Tag Archives: TVA

Nuclear Power: Present Tense

— Tweet — Nuclear Power: Accident in France Kills 1, Injures 4 — NPR, and the Associated Press report “An explosion at a nuclear waste facility in southern France killed one person and injured four on Monday… The Nuclear Safety Authority declared the accident “terminated” soon after the blast at a furnace in the Centraco site, in the southern Languedoc-Roussillon region, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the city of Avignon. One of the injured suffered severe burns.”

The DC Bureau reported “The workers were operating a high temperature industrial oven that burns low-level nuclear waste in a sealed building when the unit blew up. The worker who was killed was burned so badly his body was carbonized, according to officials.”

The French Nuclear Safety Authority, analogous to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or maybe Vichy, designated the accident as a 1 on a scale from 0 to 9.

While a death in an industrial accident is tragic, and while a worker could die as a result of injuries sustained falling off the nacelle of a wind turbine or a roof while installing or working on a solar array, it is probably impossible for a worker to get ‘Carbonized’ working on a wind turbine or solar farm. Continue reading →

Why the TVA Wants Nuclear Power

In “Why We Still Need Nuclear,” the “op-ed” piece written in the New York Times, July 30, 2011, Tom Kilgore, the President and CEO of the Tennessee Valley Authority, seems to have made up his mind to attempt to complete the Bellefonte 1 nuclear power plant, in Hollywood, Alabama. Mr. Kilgore is in good company: the President of Iran, Mahmoud Achmadinejad, also wants to build nuclear power plants.

The TVA began work on the Bellefonte nuclear plants in 1974. Construction was suspended in 1988, after the TVA spent about $4.1 Billion on the plant. The TVA wants to spend another $5 Billion over the next six to eight years to complete the plant. It would therefore cost a total of $9.1 Billion to construct a 1.26 gigawatt plant. That’s $7.22 Billion per gigawatt, plus interest, over a period that spans 34 years, with construction in three phases: 14 years of work from ’74 to ’88, 22 years of non-work, from ’88 to 2012, and another six to eight years of work. (Times Free Press, TVA News, TVA Environment).

This suggests the real reason why the TVA wants to complete the plant. Currently Bellefonte 1 a $4.1 billion liability on the TVA’s books. If the TVA adds another $5 Billion, this $4.1 hot white elephant will be magically transformed into a cool (but heat producing) 9.1 billion asset. Continue reading →

Egypt, Wisconsin – It's the Economy, Stupid

The James home, Knoxville Biz.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is trying to stimulate the economy by eliminating corporate income taxes and regulations on businesses and cutting taxes on wealthy people (click here or here). These kinds of activities do stimulate GDP. Here’s how.

Wealthy people, like Lindsay Lohan, Brittney Spears, Mel Gibson, and Charlie Sheen have people, including paparazzi and media people following them around. That costs money. They do things in a spectacular way, and when they do stupid things in a spectacular way they have lawyers get them out of trouble. Economists call this “multipliers.” The lawyers, paparazzi and media folks need to eat, sleep, rent hotel rooms, etc. And they don’t camp out and chow down on toast, water, and dried fruits and nuts. Celebrities often require high powered consultants from the sex and pharmaceuticals industries. When they trigger rapid increases in the entropy of hotel rooms, by “trashing” them, carpenters, electricians, decorators, architects and others need be hired to restore the room – all this costs money, and stimulates GDP.

When regulations are lax or eliminated businesses regulate themselves. This stimulates GDP. Consider the recent GDP stimulus of Wall Street, when those now-legendary credit default swaps raised real estate values (until they crashed). Similarly, when industries are releived of the burden of environmental regulations, they create products which increase GDP and pollution which is not counted in GDP. When the pollution is cleaned up, at taxpayer expense, the GDP again increases. We see this dramatically in Tennessee, at the site of the Kingston Steam Plant. When a flood released 1.2 billion gallons of toxic coal ash sludge from the coal-fired power plant, December, 22, 2008, the cleanup costs were added to the bills of the people who buy power from the TVA.
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Coal Plant Disaster Leads to New Coal Mines

As noted on this website, (click here ) On Dec. 22, 2008, a billion gallons of sludge covered 300 acres, and spilled into the Clinch River and the Tennessee River when the retention pond burst at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Steam Plant. That’s 1,000,000,000 gallons of toxic soup containing Arsenic, Lead, Mercury, Selenium and other toxics and carcinogens. Knoxvillebiz.com.

posted on Yale Environment 360 (Click Here)

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved 42 mountaintop removal coal mining permits in the Appalachian Mountains, dashing hopes among many environmentalists that the Obama administration would move quickly to crack down on the destructive and controversial practice. U.S. Rep. Nick J. Rahall (D-W.V.), chairman of the

Photo by Teri Blanton

House Natural Resources Committee, said the EPA has given the green light to 42 of 48 mountaintop removal projects currently under review by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In mountaintop removal mining, coal companies blast and bulldoze the tops off mountains to get at coal seams below. In recent years, the practice has destroyed nearly 1 million acres of Appalachian forests and buried close to 1,000 miles of streams in mining debris. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said recently that the agency was reviewing the permits because the projects might violate the U.S. Clean Water Act, but she added that “the bulk” of the pending permits did not appear to raise environmental concerns. Environmental leaders criticized the EPA for not taking a stronger stand and called on the White House Council on Environmental Quality to take action to stop the 42 projects from proceeding.

Clean Coal, My Ash

On Dec. 22, 2008, a billion gallons of sludge covered 300 acres, and spilled into the Clinch and Emory Rivers when the retention pond burst at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Steam Plant. That’s 1,000,000,000 gallons of toxic soup containing Arsenic, Lead, Mercury, Selenium and other toxics and carcinogens. Tennessean.com, Knoxvillebiz.com.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s law firm, Kennedy, Madonna, LLP, and the Levin Papantonio Law Firm have joined to investigate the Tennessee Coal Spill on behalf of property owners living in the impacted area. For more information call 888-435-7001 or click here.

According to TVA spokesman Gilbert Francis, “Most of that material is inert. It does have some heavy metals within it, but it’s not toxic or anything.” However, according to the EPA, coal fly ash and sludge contains carcinogens and high concentrations of heavy metals. Furthermore, “concentrations of arsenic to which people might be exposed through drinking water contaminated by fly ash could increase cancer risks several hundredfold” AP, NYTimes, Yahoo.

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Systems thinking on the biohumanosphere.