Sediment dynamics in the Rhine catchment :

Quantification of fluvial response to climate change and human impact
Dissertation
Publisher: www.knag.nl
Author: Erkens, Gilles

Pointer's birth place
Fluvial systems are strongly respon- sive to changes in climate and land use — but take their time to show it. Accurate prediction of the timing and degree of future fluvial response requires comprehensive understanding of fluvial response in the past. This PhD-thesis studied the response of the river Rhine over the last 20,000 years, as recorded in the morphology, composition and volumes of its sediment. Borehole data and various dating techniques were combined to time-slice cross-sections and to construct a series of palaeogeographic maps. A method to calculate amounts of sediment carried both in suspension and as bed load during millennia-long time slices was developed. This research shows that only climate changes during the glacial-interglacial transition and the strong rise of human land use during the late Holocene were large enough to trigger response and overwhelm ongoing autogenic behaviour of the river and the buffering capacities of the Rhine catchment. The climatic changes at the glacial-interglacial transition triggered incision and abandonment of the Pleniglacial braidplain terrace along the entire Rhine valley. This was accompanied by a shift from a braided to a meandering fluvial style, but it took several millennia to complete the transition to a single meandering channel. As a result, the Rhine was a multi-channel river during the Late Glacial and most of early Holocene. The last phase of fluvial response to the glacial-interglacial transition consists of increased delivery of fine sediment during the first half of the Holocene (until ~ 6000 years ago). This sediment had been stored in the upstream tributary valleys since the full glacial, and was released by incision of the Rhine and its tributaries when they adapted to the interglacial climate conditions.



Overall, this study shows that sizable fluvial catchments adapted slowly to large scale climatic changes, in both spatially and temporally complex ways. During the Holocene other external factors than climate change became important for the development of the Rhine system. In the Rhine delta, the combination of eustatic sea level rise and subsidence provided in large accommodation space for sediment delivered from upstream. Release of bed load by the meandering and incising Rhine in the trunk valley forms the source for bed load delivery to the delta. Both the Rhine trunk valley and delta are sinks for suspended sediment, and the amount of stored sediment in these areas was used to reconstruct fine sediment transfer through the lower Rhine. Following the aforementioned increased delivery of fine sediment during the first part of the Holocene, sediment transfer stabilised during the middle Holocene. During the last 2000 years the delivery of fine sediments to the sinks is up to 150 % higher compared to the directly preceding millennia. This can only be explained as the result of progressive deforestations for agricultural land use since the late-Neolithic (6300 years ago). The timing of the increased delivery of fine sediments suggests that pre-Roman land use was already extensive. Hence, prehistoric land use should be regarded as a drainage basin-wide forcing factor for fluvial systems.

Beekeeping gains in the concrete jungle, despite some concerns.

Honeybees may not be the first thing that come to mind when you think of Brooklyn. Yet here’s Yeshwant Chitalkar, high on a rooftop in the Red Hook section of the New York borough, opening a bright blue hive to check on its queen. The vista is a mix of parks, light industrial areas, and housing projects. Dr. Chitalkar works methodically, barehanded, carefully lifting out the hive’s frames, which are covered in a velvety, undulating layer of bees.

He is one of a growing number of urbanites who keep bees in cities across the country. Their motivations vary: Some are worried about the environmental impact of fewer bees to pollinate food crops. And some are urban gardeners who want to make their gardens more productive. Others say beekeeping is a way to connect with nature even in the heart of the concrete jungle.

Oh, and there’s the honey, too. Counterintuitive as it might seem, urban hives are generally as productive and healthy as rural ones. In a good year, one hive can produce up to 200 pounds of honey.

Urban beekeeping isn’t all sweet, though. It can be hard, dirty work and the challenges are many: jittery neighbors; vandals; city ordinances banning the activity; and problems, such as mites and parasites, that vex beekeepers everywhere.

But that doesn’t daunt those who want to keep bees. This year there are at least 30 new hives in community gardens, on rooftops, and in backyards across New York. Most are the result of a series of beekeeping classes taught last winter by Jim Fischer, a veteran beekeeper who lives in Manhattan.

Mr. Fischer and some of his students formed the Gotham City Honey Co-op to buy beekeeping equipment in bulk, and hope eventually to set up a site where members can extract and bottle their honey. The co-op also plans to brand its honey and sell it to specialty stores.

The only hitch: Beekeeping is illegal in New York City.

Mr. Fischer and other Big Apple beekeepers are confident that the honeybee ban will be lifted soon. A city councilor has introduced a bill to legalize it, and urban gardening groups are pushing for it to be passed.

The situation is quite different in Chicago, where City Hall’s green roof boasts a beehive. Michael Thompson, who helped install the city-owned hive, has been keeping bees within the city limits since the 1970s.

Today he is the farm manager at the Chicago Honey Co-op, which has about a hundred hives on the city’s West Side. Many belong to people who give half their honey to the co-op in exchange for keeping their hives at the site.

The city is an ideal spot for bees, Mr. Thompson learned when he moved there from a rural area where he kept bees.

“It’s much better to keep bees in a city,” he says. In rural and suburban areas, pesticides sprayed for agriculture and mosquito control can also harm bees. But in the city, the use of these kinds of pesticides is less widespread.



“People have the perception that a hive in the city can’t make any honey at all,” Fischer says. “That’s just not true.”

Honeybees can find abundant nectar in parks and along tree-lined boulevards. Also, urban areas often have extensive ornamental gardens in bloom throughout the growing season.

But Nick Calderone, associate professor of entomology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., injects a note of caution. He says that hives can thrive in cities only if they’re near green spaces or gardens.

Many of the beekeepers Fischer knows are urban gardeners who began keeping bees because they wanted to increase their crops’ productivity. “If you want local food, you need local bees,” he says.

That’s why Roger Repohl of the Bronx became a beekeeper 10 years ago. Although his plants had plenty of flowers, they produced few vegetables. When he asked for advice from someone in the city’s Parks Department, he was told: “ ‘Oh, we don’t have pollinators in the South Bronx,’ ” he relates.

Although “some pollination is done by wind and rain, the majority is done by insects – including beetles, flies, butterflies, and, most significantly, by bees,” says Dr. Calderone. Many native species of bees are important pollinators, but their numbers have declined as their habitat has disappeared to development and large-scale agriculture.

Honeybees, which aren’t native to the United States, are used as pollinators on large farms as well as in personal gardens. But they are struggling, too.

The number of managed honeybee colonies in the US has dropped from 5 million to 2.5 million since the 1940s, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

And two mites that appeared in the US in the 1980s have been wreaking havoc on honeybee colonies since, says Calderone. Before their advent, home beekeepers might have lost 5 percent of their colonies per year and a migratory beekeeper 10 to 15 percent. Now, during bad years, beekeepers may lose five times that many colonies.

Then there’s the little-understood but much-publicized disease known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), which causes the mysterious disappearance of adult bees from colonies. While CCD’s cause is still not understood, “it’s certainly real and it’s certainly killing lots of bees, but exactly what it is, is hard to say,” says Calderone.

In urban areas, these problems haven’t discouraged gardeners from becoming beekeepers, And that’s good for all residents of the city, says Calderone. “Unless you want a totally sterile environment that’s devoid of all life other than people, you’re going to need plants. And to keep them functioning, you’re going to need pollinators.”

Toni Burnham, who blogs about urban beekeeping (City Bees), was inspired to start hives after hearing about London beekeepers. She has established several hives and was a consultant on the successful effort to put beehives on the White House lawn.

She sees beekeeping as a key part of maintaining a healthy city. “If those plants that are the bottom line for ecological health in my town can produce adequate fruit and leaves, there’s a whole range of bugs, snakes, and birds that can survive,” she says.

One of the biggest challenges for urban beekeepers is neighbors who are unhappy about living near beehives. Many people are afraid of bees, and much of that fear is rooted in misunderstanding, says Fischer.

Since bee populations have declined, people understand them less, says Fischer, who as a child spent the summers playing baseball barefoot. Back then, grass-seed mixes included red clover, a bee favorite. Inevitably, children stepped on bees. There were tears, but parents took it in stride – “the response was a hug and a cookie,” he says.

Today, many people mistake one bodily response to a bee sting – some swelling and itching – for an allergic reaction and take their children to the emergency room, Fischer says.

If their nests are threatened, bees will sting. But, Calderone says, they don’t generally do so when away from their nests.

Still, bee swarms, which occur when part or all of a colony leaves its home en masse to find a new one, make headlines. Fischer, who is frequently called to remove them in New York, once was called to a site where a swarm had landed on a newspaper box. When he got there, police had closed the intersection and cordoned off the area with yellow crime scene tape. Several television crews were filming. “Swarms scare the civilians,” he says.

But swarms aren’t particularly dangerous, he says. The bees may number in the thousands, but lack a hive to defend and are focused on finding a new home, although they will sting if provoked. Fischer calls them “the most docile configuration of bees.”

Still, “it’s important to cultivate respect for [honeybees]. They’re not chickens, cats, or dogs,” says Mr. Repohl, whose community garden regularly hosts school groups.

Keeping bees may have another benefit for busy city dwellers – encouraging them to slow down. Ms. Burnham, who says she’s the type of person who drinks too much coffee and waves her hands around when she’s talking, likens beekeeping to yoga: “I plan my movements, and I do them deliberately. I’m thinking about the effect of my motions on these creatures. I have to be in a different way,” she says.

Michaela Hayes, who has a new hive in Brooklyn, agrees. “I love the bees; they’re so peaceful,” she says. Ms. Hayes dreams of the day when she’ll make ginger beer from her honey, but for now she’s content to watch the bees as they go about their business. “They’re fascinating to me. It’s kind of like a big science experiment for adults."

FOOLING WITH DISASTER?

Startling revelations about Three Mile Island disaster raise doubts over nuclear plant safety.

Source: Institute For Southern Studies
Second Source Wikipedia
It was April Fool's Day, 1979 -- 30 years ago this week -- when Randall Thompson first set foot inside the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa. Just four days earlier, in the early morning hours of March 28, a relatively minor problem in the plant's Unit 2 reactor sparked a series of mishaps that led to the meltdown of almost half the uranium fuel and uncontrolled releases of radiation into the air and surrounding Susquehanna River.



It was the single worst disaster ever to befall the U.S. nuclear power industry, and Thompson was hired as a health physics technician to go inside the plant and find out how dangerous the situation was. He spent 28 days monitoring radiation releases.

Today, his story about what he witnessed at Three Mile Island is being brought to the public in detail for the first time -- and his version of what happened during that time, supported by a growing body of other scientific evidence, contradicts the official U.S. government story that the Three Mile Island accident posed no threat to the public.

"What happened at TMI was a whole lot worse than what has been reported," Randall Thompson told Facing South. "Hundreds of times worse."

Thompson and his wife, Joy, a nuclear health physicist who also worked at TMI in the disaster's aftermath, claim that what they witnessed there was a public health tragedy. The Thompsons also warn that the government's failure to acknowledge the full scope of the disaster is leading officials to underestimate the risks posed by a new generation of nuclear power plants.

While new reactor construction ground to a halt after the 1979 incident, state leaders and energy executives today are pushing for a nuclear energy revival that's centered in the South, where 12 of the 17 facilities seeking new reactors are located.

Fundamental to the industry's case for expansion is the claim that history proves nuclear power is clean and safe -- a claim on which the Thompsons and others, bolstered by startling new evidence, are casting doubt.

An unlikely critic

Randall Thompson could never be accused of being a knee-jerk anti-nuclear alarmist. A veteran of the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine program, he is a self-described "nuclear geek" who after finishing military service jumped at the chance to work for commercial nuclear power companies.

He worked for a time at the Peach Bottom nuclear plant south of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania's York County, but quit the industry six months before the TMI disaster over concerns that nuclear companies were cutting corners for higher profits, with potentially dangerous results. Instead, he began publishing a skateboarding magazine with his wife Joy.

But the moment the Thompsons heard about the TMI incident, they wanted to get inside the plant and see what was happening first-hand. That didn't prove difficult: Plant operator Metropolitan Edison's in-house health physics staff fled after the incident began, so responsibility for monitoring radioactive emissions went to a private contractor called Rad Services.

The company immediately hired Randall Thompson to serve as the health physics technician in charge of monitoring radioactive emissions, while Joy Thompson got a job monitoring radiation doses to TMI workers.

"I had other health physicists from around the country calling me saying, 'Don't let it melt without me!" Randall Thompson recalls. "It was exciting. Our attitude was, 'Sure I may get some cancer, but I can find out some cool stuff.'"

What the Thompsons say they found out during their time inside TMI suggests radiation releases from the plant were hundreds if not thousands of times higher than the government and industry have acknowledged -- high enough to cause the acute health effects documented in people living near the plant but that have been dismissed by the industry and the government as impossible given official radiation dose estimates.

The Thompsons tried to draw attention to their findings and provide health information for people living near the plant, but what they say happened next reads like a John Grisham thriller.

They tell of how a stranger approached Randall Thompson in a grocery store parking lot in late April 1979 and warned him his life was at risk, leading the family to flee Pennsylvania. How they ended up in New Mexico working on a book about their experiences with the help of Joy's brother Charles Busey, another nuclear Navy vet and a former worker at the Hatch nuclear power plant in Georgia. How one evening while driving home from the store Busey and Randall Thompson were run off the road, injuring Thompson and killing Busey. How a copy of the book manuscript they were working on was missing from the car's trunk after the accident. These allegations were detailed in several newspaper accounts back in 1981.

Eventually, after a decade of having their lives ruled by TMI, the Thompsons decided to move on. Randall Thompson went to college to study computer science. Joy Thompson returned to publishing and writing.

Today they live quietly in the mountains of North Carolina where, inspired by time spent seeking refuge with a traveling circus, they have forged a new career for themselves as clowns -- or what they like to call "professional fools." As Joy Thompson wrote in the fall 2001 issue of Parabola, a journal of myth, the role of the fool is to help people "perceive the foolishness in even ... the most powerful institutions," noting the medieval court jester's role of telling the King what others dare not.

That conviction has led the Thompsons to tell their story today.

"They haven't told the truth yet about what happened at Three Mile Island," says Randall Thompson. "A lot of people have died because of this accident. A lot."

Anomalies abound

That a lot of people died because of what happened at Three Mile Island, as the Thompsons claim, is definitely not part of the official story. In fact, the commercial nuclear power industry and the government insist that despite the meltdown of almost half of the uranium fuel at TMI, there were only minimal releases of radiation to the environment that harmed no one.

For example, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying group for the U.S. nuclear industry, declares on its website that there have been "no public health or safety consequences from the TMI-2 accident." The government's position is the same, reflected in a fact sheet distributed today by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency charged with overseeing the U.S. nuclear power industry: TMI, it says, "led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community." [The watchdog group Three Mile Island Alert offers their take on the NRC factsheet here.]

Those upbeat claims are based on the findings of the Kemeny Commission, a panel assembled by President Jimmy Carter in April 1979 to investigate the TMI disaster. Using release figures presented by Metropolitan Edison and the NRC, the commission calculated that in the month following the disaster there were releases of up to 13 million curies of so-called "noble gases" -- considered relatively harmless -- but only 13 to 17 curies of iodine-131, a radioactive form of the element that at even moderate exposures causes thyroid cancer. (A curie is a measure of radioactivity, with 1 curie equal to the activity of one gram of radium. For help understanding these and other terms, see the glossary at the end of this piece.)

But the official story that there were no health impacts from the disaster doesn't jibe with the experiences of people living near TMI. On the contrary, their stories suggest that area residents actually suffered exposure to levels of radiation high enough to cause acute effects -- far more than the industry and the government has acknowledged.

Some of their disturbing experiences were collected in the book Three Mile Island: The People's Testament, which is based on interviews with 250 area residents done between 1979 and 1988 by Katagiri Mitsuru and Aileen M. Smith.

It includes the story of Jean Trimmer, a farmer who lived in Lisburn, Pa. about 10 miles west of TMI. On the evening of March 30, 1979, Trimmer stepped outside on her front porch to fetch her cat when she was hit with a blast of heat and rain. Soon after, her skin became red and itchy as if badly sunburned, a condition known as erythema. About three weeks later, her hair turned white and began falling out. Not long after, she reported, her left kidney "just dried up and disappeared" -- an occurrence so strange that her case was presented to a symposium of doctors at the nearby Hershey Medical Center. All of those symptoms are consistent with high-dose radiation exposure.

There was also Bill Peters, an auto-body shop owner and a former justice of the peace who lived just a few miles west of the plant in Etters, Pa. The day after the disaster, he and his son -- who like most area residents were unaware of what was unfolding nearby -- were working in their garage with the doors open when they developed what they first thought was a bad sunburn. They also experienced burning in their throats and tasted what seemed to be metal in the air. That same metallic taste was reported by many local residents and is another symptom of radiation exposure, commonly reported in cancer patients receiving radiation therapy.

Peters soon developed diarrhea and nausea, blisters on his lips and inside his nose, and a burning feeling in his chest. Not long after, he had surgery for a damaged heart valve. When his family evacuated the area a few days later, they left their four-year-old German shepherd in their garage with 200 pounds of dog chow, 50 gallons of water and a mattress. When they returned a week later, they found the dog dead on the mattress, his eyes burnt completely white. His food was untouched, and he had vomited water all over the garage. They also found four of their five cats dead -- their eyes also burnt white -- and one alive but blinded. Peters later found scores of wild bird carcasses scattered over their property.

Similar stories surfaced in The People of Three Mile Island, a book by documentary photographer Robert Del Tredici. He found local farmers whose cattle and goats died, suffered miscarriages and gave birth to deformed young after the incident; whose chickens developed respiratory problems and died; and whose fruit trees abruptly lost all their leaves. Local residents also collected evidence of deformed plants, some of which were examined by James Gunckel, a botanist and radiation expert with Brookhaven National Laboratory and Rutgers University.

"There were a number of anomalies entirely comparable to those induced by ionizing radiation -- stem fasciations, growth stimulation, induction of extra vegetative buds and stem tumors," he swore in a 1984 affidavit.

Scientists say these kinds of anomalies simply aren't explained by official radiation release estimates.

Evidence of harm

The evidence that people, animals and plants near TMI were exposed to high levels of radiation in the 1979 disaster is not merely anecdotal. While government studies of the disaster as well as a number of independent researchers assert the incident caused no harm, other surveys and studies have also documented health effects that point to a high likelihood of significant radiation exposures.

In 1984, for example, psychologist Marjorie Aamodt and her engineer husband, Norman -- owners of an organic dairy farm east of Three Mile Island who got involved in a lawsuit seeking to stop TMI from restarting its Unit 1 reactor -- surveyed residents in three hilltop neighborhoods near the plant. Dozens of neighbors reported a metallic taste, nausea, vomiting and hair loss as well as illnesses including cancers, skin and reproductive problems, and collapsed organs -- all associated with radiation exposure. Among the 450 people surveyed, there were 19 cancer deaths reported between 1980 and 1984 -- more than seven times what would be expected statistically.

That survey came to the attention of the industry-financed TMI Public Health Fund, created in 1981 as part of a settlement for economic losses from the disaster. The fund's scientific advisors verified the Aamodts' calculations and launched a more comprehensive study of TMI-related cancer deaths led by a team of scientists from Columbia University. The researchers found an association between estimated radiation doses received by area residents and instances of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, lung cancer, leukemia and all cancers combined. Crucially, however, the researchers decided there wasn't "convincing evidence" that TMI radiation releases were linked to the increase in cancers in the area because of the "low estimates of radiation exposure." The paper did not consider what conclusions could be drawn if those "low estimates" turned out to be wrong.

By the time the Columbia research was published in the early 1990s, a class-action lawsuit was underway involving about 2,000 plaintiffs claiming that the radiation emissions were much larger than admitted by the government and industry. (The federal courts eventually rejected that suit, though hundreds of out-of-court settlements totaling millions of dollars have been reached with victims, including the parents of children born with birth defects.)

Consulting for the plaintiffs' attorneys, the Aamodts contacted Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health in Chapel Hill to provide support for the plaintiffs. Dr. Wing was reluctant to get involved because -- as he wrote in a 2003 paper about his experience -- "allegations of high radiation doses at TMI were considered by mainstream radiation scientists to be a product of radiation phobia or efforts to extort money from a blameless industry." But impressed with the Aamodts' compelling if imperfect evidence, Wing agreed to look at whether there were connections between radiation exposure from TMI and cancer rates.

Wing reanalyzed the Columbia scientists' data, looking at cancer rates before the TMI disaster to control for other possible risk factors in the 10-mile area. His peer-reviewed results, published in 1997, found positive relationships between accident dose estimates and rates of leukemia, lung cancer and all cancers. Where the Columbia study found a 30 percent average increase in lung cancer risk among one group of residents, for example, Wing found an 85 percent increase. And while the Columbia researchers found little or no increase in adult leukemias and a statistically unreliable increase in childhood cases, Wing found that people downwind during the most intense releases were eight to 10 times more likely on average than their neighbors to develop leukemia.

Dr. Wing reflected on his findings at a symposium in Harrisburg marking the 30-year anniversary of the Three Mile Island disaster last week.

"I believe this is very good evidence that releases were thousands of times greater than the story we've been told," he said. "As we think about the current plans to open more nuclear reactors, when we hear -- which we hear often -- that no one was harmed at Three Mile Island, we really should question that."

Documenting discrepancies

Randall and Joy Thompson couldn't agree more. If anything, they think Dr. Wing's findings understate the impact of Three Mile Island because they're based on low-ball estimates of radiation releases.

"Given what he was allowed to know or could figure out, he did a slam-bang job of it," Joyce Thompson says.

In 1995, the Thompsons -- with the help of another health physics expert who was also hired to monitor radiation after the TMI disaster, David Bear (formerly Bloombaum) - prepared a report analyzing the Kemeny Commission findings. Their research, which hasn't been covered by any major media, documents a series of inconsistencies and omissions in the government's account.

For example, the official story is that the TMI incident released only 13 to 17 curies of dangerous iodine into the outside environment, a tiny fraction of the 13 million curies of less dangerous radioactive gases officials say were released, primarily xenon. Such a number would seem small compared with, for example, the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, which released anywhere from 13 million to 40 million curies of iodine and is linked to 50,000 cases of thyroid cancer, according to World Health Organization estimates.

But the Thompsons and Bear point out that the commission's own Technical Assessment Task Force, in a separate volume, had concluded that iodine accounted for 8 to 12 percent of the total radioactive gases leaked from Three Mile Island. Conservatively assuming the 13 million curie figure was the total amount of radioactive gases released rather than just the xenon portion, and then using the Task Force's own 8 to 12 percent estimate of the proportion that was iodine, they point out that "the actual figure for Iodine release would be over 1 million curies" -- a much more substantial public health threat.

In another instance, the Kemeny Commission claimed that there were 7.5 million curies of iodine present in TMI's primary loop, the contained system that delivers cooling water to the reactor. But a laboratory analysis done on March 30 found a higher concentration of iodine in the reactor water, which would put the total amount of iodine present -- and which could potentially leak into the environment -- at 7.65 million curies.

"Thus, while the apparent difference between 7.5 and 7.65 seems inconsiderable at first glance," the Thompson/Bear report states, "this convenient rounding off served to 'lose' a hundred and fifty thousand curies of radioactive Iodine."

They also offer evidence of atmospheric releases of dangerously long-lived radioactive particles such as cesium and strontium -- releases denied by the Kemeny Commission but indicated in the Thompsons' own post-disaster monitoring and detailed in the report -- and show that there were pathways for the radiation to escape into the environment. They demonstrate that the plant's radiation filtration system was totally inadequate to handle the large amounts of radiation released from the melted fuel and suggest that the commission may have arbitrarily set release estimates at levels low enough to make the filtration appear adequate.

Shockingly, they also report that when readings from the dosimeters used to monitor radiation doses to workers and the public were logged, doses of beta radiation -- one of three basic types along with alpha and gamma -- were simply not recorded, which Joy Thompson knew since she did the recording. But Thompson's monitoring equipment also indicated that beta radiation represented about 90 percent of the radiation to which TMI's neighbors were exposed in April 1979, which means an enormous part of the disaster's public health risk may have been wiped from the record.

Finally, in a separate analysis the Thompsons point to discrepancies in government and industry accounts of the disaster that suggest the TMI Unit 2 suffered a scram failure -- that is, a breakdown of the emergency shutoff system. That would mean the nuclear reaction spiraled out of control and therefore posed a much greater danger than the official story allows.

The Thompsons aren't the only ones who have produced evidence that the radiation releases from TMI were much higher than the official estimates. Arnie Gundersen -- a nuclear engineer and former nuclear industry executive turned whistle-blower -- has done his own analysis, which he shared for the first time at a symposium in Harrisburg last week.

"I think the numbers on the NRC's website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000," he said.

Exactly how much radiation was released is impossible to say, since onsite monitors immediately went off the scale after the explosion. But Gundersen points to an inside report by an NRC manager who himself estimated the release of about 36 million curies -- almost three times as much as the NRC's official estimate. Gundersen also notes that industry itself has acknowledged there was a total of 10 billion curies of radiation inside the reactor containment. Using the common estimate that a tenth of it escaped, that means as much as a billion curies could have been released to the environment.

Gundersen also offered compelling evidence based on pressure monitoring data from the plant that shortly before 2 p.m. on March 28, 1979 there was a hydrogen explosion inside the TMI containment building that could have released significant amounts of radiation to the environment. The NRC and industry to this day deny there was an explosion, instead referring to what happened as a "hydrogen burn." But Gundersen noted that affidavits from four reactor operators confirm that the plant manager was aware of a dramatic pressure spike after which the internal pressure dropped to outside pressure; he also noted that the control room shook and doors were blown off hinges. In addition, Gundersen reported that while Metropolitan Edison would have known about the pressure spike immediately from monitoring equipment, it didn't notify the NRC about what had happened until two days later.

Gundersen maintains under the NRC's own rules an evacuation should have been ordered on the disaster's first day, when calculated radiation exposures in the town of Goldsboro, Pa. were as high as 10 rems an hour compared to an average cumulative annual background dose of about 0.125 rems. No evacuation order was ever issued, though Gov. Dick Thornburgh did issue an evacuation advisory on March 30 for pregnant women and preschool children within 5 miles of the plant. The government also did not distribute potassium iodide to the public, which would have protected people from the health-damaging effects of radioactive iodine.

Lessons for the future?

When asked by Facing South to respond to these allegations, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not address them directly, instead stating that it continues to stand by the Kemeny Commission report. The NRC further insists that the radiation releases from Three Mile Island had only "negligible effects" on the physical health of humans and the environment, citing other reports from federal agencies [For a PDF of the NRC's response to Facing South, see here.]

But Gundersen and the Thompsons argue such claims don't address new findings at odds with the government's account.

"I believe [the] data shows releases from TMI were significantly greater than reported by the federal government," Gundersen says.

They also say their findings that releases were potentially much larger have important ramifications for current plans to expand the nuclear power industry.

With more than $18 billion in federal subsidies at stake, 17 companies are seeking federal licenses to build a total of 26 nuclear reactors across the country, the first applications since the 1979 disaster. The Atlanta-based Southern Co. plans to begin site work this summer for two new reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia, where state lawmakers recently approved legislation forcing ratepayers to foot the bill for those facilities up front. Florida and South Carolina residents have also begun paying new utility charges to finance planned reactors, USA Today reports. Plans are in the works as well for new reactors in Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Harold Denton, a retired NRC official who worked in Three Mile Island during the crisis, recently told Greenwire that changes made after the 1979 disaster "significantly reduced the overall risks of a future serious accident." But the Thompsons and Gundersen point out that the standards the NRC is applying to the new generation of nuclear plants are influenced by assumptions about what happened at Three Mile Island. They say the NRC's low estimates of radiation exposure have resulted in inadequate requirements for safety and containment protocols as well as the size of the evacuation zones around nuclear plants.

Other nuclear watchdogs have also raised concerns that the NRC's standards for protection against severe accidents like TMI remain inadequate. In a December 2007 report titled "Nuclear Power in a Warming World," the Union of Concerned Scientists notes that the worst accident the current generation of reactors was designed to withstand involves only partial melting of the reactor core but no breach of containment. And the NRC requires operators of plants found to be vulnerable to severe accidents to fix the problem "only if a cost-benefit analysis shows that the financial benefit of a safety backfit - determined by assigning a dollar value to the number of projected cancer deaths that would result from a severe accident - outweighs the cost of fixing the problem," the report states.

Given their personal experiences, the Thompsons warn that we may be fooling ourselves into believing nuclear power is safer than evidence and history suggest.

"Once you realize how deep and broad the realignment of facts about TMI has been, it becomes really pretty amazing," Randall Thompson says. "I guess that's what it takes to protect this industry."

Troubled Waters Hard To Bridge

ISTANBUL (IPS) - The fifth World Water Forum (WWF) held in Istanbul ended Sunday with wide- ranging differences among governments and groups with an interest in water.

The forum adopted a declaration calling for "new and adequate resources" for the water sector. It also stressed the need for increased vigilance against corruption and for preparedness for climate change.

But the final declaration by close to 100 ministers made no mention of the hotly contested issue whether water is a human right or a commodity to be traded like oil, gas or gold. It only described access to safe drinking water and sanitation as "a basic human need."

This led to a counter declaration by delegations from Bolivia, Uruguay, Spain, Guatemala, Ecuador, Cuba and Chile, drawing support also from Bangladesh, Benin, Chad, Ethiopia, Honduras, Morocco, Namibia, Niger, Panama, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, Switzerland and South Africa. "We recognise that access to water and sanitation is a human right and we are committed to all necessary actions for the progressive implementation of this right," the dissident statement said.

The European Parliament also supported water as a "fundamental and universal right," according to a statement read by Cristina Gutierrez- Cortinez, Member of the European Parliament from Spain. About 250 parliamentarians and close to 100 mayors too said they recognised water as a basic human right.

The dissenting views received support from the president of the UN General Assembly Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, who said in a message to the forum on the eve of its closure that "water is a public trust, a common heritage of people and nature, and a fundamental human right. I am convinced that we must challenge the notion that water is a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market."

Also dividing the forum was the issue who should call such meetings. So far it has been the World Water Council (WWC), an international organisation based in Marseille, France, which is not a part of the United Nations. The WWC has some 300 members from 60 countries representing governments and their agencies, international organisations including some UN agencies, water professionals, business interests and NGOs.

The council considers itself a "multi-stakeholder" open to all those interested in the water sector. But its legitimacy was questioned by a coalition of labour and civil society groups from 70 countries at an alternative forum.

The coalition described the WWC as a creation of business interests seeking to privatise water for profit. It asked instead that "polices about water be decided in an open, transparent and democratic forum rather than a trade show for the world's largest water corporations." The WWC counts 40 business groups among its 300 members.

Maude Barlow, advisor to the UN General Assembly president, characterised WWC members as "water lords" without a legitimate mandate, and demanded that future forums be held under the auspices of the UN.

Benin, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay and Venezuela called on "states to develop a global water forum within the framework of the United Nations, based on the principles of democracy, full participation, equity, transparency and social inclusion."

But business had its say. Jack Moss of the group Business Action for Water told the closing session: "Without water, there is no business. Without business, there is no water."

Despite divergences, both the forum and its opponents agreed on the severity of the water crisis and that this was likely to deteriorate once climate change hits water and leads to shortages where water is needed most and flooding where the need is least.

UN figures show that some 1 billion people lack access to clean drinking water. In 2025, roughly 40 percent of the world population will be living in water-scarce regions.

Bush Rules on Toxic Mercury from Power Plants Overturned

The Supreme Court declines to review the case, forcing the EPA to impose mandatory cuts in mercury pollution
The Supreme Court today denied an industry request to reconsider a lower court ruling against a Bush administration rule on mercury emissions from power plants.
The court announced today that it would not review a decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, requested by the Utility Air Regulatory Group, to overturn the Clean Air Mercury Rule.

The utility group asked the court to review the case last fall, arguing that the Bush administration had legally decided not to regulate power plants under the Clean Air Act's Section 112, which requires the strictest emission controls, in order to allow for a more flexible cap-and-trade approach favored by utilities.
Attorneys for the Bush administration's Justice Department also requested a Supreme Court hearing on the mercury case last fall, but the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court earlier this month to drop the request for review.
The court today also granted the Obama administration's request to dismiss the Bush administration's appeal.
Obama's EPA this month announced plans to develop maximum achievable control technology, or MACT, standards for electric utilities that force each individual plant to curb their emissions, as opposed to the Bush administration's cap-and-trade approach that the federal appeals court struck down.

John Walke, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the Obama administration would end eight years of efforts to stave off mercury controls for power plants. "That shameful era is at an end, but thankfully now we can all look forward to strong MACT standards that will sharply reduce mercury emissions from power plants," Walke said.
The utility group maintains that EPA had lawfully decided not to regulate coal- and oil-fired power plants under the stricter section of the Clean Air Act, said Lee Zeugin, the industry group's counsel and an attorney at Hunton & Williams. "I guess we're going to move forward with MACT [standards]," Zeugin said, adding that the group remains concerned about whether EPA has the legal authority to require stricter controls from power plants.
The agency will now embark on several years of MACT rulemaking for power plants with no mercury regulations in place in the meantime, Zeugin said. When the final rule is released, "I'm sure UARG will challenge EPA's authority to do any of it," he said.

Prius: It’s Not Just a Car, It’s an Emergency Generator

By Kate Galbraith and Pointer.
The Prius has a new use, and it does not involve driving. The Harvard Press — which serves the Massachusetts town of Harvard as opposed to the university — reported that the car’s battery helped keep the lights on for some locals during the recent ice storms.
The newspaper reports that John Sweeney, a resident who lost power, “ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan and several lights through his Prius, for three days, on roughly five gallons of gas.”
Said Mr. Sweeney, in an e-mail message to The Press: “When it looked like we were going to be without power for awhile, I dug out an inverter (which takes 12v DC and creates 120v AC from it) and wired it into our Prius.”

According to the newspaper, “the device allowed the engine to run every half hour, automatically charging the car battery and indirectly supplying the required power.” (The Times reported on a similar venture last year.)
In fact, this development, which comes at a tough time for Toyota, which makes the Prius, may not be as strange as it sounds. Mr. Sweeney’s tinkering is along the lines of the “smart grid” technology that many utility executives and other experts say lies in our future. The idea is that the battery of an electric car — a plug-in, in most smart-grid scenarios — can feed power to the electricity grid when the grid needs it.
Even President-elect Barack Obama has endorsed this idea, as seen toward the end of this YouTube clip in which he said: “We’re going to have to have a smart grid if we want to use plug-in hybrids — then we want to be able to have ordinary consumers sell back the electricity that’s generated.”
O yes, Rachel Maddow is great, Barack Obama is greater and where do you get them both together? Simpel, watch this:

Mr. Sweeney, out of necessity, got there first. But Pointer has with part 2 of the Rachel and Obama talk the last blast of a hit:
Sometimes you need some inspiring talk to energize.

Drillers break into magma chamber

Source caption: This is a three-dimensional perspective view of a false-color image of the eastern part of the Big Island of Hawaii. It was produced using all three radar frequencies -- X-band, C-band and L-band -- from the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) flying on the space shuttle Endeavour, overlaid on a U.S. Geological Survey digital elevation map. Visible in the center of the image in blue are the summit crater (Kilauea Caldera) which contains the smaller Halemaumau Crater, and the line of collapse craters below them that form the Chain of Craters Road.
The image was acquired on April 12, 1994 during orbit 52 of the space shuttle. The area shown is approximately 34 by 57 kilometers (21 by 35 miles) with the top of the image pointing toward northwest. The image is centered at about 155.25 degrees west longitude and 19.5 degrees north latitude. The false colors are created by displaying three radar channels of different frequency. Red areas correspond to high backscatter at L-HV polarization, while green areas exhibit high backscatter at C-HV polarization. Finally, blue shows high return at X-VV polarization. Using this color scheme, the rain forest appears bright on the image, while the green areas correspond to lower vegetation. The lava flows have different colors depending on their types and are easily recognizable due to their shapes.
It has been described as a geologist's dream - a unique opportunity to study up close the volcanic processes that built the Earth's continents.
Drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber.
Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several metres before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study.
Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made.
"This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat," the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, professor told BBC News.
"Before, all we had to deal with were lava flows; but they are the end of a magma's life. They're lying there on the surface, they've de-gassed. It's not the natural habitat.

"It's the difference between looking at dinosaur bones in a museum and seeing a real, living dinosaur roaming out in the field."
Professor Marsh has been discussing the discovery here at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting 2008.

In control
This is not the first time drillers have encountered magma; the depth of the hit and the setting are, however, thought to be unique.
The exploratory well was being put down in the east of Hawaii's Big Island, through the basalt lava fields formed by Kilauea Volcano.
The idea was to find steam from waters heated deep underground in fractured rock, to drive turbines on the surface to generate electricity. The company behind the project, Puna Geothermal Venture, has had a successful power operation in the area for 15 years.
But the drillers were shocked - not only to hit magma but to also hit such a big heat source at the relatively shallow depth of 2.5km.
"It's hotter than hell; it's over a thousand degrees centigrade," said Professor Marsh.
Bill Teplow, a consulting geologist with US Geothermal Inc, who oversaw the drilling, stressed there was no risk of an explosion or of a volcanic eruption at the site.
"It was easily controlled in the well bore because of the magma's highly viscous nature. It flowed up the well bore 5-10m but then the cool drilling fluid caused it to solidify and stop flowing," said Mr Teplow.
"At no time were we in danger of losing control of the well."

The breakthrough was made in 2005. Only now are researchers confident enough about their work to discuss the details publicly.
They are not sure how large the magma chamber is, but some initial testing suggests it may have been put in place by activity from Kilauea in the 1950s, perhaps even the 1920s.Professor Marsh said the chamber was docile and slowly cooling. The consistency of the magma was like chilled pancake syrup, he said.
It is hoped the site can now become a laboratory, with a series of cores drilled around the chamber to better characterise the crystallisation changes occurring in the rock as it loses temperature.
The magma is a dacite, making it chemically distinct from the basalt which forms nearly the entire mass of the Hawaiian Islands and the surrounding oceanic crust. It has a much higher silica content.
Dacite magma chemistry is similar to that of the granitic core of the continents. Professor Marsh said the Puna material, therefore, may represent the first time that the actual process of differentiation of continental-type rock from primitive oceanic basalt had been observed in situ.
"Granites are about 75% SiO2 and basalts are about 50%. Average continental material is probably in between, at about 60%," explained Professor Marsh.
"Here's one that turns out to be 67% silica. It's up there; it's a very respectable silicic magma. And it's in the middle of the ocean, and it could be this is how continents could have been started to be built on the planet."
Geothermal experts are also fascinated by the event. The Kilauea encounter is by far the shallowest and the hottest encounter of rock in a commercial operation, and it will be studied to see if there are lessons that can be applied to electrical generation project elsewhere in the world.
"We were at about 2.5km which is pretty routine drilling depth," explained Mr Teplow.
"But that is half the depth of experimental projects in Europe and Australia where they are drilling very deep into hot granite - some 5-5.5km down - and getting 260C rock; and here we're getting 1,050C rock."

Open letter from Dr. Gerhard Knies (DESERTEC):

Dear supporters of the DESERTEC Concept,
the original visions of the Transmediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation TREC of EUMENA as a "Community for Development, Climate Stabilisation and Good Neighbourhood", as conceived in the TREC founding paper from October 6th 2003 (see attachment - it is very interesting to read this over 5 years old paper!) are beginning to become a reality, thanks to the Union for the Mediterranean and its Mediterranean Solar Plan (MSP).
This is a very good message to all of us who worked for this goal since 5 years.
In fact, essential targets of the MSP are based on the DESERTEC Concept presented in our White Paper summarizing the DLR studies MED- and TRANS-CSP, and furthermore, as a senior member of the French Ministry for economy and finance told me at the end of the Ministerial meeting on the Solar Plan, on Saturday, 22/11 in Paris, also the conception of the Solar Plan was directly stimulated by our work. After the sessions had ended, he approached me to tell me: " Mr. Knies, you should know: TREC is the father of the Solar Plan."
I replied that each success has many fathers, and that I know that there are many who contributed! But he insisted that our work gave the decisive kick to the French government, at the end of 2007.
He told me that he had been reading the TREC web sites since some time and that he copied material, in particular the fresh White Paper on DESERTEC, and gave it to colleagues in the government who were working on the plans for the Mediterranean Union (now: Barcelona Proces: Union for the Mediterranean), and that the information about the DESERTEC Concept was recieved with great interest.
Indeed, I remember how we were surprised when Michael Straub was approached by the French Embassy in Berlin because of the DESERTEC Concept, on January 17th 2008, and then at January 25th, when I received an e-mail from Tristan Mocilnikar from the French Presidential office which said: "We are very much interested in these ideas. Can we have a talk about that?"
We immediately had one and several long phone conversations followed.
The approach by the French embassy was triggered by our presentation of the DESERTEC-Concept at the "Zukunftssalon" of 4 MdBs (Hans-Josef Fell, Josef Göppel, Michael Kauch, and Michael Müller) in Dresdener Bank, at November-6 2007, and the approach by the Presidential Office went back to a recommendation to Tristan Mocilnikar by Paul Suding from REN21.
The DESERTEC Concept had also been brought to the attention of the European Parliament at a public event, organized by 4 MEPs (Matthias Groote, Rebecca Harms, Vittorio Prodi and Anders Wijkman) in Brussels, by His Royal Highness Prince Hassan bin Talal from Jordan, on November 28th, and by handing over of the White Paper to the Parliament's president Prof. Gert Pöttering. As a follow up, this presentation led later to an appeal of 25 MEPs to the President of the European Council, Nicolas Sarkozy, and to the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso.
Our communication with the French authorities in January then lead to an invitation to the French embassy in Berlin at February 12th, to a 2+1/2 hour meeting with 3 representatives from the embassy, where we then were asked about many details and about the status of the DESERTEC project.
At this meeting we were assured that France was seriously looking into solar energy projects with the intent to create cooperation between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, along the lines rolled out in the DESERTEC Concept, even though France was pushing for nuclear energy projects in this region at the same time. We were informed that its nuclear power plans France would continue to pursue bilaterally and
directly with countries in this region. The solar energy projects as envisaged in the MED-CSP and TRANS-CSP studies of DLR and then summarized in our White Paper "The DESERTEC Concept", would be needed in addition for the upcoming power demands, and could be the core of joint efforts in the EUMENA region and become an important activity of the Union for the Mediterranean.
We were also asked if we would know or what we would expect how the German government might react when approached with this proposal.
The DESERTEC Concept then became a basic part of the first French preliminary working paper for the Solar Plan from February 6th.
The communication and the cooperation with French President's office and with French government branches in the run-up to the July 13th event was very pleasant. We are glad that we not only contributed to the CSP studies for the German Government, but by our work also to the transfer of the outcome of these studies to European politics.
Now there is the Solar Plan, and it is officially called the flagship project of the Union for the Mediterranean!
This is exactly what TREC originally wanted to achieve, but it is more than most of us believed we ever would achieve.
With pleasure we here acknowledge the role of Minister Jürgen Trittin, who approved the financial support for the DLR-studies so swiftly at the end of 2003, and the approval of the AQUA-CSP study by BMU under Minister Sigmar Gabriel. We also enjoyed supporting efforts from various sides, in particular from the Potsdam Institute of Climate Change Impact Research (PIK), from the e-parliament network, and from ESTELA association.

I thought you all should be informed on this very important process.

The new DESERTEC Foundation will now accompany and support the further development of this great endeavour, to make it a real success on the ground, and to spread this concept to other parts of the world with the aim: DESERTEC - clean power from deserts for a sustainable world of 10 billion people.

My best regards,
Gerhard

PS: feel free to pass on this e-mail to further people with an interest
in DESERTEC.

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New Solar Balloon Creates 400 Times More Energy Than The Average Solar Cell

There are many new forms of alternative energy but maybe none as interesting as the Cool Earth Solar “Balloon.” The concept behind this design is that they create an “inflatable plastic thin-film balloon (solar concentrator) that, upon inflation, focuses sunlight onto a photovoltaic cell held at its focal point.

The design produces 400 times the electricity that a solar cell would create without the company’s concentrator.” Cool Earth has already began construction on a power plant in Livermore, CA that will utilize this new technology. The plant is modest in size, creating only 1.4 Megawatts but if this plant works as well as they expect it to, they plan on launching a full sized plant next summer. One great thing about this device is that it’s made up of a very common and cheap material. “Plastic thin film is abundant and cheap,” said Cool Earth Solar CEO Rob Lamkin. “It only costs two dollars for the plastic material necessary for our solar concentrator.”

It’s ideas like this that I think will stick. It’s cost efficient. It’s made of an easy to find material and it’s an environmentally sound concept.

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Geothermal Energy in the Military

In the middle of the Mojave Desert, a nondescript two-story building behind a gated fence houses an unlikely group of geologists. Their lineage is strong: several generations of prospectors have been drawn to dig in this dry corner. Within 100 kilometers of the geologists' base near China Lake, Calif., 19th-century gold diggers stumbled on riches, and later oilmen got lucky in the same inhospitable soil. Now these earth-minded fellows have grand ambitions of their own. Their aim is to turn the U.S. Department of Defense into one of the world's largest users of geothermal energy.

Their vision isn't all a pipe dream. The rising cost of fuel has the Pentagon pressuring the four branches of the armed services to cut their energy bills wherever they can. It's easy to see why—every US $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil costs the Air Force, for example, an extra $600 million. The Army, Navy, and Marines, too, are tearing through their budgets. In response, energy managers at bases across the country are reevaluating how they light, insulate, heat, and cool their buildings. The most ambitious of these managers have begun aggressively adopting renewable-energy technologies. Together they have emerged as a distributed network of clean-energy advocates. The irony, of course, is that these military men and women should form such a group at the heart of one of the most energy-intensive operations on the planet. Read more:

Rescued Pinguins Back to Sea

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Palin Nixes Nuclear Energy for Iran

By Glenn Kessler
During last Thursday's vice presidential debate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin appeared to break with the Bush administration's current policy on Iran: "Now a leader like [Iranian leader Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad who is not sane or stable when he says things like that is not one whom we can allow to acquire nuclear energy, nuclear weapons."
From Palin's statement, it wasn't clear if she meant Iran cannot have nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, or if she was simply correcting herself, replacing "nuclear weapons" after first mistakenly saying "nuclear energy."

But Randy Scheunemann, foreign policy director for the McCain-Palin campaign, said in an e-mail that Palin "stated Sen. McCain's and her position accurately" when she said Iran should also not have access to nuclear energy.
"There is no circumstance under which the international community could be confident that uranium enrichment or plutonium production activities undertaken by the current government of Iran are purely for peaceful purposes," Scheunemann said. "Given the Iranian regime's history of deception with regard to its nuclear program, its continuing lack of cooperation with the IAEA, its still unacknowledged work on weaponization, its defiance of international norms with regard to support for terrorism and threats toward Israel, and the lack of any serious economic justification for the program in the first place, Iran has forfeited any plausible claim to be pursuing a 'peaceful' nuclear energy program."
Scheunemann's comments seem to place McCain and Palin to the right of current Bush policy, suggesting that an incoming Republican administration would revert to the position taken during Bush's first term, when the president and his aides were scornful of Iran's quest for nuclear energy.

In 2005, during Bush's second term, the administration made an important shift in its position, largely at the request of European allies. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that Iran had a right to nuclear energy -- just not control over the fuel cycle that might allow for the diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program.
"Iran can have civil nuclear energy, if that's what they want," Rice explained in an interview last week. "We have talked with the Europeans about even some of the most advanced civil nuclear technology to Iran if it will forgo enrichment and reprocessing. So this is not an issue of denying Iran certain technologies. There's plenty in this for Iran."

Scheunemann, in his e-mail, did hint at some flexibility on the question of nuclear power for Iran. "The simple fact is that Iran does not need to be able to produce nuclear fuel in Iran; there is no reason it cannot rely on an International Uranium Enrichment Center (IUEC) along the lines that Russia has proposed, or other foreign sources of supply," he wrote.
However, he and McCain spokesman Brian Rogers have not responded to repeated inquiries since Friday to explain whether the door was partially open to nuclear energy for Iran -- or if Palin's categorical statement stood as the campaign's final word on the subject.

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A Gift From the ’70s: Energy Lessons

The presidential candidates claim to see America’s energy future, but their competing visions have a certain vintage quality. They’ve revived that classic debate: the hard path versus the soft path.
The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants — the technologies that Senator Barack Obama emphasizes in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about building nuclear power plants, the quintessential hard path.

As a rule, it’s not a good idea to revive anything from the 1970s. But this debate is the exception, and not just because the threat of global warming has raised the stakes. The old lessons are as good a guide as any to the future, as William Tucker argues in “Terrestrial Energy,” his history of the hard-soft debate.

The initial debate over nuclear power seemed to end not long after the partial meltdown in 1979 of the reactor at Three Mile Island. Utilities canceled orders and stopped building reactors, partly because of public fears, but perhaps mainly because of rising costs. Mr. Lovins and his allies liked to say that nuclear power, once promoted as “too cheap to meter,” had now become “too expensive to matter.”

The soft path seemed to be the way to go, particularly when some of Mr. Lovins’s predictions about energy conservation came true. As Americans cut back in response to higher prices and new incentives, the growth in electricity demand slowed. Some public officials, most enthusiastically in California, told utilities to stop building large power plants. Instead, they subsidized wind farms and solar power, which were supposed to be cheap and plentiful alternatives once the technologies matured.

Instead, they remained so costly and scarce that Californians’ electricity rates were among the highest in America. They endured rolling blackouts in 2000 while paying astronomical prices for power from nuclear and fossil-fuel plants in other states. The crisis was attributed to price controls and Enron’s market manipulation, but the underlying problem was a shortage of power that forced the state to start building old-fashioned fossil-fuel plants for itself.

Meanwhile, there was a surprise on the hard path, too. Once utilities stopped building reactors, the share of electricity from nuclear power was projected to decline steadily as the oldest reactors were retired. But then several new “merchant energy” companies began assembling fleets of reactors sold off by local utilities. The new owners standardized operations, retrained workers and brought in human-factor engineers to redesign the famously indecipherable control panels.

Under the old owners, the reactors were balky white elephants operating only 60 percent of the time. By improving maintenance and preventing mistakes, the new owners kept them running 90 percent of the time and won permission to upgrade their capacities. So even as the nuclear industry was shrinking in the last two decades as the oldest reactors shut down, the remaining ones were profitably generating an increasing share of the country’s electricity.

Today about 20 percent of electricity in America is generated by nuclear power, which is about 20 times the contribution from solar and wind power. Nuclear power also costs less, according to Gilbert Metcalf, an economist at Tufts University. After estimating the costs and factoring out the hefty tax breaks for different forms of low-carbon energy, he estimates that new nuclear plants could produce electricity more cheaply than windmills, solar power or “clean coal” plants.

The outlook could change, of course, if new nuclear plants turn out to be more expensive than expected, or if engineers make breakthroughs in other technologies. (To debate these possibilities, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.) Given the uncertainties, Dr. Metcalf cautions, it would be risky to bet everything on nuclear power as the answer to global warming.

But it seems even riskier to bet on just the soft path, as so many greens are doing, either by flatly opposing nuclear power or by setting so many conditions that no plants could be built for decades, if ever. (Mr. Obama says nuclear power is necessary but should not be expanded until security and safety issues are addressed.)

“The nuclear debate is still stuck back in the 1980s,” says Mr. Tucker, the author of “Terrestrial Energy,” the new brand he’s trying to affix to nuclear power. If people started associating nuclear plants with natural radioactive processes in the Earth instead of atomic bombs, he says, they might be persuaded that it’s the most environmentally benign form of energy, particularly compared with wind farms that cover scenic ridges and the vast solar arrays proposed for “empty” land in deserts.

Mr. Tucker, a journalist who has been debunking environmental alarms for decades, says he has come around to Al Gore’s view on the danger of global warming, and he’d like environmentalists to rethink their views, too.

“Even when greens give grudging support to nuclear power,” he says, “they add the caveat, ‘But first we have to make sure the plants are absolutely safe’ — as if reactors haven’t been operating safely for 25 years. Nobody recognizes the complete overhaul that has occurred in the industry or how it’s now pumping out twice as much electricity from the same plants with a vastly improved safety record.”

By scaring people about the tiny levels of radiation emitted during the normal operation of a nuclear plant, Mr. Tucker says, greens have effectively encouraged the construction of coal plants that actually release more radiation because of the traces of uranium in coal dust. He argues that the risks of terrorist attacks and nuclear waste have been exaggerated, particularly by the environmentalists who objected when the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste depository was being designed to guarantee a level of safety for only 10,000 years.

They successfully sued to enforce a safety standard extending one million years — which, in an ideal world, would be a very nice standard. But if you believe global warming is a planetary crisis that must be addressed immediately, should you really be obsessing about hypothetical dangers near one mountain in A.D. 1,000,000? If there’s already a proven technology that doesn’t spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, why fiddle while coal burns?

Filipinos Draw Power From Buried Heat

ORMOC, Philippines -- Ferdinand Marcos, the despot who ruled here for 21 years, is remembered mainly for the staggering quantity of his wife's shoes. But there is another Marcos legacy, and it is drawing new attention at a time of high oil prices, global warming and urgent questions about the role of government in alternative energy development.
Reacting to the early 1970s oil shock, Marcos created a major government program to find, develop and generate electricity from hot rocks deep in the ground. Since then, the Philippine government has championed this form of energy.
Geothermal power now accounts for about 28 percent of the electricity generated in the Philippines. With 90 million people, about 40 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day, this country has become the world's largest consumer of electricity from geothermal sources. Billions of dollars have been saved here because of reduced need for imported oil and coal.
"Goes to show that things aren't always the way we might expect," said Roland N. Horne, a Stanford University expert on geothermal power who has visited this country more than 20 times. "The Philippines would be in hugely worse shape without geothermal as an indigenous energy source."
In installed geothermal power capacity, the country ranks No. 2 in the world, narrowly trailing the United States, which has far more geothermal potential, far more engineering talent and far greater demand for clean sustainable power.
But unlike in the Philippines, government policy in the United States has been inconsistent. In 2006, the Bush administration cut most geothermal spending -- federal programs that received as much as $100 million a year in the 1980s shrank to $5 million. Research projects were dismantled. Scientists in the field had to find other jobs.

"Most of the federal infrastructure, the laboratories and the researchers are now gone," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association in Washington.

More...

Solar Projects Draw New Opposition

Link
WHAT’S not to like about solar power? Sunlight is clean, quiet and abundant. If enough of it were harnessed and turned into electricity, it could be the solution to the energy crisis. But surprisingly, solar power projects are running into mounting opposition — and not from hard-nosed, coal-fired naysayers, but from environmentalists.
NATIVE Opponents are concerned about the impact on animals like the desert tortoise.
The opposition is particularly strong in Southern California. Aside from abundant sunshine and virtually cloudless skies, the California desert has altitude, so there is less atmospheric interference for the sun’s rays, as well as broad swaths of level land for installing equipment, and proximity to large, electricity-hungry cities.
But it is also home to the Mojave ground squirrel, the desert tortoise and the burrowing owl, and to human residents who describe themselves as desert survivors and who are unhappy about the proliferation of solar projects planned for their home turf.
“We’re tired of everyone looking at the desert like a wasteland,” said Donna Charpied, who lives with her husband, Larry, in Desert Center, Calif., where they have been farming jojoba, a native shrub cultivated for its oil, for 27 years. She is also the policy advocate for the Desert Communities Protection Campaign of the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice.
The United States Bureau of Land Management said it had applications for solar power projects that would cover 78,490 acres in the area around the Charpieds’ farm, which abuts Joshua Tree National Park. For the entire United States, the total number of applications is far greater, growing from zero less than two years ago to more than 125 projects with a combined electrical potential of 70,000 megawatts, the equivalent of the electrical capacity of about 70 large coal-fired power plants.
Investors, developers and speculators filed so many applications with the bureau that in May it declared a moratorium on new ones. On July 2, overwhelmed by protests, it reversed itself and ended the moratorium.
The land rush is being driven in large part by a California law that calls for 20 percent of the state’s electricity to come from renewable resources by 2010.
The California Public Utilities Commission said the state was falling behind in meeting that goal. It estimated that California’s electric utilities would have to build or buy 3,000 megawatts of renewable resources over the next two years to meet the 20 percent target. So the utilities are scrambling to find renewable resources, and developers are working furiously to build projects.
Last month, Pacific Gas and Electric, based in San Francisco, signed contracts to buy the electricity produced by projects under development in San Luis Obispo County by two companies, OptiSolar and the SunPower Corporation, which are expected to come on line between 2010 and 2013.
This sudden flood of solar power projects not only caught the staff of the Bureau of Land Management off guard, it also surprised some environmentalists. “Many community groups are up in arms” about the projects planned in the Mojave Desert and Coachella Valley regions, said D’Anne Albers, the California desert associate for Defenders of Wildlife, citing plans by OptiSolar, BrightSource Energy and FPL Energy.
Jim Harvey, a founder of the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, an environmental group in Joshua Tree, said: “Our position is that none of this is needed. We support renewable energy, and we support California’s renewable energy targets, but we think it can be done through rooftop solar.”
Mr. Harvey said that if Germany, which is as far north as the Canadian city of Calgary, could have a successful solar power program that relies heavily on rooftops, so could the United States. Germany’s solar program works, he said, because the government offers so-called feed-in tariffs — fixed-rate payments for electricity generated from solar panels.
The tariff is the equivalent of about 50 cents a kilowatt hour. The average residential retail rate in the United States is about 11 cents a kilowatt hour, according to the Department of Energy.
Mr. Harvey said the tariff would not have to be that high in the United States. Matching wholesale rates would be sufficient to spur a rush to small solar power. “It’s all about policy,” he said. “Our lawmakers have sold out to the big solar lobby.”
In addition to obstructing views and disrupting habitats, large solar power projects take a toll on the desert’s scarce water supply, environmentalists like Mr. Harvey said. Mirrors and solar panels have to be washed, and some solar projects incorporate steam turbines, which require even more water.
In addition, some solar projects call for grading the land and spraying it with chemicals to inhibit dust or plant growth that can reduce the efficiency of solar panels. Others require backup generators powered by fossil fuels.
These environmentalists favor “distributed generation,” like solar panels on rooftops, and they argue that the leadership of national environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council has gone in the wrong direction.
Terry Frewin, the chairman of the Sierra Club’s California/Nevada desert committee, wrote to the club’s executive director, Carl Pope, in July, criticizing him for backing large-scale solar projects.
“Remote solar arrays destroy all native resources on site, and have indirect and irreversible impacts on surrounding wildernesses,” Mr. Frewin wrote. He urged the Sierra Club to embrace distributed generation as an alternative to the “industrial renewable” option.
Carl Zichella, Western renewable projects director for the Sierra Club, said in response to the letter, “We don’t take a back seat to anyone in caring for the desert.” But he said the group’s position was unchanged.
At the current rate of adding 200 megawatts of rooftop solar power a year, it would take 100 years to meet the 20 percent renewable target that California must meet by 2010, Mr. Zichella said. “What they are proposing is not a solution at all.”
One of the first tests of public land use for large, privately owned solar projects is likely to be over BrightSource Energy’s planned 400-megawatt solar project, which would occupy 3,400 acres on the California border near Primm, Nev.
The project would use an array of mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on a boiler. Steam produced in the boiler would turn a turbine that would generate enough electricity to power 250,000 homes.
John Woolard, the chief executive of BrightSource, cited several ways in which the company was trying to have as little impact as possible on the desert. He said the project would use “dry cooling” technology to condense the steam in the turbines for reuse, keeping water usage to a minimum, and that BrightSource had purposely sought out already disrupted land (it had been used for cattle grazing) for its project.
But in the end, the scale of BrightSource’s project is driven by the efficiencies of the technology. “You get half as much bang for your buck from rooftop solar” as with concentrating solar technology, Mr. Woolard said, adding, “Rooftop solar will never put a dent in California’s renewable targets.”
Currently available commercial photovoltaic technology converts sunlight to electricity at an efficiency rate of 12 percent to 14 percent. (The most efficient power plants can achieve efficiencies of nearly 60 percent.)
Absent an economic incentive, solar power just does not make sense, said Al Forte, principal and director of the clean energy solutions practice at Nexant, an energy industry consulting firm. Lucrative incentives like Germany’s feed-in tariff “tend to warp the reality of the market,” he said.
One of the first battles over a large solar power project was fought on the outskirts of Victorville, Calif., on the western edge of the Mojave. Inland Energy is building a “hybrid” project on 250 acres there for the city of Victorville that will combine solar panels with conventional technology.
In compliance with state law, Inland hired a firm to look for endangered species, including the Mojave ground squirrel and the desert tortoise. No squirrels were found, but three or four tortoises were found. Because no squirrels were found, Inland proposed to the California Department of Fish and Game that it buy one acre of land to offset every acre of lost habitat, said Tom Barnett, executive vice president at Inland. But the department insisted on the three-to-one ratio its rules call for, he said.
“Time is more important than anything else” in project development, Mr. Barnett said, explaining why Inland agreed to the three-to-one ratio. But he noted that it would cost $6.5 million to $10 million to buy and maintain the offsetting acreage for the tortoises.
A family — of human beings — was also living on the site. Inland reached a deal to relocate them at a total cost of $250,000.
“One of the biggest concerns we have,” Mr. Barnett said, “is that ours is just a 50-megawatt project.”
The much larger projects being proposed will be that much more complicated, but Mr. Barnett, who has a master’s in environmental science, is not giving up easily. He has begun work on an identical project in Palmdale, Calif., where the wildlife survey, once again, found no squirrels. He said he was prepared to fight the habitat battle again.
Meanwhile, on the other side off the desert, south of Joshua Tree National Park, Donna Charpied said desert residents of California and Nevada were planning some unspecified action within two months. “The desert will not go quietly into that dark night,” she said.
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