GreenDel Alert 654:
Ciba (BASF) in Newport, DE, rolls out a new air pollution threat to your health:
Proposed “Biomass” incinerator would belch air pollutants
Please help stop the attempt to roll back Delaware’s laws against incineration
Alert 662: The big bad guys, a sick river, some good guys, and “Cooling towers”
June 17th, 2009Many readers will know about this issue–Green Delaware has written about it quite a bit, and recently even the mainstream press has been paying some attention.
Technically, the problem is simple: Big bad industrial sites–mainly, in Delaware, Conectiv’s Edge-Moor Power Plant, Valero’s Delaware City Refinery, and NRG’s Indian River Power Plant–pump hundreds of millions of gallons of water out of the Delaware River and Rehoboth Bay every day. DuPont, Sunoco, and others are also offenders. The biggest single offender is the Salem/Hope Creek nuclear complex across the river in New Jersey.
Some fish are trapped and killed on the intake screens. Worse, the eggs and larvae of fish, crabs, and other marine life are ground up and cooked as they go through the pumps and condensers.
Millions of “adult equivalent” fish are destroyed every year. Possibly, there are one-half as many fish in Delaware’s part of the river as there would be without Delaware’s three big pumpers.
There’s more: The discharge of heat from power plants amounts to about two-thirds of the total heat energy in the fuel. That is, for every unit of electric energy produced, about 2 equivalent units of “waste heat” are dumped into the air or water. This “thermal pollution” causes problems, especially in shall, somewhat stagnant Rehoboth Bay, where NRG dumps.
There is no need for this at all. “Evaporative” cooling towers reduce water consumption by 90-95 percent. “Dry cooling (like the radiator of a car) nearly eliminates cooling water use.
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Another aspect has been far less discussed: The big bad guys use their big return flows of “cooling water” to disperse pollutants. Green Delaware fussed about the permit for the refinery, which allows dumping 38 thousand pounds per day of “oil and grease” into the river.
How can this be, you may ask? EPA allows a certain concentration of oil and grease to be in discharged wastewaters. This is supposed to mean the effluent from a “sewer” plant. But the DNREC “surface water discharges” folk, in their wisdom, allow these concentrations to be multiplied by the total flow of “non contact cooling water.” We’ve been complaining about this for years, but the polluters are happy with it, so the DNREC is happy with it, and the US EPA seems happy with it.
House Concurrent Resolution 7() has been working its way through the General Assembly. The driving force has been citizen activist Richard Schneider, who’s visited the General Assembly dozens of times to lobby for progress towards cooling towers. HCR 7 has been approved by a House committee, passed by the House of Representatives, and will be up before a Senate committed on Wed., June 18, 2009. The meeting will be in the Tatnall Building, next to Legislative Hall in Dover, at 2:30 pm.
HCR 7, whose leading and passionate sponsor is Rep. Billy Oberle, isn’t really that strong. It doesn’t have the force of law and only suggests to the DNREC that cooling towers be required.
But the big bad guys seem to hate and fear it. At the House committee hearing, lobbyists for DuPont, NRG, and Conectiv, and the Evil Chamber (Delaware State Chamber of Commerce) went on and on about why they didn’t like it. Their basic theme was “leave the decision up to DNREC—we have confidence in DNREC.”
I said, in brief testimony: “These polluters are right to have confidence in DNREC, because they know that DNREC will let them keep on if you legislators don’t tell them otherwise.”
No one from the DNREC testified at that hearing. Excuses for that are varied, but the DNREC doesn’t hesitate to testify on issues it cares about.
Does this mean nobody in the DNREC cares? In my opinion, no. Some DNREC staff, especially in the Division of Fish and Wildlife, care very much. The problem is, simply, that the big polluters have a lot more influence. Fish and crabs don’t vote, and fishermen seldom oppose industrial interests.
Roy, Miller, Fisheries director for DNREC, has worked there since 1975. One day he and colleagues went to the refinery and counted 32 thousand fish killed on the cooling water intake screens in one day.
Roy is a quiet person, not given to much public display. He’s retiring on June 30. He’s not saying why, but I doubt he’s pleased by having his pay cut and Governor Markell talking about government employees as if they are nuisances to be minimized.
So this resolution, as I see it, should be named after three people:
Roy Miller, Richard Schneider, and Billy Oberle.
Most important, it should be passed by the Senate,Signed by the Governor, and carried out by the DNREC.
And as for the lobbyists for the big bad guys They make us sick, literally and figuratively. They have great social and financial standing with elected officials. Why is so hard to make the right thing happen, no matter how obvious it is? Why is is so much more socially acceptable and financially rewarding to represent the bad guys?
DuPont’s lobbyist: Derrick Deadwyler
NRG’s lobbyist: Rhett Ruggerio
Conectiv’s lobbyist: Roger Roy
Refinery lobbyist: Kimberly Turner, Rhett Ruggerio
Alan Muller
Alert 661: Garbage in, garbage out–dump expansion hearings June 4th and 25th, 2009
June 4th, 2009Alert 661: Garbage in, garbage out–DSWA dump expansion hearings June 4th and 25th, 2009
Green Delaware’s detailed comments below
Say YES to “zero waste,” NO to dumping and burning
Green Delaware’s detailed comments below
Say YES to “zero waste,” NO to dumping and burning
Send YOUR comments to: collin.omara@state.de.us, jack.markell@state.de.us
Goodbye, GM …by Michael Moore
June 1st, 2009Monday, June 1st, 2009
Goodbye, GM …by Michael Moore
I write this on the morning of the end of the once-mighty General Motors. By high noon, the President of the United States will have made it official: General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled.
Read the rest of this entry »
“Pull the plug on Del.’s share of PBS’ WHYY”
May 31st, 2009This is from News Journal columnist and Editorial Board member Ron Williams.
Green Delaware has been seeking an end to the state subsidy for WHYY for many years.
Report on May 28, 2009, Newport incinerator meeting ….
May 29th, 2009A battle won, but the war will continue.
“There is no way we are going to work that this session.”
“The state, however, needs to be careful not to allow cogeneration systems to burn high emission solid fuels.”
–candidate Jack Markell
Alert 659: Protect our children’s health: Don’t let incinerator pollution back into Delaware
May 28th, 2009Greendel Alert 659: Protect our children’s health: Don’t let incinerator pollution back into Delaware
Meeting to promote incinerator being held Thurs. May 28th in Newport, 7:00 pm
Update on Ciba’s attempt to bring back incineration
Meeting to promote incinerator being held Thurs. May 28th in Newport, 7:00 pm
“I’m going to oppose any change. If you can’t breathe, nothing else matters”
–Sen Dave McBride
“nothing less is at stake than our health and the health of our children.”
–Alan Muller, Green Delaware
Governor: new ideas and real change needed for Delaware
May 27th, 2009From Dr. James Prescott
In his “State of the State” address, Gov. Jack Markell, like President Obama and many other governors, is faced with a financial and economic crisis that has not been experienced since the Great Depression: “Our state government also faces a challenge: the largest budget shortfall in our state’s history, almost $780 million and growing. Together, we must balance our budget; we must live within our means. We must keep our government’s core commitments, such as protecting the health and safety of our families, fostering the growth of our economy and protecting the quality of our air and water. We must give every child an opportunity to succeed and assist our senior citizens and those with disabilities.
Rx and the Single Payer
May 27th, 2009Rx and the Single Payer
by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
(Photo: Robin Dude / flickr )
In 2003, a young Illinois state senator named Barack Obama told an AFL-CIO meeting, “I am a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program.”
Held Hostage by the Health System
May 27th, 2009by Dr. Marcia Angell
The Senate Finance Committee’s hearings on health reform earlier this month did not include testimony from any advocate for single-payer insurance. Physicians for a National Health Program, which represents 16,000 doctors, asked the committee to invite me to testify, but it chose not to. If I had been invited, this is what I would have said: