BTW, I called Grasberg a base metal (copper) mine below; Poulgrain repeatedly calls it a gold mine. It is both -- on value it has been about 60:40 copper:gold over the 30-year life of the open pit (1990-2019; mining has now moved underground).
Reported total open pit production was 12.2 million tonnes of copper and 47 million ounces of gold. At approximate 30-year average prices, those were worth US$60 billion for the copper and US$40 billion for the gold -- about US$100 billion all up.
That's (Douglas Adams' mice voice) 'a lot of moneeeey', but hardly an Earth-shattering amount …and note that development turned out to be so challenging that the thing wouldn't have shown a profit until the end of the century, by when Allen Dulles had been dead for 30 years.
*If* it was an intense personal interest of his, then it was an extremely foolish one. Wouldn't be the first in history to be gold-obsessed though.
Another #DYK: Grasberg was for many years operated fly-in fly-out out of Cairns, at least for expat staff. Our country is full of dirty little 'secrets'.
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Don't like this old calculation that I've quoted several times recently? Coal-fired power stations are thermodynamic heat engines; they do not get to break the laws of physics. The maximum achievable thermodynamic efficiency depends on the ratio of the absolute temperatures...
…The ratio of the (Kelvin) temperature of the 'cold side' of the engine (~condensing steam in the condenser) to that of the 'hot side' (~the hottest steam in the boiler). Under idealised low-heat-flow conditions, the well-know Carnot formula applies:
ηₘₐₓ = 1 - Tc/Th
...But under more realistic high-flow conditions, it becomes the square root of the temperature ratio, which is what I applied:
'High-efficiency low-emissions' (HELE) coal-fired power is an outright lie. Each time you hear some politician spruiking it, ask who is paying them, what have they been promised, who are they working for (hint: it isn't you).
We've been over this ground so many times, but still they flog it. Things: 1. Australia already has multiple 'higher-efficiency' supercritical coal-fired power stations. They're our newest and *least reliable*: Callide C (currently broken), Kogan Creek (breaks often), Millmerran.
2. What liars ('proponents') are mostly talking with HELE is 'ultra-supercritical' -- slightly higher steam temperature and pressure than standard supercritical. The extra efficiency gain from that is *small*, about 5%.
That Science Show segment from Karlie Noon and Corey Tutt was just ghastly. How, still, after all this time, are we still doing this? Australian is deeply, fundamentally racist at levels that are incomprehensible to me.
...And sexist. Apart from anything else, it's a vast societal and economic waste to not make the best of every child, every student, at every school, especially at every public school. Why do we not see this? Why can't we manage it? WTF is wrong with us.
Sure, some will manage to achieve anyway. What about the rest? Yet we still spend bulk public funds on wealthy private schools that: 1. Do not educate most students 2. Do not educate the most challenging students 3. Waste our limited resources on grandiose pretence.
ABC 'Back to Nature' -- wonderful pics; absolute crap commentary. Is she making it up as she goes along, cherry picking half-baked nonsense stories?
Once again, how drones have transformed filmmaking, and not just docos.
'Finke River on the same course as 100 million years ago' ...really, maybe cite? The world was an unrecognisably different place 100 million years ago – 10-15°C hotter than now, with crocodiles and turtles living near the north pole. Australia was still connected to Antarctica!
Vote albatross! (Yes that is the right one, but pic was in Nzud.)
Is very much an Australian bird -- it breeds on three little islands in Tasmania and nowhere else, anywhere: Albatross Island, Pedra Branca, and the Mewstone.