“Vermont Yankee is committed to keeping Vermont’s environment strong and healthy. The safe and reliable operation of the plant helps ensure that the state’s abundant and beautiful forests, rivers, and lakes are not damaged by acid rain. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), in 2008, Vermont Yankee avoided the emission of 6,500 tons of sulfur dioxide, 1,400 tons of nitrogen oxides and 2.8 million metric tons of CO2. Since 2005, Vermont Yankee has been contributing to Vermont’s “Clean Energy Fund,” and by 2012, VY will have contributed about $35 million, providing money for the development of renewable energy sources in VT.
In the United States alone nuclear energy accounts for about 72 percent of all U.S. emission-free generation.
According to NEI, generating electricity is the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the…
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This is a followup to my post about whether or not nuclear power is considered green power and Vermont, the Green Mountain State’s issue with the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant license renewal. I was channel surfing today and because of my “connection” with Vermont, the power plant in Vernon, and the refusal of by Vermont’s legislature to renew the plant’s license to operate, a segment on Varney & Company caught my ear.
On Monday Stuart Varney interviewed State Senator Peter Shumlin (D) Vermont, about the power plant license renewal. A question asked by Mr. Varney was about what Vermont was going to do when the power plant was shutdown in 2012. Where were they going to get their power? Senator Shumlin’s answer was a little vague saying that they would buy some from Canada and encourage more renewable energy like solar, after all, “Germany was getting 30% of their power from solar energy”.
Well, after some research by Mr. Varney, and shared on Tuesday’s show, it was…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Evidently, the whole Climate Change thing (say some folks) is just vaporware. Pun intended.
Today’s Boston Globe has a very telling article (read the whole thing here), with some poll statistics showing that people are backing off their belief in climate change.
To us, the most revealing statistic is this one: Just since 2008, the number of people who do not think “that global warming is happening” has doubled. It’s still an (ignorant, in our opinion) minority of 20%, but it’s 20% now, when it was 10% in 2008. see the chart below.
And, according to the surveys, done by Yale and George Mason Universities,
Sixteen percent are considered “dismissive’’ – believing that global warming isn’t happening and is probably a hoax – up from 7 percent in 2008. So the number who actually think this is a hoax, has MORE than doubled.
Here’s a quote from the article:
“This issue is so politically sensitive, scientists need to be careful they [focus] on the science and not advocacy. ….
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Is a nuclear power plant a green way to provide energy? There seems to be quite a division in thinking on this one. President Obama thinks that nuclear power is a good thing and his administration is promising $8+ billion of federal loan guarantees to build two new plants. But the 800 pound gorilla continues to lurk in the foreground. The problem with nuclear waste plagues the industry. After all these years, and billions of dollars, there still isn’t a good solution. In spite of a good solution to the nuclear waste problem, our European counterparts are on-board with nuclear power. France now generates 80% of its power that way. We produce about 20% of our power.
I read recently that Vermont has voted to block the license renewal for the Vermont Yankee (VTY) plant in Vernon, Vermont. That has some nostalgic significance to me because I worked for the “project managers” (utility engineers) during construction of the plant in 1970. Commissioned in August…
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NEWMAN, Australia – Here in this land of searing heat, scrub, and eucalyptus, a land so vast that road signs warn the next gas station is 600 miles away, Mount Whaleback was once 1,500 feet high. Today it’s a hole, the biggest open-pit iron ore mine in the world – an entire mountain crushed, sold, and shipped to China.
Trucks with tires twice the height of a grown man cart thousands of tons of raw ore to a processing plant, where it is separated and poured into the longest and heaviest train in the world – 336 freight cars pulled by six locomotives. It chugs 300 miles to Port Hedland, where it is loaded onto ships bound for the unquenchable steel mills of the People’s Republic.
Ton by ton, China is buying Australia. One of the world’s most staggeringly huge transfers of natural resources has both enriched and alarmed Australia, prompted a determined response from Washington, and illustrated both China’s savvy…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
According to the AWEA (American Wind Energy Association), the U.S. wind industry broke all previous records by installing nearly 10,000 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity in 2009 (enough to serve over 2.4 million homes), but still lags in manufacturing, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said today in its Q4 report. These new projects place wind power neck and neck with natural gas as the leading source of new electricity generation for the country. Together, the two sources account for about 80% of the new capacity added in the country last year.
But is this enough?
“The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all installation records in 2009, chalking up the Recovery Act as a historic success in creating jobs, avoiding carbon, and protecting consumers,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “But U.S. wind turbine manufacturing – the canary in the mine — is down compared to last year’s levels, and needs long-term policy certainty and market pull in order…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Gina Abudi is the creator the Peak Performance blog and an accomplished PM leader, having earned a place in PMI’s “Power 50″ – the 50 most influential people in our field.
There she is, below.
She’s invited us to guest post on her blog, and of course we took her up on the offer.
Take a peek at our posting, and see if this Peak Performance posting piques your interest.
Have you ever heard of “hypoxia”? Perhaps you’ve heard of the more informal moniker: Dead Zones.
Should you be interested? Perhaps only if you eat. Have a look at this quote:
“More than 212,000 metric tons [235,000 tons] of food is lost to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico,” says marine biologist Robert Diaz of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who surveyed the dead zones along with marine ecologist Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “That’s enough to feed 75 percent of the average brown shrimp harvest from the Louisiana gulf. If there was no hypoxia and there was that much more food, don’t you think the shrimp and crabs would be happier? They would certainly be fatter.”
Hypoxic, or “dead” zones, are becoming more prevalent, and may trigger projects to try to reduce their effect and/or prevent them from getting so severe. The Hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pictured above, is about the size of New Jersey. Although the basis for…
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You can find out whether your Alma Mater is making a difference in Sustainability. We’ve found a great site that allows you to check out most colleges in terms of their efforts to keep themselves green with green projects, green buildings, even in their transparency about the way environmental decisions are made.
The site does a tremendous job in allowing you to search by school, by state, even by athletic conference. You can also see how a school’s grades in each of the subcategories are improving (or not!) from year to year.
This is a non-profit organization which appears to put a great deal of thinking into their analysis.
From their site:
What is the College Sustainability Report Card?
The College Sustainability Report Card is the only comparative evaluation of campus and endowment sustainability…
(Read the rest of this article at the following article source link for the full story)
Looks like EarthPM is starting to gain some notoriety, and luckily, it’s of the good kind.
We were recently put on the list of Top 100 Project Management Blogs, in the ’specialty’ section, as ranked by Construction Management Degrees. Have a look. And please help spread the word about our site – we’re getting flooded with hits, it’s true, but we’re trying to reach an even broader audience of project managers.
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e is committed to keeping Vermont’s environment strong and healthy. The safe and reliable operation of the plant helps ensure that the state’s abundant and beautiful forests, rivers, and lakes are not damaged by acid rain. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), in 2008, Vermont Yankee avoided the emission of 6,500 tons of sulfur dioxide, 1,400 tons of nitrogen oxides and 2.8 million metric tons of CO2. Since 2005, Vermont Yankee has been contributing to Vermont’s “Clean Energy Fund,” and by 2012, VY will have contributed about $35 million, providing money for the development of renewable energy sources in VT.
This is a followup to my post about whether or not nuclear power is considered green power and Vermont, the 
Is a nuclear power plant a green way to provide energy? There seems to be quite a division in thinking on this one. President Obama thinks that nuclear power is a good thing and his administration is promising $8+ billion of federal loan guarantees to build two new plants. But the 800 pound gorilla continues to lurk in the foreground. The problem with nuclear waste plagues the industry. After all these years, and billions of dollars, there still isn’t a good solution. In spite of a good solution to the nuclear waste problem, our European counterparts are on-board with nuclear power. France now generates 80% of its power that way. We produce about 20% of our power.
