A couple things I read over the weekend that are worth passing on to anyone else who would be interested:
- The Jane Fonda Effect — This is an article on nuclear energy written by “Freakonomics” authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, and published in the New York Times. It’s pro-nuclear-energy, in case you’re wondering. Although they mention it in passing at the end, the article left me wondering whether, for all its pluses, if the bugaboo in nuclear energy is what to do with all the waste. It still seems to me that the cleaner-burning coal would be a better solution.
- Working to Reduce Sewer Overflows to the Illinois River — If you want a clear, easy-to-read explanation of what the whole Combined Sewer Overflow, or “CSO,” problem is about, look no further than Gene Hewitt’s article in this month’s Interbusiness Issues. Well-written and informative, it left me with only one question: why can’t they just enlarge the interceptor sewer or create some sort of temporary retention area for those 28 days it overflows? I’m guessing such a thing would be too large and/or expensive to build, but it seems like the obvious answer at first blush. I’d love to see a follow-up article on what the possible solutions are, and the pros and cons of each.
As to nuclear power, you are absolutely right, the real problem is the waste. Hauling and disposing of that stuff safely and securely is a problem not even close to being solved. And “securely” is actually a bigger problem than mere safety. Nuclear power waste can be “recylced” into nuclear weapons.
The disposal of nuclear waste is the biggest non-issue in the world. We can put the waste back where we get uranium: Underground. The only reason it’s an issue is because a bunch of folks have made a career of opposing any attempt to dispose of it. It’s classic not-in-my-backyardism. I absolutely guarantee that putting nuclear waste in barrels and storing them in s state-of-the art facility is safer for the environment that burning even clean burning coal.
“why can’t they just enlarge the interceptor sewer or create some sort of temporary retention area for those 28 days it overflows?”
The Deep Tunnel system in Chicago took 30 years to build at a cost of over $3 billion dollars (so far; it’s not quite done), and as recently as 2002 (I think it was; I was home from law school at the time) it overflowed ANYWAY, requiring the river to be released into the lake, contaminating the drinking water and requiring us all to drink chlorine for three weeks. (Whenever they dump the river into the lake the tapwater just REEKS for weeks because the pathogen issue in the river is so major.)
So I’m guessing that’s why. 🙂
One solution many smaller cities are pursuing, here and in Europe, is to divert combined sewers (when they’re too expensive to rebuild separately) into massive sloughs when they overflow, sort-of like retaining ponds, but with native plants in them that clean and filter water and usually with some sort of current encouraged (either by gravity or occasionally with pumps). The overflow can then be safely returned to the groundwater (which is good; generally we deplete groundwater faster than it replaces itself) and self-cleans without any human intervention other than some minor gardening (removing invasive plants periodically, replacing plants in case of disease, etc.). These areas can also be turned into parks and wildlife preserves.
What I don’t know is how big Peoria’s overflow is and how much water the largest of these sloughs yet built can handle. There’s not any particular reason you couldn’t build one to handle ALL the overflow from even a city the size of Chicago; it’s just that we’d be talking about a swamp the size of the entire Chicago lakefront which, hey, is what was there originally. 🙂 So I don’t know if a slough to manage Peoria’s overflow wastewater would be prohibitively large or not.
Kansas City is attacking the problem in a slightly different way, with a program called Ten Thousand Rain Gardens, where they’re encouraging local citizens to put rain gardens on their property, which rather than letting storm overflow run down into the street and the sewers, keeps it on the land and lets it soak down into the groundwater, which (again) helps replenish the groundwater and helps reduce the load on the storm sewers during storms. They provide information, support, and some grant funding for homeowners to do it. Rain gardens are easy and pretty and also support native wildlife (around here, monarch butterflies in particular).
We have a little tiny rain garden where our back gutter and sump dump out. It’s about 3′ across and handles all that water that used to swampify our grass and seep back against the walls of the house. We’re not quite done with it, but when it’s finished it’ll carry the gutter water 20 feet from the house in a little man-made stream with an impermeable bottom to the slight depression we dug and filled with swampy prairie plants that are accustomed to being alternately soaked and parched and think we’re the greatest people EVER for giving them such a lovely hole to live in.
Ideally you’d set up your yard so your driveway would drain into your yard’s rain garden as well, but that can be tricky since most lots are built on purpose to have the driveway drain into the street. We also need to figure out where to site one in our front yard, which has swampiness issues.
But Kansas City’s program is DEFINITELY copyable in Peoria.
http://www.rainkc.com/home/index.asp by the way. 🙂
The third generation nuclear power plants actually “burn” the most dangerous wastes produced by our current plants and their waste is far less toxic and far less radioactive then the current plants. We could actually reprocess the waste from our current plants into the fuel for the third gen plants. This technology has been around for almost twenty years, it was stopped by Bill Clinton as a budget cut just before the first full scale reactor was to be built.
Coal has it’s own radioactivity problems, coal is actually fairly rich in uranium and other radioactive elements, not to mention heavy metals. Burning coal basically releases these into the atmosphere. I have not read if the gasification pulls these elements our, but even if it does we will still have to store the waste somewhere.
WLW: Stop confusing people with FACTS. Stick to factoids … like the kind that Sierra Club members use on their pamphlets.
We ran the entire gutter sytem to dump in the front. one side goes to an ever thirsty maple tree and shade garden, the other a mini garden and one side of the front lawn. This seems to work. When they ran out the back no matter how far out, it seeped back into the house. We built up the dirt on the side of the house on the driveway side to absorb the excess water, We have to have a complete gully washer before any of it would ever hit the street, but then we’d be building an ark, so CSO would the least of the worries.
Eyebrows, that KC plan to let plants ‘clean’ overflow sewer water reminds what they do in Appalachia to clean mine water runoff. I wish I could find a good weblink that describes it, but they have some pretty neat treatment systems. The coolest are similar to a cow’s stomach, where several ponds in series progressively clean the water until it’s ready to flow back into a ‘natural’ stream/lake/etc.
The sewer problem is mostly biological, while the minewater issue is inorganic, but it’s amazing what you can do with ‘natural’ processing systems.