Clinton strays from her roots as coal miner’s great granddaughter – by Valerie Volcovici and Amanda Becker (Reuters U.S. – August 10, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

WASHINGTON – In her 2008 bid for the White House, Hillary Clinton cast herself as a blue-collar Democrat who was unabashedly pro-coal, a stance that helped her beat opponent Barack Obama easily in primaries in states that produced or were reliant on coal.

Eight years later, a Reuters review of her recent campaign speeches and policy announcements shows that the great-granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner is now talking about the coal industry in the past tense.

The little-noticed shift in rhetoric speaks volumes about how the United States’ energy landscape has changed since Clinton last campaigned in 2008: oil and gas fracking have exploded and cheap natural gas has taken a huge bite out of coal.

In the intervening years the Obama administration has also proposed aggressive measures to tamp down greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels like coal, while once-powerful coal companies like Alpha Natural Resources, which declared bankruptcy last week, have lost their political clout.

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GLOBE EDITORIAL: To glimpse the future of oil, look at coal in the U.S. (Globe and Mail – August 8, 2015)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

“We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change, and we’re the last generation that can do something about it,” Barack Obama said on Monday. The President backed up his words with the Clean Power Plan, a White House initiative that will almost certainly end coal-fired electricity production in the United States in the next decade.

There are five lessons in the announcement for Canada, which recently signed on to the G7 commitment to “decarbonize” the global economy by the end of the century.

Lesson 1: Greenhouse-gas emissions are a legitimate public-health issue. Mr. Obama has done an end run around Congress and unilaterally set regulations to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from electricity production by 32 per cent (compared with levels in 2005) by the year 2030.

He can do this under the Clean Air Act, which obliges the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate any pollutant that is a danger to public health. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that large amounts of carbon dioxide qualify as a dangerous pollutant, since they lead to climate change.

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EPA: Pollution from mine spill much worse than feared – by Steve Garrison and Joshua Kellogg (USA Today – August 10, 2015)

http://www.usatoday.com/

FARMINGTON, N.M. — Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency said Sunday that the Gold King Mine discharged an estimated 3 million gallons of contaminated water, three times the amount previously believed.

The mine continues to discharge 500 gallons per minute, EPA Region 8 administrator Shaun McGrath said in a teleconference call Sunday afternoon, but the polluted water is being contained and treated in two ponds by the site of the spill near Silverton, Colo.

According to preliminary testing data the EPA released Sunday, arsenic levels in the Durango area of the Animas River were, at their peak, 300 times the normal level, and lead was 3,500 times the normal level. Officials said those levels have dropped significantly since the plume moved through the area.

Both metals pose a significant danger to humans at high levels of concentration.

“Yes, those numbers are high and they seem scary,” said Deborah McKean, chief of the Region 8 Toxicology and Human Health and Risk Assessment. “But it’s not just a matter of toxicity of the chemicals, it’s a matter of exposure.”

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Editorial: [Virginia, U.S.A.] Uranium mining debate resurfaces again (Richmond Times-Dispatch – August 9, 2015)

http://www.richmond.com/

For decades, the commonwealth has been having an on-again, off-again debate over uranium mining. With the filing of a federal lawsuit by Virginia Uranium Inc., the debate is officially back on.

The lawsuit makes a straightforward claim: The Atomic Energy Act vests all authority for radiation-related regulation in the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Virginia can write rules for a uranium mine on any number of grounds, such as hours of operation or surety bonds.

But it cannot regulate radiation safety matters, which are the exclusive province of the feds. And yet, the plaintiffs claim, Virginia’s ban on uranium mining is based almost exclusively on concerns about the hazards presented by radioactive tailings from the mining process.

That much will ring true to anyone who has followed the debate over the moratorium. In its resolution in support of keeping the ban, the Danville-Pittsylvania Chamber of Commerce cited “significant questions around whether uranium can be mined and milled safely in the commonwealth.”

Gov. Terry McAuliffe said he opposed uranium mining because “my job is to make sure that our communities and our citizenry are safe.”

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Coal Industry Wobbles as Market Forces Slug Away – by James B. Stewart (New York Times – August 6, 2015)

http://www.nytimes.com/

In April 2005, President George W. Bush hailed “clean coal” as a key to “greater energy independence,” pledging $2 billion in research funds that promised a new golden age for America‘s most abundant energy resource.

But a decade later, the United States coal industry is reeling as never before in its history, the victim of new environmental regulations, intensifying attacks by activists, collapsing coal prices, and — above all — the rise of cheap alternative fuels, especially natural gas.

This week President Obama slammed the industry with tougher-than-expected rules from the Environmental Protection Agency limiting power plant carbon emissions, which will accelerate an already huge shift from coal to natural gas and other alternatives. “Clean coal” remains an expensive and thus far impractical pipe dream. Coal is the world’s biggest source of carbon emissions by far and the leading culprit in global warming. Coal advocates like Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky senator and Republican majority leader, have accused the president of an out-and-out “war on coal.”

But it’s collapsing prices and heavy debt loads that are driving the industry into bankruptcy.

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In coal-mining Kentucky, shock and dismay over Clean Power Plan’s new targets – by Francine Kiefer and Ryan Alessi (Yahoo News – August 5, 2015)

http://news.yahoo.com/

Kentucky was on track to meet an earlier proposed target in the Clean Power Plan. Now the state, which has lost thousands of coal-mining jobs in recent years, plans to fight the final, more stringent rule in the courts.

It is a tense time in Kentucky. The Environmental Protection Agency has just come out with its final rule on reducing carbon emissions – the strongest step ever taken to counter climate change in the United States – and this coal state is reeling.

“We are shocked at the difference in the proposal we were given to work on last year, versus the final rule announced Monday,” said Dick Brown, spokesman for the state’s Energy and Environment Cabinet, in an e-mail. The new target is a 27 percent increase in the amount of CO2 emissions that Kentucky’s power plants have to reduce by 2030, he says.

In many states, residents may be wondering how the EPA’s Clean Power Plan will affect their energy bills, for example. But in states like Kentucky, the new carbon rule arguably hits even closer to home. The Bluegrass State is America’s third-largest coal producer, and it gets more than 90 percent of its electricity from coal. Even before the carbon rule was finalized, the state had lost thousands of coal-mining jobs in the past two years alone.

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Obama Didn’t Kill Coal, the Market Did – by Michael R. Bloomberg (Bloomberg News – August 4, 2015)

http://www.bloombergview.com/

Critics of the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Clean Power Plan are describing it in apocalyptic terms. But much of what they believe about the plan — that it will destroy the coal industry, kill jobs and raise costs for consumers — is wrong. And it’s important to understand why.

The overblown political rhetoric about the plan tends to obscure the market reality that the coal industry has been in steady decline for a decade, partly as a result of the natural gas boom, but mostly because consumers are demanding cleaner air and action on climate change.

Communities across the U.S. have led the way in persuading utilities to close dirty old coal plants and transition to cleaner forms of energy. The Sierra Club’s grass-roots Beyond Coal campaign (which Bloomberg Philanthropies funds) has helped close or phase out more than 200 coal plants over the past five years.

The primary reason for the public revolt against coal is simple: It causes death, disease and debilitating respiratory problems. A decade ago, coal pollution was killing 13,000 people a year. Today, the number is down to 7,500, which means that more than 5,000 Americans are living longer, healthier lives each year thanks to cleaner power.

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States Should Shun the EPA’s New Power Mandate – by Hal Quinn ad Peter Glaser (Wall Street Journal – August 2, 2015)

http://www.wsj.com/

The agency has failed to properly weigh the costs, even though the Supreme Court says it must.

On Monday President Obama is announcing the final version of his Clean Power Plan, the carbon-emission rules for power plants to secure his climate-change legacy. The plan is designed to hobble electricity generators much as the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2012 rule to reduce mercury and other emissions has harmed the coal industry.

Fortunately for consumers, on June 29 the Supreme Court slapped down the agency’s 2012 rule. In Michigan v. EPA, the court said the agency failed its legal obligation to compare the cost of its mercury standards with the benefits.

Reckless disregard for costs has also guided the agency’s Clean Power Plan. The White House promises Monday’s rule will offer more flexibility to meet emissions targets than an earlier draft, but the targets may be even more difficult to meet. That will force rate payers into steeper cost increases, and concessions the EPA makes to some states and industries will come at the expense of others.

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White House set to adopt sweeping curbs on carbon pollution – by Joby Warrick (Washington Post – August 1, 2015)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

The Obama administration will formally adopt an ambitious regulation for cutting greenhouse-gas pollution on Monday, requiring every state to reduce emissions from coal-burning power plants and putting the country on a course that could change the way millions of Americans get their electricity.

A retooled version of the administration’s Clean Power Plan, first proposed a year ago, will seek to accelerate the shift to renewable energy while setting tougher goals for slashing carbon emissions blamed for global warming, according to administration officials briefed on the details.

The new plan sets a goal of cutting carbon pollution from power plants by 32 percent by the year 2030, compared with 2005 levels — a 9 percent jump from the previous target of 30 percent — while rewarding states and utility companies that move quickly to expand their investment in solar and wind power.

Many states will face tougher requirements for lowering greenhouse-gas emissions under the revised plan.

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New EPA rule on greenhouse gases the latest blow to King Coal – by Steven Mufson (Washington Post – August 1, 2015)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

When coal was king, it fueled more than half of the nation’s electricity. It fired up American industry and powered an ever-growing variety of household appliances and electronics. And American presidential hopefuls paid homage to coal, courting mine owners and miners whose unionized ranks once numbered more than 400,000.

Barack Obama was no exception. As a state legislator in 2004 and again as a U.S. senator, he supported proposals for huge federal subsidies to turn coal into motor fuel and ease America’s reliance on oil imports. “With the right technological innovations, coal has the potential to be a cleaner-burning, domestic alternative to imported oil,” Obama said in June 2007.

All of that has changed. On Monday, the Obama administration takes on the coal industry with the final version of rules it has dubbed the Clean Power Plan, a complex scheme designed to reduce, on a state-by-state basis, the amount of greenhouse gases the nation’s electric power sector emits. The main target: coal.

Today, more people in the United States work jobs installing solar panels than work in the coal industry.

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Birthplace of the A-bomb: Nuclear New Mexico: Past and future – by Tom Vaughn (Desert Exposure – August 2015)

http://www.desertexposure.com/

The atomic genie was let out of the bottle 70 years ago here in New Mexico. It can’t be put back in; nobody wants it to go away. Nuclear medicine, nuclear power, atomic clocks, nuclear propulsion in submarines and spacecraft … the technological advances made possible by atomic research are not to be given up. Yet the genie is still capable of destroying worlds, or at least wreaking havoc locally. The challenge today is to keep it corralled.

The earliest uses of uranium ores in New Mexico had nothing to do with radioactivity. Ground to a powder, the yellowish minerals were used by Native Americans to color designs on deerskin cradle-board coverings.

In the 1920s, low-grade uranium ores (autunite and torbernite) were recovered from old silver mines in the White Signal and Black Hawk mining districts west of Silver City for use in glazes and to color glass. Significant uranium deposits in these areas were identified during the uranium boom of the 1950s.

World War II gave birth to the Manhattan Project — a search for a super-weapon that could give its wielder a decisive victory. Building on earlier research into radioactivity and atomic physics, both Germany and the United States raced to produce an atomic bomb.

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Coal’s Fortunes Keep Getting Worse – by James Stafford (Huffington Post – July 21, 2015)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/business/

James Stafford is the editor of Oilprice.com.

The coal industry is in uncharted territory. After decades of strong financial numbers and dominance in the electric power sector, coal producers are starting to fall apart faster than anyone could have anticipated. SNL Financial has produced some jaw dropping data on the quickly deteriorating coal industry, with a horrific performance in the second quarter.

The U.S. coal mining sector has exhibited an unprecedented wave of turmoil in just the last few weeks.

Walter Energy, an Alabama coal miner, announced on July 15 that it is filing for bankruptcy. Senior lenders will see their debt turned into equity, and if the company cannot turn the ship around, it will more or less sell off all of its assets. “In the face of ongoing depressed conditions in the market for met coal, we must do what is necessary to adapt to the new reality in our industry,” Walter Energy’s CEO Walt Scheller said in a press release.

Alpha Natural Resources, a top producer of metallurgical coal (used for steelmaking), was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because its share price was “abnormally low.” The company is eyeing the possibility of declaring bankruptcy protection.

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Pictures from the atomic age: The AGO’s Camera Atomica exhibit is oddly poignant – by David Berry (National Post – July 21, 2015)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The first official image in Camera Atomica is an x-ray; the first x-ray, actually, taken by physicist Wilhelm Rontgen, of his wife’s hand (her wedding ring is still visible as a rather large lump).

The discovery of this miraculous technology — it “makes the invisible visible” curator John O’Brian proudly proclaims — was an accident. But it was also our first, fumbling step into the atomic age, our first grasp of a power that would come to (quite literally) rewrite the DNA of the human experience.

“When Rontgen’s wife saw it, she was shocked. She said, ‘I’ve seen my own death,’” O’Brian explains, pointing to the image and pausing for dramatic effect. “That sort of predicted some of the worst sides of it. But this shows you there’s really a fatal interdependence between the camera and nuclear fission.”

O’Brian’s exhibit gathers some of the most powerful photographic images of the last 120 years of nuclear power — not, he says, to get us to contemplate our own deaths, but to bring attention back to an issue that’s still humming in the background of our everyday life.

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Lifton on asteroid mining rare earths and Molycorp’s Mountain Pass – by Jack Lifton (Investor Intel – July 20, 2015)

http://investorintel.com/

Some rules don’t change. But that doesn’t mean that our poorly educated journalists have to know of them or even have to understand them, when they are described or applied. One rule, frequently swept under the rug by junior mining promoters eager to take advantage of journalistic ignorance can be stated as:

“In order for any deposit to be developed into a profitable mine the infrastructure to access it must already exist, or, if not, then its costs must be included in the feasibility study.”

Trivially this means for example no commercial mining until I can get to the deposit and either process the material to a commercial form at the site or move it to a processing site without logistics’ costs destroying the project economics.

A corollary of the above “rule” is that the cost of infrastructure must be quantified and covered before the project enters development. Now, the above rules of economics having been stated let’s get to what I am talking about today.

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In dispute over coal mine project, two ways of life hang in the balance – by William Yardley (Los Angeles Times – July 21, 2015)

http://www.latimes.com/

Crow Agency, Montana – Neither tribe created the modern energy economy. They did not build the railroads or the power plants or the giant freighters that cross the ocean.

But the Crow Tribe, on a vast and remote reservation here in the grasslands of the northern Plains, and the Lummi Nation, nearly a thousand miles to the west on a sliver of shoreline along the Salish Sea in Washington state, have both become unlikely pieces of the machinery that serves the global demand for electricity — and that connection has put them in bitter conflict.

The Crow, whose 2.2 million-acre reservation is one of the largest in the country, have signed an agreement to mine 1.4 billion tons of coal on their land — enough to provide more than a year’s worth of the nation’s coal consumption.

The Lummi, on a 13,000-acre peninsula north of Seattle, are leading dozens of other tribes in a campaign that could block the project. They say it threatens not only the earth’s future climate, but also native lands, sacred sites and a fragile fishery the Lummi and others have depended on for thousands of years.

For the Crow, the project is a matter of survival. Traffic at the Crow’s remote and modest casino provides no meaningful revenue, there are no reservation hotels and unemployment here is well into the double digits.

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