Ammonia!

[Webstral]

Ever have one of those oeDoh! moments when you realize youve been looking at something for years and not seeing whats there Yeah. Having one right now.

According to Howling Wilderness, Colorado has a functioning nuclear power plant. The facility at Platteville is working at 8% of capacity. While electrolyzing water for hydrogen for ammonia is not as efficient as getting hydrogen from hydrocarbons, it certainly can be done. Ammonia is one of the most important soil additives in modern agriculture. As an added bonus, ammonia can be used in place of fossil fuels with minimal adjustments to the engine.

Yall see where Im going with this, right With an operating nuke plant, Milgov can create ammonia for agriculture, moving the ammonia to the fields, and driving modified tractors and combines. The release of population for other important activities, like mining, fighting, and working machines, would be stupendous. The basis of the Colorado economy, with its 3 million inhabitants, might resemble a pre-war economy in a passing way.

Seeing the relationship between electricity and ammonia in this way changes absolutely everything. If ammonia can be synthesized without fossil fuels or organic energy, and if ammonia can both power farm machinery and double, treble, or quintuple crop yields, then anyone with a functioning nuke plant is a superpower. Heck with running the lights or even powering industrial machinery. Having fertilizer and transportation in your hands changes the entire post-Exchange equation.

Seeing this (and knowing that this knowledge must be pretty darned widespread) makes me reconsider the priority of putting nuke plants back on-line. It also makes me think that finding and recovering the people with the knowledge to run hydroelectric plants (also a good source of abundant electricity) would be a very high priority. If I can figure out a way to get ammonia produced in SAMAD, the fuel problem would be solved. Im not sure if the labor picture would be changed all that much, since the most limiting factor in Samadi agriculture is water, which is applied by hand.

Unfortunately, the New Americans in west central Florida also have a real basis of power with their electrical plants. With ammonia for fertilizer and fuel, the New Americans will be even more powerful than they have been made out to be in Urban Guerilla.

[Tegyrius]

Holy crop yield, Batman. That completely changes the "incipient collapse of industrial agriculture" issue for the 2013 Czech Republic setting, too, thanks to the similarly functional plant at Temelin. And it makes the region even more of a treasure/target than it was before. Thanks, Web!

- C.

[ArmySGT.]

That makes the EBR-1 and the Idaho National Laboratory valuable again outside Butte, Idaho.

Pretty nice ranges. The Dept of Energy sure takes a supposedly closed site seriously.

[ArmySGT.]

Are you factoring in the U.S. Navy Oil Shale reserves on the Western Slope

There is significant coal in Colorado too. It is mostly drift mined so strip mining for coal in Wyoming and Montana is cheaper.

Don't forget that Wyoming and Montana have their own Oil refineries. If those are able to be brought online.

As far as MilGov goes who did the Denver Mint side with What about the Federal Center on the West Side of Lakewood, CO. The National Institute of Science and Technology (Boulder, CO).

In the 90s the Rocky Flats Depot was open with nuclear warheads processing.

[Webstral]

Are you factoring in the U.S. Navy Oil Shale reserves on the Western Slope

There is significant coal in Colorado too. It is mostly drift mined so strip mining for coal in Wyoming and Montana is cheaper.

Don't forget that Wyoming and Montana have their own Oil refineries. If those are able to be brought online.

Certainly, Milgov is going to avail itself of each and every energy resource. I expect the oil, coal, and natural gas available in Colorado and Wyoming to be utilized to the max. Ammonia produced by electricity from the Ft. St. Vrain nuclear plant at Platteville offers Milgov an important opportunity to diversify, not replace. When one considers the idea that ammonia produced near the nuke plant using water and air (!) doesnt require feedstock to be moved from the fields where oil, natural gas, and coal are being extracted to a processing facility of some sort, then to the point of use. If ammonia only gets used in the fields and in the engines of farming machinery (because the tanks of ammonia are going to the farms anyway), both ammonia and the nuke plant have an enormous role to play in Colorado and the recovery of the nation.

I think ammonia is the solution I have been looking for regarding fuel for the military vehicles of SAMAD. I never have been happy with fueling trucks and AFV with alcohol or biodiesel. Fuels based on food reverse the ideal flow of types of energy from inorganic-organic to organic-inorganic. Using people food to power machinery is an act of desperation. Twilight: 2000 is a desperate time, so I dont have an issue with its happening. However, smart people are going to power their machines with energy that cant go into peoples stomachs whenever possible. Ideally, inorganic energy will get turned into organic energy. Using electricity from nuclear power, solar, wind, etc. to create ammonia, which in turn creates more food and powers the farm implements turns the desperation of Twilight: 2000 back to a more pre-war norm. Now I have to put some numbers to my little scheme for Samadi ammonia.

[WallShadow]

Ever have one of those oeDoh! moments when you realize youve been looking at something for years and not seeing whats there Yeah. Having one right now.

According to Howling Wilderness, Colorado has a functioning nuclear power plant. The facility at Platteville is working at 8% of capacity. While electrolyzing water for hydrogen for ammonia is not as efficient as getting hydrogen from hydrocarbons, it certainly can be done. Ammonia is one of the most important soil additives in modern agriculture. As an added bonus, ammonia can be used in place of fossil fuels with minimal adjustments to the engine.

<SNIP>
Seeing this (and knowing that this knowledge must be pretty darned widespread) makes me reconsider the priority of putting nuke plants back on-line. It also makes me think that finding and recovering the people with the knowledge to run hydroelectric plants (also a good source of abundant electricity) would be a very high priority. If I can figure out a way to get ammonia produced in SAMAD, the fuel problem would be solved. Im not sure if the labor picture would be changed all that much, since the most limiting factor in Samadi agriculture is water, which is applied by hand. [/I].

Uh, Webstral, what is SAMAD, or any enclave of civilization doing with the liquid component of its sewage Lots of ready-made ammonia waiting for harvesting right there, useable with minimal processing.

[Webstral]

Uh, Webstral, what is SAMAD, or any enclave of civilization doing with the liquid component of its sewage Lots of ready-made ammonia waiting for harvesting right there, useable with minimal processing.

Certainly, research shows that urine can be an effective fertilizer. There are some potential long-term issues with salts, but in the years immediately following the Exchange few are going to be concerned about that. For intensive gardening, where the source of urine and the plants to be fertilized are closely co-located, urine might compete well with ammonia fertilizer. For larger-scale farming, though, gathering and applying urine might be a difficult exercise. Still, it would be interesting to see the results of a concerted effort to gather urine (and urine only) for spraying on fields as a fertilizer. The survivors of the nuclear exchange should be amenable to having their habits changed if anyone is.

Ammonia also has the advantage of being useful as fuel. As the scale of agriculture expands from garden plots to something resembling modern American agriculture, you have to pull the plow and the combines somehow. Modern machinery has the advantage of minimizing labor, provided you can fuel the machines. You can use horses, but they need a portion of the food being grown. Turning electricity into fertilizer and fuel for the farm machines enables a handful of people to do the job relative to the huge numbers of folks involved in subsistence agriculture throughout much of the US in 2000. People freed from the farms can do other jobs, like fight or make things.

So while urine certainly can do the job of fertilizing, it seems to lend itself more to intensive gardening than large-scale agriculture when compared to industrially-produced ammonia. Provided yields are in any way comparable, the practitioners of large-scale agriculture are going to have an edge over the intensive gardeners because the large-scale folks will be able to commit more manpower to doing things beside growing food.

[WallShadow]

Webstral, your line on ammonia has another benefit in the scheme of food production--feeding ammonia-treated low quality silages (straw and other sub-optimum feed) to milch cattle improves milk production and muscle weight. This allows cattle to be fed on less-desirable materials with the same result as higher-quality feeds--more cattle can be fed with the normal amount of regular feed. Also, this process works best on low-quality silages--better quality feedstocks are only minimally affected.

For some reason this clicked in my head when I was remembering that hominy is maize treated with lye....

[mikeo80]

This topic made me pause and think for a moment.

Here in NC, we have Sharon Harris Nuke Plant near Raleigh/Durham. According to V1.0 and V2.2, this area does not catch a "present". And, this area also joins "CivGov".

NC does not have the advantage of coal, however, there is a HUGE turkey and hog farming subsector of the economy.

These factors should help the local (i.e. Southern Va, NC, SC) economy start on the way back to something "normal".

My $0.02

Mike

[Tegyrius]

I will reluctantly point out that "intact" doesn't necessarily mean "functional" where a nuke plant is concerned. I suspect a lot of them were shut down when the first nuclear strike warnings went out because of the danger of EMP doing something unpleasant to the control systems. Even those which survived physically (and electronically) intact would need to be brought back online, and trained personnel are going to be rare and hard to find by 7/2000 (or later). Look at the Navy's difficulty in scrounging up nuclear power plant operators for City of Corpus Christi.

Needless to say, that sort of recruiting project is tailor-made for PCs...

- C.

[Targan]

Here in NC, we have Sharon Harris Nuke Plant near Raleigh/Durham. According to V1.0 and V2.2, this area does not catch a "present". And, this area also joins "CivGov".

I'll mention a point often made by others on this forum (that bears repeating): just because it's not on the game's published nuke target lists doesn't definitively mean it wasn't nuked. It just means it wasn't hit by a warhead 500kt or larger. Now, I'm not suggesting that the Sharon Harris Nuke Plant WAS nuked (to be honest I don't have an opinion one way or the other), I'm just saying that we often forget that the published target lists were listing only half megaton strikes and larger. Any given site on the entire planet NOT mentioned in the published lists could still have been nuked, with a low-yield warhead, a cruise missile nuke, nuclear artillery, a small air-delivered nuke or even a backpack nuke. Or a big conventional strike. Or a chem strike. Or nothing at all.

[mikeo80]

I'll mention a point often made by others on this forum (that bears repeating): just because it's not on the game's published nuke target lists doesn't definitively mean it wasn't nuked. It just means it wasn't hit by a warhead 500kt or larger. Now, I'm not suggesting that the Sharon Harris Nuke Plant WAS nuked (to be honest I don't have an opinion one way or the other), I'm just saying that we often forget that the published target lists were listing only half megaton strikes and larger. Any given site on the entire planet NOT mentioned in the published lists could still have been nuked, with a low-yield warhead, a cruise missile nuke, nuclear artillery, a small air-delivered nuke or even a backpack nuke. Or a big conventional strike. Or a chem strike. Or nothing at all.

Targan,

I get your point.

I've always thought that the "suitcase nuke" scenario was an excellent way of taking a particularly choice piece of real estate away from PC's.

I brought up Sharon Harris the same way others in this thread have brought up other nuke plants not mentioned in v1.0 or v2.2. Any and all of these could have been targeted. Hell, Spetznaz teams could have been inserted into the USA to hit some of these targets. The lack of adequate border survailance is an on going political minefield. As is the fact of a 4500 MILE border with Canada. Going through some of the most remote parts of the US and Canada.

I can easily see a Spetznaz vs. Ranger battle happening right here in North Carolina over the control or destruction of Sharon Harris.

My $0.02

Mike

[Webstral]

I mention the Ft. St. Vrain facility only because Howling Wilderness specifically mentions it. While I don't buy into the drought, I'm more inclined to go with the rarity of functioning nuke plants. For instance, there are none in New England. Bummer, because a nuke plant producing 20 MW of electricity in New England could put ammonia fuel into the Coast Guard's ships.

I agree that a nuke plant in decent shape anywhere in the country makes the basis of an interesting adventure as the players try to find experts and materials to bring it back on-line.

[mikeo80]

I agree that a nuke plant in decent shape anywhere in the country makes the basis of an interesting adventure as the players try to find experts and materials to bring it back on-line.

I agree. The other little gems in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area are called University of North Carolina, North Carolina State, Duke University, Wake Forest University. As well as the Research Triangle Park. One of the most densely populated high tech areas outside of Silicon Valley.

Also a not so well known fact, NC State has its' own nuclear reactor as part of its' nuclear engeneering program.

There are three other reactors here in NC. Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station, McGuire Nuclear Station, South River Nuclear Plant.

I would think that with the first exchange between USSR and CHina, these reactors would be shut down. Now IF the state of NC is intellegent, (Yeah, I know, politicians = intellegent) The Govenor should make a grab for as many techs as he/she can get. Use the National Guard, State Police, WHATEVER to secure the areas around the plants.

OK

Time for me to get off of my soap box

My $0.02

Mike

[Tombot]

Holy crop yield, Batman.

- C.