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Can oceans power the world? · Stuff You Should Know

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Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
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Speaker 1: from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
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Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chucker's Bryant
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Speaker 1: that makes this stuff you should know? And the heavy
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Speaker 1: index finger of Matt Frederick. Yeah did you hear that?
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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it was like an ant boat coming down
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Speaker 1: on something. Nobody push his record, Like Maddie, one of
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Speaker 1: my friends has um finger tips, just the fingertips that
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Speaker 1: look very much like big toes all across and um,
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Speaker 1: they're big. He has big, huge fingertips. Is is what
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Speaker 1: you like? The finger is just narrow and then it
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Speaker 1: balloons up at the end really freakishly. So he'd be
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Speaker 1: a good bass player, I would think, maybe, So I'll
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Speaker 1: ask him you should do that, Chuck. Do you remember
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Speaker 1: we have talked about capturing enter g right, because energy
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Speaker 1: can neither be created nor destroyed, It can only be captured.
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Speaker 1: We talked about several ways to do this. Yes, well,
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Speaker 1: one of the ways we talked about, um was by
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Speaker 1: putting basically what amount to wind turbines underwater, and there
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Speaker 1: was a we did under water turbines. Yeah, sure we did, right,
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Speaker 1: I think so it's hard to tell these days. Well,
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Speaker 1: if we didn't, that's good because we're going to cover
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Speaker 1: that again in this podcast. I think we did because
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Speaker 1: we talked about Verdant technology and they were the ones
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Speaker 1: who put some in the Hudson, didn't we East River? Yes? Sure? Okay, so,
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Speaker 1: um they put some into two thousand and six. It was,
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Speaker 1: you know, to to wide acclaim. This is a huge project.
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Speaker 1: They were gonna just power large parts of New York
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Speaker 1: with this technology. And they went back to check on
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Speaker 1: them and they found that, um, all but two of
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Speaker 1: their wind turbines were just completely in shambles. It's one
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Speaker 1: of the great challenges in underwater energy production BINGO. I
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Speaker 1: have updates on them. We'll get to that later though. Okay,
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Speaker 1: luckily for us, right, because the the ocean and well
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Speaker 1: bodies of water are this huge untapped resource, well mostly
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Speaker 1: untapped resource of energy, there are other ways to capture
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Speaker 1: energy from the ocean, right, which is what we're going
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Speaker 1: to talk about today. Let's do it, and let's start
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Speaker 1: with the French, because apparently they've long known they're all
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Speaker 1: over it. Yeah, we like all of the major innovations
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Speaker 1: that we're pursuing right now came from the French over
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Speaker 1: the last couple of centuries, right who knew, Well, we
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Speaker 1: should just mention the history in in uh long time ago,
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Speaker 1: a frenchy and his son who I could not find
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Speaker 1: their names. I couldn't either, but they had a pretty
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Speaker 1: cool idea. They attached a big lever to the side
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Speaker 1: of their boat, and when the ocean moved up and down,
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Speaker 1: the lever moved up and down, which could potentially power
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Speaker 1: pumps and saws and things like that. Right, and let's
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Speaker 1: cat showing the mechanical energy of wave motion. Very good sense.
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Speaker 1: But unfortunately, well or maybe fortunately, the steam engine came
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Speaker 1: along kind of rendered that. Unfortunately for him, his idea
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Speaker 1: was rendered moot. But thanks to the rest of us,
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Speaker 1: because steam energy turned out to be a pretty cool
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Speaker 1: thing the steam engine did. About a hundred years after that,
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Speaker 1: another Frenchman used heat energy from the ocean to generate power,
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Speaker 1: but it was not very cost effective, so that died
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Speaker 1: as well. And then uh nineteen sixty six there was
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Speaker 1: finally some success once again in France. In Britain, Yeah,
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Speaker 1: and the on the Ross River and uh, it still
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Speaker 1: operates today, and it is actually, from what I can tell,
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Speaker 1: that the biggest success, right, that's yeah, and it's because
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Speaker 1: it's actually generating electricity quite a bit, two D forty megawatts,
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Speaker 1: which is uh about that's better than a wind farm
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Speaker 1: and that's yeah that typical. Not quite as good as
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Speaker 1: a coal fire power plant, but um it is better
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Speaker 1: than a typic coal wind farm, and um it is
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Speaker 1: far and away I think the most successful UH Ocean
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Speaker 1: Energy UM outfit running right now. Right. Yeah, well that's
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Speaker 1: on the river though, was it. Yeah, So it's capturing
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Speaker 1: the energy of the tide. There's also you can you
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Speaker 1: can capture the energy of the heat differential, right, and
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Speaker 1: you can capture the mechanical energy right with ways. There's
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Speaker 1: three ways, three at least, yeah, yeah, exactly right, because
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Speaker 1: there's also the currents underwater turbines. It's four, I mean,
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Speaker 1: the ways to capture energy. Right, let's talk about ways.
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Speaker 1: This one is my favorite because there's so much to it. Right,
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Speaker 1: there's mechanical energy that can be captured, kinetic energy that
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Speaker 1: can be converted into useful mechanical energy. Basically, what you
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Speaker 1: do is you want to power somehow power turbine or
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Speaker 1: a piston to create electric city from a generator. Right. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: and waves move thanks to the wind, create big crest
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Speaker 1: and troughs. And at one point someone looked at those
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Speaker 1: and said, hey, that's pretty consistent. I bet we could
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Speaker 1: capture that. Um. It is very consistent, is very predictable, right, Um.
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Speaker 1: Waves are found all over the place, so they actually
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Speaker 1: can bring energy from other parts of the globe to you,
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Speaker 1: to you, top of the muffin, to you. Uh and um,
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Speaker 1: let's talk about how a wave comes up. Did you
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Speaker 1: read this? No, because you're the expert. You're the wave expert.
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Speaker 1: All right. So waves are the result of a transfer
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Speaker 1: of solar energy to the water, to the ocean. Okay,
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Speaker 1: so did you know that wind is really just a
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Speaker 1: creation of solar energy, solar radiation, solar heat, and that
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Speaker 1: ends up driving the wave. Yes, But it's interesting how
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Speaker 1: it starts with the sun. It does. It does start
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Speaker 1: with the sun, Chuck, thanks for that segue. Um, this
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Speaker 1: sun does not heat the earth evenly, right, right, So
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Speaker 1: there's different pockets of air, surface air that are heated
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Speaker 1: more quickly than others. They rise, okay, and as they rise,
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Speaker 1: the colder air rushes in and the movement of the
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Speaker 1: colder air to fill in the space left by the
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Speaker 1: warmer air. That's wind. That's wind. That's awesome. Okay. So
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Speaker 1: when this, when this water, when the ocean is pushed
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Speaker 1: by wind enough, long enough, hard enough, fast enough for
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Speaker 1: far enough distances, waves pick up, right, And that that
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Speaker 1: gives even more traction to the wind. So the waves
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Speaker 1: just get bigger and bigger. That's why a good storm
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Speaker 1: will produce bigger waves. Right. But what you have is
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Speaker 1: kinetic energy pushing the water into waves, and that kinetic
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Speaker 1: energy becomes stored in the wave. Right. So the wave
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Speaker 1: isn't a bunch of moving water. The water actually, as
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Speaker 1: this kinetic energy rolls over, it acts as a conveyor belt,
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Speaker 1: so it moves in a scular motion and delivers this
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Speaker 1: big dent amount of kinetic energy to you to capture
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Speaker 1: if you have a wave converter. Uh, handy, exactly, dude,
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Speaker 1: Very nice explanation, was it? Yeah? Thanks man? I think so.
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Speaker 1: It's been a little while since I got one. Right.
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Speaker 1: Shall we talk about tides now? Yes, much to the
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Speaker 1: chagrin of Bill O'Reilly, we do know what causes tide.
7:23
Speaker 1: I'm glad you meant did you see that? Bill O'Reilly
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Speaker 1: didn't know that the pull of the moon, the gravitational
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Speaker 1: force of the moon, is what creates tides. What's crazy
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Speaker 1: is that the atheist was like, well, we don't know,
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Speaker 1: but still he was a little flustered. I can he
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Speaker 1: was flustered, but a real opportunity to be like everybody
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Speaker 1: that saw that was on the edge of their seats saying,
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Speaker 1: say it the moon, and the guy was like, yeah, well. Unfortunately,
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Speaker 1: no steps in there to correct him. I haven't heard
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Speaker 1: a response from him either. I'm curious who Bill O'Reilly. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: I don't think he's going to come out and address it.
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Speaker 1: At this point, he already looked dumb enough. He didn't care. Okay,
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Speaker 1: so uh, for those of you don't know what you're
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Speaker 1: talking about quickly. Bill O'Reilly was interviewing the head of
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Speaker 1: the Atheists of America and said, he explains God by
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Speaker 1: the fact that no one can explain what causes tides.
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Speaker 1: The tides go out, tides come in every day, and
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Speaker 1: we can't explain it, and no one knows why. I
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Speaker 1: think is what he said. So anyway, it is in
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Speaker 1: fact caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. Mr
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Speaker 1: O'Reilly and Uh. The cool thing about tides is there
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Speaker 1: everywhere along the coast. They all coastal areas experienced too
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Speaker 1: high tides and two low tides every day and they're
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Speaker 1: pretty much on the button. The unfortunate thing is there's
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Speaker 1: only about forty places around the Earth where you can
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Speaker 1: generate electricity from this because the difference between high and
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Speaker 1: low tide has to be at least sixteen feet and
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Speaker 1: that doesn't happen everywhere. So there's like forty sites around
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Speaker 1: the world that are suitable. Forty sites and the Bay
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Speaker 1: of Fundy I don't think we mentioned yet that is
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Speaker 1: where they're actually doing this, and it's it's a great place. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: it's um a narrow inlet and has the highest tides
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Speaker 1: in the world fifty feet in a very short cycle,
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Speaker 1: so in six hours they can produce a hundred and
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Speaker 1: ten billion tons of seawater flow in and out. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: that's a lot. Again it is. So that's yeah, and
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Speaker 1: they're they're actually generating power there that Fundy. But what's
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Speaker 1: crazy is that that when we talked about in Britain
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Speaker 1: France um two forty megawatts the Bay of fundy with
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Speaker 1: that enormous transfer of seawater in and out still only
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Speaker 1: generates a twenty megawatt um power twenty megawatts of power,
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Speaker 1: twenty megawatt power just one. So one way they can
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Speaker 1: do this, Josh, is with uh, like rivers with a dam. Right,
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Speaker 1: they can build a title dam essentially and it operates
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Speaker 1: kind of in the same way, which is how buddy,
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Speaker 1: they don't know if we need to explain that gates
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Speaker 1: open up. It's called a beverage or is it a
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Speaker 1: beverage or barrage barage and the tides Uh. When there's
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Speaker 1: an adequate difference in the level of water on the
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Speaker 1: oposite side of the dam, the gate opens and allows
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Speaker 1: water to flow in across the turbine spinds. The turbine
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Speaker 1: creates h electricity via generator. Right, So anytime you're talking
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Speaker 1: about wave action or the movement of water, UH, there's
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Speaker 1: going to be some sort of turbine or piston involved
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Speaker 1: because that's all you need and it's going to generate electricity.
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Speaker 1: It still blows me away that that's possible. Yeah, but
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Speaker 1: it's so simple too. We just have to figure out
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Speaker 1: how to do it more efficiently and then you know,
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Speaker 1: we'll be able to come up with this nice grab
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Speaker 1: bag of energy providers. It's right. Yeah, ocean tides Josh
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Speaker 1: into title currents is another way. Yeah, what are title currents? Well,
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Speaker 1: title currents are well what bring in the tides? Are
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Speaker 1: the currents that are created by the tides coming in
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Speaker 1: and out. Right. The problem with the title currents is
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Speaker 1: that they're not constant. Like you said, they happen twice
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Speaker 1: a day in and out each twice a day, right,
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Speaker 1: too high, too low. So you've got four tidal currents.
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Speaker 1: If you're set up to um generate power as it's
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Speaker 1: going in and out, well, how would you do that? Though?
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Speaker 1: Underwater turbines it's basically like a wind underwater wind farm.
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Speaker 1: I didn't realize that, like sixty six foot propellers underwater spinning.
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Speaker 1: But that's what they put. Was it the East River?
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Speaker 1: That's what they put in New York? They had these
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Speaker 1: in there. Still, Yeah, well at least two more than that.
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Speaker 1: We'll get to that. It's it's paying off finally, So Chuck,
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Speaker 1: that's that's electrical. As as we said electrical, there's going
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Speaker 1: to be some sort of turbine or piston that is
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Speaker 1: moved up and down by the the either the well
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Speaker 1: the movement of water, whether it's waves, currents, tides, whatever.
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Speaker 1: But then there's also um thermal energy big time. You
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Speaker 1: want the stat Yeah, the ocean, the sun provides the
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Speaker 1: equivalent of two hundred and fifty billion barrels of oil
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Speaker 1: per day. Yeah in the ocean. Yeah, that's that's a lot. Yeah,
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Speaker 1: that's a lot. More sits out there and collects all
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Speaker 1: this heat from the ocean. I think in the unit
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Speaker 1: in the US we use twenty one million barrels of
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Speaker 1: oil a day. And this is now the problem is
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Speaker 1: is like that's across the entire ocean, that's across the
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Speaker 1: Earth's surface. We we don't know how to do that.
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Speaker 1: We're still working with full of vite ex cels, like
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Speaker 1: how does this work? How do we make this happen?
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Speaker 1: So that's that's as much as we could ever possibly capture, right,
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Speaker 1: but still even if we get a significant portion of
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Speaker 1: that and can convert it into energy, we're on easy Street. Explain,
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Speaker 1: Oh tech is ocean thermal energy conversion? Right? Yeah, that's
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Speaker 1: how they do it, and there's a couple of ways
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Speaker 1: to do it. There's a closed system there's an open system,
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Speaker 1: and there's a hybrid system, which is open and closed
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Speaker 1: system mixed together. So with a closed system, um, you
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Speaker 1: usually you take some sort of low boiling point liquid
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Speaker 1: like ammonia, which has a boiling point of like negative
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Speaker 1: twenty eight degrees fahrenheit, right, which I don't understand how
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Speaker 1: windex works. Then that's something I think we need to
13:11
Speaker 1: look up index works. Yeah, has ammonia in it? Right?
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Speaker 1: How is it kept liquid? Because I can tell you
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Speaker 1: my the the area under my sink is warmer than
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Speaker 1: negative twenty degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, I mean, but there's bottles
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Speaker 1: of ammonia to just playing ammonia. Right. I guess Bill
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Speaker 1: O'Reilly was right, Chuck. Um. So in a close in
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Speaker 1: a closed system, you take ammonia, um, you expose it
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Speaker 1: to sea water warmer seawater, right, uh, and it immediately
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Speaker 1: vaporizes into gas. As that gas expands, it pushes a turbine.
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Speaker 1: There's another turbine, right, It's like a steam engine. Wood
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Speaker 1: powers a generator, and then the gas has moved into
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Speaker 1: another chamber where it encounters co old sea water and
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Speaker 1: converts back into liquid, and it's pumped back into the
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Speaker 1: original chamber again. See I love systems like this where
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Speaker 1: it's just a loop. Stuff becomes vapor, then it goes
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Speaker 1: back to what it was, then it becomes vapor again.
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Speaker 1: Seems real efficient, closed system, right yes, yes, And then
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Speaker 1: there's the open system, right yeah, And that's a little
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Speaker 1: bit of a different principle. It's warm surface water, but
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Speaker 1: he's a vacuum chamber. They move all the air and
14:28
Speaker 1: because of magic, when you do this, the seawater boils.
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Speaker 1: Is that insane clown posse? I think so? So it
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Speaker 1: actually boils and that produces steam, like pure water steam,
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Speaker 1: and then that can drive the turbine. And then just
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Speaker 1: like with the ammonia, you pump cold sea water back
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Speaker 1: in cools, the steam changes it back into water and
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Speaker 1: back again back again. The cool part about this is
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Speaker 1: they can create fresh water as sort of a byproduct,
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Speaker 1: which is awesome. That's huge desalienation is they've had a
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Speaker 1: lot of t auble doing that successfully in a large
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Speaker 1: scale right right. Um we talked about that in manufacturing
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Speaker 1: water and some of the other ones. Um. But yeah,
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Speaker 1: if you if you create the steam out of sea water,
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Speaker 1: they found that it's almost pure water, pure freshwater. No
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Speaker 1: salt and you can drink that. So yeah, they're trying
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Speaker 1: to figure out how to use open cycle systems and
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Speaker 1: the hybrid system, which, like I said, combines closed in
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Speaker 1: open systems. Um, but both the hybrid and the open
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Speaker 1: create fresh water. And I think they figured out that
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Speaker 1: a single too megawatt oh tech plant, either open or hybrid,
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Speaker 1: could produce cubic meters of desalinated water every day, which
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Speaker 1: is that I can't drink that much. Yeah, you can
15:47
Speaker 1: drink that much coffee. I do, which is why I
15:51
Speaker 1: spill it right now. Unfortunately, otech systems aren't producing a
15:55
Speaker 1: lot of electricity, but they think that the potential there
15:59
Speaker 1: is pretty great. Other people are investing in that at
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Speaker 1: this point. Yeah, that seems to be the one that's
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Speaker 1: attracting the most investment dollars right now. I wonder why, uh,
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Speaker 1: what do you mean why people are going that way? Yeah,
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Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe it's the most efficient, cost effective
16:14
Speaker 1: way at this point, who knows. I think it's actually
16:16
Speaker 1: the most expensive, to tell you the truth. Really, I
16:19
Speaker 1: mean it's not the most efficient it maybe it's true,
16:23
Speaker 1: but it's it's the most expensive. I think. Well, right now,
16:26
Speaker 1: what's going on is there's a lot of research and
16:28
Speaker 1: development happening and all these fields because they think the
16:31
Speaker 1: ocean is really where it's at. We talked about Verdant Power. UM,
16:36
Speaker 1: here's a little update on their system. They are in
16:39
Speaker 1: phase three right now. They, like you said, they had
16:43
Speaker 1: some problems in the demonstration phase because marine environments are
16:48
Speaker 1: pretty rough on everything. Just ask anyone who like lives
16:51
Speaker 1: on the beach with a car. Some fishes like I'm
16:54
Speaker 1: swimming here. That's true. We'll get to that as controversial.
16:58
Speaker 1: UH talked about it before, but yeah, that's true. In
17:02
Speaker 1: the demonstration period though, they did produced a free flow system.
17:07
Speaker 1: They produced elect They called it excellent hydrodynamic, mechanical and
17:11
Speaker 1: electrical performance grid connect the power with no quality problems,
17:15
Speaker 1: fully by directional, continuous unattended operation. So they don't even
17:22
Speaker 1: have some dude down there right. I wonder how it's
17:26
Speaker 1: that job would pay exactly. In the end, they produced
17:29
Speaker 1: seventy megawatt hours of energy to two end users and
17:33
Speaker 1: UM right now, they applied for a permit basically in
17:37
Speaker 1: just a couple of months ago. Last month in December,
17:40
Speaker 1: they applied for a permit to make it real, and
17:42
Speaker 1: they're waiting on. All of that was just they just
17:45
Speaker 1: wrote that story down there, like now let's make this real. Well,
17:49
Speaker 1: they want to do it, you know, in earnest and
17:52
Speaker 1: not just demonstrate, and they think they're at that point now.
17:54
Speaker 1: So they're waiting on I think right now they're waiting
17:56
Speaker 1: on New York City to say, take over the East
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Speaker 1: River or this portion of it and do it so
18:01
Speaker 1: to megawatts uh, seventy megawatt hours of energy families to
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Speaker 1: two end users. I don't think they were families. I
18:08
Speaker 1: think they were probably power plants or something. Ohh gotcha,
18:12
Speaker 1: Yeah are you sure? No, I'm not because then user
18:14
Speaker 1: could also be like some guy with a hot plate
18:16
Speaker 1: and he's like, hey, I'm my hot plates working just fine.
18:20
Speaker 1: The UK is is who is leading title turbine research
18:23
Speaker 1: right now, though, So hats off to you, is it
18:26
Speaker 1: the UK? I thought this has something? Well, no, they're
18:30
Speaker 1: they're all dabbling in its Spain in Portugal, but the
18:32
Speaker 1: UK is currently ahead of the game in in this
18:35
Speaker 1: kind of stuff so far. Wow. Well, yeah, that's off
18:38
Speaker 1: for sure. And yeah they took the mantle from the
18:41
Speaker 1: French and ran with it, right The French are like,
18:45
Speaker 1: it's two accents for me to zero for you today.
18:48
Speaker 1: That's a switch. So why is this good? Why are
18:52
Speaker 1: we doing this? What are the environmental advantages? Well, one
18:55
Speaker 1: of the things we said was the um with wave energy. Right,
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Speaker 1: I didn't give you a stat that's going to blow
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Speaker 1: your mind. Wave energy alone, right, the kinnectic energy found
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Speaker 1: in the motion on the ocean, right could point zero
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Speaker 1: two percent of that, right, could power the entire planet.
19:17
Speaker 1: Point zero two I'm sorry, point of the energy, and
19:20
Speaker 1: ocean waves could power the entire But still it's pretty
19:23
Speaker 1: impressive point to, not two point anything point to. So
19:28
Speaker 1: what you're saying is we just need to be able
19:29
Speaker 1: to harness a very tiny percentage. Yes. Plus also the
19:33
Speaker 1: good thing, the good thing about waves, which is why
19:35
Speaker 1: I throw my weight behind it. As compared to a
19:37
Speaker 1: wind farm, right, Um, you've got three times the density, right,
19:43
Speaker 1: so conceivably moving it about the same rate as as
19:48
Speaker 1: you know, wind five knots or something like that, you
19:50
Speaker 1: would have three times the amount of energy capable of
19:53
Speaker 1: being captured and transferred into usable electricity. Yeah, it says
19:58
Speaker 1: a current, a water current, ocean current running five miles
20:01
Speaker 1: an hour can turn a tidal turbine thirty revolutions per minute,
20:05
Speaker 1: and that is very much more than the wind. Well,
20:08
Speaker 1: just and don't forget. I mean we're talking about turbines
20:11
Speaker 1: that are propellers that are sixty ft across each. I
20:15
Speaker 1: mean that's a lot, yes, thirty times a minute, it's
20:18
Speaker 1: like almost once every few seconds. Uh. They also run
20:23
Speaker 1: silent and run deep. So a lot of people complain
20:26
Speaker 1: about the noise of wind farms, the buzzing, the buzzing,
20:31
Speaker 1: the constant buzzing, the aerodynamics noise, and you know they're
20:35
Speaker 1: underwater so you don't see it. Is. The funny thing
20:37
Speaker 1: is that's such a like a human centric way of
20:40
Speaker 1: looking at it, like, oh, it doesn't make any noise
20:42
Speaker 1: because we're above water, right, who cares about what it
20:46
Speaker 1: sounds like below water? Surely placing these things in the
20:49
Speaker 1: ocean are going to have like a huge impact, right well,
20:52
Speaker 1: and that's the downside. Might as well get to that.
20:55
Speaker 1: You can't you can't just throw these things in the
20:57
Speaker 1: ocean and have no impact on marine life. Gonna kill
21:00
Speaker 1: some fish, definitely disrupt some some spawning patterns will take
21:05
Speaker 1: Like an otech system, right, a closed otech system, if
21:09
Speaker 1: say it's battered about by a particularly bad typhoon, that
21:14
Speaker 1: closed system may not be closed any longer, and you've
21:16
Speaker 1: got a massive ammonia spill in a local area in
21:19
Speaker 1: the ocean, and yeah, that's gonna kill some fish, right. Um,
21:24
Speaker 1: same with any grease that you might need to keep
21:27
Speaker 1: a piston moving properly. There's just there's a lot of
21:31
Speaker 1: factors involved. But conceivably, I'm I'm pretty sure you could
21:35
Speaker 1: do a um what are those called that that risk
21:39
Speaker 1: assessment people do, like a cost benefit analysis versus say
21:44
Speaker 1: something like a power plant UH is spewing out right?
21:49
Speaker 1: How how much couldn't you compare that pretty easily? I think?
21:54
Speaker 1: And I wonder if if the impact would be much
21:57
Speaker 1: less severe on ocean environment than right above ground. Well,
22:03
Speaker 1: there's going to be an impact. You can't create electricity
22:05
Speaker 1: without some sort of impact on something in the environments,
22:08
Speaker 1: like making so exactly got to break a few eggs.
22:11
Speaker 1: So I think the ideal is to find the minimal
22:15
Speaker 1: impact with the maximum payoff. Right now, it is not
22:19
Speaker 1: ocean UH power because it's still heavily in the R
22:24
Speaker 1: and D phase, which means it's expensive. But as the
22:27
Speaker 1: kinks get worked out, like the solar panels were, I
22:31
Speaker 1: mean they're still expensive, but they were way more expensive
22:33
Speaker 1: twenty years ago because they didn't work right all the
22:36
Speaker 1: time and you had to put more money into making
22:38
Speaker 1: them work right. But once you get the kinks worked out,
22:40
Speaker 1: it becomes a little more efficient, little cheaper. So maybe
22:42
Speaker 1: it'll it'll close that gap a bit. Yeah, my my
22:45
Speaker 1: money and I think we should talk about why tides,
22:48
Speaker 1: title damns barages don't are have are problematic problem because
22:54
Speaker 1: they kind of captured my attention, like I was thinking, well, yeah,
22:57
Speaker 1: it's build some hydro electric electric damns these forty sites
23:01
Speaker 1: and that will help tremendously. Sure. Part of the problem
23:03
Speaker 1: is the whole point of um title movement in a bay,
23:07
Speaker 1: or one of the benefits of it, UH is to
23:11
Speaker 1: filter out impurities, silt, crud, dead crayfish, all that stuff
23:17
Speaker 1: sucked out and you know turned into food or you
23:19
Speaker 1: know filtered into the rest of the ocean. Right If
23:22
Speaker 1: you have a damn there, that's that's UH making that
23:26
Speaker 1: more difficult or preventing that. In some cases, the local
23:29
Speaker 1: environment around that bay suffers because the water purity plummets.
23:34
Speaker 1: My money's on wave converter wave energy converters like Salter's duck.
23:39
Speaker 1: Plus we found out that damns on the earth can
23:41
Speaker 1: potentially cause earthquakes. Wonder I mean, I wonder if we
23:45
Speaker 1: could have an effect under the seafloor as well. Yeah,
23:49
Speaker 1: learn the hard way sometimes, we definitely do. Actually that's
23:52
Speaker 1: the only way humans learned. Chuck. Yeah, agreed. Well, if
23:57
Speaker 1: you want to learn more about Salter's duck, this a
24:00
Speaker 1: sterious thing I've just now mentioned, I would recommend you
24:03
Speaker 1: type that in S A L T E R apostrophe
24:07
Speaker 1: s in the handy search bar How stuff works dot Com.
24:09
Speaker 1: Also required reading for this one is wave energy type
24:13
Speaker 1: that in and ocean power. That'll just bring up everything
24:17
Speaker 1: right there. Read those three, and uh, listen to this
24:19
Speaker 1: podcast and just start spewing out information whenever somebody's like,
24:24
Speaker 1: I love oil, Yeah for coal? Yeah, you know, we
24:28
Speaker 1: need to do a show on his mountaintop removal coal mining.
24:31
Speaker 1: Have you heard of that? Yeah, that's that's tough stuff
24:36
Speaker 1: that makes releasing lubricants into the ocean through an o
24:39
Speaker 1: tech system look like nothing exactly. Yeah. Alright, well, yeah,
24:44
Speaker 1: I said handy search bar already, right, listener, mail Josh,
24:50
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this one of a hundred or more
24:54
Speaker 1: ocular migraine emails. I would say at least the hundred.
24:57
Speaker 1: We've heard from a lot of people who suffer from
24:59
Speaker 1: the ease, and we came We've got the idea. Right.
25:03
Speaker 1: I want to say to everyone that I'm sorry you
25:05
Speaker 1: have to deal with this stuff. But I picked out
25:07
Speaker 1: one from David in the UK because I like a
25:10
Speaker 1: UK Did that have a funny accent? It did? Hey, guys,
25:14
Speaker 1: just listen to the migraine podcast. I'm responding to your call.
25:17
Speaker 1: I was first diagnosed with migraines at fourteen. I'm now
25:19
Speaker 1: forty seven. When I had an extreme port of of
25:23
Speaker 1: dizziness at fourteen, it made me nauseous, preventing me from
25:26
Speaker 1: standing because the room was spinning, preventing my eyes from
25:29
Speaker 1: remaining still if I look to the right jittered. I've
25:34
Speaker 1: not had a particular episode like this since, but the
25:36
Speaker 1: migraine symptoms have changed over the years. Up to the
25:39
Speaker 1: early twenties, I would get tunnel vision. I could only
25:41
Speaker 1: see what was directly what I was directly looking at
25:44
Speaker 1: about fifteen percent of my vision. The rest was all swirly.
25:48
Speaker 1: Imagine looking through a scene through two highly polished steel tubes.
25:54
Speaker 1: From then on, it was the opposite. The subject I
25:56
Speaker 1: was looking at would disappear, but the outer part was clear.
25:58
Speaker 1: Imagine looking at some twenty ft away, but look directly
26:02
Speaker 1: at their face. Their head disappeared. Peculiar thing. I think
26:06
Speaker 1: that's peculiar enough. The peculiar thing is that it didn't
26:09
Speaker 1: look odd until I thought about it. Somewhat like a
26:12
Speaker 1: blind spot test. Yeah, blind spots are very um common,
26:19
Speaker 1: so well, sure they're just concerued. Uh. There's a very
26:22
Speaker 1: mild headache following an episode, similar to eyestrain, and sometimes
26:26
Speaker 1: a feeling which I can only describe as an empty
26:28
Speaker 1: space in my head that feels as though it should
26:31
Speaker 1: have a sign saying headache to be erected here soon.
26:36
Speaker 1: That's not age, that's not touch wood, guys. I have
26:38
Speaker 1: not had an episode in waking hours for about four
26:41
Speaker 1: years now, and notice no more morning symptoms, which I
26:44
Speaker 1: attribute to being on permanent statin medication for high cholesterol.
26:49
Speaker 1: You know, here in America we don't touch wood. We not.
26:55
Speaker 1: So that's from David in the UK. And uh, for
26:57
Speaker 1: everyone suffering from ocular migraines, I'm so right, yes, same,
27:01
Speaker 1: it sounds awful. He talked about um his eyes when
27:06
Speaker 1: he looked to the right, his eyes trembling back and forth.
27:09
Speaker 1: Do you remember that actor whose whose eyes like went
27:11
Speaker 1: back and forth all the time. He was in h
27:15
Speaker 1: what's the one with John Cusack where there's a murder
27:18
Speaker 1: John Cusack? Ray Leota say anything? Oh the hotel thing? Yeah, yeah,
27:23
Speaker 1: that was awful. What was the name of the movie though,
27:25
Speaker 1: Oh I can't remember. Well, he played the guy, like
27:29
Speaker 1: the bad guy in that one. But he was also
27:31
Speaker 1: in a movie with Mickey Rourke. His eyes twitchy. Yeah,
27:34
Speaker 1: that's just like what the actor was known for. Like,
27:37
Speaker 1: they just moved back and forth in a really weird way.
27:40
Speaker 1: So if you can tell me what movie that that
27:43
Speaker 1: guy appeared with with Mickey Rourke? All right, yeah, I
27:47
Speaker 1: want to hear Okay, right, I think we should. Well,
27:49
Speaker 1: we can't do contests anymore, can't we. You know, actors
27:52
Speaker 1: always list have you ever seen a head shot? They
27:53
Speaker 1: always list on the back their special things they can do. Yeah,
27:57
Speaker 1: this is always like horseback riding, BURPONCM man accents and
28:01
Speaker 1: this guy head high twitch right, it's crazy. I can't
28:05
Speaker 1: believe you haven't seen it. I probably haven't just didn't
28:08
Speaker 1: notice it or something. Well, if you can tell me
28:09
Speaker 1: what movie he was in with Mickey work. I want
28:11
Speaker 1: to hear it. Wrap it up in an email and
28:14
Speaker 1: send it to stuff Podcasts at how stuff works dot com.
28:21
Speaker 1: For moral on this and thousands of other topics. Is
28:24
Speaker 1: that how stuff works dot com. To learn more about
28:26
Speaker 1: the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper
28:29
Speaker 1: right corner of our homepage. The how Stuff Works iPhone
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