Received yesterday on
Nuclear Plant Hatch radioactive leaks. Tritium (3H, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen)
is the stuff nuclear Plant Hatch
is letting leak into our groundwater.
NRC lists 44 leaking sites
out of 65 active reactor locations.
No solar or wind plants leak tritium.
-jsq
Continue readingIn case you haven’t seen this yet: TRITIUM: HEALTH CONSEQUENCES. Excerpt:
Most studies indicate that tritium in living creatures can produce
All it takes is the will to get it done, and Apple is doing it:
from 35% renewable energy in 2010 to 75% in 2012, and 100%
at all Apple data centers.
Cost? They’ll save more than they spent.
Time for Georgia Power and Southern Company to stop dragging their feet
and help us get on with it in Georgia.
Peter Burrows wrote for Bloomberg Thursday that Apple got nudged:
Continue reading
Big Little River Paddle Racepostponed
on account of weather for one week until Saturday 29 30 March 2013.
Sorry about that; please come next week!
-jsq
The NRC publishes annual Radioactive Effluent and Environmental Reports for every operating nuclear power reactor. The reports for Plant Hatch 1 & 2 say radioactive tritium has repeatedly leaked into the soil and groundwater, but the internal swamp is getting less radioactive. Reports like this are not needed for wind or solar plants.
Annual Radiological Environmental Operating Reports for 2011
According to a 2007 Industry Groundwater Protection Initiative Voluntary Data Collection Questionnaire,
Continue reading
Some thoughts on the
Kay Harris resignation letter.
Certainly a SPLOST is better than a MOST.
-gretchen
Renewable Energy Portfolio Standards (RPS) are being proposed in Georgia and ALEC is trying to do away with them in North Carolina. If ALEC doesn’t like them, there must be something good about RPS. Let’s get on with real renewable energy in Georgia.
In Georgia,
HB 503,
sponsored by Karla Drenner, Carol Fullerton, Debbie Buckner, Scott
Holcomb, Spencer Frye, and Earnest Smith,
would create a Renewable Energy Credits Trading program as part of
renewable portfolio standards,
as Kyle wrote for Spencer Frye’s blog 10 March 2013,
Let the Sunshine In.
Unfortunately, HB 503 includes biomass as a renewable energy source.
Maybe they just mean landfill gas, which I consider a special case
since it’s being produced anyway, and since methane is worse as
a greenhouse gas than CO2, burning landfill gas makes some sense.
Nope, in
the actual bill, 46-3-71 (1):
‘Biomass material’ means organic matter, excluding fossil fuels and black liquor, including agricultural crops, plants, trees, wood, wood wastes and residues, sawmill waste, sawdust, wood chips, bark chips, and forest thinning, harvesting, or clearing residues; wood waste from pallets or other wood demolition debris; peanut shells; cotton plants; corn stalks; and plant matter, including aquatic plants, grasses, stalks, vegetation, and residues, including hulls, shells, or cellulose containing fibers
The barn door in there is “harvesting”, which can mean whole trees, but the rest isn’t much better. We don’t need to be burning things that increase atmospheric CO2 and end up stripping our forests. In North Carolina they staretd with just tops and limbs and then tried to escalate to whole trees. We already fought off the biomass boondoggle here in south Georgia; let’s not have it encouraged statewide. Especially when we have better solutions: solar and wind power. HB 503 isn’t going to get passed this year, since it didn’t make crossover day, so maybe its sponsors can clean up that biomass mess before they submit it again.
Speaking of North Carolina, Continue reading
Today is the last day of the $20 online registration for the
Big Little River Paddle Race, cosponsored by WWALS Watershed Coalition
and Friends of Reed Bingham, to be held Saturday March 23rd
at Reed Bingham State Park.
WWALS blog post; event flyer PDF, and much of the flyer text is below.
Continue readingReceived today: PDF, with transcription appended below. -jsq
Continue readingMarch 15, 2013
Joe Pritchard
County Manager
Lowndes County
327 N. Ashley St.
Valdosta, GA 31601
Dear Mr. Pritchard:
It is with great regret that I find the need to step down from the Lowndes County
and South Georgia Regional Library Board of Trustees. I fear that I am no longer
capable of holding this position in light of the county’s recent actions.
As you are aware,
Wanting to go to the Industrial Authority meeting tonight? Oops, you missed it: they held it 11 days ago. Did you want to speak there? Nope, no Citizens to be Heard on that agenda, and not much else, either.
To find that agenda on VLCIA’s website: Home → About Us → Industrial Authority → Meeting Schedule,
There will be a Special Called Meeting of the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority on Friday, March 8, 2013, 11:00 am at the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority Offices. This Special Called Meeting will also serve as the Regular March 2013 Meeting.
Agenda (PDF) There will be no meeting on Tuesday, March 19, 2013.
I don’t know when they put that on their website, but they announced the same thing on their facebook page on March 4th. Much of the usual agenda boilerplate is replaced by an executive session, and the agenda doesn’t even say for what. I seem to recall the Industrial Authority’s attorney on several occasions reminding the Chair that before going into executive session it was necessary to say for what purpose. As the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG) puts it:
Continue readingWhat is the procedure for going into and holding an “executive session” or “closing a meeting”?
Sinkholes aren’t just
for Florida anymore: Albany’s got them.
Are sinkholes risky?
You may think so if one is under your house.
And here above the Floridan Aquifer you probably won’t know that
until your foundations starts cracking.
Maybe we should do something to prevent the problem,
and to help people who are affected by it.
Perhaps the Lowndes County government till pay attention when
somebody’s house falls into a sinkhole.
Jim Wallace wrote for WALB 9 March 2013, Expect more sinkholes,
Some sinkholes have opened up in South Georgia since the recent heavy rains.
And engineers and public works experts say they expect more sinkholes to develop in the coming weeks. It’s just nature at work, but it can really cause some problems.
Really? Does “nature at work” include sinkholes predictably forming after massive water pumping to sprinkle strawberries during a cold snap?
The WALB story pooh-poohs the possibility of anything like that Sefner sinkhole showing up in south Georgia, and then details two Albany sinkholes:
Continue reading