Archive for the 'Nuclear Power' Category

Wired Gets It Wrong - Nuclear Power is Not Good For the Planet

Published
by
Larry
on May 27, 2008
in Cogen, Energy, Geothermal, Global Warming, Marine Kinetic, Negawatts, Nuclear Power, Solar and Wind Power
. 0 Comments
Hummers: Illogical, Un-Economical, and Bad for The Environment. But They Sure Are Big!

Spencer Reiss, writing in Wired Magazine says “Nuclear Power is The Most Climate Friendly Insdustrial Scale Form of Energy“. Forgetting for a moment that nuclear power requires fuel, waste management, national security infrastructure, massive government subsidies, including artificial limits to liability, nuclear releases tremendous amounts of heat into the environment, and new nuclear are estimated to cost about 2 to 4 times the price of new wind facilities, without cost overruns (and cost overruns are a given with nuclear power plants) and take 10 to 12 years.

The climate friendly industrial scale forms of energy are Solar, Offshore Wind, large scale Marine Kinetic - tapping the Gulf Stream, Deep Geothermal, CoGen, and the NegaWatts available via conservation. Just as a screw can propel a ship thru the water, a screw anchored to the ocean floor will spin because of currents, and can power turbines. Marine Current Turbines, Ltd., based in Bristol, England has just completed the world’s first megawatt scale tidal/marine current driven power plant in the Strangford Narrows in Northern Ireland. If with wind, the sky’s literally the limit, with MCT the sea’s the limit. Geothermal exploits temperature differentials for heating and cooling. Deep Geothermal would use the earth’s heat in abandoned mines and wells to generate steam for industrial process power. Recycled Energy Development, RED, of Westmont, Il does CoGen. RED captures industrial waste energy to produce electricity and thermal power, often without burning any additional fuel or emitting any additional pollution. For industrial partners, RED reduces energy costs substantially, increases reliability, and offers the opportunity for emissions credits. Akeena, Evergreen Solar, First Solar, Sunpower, World Water and Solar, and Vestas Wind are old news. Ausra develops and deploys utility-scale solar thermal technologies to serve global electricity needs in a dependable, market competitive, environmentally responsible manner.

Wired Magazine also published a companion piece by Matt Power that says “Pound for pound, making a Prius contributes more carbon to the atmosphere than making a Hummer” (click here). The fallacy here is that they forget to mention that a Hummer weighs about three times more than a Prius, so to have an honest statistic you need to compare 3 pounds of Hummer to each pound of Prius. They do note that the operating efficiency of the Prius outweighs any manufacturing inefficiency. And they point out that it is better for the planet to buy a used car than a new car.

Nuclear Plants: High Cost in Time and Money

Published
by
Larry
on May 17, 2008
in Nuclear Power, Solar and Wind Power
. 0 Comments

Rebecca Smith reported in the Wall Street Journal that Florida Power and Light, FPL, is considering spending $12 to $18 Billion to construct two nuclear reactors at its appropriately named Turkey Point facility in southeast Florida.

Florida Power says “two advanced-design nuclear plants at Turkey Point that would add between 2,200 and 3,000 megawatts. If built, the units are expected to go into service in the years 2018 and 2020.”

John Dorschner writes in the Miami Herald that FPL wants to start billing today for plants that may or may not be built and running in 10 to 12 years! “The average home electric bill in South Florida is likely to increase about $2.50 a month next year to start paying for two nuclear power plants that Florida Power & Light hopes to put in service in 10 or 12 years.” That’s like ‘buy now pay later,’ except it’s ‘pay now, buy later.’ And the plants haven’t been approved by Florida’s Public Service Commission. So it’s ‘Pay now, buy later - maybe!‘

What about Wind Power? The 7.5 MW Atlantic County Utilities Authority Wind Farm cost an estimated $12 million, approximately $1.6 per watt. (click here)

Putting the pieces of this puzzle together, FPL wants to spend $12 to $18 Billion, assuming no cost overruns, to add 2200 to 3000 mw of capacity in 2018 or 2020. If $12 Billion builds 2200 MW, then we are looking at $5.46 per watt of capacity. Similarly, if $18 Billion builds 3000 MW, we are looking at $6.00 per watt. That’s about what it costs to install commercial scale PV solar, and about four times what it costs to build land based wind farms, and twice what it costs to construct an offshore wind farm. And it takes a whole lot less than 10 or 12 years to install solar panels and build wind farms. Since there is no fuel, there is no fuel cycle, there are no fuel costs, there is no waste heat, and are no toxic or radioactive wastes with wind and solar.

Let’s ignore for a second the fact that nuclear plants present terrorists with targets, the massive subsidies that the government provides nuclear power, the national security ramifications of nuclear power, and the fact that the NRC fires whistleblowers and ignores critics – which in and of itself is a cause for concern – the regulator appears to be incompetent. Why should we spend Billions to build nuclear plants that won’t be operational for at least 10 or 12 years when we could spend a fraction to build solar and wind systems – which are available almost immediately with no pollution, no security challenges, no potential for disaster, and no need for incompetent government regulators?


 Nuclear PV Solar PV Solar Wind – Offshore Wind – Onshore

FPL Turkey Point NJ Residential NJ Commercial Estimated NJ ACMUA
Cost $12 Billion
 $80,000 $20 Million
 $24 Million
 $12 Million
Capacity 2.2 GW
 10 KW
 3.5 MW 7.5 MW
 75 MW
Cost / watt $5.45 $8.00 $5.71 $3.20 $1.60
Fuel Unknown $Zero $Zero $Zero $Zero
Safety & Oversight Unknown $Zero $Zero $Zero $Zero
Security Unknown $Zero $Zero $Zero $Zero
Waste Management High $Zero $Zero $Zero $Zero

The Day After Three Mile Island

Published
by
Larry
on March 29, 2008
in Chernobyl, Energy, Environmental Issues, Lessons Learned (or not), Nuclear Power, Oyster Creek and Three Mile Island
. 0 Comments

March 28, 2008 was the 28th Anniversary of the Meltdown at Three Mile Island, which makes March 29 the 28th Anniversary of the Day After Three Mile Island.

Still, it’s hard to say ‘Happy Anniversary.’ The last nuclear power plant to come on line in the United States, the Watts Bar plant in Tennessee, took 23 years to complete. And no new nuclear power plants have been ordered or built.

This is in part because of Three Mile Island, and its sister-disaster, Chernobyl. While the American nuclear power industry says ‘We do it better’ the truth of the matter is that American reactors are safer because American anti-nuclear activists have forced the United States government to pay attention and American nuclear plant owners and operators to build in redundant safety systems. Continue reading ‘The Day After Three Mile Island’

The Future of Energy

Published
by
Larry
on March 15, 2008
in Clean Energy, Energy, Nuclear Power, Solar and Wind Power
. 1 Comment

Thursday, March 6, 2008, I attended a seminar on solar and wind power at the Atlantic County Utilities Authority, ACUA, clean energy plant, hosted by Cassandra Kling of Clean Energy Holdings. It’s a small plant: 7.0 MW of wind and 0.5 MW of solar, it provides about 0.1% of New Jersey’s power. On the way back I drove into the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Ocean County, NJ, to look around and to get a visceral feel for the place. Oyster Creek provides about 10% of New Jersey’s power. (Click here for the official story or here for NJPIRG.)

There are armed guards outside the nuclear plant. There are watchtowers, presumably with armed sentries. They really don’t want people looking around, “getting a feel for the place”. They looked me over, looked at my driver’s license, searched my car – looked in the trunk, looked under the hood, looked in the front seat, the back seat, under the car, and then escorted me out of the complex. I felt like Arlo Guthrie in ” Alices’s Restaurant” (Click here for Arlo on YouTube“, here for Arlo.net) exceptin’ the fact that I wasn’t arrested.

Continue reading ‘The Future of Energy’

Chairman of NRC Panel indifferent to whether Indian Point hearings audible to audience - or participants

Published
by
Jon
on March 11, 2008
in Evacuations and Nuclear Power
. 0 Comments

From Matthew Wald’s piece in The New York Times [emphasis supplied]:

Opponents of the Indian Point nuclear power plants, including New York State, got their day in court on Monday - sort of - to explain why they thought the two reactors should not be allowed to operate 20 more years. It signified the first time that a state had stepped forward to flatly oppose license renewals.

But like much about the tangled history of the plants in Westchester County, the hearing before a three-judge panel appointed by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission was not that simple.

The proceedings got off to a prickly start when a member of the audience seated in a courtroom at the Westchester County Courthouse here complained to the panel chairman, Lawrence G. McDade, that he could not hear what was being said. “The acoustics here are what the acoustics here are,” said Mr. McDade, a former military judge, who was himself using a microphone.

The difficulty was that about 20 lawyers seated at five tables and flanked by cartons of documents, as well as another 20 or so who spilled over into the jury box, did not have microphones.

When Michael B. Kaplowitz, vice chairman of the Westchester County Board of Legislators, rose and said he could not hear the lawyers representing him - and that he was not a member of the audience but a participant - Mr. McDade told Mr. Kaplowitz that he could read the transcript later.

After a lunch break, Mr. McDade relented and had more microphones brought in.

Acoustics were not the only setback for those opposed to relicensing the two plants in Buchanan, on the east bank of the Hudson River 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.

It was immediately clear that for the opponents - the state, Westchester County and several environmental groups - to win the day, they would have to persuade the panel and the regulatory agency itself to reconsider what arguments are admissible.

The commission has ruled that for an argument to be considered in license extension hearings, it must deal with problems that may arise because the license is extended. The state contends, however, that the region’s extraordinary population density, when considered together with the threat of terrorism or earthquake, makes the plants unsafe.

“The presence of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in our midst is untenable,” the state argued in a legal brief.

Joan Leary Matthews, a lawyer for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, said in an opening statement that “whatever the chances of a failure at Indian Point, the consequences could be catastrophic in ways that are almost too horrific to contemplate.”

Sherwin Turk, a lawyer for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that questioning whether the site was a good idea in the first place was not within the scope of the proceeding.

Foes of Indian Point Begin Legal Battle, The New York Times, March 11, 2008.

Preliminary evidence, then, supports these propositions:

  1. The NRC is interested in limiting the scope of the public hearings;
  2. the NRC doesn’t mind if no one can hear what’s being said

Attempts by persons or groups to conceal their actions may be interpreted as circumstantial evidence of consciousness of guilt (Wigmore On Evidence, 2nd edition, 1915, § 178). We could probably find more citations, but the point is - what’s the NRC got to be afraid of?

Matthew Wald on the peculiar economics of nuclear waste

Published
by
Jon
on February 18, 2008
in Energy, Energy - Department of, Nuclear Power and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Matthew Wald has a piece in yesterday’s Times about the rules governing the growing piles of waste from nuclear power plants, which the federal government is obliged to store - indefinitely, for all practical purposes. NRC yucca drawing

What’s most disturbing isn’t actually new - Wald’s explanation of the long-standing setup is troubling enough:

  • The federal government has obliged itself to “dispose” of nuclear waste for a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour
  • Because it hasn’t taken the waste away on time - nuclear utilities have sued the federal government for their costs in storing the waste until it’s picked up
  • it was supposed to have started picking up the waste in 1998
  • this is costing about $500 million per year; because these payments are the result of lawsuits - they’re paid out of a “judgment fund,”

According to Wald,

Initially, the Energy Department tried to pay the damages out of the Nuclear Waste Fund, the money collected from the nuclear utilities, plus interest, which comes to about $30 billion. But other utilities sued, saying that if the government did that, there might not be enough money left for the intended purpose, building a repository. So the government now pays the damages out of general revenues.

The damages are large relative to the annual budget of the Energy Department, which is about $25 billion. But the money comes out of the Treasury, not the Energy Department. Under a law passed in the Carter administration, such payments are recognized as obligations of the federal government and no further action by Congress is required to make them.

The money comes out of a federal account called the Judgment Fund, which is used to pay settlements and court-ordered payments. For the last five years, the fund has made payments in the range of $700 million to $1 billion, with the average payment being $80,000 to $150,000. In contrast, payments to utilities have been in the tens of millions.

Matthew Wald, “As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense to U.S. Rises,” The New York Times, 17 February 2008.

Perhaps a useful goal here would be, at a minimum, to attribute these costs to the cost per kilowatt hour of nuclear power. Strong evidence that, before we see nuclear power as central to our energy problems, we hedge our bets with safer options.

Lawrence Livermore lab explanation of the Yucca Mountain project here.

NRC Failing in Oversight

Published
by
Larry
on January 26, 2008
in New Jersey, Nuclear Power, Oyster Creek and nuclear terrorism
. 0 Comments

Janet Tauro, of the NJ Environmental Federation, raises a disturbing question - is the NRC as incompetant as FEMA?

The NRC’s mission is to protect citizens, not put up roadblocks to a full and open airing of safety concerns, but as Janet Tauro writes in the Asbury Park Press,

“It should not have been citizens who made public the safety problems at Oyster Creek. It should have been the NRC.

It took a whistleblower who took pictures of a bunch of sleeping guards at the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania to wake up Congress about NRC’s lackadaisical approach to citizens’ safety concerns. Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, announced recently that an investigation by the Office of Inspector General that found “questionable decisions by the commission with respect to nuclear power plant relicensing” also will be under review.

Some of these Questionable Decisions:

  • The NRC’s refusal to evaluate the terrorist risk of elevated fuel pools jam-packed with thousands of pounds of highly radioactive fuel rods,
  • The lack of a workable evacuation plan,
  • The transfer of the state’s most senior nuclear expert after he publicly chastised NRC officials for not imposing penalties on Exelon after the department discovered safety commitments were not being honored,
  • The discovery of radioactive Cesium in soil samples outside of the plant,
  • Massive fish kills in Barnegat Bay, and
  • The mysterious emptying of water collection buckets shortly before NRC and state inspectors arrived to draw samples to try to determine the source of leaks within the drywell, the reactor’s steel containment vessel.

In addition, Rep. Dingell’s committee might review:

  • Transcripts from our precedent-setting hearing before the Atomic Safety Licensing Board and decide whether preferential treatment was given to Exelon and the NRC, while NJ Environmental Federation’s attorney and expert were badgered and interrupted.
  • Judge Anthony J. Baratta’s minority opinion that affirmed our coalition’s contention that there is no analytical proof that the drywell meets current safety standards, and that those standards must be met as a condition of relicensing.
  • The NRC’s attempt to change the basis of Exelon’s current licensing, which stipulates adherence to accepted engineering standards for safety. When an NRC inspector affirmed that the drywell did not meet minimum safety standards for thickness, the NRC tried at the last minute to change its rules, saying that it wasn’t necessary, just preferable, to meet those standards.

The NRC must regulate nuclear power, to guarantee that nuclear power plants are operated safely. Or the NRC should be shut down, and every nuclear power plant as well.

Nuclear Power - Not Green, Not Cheap. But It’s A Security Nightmare.

Published
by
Larry
on January 26, 2008
in 9/11, Chernobyl, Clean Energy, Energy, Nuclear Power, September 11th Attacks, Solar, Terrorisim, Three Mile Island, Uncategorized, Wind Power and nuclear terrorism
. 0 Comments

This Letter to the Editor, written by Larry, was published in the Asbury Park Press, Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008 (Click Here). The full text is reproduced below.

Nuclear power too dangerous.

Nuclear power is not green or cheap. It is a security nightmare.

When you look at mining, milling and transporting nuclear fuel, nuclear power emits four to five times as much carbon dioxide as wind and solar. The fuel cycle also creates massive amounts of radioactive waste — 100,000 metric tons per plant per year. Thermal pollution from Oyster Creek kills fish, shellfish and amphibians. And radioactive wastes must be isolated from the environment for a long time.

No new nuclear power plants were built in the United States after electricity was deregulated. That’s not because of the Three Mile Island accident or the Chernobyl disaster, and not because of the protests against nuclear power or rational fears of the technology, but because of the time and expense to build new nuclear power plants. When you look at the capital costs of building nuclear plants, and add the costs of insurance, evacuation plans, security systems and government regulation, nuclear power becomes too expensive to compete.

So in 2005, the federal government mandated $125 million in tax breaks for each new nuclear power plant and provided loan guarantees of 80 percent of a plant’s cost, including overruns. Taxpayers pay for those tax breaks and loan guarantees. That does not make it cost-effective; it just shifts the burden.

Nuclear power is a security nightmare. If the Sept. 11 killers had crashed one of the hijacked planes into Oyster Creek rather than the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, much of the Jersey Shore would be like the area around Chernobyl — condemned, abandoned and uninhabitable.

If we were smart, we would move forward quickly on offshore wind, photovoltaic solar, geothermal, ocean current turbines and conservation.

Larry Furman

New York first state ever to oppose nuclear plant license renewal

Published
by
Jon
on December 25, 2007
in Nuclear Power
. 0 Comments

New York appears to have become the first state to oppose renewal of a nuclear power plant license:

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo said on Monday that the state had asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to deny an application to extend the license of the Indian Point nuclear reactors, citing “a long and troubling history of problems.”

Mr. Cuomo, flanked by Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson and members of the Congressional delegation at a news conference, claimed that the nuclear plant, in densely populated Westchester County, could not be defended from a terrorist attack and that the surrounding area could not be evacuated if a major accident occurred. The state filed a 313-page petition on behalf of Mr. Cuomo and Gov. Eliot Spitzer on Friday.

N.R.C. Officials could not recall a previous occasion when a state had tried to block a license extension.

Most recently, opponents’ ire had been directed at the plant owner’s belated progress in meeting federal deadlines to install warning sirens around the plant, which is on the Hudson River in Buchanan.

The state also contends that the application to extend the plant’s license for 20 more years, which was filed on April 30 by the plant’s owner, Entergy Nuclear, failed to account for pipes, cables and fire-protection systems that have deteriorated at the nuclear reactors, which began operation in the mid-’70s.

“I believe Indian Point should be closed and it should be closed now,” Mr. Cuomo said at the news conference at the Westchester County administrative building.

Officials of the N.R.C. could not recall a previous occasion when a state had tried to intervene in a license-extension proceeding to block the extension. New York State owned Indian Point 3 from 1975 until 2000.

Citing Past Troubles at Indian Point, State Urges Panel to Deny License Extension, by John Sullivan and Matthew L. Wald.

Continue reading ‘New York first state ever to oppose nuclear plant license renewal’

Al Gore on Nuclear Power and Global Warming, 1992.

Published
by
Larry
on December 12, 2007
in Global Warming and Nuclear Power
. 0 Comments
Al Gore

Al Gore, photographed for Time, earlier this year.

In Earth In The Balance, 1992, Plume Publishing, New York, Gore wrote:

“Almost every discussion of substitutes for fossil fuels includes an argument over the role of nuclear power in our energy future. In fact, some opponents of positive action to save the environment try to cut short discussions of global warming with a dismissive reference to the political difficulties involved in building new nuclear reactors and expressions of exaggerated frustration with envrionmentalists, who, they imply are the principal obstacles to adopting nuclear power as the obvious subsitute for coal and oil.

“Of course, uncertainties about future projections of energy demand and economic problems like cost overruns were the major causes of the cancellation of reactors by utilities, well before accidents like those at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl heightened public apprehension. Growing concern about our capacity to accept responsibility for the safety of storing nuclear waste products with extremely long lifetimes also adds to the resistance many feel to a dramatic increase in the use of nuclear power.

“In my own view, the present generation of nuclear technology, light water-pressureized reactors, seems now rather obviously at a technological dead end. The research and development of alternative approaches should focus on discovering, first, how to build a passively safe design (whose safety does not depend on the constant attention of bleary-eyed technicians) that eliminates the many risks of current reactors, and second, whether there is a scientifically and politically acceptable means for disposing of - in fact, isolating - nuclear waste.

“In any event, the proportion of world energy use that could practically be derived from nuclear is fairly small and is likely to remain so.”

Chernobyl, 20 Years Later - Part Alpha

Published
by
Larry
on December 12, 2007
in Chernobyl, Environmental Issues and Nuclear Power
. 0 Comments

“There are claims that the economic consequences of the Chernobyl reactor accident were one of the lethal blows for the former Soviet Union.” - Dr. Hermann Scheer, A Solar Manifesto, pg 61.

Supporting those claims:

Demonstration

Demonstrators request the government make Chernobyl secret documents public during a march that ended in the Dynamo stadium in Kiev. A banner reads “We demand a Nuremburg tral for Chernobyl.”

Chernobyl, 20 Years Later - Part Beta

Published
by
Larry
on December 12, 2007
in Chernobyl and Nuclear Power
. 0 Comments

We found out about Chernobyl because nuclear power plant operators in Sweden noticed their geiger counters indicating radiation - outside the reactor … From Der Speigel

Murderous Atoms

The Geiger counters continued to tick away for days as much as 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) away from the disaster zone, as air masses contaminated with radiation pushed across Europe. Many fears are justified. The major disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant proved the prophets wrong who underestimated the “residual risk” of nuclear energy. A look back from the archives of DER SPIEGEL.

The following article appeared in the May 5, 1986 issue of DER SPIEGEL:

The staff at Sweden’s Forsmark nuclear power plant, located on the Baltic coast north of Stockholm, was just changing shifts. It was 7:00 a.m. last Monday when workers passing through a routine check in the security sluice at the entrance to the plant’s reactor building set off warning signals.

Continue reading ‘Chernobyl, 20 Years Later - Part Beta’

Chernobyl, 20 Years Later - Part Gamma

Published
by
Larry
on December 11, 2007
in Nuclear Power
. 0 Comments

Some people are saying ‘We need nuclear because we can’t burn coal or oil.’

That’s like smoking cigars or a pipe or chewing tobacco because you don’t want to smoke cigarettes, because cigarettes cause cancer. We all know cigarettes that cause cancer, and smokers “should” quit or cut down. But pipes, cigars, and chewing tobacco are still tobacco. “Quitting cigarettes and smoking cigars is like going from crack cocaine to powdered cocaine or heroin. Which is a better way to die? Lung cancer from smoking cigarettes or lung cancer from smoking cigars?

Der Speigel Cover - On Chernobyl

Der Speigel, May, 1986.

Der Speigel published Looking Back at Chernobyl, beginning April 19, 2006.


One fact jumps out - the accident at Three Mile Island (Wikipedia) which the NRC describes as “serious,” is said to have released 15 curies of radioactive material. The explosion at Chernobyl disbursed “roughly 80 million curies of iodine 131 and 6 million curies of caesium 137, a “large part” of which was released into the atmosphere.”

Three Mile Island

Joni Mitchell once sang “Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees, please.”

Joni Mitchell Hits

You can see her recorded live on You Tube

Solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, oceanic hydro - these are available, and much more cost effective. They are the technologies of the future, available today.

Plastic Debris in the Oceans, and RadioActive Waste

Published
by
Larry
on December 8, 2007
in Ecology, Einstein, Evolution, Nature, Nuclear Power and Plastics
. 0 Comments

Despite the fact that 40% of Americans - about 120 million people - believe that plastic is biodegradable, there are no organisms in the biosphere that eat plastic, no metabolic pathways that break it down. Plastic isn’t biodegradable. It just gets torn into smaller and smaller pieces.

The volume of plastic is growing, probably exponentially, each year. It’s like the character said in “The Graduate” “Plastics – There’s a great future in plastic.” Much of this garbage winds up in the oceans. There is a large nexus of plastic swirling around the Pacific, called and the so-called “Great Pacific Garbage Dump,” in the vicinity of the ‘Horse Latitudes.’ (Click here for the Green Peace report on the extent of the problem. Click Here, Here, Here or Google ‘Plastic debris in the oceans’). By “Large” I mean 10 million square miles - about the size of Africa - and about 100 feet thick. Captain Charles Moore, of the ORV Alguita, has been exploring the dump click here or here.

The theory of evolution would suggest that eventually a denizen of the gyre, be it bacterial, plankton, or jellyfish, will evolve a metabolic pathway such that this organism will be able to eat, that is degrade, the plastic. It will eat, gorge itself, and reproduce. And then there will be 2 organisms that can eat plastic. Then 4, 8, 16, 32, … 1,024, 2,048, … and then millions and millions. This could start tomorrow, or in 10,000 years.

Scientists could kick start this process. Take some bacteria, plastics and mutagenic agents, put them together in salt water – and wait. Or better yet use genetic engineering and biochemistry to engineer metabolic pathways to biodegrade, i.e., “eat” plastic.

Or, if I may be permitted to wax sarcastic, dump radioactive wastes into this plastic soup. The radioactive wastes may eventually trigger the mutations that create the required metabolic pathways.

(Also posted on Orion Magazine on the discussion of Rebecca Solnit’s Reasons Not to Glow, LF)

 

Orion Magazine

Orion Magazine - Reasons Not to Glow

Energy Bills - Good for the Environment and the Economy.

Published
by
Larry
on December 7, 2007
in Clean Energy, Nuclear Power, Solar, Wind Power and cafe standards
. 0 Comments

Last summer’s energy bills were not good for the environment.

Yes, both houses of Congress passed energy bills “oriented toward increasing energy efficiency and boosting renewable power and biofuels.” But the House version had no Corporate Average Fuel Economy program (CAFE) car mileage mandate, thanks to the shortsightedness of Michigan Rep. John Dingell, (who believes himself to be an auto industry champion, but is killing the patient), and the Senate version had no Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) due to strong opposition from Senate Republicans. People who think about sustainable economies and environmentalists wanted both mandates in a final bill.

The final bill now includes a 35 mpg CAFE standard, an Renewable Electricity Standard of 15 percent, and 21 billion dollars of investment in the renewable energy economy.

Among other things, the 21 billion dollars will fund production tax credits for solar and wind power over a four-year period; it will fund research and development programs for renewable energy and job training programs for solar power installers; and it will fund individual tax credits for solar energy, home weatherization and purchase of fuel efficient vehicles like plug-in hybrid cars.

And 50 billion dollars in loan guarantees for new nuclear plants were dropped from the Senate version. (They were in the summer’s version.

While the Republicans like subsidizing the nuclear industry, and they like subsidizing the oil industry, they don’t like the Renewable Electricity Standard and the $21 billion tax package that will fund the bill, especially the $13.5 billion in higher taxes on oil companies. President Bush warned that he is likely to veto the bill if it passes the Senate. Sen. Pete Domenici said, “If it comes over here, we have no alternative but … war.” One sardonic environmentalist said “This war is as well thought out as the War in Iraq. Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who put a hold on the bill back in October, called the tax increase “discrimination against one industry.” (Please note that Hutchison received $284,000 in contributions from the oil and gas industries in 2005 and 2006, (click here) and a total of$1.3 million as of May, 2001 (click here).

The Republicans will fall on their swords. Then they will return as lobbyists. Truthout. Houston Chronicle. Washington Post. LA Times.