Cocoposts

Paradox Valley

In the Durango Telegraph, Will Sands reports news of a local planning commission's approval of new uranium mill in the Four-Corners region -  the nation's first in 25 years. 

Proponents are counting on a forgotten past. 

Many pointed to recent history and the former town of Uravan, which was once located just downstream from Naturita. In 1986, the uranium mill/mining town was deemed unfit for human occupation and declared a Superfund site. The clean-up took 15 years and $70 million in federal funding, and widespread cancer is one of Uravan’s only enduring legacies.

(Poster from a 2007 Mother Jones story.)

Cold War Car Buff

  The BMW Isetta - at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in an exhibit entitled, Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures.  From the Los Angeles Times. 

Classic car buffs may be more interested in the Isetta, a little runabout produced by BMW in the 1950s and early 1960s. “Powered” by a one-cylinder, 13-horsepower modified motorcycle engine, the Isetta bears little resemblance to the high-performance machines BMW is known for today.

Based on an Italian design, the Isetta was an odd-looking egg — in fact, Germans called the car “the rolling egg” because of its ovoid shape.

Closing the Halliburton Loophole

From the Durango Telegraph:

Members of the U.S. Legislature are currently working to close the “Halliburton Loophole” and shed a little light on drilling practices. New legislation named the FRAC Act – Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act – would repeal a Safe Drinking Water Act exemption provided for the oil and gas industry. It would also require oil and gas companies to disclose the chemicals they use in their hydraulic fracturing processes, where a stew of unknown chemicals is injected underground to break up oil and gas deposits.

The number of new wells in recent years and their proximity to development is shocking in light of the impacts. 

Four Corners resident Shirley McNall is no stranger to oil and gas drilling. While McNall and her husband live inside Aztec city limits, their home is also in close proximity to 9 different natural gas wells.

In recent years, she’s seen gas leaking from production tanks; bubbling well heads submerged in deep water; and “foul-smelling, dark-colored fluid” running off a well pad, down a gully and puddling 500 feet from subdivision homes. The dirty list goes on to include things like split pit liners, noxious fumes and trucks deliberately dumping hundreds of gallons of hydraulic fracturing fluid into arroyos.

“We’ve got nine wells surrounding our property, and of the nine, only one’s not been a problem,” McNall said.

The situation is especially distressing for McNall because she knows that much more than natural gas is finding its way into the air, the ground, the watershed and the neighborhood. “All these episodes happened right here under our noses and inside Aztec city limits,” she said. “Can you imagine what’s happening on well pads and drilling operations out in the middle of nowhere?" 

I-House

Great green modular building news in the Santa Fe New Mexican that Clayton Homes, one of the nation's largest mobile home builders, has a new "i-house" design being built here at Karsten Homes. Looks cool.   Must go for a looky loo. 

Solar Sprawl

How green is our sprawl!  Open a jaded eye upon this Albuquerque Journal editorial this morning to bold barking about our economic development greatness for having recruited the company Solar Array Adventures Ventures to come here.

Why does this sound so familiar?  Because it's the same self-congratulatory crap about how clever and fortunate we are that they choose us.   It is back patting that entails no question that it was a good idea.  No question about the huge incentive package.  No question about the location in far flung Cordero Mesa.

Did they look at any other County locations or, as I've always theorized, is the economic development recruitment game  hard-wired for sprawl?  What about locating near the other  solar plant at Mesa del Sol?  Or right on the rail line?  Near bus service?   Someplace that does not require new water, sewer, roads and storm drainage systems?  

Nuke Doodoo

From Reuters via Houston Chronicle comes news of the International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Beijing.  Officials say it's all looking good for nuke power because of, and in spite of,  costs and crisis.   Win - win.  Go turn on those lights and air conditioners. 

Thierry Dujardin, a deputy director of the OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency, said that although the financial crisis was making it more difficult to fund some proposed nuclear power plants, longer-term worries about energy security and global warming were likely to buffer the impact of the crisis on the sector.

"In the short term, it's obvious that it will be more difficult to find the funding for new investments, heavy investment, in energy infrastructure, such as nuclear power plants," Dujardin told a news conference.  "There is a chance that nuclear energy as such will not be so strongly impacted by the current economic crisis, because the need for energy will be there."

For such a complex technology with so many associated risks, this seems like exceedingly simplistic black-box reasoning. So many issues affect demand.  Cost, crisis and security not the least among them.   Yet  the energy industry tells complacent consumers to never mind that economic recession, expense or security.  Demand is everything.  

All thumbs-up.  Asia - all aboard. 

As of the end of August 2008, China topped the list of countries with nuclear power plants under construction, with 5,220 megawatts (MW), followed by India at 2,910 MW and South Korea at 2,880 MW, according to the International Energy Agency.

 But the ambitious plans for nuclear power growth across the developing world also risk straining safety standards and safeguards against weapons proliferation.

Oh that. 

Point of Use Water

Water pricing issues are the topic of Sean Olson's piece in the Albuquerque Journal.  He talks to the author of  Aguanomics who writes refreshing thoughty bits about water pricing and the compunction to build more and more water delivery systems.

We need more creative thinking of how to get the most bang for our buck -- not just more dams and canals. 

Wildflower Trains

So the San Francisco Chronicle is all uplifty this morning with wee less prominent shooting news and this travel piece about trains and wildflowers - silent commentary maybe on the state of trains for actual travel. 

Travel is not why we would be caught dead getting out of the pick-up and taking the train in America - its the scenery!  Confirming this is that all but one of these trains are vintage - quaint remnant routes of a real rail network.

We think we're so damned advanced and high-tech, but here it is 2009 and I can't take a train from Albuquerque to Denver or El Paso.*  That would be unheard of 100 years ago. 

National Sacrifice Areas - Appalachia Edition

From Feministing:

... Appalachians are a strong, diverse, proud people. We are not a throw-away culture. Appalachia should not serve as a national sacrificial area. These beautiful mountains are the second most bio-diverse region in the world, second only behind the tropical rainforest. Why is our nation destroying them at the expense of so-called cheap energy, a source of energy that's emitting the most C02 of anything in the world and the greatest cause of climate change? It just doesn't make sense. And it pisses me off.

                                                                                                          Theresa L. Burriss, Radford University

Remember Indian Point?

Putting it plainly in the New York Times Peter Applebome describes the air of scripted Kabuki about public hearings for relicensing of the Indian Point nuclear reactors in New York. 

He sets forth some clear classic conundrums and I tried  to pick out excerpts but ended up pasting the whole thing below - resisting the overwhelming urge to highlight.  There'd be too much bold.  Photo too.