Renewable Energy Plant Demolished on Long Island.

[NNadir]

In a bit of muted symbolism, Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi personally guided a giant-toothed shovel into the side of the Long Beach incinerator Tuesday, sending bricks and debris crashing to the ground.

Sitting at the controls of a hydraulic excavator for about 15 minutes, Suozzi tore away about one-quarter of one wall of the main incinerator building, which is being demolished to make way for a development along Reynolds Channel...

...The incinerator had served the city for almost half a decade before it was shut down in 1997 after a lengthy battle by environmentalists and area residents concerned about the ashes and contaminants it spewed.

"This is a page-turning event in the environmental history of Long Island," Daniel Hendrick, spokesman for the New York League of Conservation Voters, said in an interview before the demolition began.

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/nassau/ny-lilong0808,0,1019870.story

The plant operated 5 years.

Long Island is famous for building power plants that never operate. The scale of the Long Beach incinerator was about 100 MWe. There is no word on its capacity utilization for the five years it operated.

Long Island is almost wholly dependent on dangerous fossil fuels and generates millions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste which it dumps indiscrimately into the atmosphere.

Much of Long Islands densely populated South Shore is expected to be inundated as the seas rise.

[Javaman]

1. This is why I moved out of there 18 years ago. nt

[invader zim]

2. threadjacker

NNadir, I hope you don't mind me jacking your thread but I don't have enough posts to start one myself. I am wanting to share the energy fuel mix statement for Maryland. I recieved it with my utility bill. I find that renewables comes up painfully short.

Maryland Energy Source Fuel Mix
Jan. 01 2006 to Dec 31 2006

Coal 54.0%
Gas 4.9%
Nuclear 33.5%
Oil 0.3%
PJM sys mix (power bought on the Mid-Alantic grid) 3.5%

Renewable Energy
Captured Methane Gas 0.8%
Geothermal 0.0%
Hydroelectric 2.0%
Solar 0.0%
Solid waste 0.7%
Wind 0.0%
Wood or other Biomass 0.3%
unspecified renewables 0.0%
Total 100%
Renewable energy sources subtotal 3.8%

I guess I'm tring to say that despite the wishes of many on the board, renewable energy is not a significant source of power and will not be any time in the near future. We need more nuclear power to replace coal as our main source of baseload energy. This a difficult admission of a long time "solar will save us" advocate.

Thanks for your efforts and information NNadir. It has really opened my eyes.
Zim

[NNadir]

3. My pleasure.

No one is really against renewable energy - at least in theory - of course, and that is indicative of the problem.

In spite of years and years and years of cheering for it, it still produces doodly squat, unless you count the trash incinerators.

The bulk of "renewable" energy on Long Island has always involved trash, going back to the 1950s. I grew up there and I know whence I speak, but one cannot say that I trash renewable energy because I grew up associating it with trash. When one talks trash about renewable energy the point is not to wish for it to fail so much as noting that it causes a kind of narcoleptic wishful thinking that makes real action more difficult.

I suppose there is talk of filling the Long Island Sound not only with natural gas terminals - including the one proposed at Shoreham - but with windmills as well. Long Island is the original home of NIMBY however. I believe that if LILCO had not proposed (gasp) building a nuclear plant among the rich folk on Lloyd's Neck - who with their highly paid lawyers and public relations people were the inventors of anti-nuclear trash talk - three or four nuclear plants would be making life safer and cleaner on Long Island.

[Ready4Change]

4. What?

Do you mean the numerous, massive, publicly funded solar harvesting stations aren't producing any power?

You mean the expansive rows of wind turbines along the tops of ridgelines, and the hundreds of wind farms along the Eastern Shore aren't producing any power?

Oh, wait, that's right, NONE of those exist. They haven't received funding, nor political support, on anywhere NEAR the scale that coal, NG and nuclear power generating stations have received in the past.

The lack of renewable energy power in this state, and so many others, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Comparing energy production numbers of different sources is pointless, if you don't also compare investments made towards those sources. I think you'll find the money spent on renewables over the last 20 years is a drop in the bucket compared to what was spent on building and maintaining coal, NG and nuclear sources.

[Kolesar]

5. The growth in generation in the last few decades was a lot of natural gas in the growth states

So much that Florida gets 40% of its electricity from natural gas powered generators. There has been a lot of coal generation built, but where I live its been the same nuclear and coal plants that we have had for three decades. Scant growth in Ohio.

[losthills]

6. That's because the voters have not demanded change.

And the energy companies have demanded more of the same, and greased their demands with "campaign" dollars....

[Kolesar]

7. Your are correct. The energy companies controlled the government and the media

to the point where conserving resources was ridiculed and shamed.

[NNadir]

8. The reason people build dangerous natural gas plants is that people couldn't care

less about dangerous fossil fuels.

Dangerous natural gas is represented as "clean" fuel.

It isn't, since it produces dangerous fossil fuel waste which is indiscriminately dumped into the atmosphere.

Another reason that people build dangerous natural gas plants is they all believed Amory Lovins' nonsensical 1976 report that renewable energy would save us.

Guess what?

It didn't.

The renewable fantasy has proved a failure and the price that was paid was more and more and more dangerous fossil fuels and more and more and more and more dangerous fossil fuel waste.

Even though it is 31 years later, you can still find people repeating exactly the same lines today.

This is mostly because people can't think.

In fact, Amory Lovins' religious faith has made it certain that it is too late to do much. It is another demonstration of how faith kills while reason is ignored.

Ohio is a dangerous fossil fuel waste land, generating more than 87% of its electricity from dangerous coal and dumping the dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere. Poisonous heavy metals from Ohio dangerous fossil fuel plants land on New Jersey and waft out into the ocean where they show up in fish.

Apparently there are all sorts of the Lovins type cult running around in Ohio driving dangerous fossil fuel propelled vehicles to Lovins faith revival meetings, but actually non hydro renewable energy produced 64% of the non-hydro renewables in 2005 than was produced produced in Ohio in 1990. (Probably they shut some garbage incinerators.) "Renewable production" fell more than 223,000 Megawatt-hours.

Ohio has failed to conserve as well. Electrical energy consumption in the state in 2005 was 122% of what it was in 1990. If there are people living off grid (and one hears endlessly about such people) they haven't made a difference in Ohio. Coal rose to 118% of what it was in 1990. Natural gas use rose, but still remains trivial in Ohio, although no where near as trivial as wind, solar blah, blah, blah.

Nuclear energy, which represents vast bulk of climate change free energy (94% of it with 3% coming from hydro) in Ohio, is producing 138% of what it produced in 1990, but represents only 9.4% of Ohio's electricity. There are people in Ohio who are trying to shut nuclear power in Ohio, apparently because they couldn't care less about fossil fuels.

Among the three dangerous fossil fuels, Ohio has chosen the most dangerous of all. There is no plan to phase out dangerous fossil fuels or the dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste in Ohio. In fact the only way to phase out dangerous fossil fuels - the only such plan that exists is in Ontario - involves being able to spell the word N-U-C-L-E-A-R. The phase out of dangerous fossil fuels has nothing to do with reading verses from the Book of Amory any more than it did in 1976.

The rather disgusting electrical energy practices of Ohio can be read directly here:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/sept05oh.xls

[Kolesar]

9. Are you saying that the electrical generation industry gets their direction from Amory Lovins?

It is the generation industry who determines what generation capacity will be built. They, with their useful tool, Governor George Voinovich, who ran the Ohio government from 1990-1998 and Bob Taft who ended his term in January.

[NNadir]

10. Amory Lovins never met a natural gas plant he didn't like..

The famous pixilated anti-nuke used to run around quoting Jeffry Skilling, yes, that Jeffry Skilling, the Enron Jeffry Skilling, the one who's serving 24 years in Waseca Minnesota for fraud.

Skilling returned the favor.

http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/01/01-06skilling-speech.html

Reportedly Lovins erased all references to Skilling and Enron from his resume. I have heard, so as to believe it, that Lovins once had a direct quotation from Skilling "Nuclear Power is dead" from the convicted felon on his web page.

The guy is a consultant for Walmart for Chrissake's, yes that Walmart, the one that exists to serve the idiotic car culture, the car culture that allows people to drive around showing off their solar cells at solar fairs.

If Amory Lovins ever published an article about coal comparable to his 1980 drivel about the impending death of the nuclear industry (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1980 1137-1171) go ahead and produce it.

The difference between Lovins and Skilling is that Skilling is being punished for his fraud and Lovins is still asking for money for hydrogen hypercars.

Now, let's get to the bottom of who is responsible for the failure of Ohio to do a damn thing about phasing out dangerous fossil fuels.

If you think that public attitudes do not play a role in industrial decisions, well, that's to be expected. It's not like the anti-nuclear religion believes in taking responsibility.

If I were a utility executive contemplating the realities of fossil fuels in Ohio, I probably would have just said, "Let them breathe coal..."

There is one and only one way to phase out coal. It's the way France used. If Ohio had tried to exercise the only path, every solar cell toting anti-nuke in the state would have been there fighting that path, talking big about their useless solar cells.

I've been looking into this matter recently, the history of the anti-nuke movement and what I have discovered is that the anti-nuke industry got what it wanted. It successfully isolated nuclear energy from its alternatives. On one hand, this served to make the nuclear industry even better than it was, as damn near to perfect as any exajoule scale form of energy can be, but on the other hand, this diddling selective attention, put brakes on the expansion of the highly successful industry, causing great damage to all humanity.

If you want to know what the dangerous antinuke industry wanted, buy a carbon dioxide analyzer and check out what's happened with dangerous fossil fuels in the last 31 years since Amory Lovins began offering his venal, verbal puke for wide distribution.

When we scratch the surface of prominent anti-nukes, people like Gerhard Schroeder and Amory Lovins, we find funding by the dangerous fossil fuel industry. It's not like these people are even trying to hide where their true interests lie.

[Kolesar]

28. That's an interesting account of Lovins' coupling with Jeff Skilling of Enron

I really had no idea. I had not heard of Lovins until a few years ago. But do you really think that this had anything to do with power plant sitings in Ohio? We have had scant increases in capacity. I have been following the stories in the media. I recall that one coal fired plant was put into our rate base recently. That was the last rate increase since Beaver Valley and Perry nuclear plants were brought online in 1987.

BTW, our electricity went from 8 cents to 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour when Perry and Beaver Valley came online.

[NNadir]

11. Here's your pal citing his pal.

I found a reference:

http://units.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2001/october/a3oct01.cfm

Why Nuclear Power’s Failure in the Marketplace Is Irreversible

(Fortunately for Nonproliferation and Climate Protection)


amory b. lovins


AP: Would the introduction of more nuclear power plants -- something the vice president has said the country needs to meet future electricity demand -- weaken Enron's natural gas trading business?


SKILLING (former CEO of Enron): I will personally eat every new nuclear power plant built in this country for the next 100 years. I don't think we are going to see any new plants built. We've just got a fundamental problem in that nuclear plants make a lot of waste and there is no solution to that problem right now. So they can talk all they want about nuclear power. I don't believe it.


Nuclear power has suffered the greatest collapse of any enterprise in the industrial history of the world. The twentieth century ended with installed nuclear capacity less than 10%, and an ordering rate less than 1%, of the lowest IAEA forecasts made a quarter-century ago. No vendor has made money by selling reactors, though some have made it up on repairs. Worldwide, nuclear power is stuck at 11% of total generating capacity, providing 6.3% of 1998 primary energy output, vs. 8.8% for renewables without, or about 20.3% with, traditional biofuels. In the U.S., nuclear investments exceeding a trillion dollars are delivering little more energy than biofuels; nuclear power’s primary energy output and installed capacity are roughly the same as renewables’, though its electric output is about four-fifths higher due to nuclear plants’ recently improved capacity factors.

http://units.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2001/october/a3oct01.cfm

Personally, I'd love to see both frauds try to eat the next nuclear power plant built. They both have huge fat mouthes that have worked to cause great harm to innocent people. Although nuclear power plants are small compared to mountains of coal, they'd probably be large enough to stuff those pernicious mouthes.

On the other hand it might be more fun to both frauds eat a hundred million tons of the coal ash they have caused to be released every fucking year since they set humanity on the path to destruction.

[losthills]

12. more false choices....

[wordpix]

13. we have already been through this "nukes will save us" era in the '70's

We had the 3-Mile Island near meltdown, Chernobyl and more. We presently have the problem of disposing of nuclear waste, which no one wants. Read about Yucca Mt. in Nevada. Do you want all those fuel rods rolling beside you on the highway?

Nuclear plants are a terror target and it will cost millions each year to provide security for each plant.

You are dreaming if you think nukes are the answer. You need to read up---Union of Concerned Scientists, Helen Caldicott, Chernobyl disaster and so on. Get educated!

[phantom power]

14. We've been thru the "renewables will save us" era in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s....

[NickB79]

15. LOL

"Helen Caldicott" and "educated" in the same paragraph.

[Nihil]

18. Now now ...

... the poster *must* be serious as they mentioned "Chernobyl" twice
as well as "terror".

Everyone knows how many people have been killed by terrorist attacks
involving the nuclear power industry so there's no hype necessary ...

:shrug:

[Kolesar]

16. Fuel rods would be transported by train and I don't think the risk is bad

A rail car that weighs fifty tons or more can be made pretty darn crash proof. The real problem is...where does the waste train stop and unload? Nevadans don't want it. The next likely plan is to put it in Ohio for a long period of time until a fuel rod reprocessing plant is designed, funded, and constructed. What I don't like about that plan is that they would have to vent off radioactive gas into the local air on occasion. So, here we are with the fuel rods waiting in the extra tanks that they built at each generating plant. Maybe the grandkids will figure out what to do. What time is the game on tonight?

[wordpix]

21. no, there are never any derailments (sarcasm)

[Dead_Parrot]

29. Yeah, 'cause a derailment would split those 25-ton containers like an egg

And they've never been tested by, say, ploughing a train straight into them.



:eyes:

[NNadir]

17. Um nukes did save us.

They produced more than 168 exajoules of energy between 1980 and 2005. This is the equivalent of removing all of the pollution associated with US energy for about 2 years, releasing not an gram of carbon dioxide.

Since 1980, zero people in this country have died from nuclear materials or operations. Most people couldn't care less that coal kills tens of thousands per year in <em>normal</em> operations.

The Union of Concerned "Scientists" and Helen Caldicott are just ignoramuses in general.

I suspect that it is you and not I who is educated on Chernobyl. You seem to know almost zero about nuclear issues.

[losthills]

19. Hallelujah!!

"The Union of Concerned "Scientists" and Helen Caldicott are just ignoramuses in general."

If you think statements like that give weight to your pro-industry propaganda, you need to step away from the fuel rods and take a breath of fresh air.

But they must be attacked and ridiculed by the nuclear messiahs because they, like Geenpeace, NRDC, the Sierra Club and every other environmental organization and non-industry scientist point out the holes in your increasingly strident arguments.

The statements that "zero people in this country have died from nuclear materials or operations." and nuclear operations have released "not an gram of carbon dioxide" are simply false.

Cancer rates downwind of nuclear reactors and uranium mines have been posted in this group before. The carbon footprint from mining and enriching uranium and from building and decommissioning nuclear plants is substantial. The envirionmental costs and human health costs of uranium mining are terrible and would become much worse as we went after the lower grade ore.

And of course, the environmental and health costs of dealing with the waste have been pointed out over and over, but we continue to get these attacks and propagandistic statements in return.

Hallefrickin'lujah....

[hunter]

24. Numbers please?

I remember very well all the crap numbers from Rancho Seco, especially all the horrors attributed to radiation leaks that were very clearly the result of agricultural toxins. U.S. agricultural practices are deadly, and kill and maim far more people than the very worst of our nuclear power plants.

Mind you, Rancho Seco was an exceptionally cranky machine, an epitome of crap 'sixties-'seventies U.S. God-Bless-America engineering of the same sort that takes bridges down in Minnesota, but it got blamed for a lot of "environmental and human health costs" it did not deserve.

[NNadir]

27. The reminds me of the great John Lennon line...

"If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow."

Neither David Lochbaum, the UCS "concerned scientist" - a disgruntled former nuclear engineer who last had a real job 17 years ago - nor Helen Caldicott, who makes a great living preaching to the converted about a subject about which she knows zero, are qualified to make statements on nuclear energy. Instead they are part of the vast circle jerk of self-referential anti-nukes.

I am not "racheting up" my concern. I have consistently been saying what I am saying now for many years now. The choice between used nuclear fuel rods and dangerous fossil fuel waste is very, very, very, very, very clear to anyone who steps out of the self-referential circle jerk.

I started discussing this issue hundreds of billions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste ago:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls

The kind of rhetoric you produce is neither original nor interesting. The natural gas shill Amory Lovins was producing this sort of rhetoric in 1980, 500 billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste ago.

[wordpix]

20. what BushCo nuke corp are YOU working for, NNadir? Must be a big one...

[phantom power]

23. What PV corporation are you working for? Evergreen? Siemens?

Or are you a wind industry shill? Maybe you're a viral marketer for GE?

Hey, I can play this idiotic game too.

[NNadir]

26. What fossil fuel company are you working for?

It must be very big, 28 billion tons per year big.

One of the conceits of the dangerous fossil fuel glossing industry is that it has pure intentions.

Nonsense. The prominent anti-nukes, including the former Chancellor of Germany are in the big time pay of natural gas companies, and probably coal companies as well.

You want a true picture of an anti-nuke? Take a gander at the man who needlessly set out to destroy the nearly harmless German nuclear industry:

http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2005/Gerhard-Schroeder-Gazprom13dec2005.htm

Note that this link comes from an anti-nuke site. At least some anti-nukes pay lip service to being embarrassed. Most of course, couldn't care less about moral consistency.

Come back and tell me about your (and Schroeder's) ethical purity when you start figuring out what that means exactly.

It would be really, really, really, really interesting if you could produce one person, just one, (one), 1 person who was killed by nuclear operations in the Germany in the ten, fifteen or twenty years.

And of course, great ethicist that you are, you will be unable to produce any comment whatsoever on this happy report:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4283295.stm

In general the anti-nuke industry couldn't care less about how many people die from dangerous fossil fuel waste, not at least while their coming up with tortured evocations of what could happen as a consequence of the largest, safest and most reliable source of greenhouse gas free energy there is, nuclear energy.

[wordpix]

22. dream on

[4bh0r53n]

25. wordpix

if you keep on arguing like you currently are (calling anyone a shill if they are pro-nuclear), you will get a similar response. Nobody has to be paid to be pro-nuke. Keep you arguments to the subject, not the poster.