from CDPHE outlining the investigation I generated. The conclusion reached is that the radar image is from dust coming from a gravel mining and crushing operation just adjacent to the refuge. Here is the letter:

Begin forwarded message:

From: “Spreng, Carl” <carl.spreng@state.co.us>
Date: July 13, 2016 at 3:56:58 PM MDT
To: levanks@me.com
Cc: Phillip Peterson – CDPHE <phillip.peterson@state.co.us>, Surovchak Scott <Scott.Surovchak@lm.doe.gov>, “Moritz, Vera” <Moritz.Vera@epa.gov>, Lindsay Masters – CDPHE <lindsay.masters@state.co.us>, Darr Bob <Bob.Darr@lm.doe.gov>, Rob Beierle – CDPHE <robert.beierle@state.co.us>, Smith Warren <warren.smith@state.co.us>
Subject: Rocky Flats

William Shanks

levanks@me.com

Mr. Shanks,

Your message sent to Phill Peterson in our Radiation Control Program was forwarded to me for response. I discussed your observations with a representative of NOAA. NOAA scientists apparently notice a fairly consistent dust cloud in the Rocky Flats area. This is consistent with the adjacent gravel operations — current and historic. You can observe the dust that rises off these operations as you drive by the site.

During remediation, the source areas of radiological risk in the Central Operable Unit (managed by the US Dept. of Energy) were excavated and shipped out of state. The human health risks inside the Central Operable Unit and the remainder of the site (managed as a refuge by the US Fish and Wildlife Service) were assessed following remediation and risks were found to be very low. A final decision for the site declared that any conceivable use would be appropriate in the Refuge area. That decision was based on an enormous amount of data (surface soil, subsurface soil, groundwater, surface water, air). After the remediation was completed, an aerial survey was conducted using a low-flying helicopter with detectors.

Offsite areas in the vicinity of Rocky Flats are also safe for any use. Numerous offsite surveys confirm the conclusion that only a few samples just east of Rocky Flats detected plutonium concentrations above background levels. You can read more information about the sampling on and around Rocky Flats on the Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment’s (CDPHE) web page at: http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/hm/rf/index.htm.

Please contact us again if you have more questions.

Carl Spreng

P 303.692.3358 | F 303.759.5355 | C 303-328-7289

4300 Cherry Creek Drive S, Denver, CO 80246-1530

carl.spreng@state.co.us |

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Carol Leavenworth <levanks@me.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 12:39 PM
Subject: Rocky Flats
To: phillip.peterson@state.co.us

Sir,
I notice there is a consistent radar image over the Rocky Flats NWR when viewing the NOAA national weather radar website. I am no physicist, but ionizing radiation is detectable by radar. Is this the case at Rocky Flats? Is there a radiation hazard outside the closed zone? Is there a public health risk for the nearby residential areas?I was a radar repairman in the Army in the 1960’s and remain interested in the field. There weren’t many RF energy safeguards back then and there were nuclear weapons stored where I was stationed in Germany.
Thanks.
William Shanks
2032 S. Logan St.
Denver CO 80210
303-830-0599

After Cleanup

I was skeptical, so I drove out there. I made a couple of circuits around the area, passing through new subdivisions where grading was going on and decided that was not the source. I then turned off SH 93, the road from Golden to Boulder into what used to be the west gate to the bomb plant. I went past lots of no trespassing signs to a big gravel mining and crushing operation. The crusher was producing a significant dust cloud. There were lots of big gravel trucks, indicating a major operation.

I left without getting stopped for trespassing and made another lap around the refuge. The gravel operation is to the southwest of the refuge, and I could see the dust cloud from north of the refuge. Mystery solved. it is not ionizing radiation creating the radar image, it is dust.

There is no radioactive cloud coming off Rocky Flats. There is, however, still a lot of radioactive and chemical pollution out there. I suggest you not buy one of the nice new houses being built in the area..

Posted in Colorado History, Energy Policy, Engineering Failures, Federal Land, Health Issues, Ionizing Radiation, Plutonium, Radar Images, Stories, Wind

What’s Going On?

Posted on July 24, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

His Yellowness

Here we are in one of the most bizarre presidential campaigns in a land marked by bizarre politics. In many cases, the underlying reason for the periodic upheavals is race. Yankee slavers hauled terrified captives to a strange land where they were put to work on plantations. The plantation-owning Southern aristocracy dominated the agrarian south. Farming in the north was mostly small family farms. Industrial cities grew and a diverse economy grew in contrast to southern agrarianism.

Black people were looked on as inferior and deserved their servitude. The divided country compromised and made a black person worth 3/5th of a white in the Constitution, that standard of democracy. The race problem became the dominant issue in the nineteenth century and remains so today.

The split has always been marked by violence. The tragedy of the Civil War continued after the war with Jim Crow making his mark across the country. Some change came with the great migration of African-Americans from the rural south to the urban north. Race turmoil came with the migration. The civil rights era focused on the south, but the racial divide is as deep in the north as in the north. Race violence seems to be nationwide.

I was stationed in Alabama when I was in the Army in the early 1960s. I was shocked by the segregation. I was more shocked by the segregation in Chicago. The African-Americans moved north to find opportunity. Some found opportunity, but Jim Crow moved north with them. Things are now changing. We have an African-American President who made his home in Chicago. Black people have more opportunity now than at any other time, but it is not enough.

The divides remain. White cops shooting blacks, blacks shooting cops. Rioting comes in cycles, mostly when the weather is hot. Poor people don’t have air conditioning. Much of the hysteria around race violence is fueled by television news. “If it bleeds, it leads”. People watch these relatively isolated incidents and feel it is happening just down the street. Chicago’s south side is something of an aberration; gang violence reinforced by a corrupt police department. After all, we are talking about Cook County with its rich history of corruption and crime.

The black neighborhoods are a different place. Being stopped for driving while black is no joke. It is a means of race-based repression. The lynchings have not really stopped; the racist bully cops who are a small part of every police department have assumed the role. No longer is it a rope, it’s a nine millimeter handgun in the hands of a rogue police officer.

All this brings me to the Republicans. Our national economy is changing. Many working class people are politically conservative, wanting more stability in a changing economy that is leaving them behind. Good paying industrial jobs are drying up.

A good example is here in Denver. Gates Rubber is gone, the production moved out of the country. The former Gates factory which used to dominate South Denver is being replaced with expensive apartment complexes. Today, the jobs are in offices and restaurants. The office people move into the apartments, the poorly paid workers move to decaying suburbs or cram themselves into tiny apartments on Capitol Hill.

There is one growing industry here, marijuana. Jobs are being created and rents for warehouses for grow operations are going up. The warehouses were built for thriving small businesses doing light manufacturing and supporting the construction industry. The Great Recession created by our friends who run things from lower Manhattan killed many of those small businesses. The working class lost out again.

The white working class is angry. Many of the jobs are gone, the opportunity for small businesses has shrunk, and immigrants seem to be taking the jobs at the bottom. Until this year, the Republican Party has failed to capitalize on this growing disaffection. The party’s emphasis has been to enrich the wealthy, ignore the poor, take their safety nets away, and keep the minimum wage at poverty level. Uh, oh, here comes Mr. Trump. It is hard to tell what he really believes, but his rhetoric has focused on returning to some past that was better for those angry people than the present. He mocks the liberal ideals of social progress and seems to advocate a return to a dominant, imperialistic America returning to the industrial prosperity of post-World War II America when white people were firmly in control. He also wants to remove all constraints on free-wheeling development without regard to social or environmental consequences. More jobs.

His own record doesn’t support his rhetoric, but the discontent he is exploiting overrules his inconsistencies. Democrats want a well-regulated welfare state, and Republicans want to make rich people richer. Disaffected workers are turning to a man who advocates strength, control, and more jobs by rebuilding the industrial economy that has moved to China. No more free trade, the USA will regain former worker’s prosperity with protectionism.

The rich will get richer, but the workers will regain what was lost in the shift to a global economy. Trump and Putin will share the spoils of the new nationalism. Europe can muddle along, but the rest of the world is there to be shared by the U.S. and Russia.

The voting bloc Trump tapped into was enough to get him nominated, but he will probably lose to Ms. Clinton. Her problem is much the same as the old Republicans. She is a reformer who has always worked for those at the margins, however working class economic problems persist. Those problems created the Trump phenomenon, and solutions are hard to come by. The Obamas promote college for everyone, but who is going to do the work? There needs to be some way to build a good life for the workers. How? This is the twenty first century dilemma.

Posted in Apocalyptic Prophesies, Fear, Politics, Race, Stories, Trump

Those Damn Cars

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Tacoma. Mine has lots of brush scrapes on the sides.

Living in the USA almost always means having cars. It is possible to do without, but difficult except in New York, Boston, and San Francisco. I was eighteen when I got my first car, a 1957 Ford. I have lost count of how many since 1961. I have had sedans, a panel truck, 2wd pickups, 4×4 pickups, SUV’s, and sports cars. I have also crashed a few. It’s a combination of ADD and poor eye-hand coordination responsible for the crashes. I was even in one crash that wasn’t my fault.

My favorites? Pickups and sports cars, sort of on opposite ends of the automotive spectrum. I learned how to drive in a pickup, and their versatility appeals to me. Lately, the pickups have been four wheel drive so I can risk my life on really bad mountain and desert roads. Currently my four wheeler is a Toyota Tacoma. It is just went in to get its rear springs replaced. That is the third recall.

Matrix

Carol’s car is a Toyota Matrix, sort of a mini SUV. It has had recalls as well, those Takata airbags that throw shrapnel. I still like Toyotas. They are reliable and are for the most part well thought out. We have friends with Priuses, but I am still not sure.

We have another resident in the garage. It is a 2006 BMW 325i four door sedan. Don’t be fooled, the thing is a sports car with four doors. Power, handling, looks, and some snobbery.

That thing is fun. I turn corners without slowing down. It just turns, no squeal, no big deal. The steering varies with speed. At slow speeds, it hardly takes any turns to corner. At higher speeds, you have to give the steering wheel more input.

BMW 325i

The BMW is fast. I don’t have any comparison with, say, a Mustang, but it goes when you mash down. To me, it has just enough power. Passing those RV’s in the mountains is no problem at all. Speeding up or slowing down to change lanes, zip. I have never spun the tires to show off.

It is helpless in the snow. It has traction control, but no help. The tires are wide, the car is low, and it just sits there and spins those rear wheels. The BMW’s with an X in their model name have all wheel drive. Carol’s daughter didn’t need AWD in Silicon Valley, where she bought the car.

The thing is automated. Everything is programmable, even the rear view mirrors. There are buttons everywhere and a digital interface controlled by a knob you turn to scroll through options. I think I can operate about ten percent of the stuff. I keep telling myself to get out there with the owners manual and learn, but I haven’t done it in seven months.

BMW’s cost too much, they are expensive to fix, not very roomy, and so much fun to drive. We don’t need three cars. We could probably be fine with one. I don’t know what we are going to do. we will probably sell the Matrix and the BMW and get Carol a cool AWD car.

Posted in Cars, Current Activities, Family History, Money, My Story, Stories

Dirty Denver

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Windstorm

The wind blows here in Denver, and it is not all air. Those mountains just west of us are wearing down. Most of the sand and dirt ends up in the rivers, put the wind blows some of the mountains away. If you park your car outside, you already know this. The dust covers everything on the car, and you have to wash the damn thing. Mostly the dust is that tan/brown dirt color, but sometimes it is red when parts of Utah decide to take a visit.

The constant deposition of wind-blown dirt is why ancient cities get buried. The process is slow, but relentless. Denver is being buried, but we haul a lot of it away. Our older house has what seems to be sunken sidewalks. It is the wind- blown dust combined with organic matter (grass clippings) to form topsoil.

Carol likes to say that a lot of the stuff that accumulates is spider legs. True, along with the exoskeletons of millions of insects. In geologic terms the rate of deposition of all that stuff is fairly rapid.

Here on Colorado’s Front Range we get wind, but nothing like the mountain winds, unless you live in Boulder or other places at the foot of the mountains. The mountains are high enough to get some of the higher altitude winds that the flatlands don’t get much of. Also, when a weather system blows in, the mountains act as a barrier, forcing all that moving air up. As it rises, it cools, gets more dense, and descends on the lee side of the mountains. As it falls, it gains velocity and tends to warm up, creating our famous chinook winds.

Loess Soil
Windblown Dirt

As the wind moves on the plains, it’s velocity decreases and some of the dirt it carries falls out. Close to the mountains, a lot of it is sand. That explains the sand hills we have close to the mountains. You can identify the sand because it does not support plant growth as well as soil. Sandy areas are cow country, no farming. A little farther east, the dirt falls down. A lot of dirt falls down, forming loess, a German term for wind-blown dirt deposits. Eastern Colorado has thousands of square miles of loess. Without irrigation, it is usually planted in wheat.

Of course, all the water or wind-borne sediment is headed for Mississippi, Lousiana, or the gulf. Most of that Mississippi mud will end up as shale. At some point plate tectonics will shove it up as dry land and the cycle starts over. Most of the sand will eventually end up in the streams, get buried, and form sandstone like the Dakota sandstone dinosaur fossils are found in. In other places, tremendous deposits of wind blown sand accumulate, eventually forming the sandstone that blankets the Colorado Plateau.

That dirt accumulating in your lawn and garden is part of a recycling process going on all over our planet for millions of years. The process will continue long after we are all gone, as long as there is air and water on the planet. To me, the whole thing is a miracle, all these geologic processes creating conditions existing long enough for the evolutionary mistake known as humanity to develop.

Posted in Stories, Weather, Wind

Shaking and Baking

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

As you are aware if you are a regular reader of my ravings, I am a geology buff. I like the Big Picture, mid-ocean rifts and rises, tectonic plates shoving one another around, places where the hot insides spout out of the ground, mountains rising and being worn away, and the oceans becoming ever more salty. Most of the time, all this is a slow process, but sometimes all hell breaks loose.

San Andreas Fault

Just look at that photo of the San Andreas Fault. Things are clearly on the move and the land is being torn apart. The Pacific Plate is sliding northward along the North American Plate. Pasadena will one day be next to Anchorage. Don’t wait up for it, though. The Pacific coast of North America is one of the most seismically active regions on the Ring of Fire surrounding the Pacific Ocean. It shakes, it blows, it smokes, it flows.

Places like that make nice places to live. Most of the time. There is the ocean, lots of pretty landscapes with beautiful mountains nearby, and places to grow things. Just look at the Seattle-Tacoma area. Bays, inlets, rivers, islands, and a big old mountain to look at. It is easy to forget that mountain is a large volcano just biding it’s time until it lets loose again.

Mount Rainier. Close to Town

If Rainier resembles Mt. St. Helens in the way it erupts, there might be some warning. What we won’t know is how big, exactly when, and for how long. There is a lot going on in that area. Boeing, Microsoft, REI, millions of people, and Starbucks are a few examples. If a swarm of magnitude four earthquakes begin, what to do? Shut everything down and evacuate? Where will everyone go? What about looting and plundering? What if it doesn’t erupt for months, if ever?

Pyroclastic flows of very hot, wet, chunky stuff have flowed off that mountain all the way to the ocean. The old cliche says “It is not if, but when.” We just do not know when. So, life along the Pacific Rim is always something of a gamble. I have felt small earthquakes and looked into the crater of a Volcano in Costa Rica, a lovely, green, paradise. Earthquakes destroy roads and railroads, volcanos bury villages, and life goes on.

Irazu, Costa Rica

Small, poor Costa Rica is one thing, the Seattle-Tacoma area, or Los Angeles, or Portland, or Eugene, or San Francisco are entirely different matters. No amount of preparation can take into account all the things which might happen. Prediction is in its infancy. Mt. St. Helens in hindsight gave lots of warning, but the disaster was huge in a relatively isolated area. When Rainier or Mt. Hood let go the disaster will be in a heavily populated area with just a few ways out.

Currently there are lots of earthquakes in the oil field regions of Texas, Oklahoma, and surrounding areas. I wouldn’t worry too much if I lived there, the odds of a Big One are fairly small. St. Louis and Salt Lake are at more risk. The West Coast is the big danger zone. The earth will keep moving, the plates will continue to slide. Eruptions and quakes will continue to happen. My solution? Don’t live there. What is your plan?

Posted in Apocalyptic Prophesies, Cliches, Earthquakes, Environment, Fear, Mt. St. Helens, Stories, Volcanos

More on Discontent

Posted on June 22, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

The Age of Steam

Our economy has been one of change since the beginning. When the railroads came to Colorado in 1870, a lot of teamster jobs hauling freight from Omaha and Kansas City went away. The automobile would not have happened without the new petroleum industry. Coal retained its strength from powering locomotives, heating homes, and fueling industry. Industry and manufacturing grew, making the American economy one of the largest in the world.

What a combination, land, natural resources, transportation, a growing population of people with ambition, mobility, and a willingness to try something new. Some were left behind. Native Americans, African Americans, and those new citizens in the Southwest who were once part of Mexico with its traditional ways. As always, immigrants ended up at the bottom because of language and discrimination.

There were troubles. Low wages, a turbulent labor history, drought, an unstable business cycle creating panics individuals were helpless to influence. There were some adventures the government engaged in, such as Cuba, the Philippines China, Japan, all the trappings of empire. In many ways the American West was an empire, won at the expense of those who were living there.

John Deere

Agriculture was becoming more mechanized, displacing people who moved to the cities to work in industry. All the change continues. There is a tremendous amount of wealth in Silicon Valley, not so much in Michigan.

The West has been boom-bust from the start. The fur trade collapsed, but the gold rushes started. The government started giving land to the railroads and individuals. The short grass prairie boomed with hopeful wheat growers, then the droughts came. Oil and gas grew and grew, and grew. As old fields played out, new oil fields were discovered. A couple of big wars really heated things up.

It all looked great. Yes, lots of change, but people could find good jobs and things steamed along. The real upheavals were when the business cycle threw millions out of work. The 1930’s were a terrible time, but a war healed all that.

The West That Never Existed

The 1950’s seemed like a golden age. Lots of jobs, the U.S. Ruled much of the world, and television built a myth of stability, prosperity, and a bright future for everyone. the myth came from relative prosperity and the ubitiquous westerns on television promoting a life that never existed.

The 1960’s brought social upheaval accompanied by a growing shift in how people made their living. Steel mills closed, imported cars were on the roads, and computer-driven automation started taking industrial jobs. The word Yuppie became a term of derision, but the Yuppies were the wave of the future. They possessed education and a skill set many people could or would not obtain.

The skilled trades fell out of favor. It is college or else. The trade jobs are filled the way they have always been filled, by immigrants. This time however, the immigrants are not easily assimilated Europeans. They are Latin, and and bring their culture with them. Many are just not as interested in assimilating, and many are undocumented.

All this change leaves a huge segment of our society out of the good life. Many are rural, where big mechanized farms haven taken jobs. Many just do not have social and intellectual requirements to move into the new economy. What’s left? Low-paying service economy jobs, often for an out of date minimum wage inadequate for one person, let alone a family. It is hard to build a life mowing lawns and doing kitchen work. Much of the time jobs that used to be stepping stones have turned into dead ends.

The trouble is just beginning. Those people marginalized by an economy where they don’t fit can be radicalized and turn to violence and terror or Donald Trump, which may be same thing. The discontent is just not with the marginalized working class. There are lots of well-educated people from middle class families making pizzas and living in their parents’ basement. They thought they were doing the right thing going into debt to get an education and found nobody wants them.

This is still a rich country. There is a huge imbalance in the distribution of wealth which has to change. The change agent must be government. A true progressive tax structure and an end to the massive influence of special interests in government are desperately needed. The nation has the resources to provide everyone with an income providing them some dignity and the flexibility to enhance their station in life. Given a decent income, most will seek ways to do even better.

We will always have the wealthy and the poor. Now, there is too much concentrated wealth for a few and too many poor. Trying to revert to an American utopia which never existed will only add to social instability.

Happy Days Are Here Again

There should be no food banks or coat drives. There should be no one sleeping on the streets. People with mental health problems should not be cast out. Everyone should have the time and resources available to build better lives for themselves rather than being trapped in poverty.

In other words, we need a new time of progressive change, not an attempt to return to a myth. How to pay for it all? A realistic progressive tax system to redistribute income.

Posted in Coal, Colorado History, Economics, Energy Policy, History, Money, Myths, Oil and Gas Policy, Polarization, Politics, Small Towns, Stories

The Summer Of Our Discontent

Posted on June 17, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

What a time! It’s hot about two weeks early for this area. I got a replacement toolbox for my Toyota Tacoma’s toolbox. The old one failed because I haul so much stuff around. Fortunately it had a lifetime guarantee. We seem to be spending entirely too much time in doctor’s offices; me getting pre-cancerous patches frozen on my head, Carol with eye trouble, and her son with a broken wrist and atrial fibrillation.

On the positive side, our garden is looking great, no hail this year so far. We are going to have a big raspberry crop, the flowers are beautiful, and all the veggies are growing away. Things seem to be going fairly well for an old couple.

There is tragedy in the land. Murdering large groups of innocent people just trying to have a good time is terrible. There has to be some means in place to restrict weapons solely designed for killing large numbers of people.

The reason I am writing this, however, is about the current political situation. The U.S. Has a long tradition of sending poorly qualified people to the White House, but this is getting ridiculous. This guy the Republicans have chosen to run has managed to combine all the worst qualities of American politicians in one outrageous package. The man has no qualifications to lead the nation in any direction other than backward, and possibly into chaos. Just his hair should be a cue. What are those people thinking?

I understand the discontent. A lot of people are not liberal and want leadership addressing their problems. Stagnant wages, a lack of good skilled industrial jobs, and rapid change rather than a safe, stable, comfortable life like Ward, June, Wally, and the Beav lived. They forget that the Cleavers didn’t exist, they were just a TV show.

They sit in front of the TV watching pretty people having a crisis which always has a happy ending. Their lives aren’t so happy, and they are angry about it. So here comes a TV show host who says he can fix everything. He will get rid of “those people”, give them good jobs, make the country safe, and put steak on the plate and a nice diesel Super Duty pickup in every driveway. If there is trouble, the Marines can stop it. The country will regress or else.

The mainstream Republican approach is to make rich people richer, take away benefits, and cut schools, highways, parks, sell the government land off. and send their sons off to endless wars. Congress is paralyzed. That plan has run its course. The only reason it worked at all is the rich ones spent lots of money fooling people and buying politicians.

The result is Donald Trump. He says he can fix it. Well, no. The man seems to have no idea how our government works. He thinks he can issue commands on impulse and get an immediate response, whether his commands are legal or not. The only things he really wants are adulation and a chance to get rid of those who ask the wrong questions.

Hillary has done a lot of things well, but she has a past. Trump will sling as much dirt as he can, hoping enough will stick to her to get him elected. It worked with the primaries, let’s hope it won’t work for the Big One.

Posted in Current Activities, Fear, Polarization, Politics, Stories, Terrorism

King Coal’s Crown is Slipping

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Idle Coal Car

Recently I have done a couple of road trips where I paralleled abandoned or seldom used railroads. On one trip I came down the Arkansas from Salida to Pueblo, years ago the main line of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. The other route was from Alamosa to Walsenburg, the route of the Rio Grande to the San Luis Valley and on to Gunnison over Marshall Pass.

On both trips the lower portion of the railroad grade had literally miles of parked gondolas, or coal cars. The gondolas on the Arkansas were the old-fashioned steel cars. Those cars are replaced by mostly aluminum cars which are significantly lighter. The railroads make more money hauling coal instead of heavy steel cars. Dropping down to Walsenburg were miles of the more modern aluminum cars holding air rather than coal.

The railroads have lost a huge amount of coal hauling business. All over the country, coal mines are shutting down, the coal replaced by cheaper natural gas. Not all the coal trains are gone, I saw one yesterday on its way south through Denver.

Colorado Springs Power Plant With Idle Coal Cars

Colorado Springs has a socialist Utilities Department, generating power and delivering natural gas along with the traditional water and wastewater systems. The big power plant south of the city used to burn so much coal the city bought its own coal train. All those cars are idle, sitting at the power plant. Now, it is natural gas powering the generators.

Colorado has a colorful coal mining history. The Colorado Fuel and Iron steel mill in Pueblo got its coal from mines just west of Trinidad. That region had lots of mines accompanied by lots of labor trouble around the turn of the twentieth century. There were mines in Colorado Springs, west of Denver, a big industry around Louisville and Lafayette. The mines at Somerset, just north of Paonia are in the process of shutting down. Craig and Hayden are in trouble, and the mines in the Grand Junction region are long gone.

“Clean Coal”, a big lie if there ever was one, is on its way out. Peabody Energy is bankrupt, along with many other mine operators. We will have coal’s legacy for a long time. Climate change, fouled rivers and air, areas mutilated by strip mining, and huge piles of mine waste are our children’s inheritance.

Alternative energy, including solar power and wind generation are part of the equation, but cheap and more clean burning natural gas is the main reason for the change. Gas is cleaner than coal, but it still puts huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. It is just another fossil fuel. The fossil fuels sequestered huge amounts of carbon that otherwise would contribute to global warming. Now we are burning all that carbon and heating up the planet.

Gas is better, but still bad. All that cheap cleaner burning gas may even slow the transition to renewable energy sources. On balance, however, we are better off with gas than coal.

Where is all that cheap gas coming from? There has been a major technological advance in the oil and gas industry. The advance is horizontal drilling. In past years, one hole went into the ground and the oil and gas was extracted froze around that single hole. The amount recovered was highly dependent on the porosity of the rock formation holding the oil and gas.

Hydraulic fracturing (fracking), developed in the 1950’s expanded the amount removed from less porous strata, but not on a huge scale. To get more out of any field with tight rock required lots of expensive drill holes.

The big change was the development of horizontal drilling. The process took years of development, but now slant drilling is cost effective and allows hydraulic fracturing over a much wider area compared to down hole drilling. Fracking the slanted holes allows gas and oil to be extracted from oil and gas bearing shales formerly not economically feasible.

There is much opposition to fracking because the technology allows drilling in new areas where the population is not used to a dirty industry in their back yards. Traditionally, the industry did not pay much attention to leaking wells. There was little regulation, and all that stuff went into the atmosphere. The oil fields in the Four Corners region are the source of the highest atmospheric methane readings in the country.

Leaks are common because it costs money to prevent them, lowering profits. The leaks can be prevented, it just takes more work and money. The big blowout in the Gulf shows that oil companies tend to cheat when the dangerous practices are taking place where no one can see them. On-site regulation can stop the cheating and oil and gas production from horizontal drilling and fracking can continue safely.

The downside is the clear need to eliminate our dependency on fossil fuels. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, not increase the amount. Until more alternative sources come on line, natural gas is preferable to coal, and King Coal can be deposed. The current difficulty in making the transition is political, with the extractive industries resisting the change at every step. They are spending money to delay the changes that could be used to make change, not enrich politicians and the advertising industry.

Residential Solar Power

We have solar panels on our house and garage. Out utility bill this month will be less than twenty dollars. Xcel Energy is attempting to eliminate the incentives for home solar power so they can continue to produce power using natural gas. It’s political, folks.

Posted in Coal, Energy Policy, Environment, Oil and Gas Policy, Stories

The Golden Fault

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Red Rocks. on the Golden Fault

I live at the base of the Southern Rocky Mountains. The Rockies are a lengthy mountain cordillera running from southern New Mexico to well into Canada; almost in mid-continent. The most dramatic portion is in Colorado in terms of elevation and extent. You may have heard of Pikes Peak, one of sixty three 14,000 feet high mountains.

Usually mountain ranges sit at continental plate boundaries. The Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades, the Andes, the San Gabriels, and the mountains in Central America are an example. The Himalayas are the result of the Indian sub-continent colliding with Eurasia. So, why are the Rockies here? The most accepted theory is the Pacific tectonic plate once failed to subduct at the continental boundary and slid under the continent then dove, pushing the Rockies up.

All the features of mountain building are here, volcanos, lava flows, and a succession of mostly parallel ranges. The anomaly is they are about 800 miles from the coast. Our current Rockies are not the first ones here. The 300 million year old Ancestral Rockies rose, wore away, and were replaced by our modern Rockies, about 64 million years old. The idea is there is some sort of crustal weakness under the Rockies contributing to their birth here.

The western Rockies sort of grade off onto the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range province. On the east side, things are more dramatic. Travelers go along the gradually rising Great Plains until wham, the Rockies poke up. Flat country, than mountains. Lots of us live along the base of the mountains. There is water, good soil, nearby timber for building, and a dramatic setting with a somewhat better climate.

The Native Americans often wintered here, returning to the plains in spring to hunt buffalo (Yes, buffalo, not bison. Leave that name for the biology geeks.). The Pikes Peak gold rush meant the end for the Indians. By 1870, the plains Indians were gone from Colorado. The miners and the followers stayed, and the Front Range Urban Corridor grew to the crowded area we get stuck in traffic today.

Just west of Denver is the Golden Fault. The big crack of the fault along the base of the mountains west of Denver dived westward under the mountains when the Rockies rose during the Laramide Orogeny, about 64-67 million years ago. The uplift along the fault exposed rocks that are buried 14,000 feet down east of the fault. The San Andreas Fault can’t match that one. In addition, the mountains slid about one and a half miles over the plains.

Red Rocks Park, home of many rock concerts, is composed of the Fountain Formation, about 300 million years old, formed of debris shed off the Ancestral Rockies. Just to the west are what geologists call basement rocks, 1.7 billion years old. The gap is the Great Unconformity, with the geologic record missing. All that time is gone due to erosion. Those basement rocks are highly modified remnants of an island arc which drifted north across an ancestral ocean and collided with the older rocks of the Wyoming Craton. The same process is going on today as the Phillipines, Java, Taiwan, and the other islands are headed to a collision with Asia. Listen for the noise from the smash.

Another benefit of the Golden Fault for us is all the interesting rocks tilted up by the fault. Red Rocks, Dinosaur Ridge, Lookout Mountain, Green Mountain, and North and South Table mountains all owe their origin to the fault. The last three are with us because of a lava flow originating from north of Ralston creek.

Another fun feature is the erosion which wore the Rockies down at almost the rate they were uplifted. The result was a gradual plain sloping off the mostly buried mountains to the prairie. Then, Monument Creek, the South Platte, Clear Creek, the Big Thompson, and the Cache La Poudre, and their tributaries went to work, along with some more uplift. The erosion created the canyon-carved escarpment we have today. The Rocky Mountain Erosion Surface is the result of the river’s work. From Green Mountain Falls to Estes park is a bench marking the ancient surface. The Rampart Range road and the Peak to Peak highway run along the surface, with scenic canyons carved into the rock. Deer Creek Canyon, Clear Creek Canyon, Golden Gate Canyon, and Coal Creek Canyon are some of the canyons we can drive down today. Thank the South Platte River and Monument Creek for the scenery.

The Laramide Orogeny uplifted the Rockies, with the now buried Golden Fault being a major feature and result of the bulging, and the later exhumation created the landscape those of us living on the foreland enjoy today. The Rockies may still be rising, but it is slow compared to the coastal mountains. The South Platte just keeps on digging.

If you feel some shaking of the earth, it may be from the southern San Andreas fault letting go. It is locked, but there is about 100 feet of movement between the Pacific and North American plates ready to happen. Another earthquake source is the New Madrid Fault south of St. Louis. As they say, it is not if they will move, but when.

Posted in Stories

Knees and Such

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Bill Leave a comment

Arthritis

Old age happens if things go as planned. Inside, I feel like the Bill I always have, but the case is starting to wear out. I get together with my buddy Dan, and we always devote some time to catching up with our health care issues. I went to the Orthopod this week, got a cortisone shot in my left knee (the other knee is Titanium). Didn’t do much good.

Every time Dan plays pickleball (I know, just look it up.), he limps. He has a bad ticker, I have a bad brain. I spend time at the VA audiology clinic dealing with hearing aids. I saw the ENT specialist there about my balance problem that may be from damage to the vestibular nerve that was damaged from the loud noises responsible for my hearing loss.

Vestibulocochlear Nerve Anatomy

I itch. For most of my life I was allergy free. No more. There is always something setting my eczema off along with the stuffy nose. I have almost no sense of smell left. Springtime is wonderful except for the pollen. Fall is wonderful except for the pollen.

I ache. The knee, my wrist, both shoulders, and my back. I think all this is a sign of old age. Most of the time all these symptoms don’t interfere with my life. I just soldier along not letting all the stuff get to me. After all, it is just pain and will change tomorrow. I can usually let it all go. Yesterday, however, my knee hurt when it was straight. It also hurt when it was bent. Today it just barely hurts.

The trick for me is to not let the pain go to suffering. After all, we can’t do much about the pain, but suffering about it is a choice. All this stuff is a reminder about death. It’s clear by no that I am in the last third of my life, sitting in a coffee shop full of people in the first third of their lives.

The good thing about getting older is that I know a lot of stuff. I like thinking and writing about all that stuff. For example, I am about to make you yawn as you read about the Golden Fault. There is something for you to look forward to. In the meantime, health issues.

Carol has a chronic illness that limits her life, but the last year has been a bad one. Late last spring she had cataract surgery that went bad. The little sac the lens lives in tore, so the new lens had to go between her iris and cornea. She got a little hole poked in her iris to let fluid move around. The hole is too big, letting in too much light where it doesn’t belong, leading to lots of vision problems.

Cataract Surgery

She also had five stitches in her cornea, which meant pain for weeks. Now, with a new Ophthalmologist, she is wearing a tinted contact lens to confirm the hole in her iris is too large. The lens works, but she is not a contact lens candidate. More discomfort. The next step is a minor surgical! procedure to make the hole smaller.

In the middle of all this, with all the multiple visits to eye doctors, she had hemorrhoid surgery. It was her last resort and believe me, it should be a last resort. Pain, lots of it, and a major restriction on activity. What a year.

But, through it all, life is good. We have fun, cooking, snuggling, reading aloud, gardening, fixing the garage where I drove into it (I am always on her case about her driving.). And, we are watching NCIS from the first season on. There is something about murder mysteries that pulls us, and the character development is as good as it was in Seinfeld. We still call Mark Harmon Dickie, from a role he had as a detective years ago. The name seems to fit him.

Aging, health issues, losing old friends, all this comes when you are in your seventies, but life goes,on, and we are wise and skilled at enjoying life. In addition, we just found out that Carol’s sister, diagnosed with stage four cancer, is now cancer free after an ordeal with treatment. She had multiple tumors, and they are gone.

Posted in Current Activities, Health Issues, My Story, Pain, Stories

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