NEW ENERGY – HERE AND STAYING

A recent protest at the Washington, D.C., Capitol Power Plant (CPP) brought out thousands of anti-coal activists determined - despite a frigid, snowy day - to shutdown the coal-fired operation. It was a national signal from a long-maturing grassroots movement that it is here to stay.

The movement is fighting proposed new coal plants across the country, legally, legislatively, through every step of the permitting process and in the court of public opinion. In recent months, its success has been growing.

A chronicle of history being made. From htollive via YouTube.

The fight most recently has taken the forms of (1) a powerful public relations campaign to counteract the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE)'s coal industry-funded lie that coal is "clean" and (2) a new report showing that though coal is abundant, much of it may not be economically recoverable.

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Example of the movement's success: Nevada’s LS Power recently announced it will “postpone” building a proposed 1,600-megawatt coal plant and will instead develop Nevada’s geothermal, wind and solar potentials.

Example of the movement's success: Iowa's Interstate Power and Light recently said it will “postpone” building a 630-megawatt coal plant and instead develop a 200-megawatt wind installation.

“Postpone” is corporate-talk for “it isn’t worth the effort anymore.”

In 2008, only 5 new coal plants, generating 1,400 megawatts, went on line. 8,300+ megawatts of new wind power were built.

Bruce Nilles, director, Sierra Club Move Beyond Coal campaign: "In the last year the world has changed 180 degrees…"

The turning point was the 2007 Supreme Court ruling that greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs), as pollutants, must be controlled by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under the dictates of the Clean Air Act.

In response, Kansas’ Department of Health and Environment refused to permit a coal-fired power plant. That was the first domino. At the time, there were 151 new coal plants scheduled for construction. Of those, only 95 are still scheduled.

The grassroots movement has now reached into the highest political circles.

In response to the CPP protest, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) and Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) ordered the Architect of the Capitol to transfer the coal-burning plant to natural gas fuel by the end of the year.

The Obama administration budget, signed last month, allotted $16.8 billion for New Energy and Energy Efficiency programs but just $3.4 billion for coal. Congress stripped $50 billion in loan guarantees from it for new coal-to-liquids facilities and for the nuclear industry.

The coal industry’s response has been an increased campaign for “clean” coal, something that is a theory, not a reality. It involves the capture and burying of coal plants’ GhG spew.

With 28 coal plants still under construction and an estimated 600 now providing almost half of U.S. electricity, the idea of capturing the spew is deeply appealing. Presently operating plants are responsible for ~1/3 of U.S. GhGs.

NASA scientist Jim Hansen, the Nobel laureate Intergoernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and thousands of scientists worldwide say U.S. coal plant emissions must be phased out in the next 2 decades to prevent atmospheric GhG concentrations that will produce the worst impacts of global climate change.

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), the capture and safe underground storage of GhG emissions, is the only way coal could remain in use without a serious negative impact on the atmosphere.

Jim Hansen, premier climate change scientist, NASA: "It [CCS] is the only hope for coal, and it is a pretty slender thread to be hanging by…Coal is exceedingly dirty stuff. The best place for it is in the ground."

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At the scale coal is now used in the U.S., CCS is impossible and would be, were it possible, prohibitively expensive. Some researchers believe it can be done but not at a price or in a time frame that would suit present needs.

And there is no way to be certain the volatile and dangerous GhG gases would not leak out from where they would be sequestered.

Burying waste works well for cats because they have humans to clean out the litter box.

Many also doubt burying GhG spew is practical for the coal industry because the idea of burying nuclear waste hasn’t worked out well for the nuclear industry. The problem is the same: Nobody wants to be responsible for the litter box.

The Obama budget’s cuts for nuclear included a rejection of funding for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. Led by Senator Reid, the state has repeatedly told the federal government to find someplace else to put their radioactive garbage.

No place else is wholeheartedly volunteering.

Meanwhile, waste keeps piling up at nuclear plants around the country and the federal government is threatened with lawsuits from utilities that consume nuclear energy-generated electricity and are paying to store the dangerous spent fuel onsite.

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Such lawsuits have already cost the government $1 billion dollars for failing to fulfill its promise to take on the storage problem after 1998.

The Obama adminstration budget decision means “back to the drawing board” for the problem of radioactive spent fuel storage, a problem that has cost the U.S. $10.4 billion since 1983 and continues to cost about $500 million a year.

If the cost of handling nuclear waste was included into the price of using nuclear energy to generate electricity, the discussion of using nuclear energy would likely end right then and there. Which, however, would curtail the discussion before it got to the subject of the enormous capital costs and long wait for a return on investment that building a nuclear plant entails.

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Yucca Mountain is a Nevada ridge of volcanic rock. It was chosen as the site in 1987, but without real scientific investigation. Congress simply declared it satisfactorily dry and remote. Geologists since have found that water flows through Yucca Mountain fast enough to suggest radioactive substance could leach through the rock into the water table.

Despite Senator Reid’s power, he can only keep the Yucca Mountain proposal on hold but not kill it because the rest of Congress does not want DOE to begin looking in their states for potential storage sites.

Edward F. Sproat III, Bush administraion official in charge of the Yucca Mountain repository project, DOE: “[If Senator Reid kills the project] everybody knows their state is going to be back in play.”

The nuclear industry wants an independent panel to decide what to do. First, there will be Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) hearings. The Obama administration has already moved to prevent the hearings from being conclusive by limiting the commissioners to answering questions instead of presenting complete scientific findings and proposals.

Ultimately, the politics of Yucca Mountain dictate that the project cannot be cancelled or approved. The administration may simply hang the decision up indefinitely. It’s more than a little like the dilemma of the classic Groucho Marx con man character Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers, whose theme song was Hello, I Must Be Going.

Bottom line: Both the coal and nuclear industries are like Captain Spaulding (though not nearly so much fun). He presented himself as a big game hunter but in fact was just a big talker. Both coal and nuclear present themselves as abundant, cheap, domestic sources of energy but in fact are more talk than truth. They are partial solutions and offer no better answer for what to do about the costly toxic waste they generate than a kitten has for its waste.

Meanwhile, New Energy - abundant, domestic, cheap and getting cheaper - is here and staying. It is now cheaper to build new wind power than to build new coal or new nuclear even when the costs of coal and nuclear waste are not included in the calculation. Wind was the second biggest source of new electricity generation, after natural gas, built in 2007 and 2008. And wind supplies will never peak. Investors put their money in it, even when the economy was crashing, because – unlike nuclear and coal – wind is a solid investment.

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A new study just pronounced the generation of electricity from geothermal sources cheaper than coal. (See GEOTHERMAL JOINS THE NEW ENERGIES THAT BEAT COAL…)

And electricity generated from solar energy, the most abundant source of power on this good earth, seems to get closer to grid parity every day.

Nothing could be truer about coal and nuclear energies than Captain Spaulding’s theme song. Over the next 2 decades, the U.S. must and inevitably will serenade them with “Hello, you must be going.”

From moochcassidy202 via YouTube

Coal plants checked by enviro campaigns, costs
Matthew Brown, March 7, 2009 (AP)
and
Future Dim for Nuclear Waste Repository
Matthew L. Wald, March 6, 2009 (NY Times)

WHO
Sierra Club Move Beyond Coal campaign (Bruce Nilles, director); The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE); Brian Schweitzer, Governor, Montana; American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) (Joe Lucas, vice president); Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)( Eliot Brenner, spokesman); President Barack Obama; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev); Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif)

WHAT
Anti-coal activists, spurred by the urgency of global climate change, are stopping the building of new coal plants. President Obama pulled funding for the proposed nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada with the approval of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev), essentially certifying the continued stalemate on building new nuclear plants.

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WHEN
- Some say eastern Montana and Wyoming have enough coal to last the U.S. 100+ years without changing rates of use but a recent report finds most of those reserves may not be economically recoverable.
- Since 2002: 90+ new coal-fired power plants and plant expansions have been stopped.
- 2007: DOE predicted 151 new coal plants
- 2007: Supreme Court decision finding that GhGs, as pollutants, must be controlled by EPA under the Clean Air Act.
- 2009: DOE predicts 95 new coal plants.
- Yearly: It costs ~ a half-billion dollars for nuclear spent fuel to be stored at power plant sites instead of being transferred to the promised but not built federal repository.

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WHERE
- Just less than half of U.S.electricity comes from coal. About 20% comes from nuclear energy. The rest comes fromnatural gas, hydroelectric generation and New Energy.
- Eastern Montana and Wyoming reserves are estimated at 180 billion tons. It is possilbe less than 10% is economically recoverable.
- The shutdown of planned cola fired power plants is happening everywhere across the country.
- Yucca Mountain is in Nevada, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

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WHY
- The Sierra Club and others have vowed to challenge new coal plants legally, legislatively throughout the permitting process and in the court of public opinion.
- Example: After a 4-year legal battle with activist environmentalists, a group of rural Montana electric co-ops abandoned a partially built 250-megawatt coal-fired plant in favor plans to use natural gas. The co-ops were fighting the activists and skyrocketing costs.
- Example: The U.S. Air Force dropped plans for a coal-to-jet fuel project.
- Coal companies seek federal subsidies for “clean” coal technologies.
- ACCCE and associated PR groups spent an estimated $40 million during the 2008 election pushing “clean” coal and are budgeted for a like amount in 2009.
- The radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power plants is accumulating in steel-lined pools or giant steel-and-concrete casks near the reactors.
- The nuclear industry wants $22 billion it paid DOE for a waste repository back.
- The scientific merit of Yucca Mountain as a waste repository has not been established by independent judges.

The newest statement on “clean” coal from the This Is Reality coalition. “In reality, there’s no such thing as clean coal.” From ThorntonGazerro via YouTube.

QUOTES
- Joe Lucas, vice president, ACCCE: "We see this as an ongoing effort…When we talk about plugging in (electric) cars, we're going to create new demand in this country and that demand is going to be met in large part like it is today, by fuels like coal."
- Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer: "Throw a dart at a map and you're going to hit within a hundred miles of where somebody two years ago thought they were going to build a pulverized coal plant with no carbon dioxide capture…In every single case, they've either announced their going to stop it or they're one press release away from it."
- Eliot Brenner, spokesman, NRC: “What happens once we say yes or no is out of our hands…”