Climate Energy
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Future of Pennsylvania is dystopian wasteland studded with natural gas wells
Time's cover story "Could Shale Gas Power the World?" is all about how we're going to get ourselves out of our current energy crisis by turning the Marcellus shale formation into a hydrocarbon war zone pockmarked with loud, noxious natural gas wells. The reserves in question happen to be underneath some of the most densely […]
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In face of ‘peak everything,’ governments shrug at environmental cost of energy
Less than a year after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the U.S. government has begun issuing new permits for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Pundits think that despite a pause in the "nuclear renaissance," the same thing could happen to nuclear power plants in the wake of Fukushima, at least outside the U.S. The […]
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The coal power industry’s willfully deceptive picture of EPA rules
Every Republican who’s come within shouting distance of a microphone in the past year has charged the EPA with out-of-control, unconstitutional job-killing malefaction — “regulatory overreach” for short. More than a few conservative Dems, led by the crudely pandering Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have followed suit. This is their way of advocating for […]
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New reality show is ‘Ice Road Truckers’ for coal miners
The Spike network is set to run a show about coal miners, in the mold of Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers — gritty dudes fighting their way through the world’s hardest jobs. This has the potential to expose coal’s seamy underbelly, or to glamorize it beyond repair (at least in the minds of Spike-watching […]
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Japanese utility baffled that nuclear plant leak couldn’t be plugged with shredded newspaper
Newest terrifying thing at the Fukushima Daiichi plant: A breach in a trench is leaking highly radioactive water into the surrounding ocean. Japanese utility TEPCO tried over the weekend to use concrete to plug the leak. When that failed, they went for the next most logical solution: a mixture of "132 pounds of sawdust, 18 […]
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The earthquake kit: How to unpack for a disaster and survive the unexpected
What’s in your earthquake survival kit? And what’s not?Photo: Global XThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. The first American responses to the triple calamity in Japan were deeply empathetic and then, as news of the Fukushima nuclear complex’s leaking radiation spread, a lot of people began […]
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Think energy efficiency isn’t working? Think again
Imagine a press release with this message: We’re not using more household energy than we used to — and the latest data won’t be available until next year. If you read that, I’m guessing you would join me in yawning and moving on to the next story. That is what the Energy Information Administration (EIA), […]
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Fukushima workers prepared to die; don’t even know how much radiation they’ve been exposed to
A piece in today's Guardian reveals that TEPCO, the utility responsible for the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors, did not until very recently have enough dosimeters for all of the employees who are working to stop an even worse catastrophe at the plant. Normally, dosimeters would be worn at all times in order to measure cumulative exposure […]
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High-def flyover video of Fukushima shows the extent of the damage
This stunning, sobering flyover video of the Fukushima plant was shot in HD, which means it's probably as detailed as you can get while trying to focus a camera from a plane. Some of the rubble is still smoking.
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We have gobs of money to spend on nuclear waste disposal — so why is our storage leaking?
The country has $24 billion dollars tied up in a fund to create a permanent storage solution for spent nuclear fuel rods. Yet plants are stuffing spent rods into already-overfull, vulnerable, sometimes leaky pools of water. What the hell? Basically, our nuclear waste is like a trust-fund kid in some wacky comedy, who can only […]
