Your Results May Differ

"Is it time for the USGS and DOE to join forces and speak with one mind?"

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it. The organization has four major science disciplines, concerning biology, geography, geology, and hydrology. The USGS is a fact-finding research organization with no regulatory responsibility. The motto of the USGS is "Science for a changing world".

These seem to be two entirely different sacred cows with entirely different missions. Which mouth should such a combined group speak from?

We need to completely eliminate the DOE. It started as a Carter plan to get us off of foreign oil..............it failed................scrap it.

These guys can worry about nuclear material.

I goofed. These guys, mentioned above, are an arm of the DOE. Okay, maybe we should stop adding arms to failures.

How about these guys, for nuke material?

How about these guys?

Ahem. Only one of the goals of the DOE was finding alternate energy sources. The other goal was scientific research at several national facilities, like one that I'm fond of.

Definitely cool.

If this statement is accurate, we don't need the DOE, some greedy corporation will come along to exploit it.

"Plant fatty acids are an approximately $150-billion-dollar-a-year market," said Brookhaven biochemist John Shanklin, lead author on the paper.

Well, ahem. National labs existed before DOE iust fine, and will exist under another umbrella after DOE, thank you. Tasks assigned and withdrawn to departments all the time. And I am fond of the Long Island one too.

National labs did exist prior to the DOE but under many different umbrellas. This maximized the bureaucracy overhead in the labs and the universities that wished to use their facilities. Now there are many problems with all bureaucracies and DOE proves this point. But to dissolve any organization without a sound or even plausible plan to fill the void is naive at best.

DOE failed in its prime directive: charting the path to energy independence. A fundamental review is timely. Keeping the Labs in good working order is a part of it, only. For that, a few observations.

Hydrocarbons are needed for certain purposes: chemistry and transportation. It is nearly obscene to use them for energy production.

Generation 4 atomic power is the sane way to provide baseline power, no matter the catervaulig on the matter. The rev. 0,9 ones we operate today were passee long time ago.

There is plenty to do in it, after the basic decisions are made.

Nuclear is the way to go no doubt.

Trying to get the general public's collective head out of their backside takes a long time - to get politicians organized to do anything is damn near impossible.

Yucca Mountain is a case on the table today.

In both cases , the "mouth" at the other end?

Speaking with one voice? What for? Anybody who lives in a family, has friends, works someplace, handles and iudges multiple voices iust fine. It is called life.

Geologists speak an interesting language. There are a half a dozen reserves categories from readily available to theorethically existing at all. For example, fracking technology - in discourse right now - upgraded a whole class into available.

As the present political push goes now, assesment may be influenced. Not the facts in the ground.

There's a logical fallacy that people have overlooked here. Both of these numbers are estimates not measurements. As the article points out, each estimate uses a different set of data and different methodologies to produce a number. This does not show incompetence in either agency but the uncertainty in predicting the result of retrieving underground gas pockets.

IMHO this validates the large quantity of usable gas found in the Marcellus shale. Two agencies in trying to predict this unmeasurable quantity with different data and methods to use the data are within an order of magnitude of each other.

Well, I would prefer to put it a somewhat different way. In the classification by the geologists from certain reserves down to theoretical the uncertainty grows rapidly, and it becomes more and more a professional guesstimate. Those people are proud professionals, and I do not care to underestimate the quality of their statements.

In the case of the fracking gas field, there is a natural "out". It takes 10s of thousand of drillings to cover the whole field. As the edge is approached, the yield drops, the ratio of dry holes grows. No economic problem at so many holes drilled. I am not normally a betting person, but in this case a case of good wine is on, that the results will be on the high side. I am not risking much, as the geologists are known to be quite conservative.

But, here it is.