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Thursday, September 18, 2014

How dedicated to the environment are Charlestown’s leaders?

Not so much when it comes to energy policy
From Fake Science
By Will Collette

Charlestown’s obsessive opposition to wind energy and lack of interest in other types of green energy raise lots of questions about our town leadership’s commitment to the environment. We are one of the most vulnerable communities in Rhode Island to the effects of ocean rise and intensified storms caused by climate change. 

Plus we are just 20 miles down-wind from  the  trouble-prone Millstone nuclear power plant, well within the 50 mile danger zone that a major accident would generate.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has just sent yet another team of special inspectors to the Millstone Nuclear Power Station just outside of New London, to find out why the cooling system for the newer of their two reactors, Unit 3, keeps having problems.

The NRC has a well-deserved reputation for being among the worst regulators, a captive of the industry it is supposed to regulate. When they actually admit problems, it is truly cause for alarm. Click here for examples.

The NRC took this latest action because the cooling pump failed on July 15 and again on September 10. The NRC issued Millstone with a “white finding” over a violation of “low-to-moderate significance” on August 28. Cooling pump problems are a major big deal because the operator’s ability to bring in cooling seawater to keep the reactors at a safe temperature is what keeps reactors from melting down.

Millstone just completed its first ever training drill of its personnel and surrounding community first responders on how they would respond to an attack by terrorists. It took them until the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11 to come up with the bright idea that they should be prepared for an attack by foreign or domestic terrorists.

These are part of a long string of persistent problems at Millstone. The New London Day has been covering Millstone extensively and I have been reporting on Millstone and other nuclear-related problems almost since we started publishing Progressive Charlestown. Millstone is also the site for the indefinite storage of millions of pounds of high-level radioactive waste.

On top of everything else, Millstone sucks in billions of gallons daily from Long Island Sound and then discharges all that water after its been heated by its journey through the two operating reactors severely disrupting the marine ecology. But at least the water keeps the plant from blowing up.

The NRC knows what it's doing, tight?

5.6% of NRC employees fell for phishing spam like this
If all this isn’t enough to bother you, consider how the NRC discovered that it had been hacked by foreigners twice, and another time by an unknown hacker, according to an internal report. In one incident, 215 NRC employees were sent “phishing” e-mails (you get them, I sure – the ones that say you need to click on a link and enter requested information to keep from losing a service) and a dozen of them took the bait!

The Inspector General’s Cybercrime Unit was eventually able to trace the phishing e-mail back to its foreign source. But in the course of investigating that hack, we learn that 5.6% of this sample of NRC employees are idiots.

The report noted that in other incidents, NRC employees opened attachments that downloaded malware. Given the US’s own history in hacking the nuclear programs of its enemies – the best known case being the “Stuxnet” virus that American and Israeli hackers injected into Iran’s nuclear weapons development program (setting their bomb-making back by months), you’d think the NRC would be a little more cyber-security conscious.
Stuxnet almost crippled Iran's
A-bomb program

On September 23rd, URI is hosting a talk by an expert on the Stuxnet hack (details here) as part of its fall series on privacy and cyber-security.

Anyway, I just don’t get why our supposedly environmentalist leaders of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance have nothing to say about energy, other than to oppose wind power in all its forms, including small wind turbines for residential use. If you want to understand why you can’t build a wind turbine in Charlestown for your own personal use, click here.

Meanwhile, out in the real world…

Deepwater Wind has received all the federal approvals it needs for its pilot five-turbine 30-megawatt wind farm on the far side of Block Island and with almost no more hurdles, is getting ready to build, starting next summer and go on line in 2016.

Right behind them is Cape Wind, with its planned offshore wind project off Nantucket. They recently announced they plan to base their shore operations, where the turbines will be assembled and the construction will be staged, in New Bedford. 

In addition to hundreds of construction jobs, there will also be hundreds of permanent jobs in New Bedford, a town that desperately needs the work.

There was an interesting article in the New Bedford Standard-Times about constructive efforts the wind industry and fishing industry are undertaking to co-exist. One of the fishing industry officials, Jim Kendall, summed up the situation this way: "There is a big feeling that this is just another thing encroaching on us, but we know we'll have to coexist to survive."

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

Portsmouth is fixing an expensive screw-up. Cost lots of money but no lives
In Charlestown, during the fight against the proposed Whalerock wind turbine project, opponents cited some trouble-plagued turbine projects that made wind energy look bad. Not bad in the sense of irradiating tens of thousands of people or exposing people to toxic gasses, but wind turbines that failed or worked poorly.

One conspicuous example is the huge municipal turbine bought by the town of Portsmouth and erected on the side of Route 24, the route to Fall River and the Cape. That turbine was supposed to power Portsmouth High School and other town buildings and save a lot of money. Town leaders were especially proud of the bargain-basement deal they got when they bought it.

Except then it broke. It turns out it was assembled wrong and in a short time, that caused the gearbox to burn out. The turbine manufacturer went out of business and Portsmouth was stuck with this glaring monument to failure.

But they finally figured out exactly what went wrong and how to fix it, at a cost estimate of $885,000 by replacing key elements of the system without having to do a complete tear-down and new construction.

They put it out to bid and got several bids within their budget. They also received $250,000 as a share of a lawsuit settlement, courtesy of Attorney General Peter Kilmartin. In July, the RI Commerce Corporation (formerly known as the Economic Development Corporation) renegotiated Portsmouth’s $370,000 loan on favorable terms.

While I won’t believe that turbine is fixed until it’s been up and running for a few months, it looks like good news for wind energy in Rhode Island.

Just a few short miles from the broken Portsmouth turbine is an energy problem of a much larger and different sort: the Brayton Point Power Plant in Somerset MA, formerly owned by the current owners of the Millstone nuclear power plant.

Brayton Point
Brayton Point has been New England’s dirtiest coal-fired power plant. Shortly after Millstone’s owner, Dominion Energy, sold Brayton Point to Equipower Resource Group, a company that apparently buys old power plants and then flips them. 

They shocked everyone by announcing the imminent closure of Brayton Point, a decision that scared the hell out of Somerset which has long counted on Brayton Point to provide nearly all of the town’s tax base and jobs.

The closing date has since been pushed back to 2017. But now, there’s an active push to find other, perhaps greener, uses for the old power plant. However, what do you do with an old, clapped-out coal burner? The only remotely practical idea I’ve read so far is to convert it to burn natural gas in the hope that the market for cheap gas remains stable for the long term.

Meanwhile, Brayton Point and the other assets of the Equipower Group are about to be bought by energy giant Dynergy, which still plans to shut Brayton Point down. Dynergy will pay Equipower $3.45 billion for its collection of antique power plants. 

Will somebody please explain to me how they make money doing this? 

Despite their complexity, energy issues drive our economy and impact our planetary environment. They are life-and-death issues for all of us, so it’s in our interests to stay knowledgeable.
This is one of the few approved forms of alternative energy in Charlestown


Except if you live in Charlestown, where the CCA Party looks after us and prevents all forms of wind energy and attacked our last Town Administrator for exploring the feasibility of a bio-fuel facility as a way to put an old toxic waste site back to productive use.

With the recent announcement of a new round of funding for small-scale solar projects that included Charlestown among the prospective locations, I am waiting for our Town Council to invoke Charlestown’s new border protection policy that bans anyone from doing anything, no matter how good for the environment, without the CCA Party’s approval.