Category Archives: dumb ideas

When Utility companies Scream Bloody Murder – You know something is going right

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Passed ON. That is what all this ruckus is about. What does the non technical phrase – pass on mean? Large corporations always say things like, “if you tax us we’ll just pass the costs on customers”. Well that assumes the government is going to let you do that. If the government says, “Nope – can’t do that”. Well, like 2 yros, they can cry and pout, but they can also get sent to their collective rooms. Leave it to PG&E and FLP to try to weasel out of the future.

Then who are these environmental groups in the headline, oh media writer? Its one group in California. Towards the bottom of the piece, and I mean the BOTtom – he says MOST environmental groups are “closer to solar’s position”. Great reading if you are stuck inside by a foot of snow and road conditions that are dangerous. Thank you very much.

https://news.yahoo.com/florida-and-california-consider-changes-that-could-decimate-the-rooftop-solar-market-experts-say-100018985.html

Florida and California consider changes that could ‘decimate the rooftop solar market,’ experts say

Ben Adler

·Senior Climate Editor

California and Florida are considering revoking a policy that has encouraged homeowners to install rooftop solar panels — causing fear among solar panel owners and installers, and creating divisions in the environmental community.

Utility companies in the two states, some sympathetic politicians and even some environmental advocacy groups are taking aim at subsidies to purchase and install solar panels because they say those costs are ultimately passed on to other ratepayers.

The crux of the issue is a practice called “net metering,” in which the electricity solar panel owners send back to the grid is removed from their monthly bill. The credits are applied at the same retail rate at which electricity is sold to consumers. That’s a higher rate than the wholesale price at which utilities buy electricity from large-scale producers. For example, if the retail rate is 30 cents per kilowatt hour, the amount a utility would pay a bulk producer — like a commercial wind farm — might be 15 cents per kilowatt hour. The difference covers the costs of building and maintaining the electric grid and the utility’s other overhead costs. (Utilities’ profit margins more typically come from their capital investments.)

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Go there and read as much as you can stomach. More next week.

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These People Protect Nuclear Waste For 20,000 Years – Hahahahaha

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Excuse me.

https://news.yahoo.com/nrc-fines-owner-former-nuke-220259947.html

NRC fines owner of former nuke plant for 2nd security lapse

WAYNE PARRY
·2 min read

LACEY TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) — For the second time in as many months, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has fined the owners of a former New Jersey nuclear power plant for security-related violations.

The agency said Wednesday it fined Jupiter, Florida-based Holtec Decommissioning International $50,000 for security violations at the former Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in the Forked River section of Lacey Township.

The plant was one of the oldest in the U.S. when it shut down in 2018.

The fine involved a company employee working as an armorer at the plant.

In an investigation that concluded in March 2021, the NRC determined the armorer “deliberately failed to properly perform required annual material-condition inspections of response unit rifles, and falsified related records.”

The plant has several fortified bunkers from which armed security staff can fight off attackers. The NRC said the violation was the work of “a now-former security superintendent.”

 

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Go there and read. More next week

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Handling Hanfords Radioactive Waste – It has been a fiasco from the begining

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What genius decided to put Hanford Nuclear Site so close to the Columbia River that it is about to ruin it for good? Actually whose idea was it to put in a river valley in the first place? They really could have done a much better job. I mean look at the other World War II sites like Tennessee and New Mexico. It is almost collectively like they said, ” Heh’ lets do something like Rocky Mountain Flats in Denver.  But we well do it better”. And now after 80 years and one 12 story failed attempt, they are “excited to get going” with the attempted clean up. Sometimes I do not want to admit I am part of the Human race. sigh.

https://news.yahoo.com/doggone-exciting-historic-treatment-begin-204249785.html

‘Doggone exciting.’ Historic treatment to begin on decades-old Hanford nuclear waste

Annette Cary
·6 min read

Hanford is close to starting the first large-scale pretreatment of the millions of gallons of radioactive waste stored for decades at the site.

In about two months it could start operating around the clock, preparing waste to be fed to the $17 billion vitrification plant to turn it into a stable glass form for disposal.

Hanford officials say that will be a historic moment.

“Being on the verge of the first use of large scale tank waste treatment on the Hanford site is pretty doggone exciting,” said John Eschenberg, president of Hanford’s tank waste contractor, Washington River Protection Solution.

The Department of Energy announced on Tuesday that construction and the readiness assessment of the Tank-Side Cesium Removal. or TSCR, system at Hanford had been completed.

“What a lot of people don’t recognize is the start of tank waste treatment actually starts when TSCR operations begin, so we will be actually treating waste on the industrial scale in just a few months for the first time in the history of the site,” said Brian Vance, the DOE Hanford manager.

The system, placed next to a Hanford underground waste storage tank, was developed in three years as a workaround to the Pretreatment Facility, which stands 12 stories high and covers an area larger than a football field at the vitrification plant.

The Pretreatment Facility was planned to separate waste into low-activity and high-level radioactive waste streams for treatment, but after possible technical issues related to high level waste were identified in 2012, construction on the building stopped.

DOE changed course, deciding to start treating just low activity radioactive waste first and delay treatment of high level radioactive waste for more than a decade.

It estimates that about 90% of the waste in underground tanks could be treated and disposed of in a lined landfill at Hanford as low activity waste.

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I dare you. Go there and read. More next week.

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Leave It In The Ground – Biden should not tap the Petroleum Reserves

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But he will because he is afraid. Generally I have liked the policies that Biden has enacted and the results. But tapping the Petroleum Reserves is not one of them. He is doing it because he is afraid of the effects of inflation on the mid term elections. But it will not change that. Those effects are already present. “Leave it in the ground”, is a slogan for a reason. Once you let fossil fuels out, they will be used. That Biden doesn’t get this is a sign that he is old. Please! Will some of the younger people around him shake him and wake him up. Like Greta says, Old People talk – blah blah blah but they DO Nothing. Wake up Biden, Wake up. Yes the costs may fall but will it be worth the Price.

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/21/1056835748/u-s-emergency-oil-stockpiles-spr-gas-prices

Energy

The U.S. emergency oil stash is in the spotlight as gas prices surge. What to know

A recent surge in gasoline prices has left President Biden scrambling for options to do something about it.

One that’s getting a lot of attention is the possibility that the Biden administration will release crude oil from the country’s emergency oil stockpile, known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Much will depend on oil prices, which have soared over the past year, recovering to their pre-pandemic levels and then some. But after rising to more than $86 a barrel in October, they have since dropped to less than $80.

A lot of factors are affecting prices — including the fact that the White House is now talking about tapping the stockpile.

Here’s an explainer on the country’s oil reserves and whether tapping them would actually be effective.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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We Don’t Need No Stinkin Baseload – What we need is more storage

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By more storage I do not mean Batteries. I mean things like gas and liquid Compression, or liquid transportation. There are other possibilities that are well known like winding springs, etc. The idea of Baseload is in fact obsolete but you can’t tell. She locked into the past when she gushes about building a small Nuke next to an OLD coal plant. She just wants to “substitute” one source for another not write the Future. This administration is so OLD it is frightening. (quick aside – like for the last 100 yrs – how do get rid of the waste?)

https://news.yahoo.com/us-very-bullish-on-new-nuclear-technology-granholm-says-110016617.html

U.S. ‘very bullish’ on new nuclear technology, Granholm says

Ben Adler

·Senior Climate Editor
·6 min read

GLASGOW, Scotland — In an interview at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told Yahoo News on Friday that the Biden administration is “very bullish” on building new nuclear reactors in the United States.

“We are very bullish on these advanced nuclear reactors,” she said. “We have, in fact, invested a lot of money in the research and development of those. We are very supportive of that.”

Nuclear energy is controversial among environmental activists and experts because while it does not create the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, it has the potential to trigger dangerous nuclear meltdowns and creates radioactive nuclear waste.

Most of the Biden administration’s effort to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and almost all the rhetoric at the climate change conference, also known as COP26, is about promoting other clean forms of energy, such as wind and solar power.

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Go there and scream. I mean read. More next week.

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Kyrsten Sinema Should Be Staked Out In The Desert – Stripped naked

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and covered in Honey so the Fire Ants come. Again, why do these people call themselves Democrats? She started out in the “Green” party forgodsakes and now she is fronting for Natural Gas. Arizona is one of the first places to feel Global Warming and she dithers. I say, “String her UP”. This from June and things have only gotten worse.

https://apnews.com/article/voting-rights-government-and-politics-04909b913669631abd3c5a3ed99ee2c7

AP NEWS

Biden calls out 2 Democratic lawmakers for blocking agenda

By ALEXANDRA JAFFE June 1, 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden called out two fellow Democrats on Tuesday in explaining why he hasn’t enacted some of the most ambitious elements of his agenda, noting that slim majorities in the House and evenly divided Senate have hamstrung legislative negotiations around key issues like voting rights.

Biden, speaking during an event marking the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, responded to critics who question why he hasn’t been able to get a wide-reaching voting rights bill passed.

“Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House, and a tie in the Senate — with two members of the Senate who voted more with my Republican friends,” he lamented.

It appeared to be a veiled reference to Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both of whom have frustrated Democrats with their defense of the filibuster — the rule requiring most legislation to win 60 votes to pass, making many of Democrats’ biggest priorities like voting rights and gun control bills dead on arrival in the 50-50 Senate. While Sinema is a sponsor of the voting rights bill that passed the House, known as the For the People Act, Manchin has refused to sign on, calling the measure “too broad.

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Go there and scream in rage. Oh I mean read. More next week.

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I Hope You Rot In Hell Joe Manchin – Why do you even call yourself a Democrat

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Let me very quickly say, that I wish no immediate harm to the simpering moron (sigh). I am not urging anybody anywhere to do any harm to the coal toad.  All I am say is that after he dies of Black Lung, I hope bad things happen to him.

He is not even a Democrat. He is a DINO: Democrat In Name Only. He knows the majority is thin and thus his power is great. So behind the flag of Fiscal Responsibility he argues for a smaller bill. A Bill that can “get paid for”. What gets dropped out of that smaller bill? Surprise! Surprise! The Climate Change program that his coal sucking buddies hate. I mean this is from Vanity Fair for God’s sake.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/joe-manchin-is-about-to-make-life-worse-for-his-own-constituents-and-the-planet

Infrastructure

Joe Manchin Is About to Make Life Worse for His Own Constituents—And the Planet

The West Virginia senator’s reported opposition to programs aimed at helping working families and combating climate change would dramatically dilute the Democrats’ infrastructure plans.

By Eric Lutz

Although Joe Manchin has been holding up Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans for a while now over the price tag, the West Virginia senator has been somewhat cagey about his actual demands. Not as guarded, perhaps, as Kyrsten Sinema, his fellow Democratic holdout; where she has refused to state her terms to anyone outside the White House, Manchin at least engages with his colleagues and speaks publicly about his objections to the reconciliation bill. But he’s been difficult to pin down nonetheless, adding to the frustrations of Democrats as they seek to deliver on the centerpiece of Biden’s domestic agenda.

Finally, while his terms are coming into clearer view, they’re only casting the future of the infrastructure bills in a thicker cloud of uncertainty. Now, the question isn’t only if the Biden bills will pass. It’s whether the bills will be recognizable if they do. Axios on Sunday reported that Manchin has given something of an ultimatum to the White House: He’ll support the child tax credit that would be one of the package’s biggest boosts to working families, but only if it…well, does less to help working families. Manchin is asking for the credit to include a work requirement and an income cap that would make families earning more than $60,000 ineligible for assistance—a demand that would weaken a key part of the spending bill. He is also, as Axios reported, continuing to rail against provisions of the reconciliation bill that are crucial to addressing climate change, supposedly because of concerns that the shift to clean energy the Biden plan would help usher in could cost jobs in the coal state of West Virginia. The Times reported Friday that Manchin, who personally has financial ties to the coal industry, opposes “a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy” that’s seen as key to Biden’s climate agenda.

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Go there and get mad; I mean read and get mad. More next week.

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Climate Change Started In The 1960s – People spoke up

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Just like CANCER. That was the first thought I had when I read this article. Evidence was gathered 60 years ago. People spoke up, and the oil and gas industry killed any discussion. Now we are stuck with more powerful Hurricanes. We are stuck with the American west being consumed by droughts and fire. The Arctic is gone and the Antarctic going. The world should confiscate their wealth and apply every dime to remediating the effects. Unfortunately the whole world never does anything. I mean the UN could pass a resolution but Pfffhh.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/05/sixty-years-of-climate-change-warnings-the-signs-that-were-missed-and-ignored?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored)

The effects of ‘weird weather’ were already being felt in the 1960s, but scientists linking fossil fuels with climate change were dismissed as prophets of doom

by
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Mon 5 Jul 2021 01.00 EDT
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In August 1974, the CIA produced a study on “climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems”. The diagnosis was dramatic. It warned of the emergence of a new era of weird weather, leading to political unrest and mass migration (which, in turn, would cause more unrest). The new era the agency imagined wasn’t necessarily one of hotter temperatures; the CIA had heard from scientists warning of global cooling as well as warming. But the direction in which the thermometer was traveling wasn’t their immediate concern; it was the political impact. They knew that the so-called “little ice age”, a series of cold snaps between, roughly, 1350 and 1850, had brought not only drought and famine, but also war – and so could these new climatic changes.

“The climate change began in 1960,” the report’s first page informs us, “but no one, including the climatologists, recognized it.” Crop failures in the Soviet Union and India in the early 1960s had been attributed to standard unlucky weather. The US shipped grain to India and the Soviets killed off livestock to eat, “and premier Nikita Khrushchev was quietly deposed”.

But, the report argued, the world ignored this warning, as the global population continued to grow and states made massive investments in energy, technology and medicine.

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Go there and read. More next week (if we are still here)

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Big Oil Had The Worst Day Ever – That’s a good thing for the Earth

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I hate to gloat. I hate to Smirk. But I am gloating right now. I am SMIRKING so hard I think I Broke my face. As Tommy Friedman (New York Times pundent) had this to say, the Big Oil Companies business plan was “good to the last drop”. But it isn’t. Never could be. When a better technology comes along. The old technology is abandoned. They are gonna be left with all those oil leases and oil wells when nobody wants the stuff. I say – GOOD for THEM. It is what they deserve.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/big-oils-bad-bad-day?utm_source=digg

Annals of a Warming Planet

Big Oil’s Bad, Bad Day

Crushing blows to three of the world’s largest oil companies have made it clear that the arguments many have been making for decades have sunk in at the highest levels.

By Bill McKibben

In what may be the most cataclysmic day so far for the traditional fossil-fuel industry, a remarkable set of shareholder votes and court rulings have scrambled the future of three of the world’s largest oil companies. On Wednesday, a court in the Netherlands ordered Royal Dutch Shell to dramatically cut its emissions over the next decade—a mandate it can likely only meet by dramatically changing its business model. A few hours later, sixty-one per cent of shareholders at Chevron voted, over management objections, to demand that the company cut so-called Scope 3 emissions, which include emissions caused by its customers burning its products. Oil companies are willing to address the emissions that come from their operations, but, as Reuters pointed out, the support for the cuts “shows growing investor frustration with companies, which they believe are not doing enough to tackle climate change.” The most powerful proof of such frustration came shortly afterward, as ExxonMobil officials announced that shareholders had (over the company’s strenuous opposition) elected two dissident candidates to the company’s board, both of whom pledge to push for climate action.

The action at ExxonMobil’s shareholder meeting was fascinating: the company, which regularly used to make the list of most-admired companies, had been pulling out all stops to defeat the slate of dissident candidates, which was put forward by Engine No. 1, a tiny activist fund based in San Francisco that owns just 0.02 per cent of the company’s stock, but has insisted that Exxon needs a better answer to the question of how to meet the climate challenge. Exxon has simply insisted on doubling down: its current plan actually calls for increasing oil and gas production in Guyana and the Permian Basin this decade, even though the International Energy Agency last week called for an end to new development of fossil fuels. Observers at the meeting described a long adjournment midmeeting, and meandering answers to questions from the floor, perhaps as an effort to buy time to persuade more shareholders to go the company’s way. But the effort failed. Notably, efforts by activists to push big investors appear to have paid off: according to sources, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, backed three of the dissident candidates for the Exxon boar

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Go there and read More next week.

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Springfield Wants To Keep Burning Coal – They have come up with an insidious way to do it

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Springfield IL has always been opposed to renewable energy. It took a Friend of mine with a degree in Solar Power 20 years at CWLP to get the City to erect a modest Solar Farm. 700 panels, I think. There is no Wind Power because the county changed the zoning ordinances to make turbine placement unfeasible. There is modest geothermal. For homeowners, the City Council is always trying to tax smart meters to Solar more expensive. So why does it not surprise me that CWLP came up with  “program to prevent global warming” by continuing to burn tons of coal daily.

https://www.sj-r.com/story/news/politics/state/2020/06/04/cwlp-could-become-worldrsquos-largest-carbon-capture-research-station/114279824/

State

CWLP could become world’s largest carbon capture research station

Kade Heather Staff Writer

JUNE 4, 2020

City Water, Light & Power is on path for constructing the world’s largest research and development pilot for a new carbon capture system.

The U.S. Department of Energy had about 30 responses from power plants across the country when it initially proposed the idea about three years ago. The DOE has narrowed it down to about five competitors – CWLP being one.

While CWLP is not guaranteed to host the pilot system, Kevin OBrien, director of the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center at the University of Illinois, and the principle investigator overseeing the project, said DOE is “very impressed by the team,” and by CWLP’s facility.

“They toured the plant, they feel it’s a very, very well-run plant and they’re impressed by that, and that’s an important factor when you’re competing for these types of projects. So there’s no guarantee, but we think we’ve got a really high probability of winning this one,” OBrien said.

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Go there and read. Then write letters to the Mayor and the City Council condeming the idea. More next week.

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