Air Emissions Air emissions from coal-fired power plants are equally enormous, despite 40 years of the Clean Air Act. Coal plants emit 67% (over 5 million tons) of the sulfur dioxide in the country, which causes acid rain and lung damage; about 17% (about 2.5 million tons) of the nitrogen oxides, which causes smog; and, 386,000 tons per year of 84 toxic air pollution, including 40% of US mercury (about 40 tons), which causes neurological damage, and 76% of US acid gas emissions. It is also responsible for about 40% (2.5 billion tons) of the ...

The continued, unabated, use of coal to generate electricity is much too high a public health and environmental risk for the public to bear. And there are enormous costs associated with the damage from coal. Peter Montague, editor of Rachel's Democracy and Health News, aptly states: "Coal is not green. Coal is the color of death." Mining and Washing of Coal US annual coal production in 2010 was approximately 1.1 billion tons in 27 states. Most of the coal mined in the US is from strip mines. The majority of that is from Wyoming. Through...

The United States does not need to expand the natural gas sector to meet its energy needs. If we allow the continued expansion of natural gas, there will be serious financial, health, and environmental consequences. This report, released by Civil Society Institute authored by Synapse Energy Economics, makes the case for a decisive transition to a true CLEAN energy future through energy efficiency and off the shelf technologies. Our energy grid is key to our prosperity and our security. Taxpayer dollars or loan guarantees should be an invest...

Dear Friend, Last night President Obama called for an "all of the above" approach to our energy policies. He advocated for a "Clean Energy Standard" and specifically endorsed shale gas and fracking, saying it would be done "safely". He called on the gas companies to divulge the chemicals they use in the process and did not suggest that, at a bare minimum, these chemicals should be regulated to protect public health and fragile water resources. The only thing 'clean' about the energy future that President Obama laid out last night is his mis...

Earlier this month, the Civil Society Institute released a report detailing that if we start to transition away from fossil fuels and nuclear energy now, we can get surprisingly far in the path towards a safe, healthy, and sustainable electricity sector by 2050. With current renewable energy technology and energy efficiency, the report demonstrates that we can completely eliminate coal-fired power generation, reduce nuclear energy use by 23%, and staunch the explosive growth of natural gas. Even better, this can be achieved with net savings....

Dear CLEAN Activist, As a dedicated member of the CLEAN network, we thought you would like to receive a copy of the Civil Society Institute's newest report, which details the economic, health, and human safety costs associated with our nation's current energy policy. The report translates what are often referred to as "externalities" into real numbers: thousands of lost lives, billions of wasted investment dollars, and irreversible damage to our environment. Furthermore, it outlines the predicted and current damage to our air, waterways, and ...

Since 2003, the Civil Society Institute has conducted more than 25 major national and state-level surveys on a range of energy issues including public attitudes on climate change, coal, nuclear, global warming, wind and other renewable energy, vehicle fuel efficiency standards, consumer demand for hybrids/other highly fuel efficient vehicles, and gas prices. The survey that CSI released this week shows that Congress and the White House, with their continuing priority on fossil fuels and nuclear power, are out of touch with views of mainstream ...

Nothing can prepare a person for the reality of high-volume "fracking"; certainly not the coaxing of suave salesmen who convince landowners to sign leases by telling them that they've won "the natural gas sweepstakes." And certainly not their description of benign completed gas wells that stand in green meadows, silently pumping money out of the ground. When the frackers come, they arrive like an invading army: Trucks by the hundreds, tankers, dump trucks, drilling rigs, fracking rigs. Five-acre drilling pads were bulldozed in the middle ...

Many industry and government officials are touting natural gas as a "transition" fuel to wean the country off coal. They cite the fact that during normal plant operation less carbon dioxide is emitted than in coal plants. Because of this, they are labeling it "clean," "reliable," and "affordable." What they overlook, is that there are many related problems outside of combustion (often called "externalities"), that prove that none of these claims are true. Natural gas is: NOT SO CLEAN -According to a study by Worldwatch Institute, the gree...

KEEPING THE LIGHTS ON: Running the Grid Without Coal and Nuclear Baseload Power Obviously, building out all wind and solar resources would be difficult to achieve and some areas would be restricted for such use. Even if a substantial amount of the alternatives to coal and nuclear were built out, we would still have to coordinate those resources to maintain grid reliability as coal-fired and nuclear power are phased out. But it can be done. Imagine not only avoiding more coal and nuclear plants, but getting rid of coal-fired power altogether...

For decades the backbone of the US electric power system has been baseload power.  These are large, central-station power plants, primarily coal-fired and nuclear plants, that are located, usually, many miles from the urban populations they supply. This paradigm persists today.  Baseload plants - defined as running 80 to 85% of the time - are backed up by intermediate plants - coal or natural gas plants that run during business hours, 40 to 60% of the time - and smaller natural gas plants, known as peaking units that run about 10% of the time ...

Accidents Waiting to Happen Spent nuclear fuel pools – where 75 percent of the 65,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste are stored in the US – have no backup systems.  The operating procedure for the pools, it can be argued, is a greater safety/accident threat than natural disasters.  Similar to the nuclear core, pools must be cooled.  If water drains from a spent nuclear fuel pool, a meltdown would ensue.  And the pools contain much more radiation than the cores, five to 10 times more. In May of this year, Robert Alvarez (a senior sch...

What Caused the Meltdowns at Fukushima? At 3:29 p.m. on March 11, the day of the 9.0 earthquake off Japan and reported by the Independent, "Bloomberg news agency reported that a radiation alarm went off about a mile from the plant (the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant)." Workers, interviewed by the Independent, say they saw pipes bursting as a result of the earthquake. Others suggest that the meltdown of at least unit one was underway prior to the tsunami knocking out the diesel generators. The most obvious reason for the destruction o...

There is a silent killer wafting over the United States. You can't see it. It has no aroma. You can't taste it. It's radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. It is entering our water and food supplies. Statistically, the fallout was killing babies within weeks of the accident. While the French government is informing pregnant women of what to eat and what not to eat, our government remains silent. EPA has stopped monitoring the radiation, and NRC altered its position on a key point in the disaster. Meanwhile a...

When President Obama, in his State of the Union address, added the words "clean coal" to the list of power sources in a Clean Energy Standard (CES), he hoped to lure the coal industry and Congressional coal champions to support his proposed plan and improve their image with a public hungry for real, clean energy. If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there: Maybe the President's friends at the Center for American Progress (CAP) advised him that the American people would go along with the rebranding game. CAP, major supp...

Talk on Capitol Hill of a "nuclear renaissance" may be considered hope or hype, but the fundamental reality is that nuclear power is totally uneconomic. It would seem that nuclear power's damage to human health and water coupled with the risk of catastrophic disaster and the unresolved challenge of how to safely store radioactive waste would kill the dream. However, it is the skyrocketing costs of building new reactors, lower cost alternatives and declining demand for electricity that have ended the nuclear renaissance before it began. Presi...

President Obama recently announced that he would pursue a "Clean Energy Standard" rather than a "Renewable Energy Standard." US Senator Bingaman on July 12, 2011 announced that he would introduce CES legislation, knowing it would be difficult to pass. (But not for the right reasons.) The CES is the ultimate political ploy in that it includes just about any electric generation technology. Among those technologies anointed with the "Clean" moniker by the President and Mr. Bingaman is nuclear power. These men and their supporters couldn't be ...

Hand wringing about the picking of winners and losers wasn't the mode de jour when Congress fell in love with ethanol. In Iowa, corn is King and ethanol is the King's bejeweled crown that garners not only tax subsidies of close to $6 billion a year for ethanol producers, but also protection from foreign competition by an import tariff of 45-cents-per-gallon AND a federal mandate requiring transportation fuel include increasing amounts - set at 12.6 billion gallons in 2011. (Big Oil, Big Corn: An in-depth look at the Volumetric Ethanol Excise ...

The latest argument against a federal Renewable Electricity Standard is that government shouldn't pick winners and losers. However, picking winners in the energy sector is a time-honored practice of Congress. In terms of electric generation, Congress' biggest winner has been the biggest loser financially. Nuclear power has been a favorite of policy makers since the 1940s. Taxpayers have subsidized billions in R&D, tax breaks of various kinds, loan guarantees, and accident insurance. By one estimate, support for nuclear and solar power...

Again and again the Congress has failed to pass a national renewable energy standard (RES). As good science and logic would dictate, coal and nuclear were not included among the energy sources that utilities could use to meet the designated amount of electricity. And again and again, special interest politics trumped science and rational policy planning. The Senate's energy bill in 2009, which died on the vine of the last Congress, included an RES that could be lauded only as a symbolic signpost. The Union of Concerned Scientists' said th...