Over more than an hour and a half of back-and-forth, climate change got just a couple minutes of airtime during a CNN-hosted debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump on Thursday.

It was the first time the men had faced each other on the debate stage since October 2020. Both candidates were reportedly eager for the confrontation, with Biden’s team seeking to warn voters about the increased radicalism that Trump is promising to bring to a second term, and Trump keen on digging into his rival’s alleged cognitive decline. 

Most of the discourse focused on hot-button issues like immigration and the economy. Biden spoke with a raspy voice and at times tripped over his words, while Trump took many wild discursions and uttered several falsehoods that moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper did little to rein in.

A little over halfway in, however, Bash asked whether the candidates would do anything as president to address the climate crisis. Neither candidate directly answered the question, but Biden pointed to policies his administration has implemented to encourage the development of clean energy technologies. Trump gave an incoherent nonanswer.

“I want absolutely immaculate clean water and absolutely clean air,” Trump said. “And we had it. We had H2O, we had the best numbers ever, and we were using all forms of energy, everything.” He said his presidency saw “the best environmental numbers ever,” a statistic he said his advisers had given him moments before he walked onto the stage. In truth, Trump rolled back more than 200 environmental policies during his four years in office.

Trump also took credit for pulling the country out of the Paris Agreement — a “ripoff” for the U.S., as he described it. He otherwise used his allotted climate time to talk about his support among police groups and Biden’s border policies, among other unrelated topics.

Biden, for his part, said he enacted “the most extensive climate change legislation in history,” a reference to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which contained $369 billion in clean energy tax credits and funding for climate and energy programs. He also mentioned his administration’s creation of the American Climate Corps — a federal program to put young people to work on landscape restoration, renewable energy deployment, and other green projects — and reiterated the importance of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

In combination with preexisting policies, the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 42 percent by 2030, almost within reach of the country’s commitment under the Paris Agreement to halve emissions compared to 2005 values by the end of the decade. 

This is in marked contrast to projections about what could happen to the climate under a second Trump term. According to an analysis published in March by Carbon Brief, another Trump administration could add some 4 billion metric tons to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared to a second Biden term. This increase could cause $900 billion in additional climate damages globally. The analysis predicted that, if Trump rolled back all of Biden’s key climate policies, the U.S. would be “all but guaranteed” to miss its 2030 climate target.

“Given the scale of U.S. emissions and its influence on the world, this makes the election crucial to hopes of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” Carbon Brief said.

Beyond the one question from Bash, the only other climate-related mentions during the debate came from Trump, who blamed the U.S.’s federal deficit on a failure to extract “the liquid gold right under our feet” — oil and gas — and referred to Biden’s climate policies as the “green new scam.” He also used the term “energy independent” to describe the nation on January 6, 2021, the day he told his supporters to launch an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.

This is in line with some of the former president’s previous messaging about climate change, although it’s hard to parse what he actually believes from his history of erratic, conflicting statements. Sometimes he’s said climate change is a “hoax” orchestrated by China; other times he’s acknowledged its existence but questioned its connection to human activity.

More recently, Trump has downplayed the seriousness of the climate crisis. At a campaign rally in January, he called a youth climate protester “immature” and told her to “go home to mommy.” If elected, he has promised to “drill, baby, drill,” and reverse Biden administration climate policies like the Inflation Reduction Act.

Although expectations have never been particularly high about the prominence of climate change during a presidential debate, climate experts expressed disappointment in the brevity and shallowness of Thursday’s climate discussions. “More time discussing golf than climate. What a world we are living in,” tweeted Jeff Goodell, the author of The Heat Will Kill You First, referring to a bizarre exchange between the two candidates in which Biden challenged Trump to a round of golf. 

Other observers shared deeper concerns about Biden’s performance, which included mistakes that his opponent was quick to point out. 

“I hope he reviews his debate performance Thursday evening and withdraws from the race, throwing the choice of a Democratic nominee to the convention in August,” wrote the New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change got a question in the presidential debate. It didn’t get much of an answer. on Jun 28, 2024.

The era of voluntary sustainability and ESG disclosure reporting is coming to a close. Newly enacted US and European rules are entering into force, creating a regulatory landscape that can be daunting to navigate.

In a ruling that court observers said was “really extraordinary” and achieved through “a procedural strangeness,” the Supreme Court on Thursday blocked a federal plan to reduce air pollution that blows across state lines. 

The 5-4 decision from the court’s conservative justices halts, for now, the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Good Neighbor” rule and its stringent smokestack emissions requirements on power plants and other industrial sources. The court ruled that the EPA failed to “reasonably explain” its policy and placed it on hold pending the outcome of more than a dozen lawsuits.

Environmental advocates said the decision will leave millions of people breathing dirtier air this summer. They also worry that future challenges to federal policies could similarly “short-circuit the normal process of judicial review” by appealing directly to the Supreme Court. 

“What this shows me is that this court is no longer neutral in cases involving environmental regulations,” Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice, told reporters on Thursday. “It’s actively skeptical of EPA and new environmental regulations.”

The Good Neighbor plan was adopted to ensure compliance with a 2015 update to the Clean Air Act that tightened federal limits on ozone, a harmful pollutant and the primary component of smog. That update triggered a requirement for each state to submit a plan within three years detailing how it would reduce ozone-forming emissions from coal-fired power plants and heavy industry to protect downwind states. The law also required the EPA to craft a plan for states that failed to provide an adequate proposal.

Twenty-one states submitted plans indicating that they would do nothing, while Pennsylvania and Virginia didn’t offer one at all. In March 2023, the EPA issued its own proposal for the 23 states, prompting dozens of lawsuits in federal courts around the country.

Ohio, Indiana, and Virginia, joined by pipeline company Kinder Morgan, U.S. Steel, and others, in challenging the plan, argued that the EPA’s approach failed to consider the impact of a federal plan on each state. They also alleged that the steps needed to implement it could create economic and operational harm even as lower courts decide other lawsuits.

The justices, in a majority opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, agreed. Gorsuch noted that the EPA’s plan to implement pollution reduction requirements regardless of how many states are involved was not “reasonably explained.” 

“The government refused to say with certainty that EPA would have reached the same conclusions regardless of which states were included,” he wrote.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett argued in a strongly worded dissent that the agency “thoroughly explained” its methodology for calculating emissions reduction requirements, which depends not on the number of states included in the plan, but on cost-effective measures that can be achieved at each source of pollution. Barrett also noted that the plaintiffs and the court failed to identify how exactly the rule would differ if the number of states changed.

Sankar, who has for 25 years closely watched the Supreme Court’s decisions on environmental matters, called the ruling “really extraordinary” for two reasons. First, the EPA did in fact explain its reasoning in numerous documents. Second, the case landed on the court’s emergency docket, a lineup that until recently largely was reserved for minor procedural issues typically decided without the justices hearing oral arguments.

Zachary Fabish, senior attorney at the Sierra Club, told Grist that by hearing oral arguments and issuing so consequential an opinion on its emergency docket, the Supreme Court has created a kind of “procedural strangeness” in its decision making. He pointed out that the case had yet to be decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which will likely rule on the legitimacy of the Good Neighbor plan sometime next year. That means that even before the lower court’s decision, the Supreme Court has already weighed in — but without the benefit of extensive briefings, arguments, and opinions from a lower court, he said. 

Today’s ruling suggests future environmental policies could face similar challenges on the emergency docket, said Sankar. “It’s really hard to say that there are any rules that aren’t subject to this kind of attack.”

Clean air advocates highlighted another glaring omission from the court’s opinion: It made no mention of the public health toll of the pollution on downwind states. Ozone forms in high temperatures and sunlight, making summer months particularly conducive to its formation. As Fabish puts it, “The hotter the summer, the worse the ozone season” — a foreboding sign as much of the country broils under relentless heat. Research has shown that ozone increases the risk of life-threatening conditions like asthma attacks, especially among children, older adults, people who work outside, and people with respiratory and other illnesses.

Last summer, data collected by the EPA showed that from May to September, the Good Neighbor rule — which at the time was in effect in 10 states, including Illinois, New York, and Ohio — successfully drove down ozone-forming emissions by 18 percent. “Staying this rule threatens the progress that happened last ozone season when the rule was partially in effect,” Fabish said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Supreme Court blocks an EPA plan to curb ozone air pollution on Jun 27, 2024.

The United States Supreme Court has put a temporary hold on enforcement of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s “Good Neighbor” plan that aims to reduce the drifting of dangerous air pollution from power plants and factories in states in the West and Midwest into those in the East.

The 5-4 decision of the Court granted requests by the states of Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia — along with oil and gas pipeline operator Kinder Morgan, U.S. Steel Corporation and industry groups — to stop enforcement of the rule while they contest its legality in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, reported Reuters.

In their original suit, plaintiffs argued that the EPA had violated a federal law meant to ensure the actions of agencies are reasonable.

“The court grants the states’ application to put the rule on hold while the case proceeds in the lower courts,” a majority of the justices ruled, as The Guardian reported. The judges added that the EPA would likely lose its case in circuit court.

Joining the three liberal justices in dissent, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the court “justifies this decision based on an alleged procedural error that likely had no impact on the plan.”

EPA’s Good Neighbor rule was initially issued in March of last year with the intent of tackling ozone-forming gases — a main component of smog — from industrial sources in 23 states whose plans didn’t meet the standards of the Clean Air Act’s “Good Neighbor” provision.

The Clean Air Act permits states to come up with their own air pollution plans, subject to EPA approval.

The Court’s ruling was provisional while the appeals court case continues, but the temporary halt to enforcement of the EPA plan will result in it being suspended for months and possibly longer, reported The New York Times.

The ruling came after other recent decisions that undercut the EPA’s authority to combat water pollution and climate change.

The application by the three states asking the Supreme Court to block the Good Neighbor rule called it “a failed experiment” and “a shell of its original self.”

The EPA responded, arguing that blocking the rule would have dire consequences and that the national rule should not be affected by the states’ plans.

“It would delay efforts to control pollution that contributes to unhealthy air in downwind states, which is contrary to Congress’s express directive that sources in upwind states must assume responsibility for their contributions to emissions levels in downwind states,” the brief on behalf of the EPA said.

The post Supreme Court Blocks EPA’s ‘Good Neighbor’ Rule Limiting Air Pollution Across State Lines appeared first on EcoWatch.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) investigation has determined that the venting and burning of tank cars of the derailed train in East Palestine, Ohio was not necessary, and that the decision to burn was made under incomplete and misleading information from Norfolk Southern, operator of the train.

Last year, NTSB held an investigative hearing over the train derailment and following handling of the hazardous materials onboard in East Palestine that happened in February 2023. The investigation revealed the cause of the derailment and analyzed the actions that happened following the incident, which included the burning of tank cars that were carrying vinyl chloride. After the incident, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced that the train had never been marked as a “high hazardous material train” in the first place.

According to NTSB, the tank cars underwent a vent and burn procedure, which involves releasing the chemicals inside the tank cars into the ground and then setting them on fire, three days after the derailment. The decision came from incident commander and East Palestine fire chief Keith Drabick, who had told investigators that Norfolk Southern were positioning a vent and burn as the safest option, HuffPost reported. The fire chief had said Norfolk Southern pressured him to respond with a decision on a vent and burn in just 13 minutes.

Some concerns were raised by Norfolk Southern and its contractors over the potential for the chemicals in the tank cars to undergo polymerization, which could lead to an explosion.

“Norfolk Southern and its contractors continued to assert the necessity of a vent and burn, even though available evidence should have led them to re-evaluate their initial conclusions,” said Paul Stancil of NTSB, as reported by HuffPost.

But according to NTSB’s report on its investigation, a vent and burn “was not necessary to prevent a polymerization induced explosion” and the board wrote that Norfolk Southern “compromised the integrity of the decision to vent and burn the tank cars by not communicating expertise and dissenting opinions to the incident commander making the final decision.” NTSB said that the on-site temperature trends showed no signs of polymerization.

NTSB said that the choice to vent and burn instead posed “high local and environmental impacts” and suggested that federal guidance be developed over when to conduct a vent and burn procedure.

Additionally, NTSB said that volunteer firefighter laws in Ohio were insufficient for providing a safe emergency response to the train derailment in East Palestine, and that there was inefficient coordination and communication because of a lack of common radio channels. Further, the board said that Norfolk Southern’s delays in relaying information about the train consist — or the contents and positioning of the train cars — to emergency responders increased hazardous exposures to the emergency responders and the public.

NTSB’s report found that an overheating bearing caused the derailment. According to the report, the bearing overheated, causing an axle to separate. 

“Unfortunately, some have sought to minimize the wide-ranging impacts of this derailment, pointing to the fact that there were no fatalities or injuries. For this, we are certainly grateful, but the absence of a fatality or injury doesn’t mean the presence of safety,” NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said in a statement. “Our agency doesn’t wait for death or injury to occur. Instead, we objectively analyze the facts and evidence to make recommendations that, if implemented, will ensure this never happens again. Thanks to the hard work of our world-class investigators, we now have a roadmap to do just that.”

NTSB listed 31 recommendations for improving railway safety. Some of these recommendations included:

• For the Federal Railroad Administration to research and regulate bearing defect detection systems and responses,;
• For the Association of American Railroads to create a database on bearing failure and replacements;
• For Ohio to adjust its volunteer firefighter training requirements to meet “a widely accepted” standard;
• For Columbiana County Emergency Management Agency to establish a policy requiring train consist information to be provided immediately; and
• For The Chlorine Institute to update its pamphlet on vinyl chloride monomer, which Norfolk Southern had used in support of the vent and burn decision and which NTSB had defined as having “misleading information about signs of polymerization.”

The full list of findings and recommendations are available to the public in the NTSB’s report abstract. The full investigation docket is also available online.

The post Burning Train Cars With Toxic Chemicals After Derailment in East Palestine Was Unnecessary, Federal Investigation Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

The world’s first permanent depository for nuclear fuel waste opens later this year on Olkiluoto, a sparsely populated and lushly forested island in the Baltic Sea three hours north of Helsinki. 

Onkalo — the name means “cavity” or “cave” in Finnish — is among the most advanced facilities of its kind, designed for an unprecedented and urgent task: safely storing some of the most toxic material on Earth nearly 1,500 feet underground in what’s called a deep mined geologic repository.

The process requires remarkable feats of engineering. It begins in an encapsulation plant, where robots remove spent nuclear fuel rods from storage canisters and place them in copper and cast iron casks up to two stories tall. Once full, these hefty vessels, weighing around 24 metric tons, will descend more than a quarter-mile in an elevator to a cavern hollowed out of crystalline bedrock 2 billion years old. (The trip takes 50 minutes.) Each tomb will hold 30 to 40 of these enormous containers ensconced in bentonite clay and sealed behind concrete. As many as 3,250 canisters containing 6,500 metric tons of humanity’s most dangerous refuse will, the theory goes, lie undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years.

Nothing assembled by human hands has stood for more than a fraction of that. The world’s oldest known structure, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, is a bit more than 11,000 years old. Designing Onkalo to endure for so unfathomably long is necessary because the material left behind by nuclear fission remains radioactive for millennia. Safely disposing of it requires stashing it for, essentially, eternity. That way nothing — be it natural disasters, future ice ages, or even the end of humanity itself — would expose anyone, or anything, to its dangers.

“The plan is that there will be no sign [of the facility],” said Pasi Tuohimaa, communications manager for Posiva, the agency that manages Finland’s nuclear waste. “Nobody would even know it’s there, whether we’re talking about future generations or future aliens or whatever.”

Building such a place, as technologically complex as it is, might be easier than convincing a community to host it. Gaining that approval can take decades and rests upon a simple premise.

“One of the principles of geologic disposal is the idea that the generations that enjoy the benefits of nuclear power should also pay for and participate in the solution,” said Rodney Ewing, a mineralogist and materials scientist at Stanford University and co-director of the university’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.

The long process of gaining such support is called consent-based siting, an undertaking many in the nuclear energy sector consider vital as the world abandons fossil fuels. Nuclear power accounts for almost a fifth of the United States’ electricity generation, and its expansion is among the few elements of the Biden administration’s energy agenda that enjoys strong bipartisan support. Over the last year, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has touted the nation’s newest reactor, celebrated plans for an experimental small modular reactor, and unveiled a $1.5 billion loan to restart a defunct plant in Michigan. 

These are hardly one-offs. The U.S. intends to triple its nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Yet experts say there isn’t enough public discussion of how to deal with the corresponding increase in radioactive trash, which will compound a problem the country has deferred since the start of the nuclear age. After botching plans for a deep mined geological repository a generation ago, the United States is scrambling to catch up to Finland and several other nations, including Canada, which could choose a site by year’s end.

As the U.S. races toward a post-carbon future in which nuclear energy could play a key role, policymakers, energy experts, and community leaders say dealing with the inevitable waste isn’t a technical problem, but a social one. Engineers know how to build a repository capable of safeguarding the public for millennia. The bigger challenge is convincing people that it’s safe to live next to it.

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The United States knew, even before the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant began operating in Pennsylvania in 1957, how best to dispose of the effluvium generated by splitting atoms to generate electricity. Earlier that year, geologists and geophysicists wrote a National Academy of Sciences report that proposed burying it. Opinions haven’t changed much in the 67 years since. 

“The only viable way to possibly deal with the issue of isolating radioactive waste that can remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years from the environment is a deep geologic repository,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There’s really no alternative.”

Yet this refuse, most of it from the nation’s 54 commercial reactors, remains in what amounts to cold storage. Depleted fuel rods are kept on-site in water tanks for about half a decade, then moved to steel and concrete canisters called dry casks and held for another 40 years in what’s known as interim storage. Only then is the material cool enough to stash underground. That last step has never happened, however. The nation’s 85 interim storage sites hold more than 86,000 tons of waste, a situation that’s akin to leaving your trash behind the garage indefinitely. The situation could grow more dire as the nation invests in advanced small modular reactors. 

“It’s a pet peeve of mine, to be honest,” said Paul Murray, who became the Department of Energy’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in October. “Everybody talks about the shiny new reactors, but nobody ever talks about back-end management of the fuel that comes out of them.”

Congress attempted to rectify that in 1982 when it passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. President Ronald Reagan called the law “an important step in the pursuit of the peaceful uses of atomic energy.” It required that the federal government begin taking responsibility for the nation’s nuclear waste by 1998, and that the utilities generating it pay a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity to be rid of it. The plan stalled because the government never took possession of most of the waste. That failure has allowed the utilities to collect $500 million in fines from Washington each year since 1998. A report that the Government Accountability Office released in 2021 noted that federal liabilities could reach $60 billion by 2030. 

The federal government’s missteps continued when plans for a deep geologic repository derailed about 15 years ago. The 1982 law directed the Department of Energy to provide the president, Congress, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency with suggestions for several sites. Congress amended the law in 1987 to designate one: Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas on land the Western Shoshone Nation considers sacred.

This top-down process was the antithesis of consent-based siting, and it collapsed amid community opposition and the efforts of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Nevada Democrat convinced President Obama to scuttle the proposal, which by that point had cost $13 billion. The Obama administration convened a panel of scientists to devise a new plan; in 2012, it suggested creating an independent agency, giving it responsibility for the nuclear fund and directing it to revamp the effort through consent-based siting.

That recommendation mimicked what Finland had done, and Canada was doing, to build community consensus. Posiva spent four decades working toward the facility on Olkiluoto; the Canadian search started 24 years ago with the creation of the independent Nuclear Waste Management Organization. Yet more than 10 years after the Department of Energy made consent-based siting its official policy, there’s been little progress toward a deep mined geologic repository in the U.S. for commercial nuclear waste. (Radioactive refuse generated by the defense industry has, since 1999, been secured 2,150 feet underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.)

Instead of identifying possible sites for a deep geologic repository, the Energy Department directed Murray, who has a background in nuclear technology and environmental stewardship, to address a backlog of waste that could, by his estimate, take 55 years to clear out of interim storage. Much of this trash is languishing in dry casks that dot power plants in 37 states. Last year, he formed a 12-member Consent-Based Siting Consortia to start the search for a federally-managed site that would temporarily consolidate the nation’s waste until a permanent site is built.

He could start by looking at existing energy communities with coal-fired power plants that have been decommissioned or soon will be, according to Kara Colton. She leads the Energy Communities Alliance, a coalition of local governments that is part of the consortia and is distributing $1 million in federal grants to three communities interested in hosting a nuclear waste storage facility. (Additional grants will be available this summer.) But she worries that, without a concerted, long-term effort by the government to find a permanent repository, no one will commit to participating.

“This is a multi-generational project and we have a political system that changes all the time,” she said. “Without assured funding, we’re checking every year to see if the progress that’s made will change.” 

But Murray’s quest to consolidate temporary waste storage may be moot. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the Department of Energy lacks the authority to designate an interim storage site unless that facility is tied to a plan to establish a deep mined geologic repository. That makes Murray’s efforts “pretty meaningless,” Lyman said.

Murray concedes that his mission faces challenges. “Without a robust repository program, it’s very difficult to site interim storage,” he said. “We have to, as a nation, start a repository program, otherwise people think they’ll become the de facto disposal facility.”

Gaining consensus for a permanent storage site, then building it, could take 50 years, he said. In the meantime, the nation’s utilities continue to pile up 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste each year. 

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If 50 years sounds preposterous, consider that Finland began its search for a repository site in 1983. Within a decade, the government had considered four locations in a process that weighed community opinions alongside geological and environmental criteria like bedrock density, groundwater movement, and potential changes in the movement and formation of the glaciers above due to climate change. 

Eurajoki, a rural village of just over 9,000 people, provided the greatest social support and the best geographical factors. When the town council voted to approve the site in 2000, its members, and many residents, seemed predisposed to the idea because Olkilouto, which is 8 miles away, already hosted two reactors. (A third, Olkiluoto 3, opened in April 2023; the three plants provide about one-third of the country’s electricity.)

Still, Posiva, the independent agency charged with establishing a deep geologic repository, engaged in a long-term campaign to foster community support and trust, teaching residents about nuclear energy and waste storage to alleviate their concerns. Tuohimma, Posiva’s communications manager, called it a “long road show” with origins in the company’s efforts to sell the technology in the 1970s. Although the Finnish Green Party and Greenpeace expressed concerns about the project — stemming from the building of new nuclear plants and not disposal of the waste — opposition has since eased. Construction of the 1 billion euro facility started in 2000; Posiva estimates that over the next century, running, filling, and eventually sealing the site will cost 5.5 billion euros. How long that takes will depend upon the rate at which the country generates radioactive waste.

Eurajoki Mayor Vesa Lakaniemi told German news site DW that hosting all that nuclear infrastructure generates about 20 million euros in taxes each year. That’s almost half the town’s annual revenue and is “how we can plan our future investments,” including a renovated school, a new library, and an 8 million euro sports facility. Lakaniemi believes residents ultimately supported the project because of Posiva’s safety record, and because Finns tend to trust their government and its institutions.

Canada’s efforts have not gone so smoothly.

The country’s hunt for a site began in 2002 when parliament passed the Nuclear Fuel Waste Act. The law established the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, or NWMO, which unveiled a nine-step plan in 2010 that would lead, within a decade or so, to an agreement to host a repository. Within two years, 21 communities had expressed interest in doing just that. 

The agency spent the past dozen years winnowing the list to the two most geologically and socially appropriate sites. To do that, it began by ensuring each candidate had a suitable site — one large enough for the required infrastructure, yet far enough from drinking water supplies and protected lands like national parks. Communities also had to outline the material benefits they would receive from the employment opportunities and industrial development the project would foster.

Over time, the screening process cut the list of potential sites to two. The first is South Bruce, a small farming community roughly 100 miles west of Toronto and about 35 miles from the country’s largest nuclear power plant. The other is Ignace, a rural town about 150 miles northwest of Lake Superior. 

The First Nations communities in those locations — the Saugeen Ojibway Nation near South Bruce and the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation near Ignace — also must provide consent, but that process is separate, and generally less publicized, from those taking place in the townships.

The site near Ignace sits on what is roughly equivalent to federal land, which makes acquisition easier than in South Bruce, where the Nuclear Waste Management Organization had to sign agreements with property holders to eventually purchase their land for the 1,500-acre project, should it go through. That meant selling the idea not only to the community, but to individual landowners. The agency gained support by spending liberally to help the town with everything from new fire trucks to a scholarship fund to paying some municipal salaries. All told, it has given the town more than $9.3 million since 2013. (Ignace has received almost $14 million since 2018.)

Still, the idea of hosting a repository has divided the 6,000 or so residents in South Bruce, who were once united by their participation in church groups and youth sports. Supporters say they trust the science showing that repository technology is safe, and they point to the benefits it’s already brought. But critics worry about the impact of all that radioactive material on the town now and decades into the future, and they worry the potential economic and environmental costs haven’t been adequately studied. They also feel the NWMO is less interested in considering their perspectives and answering their questions than in selling the repository through fiscal promises.

Carolyn Fell, the agency’s communications manager in South Bruce, said residents can find her in the office five days a week, where she is happy to answer questions. “We have heard concerns from the community, and at every turn we do our best to answer in a very up-front and transparent way,” she said.

Michelle Stein isn’t so sure about that. She and her husband Gary raise cattle and sheep on a farm they bought in South Bruce 30 years ago. They also raise three children there, with dreams of them taking over. But after NWMO started signing agreements with adjacent landowners for what would become 1,500 acres back in 2019, Stein’s kids moved away. Now, she worries her land could soon be worthless and her livelihood gone.

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“In my opinion, they should at least pay us what they paid people who sold at the beginning of the project,” Stein said. She also fears the impact the facility might have on groundwater, and whether anyone would buy beef and lamb grown alongside a nuclear site. She feels some of her neighbors, and the town council, have been bought off by NWMO’s investments in the community.

“They say they won’t come into a non-willing community,” Stein said, “but they’re certainly pushing us to be willing.”

Stein joined more than a dozen others in organizing Protect Our Waterways to oppose the project. The group’s volunteer chair, Anja Vandervlies, worries the buffer zone, which prohibits living or farming within a certain distance of the facility, might end up including some or all of her farm. She and Stein have testified before the town council, written op-eds for the local paper, and erected bright yellow, handmade billboards reading, “Say No to NWMO” and “Stop Canada’s Nuke Dump!” But they have felt crowded out by what they considered aggressive marketing by the agency. In 2022, their field of candidates for town council fared poorly in the election; Mayor Mark Goetz said he and the body’s five elected members now publicly support the waste facility. 

Goetz succeeded his father, who was mayor in 2012 when South Bruce told the Nuclear Waste Management Organization it was interested in hosting the repository. Goetz said his father was interested in the economic development the project would bring to a community heavily dependent on agriculture. He rejects claims that the town council has not sought community input, noting that it has held hundreds of events over the past 12 years. He’s also grateful for the financial support the NWMO has provided thus far. More than that, however, he believes someone has to host the site, so why not South Bruce?

“We’ve benefited from cheap nuclear power, and I don’t think we should leave this waste to sit for future generations to deal with,” Goetz said. 

Voters will decide the matter in a referendum in October. More than 50 percent of voters must cast ballots for it to count, which, to Goetz’s mind, makes the council’s position largely moot.

“The beauty of the referendum is that everyone gets an equal vote,” he said. “It’s a democracy, and it’ll be majority rule, so it doesn’t really matter which way the council decides.” 

But if the referendum brings out less than 50 percent of voters, the decision falls back to the town council.

A win in South Bruce won’t necessarily be enough, though, because the Saugeen Ojibway Nation also must endorse the idea. Even then, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization will make the final decision later this year, and it also has an eye on the location near Ignace.

That option, called the Revell site, sits about midway between Ignace and the larger town of Dryden. Vince Ponka, the agency’s regional communications manager for northern Ontario, described it as an egg-shaped formation of granite several miles long and deep within the Canadian Shield, a vast igneous and metamorphic formation that rings Hudson Bay. 

“It’s an ideal piece of rock to hold the [deep mined geologic repository],” he said. Although the facility would be beyond the city limits, Ignace would host the “Center of Expertise,” an office and educational complex meant to teach people about the repository. He called it a “real architectural gem” that could boost economic development. 

Jodie Defeo, a registered nurse and an Ignace town council member, said she was indifferent when she learned about the possibility of a repository 14 years ago, but any skepticism was allayed last summer during a trip to Olkiluoto that the Nuclear Waste Management Organization funded. 

“There was no sense of caution or anything, it appeared like there was no cause for concern” among the people of Eurajoki, she said. She saw the improvements the tax revenue made in the local schools and infrastructure, and she returned home a booster. She believes a similar facility could bring good fortune to Ignace, which fell upon hard times when the mining industry began to dwindle a few decades ago. 

“There are no pots of money for aging infrastructure,” she said. Few jobs, a tanking housing market, and a dwindling population result in a tiny tax base. While her 17-year-old son is interested in staying in Ignace, her 27-year-old son moved to Thunder Bay, a city of roughly 110,000 almost three hours south on the shore of Lake Superior. For Defeo, the possibility of hosting a repository brings with it a sense of hope.

“I feel like we could be on the cusp of a change,” she said.

Wendy O’Connor doesn’t share her optimism. She’s the communications officer for Thunder Bay and volunteers with the opposition group We the Nuclear Free North. She said that although Ignace raised its hand to host the repository, all the waste will pass through her city. The trucks carrying it will trundle about 1,000 miles along the Trans Canada Highway, a largely two-lane road that hugs the coast of Lake Huron and the cliffs of Lake Superior. She’s worried about the risk of accidents on the highway or at the site.

Of course, there is always the risk that radioactive material will leak while in transit or short-term storage, something that has happened in Germany and New Mexico over the past two decades — though with no known health impacts. 

“We can say with confidence, accidents are not only possible but they occur,” said Ewing, the Stanford University professor. But, he added, they are studied and mistakes remedied. 

Although scientists express confidence in the engineering of repositories, it is almost inevitable that, over millennia, some of the canisters within them will corrode, some of the barriers sealing their tombs will erode, and some of the waste will leak. Theoretically, it is safer that it happens deep within the Earth, where it poses a far smaller threat. As the 2018 Stanford report that Ewing helped produce notes, “‘safe’ doesn’t mean zero health risks for hundreds of thousands of years, but a health risk that is low enough to be acceptable to today’s population and future generations.”

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Given the risks, however small, of hosting the nation’s nuclear waste, some wonder if consent-based siting is little more than a form of flattery, a way of paying a community to take on a task no one else wants to do. 

“A cynic would say that what it really means is that every community has its price,” said Lyman. “The question is how much compensation is enough, and is the level of compensation that will be enough something that the industry and the government can afford. These are all unanswered questions.” 

But as the efforts in Finland and Canada show, at least the approach provides a community with a say in its future — something the U.S. government denied the people of Nevada when it chose Yucca Mountain all those years ago. The collapse of that effort shows the limitations of a top-down approach, and the nation’s growing stockpile of nuclear waste underscores the urgent need to address a problem too long ignored. As Lyman noted, the country needs to push forward. It must be mindful of intergenerational equity by making the best choice it can to protect those who will be here hundreds, even thousands, of years from now, using the best science and technology available today. And that, in the eyes of many experts in the field, means developing deep mined geologic repositories.

“Any strategy to increase nuclear power that doesn’t include a strategy to handle the waste should not be pursued,” Ewing said.

Of course, nuclear energy is not the only path leading the world away from fossil fuels, and there are legitimate safety concerns and other reasons to question its place in a post-carbon future. But as long as the United States and other governments consider expanding its use, they will have to figure out what to do with the inevitable waste it generates, and do so with the support of the communities that will bear that burden. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How do you convince someone to live next to a nuclear waste site? on Jun 27, 2024.

Along with earthworms, rocks, and the occasional skeleton, there’s a massive battery right under your feet. Unlike a flammable lithium ion battery, though, this one is perfectly stable, free to use, and ripe for sustainable exploitation: the Earth itself. 

While temperatures above-ground fluctuate throughout the year, the ground stays a stable temperature, meaning it’s humming with geothermal energy that engineers can exploit. “Every building sits on a thermal asset,” said Cameron Best, director of business development at Brightcore Energy in New York, which deploys geothermal systems. “I really don’t think there’s any more efficient or better way to heat and cool our homes.”

At the start of June, Eversource Energy commissioned the United States’ first networked geothermal neighborhood operated by a utility, in Framingham, Massachusetts. Pipes run down boreholes 600 to 700 feet deep, where the temperature of the rock is consistently 55 degrees Fahrenheit. A mixture of water and propylene glycol (a food additive that works here as an antifreeze) pumps through the piping, absorbing that geothermal energy, then flows to 31 residential and five commercial buildings, where fully electric heat pumps use the liquid to either heat or cool a space. If deployed across the country, these geothermal systems could go a long way in helping decarbonize buildings, which are responsible for about a third of total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. 

Once a system is in place, buildings can draw heat from water pumped from below their foundations, instead of burning natural gas piped in from afar. Utilities use the same equipment to deploy networked geothermal as they do for gas lines, and even the same kind of pipes — they’re just circulating fluid instead of gas. The networks don’t need special geology to operate, so they can be set up pretty much anywhere. The project in Framingham, then, could be the start of something big.

In Massachusetts, commercial buildings tend to be more cooling-heavy, meaning that they cool more than heat over the course of a year, whereas residential homes tend to be more heating-heavy. Lots of different structures, with different heating and cooling needs, share one loop of piping in a geothermal network. “When you combine them onto the same loop, you keep the ground temperature stable,” said Eric Bosworth, manager of clean technologies at Eversource Energy. “You’re not putting energy in or out of the ground when you add all of the loads up.” 

To scale up, a geothermal loop like Framingham’s might connect to an adjacent neighborhood, and that one to another. “In the end, what we would like is if the gas utilities become thermal utilities,” said Audrey Schulman, executive director of the nonprofit climate-solutions incubator HEETlabs. (A spinoff of the climate nonprofit HEET, which began pitching the idea to Eversource and other utilities in 2017.) “Each individual, shared loop can be interconnected, like Lego blocks, to grow bigger and bigger.”

That goal may not be far off as utilities face increasing regulatory pressure to phase out gas. So Eversource Energy and two dozen other utilities, representing 47 percent of the country’s natural gas customers, have joined into an information-sharing coalition called the Utility Networked Geothermal Collaborative. “We’ve made a point to think about: Are we really a gas company, or are we a thermal energy delivery company?” said Holly Braun, business development and innovation manager at the Oregon utility NW Natural, which co-founded the coalition. 

These geothermal systems hinge on the humble heat pump. For most homes, an “air source” heat pump is currently the best option: Using an outdoor unit, it extracts warmth from even chilly winter air and pumps it inside. It then reverses in the summer to act like an air conditioner. 

The heat pumps in a geothermal system work the same way, only instead of extracting heat from air, the appliance extracts it from the water that’s been coursing underground. In the summer, the heat pump cools a space by injecting indoor heat into the water, which is then pumped back into the earth. That helps warm up the ground, recharging the subterranean battery so there’s plenty of energy to extract in the winter. 

A networked geothermal system is extremely efficient. It scores a “coefficient of performance,” or COP, of 6, meaning for every one unit of energy going in, you get six units of heat out. By contrast, gas furnaces have a COP of less than 1.

These heat pumps are exploiting water moving through rock that’s consistently 55 degrees. An air-source heat pump in the same neighborhood might have to run when it’s 10 degrees out, meaning it’ll have to work harder to provide the same amount of heat. Accordingly, its COP of 2 or 3 would still far outpace a gas furnace, but not approach geothermal’s COP of 6. “That means you have a higher efficiency with a ground-source system, which, of course, helps then with running costs,” said Jan Rosenow, who studies heat pumps at the Regulatory Assistance Project, a global energy NGO.

That kind of efficiency will be critical if the U.S. is going to wean itself off fossil fuels. The more gas furnaces people replace with electric heat pumps, the more demand on the electrical grid. But the more efficient that engineers can make heating and cooling systems, the less capacity utilities will have to add to the grid. “Ground-source heat pumps, and particularly those community networked shallow geothermal, take the lowest electricity draw on that coldest day in winter,” said Tamsin Lishman, CEO of Kensa Group, which is pioneering networked geothermal in the United Kingdom. “It supports a substantial saving in the upgrade needed in the grid.”

But if a utility has perfectly good infrastructure already in the ground to deliver gas, and it’s making good money doing so, why would it invest in a new kind of geothermal infrastructure? The reality is that a lot of that gas infrastructure isn’t particularly good, and is downright dangerous if it’s leaking an explosive gas. A utility might use networked geothermal to just swap in water for gas. “If you’re in a situation where you’re going to need to upgrade your pipe anyway, or replace it, you maybe think about: Do I replace it instead with a pipe that doesn’t require fuel, and it’s naturally replenishing energy from the ground?” Braun said.

At the same time, utilities are under mounting pressure to phase out natural gas: Last year, New York became the first state to ban it in most new buildings. Utilities are also staring at mandates in states like California, Vermont, and Colorado to slash their overall carbon emissions, and they can’t do that if they keep delivering the same amount of natural gas. “If you’re in a jurisdiction that says ‘no new gas,’ well, you don’t put in new gas,” Braun said. “You got to have something else, or you just keep shrinking your business.”

For new housing developments in particular — especially where recent ordinances have limited the amount of new buildings that can be connected to gas — they can drill the boreholes and lay the piping for buildings, and the homes will be ready to go fully electric. “We could lose those customers — we could just take ourselves out of the game — or we could present them with a new, decarbonized option that utilizes our existing strengths,” said Morgan Hood, manager of innovative products and services at Vermont Gas Systems, which co-founded the Utility Networked Geothermal Collaborative. “That’s what geothermal does.”

Though networked geothermal is vastly more efficient than burning gas in a furnace, it’s still unclear how it would impact a customer’s energy bill. Because utilities are still experimenting with these systems, they haven’t settled on a rate structure. One option may be a flat monthly rate to tap into the geothermal network, depending on how much water a given structure needs to provide adequate heating and cooling. It’s a relatively new technology, so the costs to install are still high: Eversource says its budget for the Framingham project was around $18 million for those 36 residential and commercial buildings. But as with any technology, costs will come down as the technique matures.

If the United States is going to properly decarbonize, the home of tomorrow could ditch natural gas and instead use a heat pump to tap into the air or the earth itself as a natural battery. The energy’s there — it’s always been there — now it’s just a matter of realizing its full potential.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The secret to decarbonizing buildings might be right beneath your feet on Jun 27, 2024.

Residents of California now have access to up to $14,000 in new incentives for electric vehicle purchases and charging access, perks that could help more people afford to swap older, higher tailpipe emissions vehicles for much cleaner options.

The California Air Resources Board is rolling out a new Driving Clean Assistance Program that offers incentives for eligible applicants who are chosen for the program. Participants will need to be approved before making their EV purchase in order to receive the benefits, as the California Air Resources Board noted this program does not apply retroactively to previous EV purchases.

As CleanTechnica noted, the Driving Clean Assistance Program has is similar to the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), also known as “Cash for Clunkers.” The former federal CARS program, which expired in 2009, was established to encourage people to trade in older vehicles that produced more emissions in exchange for discounts on newer, more efficient vehicles. A 2010 study from the University of Michigan had found that the CARS program was effective at preventing 4.4 million metric tons of carbon emissions.

California’s new Driving Clean Assistance Program offers up to $14,000 for low-income residents toward the purchase of new or used EVs and hybrids while providing bigger cost incentives for those who trade in older vehicles for scrap. The program also provides funding for EV charging to make the transition more accessible.

For residents who trade in their old, high-emissions vehicle for scrap, the program offers up to $12,000 for grants toward lower-emissions alternatives, plus $2,000 for either EV charging credits on a prepaid card or toward the cost installing charging infrastructure for participants with Disadvantaged Community (DAC) status. Those participants without this status are eligible for up to $10,000 in vehicle purchase grants for EVs and other cleaner vehicles, plus the $2,000 to go toward charging credits or charging infrastructure installation. 

For participants without a vehicle to scrap, they can receive up to $7,500 toward the EV purchase and $2,000 in funding for charging. In addition, the program establishes an 8% annual percentage rate (APR) cap on interest for participants that need loans to purchase their EVs.

Both new and used EV purchases are eligible for the grants. However, there are some further rules on the types of vehicles available to purchase via the program. New or used vehicles can’t exceed $45,000 in purchase price, and used models have to be younger than 8 years with under 80,000 miles. 

As The Drive reported, the Driving Clean Assistance Program only specifies that a vehicle purchased through the program needs to be a “cleaner vehicle,” meaning hybrid vehicles could also qualify for the incentives. Participants can consult the California Air Resources Board’s list of approved vehicles to determine which vehicle purchases are eligible for the program.

The program gives priority to low-income households and requires applicants to have a household income at or below 300% of the Federal Poverty Level, which means applicants should have an household income of $93,600 for a four-person family. It is free for eligible applicants to apply for the program.

“A tiered incentive structure provides maximum incentives to the lowest income participants purchasing or leasing the cleanest technology vehicles that reside within and near priority populations,” the board said in the program fact sheet. “This reduces health risks and transportation costs, and provides greater, more reliable mobility and increased access to clean transportation to priority populations.”

As CleanTechnica reported, around one-third of all electric car sales in the U.S. come from California. The state’s ongoing initiatives to promote EVs, including the new Driving Clean Assistance Program, could help further improve the state’s air quality and allow the state to continue leading the charge in transitioning to cleaner vehicles by taking more heavy polluters off the roads.

The post California: New EV Incentives for Low-Income Buyers Could Help Replace ‘Clunkers,’ Improve Air Quality appeared first on EcoWatch.