Source d’énergie surprenante: cheminées industrielles

Les pertes de chaleurs des cheminées industrielles pourraient générer des quantités énormes d’électricité.

[Orion] From his desk in an office in Chicago, Jeff Smith has a bird’s-eye view of the American landscape. Combing through a huge database of information compiled by the EPA, he can, almost literally, peer down every smokestack in the nation and figure out what’s going on inside.

And what he sees is heat. Waste heat—one of the country’s largest potential sources of power, pouring up out of those smokestacks. If it could be recycled into electricity, that heat would generate immense amounts of power without our having to burn any new fossil fuels. By immense, I mean, speaking technically, humongous. Even after he’s winnowed the nation’s half a million smokestacks down to the most likely customers, that leaves twenty-five thousand stacks. “An astronomical number,” Smith says.

Cables sectionnés: la suite

Ceci semble bien recherché… Je cherche à validre, à suivre…

Voici quelques uns des « hazards » relevés par cet article:

• 4 à 8 cables sectionnés en une dizaine de jours
• Presque tous autour de pays musulmans
• L’Iran ouvre sa bourse du pétrole le 17 février

Les impacts humains sur les océans

[Guardian] Fishing, climate change and pollution have left an indelible mark on virtually all of the world’s oceans, according to a huge study that has mapped the total human impact on the seas for the first time. Scientists found that almost no areas have been left pristine and that more than 40% of the world’s oceans have been heavily affected.

« This project allows us to finally start to see the big picture of how humans are affecting the oceans, » said Ben Halpern, assistant research scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led the research. « Our results show that when these and other individual impacts are summed up, the big picture looks much worse than I imagine most people expected. It was certainly a surprise to me. »