2008
2008 December 25. Solar
Meets Polar as Winter Curbs Clean Energy. By
Kate Galbraith. Excerpt:
Old Man Winter, it turns out, is no friend
of renewable energy.This time of year, wind
turbine blades ice up, biodiesel congeals
in tanks and solar panels produce less power
because there is not as much sun. And perhaps
most irritating to the people who own them,
the panels become covered with snow, rendering
them useless even in bright winter sunshine...As
concern has grown about global warming, many
utilities and homeowners have been trying
to shrink their emissions of carbon dioxide — their
carbon footprints — by installing solar
panels, wind turbines and even generators
powered by tides or rivers. But for the moment,
at least, the planet is still cold enough
to deal nasty winter blows to some of this
green machinery...The
wind industry admits that turbines can drop
ice, like a lamppost or any tall structure.
To ameliorate the hazard, some turbines are
painted black to absorb sunlight and melt
the ice faster. But Ron Stimmel, an expert
on small wind turbines at the American Wind
Energy Association, denies that the whirling
blades tend to hurl icy javelins.Large turbines
turn off automatically as ice builds up, and
small turbines will slow and stop because
the ice prevents them from spinning — “just
like a plane’s wing needs to be de-iced
to fly,” Mr. Stimmel said.Mr. Brokaw
says that his turbines do turn off when they
are too icy, but the danger sometimes comes
right before the turbines shut down, after
a wet, warm snow causes ice buildup.From the
standpoint of generating power, winter is
actually good for wind turbines, because it
is generally windier than summer. In Vermont,
for example, Green Mountain Power, which operates
a small wind farm in the southeastern part
of the state, gets more than twice the monthly
production in winter as in August.The opposite
is true, however, for solar power. Days are
shorter and the sun is lower in the sky during
the winter, ensuring less power production...
2008 October 6. A
Gift From the ’70s: Energy Lessons. By
John Tierny, The New York Times. Excerpt:
The presidential candidates claim to see America’s
energy future, but their competing visions
have a certain vintage quality. They’ve
revived that classic debate: the hard path
versus the soft path.
The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it
in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power
from the sun, wind and plants — the
technologies that Senator Barack Obama emphasizes
in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions.
Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about
building nuclear power plants, the quintessential
hard path.
As a rule, it’s not a good idea to revive
anything from the 1970s. But this debate is
the exception, and not just because the threat
of global warming has raised the stakes. The
old lessons are as good a guide as any to
the future, as William Tucker argues in “Terrestrial
Energy,” his history of the hard-soft
debate.
...Today about 20 percent of electricity in
America is generated by nuclear power, which
is about 20 times the contribution from solar
and wind power. Nuclear power also costs less,
according to Gilbert Metcalf, an economist
at Tufts University. After estimating the
costs and factoring out the hefty tax breaks
for different forms of low-carbon energy,
he estimates that new nuclear plants could
produce electricity more cheaply than windmills,
solar power or “clean coal” plants....
..."The nuclear debate is still stuck
back in the 1980s," says Mr. Tucker,
the author of "Terrestrial Energy,"
the new brand he's trying to affix to nuclear
power. If people started associating nuclear
plants with natural radioactive processes
in the Earth instead of atomic bombs, he says,
they might be persuaded that it's the most
environmentally benign form of energy....
2008 Sep. Nuclear
Redux - Climate Change Forces a Reexamination
of Nuclear Power. By AMY KISER, Terrain
Magazine. Excerpt:
For the last several decades, "no nukes" has
been the mantra of environmentalists and a
no-brainer for many US citizens. The generation
of nuclear power involved impossible-to-ignore
environmental risks, horribly obvious after
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl....plants
could suffer meltdowns, and safe storage options
for spent fuel were questionable.
Plans to build new nuclear power plants ground
to a halt in many countries, including the
US, partially due to bad publicity and the
enormous expense of plant construction.
But then ... global warming took center stage....
The need to transition away from burning fossil
fuels became paramount, and some environmentalists
began to reconsider nuclear power as a necessary
and even preferable part of the energy portfolio.
...The Energy Commission found that a complete
life-cycle analysis of nuclear power reveals
that its greenhouse gas emissions are comparable
to wind, solar voltaics, and geothermal technologies.
...The radioactive spent fuel left over from
generating nuclear power is one of its greatest
liabilities, but some argue that radioactive
waste-because it is contained-is better than
the byproducts of burning coal. ... In 1993,
nuclear physicist Alex Gabbard of Oak Ridge
National Laboratory wrote in a seminal article,
"Overall, nuclear power produces far less waste material
than fossil-fuel based power plants. Coal-burning plants are
particularly noted for producing large amounts of toxic and
mildly radioactive ash due to concentrating naturally occurring
metals and radioactive material from the coal. Contrary to
popular belief, coal power actually results in more radioactive
waste being released into the environment than nuclear power.
The population effective dose equivalent from radiation from
coal plants is 100 times as much as nuclear plants."
Admittedly, comparing anything to coal sets
a pretty low bar. ...The US nuclear power
industry gets much of its fuel from Russia's
decommissioned nuclear weapons.
... a large quantity of intermediate-level
waste is created, and deep repositories like
Yucca Mountain are still necessary.
...Soon, the US will be in the business of
recovering plutonium from our own surplus
weapons.
...Nuclear power plants (and reprocessing
plants) are costly to build, and they depend
on government subsidies and loan guarantees
to be competitive. Large reactors can cost
$2.5 billion to $4 billion each; it takes
decades to recoup the investment. As part
of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, Congress granted
approximately $10 billion in new subsidies
to the nuclear industry.
Many environmentalists fear that public investment
in nuclear will gobble up dollars that could
be invested in renewable energy and energy
efficiency. The National Resources Defense
Council warns that the cost of nuclear power
is prohibitive and makes it uncompetitive
on the free market.
...Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute
has argued that,
"every dollar invested in nuclear expansion will worsen
climate change by buying less solution per dollar."
...Many environmentalists are content to let
nuclear power fade into history because they
believe that the current paradigm of the energy
grid, featuring large, centralized power plants,
is outdated. The evolving model involves decentralized
generation, often called "the Internet
for energy."
...Stewart Brand insists that a decentralized
model does not preclude nuclear power generation.
Indeed, a race is on worldwide to produce
a new generation of small nuclear reactors
that can live on a barge or sit in a hole
in the ground for decades. ....
2008 August 31. Tajikistan
Hopes Water Will Power Its Ambitions. By
DAVID L. STERN, The New York Times. Excerpt:
NUREK, Tajikistan — The inscription
just above a tunnel at the foot of the colossal
Nurek hydropower dam in south central Tajikistan
is succinct: “Water Is Life.” The
frigid, frothing Vakhsh River rushing under
it adds a visual punctuation mark.
In Tajikistan, the source of more than 40
percent of Central Asia’s water, this
is no mere platitude. The mountainous state
lacks the industry and natural riches that
bless other former Soviet Central Asian republics.
Water is one of the few resources the country
possesses in great abundance.
For this reason, President Emomali Rakhmon
has pinned Tajikistan’s economic hopes — and
perhaps even its continued political existence — on
developing its hydropower potential.
Three projects are either under construction
or being considered, including Rogun, a gargantuan
structure farther up the Vakhsh River. Tajik
officials say they have hopes of building
more than 20 hydroelectric plants and dams.
But a number of sizable hurdles must be surmounted
before the plans for a great hydropower future
can be realized. Tajikistan is in an earthquake
zone and the dams must be built to withstand
major seismic shocks. Officials are expected
to conduct environmental impact studies to
determine whether any flora or fauna will
be threatened.
The Tajik government is also heavily in debt
and must find heavy foreign investment to
build the dams. On Wednesday, China agreed
to build a $300 million hydroelectric power
plant, Nurobad-2, with a capacity of 160 to
220 megawatts. But Tajik officials say Rogun
alone will cost up to $3.2 billion.
...Though for the moment it seems to be managing,
Tajikistan threatens to become a failed state,
say Western experts and diplomats...The country
still has not fully recovered from a devastating
civil war a decade ago. State coffers are
virtually empty, while the government is viewed
as unable to meet basic needs.
...All of Tajikistan’s power troubles
will be remedied by the dam projects, the
Rakhmon government hopes. They will not only
provide for all of Tajikistan’s energy
needs but also allow the country to export
power to neighboring countries.
...Rogun, for example, will generate about
13 billion kilowatt hours per year, more than
80 percent of the country’s average
consumption, officials at the construction
site say....
2008 August 26. Air
Storage Is Explored for Energy. By KEN
BELSON, The New York Times. Excerpt:
When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg dreamed out
loud last week about a New York skyline filled
with wind turbines, one of the most serious
issues raised by the naysayers was that the
wind does not always blow when you need it.
But a New Jersey company plans to announce
on Tuesday that it is working on a solution
to this perennial problem with wind power:
using wind turbines to produce compressed
air that can be stored underground or in tanks
and released later to power generators during
peak hours.
The company, Public Service Enterprise Group
Global LLC, a subsidiary of P.S.E.G. Energy
Holdings, is forming a joint venture with
Michael Nakhamkin, a leader in the development
of energy storage technology....
The venture has met with utilities that might
buy the storage technology. Compressed air
can be produced by a variety of fuels. But
the new venture hopes to put wind power generated
during off-peak hours to use during peak hours — typically
9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — and especially on
hot days.
...P.S.E.G. Global is trying to win a contract
to build 95 windmills that would produce a
maximum of 350 megawatts of electricity off
the New Jersey coast. If the company is chosen,
it would consider linking the windmills to
a compressed air storage plant, Mr. Byrd said,
and then feeding it into the power grid.
Roy Daniel, the chief executive of Energy
Storage and Power, said that an underground
reservoir the size of Giants Stadium could
hold enough compressed air to power three
300-megawatt plants. (One megawatt hour can
power a large hospital for an hour.) The reservoirs,
which are typically more than 1,500 feet below
ground, could take eight hours to fill at
night. The compressed air would be released
to run generators for eight hours during the
day....
2008 July 25. Oil
Spill on Nearly 100 Miles of Mississippi River. By
ADAM NOSSITER, NY Times. Excerpt:
NEW ORLEANS - A sheen of oil coated the Mississippi
River for nearly 100 miles from the center
of this city to the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday
following the worst oil spill here in nearly
a decade. The fuel-laden barge that collided
with a heavy tanker on Wednesday was still
leaking.
The thick industrial fuel pouring from the
barge could be smelled for miles in city neighborhoods
up and down the river, even as hundreds of
cleanup workers struggled to contain the hundreds
of thousands of gallons. Some environmentalists
worried about reports of fish and bird kills
in sensitive marsh areas downstream, though
officials said they had so far heard of only
a handful of oil-covered birds. Booms to protect
areas richest in wildlife, at the river's
mouth, were being deployed, officials said.
..."We've had a number of large spills
in the New Orleans area, but this is a heavy,
nasty product, problematic in the cleanup," said
Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesau of the Coast Guard,
adding that it is of the sort normally used
to fire up boilers at power plants.
"It's a significant spill, if for nothing else because
of its impact on the water supply," Commander Ben-Iesau
said. "We've got a lot of commerce dependent on this water
supply, so we're scrambling to get it cleaned up."
...Officials were generally guarded about
the possible effects on fish, plants and wildlife
in these rivers of grass and marshlands, but
some in the state's environmental community
were not.
"When it goes down to the area where there are no longer
levees, it gets into the swamp," said Wilma Subra of the
Louisiana Environmental Action Network. "It's going to
contaminate the marsh."....
2008 June 13. The
case for Yucca mountain revisited. NUCLEAR
WASTE: Yucca Mountain Revisited. Isaac J.
Winograd* and Eugene H. Roseboom Jr. - Science
13 June 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5882, pp. 1426
- 1427 - Excerpt:
In papers published over a quarter of a century
ago (1-3), we discussed the assets and liabilities
of isolating high-level radioactive wastes
(HLWs) (chiefly spent fuel from nuclear reactors)
from the environment by burying them in areas
with deep water tables, ... This idea--endorsed
for further study by our colleagues at the
U.S. Geological Survey and by scientists at
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (4) and the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (5)--eventually
led to identification of Yucca Mountain (YM)
(see photograph) as a potential repository
for HLWs. ....
The idea of storing radioactive waste at YM
was born into political controversy. In 1987,
Congress, via an amendment to the Nuclear
Waste Policy Act of 1982, selected YM from
a group of three previously identified potential
repository sites. ...the Nuclear Waste Policy
Amendments Act of 1987 became known among
Nevadans as the "screw Nevada bill."
...The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit was aware that some of
the radionuclides in HLWs have half-lives
of thousands to millions of years and followed
a recommendation of the National Research
Council (9) regarding time frames. ... for
permissible releases of radioactivity to the
environment to encompass a time frame of hundreds
of thousands to a million years. Before the
court's ruling, the USEPA considered a 10,000-year
time frame as an achievable requirement. ....
...Last, and hardly least, is the decades-old
public opposition to a geologic repository,
not only in Nevada and across the United States,
but in Europe as well.... This opposition
stems from various concerns and/or agendas,
including: fear of nuclear radiation; distrust
of governmental and technical community assurances
regarding safety; opposition to nuclear power;
and various NIMBY...-related issues....
In view of the above matters, it has been
argued that HLWs should be stored at the surface,
perhaps even for a century or two during which
time better solutions may develop. However,
extended surface storage of the HLWs (presently
about 60,000 metric tons) at 72 commercial
reactor sites--many adjacent to metropolitan
areas and all next to rivers, lakes, or the
ocean--introduces its own set of uncertainties.
For example, what is the likelihood that more
pressing future national problems could cause
final isolation of the HLWs to be postponed
indefinitely? What is the probability that
the funds for HLW disposal, now being generated
by a surcharge on nuclear-generated electricity,
will still be available a century in the future?
In the event of accidents, sabotage, or a
loss of institutional control, a variety of
scenarios can be envisioned that would create
environmental hazards greater than any that
could result from emplacement of HLWs in an
underground repository. ....
Given that both geologic isolation of HLWs
and their storage at the surface are fraught
with uncertainty, how might we proceed with
the disposition of HLWs in a manner that restores
public confidence?
2008 July 9. Ocean
Wind Power Maps Reveal Possible Wind Energy
Sources. NASA News Release. Excerpt:
WASHINGTON -- Efforts to harness the energy
potential of Earth's ocean winds could soon
gain an important new tool: global satellite
maps from NASA. Scientists have been creating
maps using nearly a decade of data from NASA's
QuikSCAT satellite that reveal ocean areas
where winds could produce wind energy.
The new maps have many potential uses including
planning the location of offshore wind farms
to convert wind energy into electric energy...
"Wind energy is environmentally friendly. After the initial
energy investment to build and install wind turbines, you don't
burn fossil fuels that emit carbon," said study lead author
Tim Liu, a senior research scientist and QuikSCAT science team
leader at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Like
solar power, wind energy is green energy."
QuikSCAT, launched in 1999, tracks the speed,
direction and power of winds near the ocean
surface. Data from QuikSCAT, collected continuously
by a specialized microwave radar instrument
named SeaWinds, also are used to predict storms
and enhance the accuracy of weather forecasts.
Wind energy has the potential to provide 10
to 15 percent of future world energy requirements,
according to Paul Dimotakis, chief technologist
at JPL. If ocean areas with high winds were
tapped for wind energy, they could potentially
generate 500 to 800 watts of energy per square
meter, according to Liu's research. Dimotakis
notes that while this is slightly less than
solar energy (which generates about one kilowatt
of energy per square meter), wind power can
be converted to electricity more efficiently
than solar energy and at a lower cost per
watt of electricity produced...
2008 July. DOE
urged to proceed more deliberately with global
plan to expand nuclear power. David Kramer,
Physics Today page 19. Excerpt:
Critics of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
[GNEP] say the Department of Energy is rushing
to commercialize unproven technologies. ...Many
experts believe that a vast expansion of nuclear
power is the only plausible option for meeting
the anticipated explosion in electricity demand
from the developing world while mitigating
global warming.
...Unveiled in 2006 by President Bush, the
GNEP envisions the US and other nuclear powers
supplying aspiring nuclear nations with both
advanced reactors and the nuclear fuel for
them. For their part, recipient nations would
agree to return their spent fuel to its nation
of origin and pledge not to develop uranium-enrichment
or spent-fuel reprocessing capabilities of
their own.
...Two groups of outside reviewers also have
urged DOE to apply the brakes to the GNEP.
The Government Accountability Office warned
in a May report that moving to construction
too rapidly will "likely require using
unproven evolutions of existing technologies" and
ultimately limit their usefulness for nuclear
waste reduction and proliferation prevention.
...No feature of the GNEP is more controversial
than reprocessing, a technology that the US
forswore for civilian use in the late 1970s
out of concern that reprocessed plutonium
could be stolen or diverted for weapons purposes.
... "We know exactly what it costs to
reprocess, but nobody has even the slightest
idea what it will cost to store spent fuel," [Alan]
Hanson [executive vice president of Areva,
the French nuclear conglomerate] told the
May roundtable.
Indeed, storage costs can't be estimated as
long as the already decades-long delay with
building the Yucca Mountain site drags on.
But even if the repository is completed-not
before 2020, according to DOE-it will have
only enough room for spent fuel that is generated
through the year 2010 (see PHYSICS TODAY,
June 2008, page 28). Without reprocessing,
DOE warns, a second repository will need to
be built to accommodate the growing quantities
of spent fuel that will result from a revitalized
US nuclear industry, let alone material that
will be shipped back to the US under the GNEP.
2008 Summer. America's
Energy Future: Why Water Matters. David
Holtz, Clean Water Action News. Excerpt:
While enacting strong policies that encourage
energy sources like wind and solar seem like
obvious good global warming and employment
solutions, it is also increasingly clear that
water - protecting it, conserving it - matters
a lot in considering other choices, particularly
nuclear and coal, in the context of global
warming.
... Proposed expansion of nuclear power and
the introduction of new, untried technology
of capturing carbon from coal plant emissions
and sequestering it underground raise important
and still unaddressed questions related to
water. Both nuclear and coal power plants
use huge amounts of water, mostly in cooling
processes.
... In August, the Tennessee Valley Authority
was forced to shut down one reactor at the
Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama and
scale back production at the plant's two other
reactors because of overheated water in the
Tennessee River, which is used to cool the
facility.
..."Water is the nuclear industry's Achilles
heel," Jim Warren, executive director
of N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network,
told the Associated Press in January. "You
need a lot of water to operate nuclear plants."
The vast amounts of water used by coal plants
for cooling purposes also raise questions,
said Roger Smith, Clean Water Action's Global
Warming and Energy Policy Associate. "All
of our assumptions for power plant water use
are based on current and historical levels
of water," Smith explained. "What
happens if those assumptions are wrong?
2008 July 1. Georgia
Judge Cites Carbon Dioxide in Denying Coal
Plant Permit. By Matthew L. Wald, The
New York Times. Excerpt:
A judge in Georgia has thrown out an air pollution
permit for a new coal-fired power plant because
the permit did not set limits on carbon dioxide
emissions.
Both opponents of coal use and the company
that wants to build the plant said it was
the first time a court decision had linked
carbon dioxide to an air pollution permit.
The decision’s broader legal impact
was not clear, either for the plant, proposed
to be built near Blakely, in Early County,
Ga., or for others outside Georgia, but it
signaled that builders of coal plants would
face continued difficulties in the court system
as well as with elected officials in many
states.
In the ruling released late Monday afternoon,
a state judge relied on a decision by the
Supreme Court last year that carbon dioxide
could be regulated as a pollutant. Carbon
dioxide, which is colorless, odorless and
not directly harmful to animals or plants,
is not now regulated, and the Bush administration
has signaled that it would not issue such
regulations before the president leaves office.
But the judge, Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore
in Superior Court in Fulton County, Ga., said
that federal air pollution control laws required
pollution permits to cover all pollutants
that could be regulated under the Clean Air
Act, not just those for which there is “a
separate, general numerical limitation.”
Robert Wyman, a partner in the Los Angeles
office of Latham & Watkins, the law firm,
who has represented power producers in previous
cases, said of the decision: “I would
be surprised if it had much of an impact.
I’m not sure other jurisdictions will
pick up that opinion.”
Vickie Patton, the deputy general counsel
at the Environmental Defense Fund, however,
argued that the judge’s reasoning might
prove persuasive to other courts facing similar
issues...
2008 May 30. Mounting
Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal.By
MATTHEW L. WALD, NY Times. Excerpt:
WASHINGTON - For years, scientists have had
a straightforward idea for taming global warming.
They want to take the carbon dioxide that
spews from coal-burning power plants and pump
it back into the ground. President Bush ...
has spent years talking up the virtues of "clean
coal." All three candidates to succeed
him favor the approach. So do many other members
of Congress.
Coal companies are for it. Many environmentalists
favor it. Utility executives are practically
begging for the technology. But it has become
clear in recent months that the nation's effort
to develop the technique is lagging badly.
In January, the government canceled its support
for what was supposed to be a showcase project,
a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois
where there was coal, access to the power
grid, and soil underfoot that backers said
could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.
Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility
projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio,
Minnesota and Washington State that would
have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide
have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory
limbo.
...In Wisconsin, engineers are testing a method
that may allow them to bolt machinery for
capturing carbon dioxide onto the back of
old-style power plants; Sweden, Australia
and Denmark are planning similar tests. And
German engineers are exploring another approach,
one that involves burning coal in pure oxygen,
which would produce a clean stream of exhaust
gases that could be injected into the ground.
But no project is very far along, and it remains
an open question whether techniques for capturing
and storing carbon dioxide will be available
by the time they are critically needed....
2008 May 23. Italy
Plans to Resume Building Atomic Plants.By
ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, NY Times. Excerpt:
ROME - Italy announced Thursday that within
five years it planned to resume building nuclear
energy plants, two decades after a public
referendum resoundingly banned nuclear power
and deactivated all its reactors. ...The change
is a striking sign of the times, reflecting
growing concern in many European countries
over the skyrocketing price of oil and energy
security, and the warming effects of carbon
emissions from fossil fuels. All have combined
to make this once-scorned form of energy far
more palatable.
"Italy has had the most dramatic, the most public turnaround,
but the sentiments against nuclear are reversing very quickly
all across Europe - Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and more," said
Ian Hore-Lacey, spokesman for the World Nuclear Association,
an industry group based in London.
...A number of European countries have banned
or restricted nuclear power in the past 20
years, including Italy, which closed all its
plants. Germany and Belgium have long prohibited
the building of reactors, although existing
ones were allowed to run their natural lifespan.
France was one of the few countries that continued
to rely heavily on nuclear power.
...conditions were very different in the 1980s,
when European countries turned away from nuclear
power. Oil cost less than $50 a barrel, global
warming was a fringe science and climate change
had not been linked to manmade emissions.
Perhaps more important for the public psyche,
almost all of Europe's nuclear bans and restrictions
were enacted after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster
in the Soviet Union in which radioactivity
was released into the environment.
The equation has changed. Today, with oil
approaching $150 a barrel, most European countries,
which generally have no oil and gas resources,
have been forced by finances to consider new
forms of energy - and fast. New nuclear plants
take 20 years to build. Also, Europeans watched
in horror in 2006 as President Vladimir V.
Putin of Russia cut off the natural gas supply
to Ukraine in a price dispute, leaving it
in darkness.
...To build nuclear plants, Italy would almost
certainly have to improve its system of dealing
with nuclear waste. The plants that were shut
down years ago still store 235 tons of nuclear
fuel. See also World Uranium Reserves, [http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html]
By James Hopf, Nuclear Engineer, November
2004
2008 April 23. Europe
Turns Back to Coal, Raising Climate Fears.
ELISABETH ROSENTHAL. The NY times. Excerpt:
At a time when the world’s top climate
experts agree that carbon emissions must be
rapidly reduced to hold down global warming,
Italy’s major electricity producer,
Enel, is converting its massive power plant
here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest
fuel on earth. Over the next five years, Italy
will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent
from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from
coal will rise to 50 percent. And Italy is
not alone in its return to coal. Driven by
rising demand, record high oil and natural
gas prices, concerns over energy security
and an aversion to nuclear energy, European
countries are expected to put into operation
about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five
years, plants that will be in use for the
next five decades…
Enel and many other electricity companies
say they have little choice but to build coal
plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly
in countries like Italy and Germany that have
banned the building of nuclear power plants.
Fuel costs have risen 151 percent since 1996,
and Italians pay the highest electricity costs
in Europe. In terms of cost and energy security,
coal has all the advantages, its proponents
argue. Coal reserves will last for 200 years,
rather than 50 years for gas and oil. Coal
is relatively cheap compared with oil and
natural gas, although coal prices have tripled
in the past few years. More important, hundreds
of countries export coal — there is
not a coal cartel — so there is more
room to negotiate prices…
The task — in which carbon emissions
are pumped into underground reservoirs rather
than released — is challenging for any
fuel source, but particularly so for coal,
which produces more carbon dioxide than oil
or natural gas. Under optimal current conditions,
coal produces more than twice as much carbon
dioxide per unit of electricity as natural
gas, the second most common fuel used for
electricity generation, according to the Electric
Power Research Institute. In the developing
world, where even new coal plants use lower
grade coal and less efficient machinery, the
equation is even worse…The European
Union had pledged to develop 12 pilot carbon-capture
projects for Europe, but says that is not
enough.
On many other fronts, the new Enel plant is
a model of efficiency and recycling. The nitrous
oxide is chemically altered to generate ammonia,
which is then sold. The resulting coal ash
and gypsum are sold to the cement industry.
An on-site desalination plant means that the
operation generates its own water for cooling.
Even the heated water that comes out of the
plant is not wasted: it heats a fish farm,
one of Italy’s largest…
In the towns surrounding Civitavecchia, the
impending arrival of a huge coal plant, with
its three silvery domes, is being greeted
with a hefty dose of dread….
2008 Apr 15. Technology
Smooths the Way for Home Wind-Power Turbines.
By JOHN CASEY, NY Times. Excerpt:
Wind turbines, once used primarily for farms
and rural houses far from electrical service,
are becoming more common in heavily populated
residential areas as homeowners are attracted
to ease of use, financial incentives and low
environmental effects.
No one tracks the number of small-scale residential
wind turbines - windmills that run turbines
to produce electricity - in the United States.
... a convergence of factors, political, technical
and ecological, has caused a surge in the
use of residential wind turbines, especially
in the Northeast and California. "Back
in the early days, off-grid electrical generation
was pursued mostly by hippies and rednecks,
usually in isolated, rural areas," said
Joe Schwartz, editor of Home Power magazine. "Now,
it's a lot more mainstream."
"The big shift happened in the last three years," Mr.
Schwartz said, because of technology that makes it possible
to feed electricity back to the grid, the commercial power
system fed by large utilities. "These new systems use
the utility for back up power, removing the need for big, expensive
battery backup systems." ...Ecological concerns, more
than cost savings may drive many new residential turbine installations. "People
want to reduce their carbon footprints," Mr. Tonko said. "They're
concerned about climate change and they want to reduce our
reliance of foreign sources of fuels."
Mr. Schwartz, the editor, said that even with
the economic benefits, it can take 20 years
to pay back the installation cost. "This
isn't about people putting turbines in to
lower their electric bills as much as it is
about people voting with their dollars to
help the environment in some small way," he
said.
...Even if the wind is strong, zoning and
aesthetics can pose problems. "Turbines
work in rural areas with strong wind," Mr.
Schwartz said. "But in urban and suburban
areas, neighbors are never happy to see a
60- to 120-foot tower going up across the
street."
2008 Apr 15. New
Ways to Store Solar Energy for Nighttime and
Cloudy Days. By MATTHEW L. WALD, NY Times. Excerpt:
Solar power, the holy grail of renewable energy,
has always faced the problem of how to store
the energy captured from the sun's rays so
that demand for electricity can be met at
night or whenever the sun is not shining.
The difficulty is that electricity is hard
to store. Batteries are not up to efficiently
storing energy on a large scale. A different
approach being tried by the solar power industry
could eliminate the problem.
The idea is to capture the sun's heat. ...
a "power tower," a little bit like
a water tank on stilts surrounded by hundreds
of mirrors that tilt on two axes, one to follow
the sun across the sky in the course of the
day and the other in the course of the year.
In the tower and in a tank below are tens
of thousands of gallons of molten salt that
can be heated to very high temperatures and
not reach high pressure.
...Terry Murphy, president and chief executive
of SolarReserve, ... design is for a power
tower that can supply 540 megawatts of heat.
At the high temperatures it could achieve,
that would produce 250 megawatts of electricity,
enough to run a fair-size city. It might make
more sense to produce a smaller quantity and
run well into the evening or around the clock
or for several days when it is cloudy, he
said.
At Black & Veatch, a builder of power
plants, Larry Stoddard, the manager of renewable
energy consulting, said that with a molten
salt design, "your turbine is totally
buffered from the vagaries of the sun." By
contrast, "if I've got a 50 megawatt
photovoltaic plant, covering 300 acres or
so, and a large cloud comes over, I lose 50
megawatts in something like 100 to 120 seconds," he
said, adding, "That strikes fear into
the hearts of utility dispatchers."....
2008 Apr 7. Trees
Block Solar Panels, and a Feud Ends in Court.
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times. Excerpt:
Under a California law, a criminal court ruled
that these redwood trees cast too much shade
on Mark Vargas's solar panels. SUNNYVALE,
Calif. - Call it an eco-parable: one Prius-driving
couple takes pride in their eight redwoods,...
Their electric-car-driving neighbors take
pride in their rooftop solar panels, installed
five years after the first trees were planted.
...The solar-redwoods dispute is unusual largely
because it is a solar-panel owner who is mounting
the challenge. Typically, solar-panel owners
have to play defense. For example, despite
a 1980 Arizona law to protect homeowners who
install photovoltaic panels, Henry Speak,
a retiree in Avondale, Ariz., had to battle
his homeowners' association through a series
of state courts to keep his rooftop solar
system without adding expensive screening
- screening that, like the redwoods, would
have reduced the panels' efficiency.
...On both sides of the Sunnyvale backyard
fence, there is evidence of environmental
virtue - one Prius (Ms. Bissett and Mr. Treanor),
one electric car (the Vargases), one water-free
xeriscaped front yard with recycled-plastic
borders (Ms. Bissett and Mr. Treanor), 128
solar panels providing almost all the power
for one home (the Vargases), and eight carbon-dioxide-sipping,
bird-friendly redwood trees in various stages
of growth (Ms. Bissett and Mr. Treanor). ...There
was little communication between the neighbors
- until Ms. Bissett introduced three redwood
trees in 1996. In the next five years, she
planted five more....
In 2001, Mr. Vargas installed solar panels
... then informed his neighbors - brusquely,
they say - about the solar shade law, saying
they must cut down all of the redwoods. ...
and offered to pay for removal and replacement.
... in 2005, the deputy district attorney,
John Fioretta, began the first prosecution
under the Solar Shade Act. It ended in December
with the conviction of Ms. Bissett and Mr.
Treanor by Judge Kurt Kumli of Santa Clara
County Superior Court. ...found that Trees
Nos. 4, 5 and 6, ... were now collectively
blocking more than 10 percent of the panels
over the hot tub. Trees Nos. 1, 2 and 3 shaded
the area when the panels were installed, so
they were exempt, and Trees Nos. 7 and 8 did
not violate the law, the judge ruled. ...Mr.
Treanor and Ms. Bissett still do not quite
believe what happened. "It was like I'd
been hit in the chest," Ms. Bissett said
....
Mr. Vargas said it all could have been avoided. "My
entire goal was to find a more appropriate
tree to place between our two properties," he
said. "To have a 60-foot barrier is unreasonable."....
2008 March 6. THE
ENERGY CHALLENGE Turning Glare Into Watts. By
MATTHEW L. WALD, NY Times. Excerpt:
BOULDER CITY, Nev. - At first, as he adjusted
pumps and checked temperatures, Aaron Boucher
looked like any technician in the control
room of an electrical plant. Then he rushed
to the window and scanned the sky, to check
his fuel supply. ...Especially in areas of
intense sun, an array of reflectors can concentrate
sunlight, heating a fluid to create steam
and power. Mr. Boucher was battling clouds,
timing the operations of his power plant to
get the most out of patchy sunshine. It is
a skill that may soon be in greater demand,
for the world appears to be on the verge of
a boom in a little-known but promising type
of solar power ... covering acres of desert
with mirrors that focus intense sunlight on
a fluid, heating it enough to make steam.
The steam turns a turbine and generates electricity.
...After a decade of no activity, two prototype
solar thermal plants were recently opened
in the United States, with a capacity that
could power several big hotels, neon included,
on the Las Vegas Strip, about 20 miles north
of here. Another 10 power plants are in advanced
planning in California, Arizona and Nevada.
On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would
produce as much electricity as three nuclear
reactors, but they can be built in as little
as two years, compared with a decade or longer
for a nuclear plant. Some of the new plants
will feature systems that allow them to store
heat and generate electricity for hours after
sunset. Aside from the ones in the United
States, eight plants are under construction
in Spain, Algeria and Morocco. Another nine
projects are in various stages of planning
in those countries as well as Israel, Mexico,
China, South Africa and Egypt, ...Donald E.
Brandt, the chief executive of Pinnacle West,
said the decision to build the new solar plant
was as important as his company's decision
in 1973 to build the Palo Verde nuclear plant,
the largest and most modern in the United
States.
"The key is, the solar technology has advanced," Mr.
Brandt said. At 280 megawatts, "it's a critical size;
it's a real power plant; it's meaningful; it's beyond the demonstration
stage."
...If large numbers of plants are built, they
will eventually pose some problems, even in
the desert. They could take up immense amounts
of land and damage the environment. Already,
building a plant in California requires hiring
a licensed tortoise wrangler to capture and
relocate endangered desert tortoises. "The
one thing that's eventually going to raise
its head is desert biodiversity, and the land
area itself," said Terrence J. Collins,
an environmental expert and professor at Carnegie
Mellon University....
2008 Feb 23. Move
Over, Oil, There's Money in Texas Wind. By
CLIFFORD KRAUSS, The New York Times.Excerpt:
SWEETWATER, Tex. - ... wind turbines that
recently went up on Louis Brooks's ranch ...
paid $500 a month apiece to permit 78 of them
on his land, with 76 more on the way.
"That's just money you're hearing," he said as they
hummed in a brisk breeze recently.
Texas, once the oil capital of North America,
is rapidly turning into the capital of wind
power. ...more than 3 percent of its electricity,
enough to supply power to one million homes,
comes from wind turbines. Texans are even
turning tapped-out oil fields into wind farms,
and no less an oilman than Boone Pickens is
getting into alternative energy. "I have
the same feelings about wind," Mr. Pickens
said in an interview, "as I had about
the best oil field I ever found." He
is planning to build the biggest wind farm
in the world, a $10 billion behemoth that
could power a small city by itself.
Wind turbines were once a marginal form of
electrical generation. But amid rising concern
about greenhouse gases from coal-burning power
plants, wind power is booming. Installed wind
capacity in the United States grew 45 percent
last year, albeit from a small base, and a
comparable increase is expected this year.
...The United States recently overtook Spain
as the world's second-largest wind power market,
after Germany, with $9 billion invested last
year.
...The turbines are getting bigger and their
blades can kill birds and bats. Aesthetic
and wildlife issues have led to opposition
emerging around the country, particularly
in coastal areas like Cape Cod. Some opposition
in Texas has cropped up as well, ...Some Texans
see the sleek new turbines as a welcome change
in the landscape. "Texas has been looking
at oil and gas rigs for 100 years, and frankly,
wind turbines look a little nicer," said
Jerry Patterson, the Texas land commissioner....
...At the end of 2007, Texas ranked No. 1
in the nation with installed wind power of
4,356 megawatts (and 1,238 under construction),
far outdistancing California's 2,439 megawatts
(and 165 under construction). Minnesota and
Iowa came in third and fourth with almost
1,300 megawatts each (and 46 and 116 under
construction, respectively).
Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado and Oregon, states
with smaller populations than Texas, all get
5 to 8 percent of their power from wind farms,
according to estimates by the American Wind
Energy Association....
2008 February 3. A
'Bold' Step to Capture an Elusive Gas Falters. By
ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt:
CAPTURING heat-trapping emissions from coal-fired
power plants is on nearly every climate expert's
menu for a planet whose inhabitants all want
a plugged-in lifestyle.
So there was much enthusiasm five years ago
when the Bush administration said it would
pursue "one of the boldest steps our
nation has taken toward a pollution-free energy
future" by building a commercial-scale
coal-fire plant that would emit no carbon
dioxide - the greenhouse gas that makes those
plants major contributors to global warming.
That bold step forward stumbled last week.
With the budget of the so-called FutureGen
project having nearly doubled, to $1.8 billion,
and the government responsible for more than
70 percent of the eventual bill, the administration
completely revamped the project. ...The idea
is to capture carbon dioxide emitted by coal-fire
power plants and then pump it deep into the
earth to avoid further buildup of the gas
in the atmosphere. But several experts said
the plan still lacked the scope to test various
gas-separation technologies, coal varieties,
and - most important - whether varied geological
conditions can permanently hold carbon dioxide.
Coal companies are desperate for this option
to work, given how much coal remains to be
mined. Many climate scientists and environmental
campaigners see it as vital. Steady growth
in coal use by developing and industrialized
countries is expected to extend well beyond
2030. David G. Hawkins, an energy analyst
at the Natural Resources Defense Council,
said the new approach would have been a good
move four years ago. "But to tout FutureGen
for five years and then in the president's
last year pull the plug is just bait and switch," he
said....
2007
2007 November 29. Helium
Isotopes Point to New Sources of Geothermal
Energy. Research News, Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory. Excerpt:
BERKELEY, CA -- ... geochemists Mack Kennedy
of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory and Matthijs van Soest
of Arizona State University have discovered
a new tool for identifying potential geothermal
energy resources.
Currently, most developed geothermal energy comes from regions
of volcanic activity, such as The Geysers in Northern California.
The potential resources identified by Kennedy and van Soest arise
not from volcanism but from the flow of surface fluids through
deep fractures that penetrate the earth's lower crust, in regions
far from current or recent volcanic activity. The researchers
report their findings in the November 30, 2007 issue of Science.
"A good geothermal energy source has three basic requirements:
a high thermal gradient -- which means accessible hot rock --
plus a rechargeable reservoir fluid, usually water, and finally,
deep permeable pathways for the fluid to circulate through the
hot rock," says Kennedy, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's
Earth Sciences Division. "We believe we have found a way
to map and quantify zones of permeability deep in the lower crust
that result not from volcanic activity but from tectonic activity,
the movement of pieces of the Earth's crust."
Kennedy and van Soest made their discovery by comparing the ratios
of helium isotopes in samples gathered from wells, surface springs,
and vents across the northern Basin and Range. ...a high ratio
of helium-three to helium-four in a fluid sample indicates that
much of the fluid came from the mantle.
..."We have never seen such a clear correlation of surface
geochemical signals with tectonic activity, nor have we ever
been able to quantify deep permeability from surface measurements
of any kind," says Kennedy. The samples they collected on
the surface gave the researchers a window into the structure
of the rocks far below, with no need to drill.
With the urgent need to find energy sources that are renewable
and don't emit greenhouse gases, geothermal energy is ideal -- "the
best renewable energy source besides the sun," Kennedy says.
Accessible geothermal energy in the United States, excluding
Alaska and Hawaii, has been estimated at 9 x 1016 (90 quadrillion)
kilowatt-hours, 3,000 times more than the country's total annual
energy consumption....
2007 November 23. Sweden
Turns to a Promising Power Source, With Flaws. The
New York Times. By MARK LANDLER. Excerpt:
MALMO, Sweden ...A 30-mile-an-hour wind was
twirling the fingerlike blades of a turbine
380 feet above his head. Around him, a field
of turbines rotated in a synchronized ballet
that, when fully connected to an electrical
grid, would generate enough power to light
60,000 nearby houses.
"We've created a new landmark," said Mr. [Arne] Floderus,
the project manager of the $280 million wind park, one of the
world's largest, which was built by the Swedish power company
Vattenfall.
...Yet Sweden's gleaming wind park is entering
service at a time when wind energy is coming
under sharper scrutiny, not just from hostile
neighbors, who complain that the towers are
a blot on the landscape, but from energy experts
who question its reliability as a source of
power.
For starters, the wind does not blow all the
time. When it does, it does not necessarily
do so during periods of high demand for electricity.
That makes wind a shaky replacement for more
dependable, if polluting, energy sources like
oil, coal and natural gas. Moreover, to capture
the best breezes, wind farms are often built
far from where the demand for electricity
is highest. The power they generate must then
be carried over long distances on high-voltage
lines, which in Germany and other countries
are strained and prone to breakdowns.
...In Denmark, which pioneered wind energy
in Europe, construction of wind farms has
stagnated in recent years. The Danes export
much of their wind-generated electricity to
Norway and Sweden because it comes in unpredictable
surges that often outstrip demand.
...For a socially conscious society like Sweden,
wind turbines exert a fashionable appeal.
Today, they account for less than 1 percent
of Sweden's electricity generation. But the
government wants to increase annual wind power
production to 10 terawatt hours, or 10 trillion
watt hours, by 2015 from less than 1 terawatt
hour now (the park off Malmo will produce
a third of a terawatt hour).
Vattenfall hopes to develop an even larger
off-shore park in the Baltic Sea, between
Sweden and Germany.
...Sweden does not need to build wind parks
to get wind power. It could simply buy more
surplus wind power from Denmark, which it
uses, as does Norway, to pump underground
water into elevated reservoirs. The water
is later released during periods of peak electric
demand to drive hydroelectric stations. In
this way, hydro acts as a form of storage
for wind energy - addressing one of wind power's
biggest shortcomings....
2007 October 22. Scientists
see coal as key challenge. By CHARLES
J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent. Excerpt:
The proliferation of coal-burning power plants
around the world may pose "the single
greatest challenge" to averting dangerous
climate change, an international panel of
scientists reported Monday.Governments and
the private sector are spending too little
on research into a partial solution - technology
to capture and store the carbon dioxide emissions
from such plants, the group said.
The study by 15 scientists from 13 nations, "Lighting
the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future," was
commissioned by the governments of China and
Brazil and is the product of two years of
workshops organized by the InterAcademy Council,
the Netherlands-based network of national
academies of science.
The 174-page report details current and developing
technologies, and government incentives and
other policies that could lead both the developed
and developing world to clean, affordable
and sustainable energy supplies.
"The first thing it says, really, is that conservation
and energy efficiency will remain for the next couple of decades
the most important thing the world can do to get on a sustainable
path," said co-chairman Steven Chu, Nobel Prize-winning
physicist and director of California's Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory.
...China expects to open one new coal-fired
plant per week over the next five years. In
the United States, plans for more than 150
new coal plants have been announced since
the late 1990s, although some recently have
been scrapped or delayed because of climate
and other concerns....
2007 July 23. A
Warming World: No to Nukes. The Los Angeles
Times | Editorial. Excerpt:
... Japan sees nuclear power as a solution
to global warming, but.... Last week, a magnitude
6.8 earthquake caused dozens of problems at
the world's biggest nuclear plant, leading
to releases of radioactive elements into the
air and ocean and an indefinite shutdown.
...Japan has a sordid history of serious nuclear
accidents or spills followed by cover-ups....
The U.S. government allows nuclear plants
to operate under a level of secrecy usually
reserved for the national security apparatus.
Last year...about nine gallons of highly enriched
uranium spilled at a processing plant in Tennessee,
forming a puddle a few feet from an elevator
shaft. Had it dripped into the shaft, it might
have formed a critical mass sufficient for
a chain reaction, releasing enough radiation
to kill or burn workers nearby....
No U.S. utility has ordered a new nuclear
plant since 1978....
Many respected academics and environmentalists
argue that nuclear power must be part of any
solution to climate change because nuclear
power plants don't release greenhouse gases.
...nuclear power is extremely risky. ...there
are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives
that come with none of the risks.
...The Union of Concerned Scientists cites
51 cases at 41 U.S. nuclear plants in which
reactors have been shut down for more than
a year.... Nuclear plants are also considered
attractive terrorist targets.... Weapons proliferation
is an even more serious concern.... It would
be more than a little hypocritical for the
U.S. to expand its own nuclear power capacity
while forbidding countries it doesn't like
from doing the same. ...No country in the
world has yet built a permanent underground
waste repository.... The existing 104 nuclear
plants in the U.S., which supply roughly 20%
of the nation's electricity, are old and nearing
the end of their useful lives. ... to replace
them would require building a new reactor
every four or five months for the next 40
years. ...The average nuclear plant is estimated
to cost about $4 billion. Because of the risks
involved, there is scarce interest among investors
in putting up the needed capital. ...The newest
nuclear plant in the U.S. opened in 1996,
after having been ordered in 1970 - a 26-year
gap....
2007 July 1. Nuclear
Energy Hot Topic Once Again. The New York
Times. By The Associated Press. Excerpt:
Thanks to global
warming, nuclear energy is hot again.
Its promise of abundant, carbon emissions-free
power is being pushed by the president and
newly considered by environmentalists. But
any expansion won't come cheap or easy. The
enormous obstacles facing nuclear power are
the same as they were in 1996, when the nation's
last new nuclear plant opened near the Watts
Bar reservoir in Tennessee after 22 years
of construction and $7 billion in costs. Waste
disposal, safe operation and security remain
major concerns, but economics may be the biggest
deterrent. Huge capital costs combine into
an enormous price tag for would-be investors.
There is also fervent anti-nuke opposition
waiting to be re-stoked. Recycling used fuel,
which contains 90 percent of its original
energy after one use, can reduce waste. ''Reprocessing''
also produces a plutonium that's nearer to
weapons grade, raising fears that widespread
reprocessing could increase the risks of nuclear
proliferation. … ''You don't ban the
beneficial uses of a technology just because
that same technology can be used for evil,''
he said. ''Otherwise we would never have harnessed
fire.'' …
2007 June 6. From
Turkey Waste, a New Fuel and a New Fight.
By SUSAN SAULNY, The New York Times. Excerpt:
BENSON, Minn. - ...Thanks to the abundance
of local droppings, Benson is home to a new
$200 million power plant that burns turkey
litter to produce electricity. For the last
few weeks now, since before generating operations
began in mid-May, turkey waste has poured
in from nearby farms by the truckload, filling
a fuel hall several stories high.
The power plant is a novelty on the prairie,
the first in the country to burn animal litter
(manure mixed with farm-animal bedding like
wood chips). And it sits at the intersection
of two national obsessions: an appetite for
lean meat and a demand for alternative fuels.
...The critics say turkey litter, of all farm
animals' manure, is the most valuable just
as it is, useful as a rich, organic fertilizer
at a time when demand is growing for all things
organic. ...the unwanted attention shows,
once again, how the landscape of renewable
energy production is fraught with potential
land mines, even in a case that seems small-scale
and straightforward. What could be so offensive
about burning turkey poop?
"This is the only advancement in manure utilization since
the manure spreader - that's 100-year-old technology," said
Greg Langmo, a third-generation turkey farmer who lobbied for
the plant, where he now works as a field manager.
Minnesota produces more turkeys than any other
state, some 44.5 million birds in 2005, the
most recent year for which data are available.
It follows that the turkeys leave behind a
lot of waste in their pens, where most are
confined to gobble and peck until they are
robust enough for slaughter. The Benson plant,
then, has been of considerable help for farmers
with a disposal problem.
The plant was built by Fibrowatt, a Philadelphia-based
company, with financial incentives from the
State of Minnesota.
...biomass burning, as it is called, produces
its own pollutants. According to information
in one of its federal air permits, the plant
is a major source of particulate matter, sulfur
dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides
and hydrogen sulfide....
2007 June. Falling
in Love with Wind. OnEarth, NRDC. by Joseph
D'Agnese. Excerpt:
How a small farm town traded its dairy cows
for renewable energy. In the spring of 1999
a stranger named Bill Moore arrived in the
small town of Lowville, ... New York, and
... had what he considered a good proposal
for the 27,000 citizens of Lewis County: Milk
wind, not cows. When he started telling the
locals about his notion, Moore was met with
indulgent smiles but little genuine enthusiasm. "...they
looked at me like I was from Mars," he
says. "They were polite. They didn't
openly laugh."
...Eight years later, though, it's as if the
cool reception Moore received never happened
at all. Windmills stud the flat, stark landscape
as far as the eye can see. Each turbine is
taller than the Statue of Liberty, and nearly
all of them are spinning inexorably toward
the future of Lewis County -- and perhaps
our own. This is the Maple Ridge Wind Farm,
the nation's largest new alternative energy
project east of the Mississippi River. In
the last year or so, 195 turbines have become
operational in the towns of Lowville, Harrisburg,
and Martinsburg, capable of producing 320
megawatts of electricity, the amount generated
by a medium-size power plant, or enough power
to run 98,000 homes.
...The guaranteed income -- a minimum annual
payment of about $6,000 per turbine, adjusted
annually for inflation -- has transformed
their lives. "It's paying for me to retire," says
Bill Burke. "It's given us a chance to
stay in our house," adds Patricia Burke. "We
don't have to sell after all. We sold off
the herd one spring, and the heifers later,
....
... Today, 20 percent of Denmark's electricity
comes from the wind. In sharp contrast to
Maple Ridge and other big U.S. wind farms,
of the 5,600 turbines in Denmark, only about
20 percent are owned by utility companies.
Twenty-three percent belong to cooperatives
and almost 60 percent to small, local companies
or to individuals, including farmers. This
has been the key to public acceptance. As
one Danish study concluded: "People who
own shares in a turbine are significantly
more positive about wind power than people
having no economic interest in the subject.
Members of wind cooperatives are more willing
to accept that their neighbor erect [sic]
a turbine." Other experts say that local
ownership makes wind power more economical,
since expenses are lower and companies more
competitive, with cheaper connection to the
grid than big utilities would offer and faster,
less bureaucratic decision-making. But now
that grassroots-owned technology has turned
into big business, not all is well in the
state of Denmark....
2007 May 29. Uranium
Windfall Opens Choices for the Energy Dept.
By MATTHEW L. WALD Excerpt:
WASHINGTON, May 28 - The government accumulated
vast quantities of uranium when prices were
very low and no one else wanted it. But now
that uranium prices have increased tenfold,
the government has a precious commodity -
and some tough questions - on its hands. ...the
material's market value has been estimated
at $750 million to $3 billion, one of the
companies most vocal in making its case says
it deserves the uranium - without paying a
cent for it. Up for grabs is 25 million kilograms
of uranium hexafluoride that was incompletely
processed at government enrichment plants
when prices were very low. ...
The lone operating enrichment plant in this
country, built by the old Atomic Energy Commission,
is in Paducah, Ky. It is run by a subsidiary
of USEC, a company formed in the 1990s to
privatize the enrichment monopoly that the
government had run since the days of the Manhattan
Project.
The technology at the plant is outdated, and
USEC is struggling to commercialize a more
efficient system, using centrifuges, at another
plant, in southern Ohio. USEC will not say
what it thinks that project will cost, but
it has said it does not know how it will raise
the money. ...USEC officials say the Energy
Department could transfer much of the uranium
to it with the stroke of a pen.
...Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill say giving
the uranium to USEC would reward a company
that has not demonstrated fiscal responsibility.
...Representative John D. Dingell, the Michigan
Democrat who is chairman of the House Energy
and Commerce committee, said in a statement.
... Congress should consider "whether
we should be allocating this $2 billion or
$3 billion to children's health insurance
instead of subsidizing executives who have
mismanaged their companies." USEC, he
said, had "squandered resources on multimillion-dollar
golden parachutes, stock buybacks and dividend
payments that frequently exceeded their earnings."
...In addition to USEC, a consortium of British,
Dutch and German companies has expressed interest
in the partly processed uranium for a centrifuge
plant that it is building in New Mexico, using
the same type of machines that have operated
for years in Europe....
2007 May 9. Clean
Power That Reaps a Whirlwind. By KEITH
BRADSHER, The New York Times. Excerpt:
HOUXINQIU, China - The wind turbines rising
180 feet above this dusty village at the hilly
edge of Inner Mongolia could be an environmentalist's
dream... are also part of a growing dispute
over a United Nations program that is the
centerpiece of international efforts to help
developing countries combat global warming.
...the Clean Development Mechanism, ...raising
billions of dollars from rich countries and
transferring them to poor countries to curb
the emission of global warming gases. ...China
is expected to pass the United States this
year or next to become the world's largest
emitter of global warming gases. ...the Clean
Development Mechanism ...has grown at an extraordinary
pace, to $4.8 billion in transfer payments
to developing countries last year from less
than $100 million in 2002. The Clean Development
Mechanism ...helps advanced industrial nations
stay within their Kyoto Protocol limits for
emitting climate-changing gases like carbon
dioxide. For each ton of global warming gases
that a developing country can prove it has
eliminated, the secretariat of the Clean Development
Mechanism... awards it a credit. Developing
countries sold credits last year... for an
average price of $10.70 each. ...China captured
$3 billion of the $4.8 billion.... African
countries... totaled less than $150 million
last year.... Even when very poor countries
are able to organize development projects,
they may lack expertise and must sometimes
pay out as much as half the credits in the
form of fees for international consultants
and credit brokers. ...before manufacturers
can obtain the subsidies, their national governments
need to set up a legal framework for handling
the money, which some of the poorest countries
have not yet been able to do....The wind turbine
project here in Houxinqiu ...generates nearly
24 megawatts of electricity that would otherwise
come from coal. China is already building
enough coal-fired power plants each year to
light all of Britain. ...Li Guohai, a local
peasant ...explained how he had received free
electricity since the wind turbines were erected
four years ago. He has saved enough money
that he bought an all-steel plow for his mules
to pull; the new plow now frees his son to
finish junior high school and perhaps go to
high school, Mr. Li said. The project is narrowly
profitable even without Clean Development
Mechanism payments, Mr. Tao, the general manager,
said. But the payments made the project more
attractive and made it easier to raise money
for it....the wind farm saves the equivalent
of 35,119 tons of carbon dioxide emissions
a year. At $8 a credit, that is worth $281,000....
2007 May 2. Power
station harnesses Sun's rays. By David
Shukman. Science correspondent, BBC News,
Seville. ...There
is a scene in one of the Austin Powers films
where Dr Evil unleashes a giant "tractor
beam" of energy at Earth in order to
extract a massive payment. ...the new solar
thermal power plant outside Seville in southern
Spain ... concrete tower - 40 storeys high
- stood bathed in intense white light, a totally
bizarre image in the depths of the Andalusian
countryside. ...the rays of sunlight reflected
by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense
they illuminate the water vapour and dust
hanging in the air. ...It is Europe's first
commercially operating power station using
the Sun's energy this way and at the moment
its operator, Solucar, proudly claims that
it generates 11 Megawatts (MW) of electricity
without emitting a single puff of greenhouse
gas. This current figure is enough to power
up to 6,000 homes. But ultimately, the entire
plant should generate as much power as is
used by the 600,000 people of Seville. It
works by focusing the reflected rays on one
location, turning water into steam and then
blasting it into turbines to generate power.
...the solar power is most needed in the heat
of summer when air conditioners are working
flat out. ...this power is three times more
expensive than power from conventional sources....
...a more realistic comparison is with the
cost of generating power from coal or gas
only at times of peak demand - then this solar
system seems more attractive....
2007 April 23. Climate
Change Adds Twist to Debate Over Dams.
By William Yardley. NY TIMES. KLAMATH FALLS,
Ore., April 19 - Excerpt:
The power company that owns four
hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River says
the dams provide a crucial source of so-called
clean energy at a time when carbon emissions
have become one of the world's foremost environmental
concerns. The clean-energy argument has entered
a debate over dams. But the American Indians,
fishermen and environmentalists who want the
dams removed point to what has happened
since the first one was built nearly 90 years
ago: endangered salmon have been blocked from
migrating, Indian livelihoods have been threatened,
and, more recently, the commercial fishing
industry off the Oregon and California coasts
has been devastated.. …The Klamath
dams provide enough power to serve about 70,000
homes, a small fraction of PacifiCorp's 1.6
million customers, which span six Western
states. But the company says only coal or
natural gas are likely to be reliable enough
to replace the river, which hits hydroelectric
turbines four times on its way to the sea
from east of the snow-capped Cascade Range.
Those who support removing the dams largely
dismiss the clean-energy argument, saying
the benefits outweigh losing a relatively
small source of hydropower. They note that
PacifiCorp's increased interest in the environment
comes as recent rulings by judges and federal
fisheries agencies have given new momentum
for removal. The company's federal license
to run the dams expired last year, and the
government has said PacifiCorp must build
fish ladders over the four dams to get a new
license, a proposition that could cost $300
million and reduce the power the dams generate,
potentially making removal a less costly choice……The
Klamath runs more than 250 miles from southwest
Oregon to the California coast, connecting
two states where power and water supply have
long been contentious issues……The
Northwest, where more than 80 percent of the
power generated comes from hydroelectricity,
has long had some of the lowest electricity
rates in the nation. It has also been the
setting for epic environmental fights that
reflect the tension across the region's topographic
and demographic divides……
2007 March 13. White
House Seeks to Cut Geothermal Research Funds.
By Bernie Woodall. Reuters. Excerpt:
The Bush administration wants to eliminate
federal support for geothermal power just
as many U.S. states are looking to cut greenhouse
gas emissions and raise renewable power output.
The move has angered scientists who say there
is enough hot water underground to meet all
U.S. electricity needs without greenhouse
gas emissions. "The Department of Energy
has not requested funds for geothermal research
in our fiscal-year 2008 budget," said
Christina Kielich, a spokeswoman for the Department
of Energy. "Geothermal is a mature technology.
Our focus is on breakthrough energy research
and development." The administration
of George W. Bush has made renewable energy
a priority as it seeks to wean the United
States off foreign oil, but it emphasizes
use of biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel
for vehicles and nuclear research for electricity.
... DOE requested no funding for geothermal
for the 2007 fiscal year, after funding averaged
about $26 million over the previous six years,
but Congress restored $5 million. This year,
the DOE's $24.3 billion budget request includes
a 38 percent federal spending increase for
nuclear power, but nothing for geothermal.
...New geothermal power projects by 2050 could
provide 100,000 megawatts of electricity -
enough to power about 80 million U.S. homes,
or as much as U.S. nuclear power plants make
today, the MIT study said. But U.S. geothermal
development will need $300 million to $400
million over 15 years to make this type of
power competitive versus other forms of power
generation, the study said....
2007 March. Thermonuclear
Weapons. Catalyst magazine, Union of Concerned
Scientists. by Robert Nelson is a senior scientist
in the Global Security Program. Excerpt:
U.S. thermonuclear weapons derive their explosive
energy from the combined power of nuclear
fission and fusion. An initial fission reaction
generates the high temperatures needed to
trigger a secondary-and much more powerful-fusion
reaction (hence the term "thermonuclear").
...The first is the detonation of chemical
explosives that surrounds a sphere (or "pit")
of plutonium metal. The force from this blast
is directed inward, compressing the pit and
bringing its atoms closer together...sometimes
causing them to split, or fission....
...Every year since 1997, the nation's nuclear
weapons laboratories have certified that all
U.S. nuclear warheads are safe and reliable,
and that renewed nuclear explosive testing
is not currently needed to gauge reliability.
However, the laboratories have recently voiced
concern that warheads may not be reliable
over the long term.
It must be noted that the definition of "unreliable" in
this context is a weapon that falls short
of its designed yield by more than 10 percent.
In other words, an "unreliable" nuclear
weapon can still produce a devastating explosion.
A weapon with a 300-kiloton yield could be
deemed unreliable if it exploded with a 270-kiloton
yield-13 times more energy than that released
by the Nagasaki bomb.
... the United States conducted its last nuclear
explosive test in 1992. Every type of U.S.
nuclear weapon currently deployed underwent
explosive testing, but it is theoretically
possible that the properties of the plutonium
could change as it ages, resulting in a weaker
primary.
...the oldest warheads in the U.S. weapons
stockpile were assembled almost 30 years ago.
Until very recently, the minimum lifetime
of plutonium pits was conservatively estimated
to be 45 years, which would mean that the
pits in every U.S. warhead might have to be
replaced within the next two decades. This
is the rationale behind the Bush administration's
proposed Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW)
program, which would redesign and replace
all 10,000 U.S. warheads.
Over the past several years, however, the
U.S. weapons laboratories have effectively
eliminated this rationale by conducting "accelerated
aging" experiments to re-evaluate the
age at which reliability would realistically
decline. By simulating the behavior of aged
plutonium, scientists concluded that all existing
U.S. plutonium pits have minimum lifetimes
of 85 years, and most will remain reliable
for at least 100 years. (The lifetimes could
be much longer, but further experiments are
needed.)
As these results make clear U.S. thermonuclear
weapons will remain highly reliable for many
decades, undercutting the primary reason for
the Bush administration's RRW plans....
2007 February 13. In
a Corner of Virginia's 'Switzerland,' a Division
Over a Planned Wind Farm. By PAMELA J.
PODGER, for The New York Times. Excerpt:
MONTEREY, Va. - ...Mr. Wes Maupin, a 52-year-old
former corrections worker... finds no joy
in the prospect that these blustery Allegheny
ridges could soon become home to the state's
first wind farm: 19 wind turbines, each taller
than the Statue of Liberty, its pedestal included. "Any
wind farm," Mr. Maupin said, "would
surely change the character of this county
forever." ...Where some see unwelcome
industrialization of the wilderness, others
see green energy and an estimated $200,000
a year in tax revenue for the financially
needy county. ...at Grady's Barber Shop here
in Monterey, the county seat, 35 miles west
of Staunton, Roy Waggoner said he supported
the $60 million project. "One way to
clean up the environment is with the wind
turbines; it's green energy," said Mr.
Waggoner, 57, a sheep rancher. "I don't
want to see them on every inch of land, but
that ridge is very secluded." ...But
Randy Richardson, president of Highlanders
for Responsible Development, a group that
opposes the project, said people worried about
noise pollution from the turbines' blades
and light pollution from the red strobes that
would alert aircraft to the 400-foot-tall
structures. "We actually had some guy
saying these will be similar to the windmills
in Holland," Mr. Richardson said. "Well,
there is a little bit of difference between
a quaint Dutch windmill and a 400-foot turbine."....
2007 February. US-India
nuclear pact gets mixed reaction.By Jim
Dawson, Physics Today-ISSUES AND EVENTS -
Volume 60, Issue 2. Excerpt:
In the midst of the US government's attempts
to refocus its nuclear weapons program and
stop the spread of nuclear weapons in hostile
countries, President Bush signed legislation
in December [2006] allowing the sale of civilian
nuclear fuel and technology to India and thus
reversed 30 years of nonproliferation policy.
The legislation allows US companies to sell
nuclear fuel to India and invest in and construct
new civilian nuclear power plants in that
country. In exchange, India will open up 14
of its civilian nuclear reactors to international
inspections but keep 8 military reactors off-limits.
...The law makes India an exception to the
US Atomic Energy Act, which prohibits trade
of nuclear material with countries that haven't
signed the NPT. Both the US House and Senate
voted overwhelmingly in early December to
pass the legislation, with Representative
Tom Lantos (D-CA) saying it "ushers in
a new era of cooperation between our two great
democracies." But Rep. Edward Markey
(D-MA) termed the deal a "historic mistake" that
has "shredded the nuclear nonproliferation
treaty."....
2007 February. Future
of US nuclear weapons a tangle of visions,
science, and money. By Jim Dawson, Physics
Today-ISSUES AND EVENTS - Volume 60, Issue
2. Excerpt: National
Nuclear Security Administration officials
push for a new nuclear bomb, some scientists
and arms control experts are asking what's
wrong with the old ones. ...The decision on
whether to go forward with the new bomb, known
as the Reliable Replacement Warhead [RRW],
rests with the Bush administration and Congress,
but weapons and arms control experts note
that the decision is not straightforward.
The RRW program, mandated by Congress in 2004 "to
improve the reliability, longevity, and certifiability
of existing weapons," faces a host of
questions based on need and on cost. ...Weapons
experts expect the total cost of the RRW could
reach tens of billions of dollars over the
next 25 years if the bomb is developed. ...Underlying
the entire discussion about the future of
US nuclear weapons is the enormous expense.
The US currently spends about $6.7 billion
a year to maintain the existing stockpile
and the weapons complex....
2007 January 25. Smuggler's
Plot Highlights Fear Over Uranium. By
LAWRENCE SCOTT SHEETS and WILLIAM J. BROAD.
NY Times. Excerpt:
TBILISI, Georgia, Jan. 24 - Last January,
a Russian man with sunken cheeks and a wispy
mustache crossed into Georgia and traveled
to Tbilisi by car along a high mountain road.
In two plastic bags in his leather jacket,
Georgian authorities say, he carried 100 grams
of uranium so refined that it could help fuel
an atom bomb. ...Oleg Khinsagov,left, was
arrested by Georgian authorities for smuggling
almost four ounces of enriched uranium. Interior
Minister Ivane Merabishvili, right, reported
two cases of uranium smuggling in two and
a half years. The Russian, Oleg Khinsagov,
had come to meet a buyer who he believed would
pay him $1 million and deliver the material
to a Muslim man from "a serious organization," the
authorities say. The uranium was a sample,
just under four ounces, and the deal a test:
If all went smoothly, he boasted, he would
sell a far larger cache stored in his apartment
back in Vladikavkaz, two to three kilograms
of the rare material, four and a half to six
and a half pounds, which in expert hands is
enough to make a small bomb. The buyer, it
turned out, was a Georgian agent. Alerted
to Mr. Khinsagov's ambitions by spies in South
Ossetia, Georgian officials arrested him and
confiscated his merchandise. After a secret
trial, the smuggler was sentenced to eight
and a half years in prison. ...The old Soviet
empire had a vast network of nuclear facilities.
After its breakup, as managers abandoned plants
and security fell apart, the West grew alarmed
as many cases of atomic smuggling came to
light. ...Since 2000, however, the amounts
and purity of the seized material has declined
as former Soviet republics set up new security
precautions, often financed by the United
States. ...Georgians called for help from
American diplomats, who sent in experts from
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Department of Energy, American officials say.
Mr. Merabishvili said the Americans shocked
them by taking the uranium and simply putting
it "in their pocket." Uranium in
that form emits little radiation and presents
little or no danger to its handlers. When
it was analyzed at the Energy Department's
laboratory in the Pacific Northwest, it was
found to have a U-235 purity of 89.451 percent, "suitable
for certain types of research reactors, as
a source material for medical isotope production,
and for military purposes including nuclear
weapons."
2007 January 23. Study
Says Tapping of Granite Could Unleash Energy
Source. By ANDREW C. REVKIN, NY Times. Excerpt:
The United States could generate as much electricity
by 2050 as that flowing today from all of
the country's nuclear power plants by developing
technologies that tap heat locked in deep
layers of granite, according to a new study
commissioned by the Energy Department. ...The
new report, published online yesterday, focuses
on a process that it said could affordably
harvest heat locked in deep layers of granite
that exist almost everywhere on earth. The
technique, called enhanced geothermal, involves
drilling several holes - some two to three
miles deep - into granite that has been held
at chicken-roasting temperatures, around 400
degrees or more, by insulating layers of rock
above. In the right geological conditions,
pressurized water can be used to widen natural
mazelike arrays of cracks in the granite,
creating a vast, porous subterranean reservoir.
In a typical setup, water pumped down into
the reservoir through one hole absorbs heat
from the rock and flows up another hole to
a power plant, giving up its heat to generate
steam and electricity before it is recirculated
in the rock below.There are successful plants
harvesting heat from deep hot rock in Australia,
Europe and Japan, the report noted, adding
that studies of the technology largely stopped
in the United States after a brief burst of
research during the oil crises of the 1970s.
...The generating capacity by 2050 could be
100 billion watts, about 10 percent of the
country's current generating capacity....
2007 January 22. The
Future of Geothermal Energy - Impact of
Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) on the United
States in the 21st Century. A
report prepared by an MIT-led interdisciplinary
panel, was released to the public. The report
suggests that 100,000 MWe of electrical generation
capacity can be met through EGS within 50
years with a modest investment in R&D.
(14.1MB PDF)
2006
28 December 2006. It's
Free, Plentiful and Fickle. By MATTHEW
L. WALD, NY Times. Excerpt:
Wind, almost everybody's best hope for big
supplies of clean, affordable electricity,
is turning out to have complications. Engineers
have cut the price of electricity derived
from wind by about 80 percent in the last
20 years, setting up this renewable technology
for a major share of the electricity market.
But ...wind also ...is unpredictable and
often fails to blow when electricity is
most needed, ....power plants that run on
coal or gas must "be built along with
every megawatt of wind capacity," said
William Bojorquez, director of system planning
at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
... in Texas, and most of the United States,
the hottest days are the least windy. ...A
wind machine is a bit like a bicycle that
a commuter keeps in the garage for sunny
days. It saves gasoline, but the commuter
has to own a car anyway.
...Frank P. Prager, managing director of
environmental policy at [Xcel Energy], said
...that in one of the states the company
serves, Colorado, if ...wind machines reach
20 percent of total generating capacity,
the cost of standby generators will reach
$8 a megawatt-hour of wind. That is on top
of a generating cost of $50 or $60 a megawatt-hour,
after including a federal tax credit of
$18 a megawatt-hour. By contrast, electricity
from a new coal plant currently costs in
the range of $33 to $41 a megawatt-hour,
according to experts. That price, however,
would rise if the carbon dioxide produced
in burning coal were taxed, a distinct possibility
over the life of a new coal plant. (A megawatt-hour
is the amount of power that a large hospital
or a Super Wal-Mart would use in an hour.)
Without major advances in ways to store
large quantities of electricity ..., wind
may run up against its practical limits
sooner than expected. ...In May, Xcel and
the Energy Department announced a research
program to use surplus, off-peak electricity
from wind to split water molecules into
hydrogen and oxygen. ...But storage imposes
a high cost: about half the energy put into
the system is lost. The Electric Power Research
Institute said that existing hydroelectric
dams could be used as storage; they can
increase and decrease their generation quickly,
and each watt generated in a wind machine
means water need not be run through the
dam's turbines; it can be kept in storage,
ready for use later, when it is most needed.
...the amount of energy that the average
wind turbine produces over 12 months is
equal to just 30 to 40 percent of the amount
that would result from year-round operation
at capacity. That number runs closer to
90 percent at a nuclear or coal plant. Thus
a 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant will produce
nearly three times as much electricity as
1,000 megawatts of wind turbines. But operating
costs at the wind farm are lower, and the
fuel is, of course, free.
[Comment from Alan Gould:
the article does not explore possibility "distributed
storage" i.e. each home (or neighborhood)
having enough battery storage to get through
cloudy/rainy/non-windy days. Distributed storage
is the perfect match for distributed photovoltaic
systems. Also, the article's figures about
relative costs of wind and coal energy may
have the classic flaw of not factoring in
environmental costs for the coal energy.]
13 December 2006. Uranium
Is a Hot Commodity, and Claims Have Soared.
By FELICITY BARRINGER, NY Times. Excerpt:
WASHINGTON, A fourfold increase in the price
of uranium in the past three years has led
to a rush of new claims by uranium companies,
according to a new survey by an environmental
group that wants to inform the public of
potentially harmful consequences. Mining
claim data compiled by the Environmental
Working Group, Washington-based environmental
research specialists, shows that, in Colorado,
Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, the total
claims rose from just over 2,000 in 2001
to about 18,000 in 2005. ..."There's
a renaissance of people's attitudes toward
nuclear energy as a viable green, clean,
clean-air type of energy sources," said
Paul Matysek, president of the Vancouver-based
firm Energy Metals Corporation. And, Mr.
Matysek added, the increase in oil and natural-gas
prices, even though they have eased in recent
months, has spurred a mini-boom in the price
of the metal.
"Three years ago it was $12 or $14" a pound, he said. "Today
it's $65.50." ...Environmental groups said that ... the
consequences could be severe. ...In Nevada, for instance, the
environmental group's research found more than 166,000 new
claims, covering more than 3.5 million acres of public land.
...only a tiny fraction of all claims - usually less than a
tenth of one percent - are ever mined. But the scars of open-pit
mining are visible in many places on the Environmental Working
Group's Web site [http://www.ewg.org/], .... Still, said Mark
Kuchta, an associate professor of mining engineering at the
Colorado School of Mines, uranium mining in the future will
have far less impact than the mines and the associated mills
in the past. Increased cancer deaths have occurred near at
least one old uranium mining sites. "The environmental
laws have changed," Mr. Kuchta said. "In order to
build the mine, there's a plethora of permits" needed.
He added, "You can't just leave them on the surface and
walk away the way you used to do."
12 December 2006. Buffalo:
State Sues Over Nuclear Waste Site.
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS, NY Times. Excerpt:
In a lawsuit filed yesterday against the
federal government, the state is seeking
payment for the cleanup of a former nuclear
fuel reprocessing plant in western New York,
state officials said. The lawsuit... asks
the court to order the federal Department
of Energy to pay for the disposal of what
was originally 600,000 gallons of highly
radioactive nuclear waste, said David Munro,
an assistant attorney general. State officials
estimate that the cost of disposing of the
material at a planned federal waste depository
will be $228 million....
7 November 2006. Committed
to Coal, and in a Hurry, Too. By MATTHEW
L. WALD. NY Times. Excerpt:
FAIRFIELD, Tex. -
The TXU Corporation is embarking on its
next monumental task: the nation's single
largest coal-oriented construction campaign,
with a plan to add more than 9,000 megawatts
of new capacity, the equivalent of 3.5 percent
of the nation's current coal-fired capacity.
That is enough to power millions of homes.
For people who want to limit global warming
gases, the moves by TXU, which is based
in Dallas, are a reminder that outside the
laboratories and hearing rooms where scientists
and policy makers talk about limiting carbon
emissions, some power companies are racing
to build infrastructure that will put carbon
into the atmosphere into the middle of this
century or longer. Whatever the cost to
the ecosystem, it could be an immensely
profitable bet. Company executives say the
plants will provide cheap electricity for
Texas, make lots of money for shareholders,
conserve more valuable natural gas and reduce
the pollutants that make smog. Texas has
no goals for cutting carbon emissions. Nationally,
the [energy] industry expects 19 percent
growth over the next decade; in Texas, it
is 25 percent. The state's peak electric
demand grew 5 percent last summer, compared
with the summer before.
15 September 2006 Clamping
Down on Mercury Emissions BY DAN KROTZ,
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab News.
Someday,
those mercury warning labels posted
near the fish section of supermarkets
may join lead paint and asbestos
as relics of a bygone era. Berkeley
Lab scientists led by Shih-Ger
(Ted) Chang have developed a potentially
cheap and efficient way of removing
mercury from coal-fired power plant
emissions. ...As envisioned, his
technique involves injecting a
specially formulated gas into the
mercury-laden flue gas of a coal-fired
power plant, where it can convert
elemental mercury into oxidized
mercury, a form more easily captured
by existing pollution control devices.
...The problem is also global.
China's booming coal combustion
industry emits more than 200
tons of mercury per year into
the atmosphere, some of which
drifts to the U.S.
Over time, some of the mercury
released into the environment
by power plants changes to methylmercury,
which is a potent neurotoxin
that is known to be detrimental
to developing fetuses and young
children. It is passed from prey
to predator along the food chain,
building up in certain types
of fish and shellfish that people
love to eat. In fact, methylmercury
can accumulate in fish and marine
mammals in concentrations hundreds
of thousands times higher than
the levels in surrounding waters,
which is why state environmental
regulatory agencies often issue
fish consumption advisories....
9 September 2006. Interior
Department Rejects Interim Plan for Nuclear
Waste. By MARTIN STOLZ and MATTHEW L.
WALD. NY Times. Excerpt:
SKULL VALLEY, Utah, Sept. 8 - The Interior
Department has moved to block a huge "interim" nuclear
waste storage plant on an Indian reservation
here, citing a lack of confidence that it
would truly be temporary because there is
so much doubt about completion of a permanent
repository, at Yucca Mountain, Nev. ...The
decision was hailed by many elected officials
in Utah, which has no reactors, and where
many non-Indians oppose the plan. But John
D. Parkyn, the chairman of the board of
Private Fuel Storage, the consortium, said
in a telephone interview on Friday that
the opinion about Yucca Mountain was contrary
to federal policy and that there were various
errors in the decision. One, Mr. Parkyn
said, is that the decision said development
on the reservation would require a tribal
police force. But in fact, he said, the
plant would have only about 20 employees,
and most of those would be guards. If tribal
police were somehow required, he said, the
project would pay for them. ...The tribe
is divided over the project. A proponent,
Garth Jerry Bear, said Friday at his home
on the reservation that the plant would
provide hope for the desperately poor members,
good-paying jobs and money for schools.
...Sammy Blackbear, an opponent of the storage
plan, said he was elated by the decision.
"It should have come a long time ago,'' Mr. Blackbear
said, "but this is better late than never."
September 2006. Winds
of Change. Catalyst Magazine,
Union of Concerned Scientists. By Jeff Deyette.
Excerpt: ...The
United States reached a wind energy milestone
earlier this year: 10,000 megawatts (MW)
of total generating capacity, or enough
to power more than 2.5 million homes. ...Though
the U.S. wind industry continues to expand
at a rapid pace, the cost of developing
a wind power project has actually increased
over the past 18 months, in some cases significantly.
The uncertainty of federal production incentives
has deterred manufacturers from building assembly
plants in the United States, requiring most
turbines to be imported, and foreign-made
turbines have become more expensive as the
value of the U.S. dollar has fallen. At the
same time, high global demand has caused most
turbine manufacturers to sell out through
2008, and the cost of steel and other materials
has risen sharply due mostly to higher fossil
fuel prices. Other factors include the difficulties
associated with using more sophisticated electronic
components and increased profit margins by
manufacturers.
Fortunately, none of these obstacles are insurmountable.
Higher fossil fuel prices have driven up the
cost of conventional power generation, enabling
wind power to remain cost-competitive.
...Two exciting new technologies hold out
the promise of consistent growth for the wind
industry in the coming decades: turbines that
can be set in deep offshore waters, and land-based
turbines that can operate cost-effectively
at lower wind speeds....
6 August 2006. Physics Today - LETTERS
- Tough questions about wind energy Excerpts:
Kenneth Perry - Boulder, Wyoming: In suggesting
that the US should turn to wind-generated
electric power (see PHYSICS TODAY, July
2005, page 34), Cristina Archer and Mark
Jacobson fail to discuss the visual impact
of wind farms.... Terry Goldman, Los Alamos,
New Mexico:
As a free-standing, reliable, and stable
source of energy, wind power is totally
inadequate; even as a secondary, supportive
source, it has serious limitations. Due
to the character of wind, power is not produced
in a steady stream over a long period but
in a succession of spikes between zero and
full power. The fluctuation makes reliable
management of the power grid very risky.
Moreover, wind power generation delivers
only a modest fraction (20% to 25%) of the
installed power capacity....
Archer and Jacobson comment: Kenneth Perry
suggests that wind turbines interfere with
nature's beauty. We believe, though, that
the correct comparison is not with nature's
beauty but with the visual, health, and
climate impacts of coal, natural gas, and
nuclear power plants (see, for example, http://www.fotosearch.com/photos-images/coal-burning-plant.html),
which is what wind turbines would be replacing.
...Frits de Wette contends that the intermittency
of wind makes power management of a wind-energy-dominated
grid risky. This is true when wind farms
are not linked together in an organized
manner through the transmission grid, but
not true if they are. We have shown in a
new study that interconnecting up to 19
wind farms several hundred kilometers apart
converts an intermittent wind resource to
one that produces about one-third of its
electric power at the same reliability as
the average US coal-fired power plant-which
has a 12.5% outage rate. Remaining electricity
can be firmed with hydroelectric, geothermal,
solar, or other power. The website for Red
ElŽctrica, which operates Spain's electric
power system (http://www.ree.es/ingles/i-index_de.html),
further shows, as an example, that linking
most of Spain's wind farms through a common
grid would eliminate minute-by-minute fluctuations
that occur at a single wind farm.
...Terry Goldman suggests that large-scale
wind farming will cause significant bird
loss. Statistics suggest otherwise. According
to the Bird Conservancy, the 15 000 existing
US wind turbines kill 10 000 to 40 000 birds
per year, which compares with 50 million
US bird deaths per year due to transmission
towers and 200 million worldwide due to
avian flu in 2005. Extrapolating to 5 million
5-MW turbines needed to satisfy all electric
power and energy needs worldwide gives 3
million to 13 million bird deaths per year,
much less than transmission towers in the
US alone. -Cristina Archer
(lozej{at}stanford.edu), Mark Z. Jacobson
(jacobson{at}stanford.edu), Stanford University
9 August 2006. Nevada
Loses Decision on Atomic Waste
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. Excerpt:
Nevada was set back in its effort to avoid
housing a radioactive waste dump as a federal
appeals court rejected arguments against transportation
plans. Nevada had said that the Energy Department
overstepped its authority and violated environmental
rules in deciding to rely mostly on trains
to carry 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel
from around the country to Yucca Mountain. "We
conclude that some of Nevada's claims are
unripe for review, and the remaining claims
are without merit," said a decision written
by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson for a three-judge
panel of the United States Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia Circuit.
1 August 2006. LEBANESE
OIL SLICK - UN Warns of Environmental Disaster -
Spiegel Online - Excerpt:
While the war rages on, a huge environmental
disaster is threatening Lebanon's coast.
Up to 35,000 tons of oil have spilled into
the Mediterranean following Israeli air
strikes -- now it is a race against time
to prevent long-term damage and the destruction
of a fragile ecosystem. The Lebanese government
is calling it the biggest ecological catastrophe
in the country's history. Between July 13
and 15, Israeli jets bombed the Jiyyeh power
station, located 30 kilometers south of
Beirut, and caused up to 35,000 tons of
fuel oil to gush into the sea. The oil slick
has now spread along 80 kilometers of Lebanon's
225 kilometer coastline and has already
reached Syria. A clean up operation is badly
needed, but continuing hostilities between
the Israeli army and Hezbollah have made
this virtually impossible. Now, the catastrophe
is threatening to damage the environment
across many parts of the Mediterranean.
...As bad as the Exxon Valdez?
In an interview with the BBC, the ministry's
director general, Berj Hatjian, compared
the oil slick to that caused by the Exxon
Valdez tanker, "with 20,000 to 30,000
tons reaching the shoreline." When
the tanker sank off the coast of Alaska
in 1989, 40,000 tons of oil were released
into the sea. The result was the worst ever
maritime environmental disaster. Hundreds
of thousands of animals died, and because
the oil spill could not be completely cleaned
up animals are still being poisoned today.
The environmental impact of the current
oil slick is not confined to Lebanon and
risks spreading through the Mediterranean.
The Regional Marine Pollution Emergency
Response Center (Rempec), based in Malta,
has already recorded the first traces of
oil on the Syrian coast -- confirming reports
of contamination made by the port authority
at Syria's coastal town of Tartus....
16 July 2006. Atomic
Balm? A Nuclear Renaissance? By JON
GERTNER. NY Times. Excerpt:
... the Alvin W. Vogtle nuclear-power generating
station... (pronounced VOH-gull) was being
built in the 1970's and 80's, it ... was
one of the largest construction projects
in the history of Georgia. ...its total
cost, $8.87 billion, was so far overbudget
that Vogtle became yet another notorious
example of the evils of nuclear energy.
In the public mind, the issue was safety.
For the industry, the larger concern was
economics. ...Vogtle was intended to generate
a total of around 4,500 megawatts of electricity,
enough power to serve the needs of several
million homes. The grand plan was to have
four reactors. Instead, it was scaled back
to two, .... Today these reactors together
produce about 2,400 megawatts, satisfying
about 15 percent of the state's power needs.
June 2006. (from the ASEE International Engineering
Education Digest). Nuclear
power revival - Political interest in nuclear
power is reviving across the world, thanks
in part to concerns about global warming and
energy security. Currently some 441 commercial
reactors operate in 31 countries and provide
17% of the planet's electricity, according
to a US Department of Energy report cited
in the June 3rd The Economist. Until recently
the talk was of how to retire these reactors
gracefully, but now it is of how to extend
their lives. And in addition another 32 reactors
are being built, mostly in India, China and
their neighbors. The new 'third generation'
reactors are considered by their creators
to be safer than their predecessors. Further
into the future, engineers are developing
designs for so-called 'fourth generation'
plants that could be built between 2030 and
2040. Work on these designs is being undertaken
by a ten-nation research program whose members
include the US, Britain, China, France, Japan,
South Africa and South Korea. (See http://www.economist.com)
20 June 2006. THE
ENERGY CHALLENGE. Europe's Image Clashes
With Reliance on Coal. By MARK LANDLER
- NY Times. Excerpt:
SCHWARZE PUMPE, Germany - In the shadow
of two hulking boilers, which spew 10 million
tons of carbon dioxide a year into the air,
the Swedish owners of this coal-fired power
station recently broke ground on what is
to be the world's first carbon-free plant
fueled by coal. The German chancellor, Angela
Merkel, presided over the ceremony. ..."We
accept the problem of climate change," said
Reinhardt Hassa, a senior executive at Vattenfall,
which operates the plant. "If we want
a future for coal, we have to adopt new
technologies. It is not enough just to make
incremental improvements." But the
new plant, which will be just a demonstration
model, pales next to the eight coal-fired
power stations Germany plans to build for
commercial use between from now to 2011
- none of them carbon-free. "That is
really a disappointing track record," said
Stephan Singer, the director of climate
and energy policy at the World Wide Fund
for Nature in Brussels. "Just replacing
old coal plants with new coal plants won't
enable Germany to meet stricter carbon emission
targets." ...The recent spike in the
price of oil has thrown the spotlight back
on coal, even in places like Britain, where
the industry had been in a death spiral
for decades. Richard Budge, a longtime British
coal executive, ...noted [...coal] is not
a hostage to politics. When Russia abruptly
switched off its natural gas pipeline to
Ukraine in January over a pricing dispute,
gas supplies dwindled all over Western Europe.
..."Fifty-eight percent of the world's
gas is owned by Russia, Iran and Qatar," Mr.
Budge said. "Coal is on every continent." ...
in eastern Germany, ...So great is the demand
that the government allows companies to
forcibly resettle villages that lie in the
path of their excavators. The process is
costly and litigious and can take more than
a decade....
14 June 2006. Ontario
Revives Nuclear Power Plan By IAN AUSTEN.
NY Times. Excerpt:
OTTAWA, June 13 - In an effort to revive
a nuclear energy program that has been marred
by billions of dollars in debt, cost overruns
and disappointing performance, the province
of Ontario on Tuesday announced a plan to
spend about 20 billion Canadian dollars
($18 billion [US]) to build reactors and
refurbish some current units.
The plan also includes about 20 billion
Canadian dollars for renewable energy projects
and 6 billion Canadian dollars ($5.3 billion)
for power conservation. ...Vaughan Gilbert,
a spokesman for Westinghouse Nuclear, which
is based in Monroeville, Pa., and owned
by BNFL of Britain, said, "We've been
gearing up for this even though the market
for new plants in North America had dried
up." If completed as envisioned, the
plan will maintain the current level of
nuclear-generated power, which provides
about half of Ontario's electricity. The
other half is provided mainly by hydro-electric
dams and coal. ...3 of Ontario's 19 reactors
are not in use.
A Conservative government that preceded
Mr. Duncan and the Liberals restructured
the province's government-owned electrical
system as a prelude to privatization. But
a variety of problems, including a political
scandal tied to utility executives' salaries,
meant that the province never saw a major
influx of privately owned power-generating
companies.
Those issues recently forced Mr. Duncan
to back away from a campaign pledge to close
by 2009 the coal-fired generating stations.
...The project will initially involve at
least two units at a cost of about 2 billion
Canadian dollars each. ...Mark Winfield,
the director of environmental governance
at the Pembina Institute for Appropriate
Development, predicted that the province
would only experience further financial
grief by recommitting to nuclear generation. "It's
a very strange approach and a very high-risk
one as well," he said. Mr. Winfield
said he was skeptical that nuclear power
generation would succeed financially this
time around, and said the government was
underestimating the full potential of energy
conservation.
11 June 2006. THE ENERGY CHALLENGE. Pollution
From Chinese Coal Casts a Global Shadow. By
KEITH BRADSHER and DAVID BARBOZA. NY Times. Excerpt:
HANJING, China - One of China's lesser-known
exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic
chemicals and climate-changing gases from
the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants.
In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants
over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul,
sweeping along dust and desert sand before
wafting across the Pacific. An American
satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed
the West Coast. Researchers in California,
Oregon and Washington noticed specks of
sulfur compounds, carbon and other byproducts
of coal combustion coating the silvery surfaces
of their mountaintop detectors. These microscopic
particles can work their way deep into the
lungs, contributing to respiratory damage,
heart disease and cancer. Filters near Lake
Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are
the darkest that we've seen" outside
smoggy urban areas, said Steven S. Cliff,
an atmospheric scientist at the University
of California at Davis.
Unless China finds a way to clean up its
coal plants and the thousands of factories
that burn coal, pollution will soar both
at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming
gases from China's coal use will probably
exceed that for all industrialized countries
combined over the next 25 years, surpassing
by five times the reduction in such emissions
that the Kyoto Protocol seeks.... Coal is
indeed China's double-edged sword - the
new economy's black gold and the fragile
environment's dark cloud. Already, China
uses more coal than the United States, the
European Union and Japan combined. ...Every
week to 10 days, another coal-fired power
plant opens somewhere in China that is big
enough to serve all the households in Dallas
or San Diego. To make matters worse, India
is right behind China in stepping up its
construction of coal-fired power plants
- and has a population expected to outstrip
China's by 2030. ...Two years ago, Datong,
long the nation's coal capital, was branded
one of the world's most-polluted cities.
Since then, the air quality has only grown
worse. Datong is so bad that last winter
the city's air quality monitors went on
red alert. Desert dust and particulate matter
in the city had been known to force the
pollution index into warning territory,
above 300, which means people should stay
indoors.
On Dec. 28, the index hit 350. ...The Chinese
are still far from achieving what has become
the basic standard in the West. Urban elites
who can afford condominiums are still a
tiny fraction of China's population. But
these urban elites are role models with
a lifestyle sought by hundreds of millions
of Chinese. Plush condos on sale in Shanghai
are just a step toward an Americanized lifestyle
that is becoming possible in the nation's
showcase city....
2006 June 6. Debate
Over Wind Power Creates Environmental Rift. By
FELICITY BARRINGER. NY Times. Excerpt:
OAKLAND, Md. - Dan Boone ...wants to slow
the growth of wind-power projects. For four
years or more, Mr. Boone has traveled across
the mid-Atlantic to make every argument
he can muster against local wind-power projects:
they kill birds and bats; they are too noisy;
they are inefficient, making no more than
a symbolic contribution to energy needs.
... in the mountainous terrain of southwestern Pennsylvania,
western Maryland or West Virginia, areas where 15 new projects
have been proposed. If all were built, 750 to 1,000 giant turbines
would line the hilltops, most producing, on average, enough electricity
to power 600 homes.
..."The broader environmental movement knows we have this
urgent need for renewable energy to avert global warming," said
John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace U.S.A. "But
we're still dealing with groups that can't get their heads around
global warming yet."
...Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s very public opposition to the 130-turbine
Cape Wind energy facility proposed off Nantucket Sound has driven
a wedge between activists.
...Mr. Boone's quiver of anti-wind arguments includes economic
analyses, but his first line of attack is biological: he contends
that they are a threat to bats and potentially to migratory birds
and that they break up forest habitat. Scores of raptors and
other birds were killed by the first generation of wind turbines
set up at Altamont Pass in Northern California. Since the Altamont
Pass turbines were erected in the early 1980's, turbine design
has been altered, and most subsequent studies have shown that
birds tend to fly above the height of most turbines though some
experts say more studies are needed. But the turbines south of
here in Thomas, W.Va., have been lethal to bats. More than 2,000
were killed in 2003 at the Mountaineer project, whose 44 turbines
are owned by FPL Energy, a big power company that is the wind
industry's dominant player. Industry officials agree that the
bat mortality measured at the Mountaineer site is unacceptable,
and they are studying the benefits of deterrent devices and the
best ways to modify turbine operations in bat-rich areas....
28 May 2006. Industry
Leaders Bet on Coal but Split on Cleaner
Approach. By SIMON ROMERO. NY Times. Excerpt:
WRIGHT, Wyo. - More than a century ago a
blustery Wyoming politician named Fenimore
Chatterton boasted that his state alone
had enough coal to "weld every tie
that binds, drive every wheel, change the
North Pole into a tropical region, or smelt
all hell!"...His words seem prophetic.
The future for American energy users is
playing out in coal-rich areas like northeastern
Wyoming, where dump trucks and bulldozers
swarm around 80-foot-thick seams at a Peabody
Energy strip mine here, one of the largest
in the world. Coal, the nation's favorite
fuel in much of the 19th century and early
20th century, could become so again in the
21st. The United States has enough to last
at least two centuries at current use rates
- reserves far greater than those of oil
or natural gas. ... The decisions being
made right now in industry and government
on how quickly to adopt any new but more
costly technologies will be monumental.
"Coal isn't going away, so you have
to think ahead," said Gavin A. Schmidt,
a climate modeler at the Goddard Institute
for Space Studies, part of NASA. "Many
of these power stations are built to last
50 years." ...Gregory Boyce... was
chairman of an advisory panel for the Energy
Department, organized by the National Coal
Council, that produced a controversial report
in March calling for exemptions to the Clean
Air Act to encourage greater consumption
of coal through 2025. The thrust of the
report, which Mr. Boyce outlined in an interview,
is that improvements in technology to limit
carbon dioxide emissions should be left
to the market instead of government regulation.
...Led by Peabody, dozens of energy companies
have embarked on the most ambitious construction
of coal-fired electricity plants since the
1950's. ...While Peabody supports some coal
gasification projects, it remains skeptical
about departing from traditional coal-burning
methods to produce electricity. The pulverized
coal plants it wants to build, which grind
coal into a dust before burning it to make
electricity, currently cost about $2 billion
each, or 15 percent to 20 percent less to
build than the cleaner "integrated
gasification combined cycle," or I.G.C.C.,
plants, which convert coal into a gas. ...Engineers
have known how to make gas from coal for
more than a century, using this method in
the gaslights that first illuminated many
American cities. A handful of coal gasification
plants are already in operation in the United
States, Spain and the Netherlands, ...As
they proceed with plans to build pulverized
coal plants, Peabody and other companies
often point to their support of the alternative
technology through their participation in
Futuregen, a $1 billion project started
three years ago by the Bush administration
to build a showcase 275-megawatt power station
that could sequester carbon dioxide and
reduce other pollutants....
13 May 2006. U.N.
Finds New Uranium Traces in Iran. By
WILLIAM J. BROAD. NYTimes. Exceprt:
Atomic inspectors have found traces of highly
enriched uranium on equipment linked to
an Iranian military base, raising new questions
about whether Iran harbors a clandestine
program to make nuclear bombs, diplomats
said yesterday. It is the second such discovery
in three years of United Nations inspections
in Iran. As the Security Council debates
how to handle the atomic impasse with Tehran,
the finding is likely to deepen skepticism
about Iran's claims that its program is
entirely peaceful...."There are still
lots of questions," a senior European
diplomat said. "So it's not a smoking
gun."
...Highly enriched uranium contains 20 percent
or more of a rare form of uranium, known
as its 235 isotope. Bomb-grade uranium is
usually defined as 80 percent or more, and
can be fashioned into the core of a nuclear
weapon. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained
140 pounds of highly enriched uranium. The
senior European diplomat said the samples
from Iran indicated the presence of highly
enriched, but not necessarily bomb-grade,
uranium. Iran says its atomic program is
meant to enrich uranium to the relatively
low grades needed for the production of
electrical power in nuclear reactors, about
3 or 4 percent, a level that the inspectors
recently confirmed. ...
May 2006. Energy
Secretary Sends Yucca Legislation to Congress. Physics
Today, page 25. Jim Dawson. Yucca Mountain,
Nevada. Excerpt:
Some 20 years and $8.6 billion after Yucca
Mountain in Nevada was first rated by the
US Department of Energy as the best site
in the country to permanently store tens
of thousands of tons of high-level nuclear
waste, the Bush administration is beginning
a new push to get the languishing project
moving. But the new initiative, a legislative
proposal DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman sent
to Congress in early April, faces a difficult
time on Capitol Hill. ...In a letter to
the Senate and House that accompanied the
legislative proposal, Bodman said the "existence
of a repository at Yucca Mountain is critical
to the expanded use of nuclear power." Even
with the administration's new proposal for
a global nuclear energy partnership, which
focuses on recycling nuclear waste instead
of storing it, Bodman said the Yucca repository "will
continue to be necessary to deal with the
spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive
waste that will be generated by those [recycling]
technologies." Currently about 55 000
metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level
radioactive waste are stored at more than
100 sites in 39 states, according to DOE
officials. An additional 2000 metric tons
of high-level nuclear waste is being generated
each year. The proposed legislation calls
for several specific actions by Congress
to make the development of the Yucca site
possible. DOE asks that 147 000 acres of
land surrounding Yucca Mountain, which is
located about 90 miles northwest of Las
Vegas, be withdrawn from public use. Possession
of the land by DOE is one of the NRC requirements
for granting a license to build the facility.
The legislation would also repeal the 70
000-metric-ton capacity limitation for waste
storage at the facility and allow the limit
to "be determined by the actual physical
capacity of the mountain." ... the
US Environmental Protection Agency is expected
to announce in the next several months a
new standard for limiting radiation exposure
at the Yucca repository for a one-million-year
period. The revised standard is needed since
the previous standard, based on the repository's
being safe for 10 000 years, was thrown
out in 2004 by the US Court of Appeals in
the District of Columbia because it was
not "based on and consistent with" an
earlier National Academy of Sciences radiation
peak-dose safety recommendation....
27 April 2006. G.E.,
Betting on the Future, Finances a Solar
Farm in Portugal. By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
, NY Times. Excerpt:
Next month the PowerLight Corporation, using
$75 million of the General Electric Company's
money, will begin installing the first of
what will be 52,000 solar panels, capable
of generating 11 megawatts of electricity
- enough to light and heat 8,000 homes.
..."It takes a huge amount of work
to develop these projects, to get the permits,
to find the modules, and solar energy still
costs more than fossil fuels or wind,"
Mr. Marsden said. "So we are only going
to invest in countries with supportive regimes." That
list does not yet include the United States.
Richard King, a team leader in the Energy
Department's photovoltaic research group,
said that many homeowners, particularly
in California, had installed rooftop panels,
as had some Wal-Mart stores and other businesses.
But Mr. King conceded that American economics
did not yet favor solar energy. He said
that people in Portugal and many other parts
of Europe were already accustomed to paying
25 cents to 30 cents a kilowatt hour for
electricity. In the United States, the cost
still averages 10 cents to 14 cents, "and
utilities are just not going to buy 25-cent
solar electricity,"
he said.
January 2006. Rush
to Bury High-Level Nuclear Waste Ignores
Flaws of Yucca Mountain Site. PSR
Reports - Physicians for Social Responsibility
http://www.psr.org. In its annual budget
for fiscal year (FY) 2007, the Department
of Energy (DOE) requested $544.5 million
in new spending for the proposed high-level
nuclear waste storage facility in the Yucca
Mountain range near Las Vegas, Nevada. This
request reflects an almost $100 million
increase in spending on Yucca mountain from
the $450 million that Congress appropriated
for FY 2006. ...U.S. nuclear power plants
have already generated more than 40,000
tons of high-level waste (a small portion
of this is a byproduct of U.S. nuclear weapons
production activities). This highly lethal
stockpile is currently stored around the
country at commercial and government facilities,
and it continues to grow rapidly, as current
nuclear power production adds 2,000 tons
of waste to the existing pile every year.
Industry pressure for a solution is mounting;
the federal government was scheduled to
assume responsibility for this waste nearly
a decade ago. If DOE fails to move the waste
to a federal repository, power plants that
run out of on-site storage space will be
forced to shut down. ...in April 2005, Energy
Secretary Samuel Bodman publicly acknowledged
that water flow and quality assurance data
for the Yucca Mountain site could have been
falsified. DOE's own investigation and Congressional
inquiries into United States Geological
Service computer modeling of climate and
water infiltration at the site uncovered
numerous e-mail exchanges, dating back to
1998 and 2000, in which government scientists
discussed fabricating documentation for
a key scientific study about ground water
penetration into the repository and admitted
they made up data.
January 2006. Last
year, the state of Colorado implemented
incentives for promoting alternative, sustainable
sources for electrical power to Colorado
customers. The Xcel Energy company is electricity
provider that makes the Windsource program
(accredited by the Green-e
Renewable Energy Program) available
to customers who chose to pay slightly more
for electricity in order to encourage wind
powered electricity. The following text
appeared on a web page for Xcel Energy:
"Based on the electric rates effective January 1, 2006,
and monthly average usage of 625 kilowatt-hours (kWh), the
following table shows what typical Xcel Energy Colorado residential
customers would pay for monthly electricity service to purchase
500 kWh per month of Windsource.... The Windsource Adjustment
may be slightly higher for commercial & industrial customers.
|
Residential
rates effective January 1, 2006 |
Monthly
electricity cost |
$59.35 |
Windsource
Adjustment (five 100 kWh blocks @ $0.072
credit/block) |
($0.36) |
Total |
$58.99 |
Note that the "Adjustment" is
in parentheses, indicating negative quantity,
meaning that the cost of wind energy is now
LESS than the cost of other energy sources,
in particular, fossil fuel sources. There
is now a waiting list for the Windsource program
in Colorado. We could view this as a watershed
moment in the history of electrical energy
production: as fossil fuel costs continue
to increase in ever accelerating fashion,
costs of alternative electrical energy production
does not increase nearly fast. We knew that
inevitably, alternative sustainable energy
sources would be cheaper than fossil fuel
sources. We just did not know how soon that
would happen. But as the Colorado situation
shows, it's happening sooner than some people
expected. Next milestone to look for: when
cost of photovoltaic (solar) electricity undercuts
cost of fossil fuel electricity cost... ---Alan
Gould
February 18, 2005. 2
Big Appetites Take Seats at the Oil Table. By
KEITH BRADSHER , NY Times. MUMBAI - India, sharing
a ravenous thirst for oil, has joined China in an
increasingly naked grab at oil and natural gas fields
that has the world's two most populous nations bidding
up energy prices and racing against each other and
global energy companies. Energy economists in the
West cannot help admiring the success of both China
and India in kindling their industrialization furnaces.
But they also cannot help worrying about what the
effect will be on energy supplies as the 37 percent
of the world's population that lives in these two
countries rushes to catch up with Europe, the United
States and Japan. And environmentalists worry about
the effects on global warming from the two nations'
plans to burn more fossil fuels.
December 30, 2004. Alaska
Oil Spill Takes Toll on Animals and Fisheries.
By ELI SANDERS. NY Times. A local crab-fishing season
has been canceled and the estimated number of animals
killed or injured by oil has sharply increased as
a rare break in rough Bering Sea weather allows officials
to gain a better sense of the damage from a large
spill in the Aleutian Islands. More than 355,000 gallons
of fuel oil are now thought to have spilled from the
freighter Selendang Ayu, which ran aground and split
in two just off Unalaska Island on Dec. 8.
Dec 2004. Yucca
Mountain Nuclear Waste Containment Standard a Hot
Topic. Letters to the Editor--Physics Today.
October 27, 2004, Investigators
on the Trail of Suspects in an Oil Spill
By ELI SANDERS. NY Times. VASHON ISLAND, Wash. -
The crime occurred in the middle of the night, and
by the time investigators began searching for clues
after a thick morning fog had lifted, the damage
was done and the culprit had escaped. The offense
- an oil spill that fouled 20 miles of beaches in
Puget Sound - is being pursued like so many other
criminal investigations, with checks of fingerprints,
interviews with potential witnesses, a long list
of possible suspects and assurances from the authorities
that the case will be solved.
Sep 14, 2004. Petroleum
From Decay? Maybe Not, Study Says. By NICHOLAS
WADE, NY Times. Long-dead plant matter may not be
the world's only source of hydrocarbons. Twelve
miles or more beneath its surface, in hellish temperatures
and under pressures 50,000 times that at sea level,
the earth itself may be generating methane, say
researchers who have squeezed common rock and water
together to reproduce these conditions.
Sep 2004. Court
Rules Against 10 000-Year Radiation Safety Standard
at Yucca Mountain. Physics Today. Saying
the Environmental Protection Agency "unabashedly"
ignored a National Academy of Sciences report on
future radiation levels at the facility, a US appeals
court sends the radioactive waste problem back to
Congress. In the hours after the US Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia rendered its 9 July
decision on the future of the Yucca Mountain nuclear
waste facility, all sides in the case were declaring
victory. At the Department of Energy, Secretary
Spencer Abraham said he was "pleased" with the decision
and noted that the court "dismissed all challenges
to the site selection of Yucca Mountain. Our scientific
basis for the . . . project is sound." Out in Nevada,
where Yucca Mountain is located, State Attorney
General Brian Sandoval all but pronounced the project
dead, saying, "Simply put, Yucca is stopped in its
tracks because the court recognizes that the project
isn't rooted in sound science. We wouldn't trade
places with the opposition." Sandoval was referring
to the court's ruling that the US Environmental
Protection Agency's (EPA's) 10 000-year safety standard
for the facility doesn't follow the 1992 Energy
Policy Act. ... One of Yucca Mountain's chief advocates,
Senator Pete Domenici, said that if the decision
stands, "the ramifications are enormous. It may
go well beyond Yucca. It may be the end of the nuclear
industry."
August 12, 2004.
When the Power Goes Out, the Sun Still Rises
By MATTHEW L. WALD. The New York Times. WHEATON,
Md. WHEN the Rev. George Buchanan and his wife,
Harlene, put $19,000 worth of solar electric panels
on their roof here two years ago, they did it as
a matter of principle, not to save money. Someday
the earth will run out of fuel to burn, or ruin
the atmosphere trying, the Buchanans said, and someone
has to take the plunge and try something better.
Thousands of people have been drawn by the same
logic, and by the idea that the sun works every
day, even if the electric system fails as it did
during the big Northeast blackout one year ago this
week. "It's the right thing to do," said Mr. Buchanan,
82, a retired professor of New Testament theology
at the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington.
August 11, 2004. Rust
and Neglect Cited at Japan Atom Plant By
JAMES BROOKE. New York Times
TOKYO, Wednesday, Aug. 11 - A section of steam pipe
that blew out Monday, killing four workers at a
Japanese nuclear power plant, had not been inspected
in 28 years and had corroded from nearly half an
inch to a thickness little greater than metal foil,
authorities said Tuesday.... Although the carbon
steel pipe carried 300-degree steam at high pressure,
it had not been inspected since the power plant
opened in 1976. In April 2003, Nihon Arm, a maintenance
subcontractor, informed the Kansai Electric Power
Company, the plant owner, that there could be a
problem. Last November, the power company scheduled
an ultrasound inspection for Saturday. "We thought
we could postpone the checks until this month,"
Akira Kokado, the deputy plant manager, told reporters
at Mihama. "We had never expected such rapid corrosion."
But on Monday, four days before the scheduled shutdown
for the inspection, superheated steam blew a two-foot-wide
hole in the pipe, scalding four workmen to death
and injuring five others seriously. The steam that
escaped was not in contact with the nuclear reactor,
and no nuclear contamination has been reported.
Initial measurements showed that the steam had corroded
the affected section of pipe from its original thickness
of 0.4 inches to 0.06 inches, less than one-third
the minimum safety standard. Kansai Electric said
in a statement that the pipe "showed large-scale
corrosion."
July 9, 2004 Yucca
Mountain Lawsuit -- Court Overrules Government's
Lax Radiation Standards for Nuclear Waste
Also: Environmentalists,
Nevada Prevail on Key Issue of Yucca Court Case
-- Court Orders EPA to Strengthen Radiation Requirements
to Safeguard the Environment and Public Health
-- Today, a federal appeals court ruled in favor
of environmental groups and the state of Nevada,
finding that the Environmental Protection Agency
illegally issued inadequate environmental and public
health standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain
nuclear repository site.
July 10, 2004, NY Times. Court
Sets Back Federal Project on Atom Waste Site's Safety,
By MATTHEW L. WALD. The government's 17-year effort
to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada
suffered a major setback on Friday.
July 5, 2004 Ohio
Wants U.S. to Freeze Nuclear Waste Removal By
MATTHEW L. WALD Ohio is demanding that the waste
at a nuclear weapons plant be left where it is,
because the dump it was supposed to go to is not
available.
April 4, 2004. Changing
All the Rules, by Bruce Barcott, NY Times. President
Bush ..., in remarks he delivered on Sept. 15, 2003,
to a cheering crowd of power-plant workers and executives
in Monroe, Mich., about 35 miles south of Detroit.
...The Monroe plant, which is operated by Detroit
Edison, is one of the nation's top polluters. Its
coal-fired generators emit more mercury, a toxic
chemical, than any other power plant in the state.
Until recently, power plants like the one in Monroe
were governed by N.S.R. regulations, which required
the plant's owners to install new pollution-control
devices if they made any significant improvements
to the plant. Those regulations now exist in name
only; they were effectively eliminated by a series
of rule changes that the Bush administration made
out of the public eye in 2002 and 2003. What the
president was celebrating in Monroe was the effective
end of new-source review. ...''The old regulations,''
he said, speaking in front of a huge American flag,
''undermined our goals for protecting the environment
and growing the economy.'' New-source review just
didn't work, he said. It dissuaded power companies
from updating old equipment. It kept power plants
from operating at full efficiency. ''Now we've issued
new rules that will allow utility companies, like
this one right here, to make routine repairs and
upgrades without enormous costs and endless disputes,''
the president said. ''We simplified the rules. We
made them easy to understand. We trust the people
in this plant to make the right decisions.''
April 7, 2004 .
NYTimes: White House Minimized the Risks of Mercury
in Proposed Rules, Scientists Say By JENNIFER
8. LEE. While working with Environmental Protection
Agency officials to write regulations for coal-fired
power plants over several recent months, White House
staff members played down the toxic effects of mercury,
hundreds of pages of documents and e-mail messages
show. The staff members deleted or modified information
on mercury that employees of the environmental agency
say was drawn largely from a 2000 report by the
National Academy of Sciences that Congress had commissioned
to settle the scientific debate about the risks
of mercury. Also here
Feb 20, 2004. NY Times. Lack
of Safety Is Charged in Nuclear Site Cleanup
By SARAH KERSHAW and MATTHEW L. WALD The accelerated
cleanup of a complex in Richland, Wash., is endangering
the safety of the site's workers, experts say.
January 6, 2004, 3
Top Enforcement Officials Say They Will Leave E.P.A.
By JENNIFER 8. LEE. WASHINGTON, Jan. 5
- Three top enforcement officials at the Environmental
Protection Agency have resigned or retired in the
last two weeks, including two lawyers who were architects
of the agency's litigation strategy against coal-burning
power plants. The timing of the departures and comments
by at least one of the officials who is leaving
suggest that some have left out of frustration with
the Bush administration's policy toward enforcement
of the Clean Air Act.
December
13, 2003 - Heat,
Pollution Changing Precipitation, by
ANDREW BRIDGES, AP Science Writer - The massive
amounts of heat and pollution that rise from the
world's cities both delay and stimulate the fall
of precipitation, cheating some areas of much-needed
rain and snow while dousing others, scientists said.
The findings support growing evidence that urbanization
has a sharp and alarming effect on the climate,
and those changes can wreak havoc with precipitation
patterns that supply life's most precious resource:
water.
November
2003 Greentips - Union
of Concerned Scientists Plug In to Renewable Energy.
Many electricity providers now offer "green"
power packages, allowing customers to get all or
part of their home's electricity from renewable
resources such as wind, solar, bioenergy, or hydropower.
Generally speaking, renewable electricity has less
impact on the environment and public health than
electricity generated from fossil fuels or nuclear
power.
September
30, 2003 RELEASE: 03-308 NASA
Technology Reduces Some Smokestack Emissions
-- Thanks to NASA, a new method for reducing smokestack
emissions of toxic formaldehyde and carbon monoxide
may soon be in use throughout industry. Created
for satellite lasers to measure the chemical makeup
of the Earth's atmosphere, the smokestack application
of Low-Temperature Oxidation Catalysts (LTOC) comes
from a collection of technologies that enables the
destruction of pollutant gasses, such as carbon
monoxide and hydrocarbons, as well as some nitrogen
oxides. Developed at NASA's Langley Research Center
in Hampton, Va., LTOC technology is expected to
reduce formaldehyde and carbon monoxide concentrations
in smokestack emissions by approximately 85 to 95
percent. 2002
May 6, 2002: Environmentalists and State of Nevada Say Yucca Mountain Radiation Standards Violate Drinking Water Protection Law
January 15, 2002--Ireland to Build World's Largest Wind Farm,
Bijal P. Trivedi, National Geographic Today--Ireland has approved plans
to build the world's largest wind farm on a sandbank just six miles
(ten kilometers) offshore from Arklow, a town about 40 miles (70
kilometers) south of Dublin.
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Articles from 2002–2008
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