Month: September 2012

Documents released this week show a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspector based at Palisades discovered a new leak during a routine inspection on September 20^th.  

Palisades is under more scrutiny this year after a series of problems earned it one of the worst safety ratings in the country. This is at least the third water leak (depending on exactly how you tally them) at the nuclear plant this year. You can find more details about the first leak from a large water tank above the control room here, and the second water leak from the actual reactor here.

Palisades sits right next to Lake Michigan near South Haven. It uses water from the lake to help cool equipment.

This new leak is from a valve on a pipe that funnels that Lake Michigan water back into the lake. The water is leaking from that valve into a secondary building at the plant. Right now the leak is about a cup and half an hour. The water is not radioactive.

“(The pipe) can still do what it was designed to do,” NRC spokeswoman Viktoria Mitlyng said. “Eventually this valve, it needs to be fixed, but it is not an immediate safety concern.”

But this is just the latest water leak; Palisades shut down twice this year to fix two other separate water leaks. So how many leaks is too many?

“We are asking ourselves that question but in a different way, which is; why is this happening? Is there a common thread that we need to look at?” Mitlyng said.

A Palisades spokesman says they’ve determined where the leak is coming from. He says the company may repair the “through-wall, pinhole leak,” replace the valve, or change the system of pipes to bypass the valve altogether. It’s unclear when that fix will happen.

Mitlyng says this is a good example of how regular NRC inspections do identify issues of concern.

View our timeline of problems at Palisades over the past two years.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has the authority to set aside land to make sure biodiversity is preserved.  Basically, that means the DNR can designate an area to protect the variety of plants and animals that live in that place.

But new legislation seeks to greatly limit that authority.

Senate bill 1276 would prohibit the DNR from setting aside an area of land specifically for the purpose of maintaining biological diversity.  The DNR could not make or enforce a rule to do that.

Senator Tom Casperson is one of the bill’s sponsors. He says the DNR has too much power to set aside land for the purpose of conservation.

“They need to have authority but when it comes to the direction where we’re going as a state with our public lands, I think there needs to be some checks and balances.”

Casperson says he gets angry calls from his constituents when they learn, for example, that motorized vehicles are not allowed in certain areas.  He says his bill would put more power in the Legislature’s hands.

“I think they should have to have some oversight within the Legislature, somewhere at least, a check and balance to say okay we agree that’s a good move and let the public weigh in on it through their Legislature.  It seems like they’re reluctant to do that and I understand some of the reason why. It’s not easy to get stuff through the Legislature, but I would also submit that there’s a reason for that.”

Casperson’s bill is pretty wide-ranging.  S.B. 1276 would amend several parts of the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act in these ways (you can see this bill summary for more details):

• Prohibit the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Natural Resources Commission from promulgating or enforcing a rule or an order that designates or classifies an area of land specifically for the purpose of achieving or maintaining biological diversity.
•  Delete the conservation of biological diversity from the DNR’s duties regarding forest management, and require the Department to balance its management activities with economic values.
• Eliminate a requirement that the DNR manage forests in a manner that promotes restoration.
• Provide that a State department or agency would not have to designate or classify an area of land specifically for the purpose of achieving or maintaining biological diversity.
• Eliminate the restoration of natural biological diversity from the definition of “conservation.”
• Eliminate a reference to “unusual flora and fauna” in the definition of “natural area.”
• Delete a legislative finding that most losses of biological diversity are the result of human activity.

In testimony, Professor Emeritus Burt Barnes at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment calls the bill “lacking in common sense, ecological literacy, and vision; it is divisive, counterproductive, mean-spirited; couldn’t be worse.” Here’s an excerpt from his letter:

“All individuals and organizations that focus on natural resources necessarily must consider the organisms occupying the lands for which they are responsible. Therefore, it is impossible to legislate biodiversity or its restoration out of the mission of any organization trying to address and solve human-caused problems of the world.”

Environmental groups are reacting as well.

“You should be paying attention to what the Legislature is doing right now.”

Brad Garmon is the director of conservation and emerging issues at the Michigan Environmental Council.

“They’re redefining conservation in a different way than it has been understood for 100 years of Michigan’s conservation legacy, that’s made us a leader in this issue.  That stuff is in jeopardy right now.”

Garmon says the DNR does a good job of managing for all kinds of uses – including timber harvest and off road vehicles… and at the same time protecting the state’s rich animal and plant life.  And he points out the DNR does ask for public input.

“This bill is one of the worst we’ve seen in a while, in terms of just throwing out the respect for the department and the trained experts in ecology and forestry and others, and pretty much saying we don’t trust them to do a good job anymore and we the politicians are going to tell you how to manage our forests.”

He says this bill is the latest in a string of legislation that’s aiming to change the way land is used and managed in Michigan.

That’s the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams.

Enbridge Energy is replacing one of its pipelines that runs through lower Michigan.  They’re replacing Line 6B. It’s the same pipeline that broke in Marshall two years ago.  The new pipeline will allow Enbridge to double the amount of oil they can transport to refineries in Detroit, Toledo and Sarnia, Ontario.

To build the pipeline, the company says it needs additional easement next to the current 60 foot easement that runs through many people’s backyards. 

Enbridge says many people who own land along the pipeline route have signed contracts with the company.  But Enbridge is taking people who refuse to sign contracts to court.

In a courthouse in Howell yesterday, a judge heard arguments against more than a dozen landowners. (Some of the cases were settled yesterday afternoon, involving the Munsell farming family. The settlement requires Enbridge to stay within the existing 60 foot easement on the Munsell’s property, but does allow Enbridge to temporarily use additional land as workspace for the new pipeline.)

Connie Watson and her husband Tom are among the defendants. 

“Enbridge has taken us to condemnation. Eminent domain is another word for it.  And because we wouldn’t sign their contract as it was, they brought us to court to take the land.”

The Watsons say they’re frustrated with Enbridge because of experiences they’ve had with the company in the past.

For four months, Enbridge repaired sections of the current pipeline running through the Watson’s backyard.  Tom Watson says Enbridge workers brought in lights and worked in their yard with heavy equipment day and night.

“Sounds like a bomb going off about every hour or so, you know, like a bomb went off.”

Connie: “So much noise.”

The Watsons say the work caused cracks in their foundation… and other damage they say they have not been compensated for.  The couple says they were not satisfied with the offers Enbridge made for their land for the new pipeline. 

Connie Watson says she feels like she’s at the mercy of a company that has acted more like a bully than a responsible corporate neighbor.

“Makes you feel sold out, doesn’t it, Tommy? ‘Yeah.’  It makes you feel sold out.”

The lawyers for Enbridge declined to comment.

The Gannett News Service reports Enbridge has taken more than 70 homeowners in Michigan to court to force them to give up some of their property.

Carol Brimhall lives in Stockbridge on 38 acres. 

“Well, we tried to negotiate with Enbridge. We met six times with various attorneys.”

But she says they were not satisfied with any offers.  A judge in Ingham County recently ordered that Enbridge could expand its easement on her property.  Enbridge now has 25 additional feet of permanent easement and 60 feet beyond that to use as temporary workspace. 

The judge also ordered the Brimhalls to accept around $11,000 dollars in compensation from Enbridge. 

“The condemnation was devastating. We couldn’t have been in that courtroom five minutes. So I thought the judge would maybe order mediation, or say let’s give this another two weeks and you guys see if you can work it out… anything. But she signed the order and we were done.”

Brimhall says Enbridge crews cut down more than 100 large trees on her property last week.  She says the work started the same day her mom was in the hospital, dying.

“Oh, it’s awful. They came through, the day my mom was… Monday… they cut my trees. I had called and emailed the agent and said, please give me a little bit of time here, so my mom can pass away and I can be with her and not worry about what’s going on. And they were out there first thing, Monday morning.”

We asked Enbridge Energy to comment for this story.  The company did not make anyone available for an interview.

That’s the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams.

Many of those gas stations are closed now, but taxpayers are often on the hook for what’s been left behind.

A map of the open LUST sites in Michigan

Transcript

One morning the owner of Logan’s Gas & Deli came in to check his inventory, and things were a little off.

Steve Beukema is with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

“In the course of a weekend they lost about 8,000 gallons of gasoline. They came to work on a Monday and their 10,000 gallon tank was empty,” said Beukema.

Beukema is the project manager for the clean-up at this site near Battle Creek. He says when they pulled the tank, they found a dime-sized hole on the bottom.

Gas spread through the sandy soil underground, across the street, and under a house and a nearby pizza restaurant. Both get their water from underground wells.

Beukema says the owner tried to clean up the mess, but the insurance company wasn’t paying the bills fast enough.

The clean-up contractor walked away after they weren’t getting paid, and the gas station went belly up.

So that’s when you and I step in. We pay an extra fee at the gas pump that helps pay for this kind of clean-up.

Beukema showed me their clean-up system.

It uses a series of high pressure valves that force air underground. The air pushes the gas vapor upward.

“And the other part of the system is a soil vapor extraction, that’s essentially like a big vacuum cleaner. It’ll suck up all the gasoline vapors from the soil.”

Altogether this clean-up will cost more than a million dollars. Luckily, the underground drinking water wells were not affected here.

This site is an extreme case. Beukema says most leaks at gas stations don’t happen so quickly. They typically leak slowly – over long periods of time.

These kinds of slow underground leaks have affected drinking water supplies and surface water, and there have been a lot of leaks in Michigan.

Today, there are more than 9,000 documented leaks that still need to be cleaned up. Most of these tanks are not actively leaking, but the pollution remains.

In the U.S., only Florida has more open clean-up cases.

Around half of the 9,000 sites in Michigan are known as “orphan” sites. The original polluters can’t be found, or they can’t or won’t pay for them.

So it falls back to the state, but the state has been lagging behind with clean-ups.

Mark Griffin is with the Michigan Petroleum Association. 

“You could not find a more inefficient, stupid way to run a clean-up program,” said Griffin.

He blames a lot of bureaucratic red tape and a lack of funding for slowing down the clean-ups.

In Michigan, there’s a 7/8 cent fee on each gallon of gas that goes into the “Refined Petroleum Fund.”

That fund was originally set up to help clean-up leaks when gas stations replaced their underground tanks, but with the recent tight budget years, that fund has been raided for other purposes.

“I believe $10-15 million a year during the Granholm administration was siphoned off to the Department of Treasury to pay quality of life bonds,” said Griffin.

And the fund is still being diverted under the Snyder Administration.

The 7/8 of a cent that we pay on each gallon of gas generates around $50 million a year for the Refined Petroleum Fund.

But in recent years, only $20 million of that has been put toward cleaning up these leaks. (The Snyder Administration did request that $30 million go toward clean-up in the next fiscal year, but James Clift of the Michigan Environmental Council says it remains to be seen how that money will be spent.)

This summer, the legislature passed a series of bills aimed removing a lot of the red tape in the clean-up program.

It will also set up an advisory board to take a look at how the money in the Refined Petroleum Fund is spent.

The state estimates it would cost around $1.8 billion to clean up the more than 9,000 contaminated sites around the state, so even if all the gas fee money went towards clean up. It would take decades to tackle the backlog.

With this year’s drought, fish in northern Michigan are fighting low water levels and hot temperatures as they head upstream to spawn.  As Linda Stephan reports – the drought is causing major problems for one river, in particular:

The state Department of Natural Resources is about to take very rare action and ban fishing near the mouth of the Betsie River, near Frankfort.

Fisheries biologist Mark Tonello says if people stay away from the area, there is enough room for the fish to swim up river.

“Even when they’re not intending to, a lot of times they’re spooking the fish and the fish wind up beaching themselves and dying.”

Officials are trying to avoid a mass salmon die-off on Betsie Bay. For now, the request that people stay away from exposed bottomlands near the mouth of the river is voluntary.

It’s one of a handful of rivers where salmon are not stocked and must reproduce naturally to survive.

For The Environment Report, I’m Linda Stephan.

(music bump)

This is the Environment Report.

If you’re thinking of planting trees or shrubs in your yard… the U.S. Department of Agriculture has guidelines for what to plant depending on where you live. It’s called the Plant Hardiness Zone Map.  It’s based on average minimum winter temperatures.  So you can use it to decide if the kind of tree you want to plant will make it through the winter without freezing to death.

This past January, the USDA updated this map for the first time since 1990. 

But one researcher argues it’s already out of date.

Nir Krakauer is an assistant professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York. He says the USDA used the annual minimum temperatures between 1976 and 2005 to make their map.  He updated that map with more recent data.

“In general, a lot of Michigan might be a half zone less cold than the USDA map would show.”

In other words – he says – our winters have been warming faster than other seasons… and that’s shifting those plant zones north.  That means plants that used to only survive in warm southern climates are doing well farther north.

Krakauer says you might be able to experiment with growing plants that do better in warmer places.

Experts say one of the things that’s striking is how much warmer our winters have gotten on average.

Jeff Andresen is the state’s climatologist and an associate professor of geography at Michigan State University.

“If we look at our changing temperatures, Michigan is warmer now than it has been in the past, but it turns out much of the warming that has occurred, especially in the last few decades, has occurred during the winter season and the spring season as well, and overnight: minimum temperatures have increased in some cases 5 to 10 degrees F in the winter in just the last 30 years. Those are very, very significant changes.”

He says the USDA plant zone map is still a reliable guide for what to plant in your yard.

Unless you really love taking risks.

“It’s like dating in high school, people want what they can’t have, they want to go for that next one up.”

Bert Cregg is an associate professor of horticulture and forestry at MSU. (You can read his blog post to find out why he was excited when that new USDA hardiness zone map finally came out).  He says a lot of people want to try to plant things that really won’t survive in Michigan.

“I go to these gardening shows and whatnot and see Tshirts: Been There Killed That or You Don’t Really Know a Plant Until You’ve Killed it At Least Three Times.  People are always wanting to push their hardiness zones.”

Cregg says the trouble is… even in a warming climate, we can still get very cold winter events.

“Yeah, on average, the winters are getting warmer, but that extreme event is still potential and of course that’s what’s going to take your plants out.”

Cregg says you might’ve heard fall is the best time to plant trees.  But he actually recommends waiting until spring… because if it gets cold early this fall, it could be hard for those young trees to get established.

I’m Rebecca Williams.

The Palisades nuclear power plant is hosting an open house tonight in South Haven. Lindsey Smith reports it’s a rare opportunity for people to ask detailed questions about the plant:

Because of security reasons, it’s impractical to host the open house at the plant. Instead it’ll take place at the same conference center where the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has held a number of public hearings this year about the plant’s poor safety rating. In fact, the NRC will host a public meeting next week at the same place to discuss those safety concerns in detail.

Palisades spokesman Mark Savage says the open house tonight will be informal… kind of like a science fair.

“We’ll have tabletop discussions about the variety of things that historically get brought up at these public meetings and so general public is invited round the area here to come and see our wares.”

This is first time Palisades has hosted an open house since Entergy Corporation bought the plant from Consumers Energy back in 2007.

The Palisades open house will be held from 6 – 8pm tonight at the Beach Haven Event Center: 10420 M-140 Highway, South Haven

(music bump)

This is the Environment Report.

More than 28,000 high temperature records have been broken or tied so far this year in the U.S. 

And… the National Snow and Ice Data Center recently reported the amount of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen to the lowest level in the satellite record.  The scientists say the decline in summer sea ice over the last ten years is a strong signal of long-term climate warming.

Bill McKibben has been writing about climate change for the past two decades, and he’s the founder of 350.org. It’s a grassroots organization that has chapters around the world to urge governments to do something about climate change.  

Bill, thanks for joining me.  You wrote an article recently in Rolling Stone magazine, and in it, you say we are losing the fight to slow manmade warming of the climate.  Why did you say that?

Bill McKibben: “Well, we can tell we’re losing just by looking around us. The Arctic is melting away with enormous speed. We’re seeing exactly the kind of weather phenomenon that scientists told us we could expect. This summer across the U.S. is a pretty good sort of trailer of coming attractions for the global warming movie. This is what it feels like in its earliest stages and it doesn’t feel good.”

RW: So, the vast majority of publishing climate scientists agree that climate change is real, it’s happening now, and it’s mostly human-caused. But there’s a disconnect between the scientific community and our political leaders. Most politicians are not talking about climate change.

McKibben: “Mitt Romney talked about it; he made a big joke about it at the Republican convention. It was his big laugh line of his speech, that he was not going to be trying to heal the planet – instead he was going to be working on behalf of people’s families. But since most families I know live on this planet, that’s kind of an empty boast.”

RW: But you know, a few years ago, we were hearing more serious discussion about climate change in Congress. What’s changed?

McKibben:  “Well, I think what’s changed is a very well organized and heavily funded effort by the fossil fuel industry to keep this issue at bay. So they’ve now managed to persuade a huge, basically one of our parties to say there’s no such thing as climate change. And that’s a big problem. It’s an overcome-able problem if we build a movement large enough and vocal enough to really insist on change.”

RW: Bill, thank you so much.

McKibben: “Well, thanks for talking with me, Rebecca. You have a good day.”

RW: Bill McKibben is an author and the founder of 350.org. That’s the Environment Report. I’m Rebecca Williams.

Bill McKibben will be speaking at Rackham Auditorium at the University of Michigan on Friday, September 14th at 4:30 pm. The talk will be followed by a book signing.  His talk is titled: “350, the most important number in the English language.”