This is kind of the history of West Virginia in a nutshell:
This month has not been a quiet one for the booming Marcellus Shale natural gas well drilling industry, and the commotion has the attention of Debbie Borowiec of Upper Burrell, where two gas wells are planned near 67 homes on Chapeldale Drive.
The industry noise began with a “blowout” on June 3 at a Marcellus Shale well outside Penfield in rural Clearfield County. That well, adjacent to the Moshannon State Forest, spewed natural gas and drilling wastewater contaminated with toxic chemicals into the air for 16 hours.
On Monday, drillers hit a pocket of methane in an inactive deep mine, causing an explosion and fire that flared 50-feet high for four days, destroyed a drilling rig and burned all seven workers on the well pad, located in a farm field near Moundsville in West Virginia’s northern panhandle.
And, of course, the states will get the bill for everything:
Pennsylvanians are only slowly becoming aware that we are under siege. More than a thousand Marcellus Shale drill sites are in the works, with tens of thousands more poised to descend on Penn’s Woods, its towns and neighborhoods, threatening to poison water tables, suck streams dry, pollute the air with ear-splitting noise and toxic fumes — all without meaningful regulation, without meaningful taxation.
Like coal, which successfully resisted a severance tax, leaving taxpayers and volunteer associations to wrestle with the social and environmental damage wrought by more than a century of exploitation, gas drillers enabled by politicians expect Pennsylvania to remain the only major gas-producing state without a severance tax. These deep-drilled deposits of natural gas will be severed from the commonwealth forever without compensation and with little or no enforceable liability for the devastation wrought on the land, water and air. We cannot allow this to happen!
Without labor protections, community protections, landowner protections and public health protections, we cannot allow this toxic invasion to proceed.
Because, you know, if we tax them they’ll move overseas. Wait, what?
Not mentioned is the increased traffic from ginormous trucks moving at ludicrous speed on roads that would terrify most of you just to drive on, let alone with big rigs blasting down them 20 miles over the limit. I don’t know how many of you have experience driving on side roads in this region, but they aren’t very wide or straight, and I fully expect to be reading about families of five killed and the like. I’m not sure if these are the vehicles I’ve been encountering lately, but I’ve even switched some of the roads I drive on the maniacs are so reckless. Washington Pike in between Washington, PA and Wellsburg, WV is pretty much unsafe at any speed when the trucks are on the road, particularly between Independence and Washington. It is even worse than the coal trucks in southern WV, and I’m not even going to go into the damage the traffic from heavy vehicles will do to the road and normal vehicles.
Regardless, if history is any guide, they will extract all the resources, leave a disaster in their wake for us to clean up, and then everyone can get back to making jokes about people’s teeth in Appalachia and wondering why the states don’t have any money to enter the 21st century. On the upside, coal, steel, and the chemical industry have already destroyed most of our waterways, so nobody eats what they fish anymore, anyway.
(via the Powder Blue Satan)
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Growing up in Coal country, the air splitting sounds were usually from tons of Anfo blowing some innocent mountain to smitthereens, and I never knew that bath water wasn’t blood orange the world over with iron in solution from acid water.
That is all past, at least for me, thank the lard.
not for those stuck there, unfortunately.,
D-Chance.
And we’re living here in Allentown…
R-Jud
For a while now– a year? two years?– my sister and the folks from her lab have been making regular treks from the Poconos to Western PA to collect baseline well samples from people who live near these sites. I asked her what she expects to find after drilling starts. She said “Oh, you know, benzene, fun shit like that.”
Stroszek
ABC is doing a great story on this right now. They’re ripping the industry rep to shreds. Real reporting! I’m stunned!
JBerardi
The utter destruction of West Virginia by the mining industry is an amazingly well kept secret. Apparently it’s one of these news stories too depressing to report.
Ken Pidcock
A few weeks ago, we were camping on friends’ land, accessed by a dirt road, in northern PA. Because the corresponding length of Rte. 6 was restricted, there were frackwater trucks running up and down the dirt road all day and all night. The only distraction from the noise was swarms of parasitoid flies released to go after the gypsy moths.
Ah, my beloved commonwealth.
Punchy
Just dont touch Masontown and my precious AllGood Festival.
robertdsc
@JBerardi:
And yet Rockefeller and Byrd help it along with their votes. Rock on, guys.
Violet
Ain’t that the truth. When I lived in WV, a native explained to me that the less-used roads are made a lane and a half wide on purpose to save money in paving them. When you meet an oncoming vehicle, you both have to put your right tires off the road.
That doesn’t always work, as someone else I knew while living there was hit head on by a coal truck on one of those back roads. Fortunately she survived, but her truck was totaled. Coal truck was just fine.
As for all the drilling, you forgot the part about “bringing good jobs to West Virginia!” Heaven knows WV needs jobs, and that’s how they sell it to the people.
srv
Ah, the joys of gas:
http://www.durangotexas.com/eyesontexas/fortworth/barnettshale.htm
Y’all are going to enjoy having them wells in yer backyards.
Catherine D.
Yeah, I’m in the Finger Lakes region, where some of us are fighting like hell to keep the fracking out. But given that this area never came out of the 2001 recession, let alone the current one, there are lots of people eager to sell their land to gas drillers. Me, I’d rather have water to drink. That’s the one thing the east side of the Great Lakes tends to have lots of.
Just Some Fuckhead
It’s enough to make ya jump off a bridge.
JR in WV
Hi,
Not too long ago here in Lincoln county (WV) they fracked a local gas well, and every well in the neighborhood started making nitrogen instead of methane. Liquid Nitrogen is what they pump down a new hole to fracture the formation, releasing the methane (natural gas) more quickly.
I should mention well-head gas is what consumers get in the gas patch. Our gas doesn’t have impurities removed or an odorizor (methyl mercaptan) added so you can smell it when it leaks.
Of course the nitrogen snuffed all the pilot lights out; then they shut the gas off to close the regulators. After the wells started making methane again, they went around helping folks get their gas running again.
The rigs they frack with are bigger than the drilling rigs, and plenty of tank trucks of drilling mud and seecret stuff to hold the cracks open, and the many tanks of liquid nitrogen (sometimes CO2, but usually N) needed to get a good fracture.
This on little one lane barely paved country roads.
And once they’re done, they’re gone. We got free well-head gas for years, but the new owners had a plan. They plugged all the older wells on farms with residents, and drilled new ones on farms with no one living there to take the free gas.
Modern society~!
JR
Davis X. Machina
Watch how the gas people, if they haven’t already, buy Pat Toomey in the PA Senate race. It’s not just offshore.
arguingwithsignposts
I haven’t lived in WV or PA, but I did live a year in far western Virginia, which has some roads that are very similar to those you speak of, and I’ve driven I-64 through Charleston quite a few times. It’s beautiful country. Just beautiful. And such a tragedy that corporate greed is eating away at it, and has been for quite some time.
And the reason it isn’t a big national story is because there aren’t any big-time TV markets in those areas, just a bunch of white trash coal mining folk (I’m being facetious, but the national news folks probably think that way). That and the fact that the entire WV state government seems to be in the pocket of the mining industry.
bkny
Marcellus Shale wells planned for a pad 1,500 feet from homes in Upper Burrell.
the families of the marcellus shale executives need to be relocated immediately to this neighborhood for the duration of the drilling.
scav
We’re springing leaks everywhere. Least this one isn’t BP for a change, and the gulf coast is catching a break. Chevron in Salt Lake City?
Leisureguy
The problem is not the coal and oil companies—of course they will try to get away with everything—the problem is the legislatures: corrupt, ineffective, and depressingly stupid. But the people elected them, so the people will have to deal with what comes from those elections.
arguingwithsignposts
@srv:
Holy shit, I think I used to live in one of the apartment complexes pictured on that page you linked!
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@scav:
Kind of like Dick Cheney’s tiny heart.
Jenn
Yeah, it just boggles me, the shit we do to water. You know — the stuff we need to survive. It pisses me off when we have bacteria in the water, but we can filter that when we have to. But shit like benzene?!
These people are criminals, whether the law says they are or not. And it’s going to be stuff like this that is going to make 2 generations from now hate our guts. Yep, we make our water undrinkable, and build on our farmland. We are dumb dumb dumb.
I remember listening to some yahoo economist on NPR some years back, going off on how the best use of all of this bottomland was building shit on, because the market said so — after all, we could always import our food from Mexico or China. I just … boggled at the stupidity and short-sightedness of this, which I later found out was a pretty common idea. (1) Hello, that really means you are dependent on never going to war, or else your population is going to starve — which given human history, is a really stupid assumption. (Particularly since, with resource depletion, you’re pretty much GUARANTEED to be going to war.) And (2) it’s a viewpoint dependent on cheap fuel, because you need to transport everything. I’ve often wondered if 50 years from now, we’re going to be knocking down houses and warehouses in order to regain some local farmland.
Seriously. How about a brainstorming thread about what we’d like to see in an energy bill, and then start up another phone campaign with Congress? This BP disaster, Massey, and the several recent natural gas mishaps make this a perfect time to put on some pressure. And this is something where we might even be able to affect some Republican congresscritters – there’s pressure on them, too, right now.
Svensker
Where are the libertarians on this? Let the coal/energy companies pay for the REAL costs of this, and let the consumer pay the REAL cost of extracting the energy. When is this raping the present and shoving the costs off to the future going to stop? Can’t liberals and libertarians get together here?
Fergus Wooster
The smart thing would be to pass severance taxes and new penalties for groundwater contamination in WV, PA and upstate NY now. The big boys (chesapeake, atlas, etc.) have so much money invested in the Marcellus infrastructure that there’s no walking away. Even with soft natural gas prices, as we have now.
Remember that if an upstart legislator pursues new taxes or regulations, and the Chamber of Commerce makes the usual threats of capital flight – they’ve already invested fucking tens of billions in these gas shale plays. They’re not walking away. Any new marginal costs are just that – marginal.
Not being from the region, I don’t know if there are any state pols willing to take a chance, but if so, the rest of the country would benefit from the precedent.
scav
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: there are leaks you root for and there are leaks you deplore.
Second thought. Leaks? ! ? What about that themo-nuclear fix everyone was so fond of for a while? Cauterization stat!
schrodinger's cat
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: He has a heart?
tkogrumpy
@Jenn: “I wonder if 50 years from now” No need to wait. Detroit has already started.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@schrodinger’s cat: Well, yes, though mechanical in nature.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Truth is, self government is just hard. It’s hard in Arizona, we’ve been fighting the fight for 60 years. It’s hard in WV. It’s hard everywhere. But it’s all we have. So get to it.
WV can fix itself, make its mines safe, regulate its mining and extraction industries. AZ can fix itself and take control back from the shitheads who gerrymandered our legislative districts and repress the minority voters. CA can fix itself and put itself onto a path that works. It just takes a lot of hard work. Sacrifice. Determination.
George Patton was right. America likes winners, and hates losers. We don’t give up and we don’t run away from a fight.
Fuck the morons and the nihilists and let’s make America work for everybody.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@scav:
With our luck, this would release Godzilla and ruin dem prospects for the fall election.
Jenn
@tkogrumpy:
I MISSED that! Thanks for sharing that (I now have a bunch of new links to check out :-)).
scav
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Cheney v. Godzilla, Cheney v. Godzilla. Tough call.
ETA, nah, not really. Bring on the green roaring biped, the one WITH a heart, just to be blindingly clear.
Recovered Demoholic
Via ‘Muckety Paths of Influence’ and ‘NewsMeat’ donation lookup — EOG Resources (of Marcellus Shale) spiderwebs its way primarily to Democrat Politicians, and we know how well they’re doing in the Gulf. So, if we’re going to make noise, at least know whom to holler at, especially if you’re at a town hall meeting chaired by a Democrat.
Start here with to find directors, and click boxes for other relations (e.g., AIG):
http://www.muckety.com/EOG-Resources-Inc/5014574.muckety
Then look for their political contributions at (upper left):
http://www.newsmeat.com/
Chris
The argument “they” always use is: Well gosh, if we had to do this safely and cleanly, we’d have to pass the cost on to consumers ya know, and then they’d pay so much more! And if you taxed us or made us pay fair wages, the same thing would happen! So don’t regulate us in any way, it’s so much better that way!
I dearly wish “we” (which means “not me” since I am not in charge of these things) would answer back:Yeah, so? I don’t know about you, but I won’t mind paying $23.25 a month instead of $23 a month, and also having the place I live stay clean and safe, and not having relatives, friends, and strangers die. And adding another 25 or even 50 cents a month so that the people who do this dirty job can live a little better, well, that seems like a good thing to me! You corporate stooges are trying to appeal to greed. That’s just plain ugly. You keep doing it, I’ll keep pointing it out.
Sadly, “appeal to greed” seems to work pretty well.
Hippie Killer
I’ll take gas drilling over coal mining any day of the week.
Punchy
It’s because those unions are so milk toast.
Keith G
John, is the economic hold of those industries so complete that some regulation cannot be passed? In the end, it is up to the citizens to step up and do what needs to be done.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Recovered Demoholic: The entire country is addicted to cheap fossil fuel energy to maintain our upscale way of life. We are all to blame for the pollution it wreaks, to varying degrees. But there is no comparison imo, between wingnuts who want to prevent any and all regulation, and when they get in power to destroy what regulation that does exists. It is not dems, by and large, that has done this part. And not dems who have dragged our national feet on creating more non fossil fuel renewable energy.
Firebag me this.
Litlebritdifrnt
Here in NC it is logging trucks, which do not give a shit that you are actually doing the speed limit, (or more), they will pass you spewing shit despite any laws. When I am out on the road the logging trucks scare the ever loving shit out of me. They are not only dangerous but they are unsueable, cause most of the juries in this area will find that you shouldn’t have been out on the road to begin with, and the logging trucks have a purpose.
geg6
This is a huge controversy around here. There is drilling all around this part of Western PA and it’s being framed as jobs versus environmental disaster. We are just starting to pull out of the environmental and economic disaster that was the steel industry and it’s collapse. Now this, with it’s attendant side issues, which you are perfectly correct to point out. I often travel Route 18 between my home in New Brighton and as far as Burgettstown in Washington County as we have several high schools in the area that I visit for presentations and other events. The stretch between Monaca and Burgettstown, especially, is bucolic, small town, rural PA in a nutshell with only double lanes and twists, turns, hills, and slow farm equipment. It has always been a death trap with coal trucks barreling along it and the heavy truck traffic has doubled, at least. With a popular state park, Raccoon Creek State Park, a large state gameland, and it’s use as an alternate route to the Post-Gazette Pavilion, there is going to be carnage along with all the environmental damage. The argument for all this is it will create jobs, but I have seen no evidence of this. From all I’m told, they are bringing in their own workers and not hiring much, if at all, locally. All the local pols are cowards on this issue and rarely hear them discussing it except to say what a great thing this will be for the local economy. How, they never explain. That stretch already deals with having a nuclear plant and a coal fired electric plant that periodically dumps a coating of black ash on the town of Shippingport, and they are going to pay the price again for our greed and lust for energy.
Litlebritdifrnt
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: This country needs Nuclear energy, full stop. The damn tree huggers (me included) need to shit or get off the pot, either come up with a viable alternative or allow nuclear energy.
Ezra_rlz
Anyone catch this report on NPR?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127593937
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104565793&ps=rs
There’s also the matter of in 2005 the EPA effectively died a quiet death via the Safe Drinking Water Act and no longer has the authority of regulating toxins in water as a parting gift from Cheney/Bush.
Jesus wept.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Litlebritdifrnt: I am starting to come around to this position myself. Living through Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, I jumped on the no nuke plant bandwagon, but life is always about making the best, or least destructive choices and risk available. And it is becoming quite clear that fossil fuel is killing the planet and us. Gas is better than coal or oil imo, depending how it is extracted. But with our insatiable appetite for energy, the cleanest and most abundant would be nuclear. Maybe we can store the waste in Dick Cheney’s basement or on his Wyoming ranch. He’d probly make bombs from it, but we could take him out first with a drone attack.
Recovered Demoholic
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
‘Addicted’ is too loaded. We are, and always will be dependent on fuels. I will never argue against being rational, safe, and conservative about their production and usage — same goes for food and other essentials. Global Warming is a hoax & CSX is a (Gore) ponzi scheme –all based on faux-science. Impossible as it would be, even if were to stop burning all fuels now … hardly a whit of difference.
I beg you to follow the links I posted. First ‘Muckety Paths’ for EOG. Pick a link, e.g., Frank G. Wisner. Go to ‘RedMeat’ and enter for political donations, then open ‘New York State’ list. Count the Dems.
Go back to Muckety, and double click the same guy. Look at the spider web of relationships, corporate and company — Oh, Oooooh!
Now think about the Gulf of Mexico! Trying to ignore or shift the blame in any of this perfidy is a foolish as failing to do the least bit of research during the Democratic Primaries (ashamedly, my party of almost 50 years). Of course, it wouldn’t have been possible without the help of the complicit MSM.
If you want to fight against this crap, at the very least, know your opponents. And follow the money and power! But, do not contort science or abandon The Constitution.
dhd
Wow, holy crap. The only bright spot is that they are dumb enough to be drilling near populated areas in Jim Ferlo’s district (my excellent progressive state senator), and now he’s pushing a moratorium on drilling in the state senate…
trollhattan
That gas
wantsyearns to be free, and the Free Markets are just the thing to give it it’s freedom, as the Founders intended. Pay no mind to the methods supplying that Freedom(tm), none at all. Also, too, if you like how about a quarter of the dispersant used in the gulf is proprietary, you’ll love the proprietary fracking fluids they’re using. They’re magically delicious.General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Recovered Demoholic: I don’t need to follow the links to know that democrats receive all kinds of donations from bad actors, polluters and others. It is our system of elections that is the cause of that, and is why we desperately need public funded ones. But correlation is not causation, and the fact that dems take blood money like wingnuts, does not mean they govern the same. It does influence them some, but no comparison with wingers. All the donations from the hc insurance and big pharma industries did not prevent them from getting truly regulated for the first time in our history. It wasn’t a perfect bill, but way more than any wingnut would support, and certainly the industry didn’t want it, preferring to keep the status quo.
Listen, I am all for attending dem pol events and clamoring for them to do what”s right, or more right, than the wingnuts, especially the conservative dems. So long as it is not a nihilistic mob like the tea baggers. But trashing dems just because of the donations they receive is wrong headed imo, as is equating them with the repubs.
arguingwithsignposts
@Recovered Demoholic:
And that is where you lost most sane commenters on this blog.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@arguingwithsignposts: Yea, no shit. I didn’t read that far. Could be a ratfucking spoof. Who knows these days?
Litlebritdifrnt
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: I speak from having a nuclear plant on my doorstep (in England) for thirty years, it has done nothing but produce clean energy for that time. my sister’s electric bill is 1/4th of mine. It is simple math.
arguingwithsignposts
I am still not quite willing to jump on the nuclear bandwagon. While our fossil-fuel-based way of life is destructive, nuclear waste is a huge, verrrry long-term issue. I know there are nuclear plant workers who sometimes comment on these threads, and they say the plants are safe. I believe them, mostly. But I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we went to nuclear far more than we are doing now. Where is all that waste going to go?
trollhattan
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Gotta be spoofy. I vote for B.o.B posting from the local library. (Or is it Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with a candlestick?)
arguingwithsignposts
@Litlebritdifrnt: Clean energy in that it isn’t putting pollutants into the air. But it is producing waste. Waste that presents a very real long-term threat if it is breached.
We probably do need to build some more nuke plants for the short-term, but I really wish our top scientists would get involved in an “Apollo project” for really renewable energy sources.
fucen tarmal
@dhd:
i’ll buy you boodles gin martini’s, gin and tonics, gimlets all night if that passes…and they open the lcb to competition so i can buy boodles gin in this state without having to pay double and buy in quantity as a special order….
pa is hosed, and its because philly has all the power, they don’t care about us, in fact keeping us mired in this type of crap is what justifies their preconceived notions of the rest of the state. w.pa, west virginia, etc, suffer for being close enough to see what “cultural jersey” is doing from wash to bos, and therefore we must be punished…same ol same ol
Keith G
@Litlebritdifrnt: Ya know, there is no viable alternative. There isn’t. At least not for current American-style society. Will we ever be able to just replace all fossil fuels? Nuclear will be a help. It will take twenty year to have enough plants up to make a small dent and I’m guessing at least thirty for significant use of nuclear power (from the start of our significant building push, TBA).
The answer is changing the American lifestyle.
We’re doomed.
Joseph Nobles
You know, cynicism never helped any situation, but still I indulge. I don’t know why. It’s not like it makes me feel better.
But oil and coal companies do this kind of stuff because we keep jamming the fuel pump nozzle into our cars and blowing through the electricity from coal-fired plants. Do you think BP would be drilling out in the deep waters of the Gulf if there weren’t a nickel of profit to be had? The only thing BP did was cut enough corners to make six cents instead of the nickel, and whammo. Do you think Marcellus would be ravishing West Virginia if they weren’t making money? Who would waste time digging in the fool ground?
The reason there is profit in them thar hills and waves is because we keep consuming it so profigately. We sneer at the Roman vomitaria while idling in a fast food drive-through line. You are looking at (and I am writing) these words on a monitor connected to a computer connected to the Internet – for all its good, machines so wasteful in energy use that they must be kept in rooms robbed of heat energy or they would seize up utterly.
But you don’t dare tell the American people that it’s their own foolhardy appetites that got us here, because the last President that told us to turn off light switches and wear sweaters was turned into a political albatross. Malaise, darling. Squish, squish.
BP’s greed and arrogance is the direct cause of that tragedy in the Gulf. The same is true of Marcellus in West Virginia, although if a worst-case scenario I read about over at the Oil Drum bears out, Marcellus’ destruction of West Virginia will be forever eclipsed by BP’s end result. But neither could have happened without the mouths to feed. And in time, the planet will be done with us and shake us off, and maybe the Titans will get it right. After all, if they make it to Earth, they’ll have a hell of a cautionary tale writ planet-wide.
Recovered Demoholic
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
You are far too party-centric, and clueless with regard to what big government is all about. To me that is antithesis of the true progressiveness of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States.
@arguingwithsignposts:
Show me what you suppose to be the science of global warming, and I will rebut it handily. I suppose you have not seen the refutations attributable to the released East Anglia email and code, and the retractions of dozens of non-peer reviewed, bogus claims in the ICCP publications.
I was not issued a set of ‘Hype and Chains’ kneepads, so we will continue to be at odds with regard to overreaching government (of any political stripe), multi-thousand page legislation that was never read, or blame cast on our founding documents rather than the miscreants too many of us adore.
Neutron Flux
@arguingwithsignposts: You never asked me about that.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Recovered Demoholic:
And you sir, is a coconut.
Joseph Nobles
@Recovered Demoholic: Atmospheric CO2 levels are rising by 15 gigatonnes per year. Humans are emitting 26 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Humans are dramatically altering the composition of our climate.
liberal
I thought the real point of severance taxes isn’t to force the externality of pollution back onto the company doing the extraction, but rather to capture a bigger fraction of the scarcity rent (in the natural resource) for the government.
Quackosaur
@Recovered Demoholic:
Anyone who thinks that the American political system would function without parties is delusional. This isn’t 1789. There are more than 4 million people living here. Not that either of those things stopped political parties from forming, but whatever.
Keith G
@Recovered Demoholic:
The silly temper tantrums of those few scientists do not change the conclusions of years of work by hundreds of scientists. The man-made portion of climate change is a problem.
I do not care to read you rebutting a freeking thing, but if you have links to peer reviewed science articles that show how e man-made portion of climate change is a not a problem, I would love to be able to use them.
I believe that there is much more to be learned in this matter so I welcome valid input from all sides.
scav
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Put da Lime in da Coconut with Kermit!
liberal
@Recovered Demoholic:
LOL!
liberal
@Svensker:
You’re missing the biggest component of the “cost”: the scarcity rent.
That is, the costs mentioned are the cost of cleaning up the pollution, and the capital cost of getting the stuff out of the ground.
But even if the stuff came out of the ground, with no resulting pollution and no infrastructure needed to extract it, it still wouldn’t be free, because of scarcity rent.
The real problem with political economy is that most people don’t know what rent is.
arguingwithsignposts
@Neutron Flux:
Haven’t seen you around recently, Neutron. So, if you’re of a mind to, please fill me in on the waste management side of the nuke industry these days. The extend of my knowledge is that it takes a long time for the radioactivity to decay and the Nevadans don’t want it stored at Yucca Mountain.
I’m curious how much waste is put off by an avg. plant, and how big of an issue would it be if we started to ramp up to produce a sizable portion of our electrical power needs? (I’m assuming this is not going to meet our need for fossil-fuels to run our transportation needs unless we get some decent electric cars (which would again require more plants, therefore more waste).
Thanks
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@scav: It’s a hard being green, and why I loves me some Kermit.
Neutron Flux
@arguingwithsignposts: Most plants refuel every 18 months. Typically 1/3 of the core’s fuel assemblies are replaced.
The NRC has some rules about releasing information that is too specific. The call it SUNSI. Specific Unclassified Nuclear Security Information, IIRC. This includes information that terrorists might find useful or proprietary information from vendors.
So, lets just say Plant A, replaced 1/3 of their fuel with new fuel. If the plant had say, 75 total assemblies, then 25 would go to the spent fuel storage and cooling pool. It can stay there until the short lived isotopes decay away enough reduce the thermal energy to safe levels. There are approx 100 plants in the US, so 2500 spent fuel assemblies are produced every 18 months.
At this point, there are two options. Leave it in the pool or put it in dry cask storage. Yucca Mountain was the final repository, but well, that didn’t work out. Several utilities are suing the Federal Gov over that and will surely win. Several Indian Tribes are suing/petitioning the gov to let them store the spent fuel.
IMO it is a problem that should be solved prior to new plants. It is not a technical problem, Yucca Mt was a good solution.
Until this is solved the spent fuel is stored on site. You can draw your own conclusions wrt to this course of (in)action.
ETA the 75/25 numbers are hypothetical. Actual numbers may be more or less than these.
arguingwithsignposts
@Neutron Flux: Thanks for the explanation. Something tells me we still have some kinks to work out before nuclear power is the go-to for weening us off fossil fuels.
And something tells me that no matter what direction we go, Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Natural Gas (not to mention Big Corn) will be there all the way to make sure it never happens.
sigh
Recovered Demoholic
ping
Neutron Flux
@arguingwithsignposts:This is what the NRC has to say about it.
http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage.html
Recovered Demoholic
@Keith G
Sorry, I tried to respond twice (including having to look up stuff again, check links, and retype — this time in an emacs buffer, so still have), but ‘ping’ was the only thing that took.
Neutron Flux
@arguingwithsignposts:You are correct, I think.
Recovered Demoholic
@Keith G — Hope to hang around for awhile. I’m pretty busy. Actually wandered here via searching ‘Marcellus’ to help some friends in my former home state who need more than sign-waving and chanting in a struggle.
I’m still puzzled about ‘non-posted’ posts . Length?? Links?? Too complex?? There was no objectionable language. I’ll try something simpler, as another test.
Global Warming — The jury is still out, in my opinion. But, no one has shown that carbon dioxide is a culprit (in fact, follows temp rise & not precursor). My belief is that the whole thing is being used as a tool for stricter government control and ponzi schemes like the CCX.
Davis X. Machina
@Litlebritdifrnt: Don’t live near Windscale, do you?
Pat
Re: Yucca Mountain
I think the Canadians have a better idea. Their long-term storage is in a few scattered decomissioned reactors, and some silos. The silos, anyway, relieve them of the cooling and climate problems we have/had at Yucca Mountain.
One of the interesting parts of both projects is the struggle to design warning signs that will be valid for 4 billion years.
Ed Marshall
@Recovered Demoholic:
If you can’t figure out emacs, I think you might have a bit of trouble with your awesome argument rebutting everyone in science. Hint.
Mr Furious
Flux-
What’s the deal with Breeder reactors like those used in Europe?
TenguPhule
No more nuclear plants.
Solar, Wind, Bio-Algae and Wave.
Failing that, we have an overabundance of Republicans that can be burned for fuel.
stillnotking
I’m from WV too, and the part you’re leaving out is that the coal companies have massive popular support, because they’re the only people hiring. Southern WV is an economic disaster right now; it’s hard to imagine what it’d look like without coal.
This is not to defend Big Coal, obviously. They’re genuinely terrible people. I’m just pointing out the political reality.
Joseph Nobles
@Recovered Demoholic:
Satellite and surface measurements find less energy is escaping to space at CO2 absorption wavelengths.
TenguPhule
Full Red Metal Wingnut Alert. Man the Reality Stations!
meander
As part of HBO’s documentary series, the new film “Gasland” will be shown on June 21 at 9 PM. I haven’t seen it, but have a colleague at work who says the film presents a horrifying vision of what the gas industry is doing to our country (thanks Dick and Bush!).
Xboxershorts
@Keith G:
You are wrong. VERY VERY wrong. We were using hemp oil for hundreds of years here in the New World to light our lamps and cook our foods. BioDiesel is the ONLY answer that doesn’t leave toxic waste all over in it’s wake.
We can make plastics, construction materials, clothing, in fact, almost anything that you can do with petro-chemicals, we were doing with Hemp Seed oil in the 1930’s.
I live in Potter County, PA. They call it “God’s Country”. We’re fighting as hard as we can to scale back the drilling industries maddening pace. But the economy here is in tatters since Adelphia Communications went belly up in 2003-2005. We have 12+% unemployment and the promise of jobs (vbery few so far, most drill operators are coming in from our west), the promise of economic freedom is winning over the hearts and minds of the locals.
They have no clue what’s about to hit them. Our state legislators are deep in the pockets of industry shills and they refuse to investigate the THOUSANDS of legitimate complaints that originate in every place they’ve done this fracking before.
And the waste is not just hazardous. It’s legitimately toxic. Benzene, Toluene, and other hydrocarbons. But get this….It’s ALSO, often, RADIOACTIVE. (Frambroidal Pyrite, fools gold laced with Uranium is threaded throughout the Marcellus Shale)
And there will be MILLIONS of gallons of this trash to treat EVERY DAY once drilling is going full tilt. We have no way to treat this. We can’t build that many facilities…
And everywhere they’ve done this, people have gotten sick. Really sick.
You’ve GOT to watch Gasland, it’s coming to HBO later this month:
href=”http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/” rel=”nofollow”>
This is our website, we’ve joined forces with the Allegheny Defense Project (The Allegheney forest has been drilled more times than a 5 dollar coke whore), we are aggregating links to disseminate information about the fraud that is gas drilling ever since Cheney’s secret summit…
href=”http://saveourstreamspa.com/” rel=”nofollow”>
And in case you weren’t aware, the worst of the sicknesses people around these sights have to deal with, isn’t really cancer. It’s endocrine disruption (think..Lupus) where the body attacks itself…
This 45 minute video contains a wealth of information about what’s been found at drill sites thus far:
href=”http://www.endocrinedisruption.com/chemicals.video.php” rel=”nofollow”>
Hemp/Soy/Sugar Beets/Algae. It’s the ONLY way forward. Truly renewable, Truly environmentally neutral, and already proven technology.
We desperately need the progressive communities help. Tell the world how dirty and toxic the natural gas industry really is.
Forgive me the bad linkys, my HTTP skills suck,…