My Town shoot Out - Power

This week's theme is courtesy of ME!! Power - where do you get your power? Is it electric, hydroelectric, solar, wind, natural gas? The things that power our towns or it could be things that empower you personally, or places to go to regroup, regenerate your own personal power. I encourage you to go and see everyone's contributions here! Because I was the theme picker, I decided to go out and shoot all new photos for this week. All are DOOC, and not even cropped, and most were taken on one afternoon/evening while driving all of my favorite back roads nearby.

You can find power of the electric kind in my town - sometimes it is flying high above:Sometimes it is in an unassuming building:If you are thinking - holy crap, is that what I think it is?Then the answer is yes. Yes, this is a nuclear reactor, and it is on a back road near my town. I encourage you to read more about it here. The urban legend when I was growing up is that GE kept a herd of cows grazing on site that had been surgically altered to include a metal screw out plug connected to a stomach, so that scientists could remove the contents of the stomach and test it for radioactivity.The next two shots are of the windmills of the Altamont Pass Wind Farm. I shot these while in Livermore (which also houses Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). I would have shot pictures of the lab, but they call the cops on you when you try.

I found this odd array at 8826 Manning Rd, and cannot find out what it is, though it is across from a power company transitions station...The next two shots are of my local power company's golf ball.OK, it isn't REALLY a golf ball, but that is what we called it when we were young. It is actually a Lightning Test center, and was featured in Mythbusters in 2005. I can remember thinking that I FINALLY knew what went on in the golf ball! The description from the annotated episode:

It is a huge dome containing its own power generators. It can generate 700,000 volts at 500,000 watts, but even that is still much below actual lightning: "We can't even come close to what mother Nature can generate"
One interesting statistic they quoted at the facility as a rule of thumb is that 10,000 volts = 1cm of air travel.And under the heading of Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, I saw these and couldn't resist!

I can't wait to see everyone's towns and interpretations of the theme! Oh, and one of the ways I recharge is to drive the back roads around town!