Free Republic

Investigations are reportedly underway as 60,000 pounds of toxic ammonium nitrate have been reported missing while being transported from Wyoming to California.An empty railcar was found at a rail stop in the California Mojave Desert, two weeks after it had departed its initial location.Multiple entities have announced through their representatives that The Federal Railroad Administration, the California Public Utilities Commission, Union Pacific, and Dyno Nobel (the company responsible for the transport) are looking into the incident.On May 10th, the report was sent by Dyno Nobel to the government National Response Center, or NRC. Last Wednesday, the report was published in...

President Jiang Zemin gets an update on China´s Terfenol-D project. The U.S. Navy spent millions of dollars to develop Terfenol-D in the early 1980s, and intelligence experts estimate that the People's Republic of China (PRC) has devoted extensive resources to try to steal it. Insight has learned that these PRC efforts have paid off. The spy target is an exotic material made up of two types of rare-earth metals called lanthanides, terbium and dysprosium, plus iron (FE). The NOL stands for Naval Ordnance Laboratory. Hence the name Terfenol-D. Those who have worked with this exotic material call it almost magical....

The controversial Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California’s Mojave desert is going to close 14 years early despite $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy under President Barack Obama. The Ivanpah facility works by using mirrors that concentrate sunlight on a central boiling tower, which then heats water to move turbines. It has been criticized for incinerating birds and other animals within the reflecting zone. Ivanpah has become a familiar sight on the road between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and in the airspace above, with its blinding light visible for miles.

What was once the world's largest solar power plant of its type appears headed for closure just 11 years after opening, under pressure from cheaper green energy sources. Meanwhile, environmentalists continue to blame the Mojave Desert plant for killing thousands of birds and tortoises. The Ivanpah solar power plant formally opened in 2014 on roughly 5 square miles of federal land near the California-Nevada border. Though it was hailed at the time as a breakthrough moment for clean energy, its power has been struggling to compete with cheaper solar technologies. Pacific Gas & Electric said in a statement it had...

Sometimes, government makes a bad bet. Case in point: the Ivanpah solar project. Maybe you’ve seen the unsightly, blindingly bright towers while traveling from L.A. to Las Vegas, in the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada state line. Maybe you’ve read about birds getting fried to death as they fly through the sunlight directed to the tops of the towers by fields of mirrors.

“What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is my own.” James Joyce penned those words while writing Ulysses, but he could have easily written them were he composing a report on the political attitudes of the pseudo-elite greenie left of the modern era.From an article by Greg Rehner at Fox News:California clean energy project threatens thousands of protected Joshua trees: reportsA California-based renewable energy company plans to clear thousands of protected Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert to make way for a solar project that will generate electricity for nearly 180,000 homes in coastal neighborhoods instead of the impacted communities,...

How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’ Residents feel trapped and choked by dust, while experts warn environmental damage is ‘solving one problem by creating others’ eep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror. But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and...

The company that flew the first privately funded manned rocket into space has been cited in connection with an explosion last summer that killed three workers, the state said today. California occupational safety inspectors said in a report that Scaled Composites LLC failed to properly train workers about the dangers of nitrous oxide that was used during a test in July. The state levied three citations against Scaled, including two that were considered "serious," and fined the spaceship builder $25,870. The company has 15 days to pay or appeal. Three workers died and three were seriously injured in the explosion...

... He said: "We would love to finish what we started some years ago and I think pretty well all our astronauts would love us to finish and would love to go into space. "I think millions of people in the world would one day love the chance to go to space and this is the start of a long programme."

CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL SAYS ONE PERSON KILLED, ONE INJURED IN CRASH OF VIRGIN GALACTIC SPACECRAFT IN MOJAVE DESERT -CNN, CNBC This is a breaking news story. Please check back for further updates. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Oct 31 (Reuters) - A suborbital passenger spaceship being developed by Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic crashed during a test flight on Friday at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, officials said. Two pilots were aboard the spaceship, which was undergoing its first powered test flight since January. It was not immediately known if they were able to parachute to safety. More than 800...

MOJAVE, Calif. — Two people were killed and four others injured Thursday by an explosion at a Mojave Desert airport that is home to pioneering civilian rocket programs, authorities said. Wreckage of equipment and vehicles could be seen in an overhead view of the site broadcast by a KCAL-TV news helicopter. A sign on a truck behind a bunker had the name Scaled. Scaled Composites is the Mojave-based builder of SpaceShipOne, the first private manned rocket to reach space. "Reports are two fatalities and at least four critical injuries," said Kern County fire Capt. Doug Johnston, who was not at...

MYSTERY surrounds a UFO-like aircraft that was seen being towed into a top-secret US military base. According to reports, it was spotted at Lockheed Martin’s secretive Helendale radar-cross section (RCS) measurement facility in the Mojave Desert, California. The mystery craft was spotted being towed into a top-secret base in a California base The mystery craft was spotted being towed into a top-secret base in a California base A short video of the unidentified aircraft first emerged on TikTok and then the location was tracked down by internet sleuth Ruben Hofs. The footage shows what looks like an inverted stealth aircraft...

The study, published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America on Monday, says there is now a 2.3% chance of an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or greater in the next 12 months on a section of the 160-mile-long Garlock fault, which runs along the northern edge of the Mojave Desert. That increased likelihood, in turn, would cause there to be a 1.15% chance of a large earthquake on the San Andreas fault in the next year.

In the modern historical record, the 160-mile-long Garlock fault on the northern edge of the Mojave Desert has never been observed to produce either a strong earthquake or to even creep — the slow movement between earthquakes that causes a visible scar on the ground surface. But new satellite radar images now show that the fault has started to move, causing a bulging of land that can be viewed from space. “This is surprising, because we’ve never seen the Garlock fault do anything. Here, all of a sudden, it changed its behavior,” said the lead author of the study, Zachary...

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office says 69-year-old Barbara Thomas, of Bullhead City, was last seen Friday wearing a black bikini, a red baseball cap and tan hiking boots with black socks. The office says Thomas and her husband were hiking in the Mojave Desert approximately 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of the I-40 freeway when they got separated.

Calico: A 200,000-year old site in the Americas? New World archaeological sites inferred to be even slightly older than the 11.5 ka Clovis complexes have been controversial; so claims for a 200 ka site in North America have heretofore been treated with substantial disdain. But the acceptance of Monte Verde and Diring may soon change that. The classic "ancient site" in the New World is "Calico," located in the Central Mojave Desert of California (Shlemon and Budinger, 1990). Two issues have dogged acceptance of Calico by mainstream archaeologists: (1) the authenticity of the artifacts; are they truly the product of ...

California regulators may force a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert to shut down after years of under-producing electricity — not to mention the plant was blinding pilots flying over the area and incinerating birds. The Ivanpah solar plant could be shut down if state regulators don’t give it more time to meet electricity production promises it made as part of its power purchase agreements with utilities, according to The Wall Street Journal. Ivanpah, which got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama administration, only produced a fraction of the power state regulators expected it would....

Three months after Breitbart News and others outed Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) 's backdoor effort to freeze development on over one million acres of California dessert by having President Obama declare the area subject to the Antiquities Act of 1906, her efforts are going down in flames as Congressional Republicans are moving to ban the Antiquities designation. Feinstein's seven-year quest to convince "ongress to sequester over 1560 square miles of the Mojave Desert into three new national monuments under her proposed 'Desert Conservation and Recreation Act" has gone nowhere. Feinstein has argued that the area she wants designated as 'Mojave...

The Volcano House, a flying-saucer shaped home atop a 150-foot cinder cone in the Mojave Desert donated to Chapman University, has hit the market for $650,000. Huell Howser , the producer and host of the TV show "California's Gold," gave the iconic home to the university in 2012. Howser died a year later.

There is growing evidence that birds flying in the vicinity of a solar thermal power project in California’s Mojave Desert are being injured and even killed either by the solar heat that’s focused with mirrors on its three energy-collecting towers, or by colliding with the mirrors themselves. Yet a task force set up to investigate the problem at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) has brushed aside several recommendations by the forensics laboratory of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), according to the minutes of a meeting on the subject obtained by the Los Angeles public television station...