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Blackout Was Good News, For Pollution
squidfrog writes "In regard to the August blackout, University of Maryland researchers have announced the results of measurements indicating the level of pollution normally caused by power plants in the region of the blackout, which could be measured for the first time by comparing the idle power plants with those still operational. 'Aircraft sampling in the 24 hours following the blackout found a 90 percent drop in sulfur dioxide and a 50 percent cut in ozone levels, while visibility increased by more than 25 miles.'" MSNBC has a related story.
There was a fairly informative story about this on NPR recently. You can listen to it here
One of the nice things is that such a quick change bodes well for the effectiveness of improved scrubbers and clean-air standards applied to existing power plants, some of which are supposed to reduce emissions by as much as 50%.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
In true /. fashion, I haven't RTFA yet, but I did hear the story a day or two back, on NPR.
I also heard a related story, about how North Dakota has come up with an alternative pollution formula to allow them to build more power plants, and burn more coal in them, even though the current formula says they're already over the limit. The scientists at the EPA disagreed, but the politicians at the EPA overruled, and approved the EPA formula.
Meanwhile, here in Vermont, we have strict limits on the local fish we're supposed to eat. (For instance, one Walleye per person per month, and they advise that children or pregnant women probably shouldn't have even that much.) One component of this is mercury, which is largely from powerplant emissions. The North Dakota report cited their 'pristine sky'. Of course it is, it all blows downwind on the prevailing westerlies. As a kid in school in Ohio, they talked about how tall smokestacks got the junk up into the stratosphere, and were the solution to pollution. Right. It got it into the prevailing westerlies, and made it S.E.P. (Somebody Else's Problem)
No doubt if we took a similar attitude in Vermont, it would blow out to sea, and we'd hear more about dying fisheries. As it is, we have some of the highest power rates in the country. I'll rant no further.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I remember in grade 8, my Social Studies teacher explained that after industrialization, factories built increasingly larger smokestacks which would blow the pollution to somewhere far away.
This sounds very similar to the stories of the ban of aircraft travel in the few days after 11 sept affecting the climate.
This just proves how much of a huge differance we are making to the planet. One more reason to take global warming seriously.
It was reported in New Scientist 2 week ago.
My home lost power as a result of this outage, (I was on vacation), but since then, I've had several outages in the past 2 months, ranging from 4 to 6 hours in length. During the longer, I started up a small (1100W) generator and was able to run some of my equipment. Being a work-at-home employee that depends on my utilities (telephone, electricity) to work properly, this does create some dilemas for me.
Are there people out there that have reduced your dependence on the utilities using "clean" energy (solar/wind)? What i'm looking at is a hybrid system, where I would take input from: Grid, Solar and Wind. As a result, I would need to store some amount of reserve energy, and prioritize my consumption (eg: Well, Smoke Detectors, Fridge, Stove, Hot Water Heater, etc..). My intention is to not completely disconnect from the grid, or even to sell-back, but to reduce my electrical expenses.
The result would be that I would not depend so much on the outside entities, and see a cost savings after a few years (aside from possible battery replacement costs). I've found some good worksheets online at NW Power (See the calculation help sidebar) and have been using SolarDyne as my cost reference.
Now all I need is some nice blackout curtains that kill the light and output electricity for those days I want to sleep in.
If most if not all things that have biproducts that don't help the enivornment, and maybe not hurt it to some degree, gets turned off.. how can you do nothing but help the environment at best?
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
More like a multi year experiment, with one control. And that control would be the day without the powerplant emissions spewing into the atmosphere.
...Which would cause less environmental damage and human dysfunction, letting these plants continue to run, or replacing them all with nuclear reactors and getting an occasional release or radiation?
I thought that visability at ground level was only 14 miles, due to the curvature of the earth.
Can't see from the article at what height the visability was measured.
...how much nuclear waste does a nuclear power plant actually produce? Would it be feasible to fill a big rocket with it every so often and launch it into the sun? We wouldn't have to worry about environmental damage, seeing as how a) it won't be on earth, and b) the sun's not gonna notice a little extra radiation.
I'm sure the idea's been thought of before, but it sounds good to me and I'm wondering why it's not an option that's considered.
In addition to New Scientist, you can usually find good stuff on the same topic in Science News, Scientific American, Nature, and Science, to name a few.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Coming from Buffalo, N.Y., we here are taking most of our power from the Robert Moses Power Plant in Niagara Falls, which runs off of the current of the Niagara River, one of the fastest sustained currents in the world.
The power actually remained on in my suburb, although small parts of Buffalo did lose power. So that gigantic, collective "Ha! Ha!" you heard last August was Buffalo laughing at New York City.
Hydroelectric power, especially in the northeast where there is an abundance of water, should be tapped more often in my opinion. I'm not a specialist on power though, so I wouldn't know the drawbacks if there were to be any (and there usually are).
oh great, now all the radical environmentalists will systematically raze all the power plants...
Disclaimer: The above does not apply to the elitist environmentalists, who may continue driving their SUVs and throwing recyclables in the trash.
I would have thought that cars accounted for most enviormental pollution, and that the blackout would have forced more to drive, hence more pollution.
But I guess I was just wrong.
I would never have thought that power plants accounted for so much of out pollution. Considering then, that the problem is centrallised, shouldn't we be looking into some way of filtering pollution at the plants rather that cleaning up our SUVs.
May the Maths Be with you!
What about affected transportation? A lot of people didn't go to work during the blackout. People would also go to stores a lot less because a lot of stores were closed during the blackout. Here people were even told on the radio to not drive if it's not essential. IIRC there was also a decrease in air traffic in the affected area.
What about factories? I'm sure a lot of polluting factories shut down during the blackout?
This just proves what I got called a troll (by a mod no less) for saying about how we are bad for everything, including ourselves. Indications like this report should move us to smarter use of our resources...
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77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
How so? These are impossible circumstances to reproduce, mind you.
"...who search the reason of things
Are those who bring the most sorrow on themselves." --Euripides, The Medea