The treaty signed by Presidents Obama and Medvedev might bring more business to companies like USEC, which will have recycled the equivelent of 20-thousand warheads by 2013.(Photo courtesy of The White House)
The START treaty signed last week means hundreds of nuclear warheads will be dismantled. Lester Graham reports, that nuclear material could end up as fuel for nuclear power plants in the U.S.
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The START treaty signed last week means hundreds of nuclear warheads will be dismantled. Lester Graham reports, that nuclear material could end up as fuel for nuclear power plants in the U.S.
There is a historic precedent for this. Not many people know, but half of the nuclear fuel used in U.S. power plants today comes from Soviet era nuclear warheads. In an agreement signed in 1994, the U.S. and Russia entered a program called Megatons to Megawatts. Russia dismantles warheads, processes highly enriched uranium down to low enriched uranium. An American company called USEC buys it, ships it to Kentucky and then sells it to power companies. Jeff Donald is a spokesman for USEC.
“By the time the program is finished in 2013, we will have recycled 500metric tons of high enriched uranium, which is the equivalent of 20-thousand warheads.”
The START treaty signed last week covers a lot fewer warheads, but USEC is prepared to continue the program if asked.
According to Gallup, Americans are less likely to say they favor environmental protection during down economic times.(Photo courtesy of Chascar CC-2.0)
New polling data show drilling for oil and mining for coal is more important to Americans than protecting the environment. Lester Graham reports:
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New polling data show drilling for oil and mining for coal is more important to Americans than protecting the environment. Lester Graham reports:
For the first time since Gallup started asking the question nine years ago, the pollsters found Americans put a higher priority on energy production than environmental protection. Frank Newport is the Editor in Chief for Gallup. He says 50-percent of those polled put energy production as a higher priority while 43-percent put environmental protection as a higher priority.
“In other words, I think some Americans are saying we don’t have the luxury at the moment of worrying about the environment in the bad economic times.”
Attitudes seem to be affected by the down economy, more than anything else. Even when gasoline was four-dollars a gallon, most of the people put the environment ahead of energy production.
Shell says that even though it's no longer pursing water rights on the Yampa River right now, it's in no way backing off its larger ambitions for oil shale. (Photo courtesy of the US DOE)
Extracting oil from oil shale takes a lot of water. Most of the oil shale in the U.S. is in areas where there’s not a lot of water. Conrad Wilson reports, one big oil company seems to be walking away from oil shale for that reason. But not everyone thinks that’s the case.
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Extracting oil from oil shale takes a lot of water. Most of the oil shale in the U.S. is in areas where there’s not a lot of water. Conrad Wilson reports, one big oil company seems to be walking away from oil shale for that reason. But not everyone thinks that’s the case.
In the Western US, some energy companies are betting big on oil shale. That’s a process of basically heating up a shale rock into a liquid that’s eventually refined into oil. But the global recession and the threat of climate change might be giving those companies second thoughts. Add to that a increasingly limited water supply, and oil shale looks like a risky investment.
The process of creating oil shale is energy intensive and uses a lot of water. That’s a problem in the arid West. As the population grows, the value of water is increasing.
Royal Dutch Shell has the most invested in developing an oil shale technology that works. So earlier this year when the company announced it was pulling away from water rights, it sent shock waves through the industry.
“I read that decision as Shell’s acknowledgment that oil shale is a long way off and that this was a really controversial filing and that in a sense it’s not worth it.”
That’s Claire Bastable of the Western Energy Project. It’s an environmental group that keeps on eye on energy issues in the West. Shell had been pursuing water rights on the Yampa River, in the Northwest portion Colorado.
“Shell’s decision was a big deal. We’re talking about 15 billion gallons of water. … It would have basically taken the Yampa River, which is one of the the last free flowing rivers in the West and diverted a huge proportion of it to Shell for potential oil shale development.”
Bastable says the 15 billion gallons Shell was seeking is about three times the amount the city of Boulder, Colorado uses in a year.
But, Shell knows a lot of oil can be extracted from the oil shale. It’s estimated that there are 800 billion barrels of usable oil in the shale – in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.
Dr. Jeremy Boak researches oil shale development at the Colorado School of Mines. He says Shell could be simply postponing extracting that oil. Boak believes oil shale has a future, but it’s still decades away.
“With all of the comments they’ve made about what the time scale for oil shale, Shell has been pretty comfortable that this is going to take time.”
Shell says that even though it’s no longer pursing water rights on the Yampa River right now, it’s in no way backing off its larger ambitions for oil shale.
The company wouldn’t provide someone to comment for this story, but in a statement the company said:
The “ultimate goal is to create a commercial oil shale recovery operation that is economically viable, environmentally responsible and socially sustainable.”
That statement adds timing depends on government regulation and the market. The company could be waiting to see what the government does about climate change and how that affects fossil fuel costs. Shell could also be waiting for oil prices go up before deciding whether oil shale worth the effort.
Eric Kuhn heads up water management for the Colorado River District. He monitors much of the state’s water West of the Continental Divide. Kuhn says there’s probably enough water for oil shale development right now, but it’s hard to say for how long.
“I don’t think they’re dropping the filing changes anything. I think those companies are dedicated to and still have a plan to develop the oil shale resource if they can find a technology that is economically productive or if they can produce the oil shale at a competitive price, I think they will do it.”
Environmentalists in the region hope they won’t. They say Shell’s decision not to pursue the water right now should be a signal to others… oil shale just might not be worth the effort.
Stephen Schork says the rising prices are based more on investor momentum than anything else, and that there’s plenty of oil on the market.(Photo courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration)
Oil and gasoline prices are going up this summer. Lester Graham reports, it appears the higher prices are not caused by lower supplies.
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The Energy Information Administration’s new short-term energy outlook says gasoline prices will average about $2.92 this summer– hitting $3.00 or more in some regions. That’s about 50-cents a gallon higher than last summer.
The outlook also predicts oil prices to average $82 a barrel this summer. But, oil already hit $86 a barrel this week.
Stephen Schork with The Schork Report says… the government projections were put together about a week ago… and didn’t really anticipate the investors driving prices up this week.
“So this rally that we are seeing and this upward buy is based more on investor momentum than it is on underlying fundamentals. There’s plenty of oil on the market right now.”
The government says prices should remain relatively stable but rising… although is notes uncertainty over crude oil price forecasts remains high.
President Obama lifted the moratorium on offshore drilling last week, against the wishes of environmental groups. (Photo Courtesy of the US Minerals Management Service, Lee Tilton)
There’s been lots of speculation about why President Obama is allowing expanded gas and oil drilling offshore. Many environmentalists don’t like it. Lester Graham reports the move might be part of a larger strategy to get a climate bill passed in the Senate.
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There’s been lots of speculation about why President Obama is allowing expanded gas and oil drilling offshore. Many environmentalists don’t like it. Lester Graham reports the move might be part of a larger strategy to get a climate bill passed in the Senate.
President Obama never ruled out expanding drilling offshore, but it still caught a lot of people off-guard last week when he lifted the moratorium. John Prandato thinks he knows why he did. Prandato writes for the Partnership for a Secure America. In a recent article he argues it’s about the climate change and energy bill being pieced together by Senators John Kerry, Joesph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. Senator Graham has said a carbon cap-and-trade scheme such as the one in the House climate bill… is dead in the Senate. But maybe not… now…
“Graham has been a proponent of offshore drilling and he has said any climate change and energy bill would have to include expanded offshore drilling, which Obama has now made that concession. So, with any luck, this concession could revive cap-and-trade in the Senate. But, we’ll just have to see.”
Senator Graham says offshore drilling should be expanded further. The White House says the President is not “horse trading” to get a climate bill out of the Senate.
Automakers will have to get into the electric and hybrid vehicle business to meet the new requirements. (Photo courtesy of the Natural Renewable Energy Laboratory, Warren Gretz)
The Obama administration has set new rules requiring cars and trucks to get better gas mileage. Tracy Samilton reports that
will make vehicles both greener and more expensive.
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The Obama administration has set new rules requiring cars
and trucks to get better gas mileage. Tracy Samilton reports that
will make vehicles both greener and more expensive.
In ten years, automakers will have to reach an average 35 and a half
miles per gallon for their combined car and truck fleet. To get
there, most will get into the electric and hybrid vehicle business, if
they’re not there already. But that technology is expensive. So
they’ll also make regular internal combustion engines more efficient.
Even that isn’t cheap. So who will end up paying for it all? You
guessed it. You and me.
Michael Omotoso is an industry analyst with J.D. Power and Associates.
“If we say we want a cleaner environment, and reduce our
dependence on foreign oil, one way or the other, it’s going to cost us.
Everyone has an opinion about how much more we’ll pay for vehicles
because of the rules.”
The Obama administration and environmentalists say about a grand. Analysts like Omotoso say it could be more like five grand.
It takes 25% of all the fresh water Americans use just to produce food that ends up being wasted. (Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)
EN Brasserie hosts special dinners where customers pay good money to eat the kinds of things most Americans throw away. (Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)
Berg says Americans don’t necessarily understand how much food gets wasted before it even makes it to the table. (Photo courtesy of Samara Freemark)
Government researchers recently put out a study that says American’s throw away forty percent of their food. Samara Freemark reports:
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Americans waste a lot of food – by some estimates, almost half of the total amount in the food supply. Samara Freemark reports that the problem goes way beyond cleaning your plate.
A couple of months ago, government researchers put out a study that said Americans waste 40% of their food.
When I read that figure, it seemed incredibly high. So high that when I sat down with a food policy expert, I was actually a little embarrassed to ask her about it.
“I saw this number, 40%. Is that possible? It seems high to me.”
“I think the wasting of 40% of food, I actually think that could be a low number.”
That’s Jennifer Berg. She’s the director of the graduate program in food studies at New York University, and she spends a lot of time thinking about the food waste problem – in particular, about its huge environmental impacts.
It turns out, it takes 25% of all the fresh water Americans use just to produce food that eventually ends up in the garbage. It takes a lot of fuel to move that food around; packaging it takes plastic and paper, and throwing it away fills up landfills.
“There’s that old, you know ‘an orange peel…’ An orange peel takes years to break down. You know, a banana peel, half a loaf of bread. All that stuff goes into landfills. It doesn’t matter whether it’s organic matter or not. It doesn’t decompose. It doesn’t break down, when it’s all put together like that.”
Berg says Americans get plenty of messages about cleaning their plates.
But they don’t necessarily understand how much food gets wasted before it even makes it to the table.
“If you think about meat. Other countries, they will consume 85% of a cow. We will consume 30%. 20%. We only eat very specific cuts. We want our food totally filleted, we want it boned. We just eat very very specific food.”
I wanted to see what a waste-free meal looked like, so I took a trip to EN Japanese brasserie in Manhattan.
For the past couple of months, EN Brasserie has hosted special dinners where customers pay good money to eat the kinds of things most Americans throw away.
Reika Alexander owns the restaurant. She came up with the idea for the dinners when she moved to New York and saw how much food people in the city threw out.
“I realized that New Yorkers create so much garbage. When I saw that my heart was really aching. We have to do something about that.”
Alexander showed me some of the food she’d be serving that night. The first thing she handed me was a plate of fried eel backbones.
“We import live eels. So we get the whole thing. So we deep fry the bone part. It’s like a really flavorful rice cracker. Want to try. You just eat it? Like the bone? The whole bone? It’s good, right? It’s really good. The bones just fall apart in your mouth.”
There was a platter of rice topped with scraps of fish and vegetable trimmings. A salad made from salmon skin. And a cauldron of soup with whole fish heads bobbing in the broth.
“The eye, it’s so flavorful and delicious. The fish eyes have so much flavor. It makes a beautiful fish stock.”
At the dinner that night I asked college student Cordelia Blanchard what she was eating.
“I don’t know. I think the idea is that what’s left over the chefs just throw in a pot, and that’s what we have the pleasure of eating tonight. It makes me want to be more creative about how I combine what’s left in the kitchen sink.”
Which is the kind of attitude that restaurant owner Reika Alexander likes. Still, she says, she doesn’t expect the average American to sit down to a dinner of eel bones and fish eyes any time soon.
The CLEAR act was designed to avoid a carbon trading platform susceptible to market manipulation and price volatility. (Photo courtesy of FutureAtlas CC-2.0)
A new study looks at how big of a check you might get under a bi-partisan climate change bill. The CLEAR Act (Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal) is better known around Washington as the cap-and-dividend plan. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
A new study looks at how big of a check you might get under a bi-partisan climate change bill. The CLEAR Act (Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal) is better known around Washington as the cap-and-dividend plan. Lester Graham reports…
This plan would tax fossil fuels at the source, whether a tanker or foreign oil coming into port or coal coming out of a mine. 25-percent of that money would be used to invest in cleaner alternative energies. The other 75-percent… would be paid at a flat rate to each person in the nation in a monthly check to offset higher energy prices.
James Boyce at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst is one of the authors of the new report. He says for most people that monthly check will more than cover the higher costs of fossil fuels.
“So for the typical family, they’ll be paying more in higher prices on the one hand and they’ll be getting back a dividend check on the other hand.”
Boyce says since people in the highest income brackets tend to use a lot more energy, they’ll actually come up a little short on the deal.
This cap-and-dividend plan also has fewer loopholes to be exploited by special interests.
Waiting for new waste solutions, power plants across the country are still stacking spent fuel in concrete casks like this one at the Yucca Mountain site. (Photo courtesy of the US DOE)
Hazardous radioactive waste is building up at nuclear power plants across the country. For decades, the U-S government’s only plan was to stick that waste out of sight and out of mind … far below Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Recently, President Barack Obama scrapped that plan. Shawn Allee looks at where the President wants to go now:
Transcript
Hazardous radioactive waste is building up at nuclear power plants across the country.
For decades, the U-S government’s only plan was to stick that waste out of sight and out of mind … far below Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
Recently, President Barack Obama scrapped that plan.
Shawn Allee looks at where the President wants to go now.
The old nuclear waste plan was simple: take spent fuel leftover from nuclear reactors and bury it under Yucca Mountain.
That would have moved the problem away from nuclear power plants and people who live nearby.
The Obama Administration cut the program but only said, the program “has not proven effective.”
Energy Secretary Steven Chu tried explaining that to the U-S Senate.
“I don’t believe one can say, scientists are willing to say Yucca Mountain is the ideal site, given what we know today and given what we believe can be developed in the next 50 years.”
So … Obama’s administration is switching gears, and government scientists have to adjust.
“I worked at Yucca Mountain for ten years.”
Mark Peters is a deputy director at Argonne National Laboratory west of Chicago.
“I ran the testing program, so I got intimate involvement in Yucca Mountain. The license application has pieces of me all through it.”
Peters says he’s disappointed Yucca Mountain was killed.
But he says that’s a personal opinion – he’s on board with the new policy.
In fact … he’s helping it along.
Obama created a blue-ribbon commissison.
Commissioners will come up with new solutions for nuclear waste within two years.
Peters will tell them about new technology.
“There are advanced reactor concepts that could in fact do more effective burning of the fuel, so the spent fuel’s not so toxic when the fuel comes out.”
Peters says these “fast breeder reactors” might not just produce less nuclear waste.
They might use the old stuff that was supposed to head to Yucca.
“You extract the usable content, make a new fuel and burn it in a reactor, so you actually get to the point where you’re recycling the uranium and plutonium and other elements people’ve heard about.”
But Obama’s blue – ribbon nuclear waste commission could find problems with fast-breeder technology.
In the 1970s, we ran a commercial prototype, but it didn’t work very long.
Peters says new versions might be decades away.
There’s another problem, too.
“One important point is that there’s still waste from that process. So we have to go back to ultimately, some kind of geologic repository for part of the system.”
In other words … we’d have less waste, but we’d still have to bury it … somewhere.
History suggests there’s gonna be a squabble over any location.
After all, Yucca Mountain wasn’t the government’s first stab at an underground nuclear waste site.
“It had an embarassing failure in Lyons, Kansas between 1970 and 1972.”
That’s Sam Walker, a historian at the U-S Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
He’s talking about the old Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC.
The AEC pushed hard to bury nuclear waste in a salt mine, even though scientists in Kansas had doubts.
“And then it turned out that the salt mine they had planned to place the waste in was not technically suitable either. So, what the AEC did was to lose its battle on both political and technical grounds.”
Walker says for 15 years, the government scouted for another location to dump hazardous nuclear waste.
“There was lots of vocal public opposition to even investigating sites.”
Eventually, the debate got too hot.
Congress settled on Yucca Mountain, Nevada, even though scientists debated whether it’d work.
Congress kept Yucca Mountain going because it promised to keep nuclear waste out of everyone’s back yards … except for Nevada’s.
Now with Yucca Mountain out of the picture, it could take years for Obama’s administration to settle on a way to handle nuclear waste.
In the mean time, power plants across the country are stacking spent fuel in pools of water or in concrete casks.
For decades the federal government said this local storage is both safe and temporary.
It still says it’s safe, but now, no one’s sure what temporary really means.
Despite recent findings, political interests in Washington are working to extend corn ethanol subsidies set to expire at the end of this year.(Photo courtesy of AmandaLeighPanda CC-2.0)
For a long time, corn growers and the corn ethanol industry have claimed their fuel is low carbon. That is, it’s lower in the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. A second study is out which disputes that claim.Lester Graham reports:
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For a long time, corn growers and the corn ethanol industry have claimed their fuel is low carbon. That is, it’s lower in the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. Lester Graham reports… a second study is out which disputes that claim.
This study published in the journal BioScience also found corn is being used for ethanol instead of exported to other countries. Those other countries are plowing up grasslands and rainforests to plant corn for food. Less rainforest means less CO2 is being taken up by plants.
Thomas Hertel is a researcher at Purdue and lead author of the new study.
He finds ethanol from corn is not a low-carbon fuel when you include that indirect effect.
“It results in a figure which [is] not significantly lower than emissions associated with gasoline.”
But, political interests in Washington are working to extend corn ethanol subsidies which are set to expire at the end of this year.
The treaty signed by Presidents Obama and Medvedev might bring more business to companies like USEC, which will have recycled the equivelent of 20-thousand warheads by 2013.(Photo courtesy of The White House)
