Tweet I will be presenting Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes at the Space Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011.  The festival  is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott. Haley Sales, (Website / Facebook / Youtube),a local singer / songwriter, will perform.

Our current energy paradigm today is to fuel based. We burn oceans of oil and methane mountains of coal. And there are consequences.  We suffer oil spills, polluted water, mercury, coal mine disasters, nuclear power plant melt-downs, we fight wars …

According to the DoE, in 2010 we burned 1,085,281 thousand short tons of coal and 15,022 thousand short tons of coke (here).

Wind and solar don’t burn fuel. The winds blow, the sun shines, you put a widget in the path of those moving particles in the air or those photons of light and you get electricity – without greenhouse gases, radioactive wastes, toxic wastes, and it costs less. So the question is not ‘Can we meet our energy needs with clean, sustainable renewable energy technologies?” The real question are How? How Much? And How quickly?

And we could do it within 25 Years if we wanted to.

Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, coined the term “Negawatt” to mean energy you don’t need to buy, as in “The cheapest unit of energy is the one you don’t have to buy.” The next cheapest, the “nega-fuel-watt” is the unit of energy that doesn’t require fuel.

Green Living Festival

Tweet I am presenting “Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes,” a discussion of the hidden costs, or “economic externalities,” of nuclear power, coal, and oil, and the non-obvious benefits of wind, solar, marine hydro and efficiency at the Space Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011.

The festival  is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott.

Cocoa Beach is about 60 miles east of Orlando and 120 miles north of West Palm Beach. It is easily accessible by air, land, sea and space.

This will be similar to the presentation I recently gave to the NYC Business Sustainability Minded Action Round Table (Click here or here).

It is during hurricane season. Hopefully life will not be imitating art as portrayed in Vapor Trails, by Roger Saillant and Bob Siegel, and the conference will not be cut short by a hurricane of Katrina-like proportions.

courtesy NASA (our tax dollars at work)

  Tweet  It sounds too good to be true:

*   100 gigawatts of offshore wind, $300 Billion,
*   100 gw of landbased wind, $200 Billion,
*   75 gw of solar, $300 Billion,
*   75 gw of geothermal, $200 Billion.
*   200 gigawatt equivalents of efficiency – $200 Billion.
*   100 & Clean, Renewable, Sustaianble Energy: 1.2 Trillion.
*   2.7 Million New Jobs and a Healthy Economy: Priceless!

This is happening, slowly, inexorably, by the “invisible hand of the market.” But it will happen faster if the “invisible mind of the community” acts. This means the government!

In his “General Theory on Employment, Interest, and Money ” John Maynard Keynes argued that the only employer with the resources to create large numbers of jobs and dramatically unemployment is the government. It can take risks entrepreneurs cannot because it can’t go out of business. The Keynsians are not arging that government spending – when done correctly – will create jobs and stimulate the economy. They know it does. The only question is “How many jobs will be created?”

To raise revenues the government can either borrow money or raise taxes. It made sense to cut taxes to eliminate the surplus that Bill Clinton’s Presidency facilitated. And it makes sense to raise taxes to deal with the deficits today. Tax rates are such, particularly for wealthy people, that they can help finance investment in infrastructure projects that will create jobs and position the United States for the future.

Investment in shifting our energy infrastructure from coal, oil, methane and nuclear power to a sustainable framework built around wind, solar, geothermal, bio-fuels, and efficiency – clean, renewable, sustainable energy will, according to Bruce Katz at the Brookings Institution, create 2.7 million jobs. By itself this will lower the unemployment rate from 9.2% to 7.4% and cut unemployment from about 13.5 million people to about 10.8 million people. In addition, it will spur growth in other sectors – cars, housing, entertainment.

But will it work? Even if we can power our economy by a paradigm shift to sustainable energy, can we power our lifestyles with wind, solar, geothermal, renewable fuels and efficiency? Between 2000 and 2010, before Fukushima, Germany cut nuclear from 29% to 20%. Renewables make up the difference. After Fukishima, Angela Merkel announced that Germany will accelerate its transition from nuclear and coal to wind, solar and efficiency technologies. Germany will be at 40% renewable by 2025. They will be at 100% renewables by mid-century.

We can do this here – 100% renewable for about $1.2 Trillion – about the cost of the war in Iraq:

*   100 gigawatts of offshore wind, $300 Billion,
*   100 gw of landbase wind, $200 Billion,
*   75 gw of solar, $300 Billion,
*   75 gw of geothermal, $200 Billion,
*   200 gigawatt equivalents of efficiency – $200 Billion,
*   100 & Clean, Renewable, Sustaianble Energy: 1.2 Trillion,
*   2.7 Million New Jobs and a Healthy Economy, Priceless!

There are environmental impacts – wind turbines make noise, solar energy require various heavy metals in the manufacturing processes. However, these are negligible compared to the arsenic, lead, mercury, uranium, zinc and other heavy metals released when coal is mined, processed, transported and burn, or the tritium and the other radioactive wastes produced by “business as usual” operation of nuclear power.

New renewable energy systems are also cheaper to build than new coal, oil, methane, and nuclear.  New nuclear is probably on the order of $6 to $10 billion per gw, new coal w carbon sequestration is $18 b / gw. The costs of new oil and methane w sequestration are probably on the order of coal.

But … it means the government must act!

Tweet On Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and Climate Change

Ayn  Rand would not “believe” in climate change.  She would try to objectively determine whether the theory correctly modeled the data. While it is legitimate to question both the conclusions of scientists and the methodologies by which data are gathered, denying objective validity of the data, which people who call themselves “Objectivists” are doing with respect to climate science, is well, in a word, anti-Objectivist, at least as described  by Ayn Rand in 1962.

“The essence of my philosophy” she said, is:

1. Metaphysics Objective Reality
2. Epistemology Reason
3. Ethics Self-interest
4. Politics Capitalism

“Translated into simple language, ” she continued, “it would read:

1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.”
2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.”
3. “Man is an end in himself.”
4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Then she elaborated

“Objectivism, holds that

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”

Statements 1 and 2,  “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed…. Wishing won’t make it so…. Facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears…. Reason is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival” suggest that the objectivists should be taking note of several observable facts:

As shown in the graph at left, from Vincent Gray, Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, here, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 280 parts per million to 390 ppm since 1800. The mass of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from about 2.63 trillion tons to about 3.67 trillion tons, an increase of about 1.034 trillion tons.  This also corresponds to a decrease of about 282 billion tons in the mass of the earth below the surface, since the carbon in the carbon dioxide was taken from carbon sequestered below the surface in coal mines, oil wells, and gas wells.

While 211 years is one year longer than three times the Biblically defined human lifespan of three score and ten, it is a small fraction of the 5,600 years of recorded history, and the 4.5 billion years the U. S. Geological Survey tells us the earth has been in existence (here).

The non-magic number is 350 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Above that we will see dramatic changes in climate; below that, the climate in which humans and other contemporaneous species evolved (click here).

The objectivists ought look at this increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and shift from solid, liquid, and gaseous carbon below the surface into atmospheric carbon dioxide in the 211 years, and ask what it means for the earth and the ecologic systems. Will earth become warmer or cooler, or neither? Will there be more storms or fewer? Will the carbon dioxide hold more heat and allow the atmosphere to hold more water vapor?  Will this result in more storms?  Will any storms be stronger or weaker?  Will rivers like the Missouri and the Mississippi flood? Will there be heavier snowfalls? What are the effects of shifting 282 billion tons of mass from below the surface into the atmosphere? And what are the effects of combining 753 billion tons of atmospheric oxygen with 282 billion tons of subsurface carbon in order to create this 941 billion tons of carbon dioxide?

Dramatically increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, as we have done, from 280 ppm to 390 ppm, may have no effect. But believing they have zero effects, and scientifically proving they have zero effects are two different things. Rand would say “We Must KNOW! We may not simply believe!”

Earth from Space, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC

Tweet

Earth Day, 2010, I looked to the future on Popular Logistics. In 2009, I wrote about water pollution and agricultural waste in the Chesapeake. Today I am looking at the present and recent past. While a comprehensive look at where we are can be found on the web pages of the World Watch Institute, the New York Times, and the World Factbook of the Central Intelligence Agency, I want to make a few points.

Our energy policy is “when you flip a switch, the juice gotta flow.” It ain’t magic. It’s engineering and classical physics, with an understanding of radioactive fission and decay and a profound lack of long term thinking. It ain’t magic, but it might as well be. But we really need to base our energy policy on an understanding of ecological economics and sustainability.

We’ve had a few problems with nuclear power and fossil fuel in the last few years. Yet, there’s some light on the horizon.

Regarding those problems with fossil fuel …

December 22, 2008, a flood of 1.2 billion gallons of toxic coal ash at the Kingston Steam Plant on the Clinch and Emory Rivers, upstream of Kingston, Tennessee, here or here. April, 2010, a disaster at the Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia (here). One of the results of the accident was that Massey Energy, the company that operated the mine, was sued by institutional investors who alleged corporate malfeasance. And then there was the catastrophic spill of 50,000 to 70,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico for three months. These, I said, were the “Fossil Fuel Trifecta of Disaster.” My series began with “Fossil Fuels and a Walk on the Moon.”  BP’s stock – and “market capitalization” was cut in half. While it has since recovered somewhat, it is still well below the level immediately prior to the spill. BP has also lost good executives to the nascent biofuels industry.

Also back in 2009, I started covering the “Purgen Plant,” a “Rube Goldberg” design for a coal plant with carbon sequestration, here.  The technology is incredibly expensive – $16 to $18 per watt – and spectacularly stupid. The plan is to use 25% to 40% of the output of the plant to capture 90% of the carbon, then compress it and pipe it 70 miles along the sea floor, then bury it 1 mile beneath the bottom of the ocean. It will cost the taxpayers billions, as long as nothing goes wrong.

More recently I’ve been writing about the unfolding earthquake – tsunami – nuclear disaster in Japan beginning with  Earthquake, Tsunami, and Energy Policy and concluding with Nuclear Power, What Future? But there are two important points – under “normal” conditions nuclear power produces less radioactive waste than coal, and the wastes from nuclear power plants are regulated. Under real world conditions, nuclear plants leak tritium and other radioisotopes into the biosphere. Look to this blog for more posts on this in the future.

Yet, there is some good news.

• Cape Wind, LLC finally got the permits they need to build America’s first offshore wind farm (see Cape Wind, Leadership and Vision).
• The solar energy industry is strong in New Jersey and California, and expanding.
• The FDA expects America’s rural electric coops to continue to move into renewable energy.
• Bright, dedicated, passionate and beautiful people are thinking about sustainability in places like Bainbridge, Columbia Earth Institute, the Fowler Center at Case Western, Marlboro College, the Presidio, UVM.
• Large institutions such as Deutsche Bank – one of the 10 largest banks – and Zurich Reinsurance are concerned about climate change. Click here and here. concerned about climate change.

In addition to my work on this blog, my song “Sunbathing in Siberia” may not be “American Idol” fare (and that’s part of the problem) but my friends dig it, and my “Earth Energy Haikus” were posted on Amida’s web site. The problems we write about on Popular Logistics are complex “systems” problems. They have developed over the last 50 or 100 or 200 years. They can’t be fixed with a magic wand. We need to look long and hard at various paradigms, such as energy and consumption, and how they need to shift. In his lectures, his book, “Sustainability by Design” and on his blog, John Ehrenfeld defines “Sustainability” as “Flourishing forever.” Doing it is the conundrum.

–

The image of the “Blue Marble” was created by Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, at the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA GSFC. It is described here.  “This true-color image shows North and South America as they would appear from space 35,000 km (22,000 miles) above the Earth. The image is a combination of data from two satellites. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite collected the land surface data over 16 days, while NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) produced a snapshot of the Earth’s clouds.”

Tweet On May 25, 1961 President John Kennedy said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” (Kennedy library and NASA)

Ten years ago, before Sept. 11, Jim Gordon and his team set out to build a small wind farm on the waters on which the young President, his wife, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews sailed. Size is relative. It’s small compared to a large coal or nuclear power complex. The wind farm will be composed of 130 turbines and produce up to 430 megawatts of power (here).

In 2010 Jim Gordon and Cape Wind, LLC, finally, got their permits to build the wind farm. For a variety of reasons it took longer for Cape Wind, LLC to get the permits to build the wind farm than it took this nation to land a man on the moon and bring him home safely.  Had the wind farm been built by the winter of 2004, Cape Wind would have provided power during the bitter January of ’04, the heat wave of ’05, and every day, especially the coldest days of winter and the hottest days of summer – when the winds are strongest and New Englander’s electricity needs are highest.

It’s also clear, from reading Cape Wind, by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb, that the alliance to “Save Our Sound,” created an anti-wind rogue’s gallery, a bipartisan coalition of moneyed special interests which led Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-MA, Governor Willard Mitt Romney, R-MA, Senator Ted Stevens, R-AK, Representative Dan Young, R-AK, Sen. Trent Lott, R-MS, Sen. John Warner, R-VA, and very wealthy residents of Cape Cod, including Bill Koch, the late Richard Egan, Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon (Sen. Warner’s ex-mother-in-law), professional environmentalist Robert F Kennedy, Jr. to obstruct the regulatory and the legislative processes and which slowed the development of Cape Wind and offshore wind farms off of the mid-Atlantic and elsewhere.

For them to oppose this project or say “I favor wind power, as long as it’s somewhere else,” was and remains cynical. Given that we have combat troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, that Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 described the mission in Iraq as a war for oil, was unpatriotic, perhaps traitorous.

Yet another bipartisan coalition rose up to challenge them and support Cape Wind: Ted Roosevelt, IV, who lives on the Cape, Rep. Jim Bass, R-NH, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-ME, Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-NM, Matt Patrick, Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick,  Greenpeace, unions, Fox News’ Sean Hannity. What these politicians have in common is an understanding of the values of energy independence and renewable energy.

Popular Logistics is a policy blog, not a politics blog. However, it’s worth noting that several political campaigns were won in Massachusetts by Democrats who supported Cape Wind, including Matt Patrick, the 5-term Democratic Representative of the 3rd District of Barnstable, Cape Cod, and Deval Patrick who started his 2006 Gubenatorial campaign in front of the Hull, MA, wind turbine.

Mitt Romney, who signed Ted Kennedy’s health care plan into law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, (also known as Obamacare 1.0) appears to be running for President in 2012. He lost in the 2008 Primary to John McCain. Mr. Romney signed on to the Kennedy-Koch-Egan-Mellon anti-Cape Wind jihad. Americans favor wind power. Will they support Romney in 2012?

Scott “Mitt-Lite” Brown, said (here) “While I support the concept of wind power as an alternative source of energy, Nantucket Sound is a national treasure.”  Massachusetts voters favor Cape Wind 70 to 30. Will they support Brown in his re-election campaign in 2012?  The Statue of Liberty is a “National Treasure,” as is the Constitution.  I last visited Cape Cod when I was 7. Nantucket Sound is not a “National Treasure.” Getting America off coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power, moving to clean, renewable, sustainable energy means our children and grandchildren will enjoy our national treasures.

In their book Williams and Whitcomb suggest that Senator Kennedy may have realized that he had made a bad decision in opposing Cape Wind, but that for a variety of reasons he refused to back down. They may be right. While I think Kennedy was wrong, I can’t speak to whether he came to that understanding. As I noted on this blog, back in August, 2009, (here) President Obama said of Ted Kennedy,”His ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws and reflected in millions of lives: in seniors who know new dignity; in families who know new opportunity; in children who know education’s promise; and in all who can pursue their dream in an America that is more equal and more just, including myself.”

Obama said “More equal and more just,” but he didn’t say “perfect.” America is not perfect. It is nation of men and women governed by the rule of law. The laws are not perfect, and neither are the men and women who make, enforce and interpret the laws.

Our energy policy is electricity flows when people flip a switch. Most of that electricity comes from burning fossil fuels and harnessing nuclear fission. We can pretend that the carbon we are pumping into the oceans and the atmosphere will have no effect, that we have unlimited supplies of fossil fuels, and uranium, that all the waste from coal mining, processing, transporting, and burning, and all the radiation leaks from nuclear plants (and radioactive waste from coal) are trivial or routine. Or we can get real. The choice is between coal, oil, methane, and nuclear, or wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal. I choose wind, solar, tidal and geothermal; for myself, for my backyard, not just for people who are my equal in the eyes of the law, whether they have more or less money than me.

–

Index to the series that explores Offshore Wind and Politics:

1. Cape Wind, Leadership and Vision, here.
2. Why Cape Wind Still Matters, here.
3. Ted Roosevelt, IV, on Cape Wind (coming soon).

Asking a nuclear engineering professor “Is radiation bad?” is like asking Charlie Sheen “Is cocaine bad?”

On “Morning Edition” today, 3/30/11, Renee Montagne did just that when she interviewed Professor Peter Caracappa, a member of the faculty of the nuclear engineering department of RPI (Interview / nuclear engineering at RPI). As is typically the case, what was left out of the conversation could have been more interesting than what was in the conversation. My questions for Professor Caracappa are below:

1. According to Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, there were 715 nuclear engineering graduates in the US in 2009.  B.S.: 395, M.S.233, PhD: 87 (Press Release / ORISE Report). Is this enough young and good nuclear engineers to design, build and manage a new fleet of reactors?
2. How much has background radiation increased since the 1940′s, when we started doing nuclear weapons testing?
3. We burn a lot of coal each day. When coal is mined, processed, and burned we release radon, uranium, and thorium into the biosphere. Since we are careful to manage the radioactive particles in nuclear power plant waste, shouldn’t we be careful to manage the radioactive particles in coal?
4. What are the costs of managing radioactive wastes? And how do we pay those costs? Are they factored into the price of electricity from nuclear power or are they paid by the taxpayer? And if paid by the taxpayer in the budgets of the DoE, NRC, and state and local government agencies, what would they amount to if added to the cost of electricity? This should be fairly easy to calculate we know the output of any given nuclear power plant. We take the output, say 20 gigawatt hours, which is 20 million kwh, and divide that into the costs of regulation for that plant, which could be say $2 million. The result, if I did the math correctly, is $0.10 per kwh. That’s not much – what can you buy for a dime in the U. S. today? Penny candy? But that $0.10 increases the cost of the electricity dramatically – by about 100%.

My final question:

Wind and water turbines, geothermal systems, and photovoltaic solar modules produce power without burning fuel. While there are resource footprints in the manufacture, installation, and maintenance of these facilities, there are no mines, no wells, no wastes to manage in their ongoing operation.  Shouldn’t we be asking “How do we get utility scale base load power from wind and sun?” Shouldn’t we be figuring out “How to shift from a fuel-based energy paradigm to a sustainable paradigm?”

Smoke from nuclear plant. (C) Reuters

The men and women who design, build, and work at nuclear power plants are bright, dedicated people who work hard so that when we flip a switch the power flows, so we can use our computers, watch our tvs, refrigerate our food, microwave our dinners and our popcorn, heat, cool, and vacuum our homes, and jam on our electric pianos and electric guitars when we want to. The drive, dedication and service of the engineers at Fukushima is heroic.

Under normal conditions, nuclear power emits less pollutants than coal, and the waste from nuclear power is regulated. The wastes from coal are not.

Yet, radioactive materials are an intrinsic property of nuclear power; consequently meltdown and disaster are inherent dangers. The disasters at Fukushima Dai-ichi, Fukushima Diaini, and Onagawa, while not predictable, were not unexpected. We’ve seen Chernobyl in ’86, Three Mile Island in ’79. We’ve had fires at Brown’s Ferry. We have had, and continue to have leaks of radioactive material at Oyster Creek, Indian Point, Vermont Yankee, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and every other nuclear facility in the United States, Japan, France, and I am sure, the rest of the world.

And we learned what? To ‘harden’ the plants? To spare no expense in a fanatical devotion to safety and maintenance?

No. To cut corners and to defer maintenance. To extend to 60 years the life of plants designed to last 40 years.

I drive an 11 year old car with 158,000 miles under it’s engine. I’m on my third set of tires. I change the oil every 3 months or 3,000 miles, or 4 months or 4,000 miles when I’m busy and stressed. When I hold off on an oil change to 4 months or 4,000 miles, I allow negligible damage to the engine and decrease performance. if I tried to stretch it to 2 years or 30,000 miles between oil changes I would destroy the engine. I can probably get another 10 years and another 125,000 miles out of the car if I baby it. But I don’t know if I could drive it 60 years and 1.2 million miles. Yet this is how we attempt to manage our nuclear power plants.

The U.S. says people should not go within 50 miles of Fukushima. That’s a circular area of approximately 7,850 square miles. Indian Point, on the east bank of the Hudson River, is located 35 miles from Manhattan. It was built to withstand a 6.0 earthquake and was built along the Ramapo earthquake fault. Japanese authorities now tell us their killer quake was 9.0. The U. S. Geological Survey reported 154 aftershocks of 5.0 or greater and 27 aftershocks measuring 6.0 or greater in Japan.  Could Indian Point withstand an earthquake that measures 9.0 with 154 aftershocks of 5.0 or greater, 27 measuring 6.0 or greater – in a week? Japan moved 8 feet to the east. If Indian Point moves 8 feet to the west it will be swimming.

We should, with all deliberate speed, decommission every nuclear reactor and replace them with wind, solar, geothermal, other renewable, sustainable technologies, and the “negawatt” virtual-reactors of efficiency.

Like Chernobyl # 4, We should entomb Fukushima Dai-ichi in a sarcophagus the size of the Pyramids. And rather than Yucca Mountain, we should very politely ask the Japanese to transform Fukushima Dai-ichi into a nuclear waste repository for the future.

The question is not:

“Can we meet our needs with renewable, sustainable energy systems?”

but rather it is

“How can we meet our needs with renewable, sustainable energy systems?”

Latestin a series on the economics, ecological economics, finance, logistics, and systems dynamics of nuclear power in the light of the ongoing catastrophe at Fukushima.

Index to the series

1. Earthquake, Tsunami and Energy Policy, March 11-13, 2011. Here.
2. After Fukushima, Wall Street Bearish on Nuclear Power. March 14, 2011. Here.
3. Fukushima: Worse than Chernobyl? Here.
4. Fukushima: GE Mark 1: Unsustainable by Design. Here
5. Is Fukushima Dai-icha worse than Chernobyl? Here.
6. Nuclear Power: What Future? Here.

How Loud Is A Wind Turbine? Our friends at Treehugger re-published this graphic from GE, which builds wind turbines.

If a wind turbine spins in a forest do you hear it?

If you’re standing next to a utility scale wind turbine, then you’ll hear it. At 300 meters, which is as close to residences as we can build them, they are about as loud as a refrigerator. People report that a set of wind turbines – they tend to be built in sets – produce noise and subsonic vibrations, which can be irritating. But what should we do? PV solar modules are silent. However, they don’t produce power at night.  Coal produces tons of toxic waste, from arsenic to zinc, including cadmium, mercury, lead, uranium, thorium – actually producing more radioactive waste than nuclear power.  And coal produces carbon dioxide. Mining coal and uranium is dirty. We are converting mountains of natural beauty into mountains of toxic waste. (see Coal Tattoo, or I Love Mountains)

So how loud is a wind turbine? And if wind power is too loud, how should we turn on the lights?

Alex Gabbard at the Coal pile in front of the Oak Ridge National Lab

Strange and counter-intuitive as it may seem, burning coal produces more radioactive waste than nuclear fission.  And it’s not regulated.

Back in 1993, Alex Gabbard, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published “Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger” in ORNL Review. Gabbard built on the work of J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, and R. E. Blanco, also of Oak Ridge, in their article, “Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants,” Science, Dec. 8, 1978.

McBride et al wrote:

Assuming a 1 percent ash release to the atmosphere (Environmental Protection Agency regulation) and 1 part per million of uranium and 2 parts per million of thorium in the coal (approximately the U.S. average), population doses from the coal plant are typically higher than those from pressurized-water or boiling-water reactors that meet government regulations. Higher radionuclide contents and ash releases are common and would result in increased doses from the coal plant.

Gabbard wrote:

The fact that coal-fired power plants throughout the world are the major sources of radioactive materials released to the environment has several implications. It suggests that coal combustion is more hazardous to health than nuclear power and that it adds to the background radiation burden even more than does nuclear power. It also suggests that if radiation emissions from coal plants were regulated, their capital and operating costs would increase, making coal-fired power less economically competitive.

Finally, radioactive elements released in coal ash and exhaust produced by coal combustion contain fissionable fuels and much larger quantities of fertile materials that can be bred into fuels by absorption of neutrons, including those generated in the air by bombardment of oxygen, nitrogen, and other nuclei with cosmic rays; such fissionable and fertile materials can be recovered from coal ash using known technologies. These nuclear materials have growing value to private concerns and governments that may want to market them for fueling nuclear power plants. However, they are also available to those interested in accumulating material for nuclear weapons. A solution to this potential problem may be to encourage electric utilities to process coal ash and use new trapping technologies on coal combustion exhaust to isolate and collect valuable metals, such as iron and aluminum, and available nuclear fuels.

Makeup of Coal and Ash

Coal is one of the most impure of fuels. Its impurities range from trace quantities of many metals, including uranium and thorium, to much larger quantities of aluminum and iron to still larger quantities of impurities such as sulfur. Products of coal combustion include the oxides of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur; carcinogenic and mutagenic substances; and recoverable minerals of commercial value, including nuclear fuels naturally occurring in coal.

Coal ash is composed primarily of oxides of silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, titanium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, mercury, and sulfur plus small quantities of uranium and thorium.

The James home in the middle of a sea of 1.2 billion gallons of Coal Ash

Remember that 1.2 Billion gallons of coal ash flooded into the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers and 300 acres of Tennessee on Dec. 22, 2008 (click here and here).

Discussing health effects, Gabbard noted:

Although adverse health effects from increased natural background radioactivity may seem unlikely for the near term, long-term accumulation of radioactive materials from continued worldwide combustion of coal could pose serious health hazards.

The conclusions are inescapable:

We need to keep this in mind before planning new coal plants – even ones, like the Purgen experiment in Rahway in which we will attempt carbon sequestration.  As I noted in recent testimony before New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities regarding the Energy Master Plan, we obtain coal by converting mountains of natural beauty into mountains of toxic waste. This is not sustainable.