EPA To Reuse Toxic Sites For Renewable Energy 183
Hugh Pickens writes:"The Daily Climate reports that President Obama and Congress are pushing to identify thousands of contaminated landfills and abandoned mines — 'brownfields' that could be repurposed to house wind farms, solar arrays, and geothermal power plants. Using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat. 'In the next decade there's going to be a lot of renewable energy built, and all that has to go somewhere,' said Jessica Goad, an energy and climate change policy fellow for The Wilderness Society. 'We don't want to see these industrial facilities placed on land that's pristine. We love the idea of brownfields for renewable energy development because it relieves the (development) pressure on undisturbed places. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have identified nearly 4,100 contaminated sites deemed economically suitable for wind and solar power development, as well as biomass. Included are 5 million acres suitable for photovoltaic or concentrated solar power development, and 500,000 acres for wind power. These sites, if fully developed, have the potential to produce 950,000 megawatts — more than the country's total power needs in 2007, according to EPA data."
Superfund (Score:1, Insightful)
Won't be all of 'em though. (Score:3, Insightful)
And open pit mine would be a pretty rotten place for a wind farm OR a solar field.
Might make a good site for an orbital solar power downlink rectenna, though.
Re:Superfund (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of these places could never be truly cleaned up. You'd essentially have to ship the top 500 feet of soil and rock of the entire areas to China or India, but even that's just moving the problem away from the USA.
Re:Superfund (Score:4, Insightful)
Because cleaning them is next to impossible or just too costly. We humans can fuck things up really well, so well that we can't always fix them afterwards.
Seems a better idea than cleaning them to whatever the maximum contamination level is by todays standards and then building houses on top. Ten years later the standards have been changed due to new research/etc and you have an entire suburb at above safe limit contamination.
One big drawback of lots of these alternative energy methods is space - you can build a nuke plant or a coal plant to provide the same amount of energy with a much smaller amount of space. Using land that is otherwise unusable seems a good idea.
And of course I'm sure the people/companies who own that worthless (in some cases negative worth since the cleanup costs dwarf the value) making lots of campaign contributions also helped.
Re:Superfund (Score:1, Insightful)
What not to like: The possibility that some advances in technology would make it feasible to clean up said billions of tons of contamination... prevented from being used to clean it up by new infrastructure built on top of the contamination.
I think it's a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat.
I used to work in toxics cleanup and I think that's a brilliant idea. A lot of hazardous materials are more risk to dig up than just leave alone. That would put the land to some practical use and restore value to the surrounding communities, many of which were blighted by the proximity to the contamination (whether justified by actual exposure risk or not). And, oh by the way, turn that otherwise unusable ground into jobs and non-polluting energy.
So whatever led to the consideration of these sites, it's a winner. The fact no one will seriously be able to challenge the site selection on environmental grounds will simply speed getting the shovels into the ground.
This is a great idea. Whoever thought it up should get a prize.
Interesting Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
All in all it may be a good idea or may not. I hope it turns out to be economically beneficial for all.
negates a selling point of renewable energy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Superfund (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of these places could never be truly cleaned up. You'd essentially have to ship the top 500 feet of soil and rock of the entire areas to China or India, but even that's just moving the problem away from the USA.
Why clean them up either? At least this policy abandons the idea that every bit of land should be returned to some sort of pristine state.
Re:Eminent Domain bonanza!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, they are good at graft and bribery in Chicago.
My God, what are you still doing here man? Don't you know that the evil New World Obama Administration can infect your mind through your Internet connection? Quick, log off now, run to the basement, and put on your tin foil body condom, before they turn you into a mindless socialist environment-loving green weenie!
Feel free to check back in 2012, it may be safe for you to come back on line then.
Re:Superfund (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe they'll make a new island and turn it into a Disneyland to draw attention away from the obvious.
Re:Superfund (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhhh - you're trying to pretend that Obama has money to clean up all those sites, after several administrations have passed the buck, and done nothing? Get real. BTW - a lot of those sites are being cleaned up naturally anyway. Bacteria, nematodes, wildlife, sunshine, rain and wind all work to decompose and recycle a lot of the waste that has gone into the ground. Putting up something like a windfarm will tend to isolate those areas until nature has finished cleaning up our mess.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Superfund (Score:2, Insightful)
Their shoes would also walk in material, exposing any children. The the 15-25 year exposure time adds up.
But its not mommy or daddy who started work at 35 yo.
Start counting from 0-3 years and its lump or blood time around 20-40 yo.
Re:Won't be all of 'em though. (Score:2, Insightful)
And we've already taken out not-quite-as-insignificantly small chunks by building billions of houses.
This is nothing compared to the opposite effect from all the wind-absorbing trees we've cut down in order to make room for those houses, lawns, pastures, roads, parking lots, etc.
On a windy day, compare walking in a big city to walking in a forest. When it comes to wind abatement, smooth-sided, rigid buildings have nothing on trees, with their nice, fractal, flexible shapes. The same goes for windmills -- they have nothing on trees, and wind farms will cover only a fraction of the land once covered by primeval forest.
[I mention this because idiots find a windy city or parking lot easier to understand than Watts and Joules.]
What About The Connected Landowners? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The Daily Climate reports that President Obama and Congress are pushing to identify thousands of contaminated landfills and abandoned mines -- 'brownfields' that could be repurposed to house wind farms, solar arrays, and geothermal power plants. Using already disturbed lands would help avoid conflicts between renewable energy developers and environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife habitat. 'In the next decade there's going to be a lot of renewable energy built, and all that has to go somewhere,' said Jessica Goad, an energy and climate change policy fellow for The Wilderness Society.
That's all well and good for the ducks, but what about landowners who have invested good money and hosted dozens of elbow-rubbing parties over the years to develop a relationship with congresspeople and senators? How are they supposed to get the government to buy their $60 per acre swampland for $2500 per acre? Reusing land the government has already paid for severely depresses the corrupt real estate deal market, with nothing more to show for it than reduced public spending.
Won't somebody please think of the well-connected?!?
Re:Eminent Domain bonanza!!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. You do not need eminent domain to take contaminated sites. Owners of contaminated sites are usually praying that the government will take those sites off of their hands. You see, when you own land that is contaminated you are responsible for cleaning it up, and you can pay pretty hefty fines if the contamination spreads or affects the groundwater. There have been many cases where people will sell contaminated sites for negative money (i.e., pay money for someone to get them off their hands). So yes, the owners will be quite happy to give them to the government for free.
The concern is actually quite the opposite. It is possible that the Obama admin may use this program as a hidden subsidy. That is they may let owners of contaminated land off the hook for the clean-up costs and get the federal taxpayer on the hook for the clean-up costs. But in general it seems like a good idea as long as environmental groups watch the implementation carefully.
Re:Superfund (Score:2, Insightful)
By God! I have a solution! Buy them extra pairs of shoes.
(What I really mean here is that you can manage the clean up in such a way that the people doing the work clean themselves up before they leave the damn site, part of that is having them wear protective equipment)
Re:Superfund (Score:3, Insightful)
Every industrial site factors this into the design of the site. By having showers and laundering work clothes on-site to contain contaminants on site.
Re:Superfund (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been in the environmental remediation field for over 20 years. I'm somewhat tired of hearing of talk about "new technologies" to clean up waste. Despite the marketing hype, there really isn't much "new" that can be done, based on the basic physics/chemistry/biology, although improvements can and have been made.
Basically, if you have organic contamination, you can either destroy it by oxidation or reduction, remove it and put it somewhere else (preferrably in a more concentrated/lower volume form) or isolate it so nobody can be exposed to it.
For inorganic contamination, it's pretty much the same options, except the "destroy" part is fairly limited since metals are elments (but you can do things like changing hexavalent chromium to less toxic trivalent chromium for instance).
That's it.
Now, of course, there have been improvements in the destruction technologies, better ways to oxidize organics than simply burning them, for example. Chemical oxidation has come a long way, but it's still just oxidation. Reduction has seen great strides in anaerobic bacterial growth promotion, and the one truly new approach over the 20 years - zero valent iron to reduce chlorinated ethenes. And thermal technologies have been getting better and better in the "remove the stuff from the ground" category.
But these are all just improvements to the basic categories that have already been identified. And the basic challenge remains that for any of these to work (other than isolation), you have to get whatever magic dust you have in contact with the contaminants or it does nothing - that is almost always the toughest part.
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of innovation going on and to be done to improve these technologies, and they are being used more and more, and successfully I might add, in site cleanups. But thinking in terms of waiting for "advances in technology would make it feasible to clean up said billions of tons of contamination" just isn't considering the basic science.
Some days I wish I were in the semiconductor business. There, it truly seems that advances in technology are almost magic. Not so in environmental remediation.
conventional energy (Score:2, Insightful)
Conventional energy is tax payer funded as well-to make it more "economically feasible" for private energy companies, if you look at the whole stack. Cherry picking just some of the costs results in skewed figures that just make it seem to be cheaper. Thousands of miles of seized land for transmission towers and natgas pipelines, with no recompense for the private party land owners that these lines and pipelines cross, decades of uranium research run by the taxpayers or subsidized into academia and private companies, the government/taxpayers being the insurer of last resort for nuke plants (or they wouldn't exist commercially today), decades of using the US military @ *trillions* of dollars to protect oil fields all over the planet, etc., health costs associated with conventional energy sources, large hydro projects, coal, natgas amd oil sold off of public lands for cheap, then resold privately at much higher costs, a direct subsidy, yada yada.
There isn't a single form of energy production out there that isn't at least partially government/tax payer supported in some fashion if you follow the economic breadcrumbs around, and the total bill over the last century and change for "conventional" energy is *huge*. The amount thrown at more modern alternative ways is chump change in comparison. Make conventional centralized power production and distribution pay *all* their own way, including these superfund sites cleanup, and forcing the private oil companies to pay for all their own overseas security, so you see the price at the pump instead of half of it hidden in the tax bill,etc, etc,a big list, and stop hiding all the real costs with bookeeping shenanigans like that, and the alternatives-especially decentralized production of energy, become instantly quite the deal and "economically feasible" in a lot of cases.