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EPA To Reuse Toxic Sites For Renewable Energy
Hugh Pickens writes:"The Daily Climate reports that President Obama and Congress are pushing to identify thousands of contaminated landfills and abandoned mines — 'brownfields' that could be repurposed to house wind farms, solar arrays, and geothermal power plants. Using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat. 'In the next decade there's going to be a lot of renewable energy built, and all that has to go somewhere,' said Jessica Goad, an energy and climate change policy fellow for The Wilderness Society. 'We don't want to see these industrial facilities placed on land that's pristine. We love the idea of brownfields for renewable energy development because it relieves the (development) pressure on undisturbed places. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have identified nearly 4,100 contaminated sites deemed economically suitable for wind and solar power development, as well as biomass. Included are 5 million acres suitable for photovoltaic or concentrated solar power development, and 500,000 acres for wind power. These sites, if fully developed, have the potential to produce 950,000 megawatts — more than the country's total power needs in 2007, according to EPA data."
cool
Is there a reason this green and earth-friendly administration won't clean these so-called "brownfields" up? They'd rather leave them polluted and build crucial infrastructure on top of them? And when the pollution is deemed unacceptable, they'll knock down these fabulous green investments and then rebuild them after the clean-up. Brilliant! (And possibly shovel-ready, too!)
Ken
And open pit mine would be a pretty rotten place for a wind farm OR a solar field.
Might make a good site for an orbital solar power downlink rectenna, though.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Do the clean, renewable energy project get to pick up the bill for the clean up? What about the long term liability for contamination remaining after the clean up? In the long term, is there any increased risk of illness, like cancer, to the employees of the renewable energy projects? I'm sure these issues can be easily addressed to ensure that no liability is passed onto these projects. I didn't see them discussed in the article and admit being too lazy to research the EPA site for answers...
Really they have been determined to be politcally suitable. Government cannot calculate and determine if something is economical because they do not fall in the realm of profit/loss. I like the idea of reusing the land but that statement cannot be correct.
Using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat.
I used to work in toxics cleanup and I think that's a brilliant idea. A lot of hazardous materials are more risk to dig up than just leave alone. That would put the land to some practical use and restore value to the surrounding communities, many of which were blighted by the proximity to the contamination (whether justified by actual exposure risk or not). And, oh by the way, turn that otherwise unusable ground into jobs and non-polluting energy.
So whatever led to the consideration of these sites, it's a winner. The fact no one will seriously be able to challenge the site selection on environmental grounds will simply speed getting the shovels into the ground.
This is a great idea. Whoever thought it up should get a prize.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Kill yourself, troll.
All in all it may be a good idea or may not. I hope it turns out to be economically beneficial for all.
Why DONT YOU come here and put up FISTS?! DIE BITCH!!!
God Bless,
Mark
Shut the hell up troll.
Who would want to work there? It's a good thing we'll probably get national health care, because the construction workers are gonna need it when their thyroid glands swell up to the size of a cantaloupe.
Isn't one of the selling points supposed to be lower maintenance costs? But really, doesn't that get wiped out, or at least compromised, by the higher employment cost of sending crews into contaminated sites that are still waiting for clean-up? And if the site clean-up is in progress, wouldn't that drive up the maintenance crews' costs up even higher?
Found a new cause, have we, Serdar?
Building on top of a brownfield might do little to stop its contents from percolating into groundwater. (Actually, it might do something at that, simply by diverting rain that would otherwise fall onto and into it.)
I'm all for putting otherwise-unusable land to good use, but we'd need to have legal structures to protect everyone involved, so (for example) the company building the energy installation isn't suddenly on the hook for everything lurking under it.
We're already doing this in Buffalo, NY, on the old Bethlehem Steel site. It used to be one of the largest steelmakers in the world; now, we get clean energy.
why didnt we just say "the government"
Good people go to bed earlier.
Truth hurts, huh?
I would not let this happen on the landfill in my backyard! That would ruin the beautiful sunset over the steaming pile of crap I am enjoying here, and the price of my house will go like way down!
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
quit arguing with myself!
Now I have to worry about it being radioactive and/or toxic?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Now Melvin Ferd, the C.H.U.D. and the Turtles will have free, on-site power now!
And who knows? Maybe even real jobs.
[End Of Line]
Man, they are good at graft and bribery in Chicago.
My God, what are you still doing here man? Don't you know that the evil New World Obama Administration can infect your mind through your Internet connection? Quick, log off now, run to the basement, and put on your tin foil body condom, before they turn you into a mindless socialist environment-loving green weenie!
Feel free to check back in 2012, it may be safe for you to come back on line then.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
No truth from trolls by definition. Get back under your bridge.
You realize probably a large chunk of the companies building on these sites are going to be the ones responsible for the giant mess there in the first place?
I was actually thinking more of Mayor Daly and him & his friends buying up property along the proposed Olympics area.
But if you want to turn it into something about Obama, well...
should be to retool half of Tonawanda (it's a small industrial city immediately north of Buffalo, for those who aren't from the area) to make the parts for those turbines. There's a GM plant there that currently makes car transmissions. I'll bet they could switch over to making turbine innards pretty easily. I'm also quite confident that there are vacant factories large enough to accommodate making the blades. Then, when we've got the parts built, they can be shipped up the Great Lakes to the windy parts of the country.
This would: 1) create jobs where they're desperately needed; 2) bring some money back to a region that's been struggling mightily for the past 20-30 years; 3) get us going on the path towards green energy; 4) possibly spur more green industry to come to Buffalo and set up shop on our wonderfully ample supply of brownfields.
I fail to see a downside here.
Geez.. Refusing Renewable energy.. that's a really harsh penalty..
So homes built on them go dark, when fossil fuels are exhausted.
Won't anyone think of the Toxic Waste Sites?? They sure deserve to have some energy too..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Most of the brownfields, by their very definitions, are either in or close to suburbia. Basically, by putting up wind, Solar PV|thermal, or possibly geo-thermal, these will generate power CLOSE to consumption. In addition, many of these sites already had high tension lines being brought in. Generally, a brownfield was a previous manufacturing site that used loads of electricity. So, with high tension lines already there, the increased costs of build-out as well as maintenance may be far less than doing a new site located 20-50 miles away.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Anyone have a US map detailing the locations of these "brown fields" it seems to me our power should be nicely dispersed throughout the nation.
If 30% of it is Nevada desert we may have issues.
I have yet to see it, and it's already 81 posts in, troll.
"The Daily Climate reports that President Obama and Congress are pushing to identify thousands of contaminated landfills and abandoned mines -- 'brownfields' that could be repurposed to house wind farms, solar arrays, and geothermal power plants. Using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat. 'In the next decade there's going to be a lot of renewable energy built, and all that has to go somewhere,' said Jessica Goad, an energy and climate change policy fellow for The Wilderness Society.
That's all well and good for the ducks, but what about landowners who have invested good money and hosted dozens of elbow-rubbing parties over the years to develop a relationship with congresspeople and senators? How are they supposed to get the government to buy their $60 per acre swampland for $2500 per acre? Reusing land the government has already paid for severely depresses the corrupt real estate deal market, with nothing more to show for it than reduced public spending.
Won't somebody please think of the well-connected?!?
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Not really. You do not need eminent domain to take contaminated sites. Owners of contaminated sites are usually praying that the government will take those sites off of their hands. You see, when you own land that is contaminated you are responsible for cleaning it up, and you can pay pretty hefty fines if the contamination spreads or affects the groundwater. There have been many cases where people will sell contaminated sites for negative money (i.e., pay money for someone to get them off their hands). So yes, the owners will be quite happy to give them to the government for free.
The concern is actually quite the opposite. It is possible that the Obama admin may use this program as a hidden subsidy. That is they may let owners of contaminated land off the hook for the clean-up costs and get the federal taxpayer on the hook for the clean-up costs. But in general it seems like a good idea as long as environmental groups watch the implementation carefully.
Please stop misusing 'ironic'. Thank you. PS: Please stop being an inflammatory partisan relic. Stop limiting yourself and get an education. Thanks again. Greg
First, this is Slashdot. Political positions are irrelevant, it's about the tech and the geek factor. Second, the slashcode ratings system doesn't delete, but allows for comments to be moderated. Most readers choose not to view comments below a certain threshold, but the comments are still there. Thus I suspect you are merely concern-trolling without actually bothering to understand how this comment system works.
Is that another word for sick building syndrome?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Total amount of energy is quoted assuming no losses in efficiency, power factor, transmission and of of course extra energy costs to make building on such environmentally friendly.
It is a good idea however assuming the tax payer does not pick up the tab for the last part.
why was that no good?
PS as the AC poster below you says, brownfield is about development on previously used land, hence the brownfield site is redundant: if they decide to go with the development, THEN it is a brownfield site. If they decide not to, then it isn't. But it's still waste ground right up until building is usefully done.
PV doesn't produce AC.
Voltages already vary around the nominal voltage anyway.
Are you just making things up because they sound like problems?
Someone needs to mod you funny. Every toured a power plant site? Not the PR version of the tour, a real tour where you get a friend of a friend to take you around. They're not exactly the greenest industry in the world -- but they're necessary.
Those sites aren't dead, you know! They are the breeding grounds for all kinds of different mutations, including the six-legged common redneckus monstrosius and the beautiful giant caterfly.
How can you just sit there and plan building power plants on the homes of those poor mutants?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Did you just read the summary, and think "hey - that's good news!". I just did. Then doubt began to set in. What it is actually saying is that industry crapped on so much land, that if we built windmills on it we could power the whole of the US. It does not say that they could afford the windmills, or were going to build them. No power, no windmills, just a huge amount of crapped-on land and some hope. At least, the healing may have started.
There are two dirty secrets that the environmental movement does not like to talk about or engage in because either it is not politically correct among the politically correct or they do not gain much in the way of donations and support for it.
1. Population control. God for bid we would encourage people to have less Children as a way to help the environment.
2. Cleaning up a place that is already spoiled (not talking about picking up trash in the national park). Yes, there is some of this that goes on, but for the most part toxic dumps do not sell. Saving a 1,000 year old tree gets donations, but trying to cleanup a toxic site is just not sexy. It is expensive and time consuming, sometimes requiring generations and millions of dollars.
Living in Chile
Hey he was hailed as Jesus Christ and given a Nobel Peace prize after having done exactly nothing, so why not.
I remember putting forward a thesis in an old GIS class that was a bit too grand for the time I was able to spend flwshing out the particulars, but it was essentially to start creating a map layer for the North America (yes Canada and Mexico too, cuz pollution travels no?) that we could then query for whole categories of pollutants and land use restrictions. One purpose was to make the data saleable to insurance industry for rate adjustments (yes they screw people over for where they live, but they pay good money for the data too), and have publicly available data to show what kinds of pollution was airborne vs ground-situated...accounting for such things as subsurface hydrogeology etc, etc...lots of fun to be had!
But seriously, these days, with PlaceBase being bought up by Apple, wouldn't it be nice to have a single large repository of data that federal/state/provincial/Municipal agencies could use to scope out where the next location would be for that great Green project that keeps running into NIMBY restraints?
I find that that data is well guarded when it makes no sense to do anything but open it up, let the public know what's in the ground and in the air...and to move on to either fixing it up or using the areas for other projects.
Twould be nice.
Obama is doing good, he is coming up with ways to save money and is showing he has more brains then the last 3 presidents put together....keep it up Mr.President!
Conventional energy is tax payer funded as well-to make it more "economically feasible" for private energy companies, if you look at the whole stack. Cherry picking just some of the costs results in skewed figures that just make it seem to be cheaper. Thousands of miles of seized land for transmission towers and natgas pipelines, with no recompense for the private party land owners that these lines and pipelines cross, decades of uranium research run by the taxpayers or subsidized into academia and private companies, the government/taxpayers being the insurer of last resort for nuke plants (or they wouldn't exist commercially today), decades of using the US military @ *trillions* of dollars to protect oil fields all over the planet, etc., health costs associated with conventional energy sources, large hydro projects, coal, natgas amd oil sold off of public lands for cheap, then resold privately at much higher costs, a direct subsidy, yada yada.
There isn't a single form of energy production out there that isn't at least partially government/tax payer supported in some fashion if you follow the economic breadcrumbs around, and the total bill over the last century and change for "conventional" energy is *huge*. The amount thrown at more modern alternative ways is chump change in comparison. Make conventional centralized power production and distribution pay *all* their own way, including these superfund sites cleanup, and forcing the private oil companies to pay for all their own overseas security, so you see the price at the pump instead of half of it hidden in the tax bill,etc, etc,a big list, and stop hiding all the real costs with bookeeping shenanigans like that, and the alternatives-especially decentralized production of energy, become instantly quite the deal and "economically feasible" in a lot of cases.
We have one of the original Superfund sites in my town of Ashland, Massachusetts. The Nyanza dye factory dumped all sorts of waste products for decades before being shut down. Now there's a huge field where they've sealed in most of the waste, and the owner of the property is looking at putting in a solar farm on the cap with wind turbines along the perimeter. It seems like a perfect site for that sort of development, and there's not much else that can be done with the property.
Because I'm a malcontent, I've done some research on other toxic waste sites (before we found out about the CDA trail) and found that in the city where I live, Denver, there are almost a dozen EPA Superfund sites, so I have a training ride I call the Toxic Waste Ride that goes through five of them. Again, it's a great ride, out in the middle of nowhere. But the fun part is all the houses that have been built on/over several remediated Superfund sites: it's enjoyable, in a sick way, to tell people that they're living beside a radioactive waste dump, for instance. I do go on to explain why it's safe to live next to a carefully contained radioactive waste dump, but it's still funny.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
It's a cesspool of Dioxin.
It's the same answer as for why nuclear power in general hasn't taken off. It's not all that cost effective. I can't find the link now, but I read about a study that concluded that a new nuclear power plant would produce electricity at roughly twice the cost of conventional plants. Of course, solar and wind energy really need subsidies to be cost effective too, but given that a nuclear plant would be politically far more difficult to push through, I think the decision to do solar/wind/etc is pretty reasonable.
"More radioactive" != "better fuel source". There are plenty of elements "more radioactive" than uranium, but are unsuited as nuclear fuel because they have a poor neutron absorption coefficient, etc.
So much concentrated dumbassery in so few words. Let's start from the beginning - 1) there is no, zero, nada market for commercial space travel, and there's no indication that there will ever be. There is nothing you can obtain in space that is a) useful on earth (you know, where all the people live?), and b) can be obtained more cheaply in space.
2) We have a number of "commercial space satellites" (are there any ground-based satellites?) already - which has had no noticeable effect on demand for solar panels. And what possible mechanism could there be for stimulating such demand? I'm really having a hard time figuring out the connection here - while satellites do tend to use solar panels, there's only so many you can put up - they can't possibly affect the market much. And even in the vanishingly unlikely event that a lot of travel does end up going into interplanetary travel, those spacecraft would pretty much require nuclear power plants of some sort, as solar power gets scarce in the outer solar system.
This is another thing that people always forget to bring up - the giant expenditures, mostly defense, but also the other things in the parent post, required to make conventional energy available. Plus the huge externalities in the form of pollution, etc...
He was gifted that Nobel prize for looking like he was trying to do something. In the politics game, appearance is everything.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
...where you live. On this planet, Greenpeace, etc, are pretty vocal about the need for population control. And this:
The fact that "toxic waste dumps don't sell" is a "dirty secret of the environmental movement"? WTF? Again, on this planet, environmental groups spend their time trying to force businesses to clean up their own messes, not interfering in the sale of toxic waste dumps.
Well Obama did get Noblel's Peace Prize.
If he didn't have the idea himself, his academic and engaging style of leadership is at least putting other great people in the right positions to make a difference.
So I believe great things are in motion for the good, as long as people stand together and give their support.
Good idea. We should give him an environmental award just for coming up with it.
Won't this get in the way of mining the old dumps when we realize in the coming decades just how much trace elements we've thrown away?
"Well, we could go mine all the indium we've accidentally thrown away over the years, but we'd have to take the windmills offline."