Ivanpah Lake is a dry lake bed in the Mojave Desert of San Bernardino County, California on the border of California and Nevada . Nestled in the Ivanpah Valley near Primm on Interstate 15 , the 13-square-mile (34 km) lake is almost entirely within California. At the north edge of the lake lie the Nevada Welcome Center (closed) and a California Lottery retailer. It is a popular place for land sailing and kite buggying .
6-702: On March 26, 2009, the world land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle was set here by the Greenbird , clocked at 126.1 mph (202.9 km/h). Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water carrying radioactive waste from rare earth element mining spilled into and around Ivanpah Lake. In the 1980s, the Mountain Pass rare earth mine began piping wastewater as far as 14 miles to evaporation ponds on or near Ivanpah Dry Lake, east of Interstate 15 near Nevada. This pipeline repeatedly ruptured during cleaning operations to remove mineral deposits called scale. The scale
12-501: A peak speed of 126.1 mph (202.9 km/h). Greenbird , sponsored by Ecotricity , was described as being "a very high performance sailboat". It uses a rigid vertical wing , instead of the conventional sail, to generate thrust, in the same manner that the wing of an aeroplane generates lift. The only metal in the vehicle is in the wheels and the wing bearings; the remainder is made of carbon composite materials . The vehicle weighs about six hundred kilograms. According to Jenkins,
18-437: Is radioactive because of the presence of thorium and radium , which occur naturally in the rare earth ore. A federal investigation later found that some 60 spills—some unreported—occurred between 1984 and 1998, when the pipeline was shut down. In all, about 600,000 US gallons (2,300,000 L; 500,000 imp gal) of radiological and other hazardous waste flowed onto the desert floor, according to federal authorities. By
24-399: The end of the 1990s, Unocal had been hit with a cleanup order and a San Bernardino County district attorney's lawsuit. The company paid more than $ 1.4 million in fines and settlements. After preparing a cleanup plan and completing an extensive environmental study, Unocal in 2004 won approval of a county permit that allowed the mine to operate for another 30 years. In 2008, Unocal/Chevron sold
30-413: The light weight and aerodynamic shape of the vehicle allows it to attain speeds three to five times faster than the speed of the wind . Greenbird is the fifth in a series of wind-powered land vehicles that Jenkins had constructed in his efforts to break the speed record. Jenkins said he had been trying to break the record for the past ten years in different locations, such as Australia , Britain , and
36-542: The mine to privately held Molycorp Minerals LLC , a company formed to revive the Mountain Pass Mine. Ivanpah Lake appears in the 2010 videogame Fallout: New Vegas . Greenbird Greenbird is a wind-powered vehicle that broke the land speed record for sail-powered vehicles at the dry Ivanpah Lake on March 26, 2009. It was built by the British engineer Richard Jenkins . Greenbird reached
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