Power plant emissions unlawful

good

he sould have never allowed in the begin

Well they better figure out a way to filter that stuff from exhaust fast, or half of us might be sitting in the dark soon?

Something else to thank the current administration for. Notice what the nature of our money has done to us? Check out the POM Education group articles to see what you suffer because of the nature of our money. It isn't that the people in charge are evil, it's that our money affects people that way. Read and understand.

Hopefully, this ruling will have some effect.

It's about time someone stands up to Bush.

I think it is ironic that the Federal court ruled against the federal government - that is the news. I hope it means the EPA will enforce existing pollution laws and emission restrictions now. The fact that the mercury levels in our fish are so high that large segments of our population are advised against eating them, and the cost of mercury poisoning is being borne by us all ,should be the wake-up call we need to demand enforcement.

How that got through congess is beyond me. Maybe anothe of Bush's famous Signing Statements? Good for the court. I hope the Supreme Court unholds that decision. There has to be a way of scrubbing those emmissions and getting the toxic chemicals out.

Thanks for keeping us updated on this important issue.

A federal judge also ruled that Bush's exemption of the Navy's use of harmful sonar was illegal. He did not have the legal right to give the exemption...

Mercury is showing up way too much in fish, especially tuna (the apex predators).

The FDA is not regulating the levels in food in a manner protective of the consumer...
"Healthy" levels vs. the levels the FDA are regulating to are two different things...

It's not a matter of "shutting down the plants and sitting in the dark" (that's just plain silly and an immature statement)...

There are such things as cleaner burning plants and currently there are methods of upgrading old plants to be cleaner...

The choice the EPA Wanted to give the old plants was an 'Out' from having to upgrade by "buying" "pollution credits" ...

The EPA could have said, "you Have to upgrade all the dirty plants"...

It's a matter of cost not a matter of current Technology...

It is Greed plain and simple...

Either way ... Somebody Pays...

But here is a worthwhile suggestion regardless of where anybody stands or what they think...

Don't eat so much Tuna, Swordfish, etc. (watch the sushi especially)...

Do some research. Look into it...

There are ways to clean up the emissions but it cost money. (And you know how power plants love money.)

Evidently, someone's got some sense here.

I'm glad the courts changed this

Please remove tuna and swordfish from your dinner list. How much mercury is too much? I would rather avoid that issue by avoid tuna and swordfish.

This was a great ruling, and it is a shame that it had to wait so long. Bush has been able to run out the clock on too many things.

The greater issue on coal burning power plants has to do with carbon emissions. You can't "scrub" the carbon out of the emissions, because coal is mostly carbon. We do not yet have a practical way to sequester the carbon from burning coal, though we talk as if it will happen. We are in a bad place on this.

Score one for Planet Earth. Thank you for this important update.

Coal gasification power plants can reduce mercury emissions by 90% at 1/10 the price as compared to pulverized coal power plants. That's along with massively reduced SO2 (acid rain causing) emissions, NOx (smog/acid rain causing) emissions, solid wastes, water consumption, and is more efficent (meaning less CO2 emissions), and is the only coal power plants where carbon sequestration is viable.

An important decision in the nation's search for it's environmental "self".

Thanks for the update, Sam. The good news is that w. will be out of office within a year. The bad news is that he's still got nearly a year in office.

It's time we started making everyone follow the same rules!

The fact that Bush's popularity has plummeted to the depths tells me that the American people have at least some standards of decency and common sense. I wonder what would have happened if the Supreme Court had upheld Al Gore's victory in 2000, though I doubt that he would have attempted to allow 60,000 tons of mercury into the air every year.

Thanks, Sam! I have been pointing people to your articles. Best wishes!

I'm very glad to hear that the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington ruled rightly on this one.

This was an excellent Article, Sam.

David, you had some very good comments, yourself here. The mercury is not only in the Tuna in heavy levels, it is in most of the fish in heavy levels. Mercury is just one of the many things that has infiltrated the fish.

Just thinking about all of the sewage spills (during Katrina for instance) -- (here in Florida recently) -- makes me SICK. I'm very sensitive to mercury levels in sea food. I'll never forget a BIG-lip bout I had with some fish years ago. I dare not try eating fish out of the sea now. In fact, I won't eat fish of any kind, unless it is farm-raised.

Thanks Sam for this informative Article.

Blessings ~
Rene A.

Thanks all for commenting on this important issue. I do hope this ruling will convince the electricity industry around the world to reconsider adding any further coal-fired power plants, not just because of the mercury emissions, but also for their further emissions, such as the CO2 that is one of the largest contributors to antropogenic global warming. Even if new plants do stay within current standards, it's likely that standards will go up, shortening the projected lifespan of new plants. Furthermore, the case opens up the possibility of litigation against power plants, in particular class action cases.

As to existing plants, we should look at decommissioning, which means that we need to make even faster progress with renewable alternatives. The cost of decommissioning and cleaning up sites is huge. Therefore, it may be more economic to convert existing plants to geothermal - drilling pipes down into the ground could circulate water and steam, driving the turbines that are now driven by coal-fired steam. I remember someone - many years ago - suggesting that new coal-fired power plants should be built on sites where the soil could be more easily drilled, for purposes of possible conversion into geothermal later. Pity that nobody listened then!

It seems that our government has turned back the clock of progress 50 years for profit, selling out hopes for a cleaner planet in my lifetime. Its a damn shame..............it really is.

As the article discusses, coal-fired power plants will find it increasingly hard to comply with emission standards. Additionally, the price of coal has more than doubled over the past twelve months, as shown on the image below. As at 8 February 2008, spot prices for coal were $US139.44 per tonne delivered into Amsterdam/Rotterdam/Antwerp (DES ARA index) and $125.48 for coal shipped from Newcastle, Australia (NEWC index).

Both the price of coal and the costs of sea and rail transport are expected to keep rising, while the cost of mining is also likely to go up with increasing calls for stricter standards there, as discussed in this article in Orion Magazine, kindly pointed at by Steve.

Note also that it's hard for coal-fired power plants to adjust their output to supply and demand. Currently, oil generators supply extra power at peak time, sharply increasing the cost of electricity.

In conclusion, it makes sense to look at better alternatives. Wind and solar power can provide electricity in abundance, which can be stored in hydrogen and batteries for later usage. This scenario can provide a clean, safe and price-competitive alternative to coal-fired power plants.

That is welcome news, Bush has been one of the worst at protecting the environment, more interested in protecting big business & big oil to fatten his, Daddy;s, & rest of his group of fat cats. There are so many options that the big utilities should be exploring & implementing yet they seem to care less, only private groups have really run with the ball. There was a new technology mentioned recently, (dec. o7 I believe) in Popular Science that is going to make solar technology affordable & easy to install for :Joe Blow, American homeowner) it is a solar film that is no thicker than 3 sheets of aluminum foil, can be placed anywhere it can see the sun & can be utilized to run the whole house, even air conditioning , electric heat lights etc. goodbye natural gas, propane , oil & gasoline if they start utilizing it in electric cars, could conceivably need less battery capacity , so as to reduce overall cost, no emissions just quiet clean power, no electric bills if utilized fully. the company is called nanosolar, out of California & they are adding manufacturing capacity as I write this so as to start accomodating the demand, there are other solar companies out there utilizing this type of film as well.
Hopefully the big wind generartor manufacturers will soon start producing windmills that can provide 1-12kw for the homeowner at a more reasonable cost, right now everything is geared toward large scale or too small for practicle, & cost are too high for a decent payback.

jonb1944

Thanks for commenting, Jon. Solar energy is already price-competitive, using relatively low technology methods such as solar concentrators. As Nadine May calculated back in 2005, a mere 254 km² (98 miles²) of solar concentrators in the desert would theoretically suffice to meet the entire global demand for electricity for 2004. By adding storage facilities, e.g. in molten salt or in batteries, electricity can be available around the clock.

As the article in Popular Science that you mentioned reports, Nanosolar can produce solar material at a cost of $0.30/watt or $300 per kilowatt. Solar panels are commonly scheduled to remain active for 30 years, but let's conservatively estimate that it will last for 25 years (the warranty is 15 years) and will deliver the equivalent of 4 peak hours of sunlight per day. That would deliver 1kw*4h/d*365d/y*25y=36,500kWh over its lifetime, so the cost per kWh is 300$/36,500kWh=.008218$/kWh or ~ 0.8 cent per Kilowatt hour. That is less than 1 cent/kwh and cheaper than electricity currently produced by newly-built coal-fired power plants or nuclear plants. Further advances in nanotechnology, such as nanowires, promise to deliver flexible panels with substantially higher output.

When you install panels at home, there will be some extra cost, as you have to pay retail prices and you'll have to add cost for installation, inverters, wiring, batteries, etc, but homes in sunny areas will have more than 4 peak hours of sunshine, while electric cars could provide the necessary batteries. Furthermore, consumers will rarely pay less than $0.10/kwh due to the cost of the grid. As more wind power becomes available, cost of off-peak power should fall, making it attractive for consumers to buy such energy at low rates, store it in batteries and feed it back into the grid at peak times. Attractive feed-in tariffs - such as in Germany - could help establish a more distributed grid, as described in my article The Distributed Grid.

as yes the solution is to mandate change, use the tax laws to go around the laws of supply and demand, ignore the facts that many regions of the US get little such wind for energy, ignore the destruction to bird populations, low wattage production, and simply stop building or using coal fired plants...I see what you mean now.

Charles: "ignore the facts that many regions of the US get little such wind for energy"

It's not ignored at all, Charles. Some areas do get plenty of sun and they'll go for solar energy in a big way. Other areas get plenty of wind, or have a lot of potential for geothermal energy, and that what will become prominent there. Yet other areas will prefer to import most of their electricity. Electricity can be easily transferred over thousands of miles using High Voltage Direct Currency lines (HVDC) lines. Government should not prescribe what technology is to be used, it only needs to implement a framework of fees on polluting activities with the proceeds used to fund local rebates on clean and safe alternatives. Market mechanisms can best sort out what works best where.

I should add a correction to my above post. Nadine May calculated that an area 254km by 254 km would suffice to supply all electricity the world consumed in 2004. That of course adds up to 64,516 km² (or 64.5 billion m²) - given 6.4 billion people on the planet, this means that it would take about 10 square meters (108 square feet) per person, to generate electricity in this way.

As I mention in my article Reinventing the Wheel, using concentrated solar thermal energy, facilities to power the entire US grid – day and night - could fit in a 92 mile-sided square piece of desert land, at a price of about $0.10/kwh. This corresponds to less than 10% of the Federal land in the state of Nevada, land that could be made available without taking away land used for farming.

On 23 February, 2009, the Supreme Court decided it would not review the earlier decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Obama's EPA this month announced plans to develop MACT (maximum achievable control technology) standards for electric utilities, which would force each individual plant to curb their emissions as much as possible, as opposed to the Bush administration's cap-and-trade approach that the federal appeals court struck down.

Further reading: Bush Rules on Toxic Mercury from Power Plants Overturned