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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."
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.
You fill it with nuclear waste first, obviously.
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
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
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.
If one used the spare power to transmute the nuclear waste into useful non-radioactive materials then it wouldn't be "waste" anymore. The concept that the U.S. is power limited is completely false. A recent PNAS paper showed that the U.S. could supply 14x its *entire* electricity production using only high value wind power sites. Use the extra electricity to transmute the nuclear waste and one of the entire arguments against nuclear power disappears [1]. Then it becomes a simple economic discussion as to whether its better to build remote wind farms and superconducting cables to make the power available at distant cities, or build nuclear reactors closer to the cities where one could take advantage of existing transmission infrastructure. If you want to give a gift to ones children start thinking in terms of "free" green energy.
1. Also worth noting is that either laser or tokamak fusion power might come into the mix over the next decade. But that doesn't minimize the advantages in U.S. jobs and infrastructure that would result from building up wind, tidal & solar generating capacity as well as superconducting transmission infrastructure. What is required is to break the coal, oil & gas monopoly mindset. If its taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere it is *not* sustainable. Not unless your definition of "sustainable" involves killing off a lot of species and a fair number of humans.
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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 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.
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.
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.
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.