A cattle feed lot in CA - Gary Kazanjian for The New York Times

The New York Times had this very interesting article by Mark Bittman.  It reiterates why it’s good for the environment and your health to cut down on meat consumption.  Some interesting excerpts from the article:

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests….

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius….

More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.

This will be inconvenient for citizens of wealthier nations, but it could have tragic consequences for those of poorer ones, especially if higher prices for feed divert production away from food crops….

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics atStanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States….

Those grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes. The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough.

Check out the whole article here , it’s worth the read.

The Texas Railroad Commission approved a rule Tuesday requiring oil and natural gas drillers to disclose most of the chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing.

The rules also will require companies to disclose the amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process in which chemicals, water and sand are pumped at high pressure into underground rock formations to aid the flow of oil and gas to the surface.

Drillers will be required to disclose fracking chemicals and water volumes on a website, www.FracFocus.org.

Drilling companies, however, don’t have to list chemicals deemed trade secrets unless the Texas attorney general or a court determines otherwise, the commission said in a statement.

Check out the whole article! The article states that environmentalists are pleased with the rule. Hopefully it works as intended!

The City of Austin is expanding a recycling program for old, power-guzzling refrigerators that costs the city about $325 per refrigerator.

The city’s electric utility gives rebates of up to $50 to customers who turn in their working refrigerators and freezers, and it will begin accepting window air-conditioning units, dishwashers, stoves and clothes washers in the coming year, Austin Energy officials said. Rebate amounts for those appliances haven’t been set yet.

Last week, the Austin City Council approved a $1,025,000 , one-year contract with Appliance Recycling Centers of America to pick up, recycle and pay the rebates for about 3,200 appliances turned in by Austin Energy customers.

The program is designed to encourage customers to switch to new appliances that use as much as three times less energy. That can reduce peak power use for the city, making rates less expensive overall for customers, said Austin Energy spokesman Carlos Cordova.

The article also explains:

Any Austin Energy customer can have an old appliance removed. Customers in single-family homes can recycle only two refrigerators and freezers a year, while multifamily customers and businesses can recycle any number of them, Leinweber said. Refrigerators and freezers must be between 14 and 27 cubic feet….

To have your old appliances picked up, contact Austin Energy at 800-452-8685 or email custinfo@austinenergy.com.

Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell started his re-election bid in November with an announcement that it is his intention to find a way to provide energy to the City of Austin without the use of any coal-generated electricity.

“Starting immediately, I’m going to begin a dialogue with the community, with Austin Energy, with the LCRA, and with state officials, about how to make Austin coal-free–and aggressively plan a date to achieve that goal,” the mayor said during his announcements.

Currently, Austin obtains coal-based energy from only one source, the Fayette Power Project in La Grange.

The 600 megawatt plant provides nearly 20 percent of Austin’s power, while the rest comes from natural gas, nuclear
and an increasing amount of wind power. As a start to getting off coal, all City of Austin facilities and operations are 100% powered by Greenchoice® energy, derived from entirely renewable sources.

The Texas Tribune had this article about a hearing the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission held yesterday to hear testimony regarding early-stage approval to a site for a new nuclear plant in Victoria Texas filed by Exelon.  Here is an excerpt:

Exelon is not currently seeking a full permit to build a plant in Victoria County — an expensive proposition even before the Japanese tragedy. The purpose of the early permit is so officials can vet all of the safety and environmental concerns about a site before a company invests significant capital there…

TSEP [Texans for a Sound Energy Policy, a group opposed to the plant] is neutral on the use of nuclear energy but opposes the site chosen in Victoria County. The D.M. O’Connor family, landowners who have lived in Victoria for generations, has invested millions in TSEP to hire lawyers and engineers to conduct geological studies of the area.

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission attorney said the review of the permit application in Victoria is ongoing, and that “no final decisions have been made about the substance of that application.” Several other new reactors — including two at Comanche Peak in Somervell County — have also been proposed for Texas.

The geology of the proposed South Texas site in Victoria County has been called into question by TSEP, which argues that geologic activity, combined with the lack of an adequate water supply, could pose a threat to safety. The area is not prone to earthquakes or tsunamis, but Victoria County has another sort of fault, called a growth fault, that can still shake things up. Unlike the sudden, jarring shift of tectonic plate movements, the shift of growth plates happens slowly over time. They won’t abruptly topple buildings, but they do create cracks in the sidewalk, for example.

There’s also this article  by Fuel Fix, comparing the Fukushima plant to 2 existing South Texas Project plants (located about 90 miles southwest of Houston near Bay City; STP has also proposed building 2 additional nuclear plants in the same area):

On Location: “Fukushima is on the coast in one of the most active seismic zones in the world, while STP is about 11 miles inland from Matagorda Bay in a seismic zone rated zero – signifying the lowest earthquake probability. Fukushima’s coastal location probably contributed to the catastrophe there. Officials reported that diesel generators responsible for providing backup power to cooling pumps were swamped by tsunamis that followed last Friday’s massive earthquake.The South Texas Project is about 29 feet above sea level, spokesman Buddy Eller said, and appears capable of withstanding the extreme storm events that are most likely for the region.

A study looking at the possible impacts of a combined Category 5 hurricane storm surge and a 100-year flood on the Colorado River that runs adjacent to the plant site found water levels would rise to just under 28 feet.”

Age: “There’s also an age difference. The Fukushima units are 30 to 40 years old. South Texas Project Unit 1 went online in 1988 and Unit 2 in 1989, making them the sixth- and fourth-youngest units in the U.S.”

Reactor Designs:  “The Japanese and Texas plants also use different reactor designs. In Fukushima’s Boiling Water Reactors (BWR), water runs through the nuclear reactor and boils into steam that turns power generation turbines. In STP’s Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR), reactor water is heated under pressure but does not boil, and moves in a closed loop. The hot water in the loop boils water in a separate vessel into steam that runs the electric turbines.

In both designs, steam flows from the turbines to a condenser that cools it into a liquid to repeat cycle.”

Finally, there’s this Wall Street Journal article, noting that the Japan crisis is putting focus on plants in the US that have the same reactor design:

Japan’s nuclear crisis is drawing attention to aging U.S. reactors, especially the 23 most similar to reactors at the Japanese plant where workers are racing to avoid a full-scale meltdown.

Eleven U.S. utilities, including industry giants such as Southern Co., Entergy Corp. and Exelon Corp., own similar reactors in 14 states. Most of them are operating beyond their initial 40-year licenses and have been granted 20-year extensions by federal regulators.

The Japanese crisis, in which problems at four reactors have led to dangerous releases of radiation in the surrounding area, could lead to safety-related changes at similar U.S. plants. Operators said that, even if they’re not ordered to make changes by regulators, they might do so to restore public trust.

U.S. regulations require plant owners to make sure plants can survive any expected threat, even if that means they have to retrofit facilities that already have licenses.

“If there’s a change in a significant safety rule, it can be imposed retroactively,” said Richard Meserve, a physicist and former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Plant operators already are pledging to learn from Japan’s accident.

“We want to look at our systems and procedures and operator training to prevent a complete loss of power to our units” in a natural disaster, said Jeff Gasser, executive vice president of Southern Co.’s nuclear division. Its Edwin Hatch plant in Georgia has two reactors similar to the Fukashima Daiichi plant’s reactors.

Some critics say the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission should rethink the way it assesses risks and create even more conservative safety standards.

One former nuclear plant operator who opposed the license extension at Entergy Corp’s Vermont Yankee plant in Vermont, one of those similar to Japanese units, thinks the NRC and utilities will have to take a hard look at the “design basis threat”—or the maximum threat—that plants face.

“What used to be considered a non-credible threat is now credible, given what’s happened in Japan,” said Arnie Gundersen, a former senior vice president of Nuclear Energy Services, a provider of engineering and technical assistance to nuclear plants. He said he thinks safety margins should be increased.

Click on the above articles for more details.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out, with some arguing that when all goes as planned, nuclear can be a much cleaner energy source than other options such as coal , but can obviously have very disasterous consequences when things go wrong.

Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia occupied the top four spots in a list that ranked mercury emissions by state, according to a feature on Bloomberg Businessweek.

In a report released Wednesday by Environment America, the aforementioned states led the nation in mercury emissions, which carries with it associated impacts to the environment and human health. Group spokeswoman Lauren Randall said that their findings were based on the Toxics Release Inventory, which contains pollution data provided by power companies annually to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The article goes on to state the following about West Virginia’s mercury listings, but doesn’t go into any detail about Texas’ high listing:

Environment America attributed West Virginia’s fourth-place ranking in the list to the mercury emissions from the state’s coal-fired power plants. The state is the second-largest coal-producing state in the country, and a significant portion of the coal that is produced is used to generate electricity, through coal-fired power plants. According to Environment America, Dominion’s Mount Storm power station is ranked 9th of the Top 10 power plants that emit the most mercury.

In 2009, the 12 coal-fired power plants in West Virginia released 6,795 pounds of mercury.

The administrative law judges initially found fault with the way the Las Brisas developers had conducted air pollution modeling, saying the emissions estimates in the permit application were done in a “reckless manner.”

Despite the concerns, TCEQ urged the judges to complete a second review of the project in time for the commission to grant the air permit before Jan. 2, when new federal rules for carbon dioxide and other climate-altering gases took effect. The judges returned a decision — another recommendation for denial – 10 days before the TCEQ’s deadline, but the commission was unable to get the permit on its agenda until today.

The developers have said in legal filings that the project could suffer financial harm if it didn’t have an air permit in advance of the greenhouse gas rules…

In its second ruling, the judges, Tommy Broyles and Craig Bennett, concluded that TCEQ improperly helped the developers with the required modeling for tiny airborne particles linked to respiratory ailments and heart disease.

TCEQ executive director Mark Vickery, in written responses to the judges’ ruling, said its modeling was not done as a substitute for the developers’ analysis. He also turned away other technical arguments made by the public and environmental groups.

The Statesman also had an article on this issue today, following the decision by TCEQ. Here is an excerpt:

The EPA asked the Texas commission earlier this week to deny the permit application so that the two agencies could work together to resolve various issues. The federal agency wrote in the letter dated Monday that it was concerned about a lack of consultation with them and that the plant could violate federal clean air standards.

The EPA wrote that it has “strong concerns about the public health and environmental impacts” the plant would pose.

(TCEQ Chairman) Shaw said the EPA’s letter could not be considered because it was not part of the official record of Wednesday’s proceeding so it had no impact on their decision…

“This is just another example of why Gov. (Rick) Perry’s appointed commissioners are nothing but a rubber stamp for industry,” said Jennifer Powis, the Sierra Club’s senior regional representative.

“It’s really Gov. Perry standing in the way of federal law. That’s a problem on multiple levels. You can’t have a state cherry pick which law they want to apply,” Powis said.

Texas is home to 19 coal-fired power plants, more than any other state.

The $3 billion Las Brisas project that will “provide much-needed low-cost, reliable electric power for users throughout Corpus Christi and South Texas at competitive prices,” according to the company’s website, which also touts economic and job benefits. “It will be a state-of-the-art facility utilizing highly sophisticated equipment to generate clean energy and protect the region’s environment.”

But some residents questioned the company’s positive view, expressing concern that the plant would emit high levels of toxic substances like mercury.

The Statesman also notes that “[a]lthough the permit is important for clearing the way to building the plant, other permits are still needed, including a water discharge permit from the state and possibly a greenhouse gas permit from EPA.”

When Texans turn on their lights, run their air conditioning or plug in their iPads, they are getting an increasing amount of power from the wind — and from coal plants. 

Figures released earlier this month show that last year, nearly 8 percent of the power on the state’s electric grid was generated by wind. That’s more than three times the national average. And because Texas recently added several coal-generating units, coal plants — for the first time in recent memory — produced more power than any other electricity source. Nuclear power’s contribution held about steady, at 13 percent of generation.

The big loser was natural gas. While natural gas is abundant in Texas, less polluting than coal and substantially cheaper than it was jut a few years ago, it is also easily replaced by the wind. The percentage of power on the grid generated from natural gas dropped from 42 percent in 2009 to 38 percent in 2010; coal, at 39.5 percent, slightly edged it out. 

Check out the whole article for more info on natural gas and to see a neat chart of the different types of power sources.