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To: shades who wrote (68205)	8/28/2005 11:19:07 AM
From: Slagle	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Shades Re: "Portland Cement" What your redneck friend is talking about is that fly ash and furnace slag are used in the making of hydraulic cement, and have been for a long time, both as a feed stock and as a filler in some cheaper low-spec grades. If you think your friend is right, do a little experiment. Get some dry ash and mix some water with it. Then set it aside and see if it gets hard like concrete. <g> In some grades they are using fiber as a filler now, to give it more strength in tension. With the fiber add you could slip in a little more filler in some non-critical applications, but I bet it will crack in time. As there is a big concrete shortage now I am sure they are doing everything they can to stretch the available supply. For a low spec application like a sidewalk or maybe a "compression only" footer you could mix in more fly ash. For things that need to be strong, like bridge beams and building columns you can only use pure hydraulic cement of the proper specification. Making hydraulic cement is VERY energy intensive. You have to place together the right ground up minerals (calcites, silicates, ect.) and heat the whole business up to 1500F, first driving off the water of hydration and then actually melting some of the components, with many very complex endothermic reactions that take a given amount of time to occur. Very much of the heat required for this is just the cost of doing business. Vaporization and endothermic reactions require a given amount of energy and there is nothing you can do about it. Shades, I am not at all negative about what may be discovered in the future. I DO think that we will make fusion work some day and I also think that is is entirely possible that we will break the hyperspace barrier eventually. But who knows when? The danger is using this "pie in the sky" stuff for planning purposes. I will give you a perfect example: The Carter Energy Department hyped "fusion" while they scuttled the nations nuclear power initiative that was underway. They even put out estimates claiming practical application of fusion generated electric power by the year 2000. Of course they had not a single shred of evidence that that this would be possible, but the point was to use the "fusion" hype to scuttle the nuclear program, which was their main objective. Now you have Wall Street hyping "hydrogen economy" and many other fairy tales for reasons of their own. Beware Will Robinson! <g> Slagle