Local Energy News - Energy Self-Reliance in Action

Sunday

07Feb2010

New Mexico Legislature Promoting Nuclear Power

Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 09:42PM

Nice to see the progressive community here in New Mexico heading to the Roundhouse today to protest Senate Joint Memorial 38, which calls for nuclear energy to be declared “green”. As repulsive as it is to see another attempt to dress nukes up as green energy, there are three energy bills sailing through the legislature unnoticed that have far greater consequences for the future of nuclear energy in New Mexico.

To really understand how bad these bills are, it helps to first be aware that billions of dollars worth of new transmission projects are being planned in the Southwest to support the hundreds of new nuclear reactors that are on the drawing board across the country. Most of the projects are cloaked in green language and being promoted as clean. Here’s a sampling of some of the worst bills this year, along with a couple of bad memorials:

Senate Bill 190 – William Payne. This bill declares that third-party developers of renewable energy projects are not public utilities subject to regulation, but in doing so it strategically avoids addressing cogeneration projects -- leaving them in limbo with the courts. Worse, it requires the commission to give utilities cost recovery (“shall approve...rate riders”) for all the nasty things utilities always claim happen when renewables are connected to their grid: problems with frequency and voltage regulation, necessity to maintain reserve power for when the sun goes behind a cloud or the wind stops blowing – the usual lies. When it comes to accounting for the benefits created when distributed renewables are connected to the grid, the “shall” language is conspicuously absent and the commission is only required to “give due consideration” to them. How sweet!

House Bill 85 – John Heaton. This bill changes the procedure by which new transmission projects are approved, as well as the standard by which their costs can be passed along to ratepayers. It even allows the commission to bypass the public hearing process on transmission projects, assuming nobody complains (or finds out).

House Bill 98 – Jose Campos. As if the Renewable Energy Transmission Authority (RETA) wasn’t powerful enough, this bill gives it access to the Public Project Revolving Fund and exempts it from the Inspection of Public Records Act. RETA already has, from prior legislation, the right to designate transmission corridors, condemn and seize property through eminent domain, issue bonds without limit, and set (transmission) rates without hearings. It was also declared exempt from all state laws except one: the tort law (it can’t be sued). Seems like a lot more power than you would need for building renewable energy projects. RETA has always been a cover for building nukes. I can’t believe how gullible we are – why would renewables need transmission lines?

House Joint Memorial 35 – Janice Arnold-Jones. As a memorial it doesn’t carry the force of law, but this bill takes the first step towards saddling New Mexico ratepayers with billions of dollars in costs for new transmission projects, including Tres Amigas. Tres Amigas is a multi-billion dollar scheme to connect the three major U.S. power grids together with a DC tie in Clovis, New Mexico. This will enable nuclear power plants built nearby to access all three major U.S. power markets. The claim, of course, is that its purpose is to help us sell renewable energy to California. They have sunshine there too, no? Seems funny to bottle it and ship it to them fromhere, but an awful lot of people are drinking that Kool-Aid.

Senate Joint Memorial 41 – John Heaton. Again no force of law, but this memorial requests that Bill Richardson includes nuclear energy as a central component of his clean energy policy initiatives. Reference my article from last week that showed that at least 27 of the 65 nuclear power plant sites in the U.S. are now leaking radioactive Tritium into the ground water. When nukes are believed to be clean...uh...Houston, we have a problem.

As you can probably tell, I'm not a big fan of our state's legislative process!

To read the bills for yourself, visit the New Mexico Legislature website.

Mark Sardella |

1 Comment |

Tuesday

02Feb2010

At Least 27 U.S. Nuclear Power Plants are Leaking

Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 08:34AM

The discovery of radioactive tritium in groundwater at the Vermont Yankee Plant brings the count of known leaking nuclear power plants to 27 -- nearly half of the 65 plant sites in the United States. And the NRC says the list of leaky plants isn't complete, which basically means that all of them may be leaking.

The most common source of leakage is from the spent fuel-rod storage pools, many of which have corroded pipes, according to today's AP article.

Details of the tragedy of allowing electric utilities to perpetuate a central-power model fifty years after it became obsolete are clear. To protect their exclusive control over the power grid, electric utilities promoted an obsolete model of central nuke-and-coal model while suppressing their own research showing that distributed generation would revolutionize electric power.

Promoting your business and fending off competitors are standard business practices, but utilities crossed the line when they agreed on propaganda: A decentralized power system would be unsafe, unreliable, and expensive. Repeat, demonstrate, obfuscate.

We now know that decentralizing the electric power system -- allowing thousands of generators of all types and sizes to run the grid -- would have doubled its efficiency and cut emissions in half. But utilities, with their $300 million annual research budget, have known this for fifty years.

Convincing regulators and the public that 1960’s technology is still appropriate is a remarkable achievement, and not one that should go unpunished. The failure to modernize the grid, and the lies that enabled them to do it, directly caused the excess coal-burning and perpetual nuke re-licensing that is destabilizing our climate and spoiling our drinking water.

When utilities are finally convicted for this crime, what should the remedy be?

Mark Sardella |

2 Comments | | in

Electricity,

Nuclear Power

Sunday

31Jan2010

Obama's Shifting Stance on Nuclear Power

Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 03:03AM

I don't know that Obama has ever been opposed to nuclear power, but he did state explicitly during his campaign that he is not a proponent of it. Apparently that has changed -- check these quotes:

Two years ago during his campaign: (see the video)
"I start off with the premise that nuclear power is not optimal, and so I am not a nuclear energy proponent. Until we can make certain that nuclear power plants are safe, that they have solved the storage problem, until we solve those problems and the nuclear industry can show that they can produce clean, safe energy without enormous subsidies from the U.S. government, I don’t think that’s the best option." (December 30, 2007)

Last week at the State of the Union address:
"But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. (Applause.) It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. (Applause.) It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies. (Applause.) (January 27, 2010)

So that's the clean energy plan -- nukes, oil, gas, coal and advanced biofuels? Get a clue, man! The enthusiastic applause from the gallery should be your clue that the fix is already in on nukes. That, despite the fact that MoveOn determined that his call for new nuke plants was the low point of the speech in the public's eye.

Congress just voted to give the nuclear power industry another $54 billion in loan guarantees, so the plan is to start building in 2011.

Mark Sardella |

2 Comments | | in

Nuclear Power,

Politics

Thursday

21Jan2010

Still Raining Indoors at the Chavez Center

Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 11:33PM

The Chavez Center won energy awards when it opened in 2000, but when I assessed it in 2001 I quickly realized it was a mess. Oversized pumps pushing against closed valves, electrically heated water being used to flush ice (shaved from the skating rink) down the drain, and the like. Worst of all, the heat removed from the skating rink (that's how you make water freeze) was being thrown away instead of used to heat the swimming pools! So when Phaedra Haywood wrote an article about a decade-long problem of humidity from the swimming pools dripping from the ceiling of the gymnasium, I just had to respond. Enjoy!

Dear Phaedra,

Thank you for your January 12 article in The New Mexican, “Water Torture,” which detailed the decade-long saga of indoor rain at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center. Unfortunately the good folks at the City didn’t tell the whole story.

While I was Technical Director for Rebuild New Mexico in 2001, I was asked to assess the energy performance of the Chavez Center. During the assessment, Troy Houtman, the Natatorium Manager, told me about the humidity migration problem that your article chronicles, and he told me at that time that in order to prevent it the natatorium needed to be kept at negative pressure relative to the rest of the building. So the problem was already well understood in March 2001 – six months before your timeline shows it first being identified.

I wrote a report based on my walk-through assessment and submitted it to Greg Neal, Director of the Chavez Center, in April 2001. I also gave a copy to the State Energy Office, which administered the Rebuild program in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. My report included sixteen recommendations for improving the performance of the building, including several designed to reduce humidity inside the natatorium and one specifically calling for continuous measurement of the pressure differential between the natatorium and the rest of the building. I even recommended that an indicator or alarm be connected to the gauge so that the out-of-balance condition could be corrected each time it occurred, before rain would start to fall in the gymnasium.

My report was in the City’s hands long before the timeline in your article shows the problem first being identified. It described exactly how to address the problem, and if acted on at the time it would have quickly led to a permanent solution. The alarm on the pressure gauge would have highlighted the set of conditions creating the pressure imbalance, so that the ventilation system could then be adjusted to keep the imbalance from occurring.

This simple solution, if implemented, could have avoided the next eight years of paid consultants, threatening letters and negotiated settlements. And reading your article, it appears that the problem is still misunderstood. Why are we still talking about monitoring temperature and humidity when the problem arises from a pressure imbalance?

Maybe an interesting follow-up article could explore why the City didn’t consider my report, and whether they have any plans to look at it now. Beyond addressing the problem of water dripping from the gymnasium ceiling, the report contained fifteen additional recommendations for reducing energy consumption at Chavez. Back then the annual energy cost was $382,000 – what is it now, and what is the total cost of the failure to act?

This isn’t an isolated case, nor is it anywhere the worst example of costly ignorance on the part of the City. I have no idea what it would take to put an end to it, but it must stop – we simply cannot afford it any more.

Sincerely,
Mark Sardella, PE

Dear Phaedra,

Thank you for your January 12 article in The New Mexican, “Water Torture,” which detailed the decade-long saga of indoor rain at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center. Unfortunately the good folks at the City didn’t tell the whole story.

While I was Technical Director for Rebuild New Mexico in 2001, I was asked to assess the energy performance of the Chavez Center. During the assessment, Troy Houtman, the Natatorium Manager, told me about the humidity migration problem that your article chronicles, and he told me at that time that in order to prevent it the natatorium needed to be kept at negative pressure relative to the rest of the building. So the problem was already well understood in March 2001 – six months before your timeline shows it first being identified.

I wrote a report based on my walk-through assessment and submitted it to Greg Neal, Director of the Chavez Center, in April 2001. I also gave a copy to the State Energy Office, which administered the Rebuild program in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy. My report included sixteen recommendations for improving the performance of the building, including several designed to reduce humidity inside the natatorium and one specifically calling for continuous measurement of the pressure differential between the natatorium and the rest of the building. I even recommended that an indicator or alarm be connected to the gauge so that the out-of-balance condition could be corrected each time it occurred, before rain would start to fall in the gymnasium.

My report was in the City’s hands long before the timeline in your article shows the problem first being identified. It described exactly how to address the problem, and if acted on at the time it would have quickly led to a permanent solution. The alarm on the pressure gauge would have highlighted the set of conditions creating the pressure imbalance, so that the ventilation system could then be adjusted to keep the imbalance from occurring.

This simple solution, if implemented, could have avoided the next eight years of paid consultants, threatening letters and negotiated settlements. And reading your article, it appears that the problem is still misunderstood. Why are we still talking about monitoring temperature and humidity when the problem arises from a pressure imbalance?

Maybe an interesting follow-up article could explore why the City didn’t consider my report, and whether they have any plans to look at it now. Beyond addressing the problem of water dripping from the gymnasium ceiling, the report contained fifteen additional recommendations for reducing energy consumption at Chavez. Back then the annual energy cost was $382,000 – what is it now, and what is the total cost of the failure to act?

This isn’t an isolated case, nor is it anywhere the worst example of costly ignorance on the part of the City. I have no idea what it would take to put an end to it, but it must stop – we simply cannot afford it any more.

Sincerely,

Mark Sardella, PE

Mark Sardella |