I see NIMBYsm as the first step in wider consciousness. As we become
more educated about the dangers gas drilling, I expect that many of us
will further reduce our energy use and protest gas drilling, coal mining
and nuclear power wherever they occur.
Rachel Treichler
An Energy Portrait of Tompkins County
by Paul Glover
http://www.ithacahours.com/archive/ithacapower/8812.html
Here in Tompkins County these warm homes and speedy cars, the voices on
television, the tapwater splash and refrigerator hum come to us by
burning Chinese dinosaur soup, Groton cow manure, prehistoric
Pennsylvania plant fumes, Mexican rotting beans, Colorado rock dust,
Georgia cotton, and Louisiana rice shucks. All our tools and everything
in stores come from these strange earthy fuels and other fuels gathered
and burned, and they come to us from falling rivers and rain, from
volcanos, wind and flames of sun. Our lamps are plugged into California
and Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Norway, Nigeria, Italy, Algeria and
Kuwait too.
Tompkins County is connected to over 1,000 big sloppy power stations
whose wide throats guzzle oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, wood or trash
to bum the sky, and whose byproduct is electricity. These stations boil
water which spins blades that whip excited electrons to our towns. They
make Ithaca glow in the dark from miles in space. And with the help of
gasoline and diesel vehicles and propane furnaces, they keep us alive by
heating houses, by pumping water and transporting food. Without these
machines modern Ithacans would rush to creeks to drink like deer, and
freeze.
Today greater Ithaca faces its greatest civic decisions, and Ithacans
our greatest personal decisions because, though the fires are hotter now
than ever, they're about to cool. Despite low oil prices the American
joyride is ending. Cheap oil has allowed us, like children lured to cars
by candy, to enter a danger zone, of dependence on foreign oil. Even
more ominously, as this article will explain, major world and national
energy agencies agree that world oil resources will soon begin sharp
decline, that natural gas trails right behind, that nuclear power is
increasingly dangerous, that we have been digging dirtier coal, that
U.S. reserves of mined fuels are draining faster than new sources are found.
This energy portrait of Tompkins County displays the power facts of our
lives today, and describes choices and opportunities we face. All of us
will live very differently, as Ithaca rebuilds to use reliable fuels,
improving the ways we shelter, work, eat and move.
The first half of the story describes today's standard fuel and the
second half introduces local sources.
THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
This globe bristles with electricity, to 33,000 miles high, lashed by
geomagnetic storms, lightning, northern lights. Our captured electricity
is an electron chorus line kicking six billion billion electrons per
second past every point on copper wire. Though science isn't agreed
precisely what electric force is, electronics is a controllable miracle.
Ithaca first saw electricity put to work during Professor Anthony's
public lecture of 1873. By 1875 he rigged the first outdoor electric
lights in America, beside Sage Chapel, to America's first electric
generator, in Morrill Hall. Soon Ithaca had telephones, and rode
trollies electric-powered by Six Mile Creek's flow.
Local industries generated their own electricity with gasoline and coal,
until NYSEG proved able to do so cheaper. The public hooked up eagerly,
first for light, then to vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and radios, then
to toasters, air conditioners, blankets, televisions and toothbrushes.
These substitutes for gaslamp, icebox, quilt, broom and muscle presently
cost Tompkins County nine million dollars per year. Ithacans of 1988
each use more than twice as much electricity as in 1960.
NYSEG has become our Wizard of Oz, the monopoly utility whose machinery
grants our wishes, on its own terms. Their price for electricity is just
above the national average, but rises almost twice as fast as most
consumer prices.
Hell On Earth
Most of Tompkins County's electricity, 85-95 percent, is sent from
NYSEG's Milliken Station on Cayuga Lake. Milliken is the local hell on
earth, a 1005ยบ F bonfire turning Cayuga Lake into steam which twirls
magnet-wrapped axles to push 300 million watts of electricity along
steel strands to transmission and distribution substations, through
transformers atop pine poles, past voltage regulators and circuit
breakers, relays, switches and fuses, to enter neon signs, street lights
and sockets countywide. Since the plant opened 33 years ago, 23 million
tons of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia have been hauled across
Ithaca in the form of coal. This electricity is triple the amount need
here, so the excess pours toward New York City.
When Milliken is shut for repair we take juice from other NYSEG coal
plants, from the seven other New York state electric utilities, from 126
other electric utilities in the United States plus those of Canada.
Because NYSEG's 2,208 miles of power highway link us to 365,000 miles of
lines nationally, the lights of Pyramid Mall and Cass Park can be lit
from Tennessee rivers, from Utah uranium, Oklahoma natural gas,
California wind or New Jersey garbage.
New York State utilities swap power through the New York Power Pool
switchboard near Albany. Although the network seldom fails, several
trends are overloading it. Record high demand this summer (NYSEG 9
percent higher) required more imports than usual. Central New York's
electric need is expected to leap 50 percent in the next 14 years (NYPP
Outlook 1988, p.16) from the spread of homes, industries and businesses.
At this rate NYSEG would run short of steam within five years. And their
14 wheezy coal furnaces, average 31 years old, need more frequent
repair. The state itself foresees zero emergency capacity in about seven
years and constant need for imported electricity seven years after that.
During the same time, New York state reliance on foreign oil, for
heating, gasoline and electricity, would surpass 80 percent (OPEC 55%).
And worldwide competition for fuel will become intense, as the Third
World industrializes an another billion humans are added to the present
five every decade. Meanwhile nuclear power will have started to slide as
nukes end their 30-50 year life spans. Coal will be severely controlled
to slow its damage to atmosphere and water. Our dollars will burn as
fuel prices rise.
Tompkins County is a major New York State intersection of pipelines
None of the above are proper choices. There is good news found in new
directions, more solutions than problems, but the nation, state and
county have been drifting into dark holes. Next is a look at the
largest: coal.
Tompkins County's Main Fuel
Time will crush most gorge rock around us into coal. Presently though,
Tompkins County relies on western Pennsylvania for 94 percent and
Kentucky for 5 percent of the 4,500,000 pounds of coal consumed here
daily. NYSEG, New York state's Coal King, hauls bituminous by Conrail
from 100-250 miles southwest; and Cornell trucks coal 500 miles from
eastern Kentucky to Ohio River barges, to Pittsburgh onto trains and
trucks again, up Mitchell Street to be plowed 20 feet high on orange
frisbees (these expose the pile's base to the bulldozer). Other tons of
hard anthracite, for Tompkins County's 111 coal-fed houses, are trucked
from Panther Valley and other eastern Pennsylvania fields by Bowers of
Trumansburg and Ames of Newfield.
Coal is a swamp thing, wherein soggy dead plants and animals are
compressed to carbon during millions of years. Pressed deeper they melt
into crude oil, then pass to natural gas. A pound of coal and pound of
fat flesh have the same heat value.
Many consider the American coal supply endless. Pennsylvania's coal
capital is Indiana County, with 123 stripmines, 23 deep mines and enough
black stone to run Milliken Station for 1,900 years. But this is beyond
reach since 500 U.S. coal stations need coal. Nationwide, the estimated
327-year supply (DOE 1982) caves in as coal use accelerates, soon to
three times its present rate, and as more coal is hunted in deeper and
narrower seams. The United Nations calculates the U.S. has only eighty
years of cheap coal left. The youngest of us might see the embers of the
coal age.
Global Steambath and Acid Snow
Coal's legacy already piles heavy on Tompkins County. Its continued use
kills & corrupts long before it is gone. Near pure carbon, coal when
burned connects with oxygen to become carbon dioxide which clogs the
outer atmosphere to cause a global steambath-- the Greenhouse Effect-
making our region hotter and drier, damaging our food supply and raising
food prices.
Sulfur in Appalachian coal reaches clouds to fall on Greater Ithaca as
the nation's worst acid rain, acid snow and acid slush (pH 4.2).
Measured at Connecticut Hill and at Aurora, its summertime pH 3.5 is
sour as vinegar. Most drifts here from Ohio, Illinois, Indiana; 25
percent is from New York state. We get less rain than the Adirondacks,
so the effects have been diluted.
Yet despite reassurance by several experts that our highly lime soils
protect local trees, some farmers see problems. Gordon Nesbitt, of the
Regional Forest Practices Board says, "I think our forests suffer from
acid rain. I can see where the pH of soils has declined much faster than
it should have." Two south county tree farmers, where soil is less lime,
discover doubling lime no longer helps. Chemists found rainwater there
the "worst they had ever seen.
Technology could wash and fluidize or gasify coal, for cleaner burn,
then scrub the vapor, but it's expensive. Midwest states would rather
pollute our air at low cost than pollute their own water at high cost.
Smokestacks release arsenic, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, iron,
nickel, manganese, selenium and zinc. Even during drought we sweep acid
dust. An estimated 134 asthmatic Americans die prematurely every day
from coalborne pest. Eleven Pennsylvania miners die daily from black
lung disease. Also deserving horrible mention are toxic ash hills (nine
percent of original coal volume plowed 70 feet high near Milliken) and
toxic runoff (Cornell's goes to the city sewer). Most U.S. and
Pennsylvania coal mines are now stripmines, grand canyons of denuded
land--1,200 square miles ruined yearly.
The story now turns even less pleasant, from acid to radioactive, before
getting better.
While dissecting the universe scientists discovered that uranium, a
metal invisibly boiling, can boil water to spark electricity. They
believed the 'peaceful atom' would give cheap clean power. Recent years
cause many to doubt this.
Tompkins County gets most of its nuclear power from the Fitzpatrick,
Ginna, Nine Mile One and Two plants, located 70 miles north on Lake
Ontario. 17 percent of the electricity available to us in the New York
State grid is from 6 fission nukes, compared to 20 percent nationwide
from 108 nukes. Wyoming and Colorado send uranium ore to Metropolis,
Illinois for grinding into powder. From there it is trucked/train
delivered to Savanna River, South Carolina to remove weaker isotopes,
then sent to Pittsburgh for sealing inside black ceramic pills, then to
Wilmington, North Carolina for loading into zirconium fuel rods and up
Route 81, past Cortland to the lake nukes. Every step takes more caution
because sizzling fissile materials cause humans to explode or decay.
Mishandled, fission reactors can become atom bombs or wipe out cities
without a sound.
The nuclear industry has presented itself as leading national
independence from oil. However, we would need 3,100 new nukes to do the
work of fossil fuels, says Cornell's Professor Duane Chapman. And the
U.S. has only three active uranium mines--most is imported from Canada
and South Africa. Even were domestic mining revived and only 100 more
nukes built, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy
of Engineering agree U.S. supplies would be nearly gone within 30 years
(Problems of U.S. Uranium Supply to the Year 2010).
Some say that, despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, radiation
threats are better bets than acid rain and the Greenhouse Effect. But
high risks cause the nations' reactors to be closed 40 percent of the year.
Even when operating normally they menace public health. Retiring from
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year, James Asselstine said he
expects a major U.S. nuclear disaster within 20 years (NYT 6/7/87). One
month later, Congress recognized this threat (to the nuclear industry)
by protecting utilities from paying more than seven billion dollars to
victims of a meltdown (NYT 7/30/87).
Nuclear power is being proven a daily disaster already. The National
Cancer Institute has begun a study of cancer deaths among people
neighboring nukes, after a British study found many children dying of
leukemia near theirs. Early public health studies around several U.S.
reactors show cancer rates up 180-400%, infant mortality up 50% and
deformed births 230% above usual. Neighbors of Pilgrim One reactor
started their own map of melanoma, brain cancer and breast cancer (NYT
5/21/87). A nurse at Syracuse' St. Joseph's Hospital recently said, "You
wouldn't believe the number of leukemia cases we're getting from Nine
Mile One's neighborhood."
Cayuga Lake was selected by NYSEG for a large nuclear plant in 1968,
next to Milliken. Several Ithacans educated themselves about nuclear
power, organized public meetings attended by up to 1,000 people and, as
the Cayuga Lake Conservation Association, chased it away.
Cornell has the county's only nuclear reactor, a 500kw experimental unit
across Cascadilla Creek from Collegetown, in Ward Laboratory.
Three-quarters of a pound of serious radioactive waste waits removal.
One of the deadliest nuclear power stations in the world is located 25
miles from Ithaca at the Seneca Army Depot. About 1,300 nuclear weapons
totalling 15,250 megatons (1,220,000 Hiroshimas) are stored there. Many
Ithacans have stood vigil at the gate during this decade, just as
busloads of locals helped block the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear
station during the seventies.
American Roulette
Presently Tompkins County is downwind from 15 nuclear plants within 600
miles. This is still close enough for tragedy, for nukes have large back
yards. Although the U.S. is 8,000 miles downwind of Chernobyl, the
nation's death rate jumped 5.9 percent during the three months following
that 1986 explosion, according to the American Medical News (2/26/88).
U.S. infant mortality rose as well where increased iodine-131 crossed
the land. The 18 percent pneumonia death rate increase during those
months is also believed triggered by low-level Chernobyl radiation,
which reached Ithaca 12 days after the explosion.
The nuclear industry, brushing the dust from its lab coat, claimed the
Russian reactor was inferior to American nukes. But Chernobyl was
double-walled, as strong or stronger than U.S. models (NYT 5/19/86).
Here again, as at Three Mile Island and Windscale, human error lost
control. Carl Goldstein, vice president of the pro-nuclear lobby USCEA,
recently introduced the new PIUS "ultimate safe reactor," saying "no
nuclear reactor or nuclear facility is perfectly safe" (Omni 5/88). But
they must be. Absolutely infallibly.
U.S. Nuclear generating capacity will peak about 1992, then decline.
These plants last about 30 years, then are taken apart and
decontaminated. They will be gone, but can never be forgotten.
Radioactive waste must be guarded for hundreds of thousands of years.
New York state has 1,200 tons of spent fuel (cesium, strontium,
plutonium) waiting at nukes. But no dump secure enough has yet been
found. The first permanent site, east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, has
sprung leaks that may make it worthless. Their latest choice is Yucca
Mountain, Nevada, near an underground nuclear weapons test site.
Shooting waste into space is proposed but could backfire. This
administration approved a 30-year contract to fly plutonium over the
North Pole to Japan, so they can build 120 nukes 6,500 miles upwind of
us (NYT 1/13 & 4/18/88).
Nuclear Fusion
The hottest spot in our solar system is not the sun, but a machine 170
miles south of Ithaca in Princeton, New Jersey. The TOKAMAK experimental
fusion reactor burns thin gas at 400,000,000 degreesF to melt hydrogen
[since decommissioned]. Here in Ithaca itself, inside a giant box on
Mitchell Street near East Hill Plaza, Cornell blasts tiny pellets with
5,000,000 volts, for a millionth of a second. Such experiments worldwide
are trying to produce heat for steam by housebreaking the hydrogen bomb.
So far all use more energy than they create. Physicists like Cornell's
Hans Fleischmarm expect break-even soon. Commercial-size reactors would
not be available until 2025 at the earliest. "Fusion will not help us
for the next oil crisis," says Fleischmann.
Whether fusion would ever help us depends on more than technical
feasibility. Their safety will have to be proved beyond the doubts
stirred by grand safety claims made for fission. Because of the stress
of huge heat, these large and expensive plants would have to be replaced
as often as every ten years. One industry publication proudly announces
that nuclear fusion generators could provide lots of inexpensive tritium
for nuclear bombs.
Continued at http://www.ithacahours.com/archive/ithacapower/8812.html
George Frantz wrote:
Thank you, Margaret and Autumn.
I'm not in agreement with all the points you've made. I think however that you've raise a critical issue in that much of the debate over Marcellus shale drilling is sounding more and more like simple NIMBYism.
I see nothing progressive or enlightened about the vehement opposition to any
and all frack-based natural gas drilling in this region. As I've said before
we are confronted with an industry that would dig up its mothers' graves if
there was a chance of finding natural gas beneith them, but I also think that
some of the outrageous exaggerations and distortions by Shaleshock and its ilk
would even impress the great SpinMeister Karl Rove.
The current controversy is just another of a long string of examples in Ithaca of what
true progressives and true environmentalists refer to as "leisure class
environmentalism." It's probably not a term you'll hear on NPR or read in the New
York Times, but by definition it is the constant action of more affluent cities and
regions to push off the significant adverse environmental impacts of their middle class
American lifestyle onto poorer regions and communities of the world.
Some three-quarters of homes in the city and the town of Ithaca are heated with
natural gas, as are all of our centers of employment, our stores, bars,
restaurants and I suspect even the State Theatre. Overall in Tompkins County
almost 6 in ten homes are heated with natural gas or propane from afar. Indeed
the entire economy of Upstate New York is dependent of natural gas and propane
produced and imported from thousands of miles away.
I've seen too much of the damage wreaked by energy companies first hand in poor
communities of Appalachia and Louisiana in their quest to meet Ithaca's demands
for coal, natural gas and gasoline. I personally refuse to be a party to an
effort by Ithaca-style progressives to once again push off on other, poorer,
regions of America and the world the severe environmental costs of maintaining
our little paradise here in the Finger Lakes.
And, speaking of dairy farms, there are over 300 Marcellus Shale wells either drilled, being drilled, or have been permitted across the border in Bradford County, PA. Many of them are on dairy farms. In many cases you can not even see the finished wells, because the drilling sites have been restored and crops have been planted.
Millions of gallons of fracking fluids are flowing right now. Probably some 5-6 billion gallons or so of water have been pulled from the Susquehanna River or its tributaries by now. Take a drive down and check out the environmental havoc wreaked by the drilling companies, if you can find it.
George Frantz
_______________________________________________
For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please
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_______________________________________________
For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please
visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/
RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for:
[email protected]
http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins
Questions about the list? ask [email protected]
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_______________________________________________
For more information about sustainability in the Tompkins County area, please
visit: http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/
RSS, archives, subscription & listserv information for:
[email protected]
http://lists.mutualaid.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainabletompkins
Questions about the list? ask [email protected]
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