Yesterday's field trip.

Together with about 30 others with our homeschool group, the boys and I toured the Rawhide Energy Station north of Fort Collins yesterday. It was pretty cool actually. I had no idea the plant was even there, let alone how efficiently the plant operates. We started out with a very thorough presentation and Q&A session then divided into two groups to tour the facility. The boys were rather impressed by the sheer size of things and by the fact that they got to wear headsets under their hard hats so that they could hear the tour leader speak. 

Though my boys apparently already knew how coal turbines work, they still found the field trip educational. They were particularly fascinated by:

• the fish living in the reservoir that they use for cooling the purified water that runs through the turbine process. Apparently, they stocked the reservoir with some sort of algae-eating carp about 30 years ago. They're still there and are now about 5 feet long. (They're hybrids, so don't reproduce.)...
• the method of dumping the coal from the train cars. The cars actually stay coupled to the train and just get rotated about 160 degrees to dump the coal. Micah informed me that this is just like how lego train couplings work, lol...
• the process for cleaning the air before re-released into the atmosphere. The engineer leading our group went into detail about the processes for removing both sulphur and mercury...and,
• the fact that this one plant provides most of the power for the cities of Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont and Estes Park. This, Noah realized, means that this plant provides the power to charge his iPod. He therefore loves it. ;)

For security reasons, I wasn't allowed to take any pictures, but I stopped on our way out to snap this one by the entrance:

Yup, another beautiful homeschooling day here in Fort Collins...