This just in: the last of the Boston "snow farms" has melted. No chance for a glacier, am disappoint.
Beg to differ.
It is cheaper and/or faster to melt the snow near the source than to try and transport it through the city. That also assumes the city has enough space to store the snow, which was not the case this winter and several others in recent memory.
MassPort has been melting the snow at Logan Airport for years. Under Menino the city would not buy them but borrowed the MassPort equipment to clear downtown. Northeastern University bought one, I believe the city purchased two, and we borrowed two from NY.
To put it in perspective, I believe the total bill in Boston was $30-35 million. Montreal is 4X bigger than Boston, but spens 5-6X as much. With Boston's crucial role in the regional economy, we should probably be spending more, not less. Of course fixing the MBTA has to be part of that equation.
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I beg to differ,
Mayor Menino obviously saw how much fuel that was consumed
by these units and passed on it.
It was an opportunity cost situation where the high cost of operation
could not justify the use versus what equipment they had in inventory
or that was loaned to them.
The portable ice and snow melting trailers are energy intensive and make
use of very little of the melt water to maintain thermal mass by using
forced air heating and a small melt tank to do the work.
Yes they melt the snow, but they lose forever the thermal mass created by
the hot water that results as it overflows to the machines spillway or
discharge hose that drains the smaller tank on the snow melter.
They can never make use of the thermal mass created in a huge pit of
near boiling water to melt the incoming ice and snow even with the
larger trailer mounted snow melters for the same reason.
They waste the melting potential of huge amount of heat energy available
from snow melt kept at a near steaming state.
As far as the garbage in the snow the pit could be equipped with waste
collection baskets that would bring any debris to the surface to be
disposed of after the baskets are dumped into a roll off container.
I still have to wonder why they have not visited Hokkaido Island to
see the snow melting systems in use there.
They use the Japanese version of the ten wheeler and other dump trucks
to the dump the snow in the vats/pits and it melts quickly in a couple of
minutes as all the water is at steaming temperature.
It would not take much flat land to install several of these systems due
to the inherent ability of water to transmit energy to the melting process.
They run these things around the clock when they have the heavy snows
which the island is famous for.
Saying that the water in a snow melting pit could be kept warm early
in the snow season with a low energy demand with low pressure
hot water boiler coal stokers that do not require licensed boiler operator to run them.
The same applies to the airport as they could use a central meting station with much
higher efficiency per ton of snow with pit melter operating at near steaming temperature
as needed.
The beautiful thing about the physics of thermal mass is it take so little energy bring it back up to a high temperature.
