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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."
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
Some of these places could never be truly cleaned up. You'd essentially have to ship the top 500 feet of soil and rock of the entire areas to China or India, but even that's just moving the problem away from the USA.
We're talking billions of tons of contaminated soil, water, radioactive waste, old landfills. What do you propose is done with it? Where is it going to go when they "clean it up"? Personally, I love this idea. Renewable energy, and using otherwise unusable resources? I don't see what's not to like.
Because cleaning them is next to impossible or just too costly. We humans can fuck things up really well, so well that we can't always fix them afterwards.
Seems a better idea than cleaning them to whatever the maximum contamination level is by todays standards and then building houses on top. Ten years later the standards have been changed due to new research/etc and you have an entire suburb at above safe limit contamination.
One big drawback of lots of these alternative energy methods is space - you can build a nuke plant or a coal plant to provide the same amount of energy with a much smaller amount of space. Using land that is otherwise unusable seems a good idea.
And of course I'm sure the people/companies who own that worthless (in some cases negative worth since the cleanup costs dwarf the value) making lots of campaign contributions also helped.
They're putting the windmills in post-cleanup, big boy. Sites have to be cleaned up, but people don't necessarily want to build on them. This is using the sites after they've been cleaned.
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
I live in a brownfield. Please do not deport me. Thank you for your call sir and have a nice day.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
All in all it may be a good idea or may not. I hope it turns out to be economically beneficial for all.
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?
Some of these places could never be truly cleaned up. You'd essentially have to ship the top 500 feet of soil and rock of the entire areas to China or India, but even that's just moving the problem away from the USA.
Why clean them up either? At least this policy abandons the idea that every bit of land should be returned to some sort of pristine state.
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.
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
In about 500 years when they run out, sure, we will all be dead. But you fail to see that technology is always improving. While the parent is correct in saying that in 2009 renewable energy is not economically feasible, but by mixing together independently developed technology from other disciplines, in 30 more years it may be very feasible, all without wasting taxpayer money in a black hole of waste. The government has already put in as much funds as it needs because the seeds have already been planted. Commercial space travel and commercial space satellites will increase the demand for more efficient solar panels, this will lead to more privatized and focused research and in time lower cost and higher yield. Just look at computers, even though governments planted the seeds for development, it was the private sector that made them affordable, reliable and useful.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Srsly? Governments don't always have to calculate if something is economical, at least not in a narrow sense, because they are more or less the entity set up to deal with situations where private economic calculation is insufficient; but there is absolutely nothing stopping them from using exactly the same tools to evaluate a potential project's economic prospects that a private sector actor would.
One cannot know for certain that a given plan is economic until it is tried, sometimes things go better than forecast, sometimes worse; but that isn't a uniquely public sector problem.
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.
It won't even make it to China. They're going to drop it in the ocean a few miles off the coast and say they took it to China.
Maybe they'll make a new island and turn it into a Disneyland to draw attention away from the obvious.
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Uhhh - you're trying to pretend that Obama has money to clean up all those sites, after several administrations have passed the buck, and done nothing? Get real. BTW - a lot of those sites are being cleaned up naturally anyway. Bacteria, nematodes, wildlife, sunshine, rain and wind all work to decompose and recycle a lot of the waste that has gone into the ground. Putting up something like a windfarm will tend to isolate those areas until nature has finished cleaning up our mess.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
If it's that bad, why not build a nuclear power plant there instead? It's not like NIMBY would be a factor anymore, would it?
Life is not for the lazy.
The workers will be exposed and take material home from the site, trapped in clothing for a loved one to wash.
Their shoes would also walk in material, exposing any children. The the 15-25 year exposure time adds up.
But its not mommy or daddy who started work at 35 yo.
Start counting from 0-3 years and its lump or blood time around 20-40 yo.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"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?!?
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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.
kenh, you obviously do not know what it would take to "clean up" some of these situations. I used to work for a company that did hazardous waste remediation for the EPA, and I do have some idea.
If effect, the Obama admistration is trying to take some things that are nearly, or in some cases absolutely, hopeless, and turn them to good.
If you want to look at how "cleanup" has progressed at superfund sites, you can. The information is available on the net. Be prepared for a very depressing day.
Number of deaths in the US from Commercial nuclear accidents: 0
Number of deaths from the bursting of a molasses storage tank in Boston: 21
Anything can blowup and kill your family.
By God! I have a solution! Buy them extra pairs of shoes.
(What I really mean here is that you can manage the clean up in such a way that the people doing the work clean themselves up before they leave the damn site, part of that is having them wear protective equipment)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There's a big difference between getting them to a "pristine state" and merely getting them to be non-carcinogenic though. I really wouldn't mind the latter.
Every industrial site factors this into the design of the site. By having showers and laundering work clothes on-site to contain contaminants on site.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Superfund site cleanup already typically includes protective clothing, i.e. bunny suits and respirators effective against organic solvents and heavy metals. You can buy the bunny suits (made of tyvek) for about $8 apiece, galoshes are about $30 per wearer and can be rewashed, respirators are $20 and last about three to six months. This is a totally solved problem, and you are ignorantly or maliciously spreading FUD. Either way, stop. You're only making an ignorant ass of yourself.
If we slide much further towards another depression, we might see some of these projects carried out as public works. It is in the interest of national defense to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've been in the environmental remediation field for over 20 years. I'm somewhat tired of hearing of talk about "new technologies" to clean up waste. Despite the marketing hype, there really isn't much "new" that can be done, based on the basic physics/chemistry/biology, although improvements can and have been made.
Basically, if you have organic contamination, you can either destroy it by oxidation or reduction, remove it and put it somewhere else (preferrably in a more concentrated/lower volume form) or isolate it so nobody can be exposed to it.
For inorganic contamination, it's pretty much the same options, except the "destroy" part is fairly limited since metals are elments (but you can do things like changing hexavalent chromium to less toxic trivalent chromium for instance).
That's it.
Now, of course, there have been improvements in the destruction technologies, better ways to oxidize organics than simply burning them, for example. Chemical oxidation has come a long way, but it's still just oxidation. Reduction has seen great strides in anaerobic bacterial growth promotion, and the one truly new approach over the 20 years - zero valent iron to reduce chlorinated ethenes. And thermal technologies have been getting better and better in the "remove the stuff from the ground" category.
But these are all just improvements to the basic categories that have already been identified. And the basic challenge remains that for any of these to work (other than isolation), you have to get whatever magic dust you have in contact with the contaminants or it does nothing - that is almost always the toughest part.
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of innovation going on and to be done to improve these technologies, and they are being used more and more, and successfully I might add, in site cleanups. But thinking in terms of waiting for "advances in technology would make it feasible to clean up said billions of tons of contamination" just isn't considering the basic science.
Some days I wish I were in the semiconductor business. There, it truly seems that advances in technology are almost magic. Not so in environmental remediation.
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.