New Mexico (And Some Navajo) Object To 1,500-megawatt Coal-Fired Power Plant
New Mexico officials said Thursday they will appeal an air-quality permit the U.S. federal government granted…The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a permit Thursday for a 1,500-megawatt coal-fired power plant called Desert Rock being developed on Navajo Nation land by the nation’s Dine Power Authority and by energy company Sithe Global Power LLC. The developers estimate the plant will cost $3 billion.
(Via TreeHugger)
I believe coal and nuclear power are the past and micro-prodution and renewable resources are the future.
The Case Against Nuclear
Lovins highlights four problems with nuclear that keep it from competing against cheaper, swifter rivals such as cogeneration, wind and energy efficiency:Cost: Nuclear plants are very expensive to build, and getting more so. Worldwide, construction costs have risen much faster for nuclear plants than non-nuclear plants.
Carbon: Because new nuclear power costs far more than its competitors, it buys far less energy per dollar, and therefore displaces far less coal energy per dollar than other sources of power.
Reliability: When nuclear plants go offline, they fail in billion-watt chunks and take a long time to restart.
Security: Proliferation is greatly facilitated by nuclear power’s flow of materials, equipment, skills, and knowledge, all hidden behind an innocent-looking civilian disguise.
On all these fronts, Lovins says small, distributed energy sources are better buys than nuclear.
Many of the points Amory Lovins makes can also be applied to giant coal-fired power plants. A lot small sources will always be safer than a handful of mammoth producers – safer in terms of environment and safer in terms of failure.
Yes. But what about the hours between past and future?
And from a Europeans POV: how to tell the Chinese, Russians and the US?
Yes, Boris, indeed. And how to tell the Europeans that their Nuclear power plants need to be eliminated – see this. I believe most of France’s electricity comes from nukes and Germany has a bunch as well. Even Switzerland does.
As for Germany, the last government (social democrats + green) has decided that no more nuclear power plants will be built and has agreed on the rest running time of the existing plants. The current government (so called grand coalition) backed this decision. What troubles me, though, is that an energy company like Vattenfall (who serves households in Eastern Germany) is said to acquire energy from plants such as Tschernobyl in Eastern Europe because they don’t get enough energy out of the sources in Germany, among them the renewable energies. But still, these days with the oil price that high are good days for renewable energies in Germany: never have been so many IPOs of companies producing photovoltaic cells etc. It’s kind of booming atm.