Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe to Comments:

5 Comments

  1. How on earth are they getting away with calling the burning of refuse (or in other words Incineration the of Municipal Waste) renewable?

    1. @Z Phillips

      “Renewable” is a carefully constructed brand name designed to market products to consumers in a way that sounds warm and fuzzy enough for them to agree to pay higher prices in both their electricity bills and in their taxes. The sources are often ugly when you get close enough to see through the green packaging.

      In a video clip captured in the summer of 2010, Michael Ekhart, then head of the American Council on Renewable Energy, clearly explained to a conference audience how the “renewable” brand has been constructed to purposely exclude nuclear energy.

      MSW (municipal solid waste), on the other hand, has had the political pull required to move it under the political umbrella of the renewable brand marketing campaign – at times.

      1. The video clip captured in the summer of 2010, was an eye opener to say the least but at least they claim to want a world of energy abundance.

        What I think we need to do is get press attention to the fact that the burning of refuse is considered “environmentally friendly” by this implication and press for the term Renewable to be replace with a clear to the point term like non combustives and remind people about the existence of air pollution.

        Because in my opinion the environmental movement at least in the UK has really overlooked air pollution – take their involvement in changing the way the cost of vehicles licenses are calculated to being based on the vehicles (alleged) Co2 emissions (grams per KM) which resulted in a surge in the use of diesel vehicles (and rise in NOx levels in practically every urban area in the UK) due to petrol model of the same car in some case having a 10x greater yearly cost and we then have the use of wood burners in smoke control areas.

  2. …the work force (reduction) at Vermont Yankee, from an operating staff of 600 people with periodic influxes for refueling outages to an eventual security staff of about 50 people after all of the fuel that is currently in the used fuel pool has been transferred to dry casks and moved to the holding pads.

    92% reduction? Pffft! You don’t think those jobs are actually going away, do you? Think of all the starving gas riggers in the Marcellus! We don’t want them to go hungry, do we?

    …well okay. Some of us might. But seriously, job$! Job$!! JOB$!!! are used as excuse for everything from Keystone XL to the wind or solar farm du jour. And jobs are important — ask anyone without one. (Or any politician with one…) And the jobs associated with any particular energy technology or source go well beyond the plant operators or gas drillers to include construction and infrastructure and uranium mining and fuel fabrication and pipeline construction and maintenance and operation and transmission lines and storage and so on. My question is this: is it possible, even in principle, to break out the jobs per megawatt hour generated for different technologies?

    Or perhaps more meaningful, its inverse: MWh per mythical man-month. Something to give a clue as to the labor intensity of wind with and storage say, versus hydro or any of the dispatchable thermal generators.

    Wind and solar are touted as providing good, high paying jobs. Which they do and life is good. So does nuclear. What are the relative paybacks in terms of clean energy per job? I don’t think its an easy question. Throw in university researchers and national lab rats and you’re probably talking at least a couple MBA thesis, “Masters of Corporate Environmental Sustainability Management”, or some such.

Recent Comments from our Readers

  1. Avatar
  2. Avatar
  3. Avatar
  4. Avatar
  5. Avatar

Similar Posts