Photo: Snorky [wikipedia]
In the coal stripmine Hambach in Germany, there was a machine so big that it boggles the mind.the Bagger 288:
This is the 45,000 ton Bagger 288 digger built by Krupps in Germany, and it is the largest land based machine built by humans on the face of the planet.
It’s not fast, moving at about 2 meters a minute, but boy can it shift rubble.
It can dig up 240,000 cubic meters of dirt a day. That’s about the same as a football field sized hole that’s 30 metres deep.
And why do you need a machine so absurdly big? So we can strip mine coal out of the ground, transport it hundreds of miles on massive trains and take it to power stations where we burn it to make electricity. And where does quite a chunk of this electricity go? Strangely back to the digger, as it requires 16.56 megawatts of electricity to operate. You’re not going to find a lot of solar panels on this leviathan.
Once it starts digging, it literally will not stop. Anything in its path will be chewed up, including this 60 ton bulldozer. How, I ask you, do you miss a 60 ton bulldozer?
http://www.channelflip.com/2010/01/04/the-worlds-largest-land-machine-the-badger-digger/
But what is the true purpose of such a machine? Let's all welcome our new digger overlord, as explained by Rathergood.
1 Watt = 1 Joule per second.
You might be confusing this with KWh, Kilowatthours, the amount of energy that is consumed in one hour by something that has a power of one kilowatt
Not that it is what you'd call "portable"....
Cheers,
EZ
Even the tires for the trucks used to haul away stuff are taller than me with my hands up!! I felt like Alice in Wonderland LOL
the LHC is underground. so its not techincally a land based machine.
Isn't a football field measured in yards? 3ft=1yard right? Did somebody make a mistake or did I miss something? And that's not that impressive considering its size as a machine... if the hole was as big as a football field and was 3 football fields in depth... for a day's work that's something to write about...
No power used to find fuel, no dust put into air, no old town moved in the name of digging brown coal. Were's the green idea behind this machine, I'll tell ya! Green in someones pocket not in the greater good of man and global warming issues.
My two cents, sorry thats all I can afford.
GOD Bless us all
GB
Nuclear is cheaper, but fear of spent nuclear waste and horror stories like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island kept us from building more nuclear power plants.
US of A?
So, I think, concentration in other forms of energy could be a better idea than making such a giant machinery for coal mine digging.
Sinerely
Marko
http://www.mascus.de/Baumaschinen