Word: conveyor
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...Virginia Power's Mount Storm generating station. It was built on a tortured, windswept plateau in the mid-1960s only because abundant coal was nearby. The coal was worth mining, in turn, only because Mount Storm would burn it. Tipple and boiler were linked by a two-mile covered conveyor belt that carried coal from the east portal of the mine straight to the storage silos of the power plant. The miners still marvel at the sheer handiness of the setup. "That coal never touched the ground," they...
...that tidy conveyor has been idle since January in favor of a more invasive coal-delivery system: a fleet of bottom-dumping trucks making more than 200 trips a day, at 80,000 lbs. per trip, to the Mount Storm plant from the nonunion Mettiki mine, 17 miles away and across the state line in Maryland. Some of the old miners claim that the switch is an old-fashioned union-busting effort, but it's both more and less than that...
Also vulnerable is the floating apron of sea ice that surrounds Antarctica. During the winter, this apron effectively doubles the continent's size, then in summer it shrinks 80%. The interaction of deep ocean currents and sea ice is crucial to the vast "conveyor belt" that redistributes the sun's heat around the globe. For all its importance, however, it is on average less than 2 ft. thick, and its stability depends on a precarious balance of factors ranging from air temperature to the salinity and temperature of the water...
Though sterile bottles harboring mass-produced baby boys and girls are not yet rolling gently along conveyor belts, as suggested in Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World, the thought that this could be a real possibility has ethicists, religious leaders and concerned citizens voicing their alarm over the new technology...
...terrorist, in any case, dreams of such results. Any one of those suitcases on the conveyor belt is the seedpod of our death. The furniture really does conceal monsters. Each rental truck is an apocalypse idling at the curb. Each 747 takes on some unsettling metaphysic of Jonah-eating whale, or Moby Dick. Paranoia renders nature and its objects darkly volitional, satanic. The intent of terrorism, we know, is to break down the boundaries and sane categories of the mind and to make everyone start thinking like a psychotic...