Nuclear or Coal???
Is nuclear better? Well our state regulators seem to think after approving plans of constructing two nuclear plants in South Carolina. The article by Eric Ward of the free times gives more detail.
It’s back to the future for energy in South Carolina.
In a span of two days, state regulators recently gave the go ahead to a proposed coal-fired power plant and plans for construction of two nuclear reactors.
It is true even as coal is burning out in many other parts of the nation and at the federal level. And even as long-term nuclear waste hazards remain mostly unresolved. And even as efficiency and conservation measures as well as vast clean-energy alternatives in South Carolina, such as solar, wind and biofuels, linger largely untapped.
A growing recognition that coal burning is the world’s largest source of emissions that cause climate change and harm public health, wildlife and ecosystems is dousing the carbon-based fossil fuel elsewhere.
“Many people don’t realize that coal is the main source of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” lead NASA climatologist James Hansen said in a talk at USC in October.
To a large degree, that is why more than half of about 150 coal plants proposed since 2004 have been defeated or abandoned, according to Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s national campaign to reduce reliance on coal-based energy.
But a coal-fired power plant that state-owned utility Santee Cooper wants to build on the Pee Dee River in Florence County is not among them. For now at least, it burns on through the regulatory approval process like an orange ember refusing to extinguish.
On Feb. 12, the board of the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control OK’d an air permit for the plant, which would emit dozens of pounds of highly poisonous mercury and tons of other air pollutants every year.
Mercury emissions wash into waterways from storm water, seep into fish and end up in human bodies via the food chain. A heavy metal, mercury kills neurons in the nervous system, including the visual cortex and cerebellum parts of the brain, according to the University of Washington web site. “Children exposed to mercury may be born with symptoms resembling cerebral palsy, spasticity and other movement abnormalities, convulsions, visual problems and abnormal reflexes,” the site says.
Against those foreboding facts, South Carolina depends on coal for about 61 percent of its electricity, according to a Feb. 5 report by a state legislative panel named the Public Utilities Review Committee.
Perhaps ironically, the toxicity of coal has burnished nuclear power as an option after the United States more or less turned away from it following a large radiation leak at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979.
Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, bright green by GOP standards, cited nuclear as a better alternative in coming out against Santee Cooper’s proposed coal plant the day before the DHEC board decision.
“It’s simply not realistic to suggest that neither coal nor nuclear is acceptable, because like it or not, one or the other must come our way as our state grows over time,” Sanford said.
“To that end, I’d ask the environmental community to indeed embrace nuclear power as an alternative to the coal-fired plant proposal, for the advantages it has in terms of cleaner emissions.”
Some conservationists have done just that, dividing the environmental movement on the issue in a rare way.
In explaining his position, Sanford also pointed to the Obama administration, saying the president plans to impose mercury and carbon dioxide emissions caps.
On the same day that Sanford took his stand, the S.C. Public Service Commission approved a multibillion-dollar plan by South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. and Santee Cooper to build two more reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station.
SCE&G owns and operates V.C. Summer about 25 miles northwest of Columbia in the small town of Jenkinsville.
To pay for the reactors, SCE&G plans to raise its electricity rates an estimated 36 percent over about 10 years that it would take to construct them, according to Eric Boomhower, a spokesman for the Fortune 500 SCANA-owned utility.
The proposed coal plant and nuclear reactors must clear more state and federal hurdles to be built. And the South Carolina Sierra Club and the Southern Environmental Law Center have pledged to challenge the coal plant air permit in court.
Still, for the short-term energy future of the state it seems that South Carolinians must pick their poison – coal or nuclear. Long term the challenge is clear: Build enough public pressure to force the powers that be to get real about green power.
Article link here.
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