Wednesday, January 30, 2008

D.U.S.E.L.

There's some strange stuff going on in the upper midwest. When I first moved here to Sioux City they kept referring to "The Gorilla Project" and showing pictures of a concrete gorilla in a field near Elk Point, SD, which is just 25 miles from Sioux City. It turns out that a company called Hyperion has been optioning thousands of acres to build a 10 BILLION dollar "green" oil refinery. It would be the first oil refinery constructed in the US in 30 years, producing upwards of 400,000 barrels PER DAY.

Natural questions are: 1. What is exactly 'green' about the oil refinery? (Probably the color of the building only.)
2. What the hell do gorillas have to do with it? (Probably more than we think.)

OK, stick with me here. Here is the next interesting part, DUSEL. What is DUSEL?...
"The Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab (DUSEL) at Homestake will address particle and nuclear physics, geology, hydrology, geo-engineering, biology, and biochemistry. Homestake is the deepest mine in North America with rooms at 8000 ft., well-suited for experiments that require extremely low cosmogenic backgrounds: in particular, the search for neutrino-less double beta decay and relic dark matter." They are building the DUSEL as we speak.

Ok, so they are going to study "dark matter" in a big hole in South Dakota, and build a giant new oil refinery nearby. Hmmm. I think likely this sits for a good conspiracy theory. I still have to tie gorillas, a huge oil refinery and a dark matter laboratory together. I'll let you know when I do.
In the meantime good news: I bought a PCI firewire card for my computer. (Moms and Grandmas, this means I can finally transfer home videos of Olivia to the 'ol blog.) Next Installment of the Peltgrande Blogger: Why it is helpful to refer to your significant other as ridiculous creatures from the AD&D Monster Manual when frustrated. I particularly like 'Duckbunny'.
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3 comments:

Travis said...

5 posts deleted due to possible Harkonnen Spies.

Anonymous said...

Hey - I actually toured the Homestake mine back in the 90's, and ever since then I have been able to telekinetically make dogs wag their tails on sight. I wonder if there is any connection...
Didn't see any gorillas though...

J
And remember in shield fighting you always attack slowly and defend quickly

Anonymous said...

I'd take the Hyperion Project's $10 billion facility with a grain of salt. There's a lot of money to skim off the system by pretending your going to build some new fangled facility, then ditch out at the last second. Iowa City's indoor rainforest, the Des Moines nuclear power plant, FutureGen (a $11 billion CO2 sequestration facility recently cancelled in Illinois), the list goes on. The dumber the idea, the higher probability you'll make off a millionaire.

I've already got one: Clean Resources - Energy Efficient Peatmoss project...(CREEP)

Do you know any good lobbyists?