The North Anna nuclear plant took a step toward normal today as Dominion Resources canceled the emergency alert declared yesterday when a 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck just a few miles from the site.
But the quake is giving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission new reasons, and new data, to reassess whether older US nuclear plants have enough safety margins to withstand expected earthquakes. Keep reading →
Doubts are building about the survival of the only functioning US market for emissions that contribute to global warming.
Designed to limit emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants, the Northeast Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is facing a future already less carbon-intense than its designers envisioned, but not always for the most heartening reasons. The struggling economy and widespread uptake of cheap natural gas in recent years have both weighed on prices and trading in the market. Keep reading →
Natural gas regulators and the hydraulic fracturing industry must uniformly adopt best practices and rules to protect the environment in order to “meet the needs of public trust.”
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With the bruising debt ceiling battle barely over, Washington lobbyists are already preparing for a new smackdown in September over environmental regulation.
House Republicans have amassed a Christmas wish list of rules they view as unwarranted expansions of federal power and are trying to stop them cold in the fiscal 2012 appropriations bill for the Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and several smaller agencies. They’ve subtitled the bill the “Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act.” Keep reading →
The first thing commuters in the environmentally aware neighborhood of the future do when they get home is plug in their electric cars, and that’s the problem.
“That’s a looming utility nightmare,” says Jim Pauley, Schneider Electric’s new senior vice president for External Affairs and Government Relations. “Utility infrastructure was built for something completely different,” he said, and neighborhood concentrations pulling new EV loads at 6 p.m. on still-hot afternoons could be disastrous for local distribution grids. Keep reading →
Fukushima gives US nuclear regulators a golden opportunity to tie up decades of regulatory loose ends and replace the “patchwork” of regulations that has evolved since the 1960s with a “logical, systematic and coherent regulatory framework,” a Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff task force says.
But the industry’s Nuclear Energy Institute quickly faulted the task force for failing to analyze in detail what went wrong at the Japanese nuclear station. NEI warned that rash actions, taken before the accident is fully understood, might harm US plant safety. Keep reading →
Fewer coal plant closures may result from pending Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules than previously estimated, says a new analysis from ICF International.
Combined with delays in federal greenhouse gas regulation and new expectations of rising natural gas prices, the latest estimates cut ICFI’s projection of forced coal closures from 50 gigawatts to 39 GW. Of that, 17 GW are coal plant closures already announced by operators. Keep reading →
Assessing how much natural gas and oil are in the ground, and where, involves a lot of complex science – along with big dollops of art and luck.
While experts say their ability to predict has improved markedly with advanced technology like 3-D seismic testing, they say the only proof remains actual drilling – and the most promising geology can still produce a dry hole. Keep reading →
Wind turbines cost more to operate and maintain than planned, often have poor reliability, and place costly strains on other generators warns one early wind adopter, but so far the public is willing to bear the costs.
Kevin Gaden, wholesale power director for the Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska (MEAN) and NMPP Energy, a public power consortium covering parts of Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming and Colorado, detailed his members’ experiences at the American Public Power Association conference in Washington last week. Keep reading →
Impending new environmental compliance requirements are a “regulatory train wreck” said public power companies gathered in Washington, DC this week.
Public power companies, created over the last century by local and state governments to ensure local control over electric supply, see that control slipping away under a double whammy of the environmental standards and federally-directed wholesale power markets. Keep reading →
