Tag Archives: Massachusetts

Radioactive tritium leak at Indian Point nuke stopped, but still in groundwater

Papers forged, fire and oil leak into the Hudson River, fracked methane pipeline planned next door, oh, yet built on a fault line,
and people are surprised


there’s radioactive tritium leaking from Entergy’s Indian Point nuclear plant?
Just like at

Plant Farley on the Chattahoochee River,

Plant Hatch on the Altamaha River and Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River?
How about surprised if there are any nukes that don’t leak tritium?

AP, 6 February 2016,

Radioactive Material Found in Groundwater Below Nuke Plant, Continue reading →

Ashby, Mass. grilled pipeline company



A tiny town of about 3,000 people grilled pipeline reps for two hours.
Why didn’t the pipeline companies fix the leaky pipelines they had
before building new ones, their Board of Selectment wanted to know
among many other good questions.
Representatives from Kinder Morgan and its subsidiary
Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company (TGP)
said stuff happens and those were bigger issues and basically
don’t worry your pretty little heads.
The locals weren’t buying it. Continue reading →

Solar panels in Stow, Massachusetts



In snowy Massachusetts
you can finance a solar system with little money down
and complete payoff in 11 years.
Get the Georgia legislature to pass

HB 874 and we’ll be able to do this in sunny Georgia, too.

Used with permission from howeowner Carl Howe. -jsq

People seem interested so I’ll share details of our solar
installation in Stow, MA.


Full disclosure: I know the president of our solar installation firm
socially (he’s a friend of a friend of ours), and like many solar
installers, they do pay referral fees if others sign up based on a
recommendation from an existing customer. Should anyone decide to
do business with our installer, New England Clean Energy, please
mention my name.

We used New England Clean Energy from Hudson MA. I believe that they
are one of, if not the, highest quality installer in our area. They
have more than 300+ installations in MA and NH. Of course,
SolarCity and others are also in the region, Continue reading →

Pilgrim and Salem nukes scrammed down

Two nukes down Friday:
“lowering reactor water level was due to the trip of all three Feedwater Pumps”
(Pilgrim 1 in Massachusetts) and “unidentified leakage” (Salem 1 in New Jersey).
That’s the fifth downtime for Entergy’s Pilgrim 1 this year:

cold, heat, leak, and now feedwater pumps.
Remind me about the reliability and safety of big baseload nuclear?


Pilgrim 1 and Salem 1 down 23 August 2013


Event Number: 49296 Facility: PILGRIM,

REACTOR PROTECTION ACTUATION (SCRAM)

“On Thursday, August 22, 2013 at 0755 hours [EDT], with the reactor
critical at approximately 98% core thermal power, and the mode
switch in RUN, a manual reactor scram was inserted due to lowering
reactor water level. The cause of the lowering reactor water level
was due to the trip of all three Feedwater Pumps. The cause of the
Feedwater Pump trip event is currently under investigation.

“Following the reactor scram, Continue reading →

Privatize TVA? Southern Company would like that



The hydropower assets of the Tennessee Valley Authority
would give Southern Company a way to avoid doing distributed solar for a while.
Will SO CEO Tom Fanning and Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers
bit the bullet and go straight for distributed solar instead of
helping Duke privatize TVA for a short-term stopgap that would
set both of them farther behind the disruptive solar curve?


SolarCity and Southern Company stock

Blue line: SCTY; red line: SO, chart by
Google Finance.

May 16th:

Goldman Sachs invested $500 million in SCTY.

May 22nd:

SO stockholder meeting.

May 24th:

S&P downgrades SO.

Wes Patoka wrote for Motley Fool 24 May 2013,

Who Benefits the Most if the TVA Is Privatized,

Continue reading →

SolarCity disrupting utilities in Massachusetts; how about Georgia?

Why is great big Southern Company afraid of tiny SolarCity?
Look at these 2.6KW of solar panels on a house in Bedford, Massachusetts.
Think about much more sun in Georgia, financed by Google and

Goldman Sachs,
turning into
votes for solar power.
Big coal and nuclear boondoggles already

don’t look so attractive anymore to investors.

By Giles Parkinson wrote for Reneweconomy on 9 October 2012,

SolarCity’s big challenge: Prove that energy bills can fall,


A 2.6kW SolarCity installation in Bedford, Massachusetts
SolarCity sees the traditional utilities as their biggest
competition. “We compete with them on price, predictability of
price and the ease by which customers can switch to electricity
generated by solar systems,” it says.

“We have disrupted the industry status quo by providing
renewable energy directly to customers for less than they are
currently paying for utility-generated energy. Unlike utilities, we
sell energy with a predictable cost structure that does not rely on
limited fossil fuels and is insulated from rising retail electricity
prices. As retail prices for electricity increase and distributed
solar energy costs decline, our market opportunity will grow
exponentially.”


Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Anthony Kim said the SolarCity
filing could be a “game-changing moment for the solar
industry” because it shows “how plummeting component
costs benefit a company operating on the downstream side of the
solar business.”

That article was posted before SolarCity’s stock went public, and
before

Goldman Sachs invested half a billion dollars in SolarCity.
Six months later, we know Southern Company and Georgia Power
are paying attention, because both SO CEO Tom Fanning and
Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers said so at the

Southern Company stockholder meeting.

-jsq

Georgia behind Maryland and Massachusetts in solar power


California and Texas ahead of Georgia in solar power, sure,
but Maryland and Massachusetts,
small and far to the north with less sun?
Does that seem right to you?



According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA),

Georgia should be number 5.
Georgia should be moving up the rankings as fast as any state except
maybe Arizona or Colorado, according to

an Arizona State University study of two years ago that said
Georgia was third among state that would
benefit from solar deployment through generating and exporting energy to other states.
The U.S. as a whole

keeps installing far more solar power each year,
but Georgia Power and Southern Company keep holding Georgia back.



It’s great that Valdosta will soon get

2 more megawatts of local solar power.
But while we’re waiting for Georgia Power to slowly get around to doling out

277 megawatts over several years,

New Jersey has 1,000 megawatts already installed.


Georgia is #22, behind #21 Connecticut.
Why do we let that continue?

-jsq

Vermont Yankee may be next nuke to close



UBS predicts Entergy will close its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant soon:
that’s the same Entergythat couldn’t keep the power on during the SuperBowl
and that

can’t keep Pilgrim 1 nuclear reactor up in Massachusetts during a winter storm
(down 3 days now, for the third downtime in a month).
A few days later, UBS
set Entergy up on a quarterly earnings call to mention that
Vermont Yankee had already been taken off the New England energy
capacity auction, which would make it easy to replace.

San Onofre still down in California,

Dominion Power closing Kewaunee in Wisconsin,

NRC terminated Calvert Cliffs in Maryland,

Duke closing Crystal River in Florida,
and maybe Vermont Yankee next?
How about

we pass HB 267 to stop Georgia Power charging for cost overruns
for Vogtle 3 and 4 and see how long before Southern Company stops that project?

Andrew Stein wrote for vtdigger 6 February 2013 (updated 7 Feb),

In report, financial firm forecasts that Entergy may close Vermont Yankee,

In an investment research letter, the Swiss financial services
company UBS Securities anticipates Entergy Corp. will retire one of
its nuclear power plants in 2013, and it cites “Vermont Yankee
as the most tenuously positioned plant.”



UBS representatives met with Entergy’s new leadership team on Feb.
1, the same day Leo Denault became CEO and chair of the board for
the Louisiana-based company that operates the Vermont Yankee nuclear
power plant.

And that’s how a clean-broom new CEO often signals his intentions:
by bringing in outside experts to provide him cover for what he
already intends to do anyway.
And this new-broom CEO

is Entergy’s former Chief Financial Officer
who as CFO has repeated fiddled with Vermont Yankee to try to
make it less unprofitable.
What did those experts say?

Continue reading →

Citizens can video on duty police —Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has declined to review a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals
decision that struck down an Illinois law prohibiting audio recordings
without permission,
echoing last year’s

First Court decision that you can record police on the job.
Let’s remember it’s not just police:

“Gathering information about government officials in a form that can
readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment
interest in protecting and promoting

‘the free discussion of
governmental affairs.’

”

That means all elected or appointed or employed government officials, from
County Commissioners and City Councils down through sheriff and
police departments to the Animal Shelter.
Police are employees, not elected or appointed, so these rulings would appear
to apply to other governmental employees.

Radley Balko wrote for Huffpo 27 November 2012,

Supreme Court Inaction Boosts Right To Record Police Officers,

The Illinois and Massachusetts laws have been used to arrest people
who attempt to record on-duty police officers and other public
officials. In one of the more notorious cases, Chicago resident
Tiawanda Moore was arrested in 2010 when she attempted to use her
cell phone to record officers in a Chicago police station.

Continue reading →

What other states have had charter school referendums?

Thanks to Jim Galloway, we learned that charter school proponents say

“No other state has had a positive outcome for a charter-positive ballot initiative.”
OK, what other states have had any sort of charter school referendums?
Such ballot initiatives have at least been tried in

Massachusetts,

Michigan,
and

Washington.

BallotPedia

records some state charter school referendums.

Massachusetts



In Massachusetts,

charter school proponents couldn’t even get enough signatures to put a
pro-charter school referendum on the ballot this year.

The measure would have removed limits on number of charter schools,
their funding, and enrollment. Other changes would have been made in
laws that governed charter schools, including requiring approval of
qualified applications for charter schools to be in districts where
there was low student performance.

Michigan

In Michigan,

a referendum to ban for-profit charter schools
may be on the ballot in November:

Continue reading →