Commercial Geothermal Up and Running

  • Several geothermal power plants at The Geysers (Photo courtesy of the US Department of Energy)

A new kind of commercial-scale
power plant is tapping the earth’s heat
and converting it to electricity. Lester
Graham reports:

Transcript

A new kind of commercial-scale
power plant is tapping the earth’s heat
and converting it to electricity. Lester
Graham reports:

A company called Raser Technologies just started up a new electric generating plant
using geothermal. No emissions, no pollution – just power.

Brent Cook is the CEO of Raser.

“This first phase of the plant that we just brought on-line will power approximately
nine-thousand homes in the city of Anaheim, California.”

Cook says this technology will work a lot of places out West where the earth’s crust
is a little thinner. You don’t have as far to drill down into the earth.

A National Renewable Energy Lab report estimates geothermal could meet about a
third of the nation’s electrical demand.

And, this new technology developed by UTC Power could work other places. For
example, it could convert waste heat from factories into electricity.

For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

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Chicago Looks to Beijing for Green Olympics Lessons

  • This is not your typical diesel-burning bus. Beijing now boasts the world’s largest fleet running on compressed natural gas. (Photo by Violet Law)

The Olympics in Beijing are into its final week. The city has delivered blue skies and
taken other steps to make the games environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, the City of
Chicago is bidding to host a green Olympics in 2016. The bid committee members are at
the games to observe. Violet Law is in Beijing and has this report:

Transcript

The Olympics in Beijing are into its final week. The city has delivered blue skies and
taken other steps to make the games environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, the City of
Chicago is bidding to host a green Olympics in 2016. The bid committee members are at
the games to observe. Violet Law is in Beijing and has this report:

(sound of a bus pulling up and announcing the stop)

As more Chinese are getting richer they are driving more. But most still catch the bus to
the Olympic venues, because there’s no parking for spectators. Officials have added
special bus routes to take people to the games – for free.

(sound of a bus pulling away)

But this is not your typical diesel-burning bus. Beijing now boasts the world’s largest
fleet running on compressed natural gas. That means less pollution and CO2 emissions.

Doug Arnot is in Beijing. He oversees the planning of operations and sports venues for
Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics. He says Chicago can do even better if it gets to
host the games.

“We believe that by 2016 all of our buses and all of our vehicles in the Olympic fleet will
be alternative energy or hybrid vehicles. That will have a huge impact on the
environmental imprint if you will of the Olympic Games.”

(sound of an English-language announcement of an Olympic venue stop on Beijing
subway and the noise of the train speeding through the tunnel)

Beijing has had to tackle a host of environmental problems. Most people know about the
city’s massive efforts to clean the air. But it also opened five new subway lines just in
time for the Olympics. Its added wind power generators.

But hosting the Olympics might have made one problem worse.

(sound of water fountain)

Beijing already has a water shortage. For the Olympics, workers planted trees and
flowers and added thirsty landscaping all over the city. New parkland and an urban forest
form the bulk of the Olympic Green.

‘Friends of Nature’ is the country’s oldest grassroots environmental group. Zhang Boju is
the head of research. He’s torn over seeing all this greenery.

“We think this grassland and man-made forest is a very, very important part of greener
Beijing, but it also has some problems. Is this fit for Beijing, a city which has limited
water resource?”

Hosting the Olympics has spurred the government to open up new facilities to recycle
water.

Achim Steiner heads the United Nations Environmental Programme. Steiner says he’s
pleased to see that China has seized the opportunity. His agency will issue a report
assessing the environmental impact of the Beijing games by the end of this year.

“What the Olympic Games provided was an opportunity to showcase and create a
platform to demonstrate what is possible if you’re determined to address these issues. A
great deal has been done and shown in the last seven years. What we are looking for here
is what kind of long lasting improvement the Games have brought.”

Beijing will take advantage of all these improvements. All of the newly built venues will
stay. Some, including the iconic Bird’s Nest and Water Cube, will be converted into
commercial use. The wind power generators will produce enough energy for 100,000
families.

There are also small things that show how hosting the Olympics has made Beijing a
greener city. Doug Arnot of the Chicago bid committee is taking notice.

“Every event you go to sometimes it’s not the big idea that you see, but the smaller idea
that you see. One of the things I’ve noticed is the staff and volunteers and the way they
have addressed green issues. They’re very conscious of where the recycling waste
baskets are. That may seem to be a small issue. But when you have tens of thousands of
people at your venues on a daily basis, it is very important.”

And Chicago is hoping both the small things and the big changes in its environmental
approach will win it a chance to host a green Olympics in 2016.

For The Environment Report, this is Violet Law.

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Pollution and Classroom Performance

  • Researchers at the University of Michigan are looking to see if air pollution is a factor in school kids’ health and academic performance. (Source: Motown31 at Wikimedia Commons)

Scientists are investigating whether
air pollution is affecting how well students
perform. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Scientists are investigating whether
air pollution is affecting how well students
perform. Lester Graham reports:

Researchers say we might be building schools in the wrong places. We build them
near interstates full of polluting cars and trucks, and we build schools downwind of
factories. Kids might be getting a big dose of air pollution everyday they’re at school.

Researchers at the University of Michigan want to look at whether it’s actually
affecting kids. Paul Mohai is the lead researcher.

“School-aged children are particularly vulnerable because their bodies are growing.
They’re considered a vulnerable population and that’s all the more reason we should
be looking at the toxic burden that they may face, both in the schools that they go to
and where they live.”

Mohai and his colleagues will look at all the social and economic issues, and then air
pollution to see if it’s a factor in school kids’ health and academic performance.

For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Fuel Prices Hit Auto Factories

  • High gas prices are cited as one cause for SUV and RV factories closing (Photo by Ben VanWagoner)

High gas prices are changing what people
buy in car showrooms. Gas guzzlers just aren’t
selling as well anymore and it’s affecting US
manufacturers. Mark Brush reports:

Transcript

High gas prices are changing what people
buy in car showrooms. Gas guzzlers just aren’t
selling as well anymore and it’s affecting US
manufacturers. Mark Brush reports:

GM announced it’s closing four of its truck and SUV plants. And Winnebago Industries
recently announced they’re closing their biggest RV manufacturing plant. High fuel
prices are helping to drive the closings.

For the last fifteen years, sales of SUVs and light trucks have beat the competition from
smaller cars. But that’s changed in the last couple of months. Now, smaller cars are
selling better.

Charles Territo is with the Alliance for Automobile Manufactures. He says the recent
hike in gas prices have hit a nerve.

“I think for years people have been trying figure out what that pressure point is. When
consumers will actually change their driving habits and change their behavior. I think
we’re finding now that we’ve probably reached that price.”

Federal researchers say that people are driving a lot less. The Federal Highway
Administration reports that the number of miles traveled for the month of March was one
the sharpest drops on record.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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The Comeback of the Cuyahoga

  • The famous photo of the Cuyahoga River fire that appeared in Time Magazine. The photo is not of the 1969 blaze, but rather of another fire on the river in 1952. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

Four decades ago, one event changed how much
of the nation viewed environmental issues. The Cuyahoga River caught fire. Now a filmmaker is
releasing a documentary on the burning river and how it
became a catalyst for change. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Four decades ago, one event changed how much
of the nation viewed environmental issues. The Cuyahoga River caught fire. Now a filmmaker is
releasing a documentary on the burning river and how it
became a catalyst for change. Julie Grant reports:

People viewed things much differently in the middle of the
20th century than they do today. Pollution was an obscure
term, and smokestacks were a sign of prosperity.

“And like a good sign in the heavens, is the smoke from
these mills. A sign of the forgings and castings and sheets
and wire products to come.”

That old film sets the scene for a documentary called The
Return of the Cuyahoga River
.

It wasn’t just smokestacks, but sewer pipes the spewed out
gunk.

As mills manufactured paints, varnishes and oils, the color of
the river changed daily.

In the documentary, longtime river-man Wayne Bratton says
it could turn orange, red, blue or green – depending on the
color paint mills were making.

“Fifty years ago, the river boiled like a cauldron. This was all
very black, high petroleum content. Anoxic. And just
constantly bubbling like a stew on a stove.”

And prime for catching fire. But, 1969 was not the first time
the Cuyahoga caught on fire, and it wasn’t the only river to
burn.

Jonathon Adler is a professor at Case Western Reserve Law
School in Cleveland. In the film, he says that, at that time,
It wasn’t even surprising for a river to catch fire.

“It wasn’t just in Cleveland where we had industrial river
fires. This occurred on the Rouge River in Michigan, the
Chicago river, the Schuykill river in Philadelphia. The
Baltimore harbor. All of these areas caught fire due to the
collection of industrial waste and debris that at the time
wasn’t being cleaned up.”

The film-maker who’s responsible for the documentary on
the Cuyahoga, Larry Hott, says at the time it barely made
the news. It wasn’t until six weeks later when Time
Magazine ran an article about the fire in its new “Environment”
section.

“This was just after the moon shot, the first landing, and it
was also just after Ted Kennedy’s incident at Chapaquitic.
And this turned out to be the best selling magazine in time
magazine’s history. So millions of people saw this story.
And then people started talking about it – ‘what do you
mean, a river caught on fire?’”

After the Time Magazine article, the Cuyahoga became the
poster child of the environmental movement. In the
documentary, Professor Jonathon Adler says people were
astonished.

“One consequence of the Cuyahoga fire was greater political
pressure for additional federal legislation. And one of the
things that led to was the Clean Water Act of 1972, when the
federal government really increased dramatically its role in
helping to maintain water quality.”

The Clean Water Act and other federal regulations stopped
factories from dumping waste directly into rivers.

Many of the nation’s rivers are still being cleaned up. The
Cuyahoga still has problems, but it’s much cleaner than it
was a few decades ago. The documentary producer, Larry
Hott, says he recently took a boat into the river and was
surprised by the beauty of the Cuyahoga.

“You can save a river. It’s a symbol of hope. It gives us
hope – that after everything has gone wrong, after the cities
have burned and the river has burned, it can come back, and
we can be hopeful about the environment.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Sewage Funding Blocked Up

Officials from local governments are lobbying Congress to put more money into wastewater treatment projects this year. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

Officials from local governments are lobbying Congress to put more money into wastewater treatment projects this year. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

President Bush’s proposed budget would cut money for keeping up and building new sewage treatment plants. The White House wants to reduce funds for a loan program that provides money for wastewater infrastructure for municipalities and factories and stormwater management.

Gary Becker chairs the Great Lakes — Saint Lawrence Cities Initiative. He says there’s a huge need for full funding of the program.

“As population expands, as cities grow, as municipalities grow you have a constant need to expand the plants. .. in addition to being able to upgrade the ones that were put in 30 years ago when the Clean Water Act was put together.”


Becker says he hopes Congress will reverse what the President has in mind. The Bush Administration has generally said it’s trying to shrink spending on everything – except for the military – as a way to reduce the federal budget deficit.

For the Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

Related Links

Making Power Out of Pollution

  • Ford Motor Company installs a permanent Fumes to Fuel system at Michigan Truck Plant after a successful pilot program at the Ford Rouge Center last year. (Photo courtesy of Ford Motor Company)

Pollution from factories and other places might be dollars just going up in smoke. But a promising new technology turns these ordinarily troublesome waste products into something that’s especially valuable these days: cheap electricity. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Halpert has this
report:

Transcript

Pollution from factories and other places might be dollars just going up
in smoke, but a promising new technology turns these ordinarily
troublesome waste products into something that’s especially valuable
these days: cheap electricity. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie
Halpert has this report:


Remember the children’s story, where Rumpelstiltskin was able to take
straw, a cheap, abundant material, and magically transform it into
precious gold? Well, these days, cheap energy is like gold, and one
company has found a way to similarly generate power from pollution.


(Sound of engine running)


To see how it works, I’m standing on a roof sixty-five feet above the
ground. This is where Ford Motor Company maintains its pollution
control equipment. There are rectangular gray metal boxes as tall as I am
all over the roof, so many that we can barely walk between them. Under
the roof, they’re painting trucks. The paint emits vapors that Ford is now
capturing with these big boxes of machinery.


Mark Wherrett is Ford’s principal environmental engineer.


“We’re here at the Ford Motor Company Michigan truck plant, where the
paint solvent is collected from the process and used as a fuel to make
electricity in a Stirling Engine.”


The Stirling Engine is key. Here’s how it works. Ford’s using an engine
developed by STM Power. STM is using an old engine style called a
Stirling Engine that was once used in place of a steam engine. Instead of
using coal or wood to heat up water and make steam, STM burns the
paint fumes to heat up hydrogen and power the engine. The fumes will
generate 55 kilowatts of electricity. That’s enough to power 11 homes.


There’s not as much pollution emitted at the end, since burning can be
adjusted to temperatures where pollutants are reduced. Wherrett says
that for Ford, the technology simply has no downsides.


“The fumes to fuel process takes the environmental emissions and turns
them on their head, so instead of them being a waste product that we
have to dispose of, we can then turn it into a commodity where we can
then use that to make electricity and use that in our plant systems.”


And that means Ford doesn’t have to purchase as much power from the
grid.


Dorrance Noonan is CEO of STM Power, the company that’s redesigned
the old engine. Noonan says Ford is a perfect candidate for this
technology.


“We’re really excited about the Ford project because it offers a
tremendous opportunity to manufacturing companies and large paint
operations, who have large VOC problems that they have to deal with in
very expensive ways.”


The Ford plant is just the beginning for the company. They also plan to
deliver their portable on-site generators to landfills and wastewater
treatment plants. In that situation, methane gas is used as the fuel to
generate electricity. Noonan says his company has a bright future.


“Well, in the next couple of years, we see strong penetration in our two focus
markets, which are the landfill markets in the U.S. and the wastewater
treatment markets in the United States, and then we see that expansion
going outside of the United States to Europe and eventually to Asia.”


There are some skeptics.


Dan Rassler, with the Electric Power Research Institute, says STM’s
technology does have the potential to create viable new sources of
energy, but more companies need to actually start using it before he can
know for sure, and he says that right now the technology is still too
expensive for many companies.


“We’d like to see the capitol costs of these systems be lower than where
they are today.”


Right now, an STM unit costs $65,000. Rassler would like to see overall
costs cut by 10 to 20 percent. He says costs could decrease as more of
these units come on line.


STM CEO Dorrance Noonan says the costs are comparable to competing
on-site generators, and these expenses will be offset by using the free
fuel used to generate electricity that his engines provide. Noonan says
that continuing high natural gas prices will be his technology’s best
friend, as companies strive for ways to reduce energy costs.


For the GLRC, I’m Julie Halpert.

Related Links

Creating Particle Pollution Warning System

  • Smokestacks, diesel engines, and a number of other things cause particulate emissions, which can create some negative health effects, and aggravate existing health problems. (Photo by Kenn Kiser)

In the summer, local weather forecasts often
include information about dangerous ozone levels.
But scientists are learning more and more about
another type of pollution that can reach harmful
levels even in the winter months. And as the Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sarah Hulett reports… we
might be hearing more about this type of pollution in
our daily weather reports:

Transcript

In the summer, local weather forecasts often include information about dangerous ozone levels. But scientists are learning more and more about another type of pollution that can reach harmful levels even in the winter months. And as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sarah Hulett reports, we might be hearing more about this type of pollution in our daily weather reports:


Parts of the region recently reached “code red” for poor air quality. And
that had some people perplexed. Warnings about dangerous levels of ozone are
frequent on hot summer days, especially in urban areas. But this was the
middle of winter.


The warnings were for high levels of tiny particles that federal regulators
only recently began monitoring. They’re spewn from diesel engines,
factories, power plants, and fireplaces. Air monitors in Michigan,
Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Indiana recently registered unhealthy levels of
these particles – some of them for a few days straight.


Jim Haywood says the problem was an unusual weather event for this time of
year. Haywood is a meteorologist with the Michigan Department of
Environmental Quality. He says a high pressure system moved very slowly over
the Great Lakes region for several days. When you get high pressure, the air
below sinks, generating a layer of warm air that acts like a lid.


“So that warm air that was sinking effectively stops at a few hundred feet
from the surface of the ground. It acts like a cap. It does not let any of
the pollutants that are released at the surface pop up through that cap.”


So all the pollutants that would have gotten picked up and diluted by the
wind instead just hung out for days – building up, and reflecting sunlight
to create haze.


Eventually, a cold front pushed the high pressure system out of the way, and
took the pollution with it. But what about those few days when the Environmental Protection Agency was warning about unhealthy levels of particulate pollution? For people with
heart or lung disease, agency health officials say short-term episodes can
lead to asthma attacks or even heart attacks. And they say healthy children
and adults can experience throat and lung irritation.


Susan Stone is an environmental health scientist with EPA. She says
particle pollution warnings could soon become a staple of the daily weather
report – much like the familiar summer ozone warnings.


“With ozone, we have the network in place to be able to deliver those
forcasts, people are used to hearing that on TV, and we are working to
provide that same level of coverage for particle pollution.”


Stone says EPA is rolling out a new program called Enviro-Flash
nationwide. It sends real-time air quality information to people’s email
accounts or pagers. EPA is offering the service through state
environmental agencies. And beginning in 2010, areas that register
unacceptable levels of particle pollution will be required to clean up their
air.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Sarah Hulett.

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Seaway Navigation Study Raises Questions

The U.S. and Canada are about halfway through a major study of navigation in the Great Lakes. The scope of the study has changed since it was first proposed. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

The U.S. and Canada are about halfway through a major study of navigation
in the Great Lakes. The scope of the study has changed since it was first
proposed. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:


The Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway connect Midwest farms and
factories with the Atlantic Ocean. Its locks are aging, and big ocean-going ships can’t
squeeze through. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to look at widening the
locks and deepening the channels.


But Canada wasn’t interested in that, and Congress directed the Corps to
scale back the study.


Wayne Schloop is the study manager.


‘There’s a lot of question marks as far as what does the bi-national system
need, in its entirety, not just the U.S. portion. There’s also a realization
there’s a lot of environmental sensitivity to the system, and you need to
address that in some manner before you can make any potential
recommendations about long-term improvements if they’re warranted, or if
they’re out there.”


Five public meetings are being held around the Great Lakes this summer, and
a final report is expected in fall 2005.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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Unions Sue Over Factory Air Quality

The United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers of America have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Labor Department. The unions want the federal department to set clean air standards inside factories. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jerome Vaughn has details:

Transcript

The United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers of America have filed a
lawsuit against the U.S. Labor Department. The unions want the federal
department to set clean air standards inside factories. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Jerome Vaughn has details:


The Unions want a federal appeals court in Philadelphia to order the Labor
Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration otherwise known
as OSHA to issue new indoor clean air standards. The regulations would
reduce exposure to toxic metal working fluids used in building
automobiles, aircraft, and other products.


The UAW and the Steelworkers union say the current regulations instituted
in 1971 just aren’t stringent enough. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control
says there’s substantial evidence that the fluids can cause cancer of the
larynx, pancreas, skin and bladder.


The unions originally petitioned the Labor Department to change its
regulations back in 1993 but the agency has not explained its reasons for
refusing to make the changes.


The Labor Department says its highest priority is the health and well-being
of U.S. workers.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jerome Vaughn in Detroit.

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