Obama Budget Plan a Mixed Bag for Environment
The Obama administration’s 2011 budget plan, released this week, includes a lot of things that have the potential to help the environment: more investments in renewable energy (including solar, wind and energy efficiency), some reduction in spending on fossil fuels, and backing for wilderness protection, clean air and water, greenhouse gas regulations and green jobs. The drawbacks, some environmentalists say, include new loan guarantees for the nuclear power industry (with plans to support seven to 10 new nuclear plants), opportunities for more offshore oil and gas drilling, a lack of focus on endangered species protection, and the continuing imbalance between what traditional energy sources and renewable sources would receive. "With this budget, President Obama is starting to usher in a clean energy economy," said Wesley Warren, director of programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Now it’s up to Congress to deliver on the president’s funding priorities for a cleaner, more secure America." In a statement, however, Warren raised concerns about the president’s proposal for additional loan guarantees to the nuclear power industry, calling them a "mistake." "This is a mature industry that generates high-cost, non-renewable energy and dangerous waste," Warren said. "It should not receive additional taxpayer subsidies." The marine conservation group Oceana said in a statement that it "applauds the Administration’s effort to level the playing field for clean sources of energy and to save taxpayers money by cutting tax preferences for dirty fossil fuels," but added: "Expanding offshore drilling for oil and gas would further contribute to the release of harmful greenhouse gas emissions and compromise our clean energy future." Here’s a look at the proposed budgets of some key departments and agencies and what their plans could mean for Americans and the environment: DOE: Support for clean energy, but also for nukes, coal The proposed $28.4 billion Department of Energy budget targets several projects designed to help "green the economy," including $2.4 billion slated for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and development. Solar power gets the largest share of this R&D money ($300 million), followed by wind power ($123 million) and geothermal ($55 million). Those numbers please renewable energy advocates such as Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association , who predicted that the 22 percent increase in solar funding "will expand the industry’s ability to advance technologies that will create jobs and economic opportunities." The amount, however, is still well short of the $1.4 billion that the Carter administration spent in 1981 on a program to make the United States the world leader in solar power. Many environmentalists are concerned by the administration’s plans to boost funding for nuclear power. Energy Secretary Steven Chu explained that the nearly $1 billion slated for nuclear R&D is needed to "restart the nuclear power industry in the United States" — a goal not shared by many clean energy advocates. Although DOE’s budget eliminates $2.7 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, it also supports coal-burning power plants by calling for $500 million in research on what some call "clean coal technologies." Interior: Solar projects, offshore wind — where’s species protection? Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s $12 billion budget put jobs, energy security, and climate change in the foreground, with some twists to emphasize the department’s breaks with Bush administration practices. Salazar gave clean energy programs the biggest push at the budget rollout yesterday. Interior’s budget request includes $73 million for renewable energy programs, including the assessment of potential sites for 5,000 miles of new transmission lines. The department also hopes to expedite the review of 220 applications for utility-scale solar power projects in the West. By the end of 2011, Salazar hopes to have issued permits for renewable power plants capable of generating 9,000 megawatts of electricity — the equivalent to 25 major coal-fired power plants, the secretary said. Interior is asking for $73.3 million for its renewable energy development programs, which is $14.2 million above 2010 levels. A considerable percentage of that funding — $34.9 million — would go to the Minerals Management Service, which oversees development of offshore wind power on the Outer Continental Shelf. The remainder is split between four other agencies within Interior, including $7 million tagged to assessing the impacts of renewable energy development on wildlife. There is also $71 million in the department’s budget for research on climate change. The funds would be used to determine which areas of the country and which species of plants and animals are most at risk from changing weather patterns. One area of disappointment for many environmentalists: there were few specifics on Interior’s plans for wildlife protection under the Endangered Species Act, even though eight years of neglect under the Bush administration has left many species with little or no protected habitat. "It’s good to hear they’ve recognized that assessing the impacts of renewable energy on wildlife is important," said Noah Greenwald with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. "(But) it sounds like in the budget there is not much mention of listing of species, or the listing program at all, even though there are 259 species that are candidates for protection right now." EPA: Funds for protecting health, air, water The 2011 budget request for the Environmental Protection Agency is down 5 percent from last year’s record $10.5 billion, but Administrator Lisa Jackson reminded critics yesterday that the Obama administration increased funding for the agency by nearly 30 percent in its first year. (That doesn’t include an extra $7 billion allocated to programs under the EPA’s purview in last year’s economic recovery act.) Scott Brown with the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS) says that although the 2011 budget isn’t perfect, "it’s such a huge improvement that I don’t feel compelled to do an alternative budget for the first time in five years." The budget includes funding to address a variety of health concerns that have been neglected in previous administrations. These include studies of endocrine disruptors and the effects of hydraulic fracturing — a technique used to release underground pockets of natural gas — and to clean up polluted brownfields, particularly in underserved and economic disadvantaged areas. "There is no moving away from a greener, more sustainable economy," Jackson said. "The president has made that clear, and the work EPA does is the backbone of that."
Read the rest here:
Obama Budget Plan a Mixed Bag for Environment
Atomic Pause
Back in 2006, when policy makers and advocates of all stripes were looking for ways to reduce carbon emissions, NRDC was pushing for the development of solar and wind. Meanwhile, the Bush administration was busy hatching the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a program meant to develop an international community in which partner nations, including Russia and China, would share the technological secrets of nuclear reprocessing. Reprocessing separates plutonium from spent nuclear fuel; the plutonium is then used to power other nuclear energy plants. Sounds good in theory — who doesn’t want to recycle? — but not in practice. NRDC and other groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility, were quick to speak out against reprocessing. NRDC’s nuclear scientists prepared a report, "Peddling Plutonium," explaining that reprocessing is uneconomical and increases the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation ( nrdc.org/nuclear/gnep/agnep.asp ). At long last, some good news arrived in June: with little fanfare, an announcement in the Federal Register informed the public that the Department of Energy cancelled the completion of the GNEP program’s environmental impact statement — a move that will delay commercial deployment of U.S. nuclear reprocessing facilities for at least 10 years. For now, the department will research new technologies to make reprocessing less expensive and improve practices designed to reduce the proliferation risks. All in all, it’s a quiet victory that’s worth shouting about.
Read the rest of the post here:
Atomic Pause
Related Posts
Are We Going Nuclear?
A series of mishaps in the 1980s-the nuclear energy industry has come roaring back into the spotlight, eager to save a world frantically seeking a carbon-free alternative to dirty fossil fuels. In the past six months, 17 American utilities have applied to build 21 nuclear power reactors, which would be the first new atomic power facilities in the United States in more than 20 years. Some famous former foes of the industry, including Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore and the Gaia theorist James Lovelock, have unabashedly embraced nuclear power. Even California, which years ago banned the construction of new nuclear facilities, at least until the radioactive waste problem is solved, is talking about moving from No Nukes to Maybe Nukes, regardless of the waste situation. Ready or not, the nuclear renaissance is under way. Meanwhile, the more explosive side (pun intended) of the nuclear issue continues to hold sway over American foreign policy. The Bush administration may be gone, but the Obama White House still has to contend with thorny problems like North Korea (which may or may not have the bomb), Iran (which wants one), and Al Qaeda (which would love to get its hands on one). What we could really use right now is a clear-eyed look at all things nuclear: a sharp, science-based analysis of both the energy and the national security aspects of the nuclear question, something that might help us finally figure out what’s worth worrying about and where we ought to focus our attention. Enter Tom Zoellner, who in his latest book, Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World , comes close to offering up just such an analysis. His is a fascinating history of the strange metal that started some wars, stopped others, and fuels the most controversial form of energy production the world has ever known. It is also a frustratingly incomplete account of the current revival of nuclear energy, leaving readers with a bucketful of questions asked but unanswered. Zoellner, the author of a previous book on the global diamond trade, The Heartless Stone , was inspired in part by the nuclear fear that pitched the United States headlong into a military debacle. "In the present decade," he writes, "as the United States has gone to war in Iraq on the premise of keeping uranium out of the wrong hands-and as tensions mount in Iran over that nation’s plan to enrich the fatal ore-I realized that I still knew almost nothing about this one entry in the periodic table that had so drastically reordered the global hierarchy after World War II and continued to amplify some of the darker pulls of humanity: greed, vanity, xenophobia, arrogance, and a certain suicidal glee." What he found was a powerful mineral with decidedly humble beginnings. German miners in the 1500s called uranium Pechblende ("bad-luck rock"), a trash mineral that got in the way of their silver excavations. A Berlin pharmacist, Martin Klaproth, isolated the element in 1789 and named it uranium to honor Uranus, which had recently been discovered by a British astronomer. (The name was intended as a placeholder "until a more suitable moniker could be found," Zoellner writes. "But none ever was.") A century passed before another scientist, Marie Curie, turned her attention to Klaproth’s strange metal. In 1898 she isolated radium, an element formed by the natural radioactive decay of uranium, using pechblende from Bohemian silver mines. With her husband, Pierre, Curie discovered that concentrated doses of radium could shrink and even eliminate cancerous tumors. That set off a radium mania that swept across Europe and the United States. Radiation’s health-giving properties were trumpeted in magazines and newspapers. Spas with names like the Radium Palace Hotel opened near pechblende mines, and breweries sold Radium Beer. As wrongheaded health fads go, this one ranks near the top of the list. By the time the Curies were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903, Pierre was too sick with radiation poisoning to deliver his acceptance speech. When he finally got to Stockholm two years later, Pierre Curie warned the world that radium "could be very dangerous in criminal hands." But he didn’t envision it in a bomb. That leap required the imagination of a professional fabulist: H. G. Wells, the father of science fiction. In a 1914 novella titled The World Set Free , Wells imagined "Carolinum," a fictional stand-in for uranium, as the main ingredient in a new kind of superweapon. He called it an "atomic bomb." Zoellner covers the span from the Curies to Hiroshima in roughly 50 pages of masterful scientific history, following the ever-quickening progress of nuclear science as a sort of character in itself as it caroms from physicist to physicist, Enrico Fermi to Niels Bohr to Otto Frisch to Leo Szilard and, finally, to Robert Oppenheimer. Along the way, Zoellner blends detailed science with literary clarity to offer a lucid primer on the physics behind the bomb. This isn’t a history of the bomb, though, and the author never loses sight of his true subject, the rock. Zoellner visits uranium mines around the world, but his story always circles back to one eerie hole in the ground: Shinkolobwe, the mine that supplied most of the raw uranium ore for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Located in a remote region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Shinkolobwe is a place shrouded in mystery and rumor. It’s said to be so remote and dangerous that members of the country’s presidential guard refuse to go there. When Zoellner attempts to visit, he is told that four roadblocks surround the site, each more forbidding than the last. It is said that United Nations soldiers guard the mine itself. "That place is highly secure," one miner tells the author. "You’re not even allowed to fly over it." And yet when Zoellner reaches the mine, he finds himself standing at the edge of the uranium pit with only his traveling companions in sight. "Nobody was guarding Shinkolobwe," he writes. "We had walked right in." The whole thing is a security nightmare-or so it seems, until the author digs deeper and finds that both our fears and our attention are misplaced. Turning raw ore into weapons-grade U-235 (a naturally occurring isotope that makes up less than 1 percent of uranium ore) is a hugely expensive and highly technical process. The phantom "yellowcake" uranium that the Bush administration used to bolster its case for invading Iraq is, as Zoellner points out, pretty common stuff. Yellowcake is uranium oxide (U-308), the standard form in which uranium meant for nuclear power plants is transported. "Anybody who stole a barrel would have a very difficult time using it for anything but decorative gravel," Zoellner writes. The takeaway: if rogue states or terrorist groups want bomb-making material, their best bet would be to steal it from an existing weapons stockpile. That’s where America should be focusing its security efforts. Fretting over yellowcake is not the best use of our time. The clarity of Zoellner’s scientific explanations and the doggedness of his reporting on the military aspects of uranium are so well done that it comes as a disappointing surprise to find his work on the current state of nuclear energy to be so incomplete. Uranium ’s focus on the rock allows the author to get caught up in the recent mining boom (between 2003 and 2007, the spot market price of uranium increased sixfold, and so did uranium mining claims in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico) without considering the deeper causes of the "renaissance" and the problems that may follow. Without the Bush administration’s insistence on federal loan guarantees for nuclear power plants, for instance, there would be no plans for new American reactors because there would be no money to build them. Even when Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and their kin were snapping up high-risk mortgage-backed securities, Wall Street declared nuclear power plants too expensive and too risky to finance. There’s next to nothing about this in the book. Instead, Zoellner posits the current nuclear vogue as an inevitable result of the yearning for a carbon-free world. Uranium is also strangely silent on the issue of radioactive waste, a problem that remains unsolved. Our best plan, 50 years after the birth of atomic power, is to store the waste deep in a manmade cave in Nevada and hope for the best. I can appreciate not wanting to burden a zippy narrative with price-per-kilowatt-hour comparisons, but Uranium ’s energy chapters would benefit from more probing questions and less face-value acceptance of quotes from the World Nuclear Association. In the coming months the Obama administration will reset the nation’s energy strategy and security priorities. As part of that process, the new president has promised a new era of openness and dialogue with concerned citizens. That will work only if concerned citizens become informed citizens. Uranium isn’t the perfect primer on nuclear issues, but it’s a pretty good place to start.
More here: Are We Going Nuclear?