Slashdot Mirror
White House Reportedly Exploring Wartime Rule To Help Coal, Nuclear (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to reports from Bloomberg and E&E News, the Trump Administration has been exploring another way to help coal and nuclear generators: the Defense Production Act of 1950. The Act was passed under President Truman. Motivated by the Korean War, it allows the president broad authority to boost U.S. industries that are considered a priority for national security. On Thursday, E&E News cited sources that said "an interagency process is underway" at the White House to examine possible application of the act to the energy industry. The goal would be to give some form of preference to coal and nuclear plants that are struggling to compete with cheap natural gas.
If the DOE decides not to invoke Section 202(c), the president may turn to the Defense Production Act. According to a 2014 summary report (PDF) from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the act would allow the president to "demand priority for defense-related products," "provide incentives to develop, modernize, and expand defense productive capacity," and establish "a voluntary reserve of trained private sector executives available for emergency federal employment," among other powers. (Some even more permissive applications of the Act were terminated in 1957.) Using the Act to protect coal and nuclear facilities would almost certainly be more controversial, as the link between national defense and keeping uneconomic coal generators running is not well-established. The Administration could apply the Act to "provide or guarantee loans to industry" for material-specific deliveries and production. "The president may also authorize the purchase of 'industrial items or technologies for installation in government or private industrial facilities,'" reports Ars.
If the DOE decides not to invoke Section 202(c), the president may turn to the Defense Production Act. According to a 2014 summary report (PDF) from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the act would allow the president to "demand priority for defense-related products," "provide incentives to develop, modernize, and expand defense productive capacity," and establish "a voluntary reserve of trained private sector executives available for emergency federal employment," among other powers. (Some even more permissive applications of the Act were terminated in 1957.) Using the Act to protect coal and nuclear facilities would almost certainly be more controversial, as the link between national defense and keeping uneconomic coal generators running is not well-established. The Administration could apply the Act to "provide or guarantee loans to industry" for material-specific deliveries and production. "The president may also authorize the purchase of 'industrial items or technologies for installation in government or private industrial facilities,'" reports Ars.
Seems that the fabled fossil fuel industries must be carefully fed taxpayer dollars just to stay afloat.
So who's the leech here, oil barons?
Solar? Wind? Geothermal? Biomass?
Nope, it's YOU fools.
Coal is not clean at all. It causes lots of air pollution, especially in the form of carbon. The carbon dioxide is causing global temperatures to rapidly warm and is threatening mass extinctions. Yet you right wing nutjobs are obsessed with coal. Your obsession with coal is helping to destroy the Earth, along with your obsession with huge SUVs that waste gasoline. Why do you right wing nutjobs hate the Earth?
Even if you cut renewables out, Natural Gas is cheaper to extract, requires fewer workers, and is safer both to burn and acquire. This isn't propping up fossil fuels, this is preferring an industry whose workforce doesn't want to adapt or change.
I don't read AC
Seriously, we have been at war in the Middle East for decades for one reason: energy. It's why we had Gulf War I, Gulf War II, and so many others. Fun fact, did you know the reason we refuse to withdraw from Syria despite the fact that ISIS has been defeated is energy? Yup. A proposed pipeline to supply from Qatar to Europe would weaken Russian influence. That's why we can't stop making war there. So let's not trot out the fiction that energy has nothing to do with national security, because it absolutely does.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
He's a conman and he's doing what he knows.
Is more R&D into advanced GenIV designs like MSR, VHTR, or small modular reactors, and a less punishing regulatory review process. We are abdicating our leadership to China, India, and Europe.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
I'm impressed!
And I am confident that the voters will correct this problem in November by replacing all the incumbents with honest independents, right?
If you don't Sweep the House, then fuck you! You deserve Trump, and all the other corruption you vote for.
Republicans are all about subsidizing broken, obsolete or flawed ideas. It's their entire platform, while pretending to be against big deficit spending (for a few years)
The Koch family empire was built on coal.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
They solve the spin up time problem by just running the plants all the time whether power is needed or not, then selling the power they don't need to their neighbors over the grid. That is nonsense. We have no strange spin up times where coal can not handle it.
Coal plants have lots of issues with starting up quickly. 23% of all coal plant cold start-up events fail (produce no electricity). These failed start-ups persist for a median of 4 hours before being retried, though the average is 8 hours (i.e. a substantial number persist much longer). Of the start-ups that succeed the average start-up time from the beginning of combustion to producing power is about 8 hours.
Coal plants are strictly base load plants, unable to deal with load fluctuation on a scale significantly shorter than a day.
OTOH, natural gas peaking plants start-up in a matter of minutes.
And: coal is down ot 40% of our power mix.
And: we still produce 10%-12% of oir power by nuclear.
Eh? No. In 2017 it coal power production was 30%, nuclear was 20%.
Get a damn clue and stop spreading FUD.
Maybe you should start looking up actual data and providing citations.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I don't think the coal industry has enough money to make big contributions to Republicans. Rather, I think the Republicans are playing on the notion that coal will save the states where there are enough fools in those states to think coal could do this.
As for the Republicans blaming Obama for a "war on coal", in some sense it doesn't matter what Obama did, they'd have picked on something else. They needed an "issue" and the "war on coal" guaranteed them Republican voters. Those states never bought into the whole Environment Degradation issue that is central to Democrats. The voters in those states more or less have a Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to coal. Coal can foul their air and their water, but they understand coal, they do not understand Env. Deg. E. D. doesn't provide jobs. The whole fact that coal doesn't provide many jobs and what jobs it does are being automated away is lost on the voters in those states.
Nothing the White House can do on coal will save it, natural gas will eat the part of the lunch it hasn't already eaten. I'm unsure about nuclear. If the W.H. were serious about nuclear, they'd solve the waste issue first...but they aren't serious, and solving it would be unglamorous, take a lot of time, require far reaching policy decisions...in short, just what the Republicans are no good at.
So you're arguing socialized medicine and Public services/state-subsidized education are a bad thing? Wow.
Where I live we call it civilization.
Nah he's fine with being someone else's pawn. Doesn't care that tax cuts to the rich limit his ability to succeed while preserving their elite position for no other reason than they already occupy that position. Doesn't care that the debt that is drawn as a result of the tax cuts is then bought by wealthy foreign nationals and the very same people who got the tax cut allowing them to not only invest more but then get further benefits in long term stable bond interest rates - essentially his tax pays them interest. He's fine with that.
Meanwhile China is getting rich from this very system and investing the profits in huge state funded developments which mean that their internal transport economy is massively improved, their ability to move their military internally is much more efficient and their population has 65 million empty homes to grow into.
One empire is heading towards a new golden age. The other is crumbling. But you know, pets not actually stop to think about why it's crumbling.
There is proof in economic theory that stimulating the bottom end of the economy actually generates the most growth. Not this trickle down deflationary bullshit.
But then again who would expect programmers who are good at maths to actually understand the macroeconomic implications of this usury. No one cares that a peasant in the 1400s had access and right through commons to more natural resources than the average working class citizen today. That resources that belonged to you and everyone were sold without your implicit permission in a way that you saw no benefit to allow generations of certain privileged families to feast on the cream of your crop.
Unless you're a billionaire you're a nieve moron if you don't understand that you would be better off under some kind of socialism. It's not like democratic capitalist countries have a proven track record of limiting the human rights abuses so often used to juxtapose capitalism and communism. When the leaders of the free world have directly authorised the most aggressive behaviour both militarily and financially. It is under these regimes that water is no longer your human right.
These very fossil fuel industries can't wait for their byproduct of foul air to allow a market to sell your canned air. You should be thankful you're alive peasant. It is by the grace of the glorious elite that you are even allowed to live. It is by their invention and means of production that you even survive. They own it. Not you. Even if it should have been yours, and everyone else's all along.
So if they can modernize the coal stations so that they don't emit carbon soot that would be a good thing. There are systems to scrub and collect all those gases and pollutants. Same with nuclear power. The old slashdot joke states that the nuclear industry wanted to decommission old plants and build new ones. The environmentalists wanted no more new plants and to decommission the old ones. So they compromised. Keep the old plants running and don't build any new plants.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads