“Vermont Yankee is committed to keeping Vermont’s environment strong and healthy. The safe and reliable operation of the plant helps ensure that the state’s abundant and beautiful forests, rivers, and lakes are not damaged by acid rain. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), in 2008, Vermont Yankee avoided the emission of 6,500 tons of sulfur dioxide, 1,400 tons of nitrogen oxides and 2.8 million metric tons of CO2. Since 2005, Vermont Yankee has been contributing to Vermont’s “Clean Energy Fund,” and by 2012, VY will have contributed about $35 million, providing money for the development of renewable energy sources in VT.

In the United States alone nuclear energy accounts for about 72 percent of all U.S. emission-free generation.

According to NEI, generating electricity is the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, representing 41 percent of all emissions. As the issue of global warming continues to capture the focus of America and the world, it is vitally important to look at the role nuclear can play in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that continue to pollute the air and damage our ecosystem.

In fact, electricity generated by nuclear avoids almost 700 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year in the U.S. This is nearly as much carbon dioxide as is released from all U.S. passenger cars.

In thinking about energy and the powerful role it plays in ensuring the quality of the environment, we are compelled to look at the carbon footprint of various energy sources.

Life-cycle analysis is a mechanism for measuring the total environmental impact of various energy sources. This includes emissions resulting from all aspects of each energy source-construction, operation, dismantling and disposal.

The life-cycle impact of nuclear energy is among the lowest of any form of electricity generation, comparable with renewable technologies such as wind and solar power.”

On Monday Stuart Varney interviewed State Senator Peter Shumlin (D) Vermont, about the power plant license renewal.  A question asked by Mr. Varney was about what Vermont was going to do when the power plant was shutdown in 2012.  Where were they going to get their power?  Senator Shumlin’s answer was a little vague saying that they would buy some from Canada and encourage more renewable energy like solar, after all, “Germany was getting 30% of their power from solar energy”.

Well, after some research by Mr. Varney, and shared on Tuesday’s show, it was discovered that Germany’s solar power provides less than 1% of its power requirement, quite a difference, don’t you think.  Solar energy can help, but using it on a large scale is still quite a ways off, especially to replace 1/3 of the power requirements for Vermont now provided by the Vermont Yankee plant.  This kind of misstatement really hurts our cause and the lack of knowledge by people who are making these decisions is disconcerting to say the least.

I wish that politicians would concentrate on getting us a good, fair, and balanced energy policy, that will protect as well as efficiently utilize our resources and provide for alternative energies.  I want them to think, yes think hard about alternatives and consequences before they make a decision.  Maybe there should be more project managers running the country.  Risk management and contingency planning are part of our DNA.

Today’s Boston Globe has a very telling article (read the whole thing here), with some poll statistics showing that people are backing off their belief in climate change.

To us, the most revealing statistic is this one: Just since 2008, the number of people who do not think “that global warming is happening” has doubled. It’s still an (ignorant, in our opinion) minority of 20%, but it’s 20% now, when it was 10% in 2008.   see the chart below.

And, according to the surveys, done by Yale and George Mason Universities,

Sixteen percent are considered “dismissive’’ – believing that global warming isn’t happening and is probably a hoax – up from 7 percent in 2008. So the number who actually think this is a hoax, has MORE than doubled.

Here’s a quote from the article:

“This issue is so politically sensitive, scientists need to be careful they [focus] on the science and not advocacy. . . . The science is robust and can speak for itself,’’ said Adil Najam, a lead author of two Intergovernmental Panel assessments and director of Boston University’s Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. He said the recent errors do not undermine the fact that man is significantly contributing to global warming, “but the review process needs to be strengthened’’ for future reports.

Dyslexia is not equal to a hoax

One of the issues providing fuel (again, pun intended) for the cynics, is the fact that some of the scientific reporting has been sloppy.  Not good, ladies and gentlemen, please tighten up on this. Turns out that when one report cited the ice on the Himalayas would melt by 2035, they reversed a couple of numbers – it should have read 2350.  In scientific terms, of course, that’s a blink of the eye.  In talk-show host language, though, this is ammunition, baby.  It shows bias.  It proves that this is a hoax.  Damn lying scientists!  Proving their points with false facts! Give the talk show hosts a little nub like this and they will hang their hats on it.  Again, to quote the Globe, “the errors went beyond sloppiness and were troubling to scientists because advocacy group reports, no matter how robust, can give the perception of bias and are often not peer-reviewed – meaning they have not been vetted by independent scientists, as are studies published in scientific journals.”

More than one way to be wrong

The article also points out – quite correctly – that errors have probably also been made which underestimate the problem.  And even without errors, are we 100% sure that we have all of the effects in hand?  We may be missing an “accelerator” factor that actually would either increase the intensity or speed of some of the changes that have been detected, and may not even have detected or predicted other changes at all.

Have a look at the detailed poll below.

Your comments wanted

What do YOU think? If you’re a cynic, where are you getting your energy (pun)? And if you are in the camp that thinks that there is a change to the climate initiated by millions of tons of GHGs (greenhouse gasses) produced by humankind, what’s keeping your belief level high despite the dyslexic and dumb dabbling of some of our scientists?

Is a nuclear power plant a green way to provide energy?  There seems to be quite a division in thinking on this one.  President Obama thinks that nuclear power is a good thing and his administration is promising $8+ billion of federal loan guarantees to build two new plants.  But the 800 pound gorilla continues to lurk in the foreground.  The problem with nuclear waste plagues the industry.  After all these years, and billions of dollars, there still isn’t a good solution.  In spite of a good solution to the nuclear waste problem, our European counterparts are on-board with nuclear power.  France now generates 80% of its power that way.  We produce about 20% of our power.

I read recently that Vermont has voted to block the license renewal for the Vermont Yankee (VTY) plant in Vernon, Vermont.  That has some nostalgic significance to me because I worked for the “project managers” (utility engineers) during construction of the plant in 1970.  Commissioned in August 1966 and given its operating license in March 1972, Vermont Yankee is one of the older plants in the American inventory of 104 power reactors. The oldest still running is Oyster Creek, near Toms River, N.J., which is of a similar design and opened in December 1969.  I happened to have investigated a fish kill the Oyster River plant site in the mid-‘70’s when I was doing some reporting for a local paper.  They shut down the plant for maintenance in mid-winter without giving the fish life around the plant ample time to acclimate, a no-no, but that’s another story.

A couple of things stand out about my time at VTY.  Working in what amounted to a big freezer (a concrete enclosure) during one of the coldest Vermont winters is hard to forget.  But even harder to forget were the people I met during the construction.  We were basically the quality control group for the construction, X-raying welds, checking welder qualifications, inspecting critical welds, checking installation against design blueprints, etc.   The inspectors as well as the welders were top notch and realized, even then, the potential for disaster if things weren’t done well.  The protection of the environment, especially the water quality of the mighty Connecticut River, was considered very important by the regulators and the plant designers.

As of a couple of years ago, when I had some contact with plant engineers, the VTY plant is continually being upgraded with the latest safety measures and operating well and efficiently.  As a matter of fact, VTY sells power to Vermont utilities for about 4 cents/kWh, half the national average, making it one of the least expensive power alternatives.   I know, there is the little issue of tritium.  Recently, test wells around the VTY property showed unusually high quantities of tritium.  To find all the facts about tritium, see http://www.epa.gov/radiation/radionuclides/tritium.html .  The plant is located on the banks of the Connecticut River, so not only area wells could be affected, but also the river itself.  Whether or not they can find the leak, and whether or not finding and correcting the issue will placate the detractors is another story.  But I know that whether tritium is fuel (excuse the pun) for the fire, or the fire to abandon nuclear power is just too out of control; nuclear energy may be one of our best “green” alternatives.  You think?

The following excerpt comes from today’s Sunday Boston Globe.

NEWMAN, Australia – Here in this land of searing heat, scrub, and eucalyptus, a land so vast that road signs warn the next gas station is 600 miles away, Mount Whaleback was once 1,500 feet high. Today it’s a hole, the biggest open-pit iron ore mine in the world – an entire mountain crushed, sold, and shipped to China.

Trucks with tires twice the height of a grown man cart thousands of tons of raw ore to a processing plant, where it is separated and poured into the longest and heaviest train in the world – 336 freight cars pulled by six locomotives. It chugs 300 miles to Port Hedland, where it is loaded onto ships bound for the unquenchable steel mills of the People’s Republic.

The grey arrows indicate the trend is worse year-to-year.
For some local flavor about the mining operations, we suggest these links.

http://www.kiwihyde.com/?p=68

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtA0p09SE6o&feature=related

We’re interested in hearing from you about the environmental impacts of this type of mining, especially considering the numbers above.
Comments?  Enlightenment?  We’re listening…

According to the AWEA (American Wind Energy Association), the U.S. wind industry broke all previous records by installing nearly 10,000 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity in 2009 (enough to serve over 2.4 million homes), but still lags in manufacturing, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said today in its Q4 report. These new projects place wind power neck and neck with natural gas as the leading source of new electricity generation for the country.  Together, the two sources account for about 80% of the new capacity added in the country last year.

But is this enough?

“The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all installation records in 2009, chalking up the Recovery Act as a historic success in creating jobs, avoiding carbon, and protecting consumers,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “But U.S. wind turbine manufacturing – the canary in the mine — is down compared to last year’s levels, and needs long-term policy certainty and market pull in order to grow.  We need to set hard targets, in the form of a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), in order to provide the necessary stability for manufacturers to expand their U.S. operations and to seize the historic opportunity we have today to build up a thriving renewable energy industry.”
Where is this wind power?

Amongst other places, deep in the heart of Texas.

See the table below, showing the top 5 states in terms of  MW of power installed.

Texas, the nation’s wind-power leader, set a new record for wind generation today, March 5, 2010, when — at 6:37 a.m. — about 19 percent of the electricity on the state’s main grid was supplied by turbines.

But sometimes, the problem – strangely enough – is that the wind turbines are shut down because they are generating too much power, yielding an effect in which the value of the electricity they generate is actually lower than zero.  Read this snippet from the New York Times eco blog, GreenInc:

“Texas’s progress in installing turbines is testing the bounds of just how much wind the electrical grid can handle. Some turbines are slowed or shut down on windy days because the state does not have sufficient transmission wires to move all the power from the remote, windy areas of West Texas to cities like Dallas and Houston that need it. Last night and this morning, for example, the prices for wind generation offered on the main Texas grid actually fell below zero, a sign of oversupply that usually prompts wind generators to shut their turbines down.

Texas is spending nearly $5 billion to fix the transmission problem. It plans to build a web of power lines that would be able to deliver the wind energy from congested West Texas, home to 89 percent of the wind capacity on the state’s main grid, to power-hungry cities. That process, however, looks likely to be delayed by a recent court decision.”

Whoa.  Here at EarthPM that sparks (yes, a pun!) a lot of ideas for projects.  Power transmission projects.  Power storage projects.  So we’d like to hear about some record number of project managers being hired…

There she is, below.

She’s invited us to guest post on her blog, and of course we took her up on the offer.

Take a peek at our posting,  and see if this Peak Performance posting piques your interest.

http://www.ginaabudi.com/greenality-and-projects/

Have you ever heard of “hypoxia”?  Perhaps you’ve heard of the more informal moniker: Dead Zones.

Should you be interested?  Perhaps only if you eat.  Have a look at this quote:

“More than 212,000 metric tons [235,000 tons] of food is lost to hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico,” says marine biologist Robert Diaz of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who surveyed the dead zones along with marine ecologist Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “That’s enough to feed 75 percent of the average brown shrimp harvest from the Louisiana gulf. If there was no hypoxia and there was that much more food, don’t you think the shrimp and crabs would be happier? They would certainly be fatter.”

Hypoxic, or “dead” zones, are becoming more prevalent, and may trigger projects to try to reduce their effect and/or prevent them from getting so severe.  The Hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pictured above, is about the size of New Jersey.  Although the basis for hypoxia is natural and this occurs without the help of humans (or pollutants), the prevalence, severity, and size of these zones has been increasing and is traceable to – well, to you and me – because the farmers that fertilize their land along the Mississippi, for example, are doing so on our behalf.

We suggest you watch this fast-moving video before continuing: click here. Or this one.  Or, click here.

Only a few dead zones have ever recovered, such as the Black Sea, which rebounded quickly in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a massive reduction in fertilizer runoff from fields in Russia and Ukraine. Fertilizer contains large amounts of nitrogen, and it runs off of agricultural fields in water and into rivers, and eventually into oceans.

This fertilizer runoff, instead of contributing to more corn or wheat, feeds massive algae blooms in the coastal oceans. This algae, in turn, dies and sinks to the bottom where it is consumed by microbes, which consume oxygen in the process. More algae means more oxygen-burning, and thereby less oxygen in the water, resulting in a massive flight by those fish, crustaceans and other ocean-dwellers able to relocate as well as the mass death of immobile creatures, such as clams or other bottom-dwellers. And that’s when the microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments take over, forming vast bacterial mats that produce hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas.

Diaz continues: “The primary culprit in marine environments is nitrogen and, nowadays, the biggest contributor of nitrogen to marine systems is agriculture. It’s the same scenario all over the world,” Diaz says. “Farmers are not doing it on purpose. They’d prefer to have it stick on the land.”

In addition to fertilizers, the other primary culprit is the consumption of fossil fuels. Burning gasoline and diesel results in smog-forming nitrogen oxides, which subsequently clear when rain washes the nitrogen out of the sky and, ultimately, into the ocean.

Technological improvements, such as electric or hydrogen cars, could solve that problem but the agricultural question is trickier. “Nitrogen is very slippery; it’s very difficult to keep it on land,” Diaz notes. “We need to find a technology to keep nitrogen from leaving the soil.”

Here is a “Hypoxia 101″ tutorial from the EPA.

To read a detailed PDF from which we got the quotes above, click here.

For a general page about the Mississippi Basin covering many threats to that extensive region, click here.

We discuss hypoxia in our upcoming book.  We do this not to be alarmist, but to be practical.  As project managers we sense that this is an important phenomenon to be aware of, conversant about – you may be asked to manage a project to reduce nitrogen content of a fertilizer.  Who knows?

If you are an Alum of the University of New Hampshire, you’ll probably be happy with what you see.  If you happen to be from Duquense University, however, well… er…not so much.

The site does a tremendous job in allowing you to search by school, by state, even by athletic conference.  You can also see how a school’s grades in each of the subcategories are improving (or not!) from year to year.

This is a non-profit organization which appears to put a great deal of thinking into their analysis.

From their site:

What is the College Sustainability Report Card?

The College Sustainability Report Card is the only comparative evaluation of campus and endowment sustainability activities at colleges and universities in the United States and in Canada. In contrast to an academic focus on sustainability in research and teaching, the Report Card examines colleges and universities, as institutions, through the lens of sustainability.

The Report Card is designed to identify colleges and universities that are leaders in sustainability. The aim is to provide accessible information for schools to learn from each other’s experiences and establish more effective sustainability practices.

The College Sustainability Report Card 2010 has the highest participation rate of any sustainability ranking or rating, with 318 of 332 schools (96 percent) responding to at least one Report Card survey.

What is the Sustainable Endowments Institute?

The Sustainable Endowments Institute is a nonprofit organization engaged in research and education to advance sustainability in campus operations and endowment practices. The College Sustainability Report Card and GreenReportCard.org are initiatives of the Institute.

Founded in 2005, the Institute is a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. Please see About SEI for more information.

Here is a summary of their methodology.

• Selection: The College Sustainability Report Card 2010 evaluates environmental sustainability efforts at 332 schools in the United States and Canada.
• Survey Composition: Four surveys were designed to gather information about sustainability in campus operations, dining services, endowment investment practices and student activities. This year, for the first time, the complete survey responses are available online.
• Data Collection & Verification: Data collection for the College Sustainability Report Card 2010 took place from June through August 2009. The research process included sending surveys to administrators and students at all 332 institutions. Researchers also gathered information from publicly available sources.
• Assessment: A school’s overall grade is calculated from the grades received in nine equally-weighted categories. A total of 48 indicators are used to evaluate performance within the categories.
• Recognition:The Overall College Sustainability Leaders award is given to schools that have made notable achievements i

For our international readers, unfortunately this is focused on the US and Canada only but it’s a great model, not only for schools but other organziations.

Check out your school’s report card here:

http://www.greenreportcard.org/

Looks like EarthPM is starting to gain some notoriety, and luckily, it’s of the good kind.

We were recently put on the list of Top 100 Project Management Blogs, in the ’specialty’ section, as ranked by Construction Management Degrees. Have a look.  And please help spread the word about our site – we’re getting flooded with hits, it’s true, but we’re trying to reach an even broader audience of project managers.

Thanks.